Episode 67: Every Night Ever

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This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate the Mayo.

It was the same night, over and over.

Tom and Ed would close up the barber shop, grab a couple of six-packs on the way home.

Their roommate, Buddy, would show up at some point, clean up after a day at the butcher shop, and they'd all kick back, pop some tops, turn on the radio.

They probably didn't have a TV.

It was 1953.

And whatever the penetration of television ownership in Lithia Springs, Georgia was back then, I'm gonna assume it didn't extend to these three dudes in their 20s.

the two buddies from the barber shop and their friend buddy, the butcher.

So they'd just hang out, like always.

The air thick with humidity, cigarette smoke, cricket song.

Some fire hazard electric fan fights a losing battle against the July heat.

Moths and summer bugs loiter by the bare bulb on the porch.

The same night, over and over.

You come home from work, you play some cards, drink some beers, hit the hay.

You get up, and you do it all again.

Unless you don't.

On the night of Wednesday, July 8th, 1953, a police officer named Shirley Brown and his partner were on patrol, driving the back roads of Austel, Georgia, when their headlights caught a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road.

They pulled over and found three thoroughly freaked-out young men in the strangest thing the two veterans of the Cobb County Police Department had ever seen in their lives.

There,

sprawled out on the blacktop, was a two-foot-long creature.

And damn if that thing didn't look like a dead alien.

The story, told breathlessly by the side of the road, red police lights sweeping round and round through the trees, went like this.

The three guys, the two barbers, Buddy the butcher, were out just driving around in their truck.

And when a flying saucer came out of nowhere, just bam, there it was, in the middle of the road, glowing all red, you know, like they do.

And there were these three little aliens, three little Martians or moonmen or Venusians, just skittering around.

So the fellas jam on the brakes, and the spacemen scatter, but one of them goes the wrong way, and, you know, roadkill.

Then the other two ran back into the saucer, and then the lights in the thing go from red to blue, and just zoom, the thing whizzed up and away.

Officer Brown and his partner surveyed the scene.

There was indeed one green alien-looking thing.

Humanoid.

Big old crazy-looking eyes.

And there were skid marks consistent with a truck stopping short to avoid striking an object in the road, like a deer or a down power line, or a box spring that fell off the back of a mattress truck, or an extraterrestrial.

And right where the three guys said the spaceship turned all blue and then whooshed off into the night, there were circular burn marks in the road from the space blasters or their propulsion system or what have you.

They called it into the station.

And they let the boys go.

Told them to head right home, told them they could keep the alien.

So the guys went back to the apartment, cleared out some space in the fridge for the E.T., and called the paper.

Next thing you know, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has got the butcher, the two barbers, and the alien on its front page, with quotes from a veterinarian who said, indeed, whatever this thing was, it was most likely something out of this world.

As was the response.

The story hit the wires, and soon, the world knew that three young men from Lithia Springs, Georgia had just captured a creature from another planet.

This is the scene in the black and white movie where the newspapers spin around and then stop for a second to show you the headline.

UFOs land outside of Atlanta, Spin Spin Span.

Flying saucer man captured, Spin Spin Span.

Doctor confirms it's something out of this world.

Cut to reporters in shirt sleeves and fedoras with press cards sticking out of their hatbands as they roll their studebakers up some neighbor's lawn and hop out and sprint to take pictures of the dazed young men in their front steps, giant flashbulbs popping.

And the kids in the neighborhood are running around with tinfoil hats, looking up at the sky with telescopes they bought with boxtops.

Some pretty mom in a gingham dress and a frilly white apron faints.

Probably drops a pie.

And for a while there, in the second week of July, 1953,

people thought it finally happened.

That thing they'd seen in the movies, it was real.

The flying saucers came, and they didn't pick the White House, they didn't zap the Eiffel Tower.

They landed right there in Lithia Springs.

And then a day or two later, a different vet took a look at the alien and said if this is a Martian, then they have monkeys on Mars.

And then the jig was up.

There was an article in the paper the next week.

Lays out the whole thing.

How the barbers and their buddy buddy, the butcher, were bored one night, playing cards, drinking beers.

Same old.

And one of them, one of the barbers, bet his buddies 10 bucks that he could get his name in the paper.

Next thing they know, they're buying a rhesus monkey at the pet store because, I don't know, there was a rhesus monkey at the pet store.

They're giving the poor thing a lethal dose of chloroform and a full body shave.

The butcher cuts off its tail.

Someone finds an old bucket of green paint.

Someone burns a UFO-like circle in the pavement with a blowtorch.

And then, next thing you know, the other barber and the butcher are out five bucks each.

Not long after that, the barber who won the bet was 40 in the hole.

He got fined $50 for blocking traffic.

And that was that for the barbers and the butcher and the alien.

Everyone else in town went about their business, put away their tinfoil hats, cleaned up the fallen pie from the linoleum.

punched back in at the plant.

Told everyone that they never believed it anyway.

They knew from from the get-go it was all a hoax.

Just some good old boys, never meaning no harm.

But

don't believe them.

Or most of them anyway.

Because they believed it.

At least for a minute there.

Because they had seen those movies where the spaceman lands.

And people were talking about UFOs all the time back then.

And just a few nights before the incident, people saw some strange lights near Marietta, swore that there was definitely something there in the sky.

They saw it with their own eyes.

Or at least their cousin did, the guy at the diner.

So basically, everyone.

But they said they never believed it.

So they talked big.

They made fun of the three perpetrators whenever they'd run into them at the barber shop or the butcher shop.

They were relentless.

Eventually got so bad that one of the guys moved out of town.

rather than have his neighbors rag on him for being the monkey hoax guy for the rest of his life.

Which seems extreme.

Because really,

you might feel bad about being the monkey hoax guy.

Forget those people.

And why would those people make fun of the monkey hoax guy?

Were people mad because these three guys fooled everybody?

Because they got all that attention?

I think maybe they were ticked because these three guys knew something they didn't.

Or at least they remembered something that the rest of them had forgotten along the way.

That it's the same damn thing every damn day.

You get up, you go to work, you come home, you drink some beers, play some cards, pack some lunches, smoke some cigarettes, walk the dog, put your curlers in, hit the hay, and you do it all over again.

Unless you don't.

The two barbers, the butcher, they took some regular Wednesday night, and then they had themselves a night.

And they gave a whole lot of people most of a whole week where it wasn't the same thing every day.

Everybody wins,

except the monkey.

This episode was originally released way back in 2015.

Doc when people thinking stuff in the sky was aliens seemed kind of quaint.

It was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo.

The show is a member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

You can follow me on Twitter or Facebook at TheMemory Palace.

You can always drop me a line at nate at theememorypalace.org.

I will be back with a new episode in a couple of weeks.

Take care.

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from PRX