Introducing... "The Monster Missive" our new weekly newsletter (Patreon)

Welcome to our new weekly newsletter, brought to you by MAU team members, Delainey Bowers and Conor Ryan, every Friday.

-Show Notes Spotlight-

A more in-depth look at some of the research covered in this week's Tuesday and Thursday episodes.

On Tuesday’s episode (Sn. 20 Ep. 43), Nick shared a touching story about being startled to find a fox sitting just outside her door on the day of her grandmother’s death. In traditional folklore from around the world, the fox is often considered to be a trickster archetype that represents mischief-making, cunning, and resourcefulness. We find the juxtaposition between a fox, known for its intelligence, and a woman with Alzheimer’s, which impairs cognitive function, to be a particularly powerful one. But maybe that’s just us. 

Often in modern culture, foxes get a bad rap (looking at you, Dora). This summary from Thorn and Claw shows that Celtic beliefs were much more reverential of our beloved woodland creatures.

“In Celtic mythology and folklore, foxes were revered as magical creatures bridging worlds, guiding souls with wisdom. [In these tales] foxes are mystical guides, representing cleverness and transformation, urging you to trust your instincts in uncertain times. Fox sightings often carry powerful symbolic messages from nature, guiding you towards intuition, adaptability, and keen awareness.”

If we pitter and patter over to a different island, we find that Japan also takes a kinder view of foxes. Matthew Meyer over at Yokai.com gives a great summary of Japanese beliefs regarding Kitsune.

"Holy foxes are servants of the Shinto deity Inari, and Inari’s shrines are decorated with statues and images of these foxes. Legends tell of celestial foxes providing wisdom or service to good and pious humans. These holy foxes act as messengers of the gods and mediums between the celestial and human worlds. They often protect humans or places, provide good luck, and ward evil spirits away."

If you still haven’t heard enough about foxes and their lore-based context, Lexlingua might be able to help you out. Here at MAU, our main belief is that we just wish we could squish their cute little faces and say things like “Who's a good little floofy floofer fluffy guy?” However, we know they wouldn’t really appreciate that as much as we would, so we respectfully refrain. 

Have you ever had a dream about someone you know then texted them right when you woke up to tell them about it? Or maybe you had a dream about someone that you will never, ever tell them no matter what questions they ask? What about that time where you dreamed you and your brother were abducted by a UFO piloted by life-size bunnies that spoke backwards, but then were awoken by a call from your brother telling you about the same dream? Well, you’re not alone!

On our Thursday episode this week (Sn. 20 Ep. 44), Dani called in a terrifying shared dream experience. She was desperately searching for her best friend in a labyrinth, only to wake up and have her best friend tell her that she had a nightmare where she was lost in some sort of maze while Dani was screaming for her.

In this 2017 study conducted by the University of Minnesota, researchers found that:

92% of mutual dreams were between 2 people.

27% of these were between friends, 42% relatives, 27% significant others, and 4% nonfamiliar people.

They came to the conclusion that mutual dreams tend to occur in close dyadic relationships, be very similar in content, and occur when related dreamers are separated and not feeling very intimate. However, because this is considered to be a “fringe” topic, there’s not a lot of peer-reviewed, hard-science data that can be shared. 

Linda Lane Magallón has spent more than two decades researching lucid, mutual, telepathic and flying dreams. In the segment below from about the 3:37 to the 4:27 mark, she talks about the two types of mutual dreams. 

If you already have a creeping fear of the unyielding horrors of technology, you might want to skip this next part. There was a study performed back in September 2024 by researchers at REMspace, a California start-up with a focus on lucid dreaming. Per this Interesting Engineering article by Prabhat Ranjan Mishra,

“Participants were sleeping at their homes when their brain waves and other polysomnographic data were tracked remotely by a specially developed apparatus. When the server detected that the first participant entered a lucid dream, it generated a random Remmyo word and sent it to him via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in his dream, with his response captured and stored on the server.

The next participant entered a lucid dream eight minutes later and received the stored message from the first participant. She confirmed it after awakening, marking the first-ever ‘chat’ exchanged in dreams.”

How Inception of them. There are a lot of questions to be raised about the experiment itself, and there have yet to be any replicated studies, so don’t put on your tinfoil hats just yet (but keep them close)!

Here at the invisible cabin where we produce the show, it’s a regular occurrence for us to commune with the ever-present ships we see floating silently in the sky. However, we know for some of our listeners, seeing these types of things is a rarer occurrence. 

On this weeks’ Thursday episode (Sn. 20 Ep. 44), we featured a few calls about UFO sightings. The first of these was from Maureen, who saw a football-shaped craft hover over the pool at an apartment building sometime in the mid-1970s. At first, that shape might seem odd for a UFO, but it turns out there’s no shortage of reports about football-shaped crafts from over the decades. Here are just two examples we were able to dig up from the same decade.

In NUFORC UFO Sighting 47982, the observer from Maryland describes relays that, 

“While I was cleaning up the remains of an outside dinner I saw this craft that was HUGE, to a little kid, just hovering silently. My view of the craft was slightly obstructed by the house but I clearly remember it had different colored lights (red, blue, yellow) slowly revolving around its perimeter. I don't remember how long it stayed but I remember just staring at it for what seemed a long time and then it just sped away.”

Interestingly, as with Maureen’s call, the observer here mentions later in his account that they initially thought that the craft was some sort of advertisement before realizing how truly anomalous it was.

It seems like our Canadian friends up North have also had their own run-ins with the same type of craft. In NUFORC UFO Sighting 106854, the observer says, 

“In the late 1970’s around dinner time, I walked outside my apartment building with my dog and my friend and looked half way up the building (approx.. 7 floors) in the corner of the building (approx. 300 feet from me) and saw a football shaped grey object that was huge, no wings, no windows and multi-colored lights where the wings would normally be. The object did not move and my friend was scared and ran away. I stayed and watched until it just vanished (approx.. 10 minutes later). I called the Ottawa airport and reported it to the air traffic control tower but they didn’t see anything in the sky. Weird occurrence… I checked in the distance and there was a plane but it was way too far away to create what I saw.”

We also aired a call from Skeeter, who saw a bright light zip off into the sky on September 13th, 2024 near Rice Lake, WI. And while we’re already exploring the skies of the 1970s, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention a famous UFO encounter that took place just 70 miles south of Rice Lake.

To set the scene - Disco Lady by Johnnie Taylor was at the top of the charts, everyone was getting wall to wall orange shag carpeting installed in their split-level ranches, and for some reason waterbeds were all the rage. However, as Wisconsin Frights writes, it appears that all was not groovy in Elmwood, WI.

“On April 22, 1976, officer George Wheeler drove his patrol car to the top of Tuttle Hill after seeing what he described as a “flaming ball the size of a football field” fly overhead. Wheeler assumed the fiery mass was a downed 747 jet engine hurtling towards a nearby town. 

When he got [to Tuttle Hill], however, he discovered a glowing, saucer-shaped object. He told his wife that he could see people moving around inside.

…A farmer found Wheeler still sitting in his car at the top of the dark hill. He was dazed, and the vehicle’s electrical system was dead.

Wheeler said the UFO had ‘zapped’ him with a bright blue light, and then didn’t remember anything after that until the farmer arrived.

In the following weeks, Wheeler started to not feel well, and complained of nightmares. He became increasingly more ill, and died less than a year later on February 12, 1977.”

Before he died, George did give his account in his own words, which you can hear over at Eyes on Cinema. And it appears, based on this 2024 video, that he wasn’t the only one to ever see something strange in the skies above Elmwood.

Perhaps if the Green Bay Packers were doing better that year then maybe the craft would have been football shaped instead of saucer shaped, but we here at MAU aren’t sure how closely our alien friends follow the NFL.

-Here There Be Headlines-

A round-up of bizarre, curious, head-scratching news stories that leave you saying, "huh."

If you still haven’t had your fill of strange stories for the week, here’s some weird news that caught our attention this week. We hope you have a great weekend, but we’ve got to go look up some new recipes because the titan arum in our office just bloomed and boy oh boy does it smell delicious!

Your guide to the recent (and perhaps ongoing!) Ohio Bigfoot flap

“I love the smell of rotting flesh in the morning!”

“De-extinction” you say?

Eau de mummy

Mosquitos demand human sacrifice

Adding “meteorite hunter” to my resume