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Here Be Monsters · Here Be Monsters

HBM157: The Raw Whatever

November 28, 2022·40 min·3 clips
Alan Greenfield describes opening the armoire and finding something formless but not void — a low-pitched hum and a sense of 'other' so total he wanted to stick a finger through it.
A phone call opens it. Jeff asks his dad what it was like to hear the show and sense old family stuff moving underneath it. His dad answers with care, and with a little dry comedy: both parents listened together and wondered if they had somehow done something to him. The question lands softly, which makes it funnier and sadder. From there, the episode lets family memory sit beside stranger material without sanding down either side. The talk turns outward. A guest describes encounters that do not fit ordinary description, where reality may be arriving through senses and brains that are not quite made for it. Belief gets handled plainly. UFOs here are not a team to join. They are either there or they are not, and that means someone has to look. Then the old movie images come in. Michael Rennie as Klaatu, and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, become the guest's first remembered aliens. The fear was not theoretical. As a child, he had to leave, rattled by the robot and by images he later reads through a Freudian lens. The joke is quiet: the thing that scared him helped send him toward science fiction, aerial phenomena, and NICAP. Jeff hears the pattern. A childhood fright can keep tugging for years. A closet, a movie robot, a family story. The ending comes back home, with Jeff and his dad talking about parenting, Santa Claus, and the uneasy ethics tucked inside ordinary tenderness. It feels handmade. The pieces do not snap together, but they belong near each other: fathers, fear, belief, investigation, and the raw whatever left after the explanation runs out.

As heard by us

A father-son conversation moves from childhood fear to UFOs, occult reading, and the long reach of memory.

This Here Be Monsters episode centers on Jeff Emtman and his dad, and that frame gives the conversation its shape. It moves from a question about fatherhood into memory, upbringing, and the kind of childhood fear that can stick around for years.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A father-son call that moves from personal memory into UFOs, occult reading, and Santa Claus ethics.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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