Lore · Aaron Mahnke

Lore 303: Shoot for the Stars

April 6, 2026·29 min·2 clips

William Shatner finally reached space at age 90—and his reaction was not joy but existential dread.

It starts with a ritual everyone can picture. William Shatner, tied in the public imagination to space travel for decades, climbs aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-18 for a ten-minute suborbital trip on October 13, 2021. He was ninety. The setup sounds almost too tidy: the man who pretended to leave Earth finally does it. But the episode does not leave the story there. It turns toward an older habit, the way people look up and decide the sky is speaking directly to them. Comets had hair, supposedly. The host follows how those strange trails, now understood as dust and ionized gas, were read as warnings. Vespasian found a way around one. Told a comet might be an omen, the Roman emperor decided it could not be meant for him because he was bald. It had to be for the very hairy king of the Parthians. Funny, yes, but also revealing. People wanted heaven's odd lights to mean somebody was being singled out. Then France gets weirder. In Oloron, in October of 1952, witnesses saw a giant cigar-shaped UFO moving south across a normal day. Nearly thirty more objects followed, described through opera glasses as smoky balls with red centers and yellowish rings. Then pale white threads fell over rooftops, trees, and telephone wires. A dentist crossing a bridge got tangled in them. When touched, the material reportedly turned jelly-like, then disappeared, leaving only the story and the unease.

As heard by us

A skyward story about wonder, omen, and the old human need to explain the impossible.

Aaron Mahnke centers this Lore episode on William Shatner's 2021 suborbital flight, then lets the focus widen into older patterns of fear, omen, and interpretation.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When the sky starts meaning something, you get the point of this one.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Lore