Midnight in Kentucky

Hellier Episode 2: ‘Ink and Black’ Review

This review contains spoilers! Follow the link below to watch before reading!

Hellier Episode 2: Ink and Black

https://youtu.be/BbXbfImzpo8

Episode two of Hellier takes us to the infamous hills of eastern Kentucky on the hunt of goblins with the Alien Cave Base Task Force. To me, the buildup to the team arriving in Hellier echoed another series whose narrative is steeped heavily in occulture and ultraterrestrials. Twin Peaks fans are familiar with all of the story lines and synchronicities that had to slowly converge in the series’ third season to culminate in the heroes returning to the titular north western town. Though Hellier’s narrative brought us to it’s own title’s namesake at a much quicker pace, the synchronicities and subtle calling of high strangeness that slowly led both Dale Cooper back to Twin Peaks after twenty five years, and Greg Newkirk to Hellier, Kentucky, five years after the case began, bear striking similarities to each other. The oddities that spring forth from these synchronicities and strange occurrences for Greg, Dana, and the gang, are Lynchian to the max.

The Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts, as it is termed by Allen Greenfield in his book by the same name, takes center stage in Ink and Black. Indeed, the name of the episode itself comes from a term that appears both in Terry Wriste’s e-mails to Greg and is said to describe none other than Indrid Cold, the supposed extradimensional being that appeared to Woodrow Derenberger during the Mothman sightings in West Virginia, through the Cypher that Greenfield writes about. It’s Karl who first recognizes the commonality between Greenfield’s findings and Terry Wriste’s own communications en route to Hellier, setting the tone for their time in the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky before they had even fully arrived. This air of otherworldly intervention continues as Hellier residents seem reluctant to discuss the happenings around the town when the team arrives and even more so when news agencies and police departments show no interest in speaking with them. In the words of Dana Newkirk, “The strangest thing we encountered was the lack of strangeness.”

This lack of strangeness seems to be the calm before the storm, however. No one in town knows of David Christie, the supposed doctor who sent Greg the original e-mails. On the hunt for Christie, though, the team are told of more odd goings on within the hills of Hellier, such as sounds of a baby crying within the caves at night. This leads Dana to theorize that what they may be dealing with in Hellier is some kind of elemental entity or entities. Puckwudgies were what originally sprang to my mind when Dana made mention of this. (For more information on these creatures follow the link below.) Regardless, though the case takes a more treacherous turn in episode two, as Ink and Black steeps us further into the strangeness happening within Hellier and like it’s thematic, fictional brethren, Twin Peaks, manages to raise more questions on just what it is behind the odd occurrences. In Hellier, energies are building and something is about to break.

See you guys for a combined episode three and four review: ‘Trapped in a Maze’ & ‘Slivers of the Future’

‘Til the next moon rises, Night Owls!

• Puckwudgie: Evil Goblins or Helpful Elementals

Hellier Episode 1: ‘The Midnight Children’ Review

This review contains spoilers! Follow the link below to watch before reading!

Hellier Episode 1: The Midnight Children

There is a pertinent moment early on in ‘The Midnight Children’, the first episode of Hellier, that manages to perfectly capture one of the five part docu-series’ most important overall themes. This foreboding instance comes in Greg Newkirk’s initial interview. Greg notes that in his experience as a supernatural and paranormal investigator often times the deeper a case is pursued the stranger, and evermore stranger, it becomes. Not only does this statement absolutely apply to the Hellier investigation at hand going forward, but it is also very applicable to something that has always bugged me about the way the overall community surrounding the supernatural and paranormal perceives any given popular happening that comes our way. Take the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville ‘UFO crash’ for instance, an event that plays heavily into the Hellier documentary. (I assume most readers are familiar with this incident, though, if not check out Nick Redfern’s Mysterious Universe article in the link following this review.) While we’ve spent decades arguing about whether the creatures seen by the Sutton’s on that hot August evening were in fact other worldly entities or just barn owls, we’ve failed to take into account the centuries of interactions that the human population in and around Kentucky have had with beings like the goblins near our natural cave systems. Too many times we’re so willing to hear the details of a case, and as believers herald it as the coming of the extraterrestrials, or as skeptics, take it as just another case of wildlife misidentification, without allowing the thing to develop to its full high strangeness. The crew of Hellier certainly can’t be accused of this.

In fact much of the Hellier investigation revolves around a strange series of synchronicities that took place involving researcher Karl Pfeiffer and his relation to the ongoing investigation by Greg and Dana Newkirk into ‘The Return of the Kentucky Goblins’. For those who may not know of the phenomena of synchronicities, I’ll quickly summarize by quoting the originator of the term, Carl Jung’s definition of ‘a meaningful coincidence’. (You can read more on synchronicities at the link following this review.) I’m sure for more than a few diehard ‘UFO people’ I know, and by reading other’s thoughts on the series online, this element of synchronicity and esoterica was already a point of contention with Hellier. However, just like we as a community have failed to acknowledge the connections of the holler goblin legends in Kentucky with the ‘55 encounter in Kelly and so many more instances in hundreds of cases across the board, we often times fail to realize that these moments of high strangeness are elements of some of the most prolific incidences of the paranormal and supernatural. As is referenced throughout the series, prominent Mothman investigator John Keel experienced many of these moments of synchronicity and strangeness throughout, and after, his time in Point Pleasant. Indeed, as Greg points out in ‘The Midnight Children’ the letters Keel received from a mysterious group known as ‘The International Bankers’ in connection with his investigation in ‘69 mirrors the cadence and word use of their own Terry Wriste emails shown in this episode. These meaningful coincidences have been reported by various renowned researchers in addition to Keel in conjunction with various cases. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the 2002 fictionalized account of John Keel’s Mothman investigation, ‘The Mothman Prophecies’: “One day you’re just driving along in your car, and the universe just points at you and says, “Ah, there you are. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve been looking for you.” It’s as if the something has opened up to these investigators for a major revelation. Many times though, that’s only more questions.

Overall these reviews won’t be the standard recap assessments that these kind of things often are but instead will examine the themes, motifs, and overall subject matter of the individual episodes. ‘The Midnight Children’ introduces us to our investigation team and slowly lulls us into the deep, dark hills of eastern Kentucky, to a place that any bluegrass resident will immediately recognize as a reflection of home. Hellier overall does an excellent job of capturing the unique individualism of our state while at once accentuating our immersion in an ongoing flap of bizarre and other worldly activity. While communally we seem to continually come back to, and pore over, the well known cases like the Flatwood’s Monster, the Fargo UFO dogfight, and the Roswell incident, cases like this one are developing right now in real time. While there is nothing inherently wrong with going back to these incidences and reopening investigations, what Hellier does is take an open run at a new corner of an ongoing occurrence and presents us with a whole new take on just what the ‘Kentucky Goblins’ may be up to, and ‘The Midnight Children’ is only the beginning.

See you guys for episode two: ‘The Ink and the Black’.

‘Til the next moon rises, Night Owls!

•1955: A Really, Really Close Encounter

1955: A Really, REALLY Close Encounter

•What is Synchronicity

https://www.carl-jung.net/synchronicity.html