Interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
How did this book come to be?
Mason Smith, co-author of Paranormal Kentucky
For many years, I taught English 101 and 102 at Eastern Kentucky University and 102, in particular, is the research class. Traditionally, that was where the students were asked to write a term paper. And I got really tired of reading endless, endless, endless papers on global warming or the campus parking situation, so I decided to make the focus of my English 102 sections paranormal phenomena. That worked out really well because then you can talk with the students about what makes a good source and what makes a really bad source.
Marie Mitchell, co-author of Paranormal Kentucky
And then Bill Goodman with the Humanities Council heard about Mason's interest and invited him to do a podcast with him about paranormal activity, and someone from the University Press of Kentucky heard that podcast, called Mason, and kind of indicated “If you write a book about this, then we will publish it.”
Mason and I collaborate on a lot of our writing, and since I was going to be traveling to these places with him and helping with the research, I just signed on as a co-author.
It's been a lot of fun traveling the paranormal highway of Kentucky. We tried to visit as many places that we wrote about as possible because it's a completely different feel going to a place and seeing where events happened than just reading about it and researching it from a distance.
Mason
There's one thing about doing library research and something else about walking into a space where people have seen a UFO or have experienced a ghost or have seen a dogman or a Bigfoot or something like that. There's a lot to be said for having boots on the ground.
Marie
There are lots of books out there about haunted places in Kentucky and they tend to be more anecdotal. “This is what happened. This is what the person reported.”
We tried to go beyond that by looking at context. What was going on in that area at that time or in that time period? What we did was look for explanations and options to explain things. But on some of the stories that we investigated, we had to just say, “We really don't know. We have no idea.”
We decided at the outset that we will take things at face value with the witness reports because most of these people - practically all of them that we investigated - they just wanted an explanation for what they saw. They truly believed in their hearts they saw a Bigfoot or they saw an alien spaceship or something paranormal. If they took a lie detector test, they would probably pass because they truly believed they saw what they reported seeing. So respectfully, we always accepted that.
Now, Could there be another explanation than a Bigfoot or a ghost or an alien? Sure, there could be, and that's what we were trying to do - get a little bit deeper into other options, other possibilities.
Clay
You’re both former journalists. In the introduction, you talk about how you are approaching the paranormal with as little bias as possible. In the UFO section of the book, there’s this alien abduction story with people on a highway, and you've listed out different explanations of what might have happened. Highway hypnosis, dishonesty (which you quickly rule out, because of the damage to their reputations)… But what I found interesting is that you listed the possibility of alien abduction as “unlikely.” So, you didn’t rule it out, but you brought some bias of “It probably didn’t happen, right?” How do you weigh these different options?
Mason
It seems to Marie and me that there's an enormous amount of evidence that people are seeing unusual things in the sky. There’s physical evidence for that: radar reports and photography and the infrared sensors on the Nimitz incident - the “Tic-Tac” incident.
But there is no evidence that those things in the sky are really from another star system. It's a two-part equation. Are people seeing weird things in the sky? Absolutely. Are those things in the sky from Zeta Reticuli full of little gray guys? Okay, well, that's a whole other ballgame. And we're not as confident about that as we are that people are seeing weird things in the sky.
Marie
Now, the incident that you're talking about involved three Casey County women who had gone to Lancaster to celebrate one of their birthdays and were driving back to Casey County. They felt that their car had been taken over by some other force and they couldn't control it, then there's a lapse where they can't account for time. They've got burns on their necks and on their bodies. They have no idea what happened. Other people had seen lights in that same area at about that same time. They are just stunned and looking for explanations because they can't come up with anything themselves. They've traveled eight miles and none of them of the three can recall driving that stretch of road. They all took lie detector tests and passed. Then, they did regressive hypnosis. And that's where it got a little more difficult to understand because each one felt that they had been examined - not prodded, necessarily, but examined by an alien being. But there were different descriptions of what took place and the description of the alien that was doing the exam.
These three women lived in terror the rest of their lives, worried that those aliens were going to come back and abduct them again. And they went to their graves not really knowing what had happened to them. It really did traumatize them and they had no reason to make up that story. It's one of those situations that got national headlines.
Mason
You know, Kentucky is really, I guess you would say, lucky.
We have some nationally known incidents. The Thomas Mantell incident from 1948 made national headlines because that man who was a decorated war hero, his plane crashed, and the story became that he was literally shot down by a UFO.
They had just dispatched him to go after something they saw flying over Fort Knox, and he picks it up flying a P-51 Mustang.
What probably happened to him is he was flying above his flight ceiling without oxygen, blacked out, and crashed. But at the time, it made national headlines. Then there’s The Stanford incident with the three women, that’s nationally known, and the Kelly-Hopkinsville incident from 1955. These Kentucky cases are right up there among the most famous.
Clay
Your book has sections on ghosts, aliens, and cryptids. What connects these phenomena to be able to cover them all in one book?
Marie
Well, there was a challenge! It all falls under the umbrella of the paranormal, but we divided them into sections. You start off with Thomas Mantel and the alien stories, and then go to ghosts, and you’ve got a number of cryptids - Dogman, Bigfoot, the Herrington Lake monster - all in later chapters.
Mason
In one sense, the book is really a travelogue because one thing that threads everything together is the fact that Marie and I got in a car and went to these places and knocked on doors. We went to the Anderson Hotel. We went to Waverly Hills. We went to Land Between the Lakes looking for dogmen - although not in the middle of the night.
Marie
Not in the dark.
Mason
Not in the dark. We went looking for dogmen in the clear light of day. When it got dark, we were back at Kentucky Lake State Resort Park in our room by the fire.
It allows us, in a narrative sense, to tie stories together: here’s what we saw when we went down, here’s what it looks like now, and here’s who we met.
We’re really thankful we went to go see these places. We have not seen any ghosts. We haven’t seen any UFOs. We haven’t seen a Bigfoot or a Dogman. But we’ve had a whole lot of fun talking to people all over the Commonwealth of Kentucky, many of whom report that they have seen a Dogman or a Bigfoot or a UFO or a ghost.
Marie
And the ghosts tend to be in haunted cemeteries, historic homes, and Civil War battlefields. Those are places that you would expect to see them. Every place we've done a tour, the docents are so full of history that they just can't wait to share with you.
Mason
We went down to Perryville, which was a major battle in the Civil War, the largest battle fought in Kentucky, but also an important battle in the Western theater and had implications for the war as a whole. It's a big deal.
Visiting the park, one of the first things you see when you walk in are these two mass graves. Very few places in America, short of a Civil War battlefield, do you find mass graves. So many people died so suddenly, and they were unidentified, and the only thing the people could do was to get them a decent burial as quickly as possible.
Brian Bush [Park Manager for the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site] was talking to us at Perryville. His story was: “We encounter paranormal stuff every day. That's just no big deal for us.”
Marie
Just another day at the office. They hear cannons going off. They hear horse hooves running. They hear voices when there's no person around that could be speaking them. They've just kind of accepted that.
What tends to happen at the haunted battlefield sites is you have reenactors in very authentic uniforms. Down to the buttons and to the spectacles, it’s true to the 1860s. So, if there is a ghost, they tend to come up to the reenactors because they look similar and they feel some companionship or some association with them.
Clay
Your research put you in touch with TAPS, with MUFON, and with BFRO, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. What was it like to get in touch with those organizations, and how did their input or resources help with the project?
Mason
Well, we were really lucky. Generally speaking, everybody was very kind to us and very cooperative.
About ten years ago, I was sent out to get milk one Sunday after Thanksgiving. I was trying to get my car unlocked and happened to look up and I could see what looked like a red laser pointer passing overhead very slowly, very silently. I’ve never seen a flying saucer and I’ve never seen spaceships, but I have seen an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
So, I called MUFON. I filled out and submitted a report. About three or four days later, I get a call from this woman who’s a field investigator for Kentucky. She had an extensive list of questions. Had I been drinking? Was I taking recreational drugs? Was I in the care of a psychiatrist? She was trying to eliminate the possibilities that I was hoaxing or ill or hallucinating. So, somewhere in the files of MUFON, there is a Mason Smith report from Richmond, Kentucky.
It was, almost certainly, the International Space Station passing overhead. I don’t expect to be visited by little gray aliens anytime soon. But, for the most part, everybody was very cordial!
Marie
Charlie Raymond with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, he was very gracious with his time. We've run into him a couple times since, and he is sincere about investigating reports. Like us, he treated people respectfully.
He’s had over 400 interviews he’s done himself. He gets a report, makes careful note of time, date, place, and who the witness is. He interviews the witness and asks for physical evidence. He’ll go out and cast footprints if he can find them.
He’s trying to build a good data set. Somebody’s got to do the groundwork, because we’ll never make any progress if it’s all anecdotal. We need someone like Charlie Raymond who’s going to devote the time and the effort to interview these people, record all the data, and keep it centralized.
Clay
I noticed you’re wearing themed shirts. Marie, you’re wearing one that says “Got Ghosts?” And Mason, you’re wearing a shirt with some UFOs beaming up critters. Are those representative of your favorite type of paranormal story?
Mason
Well, about the apparel: Marie and I have four children. When you're a parent and it’s a birthday or Father's Day or Mother's Day or Christmas, a lot of dads get a tie or a new billfold. I get a T-shirt with a Bigfoot or Mothman on it. We’re wearing the paraphernalia because we've been given the paraphernalia.
Marie
You have to dress the part. If we're doing a talk on ghosts, this is what I would wear - “Got Ghosts?” and my ghost earrings. If we're doing Bigfoot, I have a Bigfoot t-shirt, leggings and Bigfoot earrings. That's kind of our natural attire anymore. Get rid of all these other dress-up clothes. Who needs them?
Mason
But to the intent of your question: Do we have a favorite paranormal event?
As I’ve done more reading on this, and as Marie and I have talked about it, I’m coming to the belief that John Keel came up with. He’s the author of The Mothman Prophecies and was a longtime researcher. John Keel didn’t believe that there were five or six different phenomena - like Bigfoot and ghosts and cryptids and UFOS. He thought it was one phenomena that manifests itself in a bunch of different ways.
It depends on where you are. If you’re out in the woods and it’s a dark and stormy night, you’re more likely to see a Bigfoot or a Dogman. If you're in a creepy old house and it's windy and you're hearing weird things, well, you're going to see the ghost of Great Aunt Tilly coming down the hallway.
I've come to believe that it may not be a whole bunch of different phenomena. It may be one phenomena that manifests itself in different ways depending on the person. So I'm fond of all of them, but I think we ought to look for a unified experience here, not a whole bunch of different things.
Marie
I'm fond of the haunted houses because of the history that you get from the docents. In their spare time, they read up on things about their houses. They’re so invested in it, and they just can’t wait to share that information with you and make it come alive, make it meaningful and real. These were real people who lived here and encountered different things. You get so much history wrapped up in the hauntings, and I enjoy that.
Clay
On the “unified experience” thing… Something that gets said in the book is that, following some inciting event, there’s a response that manifests as seeing something stressful or strange or unfamiliar. But there are also benevolent sightings. If the phenomenon is a fear-response, what does that say about the more benevolent sightings like the Gray Lady of Liberty Hall or the Hopkinsville Goblins, which weren’t exactly aggressive, despite being shot at?
Mason
There's an honest mystery here. I think we're being diverted by all the ghost equipment, by the TV kind of ghost hunters and UFO shows. In more serious interviews, the vast majority of sightings are relatively benign.
Jacques Vallée is a longtime UFO researcher. He’s written many books going back decades on the UFO phenomenon. He believes - and this is one of my favorite things - Jacques Vallée believes there's an element of humor. They're messing with us.
Marie and I have cats in the home. You can get a little laser pointer and play with the cat, and the cat wants that red dot, and the cat will do whatever it takes to capture the red dot. Jacques Vallée says the phenomenon is messing with us like a cat owner with a laser pointer. We're made to run around and jump up and do funny things and somebody in the realm of the ether is getting a real laugh out of all the humans going on the UFO hunts and Bigfoot hunts and ghost hunts. It’s not like they're devouring us. It’s not a creature-feature late on a Saturday night. They’re not coming here to steal Earth women. But there is a trickster element to it, an element of humor. A non-human intelligence would also have a non-human sense of humor.
Clay
Sounds like a very human sense of humor!
Marie and Mitchell will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington for the Kentucky Book Festival Saturday, November 1, 2025.