In 2012, Dana and Greg Newkirk were contacted by a man called David who claimed that small humanoid beings were coming out of a mine shaft on his family’s property in Kentucky.
According to David, the creatures would appear at night, looking through windows and scurrying around outside the house. He sent the Newkirks some blurry photographs of the alleged creatures and photographs of three-toed footprints he said they had left behind.
And then his emails stopped.
It’s the sort of story that is almost custom-built to send somebody down a paranormal rabbit hole, and years later that is exactly what happened in Hellier, the documentary series following Greg and Dana Newkirk, Karl Pfeiffer and Connor Randall as they travelled to Kentucky to investigate.
Except there’s something worth pointing out before we even get to Kentucky: David didn’t actually describe the things he claimed to have seen as Goblins.
That connection came later.
The Newkirks linked David’s reports to the much older Hopkinsville Goblin case, another Kentucky encounter involving strange humanoid creatures which dates back to the 1950s.1 Suddenly the things supposedly crawling around outside David’s house weren’t just unidentified little humanoids. They were part of a wider Kentucky Goblin mystery.
And Hellier gets much, much stranger from there.
The initial eye-witness reports of the modern Kentucky Goblins from David don’t really provide anything of substance other than personal accounts (which are quite creepy at face value), a few blurry photos, and the footprints.
It becomes apparent quite quickly that the cast don’t see this as restrictive and seem to believe that these Goblin creatures might be CryptoTerrestrial phenomena - which is to say that they’re extra-terrestrial creatures living on this Earth who’ve managed to evade the human race by (in this case) living in the vast network of mines and caves that stretch beneath Kentucky and beyond.
This means that to the Hellier investigators, the creatures reported by David can potentially be connected to other strange creatures, other encounters, and other apparently anomalous events across the United States.
This is where I started wondering how much of the case still belonged to David.
There is a difference between investigating somebody’s report that small creatures are appearing outside their home and constructing a theory about hidden non-human intelligences living underground. The latter might be interesting, but it isn’t evidence for the former.
And because David had stopped emailing, there was nobody there to clarify what he had actually seen or what he himself thought it might have been.
High Strangeness
It only gets weirder from there on. Or, should I say Stranger?
After David disappears from the correspondence, other mysterious emails relating to the case begin arriving. These eventually lead the Hellier investigators towards the idea that the Goblins might be only one small part of something much bigger.
Synchromysticism enters the picture.
This takes Jung’s concept of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence), and pushes it further by treating apparently connected coincidences as potentially meaningful parts of some larger force or intelligence. As a result, the Hellier investigators begin to see connected meaning in a number of different events, numbers, words and coincidences. They increasingly entertain the possibility that something is deliberately leading them through the investigation.
However, by believing that they aren’t in control of the outcome of their actions, and that something was messing with or leading them through their investigation, they don’t stop to consider if someone could have been messing with them instead.
For example, there was never any certainty that David was who he claimed to be, or even that the person sending the later emails had any genuine connection to the original case.
Which makes one particuar moment in Hellier stand out.
They are already in rural Kentucky when they decide it might be a good idea to trace the IP address of the person who has been emailing them.
I’d have done this before I even left my house. It’s the sort of basic check that should happen before fieldwork begins, particuarly when anonymous or semi-anonymous online correspondence is the foundation of the case you’re investigating. Instead, the possibility that the emails themselves might be part of an ordinary human hoax competes with increasingly elaborate ideas about something unseen guiding the investigators.
The boundaries continue to blur as the series progresses.
Like John Keel, the Hellier team entertain the possibility that cryptoterrestrial phenomena might somehow be connected to elemental or other paranormal phenomena. They use a Spirit Box and the Estes Method in an attempt to communicate with whatever they believe they might be dealing with.
I’ve written before about why the Estes Method doesn’t stand up particularly well to scientific scrutiny. In Hellier, its main contribution seems to be giving the investigators another opportunity to interpret random material as meaningful.
Tin Can Thinking
This is where Hellier started to lose me.
I don’t think the people involved are pretending to believe what they say they believe, and I don’t think their reactions are fake. I think they genuinely find what is happening to them strange and significant.
That’s part of what makes the series interesting.
But sincerity doesn’t make an investigative method reliable.
Once coincidences, random words, anonymous emails and personal intuitions can all potentially be treated as part of the same mystery, it becomes very difficult for anything to count against that mystery. It means that an unanswered question creates another question, and a coincidence becomes a clue, and something generated randomly by a Spirit Box might have meaning.
If one theory doesn’t quite work, the mystery can expand until another one accommodates it. You can keep doing that almost indefinitely.
And that’s my problem with the investigation in Hellier. The team seem predisposed towards having a paranormal adventure, and the methods they use make it extremely easy for the adventure to continue providing them with new things to investigate.
That doesn’t mean nothing strange happened, just that the investigation does very little to help us establish what did.
Synchromysticism is particularly difficult to investigate because almost any coincidence can be incorporated after the fact. Once you begin assuming that apparently unrelated events may be deliberately connected, finding another connection can itself become evidence that you were right to look for connections.
It becomes a loop.
At some point, you have to ask what evidence could persuade you that two things aren’t connected, because if the answer is “nothing”, you no longer have much of an investigation and instead you have a story capable of absorbing anything that happens around it.
And if you’re not careful, you can become so caught up in seeing meaning in coincidences that you get excited about the interconnectedness of rusty tin cans.
The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.
Kentucky New Era, ‘Story of Space-ship, 12 Little Men Probed Today’, August 22, 1955, [scanned document] Available at https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=HeYrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qmUFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2838,3341366 (Accessed 20th April 2019)