Episode 3: Inconvenient Lives

LES SILLARS, HOST: The first hint of a problem came one night in 1999. It was a few months after Jill Stanek started working as a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. The nurses were gathered around the desk for a shift change. It was a normal night, until a supervising nurse said matter-of-factly, “There’s a patient aborting a second trimester baby with Down Syndrome on our floor.”

MUSIC: Tragic Story by Myuu

Jill was shocked. She looked around the room. No one looked surprised or concerned.

JILL: I worked in the department for a year and I never, I never knew it was going on around me… Who would think that a hospital named “Christ” could be involved in such a thing?

It’s a good question. And, as our reporter Mary Muncy found, there were even more ... questions. More ... things. Things that would—once Jill went public with them—have a profound effect on her. And on the pro-life movement.

Once I heard Mary tell this story, I realized it’s about more than abortion. In an odd way it reminded me of something I tell my journalism students. That hardly anybody sets out to do really, really horrible things. So often people—in their day-to-day routine—somehow lose track of what they’re actually doing. Then they just sort of drift into evil.

So, today, a story about someone who refused to lose track. Someone who paid attention to what was going on right in front of her. Someone who wasn’t the same when she finally did see it clearly.

Before we get too far into this, you need to know that this is one of those hard stories. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it deals with an issue that parents might not want their kids to know about just yet. So this would be a good time to hit pause, if necessary. OK?

Mary will take it from here. I’m Les Sillars. This is Doubletake.

MARY MUNCY: Jill started working at Christ Hospital so that she wouldn’t have think about abortion. There’s a giant gold cross on the roof above the doorway, for Pete’s sake.

But that first night, when she realized the hospital did performed abortions, she decided it wasn’t her patient. Not her problem. So, she went on with her shift. And then the next shift. And the next.

Jill was a church-going Christian. She went every week. But being personally pro life was one thing. She did not want to be one of those… what she called “crazy” pro-lifers.

MUSIC: Melancholia by Godmode

She had a good job. She helped support her family. What could she actually do anyway?

Then everything changed.

One night a few months later, she passed another nurse holding a bundle on her way to the soiled utility room. The room where you throw soiled linens, instruments, and biohazardous waste after delivery. Placentas, that sort of thing.

JILL: I knew at that point, that's what that's where the babies went. But I'd never physically been in the department when an abortion was actually being committed.

Jill stopped her and saw the bundle was a tiny little boy.

A preemie. He had just survived an attempted abortion, the nurse said, and his parents didn’t have time to hold him. She didn’t either. She was going to set him on a table beside the linens and walk away.

JILL: I couldn’t let this suffering child die alone.

Jill took him. She held him by the nurse’s station. Rocked him. He was about the size of her hand and about a half a pound. She had him covered slightly when another nurse walked up.

JILL: She thought I was just holding some newborn and you know, took the top of the blanket off. And then she went ‘Oh,’ and put it back.

The head nurse at the nurses’ station said, maybe you should go hold the baby somewhere else. So Jill took him to the recovery room. It was dark and no one was in there. She sat on a bed.

JILL: And just kept thinking, like, this is insane, I can't believe this is happening. And toward the end of his life, I couldn't tell if he was alive or not unless I held them up against the light to see if I could see his heart beating through his chest wall because their skin is so thin at that age.

Forty-five minutes passed. Then he … died.

He was between 21 and 22 weeks old. Just old enough that he might be able to survive had he been born under different circumstances. But that’s the whole point. Someone had tried to kill him.

Only three states in the US report when a baby is born alive after an attempted abortion. This makes it really difficult to know how many there are. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

TOBIAS: My name is Carol Tobias. And I’m the president of National Right to Life.

Tobias said that in Canada, abortion facilities are required to report when it happens. She said,

TOBIAS: And up there, they say it's about one-tenth of one percent of all abortions. If we would just use that number in the U.S., that’s about 700 to 900 babies a year.

You might be thinking that can’t be right. There has to be some sort of protection for these babies. No one’s just going to leave a living baby in a soiled utility room to die.

But it happens all over the country. Hundreds of times per year, an almost-fully-formed baby survives an attempt on his or her life—and is born alive.

Jill took this infant back to the soiled utility room, with the dirty linens and other things to be thrown out. She tied his hands and feet together with a string so that his arms were crossed over his chest and put him in a shroud.

JILL: Then I took him to the morgue and set him where all the other dead patients were in this cold refrigerator. And so they knew this wasn't just a body part, you know, they knew this was a human being that they killed.

And just like that, Jill Stanek became one of those crazy pro-lifers.

Jill decided to be a nurse back in the 1980s. This from a speech she gave a pro-life conference,

JILL: When I was a young mom barely out of my teens, I was the first person to happen on an accident in my home state of Indiana.

Jill was driving down a highway and people didn’t use seatbelts very much at the time. A car with a father and mother, holding a baby girl, passed her. Then, as the couple’s car went up a hill, it stalled and the semi behind them couldn’t stop in time. It smashed into the back of the couple’s car and the baby went flying out of her mother’s arms into the windshield. Jill saw the accident happen and was the first person to reach them.

JILL: And so I saw the dad sitting in shock next to the car holding his dying baby girl. And there was nothing that I could do to help her and she did go on and pass away.

So, after her kids started high school she got her nursing degree. And she applied at only one hospital, Christ Hospital.

She wanted to work somewhere she wouldn’t have to face many ethical challenges. She thought a Christian hospital would be safe—and for the first few years, it was.

Jill worked in the cardiac unit until 1999. Then she transferred to the labor and delivery department so she could work with the babies. A few months later, she held the aborted baby. After that, she couldn’t just act like nothing happened. She went home and talked to her husband.

They realized that if she went public with what she’d found, she might lose her job. Her kids were still teenagers and she held the family insurance through the hospital. But her husband said he would stand beside her. He said, “she had to do what she had to do.”

Then she called her pastor.

TIM HARLOW: I'm Tim Harlow, the pastor at Parkview Christian Church. I've known Jill for 32 years. And I was her pastor and her very close friend at the beginning of this process and really all the way through it.

He got the call when he was at the offsite church offices. Jill had just gotten back from holding the dying baby and told him the story. Tim stepped outside And started walking down the sidewalk, past the little strip mall stores nearby.

TIM: Most of the time, you know, I'm trying to tell some husband to stay with his wife. … But the moral choices that are very cut and dried for me became decisions that were no longer cut and dried.

Tim stood there, looking at the laundromat and Chinese restaurant.

MUSIC: Resolution by Wayne Jones

He tried to think through what he would do in her situation. But he thought it came to an awful choice.

TIM: You shut up and let it go and keep your job or, or, or say something and lose it.

He knew that he could only give advice. She was an employee and would have to go through the proper channels. He couldn’t storm the castle with her.

He could listen. He could help rally people around her. He could pray. That was all just about anyone could do. So, Tim prayed with her. Then he hung up. Jill started by writing a letter to the hospital’s religious authorities.

Christ Hospital is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Both call themselves “pro-choice” denominations. Jill hadn’t even known there was such a thing.

JILL: I tried to follow Jesus's protocol and Matthew 19:18. When you see someone in sin, you go to them privately and appeal to them to stop, and then you take back witnesses, if that doesn't work, and then you eventually take the matter before the church.

She was called into a meeting with two department supervisors, both Catholics. She was sure she was being fired.

JILL: I was petrified, you know, if, if people expect that when a moment comes when you have to be courageously faithful you'll be like, David, you know, just hey, Goliath, take that. And I wasn't like that, for me.

The room was small with a little round table in the corner. They all sat down around it.

JILL: I was like, scared out of my wits. But I had started taking my Bible to work with me. And so when I went into this meeting, I had my nurses bag on my lap, and I just kept my hands on the Bible on top of the nurses bag.

The administrators started with explanations. Christ Hospital had been doing this since 1978, they said and they weren’t the first ones.

This was the most compassionate way to abort a baby, they said. Parents can hold the child and grieve and it’s the right thing to do when a baby’s diagnosed with Down Syndrome or spina bifida. No, there was no policy for it, they said. No, they were not going to stop.

JILL: And they said that I might, I might want to consider working at a hospital that was more in line with my pro-life convictions.

Jill got the impression they thought of her as just a naive nurse who would learn to understand the complexities that they had to face every day. They didn’t know her very well.

She walked out of that meeting knowing that her “pro-life convictions” meant she needed to stay and fight.

JILL: I stayed was because if I left then it would just go hush hush again. But as long as I was there, it was a controversial point and got a lot of recognition and I got to find out a lot while I you know, when I would go to work just keeping apprised of the situation.

After the break: how to survive an abortion. We’ll be right back.

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Remember the baby Jill found? Well he survived a very specific type of abortion. An induced labor abortion.

JILL: When Mom is pregnant, the uterus becomes shaped like a hot air balloon or a light bulb. And at the bottom of this hot air balloon is an opening called the cervix that is supposed to stay closed until a mom is about 40 weeks pregnant.

Back then, the first step of an induced labor abortion was to inject a strong saline solution into the uterus to kill the baby. These days abortionists usually use potassium chloride or a drug called Digoxin, a heart medication often used to treat heart failure or arrhythmia. But it poisons babies.

After that, an abortionist inserts a medication into the cervix that irritates it and causes it to open.

JILL: … so these small but you know, fully formed preemies just, just fall out.

And if that baby is farther along than the mother or hospital staff thought, say 24 weeks instead of 22, her chances of surviving are that much higher. Jill added that sometimes abortionists skip the first step.

JILL: In my experience hospitals don't kill the baby ahead of time.

Instead, the abortionist lets the baby suffocate to death. Babies delivered before 22 weeks rarely have lungs formed enough to hold air. It can take minutes, or hours, but eventually her lungs just can’t keep up.

MUSIC: Poisoned Rose by Aakash Gandhi

But there’s another reason. An abortionist may not kill the baby before inducing labor because they’re going to “harvest” the fetal tissue for research.

In 2015, David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, or the CMP, did an undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood. He recorded abortionists saying that they didn’t use the first half of the abortion cocktail, Digoxin, when they intended to sell the organs. Why? Because tissue must be uncontaminated and recently alive in order to be harvested and that would kill the baby too early and contaminate it.

That investigation got a lot of attention—especially from Planned Parenthood. It sued the CMP for invasion of privacy and recording confidential meetings. Planned Parenthood won a $2 million judgment in 2019, but CMP has appealed, and the decision is pending.

But CMP wasn’t done. Last fall it came out with another bombshell.

ETWN Announcer: Undercover pro-life journalist David Daleiden claims a federally funded research project at the University of Pittsburgh uses organs extracted from live fetuses … His group, the Center for Medical Progress, claims the university is carrying out barbaric experiments on aborted infants, and killing infants delivered alive for liver harvesting and experiments funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Daleiden told the Catholic TV network, EWTN, that the NIH funded a program that collected large numbers of aborted fetal kidneys, bladders, and other organs. In its grant application, the university proposed becoming a distribution hub for these organs.

It also promised to use induced labor abortions to keep the babies alive as long as possible. Here’s Daleiden.

DALEIDEN: The University of Pittsburgh is saying, they're going to be laboring babies out and they're going to be taking steps to make sure that there's blood circulation as long as possible into those organs--sounds suspiciously like changing the way they're doing the abortions, likely illegal partial birth abortions or even straight up infanticide.

The university has denied it extracts organs from live infants. It also hired an outside reviewer in January of 2022. He found that the university’s practices complied with state and federal law.

So what would happen if one of these babies survived longer than a few minutes or hours? What if the abortionist wasn’t able to harvest its organs?

MUSIC: Pouring Out by Asher Fulero

What if Jill, back in 1999, could have rushed that baby straight to the neonatal intensive care unit? What if someone had wanted him to survive? He might have had a life something like Melissa Ohden’s.

MELISSA: I'm Melissa Ohden and I'm the survivor of a failed saline infusion abortion.

In August 1977, Melissa’s birth mom was a college student in Sioux City, Iowa. Then she found out she was pregnant. Mellisa’s grandmother insisted that her mom get an abortion. So, she went and the abortionist gave her the first half of an abortion cocktail—a salt water solution injected into her womb.

Normally abortionists would wait three days before irritating the cervix but in Melissa’s case, they waited five days. Five days of salt water on her delicate skin. Then when they finally induced labor, the abortionist expected to deliver a dead baby girl.

But Melissa survived. Then someone put her in a soiled utility room, just like the baby Jill Stanek found. But a nurse heard her weak cries and rushed her to the neonatal intensive care unit. She was jaundiced and hardly breathing, but she was alive.

Melissa believes she survived because she was closer to 25 weeks along—not 19.

MELISSA: I found out my story when I was 14. That's pretty typical. For survivors like me, it tends to be a family secret.

Melissa’s grandmother signed the forms giving Melissa up for adoption, and Melissa’s mother didn’t know she had survived. She didn’t find out for another 30 years.

MELISSA: I grew up knowing I was adopted, I have an older sister who's also adopted. And you know, what I love about our parents is that they raised us to know that, that that was a gift, ... to us that our birth parents loved us enough to give us life and places for adoption when they couldn't care for us.

Melissa first heard her own story after a fight with her older sister. They were in Melissa’s room yelling at the top of their lungs and Melissa had her back to her, ready to storm out of the room.

MELISSA: And she said to me, you know, at least my biological parents wanted me.

Melissa spun on her heel.

MELISSA: I wanted to point at her and just say, Are you kidding? And when I spun around, the look on her face just stopped me dead in my tracks, because her face just fell. And I knew that there was something more going on.

Her parents weren’t home so Melissa retreated. It was dark by the time her mom came back from work. They sat down on the couch. Melissa explained what her sister had said and asked what was going on. She expected to get in trouble, but instead they spent hours dancing around the question.

MELISA: Oh, yes. You know, Missy, you were you were born prematurely. Oh, yes. Missy, you had this health issue and that health issue. And, gosh, your dad and I love you… I think she just finally got to the point where she knew that there was no way out of making that truth be known. And so that's when the words just kind of fell out of her mouth.

Your mother tried to abort you. Melissa collapsed into her mother’s arms.

MELISSA: It was like, everything I knew to be true has somehow been a lie. You know, I went from being this adoptee who was deeply loved, to this abortion survivor who someone tried to end their life.

Mellissa spent five years angry at her biological parents and acting out because of it. Then, at 19 she decided she needed to start forgiving them. So, she began trying to find them. She started by looking for her medical records. But abortion survivors rarely have medical records because, well, someone had tried to kill them.

So how do you find the people on them? Mellissa just so happened to be living in the same town as one of them. It was her father. In 2010, after she’d moved out and gotten married, she sent him a letter. But she never heard back.

But then, years later, someone knocked on her door. It was a warm spring day and Melissa was exhausted after just giving birth to her first baby girl. So she didn’t answer.

MELISSA: But here I was peeking out the bedroom window through the blinds, right thinking, Who is that? Who am I avoiding?

She didn’t recognize him. He was an older man, in his sixties. He looked nice and put together. He stuck something in the door.

MELISSA: And after they left, I went, and I opened the door, and I found a sheet of paper folded over in half, and shaky handwriting. And it was a note from my grandfather.

Her father’s father. It said that he had just found out that she was alive.

MELISSA: And he was just so happy to know about me, and he wanted to hear from me, and you know, I crumbled to the floor, when I got that, you know, ...

For the next week she clutched the letter but didn’t call him. She’d waited 10 years for this. But there was no playbook. No instructions for how to meet the parents of someone who went along with your abortion. But finally, she called him.

She was nervous and half hoping it would go to voicemail but when he picked up…

MUSIC: Snowy Peaks Pt. II by Chris Haugen

MELISSA: He was just so excited. So excited, you could hear it in his voice. And we made plans to meet for coffee at his favorite coffee place.

Melissa brought her infant daughter to the coffee shop. It was the kind of place where the regulars all know each other. He had obviously gotten there early and he came out to help Melissa and the baby. Pretty soon he was showing off his new great-granddaughter to everyone in the place.

MELISSA: But he was this doting grandfather carrying his little six week old great granddaughter around this diner, and telling people who I was. And that was, that was so affirming.

They sat in a booth and talked about her biological father. Her grandfather showed her pictures and stories. He wanted to share all the things she’d missed.

MELISSA: And it was just like catching up with, you know, with somebody, you've essentially known your whole life.

After that, her grandfather became a persistent presence in her life, and the lives of her kids. He eventually passed away in 2020 at 91 years old. About five years ago, Melissa found her birth mother and her maternal grandparents and she’s been building relationships with them ever since.

Melissa started speaking publicly about her experience in 2007. The more she talked, the more people whispered their stories to her. So, she started the Abortion Survivors Network in 2012. She wants to help people like her know they’re not alone. She told me that culture tries to tell abortion survivors that they shouldn’t exist. That they’re the exception. That they’re alone.

MELISSA: For a very good reason, we're a very inconvenient truth to the world.

Right now, the Abortion Survivors Network is connected to 403 survivors from 18 countries. Those survivors range from 1-year-olds whose parents are looking for recourses especially because abortion survivors can have a lot of health problems, to 90-year-olds who are looking for connection.

MELISSA: We know statistically we're probably somewhere in the tens of thousands.

Tens of thousands of abortion survivors worldwide, and more added daily.

After the break: Jill goes to Washington. We’ll be right back.

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When the hospital shrugged off her concerns in 1999, Jill started by taking her story to the press.

ANNOUNCERS: I sat down for an exclusive interview with nurse Jill Stanek. As a nurse, she claims to have witnessed babies aborted alive without medical care …

She appeared on talk shows. She told her story to newspapers and magazines. She went on the radio.

Then she got a call from some Republicans in Washington about a Born Alive Infants Protection Act. George W. Bush had just been elected and was sensitive to pro-life issues. The bill is just a few sentences long and defines what it means to be an infant born alive. It had been in the works for decades but was just starting to come to fruition as Jill was speaking publicly.

So, Jill took her teenage kids to Washington. Her job was to testify about her eye witness experience with infants being born alive. She was nervous. She wrote her script and then let a few congressional members read it but it didn’t really help. She just kept thinking, what would they ask her?

JILL: I got advice that House members would not want to be seen attacking a nurse, making a nurse cry. And when you're relaying a personal experience, it's hard to pick that apart as well.

Jill sat in front of a panel of straight-faced people. This is not where she thought she’d end up when she started nursing. She told the story that you heard in the beginning. How she’d taken the baby from the nurse. How he’d died in her arms. How other nurses put the babies in warmers, and how some of them could have been saved with medical care. Then she told them how the bill would protect these babies. It said,

JILL: You were to be treated. Even if you weren't wanted as a wanted human, human.

Some people cried. No one attacked her testimony.

The Born Alive Infant Protection Act says that every infant born alive is a “person.” A “human being.” A “child.” At any stage of development.” No matter how they were born whether that naturally or through abortion. In other words, an infant is a person no matter how premature they are or how they were born. If that child is breathing, has a beating heart, or moves a muscle—she’s a person. And people have rights.

JILL: It's a funny thing. When nurses would tell me about incidences that they were involved in, and then I would turn around and tell the public, they would say to me, Jill, it wasn't like that. But it didn't seem like that when they were in the situation, but it was that.

Even Jill, sitting in the recovery room didn’t name the baby she was holding. It was a human being who didn’t deserve to die, but she was still in a hospital where things really do feel different.

JILL: But I guess you know, when you're like a frog in a pot, the water slowly warming up, it doesn't affect you. People just got used to one thing, and then they got used to the next thing.

After that, Jill got calls from everywhere. Pro-life organizations wanted her to speak at seminars. News outlets all over the country wanted interviews. Then Fox News called.

BILL O’REILLY: The O’Reilly Factor is on tonight… Caution, you are about to enter the no spin zone. The Factor begins, right now …

Bill O’Reilly was in New York, talking to her through a microphone. She couldn’t see him, just hear him.

O’REILLY: In the personal story segment tonight, nurse Jill Stanek testified in front of the House of Representatives. Before that body passed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

He asked about what she told the committee. So she told him t he story of stopping the nurse in the hallway.

JILL: when she told me what she was doing. And I stepped in and said that I couldn't let this baby die alone. And I held him for the 45 minutes that it took for him to die.

O’REILLY: I really don't know what to say, how often does this happen?

Bill O’Reilly, one of the biggest names in cable news at the time, was never speechless. The silence was almost awkward.

JILL: And like, I'm thinking, should I fill this void? You know, what, what am I doing wrong?

But she was doing exactly the right thing. After that, and the rest of the attention she was getting, Christ Hospital couldn’t push it under the rug anymore.

They started getting a lot of criticism from the media. People were calling them and complaining. Protests started outside the hospital. So it built what are now known as “comfort rooms.”

JILL: They did that so that I, I would have to stop going around the country telling people that they were leaving babies to die in the soiled utility room.

The room has a “first photo machine” if parents want a picture. It has baptismal supplies, gowns, and certificates. Foot printing equipment and baby bracelets for mementos. And there’s a rocking chair in the corner.

The hospital was saying that there is no reason to hide these abortions, or act like they were shameful. Christ Hospital just realized it should have been doing more to help the parents say good-bye and comfort rooms are now quite common.

MUSIC: No. 8 Requiem by Esther Abrami

The hospital was making the case, albeit indirectly, that the parents aborting these babies were caring parents. They had legitimate reasons.

And it is true that some babies that undergo late-term abortions have a terrible terminal illness. The argument can be made that yes, inducing labor would end the child’s life, but the child would have died soon after birth anyway.

Abortion advocates still make this case. But it’s not clear how many abortions are performed on babies with terminal illnesses. Non-invasive tests early in a pregnancy can be inaccurate and lots of second-term or later abortions are on children with no abnormalities. And, anyway, pro-life advocates don't see how a possible terminal illness justifies killing the child in the womb.

For two years after she found that first baby, Jill walked around the hospital with her Bible in her bag memorizing verses to keep her going. When she walked up to a group of nurses showing off baby pictures, they would stop talking. She wasn’t invited to weddings anymore.

JILL: Of course, the pro-abortion nurses on the floor are mad at me, but I never expected the pro-life nurses to be mad at me.

Pro-choice nurses were angry because Jill was rocking the boat. Pro-life staffers were angry because it had been going on for so long without them knowing, and they were embarrassed.

But Jill wouldn’t quit. She would even go to protests outside the hospital. One time, they made a “life chain” all the way around the hospital and she held pictures of aborted babies for hours.

JILL: I would try to be brave and just, you know, stand and hold my sign. And then you're done. You go back to the car, you go home, you take a quick nap, and you come back to work, but I never raised a ruckus inside those hospital walls. I, I did it on my own time.

One day, as Jill was walking into her 11:00 a.m. shift, her boss asked her to come to the Human Resources office. “Oh thank God,” she thought.

JILL: I always prayed that I wouldn't get fired for professional lapses. That if I was going to get fired, it was going to be for this.

She walked in and the head of HR was there. They told her quickly and calmly that she was fired. Then, she was escorted from the building. She was relieved.

JILL: And so I was a little worried, like, how long can I keep physically doing this? And, you know, God, God knew that and ended it all on August 31, 2001.

By the time I got fired, I'd been speaking out against a hospital for two years publicly, and I was being asked to speak. And so after I got fired, I just my life just took a turn into full time speaking and writing.

The federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act passed a year later, in 2002. But Jill says the law has no teeth. Abortionists could just continue to let babies who had been born alive die unattended with no consequences.

So congressional Republicans in 2019, 2020, and 2021 put forward bills that require abortionists to attempt to save infants born alive or face criminal charges. None have passed.

Today, Jill works for the Susan B. Anthony List. She’s helping to develop a national strategy to help mothers in crisis pregnancies now that Roe v. Wade is overturned. And it all started because she stopped a nurse in a hallway.

MELISSA: So ever since then, I never fail to say the word Christ Hospital. I am never going to shut up. If the name of the hospital was Cook County Hospital, I might not have stayed. But because the hospital is “Christ,” and If you go by today, there's this huge gold, still the same big old lit up cross on top of the hospital, then I stayed and knew that this is what I was supposed to do and just kept walking through the next door.

And just like that cross on top of the hospital, Christ is over the darkest parts of humanity.

He brought Jill to the hospital, he gave Mellissa her voice. Because of people like them, thousands of babies have been given a chance to live and tell their stories.

SURVIVOR 1: I’m pastor Marvin Hightower Pastor or Word Faith Christian Center in Kentucky and I survived two abortion attempts by my mom.

SURVIVOR 2: In 1952 I survived multiple abortion attempts.

SURVIVOR 3: My name is Jennifer Cullender and I’m an abortion survivor.

SURVIVOR 4: In 1953, I survived an instrument abortion.

LES SILLARS: Mary Muncy reported and wrote this episode. Produced by the journalism program at Patrick Henry College, with the help of the creative team at The World and Everything In It. I’m your host, Les Sillars.

Next time, on Doubletake.

RACHEL: Something that was hovering near us.

APPLEWHITE: Planet Earth about to be recycled.

MCGRATH: Absolutely. Within physics, they totally believe that there’s a multidimensional universe.

HANNAH: Yeah, it was, I don’t know, it was not a classy joint.

BETHURUM: They told me as long as there was any strife on this planet we would not have any space travel.

TONY: … comes up with a full-throated voicing of the Demonic Eschatological Hypothesis …

WILKINSON: And one of the big questions is whether we are alone or not.

FRAVOR: There’s something out there that was better than our airplane.

ROSS: We’re dealing with something that is provably real, but not physical.

That’s next time, on Doubletake.

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