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ENCORE: Kinkella Visits "The Thing" - Ep 98
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The Archaeology Podcast Network is taking a break for the holiday season. In the meantime, please enjoy this encore episode. It’s a favorite of ours! Happy holidays!
Welcome to one of the creepiest nights of my life. Alone on a desert highway one evening in 1998, I decided to pull over into a deserted parking lot. The parking lot belonged to a large storage building which had a huge sign on the front proclaiming that it housed "The Thing." Against my better judgement, I walked in...
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Introduction to Pseudo-Archaeology
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You are now entering the pseudo-archaeology podcast, a show that uncovers what's fact, what's fake, and what's fun in the crazy world of pseudo-archaeology.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the pseudo archaeology podcast, Episode 98. Tonight, we will visit the thing and specifically, I, your host, Andrew Kinkela, will talk about visiting the thing.
00:00:44
Speaker
So first things first, what is the thing? The thing is a place in Arizona. It's a specific spot in the middle of nowhere. Right off the highway, right off the 10 freeway in, I believe, eastern Arizona.
Road Trip to Belize
00:01:06
Speaker
Now, I visited this way back in 1998, and I do have to say that it was one of the weirdest, oddest moments of my life.
00:01:18
Speaker
Now, how did I find myself in the middle of nowhere off the 10 freeway at night? Basically, I was on my way to Belize. I mean, aren't you? Isn't everyone in the middle of nowhere on the 10 at night going to Belize?
00:01:38
Speaker
This was in May, I believe, of 1998. It must have been because I had just finished my first year of grad school for my master's thesis. And as part of that, I needed to go start my field research. So I had to get to Belize now.
00:01:59
Speaker
For those of us who work in Belize, the deal is always the same. You're racing to make it before the rainy season gets there. Now, the rainy season shows up around a end of June, early July. And it just makes things much more difficult. So you want to get there as soon as possible. What that means is if you're going to school, as soon as you take your finals, you basically leave the next day. So my finals were over in like mid-May.
00:02:30
Speaker
And I literally left I think the night after my last final I think it was it was right right away and the deal was I'd be driving from Southern California. I lived in l LA at the time and I would drive across the desert Southwest and and meet up with Lisa Lucero, who I was working with. She, at the time, lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. So the first leg of my journey from LA to Las Cruces, New Mexico, I would be doing by myself. Then I'd meet up with Lisa, and we would take her car the rest of the way from Las Cruces Belize together.
00:03:08
Speaker
So this this initial drive though, it was like it was like a 13 hour drive. And I did it in my trusty old 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ55 for you Land Cruiser nerds out there. This is a very old sort of cliche looking Land Cruiser. It was a four door, it was super rusty. I bought it really cheap.
00:03:36
Speaker
In terms of driving on the freeway, it was terrible. It had no seat belts, I remember. And although it had six cylinders of power, anything over about 60 miles an hour was a serious, shaky, scary fest.
Encountering 'The Thing'
00:03:55
Speaker
And also, older cars like that are not the greatest for desert heat, which I'd learned the year before I'd done this drive the late spring prior.
00:04:06
Speaker
So in my genius for this drive, I'm like, okay, you know what? I overheated last time, so I'm gonna leave at night. And so you think this is like a 12, 13 hour drive, right? So I believe I left at like two in the morning or something like that, or four in the morning, something like that. I remember like darkness. I remember driving through a lot of darkness.
00:04:29
Speaker
And in my genius, I'm like, well, you know, it's a 13 hour drive. It's a bit long. I'll sleep in the car in the desert in late May. Yeah. You see where this is going. So I drove like all night. I got very little sleep, you know, by around 10 in the morning, I'm dying. I'm in the middle of nowhere in the desert. And I'm like, Oh my God, I can't drive anymore to go to sleep. I'm going to pull over. I try and sleep in my car. I just totally can't because you know, it's hot in the desert.
00:04:59
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's it's so good that I'm here to tell you this. i try and But I try and do this for like 20 minutes. I'm like, this is so stupid. What am I doing? So I remember I pulled over to like a motel six and I made some deal with them where I was like, you know what? I just need room for like like five hours. You know, so it's an odd time, right? You're checking it you're checking in at like 10. You're like leaving at like three.
00:05:24
Speaker
But I did it, you know, and they had AC. Ah, it was glorious, right? So I do my like four hours or five hours of sleep. And then I leave. So I leave at like four in the afternoon or whatever. So I skip the desert heat. I drive for a few more hours. Sun goes down. It's dark, right? It's eight or nine at night. I remember it being pretty late. It might even have been 10. It was weird. I remember it being late. So I'm driving and I see these signs. I've been seeing these signs, these road signs that say, what is the thing? The thing, the mystery of the desert, that kind of stuff, right? You see these billboards and every, you know, 30 miles, 40 miles, you'll see one of these. What is the thing? Always in the same font with like this yellow background.
00:06:17
Speaker
and sort of creepy creature of the black lagoon font, right? What is this thing? And I'm just, I'm just looking at this and it'll say like, what is the thing? 186 miles. What is the thing? 92 miles. And so I'm like, dude, I got to check out the thing. So I'm driving, driving, driving, driving middle of nowhere, man. My Toyota Land Cruiser is like grinding like it did. You'd go in 62 miles an hour and the thing's like bri So I see the off ramp and I pull off and you guys there is nobody there. It's one of those off ramps where all there is is like an off ramp and then an on ramp. Right. And that's it. You just kind of you're off.
00:07:07
Speaker
And then there's a little thing there and you're on and all that's there is a truck stop. But there's like no trucks there. There's just me and my Toyota Land Cruiser. Right. There's a gas station there. No attendant. No, nothing. Just there. Right. But on the other side of the gas station, there's like this huge shed kind of thing, like large I don't know. i don't I don't want to call it a barn, but it's just like a like a like a huge open singular strip mall building. It's odd, right? Just this single standalone, like large shed thing. And there's actually two or three sheds. They're like stuck together, but they're big, right? There's lights inside. There's this there's the sign that says the thing, but the lights are really dim.
00:08:03
Speaker
And there is nobody around. So i'm sitting in my I'm sitting in my car, I'm like, what is this? But I'm like, you know what? I've come this far. I don't need gas, thank God. But I need to check out this thing. I'm doing this. I need to get some spine here, man. I'm gonna go in.
Exploring the Oddities
00:08:25
Speaker
So I walk up to the door, which is open.
00:08:30
Speaker
I walk in the door, nobody there. Right. There's a cash register. One of those old school cash registers is like click, you know, those totally analog cash registers with the like numbers that circle. But next to it, I think there was a basket and it said like entrance to the thing, one dollar. And you had to like put your dollar in the basket.
00:08:57
Speaker
And so I'm like, that's cool. So I take out a dollar, I put it in. And then I think I also bought like two bumper stickers to say the thing. I still have the bumper sticker of the thing on my office door today, right? It says the thing in Texas Canyon, Arizona on the I-10, right? so And I think those are 50 cents a piece or something. So I think I put $2 in, right? No people, but the lights are on, but they're dim.
00:09:27
Speaker
And I walk in.
00:09:31
Speaker
So I start to cruise in and I'm like, what is this place? What's there? in this big open the world's biggest storage shed super dusty just chock full of junk right really crammed with just like curios and oddities and weirdness but I haven't even cruised through yet I can just sort of see it it's like the world's saddest rendition of
00:10:05
Speaker
The huge storage room at the very end of Indiana Jones. You know how when they store the Ark in that in that room, there's a huge storage room with all these like nice like these wooden boxes. It was the equivalent of that, but in a really sad U-Haul way. And there was a there was a pathway through all the like stacked up junk. Right. And the pathway was shown by huge yellow painted feet, like monster feet, you know showing you which way to go. So the deal was follow the feet and it'll lead you through this room of curiosities and weirdness on your way to ultimately seeing the thing.
00:11:00
Speaker
And as I put my foot down on the first huge monster footprint and began my journey, I'll talk about what I found after this break. All right, welcome back to the pseudo-archaeology podcast, episode 98. Kinkela visits the thing.
00:11:23
Speaker
And when we last left off, I had just walked in to this building and or series of buildings that houses the mysterious thing. Now, at this point in our story, I'm starting to walk through this crammed huge room with a bunch of odd curiosities and I'm starting to look at them. Right. And there's just it's hard to summarize what's in there because obviously it's stuff that somebody who's lived in the desert for a very long time has collected. They're a collector, right? And so they have lots of certain things and these things may be like pieces of old covered wagons.
00:12:19
Speaker
Right? They may even be driftwood that's used in art projects. You see how wild the swing is right there? And everything else in between. Everything else in between driftwood and wagon parts. You know? And I know you're like, how do you get driftwood in the desert? You buy it.
00:12:42
Speaker
So you start to go through here, but you see how there's this odd pull to look at this stuff. You're like, who it gets into the psychology of the person who collected it. So I will also say. As I start to walk through this, and I'm looking at these rusty wagon wheels and this like dripped wood art,
00:13:08
Speaker
I get a really odd feeling that somebody's watching me. Like I know that there's at least one other person in that building. I'm hearing scurrying and like maybe a door or a closet or a drawer being closed kind of far off. And I'm trying to be cool.
00:13:34
Speaker
But it's late at night. I'm in there totally by myself on an off ramp. I got off totally by myself.
Unveiling 'The Thing'
00:13:43
Speaker
And I have to say, it's starting to creep me out. It's so much like an X-Files episode. I mean, you might as well be playing the X-Files theme song as I'm walking through here.
00:14:00
Speaker
But I'm trying to be cool. I'm like, dude, don't don't let that get to you. Yeah, there's somebody here. What, they're just some sort of desert person. You know, they're just making money on this. It's cool. So I put that in the back of my mind and I keep meandering, following the giant yellow footsteps on the ground. Beyond the various pieces of rusty metal, things things are described with odd signs. Like, can this be real?
00:14:29
Speaker
And then that sign will be in front of like a driftwood art object. And you're like. Uh, kinda. I don't know if somebody really likes weird driftwood objects, it's real. As you walk through, there's gonna be a bunch of old, like, Wild West stuff, too. Right? So, there's, like, saddles. There's, I think, some six shooters, some various guns. You're gonna see kind of rusty guns in everything, you guys. Everything in there is rusty and dusty. Rusty and dusty.
00:15:02
Speaker
You know, like, like nobody been dusting this in a very, very, very long time. So the whole thing has that feeling of low light and must. And so I'm cruising through looking at the Wild West stuff. I'm like, okay. Then they have kind of a decent amount of cars to like really in poor shape 1930s cars. I believe there was like a old fire engine in there, like a 1930s fire engine. Again, to my fading memory, it was all kind of rusty. This is, you know, it wasn't even really red anymore. Just been in the desert a long time. You know, just a desert person collecting this. But then you turn the corner and there's like, and I believe it's a 1937 Rolls Royce in like vaguely okay shape.
00:15:51
Speaker
And then the sign is like, was this used by Adolf Hitler? And there's a mannequin of Adolf Hitler with the 1937 Rolls Royce. And I forget, I think he's sitting in the back or he's getting out or something, but it's like, I'm supposed to be excited that this car may have been used to drive Hitler around. And on top of it of it all, for car nerds, Rolls Royce is a British company.
00:16:22
Speaker
Hitler driving a British car in World War II? It's just so odd. Right? You're like, okay. Hitler and Rolls Royce. So, I keep going. Passing the Rolls Royce, Hitler. Looking at some more saddles, some more driftwood art, some more just rusty metal stuff, desert stuff. For those of you who work in the desert,
00:16:50
Speaker
right For those of us who've done a desert archaeology, you know you've come across this stuff. In archaeology, out in those kind of places, you just find metal stuff will just be out there for a long time, right rusting, but kind of slowly because it's a dry environment. So metal stuff tends to preserve pretty long. In archaeology, sometimes we're reduced to recording like dump sites of old cans and stuff just because they last so long in a desert environment. So somebody has collected all this in and made some sort of museum of curiosities. So I keep going. I keep hearing the scurrying. I keep hearing the vague door close in the out in the air. But I'm going to get my money's worth, man.
00:17:36
Speaker
So I keep going, you know, pass some old gold pans, use for gold panning, some miscellaneous fossils. And you know, there's going to be some miscellaneous arrowheads in there, you know, a couple pot sherds people have picked up over the years. As always, you always see that. And there's going to be like rattlesnake skins, right? You you know, this desert stuff. Finally,
00:18:06
Speaker
cruise through all this, I've followed the yellow footprints, and I'm coming up on the thing. Okay, here's the thing. So in the back, all the way through, I turn the final corner.
00:18:23
Speaker
And the big yellow footprints end at this like concrete block coffin, like a coffin made out of concrete blocks with like glass on top so you can look in. Right. And so in the dim light. Much like Howard Carter. Finding King Tut for the first time, I walk and I look in there.
00:18:50
Speaker
What is the thing? The thing. Is a dead body. And that's pretty weird. In the desert at night by yourself.
00:19:05
Speaker
With Hitler and his Rolls Royce. Look in. And it's this like. Body how they get in the desert, I really dried up. Kind of wrapped.
00:19:19
Speaker
with kind of mummy wrappings. And there's a little child mummy with it, too. So it's an adult and child that, you know, you think a mother and child. Oddly wrapped, just odd. Right. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, what is this? This is going to be fake. What is what is this? But I look at the ribs. So.
00:19:44
Speaker
To picture this, it's all it's all desiccated. It's all wrapped up like the face is all wrapped up. It's almost Egyptian esque. But wrapped up at like sunken in, you know, and dried out. But on the mom,
The Eerie Fascination
00:19:59
Speaker
the chest, kind of the upper left hand side, I think, is open and you see the ribs protruding. And I looked at the ribs and I'm like, yeah, this is fake. But I look closely at the ribs and I'm like,
00:20:12
Speaker
Wait, those ribs, that's real bone. As a budding archeologist at the time, I'm like, I know real bone. That's, that's real. That's real. What? this What Look at it and it's just weird, right? I'm really, I'm trying to be cool. But the X-Files scurrying, vaguely dead body Hitler thing,
00:20:42
Speaker
Well, I'm enough of a man to admit it's kind of getting to me. So I turn around and I start to walk out. Right. I'm like, I'm walking along the big, huge yellow footprints backwards you know and i'm cruising through but i'm trying to be cool right i'm trying to like keep my cool and i'm like cruising by and i'm cruising by all the rusty stuff and i'm cruising by the funky signs that are like was it aliens right they had those two gotta have those you're out in the desert right there's the area 51 ain't so far away and i walk out
00:21:24
Speaker
And I have to say, the last couple steps to the door, the heebie jeebies did kind of get to me a little, and I did have a bit of a spring in my step as I walked at a quick pace out of there, got to my car, got in my car, turned on the gas, and laughed. And on the road in the darkness,
00:21:54
Speaker
What the hell was that? And I'll answer that in a minute. Hello and welcome back to episode 98 of the pseudo-archaeology podcast, Kinkela Visits the Thing. When we last left, I was walking at a very quick pace out of the Thing Museum and I got back onto the road driving away, trying to figure out what the hell I just saw.
00:22:20
Speaker
So, I'm driving and I'm like, what was that? right Was it it did a dead person from like the 1880s? Stuff like that happens in the in the desert. but People die out in the desert. What if it was an immigrant like you know crossing the border illegally? That that can totally happen.
00:22:39
Speaker
But it seemed so old. I was like, ah maybe it was like ah some sort of prospect or something that died in the 1880s, you know, and it could have been in terms of ethnicity. Who knows? there There's so many stories there. You know, it it could be just sort of the Mexican immigrant. It could have been a Chinese immigrant at the time working on the railroads at the time. It could have been some sort of Anglo prospector person, this mother and child. Who knows? But then I started to think, you know, this isn't That's not really right to showcase that in that way and pay money to see that. But then at the same time, too, I was like, but there's something off about this, too. Like it didn't. It's not. ah There was just something odd. In the intervening years, my friends, I figured it out. First, I will again admit to you. I got faked out by the thing.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's fake. But it's such a weird fake that it faked me out. It's fake. This faked me out. So what is it? What is it really? Right? It's like a weird paper mache made human body with real bone shoved in there. You know, so that's see, that's what got me because I knew the bone was real.
00:24:06
Speaker
But I knew that the head didn't really look human right. at The measurements are all off if you look at it. Yes, it looks like a human body, but it's just it's something wrong, wrong about it, right?
00:24:18
Speaker
So ultimately, it's this fake, right? So what's the story of the fake? The fake was created by this person named Homer Tate. And Homer Tate, you guessed it, these characters show up in like every one of these pseudo archaeology stories. Homer Tate is like this desert rat guy.
00:24:36
Speaker
who just lives out in the boonies of of these little town in Arizona. he actually he I believe he was born in the 1880s. He actually even was was sheriff of Graham County in the 1920s. He had you know various different jobs. he Ultimately, though, in his older age, he would have been in his 50s, in the 1930s, 1940s, when all this stuff is from. right A bunch of stuff from the 30s, 40s.
00:25:03
Speaker
He found that he was good at making curios and making weird stuff with wood and real bone and paper mache, basically found objects of the desert. He would collect all this junk and then make stuff out of it and then sell it. Right. He would sell stuff like shrunken heads and he actually had like a ah curiosity shop. You know, I believe it was called like Tate's curiosity shop.
00:25:32
Speaker
You know, and then see if you wrap that in to that world of the 1940s, 1950s, you know, post-World War II, when you're gonna have that kind of Route 66.
00:25:46
Speaker
traveling the highways and byways of America visiting these places. You can see how a shop like that is gonna make money and of some sort. So he would make this stuff and he would sell it to tourists. And he anyway he was, ah as a collector too, he's gonna collect these various cars that come his way. He's gonna find this stuff in the desert. He's gonna buy it cheap from people, you know, and just and just sort of collect it all together.
00:26:09
Speaker
So he's just like this weird desert collector guy who makes these little curios. Ooh, is it a mummy or is it? You know, so but you need somebody to sell it. And that's where a lawyer named Thomas Price comes in and he buys up all of Homer Tate's stuff. And in the 1950s, I believe, and he ultimately opens this place in 1965, I think. And he puts this stuff altogether on an off-ramp in Texas Canyon, Arizona, right right off the I-10 in 1965. A scant 33 years later, we find me
00:26:55
Speaker
pulling off there late at night just to see what was happening. And I do think it's really funny that I was faked out as an as a budding archaeologist by the thing. Now, I was never that I never told people I'm like, oh, it's a it's a real mummy. I just I would always say it's just odd. And I know there's real bone in it, you know, and sometimes odd curiosities like that are much more freaky and scary and ex filesy than a real Like human skeleton, you know, there's a human skeleton in the biology lab I could go over and check out right now, but it doesn't freak me out like that because it's a known entity.
The Transformation of 'The Thing'
00:27:35
Speaker
That's what makes the thing so weird, right? It's like unknown and just odd. What makes it so odd, too, is like, who made that? Why would they do that? What's the deal? And there's a child there? Like, why? Why did you make this for me to look at? And why do I oddly kind of want to look at it? Right. It's this whole sort of voyage into the psyche.
00:27:55
Speaker
that makes the thing, so I don't know if I'm gonna use that word attractive, but it makes you want to see it. It makes you not wanna look away. So that's what this thing is, right? So it's just an organized bunch of weird junk and curiosities originally kind of collected by this guy Homer Tate and then sort of sold to the world by this lawyer, Thomas Price. And that's what it is. But there's more to our story.
00:28:23
Speaker
In the last handful of years, it's totally been cleaned up and rejuvenated. It's now called the Bolin Travel Center.
00:28:36
Speaker
And instead of $1, now it costs $5. I know. Robbery. But I looked online, right? I haven't visited the new and improved. I just visited the old school classic. The new ones talk all really cleaned up. I think the number one thing I noticed from the photos, I'm like, damn, that looks way cleaner. Just like the driftwood's gone and just the miscellaneous pieces of metal are gone and the dust is gone. And in its place,
00:29:03
Speaker
There's a lot of like actually fairly well done in a way like dinosaur statues, like ones that are even that look to me like 15 feet tall. So they kind of doubled down. They did have some fossils in the original one, but just miscellaneous pieces parts. They doubled down on the dinosaurs and they've made some like dinosaur replicas that look kind of cool and they're in really cool poses and stuff. And then of course, a bunch of aliens too. So they've totally doubled down on the alien thing. The alien thing used to be just sort of a part of it with the thing being, you know, could it be an alien?
00:29:37
Speaker
But they've they've made these much better quality models, you know, these sort of life sized and beyond models, maybe not life size totally for the dinosaurs, but big. And they sort of have these dioramas as you walk through, like you'll see a dinosaur but and the classic kind of.
00:29:54
Speaker
Tyrannosaurus battling a Triceratops, but then you'll see dinosaur battling an alien. Then you'll see an alien shooting a dinosaur. Then you'll see an alien controlling a dinosaur riding a dinosaur using mind control. So it's just gone like way over the top. But check this out. The Rolls Royce is still there, but it may have been owned by Winston Churchill.
00:30:24
Speaker
I cleaned it up for the PG audience. Thank God. But now Winston Churchill's in the back and there's an alien driving the front.
00:30:38
Speaker
They've also done they've also kind of organ. I got to give it to them. They organized a lot of junk They've also done sort of vaguely a World War two thing to where they sort of talk a bit about World War two and they've kind of organized some of this stuff in the Winston Churchill thing Works into it with it World War two with aliens So you start have a dinosaur World War two aliens vibe, you know replacing the driftwood rusty stuff Hitler vibe And and so In terms of as a business move, I think it was really smart. You know, I think way more people are going to feel way more at home checking it out now. It's much more family friendly, much more like, oh, we're just going to see this curiosity on the side of the road. We're kind of going to live our Route 66 fantasy. Good luck and God bless. and Now, ultimately, what do I think? I'm really happy I visited it in 1998.
00:31:33
Speaker
I'm really happy I got to have the real X-Files vibe that is now gone, right? It's now clean. I do think they missed a bit of a trick.
00:31:46
Speaker
losing that totally odd desert rat aspect to it. And I wonder if they should leave one of the sheds in the back like super dusty and just full of the world's most miscellaneous stuff for people to just kind of walk through, but then kind of get the heebie jeebies at least. You just be like, what is this weird stuff? They do still have the thing and you can still look upon it, but I believe it's built in. Not sure, but as you can see, they're kind of moving above and beyond the thing itself. Again, the thing is still there. You can still gaze upon it. But at the same time, you're seeing dinosaurs and aliens and stuff. You know, they're they're widening their their net. They have way more swag to buy way more t-shirts and cops. Right. And ultimately, how do I feel about this fake, obviously? And it relates to pseudo archaeology because they are selling a mummy that's not a mummy. It's like a fake on a fake.
00:32:46
Speaker
you know, that fakes me out. A fake on a fake that fakes me out. How do I feel? This one, I feel like this one is so over the top that I don't mind so much. I mean, an alien riding a dinosaur, it does harken back to that Route 66 thing. this is This is like a curio shop where the word shop is spelled with an E at the end. You know, it's just this outlandish, over-the-top homage to everything outlandish and over-the-top that you could find in Route 66.
Conclusion: Curiosity & Pseudo-Archaeology
00:33:19
Speaker
And so ultimately, eh, who doesn't like the X-Files? And with that, I'll see you guys next time.
00:33:32
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the pseudo archeology podcast. Please like and subscribe wherever you'd like and subscribe. And if you have questions for me, Dr. Andrew Kinkella, feel free to reach out using the links below or go to my YouTube channel, Kinkella teaches archeology. See you guys next time.
00:33:53
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.