**AJ Hucklefish** (0:01)
This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.
**AJ Hucklefish** (0:03)
That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too.
**SPEAKER_3** (0:09)
I'm not food with it, okay.
**AJ Hucklefish** (0:10)
Try it for yourself. Starbucks Refreshers Concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.
It was a cold October afternoon in 1974
Carl Higdon aimed his rifle at a bull elk and pulled the trigger.
The gun didn't kick. The bullet slid out of the barrel, floated about 50 feet, and dropped to the ground. Carl bent down to pick it up. Then a twig snapped behind it. He felt a tingle in the air, like the static before a thunderstorm. He turned around. He was face to face with a creature.
It smiled at him. Carl had no idea what it was, but it called itself Auso.
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The Thing was maybe 6'2, with bowed legs and yellow skin. It smiled at Carl, showing a mouthful of square teeth, big, flat, and blocky, like two rows of dice. It had no chin and no neck. Its head was right on its shoulders, stiff hair stuck straight up like straw. It had two short antennae growing from its forehead, and it watched Carl through small, deep, hollow eyes. It wore a black coverall jumpsuit with belts across its torso and waist. It didn't have hands. Where one should have been, a thin metal rod extended from its sleeve like a drill, and something floated near the end of it. The creature spoke first.
**AJ Hucklefish** (2:57)
How are you?
**AJ Hucklefish** (2:59)
The words came out scrambled, like a vinyl record spinning backward. But Carl understood. He said he was doing pretty good.
Carl Higdon wasn't supposed to be in the woods that day. He was a 41-year-old oil rig foreman out of Rollins, Wyoming. When a crew member called in sick that morning, Carl took the day off, borrowed the company truck, and drove south to hunt elk. On the way in, he stopped to help two stranded men fix their truck. They thanked him by pointing them toward a good hunting spot, deep in the Medicine Bow National Forest. His good deed sent them straight to Ouso.
The floating thing near Ouso's drill was a clear cellophane pack, the kind you get gum or cold medicine in.
It held four small pills. Ouso asked Carl if he was hungry. He said he was. The pack floated from the drill toward Carl. Ouso told him each pill would keep him fed for four days. But here's the thing about Carl. He didn't take pills, not vitamins, not even an aspirin for a headache. Carl took one and put it in his mouth without a second thought.
**AJ Hucklefish** (3:58)
Yeah, this isn't going to end well. Let's hope that pill is more paste candy and less spill casbe.
**AJ Hucklefish** (4:04)
Then Ouso asked Carl if he wanted to go with it. Carl said, I guess so.
This bothered Carl later. Not that a creature from space visited his planet, but he agreed to everything so easily.
He didn't know what Ouso wanted to show him. But leaving Earth was the last choice Ouso let him make.
Carl tried to lift his arms. He couldn't. He was strapped to a seat and pinned down.
A large helmet weighed his head down. It reminded him of a football helmet, but this one had wires coming out of the top. The chair was inside a large glass box, maybe seven feet long on each side. Carl could see through it. He saw the clearing and his truck, but the elk were gone. Owso pointed his metal drill at it, and the truck disappeared.
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