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This Survivor Revealed What Grays Actually Are Afraid Of — Transcript

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0:00At 20 2 on the afternoon of Tuesday,
0:03July 13th, 1993, a 44 year old lineman
0:07named Mitch Danforth was 35 ft up a
0:10wooden pole outside Lewistown, Montana,
0:13swapping out a cracked crossarm on a
0:157,200 volt line. It was 94°. He'd been
0:19up since 5. He'd done that same job by
0:22his own count more than 2,000 times. His
0:26left shoulder brushed a conductor he
0:28thought was covered. It wasn't. He
0:31doesn't remember the jolt. He remembers
0:33being above the field. Not floating, he
0:36says, just higher than he should have
0:38been, looking down at the gravel road,
0:40the line truck, and his own body lying
0:42in the ditch where his crew had lowered
0:44him. His foreman, a man named Arlan
0:47Boyce, was kneeling over him, pushing on
0:49his chest, counting out loud. And along
0:52the near side of the wheat field across
0:54the road, there were three small gray
0:56figures standing in a row watching.
0:59Mitch knew them. They'd been coming into
1:01his bedroom since he was 9 years old. In
1:0435 years, he had never once seen one of
1:07them hurry. Never seen one hesitate.
1:10Never seen one afraid of anything. Then
1:13Arlon stopped counting and put two
1:15fingers on Mitch's neck and said, "I've
1:18lost him." And the three in the wheat
1:20turned around and ran. That afternoon, a
1:24man who'd been visited by them his whole
1:26life found out what they're afraid of.
1:28And after that day, in 33 years, they've
1:31never laid a hand on him again. Joanie,
1:34Mitch's wife, is the one who wrote in
1:37because Mitch said nobody would believe
1:39it coming from him. The form she used is
1:41linked in the description if you've got
1:43a story of your own. Every name here is
1:46changed at his request. The voltage, he
1:49insisted, stays exactly as it was. I
1:52drove up to Lewistown to meet him in
1:54September. He's 77 now. He lives a few
1:57miles outside town in a house he built
1:59himself with a shop out back and a shelf
2:02in the hallway lined with old farm
2:04almanacs. He met me in the yard, shook
2:07my hand like he was testing a rope, and
2:09asked if I'd eaten. Joanie made
2:11sandwiches. We talked for 5 hours at
2:14their kitchen table and he got up only
2:16twice. Once for more coffee and once to
2:19take an almanac down off that shelf.
2:21I'll tell you how he talks because it's
2:23the first thing I noticed. He talks like
2:26a lineman. When I said he touched a
2:28wire, he corrected me. Conductor. When I
2:32asked how much electricity went through
2:34him, he didn't say a lot. He said 7,200
2:38volts phase to ground. in at the left
2:40shoulder, out at the right foot. Then he
2:43rolled up his sleeve and pulled off his
2:45sock and showed me both scars as if he
2:48was showing me where a fence had been
2:49mended. And when I called him a
2:51survivor, he shook his head. "I didn't
2:54survive anything," he said. Arlon did
2:56that. I was just lying there. I've
2:59learned to listen for how people handle
3:01the parts that make them look small.
3:03Mitch kept handing the credit away. So,
3:06here's how this is going to go. First,
3:09what's on paper, then the 35 years
3:12before that afternoon, and the 33 after.
3:15And I'll tell you where I stop being
3:16able to check it. Line work is one of
3:19the most dangerous jobs in America.
3:22Overhead distribution lines like the one
3:24Mitch was working on commonly carry
3:26around 7,200
3:28volts. When linemen work near them, they
3:31cover the live conductors with thick
3:32rubber sleeves called line hose, and
3:35they work in rubber gloves rated for the
3:37voltage. That afternoon, one length of
3:39hose had slipped back a few inches.
3:42That's all it took. When current like
3:44that crosses the chest, it can throw the
3:46heart into a chaotic rhythm called
3:48ventricular fibrillation, where it
3:50quivers instead of pumping. Without fast
3:53CPR and a defibrillator, that's fatal
3:56within minutes. Mitch had both. Arland
3:59did CPR in the ditch for about 9 minutes
4:02until the ambulance arrived from
4:03Lewistown. The paramedics shocked him
4:06twice. On the second shock, his heart
4:08came back. In 1994, Mitch requested his
4:12own medical records. Among them is the
4:14paramedic's run sheet from that
4:16afternoon. He let me photograph it. It's
4:19mostly what you'd expect: times, vitals,
4:22the two shocks, and then a short line at
4:24the bottom in a paramedic's quick
4:26handwriting. Patient alert after defib,
4:30confused, repeatedly asking, "Did they
4:32run?" That one word stopped me. They,
4:37not did I fall or what happened or where
4:40am I? They, a man whose heart had just
4:43been restarted beside a gravel road and
4:46the first thing he wanted to know was
4:48whether somebody else had run. Who asks
4:51that 30 seconds after coming back? I
4:54called Arlan Boyce. He's 81 and retired
4:57in Billings. He confirmed the call, the
5:00CPR, the two shocks, and he confirmed
5:02the question. He rode in the back of the
5:05ambulance, he said, and Mitch grabbed
5:07his sleeve and asked him over and over,
5:09"Did you see them run? Did you see
5:12them?" Aran didn't see anything across
5:14that road. "I wasn't looking at any
5:17field," he told me. "I was looking at
5:19Mitch." He told me about those 9 minutes
5:22without my asking, the heat coming up
5:24off the gravel. a rancher in a pickup
5:27who stopped and stood there with his hat
5:29in his hands counting out loud because
5:31counting was the only thing keeping him
5:33from losing his mind. And the moment a
5:36few minutes in when he couldn't find a
5:38pulse anymore and said so and kept going
5:41anyway because the ambulance wasn't
5:43there yet and he didn't know what else
5:44to do. I wasn't going to be the one to
5:47quit on him, Arlin said. Not in a ditch.
5:50That's what's on paper. Everything else
5:53is Mitch. He grew up on a dryland wheat
5:56farm outside Grass Range, Montana. The
5:59first time they came, he was nine. It
6:01was the spring of 1958.
6:03He woke up at night unable to move, and
6:06there were three of them at the foot of
6:07his bed, small, gray, with those eyes
6:10everybody describes. He says he's not
6:13going to tell me the rest of that first
6:14night, and that it doesn't matter
6:16because it wasn't the last. He told his
6:18parents in the morning. His father said
6:21it was a nightmare and that 9-year-olds
6:23have them. His mother didn't say
6:25anything at all. And Mitch says that
6:27bothered him more. They came two or
6:30three times a year, sometimes more.
6:32Through high school, through his years
6:34on the line crew, after he married
6:36Joanie in 1972, after his daughters were
6:39born. He never knew when. He never knew
6:42why. He kept count. Every time the next
6:46morning, he'd make a small pencil mark
6:48inside the back cover of that year's
6:50farm almanac. His grandmother had always
6:53written the first and last frost dates
6:55in the back of hers. And Mitch figured
6:57that if you were going to keep track of
6:59the weather, you could keep track of
7:00this. His father always bought one. And
7:03then Mitch did. The shelf in his hallway
7:06runs from 1958 to today. I took them
7:09down and went through them one by one.
7:12From 1958 to 1993, there are 61 marks.
7:17The researchers who've taken abduction
7:18accounts seriously, people like the
7:21artist Bud Hopkins, whose book Intruders
7:23came out in 1987, and the Harvard
7:26psychiatrist John Mack, whose book
7:28Abduction came out in 1994, both
7:31describe this same pattern. Encounters
7:34that start in childhood and keep coming
7:36back for decades. Their critics say that
7:40pattern says more about the way those
7:41accounts were gathered than about what
7:43happened. I'll come back to that. Here's
7:46what I want you to understand about
7:48Mitch's 61 marks. In all those years,
7:51the thing that frightened him most
7:53wasn't anything they did to him. It was
7:55how calm they were. Like a night crew,
7:58he said, like men doing a job they'd
8:00done 1,000 times. Nothing ever surprised
8:04them. Nothing. He gave me an example.
8:07One night in the summer of 1986, they
8:10were in his bedroom during a
8:11thunderstorm and lightning hit the pole
8:14in his yard 50 ft from the window. The
8:17transformer blew with a bang that
8:19rattled the glass and lit the whole room
8:21blue. Mitch, who couldn't move, says his
8:24heart nearly came out of his chest. The
8:26three of them didn't so much as turn
8:28their heads. Keep that night in mind.
8:31Lightning, a blown transformer, a flash,
8:34and a bang right outside the window. and
8:37they didn't even look. So, what could
8:39possibly make something like that run?
8:42Let's go back to the ditch. Mitch says
8:44that from where he was above the road,
8:46he could see everything. Arlon on his
8:49knees, the two younger men on the crew,
8:51one of them on the truck radio yelling
8:53for an ambulance, his own hard hat in
8:56the gravel upside down. He says he
8:58wasn't afraid. He says he was mostly
9:00embarrassed because he knew better than
9:02to let that conductor anywhere near him.
9:05Then he saw them, three of them, along
9:08the wheat, just past the barrerow pit
9:10across the road in broad daylight,
9:12standing exactly the way they'd always
9:15stood in his bedroom, still watching. He
9:19says his first thought was, "Of course,
9:22of course they're here. They've always
9:24been there when something was happening
9:26to me." And then something changed
9:28behind him. He's very careful about this
9:31part. He says he didn't see a tunnel or
9:34a light or anybody he knew. He says what
9:37he felt was a warmth at his back as if
9:40he was standing with his back to a big
9:41wood stove and a feeling that something
9:44was there behind him and that if he
9:46turned around he'd see it. He didn't
9:49turn around, but they could see it. The
9:52three by the wheat were facing him,
9:54which meant they were facing whatever
9:56was behind him. and Mitch watched their
9:58faces, if you can call them faces,
10:01change. That's when Aron stopped
10:03counting and said he'd lost him. And
10:06they ran. Not walked away, not faded
10:08out, ran, turned, and went into the
10:11wheat as fast as anything he's ever
10:13seen, the stalks whipping behind them,
10:16the way kids run from a grass fire. He
10:18says one of them fell down and got up
10:20and kept running. 35 years, he said to
10:24me. I'd never seen one of them move fast
10:26in my life. A week after he got out of
10:29the hospital, Mitch had Joanie drive him
10:31back out to that stretch of road. The
10:34wheat on the near side of the field,
10:36right where he'd seen them, still had
10:38three narrow lanes pressed through it,
10:40side by side, running straight out from
10:42the barrerow pit into the field for
10:44maybe 40 yards. The farmer who owned it
10:47told him it must have been deer. Mitch
10:50said he'd never seen deer run in three
10:52straight lines. But all of that came
10:54later. In the ditch, the warmth was
10:57gone, and there was a bang that went
10:59through his whole body. And he was lying
11:01in an ambulance with the ceiling light
11:03in his eyes and Arlin's sleeve in his
11:05hand. And the only thing in the world he
11:08wanted to know was whether anybody else
11:10had seen them run. If you're the kind of
11:13person who wants to know what happened
11:14next, hit subscribe now because the
11:17strangest part of this story isn't that
11:19afternoon. It's the 33 years since.
11:23Mitch went back to work that winter. He
11:25climbed for another 17 years and retired
11:28in 2010. Joanie says he was quieter for
11:32a while after the accident. And then
11:34over a year or two, he was something
11:36else, lighter, like a man who'd stopped
11:40listening for a noise in the house
11:42because they didn't come. His daughters
11:44were in high school by then. Neither of
11:46them knew anything about the marks in
11:48the Almanac, but the younger one told
11:51Joanie years later that she'd always
11:53known when her father had had a bad
11:55night because he'd be at the breakfast
11:57table before anybody with his coffee
11:59going cold, looking at nothing. After
12:021993, she said she never saw that look
12:05again. Joanie told me about the hospital
12:08that first night. She was the only
12:11person Mitch had ever told about the
12:12visits. He told her before they were
12:15married because he said she had a right
12:17to know what she was marrying. When she
12:19got to his bed in Lewis Town with his
12:21shoulder and foot bandaged and wires all
12:24over his chest, the first thing out of
12:26his mouth wasn't that he was sorry or
12:28that he was all right. It was they ran.
12:31and Joe. I watched them run. The Almanac
12:35for 1993 has the usual marks up to the
12:38spring, then nothing. 1994, nothing.
12:431995,
12:451996.
12:47For 35 years, they'd come two or three
12:49times a year, and now there was nothing
12:52at all. At first, Mitch had his own
12:55theory, and it was a lineman's theory.
12:587,200 volts had gone through him. Maybe
13:01it had changed something. Maybe he was
13:03wired different now and whatever they
13:05used to find him didn't work anymore.
13:08His cardiologist had told him the shock
13:10had left a small permanent quirk in his
13:12heart rhythm. Nothing dangerous. Mitch
13:14joked that he'd been rewired. It's not a
13:17bad theory, but it doesn't fit the
13:19ditch. They didn't run when the current
13:22hit him. They were already standing
13:24there watching after the shock while
13:26Allan worked on him. They ran at one
13:29particular moment, the moment his heart
13:32stopped completely and something came up
13:34behind him that they could see and he
13:37couldn't. It wasn't the electricity they
13:39ran from. Remember the lightning in
13:411986? They'd sat through a blown
13:44transformer without turning their heads.
13:47So, what did they see? And then in 2001
13:50they came back once. It was a Tuesday
13:54night in October. Mitch woke up a few
13:57minutes past 2 in the dead of the night
13:59and he could move. He noticed that
14:02before anything else. In all the years
14:04before he'd always woken up unable to
14:07move. This time he sat up. One of them
14:10was standing in the bedroom doorway. It
14:13didn't come in. It stood in the doorway
14:15the way they used to stand by his bed.
14:17and it looked at him. Mitch says he
14:20wasn't frightened. He says he was almost
14:22glad to see it. The way you're glad to
14:24see somebody from a job you used to
14:26have. He put his feet on the floor and
14:28stood up. It took a step back. He took a
14:31step toward it. It took another step
14:34back into the hall and it kept going
14:37backward down the length of the hallway,
14:39past the almanac shelf, past the girl's
14:41old rooms, never once turning its back
14:44on him. Mitch said it moved the way you
14:46back away from a dog you don't trust,
14:48never taking your eyes off it. Joanie
14:51woke up when he got out of bed. From
14:53where she was lying, she could see past
14:55him down the hall. She's never wanted to
14:58talk about this, and she only told me
15:00one thing. I saw something small backing
15:03up down our hallway, she said, and it
15:06was looking at my husband like he was
15:08the one that was dangerous. Where the
15:10hallway ends at the back door, it was
15:12gone. Why come back at all after 8 years
15:16only to back away? Mitch has an answer
15:19for that. He thinks it came to check to
15:22see whether whatever had been standing
15:24behind him in that field was still on
15:26him. And it was, or at least it acted
15:30like it was. Mitch stood in that hallway
15:32until his legs got cold. Then he went to
15:35the kitchen, made coffee, and sat at the
15:37table until it got light. Joanie came
15:40and sat with him. Neither of them said
15:42much. He told me that what he felt
15:45sitting there wasn't fear and it wasn't
15:48relief either. It was something closer
15:50to being sorry for it. That's the only
15:53mark in the almanac after 1993.
15:562001.
15:58One small pencil line. And next to it in
16:01Mitch's handwriting, one word, backed
16:04out. So, let me lay out what Mitch
16:06believes. And then let me lay out
16:09everything that argues against it. Mitch
16:11believes they're afraid of death, not of
16:14dying exactly, of what comes for us when
16:17we do. He thinks they could see it
16:19standing behind him in that field, and
16:21that nothing in all their long, calm,
16:24practiced work had prepared them for it.
16:26and he thinks that once it had come that
16:28close to him, once it had, in his words,
16:31put a hand on his shoulder, they
16:33couldn't bear to be near him again. They
16:36studied me for 35 years, he said. They
16:39never once looked worried. Then they saw
16:42where I was going and they ran. And if
16:44he's right, it changes how you'd read
16:47every abduction account you've ever
16:48heard. The tables, the examinations, the
16:52decades of coming back to the same
16:54people. Maybe it was never about our
16:56bodies at all. Maybe they've been
16:58studying the one thing about us they're
17:00afraid of, that we end. And that when we
17:04do, we go somewhere they can't follow.
17:07Now, here's the other side, and it's a
17:09serious one. Start with the 61 marks.
17:12Critics of Bud Hopkins and John Mack
17:15argued that their accounts were shaped
17:16by the way they were collected, often
17:18under hypnosis, by researchers who
17:21already believed. That's a fair
17:23criticism. It doesn't touch Mitch. He
17:26was never hypnotized. He never went to a
17:28support group until Joanie filled in
17:31that form. He'd told three people about
17:33the visits in his whole life. His
17:35parents in 1958 and Joanie. But that
17:39doesn't mean his experiences were what
17:41he thinks they were. People who wake up
17:43paralyzed with figures standing over
17:45them are describing something real that
17:48happens to the human brain. Whatever it
17:50means, near-death experiences have been
17:53studied properly. In 2001, the medical
17:56journal The Lancet published a study by
17:58the Dutch cardiologist Pim Vanl and his
18:01colleagues who followed 344 patients
18:04resuscitated after cardiac arrest in 10
18:07Dutch hospitals. 18% of them reported
18:11some memory from the time they were
18:12clinically dead. In a larger
18:15international study called Aware,
18:17published in 2014, researchers tracked
18:20more than 2,000 cardiac arrests across
18:2315 hospitals. In one case, a man
18:26accurately described events during his
18:28own resuscitation, including the
18:30automated voice of the defibrillator for
18:32what the researchers estimated was up to
18:353 minutes. There's also a real physical
18:38explanation on the table. At the
18:40University of Michigan, a team led by
18:42the neuroscientist GMO Borgjigan found
18:45that rats showed a surge of organized
18:48brain activity in the seconds after
18:50their hearts stopped. In 2023, the same
18:53team reported something similar in two
18:56of four dying human patients. Other
18:58researchers point out that minutes can
19:00pass between the heart stopping and the
19:02brain shutting down and that strange
19:05vivid experiences in that window are
19:07exactly what you'd expect from a brain
19:09starved of oxygen. One neurologist has
19:12suggested that near-death experiences
19:14may come from the same blending of
19:16dreaming and waking that produces those
19:18paralyzed nights. Which means a skeptic
19:21could tie Mitch's whole life into one
19:23neat explanation. The same brain that
19:26gave him 35 years of figures at the foot
19:28of his bed gave him three more of them
19:30in a wheat field when it was dying. So,
19:33a skeptic would say this. A man who'd
19:36spent 35 years believing these beings
19:39visited him, whose brain was flooded and
19:41starving in a roadside ditch put them
19:44into the most frightening experience of
19:46his life. And then, having survived it,
19:49he stopped having the experiences
19:51because something in him had changed.
19:53Not because anything was afraid of him.
19:55I take that seriously. I think it may be
19:58right. But I keep coming back to three
20:00things I can't make fit. The run sheet
20:03with a question about them written down
20:05by a paramedic before Mitch had spoken
20:07to anyone else. The almanac, 61 marks in
20:1235 years and then almost nothing with
20:15one strange word beside the only
20:17exception. and Joanie, who's never had
20:20any interest in any of this and who saw
20:23something small backing away from her
20:25husband down a hallway. After meeting
20:28Mitch, I went looking through the older
20:30messages people have sent this channel
20:32for anyone else whose visits had
20:33stopped. I found two that caught my eye.
20:37One is from a woman in Ohio. She says
20:40she was visited on and off from
20:42childhood until 1976
20:44when she was pulled out of a lake after
20:46nearly drowning. she'd stop breathing.
20:49They never came again. She'd never
20:51connected the two things, she wrote
20:53until she read something online about
20:55someone else. The other is from a man in
20:58Texas who was in a highway collision in
21:011988 and was without a pulse for about 4
21:04minutes. He writes that the visits he'd
21:06had since he was a teenager stopped that
21:08year and that he took it as a gift and
21:10never asked why. Why would a near
21:13drowning or a car wreck end something
21:15that had gone on for years? Neither of
21:18them knows Mitch. I can't connect them
21:20to him or to each other. I can only tell
21:23you they exist and that neither of them
21:25wrote to me about being afraid. Mitch
21:28isn't afraid either. That's the last
21:30thing I want to tell you about him. He
21:32says he's the only man he knows who
21:34isn't scared of dying and that it isn't
21:37courage, it's information. I've been to
21:40the edge of that field, he says. I know
21:42what's standing there, and I know
21:44they're more scared of it than I am. So,
21:47what are Gray's afraid of? When I left,
21:50Mitch walked me out to my car. The sun
21:52was going down over the wheat across the
21:54road from his house, and he stood by the
21:56fender, hands shoved in his jacket, and
21:59watched the light go for a minute. Then
22:01he said, "You know what gets me? All
22:04those years, I thought they were the
22:06ones who knew everything. Turns out
22:08there's something they don't know
22:09either. Same as us. He shook my hand,
22:12the same ropet testing grip, and went
22:15back inside. If Mitch is right, it isn't
22:18our weapons or our numbers or our anger.
22:21It's the one thing every single one of
22:24us is going to meet. The thing behind us
22:26in the field. Why would something that
22:29studied us so calmly for so long be
22:32terrified of the one place we all go?
22:35What have they seen standing there that
22:37we haven't? And if they can't follow us
22:39there, then after all those years of
22:41watching, who's really the one being
22:43left behind? If you've ever been brought
22:46back or sat with someone who was, I'd
22:49like to hear what you remember. Tell me
22:51below. In 33 years, nothing has stood at
22:55the edge of Mitch's field again. He
22:58still looks sometimes in the evenings
23:00out across the wheat toward the road. He
23:03says he isn't looking for them.

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