Topic Selection: Graeme Scallion, W14

Since my last post, I have only grown more enthusiastic about Stuff You Missed in History Class, and I’ve finalized my decision to emulate this podcast. I use the world “emulate” loosely, however. I admire the concept of the podcast – exploring hidden historical tidbits – but the style of the podcast is not in my taste. Each episode operates conversationally between the two hosts, and the dialogue is largely unscripted, save for the instances when the hosts have to cite a figure or resource. I certainly want my podcast to be informal and relaxed, but I also want to bring some showmanship into the mix and take advantage of the technology available to me. I can’t say what that will mean at this point, but I’m excited to move the project forward.

That being said, I’ll be creating a podcast exploring the Hopkinsville Goblin Case, a reported alien sighting just outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1955. Stuff You Missed in History Class has not, to my knowledge, touched on the history of alien hysteria, but they have forayed into the supernatural with podcasts with titles like The Sisters Fox: They Talked to Dead People and "New England Vampire Panic". The Hopkinsville Goblin Case is a singular and well-documented event, which will allow me to go into detail and ask questions such as:

• How was this event received by the media?

• How did this event impact cultural understanding of aliens and UFOs?
• How do skeptics explain the event?

I chose this topic without the help of SPARK, so I cannot vouch for its usefulness first-hand. I did, however, explore the website and found that, had I been a few steps behind in discovering a topic, the section on narrowing a topic would have been useful to me. If I had merely wanted to explore the supernatural, for example, I could have used  this section to narrow my focus down to alien encounters, and from there the natural thing to do would be to choose a specific story to explore. My one criticism of the site is that it operates under the assumption that a general topic has been provided, so the guidelines may be irrelevant to someone in the early stages of an open-ended assignment like this one.