Jul 16, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min · 20 segments
Austin shares stories of odd phone calls, strange text messages, and weird, smiling men that followed several UFO sightings. **Order Timothy’s new book, **The Keystone Hagstone: Faeries and Other…
Tim RennerHostI'm doing great.
How are you?
If you wanna lay some groundwork, uh, about when did these start, and as comfortable as you are, where? You don't have to get us down to the street address if you don't want to.
Yeah.
So I'm a born and raised Midwest guy.
So for context, those who are kind of familiar with the area, Central Illinois is just flat farmland.
There's not a whole lot going on there.
I grew up, I'll say, near the Bloomington-Normal area, and then I went to college originally in East Central, Central Illinois, probably about an hour and a half away kinda from that area.
So my first really kind of odd experience, uh, happened when I was a sophomore in college.
I was living with, uh, two roommates who I'm still really close with, and one of my roommates, he was a, uh, a townie, um, that ended up going to college in the same town there, and he knew the area pretty well, all the back roads and stuff like that.
So we were bored one night, and it was...
Uh, this was November 2014, by the way, so a while ago.
We're just like, "Let's go for a drive." You know, it's nighttime.
And this roommate, he was like, "Oh, yeah, let me show you this, uh, cool kind of road that's in this really pretty kinda wooded valley just out of town." So this college town where it's at, when you drive out the south side of it, the terrain changes from your, your normal flat farmland Illinois terrain to really wooded, hilly...
So it's j- it's just kind of an interesting stark contrast compared to-
... like being north of the town.
So we drive out this highway out the back side of the town, and my roommate, he and his buddies, they called this road The L, and just, like, L-shaped road.
They just gave it that silly name.
I'm doing great.
How are you?
If you wanna lay some groundwork, uh, about when did these start, and as comfortable as you are, where? You don't have to get us down to the street address if you don't want to.
Yeah.
So I'm a born and raised Midwest guy.
So for context, those who are kind of familiar with the area, Central Illinois is just flat farmland.
There's not a whole lot going on there.
I grew up, I'll say, near the Bloomington-Normal area, and then I went to college originally in East Central, Central Illinois, probably about an hour and a half away kinda from that area.
So my first really kind of odd experience, uh, happened when I was a sophomore in college.
I was living with, uh, two roommates who I'm still really close with, and one of my roommates, he was a, uh, a townie, um, that ended up going to college in the same town there, and he knew the area pretty well, all the back roads and stuff like that.
So we were bored one night, and it was...
Uh, this was November 2014, by the way, so a while ago.
We're just like, "Let's go for a drive." You know, it's nighttime.
And this roommate, he was like, "Oh, yeah, let me show you this, uh, cool kind of road that's in this really pretty kinda wooded valley just out of town." So this college town where it's at, when you drive out the south side of it, the terrain changes from your, your normal flat farmland Illinois terrain to really wooded, hilly...
So it's j- it's just kind of an interesting stark contrast compared to-
... like being north of the town.
So we drive out this highway out the back side of the town, and my roommate, he and his buddies, they called this road The L, and just, like, L-shaped road.
They just gave it that silly name.
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