Note: Odd Ball is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We highly recommend listening to the audio. The audio contains tone and emotion that are not included in the transcript. Transcripts are created using speech recognition software and human transcribers, but it may contain errors. Please verify with the audio before using any quotes in print.

[Music]

[Promo:]
Odd Ball is made possible by supporters of WJCT Public Media with additional support from Bold Bean Coffee Roasters. While this podcast might be a mystery, Bold Bean's coffee isn't. Ethically sourced beans are roasted to highlight their origin characteristics and natural sweetness. So when you order that latte, you're supporting transparency and quality at every step of the coffee chain. Bold Bean. Sourcing, roasting, brewing, and, serving outstanding coffee.

[Odd Ball theme music]

Lindsey Kilbride:
From WJCT Public Media, this is Episode 2 of Odd Ball. I'm Lindsey Kilbride.

[Montage of clips from previous episode:]

Ron Kivett: "One of my listeners called up and said, 'Ron, have you heard about this thing that they found?' And I said, 'OK, well, you know, I'll check it out.'" "Sitting on a glass top table, the ball rolled from the center of the table all the way to the edge and stopped.

Lindsey: "Do you remember your dad saying that he personally witnessed it?"

Susan:
"Yes."

Dick Burnett:
"And then at the end, they weren't sure that they got the right ball back even." "People will say you're crazy or this or that, but she is not."

Lindsey Kilbride:
I left off talking with Betz family friend Dick Burnett in his living room —

Dick Burnett:
"This is the bottom jaw of a woolly mammoth right here…"

Lindsey Kilbride:
— about his memories of the odd ball and his more recent conversations with Gerri, matriarch of the Betz household. Dick skimmed over some weird details about several UFO investigators.

Looking at the ball and the Navy's involvement, the Navy investigated the ball just days after it made headlines and April 1974. I haven't had any luck getting the official report. But newspapers say they had two weeks to investigate the ball and determined it was from Earth because it was made out of super common stainless steel. And that's despite the witnesses' and family's account of its odd behavior: vibrating and seeming to move around of its own volition. Gerri says something mysterious was going on with the officer in charge of returning the ball and he wanted to take it back. But she said no.

I have to say, going into this, I personally find it highly unlikely the ball's anything magical or extraterrestrial. And I totally believe a life beyond Earth is possible, even likely, but I'm still coming into this really skeptical if this was something truly astounding.

Wouldn't the Navy have just said it was government property, something classified? You know, not give Gerri the option of taking it back? I don't know. But everyone I've spoken to who knows Gerri says she's smart, well respected and honest. So I wanted to know more about that. Who is Gerri? Is she the kind of person who would either make up weird things about the ball? Or imagine them?

Nan Kavanaugh:
"She's a pretty extraordinary woman who has an amazing history that people probably don't know."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Nan Kavanaugh is the former editor of First Coast Magazine, which profiled Gerri Betz and 2016.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"It took me a long time to track her down. I think after the Betz sphere, she and her family, they, over the past few decades, they've just been inundated with UFO enthusiasts trying to track them down that they've kind of gone into hiding in a way.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"So tell me a little bit about your journey and getting in touch with her and how she came on your radar as someone you wanted to interview.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"There was a gentleman who lived on the Northside of Jacksonville who fancied himself as a kind of local hobby historian. And he, he's the type of guy who writes letters to the newspaper all the time, really long, intense letters."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"So you were familiar with him."

Nan Kavanaugh:
"I was familiar with him. So he would just call me, like every, I don't know, three months, every six months with, like, some story ideas. I had asked him, through one of our conversations, 'We're doing an October issue, we'd really like to focus on the supernatural. Do you have any good stories?' And that's when he said, 'Oh, you should do something on the Betz sphere.' So then I went into the archive of the Times-Union and found the file and the stories on it and Googled it online. I was like, 'Wow, that is a supernatural occurrence that people are still really like, fixated on, and so I was like, 'This is great.' And then I was like, 'OK, well, let's try to find the Betz family,' and so I began that process and it was more challenging than I expected because Gerri had such a prominent — she was a prominent figure in the 70s and 60s."

Lindsey Kilbride:
She's not kidding. Remember how he said the newspaper had this thick archive of articles related to the sphere? That same folder includes 24 articles just on Gerri, most of them predating the ball's discovery. People around here knew who she was. It also includes a stack of photos of Gerri. She's petite with brunette hair cut short or pulled back when she sat for portraits. My favorite photo of her is this one where she looks really young. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, and she's got some frizzy fly always because Florida, but she's candidly laughing while trying to compose herself for the portrait. I just like it.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"She was a business owner. Their family are large landowners in the area. She was very active in local politics."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Lots of coverage is about her fighting the city over its buying a private bus company. She argued it would obligate the city to high costs without voters' having a say. She led an effort collecting signatures to have the City Council members removed who supported the purchase. Then she was a plaintiff in a state Supreme Court case over the matter. One article spotlighted Gerri for refusing to answer questions posed by city lawyers about her research into the private bus company's finances, saying she would not disclose her source even if it meant jail. Other articles alleged City Council members may have been retaliating against her over the matter. Then there's her run for Soil and Water Board, her demonstrating for higher pay for police, and her run for a state House seat, although she didn't win.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"So I was kind of surprised when I started trying to find them through just normal means of searches that I was unable to really find any real information, contact information like, no social media accounts, nothing that I could really see. And eventually tracked them down through tax records got ahold of one of her nieces, who when I called her she was very suspicious of about me calling. And I quickly realized that if I was going to ask the family anything about the Betz sphere, I was not going to get anywhere with the family. So realizing through my research of Gerri as a person, I was like, let's shift gears here, like, there's a nature preserve named for them. And near the Fort George area, there was a large piece of land that they donated, that's Tiger Point Preserve, and they've donated a lot of land to the state for preservation."

"One of the things that the magazine was trying to do is that kind of highlight unknown and untold histories, so I was like, you know what, people go to this, go to this park all the time, they use the ramp. They probably have no idea who the family is, so let's do a story on Gerri and celebrate the work she did and what an amazing business person she was to acquire that land and the vision she had and her choice to preserve it. So that was the story that I pitched the family, and that was the story that they finally were like, 'OK, like, we'll share Gerri's phone number with you.'"

Lindsey Kilbride:
Reporter Karen Burmeister wrote that story in 2016 titled "Gutsy and Gifted: The amazing Gerri Betz Jackson." The deal? A story about Gerri's life and work. No mention of the ball allowed.

Caren Burmeister:
"She's truly a self-made woman because she grew up in such poverty and on a farm in South Georgia, and she was one of 14 children. Her parents — her mom died first and then her father died. I think a few years later, when she was quite young, want to say maybe around 10, 11, 12 when they died, and so she took care of her younger siblings and, you know, they had no electricity, no running water. They had to bring in pails of water from a well that was somewhere on the property. And she I think was born with  a talent for taking care of people and helping people. She has a big heart."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"It sounds like she's pretty resourceful, just sort of working with what she had.

Caren Burmeister:
"Oh my gosh, yeah. She got married early. And I think that it wasn't a really successful marriage. And the husband was falling behind in his payments for this truck with a trailer behind it and was about to go into default. I think she saw that that could be developed into a successful business."

Lindsey Kilbride:
In 1965, her business success was featured in the newspaper, "Jacksonville Mother of 6 Built Trucking Line from 1 Repossession." She was 32 at the time. 32, raising six kids. It describes her as "an attractive brunette with dark hair, glamour white teeth, and"— I can not believe I'm saying this — "the figure of a school girl." Later, when she ran for a state House seat along with lots of other women in 1972, that headline was "If These Women Candidates are Elected, How Will They Keep House?" Yikes.

Anyway, this article says she took over payments of the nearly new tractor trailer from a young man she had tried to help by signing his bank loan, not specifying it was her soon-to-be ex-husband. Whoever it came from she tried to sell it but with offers too low, she instead found use for it, hiring a driver, scoring a twice-a-week route to Miami hauling poultry. But then that company wanted to give her all its business. Having only one truck, she went around to truck stops in search of independent drivers looking for extra work. Within five years she had remarried, had that sixth child and purchased her ninth truck. Again, reporter Caren Burmeister:

Caren Burmeister:
"The trucks would break down on the highway, and the driver would call her and say, you know, something's wrong with it. And so she would probe him with questions and…"

Lindsey Kilbride:
And actually helped the driver fix his truck over the phone based on her own research into diesel engines. She did her own bookkeeping, scrubbed the trucks every week, and she said she made more than 100 calls a day acquainting people with her service. She said most big food chains refused to even consider her company because she was a woman. And she did most of this by herself. Her husband, a marine engineer, wasn't home much but offered moral support, according to the article. She said at the time, you had to let men speak for you to keep the peace, but sometimes you had to stir it up.

Caren Burmeister:
"Around that time, she was also buying land whenever she could. She told me that even when she was, like, in her very early or late teens or maybe even early 20s, she was saving every penny she could to buy land, and that really paid off for her later."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Not only did she donate land for preservation, Caren says, she was successful in real estate and she also had a knack for engineering, because of course she did.

Caren Burmeister:
"She loved self study. She would buy books, and she would pick people's brains and talk with people and study and she would just figure things out on her own."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Gerri largely credits her intuition, which she told Caren some may label as clairvoyance. But Gerri calls it her gift.

Caren Burmeister:
"I said, I understand that you, you know, have a very strong faith and a close relationship with God. But I think that it goes even beyond that. You have special gifts. And she's like, 'Yeah.' She didn't want to brag. She's very humble and very down to earth. She would just have these real strong instincts or gut feelings."

Lindsey Kilbride:
For instance, one time she was with a group of people and they were doing a devotional study…

Caren Burmeister:
"…in this, I think it was like a wooden facility."

Lindsey Kilbride:
It was dusk, and an inner voice told her, 'Turn off the lights.'

Caren Burmeister:
"So she flipped off the lights and that's when she looked out the window and she could see what at first she thought was fog. Then she looked more closely and realized it was smoke…"

Lindsey Kilbride:
…because the building was on fire. So Gerri believes she has a gift, like a sixth sense. Her gut told her to turn off the lights and she was able to see that the part of the building she was in was on fire. When I asked Caren what she thinks about all this, without skipping a beat, she says she believes her. I don't know what to think. Except I find it really intriguing, especially with everything she's accomplished.

Caren's article really gives you a sense of who Gerri is and that this discovery of a weird silver ball not mentioned in the article, it was just a blip. But you wouldn't know that by searching her name online. That just brings up a bunch of theories about the sphere.

Back in mid-April '74 when articles about the ball were popping up daily, Gerri's portrayal seems to shift over the course of 10 days or so.

Al Pete:
"Shift from what to what?"

Lindsey Kilbride:
"So in this first article I could find it explains the ball exhibited strange behavior. It talks about the Navy's being interested in the ball, and it says several people have advanced the theory it may be a bugging device left by a UFO. The next day the paper's own photographer is quoted backing up Gerri's claims, and the Navy spokesman admits there is something weird about the ball.

Then the Navy determined the ball was made on Earth and not odd. And the way Gerri is portrayed seems to change at this point. This is where I've noticed it, because then, we start seeing headlines like this one right here: "Just a ball? Maybe not, Sat Its Finders" So it's sort of doubting…

Al Pete:
"Yeah, it's definitely a downplay. Yeah."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"And that's how it kind of progresses. So a few days later, there's an article that says Gerri and her family 'won't give up the notion' it's from outer space. But Gerri is like, 'You still haven't told me what it is or where it came from.' And that's what I want to know. So the articles go from saying, the Navy thinks the ball is strange to the ball did not roll around at the Air Station when being x-rayed by the Navy.

So then a couple months later, there's another article and it states, 'the Betzes still believe stainless steel globe came from outer space.' And then in the article, she claims that people were trying to buy the ball, including a group offering 750 grand, which she said she turned down, that she's had to have people wanting to investigate it kicked off her property and that she's taken serious security precautions to protect the ball.

So as more and more as being reported about the sphere, Gerri seems less and less into the attention. You know, if she just wanted this to all go away, she could probably just say it stopped moving around, or, I was mistaken. The Navy was right. It's just a metal ball made on Earth. But she doesn't. So she's either really honest or really dedicated to a contrived story. Listening to this call with Ron, that radio host who took pictures of the ball, she says this ball has completely disrupted her family life with all the people wanting to see it and study it.

[Gerri Betz in archive phone call:]
"I'll tell you one thing. This thing has disrupted my family life all to heck."

Ron Kivett:
"I would imagine so."

Gerri Betz:
"…24 hours a day and it means nothing to people in the West that it's midnight here. And when they quit calling, those in the East wake up and start."

Lindsey Kilbride:
She told a reporter that if she had known what she knows now, she wouldn't have told anyone what her son found. She would have kept quiet.

Then, a second ball popped up. But first…

[Promo:]
Odd Ball is made possible by supporters of WJCT Public Media with additional support from Bold Bean Coffee Roasters. Although Bold Bean typically focuses on single-origin coffees, owner Zack Burnett created a special Odd Ball blend at his roastery in Jacksonville, Florida.

[Zack with machinery humming in background:] "So Odd Ball is a two-coffee blend. One of the blend elements comes from El Salvador. The coffees were grown on the Santa Ana volcano. It's from a family that we've been working with for going on five years. So that coffee on its own is pretty well rounded and balanced. The second component of that blend is a coffee called Kiamabara from Kenya. So we've used that coffee to kind of spice up the blend, give it a lot of character and then balance that kind of intensity out with the El Salvador. The Odd Ball is tasting a lot like luxardo cherries, like cocktail cherries. And that's kind of balanced out by a nice kind of spice note similar to, like, root beer."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Get the coffee blends now and find out how to binge all the Odd Ball episodes before they're officially released at oddballpodcast.com. And while you're there, consider making a contribution to WJCT Public Media, so we can keep making more cool podcasts like this one.

[Kickstarter promo:]
"It can feel like brilliant, creative ideas just appear out of nowhere, you know, like a mysterious metal ball from outer space. But of course, it's never that simple. Kickstarter's podcast Just the Beginning brings you stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life. And sometimes those ideas are a little out there. 'My dad and I built a little holographic studio in my room. It was right at the foot of my bed in high school. I think it was the only one on the block.' That's inventor Sean Frane, who stuck with his childhood obsession and created a desktop holographic display called the Looking Glass. To hear about his creative journey and so many others, listen to the first season of "Just the Beginning" out now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite shows. And be sure to subscribe to catch new episodes."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Just over a week after the ball made its first headlines, an official with the St. Regis Pulp and Paper Co. in Jacksonville made his own headlines, saying the Betz sphere is probably part of a ball valve his company used to use in the process of converting wood chips into pulp. He said that equipment had been discarded 15 years ago, probably sold as scrap, and there's no telling where it all ended up.

Then a woman named Lottie Robinson came forward with a second ball. She said this ball had been sitting in her garage for about 15 years. A family friend had apparently given a heavy metal ball to her kids to play with, as you do. It was 8 inches in diameter, like the Betz sphere. 20 pounds: a tad lighter than the Betzes'. And if you rolled it, there's a little thing in there kind of like the Betz sphere.

Then a local businessman who sells metal balls and the GM of a plant that makes metal balls both said the two spheres definitely seem like the kind they're familiar with using in machinery for pulp mills and chemical pumps.

That general manager I just mentioned was from the Michigan company Industrial Tectonics, which is still around today, still specializing in the making of metal balls. In '74, he said that little jingle you hear inside the Betz ball, it's probably from pieces of metal that could have fallen into a small hole left after the ball was cast and sealed.

Some articles do say the ball had like this welded-over plug. Most don't mention that.

I reached out to Industrial Tectonics and the guy spoke with said this: The process of making metal balls hasn't really changed since before the 70s. Typically, two hemispheres are welded together, but you'd never be able to tell. And he couldn't think of a reason a metal sphere would have a hole drilled and later welded over. He also said you wouldn't want little shards of material falling inside the ball but it could happen if it was poorly manufactured. And he agrees with the officials who chimed in and said that a ball matching the Betz sphere description could be used in pulp mills and chemical pumps. A hollow metal ball like this would be strong but not too heavy.

But back in this article from '74 it says a PR rep with a paper mill actually confirmed the lady's ball — that's the woman who had to look-alike — was once one of the mill's. Although the article doesn't specify the mill really took a look at lady's ball but it says to ID the Betz ball, paper company engineers would have to take a look at it. And that's where things get cloudy because I don't know if that ever happened. There's no follow up news story, and the paper plant has been shut down.

We know the ball fits the description of the mill's spheres, except, you know, theirs didn't vibrate and follow people around. But I know Gerri says her ball was not part of the mill's equipment, or so she told Ron. Her sentiment can best be summed up as, "It's not from the paper mill. I've confirmed that with a UFO investigator. But let people think that. I don't want to be bothered anymore."

A year and a half later, Gerri sat down with a Florida Times-Union newspaper reporter, Sandy Strickland.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"How long have you been what this paper?"

Sandy Strickland: "I came in December of 1969. And that means I've been here longer than anyone else."

Lindsey Kilbride:
And she's still there. I wanted to hear about her interview with Gerri but also track down other reporters who also may have known Gerri.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"These are all people who wrote about her."

Sandy Strickland:
"She's dead. She's dead. He's dead. Terry Murphy. Terry Murphy is still with us. And she is a Facebook friend."

Lindsey Kilbride:
So basically, I was extremely lucky to have Sandy, who interviewed Gerri in 1975. I brought a scanned copy of the original article with me.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"You know, I know what it feels like to read a story I wrote four years ago and cringe because I'm like, 'Oh god.' How do you feel about this?"

Sandy Strickland:
"Oh, I don't like to read my stories once they've been in print, because then you see things that you would have written differently. And you want to cut out some words and you want to add and then you think, 'Oh, I could have said it this way.' And then the writing style was different then too. I can write better than this now.

But I remember going to the house. They wanted a Halloween story. And this seemed to fit within the parameters."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Sandy went to Gerri's place, which is this gigantic house sitting in the woods, and the house is complete with one of those rounded side towers like, you know, what castles have.

Sandy Strickland:
"If you went up to the tower, you could look out and you could almost see the inlet, I think you could see the inlet. I remember all these levels, and you would walk, you know ,from one to the other, and it seemed — it was a neat house. I've never been in another house like it. They called it 'the castle.' And indeed it did look like a castle. And I remember, as I said, the orange shag carpet and they were — it was just the kind of house that you could have a great party in. You could play hide and go seek and never be found.

Lindsey Kilbride:
21 rooms: Six bedrooms, a master lounge, a Florida room, garden room, play room, shop, den, a 20-foot closet, a basement built like a dungeon. But Sandy didn't interview Gerri to profile a neat house, she profiled a rumored haunted house. The article was headlined "Haunted House? Fort George Mansion has Aura of Mystery.

[Sounds of nature along with eerie music] [Lindsey, reading from Sandy's story:] "Trees hump across the narrow, twisting road that leads to the house. On foggy days, a mist seems to emanate from around the house. [sounds of poultry] Chickens and ducks chatter in the yard, adding an incongruous note to the haunted castle atmosphere."

I don't agree with Sandy. Her writing is great.

Over the years, there had been stories that organ music could be heard throughout the house, but no organ. When the house was vacant, there were tales of mysterious phone calls, lights, voices, banging doors, a rumored secret passage never found by the house's occupants.

Once during a party, guests were sitting in the library with all the doors locked, when a crash was heard in the kitchen. Broken dishes were on the floor, but the cabinet was closed.

Sandy Strickland:
"She took me around and she showed me some of the places where some of the strange events had occurred. And the cabinet, for example, where some of the glass and china was stored, and there was no one in that room when it crashed, and there was no reason for it to crash. And then the doors. The double doors that led to the house, those were heavy doors. They were either made of metal or wood or stone and they would not blow open, and yet they opened. And there were strange noises. There were crashing sounds, telephones would ring."

Lindsey Kilbride:
A maid decided she didn't want to work at the house anymore. Once, a guest heard a heavy door slam and was reluctant to come back. But Gerri said she's always tried to look for logical explanations. Voices? Maybe they just carried over from boaters in the inlet.

Sandy's story just has brief mention of the sphere. I asked what she remembered about it.

Sandy Strickland:
"I don't think anyone thought that it dropped from outer space, that it had anything to do with extraterrestrials or alien objects or anything of that nature, you know. The mind is a powerful thing and you can let your imagination run wild to the fact that you might say, 'I wouldn't want to be alone in a room with that ball at night all by myself.'"

Lindsey Kilbride:
So on one hand Gerri says all the attention with the ball totally disrupted her family's life and although she personally didn't think the ball was from the paper mill, she was glad that theory was floating around, because maybe it would make people lose interest...yet a year later she agrees to be interviewed about rumors her house was haunted. This is sort of a red flag for me, honestly.

And it's not hard to see how the house could trigger your imagination … if you can find it.

[Driving sound] [Lindsey and her friend Nyah are in the car]

Nyah:
"We're on Ft. George Road, we're about to turn on Ft. George Road. So hopefully it's not that hard to find."

[Nyah laughs.]

Lindsey Kilbride:
Again, my friend Nyah.

Nyah:
"Check this out. Here we go. Maybe we gotta...nope… you're going to go up here past the slave house and veer left at the.."

Lindsey Kilbride:
The Betzes' old house is really close to Kingsley Plantation, which has intact slave houses – if the place weren't already eerie.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"It should be right up here."

Nyah:
"Maybe we have to turn" Lindsey Kilbride: "OK, there's a gate...OK let's. It says it's a little further up but it might be that? "

Lindsey Kilbride:
It wasn't. Google didn't know where the house was, and neither did we.

Tim Gilmore:
"The house was built in the late 1920s by Mellen Greeley, who was a prolific Jacksonville architect. He was called the Dean of Jacksonville Architects at one time, and he built it for a real estate person in Chicago names Nettleton Neff."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Local historian and English Professor Tim Gilmore describes the house as "soaked in suicide and abandonment."

Tim Gilmore:
"Neff's wife died in a fire at their summer home in Michigan and 1926. A couple years later Neff's 21-year-old son went missing. He was found two weeks later, he had hung himself in an apple tree in Connecticut."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Nettleton Neff himself ?

Tim Gilmore:
"Committed suicide in his office in Chicago, he shot himself. And he never lived in the house. And this was the late 1920s. And, you know, this is right before, kind of the economic bust and the Great Depression. And nobody lived in the house full time until 1967."

Lindsey Kilbride:
The Betz family.

Tim Gilmore:
"And no one has lived there since. The National Park Service has it boarded up."

Lindsey Kilbride:
Totally weird, but I don't think it's connected to the ball. And Gerri says all the haunted stuff predated the sphere's discovery. Still, it's alluring… like, oh, a family found this rumored UFO, and they lived in a possibly haunted house near an old plantation ... totally normal...

[Lindsey in car with Nyah:] "I'm just going to ask this guy if he knows. [rolls window down> 'I have a question. Do you live out here? You don't? We're trying to find this mansion that's back here somewhere. The Neff house?'… You think that's it?"

Nyah:
"You know I was kind of curious about that myself…This cannot be right….They meant it when they said no trespassing. I thought the no trespassing was more of a suggestion."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"Nope."

Lindsey Kilbride:
The house captured Tim's imagination so much that he wrote a Southern-gothic style short story about some teens who find it in the woods. This description from the story ultimately helped us find the house:

[Tim Gilmore reading his story:] "Then he walked off the hiking trail past the No Trespassing sign. He was walking on an old dirt road that dipped through a narrow ravine and rose up small hills. The sun came through two trees that framed a house in the near distance. When he got closer, he could tell the corner of the house was a brick tower. At least three, maybe four stories tall. The sun glinted off the conical roof like a diamond. When he got closer, he saw the windows were boarded up. A curved iron railing semi-circled the balcony over an address above the door. The address said "01." He thought it might be missing some numbers. He also thought the road had no name. What was the house address here on this road with no name, just 01? As though it were the only house or the first house in the world? He circled the house looking for a way inside. He wanted to stand on that balcony. He wanted to be in that tower. He imagined stairs inside spiraling three-and-a-half stories upward nestled against the interior round brick wall."

[Nyah and Lindsey:] "I think this is it. You coming or staying? Lindsey Kilbride: "I'll stay."

Nyah:
"I'll be back…"

Lindsey Kilbride:
We stop at the end of a gated off, narrow road and I did not believe it led to the house, but 15 minutes later.

[Nyah and Lindsey:] "This is it!"

Lindsey Kilbride:
"It is?! We found the house!"

Nyah:
"Google did not help. Our intuition did not help."

Lindsey Kilbride:
We walk along a curved path, no house in sight for several minutes.

[Sound from woods:]

Lindsey Kilbride:
"Wow… wow"

Lindsey Kilbride:
It's the house. A 21-room castle, boarded up. Half brick, half stucco with a circular tower adorned with a pointed roof.

[Sound from woods:]

Nyah:
"This is where it all happened.

Lindsey Kilbride:
This is the door. This is the door that Dick walked up to, and I can imagine him coming out here and talking to Gerri."

Nyah:
"…While the kids are inside…"

Lindsey Kilbride:
"Playing with this alien…"

Nyah:
"If we were to try to get in this, it would be very precarious… this is definitely the type of area that inspires paranormal thinking and supernatural stuff, in your house that's built to be called a castle."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"The place looks haunted, for sure. I mean it's just crazy to me that there's this huge mansion in this beautiful area and it's just abandoned, boarded up."

Lindsey Kilbride: [In studio]
"From your recollection, did things change for Gerri and her reputation after the sphere was found?"

Lindsey Kilbride:
Sandy, the newspaper reporter, says she thinks the Betz family eventually shied away from discussing the ball because maybe people started looking at them in a different way.

Sandy Strickland:
"I don't think it did, because she had she became very successful after that. I think that many things that she touched, she just had the ability to make successes of them, and I don't think things changed for her that much other than family being besieged, and I think that made them just want to shy away from discussing the ball. You know maybe people were looking at them in a different way."

Lindsey Kilbride:
"Yeah, to me it made me wonder, you know Gerri, she was such a great business woman, she was really smart, she wasn't afraid to challenge, you know, City Council, if they were wasting taxpayer dollars in her opinion. And then the sphere came, and it seemed like that's what people were knowing her for. And to me, it's like, that's such a small part of who she is. Why are we not focusing on her as this really powerful, cool woman in the community?

Sandy Strickland:
"I think that's exactly what happened. I think they— some even dubbed it 'the Betz ball.'"

Lindsey Kilbride:
Nan,  the editor who decided to profile Gerri a couple of years ago, agrees, she wasn't someone who would have been in it for the attention.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"It really was eye-opening to me to really think about a person's experience once something supernatural has occurred and you share it, right? And you don't just keep it to yourself. How that can uproot everything. People were, like, coming here from all over the country on a pilgrimage to their home, and it got crazy. You know, there's nothing in it for Gerri Betz to share this strange story. She had everything.

Nan also corroborates some of what Gerri's friend Dick told me. She says the Navy tried to keep the ball as an officer was returning it to the Betz family and that Gerri doesn't know if she even ended up with the original ball. Like, one of these UFO investigators maybe switched it out.

That's what Gerri told her the last time they talked, a few years ago.

Nan Kavanaugh:
"I want to learn more. I want to try to get down there and visit with her."

Lindsey Kilbride:
About a week after this interview, Nan came back to the studio.

Lindsey Kilbride:
"So you talked to Gerri on Monday?"

Nan Kavanaugh:
"I did."

This is Odd Ball, a production made possible by supporters of WJCT, and produced by me, Lindsey Kilbride, with help from intern Al Pete. This episode was edited by Jessica Palombo. The music is by Matthew Wardell and Al Pete. And Andrew Gustafson restored some of the archival audio.