Gary Sudbrink

 On the evening of 8 February 1993, 27-year-old Gary Sudbrink was at his parent's home in Long Island, New York. However, late that evening, Gary's parents would receive a series of strange phone calls addressed directly to Gary. The caller on the other end spoke in a strange, mechanical voice and made a number of weird statements, alluding to Gary being impersonated by someone else...

It is highly recommended that you listen to this episode while reading. Segments of audio have not been transcribed below, but are included in the episode audio.

By February of 1993, 27-year-old Gary Sudbrink, originally from Long Island, New York, was a Captain in the Air Force. Assigned to a medical pharmacy in San Antonio, Texas, Gary had decided to come home and visit his family without telling anyone ahead of time - a surprisingly important note to add before we get into the meat of this story. Gary arrived at his parent's home without issue the first weekend of February, but almost immediately thereafter, things started to get... weird.

On the evening of Monday, February 8th, Gary decided to call one of his old friends, Mike, hoping to make plans to get together and hang out while he was in town. However, during this call, Mike told Gary that they had actually spoken to one another the day before... which Gary knew wasn't the case, because surely he'd remember that conversation.

Right?

Despite Gary not believing what Mike was telling him, Mike insisted that Gary had called him on the phone the day before... or, at least, someone that sounded just like him, who called himself Gary, claimed to have flown in through LaGuardia Airport, and claimed to be getting over a cold. In reality, Gary had flown in through JFK and was in good health at the time, so this seemed to have been a weird mistake or mix-up of some kind. The alternatives were just unsettling to think about.

However, while Gary was talking to his friend at around 10:30 PM, trying to figure out what was going on, another call came in to his parent's phone line. What he heard made him pause; enough so that he pressed record on a nearby answering machine when it became clear that this was no regular call.

You'll hear Gary's mother pop in for a moment in the middle of the call, and his father do the same near the end, popping in through another landline to listen in.

As you just heard, the caller is speaking slowly and almost mechanically. It sounds like their voice has been altered in some way... slowed down and distorted to sound robotic or even alien in nature.

You may have noticed that throughout this call, Gary makes mention of a man named "Steven." Steven is Gary's older brother, who he believes might have been calling and messing with him, even though Steven wasn't necessarily known as a prankster or a joker of this kind.

And as you heard, Gary's parents jumped on the call for a moment, thinking that they'd be able to guess the identity of the caller. They weren't able to, however, due to how cryptic the caller sounded, and the weird things they were saying.

I tried to clean up the audio as best as possible, but even then, it can be hard to make out what the caller says. Twice, they seem to say - through stammers - "Is Gary Sud-Sudbrink there?" They then say, multiple times, "You're being impersonated by the other voice." And then, five times in this call alone, they ask, "How long are you going to be back from Texas?" I'd like to credit the Reddit user /u/pnut_butterjelly for transcribing this audio, because certain parts of it are hard to make out.

My first impression of this audio is that the caller was possibly using a soundboard of some type, with them seeming to repeat certain phrases over and over again. However, computer soundboards weren't really available at this point in 1993, so if they were, it implies some kind of radio or audio experience.

A little while after this call - just after 11:00 PM - the caller called back, and Gary was quick to hit record on the answering machine again.

This call seems to be a bit harder to make out because of the speaker's low volume, so I'll try and go through bits of it.

The caller first asks if it's Gary on the other end and if he's back from Texas, and then repeats some of the lines from the first call:

"How long are you going to be back from Texas?"

"Is this Gary Sudbrink?"

They then ask, in one of the stranger moments of the call:

"Who is this?"

Here, though, is where it gets truly odd. The caller, in their low, mechanical, almost-Buffalo Bill-sounding voice, say:

"Keep an eye on the skies."

"Near Orion."

"The full moon."

The caller repeats these lines a few times before Gary's dad jumps on the line. Seeming to be a believer in the paranormal or extraterrestrial, Gary's dad inquires about certain lines that the caller says, particularly when they say "Near Orion." His father's intrigue possibly fuels Gary throughout the call, so that's something to keep in mind.

Approximately half-an-hour later, while Gary and his parents were discussing the two phone calls they'd already received, their phone rang yet again. This time, the caller seemed to take a while to begin actually making any noise, and seemed quieter than ever, so listen closely. Also, at the beginning, Gary's father makes mention of a "Brian." That's just an erroneous mistake in the moment, as Brian is Gary's other brother.

During this call, the caller repeats some of the same phrases... but sometimes in slightly-different variations:

"Is Gary Sudbrink there?"

"Here is Gary Sudbrink."

"Is this Gary Sudbrink?"

They then repeat some of the same phrases from the prior two calls:

"Are you back from Texas?"

"Keep an eye on the skies."

"Orion."

"The full moon."

"Show double from you."

As you heard, Gary's father was intrigued by the call throughout, seeming to believe that his son and he were communicating with an extraterrestrial... someone he refers to a few times as "an intergalactic person". He also references a prior experience he'd had in West Virginia (which I can only presume might have been tangentially-related to the phenomenon surrounding Point Pleasant in the mid-1960s).

This third call - which came in at approximately 11:38 PM - would prove to be the Sudbrink's final phone call from this mysterious individual on the evening of February 8th, 1993. However, it would not be the last mysterious phone call they'd receive from this unknown persons... that would come the next night, February 9th, and would prove to be the weirdest phone call yet.

The following night - Tuesday, February 9th, 1993 - Gary Sudbrink was still with his parents. They had been unable to talk about much without reverting back to the series of strange phone calls they'd received the night prior.

That evening, Gary's uncle, Tom, had also come to visit. He was still there when the family's phone rang just before 10:30 PM, and you'll hear him pop in for a moment in the recorded conversation that followed.

This phone call, the longest of the bunch, features some of the strangest comments and questions yet from the mysterious individual on the other end of the line.

First, the caller begins by saying some similar statements to those from the night before:

"Is Gary Sudbrink there?'

"Is this Gary Sudbrink?"

"Gary Sudbrink."

But then, the caller starts veering into new territory: things that are extraterrestrial in nature.

"We come. To be within this planet."

"In this planet."

"We come."

"To be within this planet."

"To visit the many. To be contacted. As the same. With you."

This final line they repeated at least once.

As soon as Gary's uncle pops on the line, the caller then changes the script and enters some eerie "Men in Black" territory:

"Beware. Government interference."

"Beware."

"Government interference. Visitations to be disrupted by them."

Then, toward the end of the call - with their voice being surrounded by static and some distorted background noise - the caller then plays some of the greatest hits thus far:

"... appears. The sun will rise on... dark side of moon. World. Know."

"On the moon."

"Show double from you."

"Beware. Government interference. Visitations to be disrupted by them."

Over the years, audio from these phone calls has been used in various forums - conferences, panels, or even show discussing UFOs or UAP's - to make inferences to the caller being extraterrestrial in nature.

As you heard in the call itself, Gary's father and his uncle seemed to be believers, with his father making mention of the caller being an "intergalactic person" - at times, even seeming to press the issue when Gary was skeptical.

But the reason that I bring all of this up is that there is some context that I haven't given quite yet.

If you recall, at the beginning of this episode, I told you that the first call was preceded by Gary talking to his friend, Mike. Mike told Gary that the day before, he had received a similar call from someone that sounded just like Gary, claiming to have come to visit family. However, in this call, this individual calling himself Gary claimed to have flown in through an incorrect airport and was sick, so he wasn't able to hang out. None of this was true (other than Gary coming back home to visit family, of course) but Gary had no explanation for this discrepancy: he hadn't told any of his friends or family that he was coming back to visit before he did so.

Well, just wait... things get a bit weirder.

A year or so earlier, during one of Gary's last trips back home to Long Island, his brother Steven (the same one he mentioned in the phone calls) had recalled seeing someone driving alongside him on the highway - in a vehicle similar to the one that Gary drove back home in Texas, nonetheless. This individual that looked like Gary made some strange faces at his brother, then drove off. However, Steven had been en route to a wedding at the time that Gary was also attending, and they spoke about this reported encounter. It hadn't been Gary, despite the similarities. Gary had already been at the wedding, and hadn't even been driving... he'd flown up for the wedding and left his vehicle back home in Texas.

So back during the first phone call, when you hear Gary mention Steven and think he's pulling a prank on him, he thinks it's related to this incident.

That strange encounter from a year earlier - paired with his phone call to his friend, Mike - made Gary question the content of the phone calls entirely. In the years since, it's led way to the theory that Gary might have had a strange doppelganger of sorts, especially when you factor in some of the quotes made by the mysterious caller:

"Show double of you."

"You're being impersonated by the other voice."

To give even more ammunition to those that think this story has some paranormal or extraterrestrial link: while Gary was at the airport in Texas, getting ready to fly home, he had been approached by a man with a clipboard who asked him details such as his name/spelling, where he was going, and some other personal info. As Gary tells it, he assumed the guy was a salesman or someone taking a census, so he didn't think twice of it, so he just answered the questions and then went about his day.

However, after boarding his flight to New York, he was approached by another guy with a clipboard, who sat down in the seat next to him and asked him some similar questions. Gary asked this guy to leave him alone, and moments later, was seemingly rescued by a stewardess who told the man with the clipboard that he wasn't sitting in his assigned seat. However, the guy moved to the seat behind Gary and continued to pester him for a few more minutes, before eventually being shoo'd away. Gary wouldn't see this man for the restt of the flight, nor when they were disembarking the plane, yet he felt perturbed enough by the encounter to call his landlord to keep an eye on his apartment while he was on Long Island.

If we take the theory that this has some sort of extraterrestrial link at face value, we can only assume that a doppelganger of sorts was attempting to live in Gary's shoes for a brief time. For what reason, we can only guess at. However, if this were true - a large assumption to make, I understand - then maybe the mysterious, creepy-sounding caller was attempting to call Gary to warn him of this imposter.

The alternative to all of this, of course, is the theory that this is a prank or a hoax of some sort, possibly even one pulled at the expense of Gary... maybe even by his friends or family.

Throughout the call, Gary believes that his brother Steven is responsible for the call. Despite not having a history of pulling pranks like this, Steven is the person who told Gary the year beforehand about the weird doppelganger that he saw on the road. Maybe this was part of an elaborate running joke that never got revealed.

It's also worth pointing out that Gary's father and uncle seem to have been very into UFOs and paranormal culture. Not only had they gone to study an alleged "UFO crash" the year prior, 1992, but they were part of a Long Island UFO group prior to this phone call taking place. And, as reported by /u/ario62 on Reddit, had been featured in magazines and newsletters focusing on UAPs, including reporting their own UFO experience. Maybe they tried pulling off this prank to convince Gary of the existence of extraterrestrials, but had failed in the finer workings of the prank.

Throughout the call, the mysterious caller seemed to use a soundboard of sorts; or, at least, repeated several scripted lines that were all incredibly close to one another. Many of the phrases repeat, and seem to sound identical. Maybe the caller used a tape recorder throughout, which would explain some of the distorted whirring or scratching noises picked up on the recordings. I could even see someone at this point using a tape recorder similar to Kevin McCallister's from "Home Alone 2," which coincidentally came out in November of 1992, just a few months before these phone calls were recorded.

In the decades since these phone calls were recorded, some have also questioned why Gary was ready to record the calls so quickly, and if he would have had the means to do so with a simple answering machine. While I do know that some would have been able to record snippets of phone calls, the ability to record entire 3-4 minute long conversations is debateable... at least, growing up in the mid-to-late 90's, I don't remember having that ability with my own family's answering machines. Maybe I'm mistaken in that, though.

Some have theorized that these phone calls might have been part of a traffic pumping scheme, in which local exchange telephone carriers in rural parts of the U.S. would inflate the volume of incoming calls to their networks, profiting from the increased intercarrier compensation fees. However, this didn't really come into play until the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Regardless, the idea that these calls were pranks or a hoax of some sort has not faded over time. Whenever it comes to anything paranormal or extraterrestrial in nature, that's where my mind goes until proven wrong, but that being said, these phone calls are still incredibly unsettling decades later, especially when paired with all of the odd circumstances surrounding them at the time.

To this day, it remains unknown exactly what these strange phone calls were: if they were legitimately paranormal or if they were a prank or hoax of some sort. I personally lean toward the latter, but I understand anyone choosing to believe in the former... after all, we can make our own assumptions until proven wrong, and these calls remain a point of mystery decades later.

Gary Sudbrink is still around, just no longer in the Air Force, working as a pharmacist in Pennsylvania. Despite appearing occasionally on shows to talk about these mysterious calls from a generation ago - doing so as a skeptic, believing that they were a prank himself - he remains a rather-private person. He doesn't seem to be after a significant amount of attention or notoriety for the calls, and doesn't seem to share his family's belief that the caller was an "intergalactic person" of some sort. Rather, he seems to be just a normal guy caught up in a strange story.

For that reason, I think it's likely that someone was trying to pull a fast one on Gary, and simply never let him in on the joke, seeing how its spiralled into an obscure mystery in the years since. But who knows? Maybe Gary has been in on it from the beginning, and simply enjoys seeing his story spread to the dark corners of the internet.

If he did... could we blame him? It's kinda fun.

As of this episode's recording, the odd tale of Gary Sudbrink remains unresolved.