Popular paranormal podcast dives deeper into the Bermuda Triangle of Kentucky

What do an Alien Grave Mountain, an alleged ex-Nazi agent and a mysterious green man cult have in common?

They are linked by the strange and unexplained activity coming from the the Pennyroyal Plateau — the Bermuda Triangle of Kentucky — which covers Somerset and the surrounding region. It’s the central theme of a paranormal podcast launched last fall by some in the southcentral Kentucky town looking to uncover more about the area’s hidden truths.

Hosted by Nathan Isaac, the Penny Royal Podcast has proven popular — season one garnering over 140,000 listens and the 10-episode season two premiere coming in the next few weeks. The podcast was recorded in Somerset at Pure Grain Studios and is available on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts where it has a user rating of 4.8 stars out of 5.

“I hope what Penny Royal does for people is that it inspires them to find that hidden layer of their home,” said Isaac. “A lot of people I think take for granted the place that they call home, and they’re in a place that they live and they think, ‘Man, I’m stuck here and there’s nothing to do here, this place isn’t interesting.’ But I think if people look deeper at the place that they’re in, they’ll find all kinds of things they never expected.”

The cult of Somerset ‘worshiping a green man’

One of the many stories Isaac heard and discusses in the eight-chapter first season is of a cult in town made up of the rich and powerful. At first he didn’t put much thought into the claims until he met a woman who told him that she was part of a nearby cult at a young age.

“I still had my doubts, but ultimately the claims correlated with previous rumors I’d heard so I couldn’t ignore them,” said Isaac. “If there was something there, then that meant there was some seriously weird stuff going on in this unassuming little town.”

The head-scratching stories soon took an unexpected turn when Greg Newkirk, a paranormal investigator and producer of “Hellier”, a docuseries exploring the strangeness of a small Pike County community, visited Somerset in September 2019. While in town Newkirk met with Isaac, who told him about the local phenomena including the cult, not knowing the docuseries producer had come to town also looking for clues about a near by cult.

“That’s when he stopped me and said that he’d been getting emails from a woman living in Somerset claiming that there was a cult in town worshiping a green man,” said Isaac. “According to her it was composed of local politicians, judges, lawyers and law enforcement. As crazy as it sounded, the story lined up with a previous one he’d heard in “Hellier” and the one that I’d been told. It freaked both of us out, because neither of us took her too seriously but decided to investigate it anyway, ultimately proving ourselves wrong as we gathered five similar claims from women in town about the existence of this cult.”

Meet ‘Mr. X’

Isaac learned that the cult had supposedly been operating out of Mount Victory Mine, one of two abandoned mines in Pulaski County. He later found it was purchased in 1975 by Alexander Guterma, one of the biggest stock manipulators in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s with a shady and uncertain past that garnered him the nickname “Mr. X.” Guterma died in 1977 when a private aircraft owned by the mine crashed near LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York after departing from Somerset.

“I know he lived in Somerset but can’t find anybody here who knows who he actually was,” said Isaac. “I’ve collected countless newspaper clips and other documentation that places him here for that brief period of time. It’s insane to me that more people don’t know about him, around here or elsewhere, due to all of the crazy stuff he’s been involved in. Even though his story has nothing to do with paranormal activity I thought it was too strange not to include on the podcast.”

Featured on episode six of Penny Royal, Isaac says that the inclusion of Guterma in the podcast has attracted attention both from curious, everyday listeners to professional historians looking to unearth more about the man known as “Mr. X.” And it appears that more Guterma talk may be on the horizon in season two.

This past January Isaac filed an FOIA request with the FBI for any records pertaining to Guterma, and in February received 1,662 related files that he’s in the process of sifting through using a data mining program designed by him and co-producer Darian West.

“From our previous research we found that Guterma was likely an ex-Nazi intelligence agent that was brought to the states through the Gehlen Organization established shortly after the conclusion of World War II, which would help to explain why his past is so full of mystery,” said Isaac. “I look forward to going through all of these files and getting to the bottom of who he actually was.”

The Kentucky Anomaly

According to Isaac, his curiosity in Somerset’s mystery was piqued shortly prior to him moving there from Lexington in 2011 when he Googled “Somerset UFO Sightings” on a whim one night and came across a now defunct site for an Alien Grave Mountain in nearby Burnside. The mountain was home to the remains of a UFO crash site from the 1950s that gave tours and included a webcam on its site positioned on an alleged alien coffin.

Soon after Isaac had another fascinating discovery, stumbling upon a 1981 report analyzing data from the NASA-operated Magsat spacecraft. Launched in the fall of 1979, it’s mission was mapping the planet’s magnetic field and it showed southcentral Kentucky at the center of what was described as the “Kentucky Anomaly,” a phenomenon known to cause distortions in gravitational forces, particularly near is center.

Those serendipitous circumstances paired with Isaac learning of sensational stories like the falling from the sky death of Andrew Carter Thorndton II (of Cocaine Bear and “The Bluegrass Conspiracy” fame), the 1994 murders of Linda Gibson and Cody Garrett and the 2002 assassination of Pulaski County Sheriff Sam Catron at a political rally/fish fry led him to the idea of exploring associations between events and the Kentucky Anomaly through a podcast.

“After I moved down here I began hearing of all these wacky, unbelievable stories that got me thinking back to what I’d read about the Kentucky Anomaly and if it had played a role in any of the violent behavior.”

Season two of Penny Royal will releaseAug. 21, 2021 to supporters of the podcast on Patreon and a month later on Sept. 21 to the public.

This story was originally published August 9, 2021 at 6:00 AM.