Many people take odd jobs to make ends meet. For two Pleasant Plains natives, odd is their job, and a lucrative one at that.

“The truth is out there, but you won’t find it here” is the tagline of Hysteria 51, a weekly “odd-cast” hosted by Brent Hand and John Goforth, who take a “skeptically optimistic” approach to conspiracy theories, aliens, mysteries, paranormal, and anything unusual or unexplained. In just three years the lifelong friends have taken this creative outlet and transformed their show into one of the world's most popular niche podcasts.

“This 'world of the weird' is interminably interesting,” Hand said. “I love to talk aliens, conspiracies, the paranormal and bombard John with these topics that he is incredibly skeptical about.”

“We went this route because we found there was a bit of a hole in the podcast offerings in the genre. Most of what existed was from the perspective of true believers, it was like this big echo chamber,” Hand said. “We like to consider the possibility of things, but are skeptically optimistic about the reality of much of it.”

Hand and Goforth started recording trial podcast episodes in early 2016 and officially launched Hysteria 51 and another now-defunct show, Rad or Fad, in September of that year. They now work full time in the podcast industry. Hand produces Hysteria 51 and oversees ForthHand Productions, and Goforth is Vice President of Podcasts for iHeartRadio.

Hysteria 51 and its hosts have been featured in HuffPost, Podcast Movement, Discover Pods, Podcast Business Journal, and in 2018 the show was selected by POPSUGAR as one of the top 10 conspiracy-theory podcasts in the field. Hysteria 51 is now on the HowStuffWorks network, one of the largest podcast networks in the world.

It's been a long, strange trip for the two Sangamon County natives who attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, came back to live in Springfield for a while, then ended up in the Chicago area, where they are now based.

“We’ve known each other for 30 years and it leads to some brother-types of squabbles, but it’s also probably the single biggest strength of our show, our chemistry and familiarity with each other,” Hand said. “We are also a comedy show. It’s a lot easier to make jokes about a guy getting abducted by aliens or harassed by ghosts than it is about a murder case, I guess, unless you were the abductee.”

Each weekly Hysteria 51 “odd-cast” features the back-and-forth rapport among Goforth, Hand and Conspiracy Bot, billed as “a cranky robot bent on world domination who also happens to be the show’s head researcher.” The team has traveled to a number of places to research their shows, including the purported UFO site Area 51, the Winchester Mystery House, Alcatraz, Congress Hotel, the Queen Mary, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Fermi Lab Particle Accelerator.

According to Goforth, their show sources and friends include NASA and SpaceX employees, Mutual UFO Network members, former CIA agents, special forces members, physicists, pilots, historians and psychics.

“The most memorable show had to be on The Flat Earth Theory,” Goforth said. “We asked two 'experts' who claim the Earth is a flat disk to have a round-table discussion with a NASA employee, a Space-X employee, and an astrophysicist from central Illinois. It was fun.”

Goforth is billed as “the skeptical one” on the show, but once in a while he dives into a topic as a skeptic and resurfaces as a believer. Take, for instance, the John F. Kennedy assassination.

“I came in thinking there wasn’t any 'there' there,” Goforth said. “But after researching the wild theories about the conspiracy to kill JFK, it turned out our own government agrees. The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations said in 1978 that Kennedy’s killing was the result of a conspiracy. From there, I was hooked.”

Goforth said growing up in Sangamon County may have contributed to his appreciation for the weird and unexplained.

“You can see some weird stuff in the middle of a cornfield in the dark of midnight,” Goforth said. “But more than that, I really think my love for history and great stories was born out of it. I grew up going to the Old State Capitol, Lincoln Tomb and New Salem. Being surrounded by cool history like that gives you a lifelong appreciation for it.”

That lifelong appreciation and an unusual way of looking at things got noticed at Pleasant Plains High School, where teacher Jane Brownback had both Hand and Goforth as students.

“Brent and John were the two guys that everyone wanted to be friends with in high school. They were great entertainers in class, competing with some of their teachers for attention, but never in a disrespectful way,” Brownback said. “They were fun to have in class, imaginative, always curious, questioning and creative.

“They were great improvisers in the plays and musicals I directed. I could always count on them to be crowd pleasers,” Brownback said. “I remember their laughter, comedic timing, and the joy they brought to their high school friends. They will always be two of my favorites, among the best and the brightest.”

Nick Amdor of Springfield has been close friends with Goforth and Hand for decades.

“Brent has always been interested in unusual things and John has always been more of the business-oriented individual,” Amdor said. “It was kind of surprising when I first heard they were doing this, and then all of a sudden it has become this huge success.”

Amdor is a fan and Hysteria 51 listener.

“They have a really good banter together. It helps that they've known each other for so long that it's almost like they have their own sort of shorthand,” Amdor said. “They almost know what each other is going to say before they say it. When you have that history and friendship it makes the listener think that these people really enjoy sitting there talking about this kind of stuff.”

Hysteria 51 fans can meet Goforth and Hand during 2019 at Planet ComiCon in Kansas City, AlienCon in Los Angeles, the True Crime Podcast Festival in Chicago, the Podcast Movement in Orlando, Florida, and back to Kansas City, Missouri, in August for ParaCon. Links to the show can also be found on Facebook, Group, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, iTunes and TeePublic, as well as the Hysteria 51 website, www.hysteria51.com.

Contact David Blanchette through the metro desk: 788-1401, sjr@sj-r.com.