Welcome to the season finale! We culminate 11 episodes with a look into UFOs with the experts who study them and seek to know more about if there is really life out there. What does science say, and what can we expect our government to tell us about these unidentified objects?
Then, we break down the oddest, wildest cases and news events that the podcast team has covered. From monkey selfies and Lil Nas X's Satan shoes to Utah's near-ban on porn and a Halal chicken story that just doesn't quit, some stories are enough to make us scratch our heads and stifle a laugh.
Special guests:
This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.
Editorial staff is Bill Dotinga, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.
Welcome to the season finale! We culminate 11 episodes with a look into UFOs with the experts who study them and seek to know more about if there is really life out there. What does science say, and what can we expect our government to tell us about these unidentified objects?
Then, we break down the oddest, wildest cases and news events that the podcast team has covered. From monkey selfies and Lil Nas X's Satan shoes to Utah's near-ban on porn and a Halal chicken story that just doesn't quit, some stories are enough to make us scratch our heads and stifle a laugh.
Special guests:
This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.
Editorial staff is Bill Dotinga, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.
[Intro Music]
Bianca Bruno: Welcome to Sidebar, a podcast from Courthouse News. I'm Bianca Bruno, one of your hosts based in sunny San Diego. If this is your first time tuning in, thanks for listening. To those who've been with us throughout our first season, thank you so much for choosing Sidebar as your go-to podcast for legal news. The team and I are so happy to bring the important legal news Courthouse News reporters cover from coast to coast to a listening audience. Thanks for joining us our first season. Now, to this week's episode. For those who read our stories, you know there's one thing Courthouse News does best: weird and wacky legal news. While consequential decisions that affect Americans’ lives are made in courtrooms across the country, some weird, wacky and downright silly cases also come across the court docket. And Courthouse News reporters love to follow those cases, from filing to trial or settlement. Later in this episode, you'll hear an unscripted conversation from my Sidebar colleagues about some of those cases Courthouse News has followed over the years. But first, Amanda Pampuro in Denver takes us on a journey out of this world, or at least to the archives at the University of Colorado Boulder. That's right, we're talking UFOs. Amanda talked to scientists about how best to study unpredictable UFO sightings in a field that relies on prediction and replication. Here's her report.
[Electronic Music]
Amanda Pampuro: Sitting on a tree stump in my backyard, sometimes I'll see two lights in the sky. One usually veers north, the other south, but they're always heading east when I see them, toward me. I'm Amanda Pampuro and I live in a Denver suburb south of DIA and west of Buckley airbase so there's always an easy explanation. But admittedly, I don't know much about what planes can and can't do. So technically, these are unidentified flying objects, at least to me. But if you do ever see anything weird in the sky, you can always call the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Washington.
Peter Davenport: My name is Peter Davenport, I'm Director of the National UFO Reporting Center based in Washington state, a position I've held for the last 27 years.
AP: Did you imagine you would end up running the center one day?
PD: I had no idea. It was, like most great events in our culture, it was a function of pure accident. In retrospect, I probably would have declined if I'd known at that time what it was going to do to my life, and for all intents and purposes I think it's it is not hyperbole for me to say that I either work, or I'm on call. Two shifts a day, seven days a week in order to run the hotline.
AP: Do you investigate any of these claims?
PD: We don't investigate. Ideally, I would like to have an organization that's an investigative body. But in order to investigate a UFO sighting, it takes copious quantities of resource: time, money, personnel and so on. And we don't have any of that.
AP: What kind of report makes you excited, makes you want to have more information about it?
PD: Well, the Phoenix lights always comes to mind.
News Clip: This Wednesday marks the 22nd anniversary of the lights that were described as everything from extraterrestrial visitors to flair and secret government aircraft, even a hoax.
PD: The sighting, again, was very dramatic. The witnesses saw either five or six, wedge-shaped or chevron shaped craft. In addition to those five or six chevrons we don't know exactly the number, the exact number of objects seen. In addition, there was a disc estimated to have been a mile in diameter.
AP: What do you think it was doing there?
PD: I have no idea. I haven't talked to the crew.
News Clip: Authorities have said the lights were flares used by the Air National Guard but many still believe this was a signal from another life form. I saw these things up close and personal. They were not flares, the lights in the…
PD: Did the newspapers intentionally cover it up? Obviously, they did, because I was on the line to the Arizona Republic. I couldn't get any traction at all. They weren't interested in the story.
AP: Do you feel like you know more now about UFOs or see any patterns now that you did not know before you came into the role of director?
PD: To a slight degree, but I still, despite the last 27 years of research and data collection don't know what I'm dealing with. For what the future of this field might be, I have accumulated a lot of data, that's for sure, and I pretty well convinced myself that the UFO phenomenon is what it appears to be, namely alien foreign craft visiting our planet and interacting with humans. But beyond that, I don't know why they're here, what their objective might be or what the future of this planet might be. All of that is still unanswered, in my opinion. I'd like to communicate to our listening audience that if they've ever had a UFO sighting at any point in their life, and they haven't reported it in written form, we have an online report form that they can fill out that will capture that information, preserve it and make it available to other people. People are always contacting me wanting to know whether their sighting of 40 or 50 years ago is of any interest to us. Of course it is.
AP: Davenport collects hundreds of UFO sightings each month at nuforc.org. I didn't end up reporting the lights I saw. But I did drive to the University of Colorado Boulder to dig through the evidence physicist Edward Condon reviewed in the 1960s. The U.S. government gave him $500,000, 49 helpers and two years to decide whether the U.S. should keep funding UFO studies. There are two parts to Condon’s answer. The first part is no, the U.S. didn't learn anything from studying UFOs for 20 years. The second part is just as important. Dr. Condon said, quote, “any scientist with adequate training and credentials does come up with a clearly defined specific proposal for study should be supported.” Since the 1960s, we've learned so much about the potential for life in the universe, and relatively little about UFOs visiting Earth. Part of the reason is because science, like law, places very little value on something some person said they saw.
Kate Dorsch: Science is objective, science is quantitative, science deals with things that happen in the real world. We make knowledge through replicable experiments. UFOs are none of those things, right? We cannot predict when they'll appear, where they'll appear, to whom they'll appear, for how long, right? Scientists are sort of always confounded by the difficulty of capturing this phenomenon. I'm Dr. Kate Dorsch. I'm a historian of science and a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. I work on history of UFOs. In the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings, I think witnesses are recounting a real experience that happened to them and are trying to come up with the best explanation they can based on the information that they have.
AP: Take the 1965 UFO sightings over then-Congressman Gerald Ford's district.
KD: J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and father of modern mythology, goes to Michigan a few days later, a few days after the last sighting. There's very little evidence or even hope for evidence because it's been raining, right? It's been a few days, nobody's seen them since. And he posits that well, people were seeing a swamp gas, illuminated swamp gas, which resulted from an early, like an unseasonably warm spring thaw. And of course, Michigan constituents freak out. They feel like they're not being taken seriously. Like the scientist hasn't listened to them because he wasn't there. And there's so many of them, and there's only one of him. He didn't have this experience. They don't have sufficient evidence to show him. But in that moment, there is a hard disconnect between the people who've had an experience that for some is inspiring, for others is frightening and for almost all of them intensely confusing. And then one lone expert who rolls in and says, well, this is what you all saw.
AP: People have been seeing weird things in the sky for as long as people have been looking at the sky, but Dorsch said the way we talk about UFOs is something that comes right out of the Cold War, surrounded by socio-political fears of new technology and nuclear winter.
KD: And why do we expect the government to do something about this? I think that it is in part because the government told us that they would do something about this in the late 1940s. The United States Air Force aggressively framed UFO sightings in 47, 48, 49 as a national security issue. The assumption was that they were terrestrial and that they were most likely either coming from the Soviet Union or from the United States Navy.
AP: To this day, people around the country await the truth from the U.S. government. In 2009, Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman sued the Department of Defense for agency records on extra-terrestrial visits, UFO encounters and Area 51. He filed a second lawsuit in 2019 after he was given a stack of Russian papers.
Larry Klayman: It was eight years later; I get a letter in the mail. Frankly, I forgot I even had filed it at the time. And it basically said, sorry it took us this long and they enclosed about, I would say, three to four inches of documents, most of which were in Russian. And the fact that the government only coughed up about three to four inches of documents, you know, shows you that it's hiding something. Another hypothesis is that, you know, they're concerned about human behavior. I mean, that's why they tend to be seen in and around nuclear sites and military bases, they're perhaps concerned that we're going to screw up the universe as much as we screwed up Earth. I mean, that I'm just hypothesizing I obviously don’t know. But I do believe they've been here. From everything I've read and people I've talked to I do believe they're here.
AP: Now, if you had a message for extraterrestrials, what would you tell them?
LK: That we would hopefully we could work together to make the universe a better place? And I would welcome them. I hope they're here. I hope they are. Why not? Maybe they'll save us from ourselves.
AP: Some continue to wait for answers from the government. Others have devoted their lives to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Seth Shostak: You know, you can say, oh, well, the government is covering up. But if the government is covering up so is every other government because we're not the only ones that have satellites. It seems a little odd to me that, gosh, everybody's covering up. Why? My name is Seth Shostack and I'm the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Indeed, we're trying to find evidence that ET is actually out there. We haven't found them so far, but I'm reasonably confident that that will change within 10 or 20 years.
AP: Why is that?
SS: The equipment is getting better. You know, when you look for ET the way we do it, which is try and pick up signals, radio signals or flashing lasers or something, something like that, the equipment that you use depends very heavily on computers. And because computers keep getting faster all the time, our experiment gets faster all the time. So, in a universe where the number of stars is about equivalent to all the dry sand on, you know, the grains of dry sand on all the beaches of Earth. That's a big number, as to say at least 10% of them will have a planet like the Earth, maybe 5%. Those are still all very big numbers, even if it's only 1%. Even it's one in a million, it's still a huge number. So that's why we think we're probably not alone. But if they're more than, say, 75 light-years away, which is a lot, I mean, a light-year’s like five or six trillion miles, but they don't know about us. Because if they're more than that, right, our television FM radio radars, all these signal generators on Earth haven't reached them yet, because those signals only go at the speed of light.
AP: Against the odds, Dr. Shostak is still looking. As is Peter Davenport, Larry Klayman and Kate Dorsch.
KD: I believe that there is life in the universe somewhere. I think it's horrifying if there isn't. Right, I think if we're the only we're just like a random blip of life in the entire history of the universe like that is tragic and terrifying and alienating in all of these things. Right, so, like, I do believe that there's life in the universe. I don't necessarily believe that it's visiting us. But I think it's neat, I think the thinking about it is neat. From all kinds of perspectives.
Carl Sagan: We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
[Sweeping Music]
AP: I'll be honest, I thought we would spend 2021 rebuilding the systems broken by 2020. Then the pandemic persisted, the Colorado River kept shrinking and all our advancements in medicine seemed dated by the return of senseless acts of mass violence. But as I sit in my backyard on nights like this and pick out the stars from the planes from the I-don't-know-whats, the weight of it all starts to lift, because if the universe is unfathomably huge and we’re unfathomably small, so are our problems. Carl Sagan said every moment of human existence was a flicker on a pale blue dot. I like to think we don't have to wait for answers from UFOs. I like to think we're capable of solving problems and saving ourselves. So maybe I will renew that New Year's resolution for the planet. And if I'm wrong, I can always give up smoking in 2023.
BB: Thanks to Amanda for that far-out report. For more of Amanda's stories, and to read up on the wacky and weird court cases we discuss later in the show, please go to courthousenews.com. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter @courthousenews and @SidebarCNS. We'll be back after a short break.
[Music Break]
BB: As a journalist, if I had $1 for every time someone said they were sick and tired of reading negative, depressing news, I'd be rich and I probably wouldn't be working as a journalist anymore. Our field gets a bad rap for failing to share positive, uplifting stories, but we don't make the news. We report it as it happens, and that includes weird, wacky stories that make us scratch our heads or choke while trying to stifle a laugh in a courtroom. I hope this conversation between Sidebar hosts Nicholas Iovino, Amanda Pampuro and Nina Pullano about some of those cases bring some light or holiday cheer to your newsfeed this season. Here's their discussion.
Nicholas Iovino: Hi, Amanda and Nina.
AP: Hey, Nick, this is Amanda in Denver.
Nina Pullano: Hey, Nina in Brooklyn. How's it going?
AP: Good, good. We're having one of those record years with no snow.
NP: It's fun to see everyone from across the country. It's one of the cool things about Courthouse News is we have people everywhere, but then we don't get to all be in the same place too much.
AP: We're literally repping the East Coast, the West Coast and the center of the country today.
NI: So, we're going to talk about some weird and wild cases today.
NP: I have one that came out of Brooklyn this year. It's a lawsuit that Nike filed against the company that worked with Lil Nas X to make a pair of Satan shoes.
AP: What?
[Demonic Laughter]
NP: So, the rapper and artist Lil Nas X dropped a video earlier this year that is peak camp.
News Clip: The rapper is facing backlash for his newest video, “Call Me By Your Name.” In the video he pole-dances to hell and gives the devil a lap dance.
NP: It has some satanic themes. It has pastel-colored Marie Antoinette wigs, it's pretty wild and a lot of fun. And the company had done this before, they essentially ordered custom Nike Air Max 97s and then style them and sell them with this, but these changes to modify the shoe and give it a certain signature look. In this case, that meant adding red ink and human blood to the midsole that was one of the kind of signature, it had a pentagram on the laces, it had satanic themed detailing, but that drop of blood was really like the grabby part of the design.
NI: Hold on, there was an actual drop of blood in the sneakers.
NP: There was an actual drop of blood in the sneakers.
AP: Do you know whose blood is in the shoes?
NP: Yeah, the blood came from people at this company Mischief, and they make all kinds of kind of novelty and prank items. But I guess it was just a, you know, just a few drops and it was mixed with red ink. So, it was like a single drop of blood and then the rest of it was just ink.
AP: Oh, and do you remember how many like were sold? Are they still out there?
NP: They're not still out there. They only sold 666 pairs. They went really fast. They sold out in a minute and they went for over $1,000 per pair. Miley Cyrus had a pair, she Instagrammed them. So, definitely coveted. I wonder if those will kind of get resold in sneakerhead communities in the years to come.
NI: I'm sure there'll be very valuable with that limited supply.
AP: Sweat, blood and tears.
NP: So, Nike didn't love this idea.
News Clip: Nike is suing over Lil Nas X’s polarizing Satan shoes collaboration. The sportswear giant filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Mischief, that's the streetwear company responsible for the divisive design.
NP: And they filed this lawsuit against the company. They didn't name Lil Nas X. But obviously he was you know, the creative mind behind the whole thing. And there was a whole to-do I guess about the satanic theme, right? Like that was a big issue for Nike. But the company brought up in responding to the lawsuit that they had previously made what they call Jesus shoes, and instead of the drop of blood, those shoes had a drop of holy water in them. And that one didn't raise as many eyebrows.
NI: Were there threats to boycott Nike over this?
NP: Yeah, I think one of the things that Nike really was responding to were some comments on Instagram and they cited those in their complaint, people saying that Nike swoosh, that trademark logo is now on something that's Satanic and themed and had some issues with that. So, I don't know how kind of widespread that concern or those, you know how popular the view is that these shoes shouldn't be sold. But Nike certainly took an issue with it and the case was settled pretty quickly. We don't know the terms of the agreement, those were kept private, but I had a funny moment. I covered the lawsuit in Brooklyn, and we knew it was settled, we knew it was a done deal and a few months later, if you're on Twitter, Lil Nas X is a very prolific tweeter. He's making a lot of jokes; he tweets a lot of memes and he loves SpongeBob. So, he started tweeting, in I think it was in July, that he was going to court that morning, and he's talking about the shoes and he's saying, I might go to jail. And, and for me, having reported on the complaint, I kind of panicked, I thought I must have missed some big court appearance, and something happened to the case, some new developments, so reached out his attorneys. They said no, there's no appearance this morning. And within a few hours, the curiosity was satisfied. Lil Nas X was dropping a new music video. And in advertising it he released another video where he's in court, and again, very campy, he's playing the judge and the lawyer and himself as the defendant. And that was sort of his preview. He was just, it was all marketing and well, it worked because I was emailing his lawyers in a frenzy. And that was a fun one from earlier this year. I don't know Nick, what's the weirdest case you have ever covered?
NI: Um, I would probably have to say the monkey selfie case. That case basically ended it back in 2018. What started this dispute happened in 2011, when nature photographer David Slater went to Indonesia, and found a black crested macaque, which is a rare species of monkey in Indonesia. And the monkey’s name was named Naruto, and the photographer had the monkey take his camera and take selfie pictures.
[Monkey, Camera Sounds]
NI: He used his opposable thumbs to snap some photos. It is one of the best pictures we've published because Naruto is smiling and looks like he's really posing for the picture. We'll have to put it on the podcast website.
AP: It’s a case of monkeying around, huh?
NI: Years later in 2015, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is a notorious animal rights group that some considered to be somewhat extreme. They filed a lawsuit against the nature photographer and said he was violating this monkey’s rights to the copyright, because when you take a photo of something that's an artistic endeavor, and you own the copyright and you own the rights to profit from it, he had put these photos in a book of photography. And PETA filed a lawsuit as a next friend to Naruto and said that this money should go to benefit his endangered species. Now the suit did not go very far. The judge quickly dismissed it because he said the law does not give animals the right to sue over copyright. The copyright law does not say anything about animals being able to sue. Wikimedia was not involved in the case, but they had another legal stance saying that because animals can't own copyrights that the photos should be public domain. But there was an appeal. So, after the judge dismissed it, PETA took the case to the Ninth Circuit. They had oral arguments. And before the Ninth Circuit issued a decision, a settlement was reached, where the nature photographer David Slater agreed to donate 25% of the proceeds to benefit Naruto’s species there in Indonesia. They had asked the Ninth Circuit to dismiss the case because they settled it, but the panel refused to do so they went ahead and issued a ruling anyway, and said that they upheld that, you know, copyright law does not give animals the right to sue. So, one of the judges on the panel, N. Randy Smith, he's a George W. Bush appointee. He wanted to go further and say that PETA should never have been able to file this lawsuit. Because people should not be able to file lawsuits on behalf of animals like that. And the nature photographer who has been fighting, was fighting this lawsuit hard before he reached the settlement was really against that, he wanted to maintain that right for people to be able to file lawsuits on behalf of animals to uphold their rights. But since that was only a minority opinion, you know, N. Randy Smith's opinion is not Ninth Circuit case law now.
[Music Break]
AP: That just makes me wonder all the implications if that had continued, like animals in Hollywood having rights or those elephants that paint pictures with their snouts? Do they, could they have owned the copyright?
NI: Right? That's a question and people think there's going to be more questions in the future about robots, creating works of art and whether artificial intelligence can own a copyright.
AP: Ah, that's awesome because they have algorithm generated news stories, does that go to the company or the technology. I can't wait to see that first one filed. None of those have been filed yet, right?
NI: No, not that Not that I'm aware of.
AP: Do you know where Naruto is today?
NI: I tried to look up if he's, you know, still alive and couldn't find anything. I'm not sure what the lifespan is of the crested black macaque.
AP: I'm sure he's just living a low-key, off-grid life retired from photography.
NI: I'm sure.
AP: And alongside greeting Naruto, we should also post our picture of Cherie DeVille, the Los Angeles adult film star who stood up against Utah this year and levied the greatest First Amendment battle against their porn ban.
NP: What is the Utah porn ban?
[Pulsing Music]
AP: So Utah, the state legislature in Utah passed a bill signed by the governor into law earlier this year, that has been characterized as banning porn in the state. But it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Essentially, once five other states sign on to this law and pass similar legislation, in Utah, all mobile devices that are sold are going to have to have adult content filters turned on by default. And currently, adult content filters are turned off. And this bill was introduced by Utah Rep. Susan Pulsipher, who actually won an excellence award from the state Association of Public Charter Schools this year. And she's such a sweet, sweet lady. When I talked to her, she was shocked that her law was being characterized as an anti-porn bill. She's like, I don't care what people do in their privacy, we got to keep pornography out of the hands of children and parents are getting these devices and they don't know how to turn off filters and you can't imagine what children are accessing. So, Cherie said if a law like this passed, it's a slippery slope to government infringing on what content you can access. And one thing that did not make it into the story, she told me that based on her data, her Utah fans loved her naughty stepmom content. And she was using this as a platform to show that small steps by government can have big implications.
Cherie DeVille: This has been on my radar, not just as something that might affect adult content creators, but as something that's actually a much bigger in my opinion, free speech issue.
AP: I spoke with Benjamin Bull from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. And he said outright, yes, we want to ban porn, and we're slowly introducing bills to effectively do this. In 2016, Utah, along with Arizona, Idaho and Missouri all declared that porn was a public health crisis. In order for this adult content filter law to take effect, other states have to pass similar legislation. Similar legislation already failed in Missouri and Arizona, but it's an issue that's going to continue to unfold as Internet access expands and parents genuinely struggled to figure out how to moderate the vast Internet of Things in their children's hands.
NP: So what was the issue that Cherie DeVille was challenging here? What was the kind of basis of the lawsuit?
AP: So, there was no lawsuit over this. This was just complaints in the legislation stage. And she said, Cherie said, she didn't have the money to sue over the law.
NI: What happened to the legislation?
AP: It passed in Utah, and it will go into place if five other states enact similar bills. And the reason why it's tacked on to other states is they think that that'll give them a bigger ability to negotiate with companies like Apple and Android, which would have to set those devices to those specific settings before they send them to that state.
NI: So, if this law were to go into effect, what would be the enforcement mechanism to enforce it?
AP: If, say, Verizon doesn't start selling these devices, Utah will sue them. So, that is when we will see it challenged is when it takes effect.
NI: This law would apply to sales of phones in those states. So, you could go out of state and buy a phone that was not affected by it. Is that right?
AP: Absolutely. And you can buy a device and turn off the adult content filter in the settings as well. This was a case that started off as a big grand idea. We're going to put adult content filters in and then the application was slowly winnowed down throughout the legislative process into just like this one minor setting on the phone. Because I know that my editor had questions about how are they going to enforce this? Are they going to put tracking devices on people's phones in Utah to make sure their content filters are on the appropriate setting? And the actual law did not get into that territory.
NI: I assume in defending the law that the people who supported passing this law were saying it was too difficult for parents to make these changes and what did the other side say to that?
AP: There were several companies that lobbied against this, saying it would just pose undue hardship to setting these devices to different settings in different states. That’s the question, should the burden be placed on the parents to figure out how to use the device and turn on settings? Should the burden be on the manufacturer to make it easy for parents or people growing up in Mormon Utah to put on these settings? Maybe the tech companies will just go along with it and listen to what Utah did and respect the law, but that doesn't typically seem to be the case so I would foresee litigation. Tech companies have been very vocal and active in these kinds of First Amendment, censorship, speech laws where they intersect with the technology. And that’s definitely a space where there’s a lot of open questions. Should the government be regulating speech?
NP: I think like you said, it seems like something that will only become more of an issue for the courts to look at as more technology develops and we grapple with these types of questions.
AP: Totally. I love a lawsuit or a bill that’s being introduced that just totally brings up all these questions about what kind of society we are and not necessarily having the answers but being able to listen into that debate.
NI: Something that has puzzled some of us at Courthouse News for years is why this story about an old case regarding Halal chicken, specifically whether a KFC in Chicago can market its chicken as Halal is consistently the top viewed story at Courthouse News, even years after the most recent development. You know, we’ve been wondering, why is that? Why is everyone so interested in Halal chicken?
NP: So, hold on. Break that down a little bit. What’s going on here?
AP: So, in 2016 or 2017, KFC told this guy who owned eight KFCs in Illinois to stop marketing his food as Halal.
KFC Ad: Since 1955, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s had great tasting chicken with the colonel’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. You’re familiar with the formula, I believe.
AP: And Halal is Arabic for lawful. It’s food that Muslims are allowed to eat. And, because his chicken was certified by the Islamic Society of Washington Area and he served the Muslim community, he wanted people to know that they could feast in the chicken and not feel guilty about it. But KFC oddly enough had a policy going back to 2009 explicitly prohibiting franchisees from marketing religious dietary claims about their food.
NI: I wonder what the reason for that policy is, maybe they don’t want to offend other religions, or they just want to be a non-denominational chicken provider.
AP: In 2018, the court sided with the chicken giant and told this man to stop marketing this food as Halal. And interestingly enough, this story continues to get daily interaction that completely blows all the other coverage out of the water.
NI: I don’t know how this story is consistently number one on our website, but my only guess is people are really interested in knowing if the chicken at KFC is Halal, and that is the top story that comes up.
NP: The mysteries of SEO and browsing the Courthouse News website.
AP: That’s so interesting. We started with Satan shoes and now we have holy chicken that can’t be marketed as such.
NP: If we had listeners, who like our readers, are interested in learning more, let us know. Again, follow us on Twitter, we are @SidebarCNS, and these articles are posted still on the Courthouse News website, so you can join the legion of readers that are continuing to take interest in this story from a couple of years ago.
AP: Wow. At least in 2022 as Sidebar continues to investigate other stories of great legal and societal implications, we will get to the bottom of this mystery as well.
NI: Well, it was so great talking to you guys about these weird and wild cases and Courthouse News mysteries.
NP: Yeah, this was a great way to end the first year of our podcast.
AP: Can’t wait to see what 2022 has in store for all of us.
NI: Alright guys, I’ll see you in the New Year.
AP: Alright, bye.
[Music Break]
AP: I don’t know, should monkeys own copyrights? Should anyone be able to put blood in their shoes if they want to? Burning questions.
BB: And to think that covering something as serious as U.S. courts can sometimes be fun. It’s been great working with Nick, Amanda and Nina on Sidebar this year. Special thanks to our editors Bill Dotinga and Jamie Ross, podcast producer Kirk McDaniel and social media boss Sean Duffy. We hope you have a happy and healthy holiday season. See you next year!
[Outro Music]