Tag Archives: aliens

Greg Lawson on “Roswell: The After-Action Report”

We discuss “The Paranormal Detective” Greg Lawson’s new book, Roswell: The After Action Report. It’s a great primer if you’re interested in learning more about who the key players are in the most famous UFO crash of all time. With three decades of law enforcement experience, Greg creates dossiers of all the important figures who were involved in the crash and looks at the official transcripts through his skills as an interrogater to get closer to the truth.

Click here to find Greg’s book on Amazon.

292 – Lights In The Sky: Personal and Listener UFO Experiences

Millions of people have UFO stories. There is a one-hundred percent chance that you know at least one person that has a story! So, we went to our listeners and in our own archives for this episode’s tales of UFO experiences.

Once again, join me, Wendy Lynn, Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, and my sister Allison Jornlin from MilwaukeeGhosts.com to talk about our own stories as well as great ones from our listeners. You can watch the unedited livestream of our conversation here if you’d like to see our pretty faces while we talk.

My sister, Allison, has her own UFO story and it happened to be on the day that my daughter was born, September of 2016. Here’s the exact text of the email she sent me and it came out about 15 minutes after the birth, she didn’t know about it yet and I didn’t have much time to think about it at the time!

I saw some UFOs today at about 7:25 a.m. and I couldn’t wait to tell you. Maybe it’s a sign. Is it baby time? Below is what I wrote for the kids today during our Quick Write: Something amazing happened to me this morning.

No, my brother’s baby didn’t come yet, unfortunately. It was something else.

I was driving to school on Hwy 43 Southbound when I saw something strange in the sky. Actually it was two-somethings. I wondered were they planes, but I couldn’t stop and look because I was on the expressway. That means emergency stopping only!

The objects were pretty high up. That’s why I thought they were planes. But I actually saw two planes go by this morning also. These other objects didn’t seem to be moving and they didn’t have the blinking lights that planes have to have by law. They were like two groups of three bright, white lights hovering there. One was much lower than the other and off to the right. What were they? I wish I could have stopped and taken some video. By the time I got off the expressway, the lights were in back of me and seemed to be getting smaller.

I think maybe they were flares, but I’m not sure. They seemed to fade out instead of coming down like they were on parachutes. They also didn’t really seem to move at all, just hanging motionless in the sky for at least 5 minutes. What do you think they were?

I’ve got my own UFO story too, not exciting like an abduction or anything, but interesting enough to me that I wrote it down the same day.

I was on a vacation in January of 2008 visiting a place called Cabo Rojo which is an incredible white sand beach on the southwestern shore of the island, opening up to the Carribbean sea with a very famous lighthouse.

There was an object far away in the sky that almost looked like a blimp, but it was tremendously high in the sky, so high and so far away that we couldn’t be quite sure of what it was. It definitely didn’t look like a cloud, even though it was completely white and high enough to be a cloud. But the rest of the clouds had some kind of softness and transparency to them and this cloud didn’t. It was definitely unusual and I thought it might be a UFO, what I really thought it might have been was some kind of alien or government ship that was up there and it was meant to be disguised as a cloud, but it was just different enough so if you looked you couldn’t tell. I dunno, I wanted to take a picture of it but I was so enamored with the natural beauty of the place that I forgot about the unnatural beauty of what we were seeing. It probably was a cloud or a blimp that was very high, but it looked just different enough from the other clouds to be interesting. 

My journal, January 3rd, 2008

Funny enough, as we were getting back on the road and driving towards our next location, just what road do we end up driving on? Yeah, that’s some kind of synchronicity. I see something weird in the sky I can’t explain on the same day we randomly decide to drive Puerto Rico’s Extraterrestrial Highway.

This episode is chock full of weird lights in the sky stories, including:

  • Once again, our Patreon Dr. Ned tells us an interesting UFO encounter he had in the 1960s
  • We’ve got high strangeness on a military base from our Patreon C.E. Martin’s book Stranger Than Fiction.
  • A Chicago UFO sighting from Illinois MUFON state director, Sam Maranto
  • A Bermuda Triangle story from near Cabo Rojo where we were in Puerto Rico
  • and lots more…

Well, something I said in this episode is that I’m gonna punch the next person that says the phrase “Space Brothers” to me, well guess what, it was me. The most ridiculous UFO hunt I’ve ever been on was at the Michigan Paracon in 2017 where we all stood outside in the parking lot while Andrea Perron sang “Sentimental Journey” and it was as ridiculous as it sounds. The only reason I took it even a little seriously at first is because Dave Schrader from Darkness Radio and The Holzer Files and Amy Bruni from Kindred Spirits both said that Andrea could really make some crazy stuff happen. Well, I don’t know what they were smoking, but here’s our immediate reaction afterwards…

Okay, so obviously it was hard to take that seriously, so for this episode’s song, we decided to ask our alien friends for a favor. Here’s our Sunspot paranormal track of the week, “Space Brothers”.

You must be talking at light speed
from that black hole you got on your face
cuz when you open your mouth, time slows, and
and I just want to escape.

Oh, you piss me off on a cosmic scale,
So I don’t want ET to come in peace,
the first thing he should do is abduct you, and get you off this planet for keeps.

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

I dunno why spacemen love butts.
Who can read their alien brains?
But if they’re looking for the biggest asshole in the world
well, I can give them a name.

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

250 – How To Be A Paranormal Detective: An Interview With Greg Lawson

After serving in the US Army, Navy, and Air Force (I guess the Marines weren’t recruting that day!) Greg Lawson became a Sheriff’s Deputy and Mental Health Officer near Austin, Texas and has now been in law enforcement for almost three decades. In that time, he’s also pursued his interest in paranormal research, dabbled in acting, music, and has written several books, fiction and non-fiction on supernatural topics.

His new book is called How To Be A Paranormal Detective and it’s a how-to book hoping to help would be Mulders and Scullys in using the same skills he learned in trying to find the truth behind crimes to try and get the best evidence possible of paranormal activity.

Greg looking like a badass

In this interview we cover:

  • Some of Greg’s most peculiar cases
  • How he investigates a haunted place (lots to learn from this one!)
  • The importance of finding the terrestrial explanations first before jumping to paranormal conclusions
  • His work interviewing Roswell witnesses

The story from the interview that most affected me was the one Greg tells from his Pizza Hut Assistant Manager days about his employee that had a seizure right after saying “They’re here…” (you’ll love that one!) It’s fascinating and terrifying and we used that energy as inspiration for this episode’s song, “The Captured Soul”.

They’re here
they appear
they feed
on fear
and what they say you don’t need ears to hear

You’re beamed
to a dream
you’re frozen and can’t scream
your consciousness outside the atmosphere

There’s no escaping
hallucinating
you can’t run
from your fate
inside your mind

A prisoner locked in
trapped and forgotten
the captured soul
with a body left behind

You can feel
the unreal
your brain a spinning wheel
you know they’re there but you can’t reveal

Immobilized
Paralyzed
Delusional and hypnotized
There’s no one you can beg, none to appeal

There’s no escaping
hallucinating
you can’t run
from your fate
inside your mind

A prisoner locked in
trapped and forgotten
the captured soul
with a body left behind

249 – The Flying Saucer Physicist: Remembering Stanton Friedman

The Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction. The Roswell UFO crash. The Majestic-12 documents. These are some of the biggest bombshells in UFOlogy and they all share one common denominator at their core. Stanton Friedman was involved.

Graduating with his degree in nuclear physics in 1955, Friedman worked at companies like General Electric and McDonell-Douglas in their jet propulsion laboratories before his interest in UFOs sparked him to delve full time into the field in 1970. From then on, he wrote several books on the subject and gave hundreds of lectures around the world.

You might have seen Stanton Friedman in a UFO documentary, you might have seen him on Nightline, you might have seen him on the Travel or History Channel in one of their hundreds of UFO documentaries. The thing is, if you’re into the UFO Phenomenon, you’ve seen him! I had my fanboy moment at the Michigan Paranormal Conference and I was just walking through the vendor room and I saw him sitting quietly at a booth just making small talk with an admirer. I hadn’t read the entire schedule yet so I didn’t know that he was going to be there, and from that moment I knew I had to make sure to see his presentation.

Allison and Stanton at the 2017 Michigan Paranormal Conference

And it was exactly as I’d hoped it would be. It was a professorial lecture and it was straight up nuts-and-bolts old school extraterrestrial hypothesis aliens are piloting UFOs and the government is covering it up. Stanton Friedman was the man who first did the heavy duty research into the Roswell flying saucer crash which is now the most famous UFO event of all.

In his 1997 article, “The UFO Challenge”, Friedman said there were four major conclusions that he’d reached after decades of UFO research:

“The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not.”

“The subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate, meaning that some few people in major governments have known since July, 1947, when two crashed saucers and several alien bodies were recovered in New Mexico, that indeed SOME UFOs are ET. As noted in 1950, it’s the most classified U.S. topic.

“None of the arguments made against conclusions One and Two by a small group of debunkers such as Carl Sagan, my University of Chicago classmate for three years, can stand up to careful scrutiny.”

“The Flying Saucer story is the biggest story of the millennium: visits to Planet Earth by aliens and the U.S. government’s cover-up of the best data (the bodies and wreckage) for over fifty years.”

Stanton Friedman, “The UFO Challenge”

Those were the tenets that he stood by and he argued with debunkers, clashed with other UFOlogists, defended his research from live events to TV shows, and stuck by his guns until the very end. Stanton Friedman passed away on May 20th, 2019 at the age of 84 and he remains a giant in the field of UFOlogy and highly respected by the people who knew him.

And to remember him, for today’s episode we’re bringing in Stanton’s friend and fellow Roswell researcher Don Schmitt, who co-authored The Truth About The UFO Crash At Roswell which became the basis for the 1994 Showtime film, as well as investigative researcher and Illinois MUFON director, Sam Maranto, who was directly influenced and inspired by Friedman’s work.

Don’s latest book (coming out June 1st) is a updated version of UFO Secrets Inside Wright-Patterson: Eyewitness Accounts from the Real Area 51 and it features a foreword written by Mr. Friedman, the last thing he published before he passed away.

Stanton Friedman will also be remembered at this year’s Roswell UFO Festival, where he served as an advisor to the museum and festival, along with Don.

A phrase that we struck on in the podcast was “UFOG”… The Unidentified Flying Original Gangsta. Stanton Friedman was one of the earliest scientists who took the UFO phenomena seriously back when it wasn’t cool to be on the side of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. He debated the debunkers in worldwide forums long before the History Channel or Tom DeLonge made flying saucers culturally hip. He listened and validated the experiences of abductees before the rest of the community took them seriously. His bravery in taking the plunge is an inspiration to everyone of us who seeks the truth and this song is dedicated to him. Here is Sunspot with “UFOGs”.

Someone had to light the candle
someone had to fire the torch
someone had to lead the way

someone had to forge on forward
someone had to stay the course
someone had to be brave

hey these UFOGs
weren’t afraid to take the blame
hey these UFOGs
the truth was more important than their name

So when can’t take anymore
and your heart is on the floor
You can stand your ground
on the shoulders of the ones who came before

threats and disinformation
coverups and lies
we have to stay unafraid

we look to them for inspiration
to keep our eyes on the skies
now it’s up to us to take the reins.

hey these UFOGs
weren’t afraid to take the blame
hey these UFOGs
the truth was more important than their name

So when can’t take anymore
and your heart is on the floor
You can stand your ground
on the shoulders of the ones who came before

248 – Snatchers: Invasion of the Alien-Human Hybrids

Humans didn’t come with an instruction manual. We have only a few natural instincts. Reproduction is one of the only things in the universe that we don’t have to convince ourselves to do, the desire is there constantly. And in human society, is nothing as sacred or sensitive as children. We are hardwired to think irrationally about them. We are evolved to protect them at almost any cost. The sound of a child in danger is a biological air raid siren. Ask any person what the most important thing in the world to them and if they have children, it’s them. If they don’t, it’s family. People that would say something different are considered sociopaths.

And that’s okay, by valuing familial bonds above everything else is how we survived when we weren’t as fast as the tiger or as strong as the bear. But while we consider our reproduction to be sacrosanct, we freely interfere with the reproduction of other animals. We purposefully breed horses with donkeys to create pack animals, we regularly inseminate cows with the strongest bulls we can find, we have been mixing seeds and crops with each other since the dawn of agriculture (GMOs are a lot older than you think.). It’s how we came to dominate the planet.

But our planet is all we dominate and it’s a big universe. And just like cows can’t stop us from pumping some strange bull’s semen into them, we would be powerless to stop aliens with superior technology from violating our reproductive systems. It’s terrifying and it plays against three of our biggest fears, the violation of our personal bodies, the desire to protect our children, and the realization that we are impotent against the greater power of the universe.

From Mr. Spock to Counselor Troi in Star Trek to Evie in Out Of This World, or even Peter Quill The StarLord in Guardians Of The Galaxy the idea of a half-human, half-alien has been popular in science fiction. (Indeed, they tried to even make Doctor Who half-human in the 1996 TV movie.) But while that’s all fun and games and leads to psychic powers or the ability to freeze time, in the real world, cases of alien-human hybrids are far more terrifying.

Just this year, Korean lecturer Dr Young-hae Chi, who teaches at Oxford’s Oriental Institute, said “The primary purpose of abduction is to produce hybrids – human-alien hybrids – and the second one is the primary purpose of the hybrid project to colonise the Earth.” He just released a book called Alien Visitations and the End of Humanity.

The idea that aliens might be abducting women to impregnate them, use their eggs to create alien-human hybrids, and then releasing the hybrids into the world to eventually prepare us for First Contact (after all, if the children are half-human and they’re already here, how can we not accept them?) or to seed the population for an eventual alien takeover (if they are already here, then they can infiltrate positions of power in government and influence in society) became popular in the 1990s through the writings of Dr. David M. Jacobs.

Jacobs (a Wisconsin Badger, class of 1973, his dissertation was even published as The UFO Controversy in America, so let’s go Red!) founded the International Center for Abduction Research after interviewing thousands of abductees and regressing them hypnotically to remember their abductions. They all tended to follow a similar pattern, particularly the women’s experiences.

Jacobs is a doctor of history not medicine or psychology. So is there an Experimenter Effect on these reports? Carl Sagan thought so, but Jacobs stands by his story. In this episode, we talk about some of the history of alien-human hybrid theories and just what these theoretical aliens might be after before we get to something a little more lighthearted for the second half.

Snatchers is a horror-comedy about a Sara, a high school girl who has sex for the first time and wakes up 24 hours later fully pregnant with an alien-baby. It was an official selection for the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and we interviewed the writers, Stephen Cedars, Benji Kleiman, and Scott Yacyshyn (collectively known as the Old Money Boyz) behind the idea. The interview was in a bar in Austin at the premiere party for the movie, so you’ll have to excuse us as we pass the microphone around and suck on some fine Texas beers, but it’s fun to hear about their influences in the creation of the show.

The high school vibes from Snatchers were flowing through us as we were working on this episode’s song so we were feeling pretty emo. Here’s the Sunspot track “Hybrid”.

It’s a violation
of our very race
they sneak into our lives in the dead of night
It’s a breeding program
designed to replace
So are we going to go without a fight?

Too late for the arrival
A matter of survival

Should sins of the fathers
punish the progeny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?
How do you stand against the flood of destiny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?

These hidden hybrids
A sleeper cell
A secret colonization
It’s far too late now
how can we repel
Welcome to the new occupation

Too late for the arrival
A matter of survival

Should sins of the fathers
punish the progeny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?
How do you stand against the flood of destiny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – April 12th, 2019

Hey guys,
If you missed our last podcast it’s a great discussion with paranormal reality star Brian Cano (from Haunted Collector and Paranormal Caught on Camera). Click here to listen to it.

In the meantime, we’re back with the best paranormal news we saw this week!

‘Haunted’ doll ‘blinks’ in selfie at abandoned ‘Village of the Damned’
mirror

This one went viral on social media this week and it’s a pretty great pic. The creepy doll appeared to close her eyes in an abandoned building known as ‘The Village of the Damned’

Chinese scientists made super-monkeys with human brain genes
Futurism

And so it begins… “It is a classic slippery slope issue and one that we can expect to recur as this type of research is pursued.”

We Spoke to an MIT Computer Scientists About the Simulation Hypothesis
Digital Trends

The simulation hypothesis, which was famously probed in the 1999 film The Matrix, is the subject of a new book by Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and video game developer who leads Play Labs at MIT. In his book, Virk endeavors to unpack the heady arguments that call our physical world into question.

Iran Says ‘Tall, White’ Space Aliens Control America
Forbes

Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden conclusively prove that the United States has been ruled by a race of tall, white space aliens who also assisted the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Okay…

Incident Detail Report Shows Man Called 911 to Report Sighting of ‘7-8 ft Tall’ Creature in Woodstock, Illinois
The Singular Fortean Society

Now here’s a great example of how you do a paranormal investigation lead by our friends in The Singular Fortean Society. Someone called 911 to report seeing a strange winged creature in the northern Chicago burbs. The investigators followed up with the caller as well as did a Freedom of Information Act request to get a transcript of the call. Now, the rest of it is sketchy because the caller was hoping to “name the creature” and then they weren’t responsive to the investigator’s follow-ups. But The Singular Fortean handled this exactly right.

Stevie Wonder isn’t blind, claim wild theorists – and here’s the ‘evidence’
mirror

The so-called ‘Stevie Wonder Truthers’ bizarrely claim there’s a whole heap of evidence to suggest Stevie can see. Ummm… what?!

Sneaker Pimps – Superstition (Stevie Wonder Cover) YouTube

Trip Hop pioneers Sneaker Pimps covering Stevie?! Oh yeah. If Stevie can really see, we hope he watches the video!

Next week, we’re tackling the cursed movie Antrum. Please make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast to get it as soon as it comes out!

See you on the other side of the weekend!
Mike, Wendy, and the SYOTOS family

233 – Beyond Nuts And Bolts: Aliens, The Polar Vortex, Nukes, and Paranormal Art

This week, Wendy and I are once again joined by my sister, Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts as well as Steve Ward, a paranormal enthusiast, frequent podcast guest, and weekly contributor to Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files. I met Steve last year at the Michigan Paracon and we bonded over the fact that we both had the same They Live-inspired t-shirt!

Told you it was a cool shirt!

So, we’re currently in the middle of a Polar Vortex and it’s -20 degrees Fahrenheit as I’m typing this. In fact, Wendy had to join us from Chicago because of travel delays due to the crazy weather. And if you were online this week, you saw that the theme was the 2004 climate change apocalypse film The Day After Tomorrow, where Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal try to save the world from being iced over due to global warming.

Global warming… but wait, I thought that we were freezing? Right, so the first thing that Allison does is explain how the warming of the oceans is changing the jetstream so that the winds that normally never make it below the Arctic are slowly drifting southward, making winter temperatures colder. And indeed, today was the second coldest day in Chicago history, so this is a real deal cold snap. School has been closed for four days here in Madison already.

So, let’s take the culture war/political debate out of it, because the Earth does not care about our bumper stickers or our Facebook memes. My opinion? I just spent several days in Southern California, air pollution is a real problem and we should do at least something about it. I don’t know if the greenhouse gases that we’re sending into the atmosphere through cars, factories, and massive cow farming are destroying the planet but they’re certainly making it unpleasant to breathe in some places. Whether you believe it’s man-made or not (and plenty of people don’t), we can’t change the fact that the average global temperature has risen over the past century and that’s going to affect all of us.

So how is that paranormal? Well, in 1999, the man who gave us Coast to Coast AM, Art Bell wrote a book with the man who gave us the modern image of the alien grey with Communion, Whitley Strieber. The book was called The Coming Global Superstorm and it was the direct inspiration for the movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, the dude behind Independence Day and Stargate, it’s surprising that he left out one very significant fact of Strieber’s book… that aliens told him that the rising temperature of the oceans is going to lead to massive climate shifts and the destabilization of human civilization. Whaaaaaaat?! Awesome.

Now Steve is near Battle Creek, Michigan and he’s facing the Polar Vortex just like we are, but he’s keeping warm through reading about the cases of “high strangeness” that often come after UFO sightings. Even the Mothman case (and Steve is a John Keel aficianado!) was much more the just sightings a of flying humanoid, it was Men In Black encounters and UFO sightings, and then of course the collapse of the Silver Bridge (and some people are saying that there are still strange events stemming from those initial incidents.)

It seems like once people start having an experience that we could explain away easily through science, like a UFO encounter (we’re not stretching into the paranormal realm to say that life on other planets is feasible), it’s strange stuff that happens afterwards. There seem to be more than just nuts and bolts materialism involved here.

Steve brings the stories of two great cases that he finds somewhat related. One is of the Welsh UFO contactee Gaynor Sunderland, who claims to have seen a flying saucer land and met two creatures who came out of it. Gaynor seemed to have repeated contact with the aliens, but it wasn’t through physical-as-we-think-of-it encounters, it was through some kind of mental communication where she would go into a trance and seemingly leave her body.

Which sounds a lot like a Seventeenth Century faerie contactee Anne Jefferies who lived down the island in Cornwall. Anne was a 19-year old servant girl but she claimed to have met multiple faeries and was even kissed by them and taken to their magical land. However, after the first encounter which she said happened outside, this all happened while she was having some kind of fit (as they called it, people have speculated it was actually an epileptic seizure) and she never left her room. It sounds like she made it up, but the family that employed her was convinced that she came back from faerieland with magical powers.

They said she never had to eat, that the “Good People” nourished her. She had the power to heal and as the word spread, people would come to her to see if she could cure their ailments. She would predict the people who were coming to visit and apparently to such an accuracy that she not only developed a reputation, but a criminal history because the local Justice of the Peace charged her for communing with evil spirits.

So, there we have two similar young women with strange stories, who are dealing with fantastic creatures without ever having to step foot on a spaceship or actually into faerieland. Some people would say that’s entirely possible with astral travel but to the average UFO researcher, it starts stretching the realms of plausibility. It really is one thing to believe in the possibility of life on other planets and another to believe in faeries. But it called “the unknown” for a reason. Who’s to say those stories aren’t a lot more related than we think.

Psi-Girls by Susan Hiller

Which brings us to Wendy’s story of the week, the death of American-born but England-living artist Susan Hiller, who just passed away this week at age 78. Now Susan was inspired by paranormal themes and incorporated them into all her art.

I’m interested in occult powers, and if people find this ludicrous that is their problem. I’m not a true believer but these things are there and to say they aren’t is ridiculous. I’ve recently made a piece called Channels about people relating their so-called near-death experiences. I am interested that these stories occur all over the world and always have done, and if we don’t think that is interesting then we are very boring.

Susan Hller, 2015

One of her most famous works was called the “Sisters of Menon” which was based on a telepathy experiment that she was working on with several other female artists. The idea was that they would all do art at the same time and try to “send” each other messages and images telepathically.

But what happened is that Susan seemed to channel this group of Ancient Greek women who wanted to speak through her in her art. She found herself possessed by them to start “automatic writing”, where you just put your pen down and start writing something that isn’t coming from you, but seemingly another source. She found herself possessed by the group, so her telepathy experiment turned into something very very different.

I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of her before seeing that she passed and I lived only two blocks from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where the Sisters of Menon was being displayed. I was even there a few times and never saw it, but at least now I can appreciate it.

Sisters of Menon, 1972 -79
Section I: 4 L-shaped panels of automatic writing, blue pencil on A4 paper with typed labels (1972)
Section II: 4 panels, typescript and gouache on paper (1979)
35 7/8 x 25 1/4 in. / 91.2 x 64.2 cm 12 1/2 x 9 1/8 in. / 31.8 x 23 cm

What I thought was the most interesting this week however, was the strange high speed chase through the Nevada Nuclear Test Site on Monday. Now, the test site has been dormant for almost thirty years now, but starting in the 1940s, the US Air Force detonated hundreds of atomic bombs there. Remember Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull‘s infamous refrigerator scene? Yeah, that’s where it took place.

It’s not quite as famous as its neighbor, Area 51, and it’s now called the Nevada National Security Site (probably because we’re not blowing as much stuff up there now) but it certainly is a pretty secretive place, complete with a mile-long air strip that’s above top secret. So, what exactly happened?

According to the official statement from the Department of Energy, the driver drove past the security gate on January 28th, 2019 at 5:18pm and was quickly followed by local law enforcement as well as the private security firm that the NNSS hires to do the investigation. They chased him for 8 miles before he stopped an approached the officers with a “cylindrical object in-hand”. When he wouldn’t drop the object or comply with their commands, they shot him fatally. There’s a no-record policy on the site because of national security, so the officer didn’t have a body cam on.

We talk about this a little flippantly in the podcast, but as I’m writing this, they announced the name of the guy that was killed. Nekiylo Dawayne Graves was a 27-year old from Iowa. I’m looking at his Facebook profile and there hasn’t been any updates since 2014 (unless that’s all Facebook is leaving up), but he basically just looks like a kinda nerdy black guy. He’s into rap music like Jadakiss, has a couple tough-guy pics up, but nothing too weird. He has opinions about Captain America and Batman and calls himself the pretty sweet comic book-y name, Kilo The Conqueror. His last post from 2014 is a link to a store called OPSGEAR, which looks like it’s combat-style clothing .

Nekiylo Dawayne Graves

Looking at his pictures and his family on there is depressing because you realize you’re looking at a young life that ended tragically. Sure there’s a couple “thug-style” pictures on there, but there’s also normal selfies, pics with his family and friends, and nothing more than the kind of thing that I would’ve done to look tough or play a character, especially when you’re into comics. It does look like he did some time in jail in 2015, which might explain the Facebook disappearance around that time. And there is a depressing Change.org petition he signed because his father was locked up and missed his childhood.

But what would compel him to make that drive when he knew he was risking his life? Was he trying to learn some secrets and it just went too far? Was he disturbed and just wanted a “suicide by cop“?

I don’t know, but I hope we learn more about this sad story and get some answers, because the Nevada Testing Site has already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans through nuclear fallout (including famously being implicated in the cancer death of John Wayne) and now it has sadly claimed one more life and we have no idea why.

If you think Vegas is tacky now, picture it back in the 50s, when tourists used to come there to see atomic bombs go off…

And speaking of the “Nevada Proving Ground” as the NNSS was originally called, I find it a little hard to believe that almost eighty years later and we’re still dealing with the legacy of the Cold War. We look back to WW2 as some kind of Golden Age (the Greatest Generation and all that). Like the fact that we had the moral high ground over the Nazis made life simpler. And it might have when it came to the war effort. We were unified, we had the draft, 40 year old guys were going to war. We haven’t see that kind of thing since.

I mean, everyone in America hates the Taliban because of terrorism and female oppression (if you haven’t read The Kite Runner, which is about pre-Taliban Afghanistan, it’s worth it just to see how even a modern country can quickly devolve into medieval barbarism), but after 17 years and nothing much changed in Afghanistan, I doubt most regular people would feel some kind of moral twang if we just left right now. There wasn’t the same kind of ambiguity after Pearl Harbor.

Allison and my uncle might have lied about his age because he was eager to fight for his country, but he still didn’t want to serve with any “Negroes” in his unit. It was a different time and there were just as many problems as there were now. The creators of the atomic bomb were desperate to beat the Nazis to the secret of nuclear war, but once we had it, we didn’t need it. Dresden proved that we had the will to kill, Hiroshima just did it with one plane instead of many.

Truman wanted to show Uncle Joe Stalin that we were ready for the world after the Nazis where America finally assumed its place as the most powerful nation on Earth, where the balance of power finally shifted continents. Stalin was a murderous bastard, but their dick-swinging contest ended up costing the world millions of lives. Mostly innocent ones in proxy wars, because everyone knew what it all-out war would mean between two real nuclear powers (The Day After showed us that in the 80s.)

The Doomsday Clock was set at Two Minutes to Midnight in 1953, when the Soviets and the Americans both tested thermonuclear weapons within ten months of each other. We no longer had a monopoly on mass destruction. In 2019, the clock is set there again and we still hear about the “manipulative” and “evil” Russians in the news. The more things change, the more they stay the same and we’re still living with the legacy they powerbrokers left for us in the Atomic Age. We’re still haunted by “The Ghost of Los Alamos”.

A generation’s fear
poisoning the atmosphere
blowing up some godforsaken burning cursed place

Building a doomsday device
Progress demands sacrifice,
We just can’t afford to fall behind in this race

Out in the no-man’s land,
Playing God in the desert sand
Salt the earth and bomb it all to hell
When war goes all out
We’re left living in the Fallout
the ghost of Los Alamos
will haunt us still

A burning horror
for the children of Gomorrah,
Firestorms of nightmares and cities made of ash.

Secrets crawling out of caves
There’s no bodies left for graves,
Cover up the sickness with a blinding brutal flash

Out in the no-man’s land,
Playing God in the desert sand
Salt the earth and bomb it all to hell
When war goes all out
We’re left living in the Fallout
the ghost of Los Alamos
will haunt us still

Out in the no-man’s land,
Playing God in the desert sand
Salt the earth and bomb it all to hell
When war goes all out
We’re left living in the Fallout
the ghost of Los Alamos
will haunt us still

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – February 1st, 2019

We’re finally out of the Polar Vortex today and I’m putting my shorts on to enjoy the 18 degree weather we’re finally warming up to in Wisconsin. 

But even though we’ve been kept inside like a bunch of hibernating were-bears, we still have our eyes on the weirdest news that we can find!

https://newatlas.com/brain-signals-into-speech-algorithm/58253/

Advanced AI system converts brain signals into speech

In a landmark breakthrough, scientists have demonstrated a computer system effectively translating brain signals into intelligible speech. The extraordinary experiment presents a proof-of-concept that could pave the way for a large variety of brain-controlled communication devices in the future.

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/uri-geller-to-use-telepathic-powers-to-stop-jeremy-corbyn-becoming-prime-minister-1.479364

Uri Geller says he will use ‘telepathic powers’ to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM

Uri also told the audience he once told Theresa May that she would become Britain’s leader. Was Uri also behind Brexit?!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-romo-play-predictions-super-bowl-11548805802

Tony Romo Calls Plays Before They Happen. How Often Is He Actually Right?

The voice of the Super Bowl has become known for his eerily accurate predictions. The Wall Street Journal watched nearly 50 hours of game tape to calculate Romo’s hit rate. Read this article. This is the kind of scrutiny we should put to paranormal claims!

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/nation-world/national/article225284585.html

How did 3-year-old NC boy survive days alone in woods? | Idaho Statesman

This is the kid that said a bear took care of him in the woods. Did Baloo really save this little guy’s life? Or could it have been my man, Bigfoot?

https://nypost.com/2019/01/30/jose-canseco-says-that-aliens-can-teach-us-how-to-time-travel/

Jose Canseco says that aliens can teach us how to time travel

Former Oakland A Jose Canseco claimed on Twitter that aliens want to share the secrets of time travel, but they’re having trouble getting in touch… what?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng6LdHmFmdA

Jeff Mills – UFO (Axis — AX-024)

Techno whiz and cosmos enthusiast Jeff Mills has announced the debut of The Edgar Mitchell Affair – a new party created by that honors NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s six-day mission to space on the Apollo 14.

The party will be held at the music venue Ampere in Antwerp, Belgium on February 9 which marks the 49-year-anniversary of Mitchell’s return to earth. On his return almost half a century ago, astronaut Edgar Mitchell became a recognized and outspoken personage on the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. That sounds like the coolest part around and we wish we could be there, but instead here’s one of Jeff’s old school techno tracks, “UFO”.

Are you not a podcast person? We understand. Some people love listening to things on YouTube. You can always find our latest episodes on our podcast YouTube channel! Click here to take a look and subscribe.

New podcast episodes come out Monday nights, we’ll see YOU on the other side of the weekend!
Mike

https://othersidepodcast.com/donate

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – January 25th, 2019


Whew! January is unbelievably almost over. Sometimes it seems like the most paranormal thing is how fast time flies out here. We just released a new podcast about last week’s most interesting paranormal stories (including the Smiley Face Killers, Oumuamua, Glenn Miller’s disappearance solved, and the conspiracy behind Martin Luther King’s assassination) and here we are with more weirdness from this week!

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/oumuamua-interstellar-harvard-astrophysicist/580948

When a Harvard Professor Talks About Aliens

Abraham “Avi” Loeb has been the subject of a number of high-profile stories lately and last week he was just in The New Yorker. This week he’s in The Atlantic. It’s time to learn why this Harvard Professor becoming the new face of UFOlogy and this time it’s less about Little Green Men and more about radio telescopes…

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/ufos-warp-drives-stargates-freedom-of-information-query-reveals-secret-list-of-pentagon-research-projects/news-story/0c1fcffd8aa60239744648eb5c56dded#.h1y0j

Secret Pentagon projects exposed

The United States Defense Intelligence Agency has one great fear: that someone, somewhere, has an unknown advantage … a secret weapon that could topple the world’s sole superpower from its perch. So when it hears talk of UFOs, stargates and warp drives — it takes it seriously. We’ve interviewed members of the DIA before, and they’ve seen some WEIRD stuff!

https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/witchcraft-demons-child-abuse-religion-15709791

Witchcraft and demonic possession link to Cov child abuse

Government statistics have shown that social services identified 34 potential abuse cases in Coventry linked to faith or belief in 2018. Parents that think their child is a witch or bad luck or possessed by demons. What the Hell is going on in Coventry?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/long-fuse-big-bang/201901/the-paranormal-can-new-science-explain-old-phenomena

The Paranormal: Can New Science Explain Old Phenomena?

The new field of Epigenetics transforms the impossible into the possible. It’s always nice to see a Fortean story in a respected publication!

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/9k4exv/china-starts-hunt-for-aliens-in-2019

China to Seriously Start Hunting for Aliens in 2019

Astronomers think extraterrestrials could be trying to communicate with us so Chinese scientists built a huge telescope to find out. But with a government as tight-lipped as the Chinese are they going to be any more free with the alien goods than the U.S.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jo3F29JSfs

Pixies – Motorway to Roswell

In the mood for some classic Alternative Rock that talks about aliens? We thought you were, here’s the Pixies with one of their most fun tracks. 

Have you subscribed to See You On The Other Side on iTunes yet?We’ll help you make it easy to get the latest episodes as soon as they come out. Just click here!

See you on the other side of the weekend!

https://othersidepodcast.com/donate

232 – Shiny Space Pancakes: Big Bands, Assassination Conspiracies, Smiley Face Killers, and Oumuamua

When The New Yorker runs an article called “Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua'”, people are going to listen. It’s one of America’s most prestigious magazines, which is probably why they were a little combative in their discussion with Avi Loeb (who’s been popping up all the time lately) about the possibility that the interstellar Oumuamua object is artificial, perhaps created by an alien race to probe the universe, much like our Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft. My sister Allison was so excited about the article, she couldn’t wait to talk about it in this episode.

Of course, Avi Loeb is no slouch, he’s the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department stranger to aliens, he is also involved with the Breakthrough Initiative, the $100 million search for alien intelligence founded by a Russian billionaire which we discussed in episode 50. In the past year, he’s become the poster child for real scientists talking about the possibility of alien life in the universe. He’s tenured, so they can’t fire him for having these ideas. And he’s well-respected, so he’s not coming out of left field.

Painting of Oumuamua as a pancake-shaped object. Copyright 2018 William K. Hartmann

Since we discovered it after it was already out of range to get an actual picture of it, all the details have to come through what we can observe and mathematically derive from the data coming through the radio telescopes. So, why do they think that it might be artificial and what’s interesting about it?

  • As it spends every eight hours, it’s brightness changes by a factor of ten, that means it’s probably ten times longer than it is wide
  • That means it might be cigar shaped OR pancake shaped!
  • It deviates from an orbit that physics would dictate for a normal object around the sun
  • There are no gases coming off it like a comet, so it’s not being propelled by anything

Here’s one of the best quotes from the article:

I do not view the possibility of a technological civilization as speculative, for two reasons. The first is that we exist. And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop. If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone.

Professor Abraham “Avi” Loeb

Avi, you’re my man! He’s the guy who’s saying that it’s unscientific to completely rule out the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. He even brings up the old Sherlock Holmes chestnut “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I like him and if he ends up being a disinformation agent, I’ll be super sad,

The real Dr. Hynek and his TV counterpart J. Allen Littlefinger

Something I found really interesting this week was all the talk about the new Project Blue Book TV show on the History Channel starring Littlefinger from Game of Thrones (and Tommy Carcetti, I haven’t forgotten about you, The Wire fans!) Everyone on my Facebook feed is talking about it because it uses the real-life character of Dr. J. Allen Hynek (who we talk about extensively with author Mark O’Connell who wrote a book about him called The Close Encounters Man) who investigated UFO reports for the real Project Blue Book and turns it into X-Files style fiction.

Okay, so that is a lot of fun, but The New York Times this week also wrote an article about the real life Project Blue Book and how it was nothing like it’s described in the TV show. Those are the same authors who wrote the 2017 article that blew the lid open on modern military research into unexplained aerial phenomena. Okay, we know Hollywood is gonna Hollywood, but why are we so predisposed to believe that the government is okay lying to us?

David Crosby is one of The Truth and Reconciliation Committee members looking for new answers to the political assassinations of the 60s.

Well, I think we can thank the government of America’s Golden Age, the Happy Days of yore, because they were super good at lying to the American people. From the Tuskegee experiments to the Gulf of Tonkin, the Mid-20th Century US government wasn’t afraid to deceive its own citizens to accomplish a goal. And it’s one of the reason that on Martin Luther King Day this year, a group of 60 activists who are calling themselves the Truth and Reconciliation Council are demanding a new investigation into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X.

Celebrities include Alec Baldwin, Oliver Stone, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, famous walrus-man and musician David Crosby, as well as relatives of both Robert Kennedy and Dr. King. King’s family has long believed that James Earl Ray did not act alone and RFK Jr. himself has said that Sirhan Sirhan’s trial was a “mockery”.

There was just an invincibility and an impunity about that era of government that’s almost terrifying. From J. Edgar Hoover’s personal fiefdom of the FBI to the CIA’s mind control experiments, how many unelected officials wreaked havoc on American citizens “for our own good”? Might these assassinations be another example and we can’t learn the truth until the Boomers finally pass on?

Glenn Miller says “I gotta trombone for ya, baby.”

Wendy this week thought that it was fascinating that they think they might have found the wreckage of Glenn Miller’s airplane. One of the most popular musicians in America during Word War II, Miller’s plane disappeared over the English Channel on December 15th, 1944. There have been several theories to the disappearance:

  • Because of the freezing conditions, his plane’s engine iced over and they crashed on the way to Paris
  • British bombers returning from an air raid were told they needed to jettison their unexploded bombs over the Channel and Miller’s plane was accidentally in the way and killed by friendly fire
  • Miller made it to Paris, but had a heart attack while in a brothel, and they “disappeared” him to save the famous musician’s family embarrassment

Well, a fisherman now claims that he pulled up the remains of Miller’s plane in 1987. He says that he was advised to let it back into the deep, but he recorded the coordinates of the exact spot. What I wanna know is WHO TOLD HIM TO PUT IT BACK?!? That seems to be the missing piece in this journalism for me.

The good news is that he’s given a team of researchers the coordinates, so that if they can get the money, they can send divers down there to investigate. Because Miller’s plane is the last of its manufacture in the world that’s unaccounted for, if they find it, they’ll know it’s his and maybe the mystery can be solved.

Why so serious?

The first time we had Scott Markus on the show, we were featuring his documentary, The Hidden Truth?, which was about a series of mysterious drownings that happened in La Crosse along the Mississippi River from the 90s to the Aughts. Police claim it’s probably just drunken misadventure, but La Crosse’s Deputy Chief Medical Examiner had some other ideas and he wanted to see if their might be a paranormal explanation.

Which leads us to Scott’s topic for the week, the premiere of Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice on the Oxygen Network. In 2008, retired New York City police detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte proposed that these drownings were the work of a “Murder Club” that they nicknamed “The Smiley Face Killers” because they seemed to find smiley face graffiti near where each of these poor victims went into the river. They postulated that these murders were planned and organized by a dark web of thrill killers throughout the country.

Their ideas made some news for a little while, but it was a popular theory to debunk because of the sheer audacity of it. The FBI even made an official statement about it. However, do you think that’s going to stop the producers of reality TV?! Hell no. Oxygen has developed a series about the detectives’ continuing investigation into more mysterious drownings. What did they find and do you find their evidence convincing? Well, you can be the judge by watching the first episode online right now.

Hush now baby baby don’t you cry…

Finally, this week’s Sunspot song inspired by the conversation is just a straight up punk tune about how easily we’re manipulated. From Vladimir Lenin’s “useful idiots” to the latest stories like the Covington High School video fracas, interest groups and factions vying for power and wealth have worked over the narrative so that the “common people” will come to their way of thinking. We fully expect propaganda in advertising, but we hope that our news sources at least attempt objectivity and our elected officials are at least telling us the truth sometimes… but we know that’s not true. Sometimes, you just get sick of people in authority saying they know what’s good for you and “Father Knows Best” is just a load of bollocks.

It’s a little story that story that they wrote for you and me,
keeping out the best parts for our own good, don’t you see?

The program is designed so that the masses will obey.
We’re all the same, it’s just a game, and we don’t get to play.
Worse than Illuminati or lizard conspiracy
for who controls the narrative, controls all the money.

Father Knows Best and our trust becomes a weapon.
Mommy’s bedtime story is mind control and thought suppression.
You can’t fight the power while you’re busy getting screwed
Hey Rube, sometimes the truth ain’t good enough for you.

I guess we’re just not smart enough to grasp at the big picture,
we just get the Cliffs Notes and they tell us that it’s scripture.

They’ve got the dials all set to outrage no matter what side that you choose
When it comes to facts, no one retracts, they just play fast and loose
It’s pissed-off vegan communists or truck driver redneck hicks
It’s about the bottom line, and everything is fine, as long as they get the clicks.

Father Knows Best and our trust becomes a weapon.
Mommy’s bedtime story is mind control and thought suppression.
You can’t fight the power while you’re busy getting screwed
Hey Rube, sometimes the truth ain’t good enough for you.