Tag Archives: exorcism

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – April 5th, 2019

Yallow!

It’s Mike from See You On The Othe Side! Hope your week was weird and if it wan’t weird enough, we’re blogging the paranormal from A to Z 6 days a week during April. From Demons to Curses to Bigfoot, we’re covering a whole spectrum of strange stuff. Make sure to check out the See You On The Other Side Blog daily for all the fun!

Now here are the five most interesting paranormal stories that caught our eye this week. 

Is ‘The 37th Parallel’ really the UFO Super Highway?
Syracuse New Times

This story is always a fascinating one and if you haven’t read Ben Mezrich’s book on all of the strange cases surrounding this stretch of the United States, this article will make you want to pick it up right away!

Florida college student believed he was ‘half-dog, half-man’ when he ate victim’s face
WOFL

Classic lycanthropy!

Lawsuit Alleges Hampton Inn Employee Punished For Refusing An Exorcism
LEX18.com

A lawsuit filed in Perry County Circuit Court makes an unusual allegation. A former employee of the Hampton Inn claims that he was discriminated against for refusing a spiritual cleansing. 

Irishman spots Loch Ness Monster for second time in just one month
The Irish Sun

Ahem… the fourth sighting of the Loch Ness Monster this year has been recorded – by an Irishman who has now seen Nessie twice in a month. 

Olivia Newton-John claims she’s haunted by two dead celebrities who boost career
mirror

The Grease star says two of her late famous pals hover around her while she’s performing and act as her spirit guides

Olivia Newton-John – Xanadu
YouTube

For all the kids who saw this movie in the theater (like me!), did we have any idea of what the Hell was going on? But those songs were catchy! From Samuel Tyler-Coleridge’s Kublai Khan to the epitome of cocaine disco excess, Xanadu, my friends was the perfect distillation of the 1970s and the fact that it was a collossal flop spelled the death of disco.

If you haven’t listened to the podcast this week you missed our conversation with The Last Drive-In‘s Joe Bob Briggs and next week we’re bringing Brian Cano on from Haunted Collector and Paranormal Caught on Camera, so make sure to subscribe to not miss any of the good stuff.

Have a haunted weekend!
Mike, Wendy, and the SYOTOS misifts

D Is For Demon: Our Five Favorite Fiends

We attended the Shooting Star Paracon in Minnesota last year and conducted a survey. What’s your favorite paranormal topic and we gave four choices…

  • Ghosts
  • Cryptids
  • UFOs
  • Demons

Much to our surprise, demons took second place right behind ghosts! Cryptids came in unexpectedly last and Nessie was inconsolable. So you demon-lovers, here are our five favorite demons and the episodes that we tackled them in!

1. Valek – The Demon From The Nun

The demon Valek comes straight out of the medieval spellbook, The Lesser Key of Solomon. Magicians would try to invoke his name to perform magic. They said they could do this and remain Christian because legend says that King Solomon used the name of God to force seventy-two demons help him build the First Temple in Jerusalem.

Valek was known as the President of Hell and his magickal specialty was commanding household spirits as well as controlling serpents. Hollywod used him the inspiration for the demon that’s haunting the Warrens in The Conjuring 2 and the follow-up, The Nun. John Carpenter also used him as the original vampire in his James Woods-cracks-jokes-and-stakes-bloodusuckers flick, Vampires.

But in the original description, this wicked creature is not an Evil Nun or a rockstar-looking vamp, he’s a winged baby flying a dragon. Might not be as badass, but still pretty cool.

2. Lillith – The Original Sex Demon

In Genesis, there are two competing versions of the creation of humanity. One has man and woman being created at the same time, the other has Eve being created later out of Adam’s rib. In order to reconcile the versions, medieval Rabbis decided that Adam had to have a first wife, and they called her Lillith, which was based on the Babylonian word for demon.

When she wouldn’t submit to Adam by laying under him when it came time to do the nasty, she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden and decided to mate with a demon, Azael instead. in mythology, she’s been blamed for everything from wet dreams (the original succubus) to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She’s a seducer and baby-killer that visits in the night.

3. William Bührer, One Of The Demons Inside Carl Seige

When my sister Allison Jornlin was doing research on the famous Wisconsin exorcist, Theosophus Riesinger, she ran into a case of demonic possession in the Dairy State. Carl Seige was a German immigrant who moved with his family to Watertown, Wisconsin in the 1840s. He had been experiencing violent seizures since he was a boy and his family left the Old World so that they could escape what he claimed were the demons demons inside of him.

He exhibited at least three signs of possession. He correctly predicted when priests were coming to visit him, even though no one told him they were coming, they asked him questions in Latin that he correctly answered in German, and he reacted violently when they would show him a crucifix.

One day, during one of his worst seizures, he said he was possessed by William Bührer, who was a murderer in their German town before Carl was born. But he also said there were many other devils there as well. Carl was exorcised by a Lutheran minister, a psychic medium, an Indian medicine man, and finally by a trio of Catholic priests. While the trio finally succeeded in calming his seizures for a month, he had to be re-exorcised throughout the rest of his life to keep the evil phantasms like William Bührer at bay.

4. The Demon Who Manifested Himself to John Eagan

John Eagan was born a good Catholic boy in Brooklyn and grew up to be a special education teacher and bartender on the side. He said at the bar that he met a lot of lost souls who he would regularly pray for, since he believed no one else would. He’s still pretty religious (he even made a bust of Jesus out of wax candles that was featured in Ripley’s Believe it or Not!) and he thinks his prayers in the hope of saving those souls at the bar drew the attention of a demon.

His wife and son first started experiencing Poltergeist-like activity, but the real kicker is when John saw the demon in his living room. An evil face appeared to him surrounded by blue flames and said “No more.” John thinks the threat was about his prayers, because the Devil wanted their souls for himself. He tells the story in his own words for the episode.

5. Pazuzu from The Exorcist

Pazuzu is the Mesopotamian demon of the southeast wind that brings famine. He has the body of a winged man, talons of an eagle, the head of a dog, and the tail of a scorpion. His enemy was Lamashtu, who was the demon of hurting women and babies in childbirth (much like Lillith), people would wear amulets with Pazuzu’s image on it to protect their young families. So even though he was thought he was an evil spirit, they would wear his image because he was so nasty he would scare away other evil spirits.

So it’s a real legendary demon that William Peter Blatty used for his antagonist in The Exorcist. He had the title character, Father Merrin first meet the demon on an archaeological expedition in Iraq in the 1940s, which is on the site of the former Mesopotamia. Only later would he meet the demon again when it took over the poor soul of Regan Macneil to make her barf pea soup. In our memorial episode about William Peter Blatty, we talk all about the real inspirations that he used to write his most famous book.

Since demons are way more popular than we originally thought, who are some of our favorites? Maybe we can take on their legends in a future episode!

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – January 18th, 2019

‘Allo!

It’s Mike from See You On The Other Side, coming through your electricity to keep you para-informed!This week started off with a barnburner of a podcast discussing all last week’s best stories. We welcome Robbie Graham (who you might have seen on the last episode of Ancient Aliens!) to the conversation about UFOs, conspiracy theories, Hollywood, and murder. Listen right here!

UFOs in the The New York Times and The New Yorker this week? What?! Well come on along…

https://catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/driving-out-the-devil-whats-behind-the-exorcism-boom/

Driving out the Devil: what’s behind the exorcism boom? | Catholic Herald

An astonishing number of people undergo deliverance from demonic forces every week, but this article gives an excellent overview of how the latest surge in exorcisms might also be because of religious competition in traditionally Catholic South America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/arts/television/project-blue-book-history-true-story.html

‘Project Blue Book’ Is Based on a True U.F.O. Story. Here It Is.

If you wanna know the truth about J. Allen Hynek, you have to read Mark O’Connell’s book. (His parents and mine were friends, so of course we’re going to plug him!) This New York Times article used him as a fact-checker for their story about the real Project Blue Book.

https://people.com/music/glenn-miller-plane-believed-found-wwii-mystery/

Glenn Miller’s Airplane Believed Found 74 Years After Famed Bandleader Vanished During WWII

The disappearance of beloved Big Band leader Glenn Miller has been a mystery since before the end of World War Two. His plane was last seen over the English Channel in 1944 and was never found. People have speculated everything from friendly fire to him being a target of assassination by the Germans because he might have been a spy. But as of today, they think they’ve found the plane.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua

Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua

Avi Loeb is everywhere lately. Fast radio bursts and discussions why we need to consider the possibility that the object was sent by aliens, the dangers of unscientific speculation, and what belief in an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has in common with faith in God.

https://pilotonline.com/news/nation-world/north-carolina/article_ae39d1d0-1908-11e9-8454-53ea635585b8.html

“Please be advised that the eyes appear to glow”: Bigfoot-like sculpture alarms N.C. drivers

This Bigfoot statue is scaring rural North Carolinians because it’s eyes glow red in the glare of oncoming car lights. They’re calling the cops regularly that they’ve seen Bigfoot. This is what I mean, when people actually think they’ve seen something real, they call the cops. Because if there’s an 8-foot tall apeman on the loose, the authorities might need to be involved. They don’t save their story and put the community in danger just so they can email a frickin’ website a week after they get home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laHjiAvqL2Q

Glenn Miller and His Orchestra: “That Old Black Magic”

Speaking of Glenn Miller, here’s his version of the most paranormal song we could find of his,  “That Old Black Magic”, which was his last Number One hit in 1943

New podcast episodes come out late Monday nights, make sure you subscribe in iTunes so you don’t miss them!

See ya Monday!
Mike

This Week’s Best Paranormal News – January 4th, 2019

Hey!

It’s 2019 and we hope your New Year is starting off most excellently (party on Wayne!) If you wanna say goodbye to the old year, we’ve got a podcast about 2018’s most exciting paranormal stories that you can listen to right here.

But moving forward, we’ve got plenty of paranormal news to kick off a brand new annum!

A UFO was filmed over Kiawah Island

A mysterious glowing orange sphere evidently appeared above Kiawah Island over the Christmas holiday, a phenomenon that turns up in this area every so often.

https://observer.com/2019/01/pope-francis-exorcism-demonic-possession-culture-wars/

Exorcism and Demonic Possession Are Now Tools in the Culture Wars

This article takes the tack that exorcism is all BS, but this goes to something we’ve been talking about for awhile, the paranormal vs. hardcore atheism is part of the new culture wars and it’s in a completely different way than the hippies vs. squares generational conflict of the 60s.

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2018/12/27/youtuber-shot-dead-in-lahore-after-social-media-prank-goes-wrong/

YouTuber shot dead after social media prank goes wrong

This is what I’m always afraid is going to happen when people see those Zombie Pub Crawls. One of these days, someone’s gonna freak out and start shooting the participants. That’s what happened in Pakistan.

https://www.nationalenquirer.com/photos/psychic-predictions-hollywood-2019/

Psychic Predictions: What’s In The Stars For 2019

Psychic predictions from The National Enquirer’s team of mystics for 2018 included accurately foreseeing Clint Eastwood’s retirement from acting and Khloé Kardashian’s humiliating relationship woes. What will they predict for our favorite (and not so favorite) celebrities in 2019?

https://www.wkrg.com/entertainment/mt-hood-meadows-cryptozoologist-spots-sasquatch/1678332481

Mt Hood Meadows: Cryptozoologist ‘spots’ Sasquatch

Sasquatch was spotted near Mount Hood Meadows — or so say the people connected with Mount Hood Meadows. Take a look at the pictures and you decide if that looks like Bigfoot to you. 😉

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6539849/Has-mystery-Britains-Roswell-finally-solved.html

Has the mystery of ‘Britain’s Roswell’ finally been solved?

Dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’, the Rendlesham Forest incident in Suffolk, has intrigued UFO enthusiasts since taking place in December 1980. You’re not gonna like what this article says…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2WqYidC_0Yh

Tenacious D – Sasquatch and Trippy Mushrooms

Since we’re talking about Bigfoot again this week, let’s go back to one of the best scenes in Tenacious D’s much-maligned flick, Tenacious D In The Pick of Destiny. Is it a great movie? Well, it didn’t win any Academy Awards, but if you like Jack Black, then you get a whole heaping helping!

New podcast and paranormal song are coming up early next week, so subscribe in iTunes and we’ll see you on the other side!

225 – Evil: From Serial Killers to Slenderman

This weekend we did our first live podcast from a convention! Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts, Scott from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, Wendy, and I did a panel on EVIL at Wizard World Madison and it was a fantastic experience. Here’s how they described the panel in the literature:

From urban legends to comic books to true crime, evil permeates our pop culture. Hear about real cases of evil and how they influenced movies and TV with Madison haunted historian Mike Huberty, Milwaukee paranormal researcher Allison Jornlin, Waukesha Ghost tour guide Wendy Lynn Staats, and Chicago ghost story author, Scott Markus. From Ed Gein and Psycho to John Wayne Gacy and evil clowns, the Slenderman to famous demonic possessions, the crew behind Wisconsin paranormal and pop culture podcast, See You On The Other Side, discuss the real life evils hiding under the fiction.

Here are your evil panelists! Mike, Allison, Scott, and Wendy

So, we each took a topic that had a Wisconsin connection (since we were in Madison) of evil in real life that had paranormal implications and also had a ton of pop culture connections.

It was a great crowd and a lot of fun and if we met you at the convention, then thanks for coming to visit us at See You On The Other Side for the first time!

Wendy giving us the “skinny” on Slenderman

Evil often hides in the form of good intentions. For the song this week, we go back to this worn-out, but still valuable quote:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil

The mantra of revolution is often that once a few “necessary evils” are taken care of, they can stop and that the ends will justify the means. Whether it’s the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks, history hasn’t borne that out.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Here is Sunspot with “Evil On Evil”.

You want the power
but they won’t go without a fight
you said you’re gonna drain the swamp
this time you’ll do it right

you said you want justice
no one said it’d be bloodless
it’s time, the heads will roll
ain’t that how it always goes

Fire with fire, you gotta be lethal
it’s just evil on evil
Drag em through the eye of a needle
now you’re evil on evil

Tie up the noose
payback’s a bitch
fail the purity test
we’ll burn the witch.

you said you want justice
no one said it’d be bloodless
it’s time, the heads will roll
ain’t that how it always goes

Fire with fire, you gotta be lethal
it’s just evil on evil
Drag em through the eye of a needle
now you’re evil on evil

135 – Demonology 101: Dennis W. Carroll Vs Evil

Dennis W. Carroll, the co-founder the Carolina Society for Paranormal Research and Investigation had his first encounter with demonology as a teenager in church. The preacher had brought up a troubled man and the whole congregation prayed for him. While everyone’s eyes were closed and the were praying furiously for the man’s soul, Dennis saw three balls of what he describes as “dirty light” flee from the man’s body and disappear into the sky.

From that moment on, Dennis was a believer and has spent much of his life learning more about the invisible world of the supernatural and demonology. In addition to co-founding the CSPRI, he has also authored two books on investigation, Beyond The Shadows: A Field Guide to The Paranormal and The Road Unseen: A Paranormal Journey Into High Strangeness, as well as two collections of poetry influenced by his investigations, In Sunshine and In Shadow.

dennis w carroll demonologist
Dennis W. Carroll compelling some evil entity with the Power of Christ

Dennis has been on hundreds of investigations over the years and he shares what he’s learned as not only a “location exorcist” (i.e., a guy that blesses houses and buildings to drive out any negative energy) but a demonologist who has fought powers that are conspiring to bring down the human race in what Carroll claims is a highly organized ring of evil.

Dennis W Carroll Demonology Demonologist
Demonologist At Your Service

Also in this episode, we feature a quick preview of the latest feature from our friends at The Singular Fortean blog. It’s St, Patrick’s season so they’re featuring legends and folklore of The Emerald Isle all this month.

One of the ways that Dennis talks about opening yourself to demonic possession is by focusing too much on your negative emotions and very few things make people as negative as a bad breakup. This week’s song is all about indulging in those negative emotions and allowing yourself to fully hate your ex. Which might be good for singing songs, but not so much for defending against infernal influences, it’s called “Eat Out My Heart”.

I’ve been waiting so long for you to call,
but now you’re finally here and I’m a wreck.
Worked out a little, even did my hair,
but I’m not the man I used to be back there.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

I dodged a bullet,
One or two since then,
You’re not the only one who still calls me up.
I’m still the jerk who listens to your problems,
I never told you all the times,
I’d wished you died in a car crash.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

I’m eating out my heart.
I’m eating out my heart.

And I’m not happy for you,
That you’re a better person without me.
I’m so glad you decided to apologize,
When I’m too numb to care,
I’m just too numb to care.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

105 – Exorcism: Carl Seige and The Four Signs of Possession

Exorcism, it’s back baby! From scores of possessed Peruvian kids to the Catholic Church increasing the number of priests they train for exorcism, to a psychiatrist seriously discussing possession in the pages of The Washington Post, the word on the street is that people are getting possessed by demons and it’s gonna take some of that Power of Christ to compel them out of there!

One of our favorite paranormal experts, Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts, has been researching cases of demonic possession and we brought her on to talk about a little known, but very influential exorcism case, that occurred in the Devilish Dairy State (that’s Wisconsin) in the 1860s.

watertown wisconsin carl siege exorcism
Watertown, WI in the 19th Century – this is the best they could do for aerial views, I guess.

It all begins with the Seige Family, who were living in Germany in the late 1840s. Carl’s little sister was playing outside when she found a duck egg with a pinhole in it. She brought it into show the family but the mother immediately said to get rid of it. However, before they could, the dog ate it. Soon after, the poor pooch passed on and the sister became violently ill. She suffered for a year with blindness and fits and then passed away. One side of Carl’s body shriveled and he became very sickly. Soon after the family emigrated to Watertown, Wisconsin because they knew that the Devil wouldn’t follow them to America (right? Right?!)

Not so, Carl continued to suffer from strange symptoms. Newspapers reported that he had a lizard (or some said a snake) in his stomach. He started acting crazy so his parents brought in a Native American doctor to help draw out the evil, but that didn’t seem to work. So, they finally called in the demon-cleansing professionals, the Catholic Church.

Now the Catholic Church says that there are four Signs of Possession:

  •  Knowing The Unknowable – This is where you possess knowledge that you can’t possible have known beforehand. People’s locations, things that they were doing, who they were with, secrets, etc… Basically psychic powers like you’re Professor X watching them through Cerebro.
  • Understanding Unlearned Languages – Being able to comprehend when people are speaking to you in a tongue with which you have no prior experience. This is especially useful when possessed people go on vacation.
  • Aversion to Sacred Objects – Crosses, holy water — all the kind of stuff that people try in vampire movies but never seems to work because they don’t have enough faith.
  •  Supernatural Strength – When little kids can throw a grown man across a room or a tiny middle-aged woman can bench press a sofa bed, that means they’ve probably been popping Satanic Steroids.

You don’t have to exhibit all the signs to be authentically demonically possessed, but it’s an important checklist because at least 3 out of the 4, you can’t really fake. (It’s easy to act freaked out around a cross, people do it in Dracula movies all the time. It’s a lot harder to answer someone speaking in Latin or deadlift a Mini-Cooper.)

In Carl’s case he exhibited three of the signs, number one, he met his would-be Exorcists, the Rev. John Gmeiner and another priest as they were arriving, even though no one told him when they were coming. Number two, the priests would ask him questions in Latin and he’d give the correct answer, responding in German, but showing that he understood the Latin nonetheless (even though he had no prior education in the language.) Number three, when he was deep in the throes of his possession, he reacted violently to the crucifix.

spirits of darkness carl seige exorcism
Father Gmeiner invented the “Horror Movie” font 30 years too early!

The priests exorcised Carl and were able to drive the demons out of him according to Father Gmeiner’s book, Spirits Of Darkness. But like herpes simplex, the demons never really go away, they just hide and come back in multiple outbreaks of possession throughout your life. Carl Seige had to be exorcised many times during his life to keep the Devil at bay.

In the present day, they recently held an Exorcist training seminar in Northern Illinois at Mundelein Seminary. Allison stopped by there last week to do some research and maybe catch a glimpse of some of those Catholic heroes who are learning the proper angles to spray Holy Water and the latest in projectile vomit-avoidance techniques. Our friend, Tea Krulos, wrote an article about it in the Milwaukee Record and called it “Exorcist-palooza”.

mundelein seminary carl seige exorcism
Excuse me guys, is this where all the Exorcists hang out?

There’s an new Exorcist TV show coming on FOX this season as well. William Peter Blatty’s book was famously based on a 1949 case, but there’s some connections that Allison has been researching that are less well known, and that’s a story for another podcast.

Self-harm is one of the cornerstones of demonic possession. There’s even a case in the Bible where Jesus encounters a possessed man cutting himself with stones. (Mark 5:5) This song, “Mercy of Myth” by our band Sunspot talks about how punishing yourself needlessly isn’t worth it, because not only does it make you feel bad, it also opens you up to being possessed!

There is a Hell we hold within,
you can’t forgive yourself for the things you did.
A hair shirt and a bottle,
won’t let you forget.

Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.

And culpa’s even worse than Crack,
You don’t need a sheepskin to know that,
even after cutting, nailbiting, hair pulling and spiting.
All your shame is still toxic.

Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.

I’ll abandon ship on this guilt trip,
and let it drown,
Need some clemency from self pity,
and burn it out.

75 – Starman: David Bowie’s Legacy of UFOs and The Occult

When you were born in the 1970s, David Bowie was a very different character than if you were born in the 1960s. The slick, well-dressed English gentleman that I remember in the videos for “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance” is a far cry from the androgynous alien shapeshifter Ziggy Stardust. And most in my generation remember him for his performance in Labyrinth as Jareth the Goblin King even before his regular albums. His relevance changed from decade to decade, the Rock Star of the 70s became the Pop Icon in the 80s to the fading influencer in the 90s and then a revered Godfather in the new Millennium. Fluctuating public attention is the way of commercial art and artists, but what never changed was his hunger to constantly try something new and interesting. David Bowie was an engine of artistic innovation. Weirdly and wonderfully for us, much of his inspiration came from UFOs, spirituality, and the Occult.

david bowie ziggy stardust
Man, how awesome were the 70s?

In the episode, Wendy, Allison, and I discuss our first memories of Bowie and our favorite of his songs. Allison’s favorite David Bowie track is actually from an Adrian Belew solo album and the song is called “Gunman”, a hidden gem co-written by Bowie and Belew (Bowie’s musical director and one of his longtime guitarists) in the late 80s.

My personal favorite is from Ziggy Stardust (of course) and it’s the first song of his that I learned how to play (because I bought a guitar magazine with it in it the day I bought a bass guitar in 1990) and it’s “Suffragette City”!  While the “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am!” might enrage my sister, Allison, (her first memory of Bowie is wanting to punch him in the face for saying “shut your mouth” in “China Girl” – even though it’s the girl who’s saying it to the man, ha!) Wendy agrees by loving the entire Ziggy album and talks about listening to it over and over again in college with her roommate Erika (who now is on a lovely Doctor Who podcast called Verity! that you should check out if you’re a fan!)

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars had an alien angle from its very inception.  Ziggy Stardust was a rockstar who also was the human manifestation  of a messenger for extraterrestrial beings bringing a message of hope to an Earth doomed in five years. And on this tour, he would often go to the windows and look out at the skies to check for flying saucers while doing interviews with reporters. But David Bowie was into UFOs long before he recorded this album.

Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson even said (as quoted in Michael Luckman’s book, Alien Rock: The Rock N’ Roll Extraterrestrial Connection) that “David became convinced that he was being stalked by men from Mars in 1969 or 1970.” He’s also been quoted as seeing UFOs when he was a kid. “They came over so regularly we could time them.”, he said. “Sometimes they stood still, other times they moved so fast it was hard to keep a steady eye on them.”

And then in the year on the Aladdin Sane  tour (Bowie’s follow-up to Ziggy Stardust), his wife Angie Bowie tells the story of driving through Detroit and hearing about a UFO crash on the local news. Although the story goes that the news crew did the whole thing as a hoax and they were fired from the TV station, Angie swears the broadcasts exist (a documentarian with them recorded them on videotape) and that Bowie was keeping his eyes on the sky on their drive through the upper Midwest USA on the way to Minneapolis from Detroit, convinced that the aliens might want to make contact with him in particular.

david bowie alladin sane constellation
The Aladdin Sane makeup was such a good look for him, they’re making it his constellation…

But David Bowie didn’t just love aliens and UFOs, he also had a taste for sorcery! Bowie admitted that he dabbled in old-fashioned magic in the 1970s and he talks about about Aleister Crowley (an old friend to this podcast!) on one of his first albums, Hunky Dory (from 1971, it’s the one that has “Life On Mars?” on it) in the song “Quicksand” with the lyrics:

I’m closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley’s uniform
Of imagery
I’m living in a silent film

And when he moved to Los Angeles to record his album, Station to StationBowie went full Crowley.

david bowie cocaine
I’m never going to bed… EVER…

Fueled by mountains of Star-Spangled Powder, rockstar confidence, David Bowie and his wife Angie rented a house in LA while he spent ten months recording the album at Cherokee Studios, a place that even George Martin called “the best studio in America”. The persona that he was creating wasn’t an alien rock star anymore, but an ultra-Aryan Fascist known as The Thin White Duke. During this period (that he claims he remembers very little of because he was doing drugs constantly) he became interested in the Nazis use of sacred symbols (like the Swastika) and their quest for religious artifacts (think Raiders of the Lost Ark.) He talks about how he was fascinated that the Germans might have been looking for the Holy Grail in England in the 1930s. Okay, it’s the 70s, it’s LA, being weird is par for the course, so it’s magick time, baby!

david bowie sieg heil
Seig Hei…hiiiiiiiii guys, just ya know, trying some fascism on for size. Anybody else have a nosebleed?

Here’s Cameron Crowe (who was a rock journalist before he was a director, see Almost Famous for more info on that) interviewing Bowie during that time (and read the whole thing sometime, it covers the recording of Iggy Pop’s demo, hanging out with Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones, and what kind of celebrity life that Bowie was living at the time):

Suddenly – always suddenly – David is on his feet and rushing to a nearby picture window. He thinks he’s seen a body fall from the sky. “I’ve got to do this,” he says, pulling a shade down on the window. A ballpoint-penned star has been crudely drawn on the inside. Below it is the word “Aum.” Bowie lights a black candle on his dresser and immediately blows it out to leave a thin trail of smoke floating upward. “Don’t let me scare the pants off you. It’s only protective. I’ve been getting a little trouble from … the neighbors.”

But who exactly were the “neighbours” that Bowie was talking about? Well, his ex-wife Angie, believes that her husband was talking about the Devil himself.  She talks about him saying that he saw the Beast rising out of the indoor pool and that they had to perform an exorcism.

So they did and she claims that the water started bubbling that in no way could have been caused by the air filters of the indoor pool and then she saw a large shadow at the bottom of the pool that she said looked “in the shape of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, malevolent; it frightened me.

He started getting into the Kaballah and there’s even a picture of him drawing its central mystical symbol, the Tree of Life. He mentions more Kaballah in the first verse of “Station to Station” as well (and since the Kaballah is Hebrew mysticism, it’s a pretty good sign that even though he might have been into Nazi occultism, he didn’t partake in their anti-Semitism.)

I hope that’s not permanent marker…

Even before his death on January 10th, people were already claiming that his last album, Blackstar, was more than just a musical statement. Some are claiming the album is a message from Bowie that the Illuminati are preparing for Planet X to come back into the solar system and we’re all going to be enslaved.

What’s Planet X? Why it’s Nibiru, the tenth planet in the solar system where the Annunaki live who control the Earth and it orbits around the sun every 3600 years (which is why most astronomers haven’t noticed it.) The leading proponent of this theory was Zecharia Sitchin and his evidence is slim, but it does make for some fun sci-fi tinged conspiracy reading.

david bowie blackstar
Hey, have you heard the Good News?

That doesn’t mean that Blackstar isn’t chock full of occult-y sci-fi goodness, though, and blog Vigilant Citizen has an excellent piece on all the symbols of Blackstar (even connecting it to Bowie’s outfit on Station To Station.)  And the director of the ten-minute video that accompanies the title track had something to say about the video’s occult inspiration:

“Well, I’m a huge Crowley fan, I’ve always been. I tried to make a movie on his life a few years ago but we didn’t manage to put it together. I love Crowley for being an audacious man at certain point in time. I think he’s greatly misunderstood. He was a good guy, but he was portrayed as an evil man and he wasn’t.”
– Vice News, 
Behind “Blackstar”: An Interview with Johan Renck, the Director of David Bowie’s Ten-Minute Short Film

And you just gotta hand it to Bowie, he stayed true to his weird sensibilities right to the end. While we’ve discussed his inspired music, his film roles were inspired by the paranormal as well. His first big role was the lead character of The Man Who Fell To Earth as an alien who was trying to bring water back to his dying planet.

He also shows up in The Hunger, an erotic Vampire thriller from 1983 based on a book written by Whitley Strieber (the man who brought us modern alien abduction with his book Communion, however, The Hunger, is decidedly fiction.) Some people have made this connection with Strieber and the video for Bowie’s song “Loving The Alien” where he suffers a nosebleed (something that happens to many abductees), to infer that Bowie was making a statement about alien abduction, but I bet he had a lot different inspirations for nosebleeds in his time that had nothing to do with extraterrestrials.

But the biggest of his roles was the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and made a new generation of little ladies fall in love with him.  However you feel today, this video of David Bowie dancing and singing with goblin muppets and a baby will put you in a good mood:

Some of his other roles that merit paranormal attention are Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (a controversial film in 1989, but almost tame now) and the strange ghost of an FBI agent in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

He was in a mediocre video game that had excellent music called Omikron: The Nomad Soul. I bought it for my Sega Dreamcast and Wendy bought it for her PC, but you can get it free right here until the end of the week. A science fiction-y 1984 or Brave New World, Bowie was helping your character escape mechanical oppression.

His last really memorable role was that of the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla (himself deserving of his own episode!) in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige.

But that’s a great way to remember David Bowie, just like in The Prestige. When he shows up in the film, you’re like “Aw yeah, it’s David Bowie doing something weird and cool!” That’s the kind of reaction that he got out of me whenever I saw him because he was always doing something weird and cool (except for the “Dancing in the Street” video with Mick Jagger, but hey, nobody’s perfect.) He was even able to do the impossible was even able to turn what should be a lame Pepsi commercial into a totally sweet Frankenstein homage where he creates, and then sings and dances, with Tina Turner.

Making anything he touched into something cool, now that’s a talent that we can remember and appreciate.

For this episode’s song, we decided to forego an original track and the week that David Bowie passed on, we sang a tribute to him at our Sunspot concert at Shank Hall in Milwaukee. We did an acoustic version of the Ziggy Stardust song, “Starman”, and we had someone in the audience record it “bootleg-style” and play it in the podcast.

“Starman” – music and lyrics by David Bowie

Didn’t know what time it was and the lights were low
I leaned back on my radio
Some cat was layin’ down some rock ‘n’ roll ‘lotta soul, he said
Then the loud sound did seem to fade
Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase
That weren’t no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive

There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’s told us not to blow it
‘Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
He told me
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie

I had to phone someone so I picked on you
Hey, that’s far out so you heard him too!
Switch on the TV we may pick him up on channel two
Look out your window I can see his light
If we can sparkle he may land tonight
Don’t tell your poppa or he’ll get us locked up in fright

There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’s told us not to blow it
‘Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
He told me
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie

There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’s told us not to blow it
‘Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
He told me
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la