And it hits me, Oh my gosh, this is at triangle. You
know, there's explanation for everything that occurred in the Randallsham pars and concident.
It doesn't involve aliens at all. It was completely silent. It comes right
over our heads. Classic bodies also really standing into clearing. He turned over
to my father and held his hand, and he looked in his eyes and
said, we're not alone. Welcome to podcast UFO for our live show.
We're live every Wednesday at eight pm Eastern Standard Time on the Dark Matter Radio
Network. Please remember to visit the website podcast ufo dot com for past episodes,
blogs and forums. During the show, feel free to participate live in
our chat room, and don't forget to like us on our very active Facebook
page. Hello everyone, and welcome to the show. This is Martin.
Willis your host, and we've got a great show. It's free for everybody,
two hours long. I'll get into that in just a minute. Hondro
Rojas is coming up with the news shortly, but first of all, I
want to talk about the get joyride dot com platform. They were bought by
Google and for some reason, Google does not want to keep it going.
So that is being shut down at the end of this month, and so
because of that, I'm giving out free shows until I have an alternative plan
as far as subscribing for the second part of the show. And we have
a listener who's going to help out and his name is Sam Bosell, and
I am very grateful to him for he's going to show us away on how
to do it. And so another little bit of housekeeping is I'm going to
be off taking my first vacation since i started the show back in two eleven,
and I'm going over to Russia for a couple of weeks and I am
not going to be able to do the show from there. Next week we
have a prerecorded show and it's a great one and I've it's already, it's
in the can, ready to go. We have a doctor Eric Farouk.
He's going to be talking about UFO trace evidence that he was trying to get
taken serious by the scientific community and get it published, but no one took
him seriously. He then wrote a book. He's a great interview. He's
in the UK and secondly, one of my all time favorites will have Class
Spawn. He is the director of International research and of the Sweden UFO great
guy. He'll be on so those that's coming up next week. Again this
week we have Mark O'Connell. He's written Star Trek episodes, one of the
ones that we're in the top one hundred of all episodes, and he also
has high strangeness. UFO dot Com is going to be a great guest coming
up for the full two hours. And I want to thank everyone that has
been supporting the show and hold tight. We'll be back with some other type
of platform. And that's enough me babbling. How are you all, ajndro,
How was your holiday weekend? It was wonderful? I am. I
am wonderful because of it. That remains to be seen by the way,
Yeah, well we'll see, I think so. I am pretty sure that
everyone will agree. But yeah, I was on the beach in San Diego.
The weather was great. I jumped around in the waves, I flew
a kite. I just had a lot of fun. Right when is the
weather not good? I mean, every time I've ever been to San Diego
it's been like perfect. I know, in the winter, but I hope
they do soon. Yeah, well, you know, last time we were
there, they got a little bit of ring because I was there only like
about a month ago, where I spent the week. I actually got to
hang out with Ben Hanson, my friend, for a day, and but
this time was a short trip. You know, it's only like I have
our drive, so we try to get there often. But the weather.
What was funny is it just so happened that one of my coworkers, it
was her, she spent a week out there as well. When we got
back, I was talking about how wonderful it was, and she's like,
oh, it was so hot. It's miserable, and are you I'm like,
are you kidding? Or from Arizona? I didn't feel hot at all.
So sometimes people say it was a little hot, I didn't see it.
So every time I've been out there, the weather is phenomenal and it's
a lot of fun, and so I absolutely had a blast. Yea,
yep, one of your favorite places any you know, Yeah, that whole
area, it's just beautiful. But I wanted to tell you about Russia.
Oh okay, when you go out there, just because I'm not sure if
you're aware of all the politics going on, but I think it would be
best if you not share any state secrets, okay, because the Cold War
is supposed to be over, but there's tensions. It's not really over.
You know, there's a lot of tension going on. We've got these um
tariffs and things going on. It's it's very tense frelations and just don't get
too comfortable, watch your back. Hopefully everything will be fine, but you
might have one of these twenty ten like the movie situations where you know you're
in Russia and then things go really bad. Yeah, there's just so many
people predicting you hear you hear it on all over, you know, in
different shows. How I think you know, mid September there's going to be
this major meltdown and asteroids coming at the end of the month. So and
I'm going to be there from the basically from the fifteenth through the thirtieth.
So I'm going to be there when the asteroids hit and when the economics melt
Yeah, all of that junk. I'm not so sure about all of that.
Well, but you know, there could be some curse words exchanged over
the telephone between Obama and Putin and that could upset people. But if Putin,
you know, really gets huffy and you know he decides to keep you
guys at hostage or something. My advice. I think he seems like the
type of person that flattery goes everywhere with him. You know, it's one
of those things. Tell him how great his muscles are, how great he's
looking at, what a great job he's doing. And you'll probably be Okay,
so you're way too sexy for your shirts. Yeah, yeah exactly.
He'll be like, oh really, oh yeah, yeah, okay, I'll
keep that in mind. I just advice I don't get stuck living at the
airport or something. Yeah. Wow, anyway, soul, let's let's move
into the UFO news for this week UFOs. So, I wanted to give
an update because I did write a story before I left to San Diego with
an update on the Homeland Security UFO stuff, and I wanted to get this
out there. I was waiting, actually, because I didn't even include this
in the story, and I really should have. But I did email Customs
and Border Patrol, the local PR guy, and he said, okay,
yeah, let me get you a statement. Never heard back from him.
Emailed him and I said, hey, are you still getting me a statement?
Haven't heard anything. So I was surprised I heard from him at all,
but it seems they're not willing to share any information about this video.
However, I have heard from We've heard from a couple of people, so
we've alluded to this and that there's this Aeronautical and Astronautical association in France called
three AF. We've talked to them about them before and about how they assist
the French UFO organization and also the Chilean organization SEA and investigating UFOs. They
did get back with these guys, the sd Society or the FOR or the
Scientific Coalition for Ufology, the guys who investigated the Puerto Rico video, and
they said that they liked their findings. They thought they did a great job
with their report, and they also don't have an explanation. And then Billy
Cox talked with doctor Richard Hayes, who what used to be a NASA research
scientist and who also investigates UFOs. He doesn't like the term UFOs, he
doesn't use it. He uses the term anomalous phenomenon. And he runs a
group called NARCAP that look at this whole thing about more from the perspective of
air safety. But he liked the video too, and the investigation. He
doesn't know what it was, and he just thinks it deserves more research as
well. And so those are some of the experts you know that have communicated
are given an opinion. There's also another one that I've been in touch with
and has been in touch with the group. He doesn't want to use his
last name, or his position or the company he works for at least and
because he's afraid of his career getting affected. And he works with a whole
group of guys that are fleaar technicians. They work on the exact systems that
you took this video. He says he's viewed thousands of hours of live and
recorded video and him and his buddies don't know what the heck this is either
in this video. In fact, he says, they discussed this video quite
a bit in the office. None of them, unfortunately, are brave enough
to come forward because they say it could, you know, negatively hurt their
career. But I did ask him about some of the responses out there,
such as Mark D'Antonio MUFON's photo and video and analysts that perhaps the object was
a balloon. He thinks they measured their speed wrong, but this expert says,
there's no way it's a balloon. It's too hot, so, in
other words, the object's very dark, and the other objects in the video
that are hot are also dark. That's the whole thermal imaging thing and how
it works. So he says it's definitely not a balloon. It doesn't move
like balloons that he's seen, and it's too hot, so he didn't believe
it to be a balloon. The other person who had a theory is Chris
Pajani. She's a paranormal researcher and she has a site called you Debunked It,
So she believed she debunked this video and was able to see that it
was a bird and various reasons. She thought again like Mark, that they
got the speed calculations wrong, but she says you can see flapping, and
she had some other things that she pointed out. Again though this Dave the
the expert, says he does agree with her about some of her points about
the calculations with bead. He doesn't think it's it's possible to be precise about
how fast this object was going. However, he says he still doesn't believe
it's a bird, he says, you definitely would have seen the wings he
took. He sent me a picture of some birds you can see where their
shape is very apparent, and it's not their wings are not cooler than the
body. You know, there's been a great difference and temperature, so you
can't see the entire body of the birds. But he puts in other aspects
such as the movement of the object that shows it's not a bird, because
birds fly in a particular way and this thing moves steadily along. So he
just says, him and his buddies at the shop, they say they know
these sort of systems better than anybody, and it's not, you know,
anything that they've seen before. And I was able to verify, by the
way, Dave, I do know his last name. I was able to
verify he is who he is. I've seen his resume, I've found him
referenced online. And this guy really is an expert. He is the type
of person who, in fact, the level of expertise he's rated at is
kind of a level where this is a kind of guy that could build his
own system. He's just that much of an expert. So so, yeah,
really interesting stuff. So it you know, the debate goes on,
and I think what's great is people like doctor Haynes and the three AF and
this Flare expert are coming in and it's just rare because we don't always have
expert opinion. Often it's online, you know, researchers, amateurs for lack
of a better word, not to disparage their work, because a lot of
people do some great work, but usually we have amateurs. It's great to
have some experts actually looking into this stuff and giving some responses. So exciting
it is, and it will be fun to just see where this thing goes.
I mean, we've been talking about it for a while. It's really
quite amazing. And I can't personally see anything about a bird in that myself,
but I understand about the speed part of it. Because of the way
the maneuvering was happening. It would be awful hard to actually calculate the speed,
I think, yeah, and that's what Dave says. It would be
very difficult. However, you know, if you read the report, the
section where they did calculate the speed, it's some very interesting work they did
there, and they do thoroughly, you know, demonstrate how they determined speed.
But even if they are off, it doesn't appear as though they're off
much. But it's difficult to say. But yeah, really interesting, like
you said, and you know, if this is you know what it is.
If nobody is able to come up with any arguments against their findings,
still it might not go anywhere. I mean Robert Powell who was a part
of this group, he did the radar report of the Stephenville UFO siding,
which is never after years it has not been disputed. Then you have cases
like Chicago O'Hare another great case that's that fairly recent. But you know,
no, you just it doesn't go anywhere. I mean, we all know
about it, We learn about it. People talk about it periodically as a
great case. But that's about it. Speaking of O'Hare, I am waiting
for the day that someone that worked at that airport, that saw that that
changed their career and you know, or doing something else, will come forward
and actually talk about that. All those people were anonymous in that, and
I would love if someone would actually come forward. Maybe they have no interest
in doing that, but hopefully someone will. It would be great if they
did. It was only seven years ago, so I think, you know,
pretty much. When you're in that career, you're you're there for your
career, so it might just take someone retiring. But then again, you
know, not to be well, to be cynical, and I don't mean
to be cynical, but unfortunately we see this ever so often. You know,
someone could retire and then we have a situation like we've seen before where
someone retires and they're they're really old and they finally come forward, but they
say, oh, yeah, that was an alien and the aliens landed and
I checked the aliens baggage, so I know those aliens. And then you
know, they exaggerate and add stuff, which just hurts the credibility of the
whole story. So yeah, we'll see what happens. Hopefully someone does come
forward. You know what, I realized we have talked as long as we
usually do for our news I can't believe it. Yeah can I can?
I keep going now? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's
go. I'll be quick, okay, oh right, yeah, right,
next story. Well, the next story is Exeter, which is not a
news story. It's an old story. In fact, it's a fifty year
old story. It happened in nineteen sixty five. But the anniversary was just
in September third, and we had a great story written by an author named
Eric Hoffman submitted to the website. He's written for us before, and he
did a great job of telling in a concise manner the story of the Exeter
siting and the investigation. So I just wanted to remember it here. There
was also last weekend a festival near you that unfortunately I know you didn't make
it too, but that memorializes the event. But this is a great case,
and just for those who don't know much about it, this happened in
Exeter, New Hampshire. It started when this young man, Norman Muscalero,
was hitch hiking home after seeing his girlfriend. He had recently graduated from high
school. It was the middle of the night, it was like two o'clock
in the morning, and he was going to join the navy, so he's
going into the service soon. So he had seen, you know, his
girlfriend in Amesbury, Massachusetts, was on his way home, hitchhiking his way
home. But he was walking at this point when at two am he saw
these five bright red lights flashing in the woods and they started moving towards him.
He was so frightened, he jumped into a ditch. At that point,
you know, he noticed they eventually moved further away from him. So
he ran to this nearby farmhouse and knocked on the door, but nobody was
home. He then saw somebody in the street, so he runs to the
street, stops the car, makes them let him in the car, and
tells them to drive him to the police station. When he gets to the
police station, he talks to an officer, Reginald Tollan, who knows Muscalero
and you know, new him as an honest young man with high integrity,
so he took him seriously. He got on the radio and called the other
officers and said, hey, does anybody know anything about this weird report.
There's a man named Eugene Bertrand another officer who was in the area, and
he said, you know, some woman said had reported to him that she
witnessed a huge object with red flashing lights that followed her car for twelve miles.
So Bertrand comes into the police station, picks up Muscalero, and they
go investigate where Muscalaro had seen the UFO. When they get there, sure
enough, they see this gigantic triangular craft coming out of the forest and it
had red flashing lights on it. Bertrand was so freaked out he pulled his
gun. I guess it was just instinct he had, but he reholstered it
and said let's get in the car. And they got back in the car
and they waited there while this thing hovered over them. They called for backup
and a man, an officer, David Hunt, came to the scene.
He also saw the object and soon after Hunt came to the scene, it
slowly flew off over the woods until it was out of sight. So a
really interesting sighting by police officers and everything. There was a very thorough investigation
and Hoffman does a great job summarizing that investigation. But essentially, you know,
the Air Force came up with a lot of excuses. There's a book,
a couple of books written about it. Raymond Fowler investigated it and wrote
a book about it. So but essentially, you know, they felt that
all of the explanations fell through. In fact that at one point the Air
Force said, okay, you know it's not what we said it was.
You know, we know it and we know that one of the responses we
gave is it's not possible given the witness testimony. So that one was a
case that was the refueler story where they had this the tanker that was supposed
to be flying a refueler above. They were saying that, you know,
that was one of the debunking or the attempt to debunking it. Yeah,
it's one of the great I think it's one of the great stories, one
of the one of the solid stories out there that that you do here.
I would certainly think it's in the top, you know, fifty stories.
Anyway, agreed, it's a really good case, and so it's an interesting
story and if people are not aware of this case, they should check it
out because it's a really interesting case. I went on the website oh months
ago to see when this UFO festival was this year, and I totally got
the date wrong. I missed it, so I really wanted to go.
But there's also a one going on in New England in October sixteenth, it
is pretty sure, and I'm going to be out that way to see a
good friend, Mark D'Antonio. He'll be there. Hey Mark, we're just
talking about him, yeah a minute ago. I'm so glad he's doing well.
Yeah, No, getting one more story about one more story you had
mentioned earlier about Helen Brimstone coming this month and we're all gonna die or something
like this, And this story is some evidence to back up your your crazy
claims. Um, this is we're not my claims. Just to get that
clear. Yeah, okay, um, But this is a giant fireball that
was videotaped over Thailand. So a lot of people caught it on video from
Bangkok and the surrounding area, and yeah, it's a really cool video of
this giant fireball in the sky. Pretty cool. In fact, one of
the towns northeast of Bangkok got so freaked out that they thought it was a
plane ashing and they dispatched over a hundred rescue workers to go find out what
was going on. I don't know what these guys were doing because there was
nothing found on the ground. I guess they were looking for something. But
the news came that there was no report of a crash plane and it was
believed to be a meteorite, and so the search was called off. But
it's kind of interesting. The Bangkok Post posted a compilation video of some of
the videos that people had gotten and it's like everybody. I don't know what
it is. All the mopeds have cameras on them because most of like five
out of these six videos are people on mopeds, which is just kind of
funny. I don't know what's going on. I think that's a pretty anomalous
phenomena on its own, but yeah, it's a very interesting video. What's
funny too, is people have been given me a little bit of heck because
I said a mysterious fireball caught on video. They're like, it's not mysterious,
it's a meteorite. But actually there is a mystery because nobody can agree
what it is. The local Bangkok astronomer and a local Bangkok was contacted the
planetarium there and they said they didn't think it was a meteorite because they didn't
have any reporports of it. They didn't have any records of one happening,
and they suggested maybe it's a burning balloon. Interesting enough, weird however.
Phil Platt a former NASA Hubble space telescope guy. You read him a lot,
He does a lot. He's a very he's a skeptic really, so
he writes about UFOs and not in a positive manner often, but he said,
it's definitely a meteorite because it happened so quickly. However, the Bangkok
Post looked up on this website sat view anything that could have been re entering
and they found that there it was likely space junk. That at that time
there was supposed to be a rocket falling back into the atmosphere, So they
say it's most likely space junk. But so those people who are giving me
heck can tell me, oh, it's obviously a meteorite. I don't know.
I think if you look here and I put a link to it,
because the Bangkok Post put a link, you can clearly see that at that
time there was some space junks supposedly supposed to be re entering the atmosphere.
So most likely it was space junk or a meteorite, and probably not a
balloon on fire. But it's very shocking video. So it's really cool,
right, Yeah, and all that can be seen in our show notes,
all links that we'll go back to Open Minds dot TV. Well, it
looks like you're going to have the next couple of weeks off while I have
the next couple of weeks off. Yeah, yeah, well that's a I'm
gonna miss talking to you, and if the world should end before your return,
and this is the last show, I just want to say that it's
been fun and I've had a great it's been a great run. I think
I'm getting terry eyed here now for the show and humanity. Yeah, same
here. Now I might actually be on your show while I'm in Russia.
That's possible because the timing can work better. I'm not going to be on
my own show in the middle of the night, but it's possible. I
can record with you and it'll be a lot of fun. That will be
awesome, So I'm looking forward to that. I really hope we can make
that work. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Aljundro and we'll be
talking to you soon. My pleasure. I talk to you soon. All
right, hanging everyone for the quick music break. We'll be right back with
Mark O'Connell. I'm here. If you didn't get my last message, how
are you, Mark, I'm good, Thanks, good, good, Welcome
to the show. Thank you, it's good to be here. Yes,
So who is Mark O'Connell. I know Kurt Kurt, a mutual friend former
guests on the show, was telling you you'd be a great guest, and
you have quiet background, and I want to talk about that about your Star
Trek episode, so that you've written about all that your website High Strangeness UFOs
dot com. But first of all, who is Mark and how did you
get interested in the subject to begin with? Well, Mark is a writer
who lives in southern Wisconsin, and I have been interested in science fiction as
far back as I can remember. One of my very first memories was of
the early nineteen sixties. I was born in nineteen sixty and there was a
very famous science fiction TV show on the air in nineteen sixty two through I
think sixty four called The Outer Limits, and I can remember very vividly.
For some strange reason that I still don't understand, my mom liked to watch
that show. And here's a little, you know, two or three year
old me. I was terrified of the monsters. They had some really scary
monsters on that show, but I was fascinated, and I guess that's kind
of what hooked me. And I can then remember a few years later when
the original Star Trek went on the air. I was just in heaven because
here was this fantastic new science fiction show. But there was. There was
one problem. I had a very strict bedtime and Star Trek went on the
air a half hour before my bedtime. But it was an hour long show.
So I can remember. I can remember begging my mom, pleading with
her to just let me stay up a half an hour longer on Thursday nights
so I could watch the whole Star Trek episode. And then it's kind of
a funny theme. Then I can remember when I was about ten years old,
there was a British TV show called UFO that in Milwaukee was aired Saturday
nights at six pm. Well, our family had dinner Saturday night at exactly
six thirty pm every Saturday. And again it was an hour long show.
So every Saturday I started watching UFO and I had to miss the second half.
It wasn't until I was, you know, much later and got to
get the shows a UFO on DVD that I was able to actually watch the
second halves of all the episodes of UFO. I just pulled that UFO show
up and I do remember it myself. It's a fun show. It's a
funch show. So I have a long history. And then and the other
part of it was that my mom was also. It's funny how my mom
is such a big player in this story. She was a volunteer librarian in
the small town where I grew up, a big Ben, Wisconsin, and
she would take me into the library with her sometimes and I would for some
reason, I just always gravitated towards the science fiction section. It was.
It was a very small library. They couldn't have had more than about twenty
science fiction books, but I probably read them all. And Yeah, like
I said, I was just hooked. I've been a lifelong fan ever since.
And so did you just pursue a writing career? Basically, yeah,
I knew I wanted to. I knew I wanted to be involved in filmmaking
or TV in some way. Spent some time in California, kind of learned,
learned a few hard lessons that way. Ended up signing with an agent
when Star Trek the Next Generation came on in the late nineteen eighties, I
think eighty seven is when it premiered. I got a got a script that
got noticed at Star Trek the Next Generation and that led to me. They
invited me to pitch story ideas, which I did. From Wisconsin, a
lot of people flew out to LA I couldn't really afford that. I was.
I had a couple of young kids, and I couldn't really be flying
off to California every couple of months to pitch stories, not knowing if I
would actually sell one or not. And in the end it took me about
you know, it took me probably half a dozen tries before I finally hit
them on the right day with the right idea and made my first sale,
and then and then made made four more four more sales to them over the
next few years. Wow, And one of them ended up being I mentioned
earlier. It was one of the top shows, wasn't it. Yeah,
that was kind of a kick. Last year, a Hugo Award winning science
fiction author Charlie Jane Anders, who writes for the website io nine dot com,
she put together a really fun list of what she considered the top one
hundred Star Trek episodes. So she included all seven hundred sum episodes of the
original series, the animated series from the early nineteen seventies, and then of
course Deep Space nine and Next Generation and Voyager and Enterprise, And of that
one hundred, one of my episodes was number seventy two. It was called
Humourns for Morn and it was it was a huge kick. I was very
I was very honored to make it on that list because there were a lot
of great, great episodes on that list. We have a mutual friend,
Kurt Collins, who's been on this show, oh maybe three times or so.
He's he's a serious researcher and he wouldn't have recommended you for this show
unless you were a serious person. So I want to talk about that,
or what is your involvement with UM? Have you done some researching yourself with
move On or something like that. Yeah, And I would like to just
thank Kurt for recommending me to you. I've Kurt. Kurt's been a regular
reader of my blog and I always enjoy his comments and his insights. He's
a very interesting guy, he is, and I'm glad. I'm glad to
be online acquaintances with him. M Yeah about you know, as a writer,
I'm always looking for interesting new things to write about, and in twenty
eleven, I was in one of those phases where I had nothing to work
on and I wanted to come up with something fun to occupy me. And
I have a good friend who has been editing a photoblog for many years and
it is very successful at it, And for for years and years he was
bugging me to start writing a blog. You just said, you'd be you'd
be terrific at it, you'd love it. Well. I could never think
of anything that I really was interested in enough that I would want to continue
writing about, you know, several times a week for weeks and months and
years, and until you know, I just remember, oh God, yeah,
UFOs. Of course, I've always been interested in that. I had
kind of lost touched with the field over the years. I hadn't really followed
all the things that have been going on over the last probably fifteen twenty years.
But um, you know, once I thought of writing a blog about
UFOs, the rest just kind of came naturally. I quickly realized that they
are a lot of very smart UFO bloggers and writers out there, and I
didn't really feel like I could compete with them. So I decided that I
would make my blog high strangeness, a little bit funny when the opportunity arose,
and to sort of portray myself as you know, a little bit of
a bumbler in the UFO field. So that's you know, some of that
is a bit of a stick although, but there's a lot of me that's
really comes through as well. But then when I started writing the blog,
I realized, Wow, I need a lot of stuff to write about.
And I just happened to be on Moufon's website one day and I saw the
button on their website that said become a certified UFO Field Investigator. And that's
when lightning struck. I thought, of course, I'll become a Moufon investigator
and I can write about that experience in the blog and that'll be a fun
writing project and hopefully it'll be of interest to some people. So that that
was the genesis of the whole thing four years ago, and so I became
a Moufon investigator. I've been doing that for a little over three years now,
and that's just been a continually fascinating experience um on so many levels.
I mean, it's fascinating just to hear these firsthand accounts of people who've seen
some really really unusual things. But it's also fascinating just to learn about the
kind of people who who report these experiences. You know, the psychology behind
it is really fascinating to me as well. So um, so yeah,
so that's kind of where I come in. I've been I've been an investigator
from mouf on for a little over three years. I am now the I'm
the assistant State director and the chief investigator for the state of Wisconsin. We
just brought on two new investigators, which which is a huge, huge relief.
That's been great because we were we were a little shorthanded for the last
year or so. But our State Director, Mike Lucas, does a fantastic
job and it's it's a lot of fun and it's and it's really like I
said before, it's just really fascinating work. Wow. Okay, if you're
listening live, you can jump in our chat rooms at podcast ufo dot com
and pose a question. You can also call in anytime during the show and
that number is six h three nine six seven four h three zero. Just
to let you know, Mark, we don't get a lot of call ins.
Maybe once a show someone might call in, so um, don't be
waiting for the phone to ring, Okay, but you'll see it come up.
Since you're in Skype, you will see it come up, and I
will take take the call. Of one does come in Oka and UM,
So getting back to um your your interests in the UFO Topicum, have you
actually seen UFO? Have you had a sighting yourself? When I when I
started writing the blog in the summer of twenty eleven, I have a couple
of sightings that I now think, well, I'm pretty sure one of them
was a Chinese lantern. Um. The other one I'm not so sure about
because it was stationary in the sky for as long as we watched it,
and my wife and daughter saw it at the same time, but we were
in a moving car and we were in a busy highway, so we didn't
have a chance to pull over and actually observe it. So I don't have
a whole lot of evidence to go on that one could have been a Chinese
lantern two, but it's but it's still a bit of an unknown for me.
But that's that's all I've seen. I'd love to see more, but
that's it so far. Those Chinese lanterns pissed me off. They are pesky
little buggers, aren't they They are? Yeah, that and drones and so
what what is the sightings like in Wisconsin? It's it's it's been kind of
up and down. Um this past year, I have had a whole string
of really puzzling historical cases. I've had a whole lot of people who have
decided, for whatever reason that something they saw twenty years ago or thirty years
ago was just really really rattling around in their head for too long and they
needed to finally tell somebody about it. I have a theory on that,
and oh what is it? And it's come up on a show before,
and that is a lot of people are watching this hanger one And you know,
I myself, I'm not going to critique the show too much. They
they let a lot of things go that I don't think should they should let
go as being real. But still I think that any show like that causes
awareness, and people are all around the country move On investigators are talking about
old cases are coming to light because people are watching that and they're deciding to
contact move On because it's so publicized in that show. And so that's why
the old, the old sightings are coming forth. Yeah, that's definitely been
been my experience, Martin. I've I've heard that from a lot of people
who they say, yeah, I was watching and sometimes it's Hanger one.
Sometimes it's one of the other shows, but they say, yeah, I
was I saw this show on TV and they showed something that looked a whole
lot like what I saw, And I suddenly realized, Hey, maybe other
people have seen the same thing, and that becomes a big driver for a
lot of these people. It has anybody else seen the same thing I saw?
So so yeah, it's an interesting chain reaction that kind of leads people
to report their cases. So yeah, the last year or so, lots
and lots of historic cases. The summer before that, the summer of twenty
fourteen, we actually had a little flap right here in south central Wisconsin,
right in my home county, Jefferson County. I had, within the space
of two months, I had I think five four or five sightings that were
very very similar. They weren't all on the same night, so it wasn't
seeing the exact same thing, but I had several reports spread over this time
period that were remarkably similar, reported by people who I am assuming didn't know
each other, and in most of the cases there were multiple witnesses. Most
three out of the four cases involved families where the husband and wife and at
least one of their kids saw what was in the sky. The fourth case
was a married couple. But the family cases I thought were really interesting because
the dynamic kind of carried out the same way. It was like the dad
saw it first, called the kid out, they called mom out, and
everybody saw it. And in one case in particular, the dad and the
sun hopped in their car to chase this thing down. And because their first
thought was it looked like people over on the next block, we're shooting laser
pointers up in the tree, So they thought, oh, that's kind of
interesting. Let's go see what's happening. So they got in their car and
drove around the block. While they couldn't see anything going on with their neighbors,
but they could still see this thing in the sky, only now it
seemed even further away. So they over the course of about forty five minutes,
they drove to three different spots here in town in our town, Fort
Atkinson, and then drove out of town and kept seeing this thing. And
what they saw was a white, glowing sphere that towards the end seemed to
be sort of wrapped in a cloudlike substance. But there were also some signs
of blue and orange lights around the sphere, and they watched it out on
this lonely highway outside of town for about fifteen minutes, and then it seemed
to start moving towards them, and they got very scared and high tailed at
home, and they never saw it again. So that was a real baffler
to have all those cases right here within like ten miles of where I live,
all take place in May and June of twenty fourteen, and all involving
really kind of similar I guess we could call them, you know, a
Heineck definition of meandering nocturnal lights. They were all the objects that were described
were all very similar. And then and then it abruptly stopped. You know,
we got to the end of June, there were no more reports.
Nobody ever saw anything like that again in our area, or at least nobody
reported it. Wow. Wow, good stuff. Historically, has there been
any major case that happened in Wisconsin that comes to mind? Yeah, one
just came up this summer that that um is is still being investigated. I
have to apologize. I've just I had a lot of life stuff going on
in the last month, so I've basically taken the last month off from blogging
and moof on work. So I'm a little rusty. You'll have to just
forgive me. But but yeah. Earlier this summer, a gentleman reported a
case that took place at a military base in central Wisconsin called Fort McCoy.
Took place in nineteen eighty. This gentleman was retired and living in I can't
remember, somewhere down in the southeast. We had a really fascinating talk.
He was very he seemed came off as very sincere on the phone. What
had happened was he had been stationed at Fort McCoy in nineteen eighty. When
the fort was used, this was not a combat for it. It was
a training base, and it was being used to house all these Cuban refugees
who had come over on the flotilla in nineteen eighty when Castro basically opened up
the prisons and let you know, let all the bad eggs loose, and
they all came over to the US. Well, you know, a couple
thousand of them ended up in Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. And this gentleman was
part of the battalion that had been brought in just to help patrol the base,
and at one point some of the refugees actually tore down a fence and
tried to escape, so this gentleman had to be part of a living wall.
They made a living fence to cover this part of the fence that had
been torn down. And one night he's out with fifty other guys in forming
this human chain, and it's his turn to go to sleep, and just
as he's getting into a sleeping bag, he sees this object appear from behind
the trees. It's roughly rectangular in shape, and it has He called it
a window, but then he said it wasn't really a window because he could
tell it didn't have glass in it. It was more of a force shield
covering this opening. But he could see two beings inside this window. And
as this object moved across the sky from right to left, it seemed to
him that the heads of these beings were turning as though they were watching him
as the craft went by. Then it disappeared behind the trees, and this
guy's lieutenant was standing right next to him when he saw this, and he
looked at his lieutenant, and his lieutenant just said, don't say a word.
Wow. And he went to bed. He got into a sleeping bag
and went to bed, and he said, Mark, that was one of
the strangest things about this whole story. He said, after this bizarre thing
I had just seen in the sky, I put my head on the pillow
and I fell into the deepest sleep I've ever had. He said. I
should have been wide awake and terrified. He said, I still can't understand
why I was able to fall asleep and sleep so soundly. So and there
are a lot of interesting details to this. He said that while he was
watching it, he looked up and down the line of his fellow infantrymen who
were forming this human wall, and he said they were all staring up at
it, and a lot of guys had cameras on them, and they were
taking pictures with the cameras. And then the next day when he got up
the next day, he asked his lieutenant. He said, well, should
we tell the colonel about this? And the lieutenant said, you are on
your own, don't. I don't. I don't want to know what you're
going to do. So they saw they saw the commander of the base at
breakfast, and this guy he went up and talked to the commander of the
base and he said, you know, I saw something very strange, you
know, out on the out on the perimeter last night, and I believe
a lot of the other guys did too. And the commander of the base
said, he said, I tell you what he said, if any of
the local papers report on it, then we will file an official report.
And this the guy who reported the case, he just he said, well,
of course the CEO knew that as long as we were doing this human
fence duty, none of us was ever going to see a local paper.
We were never you know, we had no chance to get off the base
and buy a local paper. So he said that was the CEO's way of,
you know, kind of cleverly just brushing it under the rud So but
what this guy did next was really interesting. He said, he said,
I still have the duty roster because he was he was the lieutenants he was
directed. I don't know the ranks I apologize to if they're military folks out
there. He was the aid to the lieutenant who was supervising the human wall,
so he sort of had the records and things. And he told me
I still have the duty roster from that night. And he said, I
always wonder if any of these guys could be contacted, if they would remember
anything. So he sent me a copy of the duty roster. We have
the duty roster, and I've been talking with my colleagues here at Wisconsin moufon
about, first of all, whether we can do anything with that information,
and if we can, then what is the best approach, because you know,
we would be contacting people about something that happened over you know, thirty
five years ago, and they may they may not want to talk about it.
They may not be happy that somebody you know, had their name and
called them. So so we've been a little stymied on that. It would
be really it would be It would be a really a big deal if we
could get some corroboration on it. But but it presents some ethical problems that
we haven't really quite been able to solve. But it's been a really fascinating
case. And the gentleman has as he's as he's um remembered more details.
He's been really great about sending more information about the experience. So it's a
it's it's his description is very detailed, UM and and in my eyes,
very very credible. UM. He really impressed me with his sincerity. He's
been sitting on this story for thirty five years. He's never told a soul
um, you know, outside of his commanders, and he you know,
he has absolutely nothing to gain by reporting the story. Now. He just
saw something on TV that reminded him of it, and he thought, oh
wow, I wonder if anybody else has seen anything like this, So wow,
we'll see that's that's probably the best one of this latest batch. Yeah.
It actually gave someone on the chat from goosebumps. They said, oh,
yeah, I felt the same way, believe me. Yeah. Well,
you know, you very very rarely hear about anyone seeing actual beings.
Um, there's probably only a handful of stories that I've heard about, and
you know, one of them, I don't know if you've ever seen the
video of the Turkey UFO over the sea. That one, Um, that
one shows what look looks like it could be beings and they're moving and everything.
Um, pardon me, Well, another thing, if I could just
elaborate a little more on this, on this gentleman's on this gentleman's story that
he told me. One of the things that I talked before about the psychology
of under understanding, you know, why people report things. Another another aspect
of that is, I'm really interested to hear how people expressed themselves and how
they describe things. And so there were certain things in this gentleman's story that
he was really he was trying so hard to described to me, but he
just couldn't come up with the word. Even after thirty five years, he
still couldn't come up with the right words to describe what he saw and what
he felt. For instance, this the window in the side of the craft
that he said wasn't really a window because he could tell there wasn't glass in
it. He you know, he was really struggling to come up with an
explanation for the force field or whatever it was that he thought thought was in
that in that hole. The other thing was that as this object moved past,
there was sort of there was sort of what looked like sort of a
rocket exhaust coming out of the end of it, but it wasn't really moving.
It was just sort of static. And he tried so hard to describe
this flame, this static flame to me, and after about a minute minute
and a half, he just gave up. He just said, he just
said, I just don't really know what else to tell you about it.
I'm not getting it across. I can't really explain exactly what I saw,
and I can't and I just can't come up with the right words. So
you know, in that case, he just gave up. He could not
figure out how to convey, you know, what he had seen. Question
on the message board, someone wants to know did he get into details when
he describing the beings? All he saw were silhouettes? In fact, he
sent when he sent me the duty rosters, he also sent me a sketch
that he had made, and I do have I have a scan of that.
I um, again, I apologize, I'm I'm coming into this a
little rusty. I don't have I don't have my I don't have visual aids
ready. But you know, maybe there's a way we can post this on
your website or some Actually I think I may have posted this on my blog,
but I can't remember. A lot of what I can do is if
there's something like this comes up in conversation, if you send me that scan,
I'll just put it right in the show notes for the list. Okay,
right, great, Well, so he did. He drew a very
detailed sketch of the object, and he and he drew the figures in silhouette,
and they look humanoid. It's sort of like the upper half of their
bodies maybe from about if I remember right, from about waist up maybe,
and you can see sort of the shapes of the shoulders in the shapes of
heads. So he didn't he didn't see any features, He didn't see any
skin or clothing or anything. He just saw a silhouettes. But he did
sense that the heads were moving in time with the motion of the craft,
so that they remained looking at him. But I also when he when he
described that to me, I thought, well, gosh, there were fifty
other people seeing the same thing. I wonder if it looked that way to
all the other men, because you know, all these men are basically in
a straight line that's running parallel to the trajectory of this object in the sky.
So you know, if if we were able to ever able to get
in touch with any of these other any of these other folks who were there
that night, it would be it would be interesting to see or to hear
how they perceived these beings inside the craft. I was looking through your blog
a little bit and I saw that you wrote on the what I call the
Atacoma Greers doctor Greer's Baby. Yeah, uh yeah, and uh, I
actually did a spoof on that when he was right before that movie came out,
so YouTube it needs to be spoofed. So let's let's uh, let's
touch on that a little bit. And not only that, I did promise
the listener that I would not keep bringing up the May fifth Mummy. But
in your opinion, Um, where do you think I actually think the Mummy
was worse for the UFO community, But I don't think I got a lot
of publicity. Um this, uh the movie serious, there's has all over
Netflix and everything else. So it's still you know, like ongoing, whereas
The Mummy is kind of quiet right now. But um, but there are
still people clinging on to saying that this is a what it it's still an
alien. Well, you know, supposedly there was going to be that film
Code of Chrome I was going to come out anytime now telling that whole story.
I haven't seen a Hydner hair of that, and I kind of doubt
that we will. Um. Yeah, that's a that's an interesting question.
And I remember now that I included that on one of my one of my
haha funny questions that I posted on my blog, how to comm a humanoid
or or um Roswell slide being um. I think, uh, you know,
because because there was a film associated with the outcome of Humanoid, because
it was so closely associated with the citizen hearing on disclosure, you know,
that was all sort of a big package deal the career, you know,
put together. I think probably at the time, yeah, I think that
probably made more waves than than the Mummy and the Roswell Slide. I think
the roswellt slide figure was maybe a little more insulated in UFO world. But
since you asked, since you bring it up, though, it kind of
makes me. It makes makes me think about how early in twenty fifteen there
was there was a whole string in January and February there's a whole string of
news stories about UFOs that really hit the big time. I mean, they
were getting big time coverage on the Today Show and CNN. There was,
first of all, there was um the someone the CIA tweeted that, you
know, the vast majority of UFO sightings in the US in the fifties and
sixties were because of their YouTube spy planes. Oh yes, you know that
that story got a lot of play. It's a it was a bizarre thing
for the CIA to be talking about. I still can't figure out why the
why they sent out that blog, but whatever, it got a lot of
attention. And then close on the heels of that was that episode where the
live video feed from the International Space Station was cut off supposedly moments after a
UFO appeared on screen. That story got a whole lot of coverage, and
it was kind of funny to see. It seemed as though the news outlets
that missed out on the first story all all just pounced on the next one
because they didn't want to lose out. And then after that, there was
that story with the Black Vault dot com where the gentleman who runs that website,
you know, got all that attention for saying, hey, I've just
released all one hundred thirty thousand pages of Project Bluebook files for free, when
in fact they'd all been aailable for free for a long long time already.
And that story got immense amount of publicity. So a couple months later,
you know, the the the event in Mexico City with the Roswell slides.
I have to wonder, you know, did we're members of the mainstream media
feeling like they had been burned on those first three stories and they just didn't
didn't want to touch it. I don't know. Maybe because it took place
in Mexico, people just kind of ignored it. I'm not sure. I
think that's the consensus of a lot of people is because it was in Mexico.
And I am actually very thankful for that, because, you know,
I just think that was very damaging or it could have been a lot worse.
You know, if it got a great amount of coverage, it would
be a real problem. I think. Yeah. And you know, I
haven't spoken to Don Schmidt at all since that happened, but from what I
understand, and this may be totally wrong, I don't know, but I
think he's still standing with the fact that he thinks that it's an alien.
Well, since you bring up mister Schmidt, your listeners will be the first
to learn that as of today, I have been challenged by Don Schmidt to
have a public debate on Roswell. Really, yes, it's kind of interesting.
It's just at the beginning of June I took part in the first ever
Milwaukee Paranormal Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Had a great time. The organizer,
T Crulos, is a writer who who had he put on this.
He put on this whole conference basically to celebrate the publishing of his book,
which if I remember right, it's over in the next year. I think
it's called Monster Hunters, where he basically did some investigative reporting where he spent
time He's spend time out in the trenches with UFO investigators and bigfoot investigators and
I think ghost hunters and wrote a book about his adventures. And he's a
he's a Wisconsin writer. So he put together this conference and true to his
book, he had people from all you know, he had cryptozoologists, he
had lockness, monster people, bigfoot people, zombie people. It was a
really entertaining It was a really entertaining day and with a lot of really fun
people involved, and it had a little bit, you know, it had
a little bit of something for everyone. But I gave one of the talks
in the UFO series, and then Don Schmidt gave a talk. He was
kind of the keynote address at the end of the evening. And this was
just about a month after the Mexico City fiasco. So so Schmidt's talk was
kind of he didn't make any outlandish claims, but he you know, he
just kind of sounded very defensive and kind of angry about everything that had happened,
and you know, probably has a good reason to feel that way.
But the so, the organizer of this event, he's he's already talked with
me about appearing at next year's event, which I'm I would will love to
do. But he just emailed me this afternoon and he said, hey,
Mark, I was talking with you know, one of the one of the
people who had helped me to put together the first conference. We were talking
about ideas for next year's conference, and we thought it would be fun if
we could get you and Don Schmidt to agree to have a debate on stage.
And he said, all of a sudden, today, out of the
blue, I get an email from Don Schmidt saying, Hey, I'll appear
at your next conference if I can have a debate on stage with Mark O'Connell.
So I'm feeling very flattered. I've just risen up in the ranks.
Now I'm going to be I'm gonna be on stage with Dan Schmidt, so
I wrote back to Tea and I said, yes, I am very interested.
I didn't give him, I didn't give him a complete yes, I
will do it because I'd need to know more about you know, what the
parameters of the debate will be and how it will be held. But you
know, assuming we can work out all the details and everyone's an agreement on
how how it'll happen, I think it would be a really I think it
would be a really fun and interesting event. Now, so what is your
take on Roswell in general? Besides let's just put the alien slide thing away
for right now, gladly. Yeah, my take on Roswell is that it's
a very entertaining story and it's possible that something, something very amazing happened,
but nobody has ever been able to prove anything, and pretty much the ticking
clock has run out. I think at the same time, if I would
be hard pressed to prove that nothing happened in Roswell, you know, I
don't think. I don't think Don Schmidt can prove that anything did happen,
and I don't think I would be able to prove that anything didn't happen.
So if that was the debate, it would be kind of boring and stalemate.
If on the if if if it was a debate about who knows more
about Roswell, Don Schmidt would win hands down. I mean, that's all
the guy does. He knows all the names and dates and places, and
you know, in incredible detail. UM I do not. You know,
I'm not a student of that case, UM not any more than I need
to be. So. So if so, if debate, the debate was
either one of those two formats, I would have some problems with it.
So I think if we can come up with some aspect of Roswell where you
know, there's clearly defined that you can either be pro or con h you
know, I think we can work something out. But so, but I'm
giving you a much longer answer than you've asked for. I think I think
it's a really fun story. It's a really entertaining story. But I don't
know that it's anything more than that, because again, nobody's proven anything.
They've been all these smoking guns over the years that have turned out to be
nothing. UM, I just don't to me, there are a lot more
interesting cases. You know, there's there's a war the Warren Minnesota case.
I think I'm getting that right with the sheriff's deputy deputy who's whose squad car
was essentially attacked by a UFO. And that police car is sitting in a
museum in northern Minnesota with its with its dented hood and cracked windshield and burned
out lights. That's that's physical evidence right there. Why isn't anybody paying any
attention to that? See? For my money, that's a case that should
be investigated, and yet it just sits there getting completely ignored. Um,
I don't know, It's it's a funny business. It's hard to explain things
like that. Yeah. Well, we're at the top of the hour,
and generally speaking we take a break here, but I'm going to keep going.
And this show generally at second hour by subscription, but the show is
going to be free so to everyone. So we're just going to move on.
We're on the line with Mark O'Connell, and if you want to call
in at six O three nine six four h three zero, or if you
want to ask a question, you can jump in the chat room at podcast
UFO dot com. Hete Martin, Can I ask a question? Yeah?
Sure, go ahead. I don't mean to derail the conversation because I love
everything we've been talking about, but there's something that I want to ask this
in my blog. It's actually I have kind of already asked you to my
blog, but I'd love to ask you to your listeners too. My dad,
who turns ninety in November and has been on six continents, has always
wanted to get to the seventh continent, Antarctica, and a couple of weeks
ago he surprised our entire family by announcing that he is taking me and four
of my siblings to Antarctica this December. And it's going to be an amazing
trip and I'm going to see things in the sky that I've never seen before,
probably never will again. And I would love to know if there are
any I mean, of course, we all know about Hitler's secret UFO base
under the ice Tarctica. Of course I'll look for that, yeah, Um,
But but I want to know if there are any other stories involving I
mean, we'll we'll be in Buenos Aires, we will be in Tierra del
Fuego. Um, if anybody knows of stories attached to those places and to
Antarctic, I would love to hear them because I'd love to know more about
what kinds of things are seen in that part of the world. Wow,
that's that's really something Your father at ninety years old, that's amazing. Good
for him. He's quite a guy. Yeah, he must be. He
must be. Um Well, moving on about Roswell. The one thing that
in that case in particular, that um it's I don't think it's a case
that's going to die away at any anytime soon anyway. And you know,
a lot of times myth does become reality. There's a lot of times where
you'll see like a UFO show and it'll talk about something that you know that's
was a myth and that they make it seemed like it really did happen,
that type of thing. But the one thing that always puzzles me about Roswell
the most is why on Earth would the Army Air Force say they captured a
disc. I just can't understand any way that they could get that wrong before
they publicized it. And so that alone makes that case I think really important
and something I agree. There are a lot of really fascinating questions around it.
Some of the questions I have are I like to look at the totality
of the UFO phenomena and experience, and look at what are some of the
other things that UFO witnesses have experienced. People have experienced missing time, people
have experienced apparitions that seem to appear from other dimensions, that sort of appear
and disappear at will in our dimensions. And if we consider all of those
things as things that could apply to any UFO citing anywhere, then I always
have to look at Roswell in terms of, well, even if they're dumb
enough to fly halfway across the universe or transfer from another dimension and still not
be able to nail the landing. Even if they're that dumb, which I
have a hard time believing, why wouldn't they have a cleanup crew show up
immediately and sweep up the debris so that mac Brazil didn't have anything to find.
That, to me is just defies all belief. Why would there be
any wreckage there at all? Or why wouldn't they manipulate late time so that
the crash never happened. I mean, if you really want to start applying
things that people have reported in other UFO cases, then suddenly you've got a
million different ways for how that Roswell story could have gone, and you have
to ask, why didn't it go any of those ways? Why instead are
we supposed to believe that it actually unfolded in this really kind of pedestrian way
dictated by our laws of logic and reality, when every other case kind of
you know, plays out in a completely different way. That's kind of the
big issue I have with Roswell. I understand part of that, a good
part of that, and well, one thing I have to say about the
crashing part of it, and is that no matter where, like to say,
if we were traveling space, if we ever can get that advance without
blowing everyone up, and we're traveling space, well, if we come into
a relatively primitive society, a primitive technology, perhaps you know, people have
speculated maybe they weren't ready for a radar bouncing off of their electromagnetic propulsion or
whatever it was that could have possibly made them crash. Maybe there are things
radio waves or just something that they wouldn't expect and have a natural defense against,
or something like that. I mean, the whole thing is, the
more you look into it, the more of a mystery it all becomes.
And it's all speculation, and that's kind of why I like doing the show.
It's a lot of ideas and speculation, getting to hear from other people
like yourself and what their ideas are on the whole thing. So go ahead.
I was just gonna say, I have a tagline on my blog that
says, ambiguity is more convincing than certainty, and I really when it comes
to UFOs, I really truly believe that ambiguity makes it more believable to me.
I don't really know how to explain that because it's counterintuitive, but it
sounds as though you kind of feel the same way on a certain level.
Mmm. Have you ever looked the one thing that someone just brought it up
on the message board that is interesting is also the memo that is being held
in trying to remember who was holding it in their hand when they were handling
the debris, Marcel Jesse. Marcel was holding a memo. Yeah, that
was they've been trying to clear up, you know, through filters and through
technology, trying to clear up what the memo was actually saying. Have you
looked into that at all? That's interesting. I've only looked into it a
little bit, and only insofar as I thought, it was a bit strange
that the same people who were saying that enhancing the placard in the Roswell slides
was kind of a dirty trick and couldn't be trusted, those very same people
seemed to be turning around and saying, yeah, that memo held by,
you know, help held held by? Was it the Ramy memo? That's
what we're talking about, right, Yeah, these are the same people who
are saying, well, well, we've digitally enhanced that memo and we can
read exactly what it says. No, you can't have it both ways.
If you can digitally enhance one to see what it really says, then you
can digitally enhance the other. And likewise, if you can't digitally enhance one,
then you probably can't digitally enhance the other. So my only contact with
the Ramy memo just comes from that kind of that annoyance with me that of
course I wrote about it in my blog. I just thought, and the
words that apparently can be read on the Ramy memo don't really mean a whole
lot desire to fall, so I don't put a whole lot of document.
Yeah, it seems like they should be able to even enhance it as we
go along. You know, wait, everything always gets better and better.
Maybe eventually they'll be able to get the full text out of that. I
wanted to I wanted to mention something that you were just talking about though about
about how these storylines get reinforced in in popular culture. I've been thinking a
lot about that lately because my wife and I have been watching The X Files
all the way through. We're at the beginning of season three. Not neither
one of us ever watched it in the nineties. I don't even know why.
I don't even I don't have an excuse. I was a sci fi
fiend. I have no idea why I didn't watch that show, but I
didn't. So now we're watching it, and you know, starting a season
three, we're really starting to get into the whole Alien, the whole disclosure
conspiracy storyline, and it's a lot it's it's it's silly in a lot of
ways, but it's also a lot of fun. It's good entertainment. But
I've I've really been enjoying the way the writers of The X Files kind of
kind of used those storylines, like the Roswell narrative kind of used them to
their own ends to create their own mythology, but at the same time kind
of validated the mythology surrounding the original story. You know, when Mulder says
something about Roswell in an episode of The X Files, you know, twenty
five or thirty million people are watching that, and how many of those people
are saying, aha, Mulder believes that it must be true, you know,
And so you've got this sort of circular reinforcement of the mythology while creating
new mythology. It's I if I was a social scientist, I would be
digging into this like crazy. I think it's really fascinating. And there's a
really funny line in one of the season one episodes with Deep Throat and Mulder.
They're talking about something to do with an alien crash and Mulder says,
oh, Roswell, and Deep Throat just kind of gives him this really kind
of dismissive look, and he says, he's like, oh, forget Roswell.
Roswell's smoking mirrors. He goes, we have we have many many better
crash sites than Roswell. That line just cracked me up, because you know,
it's probably there's probably an elemented truth of that, even though it was
just written as a line in a TV show. Right, right, let's
talk about disclosure. What do you think about disclosure? I've said this before
in my blog. It seems to me that if disclosure was really a thing,
then it's up to the aliens to decide. The Aliens can show themselves
to us anytime they want. They're not going to wait for a decision by
any earthly government. That just makes no sense to me. And I actually
I went to a talk by Richard Goland a couple of years ago to move
on meeting and I asked him that. I just said, isn't it up
to the aliens? And he just looked at me and he said, well,
they haven't done it yet, have they, So apparently it's not.
And I thought, well, that's that's not very sound logic. Just because
they haven't yet doesn't mean they can't. It just means they haven't yet.
So no, I'm not a big fan of disclosure. I think it's I
think it's like I said, the aliens. Assuming the aliens exist, they
hold all the cards here. Why would it be up to world governments who
are essentially powerless against them? The aliens can do whatever they want whenever they
want, so, yeah, it's in their hands. Yeah, I agree
with you on that. I think that if they wanted to show themselves,
they could definitely do that. And you know, and then but there may
be many reasons why they don't. You know, maybe they don't want to
interfere with the social growth of our society being left alone or who knows what.
And you know, one thing I bring up all the time, who
knows what they are? Anyway? You know a lot of people are seeing
something definitely can't be explained. You know, people throughout numbers like five percent
of UFOs are unexplainable or whatever it is you know, somewhere around there.
But the fact if it was just one you know, to me means that,
you know, we are being visited by something unexplainable and we may never
even know what it is, and we may have a total wrong idea about
what it is. Yeah, and I agree completely and I personally am completely
comfortable with that, you know that. And again it goes back to my
little catchphrase of ambiguities more convincing than certainty. I don't have to know what
it is. And and some of that believe it has been reinforced by the
work I've done researching the work of doctor j Allen Heineck for the biography I'm
writing of him. Oh, I want to talk about that, but before
we do, I just want to I want to get this question out because
this gentleman asked a while back, what real life UFO based mythology have you
used for inspiration in your own writings for TV, etc. Oh that's a
that's a great question I have. Um, I have an unsold script.
I never actually wrote the full script, but wrote a very detailed story treatment,
and this was probably about i'm gonna say ten or twelve years ago.
That actually had a lot to do with Area fifty one and the idea that
the United States government is keeping captured alien spaceships under wraps at Area fifty one.
So you know old story. It's it's been used a million times and
it will be used a million times. Before this actually came about because I
was I had been approached by a comic book company that had a They were
looking at titles in their comics library to develop as feature films, and one
of their comic titles had to do with an alien flying saucer at area fifty
one and somebody who actually steals the flying saucer and gets away with it.
So I can't even say it was an original story, but that was the
comic book that they wanted me to development. As I said, I wrote
a very very detailed story treatment. I'm going to guess it was probably close
to twenty pages, which for a story is that's a lot of work.
The comic book company never went ahead with it, and because it was based
on their property, it wasn't something that I could go shop around to anyone
else. So unfortunately, when they decided not to move ahead with the project,
that was the end of it. But having said that, though,
there are still little bits and pieces of it that were my original work that
I added to their story that of course I still have you know on file
in my file cabinet and kicking around in my brain, and it's always possible
that a little bit of that material could still work its way into something you
just never know. And Okay, so let's move back into what you were
just talking about before I pose that question. You are writing a biography on
Jay Alan Heinek. Yeah, and um, what h can you tell us
about it and what got you started. I'm always happy to talk about it.
It's it's it's the biggest writing project I've ever done, and I'm the
most difficult by far, but also I think the most rewarding. Um.
This all goes back to again four years ago, when I started writing my
blog High Strangeness um UM. My wife at the time was working in Chicago,
so we spent a lot of time in Chicago, not just we you
know, sort of splitting our time between southern Wisconsin and Chicago. So um
again, when I was sort of fishing around for material to write about it
in the blog, I also came across the website for KUFOS, the Jail
and Heineck Center for UFO Studies, and I was very intrigued to find that
the center was literally within five miles of our apartment in Chicago. I got
very excited about that and contacted their scientific director, doctor Mark Rohdiger, and
by the time he and I talked the the info on the website was actually
obsolete. They had they had closed down their office and had actually moved essentially
moved what was left of the center's records and resources into a couple members basements
throughout Chicago. So doctor Rhodiger, Mark Rhdiger, had a whole lot of
the archives in his basement, and he said, well, you know,
the officers don't exist anymore, but you you, you know, you'd be
more than welcome to come over to my house and you know, poke around
in the basement and you know, see if anything there catches your interests.
So I was thrilled to get that invitation. Had always been interested in Heineck
and work, um, but had never really you know, only really knew
what I had read in books um. And so when I started visiting Kufos
just again just looking for material, fun stories to write about it in my
blog, I got to know Mark a little and after a couple of visits,
he mentioned that they had always been interested in finding a writer, um
to to write the definitive, definitive account of doctor Heineck's career. And I
just said, well, I would love to do that. I just you
know, I just jumped on it. I said I would I would love
to be that writer. And he said, well, you know, why
don't you give it a try. So I started. I started working right
then and there, and um uh, Mark read a lot of my initial
drafts of chapters, and and Um has been has been happy with the direction
the book is going, and has also been an incredible resource for me,
as as you know, is a fact checker. You know, he clears
up things that I don't get quite right. He points me in directions to
do, you know, new research on things. So the research has been
really fascinating, and it's been helped by the fact that not only are Heineck's
cupos files in the Chicago area in these people's basements, but Heineck was also
the chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University from nineteen sixty until his retirement
in the early eighties, so there is a wealth of material in the Northwestern
University archives. Heineck also went to school he was born and raised in Chicago
and went to school at the University of Chicago. There is a wealth of
archival material in the University of Chicago archives. So and he did his graduate
work at Yurkey's Observatory in southern Wisconsin, about a half an hour from where
I live. So it just turned out that all of these resources dealing with
Heineck's career, we're really at my fingertips, and I just went nuts with
the research. So I've just been I've been researching and writing for a while.
The big news is that just about three weeks ago, I signed with
a literary agent who is now going to start shopping the book project around to
publishers. And we were we want to pitch this book as not just a
Ufoe book. We want to sell it to a publisher as a book that
also is um that also kind appeal to a mainstream audience. And if you
look at the kind of audience that The X Files brings in and the kind
of audiences that shows like Hanger One and Ancient Aliens bring in, it's not
too big of a stress to say that, you know, this isn't just
a niche market. This is a topic that is of interest to a whole
lot of people, and there is a there is a huge audience. So
we think, will we think can be successful in pitching this to you know,
to a big publisher and you know, hopefully making it a big book.
Wow. You know, he was such a fascinating man. You know,
if you really think about his involvement with a Project Blue Book and how
he was out there to try to debunk you know everything swamp his swamp gas
talk and all that, and then you know he comes over to the UFO
side, you know, after which I think is is really amazing and um,
you know that he spent the last part of his life of just saying,
hey, you know, something is going on, and you know,
really curious about the subject it is. It's a great story. He's he
was a complicated man. I've learned so much since I've done this research,
because, as I mentioned before, what little I knew of Heineck was just
stuff I had read in UFO books. And let's let's be honest, some
of those UFO books are biased. Some of them simply repeat information that's already
been you know, that's already been written in other formats and other other media.
So you know, the end result is, over time, you know,
the sort of the same stories get told and retold and repeated, and
those stories aren't always accurate, but they sort of become sort of the conventional
wisdom of who this guy was and what his work represented. So it's been
a huge surprise to me and really a huge adventure to find out that his
work is. You know, it's it's a much more complicated story than I
than I would have imagined. You know, there's there's a lot of gray
area. He made a lot of mistakes, he did things he regretted.
Um, you know, he should have changed his mind sooner, but he
actually did start changing his mind a lot sooner than most people think. So,
you know, there's a there's a really good story there, and I
think people are going to like it a lot. The title of the book
is The Close Encounters Man, How doctor jail and Heineck made it okay for
America to believe in UFOs because because the thrust of the book is that because
of his work, we now live in a world. Even though he died
in nineteen eighty six, he's the man's been gone a very long time,
but his work planted a seed that has just bloomed into you could easily call
it a UFO industry. But more than that, it's it's it's developed into
you know, a set of cultural beliefs. Everybody knows what a close encounter
is. And Heineck thought of that terminology, you know, and Spielberg used
it for his movie, and it's part of our cultural you know, it's
it's a cultural reference. Point now. So, like I say, I
think, I think I have a good story to tell and I'm and I'm
very excited about the book. Wow. Uh yeah, I know someone that
knew him personally. Someone just mentioned on the message board Bray Stamford has Actually
he does listen to the show quite a bit. We'll probably listen to this
show in particular. I don't know if he's listening now or not, but
Ray Stamford is a good resource probably to get some information from. I would
love to talk with him. Yeah, I can set all that up easily.
And so you gave me a couple of fun questions that I could ask
you. And why are and I'm gonna I want to know this one?
Why are you followgists so grumpy and irritable? I love that one. Grumpy
is too strong a word. I shouldn't have used the word grumpy because when
I was really what I was really getting at was And again this goes back
to when I first started the blog four years ago, and I started reading
other people's blogs and just found that, um, like I said, there
were an awful lot of very serious UFO scholars who were doing very serious work
and very serious writing. And I wanted to try to find a way to
stand out from that in my own way. So to me, I just
sort of tended to look at these serious writers as you know, maybe a
little grumpy sometimes and maybe maybe a little set in their ways. It's probably
it's it's probably unfair. As I say, grumpy is probably too strong a
word. But having said that, I do think that there is U.
It's interesting to me how many uphologists have a hard time looking at the phenomenon
with any sort of sense of humor, because it does get pretty strange sometimes
and sometimes it's kind of funny. How strange it gets, you know,
kind of is the point where it just defies, it defies belief, how
strange things get. And I think there are things in this world, there
are things in the U in UFO world that can be pretty funny. And
I was very surprised to find that not many people seem to recognize that or
appreciate that. So that's kind of what I've set out to illuminate in my
work. I like that, I do. I have brought up a number
of times that a lot of times people do get sort of tarnished, you
know. I talked to a number of people that have been in the field
for a long time, and you know, a lot of times they just
say, you know, I've had it. You know, nothing's going to
change. Are you there? I think we may have lost Mark. I'm
going to try to get him back. Mark. You there. I'm sorry,
something happened. I accidentally cut us off. I'm here. You're back.
Okay, You're going to have to move up to your mic. It
can just barely hear you. Okay, yeah, that there you are.
Okay, I forgot what I was babbling about, but I'm sorry. No,
no, no. Basically that a lot of upologists get sort of burnt
out. I guess that might be the phrase. You know. They they
are not seeing anything happen within many years, any changes. Um So I
can understand that, yeah, and that you know and that and I've only
been this. I've only been in this for four years, and I can
already kind of feel some of that myself. It does get very it does
get very frustrating when you feel as though every we we we as a group
upologists, people who are interested in the field, have tried so many different
approaches to try to get a handle on on what this phenomenon is and what
it means and seem to come up short every with every attempt. It does
definitely lead to a sense of frustration. What it's like, What have we
not thought of? What haven't we tried? And boy, I just don't
know. I don't know what the answer is to that, right same here.
One of your other funny questions here was what is your favorite level at
the Dulca underground Base? And we've talked about that a number of times on
this show. You know basically that it was just disinformation, Paul bennowit's disinformation,
but that you know, going back to the myth that becomes reality.
There's a lot of people out there that still think there's underground there's an underground
base there with aliens. Well, thanks, Yeah, And I first came
across this. This happened right when I started writing the blog soum or summer
and fall of twenty eleven. There's actually a very a very small, but
popular UFO conference not far from here. It's called the Burlington Vortex Conference.
So it's not just UFOs. There is a vortex in the woods outside of
this town of Burlington, Wisconsin. So I went to this again looking for
material for my blog, and I actually ended up writing an article about it
for Milwaukee Magazine. But I met a young couple there who were fascinated with
Dulca base and they I had never heard of it before, and they started
telling me about it, and man, they were dead serious. They were
like they believed every word of it. Oh my god, Yes, there
the grays live on this level and the reptoids live on that level, and
you know, and the mantis is hate the reptoids, and the reptoids hate
the Grays, and I was just I was kind of blown away. I
had I was not prepared for that deep level of mythology, and to find
that this really is a thing, this is a thing that a lot of
people say is true, was just kind of a stunner for me. I
also had I want to tell this story too, because it's kind of along
those same lines where you have you really have to wonder where what makes people
believe certain things and where your own belief system kind of comes up short,
I had a really fascinating case for moof On a couple of years ago.
It was a young a college student who had been home for home for summer
break, and he was staying at his home folkshouse, and he was driving
home from one night in the late at night, around midnight, and he
saw this object fly across the highway in front of him. It was glowing
blue. It was about the size of a refrigerator. It zoomed across the
highway about three feet off the ground, and as it flashed past the front
of his car, he could have sworn that his dashlights flickered. Okay,
So technically that makes it a close encounter of the second kind, right,
because their physical effects on the environment. So by the time they reported this
and I was able to meet with the family, their son had already gone
back to I think it was, I can't remember it was. It was
out of state. He had gone back to college out of state, so
I couldn't talk to him. But I had a really fascinating talk with the
parents and they told me the whole story from their point of view about you
know, how their son called and called them immediately, and they could tell
how shaken up he was, and they were sure he wasn't making this up.
But as we talked, it turned out that this family has had a
whole lot of really strange experiences, some of them centered on the house.
They live in a very old house, and they were telling me about how
they think they have shadow people living in their house. That was a new
one to me. I'd never heard of shadow people. But then at some
point in the conversation the father said, hey, there's there's something I want
to show you. I've never shown this to anyone. It was it was
part of their family history, and it was sort of sensitive because it revealed
it revealed some private life details of some of their relatives that they wanted to
keep private. So they never wanted to share this letter with anyone but the
guy. But he shared it with me and said, you know, please,
don't you know, don't like broadcast this everywhere, but I'd like to
know what you think of it. And it was a letter from a friend
of the family to a family member from nineteen fifty from Pendleton Air Fort.
I know what at Pendleton, Okay, I'm blanking on that now, but
it was. It was an airbase in California, and the person writing the
letter was had been a serviceman in nineteen fifty and told this very long it
was like ten sheets of paper, this very long story about how he and
he and his platoon had been exposed to a genuine flying saucer, and they
had been exposed to all this information about how the flying saucer worked and who
piloted it and where it came from. And it was in very explicit detail,
of very precise wording in this letter. And I was just fascinated by
this and that you know, these folks had no idea what it meant.
They just said, you know, we've we've never been able to figure out
is this letter for real? Is it a joke? And I said,
well, And so they asked me if I had any information, and I
said, well, there's somebody I can talk to who I think might be
able to shed some light on this if you'll let me. So I talked
with I went back to my main source, doctor Mark Rodiger at the Center
for UFO Studies, and I just started reading him just a couple of little
passages from this letter, just to give a sort of a flavor of the
detail in this and he said, hang on a minute, I know what
that is. And he went to a book shelf and he got a book
off the shelf, and he came back to the phone and he flipped open
this book, and he started reading back to me word for word everything that
was in this letter that these people had, And it turned out the book
he was reading from was Frank Scully's nineteen fifty UFO book in which Scully unleashed
the concept of the flying saucer crash and the captive flying saucer and alien corpses.
And you know, that was a very elaborate and detailed hoax. And
here, somehow these people in Wisconsin had that very same story written in a
personal letter from a friend of the family to a member of their family.
How do you account for that? Mark and I just had a really interesting
conversation trying to figure out, you know, what does all this mean?
And we finally decided that it must be some sort of psychologic of some sort
of psy ops that the military was doing to try to sort of inoculate us
against fear of aliens from other worlds by sort of selectively showing different people things
that they would believe represented aliens from another world. Whether they did or not
didn't matter, as long as they believed that it did. And then that
story would just sort of spread out through people sending these letters to friends and
things. So that when you know, when the aliens finally did appear,
we would all be sort of prepared for it. On a certain level,
that theory makes as much sense as anything else. It was one of the
strangest, one of the strange experiences I've had as a move On investigator.
It still makes me scratch my head. I just don't know what to make
of it. But again, it goes back to that whole issue of of
myth making and how do you know where the myth starts and where you know
how much of it is that, how much of it is the person's actual
experience, and how much of it has been sort of added on over the
years. Who knows. Wow, I wonder if anyone out there has ever
heard about a similar, similar letter written, or if this was just you
know, one person's idea of hoaxing their family, you know, I mean,
yeah, today it's YouTube, right, you're exactly right. Well,
that was one of the things Mark and I talked about the person who wrote
the letter. Was that person being hoaxed or was that person part of the
hoax? You know? I mean, there's so many ways you can go
with it, and there's so many different levels to the story. It can
kind of drive you nuts. Did you say this was nineteen fifty two?
Well, I know, Scott, Oh yeah, the letter was dated nineteen
fifty two. That's great. Gully's book was published in nineteen fifty so this
was two years after the book came out, and that's when the most sightings
were seen in this whole country during that time, nineteen fifty two. Yeah,
which we now know is because of the CIA and their YouTube spipeplane.
Well there is I think we did talk about. Yeah, at least according
to them. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to read another one of one
of your questions that I thought was kind of humorous, and that is,
should have Kenneth Arnold kept his lips sealed? Well, yeah, that's something
I think about since I've been working on this book, because you know,
as we all know it all it all goes back to Kenneth Arnold in his
plane flying over the Cascade Mountains and he saw those nine crescent shaped, crescent
shaped things flying through the air in a straight line among the mountain peaks.
I don't know, it's a fascinating story and I think, I guess to
give you a serious answer, I think if it hadn't been him, it
would have been somebody else, probably within that same historical time period, because
because I have a feeling that that was just sort of the right time for
this phenomena to present itself to us. I don't know why I say that.
I just have kind of a gut feeling that if it hadn't been Kenneth
Arnold, it would have been somebody else, because that was the time it
had to happen. But you know, then Kenneth Arnold gets involved in that
whole Morey Island thing where he suddenly becomes, you know, amateur UFO investigator
and seems to be dealing with, you know, con men who are several
pay scales above him. That story, that story really makes me wonder about
Kenneth Arnold. That story makes me wish he had kind of kept his app
shut. There's a I think I read something or briefly or someone sent me
something that Ari Island is now considered a hoax. I don't know if I
could just be I'm just saying that. I don't know if that's true or
not. But you know that that was quite a story. Unfortunately. You
know, the question of whether the question of whether the case itself was a
hoax or it started out as something genuine but then it got sort of turned
into a hoax because of some misin disinformation campaign. You know, you kind
of have to look at it. You kind of have to at least consider
that possibility as well. I think, yeah. I mean there was a
crash also to a pilot, and I think it was air Force people,
wasn't it, that were investigating and had some of the so called evidence with
them in a plane that crashed. I'm not sure if I can't remember if
they were air force people, but I think they weren't government people at any
rate. Yeah, some agency, right, So what do you think?
What is your idea of the best you have O case out there? Oh,
I'm so glad you asked that. I there are a couple that I've
just really become fascinated with as I've worked on the Heineck book. There are
some that I haven't gotten to yet that I'm looking forward to getting to,
namely the coin helicopter case from nineteen seventy three. I think that's going to
be a really fascinating case because you know that the coin case basically became Heineck's
gold standard for a UFO, a UFO event, credible observers, all trained
observers, you know, they're all all the helicopter crew. Their their eyewitness
testimony all corroborate. They all corroborated each other. It was additionally corroborated by
witnesses on the ground who saw saw what was happening and thought that they were
about to witness a midair collision. That's a very, very compelling case and
I'm really looking forward to digging into that. My personal favorite, though,
is the Pascagoula abduction case, which which took place about three weeks before the
Coin helicopter case, and it's that's my favorite because, again going back to
my childhood, I can still remember that that was nineteen seventy three. I
would have been around thirteen years old. I can still remember that that case
made national made the national news. They reported on it on the radio,
they reported on it in the newspaper, they reported it on the TV news,
And that was a first for me. I don't I had never been
aware, at least before then, of a UFO case hitting the big time
as far as the national press goes, And to me, that's sort of
it wasn't just something I was reading about in a book anymore. It was
something that really happens to real people, and I was I was just really
drawn in by that story. And I've always been a huge fan of that.
And Mark, did did you contact me a while ago to get a
hold of Calvin? I believe I did. Yes, Okay, I remember,
Yeah. Yeah. Calvin's a great guy. I had him on each
talk. He rarely does interviews, and I was lucky enough to get him
on UM. He's the sole survivor of that incident and kind of a really
great story. I'll just tell you I have told it quickly on this show.
That show actually UM connected him to as a strange daughter and they talked
to each other every single day. Um. She found his information on my
show and contacted me and I got the two together. It was just one
of those great things that makes me really happy that I do this show,
that you know something like that happened out of it. Wow, that's really
profound. I'm glad you told me that story. That's that's really kind of
given me the chills. Well, I'll tell you he's such a nice gentleman.
It was a it was a real pleasure talking to him, well,
you know, researching that story, it he he and he and Charlie Hickson
both come off as such sincere, genuine people. I really didn't. I
was surprised to find out how well documented that case was once I started doing
their research. You know, for the listener are out there, why don't
you just go over the case? Oh? Sure, sure. These two
men were out fishing on a pier in Pascagoula, Missouri, near a shipyard
where they worked. It was after dark, I can't remember how late,
maybe ten or eleven at night. And it was an older man, Charlie
Hickson, and a younger man, Calvin Parker, who Charlie knew Calvin's parents,
and he had sort of promised their parents that he would sort of look
after him as when he moved to the big city. So these two guys
were out fishing on the pier along this little channel behind the shipyard, and
the fish aren't biting and they can't figure out why. And Charlie turns around
to get some bait from his tackle box and he sees this blue glowing object
sort of full or egg shaped, kind of dropping down out of the sky.
And it comes down and hovers on the ground a short distance behind them.
By this time, Calvin has turned around and seen it, and both
men stand up to look at it. And it's got this white egg shaped
craft has two glowing blue lights on the side, and as they watch,
a door opens on the side of the object and these three strange creatures come
floating out. They never touch the ground. They don't even really have feet.
They just have sort of knobs at the ends of their legs, and
they have sort of crab like pinchers on the ends of their arms, and
they have kind of featureless heads, but there's a pointy thing where the nose
should be in two pointing things where the ears should be, and there's a
tiny little slit where the mouth should be. But there are no eyes as
I remember, and Calvin and Charlie feel paralyzed. Could have just been fear,
or it could have been something else. And these creatures kind of take
them by the arms and float them into their craft. Calvin passes out as
they're being led into the craft, so he doesn't remember anything at least at
the time. Charlie, the older man, stays awake and he's invested.
He's sort of inspected inside the ship by this sort of mechanical eye that sticks
out of the wall, right, and it examines him from head to toe,
and about twenty minutes later they take him back outside. Calvin's already outside
of the craft. He's sort of kneeling down on the gravel, just sort
of petrified with fear and or with his hands stretched out. I think I'm
getting that detail right. And they deposit Charlie, the older man, next
to him, and they go floating back into the craft, and then the
craft disappears. It doesn't the craft doesn't fly back up in the sky.
It just kind of pops out of existence, which is an interest detail that
pops up in a lot of UFO experiences. That is, that's a real
tricky thing to explain. I don't know what that means, but at any
rate, so these two men have gone through this experience and they go to
the local sheriff, and this is one of the most famous parts of the
case. The sheriff is completely bewildered by what these men are telling him.
Of course, they split the two men up and they get stories from each
of the men, and their stories match up pretty much identically, aside from
the fact that Calvin passed out, and then they leave the two men together
in an interrogation room with a hidden tape recorder, and the sheriff is really
pleased with how smart he is. He thinks he's going to get to the
bottom of this. He thinks, he thinks, as soon as they leave
these two guys alone in her room, they're going to start laughing their heads
off and slapping each other on the backs, you know, congratulating themselves on
what a great joke they pulled on the sheriff. And instead they get a
tape recording of this conversation between these two men who are clearly just terrified out
of their wits and they have no idea how to process what they've just gone
through, and they just want to go home and have a stiff drink and
get to bed and forget it all. And the sheriff and his deputies are
just astounded by this tape recording. It's the exact opposite of what they thought
they would hear. And so the two guys go home and the sheriff promises
them that he will not tell anybody about what happened. But the next day
Pascaguila, Missouri, is filled with reporters from all over the country. Somehow
the story leaks out from the sheriff's department and the press picks it up,
and Heineck was there to investigate. Heineck was actually working as a consultant to
NBC News at the time on a news special that they were preparing on the
UFO phenomenon, and so Heinich. Heinich was flown down to Pascagoula, and
he was there when a psychologist attempted to hypnotize the two witnesses, and that
attempt failed because they were both so terrified. Every time the hypnotists tried to
get these two gentlemen to relive their experience, they would just become completely terrified
and they couldn't go on. So they just had to stop the hypnosis.
It just didn't work. About a month later, Calvin, by this time
had been institutionalized for the first time as a result of his experience. So
Charlie, the older man, undertook a polygraph test, and he passed the
polygraph test with flying colors, and the polygraph operator was quoted as saying,
I'm not saying he saw a spaceship, but when he says he saw a
spaceship. He's not lying. It's an incredible story. I'm getting the goosebumps
just telling the story. Yeah, well you told it pretty well. Thanks.
Yeah, no, that to me. I was thrilled to get to
get ahold of Calvin and have him on the show. And you know,
it's it's kind of funny. It'd almost like to have someone like him back,
but it's basically telling this same story. However, I've had I've had
Travis Walton on like five times, so maybe that's another interesting case in my
opinion. So those are really good stories. We have about all somewhere around
five minutes or so left, and so let's see. I want to you
did make this list of really funny questions, so I'm going to see if
I can just ask. I'm well, I'm glad you thought they were funny.
Yeah, they're they're pretty good. Oh, Which cable TV UFO show
is the best or or at least the worst as far as re enactments of
UFO cases. I can't say that I've seen all of the shows, but
what I have seen, I've been very impressed with the Canadian show called Close
Encounters. I can't remember which channel it's on. Now, I'm a little
biased on that because Mark Rodiger is one of their is one of their guests
experts, so he's in a lot of the episodes, and rightly so,
the guy's just as he's an encyclopedia of UFO lore. But I've been very
impressed with that show, with the way they recreate the UFO sightings. In
fact, that show was where I first learned about the Warren Minnesota, the
sheriff's car in Minnesota that got attacked by the UFO, because they did a
really nice reenactment of that of that sighting, So that that would so again
qualify find the answer by saying I haven't seen all the shows. Of the
ones I've seen, that one impresses me. I like it a lot.
Uh huh. Yeah. I think it's good when someone sticks to the story
and does it well. But when you actually know a story and you see
that they're going wrong with it, or you've done some research and a story
and then you see that you know they're bringing in other aspects to make it
more interesting, it's just too bad they feel it. So they have to,
you know, um accentuate a story and change things to make it better.
Well, a lot of that has done on the cutting room floor too,
Yes, and I've just had a recent experience with that. I just
did my first cable TV guest expert appearance in July on Mysteries at the Monument
on the Travel Channel. UM they did a story on the swamp gas case
in Michigan, and they were they were trying to make the case that that
that case was the exact moment when Jallen Heineck changed his mind and sort of
recanted on UFOs and became a believer, and what that case was certainly part
of the process Heineck went through, but it wasn't the exact moment. There
wasn't any exact moment, you know, was the point that I was trying
to get across. You know, him changing his mind actually took place over
about eight or ten years. It was a long painful process for him to
decide that he had been wrong. You know, it didn't just happen overnight.
It happened over a long period of time. But so I tried to
get that point across in my interview, But the producers of the show really
wanted to have that one dramatic moment where you like you know, Heineck has
his epiphany where he realizes he's been wrong and he instantly changes his mind.
So that's the storyline they went with. I was a little disappointed, so
you know, they got the spirit of the story right, but they didn't
get the details right. But that's what happens with these TV shows, right.
So we have like a minute and a half left here. So do
you want to give out your blog site? Sure, it's high Strangeness ufo
dot com one. Being a writer, have you thought about writing a book
on the topic on UFOs aside from the Heineck book? You mean right?
Oh? Yeah, I think about it all the time, and the and
the blog has given me. Between the blog and the work I've done for
mouf on Um, there are a couple different directions I could go with it,
and I probably won't decide which direction to go with it until I'm done
with the Heineck book, to be honest. Yeah, And when do you
expect that to be done? Well, a lot depends on what happens once
my agents starts shopping around. I would hope to have it done in twenty
sixteen, but I'm new to this this book publishing world. I don't really
know what kind of time scale they operate on, so I would I would
hope twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. I see. Okay, well, I've
had a lot of fun tonight. I want to thank you very much for
thank you so much for inviting me. I've really enjoyed it and hope we
can do it again. That's yes, I'd like to have you back when
you when you get that book published. That would be best. All right,
deal, all right, all right, thanks a lot, Okay,
have a good night. Yeah, thank you. Okay, everyone, Well,
that's it for the show this evening, and I appreciate you all listening
and all the supporters out there. I appreciate all your help you're giving me.
We'll get all that straightened out next week as a prerecorded show, and
on that I have Class Spawn and Doctor Eric Farouk, kind of a sciencey
show. You're gonna love that one. I won't be around. I won't
even be on the chat room. I'll be sleeping somewhere in Russia. And
so that's it for this show, and thank you so much for listening.
And you can listen to the same time next week right here on the Dark
Matter Digital network