You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network and this is six Degrees of John
Keel. Hello and welcome to the six Degrees of John Keele podcast. I'm
your host, Barbara Fisher, and I'm very happy to introduce someone tonight.
She's here visiting and we're having a great time. In fact, we almost
forgot to hit the record button because we were having so much fun talking before.
This is Cheryl Costa. She's an author, she's a witch, she's
a researcher, and she's a teacher and so welcome. I'm very happy to
finally get to talk to you. Thank you. Why don't you just go
ahead and jump in with you know, expand upon you a little bit on
your biography because I didn't want to do the deep explications because it's too many
things and i'd forget because you're like accomplished in things. Let's do with what
I'm doing right now, Okay, I want to It would be no doubt
from where I'm coming from when I talk consciousness, metaphysical consciousness, reaching out
to ets, that dip of thing, mystical woul as some people call it.
I'm a witch, card carry pointed hat wearing broom totin wave wand waving.
Okay, I am a priestess of the Goddess is Set, which you
might know her as Isis. I am priestess of hers. I am dedicated
to excuse me, I'm still getting over the cold. I was afraid I
was going to cough on you. I'm dedicated to service, sacrifice, compassion,
and love onto all things. That's what we are about. And there's
a lot of us. I've got had seven advanced students over the past year.
I never asked them who they who they venerate. I just knew they
were all pagans. Right when we decided to start teaching a super large class
fifty people of witchcraft one on one for a year. In a day,
I asked everybody what they're I was making badges. I was going to put
our icons on of our goddess traditions, you know, And I figured i'd
have a a couple and fans and things like that. Of the seven of
us, six of us were all Egyptian pantheons. That is not an exodus.
That's amazing and statistically significant. I was saying, we thought so,
you know, and we're finding a bit of that in our class as well.
So it's I've been doing the thing with Let's see a couple of years
ago, when there's an upstate New York just before we went into COVID lockdown,
I figured out I had been doing some work using marketing data, both
Facebook marketing data and Amazon marketing data, and I determined there was upwards of
eighty seven hundred two nine thousand Pagans in the Onondaga County, upstate New York
area, which is where I lived, And so I decided, since nobody
else was doing well, there was somebody else who did it, but she
moved on. A lady by the name of Mary Hudson was the first chaplain
at Syracuse University Pagan chaplain, and because that was a Methodist school, there
was a lot of who ha about it, and the old guard accepted it
with gritted teeth. When she retired, I applied for the position. I
was informally interviewed at a Christmas party. I was formally interviewed and then formally
interviewed by the director. He said, what can you do for us?
I wrote down on a piece of paper what I could do for them.
He said, let me talk to the stakeholders Ultimately he came back and he
says, we're not going to backfill the position this is. This is traditionally
a Methodist school, and we're not going to be incouraged j pagan paths.
So I just stopped dealing with them. So I went and went to I
went to the Onadaga County Ministerial Association. And when I showed up, I
was wearing a black clergy shirt like everybody else, except I had a green
collar, bright iridescent green. And so one of the first questions they asked
me, out of pure ignorance, a couple of these ministers, do you
people have a God? And my answer was, of course we do.
We got gods and Goddess is by the bushel. And they just sat there,
their eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I explained to them,
like the Egyptians had like fifteen hundred and three, but principally about one
hundred but main main gods, but they had about fifteen hundred. They had
a god for everything and sometimes backups for those. You know, the Greeks
had I'm twisting papers, I'm use reviewing my notes. The Greeks had twelve
principal gods and goddesses with a pantheon of over thirty one hundred what they call
attribute gods and goddesses in Christian tradition, we might call them saints, or
rather they got the idea of saints from deities from our pantheons. But you
know, we don't want to split a hair there. Even the god,
one god view with Allah, is seen to have ninety nine attributes. A
lot of people don't know that. Hinduism they have their huge pantheon, they
have thirty three million deities, and people say they have thirty three million deities.
And the way I explained it, in a way it was explained to
me, is think of Brahma as the core of the tree, the trunk
of the tree, and all those other pantheons that gods and goddesses, and
some of the ones that we know of are those branches and family branches on
those trees, the families of those gods. Okay, And that doesn't count
the other ninety or one hundred native traditions around the world, indigenous tribes that
have their own pantheons. So from my viewpoint, we got plenty of gods
for everybody. You know, every face you want, and then to make
myself popular, they say, well, we have one god. Oh yeah,
you got Yallo day okay, all right, so you don't seem impressed,
No I'm not, I said. I said, all the ills we
have in the world, you know, like the fall of matriarchy among other
things, all the hate, all the persecutions, the burning times for the
witches in Europe, we can blame on Yelva as a god. He's kind
of a minor demigod actually in the scale of things. He's got an ego
to size of our solar system. So I really made some points with them
by saying that, I said, but, but, but, but he
took the Jews out of Egypt, And I said, yes, in Egypt,
I told you they had thirteen hundred gods, and the Jews had their
own temple, and they had Yalve and they had a Shaa as his consort.
Now, when they got exited and Moses came down off the mountain with
some rocks with some words carved in them, suddenly there were no not going
to be any other gods other than Yalve. So all the pagan shrines went
away, all the goddess statues went away, and the Jewish women were suddenly
left with only a male face of deity to recognize and to be ve and
to venerate. It just didn't resonate. So it serves memory correctly. Memory
correctly if we think in terms of the first laws against sorceresses was from the
Hebrew Hebrew Bible and was Exodus. I'm going to drop it again there and
twenty two seventeen do not suffer a sorceress to live? Well, why would
that suddenly happen in the Exodus years when the Jews are wandering around in the
Middle East trying to look for a home. Well, think about it a
minute. If there, if their principal god has said, we'll have no
other gods before us, and all these other women decided to go back to
their Egyptian gods goddesses at least okay, so they had somebody to venerate that
recognized them as human beings and not as chattel that was against josh law.
And even moving out of that era in the second the last couple of centuries
BC, as they come into the Common era, they even signed punishments of
torture and execution for sorceress sorceresses so the fall of women was by design,
and a lot of things just haven't been right. And I call it like
I see it. And I didn't make a lot of friends initially with it.
Excuse me with the pagan with the Masterial Society initially, But then they
started realizing as we got into COVID, I was rolling with it, and
they said, how are you rolling with it better than us? I said,
we have a completely different view than you do. Now. You guys
are all sweat and all everybody dying and everything, But aren't you waiting to
go to heaven or something? I said, well, you guys do it.
We're programmed into rebirth. We know we're just going to die now.
We're just kind of come back in another chicken soup, that's all they Oh
boy, I got their attention on zoom call. They were wing those twenty
twenty zoom calls. So I've been We had a temple going for a time,
but twenty COVID messed it up. This is back in Syracuse, New
York, and I've lived here in Ohio now since the sixteenth of December twenty
twenty one. And we sat here and celebrated Yule on a card table and
two folding chairs we bought with us and brought with us in the car,
and as the movers had brought everything in our apartment looked like a container ship
because we packed a lot of our stuff in banker's boxes. So instead of
a lot of big boxes, we had a lot of little boxes, and
they were stacked too deep from every wall in the place. I used to
produce a television program. I used to to be an industrial filmmaker, and
as an industrial filmmaker, I did this for IBM for six six years.
We made industrial films, maybe like seventy of them, okay, And I
was a writer director, and I was very good at it. Not everybody
that's in is a filmmaker. Professional filmmaker is in Hollywood. That's the thing
you need to get through your head. Everybody has the idea. It's a
very tiny small percentage of the profession. Okay. There are many more industrial
filmmakers and you can shake a sticket as compared to the folks in Hollywood.
So I decided in nineteen ninety one I become I had become wickan in nineteen
seventy five when I was in the Navy. So I had this crazy idea.
I had become wickaning on Imbul officially on in Bulk nineteen seventy seven,
and I had been more or less garden Aerium, because that's pretty much what
the material was in those days. By the early eighties, I had been
plugged into goddess worship, got into got It that flavor, the star Hawks,
that type of thing. I actually used to know star Hawk up rather
well. I used to know Margot Adler really well Starhawk. Last time I
talked to her about a year or so ago, she was trying to remember
me. Were we arrested together? No, Oh, that narrowed it down
a little bit, you know. So, So the bottom line was,
I decided I knew craft to be a beautiful thing, and I decided to
produce a cable television program for it. And I went to a bunch of
cable stations and pitched them, and they laughed me out of the office,
all this sort of thing. Okay, And finally this one station said we'll
take a chance on you. We'll get We'll let you do six episodes,
and six easily half hour episodes. And I said, okay, I'll do
it. I'll produce him in the studio. Well, put him in a
can. You'll have him for the submbit replacement you're talking about. Okay,
Fine, So I went ahead and recorded about the first three of them.
Somebody got a whiff of something and I got a lady camp. At the
time, I didn't have a telephone. I was living in Laurel, Maryland.
I had just moved there, hadn't had time for Bell to put a
phone in for me. And this is ninety one, okay, And somebody
came. A lady came to the door and said, you don't know me,
but I went to high school with Jack show him so he's a executive
producer done in Arlington thirty three And I said yeah, And he says he
needs you to call him. Something thing's happened. I thought to myself,
my god, maybe the place burnt down or something, you know. So
I walked down to at the convenience store and have my MCI card out,
called him. I says, what's going on? And he says, a
three hundred word story went out on the Associated Press this morning about your show.
We haven't said anything, have you. I said, no, I
haven't said any press releases that I wanted to wait till the six six were
in the can. Well, somebody leaked it and this three hundred word story
went out on the web or out on the wire. I said, okay,
So, being a PR person, I said, did we get any
press inc He is, no, Sheryl, but CBS and ABC News is
sitting in the lobby and they want to talk to your witches. Oh so
where we lived. With straight driving time and no serious traffic, we could
have been down here in thirty five minutes. Okay, but this is Washington,
d C. In nineteen that would have been a three hour drive if
there was no accidents on the road. So the CBS affiliate said, could
we meet you tomorrow? And I told him where roughly where I work,
and I said, can we meet in that park about two blacks down.
I said sure, let's do that, and we agreed. Out of time.
The ABC affiliate Channel seven said, look, you're over on the other
side of the Beltway. This time of day. Route fifty that cuts right
across d C is literally empty. We could drive across that and meet you
over at the new Carrollton metro station. It's a subway. I know exactly
where you're talking. I used to live in Jessup. So yeah, yeah,
okay, so I know, I know, yeah, I know which
road you're even talking about. So the host of the program and I were
sharing household to save resources. She had two little girls. We each grabbed
a baby and ran through the shower. Okay, one was like two,
the other one was like about eight months old, you know. So we
ran through the shower, put a little makeup on through everybody in the kid's
seats in the yugo, and took off right met them down there at sundown,
and they had all their lights up in the parking lot and the snorkel
up there being microwave signaling back to the station, and they interviewed Kestrel,
the host of the show. She was twenty five years old at the time.
Because the witchcraft community got wind I was going to produce this and they
didn't want a transsexual precis representing witchcraft in DC nineteen ninety one, I know,
So then they interviewed me. The piece aired at eleven twenty five,
and the next morning I didn't need to see it at the time, okay,
because I didn't have a TV hook up. I got it. I
got into work the next morning at IBM, and my boss is sitting on
my desk. I said, Hi, What's what's up? He says,
eleven twenty five Channel Last night, Channel seven ran a piece on witchcraft and
a television program you're producing. This is yeah is. I got a phone
call from the general manager at eleven forty five saying, what the hell's going
on? Okay, he's concerned you're going to look badly about the company and
make us look bad because you're teaching witchcraft or you're doing Watchcraft on television.
I said, are you planning to buy advertisements on my station or on my
or on my television program? No that, I'm not going to talk about
you, okay, I only talk about people who buy advertisements. I'm sorry.
I'm a commercial producer. Oh okay. But what they couldn't get away
was that three hundred word story hit the Wingers, and suddenly the TV station,
this little TV station in Arlington, Virginia, forty nine nine thousand households,
barely fifty thousand households started getting seven to twelve phone calls a day asking
to talk to me or to Castrol. Fine, so really fourced the issues
of the phone company, get me my phone. Okay, this went on
twelve to fifteen calls from a news agency someplace for twelve weeks, every workday.
All right, So Larry King had us on the night our episode debuted.
Okay, understand I had not done any television since I had changed only
a couple of years before. Suddenly, people like my parents one didn't know
it was a which Oh boy, okay, we're getting calls they had or
from people they haven't talked to ten and fifteen years saying hey, we saw
your son dressed the address on Larry King and he she is a witch.
Oh that's the way to come out to your parents. Oh boy. So
that was the beginning of it. Then Entertainment Tonight showed up. They did
a huge piece on us, and then producers from Hollywood because we were making
the argument it's always been an ugly face of witchcraft. It's always been the
medieval church telling us what we're supposed to, how we're supposed to view witches.
We are going to show you what we really do, and that's what
we did on our program. It was like a little talk show, except
the priests sat in front of a coffee table. We had a god assault
her there, it's candles going, someth sense going, and she'd sit on
a pillow, very hippie style, and whoever her guests were, we're sitting
on pillows across from her. It's very intimate. The second season we went
to a couple wing back chairs in front of a fireplace. But that first
season was very hippie. And so people these days say to me, I'm
teaching classes that I'm part of a clergy team at a UU church here in
town. I'm the chaplain for their pagan threat in the UU church. And
they said, aren't you scared to do a public class? I said,
honey. I came out on the front Metro front page of the Metro section
of the Washington Post on June eighteenth, nineteen ninety one. Baby first sentence
says, Cheryl Consta is a witch and a computer consultant and an industrial filmmaker
for a fortune five hundred company. That's how you come out of the closet.
Yep, you just jump right out. And then we're on Larry King.
We're on Entertainment Tonight. Entertainment Tonight. Producers they asked me on the
show, well, we're going to do a proper type of witchcraft show that
doesn't paint all these ugly images. What would it look like, I said,
ideally, kind of a cross between at the time thirty something with a
big deal program. M h. I said, kind of a cross between
thirty something and Bewitch, except for a little less humor, a little bit
more drama. Next thing you know, we got people talk coming from Hollywood
to talk to us, and shortly thereafter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a
witch of good repute in her entourage, and the people who produced Charmed talk
to us and talked to a couple of other prominent witches, and charm came
out very very middle class, very straight up, and only until recently now
we've got a whole new generation of filmmakers. They are digging back into the
old what do we want to call it? The old he on the Witch.
Yeah, so that's come down to that. So bottom line, I'm
trying to get to a page because I need this page to remember what I'm
going to say. I'm old and I've been I'm loaded with ni quill if
that says anything too, So I'm a little I'm a little fried right now.
The bottom line on things. When I show up in class, I'm
usually wearing a black black dress. I'll wear a traditional clergy cowl, you
know, usually white. I wear white with rainbow stripes on it. And
people say to me about this with me got the right one. Oh,
people say, how come you wear you get that black dress on and you
wear rainbow stockings. I said, well, I work for a sky goddess.
I work for the goddess of a set and the goddess Newt who is
the sky goddess from ancient Egypt, and historically sky goddess is war rainbow colors,
including the Buddhistikinis, and that usually shuts them up because most of them
don't know that level of history that I do. So at this point,
I've told you a lot of cool stuff. Ask me any question you want,
short of what I did in the navy, which I can't tell you
and my ATMPN. Otherwise I'm an open book. All right, Well,
you've written a book about witchcraft, and your theory of magic I think is
very important, especially today because we are living in a world that is kind
of gone off the rails and is going a little bit a lot badly,
and you're your theory of magic, which is basically, we can change reality,
do it every day at will. Well, that just tells me that
we need to do that more often. You know. We need to recognize
this ability and use it for good, because we have people using a lot
of other abilities for the forces of not so good to downright evil. Okay,
let's go there for a minute. I get the question I'll asking me
all the time. In fact, Larry King asked me this in June sixth,
nineteen ninety What he says, do you guys do dark evil spells put
mammys on people? And I said, no, it's too much work,
you know, and they're not worth that kind of effort if they're that bad.
Per Okay, that's my view on it. Okay, but I come
from the school that says send out good things. So and then as I
got in, I got in nineteen ninety seven, I got picked out of
a crowd of one hundred and fifty people thirty eight years. At that point,
I had been a wikipriesist for twenty five years. And this Budhislama we
went to hear talk at a temple, walked up to me, shook hands
with me. He wouldn't let go of my hand, got up into my
face and said, I know you, and Holy Holiness, I have not
mentioned I have not known you in this lifetime. He says, of course,
not two, three, four times past four hundred years. And he
looks at the gal next to me with a pal of mine. I know
you too. And he looks back at his aid and he says, these
two they hang out together lifetime, at their lifetime, Let's just see you
again. He toddles off and his aliens into us as he plays it close
to us chest. I've never only seen him do that one other time.
Would go talk to him. So I did, and he asked me.
He said, so, what were you raised? I said, well,
I was raised Roman Catholic. Oh still a Roman Catholic? No, no,
no, no, I've been running with the wicked Shamans for the last
twenty five years. Oh, still doing the Yoghini stuff. Huh, I
said, I was a Yoghany. He says yeah. Many times, he
says, are you're good at the magic? I said, yeah, I'm
really good at it. He said, you think you learned it all in
one lifetime. This started another thread in my life of running with the Buddhists
discovering who I was. Now the general run of the mill Buddhist had no
use for magic, especially the Americans. Remember they were all raised Catholics,
Presbyterians, Baptist, Jews. You know, they were all programmed the same
way as everybody else, and they had all these bad ideas. I was
the wicked old witch in the monastery when I became a Buddhist un first seven
years. Okay, the Llama didn't treat me that way, and neither did
other Lamas who came to town. Okay, they would look at me and
call me by my monk name. From the early nineteenth century. They recognized
me who I was, even being this weird looking transit trans woman, right,
and it has. In fact, one of them asked me about my
transition. He says, you always were pretty radical for the way you taught
people things, weren't you. You know? Yeah, baby. So the
deal is in Buddhist tradition, Buddha teachers be kind. You hear the Dalai
Lama say it all the time. Dalai Lama's in the what we call the
reform tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, there are four great traditions. There's Tibetan Orthodox
in the conservative event that's when I'm in, and then there's the Dalai Lament
at the other end, which is very very liberal, very reformed, okay.
And there's two traditions sort of in the middle of a little bit of
each, okay. And the tradition I was in, the Orthodox tradition has
not only ordinary Buddhist monks and nuns, but they also recognize when Petlun Simbaba
came from India twelve hundred years ago, first people he taught Buddhist Dharma technology
to it's lesser religion more of a technology, and taught taught it to were
the Shamans of Tibet. They saw the reason of it and the logic of
it, and they embraced it. So Tibetan Orthodox Buddhism has always had two
lineages. What we call the Red lineage is the traditional Buddhist monks and nuns
with the buzz cuts and the burgundy robes and the yellow, burgundy and yellow
robes. They also have the knock phone. And I'm going to pronounce this
for you n G A K knack poone p h O n E. There's
a knack ma pas men, knock mos, knock ma's women. Okay,
easy English translations, Just say the word knock ma or knock pa. Okay,
all right. They were the tantric and shamanic practitioners. They grow long
hair, they practice magic. So if you were to go to the Dalai
Lama and say, their holiness, there's been no rain in my province for
four months. We're going to lose our crops. Can you make it rain?
He would look at them politely and say, please go talk to uh
uh Kempo's dean or headmaster or highness. Okay, his holiness, the so
and so who's the head of the Tibetan orthodox tradition, and he'll give you
a long hair to do it. Because the knock pone do the magical work,
do serious magical work. And they as I embraced them, they embraced
me and recognized me for what I was capable of and what I knew.
I've learned things from them. They've learned things from me. Okay, now
is it the things they learned from me spread widely? No, But the
ones who have interfaced with me have learned a different insights, a different set
of insights. Okay, not that I'm completely brilliant, but magic is simpler
to people make it out to be. It's not about lighting candles, dressing
candles, pouring oils on candles, burning tons of incense, and god forbid,
collecting crystals. Okay. Magic is about quieting your mind and learning to
visualize. Now, for me, that was easy because I went to film
school and I learned how to quiet my mind and thinking pictures. I tell
stories in pictures. In fact, when I'm an, I'm a published not
besides being a UFO columnist newspaper columnist, I'm also a published playwright, and
I'm a published a mystery writer, and I just got a contract to write
a ghost story and currently I'm writing a spy series. I wrote a Star
Trek novel about six months ago. It's currently an editing for Simon and Schuster.
So I write a lot of cool stuff. You know, Am I
rolling in money? No? But I make enough to make it make it
a tax burden me see it? You know, it's just enough to be
a pain and a but a tax time. Right. So one of the
things I learned in film school was the thinking pictures. Musicians, if are
musicians in your audience. They know about hearing music in their head. Okay,
so this is about thinking in pictures. This is visualizing that thing you
want. Now, one of the simplest forms of magic I ever learned in
this lifetime. I knew old lady I'm very accomplished, which very retired now,
wanted this particular style Harley. It was a It was a road king.
She wanted soft tail, and she wanted this one of those. So
she was cutting out every picture of that particular style Harley, and she was
pasting them every place she looked at. She had them on the kitchen cabinets,
she had him on the microwave, she had him on the door across
from the toilet in the bathroom. So any place where she was somewhat stopped
and relaxed, there was the road king and focused on it. Now,
some people would say, oh, well, make a spell and make the
money for the fifteen or eighteen, twenty thousand dollars it costs, you know,
No, she visualized that she wanted one to come to her about a
year later. Remember, magic is not like a pizza. Order it and
get it in twenty minutes of your money back Okay, magic is not.
It's got its own time and season. Okay. Yeah, So about a
year later, some guy died and willed it to her his a mint condition.
Okay, it came to her. Mm hmm. You've never heard of
me, but I have produced seventy industrial films which you'll never see. I
produced over seventy episodes of that Witchcraft television program. There might be three or
four copies up on the internet that survived. Videotape doesn't survive well, and
there's about three or four episodes up there for Kestrel and Company K Kestrel,
K E S Y t r L. Not with the E. Okay,
Kestrel and Company. And there might be three or four, maybe five episodes
or partial episodes. So okay, what was able to be recovered back in
twenty fourteen by some archivist. We had all seventy episode We had all seventy
episodes, but there was no funding back in the day to put it in
a controlled archive where it would have been somewhat protected. I produced the show
very much like this one on k c R in Las Vegas, midday show,
not in the middle of the night like most of these things are.
I did it at midday, two o'clock in the afternoon, three o'clock in
the afternoon, and it's called Cosmic Connections, and we talked nothing about witchcraft.
Those are around and CACR may have them on their buried in their archive,
but they're they're available. I had another talk radio. I've had two
other witchcraft talk radio programs. I had one in London, England at the
end of it started in the beginning of twenty twenty two. It went about
six months, and then the producers and I had a kind of a tiff
about it because I had guests and they wanted less guests and wanted more me
talking about mechanics of the craft. And the problem was was I worked best
when I'm talking with other people, right, you know, And they wanted
to take the other person out of the formula, and it just didn't work
for me, and I just I just used the clause of our contract and
get out of it. But what was cool was a friend of mine who
went to high school with hadn't heard from him in twenty years. He was
an attorney, corporate attorney. He called me up. He says, hey,
Ryl, He says, are you living in London. Now, no,
no, I'm not why. He says, I saw your face on
a poster at women a big banner Wimbledon. I saw your face on a
couple of big billboards out on one of the highways. You're doing a talk
show over there, I said, well, I do it from my living
room in Ohio over fiber. But yeah, I do one over in England.
Yeah you know, he says, Hey, you gotta love the Internet.
You know, you can fly a thing from halfway around the world.
So I've done all these things. I've published fifty three books on UFOs,
and I'm a statistic expert. I don't tell stories, but I wrote a
seven year newspaper column, weekly newspaper column about nothing but UFOs from twenty thirteen
to twenty nineteen, seven years almost exactly. Now. People say to me
all the time and me say, oh, Cheryl writing a newspaper. That
must be fun. I said, yeah, it's fun, but it's an
eight hundred word term paper every Thursday. Yeah yeah, think about that a
minute. Okay, uh, and you can get dry real quick. Now
there current one that I'm writing. I currently write Roswell Roswell Daily Record.
They were the people reported the Roswell crash. They hired me a couple of
months ago, and I'm seven articles ahead with them, so I don't have
to worry about coming crashing up on Tuesday afternoon wondering what what I'm going to
give them on Wednesday. Okay, I'm a better writer than I was then.
I'm but I write that I write ahead. I tend to write about
five articles. I've got a big poster right here next to my desk on
those big pads you know you buy that people scribble on. Looks like a
big post it note type of thing. And I've got a year's worth of
article one line they what they're about written, and I'm just picking them off
one. I'm just putting a marker through everyone as I write them. I'll
write about five at a time and send them till I try to cape up
out a month ahead. They say the things from going great guns. So
I'm very happy with that. Like I said, you probably I've got twelve
published plays that have been produced internationally. You've never heard of me. Okay,
okay, so this is the thing people say, Well in magic,
you know, if you're so good with magic, why aren't you rich and
famous. No, I'm really poor and infamous. But the bottom line is
I've done a lot and magic has fueled a great deal. One, you
have to learn to quiet your mind. You have to learn to put the
phone on airplane mode and not let it buzz for a certain period of time
every day. You have to learn to meditate a little bit. Not a
guided meditation, no guided meditation music. You have to just learn to sit
on a little stool or go sit on the toilet and be quiet with your
thoughts for three to five minutes. People say, well, that can't be
that hard. Monks to it, and I said, yeah, but they
learned when they were seven. Americans have been taught. You can't walk into
a restaurant anymore and not have twelve big screens blaring something at you. Right
now, I can't even go into a restaurant because all the screens are blaring
the war in Israel with Hamas and back and forth and everything. And I'm
a combat veteran, and that boice puts me in every time I end up
in a deal, like I got into a rested and they got something like
that, going a diner or something, I'm a mess afterwards. Yeah,
Okay the v I talked with the VA shrinks about twice a month. Okay,
I'm being treated for a fifty year old case of PTSD. You know
what did I do in the service I serve in Vietnam? On the ground,
I climbed telephone holes. People shoot at you on those things. Well,
yeah, because you're kind of like visible up against the sky, and
we had enough near the trees. We had a base commander who was an
idiot, so at this basis safe as a state side base, we want
everybody to follow state side protocols, which meant I had to wear a yellow
safety jacket up on the pole. No, no, sir, no,
no, no, no, you have it. I still have nightmares about
that. Sometimes, not often, every once in a while. I got
got We got the whole shot off our bucket truck. I was up there
working on a cable and around came out of nowhere, broke the hydraulic cable
and what was the faster the fast rip of the ground with oil sprunting everywhere.
Okay, that was two years. That was two years in the Air
Force in Vietnam. Later, I served in the Navy as an electronics specialists
of a specific sort. I gathered electronic intelligence DC to freaking light. I
can't tell you how, I can't tell you with what, and I can't
tell you how we did how we did our job. But as manual in
those days, we were the computers. Those days, after about nineteen eighty
two, computers were doing it right, okay, But in those days we
were the computers. Okay, yeah, but give you give you a cool
thing, like I can I have the back porch door here open. There's
a bird out there screeching a certain way. If he's got a certain pattern,
I can identify the kind of radar he represents. Oh wow, about
twenty five military radars. So Navy we observe and report. So that says
intelligence work. So I can't tell you what I did, right, Yeah,
But okay, So that's that's my military background. But in the Air
Force. I had left the Catholic Church because I at seventeen, I was
that kid everybody thought was going to do the wing to be a priest.
When I went to Catholic school, I went to Mass every morning. Look
how you ended up. It's similar, not as it's uncool, No,
no, it's uncool, But you know you did you just went on a
different path. It's just a different you know. It's fun. A very
dear friend of mine, we were first communion partners. She just celebrated thirty
years as a Catholic nun, and she is one of my most avid fans.
Okay, and last about two years ago, she gave me a great
big painting of all these witches flying around the rooms and dancing around a fire
and everything. It's called girls Night Out. I said, why did you
give me this, your Catholic none for goodness sake. I went off and
I got my master's degree. And when I was getting my master's degree,
before I went to work on a PhD, I took women's studies courses and
my eyes were opened something we never knew before. I never knew before.
And she knows the things I know about the burning times and the matriarchy coming
apart at the seams. So that's kind of what I do. I do
a lot of things, those that tell me if you told somebody back another
witch. Back in nineteen ninety one, when all the movies about witchcraft were
Jim Henson's The Witch is Very Ugly Looking Yea or Rosemary's Baby Only a few
years before. Yeah, that was the picture that was the image of witches
at the time. And I said, I'm going to change it. I'm
nobody, but I'm going to change it. And I played good practical skills.
I was a qualified filmmaker and a qualified television producer. So I said,
I will use the tools I know to paint a better picture of witchcraft.
And I launched that. Those from six episodes. Suddenly, after being
Larry King, the president of the cable station, sets me down over a
cup of coffee, puts the two pieces of paper in front of me and
said sign And I says, what's this is my confession or something you know?
And she says, no, it's two thirteen week contracts. She just
keep doing what you're doing. This is we're getting more press and visibility in
the past three months than most stationed the cable stations get in twenty years.
Yeah, just keep doing it. See and again that's that's magic. That's
magic changing the world through visualization. Take take but take the money. Yeah,
you mightn't have to have money in it. But the thing this is
about Cheryl becoming rich and famous. This was I had an objective, give
me, help me with the resources magic. Okay, yeah, visualize it,
make it happen. Visualize it every day, make it happen. I
started visualizing the project in eighty five when I was reading Spiral Dance, and
I started visualizing. Every day. I started visualizing I'd read another chapter.
I started visualizing and imagining what a show that I did documentary. In twenty
fourteen, I was finishing up a forty year old bachelor's degree, and yeah,
I did all of that other cool stuff. I didn't have a college
degree, by the way, So funny how that worked out. Huh.
I now have a master's degree, and they want me to teach classes,
and they want me to teach my old professor and I had a couple of
copy lasts two weeks ago, and they want me to teach adjunct and remotely,
they want me to teach class in creative writing. And my English teachers
in high school voted me and wrote in my yearbook least likely ever to pick
up a pencil. Again, I did not have a gift for that.
I did have a gift for telling tall tales. The Catholic nuns knew that
they may write made me write on the board five hundred times, I will
not tell tall tales anymore. So I went into a profession where it was
okay to do that. So the deal is, you can do anything with
magic, and you shouldn't be doing it for your benefit. You shouldn't be
doing it for bad things nine times nine. A lot of people you go
on Facebook and those kinds of the rooms, group rooms and things, and
they say, you know, they got a little banner in there, Oh,
we don't believe in that Buddhist Hindu stuff with karma and there's no such
thing as blowback. But they're usually the first people ale to complain how rotten
their life is and why I things keep falling down around them. You know.
In Buddhism, I learned a technique called raising the great boaty cheetah okay,
which is a practice of what they call raising the great abundance or the
great joy. Okay. So first, if you accept that there is blowback,
both good and bad. So why would you ever want to throw a
bad spell on you as somebody? If it was going to come back nine
times nine on you for that bad spell, it's eighty one times worse nah,
Okay, So what if I throw a really good spell that blowback is
nice. Now the practice I do and I teach my students, make the
offering every day and make your normal daily offering, but make that offering.
I make the offfering for all beings everywhere, every when. May they enjoy
great abundance, May they enenjoy great health, great love, and great joy.
The blowback is amazing. Yeah, think about that, Think about that.
I've had many a witch say you have a wonderful life. What is
your secret? I said, send out good things. Good things come back
in abundance, send out bad things. Duck. Yeah, yeah, I
can't argue with that at all, because well, I've done both. Okay,
made mistake. Look, every witch has to screw up something at least
once, maybe five times, six times. But I was capable of learning
from it. Yeah, that's what you have to do. You have to
be willing to shut up and look at what you did and say, oh
maybe, oh yeah, I screwed that up. Yeah what I what I
learned to do though, when someone was casting ugliness at me, is I
just, I guess repelled it with a smile. Just that's not mine,
not mine, this is not for us, this is not don't don't settle
here, just go back out, go out, be changed. This sort
of came up in my class last Saturday. I had to step down the
hall. I had kind of an emergency kind of handholding counseling call I had
to deal with. So I let my my tas run a kind of a
panel. When I came back in, there were people asking for protection spells.
Okay, the simplest things that you know, if you if you got
a ward your space, you know, go out there and by the big
thing, a kosher salt and port around your bed or something like that,
right, okay, But but people were asking not so much protection spells.
They were asking for hostility. What's the word when you're being intact retaliation?
They were asking for retaliation magic okay? And I said, they said,
sure, what do you do? And I said, I've been wrapping myself
and protect think star Trek, think shields. I've been wrapping myself in protective
spells for year after year after year. Okay, I do it at least
once a year. I'll do a meditation where I just kind of recharge the
shields, so to speak. Okay, and the mindset behind it, well,
don't you want to throw some bad. No, I don't. I
don't believe in negative magic. So if I'm doing if I'm putting these shields
up, I'm not going to make them barbed wire, I'm not going to
make them razor wire shields I put. I put no attack magic into my
defenses. Yeah, I just make it solid. But a lot of people,
our whole culture is addicted to war, and the most popular movies out
there are war movies. Okay, warrior movies. You know. It doesn't
matter whether swords or tanks, or atom bombs or phasers, it's always somebody
with a weapon. Yep. Okay, And I have walked away from more
fights with a simple stare down where they realized I was telling them no at
a very fundamental level. Yes, I've had the crap beat out of me
a couple of times. Okay. I had somebody try to beat the hell
out of me a few years ago. My person was about ready to try
and come over and take me apart, and my spell simply looked at them.
She's a combat veteran. You certainly do not want to do this.
If she comes after you, you're going to have a cobra in your hands.
Okay, I had to make peace when I came home with Vietnam,
and it took me until I got into a monastery. I got out of
Vietnam in seventy two. It wasn't till two thousand and two and a monastery
was I able to make peace with the ones that I destroyed. And I
have a very deep anger and disapproval of our government for taking someone like me,
who at that time had been a good Catholic boy, and taking me
over someplace and teaching me to kill people. Okay, I'm a very gentle
soul these days. I have made peace with a lot of bad things.
And you have to do that. If you're going to be a good witch,
you have to make peace with all those bad things, all those bad
things that people did do in school, things your brother and sister did do,
your aunts and uncle is, your step mom, whatever, your parents.
I'm a strange for my parents. They handled my gender change, they
were old with it. They found out I was a witch. I was
about to say it was the witch thing, right. I am so banished,
I am so disowned. It is ridiculous. I mean it disbanished and
disowned on paper. Okay, cannot get I cannot have a meeting with them.
I can still. I can sometimes call my mother up if she likes
UFO stories. Every now and then, I'll simply call her up. Got
quick you, Oh, I gotta say it in the first line, Got
a quick UFO story for you? Shoot, so give her a UFO story.
Wow, that's cool. Bye. Well, you know UFOs bring people
together. I yes, No, I don't disagree with that. You can't.
Before I started writing my first column back in twenty thirteen, I didn't
know how popular it was. I suspected it was. So I went to
my favorite diner, sat at the bar of the diner, and I told
the lady that was waiting on me, who knew me. I said,
I'm going to start talking loud about ufolks, and if people start whispering to
you, tell them I'm an expert, and this is why I was really
an expert, you know. And I did. She did. I started
talking loud to the truck driver next to me because I knew he'd probably seen
stuff out on the highway. Oh yeah he did. Oh yeah, big
guy, you know mixt thing. You know. I got people toddling up
to me from the booths. My uncle was abducted. My daughter was sawd
one, you know at the girls go out get and it just it was
one. I could have walked out of there with six months worth of stories
for my newspaper column and I hadn't even gotten it yet. Yeah, that's
that's absolutely the way it works. When I got the column, I got
turned down from six newspapers, I went and pitched. He left me out
of the office, escorted me to the door by security, out of the
office, chased me out of the office, you know. Everything. Nobody
wanted to talk to me. I got a phone call from a little weekly
to said, come on over, let's talk. We hear you're out pitching.
So I went in to talk to the guy. That guy's name is
Larry Dietrick. He's past now and pastor and COVID and we talked for about
twenty minutes over a cup of tea in his office, and turns out we
were about the same age, and he had read all the same books I
had in high school and early college and in the military, that kind of
thing. And at the end of about twenty minutes discussing some of the old
writers, you know, the John Keels, the the uh uh, all
those guys okay, yeah, Mark Mark, uh no, Bob, Bob
Edwards, John Edwards, John Edwards, Frank Edwards, Frank Edwards, Yeah,
all yeah yeah. And so he looked at me and says, I'm
the editor in chief. I can't write that, but you can. I'll
try you out for a month, and he had this dread pirate Roberts sound.
I'll try you out for a month, you know, I'll show the
kill you in the morning. Well, he calls me up four weeks later.
I gave him four or five articles I had already pre written. I
said, make sure you edit the month, you know, And he called
me up about four weeks later. He says, get over here. We
got to talk, and he had that pirate Roberts sound. So they got
the parking lot torn up. I can't find a place to park. I'm
ten minutes late to the meeting. I come into the meeting. All the
columnists from the papers a weekly all around this big conference table and he's talking
to him about something. And I opened up the door and he stops.
He looks at me and he says, there's our rock star. I said,
what are you talking about? He said, you've been here less than
a month. You're pulling more online page views and all of them combined.
So when the first line round of right layoffs came about six months later,
I was not on that list. I was keeping the online addition alive.
Yeah, and so it went on from there, and six months later,
the digital editor, who was my interface. I was always a freelance.
I was never actually on salary. I was probed as a freelance. And
they the digital edit, calls me up and says, hey, you're pulling
a national audience. This is Is that a big deal? He says,
for a little weekly newspaper and upstate New York. Yeah, that's a big
deal. That's completely changing our advertising mentality. And holy god, Okay,
fine, just keep doing it. Get up to the Christmas party, the
publisher and the digital editor get up there and say, our one columnist is
pulling an international audience. The wacky cracky UFO writer place went nuts. Okay,
and then we got an article. Linda n I published that book,
first book on UFO statistics, UFO Citing's Desk Reference two thousand and one to
twenty fifteen. New York Times does a story on US. I saw that
Ralph Ralph pluminghal yeah, bloominghal yeah. And he actually jumped on a train
and came up and stayed in one of the the waft hotel things and spent
two days with us. First thing, he said, I'm here to make
sure my editor satisfy my editors, you know, living in your mother's cellar
or attic. And we had we had a big, old Victorian house at
the time, and so he came in talked to me for a couple of
hours. And we had a living room in the front part of the house
that we had turned into a full library. We had a nonfiction library of
about fifteen hundred books, and we had old we had what they called stickley
furniture in it. So you expected hercue perrot to come in and have a
team with you or something, you know. Yeah, and he this,
He talked to me for a while, and then Linda came home from work
and he sat down and talked to her, and then we all went down
to an Irish pub and you know, he had a great meal down there
and got him loosely sloshed, and you know, so this is how it
went. The paper. The story came out on the electronic edition on the
twenty fourth of April. In fact, if you want to read it,
it is called people are Seeing UFOs Everywhere and this book proves it. Not
a bad title, Vitoria sel No, it's a really good title and really
good That came out on the electronic edition on the twenty fourth. The newspaper
version came out on the twenty fifth. My phone started bringing a eight thirty
in the morning. First call was from the Times of London. They interviewed
me for about forty five to fifty minutes, and it was one phone call
after another there after all day. I didn't find out till the next day
that the phones were ringing off the hook at the newspaper. Okay, so
suddenly a little newspaper in upstate New York had news directors and news editors from
all over the planet calling them because we were treating this subject matter not as
woah ha ha. I was writing columns that were sensible and made an argument,
and I treated it instead of sensation. My articles had a flavor of
I wrote the articles like a flavor of just like another car accident down the
street, fire across town, burglary of two blocks over. I just wrote
the stories like that with a great deal of respect, just traded it like
another story, like it happens every day, and I talk to people day.
Yes. Yeah. So the thing is is it happens way more often
than anybody what in you know, in normal life, would like to think
of. Way more often. People say when they read the statistics books,
this seems to be more about human activity than it does. The UFOs.
We thought, these seems to be hovering around the nuclear sites or something like
this or this or that. You know, well, they do, but
yeah, they do, they do other things. And the goofy part that
was, I said, there's let's just assume there's a constant degree of traffic
up there, that these things are not as rare as everybody says they are.
All the experts say they're rare. There's they're here. They like to
watch this little planet and our eight billion people. We're cute to watch,
you know. And the line referred to me by somebody who who is an
experiencer who has regular contact with ET and they said, what their their usual
remark is, what have the thunderheads on Tara done? Now? Oh yeah,
I'm sure We're almost like a soap opera for any creat like a Doonsbury
cartoon for the books. Well, yeah, so this is how this all
went down. So we did really well with it. And when the paper
went under nineteen June and nineteen June of twenty nineteen, the editor is actually
about February of nineteen. I had written a holiday piece for Halloween from late
eighteen and they got a lot of nice meme about it, and he said,
could you give me a series, you know, like maybe rotate it
like every other week with the UFO column and just do a column every week,
but one week do like the pagan community, one week do the UFOs.
I said, sure, I could do that. So I wrote them
up a dozen articles. They get them started, and the digital editor called
me up. She was a new editor for me, and she called me
up and said, boy, he's really excited, can't wait to latch.
This is going to be great stuff. I was okay, good, And
then they called me up and says, the paper's going under. Your last
article will be the last art, the last edition that we're doing, you
know, twenty sixth of June twenty nineteen, and they closed up. And
it was always one of those free papers, so to speak, So they
completely lived on advertising. Yeah, we had a local paper that we worked
out a lot, and they tried to do the subscription thing and people were
too slow to respond and it just ye, it was too little, too
late. Yeah, and fifty year old paper went under. And so I
tried to get other papers to pick me up. And I tried for four
years rather regularly, and I got the same David aha ha, even after
the stuff's really started coming out that it was really it was looking like congressional
hearings and things like this. The few papers that actually covered that, I
said, which like a column us who know something about it, you know.
And again they wouldn't talk to me. And then I was speaking at
the UFO, the Uful convention, and there's two in Roswell. They're kind
of competing conventions. One at the museum and there's one at the news with
the newspaper down at the civic center. They invited me to come. Now
what happened on that was I had a loose invitation to come. Most of
the editor senior editorial staff came to contact in the desert and they had heard
me speak there m and I blew their bloody socks off. I showed them
where they are, how big they are, where they've been, the patterns
when they are, when they're not. Okay, we from the data,
we have discerned a huge amount of information. Okay, it's all the Pink
book. If you go on Amazon and you want the Pink book. You
go on Amazon and you look up UFO Sitings Desk Reference the United States of
America two thousand and one to twenty twenty. It's a twenty year sample.
It's bright pink. Why is it bright pink? So you see it?
Well, that too. But in twenty nineteen, the usual suspects are lobbyists
and DC. They reached out to me and said, you know, we
didn't know Goog was coming. Okay, so they said, when said or
Rubio has written a bill, he's going to attest to a continuing spending bill,
is something maybe government reappropriations or military spending package, something they know will
pass and it's going to require congressional hearings on UFOs. It said, okay,
said you two women and have written the only books of ulful statistics that
were published, would you be willing to come and testify before Congress? We
have the end whisper in the right years and I were sitting there on the
phone call. It says like we were both federal contractors. You worked your
whole career trying not to have to testify before Congress, you know. So
we said, yeah, okay, sure. So I got off the call.
We have English. We do English tea in this house, okay.
And so we were talking about it, and I said, okay, imagine
that we've seen congressional hearings and during the course of our work, I said,
we're on c SPAN. There's all these guys up there behind these big,
big desks and things, and they got piles of papers and books and
things in front of them. If they're pulling through our book, we want
them to know that it was ours so and we want them to know since
the UFO community seems to be dominated by a lot of men, we want
them to know that it was written by a couple of women and dedicated to
a woman. So we made it bright Fusia. You can flag in aircraft
with this thing. And it's it's about it's about an inch and a half
thick. It's we're credited with one concussion. Some woman hit her husband over
the head with it, funny things to learn about in alt as an author.
If you want to find all my stuff that we've written on UFOs on
Amazon, go to Amazon book Search, not Google, but go to Amazon
book Search and put in Costa costa ufo. You will find all fifty three
books that we've published. Now, where did the volume come from? We've
written two desk Repherens one from two thousand and one to twenty fifteen. That's
the white book, the Pink Book, which we just told you about.
We published all the articles that I wrote for Syracuse New Times in one collection.
I feel like the stories that's the book to get and we published starting
last Halloween through Christmas. I've worked on it for almost two years. We
wrote fifty people had been bugging us. Can you give us a book that
this is your pink book when it goes down to the county level in each
state, can you give us something in the villages? And during twenty twenty
one day, I ran a report on my computer and had nothing better to
do. And it would have been a book about a foot and a half
two foot thick. It would have been equivalent down going down to the village
level. It would have been equivalent to three or four Oxford dictionaries. Can't
do that. Nobody's going to publish it, No one's going to buy it.
The binding alone would be ideous. Linda says, you can't build a
binding like that. Yeah, that's no. Libraries have these little private tables
for big dictionaries. Yeah, I mean it's not like people have those bookstand
things. They don't. Okay, we've got a dictionary like that. We
don't have one of those stands. And we're still watching the antique stores for
unbelieving the deal is what we did, decided I said to do. I
said, why don't I publish an individual since we build these things with PDFs
anyway, I said, why don't we build why don't we do fifty individual?
State books were detailed down to the zip Coden village level, and Linda
looked at me and said, you're crazy. So you've known them crazy since
you married me. Oh, I'm a crazy yogi, I'm a crazy witch.
For goodness sakes, here, you know. I said I can do
it, And she kept getting up in front of audience and says, I
don't think she can pull this off. So I finally came to her with
a final format for the book. It says that might work, And he
said, yeah, would you like to see the manuscripts. I'd already done
them, And so we had the manuscripts for all fifty We had to do
some tweaking and registering on Amazon so you can put the ISBN numbers in and
all that stuff. So we got them all built. I built all the
major elements of the books. Some of it's duplicated from book to book because
it's all our best papers. And then the second half the book, or
second quarter of the book, was the specific information about a state at the
state level, the county level, and down to the zip code and right
down to the cities and village level. Okay, and when you got it,
says say, say you had sightings in your town, you find your
county in the book, you get down in that county and you would look
for your zip code, and then all the cities in that zip zip codes
or villages in that zip code would have next to it every listing of every
shape that had been reported in what years. So if you had saucers and
they were reported across an assortment of eight or nine years, over twenty years,
there were all the numbers of what years they were in, not the
citing information itself, but it would say twenty eighteen five, you know,
and underneath it would be Okay, there's the fireballs, there's the spheres,
there's this, there's that. Provided they had them, and I've had people
send me hate. Now there was nothing from my talent. I said,
then, you didn't have any UFOs reported. Didn't say there wasn't any there.
You didn't somebody in your village or your zipko didn't report them. So
you got the reports from move On and New Fork, Yeah, I got.
I got dumps from both of them. Okay. And it was a
lot of work to make the two databases go together because they they they did,
they weren't compatible, right. We had to develop. But we developed
things that we developed to sanitize the data and make it compatible. That would
take us two or three months to do. Back with the White Book,
back in twenty sixteen, with the first book, things it took us like
three months to do. I can do in a month now. Things took
me a week to do back then, I can do in a morning now.
Okay, Yeah, because what do ex federal contractors know how to do?
That the average worker doesn't. We try to do as little work as
possible. It makes it sound like we're lazy. No, you do a
task, you make extensive notes, and you write a process procedure. The
next time you do it, you tighten it up even more, to the
point that every time you do it it gets a little tighter, and at
some point you've got it down to a very small amount of time. But
since the contract was written based on the first one you did, you charged
them out for the two hours that process took, but you were only dumping
them out in probably fifteen to twenty minutes. It's called profit. Yeah,
let's country remember, Yes, yes, absolutely, So we were very good
at doing this. So we had the data all cleaned up in twenty twenty
except one thing. We ran a report and we just got in there and
we noticed that did a city, little city. We'll say Jasper, Wyoming,
and it would say Jasper, Wyoming, and there might be another jest
for Wyoming. Becuse somebody put a space in front of Jasper when they typed
it in, or they Jasper Wyoming next to Joe's gas station, Bob's Pizza.
There's all this extraneous stuff put in three percent of the entire database of
one hundred and sixty seven six and thirty two records. Three percent of that.
Take your calculators out, kids, figure out how big this is.
They didn't enter the name of it city for the report blank seven percent entered
the city. Either didn't spell it right, used variable case writing to write
it, you know, capitals and little letters and make sort of just all
capital letters or something. Old people tend to do that, and or they
wrote something in like I just told you, they wrote in Jasper, Wyoming
next to Joe's gas station, right, Okay, So we couldn't clean that
up easily. So it was twenty twenty. We were in lockdown. We
had no place better to go, nothing better to do. So it was
like I suddenly came out of retirement and I sat down and put in a
seven hour day, five days a week total eight s started the second week
of August, and this first week of August and of the second week of
January twenty twenty one, I logged eight hundred and fifty hours. That's another
thing federal contractors do is log your time. Okay, So we logged eight
hundred and fifty hours doing it. But while we were doing it cleaning that
up, we added like that longitude, we added like zip code, that
kind of thing. Cleaned up the county data from the previous books data base
because some of it was wrong. It's a very delicate thing to fix,
okay, and so we fixed it all. And it was eight hundred and
fifty hour effort just to do that one task. It was about three to
five. There's no spell check to do this, believe me. No,
No, we had to write. We had to work on as little as
five hundred lines a day to as much as if I was in a good
mood, maybe twelve or fifteen hundred lines. But we took the database and
brought it down into a spreadsheet to work with it in that environment. It
was grueling. It was like going back to work it lucky day, forty
hours we okay. But when we got done, we had a pretty christine
set up. So I started building the reports for every single state, and
we stole the high level county and state data from the Pink Book since we'd
already done it for every single right. They did it once, so we
just why do it again? Why do it again? And it was the
same number of sightings anyway, we didn't add anything, so we were able
to minimize our costs of overhead and labor that way. And the percentage of
the variance is for any one state only changed by less than ten plus or
minus five kind of thing. It was not very much, so we wrote
even wrote a little disclaimer and said to save money. We did this,
okay, and nobody's argued about that. So I built all these things.
I came to Linda and they said, I would like to launch the first
one. We'll do Ohio first, since we lived there. Oh and the
names of the books are all the same. We kind of tied into the
fantastic Beasts and where to find them UFOs in Ohio and where to find them
UFOs in Texas and where to find them UFOs in California and where to find
They're all named the same thing except to the name of the state. So
we launched Ohio first, tighten up our process, launched Michigan second. Why
did we launch Michigan seconds next door? No, it's because we were hoping
to have the book out in time for a Michigan conference we went to Okay,
but we put that up and then the third installment. A week later,
we did five books. We tightened up the process the point where Linda
would go on. I gave her the titles, she plugged them into the
Amazon publishing system that would give her the uh. We had a standard stock
write up for you know, the the authors, all the stuff you got,
all the yeah, all the business and of stuff. So she had
a template for that. All she had to just cut and paste that in
and it would generate an ISBN. She'd write it down for me and she'd
hand me back these. I'd go back into the PDF that had the front
versal material. That's the only thing I had to change, make the corrections
there from the from the template we had, and then just put them all
into one PDF marginal and one PDF. Adobe Acrobat made this possible. Okay,
put them all in there. We published five the next week. Now,
remember I started on Halloween. This was a magical effort as well.
Okay, so we published five a week for the next few weeks. Got
to about the last twenty books. I've looked at Linda and said, the
process is tight enough. Now I will give you ten next week. See
if you can do it. She did, and then we did ten more
and we were done, and we were done just before winter solstice. We
did the entire thing in one magical period. That's magic in industry. Yeah,
that is amazing. Did you do any what kind of computer did analysis?
Did you do? Did you use anything like machine learning or any of
that kind of the way we call aid the data? Yeah? Truth,
we told we did most of it between a database program, a simple Microsoft
data program called Access and Excel. Okay, remember I'm an old school intelligence
analyst. I was the computer. I did the analysis analyst. So a
friend of mine is your tax dollars paid for those books in a sense by
giving me those skills, I think it was worth it. So I have
a friend who is a contractor, works for a contractor out in Dayton,
and he built a database out of Albert Rosales is humanoids. Uh books,
books of humanoid sightings. That's like, you know, because I read them
and I'm like, I'm like this is really interesting, but there's no way
I can collate it really well. And you know, so I'm an old
school journalist. So I started flagging with post its and had a map with
some pins and something, and then I was like, you goof ASTs,
We have computers. The computers, this is what they're good at. So
I said to Morgane, I said, do we know anybody who can do
that? And she said, oh, yeah, Chris Can. And I'm
like, what, I thought he was a historian. She's like, no,
he's an astrophysicist in a computer scientist for you know, somebody who contracts
for the government. Not for the government directly, but yeah. And I
said, oh, invite him to dinner please. So that's that's how I
talked him into this crazy project which we're still working on, but because he
worked as a contractor for a government agency. To your question, though,
at contacting the Desert, I had at least three people who were not just
Joe teenager plays with AI chant. Yeah, several laboratory types that ask if
we'd be willing to let them let the AI take a shot at the scale
of the database, right, and they would be doing in a level that
wouldn't be at the level where there was as much visibility and oversight. They
would be doing it like a research firm that has access to the system.
Right, Okay, it's more private, and none of them could convince us
that our names should still be with it. That's not Cole and Linda and
I just just just absolutely loved the patriarchy. As you know. It's wonderful,
isn't it. Oh yes, it's our favorite. It's our favorite.
Yet finally, a gentleman from Israel sat me down and we had a really
long talk at Contact in the desert. So understand what time this talk is.
I had just given a p I had just been on a stage with
Oh, jeepers, everybody there. You'd know. We had Nick Pope up
there, we had Linda Mowton Howe up there. We had the guy that
ran for Congress in the UFO ticket. We had Steve Bassett was the moderator,
three other people who you would know in a minute who saw them.
And I was sitting down on the far end of this panel of eight people.
Okay. In fact, when I went up on stage to do this
before they put three thousand people in to hear us, I looked at Steve
Bess. I said, Steve, I'm looking at all the names here.
Cheepers, creepers. She got me up here with with sky goddess, gods
and goddess says I can't compete with these guys. I do numbers. You've
got insight that all of them, they're all involved in politics. You've got
the numbers in your head. You know how things work. You'll see openings,
trust me. So I just sat down there and listened, and it
didn't sound look like I was going to say much. And then when someone
said something about Arizona, and they said something about how many there are,
what's going on in Arizona? I flagged for the MC and he'd give me
the gavel and I'd say, okay, Arizona is the number seven state.
Maricopa County is the number two county of thirty nine hundred counties, thirty five
hundred counties. Actually, and I just read off the high numbers. The
audience. You could feel the suction of the gasp. Yeah, yeah,
And three times that happened in the course of the talk. Okay, and
so we're wrapping it up. I asked when the last two QUI made one
of the last two statements, and I said, I've shown you the scale
of the numbers, just with a couple of things off the top of my
head. Some of you think them up here calculating. No, I was
just verifying the numbers on the calculator on my phone because I've got most of
it in my head. I was just making sure I said the right thing
before I said it is. I don't have my books with me. But
the bottom line is, folks, they're here. They're here in numbers.
We know what their patterns are. We know that they're studying us. They're
worried about our pollution. They're worried about our faults are fault lines big time.
They're lurried about all of our serious pollution, all of our big clean
up level lakes and rivers and things. They're incredibly worried about that. Everybody
says, Oh, they got to be hanging out on all all the nuclear
reactors, all fifty five nuclear reactors. I have the address to every single
one of them, right down to the street and zip code. They aren't
there. That are the people in that neighborhood aren't reporting them because they aren't
there. Now, if you say take me to a military base, not
all military bases. People's some nuclear power plants. Oh those are toxic waste
sites. No they're not. But if you take me to a base and
active base, all most of the bases in the United States back in the
seventies when that lady did that thing using National UFO Reporting Center. They were
all still strategic basis. At the end of the Cold War, a lot
of them were closed completely. They came industrial parks where they became international guard
or reserve bases. They're not active basis most bases. All of that sack
stuff got handed over to the Navy and it's all with the missile submarines and
things. Okay, So the bottom line is, and I got this confirmed
with the way I sounded over very cryptically, they're only interested in our advanced
technology aka are nuclear weapons. Has always been the case since Eisenhower. They
asked us give up nuclear weapons, and they are are war making boyfriends don't
want to do so, Okay, so that's what we're up against. But
the bottom line is, that's what they seem to be concerned about, is
the degree of a pollution. Now, why suddenly did we have a jump
in sightings after two thousand and four. We're at an at an ecological tipping
point, and I think half the reason we started seeing all of our fleet
being harassed by these guys. They're trying to get our leaders to wake up
and finally come clean which is a lot more has happened in the last three
years than we've had happened for a long time. Oh yeah, yeah,
because we seem to be in an ecological tipt point. The storm storms are
getting nastier, the water is getting warmer. If the if the Gulf Stream
shuts down, uh, Northern Europe and England are going to be the new
Greenland. Okay, this is what the implications really truly are. It's happened
before, it can happen again, and we will be the cause of it
this time. And we think, I think personally from everything I've seen,
it seems to be we're at this ecological pisson well that too, yes,
tipping point, but we are at a crossroads and et isn't going to save
us, but they're they're trying to get a dialogue going with us that we
need to take care of And everybody you talk to who's ever been an experiencer
and an abductee will tell you those folks are great, and they told us
to take care of our planet. I know that's been the that's been the
answer, that's been the message forever. Yes, like at least from the
forties, but even before that, Yes, I mean, even the Blessed
Virgin Mary says, you know, take care of your planet, stop having
war. Pray, pray for peace. We pray is magic. Uh huh.
That's what I was hoping would come out of your mouth after I said
that constant, not so much the words, but the concentrated thought and imagery
your head of peace. Yes, of what peace means, and the heart
felt intension of asking for peace and saying need at peace. Here's the deal.
Everybody thinks Heaven and God is out there someplace. The spark of life.
I shouldn't even call that the spark of life. That is what animates
you. Each of us have it. But think of it in a bigger
sense. Think of it in the sense that it's like single drop of water
in an infinite ocean. Okay, each drop of water has an impact on
all the other drops of water. But if you consider that infinite ocean to
be the God Force. Now I'm not talking to God of Abrahead. I'm
just talking the God Force. Excuse me, the God Force. What George
Lucas talked about. The force? Okay, may the force be with you,
honest really, which is understand the force is what it is, and
you are using your instance of the force to change things. Bear with me,
So the Force. If you make prayers of offering of goodwill, joy,
health, and abundance to every being, every drop, every being,
everywhere, every whin, that blowback is wonderful because you have just executed an
act of love to all of the God Force everywhere. Okay, because each
of those drops, because of being a piece of the God Force. Technically
each one of us is a God. I'm right saying that in a gender
term. Okay. I had to talk with someone this afternoon, and quite
literally a physician. Yes, how, he says, how do you do
this stuff, my goddess? I create universes? Yeah, you create universe.
I'm a storyteller. I write novels, I write short stories, and
I make plays I make I've made indie films. I tell stories. I
create universes. So did George Lucas. You may not have heard of me,
but you certainly know he created a universe. So who's to say that
didn't manifest somewhere. Okay, it's certainly his met His universe has manifested ear
and Disney bought it. Ye, Disney doesn't buy things that don't exist.
But the bottom line is you are the divine force. So here's the deal.
If we have a lot of there are I did it. I did
it. I used to write column for Wickham Magazine and uh yeah, I
get around, don't I. And I wrote an article I found one hundred
and forty I was trying to find protection deities and I didn't find anything.
Actually, I ended up only a couple of months ago. And I wrote
this article back in twenty eighteen. A couple of months ago. I found
two protector deities. Okay, there was a one hundred and forty seven war
making gods and goddesses fears wrathful, Okay, no problem, even the Holladay,
Hey baby, he's wrathful. He's a god. I you know,
our god of vengeance, you know. But the bottom line is this wrathfulness.
There was no protector deities out there. Oh, you can go to
the Buddhist tradition and find protector there, but most American pagans aren't going to
invoke some Buddhists and goofy Buddhist deity I do. I know how to work
with them, and they're great, okay. But in the traditional paganism,
tribal religious there were mostly war making gods and goddesses. And then I went
out there was one hundred and seventy five total traditions had all these war making
gods and goddesses. And then I looked up something and I said, I
wonder how many of them have peace gods? Seven traditions had gods of peace.
Okay, I only found two protector deities out there in the mix,
and both of them were Egyptian, and I just happened to be an Egyptian
priests who knew you know, but you see the problem and go back to
the UFO committee. Steve Bassett has said it very well, and I think
he got it from somebody off this world. Humans are addicted to war.
Some of the highest rated movies we are produced out there are war movies.
Yeah, okay, yeah, it's Star Wars is a war movie. It's
a war It's in the title. Take yes, take a look at Going
out There, and take a look at Buck Rogers or even Flash Gordon,
those kinds of movies back in the early days of filmmaking, and it's always
excused the expression some white guy with a phaser or a ray gun or something.
Even with Star Trek. It was the same thing. Okay, that's
what this is. This is about patriarchal people with weapons that gives us a
grow. That was a great white man with a gun in the African movies,
Yeah, great White Hunter. Yeah yeah, guys, we've got to
stop all is killing. I'll tell you what. I had a very interesting
dream the night before the Israel War broke out. And it's about two countries
that had been in a hundred years war with each other. That's not too
far from what we have right now. Yeah, yeah, give it a
more decades. And a goddess got asked to come and negotiate. The said,
we can't do it ourselves. We'll call a goddess then, and she
listens to their cases for weeks, and her solution a pox on both your
countries. You over there, you were going to die of this, and
you were there you were going to die of that, and you over there
the thing they have can cure you, and the thing that you guys have,
they've got. You can live together. You can work, work together
and live and be friends where you can fight together and die equally. And
that was the solution. Unfortunately, the next morning I got up and they're
at it again, and I can't. I have to really very carefully go
through my news because I don't want to. I don't care about it.
I don't want about it. They aren't trying to make peace, they really
aren't. And A talks on both their countries. I feel the same way.
But we've got too much stuff. There's too much there's too much profit
in war, and meet hyarchy needs to step forward and take the boy toys
away because women make communities. Yes, okay, now this is coming from
a male to female training, but I been one for thirty four years.
On this Halloween, I have my surgery in Halloween by only. It's something
we have to look at as witches, lady witches. We do have more
power in our hands than people give us credit for. We need to stop
all of the month. The mytriarchy needs to return. It needs to return
in force. The boys have made a mess of it with bloody war after
bloody war. Okay, yeah, and we need to change this. And
the women are fifty percent of the population and we need to take over the
government and we need to be one hell of a blue wave in the next
election. Yeah, okay, And it needs to be of a mentality.
We're not trying to protect a training. Say nice if we did, but
we need to not worry about the fact that they are. The Republicans have
been trying to tell us, oh, you don't want men dressing in his
kourgs and trying to take away your privilege. Privilege. Yeah, people said,
well, Chery, you're not a real woman. I took the thirty
pay cut. Okay, I took that cut, corporate cut. I didn't
get a raise for five years after I changed, and the people I worked
with and engineering at the company I worked with, they Cheryl did that crazy
sex change thing. We can't trust your judgment about anything. Took me three
years to get that level of professional self esteem back, for God, but
I got it back, and people saw what kind of talent I had outside
of the company. He said, Jesus, why are we treating her like
crap inside the company? We're gonna lose her. We got to keep her.
That is what happens when you apply yourself and channel the magic where it
needs to be not about money, it's about resources, It's about respect.
Okay, this is what I'm talking about. But the women need to stand
up and stop looking at the cosmetics, especially the younger women. Stop worrying
about getting on TikTok and being the lady's hadi taddi. You need to stand
up and take control or it's going to look like the handmaiden's wife again.
Yeah, okay, and it's going to be nasty. And you're seeing with
what they're trying to do. They're shutting down all this stuff for the trainings
because they know nobody will to defend them. We're only a half a percent
of the population and making it somic we're taking over the country. We're not.
But they're also telling you you can't control your body. They've been telling
you you can't control your body since the Middle Ages, since the Burning times.
The popes said, oh, we'll blame the women and the and the
women and the witches for the black plague. Will blame them for oh,
they eat babies and they sell their souls to the devil, because there were
women in those hierarchy circles that were providing the abortions in those days. Mm
hmm, okay. They're telling you again, oh, you can't have control
of your own body. The only beings that don't have control over their own
bodies are livestock. Understand that you need to take control. Forget the politics.
The one party that's not going to screw you over on this thing right
now is the republic Democratic Party. Need we need to take those Google boys
out of power because their mentality, if you follow their boards, is where
the church we're in power, and they're going to push that whole church mentality
two genders because you're either're a boy or a girl and nothing else, when
science has shown that there are like thirty five forty gender structures within us.
Despite what our biology is, I am not defined by my biology. I
am not defined by my da and A, your religion or your politics.
All of us have to take that view because we are not the chicken suit
you are, so I am the empty. I'm the spirit without a name
behind these eyes. And that is as a witch you need to wrap or
pagan you need to wrap your head around. You are the bright light behind
these eyes. And this thing is is transient, but you are the power.
Take control of your godly power and use the tools you have in this
chicken suit and change the world. You can do it together with others to
do it. If you can't bend together. I'll just do it in whatever
thing you have control over. Start it that way, you can do it.
Trust me, it's been done before. I'll right myself with that,
my dear. What's that? That is excellent? Thank you, my pleasure.
Thank you for being here with me tonight. Thank you for that history
lesson. I'm I'm kind of speechless. You you've rendered me speechless. Nobody
does that. I can always talk. Thank you so much. Thank you
for the love. Thank you for the work that you have done. Thank
you for my God, all of those numbers and you did at old school,
and I'm amazed. Thank you for everything. And again, you're welcome
to come back anytime you want, honest and for true. We can talk
about just about anything anytime anywhere. To come back, talk real serious woo
woo with UFOs. Okay, that'd be great topic. And just keep it
to that. Is there some really good wou and it goes into this consciousness
realm stuff and ET's already got it and they're trying to wake us up to
understand it. So yeah, that's pretty much what I've started to think.
Well, thank you. I had a lama once. Look at me in
a crowd besides telling me you knew me and this is a different lama.
He looked at the seven of the thirty five months and nuns that were at
this little gathering we were having like a weenie roast to celebrate him being there.
And he's looking around and he looks and looks at me and his friend
Vicky, and he says, oh, you two have been touched by the
sky dancers. And we, the two of us, knew each of us
had been an experiencer. Mm hmm, it's you two have been touched by
the bikinis. Oh, this is good. We should talk, you know.
So even the deepest, even some of the oldest religions, know a
great deal about this. I think it's in all of the older religions.
I mean, yeah, I don't want to be one of those people who
says, do you see that it's a ufo. That's what it is.
He's in a spaceship and you know, looking at art. But there's just
there's always been sky people, yeah, and water people. Any indigenous tribe
will tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. One one last world short story
real quickly. I gotta wrap this up there. I'll say it. I'm
losing here. At the end of the night. We were just talking about
UFOs with with like the elders and such. Mm hmm. Okay. On
the consciousness side of this thing, I'll give you a tidbit. I was
at an event with some sorry lunkin monks two thousand is okay, and it
was at a big festival, and I was looking for a restaurant. Remember
I'm a Tibetan ropes buzz cut best like the Dalai lama. And I go
into this building thinking maybe there's a restroom in here. I found myself sort
of on the edge of a stage. There were six or seven high level
lama teachers from several you know, we had Cambodia, UH Korea, Japan,
UH India. They really wide range. Okay, there's about six or
seven of them, and I realized that the door had locked behind me and
I couldn't get out. Oh and somebody on the edge of that line they
were talking, apparently to an audience. He looks back to hear what the
noise was of the door, sees me standing there in debt. Hey we
got a Tibetan. Yeah, oh, dragging out there's an empty lazy boy
recliner for me to sit in. They're having a public monastic debate, and
there's like a moderator. It's an American time unk, like two hundred and
fifty three hundred cyy lnkins in the audience, all English speaking, and I
figured, Okay, I'm sitting here now, I'm not thinking like sanag the
one that I'm reincarnated from. I am thinking like Cheryl, who is like
vocational school Buddhist person. And I'm sitting here next to people with three PhDs.
You know, I'm like, oh my god, we're going to deal
with this. I'm just going to agree with everything they say. That's that's
my way out right. And I did agree with almost everything because when they
came around it was in my teaching. I understood it and I couldn't argue
with it. It was good they got to me, and the moderator says,
Hashi, we have a question for you. How do we make how
do we Buddhism always adapts to a culture and then makes that culture. It
makes itself, makes itself over again in that culture, it becomes that culture,
part of that culture. And right now, all the Buddhism in North
America, for the most part, is important okay, it's just how do
we make it unique to America? And I looked at him, I says,
and I got a microphone on, and everything is can I skip that
question? I really don't think you're going to like my idea. Of course,
the other say, oh, something to argue about, you know.
So I said, well, all right, I said, the first thing
we have to do is louse the Asian baggage. You got to hurt a
pin drop in the auditorium. And they said, what do you mean?
And I says, well, first thing start off with you. You treat
women like property in Asia. Okay, I have it on good authority from
at least one high master in Island. It just says there's one hundred thousand
monks in Asia that will never become enlightened in this lifetime because they haven't been
able to embrace their feminine energy. But I'm talking with this voice. They
think I'm a boy. Mm hmm so, and they're going, oh yeah,
but ten centro scripture. No, no, no, no, go
back to Buddha, go back to the Vinaya, go back to what he
taught. Monks and nuns are ordained equally. Oh, but the women have
three hundred and sixty thousand months on. We have a two hundred and eighty
and they carry the apparatus for reproduction. They have more responsibility. So we
argued a couple more points. I said, a little while ago here in
the talk, we all said that we all come from the same great drop,
what's called the great Bindu, the great drop the force. And I
says, we all came from a bindu. Oh, but a female birth
is an inferior birth. And I said, yes, has seventh century scriptures
written by a lot of guys, right. Only one of them looks over
to me, a cambodiander. He says, I'm allowed. Why are you
defending the women. Why are you defending the nuns? It's because I'm a
nun. Okay, I says, let me make a point. In an
hour, we're not treated equally. In an hour, we're going to go
outside. This is a big festival. The lay people have made out a
huge table of great food out there. We're going to line up in ordination
order. Men first in ordination order, then the nuns in ordination order,
and anybody who got ordained today or last couple of days, it is going
to be behind us. And we're going to go out there with our begging
balls. Looks like a bowling ball spun aluminum. Right, We're going to
go out there begging balls. We're going to put food into our begging bowls,
and we're going to go sit down. The monks are going to be
at this nice, big long table, and the two or three or four
nuns that might be here are going to be put over here on a little
card table together, the kid's table. Yeah, thank you. That's a
good way of saying it. And there was no more questions. They moved
on to the next question. An hour later, we went out to get
the food, went lang order as I talked about, and there were two
American tie nuns and me, and we were getting ready to sit down at
the stinky little kids table, as they say. And I glanced over at
the monk table and the monks were pointing at the empty seats on there table.
He says, they out I told him it tied on, So I
said, they out rank us. We can't go over there. He says,
yes, we can't. They've invited us. We're getting ready to sit
down together with them, and he said we shouldn't be doing this. I
said, honey, we just climbed Everest. Mm hmm. I thought that
was the end of it. About four months later, my a Lama comes
to down the guy to pick me out of a crowd. I'm his duty
driver. I'm driving around in my Burgundy Saturn taking him to all his appointments.
And we're sitting at an eight minute light in Rockville Pike in Maryland,
and out of nowhere, little five off, five foot sawed off nothing.
Guys, sister, he says soul. I hear we have to lose the
Asian baggage. Oh God, who told you that? Oh? Three Buddhist
journalists that we're in the audience, I read all of their articles in trouble
said no, you said the truth is, I'm the one that told you
that monks are not going to become enlightened because they won't embrace their female energy
because there in a culture that says a female birth is inferior birth. You
said the truth. You teach that in your What you teach I said,
better become more authority if it came from you is I'm the head of Tibetan
Orthodox Buddhism North America. I can't monkey with that politics but you can.
And if it gets to cumbersome for us, we can disavow you, but
you teach it. So you just got your teaching tonight, and I am
grateful. I must go and get some sleep. Is this cold is just
killing me here? All right, my dear take care. That's vedigna everyone,
Thank you. Well, that's all for this week's episode of the Six
Degrees of John Keel podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about the
podcast, or would like to come and talk about your experiences of the paranormal,
you can contact us at six d JK six y seven at gmail dot
com. We promised even answer you and we are always happy to hear from
you. Thank you,