Speaker 1: A Cast Classics. The Witness follows Joseph O'Callahan, who provide
Speaker 1: a testimony that help convict two drug dealing gangsters for murder,
Speaker 1: making him the youngest person to ever enter the Witness
Speaker 1: Protection program in Ireland. Now he tells his extraordinary life
Speaker 1: story for the first time.
Speaker 2: Tell him to stand up now and get into Witness
Speaker 2: box and give evil as I didn't do it, so
Speaker 2: that's why I'm standing here.
Speaker 1: Find out more about The Witness and other ACAST classics
Speaker 1: at acast dot com. Forward Slash Classics.
Speaker 3: This is Where Did the Road Go? Our aim is
Speaker 3: to explore the fringe to be true, skeptics in question openly,
Speaker 3: to investigate the paranormal, bring light to the dark corners
Speaker 3: of history, and give a voice to the shun of science.
Speaker 3: We deal in mysteries and the important questions that these
Speaker 3: subjects bring to light. What is reality? Who are we?
Speaker 3: And why are we here? Join us on the web
Speaker 3: at Where Didthroadgo dot com for a full show archive,
Speaker 3: links to all our social media, upcoming schedule, and much
Speaker 3: much more. Now join your host Sayah on this week's
Speaker 3: edition of Where Did the Road Go?
Speaker 4: And welcome to this week's show, I'm here again with
Speaker 4: Luke Hey, and uh, turn that mic a little towards
Speaker 4: you better. Yeah, okay, you don't talk aloud to begin with,
Speaker 4: all right? And uh, Also I wanted to mention real quick,
Speaker 4: I have up on the site that is not being
Speaker 4: aired on the The Opinions Express, but a midweek podcast
Speaker 4: with Aaron Gullias and Divo Spice on Doctor Who. Obviously
Speaker 4: not obviously fiction material, However, I think there's a big
Speaker 4: crossover audience between Doctor Who and the stuff we're talking
Speaker 4: about here. I originally did it from my music show
Speaker 4: back in October and then decided I would toss it
Speaker 4: in on this show after posting it to the Facebook
Speaker 4: page and a lot of people were really interested in it. Plus,
Speaker 4: Aaron is such a regular guest on here, I figured
Speaker 4: given to the side to his research. So if you're
Speaker 4: interested in that, you got to go to the website
Speaker 4: where DoD Theroadgo dot com and you can download that
Speaker 4: as well the John Anthony West interviews up there in
Speaker 4: the video format on YouTube audio format on the website,
Speaker 4: and I am collecting stories for another Listener's Story episode
Speaker 4: at some point over the summer. So if you have
Speaker 4: something that's happened to you and you want to talk
Speaker 4: about it, shoot me an email, go to where at
Speaker 4: the roadgo dot com, get in touch and we'll work
Speaker 4: it out. Our guest tonight, however, is mister Michael M. Hughes.
Speaker 4: And are you with us? Michael?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 4: Am all right? And you're based out of Baltimore.
Speaker 5: Sure em yep, lift here my life.
Speaker 4: Okay. You want to give people a little bit of
Speaker 4: your background because you're you're into a lot of interesting stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, I you know, I guess you know, my
Speaker 5: interest in the paranormal, the strange goes back to as
Speaker 5: early as I can remember. You know, it was the
Speaker 5: seventies when I, you know, I was growing up, so
Speaker 5: the you know, paranormal stuff just was infused in the culture.
Speaker 5: You couldn't get away with it and pop culture. And
Speaker 5: my father was always reading paperbacks about UFOs and ghosts
Speaker 5: and Bigfoot and all that stuff. So, you know, I,
Speaker 5: I'd pick up these books that you'd leave around, and
Speaker 5: I just started absorbing all of it. You know. In
Speaker 5: Search of was on TV, and you know, a friend
Speaker 5: of my father's hosted a private showing of Chariots of
Speaker 5: the Gods. You know, so I saw that when I
Speaker 5: was a kid, so you know, I mean I was
Speaker 5: just I was just born and immersed in this stuff.
Speaker 5: And you know, I had some kind of strange experiences
Speaker 5: as a kid, which you know, we can get it
Speaker 5: to at some point, but you know, there was there
Speaker 5: was a little bit of a reality to this stuff
Speaker 5: as well in my life. So yeah, I mean, this
Speaker 5: is this is what I live and breathe. I started
Speaker 5: writing fiction. My fiction is all about this stuff because
Speaker 5: it's just a part of me. And when I'm writing stories,
Speaker 5: it all comes out in my stories. And you know,
Speaker 5: I guess I've been lucky. Some people might not consider
Speaker 5: it lucky throughout my life to have experienced unusual stuff
Speaker 5: that I can't explain very well. But so you know,
Speaker 5: it's one thing just to study this material, but it's
Speaker 5: another thing when it starts happening to you too. So
Speaker 5: that's it. It's it's really the driving force in all
Speaker 5: my writing and all of my studies. It's really just
Speaker 5: to try to understand what is behind a lot of
Speaker 5: these types of phenomena, right, right, And.
Speaker 4: Why did you decide to write fiction? And instead of
Speaker 4: like research material.
Speaker 5: Well, I do a little bit of both, but I've
Speaker 5: always loved fiction, and you know, I also as a kid,
Speaker 5: I was lucky enough that you know, the works of
Speaker 5: Poe and HG. Wells and HP Lovecraft, stuff like that
Speaker 5: was was what you could find in the in the library.
Speaker 5: So that's that became part of me too. And then
Speaker 5: I read Stephen King, who really took horror and brought
Speaker 5: it into the modern era, you know, out of the
Speaker 5: haunted castles and the deserted moors and things like that,
Speaker 5: and that really inspired inspired me to start writing myself.
Speaker 5: So so I also look at at fiction is a
Speaker 5: great way to explore a lot of these subjects in
Speaker 5: a way that allows you to explore it and you
Speaker 5: can sort of go down different avenues that you can't
Speaker 5: do when you're writing nonfiction, right right.
Speaker 4: And the debut your debut novel was entitled The Blackwater
Speaker 4: Lights and what is what is Blackwater?
Speaker 5: Well? Blackwater is a fictional town in West Virginia. I
Speaker 5: went to college in a small town of Elkins, West Virginia,
Speaker 5: and I really learned to love the state. But also
Speaker 5: there was a real spookiness about West Virginia. You know,
Speaker 5: it's still vastly you know, wild and underpopulated, and you know,
Speaker 5: there was just a vibe about West Virginia that really
Speaker 5: captured me. So I invented when I set this story,
Speaker 5: I set it in a small fictional town called Blackwater,
Speaker 5: and Blackwater is an allusion to a lot of things.
Speaker 5: But at the time there was the government contracted company
Speaker 5: Blackwater that was active in Iraq and things like that.
Speaker 5: So there's a kind of play on that, and you know,
Speaker 5: some other things.
Speaker 4: I didn't know if maybe there was a connection to
Speaker 4: the Brown the Brown Mountain lights for some reason that
Speaker 4: drew me into that direction.
Speaker 5: For just the name, Yeah, well that's the Blackwater Lights
Speaker 5: is about that sort of phenomenon, and this fictional town
Speaker 5: of Blackwater. There are these ghost lights or earth lights
Speaker 5: or whatever you want to call them that are sort
Speaker 5: of what draws the main character into the story.
Speaker 4: Okay, now you said you had an excerpt you could
Speaker 4: read us. It was a couple of minutes long.
Speaker 5: Sure, Yeah, this is just to set it up. The
Speaker 5: main protagonist, his name is Ray Simon, and he's a
Speaker 5: forty somethingter school teacher living in Baltimore when the book starts.
Speaker 5: But what happened is when he was a kid, he
Speaker 5: went to a summer camp in the town of Blackwater,
Speaker 5: West Virginia, and ever since that he's had terrifying dreams
Speaker 5: about something that happened to him at this camp. And
Speaker 5: the way the book starts is he's his friend who
Speaker 5: was also at the camp, who also has had this dreams,
Speaker 5: strange dreams of doctors and machines and experiments, but all
Speaker 5: very vague and unsettling, and they've never been able to
Speaker 5: pin down what's happened. So when the book starts, Ray's
Speaker 5: friend calls him and says, I'm here in Blackwater. I
Speaker 5: know what happened. It was real, and you've got to
Speaker 5: come see me. So that this little excerpt jumps ahead.
Speaker 5: This is a bit of a reveal. Ray has met
Speaker 5: this this sort of secret society that has a base
Speaker 5: in Blackwater, and there are two characters, Micah and Mantu,
Speaker 5: who are the two men who are part of the society.
Speaker 5: And when it starts, the revealing to Ray a little
Speaker 5: bit of what happened. So it's about a two one
Speaker 5: and a half two minute thing. So I'll start here.
Speaker 5: Micah stood and faced the stove. Let's start with Let's
Speaker 5: start with what we know it was the height of
Speaker 5: the Cold War, and if you knew the right people,
Speaker 5: you could get funding for almost anything. Uncle Sam was
Speaker 5: throwing untraceable money at all sorts of projects, and there
Speaker 5: was a lot of interest in esoteric matters in those days,
Speaker 5: the supernatural, witchcraft, extrasensory perception and the like. The military
Speaker 5: was at the center of that interest. Ray nodded. My uncle,
Speaker 5: Uncle Bill, the guy who took me to the camp,
Speaker 5: was into all that Uri geller and creskin and bending spoons.
Speaker 5: He tried to get me to bend a spoon with
Speaker 5: my mind. I couldn't do it. My mom thought he
Speaker 5: was nuts, but he was serious. Many people were serious
Speaker 5: about those things, including the governments of the US and
Speaker 5: the Soviet Union that both of them thought the other
Speaker 5: was gaining the advantage, and factions within the governments were
Speaker 5: obsessed with a pursuit of occult knowledge, in particular the
Speaker 5: m k Ultra and Bluebird contingents, and the remote viewers
Speaker 5: at Fort Meade, Project Ie and Mirror. Of course, your uncle,
Speaker 5: Mantu said, was a socio. Micah held up his hand
Speaker 5: to quiet Mantu. One group, which formed in nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 5: was infamous for its research into well, very unusual subjects.
Speaker 5: They were mostly CIA, but later also NSA and high
Speaker 5: level military intel. They traveled around the world studying call
Speaker 5: technologies from many cultures, from Asia to Africa to the
Speaker 5: Amazon and Haiti, particularly shamanism and witchcraft, witchcraft something he
Speaker 5: would have never believed only a few days earlier. It
Speaker 5: was known informally as Project Mirror, and it was enormously successful,
Speaker 5: way beyond what they had expected. But their success came
Speaker 5: with a heavy price. The men who got in the deepest,
Speaker 5: the ones putting the techniques into practice, had a tendency
Speaker 5: to die early or lose their minds. The hair on
Speaker 5: the back of Ray's neck stiffened. This is about the lights,
Speaker 5: isn't it. Mantu nodded to Micah, he's getting it.
Speaker 4: All right now, correctly if I'm wrong. But you're using
Speaker 4: a lot of real events, real information that you're putting
Speaker 4: into this fictional setting.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, And that's that's that's what I meant by
Speaker 5: fiction giving you the option to explore things. I think
Speaker 5: the best sort of scary fiction is stuff that's that
Speaker 5: is as close to reality as possible. So, and you know,
Speaker 5: because this is stuff that I've been fascinated by government
Speaker 5: research into psychic abilities and the remote viewing programs and
Speaker 5: things like that. You know, this stuff comes out in
Speaker 5: my fiction. So I like to think that a reader
Speaker 5: who's not familiar with this stuff is reading this and
Speaker 5: might think, oh, I'm going to go google mk ultra,
Speaker 5: you know, and then they're going to find this government
Speaker 5: mind control program was actually very real. H So you know,
Speaker 5: it adds a layer of reality, I think, which which
Speaker 5: pull people deeper into the stories and makes it just
Speaker 5: gives it a lot more power.
Speaker 4: And I think it's interesting when you deal with things
Speaker 4: like mk ultra. You see the horrible things that people
Speaker 4: that the government is done to its own citizens over
Speaker 4: the years, and yet there are people who, even if
Speaker 4: they know about this stuff, still think, well, that was
Speaker 4: then they wouldn't do anything like that now, right.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I did a couple of articles
Speaker 5: on my blog when the Abu Grebe stuff was coming
Speaker 5: out about what was going on in Iraq and some
Speaker 5: of these prisons that the government was running. A man,
Speaker 5: I mean, if you go back and look at what
Speaker 5: was happening there, you know there were they were doing
Speaker 5: mind control stuff. It's it's quite clear. I mean, they
Speaker 5: The way I look at it is, you know, some
Speaker 5: of these factions within the government probably thought this is
Speaker 5: this is our prime time to start working on this
Speaker 5: stuff again. And you look at some of the reports
Speaker 5: from people that were there. They talk about rooms with
Speaker 5: like candles and just some of these tech, these techniques,
Speaker 5: these things that they were doing to people. It's you know,
Speaker 5: I'm sure in ten fifteen years things are going to
Speaker 5: come out that are just absolutely mind boggling and rival
Speaker 5: rival the horrible things that were done in the MK
Speaker 5: Ultra program the fifties, sixties, seventies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, we never know the stuff that
Speaker 4: doesn't come out either.
Speaker 5: Of course.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: Now, this is this character in the books loosely based.
Speaker 5: On you, uh, not really, you know, luck luckily I
Speaker 5: was never you know, subject to government mind control experiments,
Speaker 5: or at least I don't think I was. But you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's it's he's really you know the book. Really,
Speaker 5: what I tried to do was take all of these
Speaker 5: kind of esoteric and strange things that have fascinated me
Speaker 5: and to roll them into a story that I hope
Speaker 5: will be captivating and at the same time people are
Speaker 5: enjoying the story and getting wrapped up in it is
Speaker 5: maybe it'll spark an interest into looking into some of
Speaker 5: this stuff.
Speaker 4: Okay, what kind of experiences did you have as a kid.
Speaker 5: Well, that the thing that really shakes me the most
Speaker 5: and I still go back to, is I have very
Speaker 5: distinct memories from probably when I was six, seven, eight
Speaker 5: years old around that age, of seeing lights in my bedroom.
Speaker 5: This would happen either while I was in my bedroom
Speaker 5: or when I was in the hallway of my parents' house.
Speaker 5: And the thing that I remember the most, and it's
Speaker 5: it's so vivid, you know, for memories from that age
Speaker 5: to last so long and to have been with me
Speaker 5: for so long really says to me that there's there's
Speaker 5: something there. And some of one of the more distinct
Speaker 5: memories I remember is standing in the hallway. My parents
Speaker 5: were watching TV in the living room behind me, and
Speaker 5: I would look into my bedroom and see these lights
Speaker 5: floating and then the whole bedroom would sort of start
Speaker 5: glowing and it was and I realized at this time
Speaker 5: it was this this playmate, this invisible playmate that I had,
Speaker 5: and I would just be so overcome with fear. I
Speaker 5: would fall down, like paralyzed and pass out or go
Speaker 5: unconscious or something. And when I would wake up, I
Speaker 5: would I remember getting up and my parents are just
Speaker 5: sitting in the living room as if nothing had happened,
Speaker 5: you know, watching TV. And I you know, that always
Speaker 5: puzzled me, like if what here? I am falling down
Speaker 5: in the in this hallway, overcome with fear and going unconscious,
Speaker 5: and when I come back to consciousness, it's like nothing
Speaker 5: happened as far as they were concerned. So these these
Speaker 5: things happened a couple of times, and then you know,
Speaker 5: I was so terrified of my bedroom. You know, every
Speaker 5: night I would I would just be terrified. And one
Speaker 5: night in particular, I remember waking up at the bottom
Speaker 5: of my basement steps. And if you can imagine as
Speaker 5: a kid, you know how terrifying a dark basement is
Speaker 5: in your house when you're a kid, in waking up
Speaker 5: at the bottom of the of the steps there and
Speaker 5: having no idea you know, of course, you know, I
Speaker 5: could all be explained by sleep walking or you know,
Speaker 5: these sorts of things. But but the lights, you know,
Speaker 5: that's that's what that that that whatever this experience was
Speaker 5: and manifested by my bedroom just being illuminated in this
Speaker 5: really bright light m and that you know, when something
Speaker 5: like that happens and you can't shake it off as
Speaker 5: you grow older, you know. I really think that was
Speaker 5: sort of pivotal and me spending so much time, you know,
Speaker 5: trying to understand all these differ and variety of phenomenon
Speaker 5: you know that fall under the broad umbrella of the paranormal, right.
Speaker 4: And I like the fact that you're not like trying
Speaker 4: to define what happened to you, You're just explaining what
Speaker 4: happened to you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's a big thing for me, you know.
Speaker 5: I I also I talk to a lot of people,
Speaker 5: and when I you know, when it give talks about
Speaker 5: UFOs or or other paranormal subjects, inevit inevitably people come
Speaker 5: up and they want to tell you their stories. And
Speaker 5: you know, so many people have so many different stories.
Speaker 5: And I believe them that they're telling me the truth,
Speaker 5: you know, as as far as they understand it about
Speaker 5: what happened. But I think, do you do you know
Speaker 5: Jerome Clark, if you ever read any of his stuff, Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's a he's a great writer. And he told he
Speaker 5: said to me once and and this has never left me. Uh.
Speaker 5: He said, we can. We can believe people when they
Speaker 5: tell us about their experiences. We don't have to believe
Speaker 5: their explanations. And I found that to be a really
Speaker 5: solid thing to keep in mind, because you know, one
Speaker 5: person will say, well, you know, I met these beings
Speaker 5: and they they are pleadians, and you know they're they're
Speaker 5: they're downloading wisdom into my head and things like that.
Speaker 5: You know that that person believes that. But but and
Speaker 5: they may have had an anomaloust experience. They may have
Speaker 5: had a similar experience similar to someone else. Someone else
Speaker 5: would explain that experience differently. So I think it's it's
Speaker 5: key to focus on the experience itself and to sort
Speaker 5: of remain agnostic about explanations, because when you start to
Speaker 5: grab a hold of an explanation, especially with these weird
Speaker 5: experiences where we don't have, you know, a logical, uh
Speaker 5: explanation we could grab onto, you can really get stuck
Speaker 5: in a rabbit hole or a a reality tunnel, and
Speaker 5: then everything's everything. You you start to build your all,
Speaker 5: you know, your reality around these explanations instead of letting
Speaker 5: the data lead you in that direction. And this happens
Speaker 5: all the time. You know, people get convinced, oh, these
Speaker 5: UFOs are gray aliens. But then when someone has a
Speaker 5: sighting and it doesn't fit the gray alien mold, you know,
Speaker 5: then what do they do? You know, it doesn't it
Speaker 5: doesn't compute. They can't fit it into their you know,
Speaker 5: their their ideology. And I think that's where a lot
Speaker 5: of paranormal investigators out of writers go wrong, is that
Speaker 5: they start trying to funnel everything into their belief system
Speaker 5: without actually just just letting the data lead them the
Speaker 5: right direction.
Speaker 4: And and you get people who have such intense experiences
Speaker 4: and it seems like they've been told the truth. You know,
Speaker 4: maybe the beings that you know seem to have abducted
Speaker 4: them told them they were Palladians, so they have no
Speaker 4: reason not to believe that. Sure, So they just relay
Speaker 4: that information as if it's solid truth, not realizing that
Speaker 4: it was probably a mask.
Speaker 5: Sure. And and you know, that's that's my that's my
Speaker 5: issue with channeled material. You know, a lot I know
Speaker 5: a lot of people very sincere about you know, believing
Speaker 5: that what you know, with these entities they're channeling or
Speaker 5: or are you know, or ascended masters and that sort
Speaker 5: of stuff. But you know the way I look at
Speaker 5: it is, Hey, just because an entity doesn't have a
Speaker 5: physical form does not make it all knowing. And what
Speaker 5: you know, I don't. I don't leave my front door
Speaker 5: my house open and just let people come in and start,
Speaker 5: you know, spouting wisdom at me. So what you know,
Speaker 5: why should I trust something just because I can't see
Speaker 5: it in a physical form? Why does why can't it
Speaker 5: be you know, a lying you know, trickster And you
Speaker 5: know the trickster is such an element of of of
Speaker 5: of this stuff that I'm you know, I tend to
Speaker 5: be doubtful at first, you know, I'm not going to
Speaker 5: accept something. And you know, I think that's that's the
Speaker 5: probably the safe, insane and reasonable way to address this stuff.
Speaker 4: The uh yeah, channel material I've always been very hasn't
Speaker 4: it done? Or downright dismissive at one point, And the
Speaker 4: only channel material that ever impressed me was Jane Roberts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's uh, you know, her material is is fascinating
Speaker 5: and it's so well developed, you know, the whole philosophy
Speaker 5: and the cosmology behind it and everything is fascinating stuff.
Speaker 5: And you know, I believe that the channel material is
Speaker 5: wrapped up, you know, in this wider, uh, this wider
Speaker 5: sort of encapsulation of the paranormal, and you know it
Speaker 5: goes back to you know, spiritualism and shamanism, and you know,
Speaker 5: really what it is is it's a belief in spirits
Speaker 5: or entities or or non corporeal intelligences of some sort,
Speaker 5: which is which is really where most of my research
Speaker 5: is centered. So you know, channeling is sort of part
Speaker 5: of it, but but you know it's it's just again,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to take something's word that is telling
Speaker 5: me the truth, saying with you know, a vision someone
Speaker 5: might have under d MT, or you know, a spiritualist
Speaker 5: you're bringing forth the spirit of a dead person, things
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 6: I'll listen, I'll I'll you know, acknowledge that that maybe
Speaker 6: this is something speaking through the person, but I'm not
Speaker 6: necessarily going to buy into the explanation of what this
Speaker 6: thing is saying it is or it's message right.
Speaker 4: Now. You also, you're you're a mentalist, yes, yes, And
Speaker 4: do you want to explain to people a little what
Speaker 4: that is exactly?
Speaker 5: Yeah. Mentalism is a branch of magic that simulates psychic phenomena.
Speaker 5: So it you know, spoon bending, mind reading, precognition, anything
Speaker 5: that falls under uh, you know, psychic abilities. But but
Speaker 5: but it's a magical way of creating this stuff, and
Speaker 5: it's it's different. You know, I meet a lot of
Speaker 5: mentalists and they're not like a lot of magicians. Are
Speaker 5: a lot of magicians, particularly particularly nowadays, sort of fancy
Speaker 5: themselves in the the the amazing Randy or the pen
Speaker 5: and teller debunker types. You know, they're out, they're out
Speaker 5: to to mock and make fun of uh, you know,
Speaker 5: psychic research and things like that, and they're they're very
Speaker 5: much materialists, rationalists, and you know, that's fine, that that's
Speaker 5: not that's not where I come from. But mentalists are
Speaker 5: usually different, and mentalist I find a lot of them.
Speaker 5: They they actually believe in psychic abilities. And sometimes it's
Speaker 5: because one of their tricks has gone wrong and they
Speaker 5: have to do it for real on stage. You know,
Speaker 5: I've talked to several who have said, you know, I
Speaker 5: just said, I don't know seven of diamonds, and you know,
Speaker 5: sure enough, it was the Seven of diamonds, even though
Speaker 5: their trick had gone completely wrong. And I also think
Speaker 5: there's there's an element of when you fake something long
Speaker 5: enough that maybe you start to do it for real.
Speaker 5: And that's I got into mentalism because I believed in
Speaker 5: psychic abilities. Like I said, I grew up and immersed
Speaker 5: in this stuff, and I found a book on mental
Speaker 5: magic in my local library and I started trying this
Speaker 5: stuff out. And I was amazed at the power that
Speaker 5: it had. And I was hypnotizing people when I was
Speaker 5: you know, nine, ten eleven years old and it worked,
Speaker 5: and I'm thinking, holy crap, man, I mean, this is
Speaker 5: this is powerful stuff, and what mentalism also? It kind
Speaker 5: of there's a there's a really thin barrier between the
Speaker 5: trickery and mentalism and the real stuff. There's because mentalism
Speaker 5: incorporates things like hypnotism, body magic, you know, certain things
Speaker 5: you do with your body that seemed to transcend physical abilities.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of really interesting stuff and mentalism
Speaker 5: that comes close to real magic.
Speaker 4: I would I would think that someone like David Blaine
Speaker 4: would be a good example that people might know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, people, David Blaine. You know, most of the mentalism
Speaker 5: has gotten really popular with with you know, famous magicians,
Speaker 5: because I think it's because you know, if a magician
Speaker 5: comes up and does a little trick and makes a
Speaker 5: coin disappear, it pulls a behind your ear, you know,
Speaker 5: that kind of thing, or even if it's a larger
Speaker 5: scale illusion, you know that that stuff is trickery. It's
Speaker 5: still great, it's still compelling. But if if you know,
Speaker 5: if David Blaine walks up and to ask you to
Speaker 5: think of a card, and you think of the three
Speaker 5: of clubs, and then you know, he's he reaches into
Speaker 5: the back of his throat and pulls out this you know,
Speaker 5: saliva soaked card and it's your card. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: that's pretty, That's that's weird. That's that's more real. That's
Speaker 5: people have a much uh, you know, a much. I
Speaker 5: just think it's more adult magic because we think, wow,
Speaker 5: that just might be real, you know, making the lion,
Speaker 5: you know, disappear from a box or something like that.
Speaker 5: We know that's a trick. But when someone does something
Speaker 5: that seems to be reading our mind or playing with
Speaker 5: our thoughts. Darren Brown is another good mentalist, and I
Speaker 5: don't know if you've seen him. He's a British mentalist,
Speaker 5: but he works his stuff under the idea that he's
Speaker 5: influencing your mind. He's using subliminal influences and things like that.
Speaker 5: So mentalism just just has a I think it has
Speaker 5: more power because it seems like maybe this stuff is real.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, and now you've had an experience where people,
Speaker 4: even though you've told people right up front, it's a trick,
Speaker 4: not everyone believes you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, excuse me, that was really an eye opener for
Speaker 5: me about the desire to believe among true believers. I
Speaker 5: was doing a talk on mentalism at a forty in
Speaker 5: conference for like the works of Charles Fort, a conference
Speaker 5: that was held every year in Baltimore, and so I
Speaker 5: did this really, you know, pretty amazing trick where people
Speaker 5: would write down their thoughts stick them in an envelope
Speaker 5: and I never opened the envelope. And you know, I'd
Speaker 5: ask one person to think of a name of an
Speaker 5: old friend, one to think of a four digit number,
Speaker 5: that sort of thing, and boom, you know, I just
Speaker 5: by looking at them, I gave them the answers. And
Speaker 5: it's a it's a really powerful trick. And afterwards a
Speaker 5: few people came up and they said, you know what,
Speaker 5: I know that that wasn't a trick, and it was.
Speaker 5: It was three of them together. They've been discussing this
Speaker 5: and I said, no, I did this to show you
Speaker 5: how easy it is to trick people that you have
Speaker 5: psychic powers. And they said, no, we've talked about this
Speaker 5: and there is there's no possible way that that could
Speaker 5: have been a trick. So you really did use psychic power,
Speaker 5: and they would not believe it, you know, And I
Speaker 5: mean that was a real eye opener. And I've met
Speaker 5: I just recently had a talk at the last fort Fest,
Speaker 5: which was a few weeks ago, with George Hanson, who
Speaker 5: was a magician. He wrote a book called The Trickster
Speaker 5: and the Paranormal. Great guy, fantastic, great theory, reticition of
Speaker 5: the of the paranormal. We were talking about that, and
Speaker 5: both he and I have talked to paranormal investigators, one
Speaker 5: in particular I won't name, who've written a couple of books.
Speaker 5: And I I asked George if he had asked this
Speaker 5: guy if he had ever if he had taken a
Speaker 5: mentalist or a magician with him, and George said no,
Speaker 5: he said he told George, he said, no, my perception
Speaker 5: is good enough. I don't need a magician. I don't
Speaker 5: need a mentalist. And you know, that's that's where people
Speaker 5: go wrong. If if there's someone who is displaying an
Speaker 5: ability that looks psychic and you really want to do
Speaker 5: a good investigation, you absolutely need a magician or a
Speaker 5: mentalist for the reason that that anecdote explain. And those
Speaker 5: people were insisting that I had used psychic powers, even
Speaker 5: though I was telling them flatly to their faces that
Speaker 5: it was a trick. You know, if you want to
Speaker 5: believe something, even if you're very if you're if you
Speaker 5: scrutinize that person to the best of your ability. If
Speaker 5: you're not a magician, you don't know the tricks to
Speaker 5: doing these things, you can get suckered and then you're
Speaker 5: going to be embarrassed down the line when a magician
Speaker 5: comes along and proves you know that that you that
Speaker 5: you were taking advantage of it and they were hoaxing.
Speaker 5: If that is indeed the.
Speaker 4: Case right right now? Yeah, and George George is a magician.
Speaker 4: I don't know that he's not a mentalist, is he.
Speaker 5: He's he's both, I mean, okay, yeah, yeah, he's well
Speaker 5: versed in mentalism as well, especially the kinds of mentalism
Speaker 5: that that's used. You know, it's often used like for
Speaker 5: for uh, but by people claiming to be psychic.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I always feel his book Tricks Ter the Paranormals
Speaker 4: a must read, but it's also a really hard read.
Speaker 5: It is a hard read. I mean he gets into
Speaker 5: you know, he gets into ontology and language and you know,
Speaker 5: host modern French philosophy and things like that. Is it's
Speaker 5: heady stuff. You know, I've taken a few read throughs
Speaker 5: to really, you know, to really get it all. But
Speaker 5: but he's I just think he's uh. I think he,
Speaker 5: along with Jeffrey Kreipel, are probably the two leading theorists
Speaker 5: on the paranormal nowadays. They're both brilliant. I recommend them
Speaker 5: both to your listeners.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, and I and didn't look. Didn't you
Speaker 4: say that Hanson's book was required reading in one of
Speaker 4: your classes? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It was for well, it's a comparative religion studies course.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, Hey, can I take your class?
Speaker 4: Well, he's not teaching the class.
Speaker 2: Okay, I just graduated from the college, that's all.
Speaker 5: Oh cool, congrats.
Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, So, as far as mentalism goes, you do
Speaker 4: believe there are actual legit psychic abilities out there?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I mean, you know, I think anyone who
Speaker 5: follows the research closely, you know, the parapsychological research. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: you know, it's it's the you know, it's the redheaded
Speaker 5: stepchild of science, and it's just so marginalized and the
Speaker 5: funding is so limited that you know, there's just not
Speaker 5: a lot of research going on there aren't. You know,
Speaker 5: there aren't many parapsychologists who make a living doing the
Speaker 5: research anymore. But but there is good research being done,
Speaker 5: and if you look at it, it's it's scrupulous, you know.
Speaker 5: And the problem with the skeptics is that they always
Speaker 5: want to move the goalpost because it it is unsettling,
Speaker 5: it challenges the orthodoxy. So they say, well, you know,
Speaker 5: in other in any other case, I might buy this research.
Speaker 5: But because you're you're saying that there is a you know,
Speaker 5: there's a measurable instance here that would that would indicate
Speaker 5: that there is some sort of psychic ability either, you know,
Speaker 5: like like Darryl Bem's precognition studies, things like that. They say, well,
Speaker 5: we need more proof, We need better proof than we
Speaker 5: would to accept anything else. We would use the same
Speaker 5: statistical models, and in any other case we would say, yes,
Speaker 5: you have shown that there is a statistical anomaly here.
Speaker 5: It exists, and we don't know how to explain it.
Speaker 5: What they do They say, well, because it doesn't because
Speaker 5: we can't believe that it's real, We're going to insist
Speaker 5: on an even higher level of proof. And then they
Speaker 5: keep moving the goalpost and moving the goalpost. But but yeah,
Speaker 5: even you know, I think the the the lab studies,
Speaker 5: you know that the really controls scientific studies are important,
Speaker 5: but I think anecdotal evidence is important as well. I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, we we are creatures of you know, we
Speaker 5: tell stories, and that's how we communicate with each other.
Speaker 5: And if you just open yourself up to listening to
Speaker 5: people's stories, you know, you start hearing some really incredible
Speaker 5: stuff and just the overwhelming amount and things like you know,
Speaker 5: things like these crisis apparitions that have been studied for
Speaker 5: hundreds of years and go back, you know, thousands of years.
Speaker 5: You know, you know, when people will will see someone
Speaker 5: appear at their bedside, you know, a loved one or something,
Speaker 5: and then they find out a day later or two
Speaker 5: days later the person died when they saw them. This stuff,
Speaker 5: it's been extensively documented. But but it can't be replicated
Speaker 5: in a lab. Well, sorry, it can't be replicated in
Speaker 5: a lab, But lots of things can't be replicated in
Speaker 5: a lab. That doesn't mean it doesn't have validity, right,
Speaker 5: and we should look at it and we shouldn't give
Speaker 5: credence to these stories and try to try to create
Speaker 5: models that maybe explain them.
Speaker 4: Now. Now you say, the skeptics move the goalpost. But
Speaker 4: these people are not truly skeptics. They are debunkers. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they've just as bad as true believer as anyone who's
Speaker 4: completely made up their mind about this stuff is probably wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's well, you know, I think that the prime
Speaker 5: example is a Philip Class, the UFO debunker, And yeah,
Speaker 5: I used skeptics with I guess I should have put
Speaker 5: quotes around that. But you know, the I talk about
Speaker 5: UFOs sometimes because it's been a fascination to me. I
Speaker 5: had a sighting of my own in nineteen ninety which
Speaker 5: kind of blew, you know, the top of my head off.
Speaker 5: But you know, there's one of the most extensively documented
Speaker 5: UFO sightings was in Iran in nineteen seventy six, where
Speaker 5: there were fighter planes chasing these objects around. There were
Speaker 5: ground sightings. It was it was captured on radar, you know,
Speaker 5: so people in the air are seeing these objects, people
Speaker 5: on the ground are seeing them. They've got radar tracking,
Speaker 5: they've got they've got people in the in Tehran who
Speaker 5: are looking up in the sky and watching this stuff.
Speaker 5: And Philip Class, uh, the the debunker, extraordinaire of of
Speaker 5: UFO Phenomena came out and said that all of that
Speaker 5: was explainable by a misperception of Jupiter. Of the planet Jupiter. Now,
Speaker 5: that is not a skeptic, that's a dogmatist. That's actually
Speaker 5: that's a liar. You know, there's there's no way he
Speaker 5: could have believed that that was true. But you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's there's a there's a strong uh. You know,
Speaker 5: there's just a huge brigade of people who have taken
Speaker 5: it upon themselves, especially now online, and they're just rabid
Speaker 5: debunkers and they will they just want to shoot anything
Speaker 5: down that reeks to them of you know, the horrifyingly
Speaker 5: banal word WU. You know, if I never hear have
Speaker 5: to hear that word again, I will die happy. You know.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's just as soon as someone starts talking
Speaker 5: about anything that stretches materialism or reductionism, you know, instantly
Speaker 5: the anti WOU brigade comes out. It's it's ridiculous. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's it's completely unscientific and uh and it's yeah, it's
Speaker 5: it's just it's sad because you know, I've been attacked
Speaker 5: on my my website got taken down. I think probably
Speaker 5: probably by you know, I don't know if it was,
Speaker 5: but I had just published something attacking Richard Dawkins when
Speaker 5: he was going off about Harry Potter or how pernicious fantasy,
Speaker 5: you know, literature it could be. And I got started
Speaker 5: getting all these comments on my blog and then a
Speaker 5: DOS attack took it down. So yeah, who knows, But
Speaker 5: these folks, I wouldn't put it past them. You know,
Speaker 5: it's it's a crusade. It's a crusade against what they
Speaker 5: believe is irrationalism. But what is actually, you know, the
Speaker 5: most I think that the most important kind of research.
Speaker 5: It's being done, you know, it's it's boundary, it's envelope
Speaker 5: pushing research, and they don't like that, so they'll do
Speaker 5: anything to take it down.
Speaker 4: Do you want to tell people a little bit about
Speaker 4: your UFO sighting?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's you know, that sighting really was kind of
Speaker 5: the real basis of Blackwater Lights, and the sighting that
Speaker 5: the main character Ray has in the book is very
Speaker 5: much based on my sighting. And I was in Ocean City, Maryland,
Speaker 5: it's a beach town, with my girlfriend at the time
Speaker 5: in nineteen ninety and i'd been having dreams all weekend
Speaker 5: about UFOs and they're all kinds of weird, little syncreticities
Speaker 5: of things. I can't it would take too long to
Speaker 5: get into. But there was lots of strange stuff happening
Speaker 5: that weekend. So the night we were leaving, we walked
Speaker 5: down to the beach, just the two of us, and
Speaker 5: we were all low. There was no one else of
Speaker 5: the beach was September, September twenty third, nineteen ninety and
Speaker 5: I it was a beautiful clear sky. So because I'd
Speaker 5: been so kind of caught up and thinking about this stuff,
Speaker 5: I looked up at the sky and this is where
Speaker 5: I lose a lot of a lot of people. But
Speaker 5: you know, hey, it's a paranormal show. So I'm gonna
Speaker 5: tell you what happened, and you everyone can make up
Speaker 5: their minds. But I looked up in the sky and
Speaker 5: I said, mentally inside my head, I looked up and
Speaker 5: I said, Okay, if you're out there, now is the
Speaker 5: perfect time to show yourselves. And you know, there was
Speaker 5: maybe one half of one percent of me that thought
Speaker 5: something might actually happen. You know, sorry, my phone just
Speaker 5: went off, Oh okay, with an amber alert or something.
Speaker 5: In the background or either that or the MIB's are coming.
Speaker 5: But I so, so, you know, there was maybe a
Speaker 5: tiny percent of me that thought, hey, maybe something will happen.
Speaker 5: So a few minutes later, my girlfriend points up at
Speaker 5: at the sky and she goes, what are those? And
Speaker 5: I followed where her finger was pointing, and there were
Speaker 5: two orange lights and they were they were just sort
Speaker 5: of bobbing in place, and as soon as I looked
Speaker 5: at them, they shot across the sky. And I grew
Speaker 5: up near an airport, so I know what airplanes look
Speaker 5: like when they're flying, and now what helicopters look like.
Speaker 5: These things were propelled, they were going extremely fast, and
Speaker 5: they were doing crazy maneuvers, and at one point they
Speaker 5: came together it's sort of fused as one light and
Speaker 5: flew around a little bit like that, and then they
Speaker 5: broke up again. And the whole time I was just saying,
Speaker 5: oh my god, oh my god, Oh my god, and
Speaker 5: my girlfriend saying oh my god, oh my god, oh
Speaker 5: my god. And then they just at one point they
Speaker 5: just shot off, I mean, like like lightning across the sky.
Speaker 5: So you know, it's it's one thing I think, to
Speaker 5: see a light in the sky or in you know,
Speaker 5: these these weren't Chinese lanterns. This was long before I
Speaker 5: think people started sending those things up anyway, but they
Speaker 5: were these things were propelled, I mean, they were going fast.
Speaker 5: They weren't being blown about by the wind. So you know,
Speaker 5: you know, it's one thing to see the lights in
Speaker 5: the sky. It's one thing to see a craft or
Speaker 5: you know whatever, but to ask to see something and
Speaker 5: then to have it appear, you know, And that that
Speaker 5: really shaped my way of looking at the UFO phenomenon
Speaker 5: as something that's not just spaceships in the sky, but
Speaker 5: maybe it's something kind of deeper and weirder, and it's
Speaker 5: tuned into our consciousness in a way that's that's beyond
Speaker 5: just you know, a spaceship. And and you know that's
Speaker 5: when I started, you know, I'd read stuff by Jacques
Speaker 5: Vallet and John Keel and Charles Fort, you know, who's
Speaker 5: sort of you know, they suggested that UFOs are part
Speaker 5: of something bigger, like the whole things, that the whole
Speaker 5: paranormal experience might be just different aspects of one thing. Whatever.
Speaker 5: This thing is some kind of intelligence, some kind of
Speaker 5: agency that manifests in different ways, you know, but somehow
Speaker 5: it's tied to our consciousness and and and that's what
Speaker 5: it wants to do. It wants to interact with our
Speaker 5: with our consciousness rather than just come down and take
Speaker 5: you know, skin samples or probus or whatever. You know.
Speaker 5: This stuff is, this stuff is working on a deeper level,
Speaker 5: I think, And that's what led That's where my research
Speaker 5: sort of detoured, and I started studying the entities you know,
Speaker 5: seen by people, you know when they take d MT
Speaker 5: or ayahuasca, that the entities people talk about and practices
Speaker 5: of ritual magic or you know, things like that. I mean,
Speaker 5: maybe there is a common denominator in this, I don't know,
Speaker 5: but but that's that's what intrigues me the most.
Speaker 4: I think there's definitely a connection between the altered States
Speaker 4: occultism and the UFO phenomena. Myself, being involved in ceremonial magic,
Speaker 4: at one point realized, as I'm reading Whitley Streemer stuff
Speaker 4: that hey, I've had a lot of these experiences, but
Speaker 4: they weren't UFO related exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, if you know, you can read you know,
Speaker 5: stories you know of you know, ceremonial magicians and things,
Speaker 5: and the entities they encountered, and you you know, you
Speaker 5: weigh those against you know, these entities. People see what
Speaker 5: taking d MT or ayahuasca and you look at the
Speaker 5: you know what the UFO experience too, and you're right,
Speaker 5: I mean, it all takes place in an altered state
Speaker 5: of consciousness. It doesn't happen in ordinary reality, you know. Somehow,
Speaker 5: you know, either our consciousness serves as a gate for
Speaker 5: these things, possibly which I deal with in my fiction. Uh,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe maybe that's how they get to us
Speaker 5: through through an altered state of consciousness that makes us
Speaker 5: more open accessible to them, whatever they are. You know,
Speaker 5: that's that's still that's when I'm still That's what I'm
Speaker 5: still trying to get at. You know, what are they?
Speaker 5: What are you know, what do they want? You know? Sure,
Speaker 5: they like to play tricks on us. They like to
Speaker 5: tell us things. They like to tell us that they're
Speaker 5: higher beings and all that stuff. But what are they really?
Speaker 5: You know, are they are they? Did they come out
Speaker 5: of us? Somehow? Are they? Are they some other sort
Speaker 5: of being? Are they spirits? Are they demons? Are they
Speaker 5: altra terrestrials and keel term Are they just figments of
Speaker 5: our minds? You know, I think there's there's a good
Speaker 5: argument for all of these, but but damn if it
Speaker 5: is an interesting stuff.
Speaker 4: The other thing is it leaves traces in the ordinary world,
Speaker 4: and that's where it's oh yeah, kind of hard to set.
Speaker 4: You know. You can say, well, it's all d MT
Speaker 4: until you get to those physical traces and you say, well,
Speaker 4: then what left the physical trace?
Speaker 5: Exactly. It's it's it's a phenomenon that that works through
Speaker 5: our consciousness, but there's also undeniably a physical element. And
Speaker 5: I'll tell you the other that the the second weirdest
Speaker 5: thing that happened to me. I was taking melatonin. You're
Speaker 5: familiar with melotonin. People take it to sleep. It's an
Speaker 5: it's an over the counter neuro hormone. And I was
Speaker 5: using it because I found that taking melatonin amped up
Speaker 5: my dreams.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: I started taking it because I was having trouble sleeping,
Speaker 5: and before I knew it, I was waking up exhausted
Speaker 5: from these super intense, complex dreams. And I eventually, you know,
Speaker 5: through the scientific method, realized that it was the melatonin
Speaker 5: that was doing this. Well. I was in a bed
Speaker 5: and breakfast in West Virginia, you know, I guess there's
Speaker 5: strange things do happen in West Virginia.
Speaker 4: And I was.
Speaker 5: Taking really high doses of melatonin just to see what
Speaker 5: the higher doses would do. And what happened is I
Speaker 5: had a sleep paralysis incident that was as terrifying as
Speaker 5: anything I've ever experienced. You know, you wake up, you
Speaker 5: can't move. I thought I was dying. I was going
Speaker 5: to die of fear. And I was certain that there
Speaker 5: was this evil entity in my room. I couldn't see it,
Speaker 5: but I could feel it, as you know, as easily
Speaker 5: as I could feel someone standing next to me. I mean,
Speaker 5: it was as real as anything I could possibly imagine.
Speaker 5: And so you know, like these these things passed though,
Speaker 5: like somehow I fell back asleep, but for that brief moment,
Speaker 5: it was absolutely I thought it was going to die
Speaker 5: from terror. I really thought it was gonna have a
Speaker 5: heart attack or something. Well, the next morning, when I
Speaker 5: woke up, my girlfriend looked at looked at me and said,
Speaker 5: what's that on your chest? And I couldn't see it
Speaker 5: and looking down, So I went and looked in the
Speaker 5: mirror and there was a handprint on my chest. So
Speaker 5: you think, I thought, well, it's you know, I was
Speaker 5: sleeping on my hand or something like that. But this
Speaker 5: this handprint, I couldn't fit my hand to it. Uh,
Speaker 5: And it was bigger than my hand, the fingers were longer,
Speaker 5: the hand was bigger. And then what really freaked me out.
Speaker 5: It had six fingers. This thing looked like it was
Speaker 5: painted on my chest. I mean it was not like
Speaker 5: you know, it looked it was so bright red and vivid.
Speaker 5: It looked like it was painted. And unfortunately, this was
Speaker 5: before you know, everyone had a phone on their camera
Speaker 5: and I didn't have a camera with me, and eventually
Speaker 5: it faded. But you know, you talk about leaving traces,
Speaker 5: you know, I mean I spent I spent ten minutes
Speaker 5: trying to fit my hand to this thing, and I
Speaker 5: couldn't do it, you know, And also I don't have
Speaker 5: six fingers, So so what the hell was that? You know?
Speaker 5: Did my body produce that somehow or was it you know,
Speaker 5: some a trace left by that, you know, that sleep
Speaker 5: paralysis thing. I mean, you know, so so that's the
Speaker 5: kind of thing. You know, once something like that happens
Speaker 5: to you, it's hard to go back to prosaic explanations
Speaker 5: for this stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, one of the things. We've been doing a
Speaker 4: series on the history of UFOs, and one of the
Speaker 4: things we've said is that in the end, the only
Speaker 4: thing you can really say is this thing is alien,
Speaker 4: not necessarily extraterrestrial, but alien to us. Yeah, in all
Speaker 4: the ways it appears to us. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 4: not us, whatever it is, And you got to wonder
Speaker 4: if it's something, you know, I mean, maybe it's here
Speaker 4: with us, but it's on such a different wavelength or
Speaker 4: a different wave of existing that it's trying to create
Speaker 4: a common connection between us and it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think there's there's definitely a desire. It has
Speaker 5: a desire to interact with us. It has a desire
Speaker 5: to show itself, but it also hides itself. You know,
Speaker 5: it's paradoxical. And you know, I'm sure you're aware of
Speaker 5: the work of Jacques Vallet. It was really sort of
Speaker 5: a pioneer of of looking back historically and seeing you know,
Speaker 5: the fairy stories and the analogies with with the UFO phenomenon.
Speaker 5: And again, Jeffrey Kreipel does a lot of that comparative
Speaker 5: study of this stuff too. Yeah, it's you know, I
Speaker 5: have to believe that it's been with us as long
Speaker 5: as we've been here, and it changes. You know, what
Speaker 5: what is it doing? Is it trying to open our
Speaker 5: minds to higher realities? Is it just you know, messing
Speaker 5: with us? Is it is it feeding off of us?
Speaker 8: You know?
Speaker 5: Does it get something from us from these exchanges? You know?
Speaker 5: Is it good? Is it neutral? Is it bad? I
Speaker 5: think the jury is still out.
Speaker 4: And I think you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 4: people who speculate things like the Black Eyed kids encounters.
Speaker 4: Are them feeding off our fear?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I mean there's you know, clearly this stuff, this
Speaker 5: stuff causes fear, and you know, these experiences are fearful.
Speaker 5: Even when I just saw those lights in this guy,
Speaker 5: I was scared afterwards, you know, I wanted to get
Speaker 5: the hell off the beach, you know, because I thought
Speaker 5: what's next? You know, you know, is this a prelude
Speaker 5: to something? You know, I'd read enough books that you
Speaker 5: know terrify. I mean, you read Whitley Streeber stuff. I mean,
Speaker 5: the guy was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from
Speaker 5: what happened to him, you know, So it's you know,
Speaker 5: if they're benevolent, they sure are you know, they sure
Speaker 5: are doing a terrible job of you know, bringing us
Speaker 5: in lightenment. So so I think you know that he's
Speaker 5: really out as to what you know, that what is
Speaker 5: the goal, if there is a goal, or if it's
Speaker 5: just hey, you know, let's let's mess with these with
Speaker 5: these humans and fun. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: I mean, at the same time, people when they deal
Speaker 4: like like Streamer, as he dealt with the situation differently,
Speaker 4: it went from being fearful to being more positive. And
Speaker 4: John Max's work showed the same thing. The people who
Speaker 4: approached it without that fear got something positive out of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I think it's it's how you process it.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: I'm very you know Streamer in particular, I mean, I
Speaker 5: love the guy, I love his work, but he's gone
Speaker 5: back and forth so many times. Yeah, you know, but
Speaker 5: they're demons, they're angels, they're this, they're that. You know.
Speaker 5: I think he's probably still you know, I'm not sure
Speaker 5: if he's really made up his mind. And honestly, you know,
Speaker 5: if something rapes you, you know, even if it's doing
Speaker 5: it for some higher purpose, I have a hard time
Speaker 5: believing that's that's an act of love or of benevolence.
Speaker 4: Right right, right, and and.
Speaker 5: If you look at the history. You know, you talked
Speaker 5: about ceremonial magic. I've studied that extensively too, and you know,
Speaker 5: there's if you look at it from that perspective, there
Speaker 5: are angels, you know, there are demons. You know, there
Speaker 5: are gradations. I mean, if there are non corporeal or
Speaker 5: discarnate beings, maybe some are good, maybe some are just jerks.
Speaker 4: That's true, that's true, and it could also be that
Speaker 4: they're they're all different depending. I mean, just like people are.
Speaker 4: Some people are great people except for that of the time.
Speaker 5: Right. You know, if if you know, if if aliens
Speaker 5: or you know, altraterrestrials come in my house, and you know,
Speaker 5: why is that any different than you know, like I
Speaker 5: said earlier, analogy leaving my door open. You know, people
Speaker 5: wander in my house. They might be nice people. They
Speaker 5: might you know, make me a sandwich, or they might
Speaker 5: you know, tie me up and do horrible things to me.
Speaker 5: It's so yeah, I think we have to remain very
Speaker 5: much agnostic when we're dealing with this stuff.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, and again I think anyone who's made up
Speaker 4: their mind that you know, okay, so UFOs are this,
Speaker 4: they're gray aliens you know, they're here to experiment on
Speaker 4: us or you know, create a hybrid race or whatever.
Speaker 4: As soon as you make those assumptions and view everything
Speaker 4: through those assumptions, you miss the whole picture.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's the kiss of death.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: You you wrap yourself, you know. Robert Anton Wilson called
Speaker 5: it reality tunnels. And as soon as you're in that
Speaker 5: reality tunnel, you're you're you're missing all sorts of other
Speaker 5: stuff that's outside of it, and it just gets tighter
Speaker 5: and tighter the further you go down the tunnel. So
Speaker 5: you have to be you have to remain agnostic and
Speaker 5: open minded or it's the kiss of death and this
Speaker 5: stuff in particular because it is so nebulous, and it's
Speaker 5: it's so easy to get lost, and it's so easy
Speaker 5: just to get pulled into. So, I mean, you've seen
Speaker 5: lots of normal investigators go over the edge, you know,
Speaker 5: and you know it's a hard thing to see, but
Speaker 5: it's it's dangerous, you know, magic, the paranormal is dangerous stuff.
Speaker 5: And and the danger comes when you lose your objectivity
Speaker 5: and you you lose your discernment. That's that's when things
Speaker 5: go bad.
Speaker 4: You almost got to wonder if it praise on you
Speaker 4: more at that point too, I think so.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the Golden Dawn magicians, you know back
Speaker 5: in the late yeah, right at the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: early nineteen hundreds, you know, they talked about obsession. That's
Speaker 5: what happened when you know, when you'd get the spirits
Speaker 5: would take up, take a hold of you, and you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's there's that that's a that's an interesting way
Speaker 5: to look at it. But you look through cultures all
Speaker 5: through time, you get possessed, you get obsessed, and yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean I think these things like that attention and uh,
Speaker 5: you know you don't want to get you know, you
Speaker 5: don't want to be food for for whatever it is
Speaker 5: that that likes to siphon your energy?
Speaker 4: Fair enough? Do you have any questions for him?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: I mean we're bringing up very interesting questions. I mean,
Speaker 2: does illusion become reality when people believe with enough conviction?
Speaker 2: What does it mean to have a healthy skepticism, because
Speaker 2: I mean it's something that you need if you're going
Speaker 2: to study this area. You don't really want to fall
Speaker 2: down the rabbit hole you're trying to study. But it
Speaker 2: can be very hard to talk about because I mean, like,
Speaker 2: how can we talk about these experiences without using those
Speaker 2: scientific dualisms of good and evil, real, unreal, logical, logical time.
Speaker 5: And people want answers, you know, people want answers. So
Speaker 5: when you tell them there aren't any good answers, they.
Speaker 3: Don't like that.
Speaker 5: You know, we want answers. We want to know it's
Speaker 5: you know, gray aliens from Zata Reticuli. You know, we
Speaker 5: want to know that it's Uncle Jimmy talking to us
Speaker 5: through the spirit medium. Yeah, we want to We want
Speaker 5: to believe, you know, they molder saying. But when you
Speaker 5: but you can't believe if if the data doesn't support it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: That's that's why Charles Ford was such a you know,
Speaker 5: a pioneering you know intellect. As he said, you just
Speaker 5: collect the data and then you you just file it away.
Speaker 5: You don't have to believe this or believe that. You
Speaker 5: just let it pile up and then you you just
Speaker 5: build your idea from there.
Speaker 4: And it seems with the UFOs in particular, it leads
Speaker 4: people a certain way and then at the last minute
Speaker 4: it gives you the opposite exactly.
Speaker 5: And that's that's where the trickster comes in, you know,
Speaker 5: and that's why a lot of these you know, these
Speaker 5: these UFO contact easy. You'd be told, you know, oh,
Speaker 5: you know, we've been told to gather our followers because
Speaker 5: the world's going to end. And then, hey, the world
Speaker 5: doesn't end. And then you know, you look like an idiot. Well, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe you shouldn't be listening to these things,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe you shouldn't believe. Maybe you should be
Speaker 5: more questioning, be more skeptical.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and skeptical in the sense of always asking questions,
Speaker 4: even of the stuff you think you already know.
Speaker 5: Right, Robert Anton Wilson said, question belief systems. He abbreviated
Speaker 5: his BS. He said, never always question someone else's BS,
Speaker 5: and always question your own BS in particular. And that's
Speaker 5: the key, you know, when you start believing, Oh, you know,
Speaker 5: you've got to be you've got to keep yourself separate,
Speaker 5: you know, you just maintain that discernment, maintain that skepticism
Speaker 5: about your own beliefs, not just what other people believe.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Now you've also studied shamanism.
Speaker 5: Yes, I uh, I studied shamanism sort of, you know,
Speaker 5: on the uh, on the down low, I guess because
Speaker 5: you know, a lot of the UH. The ways to
Speaker 5: access the shamanic realms were not particularly particularly UH approved
Speaker 5: by the government and law enforcement back in the day.
Speaker 5: But of course all this stuff happened long enough ago
Speaker 5: that it is, you know, the Statute of Limitations is up.
Speaker 5: But no, you know, I I you know, how could
Speaker 5: I not? You know, there the stories were so intriguing
Speaker 5: about what people were seeing in altered states brought on
Speaker 5: by you know, various drugs or plants, things like that. Uh.
Speaker 5: And you know, so I did personal study for a
Speaker 5: long time. I met a lot of people in the field.
Speaker 5: I you know, I had experiences from you know, being
Speaker 5: in a TP with Navajo's taking taking payote and stuff
Speaker 5: like that. And you know, all what that did was
Speaker 5: was also it expanded that belief I talked about earlier
Speaker 5: that whatever these intelligences, spirits, whatever they are, that that
Speaker 5: they have different you know, they're different modes of accessing them.
Speaker 5: Shamanism is definitely one. It's it's it's probably the oldest
Speaker 5: way of and all shamanism is about, really cross culturally
Speaker 5: across the world, is going into an altered state to
Speaker 5: communicate with spirits, right, and the parallels you know, you
Speaker 5: dig into the parallels between shamanism, between UFL encounters, between spiritualism.
Speaker 5: It's all the same basic template. Just like you said,
Speaker 5: it's an alter state of consciousness that facilitates contact with spirits, entities,
Speaker 5: whatever you want to call it, it's all the same template.
Speaker 5: It's just different, different symbolism, different practices, but at its core,
Speaker 5: it's the same stuff.
Speaker 4: Now you've used more than one substance to alter your consciousness.
Speaker 5: Then yes, sure certainly. I mean I for a while
Speaker 5: I was exploring Salvia divinorum, which is illegal in most states.
Speaker 5: A d MT Iowa Osca things I got. I mean,
Speaker 5: d m T is probably the most powerful, uh means
Speaker 5: of contacting this other space, this other realm. And all
Speaker 5: it took was one uh one visit there uh to
Speaker 5: to really shake up my worldview. You know, it's one
Speaker 5: thing to read about it. It's another thing too suddenly
Speaker 5: be in this other place, you know where when you're
Speaker 5: you're completely lucid, you know, your body's still there breathing,
Speaker 5: but you are in another place, and there's other things
Speaker 5: in that place with you. You know. That's that's an eye,
Speaker 5: that's an a third eye opener.
Speaker 4: I guess I would say how how similar were the
Speaker 4: experiences between the different.
Speaker 5: Very very different, very different. And and you know, if
Speaker 5: you if you look at traditional shamanas that people will
Speaker 5: say that, you know, a particular plan has a special
Speaker 5: kind of spirit with it. So for me, Salvia divinorum
Speaker 5: was always a little on the malevolent side. It also
Speaker 5: had kind of a feminine aspect to it. When it
Speaker 5: would when it would materialize, it was always to my left.
Speaker 5: And interestingly, as I've talked to people over the years,
Speaker 5: that's another commonality. And it was it would appear as
Speaker 5: almost like a physical vortex. You could feel it. You
Speaker 5: could feel it energetically, you could see it. It it was
Speaker 5: their eyes open, you could see that there's there was
Speaker 5: a change off to the left, and it was it
Speaker 5: wasn't it had it had agency, you know, it had
Speaker 5: an intelligence behind it. And uh, I never was really
Speaker 5: quite you know, comfortable with it, and uh you know,
Speaker 5: I don't I don't really go there anymore. You know,
Speaker 5: knowing meeting it and and feeling it was was was enough.
Speaker 5: You know, I I have no compulsion. I know other
Speaker 5: you know, researchers who continually use it develop you know,
Speaker 5: developing ideas, but you know, I think, you know, with
Speaker 5: with the research with and theagens and psychedelics and stuff
Speaker 5: like that, I don't really do it anymore. I think
Speaker 5: I have enough of an understanding. My focus now is
Speaker 5: on other ways. Meditation, ritual stuff like that I think
Speaker 5: are just just as potent. You know, psychedelics are, and
Speaker 5: theagents are a good way to understand other realities and
Speaker 5: that they exist and to to get yourself there. Uh,
Speaker 5: And there's nothing wrong with it. I think it's a
Speaker 5: good way to introduce yourself to other realms. But then
Speaker 5: for me and only me, other people are different. I
Speaker 5: find that other ways are more interesting, ways to take
Speaker 5: a little more work that require a little more, you know,
Speaker 5: a little more in the way of my body and
Speaker 5: mind doing it itself.
Speaker 4: Right right, Okay, Now you have the black Water Lights
Speaker 4: out and you released uh, yes, you released witch Lights
Speaker 4: the second part when like November.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which which witch Lights came out in October and
Speaker 5: I was released at Comic Con New York. So so
Speaker 5: that that was kind of fun. Yeah, that was kind
Speaker 5: of fun. The Random House, you know, set me up
Speaker 5: to do a signing there. Now, both books are e books,
Speaker 5: They're part of Random House's digital imprint called Hydra. Uh
Speaker 5: So they're only available digitally right now. I have I
Speaker 5: hope that maybe at some point they're out in paperback
Speaker 5: as well, because I know everyone doesn't like, you know,
Speaker 5: to read e books or whatever. But but yeah, Witch
Speaker 5: Lights out. The third book, which is tentatively titled the
Speaker 5: working titles Demon Lights. And you know, again, if you
Speaker 5: like this, this this stuff we're talking about, that's what
Speaker 5: these books cover fictionally, So if you like the paranormal,
Speaker 5: you know, I think you'll find these or is kind
Speaker 5: of extra fun because you know, it's it's all the
Speaker 5: stuff we're talking about holed into them. And I think
Speaker 5: Demon Lights will probably be out in the winter towards
Speaker 5: the end of the year, possibly early next year.
Speaker 4: So basically, you're you're taking these subjects and playing with
Speaker 4: them in a fictional way.
Speaker 5: Yes, I mean, but I'm exploring them, you know, It's
Speaker 5: what I'm what I'm exploring fictionally, is it just allows
Speaker 5: me to say, well, what if it is you know,
Speaker 5: what if these what if altered states do allow these
Speaker 5: entities to come through? What if there are groups of
Speaker 5: people around the world who are practiced at this, how
Speaker 5: would how would they work? You know, how if they're
Speaker 5: involved with governments or if they're involved with you know,
Speaker 5: the elites. Uh, you know, how would that change the world.
Speaker 5: So a lot of this stuff is is stuff I
Speaker 5: think about anyway in the real world. But but it's
Speaker 5: so much fun to explore it and in a story
Speaker 5: that you know, I hope is exciting and compelling and
Speaker 5: scary and fun.
Speaker 4: Okay, And your web page is what it's.
Speaker 5: Michael m Hughes dot com. You can sign up for
Speaker 5: my newsletter and get updates and all this stuff. I
Speaker 5: blog pretty regularly about everything we've talked about. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 5: on Facebook of Twitter and all that too, always as
Speaker 5: Michael M. Hughes, so you can find me everywhere.
Speaker 4: Okay, and look any any last questions for him.
Speaker 2: No, thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 5: Oh, thank you man. You know this is this is
Speaker 5: my bread and butter. I love doing this, so I'm
Speaker 5: happy to come back anytime.
Speaker 4: Good And I plan on having you back because this
Speaker 4: was a fascinating discussion and we there's so much more
Speaker 4: we can get into. There's there's more stuff you've researched,
Speaker 4: and there's secret societies and other stuff. So many questions,
Speaker 4: so we'll have you back soon.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. And uh.
Speaker 4: Yes so some psyche corporation to take you out. This
Speaker 4: is appropriately Nightmares and we'll be back next week's.
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