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206 – Inside The Lightning Ball: A Lifetime of UFO Experiences with Dr. Irena Scott

Dr. Irena Scott has been seeing UFOs since she was a little girl. She was only five when she had her first strange encounter with a lightning ball outside a window. Growing up on a tiny farm in rural Ohio in the mid-Twntietch Century, little Irena didn’t know what flying saucers were or who the little green men that flew them wanted but she continued to experience weird things all throughout her childhood and well into the rest of her life.

inside the lightning ball
Dr. Scott goes inside the lightning ball

Dr. Irena Scott went on to work for the Defense Intelligence Agency (a United States government agency focused on providing foreign intelligence to support combat missions), get her PhD in physiology from the University of Missouri, and serve  in various academic capacities at universities across the country. She’s been on MUFON’s board of directors as well as publishing several books on UFO phenomena.

While she’s researched sightings and cases with everyone from Jenny Randles (the woman who gave us some of the alien/human hybrid theories) to Budd Hopkins (one of the researchers responsible for our modern ideas of alien abduction), we mostly stick to the experiences that Dr. Irena Scott has seen for herself and in this episode, you will hear:

  • The strange light in her bedroom that both Irena Scott and her sister saw in their farmhouse as a child
  • Her mother’s later confirmation of unusual activity at the farmhouse as well
  • Her work for the DIA with spy satellite photography and what she learned about how UFOs got swept under the rug
  • Irena Scott and her sister’s UFO sightings in the 1960s on the same highway Betty and Barney Hill were on
  • The Men In Black-style experience (with a random trucker) that they both were confronted with directly after the sighting

You can find her book, Inside The Lightning Ball: Scientific Study of Lifelong UFO Experiencers on Amazon or her website, IrenaScott.com.

One of the things I liked about Dr. Scott, was that she wasn’t trying to explain anything away. There’s no theories about what aliens want or if they’re even aliens at all, we just talked about the things that she’s seen since she’s been a little girl. UFOs are real to her as planes in the sky are to you and me.

That’s the idea behind this week’s song. It must be a devil of a struggle to see things that most other people wouldn’t believe, that she herself would have a hard time believing if her sister wasn’t there with her to share the experience. When you see something that other people don’t, either they’re blind to it or you’re crazy. That’s gotta drive you mad and what can you do about it? You can tell other people right away, but what if they don’t believe you?

That’s scary for a little girl but even scarier for an academic, where UFOs are often treated as a joke. You might have to wait until you’re older and established to reveal yourself. When you’re faced with something like that, all you can do is just soldier on and “Keep Looking Up”.

And how do you explain all the things you see?
From why the sky is blue to the flight of a bumblebee
well I don’t think you can, but I don’t doubt you believe
that you can trust your senses, that you’re not crazy.

Sometimes it’s more than I can handle
sometimes it’s more than I can take
sometimes I am a bad example
of what I need when I’m gonna break

Keep looking up
When you’re stuck
outta luck
and dumbstruck
Keep looking up

Now just imagine there’s something that you know is real
something that you’ve seen your whole life, but something no one else can feel
would you hold it as your secret and always keep your truth concealed
or would you let yourself be ridiculed with a big reveal

Sometimes it’s more than you can handle
sometimes it’s more than you can take
sometimes you are a bad example
of what you need when you’re gonna break

Keep looking up
When you’re stuck
outta luck
and dumbstruck
Keep looking up

Keep looking up
When you’re stuck,
when you’re outta luck
and dumbstruck
Keep looking up

124 – Somewhere In The Skies: Ryan Sprague and The Human Side of UFOs

Coming of age in the 1990s in upstate New York, Ryan Sprague was exposed to the UFOs, alien abductions, and government conspiracy-mania that enchanted us all during the decade.

green day ufos ryan sprague
The finest music for attracting aliens…

He was listening to Green Day’s Dookie album outside on vacation on a Summer night in 1995 when he had his own UFO sighting for the first time (an experience that he shared with his father) and it inspired a lifelong obsession with watching the skies.

Ryan later moved to New York City and started working in theater, all the while writing UFO journalism for Open Minds magazine and co-hosting the podcast, Into The FrayHis methodology for investigation is all about trying to understand the personal toll that UFO witnesses often have to face and his new book Somewhere In The Skies: A Human Approach To An Alien Phenomenon.

ryan sprague somewhere in the skies

We’re really excited about the play he’s working on about the Rendlesham UFO Incident in the UK that’s inspired by his research with one of our favorites from the Paradigm Symposium, Peter Robbins!

To purchase Ryan Sprague’s book and learn more about him, definitely check out his website at http://www.somewhereintheskies.com and the profits of every purchase until the end of January goes to a great cause, the Women’s Refugee Commission.

Ryan’s Blink-182 t-shirt during the interview and the Green Day playing during his first UFO encounter inspired us to bring out an old Sunspot chestnut for this last episode of the year. Here’s one of our most pop-punk tracks and one that deals with believing in yourself and sticking to your own story, “Intellectual Terrorists”.

Intellectual terrorists are poisoning my head,
They want to break down my resistance,
And have my conscience left for dead.
They like to make you think that they’re the righteous ones,
And they’ll beat you down and call you names for sticking to your guns.
You won’t replace my sensibility,
With your overanxious, overloaded, oversensitivity.And if you look, you will find,
A rather sorry state of mind,
Of all the people who won’t stand up for their views.
And if you look you might see,
You don’t have to agree with me,
But I won’t close my mind for you.It’s easy to be blind, it’s easy to be led,
You like to cough up all the ideas,
That you’ve been force-fed.
No one likes the freak, no one likes the odd man out.
I’d rather live my life alone,
Than live a life of doubt.
I won’t let you force yourself on me,
I refuse to be a victim to your society.And if you look, you will find,
A rather sorry state of mind,
Of all the people who won’t stand up for their views.
And if you look you might see,
You don’t have to agree with me,
But I won’t close my mind for you.You can’t break me down,
I won’t close my mind for you.

Intellectual terrorists are morality anarchists,
And sensitivity exorcists are poisoning my head.
But I won’t close my eyes for you,
I won’t turn away the truth,
I won’t let you make me, overdose, or complicate me.
You can’t break me down.
I won’t close my mind for you.