296 – Dark Skies: TV Fact And Fiction with Matthew Kresal

After The X-Files set the world on fire in 1993 and helped establish the fairly new FOX Network as a major player in television, other networks tried to jump on the bandwagon with similarly-themed paranormal shows. There was the small-town horror of American Gothic, the supernatural drama of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the government conspiracy angle of The Pretender, and even David Hasselhoff got in on the action with his “paranormal investigation in paradise” show, Baywatch Nights (and Lou Rawls sang the theme song, c’mon!)

But the show that skewed the closest to The X-Files was a program called Dark Skies, set at the dawn of the UFO age and doubling down upon The X-Files’ pattern of taking real-life paranormal inspiration and turning it into fodder for fiction. The slogan for the show was: “History as we know it is a lie.”

By combining the government conspiracy paranoia of The X-Files with 1960s nostalgia, the Roswell alien craze, and the infamous Majestic 12. It mixed real historical figures with a science fiction story of extraterrestrial invasion and it ended way too soon. With a series pilot directed by Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper and the imprimatur of an appearance by Art Bell himself, it seemed like a sure bet, but it was cancelled after one season.

We talk with Matt Kresal about his new book on the series, finally learning what could have been, and also the real-life paranormal inspirations behind the series.

Some of the topics we cover in this discussion are:

  • How creators Brent V. Friedman and Bryce Zabel created the Dark Skies mythology
  • What did Ronald Reagan’s driver know about UFO disclosure
  • The plan for future seasons of the show to cover more real UFO cases in the 70s, 80s, and 90s
  • The government agents that approached the creators to try and “help them get the facts right”
  • How the CIA and Department of Defense was trying to infiltrate Hollywood to shape the alien narrative

We originally recorded this discussion for a special See You On The Other Side livestream and if you’d like to watch us talk (unedited, so umms and ahhhs intact!) then check out this video:

Matthew Kresal is an absolute wealth of knowledge of classic science fiction television and he was a pleasure to talk to, so you know why the produers and creators of Dark Skies were willing to share so much with him. You can pick up a copy of his book right here and we highly recommend it!

293 – Staying Cool In A Crisis: From Meditation to The Rosary

Horror stories, clickbait, panic porn, your amygdala is constantly getting stimulated nowadays because the media understands that if they activate your fight or flight response, you’ll pay attention. The old saying goes “If it bleeds, it leads” and that applies now more than ever. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has kept most of the world inside and glued to TV and social media for two months. We’re constantly surrounded by news stories of how many people are predicted to die, how many deaths are already happening, and how quickly the disease is spreading, and how dangerous it is.

Millions around the world have been impacted by the disease, losing loved ones or getting sick themselves, and millions have also been affected by the reaction to it. The economic shutdown has made millions of people dependent on unemployment insurance for the first time to pay their bills and a system unprepared for such a gigantic influx of new applicants has suffocated under the weight. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses whose doors were shuttered by the shutdown orders across America that had to apply for emergency loans to the Small Business Administration didn’t even get their applications looked at before the money ran out.

The school and daycare centers are closed and parents are stuck between the rock and a hard place of trying to keep money coming in and pay bills while providing their own child care, in essence, trying to juggle working full time from home (or if you work in a hospital or food industry, still having to go in) with parenting full time.

So not only are we worried about getting sick or people we love getting sick, we’re worried that we won’t have enough money to pay the bills and feed the children that we’re now assuming the teaching . Add to that, we’re in the middle of an election year, so the political teams have no co-opted the elements for the crisis and the lines in the sand have been drawn, depending on where your political beliefs fall.

People are desperate. People are scared. A lot of us are not okay. So, what are some ways that we can get back to “okay” when it feels like the world is crashing down on us. Our “fight ot flight” center, the amygdala is constantly being activated lately. So what are some ways that people have stayed cool in a crisis? From just breathing to praying and meditating? That’s what we cover in this episode.

Some of the different methods we discuss in this episode include:

We originally recorded this episode in a live YouTube broadcast during the fifth week of lockdown and you can watch that original conversation in its unedited entirety right here.

The song this week is a meditation track. It’s meant to relax you in just five minutes.  It’s got a beat programmed to slow down your heart rate, it’s in G major, (known as the most relaxing key!), it’s got a Tibetan singing bowl for meditative properties, and there’s even some sounds of rain so that you can experience a little bit of nature. Hopefully, it’ll give you five minutes of peace.

294 – The Hunger of the Damned: Chad Lewis and Wendigo Lore

When Hollywood comes looking for a nasty monster from First Nations folklore, there’s one supernatural creature that seems to dominate the landscape. The legend of the Wendigo has inspired cinematic villains from Pet Sematary to Supernatural, Ravenous to Bone Tomahawk. From the legends of the Algonquin-speaking Great Lakes tribes in the Upper Midwest and Canada, the Wendigo is the evil spirit that transforms starving humans into a voracious cannibalistic monster after they finally succumb to their basest instincts and taste human flesh.

The cover of Chad Lewis’ new book with Kevin Lee Nelson – Wendigo Lore: Monsters, Myths, and Madness

These tribes lived in an area with harsh cold winters where food becomes scarce. Right around February when you haven’t had anything decent to eat for months and your body is starving for any kind of protein outside of your shoe leather, well, your neighbor might start looking pretty good. The human instinct to survive at all costs is hard to resist. The Wendigo is our warning to resist that urge, that this evil irreparably taints the soul once you feast upon another human.

Cannibalism is the ultimate human taboo. The whole reason that humans thrived on this planet is because we work together. We don’t have the natural advantages that other creatures do like fur on a bear to survive the winter cold or teeth like a wolf to dig into our prey. Our socialization is what enabled us to conquer the planet in all of its areas and climates. Winter is the cruelest climate of all because not only is terribly cold, there’s no food. Eating your fellow man is the ultimate betrayal of what makes us human, our tribal capacity to take on the world together.

Who wants some fava beans?

Chad Lewis and Kevin Lee Nelson have been working on this compendium of Wendigo lore and mythology for almost two decades. And in this episode, Chad tells us of the journey he took in writing the book. Some of the things we also talk about in this conversation:

  • Why you’re never even supposed to say the name of the Wendigo
  • The most famous case of the Wendigo in the modern era, Swift Runner, who ate his family in 1878 Alberta
  • The far edges of the world that Chad Lewis and his co- author went to walk on the same ground as the people they talk about in the book
  • The radio station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin we used to perform at all the time and Chad had a show had an owner that thought he was a skin walker!

The Wendigo are more than just the winter spirits of desperate hunger, it is a monster that feeds on greed. The human capacity for gluttony and the desire that you will never have enough. The Wendigo, like George Romero’s zombies, is never satisfied, its craving is never satiated. It’s a eerily thin, gaunt beast who grows larger with every human it devours, but it’s still not enough. Once you break the taboo and taste the flesh, you descend into madness and you will never satisfy “The Hunger of The Damned”.

I can hear its call
in the scream of the cold
I can feel it crawl
an infection in my soul
a little voice deep inside
you’d rather eat than die
find a way to justify
as the hunger takes hold.

Famine like a disease.
What do you do when you’re hungry
More than a beast
and the monster is me

Stung by the winter’s bite
Can I make it one more night
how long can I fight
until I give in to this appetite

You’ll never be the same
once you’ve tasted flesh
don’t say it’s name
the taste that drives you insane
The Hunger of the Damned
don’t say it’s name

you’ll never be satisfied
when the madness burns inside
you’ll never be complete
When all you see is meat.

you’ll never be satisfied
when the madness burns inside
you’ll never be complete
When all you see is meat.

292 – Lights In The Sky: Personal and Listener UFO Experiences

Millions of people have UFO stories. There is a one-hundred percent chance that you know at least one person that has a story! So, we went to our listeners and in our own archives for this episode’s tales of UFO experiences.

Once again, join me, Wendy Lynn, Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, and my sister Allison Jornlin from MilwaukeeGhosts.com to talk about our own stories as well as great ones from our listeners. You can watch the unedited livestream of our conversation here if you’d like to see our pretty faces while we talk.

My sister, Allison, has her own UFO story and it happened to be on the day that my daughter was born, September of 2016. Here’s the exact text of the email she sent me and it came out about 15 minutes after the birth, she didn’t know about it yet and I didn’t have much time to think about it at the time!

I saw some UFOs today at about 7:25 a.m. and I couldn’t wait to tell you. Maybe it’s a sign. Is it baby time? Below is what I wrote for the kids today during our Quick Write: Something amazing happened to me this morning.

No, my brother’s baby didn’t come yet, unfortunately. It was something else.

I was driving to school on Hwy 43 Southbound when I saw something strange in the sky. Actually it was two-somethings. I wondered were they planes, but I couldn’t stop and look because I was on the expressway. That means emergency stopping only!

The objects were pretty high up. That’s why I thought they were planes. But I actually saw two planes go by this morning also. These other objects didn’t seem to be moving and they didn’t have the blinking lights that planes have to have by law. They were like two groups of three bright, white lights hovering there. One was much lower than the other and off to the right. What were they? I wish I could have stopped and taken some video. By the time I got off the expressway, the lights were in back of me and seemed to be getting smaller.

I think maybe they were flares, but I’m not sure. They seemed to fade out instead of coming down like they were on parachutes. They also didn’t really seem to move at all, just hanging motionless in the sky for at least 5 minutes. What do you think they were?

I’ve got my own UFO story too, not exciting like an abduction or anything, but interesting enough to me that I wrote it down the same day.

I was on a vacation in January of 2008 visiting a place called Cabo Rojo which is an incredible white sand beach on the southwestern shore of the island, opening up to the Carribbean sea with a very famous lighthouse.

There was an object far away in the sky that almost looked like a blimp, but it was tremendously high in the sky, so high and so far away that we couldn’t be quite sure of what it was. It definitely didn’t look like a cloud, even though it was completely white and high enough to be a cloud. But the rest of the clouds had some kind of softness and transparency to them and this cloud didn’t. It was definitely unusual and I thought it might be a UFO, what I really thought it might have been was some kind of alien or government ship that was up there and it was meant to be disguised as a cloud, but it was just different enough so if you looked you couldn’t tell. I dunno, I wanted to take a picture of it but I was so enamored with the natural beauty of the place that I forgot about the unnatural beauty of what we were seeing. It probably was a cloud or a blimp that was very high, but it looked just different enough from the other clouds to be interesting. 

My journal, January 3rd, 2008

Funny enough, as we were getting back on the road and driving towards our next location, just what road do we end up driving on? Yeah, that’s some kind of synchronicity. I see something weird in the sky I can’t explain on the same day we randomly decide to drive Puerto Rico’s Extraterrestrial Highway.

This episode is chock full of weird lights in the sky stories, including:

  • Once again, our Patreon Dr. Ned tells us an interesting UFO encounter he had in the 1960s
  • We’ve got high strangeness on a military base from our Patreon C.E. Martin’s book Stranger Than Fiction.
  • A Chicago UFO sighting from Illinois MUFON state director, Sam Maranto
  • A Bermuda Triangle story from near Cabo Rojo where we were in Puerto Rico
  • and lots more…

Well, something I said in this episode is that I’m gonna punch the next person that says the phrase “Space Brothers” to me, well guess what, it was me. The most ridiculous UFO hunt I’ve ever been on was at the Michigan Paracon in 2017 where we all stood outside in the parking lot while Andrea Perron sang “Sentimental Journey” and it was as ridiculous as it sounds. The only reason I took it even a little seriously at first is because Dave Schrader from Darkness Radio and The Holzer Files and Amy Bruni from Kindred Spirits both said that Andrea could really make some crazy stuff happen. Well, I don’t know what they were smoking, but here’s our immediate reaction afterwards…

Okay, so obviously it was hard to take that seriously, so for this episode’s song, we decided to ask our alien friends for a favor. Here’s our Sunspot paranormal track of the week, “Space Brothers”.

You must be talking at light speed
from that black hole you got on your face
cuz when you open your mouth, time slows, and
and I just want to escape.

Oh, you piss me off on a cosmic scale,
So I don’t want ET to come in peace,
the first thing he should do is abduct you, and get you off this planet for keeps.

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

I dunno why spacemen love butts.
Who can read their alien brains?
But if they’re looking for the biggest asshole in the world
well, I can give them a name.

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

All these lights in the sky
just watching us like a zoo
and if the Space Brothers wanna do something for me,
I wish they would anal probe you

291 – Everyone’s Got A Ghost Story: Listener and Personal Experiences

Everyone’s got a ghost story, from your grandma to your high school social studies teacher. In fact, some of the people that you least expect (and some skeptics as well), seem to have stories that they just can’t quite explain. One time, I remember talking to someone about ghost stories and he said, “Nothing’s really ever happened to me… well… except that time that heard my grandmother’s voice tell me to stop immediately when I was driving, and I narrowly avoided getting into a car crash that surely would have killed me.” Nope, nothing at all then.

So, this week, we decided to talk about our personal ghost stories as well as reach out to See You On The Other Side listeners to get their tales of the unexplained, so we could share them for this special episode. Wendy and I are joined by my sister, Allison from MilwaukeeGhosts.com as well as Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com and we originally recorded it as a livestream on Facebook.

Here’s the video of our livestream

But there was a ghost in the machine that day, so we didn’t end up listening to several of the listener stories, because of technical issues. However, all of those stories have been saved for the audio podcast for your listening pleasure, including:

  • The ghost story Allison and my mother told us when we were kids when our parents lived across the street from a cemetery
  • Our family’s strange story of our great uncle seeing an “Angel In The Mirror” right before he died
  • A comforting ghost seen by our Patreon, Dr. Ned
  • Katie’s story, who as a young girl, was out on the road doing merchandise with a country singer calls us to let us know about a hotel she stayed at where the ghost got a little too friendly
  • Former Milwaukee ghost tour guide, Mike J., tells us of a childhood haunting in the “little pink house” that his family lived in
  • Allison and her husband’s adventures at the Haunted Larium Manor Inn in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
  • Ghost hunter Scott Markus’ adventures investigating in Illinois
  • Quick stories recounted by Amy, Jimmy, and Tina as well…

We also read our Patreon C.E. Martin’s story, “The Closet of Terror” from his biographical paranormal novel, Stranger Than Fiction.

We’re doing more experimenting with recording the podcasts live during the lockdown of Coronavirus 2020, so thanks to everyone who’s been watching the livestreams.

For the song this week, we were inspired by Allison and my family story about our mother’s uncle who saw an angel in the mirror in the middle of the night, told his wife about it, went back to sleep, and never woke up. After hearing the tale since we were children, it seemed like it was about time that we dedicate a track to “The Angel In The Mirror”.

Far beyond its bloom 
only petals on the floor 
a broken flower wilts 
it won’t be pretty anymore 
When you hear the knock 
there’s nothing left to beg for 
how I’ve fought and how I tried 
to keep the lock on this door 

Blinded by the love 
as she holds onto me 
the angel in the mirror 
is the last thing I see 

Wake up in the night 
breathless from a dream 
When I open the door, 
I will find her ready for me. 
with open arms and a crooked smile 
it’s just a small mercy 
My struggle has ended 
I close my eyes and finally sleep 

Blinded by the love 
as she holds onto me 
the angel in the mirror 
is the last thing I see 
Blinded by the love 
as she holds onto me 
the angel in the mirror 
is the last thing I see

A rock band's journey into the afterlife, UFOs, entertainment, and weird science.