Abraham “Avi” Loeb has been the subject of a number of high-profile stories lately and last week he was just in The New Yorker. This week he’s in The Atlantic. It’s time to learn why this Harvard Professor becoming the new face of UFOlogy and this time it’s less about Little Green Men and more about radio telescopes…
The United States Defense Intelligence Agency has one great fear: that someone, somewhere, has an unknown advantage … a secret weapon that could topple the world’s sole superpower from its perch. So when it hears talk of UFOs, stargates and warp drives — it takes it seriously. We’ve interviewed members of the DIA before, and they’ve seen some WEIRD stuff!
Government statistics have shown that social services identified 34 potential abuse cases in Coventry linked to faith or belief in 2018. Parents that think their child is a witch or bad luck or possessed by demons. What the Hell is going on in Coventry?
Astronomers think extraterrestrials could be trying to communicate with us so Chinese scientists built a huge telescope to find out. But with a government as tight-lipped as the Chinese are they going to be any more free with the alien goods than the U.S.?
In the mood for some classic Alternative Rock that talks about aliens? We thought you were, here’s the Pixies with one of their most fun tracks.
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It’s Mike from See You On The Other Side, coming through your electricity to keep you para-informed!This week started off with a barnburner of a podcast discussing all last week’s best stories. We welcome Robbie Graham (who you might have seen on the last episode of Ancient Aliens!) to the conversation about UFOs, conspiracy theories, Hollywood, and murder. Listen right here!
UFOs in the The New York Times and The New Yorker this week? What?! Well come on along…
An astonishing number of people undergo deliverance from demonic forces every week, but this article gives an excellent overview of how the latest surge in exorcisms might also be because of religious competition in traditionally Catholic South America.
If you wanna know the truth about J. Allen Hynek, you have to read Mark O’Connell’s book. (His parents and mine were friends, so of course we’re going to plug him!) This New York Times article used him as a fact-checker for their story about the real Project Blue Book.
The disappearance of beloved Big Band leader Glenn Miller has been a mystery since before the end of World War Two. His plane was last seen over the English Channel in 1944 and was never found. People have speculated everything from friendly fire to him being a target of assassination by the Germans because he might have been a spy. But as of today, they think they’ve found the plane.
Avi Loeb is everywhere lately. Fast radio bursts and discussions why we need to consider the possibility that the object was sent by aliens, the dangers of unscientific speculation, and what belief in an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has in common with faith in God.
This Bigfoot statue is scaring rural North Carolinians because it’s eyes glow red in the glare of oncoming car lights. They’re calling the cops regularly that they’ve seen Bigfoot. This is what I mean, when people actually think they’ve seen something real, they call the cops. Because if there’s an 8-foot tall apeman on the loose, the authorities might need to be involved. They don’t save their story and put the community in danger just so they can email a frickin’ website a week after they get home.
Speaking of Glenn Miller, here’s his version of the most paranormal song we could find of his, “That Old Black Magic”, which was his last Number One hit in 1943
The “sonic attacks” that afflicted diplomats at the US Embassy in Cuba could have just been the work of crickets, according to a report Sunday. So crickets are causing hearing damage now? I smell a coverup!
Doesn’t mean it’s aliens, in fact, the guy that was all excited about Oumuamua being aliens, Avi Loeb, is the guy they’re quoting here. Saw this on everyone’s feeds this week, so I thought we should mention it.
Remember when CNN was the MH370 Channel? I feel like this news should be a bigger deal. A report from the MH370 Safety Investigation Team said most of the debris recovered was from an aircraft and a floor panel found belonged to a Boeing 777, ‘most likely MH370’.
Speaking of the Anti-Christ, it’s the man that was demonized in the 90s, Brian Warner AKA Marilyn Manson. Naming has band members half after super models and half after notorious killers, the man has never been accused of good taste. Is he still shocking? I dunno, but some of those songs are still excellent! Here’s the title track of his breakthrough album.
If you missed our conversation earlier this week, we talked about the Lost Franklin Expedition, the Doomsday Clock, new horror films based on real-life ghost stories, and Britain’s most famous UFO incident. You can listen to that episode right here.
New episode out late Monday night, so we’ll see you on the other side of the weekend! Mike
P.S. Hat tip to our Patreon, C.E. Martin for forwarding this hilarious cartoon. It’s always nice to see the weird stuff enter the mainstream!
It’s 2019 and we hope your New Year is starting off most excellently (party on Wayne!) If you wanna say goodbye to the old year, we’ve got a podcast about 2018’s most exciting paranormal stories that you can listen to right here.
But moving forward, we’ve got plenty of paranormal news to kick off a brand new annum!
A mysterious glowing orange sphere evidently appeared above Kiawah Island over the Christmas holiday, a phenomenon that turns up in this area every so often.
This article takes the tack that exorcism is all BS, but this goes to something we’ve been talking about for awhile, the paranormal vs. hardcore atheism is part of the new culture wars and it’s in a completely different way than the hippies vs. squares generational conflict of the 60s.
This is what I’m always afraid is going to happen when people see those Zombie Pub Crawls. One of these days, someone’s gonna freak out and start shooting the participants. That’s what happened in Pakistan.
Psychic predictions from The National Enquirer’s team of mystics for 2018 included accurately foreseeing Clint Eastwood’s retirement from acting and Khloé Kardashian’s humiliating relationship woes. What will they predict for our favorite (and not so favorite) celebrities in 2019?
Sasquatch was spotted near Mount Hood Meadows — or so say the people connected with Mount Hood Meadows. Take a look at the pictures and you decide if that looks like Bigfoot to you. 😉
Dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’, the Rendlesham Forest incident in Suffolk, has intrigued UFO enthusiasts since taking place in December 1980. You’re not gonna like what this article says…
Since we’re talking about Bigfoot again this week, let’s go back to one of the best scenes in Tenacious D’s much-maligned flick, Tenacious D In The Pick of Destiny. Is it a great movie? Well, it didn’t win any Academy Awards, but if you like Jack Black, then you get a whole heaping helping!
New podcast and paranormal song are coming up early next week, so subscribe in iTunes and we’ll see you on the other side!
The shadow of mental illness hangs over supernatural experience. If someone at your office job told you that they really believe that they’d been abducted by aliens, would you look at them the same? I mean, you’re reading the show notes for a paranormal podcast, so maybe you would like them even more. But there is a stigma associated with mental illness in our society and a stigma associated with believing in the supernatural. When you combine them, it’s becomes doubly dubious.
And I admit, that I’m pretty skeptical. Like most Americans (52%), I believe in the possibility of ghosts and like 57% of my countrymen and women, I’m also down with psychic powers but if you told me that you had a real deal supernatural encounter, like talking to a demon or you hear spirits in your head, I’m a doubting Thomas.
Sometimes art can help remove stigmas and sometimes they can make them worse. Sybil famously brought the world of dissociative personality disorder (multiple personality) to the public but Psycho was inspired by the real-life story of Ed Gein, a murderer diagnosed with schizophrenia. Getting our opinions on mental health from movies is dangerous because it paints an unrealistic and sometimes unsympathetic picture of illness. C’mon, in exorcism films, are the possessed ever really just sick? No, then there wouldn’t be a movie, at least not the kind that sells tickets to horror fans.
In this episode, we discuss the relationships between mental illness and the paranormal. Here’s some of the topics we cover:
Indigo Children and how people are rejecting psychiatrists’ diagnoses in favor of X-Men like psychic powers
Our band Sunspot wrote the song for this week in the late 90s, when Prozac was at its prescriptive height and it seemed that more and more children were being given the drug. My psych professors at the University of Wisconsin would tell me about the lunches that the pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly would put on for psychiatric clinics, they were lobbyists for their drugs. They would actively try to get doctors to prescribe them.
I remember when one of my teenage friends told me she was on Prozac and it shocked me, not that I thought she was crazy, but that she was so young and already on medication. I was shocked that kids weren’t being allowed to “pass through a phase”, they were getting pills right away. Maybe I was reacting to the stigma of mental illness I felt with people in my own family who were on medication, but it felt like maybe we should give kids a chance to be moody. Maybe we shouldn’t be interfering with brain chemistry that’s still so plastic, still developing, still trying to find its way.
And now it’s more than ever, 80 million Americans take a psychiatric drug and over 7 million them are under 18. Maybe we wrote this song too early?
Is she a victim of her own physiology Or just a victim of some bad psychology All I do know is she’s fifteen and she’s on Prozac
She sits in her room and cries all night Never had a real boyfriend in her life Her mommy wonders why she doesn’t have any friends Daddy only sees her when he has her on the weekends
Is she a victim of her own physiology Or just a victim of some bad psychology All I do know is she’s fifteen and she’s on Prozac
And the doctor said, “you better take your meds To fix what’s wrong inside your mind.” Just a Prozac Girl in a Prozac world Shift the blame and everything will be just fine
Her grandma thinks that it might be bad luck I think we used to call it “just growing up” When you feel that your life is just pathetic You slap it in a textbook, and blame it on genetics
Is she a victim of her own physiology Or just a victim of some bad psychology All I do know is she’s fifteen and she’s on Prozac
And the doctor said, “you better take your meds To fix what’s wrong inside your mind.” Just a Prozac Girl in a Prozac world Shift the blame and everything will be just fine
She doesn’t cry anymore She doesn’t laugh anymore She doesn’t know how she should feel anymore A chemical imbalance That’s covered by insurance It’s hard to be a little girl When you’re numb to the world
Is she a victim of her own physiology Or just a victim of some bad psychology All I do know is she’s fifteen and she’s on Prozac
And the doctor said, “you better take your meds To fix what’s wrong inside your mind.” Just a Prozac Girl in a Prozac world Shift the blame and everything will be just fine
After being fascinated with writing and having paranormal experiences at an early age, supernatural suspense author L. Sydney Fisher decided to use people’s real stories of hauntings, possessions, and demonic activity as fodder for her fiction. Her Bradford Haunting series is inspired by a real murder in the 1970s and the strange events that followed in Tupelo, Mississippi, which some of them, she witnessed herself.
L. Sydney Fisher
Her paranormal investigations have led her to write the Haunted History series as well, focusing on more legendary sites around Northeastern Mississippi, so we discuss how she does her paranormal research and the process of how she turns people’s experiences into exciting fiction. Her latest book is The Devil’s Board.
One of the things I like about Sydney’s work is that it’s inspired by true events as opposed to claiming its a documentation (ala The Amityville Horror). Fiction and narratives are meant to be exciting, and horror and suspense are meant to thrill you viscerally. Sometimes you have to go a little extreme with the story to make that happen, and real-life events aren’t usually that extreme.
When you’re researching paranormal claims, it’s really easy to want to exaggerate and make things more dramatic to excite your audience, or in many authors’ cases, to sell your book. When it’s fiction, it gives you that freedom to exaggerate what actually happened to heighten the drama and it gives readers like me (who are generally skeptical of big paranormal claims) permission to turn our BS detectors off and just enjoy the story. The fact that it started with real events, helps make it exciting without straining credulity, and I really appreciate that.
Since L. Sydney Fisher is out in “Elvis Country” and our
conversation about The King of Rock n’ Roll dominated the beginning of the conversation, we thought it’d be a perfect time to sing about the real conspiracy theory that Elvis faked his own death. Here’s Sunspot with “The King’s Not Dead”!
Well the King’s not dead baby
You know the King ain’t dead.
He faked his OD on the potty
Flew to Brazil instead
I saw Elvis Presley
At the Burger King in Kalamazoo
He just wanted some peace and quiet
And a Double Whopper too.
Well the King’s not dead baby
Hell no the king ain’t dead
He was on borrowed time from organized crime
after Nixon made him a fed.
I saw Elvis Presley
He was an extra in Home Alone.
He’s wearing a sweet turtleneck
Under the beard he had grown
Well the King’s not dead baby
Oh no the King’s not gone
Misspelled his middle name above his grave
So that we’d know it’s a big con
I saw Elvis Presley
Outside a store in Nashville
He was looking for his microphone
Cuz he’s got some time to kill.
I saw Elvis Presley
riding on a unicorn
Doing karate kicks with Bigfoot
And saying it’s alright mama, you don’t have to mourn.
One of our favorite paranormal experts, Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts, has been researching cases of demonic possession and we brought her on to talk about a little known, but very influential exorcism case, that occurred in the Devilish Dairy State (that’s Wisconsin) in the 1860s.
Watertown, WI in the 19th Century – this is the best they could do for aerial views, I guess.
It all begins with the Seige Family, who were living in Germany in the late 1840s. Carl’s little sister was playing outside when she found a duck egg with a pinhole in it. She brought it into show the family but the mother immediately said to get rid of it. However, before they could, the dog ate it. Soon after, the poor pooch passed on and the sister became violently ill. She suffered for a year with blindness and fits and then passed away. One side of Carl’s body shriveled and he became very sickly. Soon after the family emigrated to Watertown, Wisconsin because they knew that the Devil wouldn’t follow them to America (right? Right?!)
Not so, Carl continued to suffer from strange symptoms. Newspapers reported that he had a lizard (or some said a snake) in his stomach. He started acting crazy so his parents brought in a Native American doctor to help draw out the evil, but that didn’t seem to work. So, they finally called in the demon-cleansing professionals, the Catholic Church.
Now the Catholic Church says that there are four Signs of Possession:
Knowing The Unknowable – This is where you possess knowledge that you can’t possible have known beforehand. People’s locations, things that they were doing, who they were with, secrets, etc… Basically psychic powers like you’re Professor X watching them through Cerebro.
Understanding Unlearned Languages – Being able to comprehend when people are speaking to you in a tongue with which you have no prior experience. This is especially useful when possessed people go on vacation.
Aversion to Sacred Objects – Crosses, holy water — all the kind of stuff that people try in vampire movies but never seems to work because they don’t have enough faith.
Supernatural Strength – When little kids can throw a grown man across a room or a tiny middle-aged woman can bench press a sofa bed, that means they’ve probably been popping Satanic Steroids.
You don’t have to exhibit all the signs to be authentically demonically possessed, but it’s an important checklist because at least 3 out of the 4, you can’t really fake. (It’s easy to act freaked out around a cross, people do it in Dracula movies all the time. It’s a lot harder to answer someone speaking in Latin or deadlift a Mini-Cooper.)
In Carl’s case he exhibited three of the signs, number one, he met his would-be Exorcists, the Rev. John Gmeiner and another priest as they were arriving, even though no one told him when they were coming. Number two, the priests would ask him questions in Latin and he’d give the correct answer, responding in German, but showing that he understood the Latin nonetheless (even though he had no prior education in the language.) Number three, when he was deep in the throes of his possession, he reacted violently to the crucifix.
Father Gmeiner invented the “Horror Movie” font 30 years too early!
The priests exorcised Carl and were able to drive the demons out of him according to Father Gmeiner’s book, Spirits Of Darkness. But like herpes simplex, the demons never really go away, they just hide and come back in multiple outbreaks of possession throughout your life. Carl Seige had to be exorcised many times during his life to keep the Devil at bay.
In the present day, they recently held an Exorcist training seminar in Northern Illinois at Mundelein Seminary. Allison stopped by there last week to do some research and maybe catch a glimpse of some of those Catholic heroes who are learning the proper angles to spray Holy Water and the latest in projectile vomit-avoidance techniques. Our friend, Tea Krulos, wrote an article about it in the Milwaukee Record and called it “Exorcist-palooza”.
Excuse me guys, is this where all the Exorcists hang out?
There’s an new Exorcist TV show coming on FOX this season as well. William Peter Blatty’s book was famously based on a 1949 case, but there’s some connections that Allison has been researching that are less well known, and that’s a story for another podcast.
Self-harm is one of the cornerstones of demonic possession. There’s even a case in the Bible where Jesus encounters a possessed man cutting himself with stones. (Mark 5:5) This song, “Mercy of Myth” by our band Sunspot talks about how punishing yourself needlessly isn’t worth it, because not only does it make you feel bad, it also opens you up to being possessed!
There is a Hell we hold within,
you can’t forgive yourself for the things you did.
A hair shirt and a bottle,
won’t let you forget.
Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.
And culpa’s even worse than Crack,
You don’t need a sheepskin to know that,
even after cutting, nailbiting, hair pulling and spiting.
All your shame is still toxic.
Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.
I’ll abandon ship on this guilt trip,
and let it drown,
Need some clemency from self pity,
and burn it out.
A rock band's journey into the afterlife, UFOs, entertainment, and weird science.
