149 – UFOs: Reframing The Debate Part 2 with Robbie Graham and Mike Clelland

Last week, we covered the concept of “high strangeness” with Robbie Graham and Mike Clelland as we talked about the book, UFOs: Reframing The Debate, a collection of essays on modern UFOlogy conceived and edited by Robbie.

UFOS Reframing The Debate
Try checking this image out with 3-D glasses!

This week is the second half of that conversation between myself, Robbie Graham, Mike Clelland, and  Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts and we talk about healthy skepticism. I think that skepticism is just as important as belief when it comes to handling therse phenomena.

If you’ve seen a UFO, it’s always going to be a “your word” vs. “someone else’s beliefs and experiences” kind of thing. If that person hasn’t had a UFO encounter, they’re going to have a more difficult time believing yours. So, what are we trying to do? Make it more believable to convince skeptics that this stuff isn’t just hoaxes and hallucinations? Or help people who have had these experiences come to terms with them and be able to handle when they believe something has happened to them that they cannot understand.

It was in April of 2015 where we interviewed UFO researcher, Don Schmitt, about the “smoking gun” that was supposed to be the Roswell Slides released on May 5th of that year at a special pay per view event in Mexico City. If you didn’t see it, the slides were supposed to be a 1950s photograph showing a dead alien body, but really is just a mummified human. A small group formed on social media to take the investigation into their own hands and debunked the slides in a matter of a few days. Cliff Collins writes about it in UFOs: Reframing The Debate.

It’s an awesome example of why skepticism is so important. This small group ended the debate on the Roswell Slides. We’re not subjected to endless TV specials or internet sites dedicated to discussing the “controversy”, people won’t be writing books about the slides in 50 years and talking about “the unsolved mystery”. It’s debunked and now we can move on to the next thing.

But even if we could make UFO experiences more “believable”, does it matter? While Internet discourse has created an atheist skeptic vs. religious believer debate where you either fall on one side or the other, the skeptics have already lost.

A 2015 poll shows that 56% of Americans believe in UFOs and 45% of them believe that extraterrestrials have visited earth. That’s a majority of Americans who think that there is something real to that UFO phenomenon and just a little less than half believe in the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (that it’s aliens coming to visit).

Carl Sagan popularized the saying “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Healthy skepticism and scientific rigor is important, not just to debunk and rain on everyone’s parade, but to find out the cases where things that are happening are truly unexplainable and are truly weird. It’s been seventy years since Roswell and are we any closer to the truth? It’s been over fifty years since Betty and Barney Hill were abducted, over forty for Travis Walton, almost thirty since Communion

Nothing has changed. We’re not any closer to the truth. Maybe we’ll never be – in this discussion, we talk long and hard about the futility of disclosure and at length about Tom Delonge’s Sekret Machines project that’s supposed to blow the cover of the whole UFO thing.  

We have a good laugh about disclosure as well, talking about how Donald Trump would never pass up the opportunity to be the one to let the world know about extraterrestrial and giggle about an alien wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

But how we deal with the aftermath of experiencers can improve. That is something we can change. I don’t think everyone is lying or hoaxing and if we can help people come to terms with the experiences, to process it in a healthy way, then we’re doing something tremendously important.

That’s where modern skeptics can really improve. Sympathy, understanding, a psychological perspective. That’s something that the Church has a superior handle on as compared to psychiatrists. The Catholics have been trying to figure out whether miracles have actually happened for two millennia and even have a system for it, it’s certainly not completely applicable here, but it’s much more sympathetic than the Phillip Klass or James Randi approach, that just suggests experiences are deceiving or delusional.

UFOs: Reframing The Debate challenges the core notions that I had about UFOs, ETs, and even faeries and owls that I’ve had all my life. It’s the kind of book that this field needs to break out of The X-Files mindset we’ve been living in (at least until Tom Delonge proves us all wrong!) It doesn’t take sides or come in with an agenda. And if your ideas about UFO phenomena are the same when you’re done reading the book as when you started, then you’re just as closed minded as any skeptic.

One of the themes of this week’s conversation is disappointment. Whether it’s the blowup with the Roswell Slides or the fact that so many have waited with baited breath for full government disclosure to no avail, disappointment is as much a part of UFOlogy as little green men. This week’s Sunspot song is called “The Breach”, when something important to you, and breaks and it hurts, but you keep going back.

I can still taste you on the tip of my tongue,
I’m trying to hold your breath inside my lungs,
Draw me away.
Draw me amazed.
We stand outside ourselves,
so please don’t move
When I scream fire inside a crowded room.Mediocrity surrounds me,
To the point of tragedy.
And we can walk along the breach,
walk along the breach.Consumed by a devouring,
Convinced by an overwhelming.
Draw me afraid,
I watched you draw me flayed.We stood outside ourselves,
and then you moved.
When I screamed fire inside a crowded room, a crowded room.

Mediocrity escapes me,
when I hear your voice.
Barely avoiding tragedy,
We made that choice.
I closed my eyes so hard,
I didn’t know the water from the sea,
As we walked along the breach.

The crack was deeper than it seemed,
I could not cross the yawning,
that opened in my chest cavity,
The frailty that tore,
Still led us once more unto the breach.

Mediocrity escaped me,
When I heard your voice,
To the point of tragedy,
When you made your choice.
I closed my eyes so hard,
I didn’t know the water from the sea,
As we walked along the breach.

Mediocrity escaped me,
When I heard your voice,
To the point of tragedy,
When you made your choice.
I closed my eyes so hard,
To shut out the uncertainty,
Against the husk of a dream,
As we stand astride, stand astride the breach.

148 – UFOs: Reframing The Debate Part 1 with Robbie Graham and Mike Clelland

Last time we talked with Robbie Graham, he had just released Silver Screen Saucers, a brilliant tome on how Hollywood and UFOlogy have influenced each other over the past 70 years. In the meantime, Robbie’s star has quickly risen in the UFO field (or is just the planet Venus?) thanks to his thorough research and an academic approach.

His latest endeavor, UFOs: Reframing The Debate is a collection of essays written by some of the greatest modern UFO researchers, bloggers, and even skeptics. It features some of our favorite former See You On The Other Side guests like Joshua Cutchin and Ryan Sprague as well as great podcaster Micah Hanks, and even Canada’s leading “UFO guy, eh” Chris Rutkowski.

With thirteen (of course!) essays, there is plenty to agree with, disagree with, things to make you mad, things to make you think, and lots to learn.

One of the contributors to the book, Mike Clelland, is the blogger behind Hidden Experiences and the author of The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and The UFO Abductee. He’s not only a researcher into the field, he’s an experiencer as well and he and Robbie both join the discussion (along with Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts) as we do some deep diving into why we need to rethink everything we think we know about the UFO phenomenon.

That’s one of the reasons we wanted to split this podcast up. It seemed like the conversation naturally moved halfway through and we wanted to make sure that we gave each topic the thought space that they deserved. The first thing for me that changed the way I feel about UFOs was the concept of “high strangeness”.

No, high strangeness isn’t the lost Cheech & Chong movie, it’s a phrase from the great UFO researcher and Project Blue Book leader, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He used it to describe the absurd and surreal nature of the phenomenon. And people use that term now to describe how once they’ve seen a UFO, their lives change and they start seeing weird stuff in their life all the time. Mike Clelland illustrates the point with several of his stories, as he has been collecting them for years on his blog, as well as having a few experiences of his own (like seeing gray aliens outside his window, missing time as a teenager, etc…)

You see a UFO, then you might see Bigfoot, then you might start experiencing poltergeist activity. It’s like that original sighting opens the door to everything paranormal. But why would that be?

I always thought the people who have more than one kind of experience made them sound even more unbelievable, ya know? The higher the number of experiences, the higher the chance of crazy. But so many people report more than just the UFO sighting. As Mike says in his essay:

Life, death, sex, dreams,spirituality, psychic visions, genetics, expanded consciousness, mind-control, channelling,mysticism, miraculous healings, out-of-body experiences, hybrid children, personal transformation, powerful synchronicity, portals in the backyard, distorted time, telepathy,prophetic visions, trauma, ecstasy, and magic. It’s as if our brains just aren’t big enough todeal with the overload of so much weirdness.

And that made me reconsider my assumptions on aliens, that they’re just interplanetary travelers (albeit with a taste for experimenting on the wildlife) and that it’s purely a physical materialist happening, something we can understand with our current models of the universe. But I’m stuck in the 90s X-Files/Independence Day conspiracy mode of thinking, when the new evidence points to what might be an even weirder explanation, almost like Twin Peaks. Indeed, the owls might not be what they seem. (And the Richard Jones evil doppelgänger story from Kansas last week certainly made me think of the denizens of The Black Lodge!)

But that’s the idea of the book, to challenge your former beliefs, to find room in the UFO tent for perspectives ranging from materialist to spiritual to hallucinatory to anywhere in between. We’re talking about a field where even the best evidence is scoffed at (and we’ll be talking about the importance of skepticism in Part 2 next week) so to advance the study of UFOs we’re going to have to be ready to embrace opposing points of view something too often avoided in the Internet Age, because a friendly perspective, the easy path, is only a click away.

Click here to grab UFOs: Reframing The Debate new book on Amazon.

Now after seventy years of flying saucers, to change people’s entrenched beliefs on the weirdness that we’re seeing in the skies is no easy task, you might say it’s “Sisyphean”, the mythical Greek King who was damned to eternally roll a boulder up a hill as a punishment for his defiance of the gods (he was always tricking them!) So, we thought that our Sunspot track, “Sisyphus’ Rock” might be the perfect capper to the first part of our epic discussion.

Like Sisyphus and his rock,
I roll our love up a great hill.
Hoping for a chance to reach the summit.
And as the gods of thunder bowl,
I watch the light show in the sky.
But you are frozen, terrified, and weakened.

I know the reasons for your actions.
I know you’ll answer for your tears.
But who will ever be my rock?
when you decide you’re on your own,
and I still draw you rainbows in the night.

I would steal fire from the gods,
if I thought it’d make you smile.
I’d sacrifice my liver for your heart.
Look out in Hades down below,
because I’ll not look back this time.
Now I’m armed with Schwarzenegger, two gats, and a nine.

FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.
You’re the Achilles’ Heel of my soul.
FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.
Yours is the only pain I know.
But little angel don’t you fear,
when you felt me you fell from grace.
But we are all Immortals in the end.

I will decline Pandora’s Box,
but I think I’ll see what’s in yours.
I’m clawing for the hope that’s at the bottom.
I’ll fight off snakes on Gorgons’ heads,
and I’ll take thunderbolts for you.
But please don’t leave my whispers to myself.

But angel don’t you ever fear,
when you felt me you fell from grace.
But we are all Immortals in the end.

147 – She Talks To Angels: JD Cross’s Garden In Heaven

I don’t know about you, but when I’m afraid of something, I make a deal with God. When I’m faced with an unknown or something that I can’t control, or something that’s too late to have any effect on, I pray. I beg, I plead, I deal. What was the last deal you made? What were you willing to sacrifice and what did you want?

That’s baked right into the Judeo-Christian faith and really baked into religion as a whole We sacrifice something so the gods will smile upon us, whether it’s Nicolas Cage being put into The Wicker Man or God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac or the Aztecs slaughtering their prisoners of war at the tops of their pyramid.

But really, does it seem like God cares about your sacrifice? When you suffer, does God seem to care? No. People who don’t deserve things get them all the time. It’s not about deserving, it’s not about sacrifice. Can you alter your future? Absolutely, through making good decisions in your past. Miracles seem to happen, but why do they happen to some people and not others? Who determines who deserves what?

We’re never going to be able to answer that question and that’s okay. Faith isn’t about believing so you get better stuff than the other guy, faith is accepting the universe as it is, hoping that it’s all for a greater purpose and just hoping the if you do your best, things will work out but understanding that it doesn’t always happen and being willing to roll with it.

I make bargains with God all the time, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but the thing is…he never talks back to me. But certain people claim to have had contact with the Almighty. People like author J.D. Cross.

J.D. Cross’ first angel appeared to her when she was four years old and when she went to sleep, her soul would travel to a “Garden in Heaven” where she would spend time with Jesus. She had an out of body experience and died on the operating table when she was 19. God has blessed her with the gift go prophecy and the ability to talk to angels and she shares those prophecies, her experiences of soul traveling, and what it’s like when God warns you about not going to a keg party in this interview!

J.D.’s books include Soul Travel In Heaven: The Day I Died and Prophecies In The Light of Christ and you can find her official website right here.

We couldn’t pass up playing this Black Crowes song for this episode. We thought a stripped down version of their bonafide classic, “She Talks To Angels” would be perfect for an episode about a woman who’s talked to them all of her life.

She never mentions the word addiction
In certain company.
Yes, she’ll tell you she’s an orphan
After you meet her family.

She paints her eyes as black as night now.
Pulls those shades down tight.
Yeah, she gives me a smile when the pain comes.
The pain gonna make everything alright.

Says she talks to angels.
They call her out by her name.
Oh yeah, she talks to angels.
Says they call her out by her name.

She don’t know no lover,
None that I ever seen.
Yeah, to her that ain’t nothing
But to me it means, means everything.

She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket.
She wears a cross around her neck.
Yes the hair is from a little boy,
And the cross from someone she has not met, not yet.

Says she talks to angels.
Says they call her out by her name.
Oh yeah, angels
Call her out by her name
Oh angel,
They call her out by her name
Oh she talks to angels,
They call her out, yeah yeah
Call her out,
Don’t you know that they call her out by her name.

146 – Messages From Beyond: Linnea Star Talks To Dead People

Linnea Star got her first message from the Other Side when she was a child. Her grandmother was marrying a widower and his late wife appeared to the little girl. The deceased let her know that everything was alright and she approved of the match. When Linnea told her grandmother, she wasn’t shocked or scared, grandma knew that their family had a history of talking to dead people.

Today, Linnea Star works out of Massachussetts as a medium in the Jon Edwards and James van Praagh style of spirit communication. She walls through a crowd and gets messages for specific people, often related to an upcoming birth, a recently departed relative, or a guardian angel that is watching over and wants to let the person know that it’s there when needed.

In this interview, we really get into the nitty gritty of what it was like growing up with this kind of ability. What did her friends think? How did her boyfriends react? Did she ever use her gift selfishly? And she even gives me a little psychic reading at the end, so you can hear her paranormal ability in action.

Find more about Linnea Star at her website, http://www.linneastar.com.

Linnea’s message is about love. It survives death and the people you have cared about who are gone want you to know that they still love you and they can feel your affection. It’s comfort to know that people are in a better place. I know that the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has their view of this type of work, but I fail to see the harm of it.

Whether it’s your priest or rabbi assuring you that your beloved mother or uncle or child is somewhere better or it’s a psychic medium, they’re both serving the same purpose. You and I can’t receive messages from The Undiscovered Country, people like Linnea say they can. Comfort comes in many forms and I’d like to think that even if death is permanent, that our love can still be felt. That’s what this week’s song deals with, it’s called “The Price”. Even though we die, love makes the whole thing worthwhile.

 

Every song, every book, every work, ever made,
since time began,
they’re all about the same things, sex and death,
so let’s go back to

All the single-cells,
who lived primordial,
they didn’t have to multiply,
they didn’t have to age and die.
When we left the ocean,
for sexual reproduction,
the reaper came soon after,
to turn us all into cadavers.

Our brain machines made dopamine,
and split us off in twos,
so without death there would be no love,
without love there’d be no you.
Biology is tragedy, but I don’t think that’s true.
All good things must, all good things must die.

We pay the price for love.
And I would never give you up.

Parthogenesis is just paralysis,
A Darwinian dead-end,
a limitation we could transcend.
Even though someday,
we’ll get old, ugly, and gray.
It’s an easy sacrifice,
it’s a bargain at the price.

Reality is bittersweet,
but there’s no day I’ll rue,
for without death there would be no love,
without love there’d be no you.
Biology is tragedy. I don’t care that we’re doomed.
All good things must, all good things must die.

We pay the price for love.
And I would never give you up.

Maybe it’s the oxytocin talking when I say,
that I refuse to let you go until I pass away.
Who wants to live forever?
Something I’d never choose,
I’ll sacrifice eternity
Just like Superman II.

Our brain machines make dopamine,
and split us off in twos,
so without death there would be no love,
without love there’d be no you.

We die and pay the price for love.
And I would never give you up up.
All things must die and pay the price for love,
And I would never give,
would never give,
would never give,
would never give,
Never give you up.

Our brain machines made dopamine,
and split us off in twos,
but without death there would be no love,
without love there’d be no you.
Without death there would be no love,
without love there’d be no you.

145 – Twin Peaks: The Paranormal Influence Underneath TV’s Weirdest Show

In April of 1990, I was 13 years old. I remember very well watching the debut of the pilot of Twin Peaks on that Sunday night (along with 35 million other people) and I didn’t miss an episode after that. I loved the quirky characters, the murder mystery, and the weird dreams, but most of all, I enjoyed spending time in a place where magic was real, ancient demons stalked the Earth, logs could send psychic messages, and we could visit other dimensions in our dreams. My father and I were diehards who watched until the bitter end, upset about the cliffhangers that it left dangling at the second season’s conclusion.

twin-peaks

I went into Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me thinking that we’d get a resolution, excited to find out what happened the fate of Audrey from the bank explosion and Cooper in the Black Lodge. I didn’t really care what happened to James, because well, James’ weird love triangle shenanigans were boring by the end of the second season. The movie was all the weirdness of the TV show with little of the comedy and the sex and violence amped up. While I didn’t get the answers I craved, I loved going back into that world.

After the movie failed at the box office and David Lynch seemed to be bitter, I figured that was it. The bad guys won, Laura Palmer’s soul was trapped in the Red Room, and no one would ever know why David Bowie showed up as a ghost or what Jacques Renault meant when he called himself “The Great Went”. I figured it would just be a wonderful bit of nostalgia when I think about junior high. It was my favorite show at the time we were starting our rock band, when I was growing my hair long for the first time, and when I was hitting adolescence head on.

So, I was surprised as everyone else when the revival was announced. I couldn’t wait to go back. I thought that the closest thing we ever were going to get toa  reunion was when Big Ed and Nadine runiting as the bad guys in The People Under The Stairs.

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I’m the kind of fan who falls in love the mythology of a fictional universe. My favorite X-Files episodes weren’t the funny standalones, I wanted to know about the alien invasion conspiracy. I cared about the Dharma Initiative in LOST and cared about the answers they promised us. I want to know the history of the conflict between the Klingons and the Federation, I want to lose myself in the universe.

I knew that David Lynch was weird and I was down with that, but it took me until Lost Highway to appreciate his dream logic and to no longer care about coherence in the narrative (and trust me, if you’ve seen any of the Twin Peaks revival, you’ll quickly understand that coherence is the first thing out the window.) But in Twin Peaks, the story isn’t as important as the feeling you get when you hang out there. Sure, the quirky characters are fun and their obssession with coffee, apple pie, and smoking (really, that was probably the last major network series where half the characters unapologetically smoke cigarettes), but it was the world they lived in where you just wanted to spend more time.

The show was artistically fearless years before our current Golden Age of TV, it could be hilarious when it wanted to be, tedious and awkward when it wanted, the camera shots alone could evoke fear and dread, but also intense beauty and high strangeness. There’s a scene in Fire Walk With Me that is easily the top three most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a visual work. Twin Peaks made me feel things like nothing else I’d ever seen on TV.  And that’s why I love going back.

While nominally a murder mystery and a soap opera parody and a meditation on how Small Town America is often hiding a seedy dark and corrupt underbelly, Twin Peaks is also a cornucopia of otherworldly influences. In this discussion, we try to hit as many as we can and how the real-life paranormal tales  impacted the story of TV’s weirdest show.

While we finish the episode with a little musical homage to Angelo Badlamenti’s incredible Twin Peaks soundtrack, we kicked off the show with discussing the untimely death of Chris Cornell who was certainly a huge influence on our generation. I had first heard Soundgarden’s “Loud Love” in 1990 around the same time I was watching Twin Peaks and of course became a huge fan with Badmotorfinger (in fact, I can’t say how often I’ve thought on a particularly rough hangover day that “I’m looking California and feeling Minnesota”.) We talk a bit about Cornell’s amazing voice, but also how eerie it was that Soundgarden covered Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time Of Dying” (which itself was Zep’s attempt at updating an old Gospel song) at their last show before the singer tragically took his own life.

144 – The Secrets of Fatima: 100 Years of a Marian Mystery

On May 13th, 1917 three children from a small village in Portugal claimed to have an apparition of the Virgin Mary appear before them. They claimed that the Blessed Virgin revealed three secrets to them that they could reveal to no one, and in fact the Third Secret could not even be released until 1960 and not to anyone but the Pope himself. They weren’t believed in the beginning and the children were even temporarily jailed (and it’s claimed the local law enforcement even threatened to boil them in oil unless they told the truth!) But in the end, thousands of people witnessed a solar miracle in Fatima, Portugal and the children’s visions would have a big impact on the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century.

Our Lady of Fatima Children
The children behind Our Lady of Fatima

“Marian Apparitions” or visions of the Virgin Mary were pretty popular the end of the Nineteenth Century. The Church investigated many of them and determined a few “worthy of belief” (including one near Green Bay, Wisconsin, so we have our own Our Lady of Perpetual Packers Victory!) “Worthy of belief” means that they think that there’s  something to the vision, but as a Catholic you’re not required to believe it (like you are required to believe that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus is the Son of God and not just a wise carpenter who was endlessly quotable.)

Our Lady of Fatima appearing to the children
Our Lady of Fatima appearing to the children

The First Secret of Fatima was a vision of Hell that Mary showed the three childern. The Second Secret of Fatima had to do with the end of World War I and the prediction that another great war would come shortly after if Russia didn’t start turning back to religion from atheism. Those secrets came out in the 1940s when Sister Lucia (the only surviving child who originally was contacted by Our Lady of Fatima, she eventually became a nun) was forced by her bishop to share the secrets in case she got ill.

The Third Secret of Fatima was kept under lock and key until 1960 when the Pop was allowed to read it. It was said that the Pope cried when he read the secret and that was enough to freak everyone out. Was it the end of the world that he saw? This was a generation of schoolchildren who were growing up with nuclear war safety drills and people building underground bunkers in their backyards. Did the Pope see the end of the world by man’s own hand?

These secrets became of such fascination to Catholics, that in 1981 a former Trappist monk decided to hijack an Aer Lingus plane and demand that the Pope release the Third Secret of Fatima.

Totally sweet painting of the Third Secret of Fatima
Totally sweet painting of the Third Secret of Fatima

 

When the Third Secret of Fatima was finally revealed, it turned out to be kind of boring. It was a vision of the Pope being murdered by gunman and when the Vatican revealed it in the year 2000 (with a treatise written by the future Pope Benedict himself, Cardinal Ratzinger) it was really just about the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, so “Hey, no big deal everybody, on this thing we’ve been hiding for damn near a century.”

That really hasn’t been good enough for some people, who think that the secret actually revealed that there would be a Pope who leads the church into ruin, a so-called “Anti-Pope” and there are people who believe that “Cool Pope” Francis is one. Even though he was in Fatima on the 100th anniversary to canonize the original children and declare their Catholic Sainthood, his detractors say that his liberal and easygoing attitude is going to lead the Church straight to the Fires of Hell.

fatima ghost anti pope
The dude from the band Ghost is the only true Anti-Pope!

Well, whether that’s true or not, there’s a different interesting theory that the people of Fatima actually saw a UFO on that strange day they saw “The Miracle of the Sun”. No less than UFO expert  has posited that theory himself.

But a more sobering and sinister theory is that the Catholic Church was using these Marian Apparitions to influence world events, that Sister Lucia writing in 1941 that the Soviet Union must be consecrated back the Immaculate Heart of Mary and away from Atheism or the entire world would crumble was justification for the Nazi Invasion of Germany. The Church’s reputation during the Holocaust and the Second World War is often brought up as one of its less proud moments (the Vatican was completely surrounded by Fascist Italy, so there could be a good reason that they remained neutral, but still it’s an unfortunate history of silence.)

100 years later, Our Lady of Fatima still intrigues and mystifies people. But whether or not their claims were true, those three Portuguese shepherd children did something amazing, they changed the world with their story and affected millions of lives. The Sunspot song this week is in that same spirit, it’s called “Change The World”.

Did you read the news today,
did you listen to what it said?
It said our world was going to Hell,
and soon we’ll all be dead.
Don’t tell me about your apathy,
Don’t tell me you don’t wanna believe,
Don’t tell me that it’s not your problem,
Can’t you see… you’re not alone?

I want to change the world.
But I can’t do it by myself,
I need somebody else.

Wandering in the dark,
we’ve been living with blindfolds on.
Just thinking about ourselves for too damn long.
Don’t tell me that you don’t care,
Don’t tell me that the world’s not fair,
Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do to help at all.
That’s no excuse.

I want to change the world.
But I can’t do it by myself.
I need somebody else.

143 – Punk Rock and UFOs: An Interview with Mike Damante

Journalist and author Mike Damante took a left turn from covering mainstream entertainment and sports news in Houston to chronicling the weird world of the paranormal in his blog, Punk Rock and UFOs

mike damante punk rock and ufos
Mike Damante throwing up the horns!

With a lifelong passion for the music of punk rock and an interest in the weird, Mike Damante decided to take the attitude of punk music and apply it to the investigation of the unknown. While punk music can often have paranormal themes (just look at any song by the Misfits or a multitude of classic Vandals tracks), it’s the approach that punk music took to the status quo of the 1970s that Mike Damante is looking to emulate.

In the 70s, the music industry was all cocaine and big money, exemplified by the slick  sounds of Disco and the costumed denizens of Studio 54. Punk Rock was the antithesis of the laid-back California Pop-Rock sound of the Eagles. It was loud angry music created by dirty musicians in dingy clubs. It was piercings instead of glitter, mohawks instead of long flowing manes. It was the sound of a people left behind by a bloated hedonist beauty-worshipping culture and punk was their rallying cry of smashing that system.

That’s the attitude of Mike’s book and writing, Punk Rock and UFOs: Cryptozoology Meets Anarchy, is about questioning everything that you think you know when it comes to the world, especially the paranormal one.

Of course we talk about the most famous former punk rocker turned  UFO evangelist, Blink-182’s Tom Delonge who was featured in the news during the 2016 presidential election when his emails to fellow alien enthusiast John Podesta were leaked to the world, but we also go into other punk rock legends from Milo Aukerman from Descendents to Bad Religion’s Greg Gaffin. It’s a good mix of rock stories with paranormal tales and conversation.

If you’re interested in Mike’s book, you can grab it on Amazon right here. And make sure to follow Mike Damante on Twitter by clicking this link.

The song this week started off as a punk idea and ended up sounding like an adult contemporary song, ha! But sometimes when we’re writing, we just have to go where the Muse takes us. It’s an earnest track about looking back on a youth filled with paranormal adventure and all the memories and mistakes that come along with it. The track is called “Stories In The Dark”.

When we walked among the headstones,
On that August New Moon night,
That marble might have been cold,
But we raised the Fahrenheit.
And a summer is forever with,
not many on your belt,
But you know when the hurtin’ hits,
Yeah, the hurtin’ hits like Hell.
And you know when the hurtin’ hits,
Yeah, The hurtin’ hits like Hell.

There’s no point in saying sorry
For these twenty years gone past
No statute of limitations for
Acting like a jackass.
Time is always the best healer
Distance makes things much more clear
Even picking at a scab feels good,
Just in the rearview mirror.

These ghost stories in the dark
Oh my dear you were always game
Stronger than I gave you credit for
But crazy just the same
Tall tales that we tell ourselves
Do their damnedest to dull the pain
And you know every broken heart
Comes with a story
Best told in the dark
Comes with a story
Best told in the dark

Mystery by every corner,
Didn’t matter what we saw,
It wasn’t what we got that made you hot,
It was the quest that burned us raw.

Being on a pedestal just
ain’t easy as it would seem.
Well the young should never handle
Something fragile as a dream
I said the young should never handle
Something fragile as a dream

There’s no point in saying sorry
For these twenty years gone past
No statute of limitations for
Acting like a jackass.

Time is always the best healer
Distance makes things much more clear
Even picking at the scab feels good,
Just in the rearview mirror.

These ghost stories in the dark
Oh my dear you were always game
Stronger than I gave you credit for
But crazy just the same
Tall tales that we tell ourselves
Do their damnedest to dull the pain
And you know every broken heart
Comes with a story
Best told in the dark
Comes with a story
Best told in the dark

142 – Guardians of the Galaxy: Supernatural Stories of the Cast and Crew

Guardians of the Galaxy was one of 2014’s biggest surprises. A fun cosmic romp set in a part of the Marvel Universe that I didn’t even know existed, it was a breakthrough for everyone involved. Lead actor Chris Pratt established himself as an A-list star that could topline a movie, James Gunn was finally given the budget he needed to make his wild fantasies come true, and a team of intergalactic misfits that few moviegoers had heard of ended up besting the tried and true Captain America at the box office. It captured that old Star Wars spirit of swashbuckling sci-fi imagination.

Three years later, the sequel has arrived and is coming out in the U.S. Friday May 5th. A big ensemble movie like this has a huge cast and we picked some of our favorite paranormal stories where we could find them to talk about this week.

This was the big one that came out this week, Kurt Russell, who’s on the press tour for Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and plays Peter Quill/Star-Lord’s father in the movie (a character hinted at in the first film) was the pilot who reported The Phoenix Lights. Yeah? Snake Plissken himself is the pilot that was flying into Phoenix and reported the lights to the air traffic controllers for the first time.

Interestingly enough, it’s not the lights that made him question his sanity. It was the fact that he didn’t remember it or think about it again until some years later when his longtime companion Goldie Hawn was watching a TV show that mentioned The Phoenix Lights. Alien abductions are almost always reported with amnesia, could the aliens have made Kurt “forget” about what he saw in a subtle way, where he only even thinks about it when he’s directly confronted by what he saw years later? It’s a cool and almost unbelievable story.

Vin Diesel (the voice behind “I Am Groot”)’s ghost story is a little sadder, The National Enquirer posted that he saw his friend, Paul Walker’s, ghost on the set of the latest Fast and the Furious film.

Writer and director James Gunn has a great blogpost about infiltrating the Raëlien UFO cult Happiness Seminar in Las Vegas and how it really seemed more like it was about people trying to get laid, and it makes me sad that another science fiction cult just ends up being obsessed with sex.

Karen Gillan, plays the evil Nebula and in an old Doctor Who Confidential, she admits that she was obsessed with paranormal stuff when she was younger and even had a weird experience in high school. They go for a little ghost tour while they were filming the episode “The Rebel Flesh” in Wales and learn the ghost story of the Green Lady of Caerphilly Castle.

Michael Rooker alway seems game for a good time in a genre picture whether he’s the the blue skinned mohawked guy with the whistling arrows Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy or the wicked redneck Merle in The Walking Dead or the deeply disturbing lead in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, he’s a horror and fantasy favorite!

Rooker even directed a horror movie in the Pennhurst Asylum (originally called the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic)! It has several names (the mark of a great movie, yikes!) but it’s known as Pennhurst, Asylum of the Dead, or The Lost Episode depending on where you’re looking for it. Of course, old asylums definitely have a creepy vibe to them and our former guest Christopher Saint Booth also had strange paranormal experiences while filming his filming Death Tunnel at Waverly Hills Sanitarium.

Of course, Pennhurst has haunted stories of its own and actress Beverly Mitchell had her own experience in the old asylum when she was filming the movie and she tells the whole story in Celebrity Ghost Stories. (You’re not in 7th Heaven anymore Beverly!)

While that story might have been very earnest, the ones about Sylvester Stallone (who has a cameo in the new Guardians film as well!)  are of a little more of a questionable veracity. For some reason, you can find an article about how he was haunted by his son who tragically died in 2012 and needed to get an Indian spiritual cleaning, which feels like some kind of exploitative fake news.

While that’s a little sad, this next one is just ridiculous (yes, even more ridiculous than this silly Snapchat video about Chris Pratt’s haunted toilet in a Manhattan hotel room.) Sly’s mother, Jackie Stallone, turned being a celebrity mom into an industry by having her own psychic hotline in the 1990s, but you might not believe this 2010 article from Week In Weird, about something called Rumpology where she will tell you your future by looking at a picture of your butt.  

That’s right, she’ll tell you your future for $125 by looking at your butt. For that alone, this is an episode you probably want to download and listen to immediately.

One thing that really stood out about Guardians of the Galaxy was Peter’s classic rock “Awesome Mixtape Vol. 1”, so for this week we thought it would be perfect to play our own goofy Classic Rock-inspired anthem, “Turn On The Hi-Fi”.

The below video is a live version of the song from a Milwaukee show, but the live version in the actual podcast is from  January 2015 where our friend Jim Chiello from Power of Sound was the engineer and mixed our set and then worked hard on our performances to make an awesome live recording for us!

Strap on any old guitar and crank that thing up until your ears bleed, you just need,
That bass drum in your soul, it don’t matter if you look like an @#$hole, your body’s freed.

You’re dancing with the devil, man,
Record needles full of adrenaline.
I got the spirit, Can I get an amen?
There’s nothing like turning it up to ten.

Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh,
Nothing wrong that I see, so
Turn on the hi-fi, baby.
Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh,
Let’s make the jump to light speed,
Turn on the hi-fi, baby.

Whip it out and let it rip, hold on tight you’re on the rocket ship, it’s a trip,
to blast off with the sound, and jump up like you’ll never hit the ground, let’s get blitzed.

And dance with the devil, man.
Shoot me up full of adrenaline.
I got the spirit, Can I get an amen?
Feels so good, it’s gotta be a sin.

Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh,
Nothing wrong that I see, so
Turn on the hi-fi, baby.
Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh,
Let’s make the jump to light speed,
Turn on the hi-fi, baby.

Turn it on!

141 – The World of Wicca: Selena Fox and The Witches of Circle Sanctuary

With Beltane (May Day) on the horizon, we thought it was the perfect time to interview Wisconsin’s favorite Witch, Selena Fox. Selena is a Wiccan priestess who has been performing public Pagan rituals  since the early 1970s and she is the leader of the Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve in southwest Wisconsin (geologically known as the Driftless Region).

selena fox circle sanctuary
Selena leads a ceremony as you can see Allison watching on

Selena’s work on providing support for the Pagan and Wiccan religious community in the United States has been recognized in TIME and People magazines and the Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve holds public events for the 8 big Earth-based religious holidays. For this episode we concentrate on Beltane, where one of the parts of the celebration is the famous Maypole!

Earth-based religions like Wicca are all about getting back in touch with nature. They connect with their spirituality by connecting with the outdoors. They find their power in the relationship between all things, everything has a spirit from the trees to the rocks to the water to the animals and as such, we can find commonalities with those spirits and each other. Their universe is much more than a single God watching over us, it’s an ecosystem, a greater whole of energy and spirit that are bodies and souls are part of.

selena fox circle sanctuary beltane

One of the best parts of this episode is dispelling the myths that surround Wicca and Paganism. Because the god Pan features in plenty of Pagan imagery (you know, the flautist with the horns and the goat legs) and early Christians decided to use Pan to represent the Christian Devil, when you grow up with mainstream religions the ideas you get about paganism are from The 700 Club and the Tom Hanks Dan Aykroyd classic, Dragnet (and you should stop whatever you’re doing and watch the music video below, you will not be disappointed!)

Dispelling myths is also what this week’s song is about. We already talked about Walpurgisnacht in our Devil’s Night episode, but that’s the night before May Day where the witches were supposed to meet up in the German mountains and plot their wicked deeds for the year. Well, in this song, someone stumbles upon the witches’ gathering but realizes that it’s not wicked, they’re just having fun and like everybody, happy that Winter is over!

Click on these links if you’re like to learn more about  Selena Fox on Facebook or visit the official Circle Sanctuary calendar to see when the next public event is where you can join in the fun.

What did I see out behind the mountains
What did you see when you looked at the full moon?
Was it demon wings and hellfire in the sky
Did you see the witches flying for our doom?

The Devil’s whores are waiting for their master
Spring time is here and evil’s coming after

Walpurgisnacht
Is the night where Satan spreads his seed
Walpurgisnacht
Is the night that challenged my beliefs
Walpurgisnacht

They danced around the Maypole,
The earth made love to the sky
I waited and I prayed for mercy,
But old Scratch never arrived.

So what were we afraid of,
What was the magic spell?
Where was all the the temptation
That would lead me right to Hell?

So i guess that they’re not wicked,
I was scared of the wrong stuff,
They’re just happy that Winters’s over
And want to party in the buff!

Walpurgisnacht
Is the night where we pray for our seed
Walpurgisnacht
Is the night that we renew our beliefs
Walpurgisnacht

140 – The Phoenix Lights: Revisiting The Most Famous UFO Sighting In The World

With the new film, The Phoenix Forgotten coming out this weekend, we thought it was the right time to reconsider The Phoenix Lights. On March 13th, 1997, an estimated ten thousand people saw a UFO over the Phoenix skyline.

The new movie is a found-footage Blair Witch-style film produced by sci-fi movie favorite, Ridley Scott, that takes the plot of three teenagers who were witnesses to the phenomenon, go out in the mountains to investigate it, and then disappear. The idea is that they bring along a video camera (no camera phones or YouTube in 1997!) and the videotape is later discovered.

So, cool premise for a film, but what did people actually see on that Thursday night in 1997? Well, the original sighting began in Henderson, Nevada, a town right outside Las Vegas. That report was of a V-shaped object that had six lights at the leading edge and it was traveling southeast. It was then reported in several towns between Henderson and Phoenix, with Phoenix being the place where it was reported the most.

Also, people were reporting two different kinds of events as well. One was the boomerang type spacecraft that would eventually be what the Phoenix Lights is most known for. They said that it blocked out the stars as it passed overhead, with some people claiming that it was nearly a mile across (while the original Henderson, Nevada sighting claimed to only be the size of 747.) These were primarily reported in Prescott, Arizona but no known footage was taken of it there. Later in June of that year, *USA Today *would run a photo on its front page reporting the story, and that computer-generated recreation of the sighting would become the most famous image associated with the phenomenon.

phoenix lights

The second event was a set of nine lights that appeared to hover over the city at 10pm and that’s what’s been covered the most because of the famous video footage that was taken that night. The lights seemed to disappear behind a mountain range and no explanation was given.

The governor of Arizona, Fife Symington III, even talked about the lights in a press conference not too long after. He said that they “found the culprit” and brought out a cabinet member in an alien costume as a joke. The authorities didn’t treat it seriously, even while thousands of people reported the sighting and the story ended up being picked up by the national news networks in July, after the USA Today story ran.

phoenix lights

The lack of immediate response from the government allowed for people to start speculating themselves and Dr. Lynne Katei has become the most famous investigator into the phenomenon. She connects it to earlier UFO sightings in the area as well as a missing time experience that she had with her husband and wrote a book and released a documentary on the Phoenix Lights.

Since the initial sightings, debunkers have claimed that the first event was merely the Maryland Air National Guard in the are running winter exercises, and the second was the flares that they dropped as part of those exercises. Who knows why they decided not to tell everyone at the time? Since air traffic control records are usually cleared every two weeks if there’s no incident, there’s no hard copy to verify the claim. Only the word of government sources. But the lights were on the news that night, why did they wait?

Governor Fife Symington III, who originally made fun of the event in 1997, has an explanation. He didn’t want to panic the fine people of Arizona and he was afraid if they took the event too seriously, that’s what would have happened. In fact, he now claims that he saw the boomerang shaped UFO over Phoenix that night as well and that the investigation should be re-opened. He even called it “otherworldly”, so why did he change his tune ten years later?

There hasn’t been an explanation yet that satisfied all the people who witnessed The Phoenix Lights, so the mystery endures twenty years later.

On a related entertainment note, a different found footage movie about the Phoenix Lights called The Phoenix Incident came out in 2015 and they tried a different kind of marketing campaign than The Phoenix Forgotten. While I think the marketing at SXSW this year where they recreated The Phoenix Lights with drones over Austin was awesome, The Phoenix Incident tried using viral marketing in a more nefarious way.

Number one, they did an anonymous report to MUFON of a 60-year old man who claims to have seen an alien the night of the lights. This was later picked up by Cryptozoology News and reported on as a news story as well as someone reading the report into YouTube over footage from the real Phoenix Lights. Then, the director of the film does interviews claiming that his film is telling the truth with tying into a “missing persons” case from that night. They try to tie the false missing persons case to the Heaven’s Gate cult as well to further exploit the “real-life connections”.

It’s a pretty clever way to get attention for your film, but at the same time it’s damaging to the field of UFOlogy (just take this forum post from Above Top Secret for proof of people missing the fictional aspect of it) and it’s another case where they’re capitalizing on innocent people’s beliefs and natural curiosity in an event witnessed by thousands, just so that they can try to sell more tickets (I have this same issue with Tom DeLonge’s book, Sekret Machines saying that it’s fact masquerading as fiction.)

When you’re dealing with the paranormal, the lines between reality and fantasy are already blurred and mixing them further to make a little money might be good marketing but it’s bad humanity. Whether you believe in extraterrestrials or not, any time you mess with the truth for personal gain fouls it up for the rest of us.

This week’s Sunspot track takes a different tack on what the UFO was doing flying over Phoenix. Unlike The Phoenix Forgotten or The Phoenix Incident, maybe these aliens just came to Las Vegas to have a good time on a little St. Patrick’s getaway, partied too hard (because that can happen to anyone in that town), and got lost on the way home. Just saying that maybe they didn’t mean any harm, they just don’t get the same kind of fun on their homeworld. Anyway, take a listen to “The Ballad of The Phoenix Lights”.

They came down to Sin City,
For a St. Patty’s Day party
But things were far from pretty,
they started drinking too early.

They hailed from a world that was dry,
a real cosmic bore.
These boys just wanted to get high,
and maybe even score.

So they hid their ship and hit the strip,
didn’t miss a casino,
And they left a trail of wreckage
from the Luxor to the Flamingo.

When the aliens finally showed up,
they did not come to destroy,
No hellfire blaze or cosmic rays,
they came to here to enjoy
the good life that they couldn’t get
on a world beyond the black,
These spacemen just like to party,
are we gonna send them back?

Their foreign livers couldn’t process,
All the booze they did consume,
and the MIBs said they had to leave,
before they trashed their hotel room.

They stumbled back to their ship
grabbed the wheel with one eye closed,
But they took off way too fast,
and then got lost on the way home.

They thought they set the course for their world
and went southeast instead,
the driver said that he was fine,
but he was messed out of his head.

When the aliens finally showed up,
they did not come to destroy,
No hellfire blaze or cosmic rays,
they came to here to enjoy
the good life that they couldn’t get
on a world beyond the black,
These spacemen just like to party,
are we gonna send them back?

When they finally got to Phoenix,
well, it made quite a scene,
Ten thousand people saw their lights,
they knew it couldn’t be a dream.

Mericopa County had a Sheriff Joe
he saw the craft with his own eyes,
he knew he had to pull them down
Intergalactic DUI.

He tracked them down by the mountain range,
And they didn’t try to run,
‘License and registration’ he said
’You boys have had your fun.

You see this rock ain’t for aliens,
specially trouble like y’all,
This planet’s for humans only
I’m gonna kick you off our ball.’

When the aliens finally showed up,
they did not come to destroy,
No hellfire blaze or cosmic rays,
they came to here to enjoy
the good life that they couldn’t get
on a world beyond the black,
These spacemen just like to party,
are we gonna send them back?

The driver cried almond eye tears,
and Joe felt a touch of mercy,
Maybe I shouldn’t be so tough,
Maybe these things are just like me.

So he didn’t blast them back to space,
So they didn’t have to run.
And now they’re being poked and prodded,
in Area 51!

When the aliens finally showed up,
they did not come to destroy,
No hellfire blaze or cosmic rays,
they came to here to enjoy
the good life that they couldn’t get
on a world beyond the black,
These spacemen just like to party,
Now they’re never going back
These spacemen just wanted better,
now they’re never going back.
They just wanted a better life,
and they’re never going back!

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