AREA52 - DEBRIEFED With Chris Ramsay - Hollywood Director Discovers Alien Cult - Darren Bousman - DEBRIEFED ep. 44

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Patreon Exclusive Content: https://www.patreon.com/Area52investigationsAREA 52 Shop: https://www.area52.shopDarren Bousman joins me to explore the mysterious UFO case of UMMO, the dark legacy of Jack Parsons, and the occult threads connecting them. We dive into Darren’s personal paranormal experiences, including a chilling haunting on the set of 11-11-11, and a UFO sighting that left a lasting impression.

Something caught my eye is you had a book that said, Umo. By the way, the movie you were shooting. 11, 11, 11. It was the one time in my filmmaking career that I went down a rabbit hole I couldn't pull myself out of. I wanted a really unique looking house. And then I was going through the location library and I found this house. And I said, that house. And they said, no, not that house.

And I said, no, that house. You go on what's called Location Scouts. There's about 20 or 30 people. You're in a bus. And they're all kind of whispering to each other. And eventually the caretaker undoes the gate and opens it up, but he won't go inside. You walked in this house and all I can say there was a heaviness.

There were mattresses all over the floor and there was like residual of wax. And then I started noticing there were masks on the ground. On all the doorways and all the windows there was this symbol and it was an H symbol. But it wasn't an age. It was a weird looking age. We found out it was something that meant Umo. And I was like, what is Umo? And a illumination very grand.

And then it was... Ramoncim, for favor, has seen an ovny in 1960s? In 1960s, these mysterious letters and said, 70s started popping up around Europe, but especially France and Spain. Umo was apparently an extraterrestrial planet that exists 14.6 million light years away. And these people basically disseminated information from their culture throughout these letters. It wasn't like one payload.

It was multiple payloads to multiple people over multiple places. Now the debate comes, can one person write all of this? French computer scientist Jean-Pierpici, he studied it. So he had models on magneto hydrodynamics that were based on some of these papers. So they were legitimate theories. So now you have this guy saying, oh, it was me all along. Sorry about that. It was just a big joke.

Well, his son went on a rampage. There was a protest in the middle of the theater. He stopped the screening as I remember. That started what I would consider to be the most horrific 10 days of my adult life. a shot where they're standing on the beach, and behind them you can see the house. And in the house, there are these three large, picturesque windows, but the curtains were on the outside, not the inside, and they're wooden. And so to open one of these things, you have to be inside the house and not a pulley system, and you have to use both hands to pull it because they're heavy.

Well, we shot in that room, and the curtains were broken. You could not open them. And so they had to remain shut. In this shot, in the beach, all of a sudden you see every window open, open, open, Yeah, and it almost looked like a visual effect. There was a small window, as all I can say, with an H over it. Ask my assistant, I want to know what's on the other side of that, and he broke in the wall. It was a room, and inside this room, there's an altar. The previous owner of the house was in the middle of a divorce. They were sharing custody, and he buried her body in the house.

The report is sighting motorcycle over the tree line right in front of me a mile away or so. I'm a follower of David Pellias, and he said that you can't take your eyes off this thing. Otherwise, it'll disappear and look up to the left. Today we are joined by a good friend of mine who's become a good friend of mine in the last several years. How long have we known each other? 2018, I think I reached out to you. Whoa, so seven years already. Yeah.

This is Hollywood director and director of Saw 2, 3, 4, and Spiral, among so many other horrific. projects and by horrific, I mean that in a literal sense. Thank you. Darren Bousman, welcome and thank you for joining me. This is so surreal to be sitting in the skiff. You're a fan of the show? Oh, dude, I've watched every episode and I get jealous. You've actually become a bigger director than I have.

You're just insanity. It's great. Yeah. Yeah, it's a labor of love, as you know. And you're, this is really exciting. And we're going to mention this off the top because you, are getting into the podcast space as well. Yeah.

This last couple of weeks, we've just dropped our first few episodes called Darren and Josh make a movie. You're with Josh Stolman? Josh Stolberg, who wrote Spiral, who wrote your scene in Spiral. And basically, we're going to take audience, kind of like a project Greenlight, through inception of an idea all the way through the distribution of actually getting the movie out and made into theaters. and they can follow along week to week as we go through that process through the hurdles and victories and tragedies.

That's amazing. It's such an exciting venture as well to be able to take the audience through that. And I think it's really what people want more and more, right? They want to know. It's why a lot of these people sign up for like the behind the scenes, membership stuff. They want to see what's going on and how this stuff works. I didn't realize how complicated and arduous creating a podcast was, specifically with video. You know, I've directed 18 movies. And I think I've had more breakdowns in the last couple of of months with this filming the podcast and I have any film. So kudos to you for being able to put out really cool content. Yeah. And for those who don't believe me at home, how many people do I have in the studio helping me with this right now? There would be zero. I was kind of shocked. You walk into this and it's a huge warehouse and just you and some cameras. So it's more impressed now than I was walking in. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It means a lot coming from you, Mr. Hollywood with director.

Darren, we're going to be talking about some really interesting stuff. And I've been so excited to get you on the podcast because a lot of people who listen, they understand that, you know, we talk to whistleblowers, witnesses, experiences, all sorts of people from the military and three-letter agencies. But I also find it really fascinating to have people who help further the conversation in the entertainment field as well. Because, you know, for me, entertainment is a valuable means to absorb information. You know, you look at, I always say the three Georges, George Orwell, George Carlin, and George Lucas.

You know, you look at, they taught me a lot. Yeah, that's great. You know, so, and it was all through entertainment. I mean, I think that's why I learned my real education came through film and through TV. I never was really great at reading book smarts, you know, going to school. But I would pick up ideas and concepts watching movies, and it's such a great way, I think, to disseminate information. You know, through film. Yeah, there's, and we're going to be talking about that.

I'm really excited. That's actually one of the things I'm most excited about is talking about movies, you know, UFO, alien movies and that type of thing. But before we get into that, something interesting happened a few weeks ago. You were watching one of these episodes and I was shooting some B-roll. I put some B-roll in. And there was a book that caught your eye. You want to take it from there? Yeah.

I've watched every episode. And, you know, it's, even if I didn't know you and we weren't friends, I seek out UFO, paranormal, occult podcasts. So, you know, on yours, like I was watching it, irregardless of our relationship. And I love the little details. I love your cutaways. I love, you know, all of those things. And something caught my eye is you had a book that said, Umo on it. And I would consider myself pretty versed in the UFO world.

But it's a very, not a lot of people know about Umo. It's not one of those things that you talk about a lot. And I had a very impactful, traumatic experience with the name Umo. And the Umo UFO thing. And I reached out to you and I was like, dude, is that what I think? Did I just see an Umo book? It was pretty crazy. Yeah.

And just to catch people up a little bit, because this is something that I've been looking into, especially since Darren had mentioned it and we had agreed on this podcast. I was like, I got to go down this rabbit hole. And, you know, I read the first, almost the first volume of that book, went online. And so to give you a brief little history for those of you at home listening, in the 1960s, these mysterious letters and 70s started popping up around Europe, but especially France and Spain. Now, these letters were typed, like with a typewriter, and they all had this little symbol on it, known as like the Umo symbol. Well, Umo was apparently an extraterrestrial planet that exists, you know, 14.6 million light years away. And these people basically disseminated information from their culture and their sciences and their astronomy throughout these letters and sent them across Europe.

Laffable at first. Yeah, I mean, hundreds of letters. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting, it did not go to one. It wasn't like one payload. It was multiple payloads to multiple people over multiple places. Over multiple years in multiple languages. And decades, yeah.

And people started to get together and they would share the letters and they would go through the letters. And what was fascinating is these letters were not only scientific in nature, but they dealt with things that at that time, I mean, you didn't have Google. You couldn't just pull this information down. They were dense. and it really started to make an impact this idea of Uma, which I think it started originally with UFO sightings. It started with a few sightings and pictures

of someone witnessing a saucer. It's the classic saucer shape in the sky with this really unique H symbol kind of in the bottom of it. And then more people started seeing it. And then the letters started appearing. So yeah, so I'd never heard of this until 2010, I got lucky to go to Spain to Barcelona to shoot a film.

And I hear myself telling this story, and I feel like an insane person. I know that if my mother tunes into this, she'll say, stop talking about it. You seem insane. You're in the right place. I know. So my wife, who is, you know, she's avid and speak Spanish, and she can do Catalan and all of that. And in Barcelona, that's what it is. in this movie we needed a location that I wanted to be the kind of backdrop and I wanted a really

unique looking house and I kept getting the location people would send me house after house and nothing worked and then I was going through location library and I found this house and I said that house and they said no not that house and I said no that house and they said no we're not we're not going to go to that house and after weeks of me turning down the houses I went back and I said this is the house I want and they finally said listen we don't recommend but we'll take you there and show it to you. And immediately, when we arrived, there was this energy on the bus, and everyone was rapidly speaking around me. And I didn't understand what they were saying.

And we get out and some of the people stayed in the bus. And that was my first clue that something was weird. Whoa. And I was like, okay, and I get out. And this feels fake, me telling the story now. I hear it. And I'm like, this bullshit, but it's not. We get out and there's a man who is a caretaker of the house.

and he's kind of pacing back and forth and it's beautiful. It's on the Mediterranean Sea and it's surrounded by these mansions. It's beautiful. And we get out and he talked to the producer and they're kind of rapidly talking back and forth and it's getting heated.

And I'm seeing the crew, you go on what's called Location Scout. There's about 20 or 30 people. You're in a bus. And they're all kind of whispering to each other. And eventually the caretaker undoes the gate and opens it up, but he won't go inside. And we see him standing out there

and he's smoking. He's like chain smoking. And he's like chain smoking. And now I'm seeing more of the crew that are not coming through the gate. Maybe, I don't know, 18 of us went, and there was about six or seven of us that stayed behind. And we get in, and I didn't notice it at first. They opened the door up, and there was like a wait. And by the way, at this point in my life, I've never experienced anything supernatural.

I've always wanted to, but I can say I've never seen anything, never felt anything. You walked in this house, and all I can say, there was a heaviness that hit you. And the first thing that was kind of weird is the house was empty. But there were mattresses all over the floor. Mattresses in every room. And there was like residual of wax. And then I started noticing there were masks on the ground. And it very much looked like a eyes wide shut party.

And I was like, all right, whatever. Like people, people do that. Is that why people are not coming in? But then I started noticing on all the doorways and all the windows, there was this symbol. And it was an H symbol. But it wasn't an H. It was a weird-looking H. And we walked through the house.

and I noticed the H's, but it didn't really click with me. And I leave, and I say that's the house I want. And they try to talk me out of it again. And now I'm starting to get upset, because why is this production company trying to talk me out of shooting here? I had my wife come back the next day. They were doing another walkthrough. This time it was what's called G&E, or Grip and Electric,

where they had to figure out where they were going to put the trucks and pull electricity. And I wanted my wife to go because I wanted to know what they weren't telling me. And in the bus, Laura's like leaning over to me, and she says they're talking about, this cult and everyone doesn't want to be disrespectful. They don't want to do these things because of this cult. And I said, what cult? So we get there and there is a prominent age over the front door and no one wants to go past it. No one wants to open the door. No one wants to touch the age. And we found out it was something that meant Umo. And I was like, what is Umo? And they said, oh,

it was a Spanish thing. It was, you know, some people still revere it and they believe in it. And it's not considered polite to move it. And my wife, and this is, walks up to it and pulls it down. And I think she called them something. She said, you guys are a bunch of wussies and takes it down and throws it kind of on the ground. Let's cut to 24 hours later. My wife is in a hospital. She's hallucinating tremendously.

She ended up being bedridden for about five days. Whoa. That started what I would consider to be the most horrific 10 days of my adult life of just insanity occurring. in and around us where we removed all the Hs in the house, and we started finding things in the house that didn't make sense. Did you keep any of those? No. There are videos online.

It's downstairs. Oh? Yeah, so here's what I want you guys to do, and I'm serious about this. I'm very superstitious. I don't want any cold stuff here. Get that Humeo stuff and get it out of here. Now, while this is all happening, I'm sending footage. back to the distributor and they think we're setting it up and they literally said is this a

publicity thing and I'm like no this is all right now what you're seeing is real now over the course of the three weeks we were in the house we probably lost a third of the crew members that quit no way uh we had one that was pushed down the stairs uh it was the second AD who broke his ankle. Tam have you had any crazy while braces here yet I have not been harmed I'll say that but that's miraculous seeing as even our camera willing right now went through her own bit of violent illness when she walked in the house. Then we had a broken foot. We had severe head trauma twice.

Here's severe head trauma. And a bit of low-coness. One of the associate producers quit. The continuity person who is my right hand on a movie, a continuity person sits with the script, and they make sure that I am not forgetting lines in the script, and if someone's holding a drink in the right hand, the next take, it's not in the left hand.

She began to have hallucinations and get physically ill. So this is about maybe the eighth or ninth day that we're there. And I start thinking, you know, I still am not going supernatural yet. I'm, there's got to be a logical explanation for this. So I asked my assistant to find out if we can have some molder mediation. I want to have the air tested. Right. We're in a, before in a place, this house is very old.

Yeah. So we do. And it comes back completely clean. And then one of the producers finally comes up to me and tells me what was going on with the guy, the caretaker. And it gets revealed to me that this house was a, a meeting place for this cult called Umo. And at that point, I still don't know what Umo is.

And I was spelling it like it, it was an H. So I'm spelling it H-O-M-M-O. Like H. Like H.U. And that's not how it was spelled. And so now I'm able to actually go on and research what Umo is, which leads me down this rabbit hole of this fascinating UFO thing that took place.

And still, I don't want to say it's prevalent, but it's still very much around. You ever searched up something weird, like how to telephone? my neighbor's a lizard. Suddenly your inbox fills up with spam and your phone starts ringing from numbers that don't exist? Well, yeah, that's data brokers.

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And for those of you wondering at home being like, well, how, I mean, obviously this is just a hoax, right? You're thinking at home, this is obviously just a hoax. But to give you a little bit of context here, I'll just read a few things that have come to light with these documents. And so the letters included diagrams also of the spacecraft, advanced theories of physics, and even philosophical commentary. They run through the language, sociological things, cosmology, absolutely every aspect of their civilization. And what made them different was the consistency and complexity of these letters. So these letters across the board didn't cancel each other out. So if this was a team of people, which a lot of people,

expected it was because of the vast reaching sort of knowledge that was, you know, put into these documents, you would have to expect it's a lot of people. But they had concepts in there that weren't even theoretically out there yet in terms of physics. So concepts like communication via neutrinos and early mention of dark matter, which was way ahead of its time at that point. And, you know, some of some of the stuff mimicked cutting edge theories a years before they were widely accepted, loosely resembling string theory, neural networks, and multiverse structures. So if you're a layperson reading this stuff, I tried to, it is... It hurts.

Dude. Well, it hurts your head. And I think that... So now we're a couple of weeks in the shooting of this place, and I find out that it's a UFO, Colton. I've always been fascinated with UFOs. I mean, I think the first adult book that I read growing up, and this is 100% accurate, was communion because like VHS is when you would, you know, when you grew up in the 80s, you would choose movies based on the box art. I chose books by the box art, too. And so when you go see that, you know, that face,

that was one of the first I remember adult books that I read. So I've been fascinated with UFOs since a kid, but it's something that I felt that I didn't know about. So I became obsessed with figuring out what this, and his house was insane. It was, it had staircases that went nowhere. One of the things, and I think it's in the documentary, if you go on YouTube, there is.

By the way, the movie you were shooting. 11, 11, 11, 11, which we're going to get, because I want to talk to you about the 11-11 phenomenon. And by the way, for those listening and watching, the movie's terrible. The story that takes, and partially we were talking about this before we began is I feel like I lost my mind a little bit. It was the one time in my filmmaking career that I went down a rabbit hole I couldn't pull myself out of. And I became obsessed with everything that was happening in me trying to find a rational explanation for it. At this point, you know, I was very much ingrained in the horror world.

I loved a macab. But to have it happening all around me, people getting sick, people falling down staircases. One of the things that I think was the most shocking thing to me that had happened are DP, a guy named Joseph White,

a flyman from Los Angeles, and he hears these stories. I'm telling him, dude, there's a cult here. It's called Umo, and it was a UFO thing. And he's laughing. And he was like,

dude, do you hear how insane you sound? And I was like, dude, you don't understand. So he arrives two days before filming, and I hear him, I'm upstairs, in the door and he's like, where's Bowsman? I'm going to see this haunted place. And this is, again, it sounds fake me telling the story. I'm looking down from this kind of, I can see down to this very

grand entryway. And I was like, yo, Joe, and he looks up and he's like, I still don't believe in this bullshit. And I'll never forget this. I hear a noise. And I hear one of the guys that's on the G&E department tell Joe to move. And almost instantly, the chandelier that was just hung, collapses and falls directly where he was just standing. Oh, my God. So I'm like, and again, I'm still wrestling with the, what does supernatural ghost stuff have to do with the UFO cult, which led us to pull the, the information on the house and the sordid history of this house, which was insane.

So during the process of filming, I'm not focused on the movie. I'm focused on the mythology of this house, this Umo cult. And what I think I found fascinating is, and I was talking to you about this, was not only is a fascinating story about the origins of Umo but it spawned other things cults something called

daughters of Umo something called I think was the Edelweiss Foundation which was a cult in the true sense of the word where they were branding kids they was basically like a Boy Scout thing that started and they were branding kids with the Umo sigil on their skin

it got dark and people went way overboard, basically living by these documents that were, you know, mysteriously produced. And so I just became fascinated. And I think it was one of my first real itches into this world of, you know, trying to uncover the mysterious. And so while I should be making a movie, I am saying up all night and drinking too much scotch, being like, oh, my God, listen what happened here with the Umo's and this and this and this. And you can tell when you watch the movie because the movie's pretty bad. But it was, it was crazy. And it was, it was such a little known, I think. We've all heard a lot of the same UFO stories, you know, the Betty and Barney Hill story and all of these, but I'd never heard about Umo.

Yeah, Umo is one of those, it's one of the ones that Wendell Stevens, you know, but he put out a whole bunch of contact books that I'm obsessed with because, again, these are the lesser known stories. But that are quite extensive in terms of documentation, in terms of sightings. There's even a citing, I think, in 1989 in Russia. And the name alludes me right now. But in Russia, it was witnessed by children and a police officer. So a police officer and a bunch of children witnessed this craft come down. The doors open up. The toaster man.

Yeah. There was like this robotic sort of toaster. And that sort of toaster man, you know what that was? That was because apparently the person dressed up as a human would use that to destroy the clothes. So it was like a shredder that followed him around. And then there was this giant sort of three-eyed being with the symbol of Umo on its torso, this being here. Well, check that ahead. Oh.

You're a fan of ephemera. I am. That is, and this is what I think I find so fascinating about this case is I'm fascinated with religion. I'm fascinated with the occult and esoteric. And I think a lot of it has to, you can start it right here with the research of Umo. there's a large section of the population that are convinced 100% it was a hoax because the man, Jose Pena on his deathbed basically admitted to it. And he said, I did this.

I wanted to do an experiment to see that our belief, could we convince a population to believe in something just based on faith? We're going to put these documents out. And by the time that he was done, it had taken on life of its own. It had grown and it expanded. It had gone across continents. And it was unable to be stopped at that point. But then later, after his death, it was revealed that no, maybe he didn't start it.

Maybe he was told to say he started it to basically help keep it mysterious. I mean, you know a lot about that, too, about the... Yeah. Yeah. So, 1993, he came forward to say basically that he was responsible for concocting this thing as a social experiment. Now, Jose Pena is an interesting character. because he was a trained psychologist and sociologist with like a deep interest in parapsychology, in fringe physics. Now the debate comes, can one person write all of this? And if you're at home and just you want to

look into it, just Google some of the Umo documents and try to have a read through. It is mind-bendingly difficult to read. And when scientists were given this, there's all sorts of scientists, by the way. There's even a computer scientist, a French computer scientist, Jean-Pier-Pet-C, he studied Umo. and he published his own models basically were based off of Uno, Umo. So he had models on magneto hydrodynamics that were based on some of these papers. So they were legitimate theories. They weren't just half-brain concocted ideas.

So now you have this guy saying, oh, it was me all along. Sorry about that. It was just a big joke. Well, his son went on a rampage. I heard it a screening. I don't know if it was Ceches, but there was a film festival. In 2022.

There was a documentary that they basically made on Umo and Umites, which, you know, kind of really leaned into the fact it was hoaxed and that it was created by him and two of his friends. And there are some connections that are hard to overlook. Like the second sighting of it was from his roommate. That's right. So you go down this rabbit hole and there's a lot of connections. But this documentary goes into that. And, you know, there was a protest in the middle of the theater. He stopped the screening as I remember and was furious.

Because I guess the son knows it to be real. And the father's dying confession was, I guess, coerced out of him. That's right. That it was something that he was. And then there's a lot, if you go really down the rabbit hole, that maybe the CIA was involved, maybe the KGB was involved. It's fascinating. Because the minute you think you've reached the bottom of this, of this, you know, maybe hoax, maybe conspiracy, it goes, far, far deeper and darker

mentioning these kind of side cults that stem from some of the kind of mythology that these papers purported. Yeah, and these papers had enough in them to where if you fully read

through all of them, you too could be convinced that they're real. Like, I mean, really smart people read through these papers and they got together. So there are these houses

that existed back then where people would get together to try and decipher collectively as this sort of group session, these papers. And, but then you run into a house like this that you're describing. And you said something interesting to me about the beds in the direction they were facing.

Well, when we, when we first took it over, so we, one of the first things that when I started to get really kind of, I felt I was being punked. I felt that I was being screwed with because here I am as a Western director that's coming over to this, to this country making, making a movie there. I felt that maybe they were screwing with me. So I had a lot of documents pulled around the area and to try to find out the ownership of the house. It sat empty for a long time before we went in there and it was rented out. There was a lot of things that people would rent it out for events. But they, it looked like eyes wide shut party, but all the beds and the place were facing east. The candles were put up in a very ritualistic way.

Why is that important facing east? Well, I mean, getting into esoteric traditions, I mean, a lot of things have to do with direction things. I mean, if you look into Freemasonry, where they're built, which way they're facing. So inside the house, though, which is kind of incomprehensible to explain, I think the Winchester Mystery House might be the best comparison. There were staircases that went nowhere, but not like they were built like that. They were bricked over. And I think this was the most concerning thing for, for, for them. for me is so we shot in the basement of the house and in the basement of the house there is a

staircase that goes up and then you can see kind of a modern brickwork that's that's literally bricked up a quarter of the house you can't get into it and it's it's they've gone through a lot of effort to break that part of it up um in one of the scenes that uh i wanted to shoot in which we ended up not being able to shoot in because everyone that went into it got ill and that's where i was who started to get convinced, maybe this was some sort of mold or gas or something like that, there was a small window, as all I can say, with an H over it. And I asked my assistant, I want to know what's on the other side of that. And he broke in the wall and you can see it online. It was pretty ridiculous. It was a room. And inside this room, there's an altar. And inside the altar,

there's candles and there's, you know, other things like that. But they were all closed off. We tried to ask the caretaker of the house, like, why? What is this thing? And he refused to talk about it. He was just evasive? He just wouldn't, he wouldn't give us any information about it. It was, it was, it was an interesting thing. And still to this day, I mean, it's 10 years later. I still look back at some of that. And I was like, it was the most uncomfortable I ever been. I have funny kind of side stories. We leave, we leave Spain, and I go back and I'm editing in Los Angeles and I had the coolest editor. The editor edited full metal jacket.

Oh, cool. He was the editor, the assistant editor on The Shining. So he worked with Stanley Kubrick and this guy is like an old school dude. And one day he calls me in and he goes, hey, can you, what is this? And he shows me footage. And it's a guy sitting on the edge of the bed and he is doing a monologue. And he's very kind of quiet and he's whispering. But in the corner of this, the spatially, he's sitting there, you hear somebody yelling in a language that I don't know what the hell it was into it, but no one references it.

You don't hear me yell cut and the guy continues on with his monologue. So my first thing is that doesn't make sense. That's impossible because it was so loud that we would have called cut, but no one heard it there. So I write that off as a corrupted audio file. I'm like, okay, there's something weird here. This is a corrupted audio file. But then there were other anomalies in the footage. the one that was so subtle

and if you see it you might just kind of blow it off and be like that's nothing but to me it was really upsetting there's a shot and you can pull this and put it on the screen now for YouTube there's a shot where they're standing on the beach and behind them

you can see the house and in the house there are these three large picturesque windows but the curtains were on the outside not the inside and they're wooden and so to open one of these things you have to be inside the house

and not a pulley system and you have to use both hands to pull it because they're heavy. Well, we shot in that room and the curtains were broken. You could not open them. And so they had to remain shut. In this shot in the beach, they're in the foreground and they're talking, all of a sudden you see every window open, open, open, open. What?

Yeah. And it almost looked like a visual effect. Whoa. It did not open like that. We could not open them. And to make that happen, it would take six people because it took two people to do each one of the curtains. It would have had to have been coordinated to signal. Again, I'm not saying that.

the crew wasn't screwing with me and saying, let's screw with this guy. But to what point? It took me five months after we did it to me to even see it. So if I was being screwed with or, you know, punked, you thought that they would have laughed and done whatever. Yeah. But it was these subtle things throughout the footage. Do you have any of that? Yeah, that, that, that, you can find that on YouTube. If you do 11, 11, 11, 11 shutters, you can see it. Okay, great. It was funny when the DVD came out, the foreign sales company would not put it on there because they thought it was all staged. they said, there is no way we're going to pass this off as real. And it made me so angry because I'm like, it's not, it's all, we did not do that. Yeah, that's like a boy who cried wolf situation because you're also known for immersive horror.

Yeah. You're someone who creates experiences using horror and to sort of blur the lines between what's real and what's fiction. So that would seem like something you would do. I'll tell you, my wife who was there with me during the time, she became worried because you talk about this. idea you're a lot in UFO is this cognitive dissonance, this coming to grips with something that just doesn't fit with your worldview. I didn't have time to process what was happening and what was going on with the crew quitting, getting sick, these weird injuries that were occurring on set and what we were feeling and seeing. I was just such in a fog during that entire movie. It's just because it challenged everything. Like, it was like, it was just this presence in the house. So not only were we dealing with the UFO-Umo thing, we're dealing with this presence in this

And then there is a story that goes with the original owners of the house that was eventually uncovered, which the previous owner of the house was in the middle of a divorce. They were sharing custody, and the daughter kind of stopped talking to the mother, just kind of disappeared. And every time the mother would reach back out to the owner of this house, the father, he would say she was gone. She's at school. She's on vacation. She's this, she's this. eventually the mother was was done with the shenanigans she wanted to see a daughter and sent the police and the i'm going to mess up some of these details now but the the daughter died and the husband

was a political figure fearing that he was going to be blamed for it and thrown out of this political thing he he buried her body in the house and i didn't believe again it was one of these things i was like that's not true i do not believe that sounds yeah sounds like an urban legend it sounds like a horror movie right it sounds like something i would make um the the details are far less dramatic than maybe you're putting the death and all that. But again, this house has a very sorted history. But it was kind of like my first really kind of awakening into my fascination with what goes on that we don't know about. So this house ended up having potentially a murder or some type of death and some type of cover up with this child in the basement, we would assume?

It was the basement. And that's where you filmed. We did film in the basement. Now, that's not what the door was. I told you there was a staircase that went to a door. And that has nothing to do with where the body was found. That's nothing to do with where the body was found. You know, it's been, like I said, it's been almost 14 years now. I want to go back.

And I recently looked up the address. I found a call sheet. And I found the address. And I looked it up. And it's still available to rent. And I, you know, I've been in a lot of places. I was going to do a movie in the Lurie Mansion in New Orleans, which is. a lot of people consider to be one of the most haunted.

I'm telling you it had nothing on this place in Barcelona. Whoa. Yeah. That's crazy. I've, I mean, since going down this rabbit hole, I've been just completely consumed with all of this because it's like you said, so fascinating. It covers so many facets. It goes from, it goes from being, okay, potentially real UFO sightings to, okay, an elaborate hoax. Yeah.

To now some type of almost meta-religion that started. Multiple cults started off. Cults, religions. A lot of, and by the way, a lot of nonviolent, non-sort of. Most are non-violent. Yeah, when we say cults, we don't say they're drinking Kool-Aid and they're all having sex parties. That, some of it, maybe. The Edelvice, yes, they did.

The branding and the sex stuff, potentially. But for the most part, these were just gatherings of people who believed in the word of Umo because it made a lot of sense. And ironically enough, after reading some of it, this is exactly. what they wanted to avoid the Umites. Yeah. They wrote in their papers specifically, do not take this as the word because we don't want to shift your culture into ours. We're just here to observe.

If I remember correctly, in the documentation, it was very much against occult mentality. Yeah. It was the opposite of that. And I think that's what I find so fascinating about belief and religion is that, you know, if you are to believe that it's a hoax, you know, it had gone past his ability to stop it, that it had people had found a way to live with it and really believe in it and make it a way of life that even when it came out publicly that, hey, this guy made it up, it was an experiment. People didn't want to hear that. They wanted to believe. And the fact that after he admitted to doing it, letters were still surfacing. They were still being sent. For quite a while. For quite a while. And but the tone had shifted a little bit.

It had gotten a little bit more serious from the Umo. I mean, there's all sorts of really interesting stuff. I mean, I was telling you earlier, they had this, they had this whole cipher, which gave you directions to a basically end of the world bomb shelter because in the 70s, there was some tension with Iran and Israel. And that during those tensions, apparently the Umo got like signaled that they were at a 26% chance of like nuclear war. And that was enough for them to, like, leave. But they'd given instructions on where to go in case this happens.

Now, these encoded instructions were never really fully deciphered. I ran them into AI. And I got the answers back, which is super interesting. I got to say, though, is as spooky as the story is, if you want to have a good laugh on Umo, if you ever go down the rabbit hole of the Umo language, it is quite possibly the most hilarious, funny, ridiculous. And it's all about tone and inflection, but the words are all the same. So it's like, Umo, Umo, Uya, Uya, Umo, Umo. And I thought that was really funny. I actually stumbled on to a Umo music channel.

Because there are people that still very much believe in this. And, you know, it's who they are now, and there's Umo music. Yeah, it's a whole culture. And I kind of like it. I kind of think it's sick that you're here for it. Yeah, why not, dude? Like, I mean, you know, if you're not hurting anybody, but obviously if you're doing some weird.

you know, weird, deviant, deviantly natured things, then, yeah, I'm not necessarily for it. But I think it's just so interesting. Plus, you know, you're someone who has this fascination with not only horror,

but the occult. You've been just absolutely consumed by the occult. I guess it's one of your driving factors into what it is you do for a living. Can you maybe tell me, as someone who's not superverse, now I have a book here actually, Sex and Rockets, the Jack Parsons story. I've been looking into him. Fascinating character. But before we touch on that, I would love to get your sort of origin story and what brought you towards the occult.

I'll start off by saying I'm very much an armchair occultist. And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a funny story, I guess, because you are, you are a part of my occult journey. I've used my quasi-C-rate selection. celebrity fame to meet people that I like or admire. And that goes from musicians to actors to magicians, sleight of hand. And it started with sleight of hand. I became friends with yourself and Penn & Teller and Danny Garcia. And you guys all have the ability to take a deck of cards, 52 pieces of paper and plastic and do incredible things. And you can create a moment out of those 52 things. Now, if you hand those cards to anyone else that doesn't have that knowledge, they can't. They can stumble around, but you have the ability to control an entire room because you have knowledge that not everyone else has. You have methods that not everyone else knows.

Hey, guys, hope you're enjoying the podcast. I just wanted to remind you that our MJ12 collection is still available at area 52. This is some of the highest quality merch that you can get. We worked on this in-house for the past six months. This is not a drop shipment. Everything ships out of my warehouse. So if you want to support the channel and copy yourself some really cool majestic 12 merch, check it out, area 52.com. And I became fascinated to learn how you were doing it.

I became fascinated when I see Danny Garcia do something that to me breaks my brain. To be fair, Danny Garcia breaks my brain. Yeah, well, I wanted, I just had this thing that I couldn't sleep at night. because it didn't feel real to me. I knew it was a trick, but it didn't feel real. So I started collecting magic books, and I wanted to uncover the secret. And the best example that I can give

is that my kind of quest of esoteric knowledge or occult knowledge, that's all it is. I mean, a cult is just that which is hidden. That's what it is. It is uncovering things that aren't widely known and understanding the mechanics behind them in the same way that once I read a book on magic, I have, when I say magic,

slight of hand, I can start to understand what you're doing. Not that I can do it, but I understand it. I understand the mechanics behind it. But you create magic with cards, real magic. I'm talking magic like Jack Parsons' magic, because you can get a group of people together that are strangers, and you can do a trick, and you can create laughter, and emotion, and amazement.

Alchemy. Exactly. You have changed something. Who cares that you're used in sleight of hand? It is still magic. That is magic. And I became fascinated with that. So part of it started there. The other part of it, I'm a poser. I always feel like I have imposter syndrome. So my, you know, I am a horror director. I've made my career in making horror movies. And I wanted my office to feel like that. So when I first started out after Saw 2, I had a spooky looking office and I had spooky skulls and I had spooky, scary looking books and spooky candles. But they were all fake. It was all stuff you would. buy it like Spirit Halloween. And as I started to get more money, I started to replace those spooky things with real things. So I remember the first thing I did was I had all of these spooky books that, and they're plastic, you know, there are things you would buy at a Halloween store. And I was like,

this is cheap. When you come in my office and you turn the lights on, it's cheap. I want the real book. So it started with magic, sleight of handbooks. So I started buying Professor Hoffman, which are like if you're a magician or a sleight of hand person, Professor Hoffman is like he, everyone knows who he is. Strix with cards. Exactly. So I started replacing all of my spooky looking books with magic books and books on parlor magic and all of that. So now when you go into my office, it's this old Victorian-looking bookcase with all these books in it. Then I started replacing my scary books like Frankenstein and Dracula with real books of that. Then that led me into realizing how fake I'd been my entire career because I'd made a bunch of movies on religion and the occult.

And it was all bastardized Hollywood ideas of the devil and things like that. that's not what it is. Um, so it started with after I had my magic books and I had my original Frankenstein books, I started getting, um, esoteric knowledge books. And Manley P. Hall as an example, he's a, he's a, one of my favorite, uh, kind of guess, esoteric thinkers. Um, I started getting his books because I liked the way they looked. So I say I'm a poser. I like the, I like the covers. I like the images on them. And then I started reading it. And it just made sense to me. Things in it made sense. It was philosophy. It was ways to look at life. Um, And then it became a conversation piece.

I realized when people came in my office, they're like, I remember one of the books I had is called, it's a Manly P. Hall book called Anatomy of a Man. And there's a naked picture on it. And it's old and it's, you know, when you come in, you're like, what is this? And then I found myself talking about it and getting excited when I talked about it.

Because it challenges beliefs. And that's, I think, my grandfather was a Baptist minister. My mother was very religious. And for so much in my life, I didn't understand religion. I knew it was something I had to go to every Sunday. day growing up, but I didn't really have faith. And I got to be honest with you, it was through all of these weird books and in these esoteric documents that I think I found faith. And I found hermeticism, like Rosicrucianism, like that type of stuff. Yeah, you know, I think that I just found things that I

believed in in that, things that was said. And I'll tell you, you mentioned I do immersive theater. For those that don't know, there's a movie, a Michael Douglas film starring David Fincher directed it called The Game. And basically, it is a real narrative that takes place in the real world for one or two people. I started doing those. And the first one I did was based on a cult, like a Jonestown-like cult. Up into that point, every time I tried to touch religion or cult, it was all, like I said, very surface Hollywood versions of it.

I wanted to base it in something real. So I went down the rabbit hole of reading documents on secret societies. And I would change it like 8 to 10% And I started doing it And I started to base the mythology on real doctrine And it sparked something It just felt real to me And it felt real to the people doing it

And I took, I kind of cherry-picked The stuff that I believed in And the stuff that made sense to me Can you give me an example Of something that you might have done Immersively just to give people a bit of a context Because they might not be familiar with what immersive theater is So yeah, immersive theater

is if you go see a movie in the theaters right now, it's two-dimensional. You're staring into screen and it's passive. It'll never change. You can watch it 100 times. It's going to stay the same. Immersive theater interacts with you. Your interaction with the actors

changes what we do. Instead of watching someone on a screen, you're sitting next to them. You're sharing a drink with them. You can smell the cigarette that they're smoking. You can smell the perfume. And so things that we would do is like we would put documents in the downtown public library in the esoteric section.

And we would reprint entire books. And it would be 85% real, but then inside the book, there would be 20% fiction that we would create for our storyline. And so if they were to Google it, they would see it's a real book. And so we were able to base a mythology. They would believe on something very real, but it wasn't. But we would take ideas that ritualistic ideas or initiation rights, initiation is very much alchemy.

It's that you are going through a process of transformation. You start in dark and you find light. You know, that's so much on these things is stepping into light, that we are neophytes right now, but once you go down this certain path, you are awakened. Enlightened. And I think that, so we use that as a foundation very,

so you start this ARG, which is an alternate reality game, as a neophyte, you're in the dark. And it's all about elimination. You will find the answer through these tasks. And so I use my screenwriting partners, and we did traditional narratives, but we base the mythology for the first time in real documentation as opposed to bastardized doc. And so many movies that I see in Hollywood, whether it's UFOs or on the occult, are just they're fake. They're not based in anything.

They're not based on what me in a Midwest, growing up in the Midwest, thought the occult was, thought UFO. foes were. And I think what by making it a little bit more real, it just ingrained itself and imprinted itself, so much more. And that just formed a fascination. And now I collect these documents. I seek them out.

I, you know, and I, it's fascinating to me, which is the same thing for magic, a sleight of hand. I want to understand how things work. I want to understand the thought process behind why someone would, like Jack Parsons, What made him a thelamite? Why did he go down this road? As someone, you know, who created the modern rocket propulsion system, what would make him go into sex magic?

Yeah. And so I want to understand that. And so I think that it's made me a better storyteller. And I think it's helped define my own faith and my own belief system. Sure. Yeah, I think that's really profound. And that's kind of the path. I think that a lot of people in this space end up going down in one way or another, maybe not so directly, but in the sense that, we're looking to merge science and religion or science and spirituality. You know, if you look at the UFO space, for example, there's a lot of this talk of, oh, these are angelic beings and this is, you know, whatever it is. And then on the other side, it's like, no, it's just purely like nuts and bolts. But then there's this school of, okay, maybe we're talking about the same thing. Maybe what's spiritual to you is quantum physics to me. And that's something that Jack Parsons actually tried to merge. Although, you know, in a more deviant manner. Yeah, and he had a very horrific ending. Jack Parsons is, I mean, he's fascinating because you look at a guy who, a genius, a genius, but doing things that I think would be labeled insane or crazy. Yeah. In trying to find that balance between the two where, you know, by day he's this injured rocket propulsion person.

And by night, he is participating in a ritualistic magic. Yeah. And, you know, there's a fascinating, if I recommend, if you've not seen it, Strange Angel. Yeah, it just got done watching season one. It's great. I love that because it's, first off, by the time you get to season two, you're just going to ask yourself, how did this ever get greenlit? How did anyone put this on TV? Yeah.

And I love it. Is it 2016, I think it was? Yeah. Yeah. And it bums me out that it didn't continue. You'll understand why it didn't because it goes places. I mean, it definitely go. And they did not shy away from the occult in that.

I love that, though. I think even in like the first episode, there's already like this guy bringing a goat into his house and then coming out with a vial of blood later. Like, what happened there? You know, for people who don't know about Jack Parsons, he was one of the founding figures in American rocketry, co-founding JPL, so Jet Propulsion Labs and Aerojet Engineering Corp. His work laid the foundation for NASA. What we now know is NASA and the most interesting part of all this. This guy was basically just like a chemist. He didn't go to like some massive. He didn't go to school for this. And so for him to be accepted in modern rocketry, first of all, going down this whole sort of occultist, Alistair Crowley, Sex Magic route, actually, you know, they withdrew his name from a lot of this early American rocketry stuff. Yeah, he was, I mean, he was shunned his belief system because when you're dealing with what he was dealing with clearances with all.

of that. I mean, he went through a very intense process of being vetted. And then here he is. And at that time, I think he had the compound. He had that in Pasadena. I forget the name of it now. The parsonage. Yeah. Which was like this place for rituals, this place for like people from all over would come these, illuminaries or these, you know, whatever you were, these vagabonds. Well, and I think it was a hard time because anytime you mention a cult, you're either met with a dead stare. I was at dinner, I won't say the name, but I was at dinner last night

with the magician we both know. And the first question was, are you into Satanism? And I was like, no, no. And they're like, but isn't that a cult? And I'm like, no, it's not. So much of a cult comes from Christian teachings. It comes from, you know, things that are the opposite of that.

But I think that there is a belief that so much of this is, you know, evil, bad, satire. panic, whatever, and I think that what he was met, now, I'm not saying what he was doing was not, because he was on a much darker, a much darker path. But, yeah, I think that, you know, trying to juggle both of those things, being a, somebody in that high in the government and going and doing ritualistic sex magic at night. Yeah, especially in the time where it was like super taboo. This is like late 40s. Well, well, actually early to late 40s and then, you know, associating himself eventually

with people like Alastair Crowley and El Ron Hubbard. That's right. Getting mixed up with these folks and doing some really sort of like nefariously oriented things. He went down a very dark path. And then, you know, I read the book a years ago, the book, which the show was based on, but he was trying to bring about Babylon, the girl. Yeah, the elemental.

Yeah. Yeah. Female elemental, the goddess Babylon. Yeah. was him, him and El Ron Hubbert were trying to summon this, this lady, essentially. I had such a world, a worldview shift. And then he did, by the way. Yeah, and then he blew up.

Yeah, but he did end up, like, summoning. He supposedly summoned the devil. Well, his girlfriend showed up, this, like, beautiful redheaded lady who showed up. What was her name? Marjorie Cameron, sorry. His very early on in his life, I think early teens, he felt he summoned the devil. Lucifer in his room. And that's what got his fascination into the occult.

But, you know, for me, he was practicing. He was going through and doing these rituals and doing whatever. I am so just fascinated with learning in the same way that I wanted to understand in cardistry how to do a double lift or to do whatever. I wanted to understand it because it gave me a new way of thinking. When I learned magic or went down that rabbit hole lift, and I say magic, to the sleight of hand. It changed the way that I approach problems.

It was a problem, so I think as a magician now, when I'm doing a movie, when I'm doing a sawtrap example. Here's one I can explain it. We wanted all the saw traps to be practical. I didn't want to use visual effects. So we would design them in forced perspective with mirrors. I learned that through magic thinking. I wanted to understand this whole kind of idea about esoteric thought,

because I wanted just to think differently. And I think that so many people are so close-minded to whatever they grew up believing. I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in a Lutheran household. My grandfather was a Baptist minister. So I had this kind of sheltered view of the world. I've been lucky enough to travel the world with these movies. And I just recently went to Saudi Arabia. And I had a very sheltered view of Islam. And then I go there and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's this, it's this, it's this. And my whole, I guess, mentality of that culture shifted. And that's why I think I'm so fascinated with all of this esoteric thought is it completely shatters all of these preconceived notions and open my mind up to believe

and accept a lot more than I maybe wouldn't have believed or accept that if I did not read that book. Yeah, and a lot of these ritualistic things that we bear witness to at a young age. I was raised Catholic as well and, you know, eating the body of Christ, drinking the blood. Like, these are things that seem fairly normal as a child. And as you grow up and kind of have a removed sort of sense. of what this is, a bird's eye view, if you will, of what's going on. And I had that happen to me, actually, when I was in my early 20s. And at that point, I was still kind of practicing religion a little bit. I would go to church with, like, friends and stuff. And at what point I was at a baptism.

And, you know, it was a Catholic baptism. Inwalks the priest, but, like, dressed in like these golden robes. He had a scepter and, like, following him with these people with, like, this smoke and everything was gold. Somebody was holding a big golden book. That is a ritual. You were going to a ritual. That's right. And I'm watching this stuff. And it's kind of like hitting me now because I had gone every Wednesday night. We'd have like prayer night. There was music. It was beautiful. Like people would congregate and they were all lovely and everyone was really nice to each other. It was all normal. But then I started to look at it like, whoa, what's going on here? And when they baptized the child and this giant like a stone basin.

An altar. Yeah. And they and they put water. And I remember that. there is a lady. This is always, this is always stuck out to me. They go to put water on the child's head and it kind of only grazed the child's hair. And then he went on with his thing. And a lady in the back goes, you didn't get him. Right. And I'm thinking, surely this is only symbolic. And then he's like, oh, and then he puts more. And now it's in the baby's eyes. The baby's crying and everything. And at that point, I was like, wait a second. Is this symbolic or is this literal? And that really shifted how I see all of this. I'm like, this must be symbolic. And if it's symbolic, you know, surely we don't need all of this. We don't need all of these, you know, bells and whistles if it's just a mind state,

right? But for me, yeah, that really showed me that even the things that I was like you're saying, really accustomed to and never really questioned, all of a sudden from a different perspective, seemed a cult, seemed a little foreign to me. So much, I think that I'm in a unique position being in Hollywood and getting to work in movies, seeing how much the esoteric thought is ingrained in certain things. You know, some of my favorite, I love graphic novels. Some of my favorite graphic novels are written by some of the biggest occultist, Alan Moore, who most people would know from Watchman, from hell. You know, this guy is a true magician, magician, esoteric thinker. I remember I listen.

to one of my favorite books is something called The Invisibles, which is very much based in like esoteric thought, but it's, it's a graphic novel. He had a, a YouTube video off a lecture he wrote for a book called Disinformation Guide of the Occult, I think is what it's called, where he talks about chaos magic. And things just clicked for me in those, like the words they were saying, ideas that they had. And I realized how much of our life is a ritual or magic. the idea of saying I love you to me is magic because you can say I love you to someone and those words change that relationship with that person

so you've put an intention out there you said I love you and now all of a sudden your relationship has changed with that person these little things I never thought of before so things just started connecting for me that never did before how much of what we do is ritualistic I mean you just went through

imagine that same thing of a Catholic church but put it in a dark underground cave and that same thing all of a sudden that becomes satanic that becomes whatever. So much of it of society is. And that's a good point. I mean, even, you know, we would, there's this, I don't know, I don't know if there's

any truth to this, but it sounds true. But when we spell things, right? Yeah, that's like it's an actual spell. You're casting. You're saying, hey, go outside. And I send this letter across the world and the person who reads it then goes outside. You have said something and they've done something. You haven't even said it.

You've just. But that is an. action. So that, and I think that's something else that I found fascinating was this idea that magic is just something that you don't yet understand. So if you go to a caveman and hand, I'm a lighter, that's magic. But when you actually understand the mechanics of it, it's not, I always find that fascinating because I've looked at things as a kid and I was like, oh my God, that's magical. And then I learned them and I'm like, it's not magic, it's this. So how much of these things that we hear about or read about is just, I forgot who said it, but it's just magic is

science not yet defined. Yeah, Arthur C. Clark, any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. Exactly. And I just wonder how many things like that that we see that soon will no longer be magic, it'll be science. There was a book I just got it. It's amazing. It's huge. I mean, you can't hold it.

It's a manly P. Hall. It was like a secret teachings. Of all ages. Tashan just put it out. And it is, it is, I mean, it's, it's. this big. And basically he, it's like his grand opus where he went through every major secret society and esoteric and basically wrote these chapters on it. It breaks your brain. Do you have to read it? I've read through some of it. It's very dense. It's like the Umo papers. That's right.

You just cry when you get through like a page. Yeah, but it's fun to open up. Oh, it's beautiful. I just open it up sometimes and I'm like, I'll start here. And it's just like a whole chapter on the pineal gland. And I'm like, oh, interesting. Yeah. So for me, I think that the the exploration, though, started from from sleight of hand. It came from cards. It came from watching people like yourself do card tricks that I didn't understand. And I knew that if I understood them, maybe they would stop being magical. And I wanted to understand the mechanics. And that's where I started kind of my fascination with these books and collecting these documents. That's so interesting. And, man, I mean, you know, it's funny because I talk to you as a magician because you're, you know,

quite familiar with a lot of the techniques. We've hung out a lot and talked a lot. And I've talked lot of a, and I don't get to share that with very many people, you know, I can sort of abbreviate it or dumb it down a little bit for like, not dumb it down, but just put it in layman's terms for people to understand, but it's fun to be able to talk shop with you in terms of illusion, you know, and, and magic thinking. Because magic thinking is something that once you notice it, you see it everywhere. I see it within intelligence agencies. Well, 100%. And that's why I, I think that my education, I've had two educations. I had the one where I went to school when I was in my 20s. And I consider my midlife education. The midlife education was sleight of hand into what I'm doing now with these books. It's completely reframing how I approach any situation or how I think about them, including how I make movies now. you know part of we talked about this at lunch but part of magic is um it's an intention uh when you are

going to cast a spell when you're going to do something it is it is an intention you're trying to put out as a director i want to affect an audience how do i do that the series of images and sound and i have the ability to move them to scare them to discuss them to upset them um by moving pictures and images now i'm using tricks not only from magic a sleight of hand but tricks psychologically that I'm reading about in some of these other books. And I think that it's fascinating. It feels like, again, I'm back in college with all this stuff, learning new things. That's amazing. I'd love to hear it. Yeah. I mean, once your mind is attuned to how magic kind of works, you'd think you'd get disillusioned, but you actually become inspired to create

more once you're aware of these things. But it is interesting, too. I have a talk coming up but sigh games, which is like the Olympics of, you know, really cool what they're doing. Hakeem Isler, he's putting together this thing where all these people will compete in different psychic events. And I'm overseeing to make sure that they are, you know, rigorous and you can't cheat them. And we're going to see if anything can be done. But during that time, I have a talk and I'm writing it now. And the talk is about real magic and not.

magic with a K, but kind of the fact that during magic performances, psychic events tend to happen. And magicians know this. If there's any magicians watching, comment below. Let me know about a miracle that you've performed. And let me know how often these things happen, because they happen more often than they should. And there is a relationship there with, you know, Russell Targ as well, got into Cy stuff. He was the founder of one of the guys at SRI. But he got into it through doing stage magic. And I just find it so interesting. that my personal life has gotten me from Magic with a C. To Magic with a K.

To Magic with a K, to Magic with a J now. Ah, majestic. That's right. Yeah, the whole majestic thing. It all comes full circle. And so magic has been kind of, exactly, magic has been kind of following me everywhere. You know, it is crazy.

I'm watching the David Blaine special now. Do not attempt or do not try. Yeah. And what's, which. I love that special, by the way. I do too, and I think what's crazy about it is I think we are capable of great things, all of us. If you don't believe you are, then you won't be. And I think that you look at David Blaine, who's, you know, doing these feats that seem completely unreal.

But he's trained his body. He's trained his mind and can do insane things. And I think that we all have that ability. And again, if you show that 50 years ago, that is magic with a K what he's doing. And I think that, again, it's science. that we just didn't have a name for then, but if you know how to do it, if you know, and I think that's why they, you know, I'm fat, I used to always watch ghost hunting shows. Like I said, never seen one, but I would always love it. Uh, why do certain people see things and other

people's don't? And I think a lot of it has to do with what you allow yourself to believe. Um, if you're closed off to it, if you're like, I can't hold my breath for six minutes and you're never going to get to that point in your life. I can't see a ghost. You're never going to have that. I can't see a UFO. I won't. Versus those that are open to the idea of I can hold my breath for six minutes. I'm going to train my body. I'm going to do whatever. Now this impossible feat becomes possible.

I can see something that's, you know, just outside of our perception. You know, you've just described abracadabra. Yeah, I mean, I speak what I create what I speak. Exactly. It is a, it goes back to the idea of spells too. But I feel that there's such a cross section of magic with a C and magic with a K or a J. It is this belief, it is this training. It is, and so I was really fascinated by what David Blaine has done and what he continues to do.

I think I'm always fascinated, like watching your show, all of these things that, 20 years ago, you would have been laughed out of a room, these ideas, these concepts of things that exist in the sky. Now it's mainstream. It is mainstream. It's on mainstream news sites on a daily basis. That to me, I think that soon we're going to realize how interconnected this all is. You mentioned it earlier what, you know, a thousand years ago they called angels or demons. Now we call UFOs or NHI. I just feel that there's more of a connection here between the occult, the UFOs, religion. Oh, yeah.

And you can even look at places like NASA who continue to this day, allegedly, to do sort of these ritualistic, albeit less, you know, dark, but like still ritualistic nonetheless things during their or before their launches. You know, you just read American Cosmic by Diana Pesolka. Yeah. She mentions it on a few interviews as well that, yeah, sometimes they're like, hey, you got to wear your launch t-shirt and everybody has to wear or everybody has to eat the same. food or stand in a certain, those are all little rituals that they continue to do to this day because it's such a precise science, rocket science, that if the slightest miscalculation happens, that thing's going to blow up. People's lives are jeopardy billions of dollars. So they want everything on their side, including perhaps whatever's up there. Absolutely. I mean, you've got to

look at, and again, it's less now. And I live in Los Angeles, which is a completely different environment and world than a lot of other places. but you drive down the street and you see churches. I mean, we were driving down the street and you have this beautiful church and you realize that how much of the population does have a belief. They have a faith in a supernatural presence

and a being and something like that. I think that it's ingrained in us. It's indoctrinated from the very beginning of us being children. Ritual, belief in something that we cannot see. It's fascinating to me. Well, let's stop talking about it. the stuff we cannot see and a great segue into something that you saw. Now, you started telling me

about this prior to the podcast and I said, save it for the pod. I want to hear it. I want to hear it live. So I really do want to see something and that's been my thing. I want to see some apparition. I want to see. I just want the, even though I can read these things and I can conceptualize them, I want that moment. I want that. I say that now until something appears and I have an apparition. I'm like, crap my pants. I got my pants. I had one moment, and I'm hearing all your stories on your thing, and I was like, what have I had them? There is one. It's pretty, it was 4th of July weekend. I went to Kansas where my family is from, and I brought my son. I think he's four or five at this time. And we are out letting fireworks off, which are illegal in Kansas in the driveway of my parents' house. And above us, way above where the fireworks are going off, there is lights. I can't. I can't. I can't say they were in a triangle fashion, but they were definitely in a formation. And it's 4th of July. So, of course, I go to, it's, you know, it's fireworks. It's something. And then I didn't

say anything. And then I see my dad. Say, do you see that? My dad's military. He was Army. And he goes, do you see that? I was like, yeah, I see it. And I pull my phone out. And I aim my phone up at it. And it's not moving. And so my first thought was it could be like a military performance. It could be skydivers. It could be flares. It's not moving. What color were they? White. They were orb-like, but they were way above where the fireworks were. So again, I went to, is it a planetary thing?

Is it a star cluster? And I have an app on my phone that you can like aim it up at the sky and see what it is. Nothing like that. But I'm still convinced, it's Fourth of July. It didn't cross my mind at this point that it could be something else. So we keep letting the fireworks off and this thing isn't moving. It's there. And then I see, which I perceive it, that it goes from left to right, and I pull my phone out again and I start filming.

Now I'm trying to zoom in, so I'm using the optical zoom on my phone. And it moves. It moves very fast, and it moves in a way that it should not have moved. My dad runs inside to get my mom. And I run, Nancy, get out here, get out here. And now my son's looking up and he's pointing, and I'm filming it, and it's gone. In my view of the phone, it just flies off. I take it down and I'm showing my mom and it's on my phone.

I'm showing it to it. And I'm like, look at this and I'm zooming in on the phone. So I'd already zoomed in on the phone. Now I'm trying to zoom in again. And now you're getting a little more clarity of it. The neighbors come over and we try to show it to them again. As I pull my phone out, it deletes right then and there. No way.

Gone. Gone. And it to me seems so weird because it wasn't like I didn't hit the delete button on the phone. And also there's recently deleted. So if something deletes, it should be in a recently deleted. folders. Sure. Recently deleted folder is gone.

So all the photos that I deleted throughout the last couple of days, you know, just pictures of whatever, they're gone. So it was like the video did not even exist. And it happened so rapidly, too. It was just the one thing that I was like, that was one that I can't explain. Whoa. It was so, it had happened right then and there. And it wasn't like my finger went over and hit the delete, but I would have to go into

recently deleted to delete that as well. And then, you know, when I told that story again, someone was like, oh, you're stupid. Like, how could that happen? And then I started realizing today, my son got in trouble at school. He's in summer school and he got in trouble. I disabled his iPad from my phone in here. That's right. Yeah, I disabled his iPad.

And that, think about it. If there are NHI and there are things in our sky, how easy it would it be for them to just hit a button? The same way that I turned my kid's iPad off and disabled it. He can't even turn it on. I have it so I can turn his iPad off. So I just started thinking now, like how crazy really is it to believe that they could delete photos or make them blurry or whatever it is that they're doing? In the moment, I tried to rationalize it. I was like, well, maybe my phone ran out of storage, maybe whatever.

But now hearing and reading a lot of these other books, I mean, I'm sure they have the technology. It's not that surprising. It's not that surprising. Now, do they give a flying fuck? I apologize. You can beat that out. I can't imagine them actually going into my Verizon settings and my 5G and going in there and turning it off. But it's, again, it's that idea, that thinking, how my thinking has changed about advanced.

Like 20 years ago, 10 years ago, I couldn't have turned my son's iPad off. I can now. Yeah. So what is, what, what are they capable of? And who's to say that that's they at all? It could be the military. That's right. Exactly. That's where my head goes. I know. That was close to a military base as well? Well, there's a lot in Kansas. And, you know, that's what I always think as well is it so many times. I mean, how much was a stealth bomber? Sure. Miss thought of a UFO. Oh, not even just a stealth bomber. We had John Ramirez on here. And he was talking about, you know, some of the early. early flights they did with a U2 and like all sorts of like, but they were all painted silver because back then you didn't have a night vision camera or anything like that. So you didn't have infrared. So they would have to be visible. So they made them, they're weird shapes. They're silver. I mean, people would call these things all the time. They would call them in, be like, hey, Air Force, we got UFOs here. And then the CIA sent people to their houses, not to tell them they saw something they didn't. just to Intel collection, what do you think it was? Yeah, what is it? Exactly.

Well, you know, I have an interesting story. So I was shooting in a place called Awaula in Saudi Arabia, and it's the most remote place I've ever been. And there was a really cool moment where it's this desert. And as far as you can see, it's just sand and rock. And the guy that was taking us around says, he stops me. And he goes, what do you see? And I said, sand. And he goes, what don't you see?

And I looked around. And I, and he goes, look at the ground. What don't you see? And then I realized, he goes, look behind you. And there was footprints. And I looked in front, I guess I don't see footprints. And he says, in this desert, when you step on the sand here, it'll stay here for decades because the no rain, the no wind. So your footprints will stay there.

So if we were to go back now, you would see our footprints from where we walked. And so I'm looking at this beautiful, vast desert that had not been walked in for so long. And in this shoot, we had drones. And we sent the drones up. And we were going to get this huge, picturesque shot. And as they go up there, they fall out of the sky. One falls, the next one falls. And we found out later that one of the royal family was flying in,

and they have something to knock drones out of the sky. Whoa! And, you know, you think about that like 10 years ago, that would have been an alien to me. I would have been like, no, it wasn't. It was they knocked him out of the sky. Whoa. So I think that so much of what we do see could be that. But that thing on Fourth of July, which was just more than anything,

I thought, I'm an aunt. Why would they care about what was on my phone? But it did happen, and it was one of those things that I can't... I was going to ask you, I was like, can we see it? I know, I know. It was... But it happened right then and there, too. Like, we're standing around the phone.

So it was a, it was a crazy situation. That's a cool moment. Well, that's a cool micro-confirmation, you know, of, hey, I really want to see something. They're like, okay, but here's the caveat. You don't get to keep what you see. You can see it without your phone. Well, I mean, like everyone else, I would get frustrated. I told you, the first book that I read is like a...

My first adult book was Communion. I agree. Like, I'm on Reddit all the time. And why are they blurry? Why are they out of focus? Why this, you know, as a filmmaker, we have HD cameras on us all the time. But then you realize if they are as advanced as I am with my son, then I could stop anything. Yeah.

Not to mention gravitational distortion potentially. And not to mention if there is some type of, you know, adjustment bureau type deal happening in this sphere. that like anything of consequence will get snuffed out anyways. Now, that's fringe theory, but I mean, it's still, it's, you know, it's not off the table. Well, as a filmmaker, I have to ask you, what are the movies that you watch, whether UFO, alien, that have affected you the most? That have affected me the most interesting. I mean, initially fire in the sky. Yeah, that the abduction scene in that gave me nightmares as a kid.

I mean, that is one of the most horrific. 15 minutes of filmmaking. I mean, even now, it's hard to watch. Yeah, it was tough because unlike any other horror movie that I had seen, and I'd seen quite a few, I was nine years old, but I had an older brother, right? So I remember watching Lepricon, which I know you're a fan of. Source spot. Let's not talk about that.

I wanted to remake Lepricon for years, and I was kicked off that movie. So I remember watching Lepricon. I remember watching Event Horizon, like out of young age. Dude, it's a wild one. Talk about interdimensional hell, you know. But fire in the sky, what was so interesting and unique about it was that there was never an explanation given for any of it, right? And that didn't sit well with me as a child. I watched this based on a true story, first of all, an adult telling me that aliens are real, okay.

And I'm seeing this. And all the while, I'm waiting for someone to tell me why. Yeah. Right? I'm waiting for someone to say, oh, that was just, or, or they wanted this, or for the aliens to have a conversation among themselves that we could listen in on, nothing. We were given nothing. They were just shoving stuff in his mouth and like opening his eyes and doing all these weird things to him and then dropping him off and leaving. And we, and guess what? We never see him again. I'm like, what do you mean? We never see him again. They don't come back. They don't tell us what? No, we never see him again. Well, I think that probably is life. There's no resolution or explanation that we're. ever going to get that's going to satisfy us. But that's what sent me on the quest. And I had the same feeling that movie unnerved me.

And literally so did communion. Maybe it was Christopher Walken's face that just scared me. But I mean... That guy's NHI for sure. I know. You know, as a kid growing up and trying to wrap my head around this thing, that there is something that could come in your house in the middle of the night and paralyze you and you can't do anything about it.

It terrifies me. I remember poltergeist, too, was another one when I was a kid. But let's be honest, though. Killer Clowns from Outer Space might be the best of them all. Yeah, I have a fun... The same... This ties back into 11-11. The editor, his name is Martin, who was the assistant editor on The Shining, told me the greatest

Stanley Kubrick story. Is it that he faked the moon landing? Okay. No, stop. No, here's the story. No, stop. Okay, listen. It's not that.

So I said, you've got to tell me to stay on the Kubrick story. And he goes, okay, I got one. He was also an assistant on Dr. Strangelove. And he said that one day, this is in the day where, you know, you didn't have cell phones. It was a landline phone and it was, it would ring. And he said that the phone would ring and he was never supposed to answer the phone. And he said the phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing. And he finally picked up and they asked for Mr. Kubrick and it was someone at the Pentagon.

And he put him on hold and said, Mr. Kubrick, it's so-and-so at the Pentagon. Stanley gets really frustrated. He takes a breath. He picks up the phone. He waits for them to say something. hangs up the phone and takes it off the hook. And I'm like, what did that mean? And he's, and I said, I goes to the moonland and he goes, he would not talk about it.

He wouldn't address it. He believes what it was, was Dr. Strange Love dealt with, you know, the war room and dropping bombs, that there was a, I don't know if it was an agency. When you had movies that dealt with that, you had to show them. There was basically a protocol that they had to watch it to make sure that. It's like a dopser. Yeah. But I would like to believe it was about the moon landing. I would too. But he didn't confirm that. He just said, no, he hung up the phone on them and took it off the hook.

Well, there was that scene in the ET where they replaced all of the guns with walkie-talkies. With walkie-talkies. And there's also Flight of the Navigator. Love that. Which is great, by the way. And what a prophetic movie in terms of technology. Yeah, to show that to my kid. Yeah. And that was filmed at the Kennedy launch center there. That was real NASA stuff that was being shown. So that hangar where they had it in was an actual NASA hangar, right? And so when they filmed it there and they got the OK to film it there, it had to go through a bunch of screening where they were like, wait, is this too close to home?

I always wonder this. I'm, you know, I'm fascinated with conspiracy theories. But so much of it is a conspiracy. There's nothing behind it. It's, you know, I've read a lot of websites and gone down rabbit holes about Hollywood being infiltrated by the CIA or, you know, people that are putting imagery. I put tons of a cold imagery in my movies. Tons.

They're hidden in the background. I go out of my way to do things that I want people to find that most people don't find. No one's telling me to do it. It's just something because I'm fascinated by it. There's no one whispering in my ear. I do wonder on some of these movies,

like you always hear about like Stephen Spielberg on E.T. Was Jock Velae or close encounters of a third kind? Was he whispering in his ear, you need to do this? You need to do this. I often wonder that. He had like skunk work. boxes like during the taping of that. He had that hand scanner, which...

The hand scanner, which Bob Lazar, right? You know, like, so many, so many little things that are like, like you said, I believe that as well, I have my own belief about Spielberg, but I do believe that he is a fan of the UFO stuff. Yeah. And if you're a fan, like, you are of the occult. That's just it. I go out of my way to put it in there and give production designers things to do. That's right. So I think so much of it is that, like, if you have an interest, you will put Easter eggs in your thing. And then 20 years from now, I'll be a CIA shill because, look, he's got this, this and this. In reality, I'm just geeky and I love that stuff. That makes sense to me, too. But I do wonder how much of it is there that other side. Like, what was that call from Stanley Kubrick? Was, you know, I don't know. I have this theory about Steven Spielberg. I want to hear it. That I hold dear and I really want it to be true.

You know, okay, we got this guy who's the most, you know, prevalent movie director of our time. Aside Darren Bousman in 11, 11, 11. Yeah. Close second. Yeah. But, you know, we have Spielberg who's made, like, the most iconic movies in regards to especially extraterrestrials. He even put out that encounters show that I guess he produced or something. War the World.

Yeah, War the Worlds. E.T. Close encounters. Get a new one coming out. Yep. Yeah. Disclosure. So that's where I'm getting to. What if Stephen Spielberg would.

was tasked with disclosure. So get this. From early on, Steven Spielberg doesn't give a lot of interviews, by the way, about this stuff. And when he does, he's pretty standoffish.

And he's like, yeah, I'd love to see one one day, never saw one. And he's kind of, but he doesn't really lean into it at all, and he's hard to, like, pin down.

Yeah. What if he was told early on, like, hey, man, you're going to, you're going to be the soft drip, all right? We're going to give you,

uh, all these amazing, million-dollar contracts, and you're going to slowly start putting together these narratives, these narratives of these beings being benevolent, like ET, these narratives like this, like that's exchange program, like Serpo, like all of these little narratives over time, the payoff, we're going to let you use an actual UFO in a movie eventually. But you got to shut up about it, right? So come 2025, we hear about this movie that he's directing called,

the dish, right? Which is like a flying saucer thing. We're like, oh, cool, the dish, right? Then it gets changed into disclosure. It is the actual disclosure. That's what you're thinking. What if you're in theaters watching this and you get one of those, just like I saw when I watched fire in the sky, this movie is based on a true story.

What if you get this movie features an actual UFO? And even the actors don't know that they're inside one. They think it's a prop. or it's just footage, whatever. But Americans get disclosure while eating popcorn, while simultaneously the biggest box office hit of all time. I do believe that if this is all real, which I believe it is, that there is an H.I. And there's all of this. You know, it has been ingrained in it since childhood, since birth.

You know, E.T. was probably the first one of those movies that I can remember. It was an event movie for me And that I remember seeing, you know, all of these other alien films where they are portrayed every number of ways Good, bad, nefarious, helpful. And then I'm, you know, like I watch now, I'm watching The Skin Walker Ranch Show every week.

And it's just like more and more things are connecting. And it's going to make that ontological shock, I think, easier for everyone to take because it's been there since birth. It's been there since, you know, if you ask my five-year-old daughter, what this image is, she would say, that's a gray alien.

How does my five-year-old daughter? I don't put that on, around her. I'm not showing her alien pictures. Yeah. But it is ingrained in the cartoon she watches. And I think that, you know, it's, it is, I buy that theory 100%. Because I don't think, the thing is, I think about my reaction, I wouldn't be mad. No.

I'd be like, great move, America. That's sick. And just to corroborate this little thing a little bit with some anecdotal evidence, when he changed it to disclosure. Anna Lina, Anna Paulina Luna, the congresswoman, and I think Burleson both retweeted him saying things are about to get interesting. They both retweeted that.

Dude. I mean, he would be, I think what's great about him doing it. So, well, it's going to go on this for a minute. It's him. Okay. He is revered. He is iconic and he is beloved. And I think that it's not like you have, you know, some hack guy that made 11, 11, 11, 11 doing it or, you know, some subversive filmmakers.

He's beloved. Mm-hmm. And I think that would make a lot of sense. The other side of this coin, which is probably the reality that we're living in, good luck Googling disclosure 2026. Yeah, it's just going to get Spielberg. You're not going to get the, yeah. It's the same thing that happened to men and black. the movie.

Yeah. Good luck Googling men in black and not seeing Will Smith's face. I do have to think, though, I mean, do you watch the Skin Walker documentary or the TV series? I stopped, but I was pretty caught up with it. I mean, like, I do look at things like that, which, again, is entertainment.

I get it. It's completely entertainment. But there's so much that they are now doing, it's ramping up, that if I would wonder if it was real, why isn't it being shut down? If it's not real, you have to be caught up on it, but it's crazy how quickly it's mirroring what you're hearing in the congressional oversight committees, how quickly it is. And so what if it is this multifaceted thing where all of these people are doing it from music to TV to movies? I would completely buy that.

That would be the way to, I think, walk people through this, handhold them through it. And what if it isn't humans that are controlling that? what if it's actually the NHA. You know, there's there's this story. We talked about El Ron Hubbard before. Yeah. You watched that episode with Danny Sheehan. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So with Danny says that he was offered a job, you know, representing El Ron Hubbard. And he said, I want to see the three most classified, classified files that you guys have. And two of them revolved around remote viewing. One of them, namely was Pat Price, where he put on this helmet in southern Ontario and controlled an entire town to file their taxes all. And so. And so. And then, namely, was Pat Price, where he put on this helmet in southern Ontario, and controlled an entire town to file their taxes all. simultaneously into this little, this little male spot, like in the town or whatever, like 70% of the people did that. So it was an experiment to show kind of like, oh, you can use this psychic ability to control minds, right? I don't know whether that's true or not, but that was the file, apparently that Danny Sheen was shown. Now, if we can do that, what can they do? Right. And you hear about stories where people just, oh, I was flushed with, I felt so.

good in its presence and I wanted to go along and my memory was gone. Barber said that when his thing with the, uh, the egg, right? That he just felt this overwhelming sense of peace and blah, blah, blah. That was with the, actually the, uh, eight gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, you know who else said that? Dan Burrish, he said when you looked into the eyes of the J-Rod, the alien that he was tasked at taking these biological samples from, when you looked into its eyes, he said

you would fall into its eyes. And when that happened, they were trained not to fall into its eyes, by the way. He had briefing prior explaining careful because what happens after that is they start flooding you with endorphins to make you feel good. And so you have to fight that. So he said when the J-Rod started realizing that he was resisting to this flooding of endorphins, the J-Rod would let go. But he said the consequence of that was being terrified in the presence of this thing. And he said, that's what they do. He said the rogue ones. That's what they do when they abduct you in your bedroom at night.

They flood you with endorphins so that you feel like it's this benevolent angel. And you forget that it's, you know, so, man, I was like, well, it's so dark and twisted and wild. But if you can do that, you can do a lot more. It's fascinating. And I keep finding connections that, you know, it's. It's just like, you see that classic meme of like someone has a bulletin boards with a million strings everywhere. That's me in my head right now with everything because like I recently got a movie, a script about the book of Enoch. And, you know, reconceptualizing that book, which is literally about the angels that fell to Earth, the watchers as aliens, reconceptualizing all that.

There are so many connections. And when you look at mistranslations of words that we thought meant one thing actually meant something else, all of these dots. just to be in to connect. And it feels like it's this endless black hole that we're never going to get an answer. And I hope it is Spielberg in 2026 with this movie. You're on board with my conspiracy theory now. I want that.

I want that to happen. Same here. I'm going to use all of the magic and occult's intention to make that happen because that would be awesome. I have the same feeling. I'm like, this is the one I hold dear. I'm like, please just let this one be true. It's building to something.

I mean, like I said, you cannot open the news now without seeing something in there that's NHI or on, you know, UAP, it's building. Yeah. If you were to rate your top five UFO slash alien movies in no particular order, what would those be? Who would make the top five? Oh, it's so hard. I mean, I definitely, communion has such a huge part for me because of the book, then going straight into the movie, fire in the sky, obviously.

close encounters because I liked how it didn't take a fear-based approach. It was more mental in this guy's family dynamic. E.T. Yeah, but... Not so much. I'm trying to ones that actually stay... E.T. in a different way because E.T. was something that I share with my kids. And so I'm trying to think...

I mean, I would absolutely call Event Horizon one because, I mean, you're dealing with insanity and hell on a ship. So to me, it's there. Interdimensional. Yeah, I'm trying to think of some more obscure ones that maybe people haven't seen. Arrival for me is up there. Arrival is great. What I like about arrival was, you know, I think we're so used to what aliens look like

that they are these either Nordics or they are the grays. And you have these squid-like creatures in that thing, which I thought was fantastic. And also, he did such a unique approach. because again, it wasn't the classic someone being hunted or haunted by an alien. So that, you know what? I'm going to add that. Thank you.

Not only the score and the sound, but just the way that the aliens were unlike anything that I've ever seen. It was ominous too. You know another one that I really liked was the one with Natalie Portman. I'll think of the name of the second. It's based on a book.

I'm blanking out right now. I'll think of the name in a second of it. but it's like she goes to it's like an alien planet basically it's just like ours I'll think of it in a second but it was a yeah I remember seeing it in a theater and it just unnerved me and made me uncomfortable I'll come back to that

I don't know and I think that I'm also become desensitized now a little bit because you know I look around and I see all your books and in the same way that I feel if I could take back my first eight films on on anything occult-based I would because it was just me pretending

to act like I knew what I was talking about. I didn't. Now that I've read some of these alien stories, they are so much more horrific and scary and beautiful than any of the movies, because I think so much it's a fear-based thing. And there's so much more to them than that now. So I'm trying to think of some of the obscure ones

that I've seen. So I'm going to come back. I'll answer that. Maybe off air and you can put it on screen. Darren thought about it and it's this. Yeah, I'm flight of navigators made that list for me. because that was like a big event for me as a kid. I actually, you know what?

I wrote down on here. I'm going to go see where my movies were. Because I actually put down some of the... Well, to see if you'd seen some of these. So the ones that I wrote down were Close Encounters, the phenomenon, which is a documentary. The fourth kind. And it's not that it's great.

It's a mockumentary, but I saw it really late at night. And I didn't know until like 10 or 15 minutes in. It was not real. And I just, it just, those always unnerved me. Yeah, found footage type of stuff. I mean, the arrival, which I do have on here. Yeah, I have more occult movies than I have UFO movies. But those are, those are, what is, so your all-time favorite would be flight of the navigator?

No, all-time favorite. I would say it might be a rival. I've seen it a bunch of times. And every time I watch it, I get something new from it. I it it borrows from certain themes as well if you uh child's childhood childhood end right um by um blanking out on his name right now talking about um why am i blanking out his name uh you'll put it up on your pop up like i'm going to put my natalie portman of you up yeah exactly but childhood's end uh in there has a similar plot where the aliens just show up

and they wait. And then everybody gets all hectic and like, oh, are they going to attack? And then the guns put down. And then there's this whole waiting period. I think that's how it would happen. I think if they were to show up, right?

It wouldn't be show up, open the door. What's up? It would be show up. Let's let them take this in for a second. There's a famous, I think it's called the Monsters Do at Maple Street, which is the famous. And again,

it's either Twilight Zone or it's Twilight Zone where the whole, it's a great premise. These two aliens are overlooking. What was that? Arthur C. Clark. What the aliens do at Maple Street? Childhood. Oh, okay. Well, this one is these two aliens overlooking a neighborhood, and they let this suburban thing destroy themselves. Like, we don't have to do anything. Just wait, watch. And the panic that ensues, they do everything.

And I think that was, that it is right. Sometimes to me, the scariest movies are the ones that are most subtle that are not in your face. And maybe that's why Fire in the Sky is so upsetting is because it's a small community and it's almost as much about the community turning on him and not believing him than it is the aliens and what they did

and I think that to me that's scarier because there's that great scene in that In Night Shyamalan film that everyone remembers where the alien comes by the window you're in the background and they're looking and that little thing terrified me because it was subtle

it wasn't in your face it wasn't on video on video it was on video it was on video it was on video but they were looking through a window filming it. And it was, to me, I think that's scarier because it is so subtle. And I think that they will come like a thief in the night. It's not going to be this big spectacle thing that we're expecting.

And I think that to me is terrifying. Do you ever see the Vast of Night? You got out there? I want to go back here to my UFO thing. Just so you know I'm not a look at number fourth one down. Oh, yeah. Vast of Night. Yeah.

I love that one. That was a directorial debut by the director. Forget his name. But that was his first. movie. He did some really interesting cinematic things in there. You know, a lot of one shot. Yeah. Those were shot on gas powered go carts. That's so crazy. Because they were like going super fast. And I loved the whole movie because it was based in this sort of mid-century time where like TVs weren't really a thing yet. But radio shows were still really prevalent. And the audio of that

creating that tone of these aliens arriving through phone calls, through these weird anomalous sounds, through the power going out. And then at one point there's this scene in the car where they're driving and they're playing a recording of this lady who had a run in with these extraterrestrials. And she starts speaking in tongues almost or something. And the driver and the passenger just start going like this. Yeah. And their heads go back and you're like, whoa. it is this. Well, I think that we can't comprehend the idea of

aliens themselves. You're left with things like Mars attacks or something that's bigger than life, but we understand human and how humans will react. And I think that the ones that I gravitate to are the more human stories. I mean, even communion, I'm not talking about the book right now, but the movie, it's through the eyes of, you know,

in this case Christopher Walkin and in the fire in the sky, it's through his eyes. And I think that it's more terrifying because you understand that. You can comprehend it. The same thing with Vast of Knife. It's you don't see. It's why Spielberg, I think, is it is amazing. Like, go back to Jaws. How often do you really see the shark? You don't. But you see how it affects everyone in the town and the community. I'm more scared about how we react when aliens come than I am what the aliens are actually

going to do. Yeah. I mean, the chaos, the riots, the looting, the utter fear is, I think, more worrisome than whatever the ships bring in. Well, that might be the reason it hasn't happened it. I mean, it could be. That is, I'm trying to think, because there's so many obscure alien films that I know I'm leaving off this list. And there's a bunch of older ones, too. Well, I mean, like, the day the earth stood still, I was remember it was something they showed in film school, which again, I mean, now, and it's, it's kind of ridiculous with how far we've come, but just that idea terrifies me. But I also love documentaries. I mean, all of James Fox's stuff, I just, I find Um, fascinating. And I'm, I'm excited to see. I know you saw the documentary, uh, at South by. Yeah. Um, age of disclosure. Yeah. Uh, I get really now the older I get more wrapped up in documentaries. It's, um, I, I, I liked it for people who, for the uninitiated, I would say, it is a great sort of initiation by credible. I think 34 people were interviewed, right? That had firsthand knowledge of some type of program or some type of, uh,

experience within like military, you know, surroundings. For me, however, like, that's going to hit home with a lot of people who are on a fence. I know that. Right. For me, I'm, I'd much more gravitate towards something like moment of contact. Yeah. Where it's about, you know, people in a town. Yeah.

Who these people have no real agenda. Coming on camera to them makes their life worse, not better. I just read a huge kind of book on Heavens Gate or the Halbop comet. It goes back to the idea of going full circle of cult and the believability. There are so many cults have this tie-in to something celestial. And what they will do for that belief system. In that case, these people all killed themselves for this belief of a UFO trailing a comment that they could do this and end up there.

What year was that, 98? Yeah, I don't remember what it was. but if you go back and watch the videos of a D, and I forgot what his name was on it, what he called himself, it's terrifying. And again, it goes back to belief. It goes back to faith. What they believed in, what they allowed themselves to believe in,

and what they would do for their belief in their faith. It's like a Raelle. Yeah. It's, to me, it's terrifying. And I, the more I experiment in my own faith, it's crazy when you go down that, rabbit hole. But if you, for those that don't know, I mean, the Hail Bop thing or the Heavens Gate Colt thing is pretty, pretty horrific. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's akin to like the Jonestown stuff,

you know, people, it's, you know, people drinking Kool-Aid pretty much. Pretty, pretty insane stuff. But yeah, that idea of ascending to something higher, some higher purpose, you know, and I mean, I can't even imagine. Unless they're all the correct ones and we're not. Maybe they are on the back of that comment somewhere. And they're laughing at us right now. I think if that's the case, we'll all end up on the comet eventually. I just want, now I'm fascinating with your Spielberg thing. I want that to happen.

That's, we'll be his fourth movie, I guess, right? E.T. Close Encounters of a third kind, War of the World, and this will be his fourth. Yeah, and he did the encounters thing. He did the document, the show. Yeah, the show. Yeah, and this, I mean, you have to expect this. He's getting up there as well.

You'd have to expect this to like, is this the magnum opus? Is this? I was hoping that when Jimmy Carter, before he passed, he was going to drop some deathbed confession about what he knew and what he heard. You've heard the story about him, like hearing all that information. I keep waiting. I keep waiting for that person to do the deathbed confession. Deathbed stuff is the most compelling stuff. I agree.

Yeah. I... It was an Oscar Wolf guy who, you know, talked about S-4 and meeting that alien at S-4. Yeah, was that the one that was just on. I just listened to the American Alchemist one with the guy was about to die.

Danny Sheen talked about it, but originally he was interviewed, I think, by Richard Dolan and Jeremy Corbell actually was filming that interview where you see that guy in the video, the guy talking about it.

Yeah, I, uh, that, it's going to happen soon. I mean, everyone's saying that date 2027. I don't know what that, but maybe Spielberg has himself two years to get this movie out before. Yeah, well, that's,

Is it 2026 he's putting it out? I think so. But that gets us ready for 2027 when the actual thing arrives. That's what I'm saying. Way too suspicious to change it from the dish or whatever to disclosure. What a terrible name for a movie. I'm sorry? Not a great name.

I just don't know any other time that it has been this prevalent and this accepted where I remember talking about UFOs at Christmas dinner 10 years ago. And my mom would be like, stop, stop, stop, don't talk about it. Now, you know, it's on C-SPAN. You know, that you're watching, I don't know when else's entertainment that I've sat down and watched a joint oversight committee, you know, talking and whatever. I mean, I sat there and watched it if it was the Super Bowl. Yeah. The world has changed rapidly and is changing quicker. And I think AI is just going to push it further.

It gets harder and harder to hide things. But you had briefings like that happen post, you know, 1952 and the flap that happened over Washington. as well. You had a general or whatever on TV talking about, you know, we don't know what these things are. They're not ours. You know what I mean? So it feels like history a little bit to a certain extent is repeating itself over and over again. It does seem like we're getting closer. But the one thing that is coming more and more clear for me is that disclosure is not going to come in the form of like some redacted document. And it's not going to come from any figure. head telling you, whether a president or whether anyone else, it'll come from a personal belief system. You know, if I told you, oh, I have irrefutable proof of Jesus Christ, will that make you believe in Jesus? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And I think that you just hit it is that it took me wanting to know sleight of hand to go down the rabbit hole to accept books that I never thought I would read and go down rabbit holes and everything that I'd go down because I found it was a way that I understood it and it was a way that worked for me. And I think that I still sound like a crazy person when I talk to my wife about it or anything like that because you're trying to conceptualize volumes of books in a two-minute conversation before their eyes glaze over. And you're trying to get those bullet points out. It made sense to me. I think that every person's going to come to it on their own accord of what makes sense to them. But it challenged my belief system. It all started with double lifts and cards. And I was like, how do

they do that. And now here we are years later and I am, you know, probably spent my kids college fun on esoteric texts and, you know, ritualistic documentation, all for the same reason. I want to understand why people believe this, why they think it and how it works. But it will be unique and individual for everyone. At least right now it will be until the... Until Spielberg puts out his movie. Until there's a UFO on the lawn. Yeah. On the lawn of the White House. Exactly. Exactly. I'm going to go start. We got some questions here coming in from the members. So if you're a member for five bucks a month, you can become a member of the Area 52 team, basically become an intern and you have access to so many different things. Oh, look at this guy. He's a real member. Yeah. So you guys, yeah, you guys can check that

out. And with the membership, you get all sorts of cool stuff, but namely you get to ask our guest or you get the opportunity to ask her guest a question. If you give me a second, I'm going to go turn that on. My mom told me a cool story. My mom was a, I found out recently my mom had a secret, she had a top secret clearance. She never told me until she was in her mid-70s. She worked at a, I'm telling you this is, I don't think this is, you shouldn't put this on. Okay, got it. She was a secretary, and she had to get clearance, and it took six months of interviews with

her neighbors, her parents. She said that every time that she would leave work, she would have to take the typewriter ribbon out of the typewriter and send it into a bank tube that went up and she said one day after three months of working there she got called into an office and she said there was like six men there and she's never seen them before they had their arms crossed and they had like six typewriter ribbons out and they made her sit down and they said um what were you tasked to do here and her job was take dictations type the dictations out uh or handwritten letters and type them out and then send them to the person she was correcting the grammar and the

shit. And so she was correcting the misspellings and grammar that was code. And so by by correcting the grammar, they thought that she was fucking blah, blah, blah, but they were looking at the typewriter ribbon things. And I just found this out of my mom recently. I had no idea. It was a military, it was a military weapons thing. But it's so crazy. My mom had clearance. No idea. That's good. You don't want to leave that in? Ah, fuck it. You can say it. Mom, sorry. I think you're fine now. I couldn't resist. No, I don't want to play a game. I would, I would be the first one that I in a saw movie. I am a I am terrified of blood and violence.

I had to. All right. Yeah. There will be no blood sacrifices for me. All right. First question here from the members. What is your most prized occult piece in your collection by Hex? Um,

my most prized piece of my collection. I have a, I don't know, I guess you would call it like lecture notes, um, of a secret society. and their meeting notes from 1928 that is the basis of the world that I built called The Tension Experience.

The Tension Experience is the immersive theater show. And take a cold out for a second. It's a very simple premise. It's a, the show is about a family is trying to pull their daughter out of a cult. And you as an audience member are going into a compound to get her out. But I wanted to populate it with real belief and real thought and what this organization believed in. And I was at a flea market and I found a folder. And in this folder, there was this, it's not that it's so old that it should be doing this, but it crumbles when you touch it.

So it's the paper is very cheap and it crumbles. I used the art. I used the diagrams and I used about 80% of the text to base all of the tension experience and the sequels that I made on that. What was it called? Brotherhood of I'm trying to remember the last name because now it's framed on a wall so I should know the name of it and I don't

because I'm scared of breaking it but it was Dionne Fortune who is a famous occultist it was one of her lecture series and they formed like it formed its own like offshoot she wrote there's a bunch of books one of them

is a practical occultism sane occultism but that and it almost looks like like something from a Freemasonry lodge or a magician's lecture notes. You know, like old old days, magicians do the lecture notes. So it was individual pamphlets. I think that to me, just because it was such an important thing for me and my narrative

to be able to try for my first time to say, I'm not going to do the Hollywood bastardization of what I had been about, oh, it's the devil and it's black magic. And it wasn't like that. It was more philosophical and internal than it was outward and, like, ridiculous. So I would say that by far is probably the coolest thing that I have. That's awesome. Great question, Hax. All right.

By Gina here coming up. Gina got heater questions. Love this question. Think disclosure would kill horror or feed it? There was a great question, Gina. There was a thing done recently about the pandemic, and it was conducted. I want to say it was University of Chicago. They realized that people that were fans of horror,

had a much easier time dealing with the pandemic than people that were not. And the reason why is because as a horror fan, you immerse yourself in the macabre and the horrible. Zombies attacking a cabin, aliens coming down, and you live through that horror. And I think that, to me, the horror audience is probably the most grounded, rational group of people because they live out their fantasies on screen

and then they're done with them. But if you look at, trends of horror. I think every time that there is a world war, every time that there is a great tragedy, there is an influx of horror because it allows us to work out our anxiety, our fears are paranoious,

on the screen. So, no, I don't think it would kill horror. I think that it would feed it and it would fuel it. But I would think if there was, at least for me, if disclosure happened, I would probably, I don't know if I'd make it in the horror film, I would be fascinated with, I'd go down that rabbit hole like I did in 11-11 and lose my mind again.

And I think that, but no, I don't think it would, I only get anything's ever going to kill horror. That's a great question. That's a really good question. Yeah. I love that too, that the idea that it would feed it more in order for us to cope. To cope with it, to understand it, to work through our own trauma. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. All right, Tess. We got a question from Tess here. Great question again, Tess. This is awesome. You guys came in with clutch questions. questions this week. What are the most efficient psychological tactics you've utilized to manufacture

fear? That's a, these are all great questions. Tess, to answer your question, I'm going to go back to my immersive stuff, because I think for me, as I've gotten older, it's much harder for me to scare someone in a movie screen because you know you're sitting in an AMC theater, right? You're a Cinemark or a Scotia Bank. There's popcorn. There's sodas. You're watching actors. So to me, it's harder for me to suspend disbelief. So, for me, it is breaking the fourth wall and becoming meta. And what that means is, is, you know, we were talking about War of the Worlds earlier. And, you know, when you can get with someone and have them question, is this real? Is this, is this a hoax? Is this an Umo hoax? Or is it real? Inserting the idea that maybe I'm an unreliable narrator and some of this could be real is to me the way that I found to affect people the most. And how I use it with theater is, imagine you're going to go to a haunted house

and you know that in this haunted house there's a demented nurse and you get in the haunted house and you're chased around with the demented nurse and she's got a syringe in her hand and you might get scared because she's chasing you, but imagine if she hit you with the syringe and then she stopped and she called the safe word and all the

lights of the haunted house came on and all of a sudden the stage manager comes out with a microphone and he says, can I see your arm please? You need to come with me and you're taken backstage and they're looking at your arm and next thing, an ambulance show up. And next thing, they're giving you a sailing bag. That is the stuff we do. We take your idea of what you're going into. I'm going into a haunted house with a nurse and we break the fourth wall and say that was not supposed to happen. You've just been hit with something you should

not have been hit with. So we do things of breaking the fourth wall and becoming meta. And when you do that, you begin to make people question, is this part of it? Is this? And there's a great Clive Barker book. Clive Barker wrote Hellbound Heart. A lot of people know it as Hellraiser. But you wrote a book called Mr. Be Gone. And it's really good. It's taken from the standpoint of a demon. And that book is written to you, almost like there's a monster at the end of this book, the demon starts talking to you the reader. So on chapter one, it might say, you think you're so clever reading this book, I will come to you later. And on chapter three, it says, last night, did you hear me? I was the one in your wall, the one that you misrepresented as a mouse moving around. It was me. And so you're reading the book,

and it's talking to you. And I think to me that is so terrifying to me when I can't tell the difference between was that supposed to happen or not so i use that a lot now is becoming meta and breaking the fourth wall that's so great and terrifying i'm just trying to imagine when as you were talking about the nurse chasing the lights going on i was like yeah no dude i'd say you go wait is this part of it no it couldn't be they wouldn't go this far and then all these other psychological filters can i can i share one that i did yeah that nurse one wasn't real but i'll tell you what i did do in the tension experience I told you it's kind of this, and you are indoctrinated into a cult.

And one of the things you have to do is your final act is you have to take this pill, blindly take a pill. And they're gel caps. There's nothing in them. But you're put into a room, and we break you apart from your group, and there's only two or three of you in there.

And they put a pill in front of you, and you're told you have to take it if you want to continue. And everyone takes it 100% of the time. Every fifth people that would come through every fifth group, you would hear, so they would take the pill, and then you would hear something outside the door, and there'd be screaming, and you would hear LAPD, LAPD,

and all the lights would come on in the building. And then you would see flashlights going around, and the door would kick in, it would be LAT officers. They would take the actor, who just did that, and put them on the ground. They would make you stand up, and they would shine a flashlight. Have you eaten or consumed anything? Did they give you anything to eat or drink?

Yes, what did you? It took a pill. Listen, we have three people in here. They've been given the pill, and you would take it outside where there were paramedics. Now, we did that, and in that moment, you saw their actors, you saw call sheets up, You saw all of that, but you saw LAPD officers.

That, to me, was one of the most impactful things because it didn't happen to everyone. It happened every fifth time. So that to me was something pretty exciting. You're in the business of messing people up for life. Exactly. Well, this thing is that I'm a filmmaker and I want to create emotions. And it's harder for me to create emotions when you know that you're watching a movie that is designed to scare you. I can gross you out very easy, but it's really scare you.

I got to get inside your head. And that brings you back to magic a little bit too. It's all magic. It's tricks. Yes. It is knowing the psychology of your audience. That's right. Because if in a magic trick or even in an entertainment hypnotic sort of demonstration,

if you didn't believe that I was able to hypnotize you, but then I hypnotized a person beside you who you knew, that would make you be hypnotizable. so to speak. So you're also creating this idea like, oh my God, I just talk to that person, something's happening to them and they're actually convulsing or whatever that is. You know, like that's another layer of reality. I have become a better filmmaker and storyteller since learning books on slide of hand and understanding how tricks are conceived and done. I mean, I remember even going back into Thurston

and old, like the old magicians, like realized in the psychology they would use to create that astonishment of an audience, I've just transferred into the filmmaking and theater that I do now. And what lengths they would go through. It's, uh, there's what the old proverb that says, a magician is just somebody who spends an unreasonable amount of time doing, you know, doing something. That's it. Um, yeah, that it, you know, I've, I'm, I often think of, you know, to, to explain what magic is to people sometimes, magic isn't only, because we talk about angles, right? Angles are a big part of magic and knowing your angle. So if you're being surrounded, so if you're being surrounded. Well, you're not flashing or. Yeah. But if you're a, if you're a magician with

enough under your belt, you can flash. Thing is, you might be, you, you might have to manufacture what it is you're flashing. By flashing, we mean like showing the method behind something, right? So if I'm aware that someone's behind me, I might do something where purposely they get to see something. But I'm now manipulating what it is they're seeing. So their explanation of what happened can be canceled out with the next performance. You just hit on exactly, you brought this full circle again. There's a, there's a magician named Mike Pashota. He performs the Magic Castle, yeah.

He has one of the greatest things where I gave you a horror version of what I did. I'm going to give you a non-horror version of the same idea that came from magic. He does a trick where he, I don't think I'm, if I'm revealing a magician's code, beat me out here. I don't think I am. He asks three people to come up with a card and you do it together. So it's not like a magician's choice. actually saying, you give me a number, you give me a color, you give me a suit. And then he goes, I knew you were going to say that. And he pulls out a card from his pocket. And when he does it,

he flashes and he's got a what's called a pocket index. And in that pocket index, it's every card. And he puts it down and he's like, oh, should I flash? He flashes the back of a bunch of cards. Yeah. And he goes, I flashed it, and you're like, yeah. And he's like, oh, that's all right. And he pulls out all the cards and they're all the same card. So you thought he flashed, but he didn't. That was part of the thing. But your mind breaks at that point because you thought you saw something you shouldn't have seen. That's right. It's the same idea. He broke the fourth wall. He became meta with it by breaking the trick to say, did I just flash? And then he goes one step further and your mind just breaks further. And he was in control all along. All the time. And that to me

is the magic that I take now into the storytelling that I do and how I use psychology to fuck with an audience member. That's right. And that's the best magicians is what they do. Max Malini, you know, off to the lengths that this guy went through. This is like 100 years ago, but he would invite people over. He would have like 20 people over for this feast, this beautiful feast, right? Like this big turkey dinner. And the turkey would be sitting on a table and everything's like, oh, everybody's hungry. And the discussion, he would psychologically manipulate the discussion to the occult a little bit to where we'd start talking about bringing people back from the dead.

But he wouldn't bring it up. They would bring it up through conversation. psychological and social sort of tricks. And, you know, and he would go, I could, I could do that. I'm a magician. I could bring somebody back from the dead. They go, you never know. There's no way, Max, that you could do that. And everybody would start arguing. All right, well, the turkey's on the table.

So he would say, so he would say, yeah, watch this. And all of a sudden, he grabbed the turkey and the turkey would just start, no feathers running across the table. I love it. Everybody's freaking out. They're screaming. There's pandemonium. And guess what?

There's no turkey dinner now because he turned the turkey live. And the thing was, he hypnotized the turkey. He plucked the turkey's feather. He made it look like it was a cooked turkey. Oh, that's not where I thought you were going with the story. Holy shit. Yeah.

And so it was all for a trick. Well, so he would manipulate the conversation into that. Then the turkey would get up and start. And so everybody thinks he just brought back a turkey to life. And now, guess what? There's no real turkey. that's going to be served. That was the supper. So no one gets dinner. And this goes where I think all these things connect now. My office, like I mentioned, it's got these weird esoteric books and it's got

magic books. One of the thing that I've done, I figured out I could never be a slide of hand artist like yourself. And I can stare at your hands and I know what you're doing and I still can't figure it out. I understand the methods. But I'm a storyteller, right? I'm a storyteller and my hope as a storytellers, I can elicit a reaction. I can get an emotion out of you. So in my office, I have designed numerous arcane-looking occult paraphernalia that's magic tricks that I have made specifically. I'm going to give the guy a plugs, Lebanon Circle is his thing, and he makes these amazing tricks. And you'll see like a Victorian Ashes box, or you'll see this old arcane-looking hourglass. And so what happens is when people over at my house, inevitably something will come up about the occult,

because you'll see my books. And then I'll say, you know, I dabble in magic. And then I will use real magic things from real occult that I have read and used. And I will turn it into something in my room that is already ready to go because I have 20 things in my room ready to go. And depending on where you're looking, what you're doing. And what I'll do is I will create horror in that moment because it doesn't look set up in the same way that he would hypnotize a turkey. That's right. And you hear those stories about, oh, my God.

The actor, he did a 52. to Ricky Jay. You know, I've read these amazing stories about him where he did the equivalent of the fishbowl trick with ice, where he would show up to a diner and have this huge giant slab of ice and he would do this insane setup for this just one person trick. I thought, I love that to me because it allows me to be a horror storyteller in my office and get under somebody's skin in a way they were not expecting. If I pulled out of that cards and so let me show you a trick, no. In this case, it is what is that weird Egyptian thing over there? Oh, I got that in Egypt. and it's supposedly this cursed object.

Leave it alone for two hours. And then two hours later, they're looking at it after a little wine and like, what do you mean it's cursed? Boom, there's the magic trick. Yeah. And I think to me that is the sweet spot. And again, it combines my love of storytelling the occult magic's light of hand, psychology. Yeah, and that's why we see, you know, and I reference it a lot, but we see it a lot with intelligence agencies. Absolutely.

They do the same. They do sci op, which is a magic trick. We, in the tension experience, we hired a few people in the military. about how to do psychological torture. And it's not what I thought. It's not waterboarding. It's none of that. It is how to get under someone's skin very quickly

and make them uncomfortable through, it could be a fluctuation of temperature. It could be a specific frequency that's plain, that just unnerves you just a little bit. And when you compound these things, one after another after another, it will create a feeling in you. And I think that that is absolutely.

I mean, that's fascinating. All right, we got one last one here. Great questions, bud. the way, guys. And this might be something we've already kind of answered, but maybe we can touch on it one last time from UFO in the know. How has Hollywood shaped the public's perception on the UFO phenomenon? I think it's taken something that was at one point considered fringe and made it mainstream.

And it's done it not overnight. It's done it over the course of decades. whether it's introducing a little alien that lives in a CIA officer's house in a cartoon fashion like an American dad, the Seth thing, whether it is E.T. who's a friendly extraterrestrial, or whether it's Skinwalker Ranch that you are inundated. And I think what was at the Super Bowl, there was like three separate ads about Martin Scorsese was added. It's like there are all of these things that it has become mainstream now. And so, if anything, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's gotten us ready. It's, it's made it a conversation that that happens that you're not, like I said, the eyes don't glaze over as much anymore. Um, you know, reputable people at a reputable schools, uh, Gary Nolan, whoever that is, you can now, uh, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can have a, this, you know, this prestigious career and, and be focused on anomalies like that. That, that wasn't like that all the time.

So I think a lot of it has to do with Hollywood, arts, entertainment, books, making it okay to have this conversation now because it's so, it is so mainstream. Yeah, absolutely. And that's been part of the goal of this channel too, is just to help have the conversation. You know, a lot of people, they watch the videos here and they're like, well, Chris, you know, you're not conducting an actual investigation. I was like, no, this isn't an actual, I'm not an actual detective that lives in the 50s. You know, I do this for a part. Part of it is entertainment, but I also understand the value that entertainment provides because so many people can regurgitate information at you. But if you're not creating it in a way that they want to absorb it, then that is for not.

I think that you have to create a world. And that's why that's what I love doing. That's what you love doing in a world where people want to willingly be a part and learn, you know. You've opened the door to conversation. And I think that that is, is I'm nowhere near. any, I said to you jokingly that this is the episode that jumps the shark because you've had the top of the top of the top people in this field. But UFOs extend far past scientists. It goes to filmmakers and it goes to moms at, you know, soccer moms at home. And I think they all have stories about why. What is it about them? And I think my avenue into it is different than, you know, the person you had last week or the person you're going to have next week. And I think that's fascinating because those that are listening. listening and watching have their own story. And I think that conversation is important to hopefully get to Spielberg releasing

2026's actual disclosure and shows everyone that we're ready for it and we can handle it. Absolutely. Speaking of which, are you ever going to make a alien UFO-related movie? I, this is really funny that you mentioned this. Every movie that I make, there is 20 that don't end up happening that I'm attached to. either I'm fired, uh, it goes over budget or the thing just falls apart.

There is one right now that I can tell, I'll tell you the premise off the air. I'm sorry, I can't talk about it, but it is, uh, a movie that you referenced tonight. It's, it's,

it's this cousin of that movie. Um, but it's, uh, yes, and I think it combines all of my fascinations, uh, very much a nod in the way of coast to coast. Um, it's, uh, it's a human way into it.

But it, it, it, it, it, it, it, absolutely, is a alien thing. That's awesome. We'll see if it happens, though. Give it a couple years.

Well, we're all sending you our positive vibes out there on this happening. We'd love to have you back here. Let's make an Umo movie together. We'll go do that. I'll go figure out the Umo thing. As long as we don't get it, as long as you can't film in that building.

I'm going to give you the address so you go, look at the house and tell me if there's anything that happens to you there. Well, I'm actually going to Barcelona, I think, in September. I will get you in that house. I want you just to go. Dude. All right.

I might have to do a pit stop. up. You know, I might be, actually, I might be going with a UFO friend. So that might be interesting. Darren, are you down to stick around for some overtime chats? Let's do it. All right. Folks, if you want to become a member and come check out the rest of our conversation, feel free to do so. Link below, click the join button. Darren, thank you so much for joining us today. It was an absolute pleasure, folks. If you want to go check out Darren's latest project, which I highly recommend, is it Darren and Josh make a movie or Josh and Darren make a movie? He got the short straw. He did. It's a DJ make a movie on all social media as in the website. You can find us on iTunes podcast or whatever. Yeah, I'll put the link below. Very much looking forward to that. And thank you so much for coming out here. It's great to be in the skiff, man. It's crazy. It's crazy. A little star struck in here.

Good to have you, man. Thanks so much. And thanks, guys. We'll see on the next one.