Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - Pilot Took Mushrooms Before His Flight - The Joe Emerson story

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Joe Emerson is a pilot who took a flight and intensionally tried to crash the plane to wake himself up from a bad dream.

Imagine you're on a flight and it's in the air and a pilot in the cockpit suddenly decides, I'm going to crash this plane. And this would unalive you and everyone else on it. Now the pilot, his name's Joe. And Joe, he's a commercial airline pilot. He's been doing it a while and he likes this job. But one day, boom, Joe gets hit with some terrible news. His best friend Scott just suddenly passed away from a heart problem.

And Joe is devastated, like this is his best friend and he's never lost somebody close to him. And he takes this really hard and pretty quickly he starts getting depressed and he starts drinking heavily to deal with it. And as the years go by, his depression only gets worse, especially around the yearly anniversary of Scott's passing. And eventually Joe's wife is like, you're not doing well. I think you should talk to a professional. So he does. He goes to see a therapist. and therapist tells him to consider seeing a psychiatrist and getting on antidepressants.

Here's the thing, though. Apparently, if a commercial pilot goes on antidepressants, the airline will no longer allow them to fly, and he would have to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to keep his job. I guess it's their policy. So Joe's like, nah, bro, and he doesn't take any meds. He doesn't want to lose his job. Instead, he just keeps working all the time and self-medicating with alcohol.

And almost six years have passed since Joe lost his best friend and he's still feeling it. And at one point, he flies to Washington State to be with his other friends. I guess they're going to have a memorial for Scott. And during this memorial, in remembrance of Scott, Joe and his friends, they do a lot of partying. Like, a lot of partying. And the group decides they're going to do what we'll call medicinal mushrooms. Joe's never done this before, but he's like, all right. And so he takes these mushrooms and he starts feeling pretty, pretty good.

And he stays up all night and he's having a lot of fun. And a few days later, it's time for him to leave Washington and go back home. And allegedly he's been going hard. Like he hasn't slept in like 40 hours or something like that. And he goes to the airport and he gets on a plane and he's ready to fly out of there. But he's still allegedly kind of tripping from the mushrooms from a few days before. Like they're still in his system or something. Now, he's not on duty, but because he's a pilot, he's going to ride for free in the cockpit jump seat.

That's where off-duty pilots sit when they take a flight and they're not piloting. And as the plane takes off and it's in the air, Joe starts to get a really bad feeling. A feeling like he's trapped in this airplane and he'll never be able to get out. And suddenly, bam, a bad trip hits him like a freight train. And Joe feels like he's stuck in a nightmare. Like none of what he's experiencing is reality. Like the pilots flying the plane aren't really pilots. And he doesn't know what to do.

And he believes the only way out of this is to make himself wake up. And that is when he looks up to the ceiling of the plane and he sees two red handles. Those red handles are fire extinguisher handles. They're also designed to shut down the engines of the plane in an emergency. And Joe decides that in order to wake himself up, he needs to pull the levers and crash the aircraft. So he stands up and he reaches out and he pulls both of those handles. And the two pilots in the cockpit, they see this and they're like, what the fuck? And they immediately jump up and grab Joe and they pull him away.

And one of them quickly pushes the handles back in again. And this restores the fuel flow to the engines. And so the engines are working properly again. Close call. And I guess the human touch brings Joe back into his body. And so he stands up and he leaves the cockpit and he walks to the back of the plane and he sits in a flight attendants jump seat. And he tells the flight attendant to handcuff him

because this is going to get really bad. And so the flight attendants restrain his hands with flex cuff, which is like zip ties. And he's sitting there in the jump seat and I guess he's still like, I gotta wake up from this bad dream. And he grabs a whole ass pot of coffee near him and he starts drinking straight out of it.

And the poor flight attendants, they're trying to calm him down and they have no idea he was just in the cockpit trying to crash the plane. But then he reaches over toward the emergency exit and he wants to get it open so that he can jump out. Because he's like, ah, jumping out will certainly wake me up. Now luckily, the crew stops him by gently removing his hands from the door and distracting him with a bit of conversation. Now at this point, the pilots have diverted the flight to Portland because they're like, we got to get this guy the hell off this plane.

And they land and police officers come on board and they escort Joe off the plane. This is actually some footage of that. and there he is there. And so, bam, Joe is arrested. And I don't have a mugshot, but here is a photo of him detained. And he's charged with 83 counts of attempted murder and reckless endangerment, and his pilot's license is suspended, and he gets out on bail, and he's apparently clean now,

so no more mushrooms before traveling. And he and his wife have since started a nonprofit to advocate and help pilots get treated for depression. And ultimately, lucky for him, the federal court drops his attempted murder charges, but his trial for some of the other charges is still pending as of the date of me making this video. So good luck to them.