Sense of Soul - Premonitions of an Extraordinary Journey

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

We had the pleasure to have the most amazing conversation with Lionel Friedberg about his new, most extraordinary book, Forever in My Veins: How Film Led Me To The Mysterious World Of The African Shaman. Lionel is an Emmy Award-winning, Columbus Film Festival Award-winning and American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Westinghouse Award-winning who began his journey in South Africa. Throughout his amazing life, he has specialized in documentaries, filming all over the world and winning numerous awards including a Primetime Emmy Award for cinematography. He has worked for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the National Geographic Society, Discovery Channel, Arts & Entertainment cable network (A&E), American Movie Classics (AMC), The History Channel, regional television stations and many corporate clients. He is the author of three non-fiction books and is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestselling author. He is a vegan, environmentalist and supporter of numerous animal rights causes. His interests include ancient history, cosmology, aviation, classical music, collecting rare motion picture soundtracks, investigations into the nature of human consciousness and studies of the paranormal. Pick up this amazing book now! Forever in My Veins: How Film Led Me To The Mysterious World Of The African Shaman available on Amazon. www.mysenseofsoul.com

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mamby. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today we have with us an Emmy award-winning producer and New York Times best-selling author, Lionel Friedberg. Lionel has spent 50 years making films. He has worked for PBS, National Geographic Society, Discovery Channel, A&E, History Channel, just to name a few. His interests include ancient history, investigations into the nature of human consciousness, to the paranormal, and everything in between. He has received numerous awards for both his books and films. This intro seriously could last all day because this man is truly amazing and we are so very honored to have him with us today to talk about his latest book and his journey. Welcome Lionel. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure and it's

my privilege to be on your show. Thank you. Your life story is truly amazing. I thought it's going to sound pretty arrogant of me to set this down, you know, like boastful, look what I've done. And then I thought, you know, it's really not about that. I want to share this with people because I think people may take some degree of hope and optimism from what I have experienced. And I just wanted to give it out, you know, share it. It's not about, you know, telling folks what I've done, but it's what we're all capable of being and doing and learning and experiencing.

That's what it's about. That's one of the reasons why we started our podcast because at first we didn't have a lot of resources to go to when it came to asking some of the questions that we were asking. And we're like, well, who do we talk to? We had each other. And so we were like, you know what? We should talk about this so people don't feel alone.

Oh, absolutely. You know, and to kind of go through the journey out loud so that other people could join in with us. Well, kudos to you guys for doing this. I totally admire you for having done this. People need this and they need a resource to go to like what you are now providing. It's essential. I have learned that the learning process never ends. It's a continuous journey of discovery. And the more you go, the more amazing it is.

You talk about Shannon and I's favorite things. I mean, UFOs, near-death experiences, your journey throughout different countries. When you think about your life as a whole, are you like, wow, I mean, if there was one word you could pick to describe your life, what would it be? I guess the only word that I could use is just very blessed and very privileged to have gone through all of that. How did your journey start? Like who were you as a child? My memories go back to the age of about three or four. So we're talking about still the late 40s and then of course the 50s. And that was apartheid was alive and well in all its ugliness in South Africa. And that's the world I grew up in. But of course, I lived in a very privileged white society. We all had servants.

It was iniquitous beyond belief. That's how it was. And it was by law that there would be no contact. The twain never met between white or black. It was a dreadful society in which to grow up in. And I kind of became aware of that at a very, very young age, about five or six years old. One of my nannies said to me one day, I think it was a day off. And at that time, we were living in a small town just to the east of Johannesburg. She said to me, I'm going to visit a friend this afternoon. You want to come with me?

And so we walked down the road at another house and there was another domestic servant, a black lady who lived also, as our servant did, in a little tiny room at the back of the yard, in the backyard, you know, minuscule size with nothing more than a little cold shower and a tiny little toilet. When we got there, there were a couple of people waiting outside her friend's room. The door was closed. And she said, we have to wait a bit because she's seeing some people and we have to wait. She said, it won't be long because she's a doctor to these people. And I thought, what? What does that mean? You know, and I'm this little kid. The doctor for me is a guy who was in a white coat.

He used to arrive in his car in his black bag and he said, what do you mean? When these two people ahead of us went into a room, they both came out carrying little satchels, little brown paper bags, carrying something. Didn't know what that was all about. Eventually, we went inside this room. And this was my first exposure to the magic of the African healing system.

The paradigm of healing in Africa is extraordinary because it's all done by communicating with the ancestors. That's how they work, these healers. Whether it's to diagnose a disease or tell about a future event or find out about where somebody has lost something or you know prescription for some kind of medicine they do all of that and so they go by the name of sangoma i think it's originally a zulu word you know when and the word is healer that's what it

means so it turns out that this little woman who was a servant in this house had been trained as a Sangoma and she saw other people in the area in order to prescribe little medicines. Because in her tiny room on little shelves around the room were lots of little bottles and jars and containers with herbs and sticks and, you know, little pebbles and stuff. I had no idea what half of them were. Animal skins, all kinds of strange smells. So my nanny said to him, why don't you tell him what you do? And she said, yeah. And on this mat was an animal skin bag. And she picked it up and she shook it like this. And she said, inside here are the bones. Like six years old. And I'm saying, what do you mean the bones? And she said, oh, there are lots of bones here from all kinds of of animals and these little bones all fell out now I'm not talking about big bones these are little tiny knuckle bones and you know small bones from from various animals now

every Sangoma has a requirement because they are taught by someone you know an older person who is ordained in the system and And it takes years to learn the craft. They have to have a lion bone, a hyena bone, I think a bone from a crocodile. And each one means and signifies something. But then as all of these people practice their craft, they can add their own little bits and pieces to it. Whatever speaks to them or whatever allows them

to make contact with their ancestral spirits which are the guides who tell them what to do and say and see and prescribe that's how it works what she does she pulls them on the on the mat and she said and i can understand what they tell me where the bones fell in a pattern apparently spoke to her, you know. And I'm totally intrigued. This sounds like, you know, mythology. Incredible. Imagine a child being told this stuff. That was the beginning of my first introduction to the mystique and the mysteries of medicine in Africa,

which now has become pretty profound and intense because since then I have experienced the most extraordinary things with these shamans, these healers in Africa. It has been an amazing experience, but that was the beginning of it. Now I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to tell you how this eventually went. I completed my education, finished high school, and the year is now 1960, and my parents, I was an only child the apartheid system was really pretty tough and my father he thought the apartheid system was absolutely dreadful he said you know we can't live under this anymore he eventually took a job running a stall in a country called northern Rhodesia which was way to the north two countries away up there was southern Rhodesia

named after Cecil Rhodes the the great land grabber, in order to increase the size of the British Empire. And then beyond Southern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia is today Zimbabwe. And beyond that was Northern Rhodesia, which today is the Republic of Zambia. My father got a job there. He was a watchmaker by trade. He learned his trade fixing watches. It was a mining area. They mined for copper up there. So there were a string of little towns called the Copper Belt. When my folks decided to move, I wanted to go with them. And I'll tell you why. Because my mother, bless her soul, loved the movies. And she would drag me to see the movies right from the time I was a kid, four, five years

old. I fell in love with Esther Williams and Red Skelton and all these people and Carmen Miranda and all those amazing Technicolor you know musicals and I thought that's what I want to do with my life so when I first decided to to leave South Africa my mother said now you go to university and you get yourself a life and you get yourself a degree you know and go and do something respectable but I had been given a little movie camera by a cousin of mine a used one that you know he got his he got a new one and he gave me this and it changed my life because from the age of 11 onwards I was making my own home movies about school events to my kids my friends birthday parties and things like that so I thought wow now is the opportunity for me to

go and make my movies about Tarzan and the African queen and King Solomon's mines and all of those wonderful adventure films in darkest Africa. That's what I could do. You know, I mean, you know, what did I, I was, I was a teenager straight out of school, the audacity of even thinking that. So anyway, so I went up there with them. And when I arrived, you know, I looked around and I thought, oh, my, what is, you know, where am I? I am in the middle of the African bush. There was a sea of forests from horizon to horizon and copper towns, copper mining towns. Nothing else. What am I going to do here? I was horrified. And I thought, well, you know, maybe I really should go back to South Africa. But then a miracle happened.

Manor came from heaven. Somebody was listening to me because one day in the local newspaper, they were advertising for staff for a new television station that they were going to open up. Now, there was no television in that part of the world, not even in South Africa at that point. Oh, really? By the way, South Africa didn't get television until 1976, would you believe? Holy shit, that's when we were born. And let me tell you why. The reason why it took so long before South Africa got television, because under the apartheid regime, the white government, heaven forbid that the black community should see how the

rest of the world was living. And so they were denied the opportunity of being able to, you know, so I mean, for example, the landing on the moon, we didn't see that live, the rest of the world did. But I used to go, I used to go to the American American embassy they used to get footage that during the Apollo program and I used to go there to watch the movies about Apollo 11 so I saw Neil Armstrong walk on the surface of the moon three days after it happened you have a picture with him and I eventually got to work with the guy yeah I mean that's amazing I love it what a dream no big deal no big deal yeah so I see this ad and I thought I got to get a job at the station I will I will pay them to employ me they were still building the station now this was the first television station in central Africa um and I got a job I got an interview, and they hired me.

The main staff all came from the UK, all of them, the producers, the engineers, came from abroad. But there were people, you know, drivers and people to look after the props department, whatever else that they were hiring locally. Mainly, they were really looking for, you know, servants and people to do the dirty work. But I got a job in the props department, looking after cereals and, you know, you know, servants and people to do the dirty work. But I got a job in the props

department, looking after cereals and, you know, little trinkets and things and all that were used on live advertising programs. We had live advertising shows. So-and-so has got a special offer today on Coca-Cola, you know, and that kind of stuff. So I was taking care of the props bit of it. After six months of that, I said to the manager, I said, you've got to put me behind one of these cameras or I'm out of here. They liked me. They liked what I did. They allowed me to get behind one of the cameras. And he said, yeah, that's not bad.

You know, I've been shooting movies for a long, long time. I knew how to compose pictures and I knew how to get them quickly. So I was good at what I did. And my life was amazing. It was incredible so this was going on for three years and I was having a ball because in the mornings we had live broadcasts educational broadcasts to local schools for black children where there was a shortage of teachers in the vernacular languages and in the afternoon we had live programs of black culture for tribal people in the area so we used to have truckloads of people arriving

with musicians dancing and drumming, wearing their traditional tribal costumes. It was extraordinary. And at night we would have I Love Lucy and Lever to Beaver and Bonanza and all of that for the white community. So I was living in the surreal world in this television station. It was a gas. I tell you, it was absolutely amazing. And then one day, it was the tail end of colonialism. Britain was giving away all its colonies. And Northern Rhodesia was one of them that was going to become independent. And so Northern Rhodesia was in the process of transitioning from Northern Rhodesia to a black independently ruled black republic, the Republic of Zambia. When that happened, the new government decided that the white staff working on the television

station had to go. It was time to put local people in those positions, which is totally understandable. So one day we all got pink slips. You got to leave. Got to get out of the station. You have six months. You will train a local person to take over your job. And then thank you very much for what you've done. But out of here, because your job is going to be Zambianized by a local person. We didn't argue with it. None of us, because we understood that this was inevitable.

And it was fine with all of us. I mean, the country had now become independent. Give these people the opportunity to run their own show, you know? Wow. But the big dilemma for me was, what am I going to do? Now, of course, what I really wanted to do

was to end up in Hollywood and make movies in Hollywood. And here I am stuck in the middle of Africa. How do you do that? You know? So I had no choice but to consider going back to South Africa where there was quite a thriving film industry and of course as was always the case in the in the days of colonialism you know that we all had servants and and even there up in the

in the wilds of Africa we had a young black guy he wasn't much older than me who worked for us next day I went to him and I said to him David I, I said, you know, I've lost my job. What do I do? What should I do with my life? And he understood that. And I said, I don't want to go back to South Africa because, you know, there was apartheid there. And David, who was a member of the Bemba ethnic group, he understood exactly what I was saying. And he understood my righteousness to return back to South Africa and he said well let me see if I can find someone who can help you make up your mind and then in a couple of days go by it goes by and eventually he says to me I found someone and on Thursday or whatever day it was I will take you to a person who will tell you what to do

in my little sick VW Beetle on this dirt road to the outskirts of a town called Andola, which sits in the middle of the bush. And there's a little settlement out there in the bush. And on the edge of the settlement was a single house. Then David said, this is the place. This is the place, park here, which we did. And he went and knocked on the door. And the door was opened by this little shriveled up

ancient old woman. It was a hot day, but she had a blanket over her and she wore a trench coat. And the interesting thing about her is that she was an albino. She had more of a white hue to her skin than black. Often those people are despised by the tribes. In fact, there are parts of Africa where if you're born an albino, you're regarded as a freak. But often those people are respected because similar things used to happen with many of the tribes here in North America. If you had a problem like that, or for example, if you had homosexual tendencies in the tribe, and if you've ever seen Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman, you should

see that. If you haven't seen that movie, you've got to see that movie. It's amazing because there's a guy who's a member of this Indian tribe, and he's gay. And the old man, the chief of the tribe, says, yeah, he is selected by the Great Spirit to teach us. So if you're not normal, it's often regarded as being that you're special. You're selected for a particular task. And the minute I walked inside that room, I flashed back to my childhood because on the walls were all these shelves and all these containers and

all these bottles and little things containing twigs and herbs and whatever else. And on the floor was a grass mat and on the grass mat was an animal skin bag. And I knew, ah, they used to use derogatory terms of witch doctor and, you all that stuff as though they were you know to be despised uh very very derogatory and and and uh you know um awful way of of looking at it but we knew nothing white knew nothing about what what was really going on uh in in this world so i you know um so i immediately recognized her as being one of those people that I'd been introduced to as a child way back. And she spoke no English. And she said to David to tell me to sit down on the floor, which I did.

And she gave me this bag. Then she sprinkled some snuff, which is ground up tobacco leaves, into it. And then she shook the bag and she turned it upside down. And this woman was ancient. And her eyes were sort of half closed. She couldn't see very well. But she threw the bones down on the grass mat. And the minute she did this, she pulled back in horror.

Oh, my God. And she says to David, she says, I can't see. I can't see. I can't see. What are these bright lights in my eyes? And David says to me, he says, she wants to know what the these bright lights in my eyes and david says to me he says she wants to know what the big bright lights are you know what she was seeing she was seeing the lights of the television station of the studio right and the minute that happened i knew that better listen

to what this woman was saying because this isn't nonsense she was seeing stuff that we weren't seeing but she certainly was and the way these the way all these bones and things and little other trinkets you know as i said each one of these people add their own little bits and pieces sometimes a little a bottle top or a or a charm or a marble or you know all kinds of stuff whatever works for them they add to their bone set and so this woman was was picking through this with her long bony fingers, touching the bones and telling me things. Well, when she started, it was nonstop for an hour. She was just sprouting information. And David was trying his best to keep pace with her, telling me what she was saying.

And he told me through him things that were absolutely amazing. And every one of those events that I didn't understand at the time, because I didn't know what she was referring to. And I don't even think she knew what she was seeing. They have all come true. Every single one of them has come true. And I'll give you an example. You know, she says to to me now Zambia sits in the middle of Africa there's no ocean there this poor old lady probably had never been further than 10 miles from the village where she was born she could never she had never seen the sea but she says to she says to me through David she says he will cross the big water the big water

he will cross that and he will go there into that direction, pointing to the north. He will go there and there will be more lights over there. And he will meet very famous people over there. You know, he will one day go to a world where there is no color. It's only white. He will one day go into the bush and he must be very careful because there will be a great beast that will almost kill him. And he must be very careful of the big water because in the big water he will come very close to dying one day he's going to be very very very sick he's going to be so sick and the only way he's going to be able to get better is to go back to the place from where he came i don't understand anything that she's telling me. Wow.

However, she did say, I'm going to be, I'll have two wives and how many children I would have. And all of this has come true. The numbers, you know, I have, I've been married twice. I have four kids, exactly. But all the other stuff she was speaking in riddles. I didn't know what any of it meant. But one of the most amazing things,

what she told me was one day he's going to meet a man who is very, very close to the meet a man who was very very close to the most evil man who ever lived in the world ever now imagine what do you make of this kind of information you know I understood none of it I made mental notes of course of all of these things and I did keep a little notebook on all those I don't know what happened to that notebook but you know what as my life unfolded I realized one by one, as things happened, oh my God, this is what this woman foresaw. And the first time it happened was,

I always wanted to go to North America and work in Hollywood, work in L.A., but at those days, the United States government was not giving visas to whites from South Africa because of the anti-apartheid policies of the US government. I mean, this was part of the system to try and bring down apartheid. So if you wanted to immigrate to the United States from South Africa, it was very, very difficult those days. But I did get a visa to go and live in Canada. So I went to Canada. And so I immigrated. I took a ship. Those days, you didn't fly. And I'm talking about 1966 now. You didn't fly, you went by sea. People traveled around the world,

most people went by sea. So you know what? I took a ship from Cape Town to Southampton to England and from there I was going to sail across the North Atlantic to Montreal. And halfway on that first part of my journey, just as we crossed the equator, I was up on board the ship one night

and there's a big star system in the south called the Southern Cross. It's as prominent in the sky as the Big Dipper is here in the northern hemisphere. And I used to look at the Southern Cross every night and every night the Southern Cross was getting lower and lower and lower in the sky. And I became aware of the fact that, my goodness, I am moving from one side of the planet to the other. I was suddenly aware of this movement, the slow progression from south to north on the Atlantic Ocean. And you know what? It hit me.

Oh, my word. This is what that woman meant. He will go on the big water to the north. That's what I'm doing. And that was the first time that one of these big realizations hit me about this woman, what this woman had foretold. And then I can go on and give you examples of all of those other events that she mentioned. You know, like, for example, one day he will go to a world where there's no color. Everything is white. There's only white there. Well, in 1991, I did a show for PBS,

for a science series, where I went down to Antarctica, and it was a scientific expedition to basically look at, is global warming happening? Is the ozone hole getting bigger? Are the oceans getting more acidic? Is climate change really taking place? What is human activity doing to the environment and the biomass and the ecosystem down in the Antarctic, where there are no cities and freeways and whatever else? But can you see the effects of human activity down there? It's a great place to take a temperature and see if the Earth is healthy or not. The Antarctic is a wonderful place to do scientific research about the health of the planet, because you can see the impact immediately about human activity, CO2 going up,

acidity in the ocean, on and on and on. Anyway, it was Christmas 1991, and I'm doing this show down there for PBS. It's Christmas Day, and the captain decides to stop the ship so that people can celebrate and have a good time. We're on an icebreaker. It's a research ship full of scientists and everybody's partying away. And, you know, I keep copious notes of everything. Some people have asked me, how do you get such detail into your writing? Well, because I keep notes of everything and I throw nothing away. My life and my office is surrounded by notebooks that I have been keeping throughout the years. So I was up on the deck. Now, we're in the Southern Hemisphere, right? It's Christmas time. It's December. The sun never sets because it's perpetual daylight because you're

so far south in the Southern Hemisphere. Remember, it's summertime, right? And so you get an hour of like twilight time, but the rest of it is daylight and it must have been about midnight and I thought I'm going to go up and deck I had a couple of drinks with the guys and the rest of the crew and the scientists and whatever else and went up on deck and writing in my notebook and I looked around me and I said wow you know you couldn't see where the oceans ended and where the sky began because the sky also was this white white bright light wow and and the the ocean was bright and there was a little penguin there and I was sort of watching this penguin I was almost communicating

with this penguin and I was writing in my notebook again it hit me bang yeah right she saw that I'm in a world where there's no color it's all white she had foreseen that you know and so on and on and on there were so many incidents like that of what that little old lady had foreseen you know the great beast she said that great yes I love that story I was hired to cover their safari on film I remember it's film it's video those days this is 1967 on one particular day one of the hunters was going to was due to shoot an elephant they had licenses to shoot all kinds of animals now the reason i took the job wasn't because you know it was highly paid or that i fancied the idea of doing a film about a safari but i wanted to know how did guys get kicks out of shooting wild animals it made no sense to me at all i know

yeah because you're not going to eat that so why would you i mean it doesn't make any sense at all. I know. Yeah. Cause you're not going to eat that. So why would you? I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all. What is the fun of shooting innocent animals who, you know, in order to stick something up on your wall, you know, a pair of horns, what is the point? So that's why I took the job. And anyway, comes the day when this one particular guy had to shoot his elephant and the white hunter that we had with us picked out an old bull elephant on the edge of a herd and he said to the guy he said that's the elephant you you should aim for he's an old elephant uh you know he's no longer the head honcho of this group of elephants you can take him out but just make sure you get a clean kill you've got to shoot him right here between the

eyes to get a clean kill oh yeah yeah yeah you, yeah, you know, but he was not a very good shot, this guy. To cut a very long story short, I positioned myself with my camera and it's a heavy camera with film and I've got another guy, one of the trackers, who's my battery carrier. The camera's powered by a heavy wet cell battery. So I get my shot, I'm behind the white hunter

who's about to shoot this elephant and he shoots and he misses and of course the herd went absolutely crazy they were wild they dispersed in every direction except for one single solitary female elephant a cow why because she had a baby with her she had a calf and she knew that her calf might be in danger and she looked at this hunter who was in front of me and she decided to take uh revenge on him and she started to charge she was as angry as can be she wanted to kill this guy because her baby was in danger and she's oh god i'm just thinking about the movie dumbo and the mommy i am behind the hunter

and he gets terrified and you know he shoots again misses and runs out of shot and so it's just me now and this elephant keeps coming and coming and coming and the earth is shaking like an earthquake and my battery charger says come on come on we got to get out of here and the white hunter behind me says run well I was frozen to the spot I couldn't move and then just in the nick of time I hear bam behind me the white hunter shot her between the eyes and she collapsed in front of me six feet away from me and she she tumbled on her front four legs folded and she fell on her side and slowly her eyes glazed over and she died and and i'll tell you something really interesting her soul and mine communicated at that very moment and you know what that spirit of that elephant has never left me time and time again with i when i've had my bones read by Sangomas,

decades after this event happened, they've always said to me, what is this elephant in your bones? What is this elephant that is around you? And glovo is the Zulu word for elephant. What is this in glovo you've got with you? Can you believe that? Cause I know that she and I have been united

ever since that day. And it may sound like, you know, that's ooga booga stuff. Oh, no, it's true. It says not. She has been with me ever since. And she's been protecting me. And I know that. That night after this awful event, you know, we're back at base camp and the martinis are

flowing and I take my drink and I go and sit in the corner because it was pretty shocking because I could have been killed that day. Vomitized a little bit. And I suddenly realized, oh my God, this is what she saw. This old woman. Beware of the big beast in the bush. It may kill you. That's what she saw. Extraordinary. I have to ask because I'm such an empath. I'm over here like wanting to cry, but what happened to her baby? Now her baby presumably was adopted by some of the other females. Elephants are social creatures. They're extraordinary creatures. If you look into an elephant's eye, you are seeing back into some kind of antiquity and depth of wisdom and compassion that I think you probably would have experienced

by looking into the eye of a whale. There are other beings who share our world with us who are quite extraordinary. You know what I just thought of Lionel that I don't think I've thought of too much. But just like we have our ancestry within us, generations after generations and all they have been through making us who we are today. And that's still living energy within us. Animals do as well.

And just thinking of my dog and how sometimes he just looks through my soul. And I always know that he's so much more than just this dog in this life. Absolutely. I've been pondering on this quote that I found this week, and it really struck me hard. And I've posted it quite a few times on our page. It's by Hubert Reeves. His quote was, man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible nature. Unaware that this nature he's destroying is this god he's worshiping so true so so profound that is so profound and you know us city folks um it's such a shame and such a tragedy that we are so disconnected from nature

today yes you know particularly kids growing up in city areas, they have no concept about the natural world. You know, let's go and walk in the forest, go and camp in the wilderness, go and reconnect with nature. That's the essence of all things. Kids don't have that opportunity. And I wish there was more of a program in the educational system that... Included that, right. That it was part of the curriculum. I in the educational system that included that.

Right. That it was part of the curriculum. I agree. You had to learn that. You had to connect with that. You know, it's funny that you say that, because now I think about as an adult and as I awaken and I'm able to experience like presence. I don't want to be inside when I'm practicing presence and mindfulness. I want to be outside experiencing even just in my city backyard, air, wind, the trees, the birds, everything about it. Because why would I just want to be present with the television, with my phone, you know, with technologies, when you have, you know, this beautiful art of God in the earth. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great shame. I call it the great disconnect. We've also lost our contact with other beings. We think of ourselves as being, you know, it's a very much an anthropocentric world. It's about us. Yeah. we tend to ignore that there's so much other life

and sentience and consciousness and they all have emotions and feelings and they know fear and pain just as much as we do and we ignore that to the degree we do you know industrialized factory farming is a is one of the most awful criminal things that we've ever invented because these creatures are treated like commodities they're not commodities every one of them is an individual life with a history and a feeling and an emotion and and we regard them as being nothing it's just the day will come and i'm going to make this prediction that and i'm not the first one to say it, so it's not an original at all. I'm quoting some of the great people of history,

that the day will come when we're going to look back at this period as being one of the most savage criminal periods of all time because of factory farming and the way we treat animals. There was a documentary done on Netflix. I watched Cowspiracy. And so listeners, if you haven't watched it, check it out, but just know that you might not ever want to eat meat again, which is a wonderful thing. But you know, I also thought about what you what you said triggered me to think about also when I'm outside, and I am

present, one of the other things that I tend to do is I look up at the sky, and I always see things. And so I always say to people, why is it always just me that sees these things, right? And kind of where I wanted to ask you some questions about some of the things that you've wrote about UFOs. Yes. And because sometimes I, you know, even if it's just curiosity, not seeing things, but just looking up and thinking, wow, there's more than just this. There's got to be. And how you saw the stars change their direction. I notice here in Louisiana from Colorado, the moon looks so different. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I wanted to add to that really fast, Shanna, because what you described, a lot of people have to make a choice to be present to feel that choice to go out and be present it was like

I couldn't escape that oneness I was feeling with trees and the air and the wind and nature yes and so it was that was the life-changing part of it for me yeah yeah now I respect that enormously for kept me to that realization if that's what it took to get you there and it served a very valuable purpose other than the fact that you realize i'm quite sure after your nde there's more to it than we think this is not what it's all about we are not purely physical beings we are more than that the physical body is not who we are it's a shell it's a container and we can exist outside of it you know and i've done some extraordinary work. I did a big show called

Beyond Death, and I did some work with some extraordinary people, including a man by the name of Dr. Robert Jahn, who ran the PAIR unit, which stood for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Unit at Princeton University. Now, this is a top-notch guy. He's an engineer, but what he wanted to do was, he was a deep thinker. What is consciousness? And does consciousness also have energy? In other words, if you look at an object or you look at a piece of paper, can your thoughts make that paper move, have an influence on inanimate object? He wanted to find this out. This is an engineer, a nuts and bolts guy. I mean, not an ooga booga department. It's about nuts and bolts guy i mean you know not an ugga booger department it's about nuts and bolts and you know he builds bridges and electronic circuits

and so he had this extraordinary unit at princeton university buried underneath the engineering block because at princeton you know ivy league you don't want to give away the fact that you're doing experiments into what his consciousness they just kept very quiet but he had this unit going for like 25 years and over that period of time he and his team including brenda dunn now robert john unfortunately passed away but brenda dunn was his associate she's still around and she still runs a research division unit not at princeton elsewhere now and she still writes prolifically on the topic that they have proven many many times that consciousness can influence inanimate object consciousness can make not random numbered generators you know digital things just flicking by in an electronic little device for example the the the project would say try and make the number nine come up more often

than any of the other numbers in the series of numbers. And you know what? It happens. People can do that. People could actually make little tiny model cars. I do that. You do that? I do that with tubes all day. Yeah. You see, I'm a nine person and nine is in my life all the time. But I'd love to hear your story. but i guess that's for another topic another day

there were folks who could actually make little model cars move in certain directions on a tabletop which they found out at this unit so consciousness isn't buried in the brain little synapses flashing you know buried in human tissue it's outside of that it doesn't exist inside our bodies it's beyond that so is that your soul your spirit your consciousness what is it we need to find that out and i'm totally intrigued by anybody doing research into the nature of consciousness i don't know if you're familiar with the monroe institute in virginia do you guys know about that i don't think so no well it's worth looking into. The Monroe Institute in Virginia has been going for a long, long time. And what they do there is they raise consciousness by

stimulating your brain with two different audio signals. Yeah, I've seen this before. A lot of people go there, mainly burnt out businessmen and executives. You just want to learn how to relax or go into a state of mind that gets them away from the stress of everyday living. And so they go there for 10 days at a time, and a different signal is piped through each different ear. And what it does, it has an effect on the brain. It does raise your consciousness. They say they sleep better. They think more easily. They're far more relaxed when this happens but other things happen as well and i was talking to a

guy who used to work for nasa i won't mention names but he was a rocket engineer he designed rockets he went there and he said you know what i went there three or four times and as i went through these these this process over a period of years my consciousness level was getting to such a degree that i could actually travel outside of my body i'm going to say this and it's going to sound crazy to you but it's happened to me i have traveled beyond this planet i have traveled to other parts of the galaxy i have met my ancestors my consciousness is not rooted in my body i have learned how to go outside of my body and i've've met many, many other people who do that. But the Monroe Institute, totally scientific based. This is no nonsense.

Yeah, right. This is what they're discovering, that your consciousness is limitless. Which Carl Jung has been saying, you know. There you go. There you go. Right. Yeah. I think it's so crazy how very similar Louisiana is.

I got to say this. How similar, you know, actually, it shouldn't be that surprising. Louisiana is very similar. Marie Laveau. And she was one of the voodoo queens, but she didn't come from there. She came from St. Domingue, which is now haiti but um still same practices right and also they have the great lulu mardi gras prayed here oh yeah that is still in tradition you know she came here and she had she added some catholic traditions so that way some of the things that

you were talking about i think were in her practices, but she added some saints here and there. And also she became Catholic. It was a law back then. So she also had to be Catholic, but I just find it very interesting that we've been seeing that as such a fear, right? When really, is it not just a gift and, and look at how she was able to prophesize all of these things in your life. And then you were able to throughout your life, like validate. Are you finding that these things are still happening today? One that lies almost at the core of the book, and that is this kidney illness that I developed and I'm still dealing with. And it turns out that I have this idiopathicic which means they

don't know what caused it this woman told me she said you are going to get very very sick well I was very very sick and I still have this illness it's not gone away and when she said to me this younger in Zambia they don't call them sangomas they call them nangas but this old lady this old Nanga she said to me when you you will get very sick one day and you will be really sick and the only way you will get better is to go back to where you came from so when i developed this kidney complaint this was in the early 90s i have a friend who's a surgeon he's also from south africa like me and he's exactly the same age as i am and he for years and years has been studying the shamanic ways of the tribes of

Africa to learn how is it possible for these people living in the boondocks to prescribe medicines for their clients that are as often as effective as Western medicine. He wanted to learn about that, and he wanted to learn the African paradigm of healing. So he did this, and he eventually actually became ordained in the way of the African shaman. He's still in practice today as a general surgeon, not far from here in Santa Barbara. And when I got this kidney disease, he said, I'm going to Africa to go and study the ways of the shaman for a month. I'm going to south africa why don't you come with me see what it's all about and maybe they can help you i said dave you are you're a surgeon and you know yeah and you taught at stanford university and you're telling me to go and see a witch doctor

maybe there are some herbs and whatever else that they have in their arsenal, which may help your condition, which isn't working right now, because I wasn't getting any better. I was really in a very serious situation. You know, my nephrologist said, you're either going to be in dialysis within 10 years or you're going to be dead. And this is nearly 30 years ago. So I went with him.

And when I met his teacher, a wonderful old man, this is in Swaziland, which is actually the wrong term because the country's renamed itself. It's now called Eswatini. It's a small country, lots of mountains, absolutely magnificent country. The Swazi people are closely related to the Nguni group of people, which are the Zulus. They speak a similar language and fascinating and anyway so I met this guy and he throws the bones for me and I had had lots of bones thrown for me because I've

met many shamans prior to this and I also did a series in the 70s called the tribal identity for television in South Africa which looked at all the tribal groups and met lots and lots and lots of Sangomas on that trip and that's why I said all of them, you know, whenever I met them and filmed them at the end of that, I'd always say, please, why don't you throw the bones for me? And the first thing they always told me was, what is this elephant? You've got this elephant with you've got this in all, but you know, but anyway, this guy, he throws the bones and he says, Oh, I didn't tell him about my illness. He looks at his bones and he says, Oh'm so sorry i said why he says you need serious help and i said that's true and he said and you know you really need some serious treatment

and i'm going to recommend someone even more powerful than me who may help you with your illness you need to get a femba just the word frightens me i had no idea what that meant what are you talking about like oh shoot where do you put that like femba yeah exactly what color what color is it you know f-e-m-b-a and he said i'm going to introduce you to someone so on this one particular day we go to the small little town where there's a trading store and there's this guy outside that i'm introduced to and I'm told that he is the man who may really be consequential in my healing process who will do the femba. I asked what does femba mean and it turns out that femba really means an exorcism. They will exorcise from

your soul, from your body, from your being the bad spirits or the negativity or whatever it is that's causing your illness you need a femba yeah but you know again it's it's about you know our cultures are so different they're not really referring to getting rid of a demon it's about getting rid of negative energy it's about getting rid of the bad stuff It's about getting rid of the bad stuff. There's negativity in your system. And this man performed a ritual on me. I was taken to his little compound way up in the mountains. Magnificent view looking right over the whole of Mozambique. Gorgeous. You know, you could see to the end of the world. And in this hut, this round hut, were all these women. Some of them were his wives, but some of them were from other areas in the region.

Drumming is very important in the African tradition. Drumming summons the ancestors. It's essential in so many rituals. And it really, it's got power to it. There's an energy in the drumming. You know, the drumming is a simulation really of the heart. It's boom, boom, boom. The drumming resonates with that essence. Anyway,

so all of these women are drumming away. You know, some of them with little babies strapped to their backs. Were you freaking out? I abandoned everything I ever knew because I was told to undress. Oh, alright. And I was allowed to wear only my little brief.

I do wear underwear, little whitey tighties. Yes, nothing else. And I'm sitting surrounded by all these women. And I just threw everything to the window. I thought whatever's going to happen, whatever will be. But yeah, I was freaking out because it was scary. There was no sign of this guy. And I'm sitting in this hut.

There's a fire in the middle of the floor. I'm placed next to the fire with my feet stretched out sitting there you know and drumming all around me yeah and suddenly like about 20 minutes later ah at the far end of the hut through a door appears this guy in his tribal regalia in his beads and his grass skirt and his rattles strapped around his ankles and his eyes bloodshot you know like he had become another human being oh my god i'm thinking like indiana jones exactly like that you know you got it exactly that and there's this guy with his fiery eyes and it's like he was possessed by something i have no idea what and you know what he comes into the into this hut and he

dropped down onto his hands and knees on all fours he had he'd become an animal and what it reminded me most of all the way he walked was the way a hyena slinks through the bush that's how he reminded me of that and And he was grunting. I was scared shitless. And he comes up to me grunting and he starts to smell me going all the way from my feet all the way up to my body. And when he eventually gets to my...

Smelling your sickness. Where he comes to where my kidney is, he wants to wreck it. And two of his assistants ran out with a barrel and guess what he vomited the slime into the barrel it was unbelievable and the drumming is going crazy and this guy's doing this and i am just terrified by just letting all this happen and watching this happening to me and then he smelled all over my my head yeah i can hear he's breathing you know here in my ears going down and he gets to the other kidney he goes and gets sick again oh my god into this barrel this

is awesome yeah at the end of it he stands up and he folds his arms like this looking down on me and he starts making various proclamations and he says in in swazi i didn't understand what he was saying but it was translated to me afterwards with the guy that i was with that he said you know you need a walking stick because the walking stick will symbolize your ancestors and you need your grandfather to be with you your grandfather comes from a place very very far to the north my grandfather on my father's side this was in latvia i didn't even know where latvia was on the map and it shows that your grandfather he will help you the walking stick will symbolize your grandfather whenever you go

out you take the walking stick and you will be walking with your grandfather and he will take care of you and he will summon the spirits of your ancestors and they will heal you and they will always be with you it was a beautiful terrifying amazing experience i have to tell you i go nowhere without that walking stick that was carved for me for my grandfather who i'd never met and you know what gosh i should have been in dialysis years ago i should have maybe been dead years ago and i'm still going go figure what can i tell you wow that's wow first of all you're an extraordinary freaking storyteller i mean man we love storytellers we always are like oh my god tell us a story who was the evilest man in the world

you want to hear about that yes let me tell, because it was one of the most incredible things that this old woman had foretold. I had no idea what she was talking about. But now we go to the year 1983. This is like, you know, almost 20 years after she told me this. I'm living in South Africa. I'm doing a series of films on the history of South African Airways. Now, South African Airways was one of the really a very, very fine airline. And it was formed in 1929. It was a private airline. So in 1934, the plan was to expand the airline from being a little regional airline, just flying around South Africa,

and going to places like Kenya, and going to West Africa, and eventually even maybe flying abroad. But you know, this was the early days of the airline's evolution. So they ordered three brand new airliners from a company in Germany called the Junkers Aircraft Factory. These were JU-52, amazing aircraft. They sat about 14 passengers, similar to the early Ford Trimotor here in the States. Metal-skinned, reliable, but a range of about 1,000 miles carrying 14 people. So they ordered three of those. But now

how do you get aircraft from the factory in Germany all the way to Johannesburg without sending them by sea because they're too big to put on a ship? You got to fly them down Africa. And how do you do that? In those days, remember, there are no alternative airports to land at. There were very few airfields anyway, no weather forecasting, none of the services that you have today, no communications, no navigational aids. How do you do that? And one of the pilots of delivery flights of those first aircraft, apparently while we were doing our research, we found out that he was still alive. And I said, we've got to find this guy and we've got to put him in the movie. We've got to put him in the documentary. I want to interview him.

So it turns out that he was retired. He was in his late 80s, almost 90 years old, retired in a little village near Munich in Bavaria in Germany. And not only that, but he was an amateur cinematographer and he photographed that trip. And I thought, oh, where's the film? And we found out that he had given his film to a lab in Frankfurt. So I thought, we've got to go there. We've got to copy part of that film.

We've got to put it in the documentary. And we've got to interview him. So the German government were very helpful in facilitating us meeting this guy. We travel all the way from Frankfurt on the autobahn down to Munich to go to this town called Amershieh near München in Bavaria. It's a picture book place, beautiful gardens, you know, immaculate and this little tiny house. And this is where this guy lives. And the night before we do the interview,

we're in a hotel nearby. Now we've got a guy from the German government, from the foreign office who was facilitating all of this. And he was going to be my translator because apparently this pilot spoke no English. He only spoke German. We are at the hotel that night before we interviewed this man. His name was Hans Baur, B-A-U-R.

And the guy from the foreign office of the government, at about midnight, we'd had a lot of wine to drink, public relations people there, still photographers, my crew. And he says to me, he said about midnight, he says, well, you know, what do you really know about his history I said well I don't know all I want to know from in this interview is about that delivery flight he says yeah but what do you know about his background I'm not sure what he's asking me and you know I said I don't know I I guess you know he must have why and so he said

I do not want you to ask about anything about the war. So I said, no, why would I want to ask about the war? He must have been a pilot during the war. If he flew this delivery flight in the early 30s, he must have been a fighter pilot with the Luftwaffe. Yeah, so that's, so what? And he says, okay, as long as you don't discuss the war, because he has a war injury and you're not to discuss the war. And I said, that's OK. Fine by me. Anyway, we have some more wine.

The night goes on at about one o'clock in the morning. He's getting a little edgy. And he says to me, you promise you're not going to discuss the war? I said, yeah, no, I'm not going to discuss the war. And then he says to me, I have to tell you something. He said, do you know that this man was adolf hitler's personal pilot i sobered up instantly i've interviewed lots of people in my time but there's not too many opportunities where you come across something like that it's like interviewing genghis khan you know yes so the next day we we meet the guy we go to his house his wife was absolutely charming we eventually meet him he did have a wound because he had a gummy leg so he had a stick he was walking with a cane cane. He sort of limped, only spoke German, very, very frail,

old. He sits down. We put a lapel mic on his, as we usually do, and connect him to the tape deck, and we put the lights up. And I'm asking the questions, but the German foreign office is my translator. We do this interview and he's great. He tells me this wonderful story about flying all the way down Africa and his adventures and what happened and whatever else. And at the end of it, you know, I said to him in German, I said, Danke schön. Das ist fertig, we finished. And he said, ah, you know, he's very relieved it's all over.

And he says to his wife, let's have some schnapps, bring on the booze. Now we're going to celebrate. We're going to have a little drink. Right. She brings a big silver tray with lots of really good stuff on it and you know uh he pours a drink and we clink glasses you know i try to put out of my mind completely the fact that he was very very close to adolf hitler because when i shook his hand i had to dismiss from my mind yeah the fact that you know, you talk about six degrees of separation, that was one handshake degree of separation from Adolf Hitler. How many times had Adolf Hitler shaken that very hand? But I had no idea the degree of closeness that he had with

Adolf Hitler, because at the end of the interview and after we'd had a few drinks, he takes me and he shows me a photograph of him with Adolf Hitler standing in front of one of these airplanes that we'd been talking about in the interview. And he says, you know, he says to me in German, this is one of those aircraft. He doesn't mention the other guy in the picture,

you know, Adolf Hitler, but he mentioned himself. And then he looks at me and he says, you want to know more about it? And I said, yeah, Peter, please tell me. So he says, come. And he puts me, we go and sit on the couch. He calls his wife.

He says, bring the photograph albums. She brings these beautifully leather bound photograph albums. And in these albums is an entire photographic history of the inner ranks, everybody of the Third Reich. Oh my God. He's in many of these photographs. and every time Hitler had a state dinner or he's meeting with Mussolini this guy Hans Bauer was always there. He says he and Adolf Hitler were friends from way way back when he married his first wife Adolf Hitler gave him his wedding party in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich, way before he even ran for becoming Chancellor of Germany.

He says to me that, you know, Hitler took great care of him. I didn't talk about the war. I didn't talk about the Holocaust. I didn't talk about any of that stuff. But he shows me all of these images. He was a sweet man. And I wasn't going to be judgmental. I only tried to see him as a pilot.

But he was one of the closest people that Adolf Hitler ever knew. Hitler trusted nobody, by the way, even his closest confidants, people who worked with him in the inner ranks of the Third Reich. He trusted no one. He always thought his life was in danger. But this guy was his confidant. And he was very afraid of flying. But when Hans Bauer was flying his plane he was absolutely fine with that so they were really really close and so he gives me this inner look at the Third Reich from his perspective and it's extraordinary and at the end of the day we're driving away and there he was outside of his house with his little wife you know little two little people two little old people waving goodbye to their guests and it suddenly hit me that's what that woman was talking about you will meet a man who was very very close to the most evil man who ever lived how do you explain things like that you don't i have to say i'm surprised he's not on like a witness protection program or didn't change his name he was never held up for war crimes you know like so i see what you're saying he was a pilot you know yeah he probably didn't have a choice either you know and so i can't imagine with demons that he needs to go to swahili land and get taken out anyway he's long gone and you know he he signed a photograph of me

for me of him with adolf hitler in it and it says to Lionel from Hans Bar you know and I've got this picture and I mean when I think about the fact that my father's mother was a victim of the holocaust you know and I look at the photograph and I think wow I spent an afternoon with that guy sitting next to this man and I feel no animosity towards him whatsoever and I have a very very good German friend here who helped translate some of the material that I have, which I put into the book about the story. And I've written another book, by the way, since then about the history of aviation, where I tell the story in even greater detail. Has your work led you to these discoveries or was it your curiosity that led to your work? It's a very good question.

And I think that as my career unfolded, I became, what's the line in Alice in Wonderland through the looking glass? You know, she takes the tablet and she says, oh, things are getting curious and curious and curious. Yeah. Okay. Well, as my career unfolded, I became infinitely more curious all the time. And I started developing this insatiable appetite to

always want to know more. And as a documentary filmmaker, one of the things that you learn is that there's never enough to know. If you're going to make the life story of the guy who delivers the mail, or you're going to make the life story of the man who discovered the ozone hole, which I've done, or you make a documentary on the history of the Voyager spacecraft that went from Saturn to Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune, and you want to get to know those engineers and all of those scientists, you need to know as much as you possibly can about all of them. You need to know whether their grandmother had a corn on their left toe. That's how much you need to know about people before you interview them. It's essential to know all that stuff. So you do develop the sense of

curiosity. And the watchword of my faith, which I've tried to communicate to my kids, is find out something new every single day and never stop asking questions. And always be curious to want to know more. And you know, there's always more that lies beyond the horizon. The horizon is not the end. There's something beyond that. And what is it that lies beyond? And as long as we have the sense of curiosity, the human spirit will never fail and will never stop soaring and finding out. And maybe one day we'll become galactic travelers. We will. The day will come when we will get to that point. And it's your sense of curiosity that does that.

That's what put Neil Armstrong's footprint on the surface of the moon. That's what allowed us to discover the depths of the Pacific Ocean and what life that lies in those volcanic vents under the sea. You've got to be interested. You've got to be curious. What is inside the atom? Is there a tinier being peering away the onion skin layers of nature of society of people of professions it's all about that and getting to

know people but the most important thing of course you know is to do so with a degree of respect you know i was uh for four years four seasons i was supervising writer for a series called mysteries of the bible and i personally wrote a show a three-hour special called Who Wrote the Bible? And, you know, you find that as you get into those ancient texts of particularly the Old Testament, the New Testament is a, there's kind of a paper trail that you can follow about who did what and, you know, the Gospels and so on. But the Old Testament is a different story. And when you get to the first five books, Genesis, Exodus leviticus numbers deuteronomy there's a lot of grayness that you really you don't know where it comes from where's the tangible evidence where's the record where

does where does all this stuff come from and who wrote what where and where and why you know was it a little guy sitting in the desert writing it all down in a tent or was there more well science has now proven and i'm not knocking the bible and i'm not knocking anybody's religious beliefs but there are three distinct writing styles in the book of genesis alone and philologists and language experts and historians can identify not who these people are but the difference between the style of writing and this is looking at the the original hebrew texts you can see the difference. Some parts of Genesis that are contradictory. In one place, it says Noah will take into the ark animals two by two. In another

place, it says seven by seven. So how come there is this difference? And you can see that these books are based on other sources that were combined. And thank goodness they did, because the Bible is an amazing book. And the lesson of the Bible is terrific, because it teaches you humility, teaches you good sense of behavior, how to respect your neighbor, love thy neighbor, whatever you want to call it. That's its purpose. But the origin of it is really, really interesting. And so when you look at some of those ancient texts, some of them are drawn from more ancient texts, like, for example, Sumerian texts of areas which are Babylon and areas that are now Iraq, clay tablets. There are stories and there are tales in there that match almost word for word some of the things that you find in the Bible, which leads

one to ask, well, where does that come from? know and who wrote all that down and it's about learning humility and it's about being curious and it's about just being respectful without knocking anybody's faith or beliefs you've got to be respectful of everything but be open-minded enough to always know that maybe that isn't everything maybe there's still more to know. And that drives me every single day. I tell you, there rarely does a day go by where I don't read until like two, three o'clock in the morning. I'm on my tablet and I read the New York Times and I read The Economist and I read the newspapers of the world.

I've got to know stuff. Otherwise, you know, you stop and you dare not. We dare not do that. We've got to be curious and you've got to keep going. You know what? Thank you for the reminder, you know, because when Shannon and I started to grieve our religion that we were, it was very disheartening and very frustrating and almost we were angry. We were angry at a lot of the lies we'd been told.

And so when we started to believe our own findings, our own experiences, our lives shifted. But I love that you reminded us that that doesn't mean that we should disrespect it or be angry at it. We should just honor it for what it is and keep being curious. Precisely. Absolutely correct. You've nailed it. Don't knock it. It had its role. It had its place. And for many people, it still does. And we respect that. But don't stop asking questions because maybe there's more to know. And also the other thing is that connecting without any question there is a superior being, there is no question. Now, is it an energy? It's certainly not some old guy sitting on a cloud looking down at us that's for sure but there is a superior intelligence that runs or has somehow behind this amazing universe in which we live and i don't think

we're ever going to find the answer to that but that's part of our quest and we're all on a journey maybe slowly unraveling the answer to that question but that's not what we're about but the thing is that yeah you know keep looking elsewhere keep on asking is there is there more to know beautiful message i cannot let you go without asking this last question did you actually see with your own eyes a ufo yes i filmed i filmed one yes it was in canada it was 1966. It was in Saskatchewan, and we filmed it above a potash plant, a potash mine. It was sitting in this white cloud of dust, huge circular object with a triangular shape underneath it. I rolled film. We filmed it. It was a very small crew. I ran film on it. Those were the days of film, no video. When we eventually got back to Montreal, we were looking at our dailies after we'd been on this documentary trip, which was a documentary about the history of housing, how urban areas developed around in Canada. And so we're looking at all the dailies and everyone there says, what on earth is that? Well, none of us knew. And so the head of the camera department says, we got to send that.

There's a thing done in the States called Project Blue Book. Why don't we send it to those guys? Maybe they can tell us what that is. Maybe they can use it. Oh, my God. So they sent it to, I think it was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. And by courier service, I forget what the courier service is. We're talking about the year 1966.

That's a long time ago. A very high time period for UFOs, though. Yeah, yeah. Yes, of course. Well, it's always been hot. There's always UFOs around the world, always. Sometimes you hear more about it than others, but this goes on all the time.

When you saw it, though, with your own eyes, you knew what it was. I didn't know what it was. I mean, I felt instantly that this thing is certainly not man-made. That's for sure. Okay. It is. And I was always interested, by the way, in UFOs because when the first book came out

by Adamski in the 50s about UFOs, I, as a kid, read that and I was petrified. But I fell in love with the topic. And then in 1953, when I saw the first version of War of the Worlds, man, that changed my life. I would never have a window open above my bed because I always had this red hand coming. Yeah, yeah. But I always believed in aliens. And I always thought, you know, aliens could be real. But when I saw this device, this craft sitting in the cloud, not making a sound, not a window, nothing.

And we ran film and then we sent this to Project Blue Book. And after they got it, they denied receiving the film. That, for me, told us a lot because the thing is they're denying it. Why? Because they don't want us to know. You know, it goes back to roswell they were today we've been told that was a weather balloon give me a break that was no weather balloon how many books have you written total well uh non-fiction three books most of my work has been film i write all my own documentary films yeah this is this is the newest one forever

in my veins is available now tell us about that title really fast it pertains to a couple of things first of all that the spirit and the essence of africa is still very much in my blood i'm a white caucasian guy but i come from the african continent and africa is in my blood the whole mystery of that place and the history of that extraordinary continent still courses through my veins, forever in my veins. And I learned this more so by learning about the African shamans. And it's also to do with my love of film.

Film is in my veins as well. So it's got many meanings. But the main one is to do with this African context, you know, of the shamanism. That is the glue that holds all of these very different stories together. Hey Lionel, what's wondering I know that you're vegan I'm vegan yeah and because I was just thinking about I'm like where can I get

myself some of those bones in a bag so I can be shaking them and telling some futures with them but I don't think I'd want to do that unless that I knew that the bones were I don't know from deceased animals I can't get them from Amazon, like Amazon online, not Amazon jungle, but. You know, you're great. You know, I'll tell you something in the gift stores at the, at the airports in South Africa, at the, at the gift store, they sell little, little bags of bones, but of course it's nonsense. I mean, they probably did one or two little chicken bones and a little

plastic bag. And they say went i went vegan ones though yeah are you are you are you are you vegan by the way no i'm not but it doesn't it just doesn't make me i mean i would be if i could but i've got a hunter for a partner and i like gumbo too much those bones those bones are pretty difficult to come by and the only way you're going to get them is to study at the foot of a master who knows yeah and so you accumulate these bone sets over a period right so but you know i mean i like to drum so i do have a drum but i love how remo has a drum and the drum is a vegan drum but it sounds like the animal skin and it's synthetic it's been made to resemble that.

Drumming is a fantastic thing, but you know what? Just listen to nature. You listen to the sound of water dripping. Listen to the wind. Listen to the rustling of leaves. All of that is music. And all of that will move your soul and teach you a lot, just as much as the musical instruments that we play.

It really is. I play bird sounds in my car when I drive around the freeways of LA. It just takes me to another dimension. I love it. Birds are my go-to. I love birds. So tell our listeners where they can find your book. The book is available from amazon.com right now or Barnes and Noble. And if folks really want to read an excerpt of the book, they can is available from amazon.com right now or Barnes and Noble. And if folks really want to read an excerpt of the book, they can go to my website. I think there's one or two chapters on my website that they can read. My website is basically my name, lionelfriedberg.com. I love it. So this is your most personal book? This is my life as I wanted to share it. I felt compelled to share this. I felt it unfair to keep all this to myself. I want to inspire people

who really believe in themselves and the wonders of the cosmos and the wonders of the world. And we're all part of that. I end my book by saying, you know, we're all connected, whether we're people, ponies or petunias, we're all connected to this incredible grid.

And that grid exists throughout the cosmos. I know that. When's the documentary coming out on it or movie? Because just like the life of Pi, I think is extraordinary. But when I think about everything you were talking about, I could visualize it. It was very exciting.

So I'm seeing movie or documentary. Well, I'll have to give that some thought and see maybe we can do that. Yeah, we'll see. At the moment, there are no plans, but who knows? You know, it's certainly something to consider. You guys and see maybe we can do that. Yeah. We'll see. At the moment, there are no plans, but who knows? You know, it's certainly something to consider. You guys have been great.

You really have. It's been wonderful meeting you and speaking with you. And I thank you so much for this opportunity. And I thank folks for listening to this. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you very much, Shona and Mandy. You've been absolutely amazing. And it's been a pleasure.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Blessings. Namaste. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.