Somewhere in the Skies - Aaron Mahnke: The Story Behind LORE

Episode Date: October 15, 2017

On episode 27 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan first discusses the recent announcement made by Tom DeLonge regarding his new endeavor, the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. The academy has mobilized a team of the most experienced, connected and passionately curious minds from the US intelligence community, including the CIA and Department of Defense that have been operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades.   The team members all share a common thread of frustration and determination to disrupt the status quo, wanting to use their expertise and credibility to bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows and collaborate with global citizens to apply that knowledge in a way that benefits humanity. Then Ryan speaks with Aaron Mahnke, creator, and host of the critically acclaimed LORE Podcast. With the recent release of the Amazon television adaptation, Mahnke and Ryan discuss the power of storytelling and that the mysteries of humankind can often be much scarier than anything we could conjure up in our minds. Guest Bio: Aaron is the writer, host, and producer of Lore, as well as the author of a number of supernatural thrillers. Aaron has a deep love of the mysterious and frightening that began with Unsolved Mysteries and The X-Files - a love that continues to this day. Basically, he's a nerd for anything unexplainable or supernatural. He lives with his family in the historic Boston area, in the very heart of Lovecraft Country and the epicenter of the Salem witch trials. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. To receive 50% off your first box, visit www.HelloFresh.ca and use the promo code: SOMEWHERE50 Patreon Campaign: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies  Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Produced by THIRD KIND PRODUCTIONS, in association with ANTICA PRODUCTIONS. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. I want to take just one more moment to thank my new patrons on Patreon for their monthly contributions to the show. To Wayne J, Patrick M, Rob Kay, and Sean T. Thank you so much for your continued support. Many levels and rewards are now being offered. To help the show continue and grow, please consider becoming a patron today. To learn more and to contribute, visit patreon.com backslash somewhere skies. Thank you again. And now, on to this week's show. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. We are taking a break this week from spooky listener tales to talk briefly about the big announcement from former Blink 182 frontman, Tom DeLong. For a little under six months now, Tom DeLong has been teasing some grand reveal about what he's learned and where his work is heading within the realm of the UFO reality and UFO studies.

Well, on October 11th, that official announcement by DeLong was finally made. And the response has certainly been mixed. So let's start with what the announcement actually was, with a concise description from punk rock and UFO's blogger Mike Demonte. Mike writes, Tom DeLong's big announcement is the formation of the Two the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which promises to focus on synergistic divisions of science, aerospace, and entertainment. DeLong is joined by an impressive list of former government officials from national security and the scientific community to help push the progress forward in research, advanced technology, and informative storytelling, which is likely where the secret machines fiction and nonfiction franchises fit.

Thank you for that very concise description, Mike. Now, beyond what Mike covered, we have also learned that DeLong will be creating documentaries, movies, and TV shows alongside the books. This is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, as nothing more than a huge entertainment cash grab. Also, you can invest in the Academy and be given exclusive information as it progresses. For a price, the lowest level of investment, $200. Now, when I posted this announcement on the Somewhere in the Sky's Facebook group, the comments exploded. And right now, I wanted to give you just a small taste of what some listeners think about this whole thing. Some were very supportive of the endeavor, and some, not so much.

Let's start with the more optimistic responses. Chris writes, quote, loved it, and I hope it succeeds. I did my part with investing, end quote. Matthew also likes the idea of the Two the Stars Academy, stating that he is, quote, very supportive of this research being done in the public sector for a change, with visibility, very excited for the future, hope it gets some traction, end quote. Chris and Matthew are joined by some. Scott, who also says, quote, I applaud the conception and welcome the proposition, forward thinking

on a high level, end quote. Now, even with a skeptical eye, Debbie also agrees, stating, quote, some think this is a sham, a con and nothing good will come of it, and it smacks the whole possibility of disclosure in the face. I say, give this a fighting chance, end quote. But that skeptical eye widens, and some are a bit more cautious. Michael writes, quote, sounds like they're not really good. going to convey much in the way of hidden information, but rather want to raise money for a super-hyped

new Mufon with a wing that researches exotic technology." John also cautions us that these announcements have been made before. He says, quote, I'm old enough to remember those who were burned by Doty, the Aviary, and Brogno, Jonathan Reed, or any number of deeply entrenched insiders who are going to break this phenomena wide open. Again, I find this fine. I support open, honest thoughts and ideas, but as with any announcement, breakthrough, or information in this community regarding this phenomena, time and caution should be taken at every turn." End quote. Brad also brings the individuals involved under scrutiny of their motivations. He says, quote, I would be curious to know what exactly

those aerospace and military members know or believe to be true based on their personal knowledge. Are they just interested people who are approaching this topic from the same position we all are? Or did their work in the classified world expose them to certain truths or facts that make this phenomenon more than curious endeavor for them? I think that matters, because otherwise we just have another group of curious guys who want some funding to play UFO hunters. End quote. Michael H. writes, fascinating pitch. Hopefully somewhere in that inspirational mixed bag of building flying saucers, exploring ESP, and funding sci-fi movies, there will be some scientific investigation of aerial anomalies.

I doubt it, though. I see no engagement of the phenomena with this tech entertainment startup. End quote. The last listener comment brings us back to Mike DeMonte, who says, quote, Tom DeLong has always aimed high, but logistically, this would be hard to pull off, in addition to all the other things he wants to do with a relatively small operation. DeLong has lofty ambitions here, that he's likely, to not fully achieve.

But if all we get out of this is some physical footage, evidence, documentation, or confirmation via this weekly show, it won't be a total bust, end quote. Now, before we go any further on either revering or rejecting this entire endeavor, I find

it only fair to include DeLong's own words on this. So here's a portion from his live broadcast announcement. Have a listen. We're living in an age where a new universal view of ourselves is possible. And revolutionary technology is finally within our reach if we just have the courage to grasp it. And whether it's trying to launch satellites into space with lasers, which we are aiming to do,

or making major motion pictures that spark the imagination of generations to come, the rule must be the same. No one person, one government, or one hidden institution should own this information and technology unto themselves. and we must relentlessly pursue access to the information that will shape our future. Look very closely at these people and who they are and take notice of where they come from and think about the realities of what this team has the ability to accomplish and deliver if we're fully equipped. And be a part of making history and join us at the start. We cannot wait and depend for others, depend on others, to do it for us.

And you have the ability to take ownership from day one and keep all this in the public's hands. And that is my goal here. You can join us and own a piece of this because that's what it's going to take for this to happen. And you have to visit to the starsacademy.com

and click on the invest button and you will learn about the Regulation A equity crowdfunding. And this process removes the middleman and democratizes access to equity ownership. Go to to the stars academy.com. the offering circular, you can see the business plan, you can see the investment opportunities, and all the risks involved investing in this type of a venture. But this may be the only time

in history you will ever see one of the biggest aerospace engineers in the world, a senior intelligence officer from the CIA, two former senior Pentagon officials, and an experimental physicist from the DOD, take a giant leap of faith to tell you something. And I ask that you listen very carefully. These guys really went out on a limb here. And the only way to do this is if we do it in the public realm. And the only way to bring it out to you is if you help us. We're offering you the opportunity to be on the ground floor of building the future. And this is only the beginning. There is so much more coming. We're making history. And I'm inviting you to be wonderfully surprised at what we got in store. Thank you so much.

Now, that list of individuals involved is quite impressive. I personally have to admit, you have people like Jim Semmivan, who is former CIA. You've also got Hal Putoff, who has worked with GE, the NSA, NASA, and even the DOD. You also have Steve Justice, who was Programme Director for Advanced Systems with Skunk Works, and even a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon. So, I guess one thing is for certain. When DeLong first teased that he was working with prominent people, he most definitely wasn't lying. But what leaves most of the public questioning all this is why these individuals have come forward with what they know to start this entire endeavor with DeLong.

It seems that very little of this project actually has to do with UFOs. This isn't a grand disclosure or even a partial disclosure that many were either naively expecting or wishfully hoping for. It is an ambitious project helmed by a businessman. in DeLong, who definitely knows his shit, but also knows that in order for any of this to happen, a ton of money needs to be raised and invested for any of this to actually happen. What some may not realize is that both secrecy and transparency can be very expensive. And with these individuals involved, money will be going in and going out, pumped through channels that the Academy deems worthy, and the filtered knowledge and information will then be given to

public that invest. But what about those who don't? Is this just a large-scale Mufon membership feedback loop? Or is it indeed a groundbreaking step forward for humanity in terms of technological advancement and aerospace exploration?

Is pre-existing UFO technology a part of any of this? There are so many questions. And just like we all waited forever for this announcement to be made, I have no doubt that we will wait just as long to truly see where this is all heading. Personally, I will continue to safely dip my toes in the

shallow end, watching from the periphery as this all unfolds, and the boys club dives deeper and deeper. But just like the listeners above, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Have you invested? What do you think the end game is here? Please send me your thoughts and comments by using the contact tab on the website, somewhere in the skies.com. And now let's switch gears and get to this week's topic and get It has become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed podcasts to date. Lore is a bi-weekly show about non-fiction scary stories. Each episode examines historical events that show the dark side of human nature, usually through the lens of folklore.

The series was created in 2015 by Aaron Manky and received the iTunes Best of 2015 award. The podcast was also given the award for the Best History Podcast by the series. Academy of Podcasters in 2016. At the end of 2016, the podcast was included in the top lists by The Atlantic and Entertainment Weekly. But it doesn't end there. This past Friday the 13th, the podcast came to Television Life, with Amazon Studios at the helm. From the executive producer of The Walking Dead and the executive producer of the X-Files,

this anthology series brings to life Aaron Mankey's lore podcast and uncovers the real-life events that spawned our darkest nightmares. Throughout history, fear was best kept buried. Sealed. Closed. But folklore has a way of keeping the door open wide, allowing stories to live and breathe, to creep inside and haunt us. I'm Aaron Manky. This is lore. Today, I pull a fascinating an interview out of the vault, where I speak with lore creator, Aaron Manke. Manke is the writer, host, and producer of lore, as well as the author of a number of supernatural thrillers. He has a deep love of the mysterious and frightening that began with unsolved mysteries and the X-Files, a love that continues to this day. Basically, he's a nerd for

anything unexplainable, or supernatural. Manke lives with his family in the historic North Shore area of Boston, the very heart of Lovecraft Country, and the epicenter of the Salem Witch Trials. So, without further ado, let's continue our Halloween countdown with Aaron Manky. Just a warning, my personal audio during this interview is not exactly top-notch. Technical issues definitely got the best to me during this recording, but we soldiered on. On the flip side, Manky sounds incredible, as a multi-million download podcast should. Thanks for your understanding. understanding, and I hope you enjoy. Thanks for joining us, Aaron.

Thanks for having me, Ryan. Appreciate it. So when did your interest in folklore really first begin, Aaron? What is your origin story, as it were? Well, it doesn't begin in a vat of toxic chemicals, so that's probably a good thing. You know, I think folklore and legends, it sounds cliche, but they've been a part of my life since probably grade school. And I'm thinking maybe 10 years old or younger.

I don't know how old you are. But I was always sent home with those scholastic reader catalogs. kids get these now too. So I'm sure they've done them for decades. You know, it's, it was a place where people like fell in love with books. You could pick up, you know, a book on InSink or Battlestar Galactica, but you could also pick up, you know, classics. I think my mom used it to get me, um, my first fantasy set, which was the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. And it was, I think it was a book from the scholastic reader at some point when I was in, in grade school that had, it was like a collection of ghost stories and mysterious events. I remember a story about a person walking into a, like

a circle in a cornfield and then vanishing. You know, just things like that. That was the book that really kicked it off for me. And then, of course, I was growing up in the 80s. And so my interest took root in shows like Unsolved Mysteries and then later on the X-Files. And then it's just been a part of me ever since. Was there always a keen interest or maybe a personal experience in the odd or the unexplainable that sort of sent you on this path to research this type of topic and

subtopics as it were. Well, not particularly like an event in my own life. I have to sit down and think about it for a while and I haven't had a chance to do that. But the only odd event that's ever happened in my life, I think at some point, right after college, I

saw like a white lady on the side of the road driving through the cornfields of Illinois, but, you know, it's also muddled by a couple decades of memories. But, you know, for the most part, my interest is really just born out of, you know, like, again, this love of the, of the ghost stories, the mysterious,

the unsolved mysteries kind of thing. And also just a deep love of history. I think I've always been fascinated with learning as much as I can about different periods of history and the way the stories are passed on. And I didn't realize that I was collecting all of these interests into something that would one day become what it is. But, you know, hindsight's 2020, like they say. And I look back and it's kind of obvious to me now that, oh, yeah, of course, with all

these interests combined, this is what I should be doing. So, yeah, there's been pieces of it along the way. Gotcha. Yeah, we will definitely go into the history aspect for sure, Aaron. You've described lore, your podcast that we mentioned earlier, obviously, as almost an happy accident, like tripping upon it almost. Could you give us sort of a backstory as to how the podcast came to be? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so basically I had been writing and self-publishing my own supernatural thrillers for about two years. I've written three novels. And I was really actually giving, it was ready to give up. I was a full-time designer, been running my own design business for about eight years. And I noticed that every time I wrote a book, my business would suffer. And it wasn't because

I was somehow taking my foot off the gas or not marketing for that period of time. I just, I never marketed my business at all. It was always word of mouth. So I noticed a pattern and I realized, you know, I'm selling three or four. books a month. It wasn't even enough to pay for the coffee I was drinking while I was writing the books, let alone recoup my time investment. So I got to the point where I just realized it was hard to justify a hobby that wasn't paying for itself. And I mean, novels take a lot of time. You know, I wrote my latest one. I wrote really fast. I dedicated myself to at least a thousand words a day. So I wrote, I wrote, you know, like a 90,000 word book in about 45 days. But, you know, it was,

It was like, I can't do this during, you know, National Novel Writing Month. For some odd reason, I can't do it. But during January of last year, I just cranked out a book. So, you know, but it takes a lot of time. And then there's all the other stuff when you're self-publishing, you know, having a professional cover design and doing the layout and getting it all disseminated to the stores online. So I just decided I needed to figure out if it was really worth it or not.

So as a final, you know, last ditch effort, my Hail Mary was, I decided I would write this nonfiction exploration of like some of my favorite myths and legends the history behind them you know and then give that away to people in exchange for their email address because that's what's what's what all the pros will tell you is you need to build a bigger mailing list and then you have direct contact with your readers you can you can share excitement and behind the scene stuff and it's all it's all good it's about community building and i like that but um you know so in theory i thought with a bigger mailing list maybe i could sell more fiction and then that would actually justify my time in the end this this nonfiction giveaway thing just got too long, honestly.

And I don't have a lot of time to sit down and read for pleasure outside of the stuff I do for lore. But it's usually reading on a screen or in audio format. So I thought, you know, this thing is like 15,000 words long at this point. Maybe I should just record one of them and see if that's good enough as a giveaway. And so I recorded the first one, which ended up being episode one of lore. I let a friend listen to it. He has very similar interests.

were kind of from the same era. And he said, you know, this needs to be a podcast air. And you can't, don't give this a way. Make this a podcast. And I thought, you know, what the heck? What do I have to lose? And he was right. So the rest, I guess, is history.

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I've been listening since pretty much day one, my girlfriend and I. And like you said, it's that word of mouth that really gets it out there. It really is. It is. And that plays very well into the whole oral tradition of folklore as well. It does. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, but people email me all the time and say, Aaron, you know, you've really created something amazing. Like, how do I go out and start a successful podcast? And my answer is always, you know, it's tongue in cheek, but, you know, like, you've just got to create something that's really, really good, so good that people will talk about it with other people. Unfortunately, there's no, like, steps in there. It's just, that's what it is. Create something worth talking about. And then people will talk about it, it'll grow. And I somehow accidentally managed to do that.

So how do you go about your research? chairing. Where do you find your stories for lore? Well, you know, stories are like ogres. They're like onions. So a lot of the time I find stories while I'm researching other stories, which is really great because I often don't have time to sit down to think like, okay, what's my next topic? Usually what happens is while I'm working on, you know, episode X, I find four more ideas that I just kind of make note of and file them away. So I take a lot of notes. I save a lot of articles, both like an online article on a website or sources that I find through books, I'll take pictures of pages and make bibliography stuff set up just for later use.

I use Evernote for just about everything for lore on the research side. So the fact that I can jump in and highlight things so that later on when I come back, I know what paragraph really ticked off the inspiration. So yeah, so basically topics start with some sort of inspiration or memory of something that I might have bumped into or heard. And then I just, like, I chase down as many sources as I can, you know, historical accounts and books and articles and whatnot. And I read a ton.

But the Internet's made it a lot easier than this might have been, you know, 30 years ago. Google has hundreds of millions, I think, of books on their books. com website. You know, just like you would search for images, you can go to books. com and you can type in Robert the doll and put that in quotation marks. So it grabs the phrase and then hit search. And it'll search through books that it's scanned in for a topic. And so I don't have to then, you know, buy 20 books on, you know, paranormal stories and go digging for what I need.

What I need floats to the surface. Then I can read that. I can cite those sources. I can run with that info and move quicker because the episodes take a little bit of time to put together. You know, when I first started listening and you were telling these stories, it struck me. Where is he getting this from? Is he sitting down and almost writing these facts? Essays to himself. And I was so, you know, delighted to hear that, yes, you take the time to

write your entire story, as it were, in your own words, and convey that to the audience. Yeah, absolutely. That always struck me most as a writer myself. So, uh, kudos on that. I write it. So, you know, I tell people, this takes me about 40 hours from inception to, through the research and writing process, recording and production, and then putting it out. That's about 40 hours of my time. And because Laura's a business for me now, I mean, this is, it's my full-time job. So I have sponsors. So that brings in communication with sponsors and billing and invoices and, you know, taking care of things on the tax side. Like there's a whole world of the business side. That's not the sexy. Oh, cool. I want to be a podcaster kind of thing. But it comes with the

territory. You have to just let that in. If you get to that part and that's everybody's hope. So just be ready. If you want to have a successful podcast with lots of sponsors and stuff, then you're going to spend a lot of time in QuickBooks. It's a business. You're right. It is. It is. So, you know, 40 hours a week, 40 hours per episode, and then I've got the other 40, because

I'm doing them every two weeks. So essentially, half my time is spent on creating the episode and then half my time is spent on running the business and marketing and interacting with listeners and things like that. Yeah, but I write them, I write them as if I'm going to say them. You know, I don't write a term paper and then try to read that because reading things that are written for print is it's awkward you know some syllables just don't like to be said next to another syllable but they look good on paper so that's that i tend to write it in a more i maybe this is what speech writers do i don't know but this is this is what i've kind of intuited my way into i had

somebody email me just this morning um who said i love your podcast but you've got to stop saying you see a few times per episode but you know like if you were sitting in front of me or we were at a campfire and i was telling a story there are things that would come out of me vocally that I don't know if I want to call them ticks or it's part of the it's part of the fingerprint of my storytelling voice and that's that's part of it. I think you only notice things like you see or sometimes or you know the words that I say often enough in an episode. I think it's when people binge through you know 10 or 20 episodes at once they start to notice things like that. If you're listening to it every other week, it's not a big deal. So it's funny. The little things that people

will nitpick but 99% of the email I get is really positive. So that's that's that's where I have to hold on to that. Right. It's a corkman. It makes you the character that you are, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Speaking of writing, does your research into folklore or superstition, does it ever bleed into your novel writing? Kind of backwards, actually. So lore was in a sense born because of the research I was doing for the novels. So the novels that I write are kind of in the vein of like Stephen King,

except I'm not as good as him. I mean, you know, he's the master. So I sit at his feet. But as far as like the genre is concerned, you know, I take really obscure superstition, mythology, folklore, and whatnot that's local to an area, usually New England for me, because that's where I live. And it's just a, it's an area that's dripping with folklore. European, American Indian, you know, specifically the Algonquin tribes that lived

in the northeast part of the United States. It's like there's just so much really great stuff here. So a lot of that mythology is where the seeds of my books come from. And of course, I live five minutes from Salem where the witch trials happened in 1692. So there's just a lot going on. So what happens is I'm researching looking for the right, you know, what's the right thing at the center of this book? And I'll find six things. And then in the end I pick one of them.

Well, now I've got five other things that I've filed away. And so I noticed that I had this file and Evernote growing of, you know, future topics or cool. ideas or folklore to pursue. And it was out of that folder that the first, you know, three or four episodes of lore kind of came about. I was, the book I was, the little giveaway I was writing was going to be called my five favorite New England myths. And it included the Mercy Brown story from episode one, the Husuk Tunnel from episode two.

There was the Dover Demon, which was a later episode. That one needed a lot of fleshing out. So I came back to that one later and I really expanded upon it. But yeah, so it wasn't necessarily that the lore bleeds back into, although maybe it will. You know, maybe because I haven't written a book in a year now. So maybe the writing techniques and, you know, the research process and all that is going to bleed back over. But for the most part, it was leftovers from the books that became lore. Well, I mean, one of those books, grave suspicion, like you mentioned, that sort of that core to the book, for me in this book was witches.

And again, like you said, your main character, Sam, having. grown up in the Salem area. What sort of made you compelled to write about witches in this latest book and the certain lineage that your characters have to these incidents back in Salem? Well, you know, like a lot of writers, my master ideas come to me with kind of like a what-if scenario. And I remember thinking, what if, you know, like we have all these documents and we have all this oral history and then the public perception of what happened in 1692 with the witch's the witch trials in Salem. What if, what if the, you know, and there's, there's all these like symptoms or supernatural

occurrences that are listed, what if they were real? Like, what if, what if the things that happened were real? But the person who was to blame never got caught. You know, what if it wasn't all of those people who were prosecuted and some of, some of whom were hung? What if it wasn't the people who took the blame? because it was very easy to become suspicious in people's eyes back then. What if it was somebody who slipped through the cracks but actually did those things?

And then I started playing with that, you know, and so a lot of the plot of grave suspicion comes out of the idea of, well, what if we're sitting here today and we're looking back? Like, if that person got away, what kind of a thread would be left through history? And, you know, does that speak to anything that could be going on today if that makes any sense? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, it was a page turner for sure. Oh, thanks. Those what ifs are always, you know, what we try to cover on our show. Yeah.

For sure. Are there any topics, Erin, going back to lore that you found most, I guess, most intriguing or have either stretched your beliefs or made you more suspicious or somewhere in between? Anything that really sticks out to you? You know, I try not to land on one side of the fence of the other. I'm enthralled by the stories, you know, by the actions, the beliefs of the people who lived in these years before us, how the beliefs informed society and families and the way people interacted with each other. I think the episodes that really have connected with me the most,

both in just reading about them and then writing them were episodes like Black Stockings, where you have, you know, Bridget Cleary becomes sick and her husband because of this deep Irish folklore from where they lived, convinced him that his wife wasn't really his wife, that she had been replaced by a fairy changeling. And there were rules and steps that you could take in the folklore of that area that helped you figure out if she was a changeling and how to get rid of her. And unfortunately, it's kind of like the, you know, the, well, we'll dunk the witch in the water. And if she drowns, she wasn't a witch.

And if she doesn't drown, then she's a witch and we'll kill her. You know, there's this broken logic to a lot of it. And the people, because it's folklore, because it's part of their upbringing, the culture that they live in and there's the social pressures to believe what everybody else believes, they do some really horrific things, even not, not because they're horrific people, but because they're almost trapped between, you know, society and belief and desperation. And so, you know, Blackstockings was one of those episodes that really kind of reached out and grabbed a hold of me.

And other was, you know, half hung about, or half hanged, sorry, to be grammatically correct, capping about Mary Webster in Western Massachusetts and her, you know, trial, if you want to call it that, as a witch. Yeah, those are the ones that, the ones where you see society kind of become the monster, that's where it really hits home for me. You were once quoted as saying, sometimes folklore is paint on top of a messy human situation, and we tell it through the lens of a fairy tale or scary story because humans really can't be the monsters. This is, this touched me very keenly because we always look for something else other than ourselves, almost as if we fear ourselves more than what may be out there. Do you see this cultural narrative as an inspiration on either the paranormal or the unknown or where does the folklore begin and where does the reality of a situation perceivably end?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the trick of folklore, you know, because it's, it almost, it's almost like this physical entity living within a subculture or a people group. I mean, they bring it with them like luggage when they, that's why I like New England, because you can start here with a myth or a legend

or a piece of folklore that's centuries old and follow it through its roots to other places. So I, from New England and, you know, the story of Mercy Brown and the American vampires, I can follow that back through to Europe. And, you know, it's just, it spreads.

Folklore kind of moves along, almost like a virus or, you know, some sort of baggage that you bring with you. So, you know, what I think I've begun to pick up on is that humans just don't like not knowing. You know, we crave explanations. We don't like there to be an unanswered question. And maybe that's a product of the modern age and the age of enlightenment and in the scientific method and really digging for the truth. And those are all good things. But we crave explanations. So I think supernatural events, you know, did they make a search for explanations that end up sounding like supernatural? stories or you know or do they or do we use made up stories as a tool to explain deep concepts or

things that we can't otherwise wrap our minds around you know it's impossible to say you know it's like really old cultures who would you know call the mountains the bones of the earth and think of the earth as like this dead creature that that once was alive and moving and was killed by one of the titans or the gods and now we can see the bones here and you know finding a way to to wrap minds around stuff that's just too hard to understand. And I think it's impossible to say. I think it's probably a little bit of both, because nothing's ever black and white. You know, it's, it's never all or nothing. It's always a mix. It's, it's gray. So, but yeah, I see, I, I just see humans constantly craving answers and

explanation. And when there isn't one that they can grasp or find, you'll usually find in a culture some sort of a story, you know, made up that kind of explains why. I mean, speaking of storytelling, that's what sets your show apart from most podcasts, I think, that deal with the esoteric. or the quote unquote paranormal. How do you view storytelling now? What sets it apart from generations before? Well, I mean, what I do is oral storytelling. Right.

You know, in the truest sense, there's no, there's no pictures. There's no, it's just my voice and some music for mood, you know. So I think oral storytelling is very similar to what has always been. I mean, anybody that's been a camp, you know, at some point in their, you know, middle school or high school years has got some story about, you know, sitting around the campfire and telling stories that are local to that camp. campsite or whatnot. And honestly, the only things that have changed over the centuries are delivery methods and the audience size. A century ago, you would tell story to a dozen people

sitting on your front porch. And that was about as big as it got, you know? In the past, we would have gathered around the fire. And then, you know, you speak the words to each other. And maybe there would be costumes or dance or recreations of battles. Maybe it's just standing there and talking. But the power, I think, was in the words. And I like to think of it as a tribal experience, whether you're from a culture that calls it a tribe or not. You know, it's a community event. And because of that, the audience was also the, they were the participants. They were picking up the story that was being laid down for them and kind of they lived with it day in, day out.

And so story was, it just became this glue that held everything together. You know, beliefs, lessons, history. All of it was taught through story. You know, that's what the folk tales and fairy tales that Hans Christian Anderson and I'm blanking on Grims, the Grim brothers gathered together over the years. I mean, one of the things that they really wanted to do was, was capture this vocal oral storytelling that was going on all around them. And there was slight differences from town to town and all that. But they wanted to capture it all because that's how things were being passed along. Sometimes it was lessons.

Sometimes it was history. It was all taught through story. I think what's different now is that today we're a really nomadic people. I think that we move a lot more than our parents did or our grandparents did. It's easier. You can pick up and move 2,000 miles away and Facebook connects you with people and you don't feel like you're really away at all in a sense. So there are fewer and fewer geographical tribes, but the internet connects us in a way that

television and even radio before that couldn't do because even radio had limits to its reach. So it puts people in direct contact with each other. And that means that hundreds or thousands or millions of people can all hear and interact with a story like all at the same time or, you know, all in the same day. It's kind of crazy when you think about it. You know, you mentioned in the intro about 2 million downloads. Actually, this month I'm going to hit the 9 millionth download for lore. And when you think about that, like 9 million, I mean, sure, I've got 25 episodes out. So you have to do some division by that.

But still, that's a lot of people who are all gathering around this virtual campfire, you know. And I think it really speaks to how. how much people just love to have story told to them. And I love doing it. So it works up pretty nicely. It really does. Yeah, it's a wonderful dichotomy. And I mean, that's that's absolutely incredible. Nine million. Congratulations. We can only aspire. That being said, I think you're right. It's that dichotomy of sort of the isolation of being, you know, face to face with the computer screen by yourself, but being able to connect with people from all around the world, once or at your convenience.

It says a lot about the times and cannot really be argued that it's either a positive or negative. Like you said earlier, it's still in that gray area. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, because we do this oral storytelling not in front of each other, you know, around a fire on a porch or in a room together, you do lose things because part of public speaking is, you know, body language and, you know, just the way that your eyes might look while you're, you know, or.

the smile in your face, like all of that communicates. And so there are elements that we lose. But, you know, I think that podcasting, you know, I realize it's been around for a decade. And for a long time, it's been kind of this nerd thing that you have to understand RSS feeds and how to subscribe and how it all works. But hopefully it's becoming more and more accessible to people. I think the growth we're seeing thanks to shows like serial and this American life through NPR. I think that's helping teach the non-technical people more about how they can

dive into the world of podcasting and find stuff. And who knows, maybe over the years to come, we're going to find ways for those things like body language and expressions and just being in the room with somebody to be replicated in some way. I don't know how. But in some way, you know? Right. The singularity at its best.

That's right. I mean, we found this as our outlet to get these, you know, very controversial and or, you know, esoteric topics out. the public in the way we thought we could do that best. And you seem to have done that both in podcast form and books. Are you working on any new books as we speak? Can we expect anything in the coming year or so? I actually have a lot on my plate this year that is that is lore related, but not regular podcast episodes. So, so, you know, everybody's going to get every other week, they're going to get a brand new lore episode. That doesn't go away. Like, that's what it is.

My Patreon members, by the way, get extra episodes. They get, like, I could do, lore shorts, you know, five minute long or so, one story, not a lot of background stuff. It's just, let's get into the story. And this is really cool. I want to share it with you. And they get those on the off weeks. So I'm, those are the things that I'm constantly creating, but I have some, I have some other projects in the works. I can't talk about all of them. Of course. One of them is, I'm taking the anthology, I'm taking the transcripts from all of 2015 episodes. There's 24 of them. You know, it's basically just, it's all the words that I said typed out, you know, it's copies of my transcripts with the footnotes and, you know,

links to articles and whatnot. And I'll release that in February as a paperback and an e-book and things like that. My Patreon backers at a certain level have a paperback coming to them. So, and I promised months ago that it would come out in February. As a designer, you know, with experience doing paperback layout and cover design and all that, I didn't think that taking the text and then making it into a physical book would actually take that much effort on my part. I'm hiring a fantastic cover illustrator who did the new Raven shirt for me. His name is Christopher Downs. He's a cartoonist, political cartoonist in Tasmania of all places.

Oh, wow. But he's, you know, he was voted the best political cartoonist of 2015 in Australia and, like, super, super talented. And he's got this, this love of like that Edward Mori creepy side kind of like would fit really well in a Timberton movie kind of style. So he's going to do the cover art for it. I'm working right now on the, where I've gotten hung up in the footnotes, actually. It's kind of a mess. But it's just, it's about, it's about formatting. I think it's the first book I've laid out that actually has like end notes and, you know,

all that kind of stuff. But I want to work on a sequel to grave suspicion. For me, there are, there are plotters and pansers when it comes to fiction. You know, there are pansers like Stephen King who just sit down with an idea and they write until they're done. Me, I'm a plotter. I like to sit down and outline the entire book. I want to know what each chapter is going to have happened in it.

and then I can just, then I can put a repeating task on my to-do list and say, write a thousand words and, you know, it's every day. And so then I, you know, when it's time to write, I open up my outline and say, where am I? Okay, chapter three, this is what I'm writing about today. And I write it. You know, all the continuity and the flow is already planned out. So what I need to do is find time to sit down and do that. And it would probably take me about a week to just like, you know, hit my head against a wall

and mash out of an outline. I have ideas for the sequel to that book. But that's the fiction project I've got. And, yeah. Oh, I can't wait, man. So, that being said, I mean, are there any sort of topics and or folklore that you haven't covered yet that you hope to or that you would really like to? You know, okay, so confession time. I have a hard time pronouncing words and other languages.

I took German in high school. Germans are a pretty easy language to wrap your tongue around. So, you know, if you've listened to the show, I've butchered words in Icelandic. I try my best. I try my best with, you know, Algonquin and, you know, things like that. So I need to get over that fear.

I mean, even things like Irish. Yeah. You know, there are some things like, I would love to cover, you know, the story of the Banshee, you know, but it's written out in certain ways in different myths that I need to figure out how to pronounce the words.

You know, so that's, sometimes that's the holdup. It's like, I have to say this verbally, how am I going to do that? But outside of that, I would really love to explore non-European cultures as well. But it's hard because a lot of the source materials not in a language that I can read and Google Translate can only do so much for you. And so I'm trying my best.

You know, today's episode that just came out today, the Cave, Episode 25, is on an island called Chilaue, off the coast of Chile. and I wrap my head around a lot of words that I didn't know that I could pronounce. But there are resources online. I think how to pronounce.com has become a good help for me. You select the language that the word is. You paste the word in and it'll speak it for you, which is kind of cool. So, you know, I want to get a little bit more global with the stories, but I have to do it carefully.

And when you move outside of English, it's harder and harder to do things and not lose listeners and upset people from those cultures, and I want to be careful. Of course. I mean, that's the struggle with, you know, sort of folklore is what gets lost in translation or what comes off as disrespectful or, yeah, absolutely. I could see the struggle in that for sure, but that's exciting, nonetheless, sort of branching out globally with this. I think that's a great way to go. And it can only really go up from there, Aaron. Absolutely. It's obvious, my friend, that you've found an incredible outlet to tell your stories that most people either don't think about or they're sort of too afraid to confront.

But with the work you're doing, that seems to be changing one episode at a time. And I personally look forward to what comes next. And where can we find out more about lore and the books you're working on and your live performances that I've just learned about? Yeah. So I've done three live performances. They were in October, November. And it was a good season for that because, you know, the weather was, you know, the weather was

still decent and I mean New England the winter is just kind of rough. And I don't know when I'll do the next live show because with some of the plans that I have coming up is going to be some travel involved with them that won't allow me to do things like that. Plus if I ask people where they want me to do

a live show, the answer is pretty much anywhere. And that's hard. And I have a young family. I've got kids who are in, you know, kindergarten first grade. So it's hard to pack them up and rent an RV and drive around for two or three weeks. It just, I would go insane and I wouldn't be productive. So I have to figure that out carefully.

But yeah, live shows have been really fun. All of them have sold out, you know, hundreds of people coming to them. It was actually a very surreal experience. After my first live show in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there was a line for 90 minutes of people who wanted to shake my hand, take a picture with me. Wow. You know, get a book signed and, you know, buy books and stuff. It was, I didn't expect any of it. And, like, I walked away.

Just, I was speechless. I still, surreal is the only thing I can say to people a lot of times. Like, this is just so surreal. It's very cool. And I'm humbled by it all. But yeah, lorepodcast.com is a really great place to go to, you know, listen to new episodes. If you look at the episode description, there's a link to a music page for that episode that will list the songs that are used.

Musicians are all on places like SoundCloud and, you know, people like Chad Lawson, who is, you know, an iTunes top 10 classical pianist. he's become a good friend and his music is just insanely great and people need to check that out. Mu, NYU, you. He's another fantastic musician in there. So there's cool stuff to explore.

There's a transcripts page where you can learn about how to get transcripts of episodes. And I'm thinking about putting like a, I wouldn't call it blog, but like a news page on the site just so people can be up to dated on other things. The cool stuff that I haven't announced yet that I want to someday, like where do I do that?

But yeah, lorepodcast.com, which lore podcast is pretty much where you can follow the show anywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all at lore podcast. And then I have my own personal page online, Aaron Mankey.com, and I use that for the fiction. And I blog there occasionally about things like lore and whatnot. Yeah, and I'm A, M-A-H-N-K-E on Twitter. And I have a fan page on Facebook. People try to friend me on my personal account, and I always delete those requests because

Oh, of course. Personal Facebook is personal Facebook. But I've got a fan page for both, lore and my writing stuff, so people can check that out. Thank you so much for joining us today, man. And all the best with your upcoming projects. Thanks. I really appreciate it. All right, that is it for this week's show.

To find all of Aaron Manky's work, visit lorepodcast.com. And be sure to check out the all-new television adaptation exclusively on Amazon. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. It is the only way the show gains visibility on the biggest podcast platform,

in the world. While there, I hope you'll also consider rating and reviewing the show. We have a perfect five-star rating right now, and I couldn't be more honored and thankful for that. All past episodes and extra content can also be found on the website. You can also reach me directly through the contact tab for guest or topic suggestions, or to share your story that I may feature on the show. That's all at somewhere in the skies.com. Also a reminder that somewhere in the skies store is open for business. All types of apparel and merch can be found by visiting tpublic.com. That's T-E-E-E-E-Public.com. And searching for Somewhere in the Skies.

Next week, we dive right back into the Halloween spirit. When we speak with the woman who inspired me to start the Somewhere in the Sky's podcast, Miss Shannon Legrow. We talk all about her favorite and most interesting interviews she's conducted on her acclaimed podcast into the fray. You won't want to miss this jam-packed interview. next Sunday on all major podcast outlets. I'll see you next week, and remember, keep your feet on the ground,

but never... What was that? Anyways, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. That is a damn werewolf. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions. In association with Antica Productions and the Antica Podcast Network.

To learn more, visit anticaproductions.com.