Somewhere in the Skies - Mike Anthony & Leslie Kean: SURVIVING DEATH

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

On episode 151 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan is joined in-studio by Leslie Kean and Mike Anthony to talk all about their extensive work looking in to a subject many refuse to think about; death. What happens when we die? Our body ceases to function, but what about that unknown force within us? Is it consciousness or a soul. Are they different or one in the same? Have we lived many lives before and can we remember them? And most importantly, can we survive death? Returning this week is investigative journalist and New York Times Best-Selling author, Leslie Kean. Her most recent book, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife tackles the very questions I just asked and so much more. Mike Anthony is an actor in New York City. Several years ago, his father died unexpectedly. Then, something extraordinary occurred. Something Mike didn’t believe was possible. And ever since, he's been on a personal journey to find out if his father ended with his body, or continues on in ways we once thought impossible, but are now beginning to understand in the most profound of ways. Ryan will be speaking at Contact in the Desert this Spring. For tickets, CLICK HERE Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE 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

This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Today on the show, Leslie Kane and Mike Anthony.

I was sitting in England with Leslie and this man, Stuart Alexander, and I saw the thing happen right in front of my eyes that Leslie talks about in the book. It's real, right? There are some things that just simply are objectively true, are objectively real, and when I saw this thing happen, that blew me away. And I, from then on, started to believe that my dad really was here. but when I saw this thing happen, it moved me from believing it was real to knowing it was real. I can't describe how big of a shift that was in my life. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies.

I'm your host Ryan Sprague. And guess what? You're going to die. We all are. It's the singular thing that every last one of us has in common. And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can start asking the tough. for questions. What happens when we die?

Where do we go? Do we go anywhere? Our body ceases to function, but what about the unknown force within us? Our consciousness, or on a religious level, our soul? Are they different, or one and the same? Our brains shut down.

But what about everything we've ever learned or experienced? Do our memories just blip out into blankness like nothing ever happened? When we think of death, many of us brush it aside and save it for another day. And then those days turn into months, and those months turn into years. And then we're faced with that inevitable question, ourselves, of our own mortality. No matter your beliefs, no matter you're shying away from it or accepting it, death is a mystery we've only begun to scratch the surface of.

And today's guests have dug deeper into this mortal mystery. like nobody else. Returning this week is investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author, Leslie Kane. Her most recent book, Surviving Death, a journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife, tackles the very questions I just asked and so much more. Mike Anthony is an actor in New York City.

Several years ago, his father died unexpectedly. Then something extraordinary occurred. Something Mike didn't believe was possible. And ever since, he's been on a personal journey to find out if his father ended with his body or continues on in ways we once thought impossible, but are now beginning to understand in the most profound of ways. Here's our conversation with Leslie Kane and Mike Anthony. I am here with Mike. Mike, let's talk about how you and I first connected before the three of us.

us connected. Yeah. We have a pretty long history. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I want to say that it's humbling for me. I feel sort of out of place being here with these two great researchers. You know, I'm just a dumb dumb bartender. Oh, stop.

I'm here with you guys who have, you know. Look, he's a bartender too. Yeah. Yes, who has devoted years of study. And, you know, Leslie's a, you know, a world-class journalist. And so I feel a little bit out of place. But, yeah, you and I know each other because we work in the theater world. and way back when, I guess at this point it's like 10 years ago or something.

Yeah, before there was Hamilton, there was a little show called In the Heights. That's right. In Manuel's first show. And I remember that's when I met you. That's right. I was doing, I was selling T-shirts and I looked over and you were there every day. That's right. And you put a smile on everyone's faces, no matter how hard our New York gritty days were.

And then one day, I overheard you talking to somebody about UFO stuff, you know, quote-unquote UFO stuff. And my ears pricked up like a dog. And I was like, that could just say you have a? Because, you know, there aren't a lot of people in my life that I share this interest with, you know. Though I've been interested in it since I was a young kid, but most of the kids I grew up with thought I was actually insane for believing that something was going on that we couldn't explain. So when I heard you talking about it that day at the theater, that's how we sort of really started to become friends. Right. Talking about this topic.

Absolutely. And then I learned that you were, you were sort of going into a world that I'd never explored. And that had to do with, I guess some could say, supernatural, paranormal even, but more specifically, the afterlife. Yeah. Something I never touched. Now, is it a fear? It could be. I know a lot of people, death is one of the scariest things they could possibly think of and they choose not to think about it.

Yeah. And I had just learned that Leslie had written a book all about what you were about to talk about in research after her first book about UFOs. So, Leslie, how did you go from UFOs to this? I have to ask, how did this all come about for you? Well, it wasn't really related to UFOs, except that it sort of is because it's a big mystery. So all during the years when I was investigating UFOs, I sort of had this in the background. this question of what happens when you die, or is there any kind of survival past death? That's the question.

And can it be looked at from a scientific perspective, not just a matter of religion or belief systems, or even not just a matter of personal experiences, but really a matter of scientific study and investigations and stuff like that. So I'd always been interested in that question. And so after my UFO book came out, it was, and there was a couple of years where I was dealing with stuff related to the book and then it was all of a sudden like what next and I my publisher

actually invited me to write another book and this was like the perfect topic it was something I really wanted to do just the obvious topic for me to do my next book on and I'd really spent so long on UFOs that I was kind of ready to move on to something else anyway welcome to my life another simple question

from UFOs to life after death likes to focus on the simple things Yeah, I like the big mysteries. Yeah, and I'm just, it's my journalistic mind, my probing curiosity kind of gets hooked by these things. And they're usually things that we don't have answers for, but that makes them in some ways even more interesting. Right. So, yeah, and I've done a little research on this over the years. I've looked into it, a case of a child who remembered a past life because I was involved with some people who were making a movie about it.

So I kind of got introduced to a bunch of people involved in the field and stuff. So I sort of, you know, had some awareness of it, but not a lot. I had no idea what was going to happen when I started the research that I did. It turned out I had a whole lot of personal stuff. Stuff happened to me that I never expected to happen. So it became a journey, a personal journey for me. The first book was about research. I had never seen a UFO, so it was definitely not about experience.

But with this kind of material, you can choose to enter into it on an experiential level. You don't have to wait for the UFO to show up. There's various things you can do, and we can talk about that, to explore the material yourself. And when you do that, you become a participant in a certain sense, out of choice. And that's one of the different aspects of this. That's fascinating. I would love to dig into that. Sure.

Becoming a part of what you're doing. I think that's a big part of all this. And you're right. I think when it comes to the UFO topic, it's dropped in the lap of an observer without any, you know, For a lot of witnesses, UFO witnesses, no preconceived notions, no interest in the topic of UFOs. Definitely. It's not a choice. It's not a choice.

It's not a choice. And they don't wish it never had happened. Exactly. A lot of them, I'm trying to. But for something like this, I think it's interesting. It's such a deeper look into something, a different phenomenon, or possibly an interconnected phenomenon. We'll get to that. Where you can choose to be a participant.

Yeah, you can test certain things. And then also with me, things happened to me that I didn't. really choose. I never expected to happen. But that, you know, that that, that too, things happen. Yeah. Well, talking about personal journeys, Mike, how, how did you get interested in the topic of the afterlife and get connected with Leslie? Yeah, well, I've always had an interest in these questions, you know, these sort of bigger picture questions, you know, starting from when I was a young kid and I'd never seen a UFO, but I was interested in that. It was something that, because I was scientifically minded from a young age. I was going to be a high school science teacher before I

became an actor. That's where I was headed. So, you know, I was a biology major for a couple of weeks in college, so I know what I'm talking about. So what happened, though, was my dad passed away, and this is about nine years ago now, and my sister had hired a medium to come to our house and do a reading. And a medium is a person who claims the ability to somehow sense people who are no longer in a physical body. And I had known vaguely about mediumship from the show Crossing Over with John Edwards. John Edward. Yep, I don't remember that sure.

And that was my only real, other than the movie Ghost with, you know, Wubby Goldberg, Ghost and John Edward, that was my exposure to mediumship. But until... One extreme to the other. Yes, yes, exactly. And I found that show interesting, but, you know, was on television, so I assumed it was highly edited and the reaction seemed real from the sitters in the audience, but who knew how he was getting that information?

You know, were producers in his ear giving him, you know, I had no idea. So when this woman came to our house, I decided I was going to test her by coming up with a sort of a secret code that I wanted my dad to get this woman to say if it was the real deal. And the reading lasted for about two hours, and the whole thing was extraordinary. She was coming up with details that, you know, the levels of specificity that I did not think could be possible. That, you know, at one point I was looking around the room to see if there were like photographs or something up on the wall that she was getting information from. Because there were some really highly specific things. And everyone was in tears.

And I had totally forgotten by the end of it that I'd come up with this code word with my dad. Because I was already convinced that something was going on that I, I, I, could not personally explain at that time. And then as we were wrapping up to leave, she looked at me and said exactly the thing that I had asked my dad to have her say. Wow. And I gasped because I hadn't said it to anyone else on the face of planet Earth, not even my mom and sister who were there with me. Nobody knew this. And so right then in that moment, it was one of those paradigm shifting moments where it felt to me right then that what my science teachers had told me was not the complete story that we don't have this thing figured out yet. So I couldn't let it go. My mind

couldn't let it go. But I'm skeptical by nature. And there's something called a retrocognitive dissonance, right, where something doesn't necessarily comport with your sense of how the world is supposed to be working. The brain is really good at dismissing things and sort of retroactively figuring out ways that you might have misperceived

something. So then I start thinking, well, could there be any way? She had my sister's phone number. Maybe she hired a private detective and they were out listening to me when I was all alone at my dad's house and I said this thing to my dad. Maybe they had some really sensitive audio equipment which I know was insane and I but it's a possibility

and I needed to rule that out so I called this woman back her name is Angelina Diana it was about a year later and I said you know you're not going to remember me but I had this reading with you and it was life changing but I'd like to see you do that again with people that I bring

to you so that I will know there's no way you could be cheating in any kind of a normal way and she immediately said yes sure I'll do that which is a big risk for her, right? Because she gave me no instructions. There were no rules about this whole thing.

She signed the release form right away. You know, because I said, I'm going to bring people to you. I'm going to film it. I want to make a documentary about it. And whether or not a person is legitimately doing something that science currently says is not possible, it doesn't matter. An editor can make you look great or terrible, you know, depending on how they splice things together.

So she was taking a risk by giving you. this stranger at that time, the right to put this story together however I saw fit. So anyway, I started bringing people to her, random people, and I watched her time and again come up with information, specific information often, that I couldn't understand, you know, where it was coming from or how she was doing it. So that started me down this path of seeing, wait a minute. First of all, there are ways you can test this. And, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, And then I started reading books about it and came to discover that there has been so much research done into this. And I had no idea that places like Stanford and Duke and Harvard have in Princeton have studied the quote unquote paranormal for years, for years.

But sometimes getting what we would call positive results that something unexplained was going on. You know, studies like at Princeton, I think it was the ESP study at Princeton. I recently read Annie Jacobson, her phenomenon, which is about the Stargate program and the CIA's involvement and the millions of dollars they spent studying remote viewing. Leslie and I were just talking about this the other day. There's one case there that this case alone, this instance alone, is mind-boggling.

It was Erie Geller, who I know there's controversy about. There's a, it's been, I believe now this has been released. I think Annie wrote about this in, Annie Jacobson wrote about it in her book, I believe, is where I first saw this. At one point, they had a picture put in a box. It's like, you know, in a Faraday cage and everything, so there's no way he could be getting any sort of electromagnetic reading from this thing. And they asked him to remote view the picture, that was the thing that was in the box. And he started drawing these circles.

And he drew 27, I believe it was 27 circles, like a bunch of grapes. It looked like a bunch of grapes. And that's what he said it was. And when they opened up the box, it was a picture of a bunch of grapes. And there were 27 circles. So what are the chances of that alone? Astronomically small, but that could be coincidence. Yeah.

You know, that we'd have the exact number of circles. So anyway, I was fascinated to find that there's been so much study about this. And this is how I, you know, I knew Leslie's work from her UFO book in 2010, was that? 2010. And then I was sitting in Barnes & Noble one day doing a bunch of research, you know, reading, and then I went to the bathroom. And on my way, there was a book facing out on the top shelf, and it was surviving death. And I didn't see the name on it at that point.

I was just on my way to the bathroom. And I thought, oh, surviving death. That's that I'm going to have to come back and look at that. So I come back out and I take it down, and it's Leslie's book. And I was like, oh, my gosh. And I know I trust her journalistic integrity completely. And so I thought this would be a fascinating read, which it was. And I read it like cover to cover.

And I believe it was, I think it was the next day that I had posted something about the documentary I was making on Facebook. And you, Ryan, wrote to me and said, oh, you know, I should put you in touch with Leslie Kane. I was like, you know, I had no idea that you knew Leslie. You had known her for you. She had read your book and blurb your book. And anyway, it all led to Leslie and I, meeting. and then we became, you know, friends. And, yeah, just the fact that I'm sitting in Leslie's apartment right now feels paranormal.

Pretty surreal. The dominoes that had a fall. Yeah. And then the book that she wrote, Surviving Death, is this fantastic book that study, that looks at the best evidence currently out there that suggests, seems to suggest, that consciousness might exist as something separate from the physical body and that it might survive the death of the physical body. She looks at these various lines of evidence, all of which are fascinating.

And I guess, you know, I'm doing all the talking here. Well, no, no, no. This is a good place to sort of look at the idea of afterlife. I think for a lot of people out there, it's such a quote-unquote morbid topic to explore because a lot of us are afraid of that, of what comes next. None of us truly know. You know, the two biggest questions, what happens when you die? And is there life elsewhere in the universe?

I think we're getting a lot closer to some of those answers to both of those questions, possibly. Maybe not. But this is one that I and I'm sure a lot of other people in my place shy away from. And we look at it as supernatural. It's paranormal. It's so far beyond that it's not even worth looking at in a scientific way. Yet now we have this book where you're exploring the science behind their possibly being an afterlife or past lives and the idea of consciousness. So I guess, Leslie, for those like me who are so simple-minded that we think, it's heaven, they're just coming back to talk to you.

Like, that's what it is, sort of in a religious way, I would say. What is the book about? That's a huge general question. but what what were you trying to to bring to the table when it came to covering the afterlife? Yeah, I mean, I don't even think of it as the afterlife really. I didn't even like it. It's in the subtitle of the book, A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Yeah.

Me and my publisher, we tried so hard to find other language for it. It was just impossible. So I don't even, I don't know, don't even like that word that much. It's more about the fact that consciousness, as Mike said, you know, first of all, the first part of the book explores the fact that consciousness, consciousness is obviously something that can function independent. I mean, I shouldn't say obviously. But there's a lot of evidence that shows that it can function independently of a brain.

So if indeed, once you can establish that, which I believe I established that because based on research in the book, then the question becomes when the body completely disappears, does the same thing happen? And it's a very reasonable question to ask when you look at the data for the fact that it can function separately from the body. So then the reason, it's really, when you talk about heaven and stuff, it's not about any belief systems. I wanted to write a book that explored hardcore evidence for this that would not, it's not depend on any belief systems or religions.

I mean, it's just, there's no talk of God or heaven or any systems of belief in this. It's about, is there evidence for it physically, meant, you know, that it happens. It doesn't matter what the belief systems are. So I also don't think it's morbid because if this, you know, it's evidence. is showing us that we're going to have a wonderful time after we die and we're actually not going to die. That's pretty exciting and positive. And it takes a lot of the fear out of dying. So it actually takes away that sense that people have of this morbidity or this finality or this horror of dying.

Maybe dying isn't fun. Right. When you're actually gone, what if you get to go somewhere that's really beautiful and even better than this system that we have here? So it's opening the door to that possibility, not based on any beliefs, this, but based on actual research and experiences by very credible people. I just watched the show The Good Place, you know, which is about these four humans who pass, and it's about their experience in the afterlife. It's a great show. You can watch it on Netflix, but one of the lead characters at one point is talking to an immortal being on the other side, trying to explain. trying to explain what it's like to be a human.

And she says, you know, we're all aware of death. So we're all a little bit sad all the time. And that can really be true. In my own life, I remember being a young kid and I love my parents so much. And, you know, we lost a goldfish and a puppy and everything. And I remember the topic was on my mind from a young age. I was very worried about losing my parents when I was young. And now that I did lose my dad at a right.

at young age that led me on this whole journey. You know, I see sort of a connective tissue there that I was worried about it well before my dad passed. When I was a little kid, I was specifically worried about losing him for some reason when I was young. But anyway, so that's kind of true, right? We all know about death, so we're all a little bit sad all the time. Then what if there's something out there that can sort of mitigate that sadness of it? And as Leslie just said, from what I gather from her book and the evidence out there,

There is a lot to suggest that my dad did not simply disappear when his heart stopped beating. That some part of his, of who he was is still around, that it somehow kept going and is paying attention in some way to my life. I mean, there is evidence, as far as I can tell, suggesting that's true. No, in terms of evidence, I mean, that's... Because I could share with you how I initially got into this. We used to talking about, like, because I moved through the book to more of an experiential realm, and I did a lot of stuff with mediumship, which Mike has already touched on there. But what got me initially interested in this was these cases of young children,

say, between the ages of two and three, who talk about a past life that they say they had with such specificity that they'll give maybe 10 different specific points about it so that investigators are able to locate the person that they actually were in that past life and verify that all the things that child remembered were true. And at the University of Virginia, they are studying,

they have something called the Department of Perceptual Studies. The division. Division of the Division of Perceptual studies. Thank you. Just because Jim Tucker corrected me on that. You could tell you two, work together. They didn't know.

I think I'm in a buddy cop movie. There was a psychiatrist there named Ian Stevenson who studied these cases for decades and wrote volumes of all these of case studies and was fascinated by them and his work has been taken over by Jim Tucker, who Mike just mentioned, who's also, he's a

child psychiatrist and they have 2,500 cases in their database. But the interesting ones are the ones that are solved. There's hundreds of them in which you are able to verify that the memories were accurate. So when you have a young child who gives you the names of very specific names and all kinds of stuff like that, and then you can say, well, we found the person who they were,

you can go back to that person's family and you can verify everything, it's a pretty good argument for the reality of rebirth or reincarnation because it's very hard to explain it any other way. And so I was drawn into this really through that door because I found those, they were so concrete those cases. You know what they said. You make sure that it was on the record before any investigation took place so that you know that the parents didn't embellish it or decide to make things up to, you know, it's all got to be reported before anybody steps in to look into it. And there's so much that goes along with it in terms of the emotional condition of the child and they have nightmares about the previous death and their obsessions with things that they

were interested in the previous life. All this kind of stuff. this whole package. Right. Fascinating stuff. This line of inquiry alone, the evidence is so profound that Jim Tucker told me, I went down to the University of Virginia to interview him because like Leslie, this topic in particular really got my attention early on. And he said that, you know, when the Journal of the American Medical Association, right,

that's one of the most respected peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world, when they took a look at the evidence. Their conclusion was that reincarnation was the most likely answer. And I said what? Jamma? What? Why isn't, why doesn't everyone know that? Why wasn't

that on the nightly news that one of the most respected scientific journals in the world concluded based on your research here at the Division of Perceptual Studies, which has been going on for, they recently have their 50th their 50th anniversary. I mean, that's how striking the

evidence is. You know, we're just covering the very basics of these here, but I recommend people look into the stories. Yeah, I cover two cases in my book earlier. They're both American cases and they're both fairly recent. Because a lot of the earlier studies were, of course, Asian, you know, cases in India and Burma and places where it's part of the culture to accept this. In terms of like Buddhism or religious belief. It's just accepted part of the culture, the current religions, that these things happen. It's not strange. So people talk about Here, if you have a kid who's talking about the past life, you're like, honey, let's not, not at parties. No, but more no more serious note, they're told that they're just fantasizing or dreaming or something.

So when you have cases in America that have actually been, where you've actually been able to solve them, which means to find the previous personality and verify it, it's pretty stunning. And these cases were both remarkable. I'm going to talk about this at the contact in the desert thing. Oh, okay. Oh, cool. Especially, yeah, some of these cases because they're really stunning. Well, let me ask you guys this in your research. Why do you think it's kids?

Well, the reason it's important that it's kids, the reason those are the important cases to focus on is because those children have not been around to have any other information come into their brains. They've been protect, they've just been with their parents, basically. So the parents know everything they've been exposed to. And it makes it much more hard to explain when a two-year-old starts talking about different types of words.

World War II aircraft, for instance, because he remembered being a pilot of doing his life. When he's never been exposed to anything like that, now if a 21-year-old starts talking about that, even if they say, I've never been exposed this before, you know, any number of influences could have come into their mind. So when you have a little child, that's so evidential about it, coming out with these things that they couldn't possibly ever know at that age. Like two years old sometimes. Yeah. This little James lining of this case was two years And he was talking about the names of different types of aircraft, the ship name that he flew off of in the Battle of Iwo Jima, you know.

And he would talk about, like, in his parents and have nightmares about a plane crash and all this stuff. It's just, you know, it just, and the parents get really freaked out. Of course. It's really, really hard for them because their child is, some, they're often, you know, obsessed with things. And it just, I mean, it depends. Like, every case is different, but anyway.

Case to case. So that's why the most evidential cases for reincarnation, by far are the ones where these little children do this. Right. So it's not... You have adults that go into regression, do hypnotic regression or something. You know, it's interesting, but it's not the same level in terms of evidence. So it's not so much that adults aren't having these past life.

Right. What experiences, but it's the kids that have the most verifiable. Exactly. Well, what it is also is that almost all of these kids, almost 100% of them, there are some exceptions, completely forget the memories by the time they're about eight years old. Really? Yeah. They stop having acts.

to the memories, most of them. Again, there are exceptions to that that we know of, but yeah, most of them forget. So it seems, that would suggest to me that it somehow has something to do with the development of the brain, you know, because the brain is changing obviously as you're growing. And at some point, for whatever reason, something stops these memories from happening. So I speculate that it could be something about the structure, the changing structure of the brain that no longer, once it reaches a certain point in its growth process for some reason, that antenna, for lack of a better word, seems to no longer pick up that frequency or whatever it is that's going on. So that's why it's kids that are we focus on, because we just forget. Most of the kids forget. And also, I would assume kids are going to be the most honest with you. There's no baggage. There's no preconceived notions of what it could be, what it couldn't be.

You can't make stuff up. Exactly. You can't make up the name of a battleship. It's either exists or it doesn't. You can't go pick it up, you know, and they couldn't possibly have known it. The name of that battleship, by the way, was the Natoma Bay. So it wasn't like, you know, some simple name. Right.

It was like, what was the name of the battleship? And his dad thought, that sounds Japanese. It sounded to his dad. So he thought it must be a mistake, but he came to find out there sure was a battleship or an aircraft carrier. Natoma Bay. Yeah, an aircraft. An aircraft.

I should say a battleship carrier carrier carrier. Yeah. Sorry. I'm so ignorant about that. Some of the, you know, some of the evidence is, as Leslie said, incredibly specific to the point that in hundreds of the cases at the University of Virginia, they've been able to locate who the person is. So the kid's given either an address or a family name, you know, something that allows them to. And in the most fascinating of the cases, there are physiological aspects involved. So the kid will have some sort of either a birth defect or a birth mark of some kind that corresponds to how the previous person died. So in a great case that happened here in New York, Leslie, you probably remember the police officer. Do you remember this?

There was a police officer who was shot through his heart and he died. And his grandson, when he was born at very young two years old, started saying that he was, his mom's father, this guy who was shot, and he had memories. He said, I was shot, I was killed, and he remembered the circumstances of the way his grandfather had passed. And not only that, he had a congenital heart defect that he had to have this operation for that corresponded to, you know, the way that the grandfather died. He had been shot through the heart.

There are cases where, you know, there's a birthmark on the front of a person in the back, say, and the one on the front is sort of small and a little more regular, and the one on the back is bigger and irregular. And when they find the previous personality, they find out that they've been shot from through the chest and the entrance wound. You know, in the best cases, we have autopsy reports. We have photographs where we can match up the photographs from the autopsy report to the places on the kid's body where the birth marks are.

So it's not just kids having memories. There are other aspects to it as well. Now, I guess moving a little away from past life, a lot of the other evidence that you've explored, Leslie, is the idea of mediumship. I mean, you said yourself, that's what kind of got you into this. Now, in terms of that, who or why do you think certain people are chosen to be these conduits for what could possibly be someone in the afterlife,

or are more sensitive to that. Is there any type of prerequisite for being a medium, I guess? In my experience, the really good ones are born with this sensitivity. Okay. The two that I went to see that I talk about in my book, the incredible readings that I had were both, they had all kinds of experiences as kids seeing dead people. You know, just sensitivities they knew when someone was going to die and their family.

kind of thing. And in the beginning, they often think it's normal that everybody has these abilities until they learn that it's not as they grow older. And then there might come a time particularly in adolescence where they don't want to be different from anybody. So this happens a lot where they sort of turn it off for a while. But it's a latent ability that they have. And I don't know, I mean, it even runs in some families. Lorraine Jackson's had family history of this. So, you know, it's, I don't know if anybody can really say for sure like, why some people would have it and why they don't, but I do think that it's something sort of innate that they're really good at it that they've had for a long time. But, you know, it's different

for everyone. Or they might not even realize it until they're older that they have the ability. But I don't think there's any way to say why one person has it another dozen. You know, going back to the interview, you guys just did with Leslie and Diana, you were talking at the end there about the experiencers of the, you know, UFO phenomenon. how some people can seem to be more prone to seeing these things than other people. And you were saying that maybe there is something about their brain, right, that makes this possible. Maybe it's a similar thing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but definitely the mediumship thing.

And I also had an opportunity to sort of test it the same way that Mike did. And it was amazing. Would you mind sharing it? Sure, because I wrote about it in the book. My first reading was with a medium named Laurelind Jackson, and I'd never. And this was so, when I got to the point in my investigation of realizing that there's a lot of evidence for consciousness to function independently of the body, then the question immediately enrails me, well, if that's the case, then can we communicate with this consciousness when it is not in the body? Is that another way of verifying it?

Or just out of curiosity, well, wow, can we communicate with it in that state? And one way to approach that question is to study mediumship, which is basically a person serving as sort of a telephone operator for somebody who wants to contact someone on the other side. And so that's what they do. So, yes, they are apparently delivering information from a disembodied consciousness to a person. So you go to that medium. And in my first reading, it was on the phone. So they don't know what it looked like. They didn't have no visual cues or anything like that with this amazing medium named Laurel & Jackson.

And she just delivered unbelievably specific information, you know, which from two people. One of them was Bud Hopkins, the UFO investigator, who I was very close to. And I was actually with him when he died in 2011. And the second one was my brother who died very unexpectedly in 2013 when I was, while I was writing this book, my younger brother. So that was really tragic, but it was incredible because it ended up opening a lot of doors for me, not just with mediumship, but in other ways too. So they both were there.

I mean, I'm not going to go on to all specifics because it would take forever, but just, you know, the ability to identify the people, not just with information, but also through their personalities. You know, these two people had opposite personalities, and that also came through in the reading. And there's just, you know, a lot of stuff that there was no way she could have known, particularly with my brother, who was, nobody knows anything about him. But as a public figure,

but she would have had to look them up, which she doesn't do. So the interesting, but in terms of the testing thing, so there were two things, each of them said, each of them said something to me that was very personal. So when I went to do my second reading about two months later, I meditated and asked these two people, Bud and my brother, to repeat what, something they had said to me in the first reading with the second reading.

I said, if this is really you, I want you to repeat something in the second reading that you said in the first one. I don't care what it is because they said a lot. And I had, I never thought it would ever happen. I just thought, it's a lark. I'll just test this. And if it doesn't work, I never have to tell anybody about it, you know, whatever. Why not?

So I just really earnestly asked them. And then it happened. I had the second reading with a medium who didn't even know my name because I signed up with her with a fake name. It was on Skype. So she did see what I look like. but both of them repeated the most personal, most evidential thing they said to me from the first reading in the exact same word. And, you know, when that happens to you, it's like what happened to Mike, you just your jaw drops open and it's a moment of transcendence. It's a moment of, as he said, a shift in paradigm where you just suddenly think, oh my God, you know.

And you're in an altered state really with that for a while. because it shifts your whole perception of reality. Right. That how can this be? How can I communicate with them? I mean, how else could that happen unless there was a whole lot of very sophisticated telepathy and clairvoyance going on with these two mediums? They didn't know each other. They'd never spoken to each other.

I made sure of that. So, you know, you have these moments. And then, of course, and what I did with these readings, too, was I taped them, of course. So I was able to write down everything they said and kind of do a percentage calculation of accuracy. I did a lot of analysis of both of them only afterwards because while you're having it, you just want to let go into the experience of it, you know. So it was just so mind-blowing and incredible to sort of enter into that reality. And so that's how you become, as an investigator, you also become someone who, as I was talking about earlier,

a sort of experiencer at the same time because there's no other way you can do it. I was going to ask that struggle of... It's both at once. And I feel like I'm very able to make that... I'm very able to do both at once. Okay. I think some people would have a harder time. They're either very analytical or very experiential,

but it's just one of the things I happen to be able to do. And so I was able to step back from those readings and really analyze them and ask a lot of questions about them, but I'll allow myself in the moment to really just be in the experience. And that's what you have to do. Right. And I mean, being the fact that you're both... very journalistic and or skeptical in every best sense of the word skeptical.

How do you, when you have a paradigm shift like that, like many UFO experiences do as well, how do you go on day to day ordering your coffee or seeing people going into a church and coming out and being like, I have spoken to the disembodied consciousness or spirit of my father? Like, crazy. Because, you know, you're never, first of all, once you step back a little bit, you're never 100% sure.

Of course. So there's always that little element. Well, maybe it wasn't or maybe. And also, you don't stay in that sort of state of epiphany all the time. Right. You go back into your regular life. And yeah, it's not like it's a constant, a shift in your mind that never goes away, you know. So it's not like you're not living in the real world at all.

And I'm always questioning it. I'm always. And I've had so many more experience. experiences. We're the worst because we really had some incredible things. We doubt so much. I'm starting to do it less. We've seen some incredible things.

And constantly we were like, well, but maybe. You know, you always try to find an explanation. And then when you really can't, it's good. Because when you really can't find that explanation, you're much more comfortable accepting that it is something anomalous, you know, that it really is. But, you know, with mediumship, the problem with mental mediumship, which is the type we were just talking about, is that, I mean, a skeptic, although it's not really skeptic,

but you can make the argument that perhaps the mediums acquiring all the information through some extraordinary ability to read your mind or to see things at a distance, which is clairvoyance, and that maybe, therefore, no dead person has to be involved for them to be able to do this. It gets harder to explain when they give you information that you don't know, so it's not in your mind for them to read. They have to be finding it through someone else's mind. Lots of times people will get information where they think,

think, no, what are you talking about? That's the wrong answer. And then they'll go ask their mother two weeks later. And it was, what was the story you had about that birth certificate? That name? Oh, my grandfather. You think it's the wrong thing. And then you find out, and you're like, how could she get that information? He's got a really good example. Yeah, this one. I had my sister had I set up a reading with a medium named George Anderson, who's pretty well known. And we filmed it, and I had my sister have a reading with him, and he didn't know that it was my sister. Now, we do look similar, so he could have sussed that out, but I don't think that he did. It was my instinct anyway, that he didn't have any idea that this person was anything to do with me.

Anyway, the reading he gave to her was really incredible, including coming up with names, you know, like my dad's name, my grandfather's name. grandmother's name. At one point he said, I was sitting in the back of the room behind the cameras, and at one point he said to my sister, Mike. Who's Mike? There's someone named Mike that's really important here, and of course that's my name. But anyway, the real fascinating one was he said, I have your grandfather,

Jim here, your mom's father, Jim, and that was his name, Jim. And then he said, no, wait a second. Jim is what they called him, but his birth certificate would have said Vincenzia. And I was behind the camera going, no, that's wrong, you know.

wish he had just stopped at Jim because that was so cool. He was so right for a second there. And then to my surprise, my sister said, yes, that's right. And I was like, what? So it came to find out later that I guess I'm a bad grandson. I had no idea. It would have said Vincenzo on his birth certificate. So anyway, I called my mom afterwards and she has his birth certificate. And sure enough, his name was Vincenzo. He just called Jim. You're juggling a lot, but you can still squeeze in a financial plan with the Northwestern mutual financial advisor as your partner, it's not only possible, it's personalized. So if you're tying the knot, closing on a house, or welcoming a little one, you'll be ready for whatever

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and to learn more, visit www. patreon.com backslash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support. And now on with the show. We did do a test like... So once I had this experience with Angelina, the first one,

I then thought, okay, well, maybe she was reading my mind. Now, that alone shatters the materialistic paradigm, right? That alone. That's the only other explanation other than cheating. And if you can eliminate cheating, It's either has to be telepathy or it's a dead person. But the current science says telepathy is not possible, right? Just that alone is not possible.

So to test whether or not the medium was reading my mind, we went to see another medium a few months later, a different medium in Long Island, a guy named Jonathan Lewis. And I said, okay, Mom, you know, we're going to drive down to Long Island. We were up in Connecticut. When we leave here, I want you to sit on the porch and talk to dad and ask him to say a specific thing. Don't tell us what it is.

just you talk to him once we leave and ask him to say a specific thing. So we go and we have this reading and again it's phenomenal. This guy's coming up with names with things that just happened on. Stuff we had talked about on the drive there in the car. He referenced the conversation we had on the drive.

Things like that. It was extraordinary. One thing he said though didn't make sense. He said, does your mom have a bad toe? And we said, no. You know, no. And he said, okay, I'm just going to leave that with you. Just keep it in mind. And then on the drive back, We called my mom and we told her everything he said.

And then when my sister got to the bad toe, my mom got silent on the phone because she was crying. We're like, what? What? That was the thing. Apparently, my mom has a crooked toe. And when she was sitting on the porch, she had her shoes off and she looked down at her toe. And she said, okay, Robert, have him mention my crooked toe. So he didn't say the word crooked.

He said the word bad. He said bad toe. But that's a pretty damn close. So at that point I knew, okay, well, that didn't come out of my mind. If this is some form of telepathy, advanced telepathy, he somehow found my mom in Connecticut and got it out of her brain, which is just as extraordinary as it being my dad, you know? I have a question. I'd like to get both your personal thoughts on this. No, I've never really had a paradigm shifting experience like that in terms of what we're talking about today.

However, when my grandfather died, who I was very close to, when he died, I hoped and prayed as the, you know, conditioned Catholic I was growing up that he would, you know, I'd hear from him or hear his voice or a sign would come to me. And it never did. And I waited years and years for that to happen. And I kept thinking, I was so close to you. Like, there's got to be a way to bridge that gap. Like, come on. And nothing, nothing ever happened. And then one night I had a dream and he wasn't the focal point of the dream by any means, but I saw him in the background, in the dream. And it was the first time I had had a dream about him since he died. And I just remember him coming forward in the dream at one point. And he started talking to me. And all I remember him saying is, I'm here.

What do you want to talk about? And then I woke up. But still, he was there, right? He was there. And so my question for you is, what do you think when we dream this, this is a whole other aspect of this? How we interpret those dreams. Is that the consciousness? Is that them trying to communicate with us?

Because I know that is a big part of all this too, is people have dreams about their loved ones visiting them and everything. What role do dreams play in all this? Yeah, I mean, I'm not really that much of an expert on it, but I know that, I mean, I had one dream involving my brother, and I've heard this from other people, too, that there's a quality, what they call a dream visitation in the research. There's a quality to that dream that's different from your average dream. That it's really vivid, it's really intense, you never forget it. You know, most dreams you wake up and they kind of dribble away, you don't remember them. This is something that has a huge impact, and it's more alive and more.

more intense than any other dream. And you can recognize the different quality that it has. And so I think that's one way to sort of characterize what, you know, people feel to be an actual visitation in the dream state as opposed to just them having a dream. And I remember one, I had one like that involving my brother where I woke up and it was in the country and it was dead quiet and dead, you know, pitch bar black in my room, which I love because in New York, you never can have a pitch dark. Yeah.

And when I just woke up during the night and I heard his voice really clearly. I mean, it just happened to me once before, but I heard him say my name. I didn't think much about it and I went back to sleep. And it was right after that that this very, very powerful dream happened where I really felt it to be a visitation from him. A message and he was showing me something and it was showing me who he really was. And I've never forgotten it. So that's sort of the way I think you can describe these kinds of dreams. but I also think they're very subjective

and people are going to have these experiences in all different ways and really you as the person having the dream has to decide what that means to you I mean if it doesn't have that intense quality you might still be getting a message from your loved one through a dream you know and you felt that was your grandfather

I could smell the smokes he was a smoker his whole life so therefore that makes it your grandfather I mean, it doesn't matter in one level whether there's some objective reality, whether it was or wasn't or not, because it's an experience that you had and what it means to you is what's important. And if that was your grandfather, then it was. I think that really plays into the your idea of we play a big role as the active participant in all this. Definitely. And I think some experiences can be more objectified than others, but dreams, you know, no.

I mean, dreams are extremely, obviously personal and subjective. And so you decide if that person visited you, you'll know. You knew. I think a person having experience like that knows when that's, has that level of meaning for them. And a want to, I think, too. I think when you have that yearning, you're going to, chances are you're going to hear from that person. Right. But I don't know.

I feel bad for people when it doesn't happen. Right. I know. Yeah. You know, and like some people will say it's always going to happen no matter what. Like Laurelind Jackson will say that. I don't know what happens when it doesn't. I didn't expect these things to happen to me, but then they started to, and then I started to ask for them to happen more.

Just when I was ready to give up is when it happened. That's so good. I'm glad it did. And yeah, something to say about this is that, you know, dreams who know, like the brain is a complete mystery to us, right? Basically, I mean, of course there are brilliant neuroscientists out that have a lot of things mapped out and figured out. But really, when it comes down to it, we've only scratched the. tip of the iceberg with regard to the brain. It's like this miraculous, unbelievable thing stuck between our ears that we barely understand, right? So when I answer this question, I am not a

neuroscientist, obviously, right? I'm a bartender. So I just want to, you know, you're a therapist in some way. Yeah, but it's just upfront state that. And there's a big difference between what science can be used for and what an experience means to a person, right? Like, a person can have a life-changing experience that is useless to science, right? Like my experience with Angelina, where she said the thing, a scientist would obviously not be able to do anything with that data, right? It's an anomaly. It's a one-off thing they'd say. But to me, it was life-changing. So it's the same thing with these dreams. Like, what exactly is happening there? Who knows? But if it is meaningful to the person who has the dream, that's what matters, right? But to try to get

into some of the very basic science about this, the brain we know does give off waves, right? We know that it operates in different wavelengths, like there's alpha, theta, and beta. And the typical day-to-day walking around brain is operating in alpha, I believe it is, right? And I'm pretty sure it's alpha waves. And when you go to sleep, it's getting down into beta and like really, really deep sleep, I think, is theta, I believe. And, you know, there have been some mediums who've been hooked up to, you know, electroencephalograms. That what is that what it's called?

The ones that test the brain, you know, the brain waves. And sure enough, some of them are showing that the brain patterns seem to, the brainwave pattern seem to change when they go into this meditative state that they say facilitates them this communication that they claim is coming from the other side. So there is some signs that can be done. There is some empirical evidence that we can gather, at least with regard to how the brain seems to be functioning. And when we go to sleep at night, we're obviously going into a different state of consciousness, and our brain waves are changing when we sleep?

And is it possible that one form of brain wave is more conducive to, again, acting as some sort of an antenna than other brainwaves? Maybe that's true. Maybe our waking brain is filtering out in some way. maybe this stuff operates on some completely speculation obviously but maybe this stuff operates on some wavelength that that just doesn't penetrate a waking brain and that the brain needs to get into a different state of of a vibration in a sense before like if we just if we accept the the idea that consciousness can exist as something separate from the brain what is the brain's function then in that you know what what is the brain is it a You know, the big question is, current science says that the brain generates consciousness, right? The brain is the generator of consciousness. What we think of is consciousness. And when the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing and the electrical impulses end, so does consciousness.

So does what you think of as you. What we're investigating here and what Leslie has investigated with this book is the possibility that the brain is not the generator of consciousness, but is some sort of, a receiver of consciousness in some kind of a way. And so if that is the case that it is some sort of a receiver, then the state of that receiver would change what sorts of things it can pick up, you would think. So like a radio, right, if you're tuning the frequency, right now we're sitting in this room and there are hundreds of different radio stations and Wi-Fi signals, right? All of this is here right now. We can't see it or hear it or interact with it because our brains

aren't set up to be antennas to that. But if we turned on a radio, suddenly this apartment would be flooded with sound. That's here right now. We just can't hear it. And perhaps there's something about the dream state. It's like changing that dial on the radio that makes it so your brain is now picking up things that were here before, but that it just couldn't register for whatever reason. Because I've had those dreams after my dad passed, and they, for me, again, totally subjective.

but were of an entirely different quality than my typical dreams. Most of my dreams are nonsense. Like I have no idea what they're all about, you know? Playing poker with your boss. Exactly. Sometimes kind of just planet Neptune. Yeah. Like, yeah, my subconscious is like this weirdo place, as it turns out.

My dreams are just weird. But these ones with my dad are usually very simple. Like, he's just, a lot of times it's no more than he's there. And he's smiling at me and he hugs. It gets me emotional, like, because these dreams, It's still, when I really recall these dreams, it's really powerful because they are such a different, different things. So, yeah, that's a big, long, convoluted answer to how dreams play into this.

No, it's, I mean, again, it's, this is all subjective if we really look at it. Yeah. But narrowing in on the evidence, which is what Leslie's done in the book, and I think the furthering research that the two of you are doing together is, it's subjective, but at the same time, you can't argue it. It's fact. It's evidence. It's fact that it happens.

It's fact that it happens. The real question about something like mental mediumship is you can document that it happens and there's no way she could have cheated. But the question that remains, as I said, is was it there, how did they get that information? Right. And you can't prove that that information came from a dead person. Right. If you're looking at it objectively, you as a sitter, as somebody who's receiving it,

can really feel that that's where it was from because there's more than just information. It's personality traits, it's styles of, talking. Right. You know, lots of other things that enter into it. So it certainly feels that way. Yeah. But you can't objectively prove it.

But there are some things that you can. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. There's another type of mediumship. And again, I only get to this at the very end of my book. So I don't want any, I want to tell your listeners, if they read the book, read it in order. Okay.

Don't skip around. Okay. Because you got to build up. Save the best for levels. You got to build up for this because it's really the hardest thing to understand. but it's a type of mediumship called physical mediumship. And in that scenario, it's very rare, very rare. There are physical manifestations that occur in a room with this particular medium.

It's usually a group of people, and everybody sees the same thing. So therefore, it really is objective that these things are happening. I mean, again, it's hard to explain how they happen, but they're physical things that actually do happen. And lots and lots and lots of people can see them, and they can be repeated. over and over and over again. Is this what I assume is what the seance work would be?

Yeah, I mean, they call these meeting seances. I don't like the word. I don't know. I know. He's been anymore. I know. Sitting. We call it a sitting. Right, right. Right. Because we have these assumptions of what it looks like. So for lack of a better word,

it's these meetings that you have with this physical medium and it's a group that he works with on a regular basis called a circle. He calls his home circle. The medium we're talking about is a man named Stuart Alexander, who's in the UK. He's in his 70s. I'm doing this for like 40 years. Absolutely genuine, never been caught in fraud or anything like that. I know I've known him for five years and studied his mediumship in great depth, so I can vouch for him. This is an individual you both spoken to. On separate occasion, we know him well.

He's met him as well. Now, I'm not going to give away what happens at the end of Lesnar's book, because I want people to buy it and read it. But I'll just tell you that when I read the last chapter of her book, most of what's in the book I'd been aware of because I'd been studying it for the documentary I was working on, it's the last chapter on physical mediumship. The last two, right? The last two chapters, sorry.

My account of it and then Stewart's a chapter that he wrote himself. Oh, okay. But when I read her account of what she witnessed, which I won't say specifically, I was like, what? Come on. And then less than a year after reading that in her book, I was sitting in England with Leslie

and this man, Stuart Alexander, and I saw the thing happen right in front of my eyes that Leslie talks about in the book. It's real, right? So like she was saying, there are some things that just simply are objectively true,

are objectively real, and when I saw this thing happen, talk about a paradigm shifting moment. When I had the mental medium thing happen, when the medium mentioned the thing, the code word, that blew me away, and I, from then on,

started to believe that my dad really was here, and that the quote-unquote paranoia, paranormal is normal. But when I saw this thing happen, it moved me from believing it was real to knowing it was real. And that is a jump. That's a quantum leap. It's a shift between night and day, between believing, given all of the evidence, you know, and in all of the statistics, that's belief. But seeing that and knowing it, I can't describe how big of a shift that was in my life. Because once you see that something like that is so far outside of what science has always told me is the way that this thing works, this universe works, then it really, like Whitley Streber describes it as cracking the cosmic egg, I think, where like it just, it sort of shatters your sense of reality and suddenly you're open to new, to the truth, I guess, right?

because we have these narratives in our heads that are so easily created and mythologies are so easily created, right? We hear a thing. Like when I was young and I was reading about mediumship, I might have heard that, oh, Houdini, he debunked mediumship, physical mediumship. There's no truth to that. That's all I did was hear that. And that became my narrative and that became my truth. Yeah. Just like that. Just because somebody said it. I don't even remember who it was who said it or what they might have known or didn't know. And after you actually study the actual phenomenon, you find out that there's way more to the story than Houdini, quote unquote, debunked mediumship.

There's way more to that story. So once you see what Leslie describes in her book, it really opens your eyes. And now you can start to look at what's really there rather than what your brain has led you to believe is the case. Yeah, because the important thing about it is that multiple people can witness. the same thing over 10, you know, decades. Yeah. So some of the phenomena that occur there, probably hundreds of people have seen by now.

Oh, yeah, hundreds. And they see the same things, you know. We can give an example of one, which is not the big one that Mike didn't want to talk about. We got to sell copies of your book. Yeah. I don't know. It's too hard to talk about it because you've got to build up to it. Because I give a lot of supporting evidence in the book that before I talk about witnessing this myself, because it's been documented throughout, you know, in history a couple of times.

And once people read that, they'll be way more open to accepting its reality. But to give an example of something a little less spectacular, but which is also spectacular, is an example of one thing that occurs is a levitation of things or movement of things. So you're in a dark room. There's a whole lot of reasons why it's dark, which I don't know if we're going to go into right now, but it is in the dark.

And for paranormal of things to occur, lots of times you need darkness. Can I assume it's a sense deprivation sort of thing? It's not really, no. We are aware that this is a huge red flag, by the way you just want to say outright. We know obviously that's red flag. We can spend the whole half hour talking about it. I don't know if we want to.

If people can just... No, that's fine. Some of the phenomenon is light sensitive. As crazy as it sounds, the stuff that is involved in this physical phenomenon is very sensitive. I accept that. And I do. I do. There's a lot of scientists.

I quote them in my book that have looked into try to explain. why. So I just, you know, if people can just suspend that critique for now, because, and in Stewart's, uh, sanisans, the lights do go on for some of the time. It's not all in the dark. Okay. Like this thing that I saw, okay. I saw in light. Yeah. I've seen that. You know, there's some stuff that's in the light. It's, and it's not like he's trying to hide anything, but for some things to occur, they need to be in the dark for whatever reason. But this object that levitates is lit up. So it's, it's called a trumpet. It's kind of a tradition in physical mediumship. It's like a cone-shaped thing, maybe about a foot long, put in a half. It's like a megaphone

kind of shape thing. And the large opening has a luminous tape around it, so you can see it. So it starts off on the floor, and you can see it rise up into the air, and it flies all around the room. It goes around and touches people very gently and specifically, like in the pitch dark, but it'll still like, it's been like times where it stroked my whole face very gently, but doesn't touch my glasses. you know things like that or it'll touch somebody on the shoulder and you can see it because it's lit up it's flying all over the room and this is a physical object that's not supposed to be able to do that and that's that's almost like the kindergarten of this stuff I mean that's so kind of easy yeah it reminds me of Matilda yeah when I saw that happen because I saw that first

that was the first thing that I thought it was like oh my god it's so beautiful where do we go from It's happening. What am I seeing? You know, it's like hard to really, I imagine it's sort of like seeing a UFO. It's something so out of the realm of your daily experience. It's just so gorgeous. It's just like so much fun to see it. And you get into this very wonderful kind of amazed, almost childlike state of just awe.

It's really, really fun. I described in my book the first time I ever witnessed that. Okay. So anyway, we could, but I think the point is that. some phenomena that suggests survival of consciousness are more easily objectified than others. And even those, although those same thing, we can't really prove that they're being created by dead people. Can't prove it objectively, but it sure seems that way when you're in the room. Because there are spirit people or voices who speak through the medium that are people, they say,

who once lived on the earth and they're really consistent characters that you get to know over time. The whole thing sounds really, really insane. So that's why I'm telling people you've got to read other stuff first and kind of get prepared to be able to this. You even, like, hesitated to include this in the book, didn't you, initially? Yeah, I think I'm more hesitated to include my own personal experiences, which I guess is partly this. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, it was. It was really, and I think the only way I could have ever done it was the fact that I showed some documentation that was done by scientists of this happening under-executive.

of this happening under extremely controlled conditions, way more so than with Stewart, you know, in terms of the tight controls. And so I've been able to establish other incidences where it's been documented throughout in the last 100 years. By Nobel Prize winners. Yeah, really sophisticated people who are skeptics and then who published articles about it in some journals and stuff like that. So you kind of get, okay, it's happened before it's airtight.

Yeah. Then why can't it happen now? Right. And it does. But it's very rare. It's very rare. I think it's interesting to what role language plays in a lot of this. Now, I mean, we have these words that we always think of when it comes to this stuff, you know.

Consciousness, the soul, if we're looking at it more from a religious aspect. What role do you think language plays in how we interpret these anomalous things when it comes to past life, afterlife? I know you don't like that. I mean, I don't mind it that much, but that alone right there after. I try to use language that's as non-religious as possible so that it's universal, so that everybody can relate to it. Yeah. There's the word that you'll read a lot about in Leslie's book, Ectoplasm, right? I thought we weren't going to get into that, Mike.

I'm not going to get into like what I see. Once you've opened the door to that, weren't normal. Well, just as far as words go, you know, like I knew that word from Ghostbusters. Me too. You know? So when I still, when I'm like out in public talking about this stuff, I like look over my shoulder before I say the word ectoplasm. You know, I keep saying the steward. Like, we got to come up with a different.

We need a different word. It's so loaded now. Yeah. But because, yeah, language matters, you know. But that's something very specific. I think you're talking more about like a word like consciousness as opposed to soul, as opposed to spirit. And I think the key is to try to use language that's most universal. You can apply.

So if somebody wants to think of it. as a soul, that's fine. But I use the word consciousness a lot because it's sort of general. You know, you could also say the question is just conscious to survive the death? You could also say, is there a soul that survives death? It's the same question, basically. Yeah. Is there a heaven?

It's the same thing as if there's an afterlife. It just depends on how you want to frame it. But if you use language, it's applicable within any context. That works the best. Yeah. That's the way I look at it. Because words immediately conjure, right, those narratives. Certain images.

Certain images. Yeah, like Angelina is interesting. She's a medium. Most of them don't do this, but Angelina talks about heaven all the time. A lot. She said, and she said, because I had a reading with her recently, the one that Mike had a reading with earlier, she said, I believe in, I use the word heaven.

That's my word for it. You know, it's fine. She just explained that, and that's the word she uses. So, you know, everybody has to find their own framework that works for them. but all basically in its essence means the same thing. It's kind of pointing to the same thing. Right. It's like people who have near-death experiences, for instance, right,

where they're clinically dead. There's no discernible brain activity or heart activity. And they'll have these incredible experiences. And Leslie also writes about this in her book. And it depends on where you're from, what culture and maybe what your beliefs are. It definitely appears that a person's beliefs in life can affect what they experience when their heart stops beating.

You know, like, well, a young kid who's raised a Catholic might see what he calls Jesus, whereas a young kid in India might see a Hindu goddess, you know, or just like a rainbow and puppies. Like, you know, it seems to the phenomenon of having these experiences after our brain stop, functioning. It's not like just all, it's not all the same. You know, it does appear that your thoughts about what might be coming after death can influence what you at least immediately perceive. Some kind of deity or something like that.

Yeah. There are other elements of it that really aren't affected by culture. Like if you're inner, if you might, a lot of times people see experience meetings with deceased relatives or loved ones that have gone before them. and that's pretty universal. Yeah, there are universal aspects. Yeah. Well, let me ask you guys this.

I mean, we had in our previous discussion with Diana Peselka saying that a quote-unquote abduction and or alien extraterrestrial experiencer who was having an experience with what he believed to be a close encounter with a non-human intelligence saw a deceased loved one in the same experience. And I'm working with an experiencer right now who, in trying to communicate with his father, had his father say back to him, you know, where are you? Who are you with? And him saying, I'm with those who aren't from our world. Something to that effect. I don't want to put words in his mouth. This was through like a medium.

Yeah. But that could mean, not from our world, could mean just. Because the spirit people quote, Spirit people who speak through Stuart Alexander often talk about our world. Right. In our world, it's like it's a different world. Right. So I guess that could be interpreted a lot of ways.

It is organic of sound of language. It doesn't necessarily mean ET. However, do you think, though, however, that there is a connection between this book, your first book, the ET question. What I always say is that if you pull back far enough, right, if your perspective gets big enough, this all has to be connected in some way, right? it's got to be part of the same story if you look at it from them.

And I would check out Diana's book with respect to that question too, but I think there is a connection, but I don't quite understand what it is yet. Right. Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. I mean, Diana says, you know, the question of UFOs and those looking at this is

it is a new religion for a new age. And I think I struggled with that for a while when she said that, but the more I look at it, the more I can see it. Like you said, the more you zoom out, you're like,

oh my God, it is. And I think the important thing to realize about Diana's work, and I remember bringing this up in our interview with her, but she didn't really address it, but I think it's really important.

She's not saying that UFOs are not physically real. Right. Just because she puts them in a certain context of a new kind of religion and kind of connects them to previous experiences within the context of Catholicism and everything like that. It does,

it doesn't mean she's denying their physical reality. And I think, I remember on Facebook when her book first came out, people were posting on my page, oh, she just says it's religion. You know, she doesn't think they're real. And people don't, you have to realize that it's both. It's both at the same time. And she's completely aware of the reality of the objects on a physical level. She also seems to be warning against it becoming a religion in the sense that it becomes

dogmatic in some way. I mean, I think she's saying like Jeffrey Criple says, it's a lot, you know, make the cut. It's how Jefford Criple puts it. You know, there's the difference between the thing and what we interpret the thing to be. And that's where the narratives and the mythology

start. It's interpretation. Yeah. And I think you have to allow all of it to be real at the same time. And that's what you have to be able to do is hold, even conflicting things, hold them in your mind at the same time. You have to be able to do that because you're going to run up against that kind of stuff all the time.

Yeah. In this universe. It's certainly the focus of my life right now, though, is trying to figure out what the intersection of this stuff is. You know, like when we talk to these, you know, we, these again, quote, unquote, spirit people through Stewart. And, you know, do they have, you know, non-human intelligence on their life, butting into their existences somehow?

Do they know about the ones on this side, quote-unquote side? You know, how does this all relate? It's frustrating because you start to narrow in on something and you think you got the answer. And then this guy throws at me, oh, also my dead father said he's with aliens. What the hell do I do with that? Like I'm back to square one again. But I think you're right, Lizzie. I think believing at all in a sense.

Or holding it all in. Or holding it all with the same. And then you just keep probing the questions. And you might never get the answers. But the journey of trying to find them is pretty rewarding and exciting. I mean, that's what has put the three of us in this room together today. Yeah. I mean, that's just all amazing.

And it changes your whole perception of what reality is. Yeah. It's much more than what we think. Mm-hmm. And you just have to be able to hold it all. I just, for me, that's really important. Me too. Because if there aren't answers to things,

then you have to be able to behold this thing over here and this thing over here because you're never really going to have the answer and then things just kind of reveal themselves to you over time. Yeah. Jeffrey Kreppel also writes, you know, that you have to keep a chuckle about you.

You know, you have to keep a sense of humor because this is real crazy stuff we're getting into here. And it's baffling, utterly baffling. And, you know, you've got to keep it light.

Keep it light. Speaking of that. Speaking of that, another book I'd really recommend is Jeffrey Karpel's book called The Flip. Okay. It's really accessible and it's just really wonderful just about these kind of shifts of consciousness that take place when you have these experiences and how common they are. Who are some of the other leading people in this world that you guys have found yourself in? I mean, yeah, Krippel, I've definitely. Dr. Jim Tucker from University of Virginia has written two books.

His most recent book about children of past life memories is really interesting. I'd recommend that. Gosh, I have a whole book show. Dean Radin, is that name? Oh, yeah. Dean Radin's great, but he's dealing with psychic phenomena. So, you know, one thing that's, my book is

really focused on and what we're really talking about here is the question of survival's past death specifically. But there's all these other interesting elements of consciousness that don't really directly relate to that question necessarily, but they show that human capacities are much greater than we believe. And that's where Dean comes in

because he studies, sigh, he studies the ability, like a human telepathy and things like that. Okay. So human abilities that transcend

what we conceive to be acceptable in the scientific world. But they don't necessarily have to do with surviving death. Okay. So. There's a Dr.

Parnea, right, who's doing... Sam Parnea, who's studying near death experiences and is working on a, I think, Pim von Lammel, of course.

Pimvon Lomor wrote a chapter in my book. He's one of the leading of people on near death experiences. experiences, he's incredible. And Peter Fenwick is another great one. He studies end-of-life experiences. Effie. Well, I've got about ten chapters in my book written by some of these people.

So I invited about ten people to write their own chapters, sort of like I did with UFOs. Oh, that's fantastic. And so you get to hear directly from a lot of these great people who have also written books, who have studied this stuff. That's, again, I keep coming back, NDEs and alien abductions. There seemed to be so many... Yeah, those two seem to be very closely linked. After-death phenomena, it seems like NBEs are the ones that link, obviously, most to aliens, because that's where people say they see them.

Yes, when they have near-death experience. This was something I had no idea about until recently that there was this connection between people, experiencers, seeing these non-human intelligences, whatever they are, and also their deceased loved ones. I had no idea, and I just read Whitley's... Willie Streber's book is another one. A new world. A new world. And that's, I, that, I devoured that book.

I highly recommend. And he gets into this question a lot. What is the relationship? Because when he wrote Communion, he and his wife Anne started getting hundreds of thousands of letters from Experiences, as I'm sure your listeners know. And what Anne started, she started to keep a list of the commonalities, right? Like things that would come up time and time. again, she would start to make a list and make a hash mark, right, for how many times this came up.

And one of the things that was coming up over and over and over again was people seeing their deceased loved ones. And I had never heard about that. I knew nothing about that. And that's really where Whitley's, I would say, his focus seems to be right now based on his most recent book. Which is because he lost Anne and she's had a lot of communications from Anne's wife. So that sort of brings him all, closer together to this aspect of it. Yeah. Right. It wasn't. something you talked a lot about before. No. I think it's a way to cope, too.

If we're going to get to the very human, visceral level of all of this, no matter how far out we want to go in theory, I think a lot of it comes back on ourselves of wanting to keep that loved one or person somehow in our life. And whether that just comes with memory or some sort of interaction or communication, I think it really does boil down to we are very caring, loving creatures. I think that's why we have the hearts and minds that we do. You know, not all of us all the time, but for the most part, I think we all just want,

we don't want to lose something. That's what's so wonderful about, and it's about wonderful about mediumship, is that it connects you with that reality of connecting your. your loved one and you can take away with it whatever you want. But the way I look at it is why I have my doubt. You know, the doubt is always a lingering thing, but then why not allow myself to accept the experience as it felt to me in the moment? And therefore, as you say, it allows you to feel that connection to your loved ones.

When you're suffering the grief, the kind of grief that Mike suffered when he lost his dad, it was just almost you could barely survive. So this process is very, healing for people. Regardless if it's objective reality or non-reality, if you go through this process and you can find these ways of connecting with your loved one after they've died, it just changes everything because you always

feel connected to them. And it can help a lot with grieving. So it's wonderful in that way. Yeah, for me, again, I'm not a therapist, not recommending any course of action. But for me personally, as Leslie said, I was really devastated. My dad's passing was a total shock. And I was in a rough place.

And having a full-blown existential crisis, you know, thinking if someone as amazing as my dad could suddenly, it was like he had never been here before. Then what was the point of anything? Yeah. Right. And when I had this first experience, it instantly pulled me out of that hole. Like, for me, it was instantaneous. And, you know, so I recommend to grieving people all the time now. people contact me a lot asking about

mediumship and whether or not it's something to try and I can just say that for me personally it really made a difference in my life and I've seen it help other people and you know like like Leslie said so much of this is experiential you know you can read about it as much

as you'd like but until you experience it for yourself you can't really know what that moment is like where the veil seems to thin for a moment whatever that veil is Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

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Yeah, get to peek. behind every now and again. I think that hope, having hope that there is something other than this. That's right. It's just a wonderful thing to have in your life. Yeah. And why not? And you know, if you can, if there's not just your own experience, but there's also actual evidence and studies that

also support that. Yeah. You come away with, you know, that's why I was, it was so exciting to do this research because you left with that experience of the great possibility. And yes, it gives you hope, it gives you a sense that death isn't the end and that there's something much bigger going on,

and just our immediate physical day-to-day lives. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's, you know, couldn't imagine living without that. I know, right? Life is so much better if you're not constantly worried about an ending. Good point. Good point, yeah. Oh, wow.

Well, you know, sort of to wrap this up, guys, hope, looking towards the future. I know you can't give away too much, but this has brought you together in ways I'm sure you never imagined. I'm sure you've had very profound experiences with one another and separately, which can bring people closer than you can possibly imagine. What are you working on? Is there anything you can give our audience about what comes next for the two of you? Well, one thing we're working on is a, I mean, I wouldn't say we're working on it, but there is a documentary series being produced based on my book.

And so I'm a producer for that. I mean, I'm very involved with the whole production, and there's six episodes, and Mike is part of that. So Mike is one of the characters in that who describes his journey with discovering his connection to his dad through mediumship and other experiences he had, signs from his dad and all kinds of stuff. So that's something that's been really fun to share. I mean, I'm more enmeshed in it than Mike is, because I'm also a producer on it. But I think it's going to be really interesting, and it does, it goes off in a lot of different areas. I mean, way more than what's in my book. It doesn't cover everything in my book.

And it covers a whole lot of new stuff. And it's very much focused on a lot of it is about people's personal journeys. It's not really heavily, heavy scientifically, you know, heavy, heavy-duty science, but it brings the experts in. But there's a lot of human beings in this series having these amazing experiences. Yeah. And it's going to be aired. I can't say yet where, but it's going to have a major exposure probably next fall. Wow.

So it's in production right now. So that's been something that Mike and I have shared. And we also have a sitting group that we sit together, kind of a mediumship group we do every Monday together with some other people too. So we're sharing a lot of this journey right now. And it's really meaningful. It's so much more fun to have someone to share it. Yeah. It can be kind of lonely.

This is pretty weird. How many people can I call up and say, hey, can we talk about ectoplasin? We can get out of the ectoplasen burn? There aren't many for the next two hours. How many can you analyze when you think you might have gotten a sign from the other side? Could this really be that or is it something else? Right.

You know, we do a lot of that. You build off of one another. It's really, really fun. It's a beautiful thing. It's the same in the UFO field. The minute I have some sort of revelation or anything, you know, first person I call up is my mentor. And then we talk for four or five hours.

The rest is history. But I think you're right, Leslie. I think there's a lot of reward for each individual to be gained when looking at things like this. And the journey always seems to be far more rewarding than any of the destinations. I think it's true. It's all about the journey. It's about the journey.

You're never going to get the final answers to. I mean, you can maybe get answers for individual moments right in that journey. but the bigger picture, I think it's always going to be a mystery. Yeah. And I think, you know, once we all leave this mortal coil, we'll maybe find the answer. Well, we will. We either have nothing or we'll find an answer. Yeah.

And then who are we going to tell? But that's what we're trying to figure out. So I can't thank you guys enough for coming on. That's what I say to skeptics all the time. I'm like, listen, if I'm right, I'm going to be like, I told you so when we get there. If you're right, nobody's going to know. That's a good point. I had two friends who said,

look, whichever one of us passes away first, let's make a deal. I'm going to come back to haunt you. And then that's going to happen. And sure enough, a good friend of mine, Paul Kimball, lost a friend of his very early in life, very abruptly. And since then, didn't know how to deal with it or the grief for the loss. And sure enough, his friend came back. That's so great. Oh, wow.

And told him, you know, I'm here. I'm haught and yet. Oh, cool. So, I mean, it doesn't get much better than that. And I'm sure that's what we want. It's like we were talking about earlier, right? It helped him with the whole process of being, having lost his friend. It can be scary.

It can be exciting. But at the end of the day, it's beautiful. And I can't think of another way to look at it. I feared death for so long. But after having this conversation, it's opened, I think, my mind and my heart to what could come next. I'm so glad. And that's extreme. It gives me hope.

I'm glad. Yeah, that's great. Thank you, you guys. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure, absolutely. That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to keep a lookout for Leslie and Mike's documentary series, surviving death in the very near future.

For updates, follow Leslie on Twitter at Leslie Kane. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at Somewhere Skies. If you enjoyed today's show, please show your support by subscribing, rating, and reviewing on Apple Podcast. your Android apps, or wherever you get the show. It helps us gain visibility and find new listeners. Thank you in advance. If you have a story you'd like to share on the show,

you can contact me personally through the official website, Somewhere in the skies.com. Thank you, as always, to the E1 Podcast Network, Rogue Planet TV, and especially to you for listening. I'll see you here next week, and remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com.