Somewhere in the Skies - OMNIBUS 08 | Alien Abductions: Part 1

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

In another Omnibus, we tackle the controversial topic of alien abduction. From interviews with Whitley Strieber, Diana Walsh Pasulka, Peter Robbins, and David Jenkins to the controversial cases of Betty Andreasson, Travis Walton, Herb Schirmer, and so much more. Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. ANOMACON 2025: http://www.anomacon.com Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Email: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Proud member of SpectreVision Radio: https://www.spectrevision.com/podcasts Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms apply. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. There are many accounts of alien abduction that have littered the tabloids, big and small screens, and hundreds of books for decades now. Some appear to be completely fabricated or just couldn't stand the test of scientific or psychological rigor. But there are those rare cases that truly leave even the most skeptical, of minds utterly baffled.

Today, I cover an abduction case that has stood the test of time and remains one of the most interesting and credible accounts to date. This is the incredible story of Betty Andresen and the Andreessen affair. In the city of South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, on the night of January 25, 1967, one of the most celebrated cases of UFO abduction began. Betty Andreessen was working in her kitchen while her seven children, mother, and father were in the living room. Shortly after 6.30 p.m., the lights in the house briefly blinked.

Immediately thereafter, a reddish light began to beam through the kitchen window. The sudden darkness in the house set the kids' nerves on edge, and Betty ran to comfort them. Her father ran into the kitchen to peer out the window and find the source of the unusual light. To his utter shock, he saw five odd-looking beings coming towards the house with a hopping motion. Before he could regain his composure, he saw the beings walk right through the wooden door. What happened next would test the imagination and strength of even an open-minded, adventurous person. The entire family was suddenly put into a state of suspended animation. One of the creatures went to Betty's father, while one of the other four began to make telepathic communication with Betty.

He was about five feet tall. The other four appeared to be around a foot shorter. All of the beings had a pear-shaped head with wide eyes and small ears and noses. Their mouths were only slits and never moved, though they were able to communicate through their minds. The beings wore a type of cover-all, blue in color, with a wide belt. There also was a logo of a bird on their sleeves. The hands had only three fingers, and they wore boots. The creatures did not move as a human, but floated as they went. Betty would later recall, though she was frightened, that she felt a sense of calm, even friendship, towards the beings.

The creatures were holding Betty's children in a frozen state of consciousness, but when Betty showed concern for them, they released her 11-year-old daughter to assure her that the children were not being harmed. Betty was taken by the creatures outside to a waiting craft which rested on the side of a sloping backyard. The craft was estimated to be about 20 feet in diameter in the classic UFO shape of a saucer. Betty believes that after she was aboard the craft, it joined a mothership where she underwent a physical examination and also was subjected to the effects of strange equipment. After this, she was given a type of bizarre test, which caused her pain at first,

but resulted in a kind of religious experience. Here's an actual sound clip of Betty during an interview stating what happened during the examination. What did they do after they had examined you? Well, after they had examined me, they took me back to the cubicle where they told me to change into my regular clothes And from there, I was escorted into this room that appeared like a quonset pot-type room, half cylindrical.

And within it were eight glass-like chairs. And they sat me down in one of the chairs to the right, and this hood, glass-like hood came down. And I could hear it click around me. And then I felt very cold as if I was freezing. And it seemed as if I was there for a very long time. And from there I was taken and put into another chair to the left. And again, this glass like wood came down and sealed around me, and I could hear the snap. And they also put some tubes in my nose, and I could hear it, as they put them into the glass,

I could hear it seal like. And also a tube of my mouth, and they told me to keep my eyes closed. And they gave me this reddish color liquid to take, and it tasted very sweet. I felt very relaxed from it. Meanwhile, this gray liquid fell down, you know, was falling on my head, and it was filling up in the bottom of the chair. And when it was filled, it vibrated like a whirlpool around about me. From there, they drained that out, took the breathing tubes out,

and set me on this track where one being was in front of me and one being was in back of me. And at this point, they had their different uniform. was a sort of a shiny aluminum type uniform, and they put two black hoods on their heads. And we went out of this room into a very dark black tunnel. It seemed as if it was chipped out of stone, and there were other entrances. I could tell because their uniform sent off like a bright light, and I could see like darker holes off to the sides.

Did you start thinking that maybe these weren't angels after all at this point? I didn't know what it was. I really didn't know. But the term alien still didn't crash your mind. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't aware of mine, obviously. No, I wasn't aware of UFOs. Approximately four hours later, she was returned to her home by two of the captors. When she arrived, her entire family was still in a state of suspended animation.

One of the creatures had stayed in her house, evidently, to watch the other family members. After releasing the family from the Translake state, the creatures left. Betty would later state that the aliens had hypnotized her to not recall any of her experience until a designated time to be determined later. She was able to recall only certain things at a time of her experience, the red light through the kitchen window, and the beings entering the house being two of them. Before this bizarre happening,

Betty had little or no knowledge of UFO folklore, and being a devoted Christian, she believed that the abduction had had a religious meaning. It wouldn't be later until she began to view the abduction as alien in nature. Eight years later, Benny answered an ad from Dr. J. Allen Heineck, who was soliciting abduction experiences from the general public. Her letter was dismissed at the time, because of its unusual detail. and it would be January 1977 when her story would finally be fully investigated. The investigative team assigned to the Andreessen case included a solar physicist, an electronics

engineer, an aerospace engineer, a telecommunication specialist, and a UFO investigator. The service of hypnotist and a medical doctor trained in psychiatry were also used. Betty's case involved 12 months of investigation. Betty was given a character reference check, two lie detector tests, a psychiatric review, and an excruciating 14 sessions of regressive hypnosis. Small sound bites of the hypnosis sessions have been released to the public. Here is a small portion of one of them. No, I must warn you, this may be a little disturbing.

Pulling something that needle again with a tool, like on the end, and pulling. It's like he's pulling it. The results of the Andreas in abduction case were startling. Betty, along with their daughter, relived a detailed account of their experience, agreeing on all the basic aspects. These results were eventually published in book form by renowned author and investigator Raymond Fowler. Fowler joined the U.S. Air Force in 1952, attended a special school for electronic espionage, after which he was. was assigned to the USAF Security Service under the auspices of the NSA. His civilian career included work on U.S. government projects, including the Minuteman Project Weapons System. Later in

life, he became very interested in the UFO phenomenon and would subsequently serve as Director of Scientific Investigations for Mufon and also as a scientific associate for the Center for UFO Studies. He is internationally known as a highly competent investigator and a trustworthy chronicler. In fact, Jay Allen Heinek, who developed the Heinek UFO classification system, recognized Fowler as one of the most outstanding investigators in the UFO field, stating that he personally knew of no other investigator more dedicated, trustworthy, or persevering as Fowler. In an interview about the case and about his book, the Andreessen Affair, Fowler had this to say.

knowledge is probably one of the most objective investigators in the United States. And I think my buddies who saw me produce this book wondered if I had lost all sense of objectivity. And I'm really going on a limb, really, as far as my reputation goes, and bringing this book, The Andreas Neferre out. As I mentioned before, we decided this was too strange to have just one person investigated. that we had a team of five, and most of this team of five are engaged in scientific research and engineering research within the civilian scientific community and are really objective people. All five investigators in their initial individual evaluations in this 528-page report

indicated that they believe that the Andrius affair involved people who were telling the truth, who knew it to be, and that there was a real experience there. It was a sign that something really is happening to these people. especially since other cases exist similar to this. If this was just a unique case, I wouldn't be interested. But you did not go all the way to the point, or all the investigators of saying that, yes, Betty Andreasen and Becky Andreessen did have a close encounter of the third kind.

Yes, whatever that is, is a close encounter of the third kind type G. Now, the apparent stimulus for something like that is obviously extraterrestrial, but to accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis without, physical proof would be non-scientific. Now, the Andreessen Affair remains one of the best-selling UFO abduction books of all time. And Fowler

remains one of the most credible abduction researchers as well. This case is still being investigated today and remains one of the most controversial, bizarre, but genuine abduction cases of all time. But I wanted to hear from you guys about what you think of

this case and just exactly what happened to Betty and her children on that bizarre night. Rob had this to say. Quote, Betty's case is fascinating because it doesn't fit the normal mold of an abduction case. There were multiple eyewitnesses involved in the home while they took Betty on board the craft. The daughter was able to relive it through hypnosis as well as Betty. This case has been heavily investigated and still is, and it has not yet been dismissed.

Kate had this to say, quote, we have much. much the aliens want. Our soul, love, many things. We are worth something, or they would just dump us all into the ocean. A very famous experiencer once advised me not to do hypnosis. You don't want to remember that stuff. Once you become a famous experiencer, you are subject to ridicule and rejection from the public in general. Take a look at several experiences and how they are treated by the UFO world in general. Prove it, and they spend their lives proving it. and under attack constantly. David had this to say,

quote, the Andreessen case is one of the most important abduction cases, thanks in large part to Raymond Fowler's detailed investigation. It established that there is a link between alien abduction and out-of-body or near-death experiences, and that the aliens are quite familiar with the out-of-body realm, that their technology may actually operate on, quote, both sides of the veil. Tim says, quote, Betty's case is hugely important.

To my mind, it calls to question the realist or the physicalist view of reality itself, which is itself a metaphysical assumption or starting point rather than the settled science the mainstream culture would have us believe. But in terms of that settled science, some are a bit more skeptical, I would say with good reason.

Sean had this to say, quote, you need to ask why. Why would they pass through a door yet need surgical instruments to perform experiments in terms of these creatures? As a scientist, I always ask why before I even ponder if something did happen. Why would aliens, who are apparently trying to be incognito, light up their ships, like a good year blimp at a football game? Why pass through doors when they can just open them? Why freeze people in place when they could just sedate them? If it doesn't make sense, it probably didn't happen that way. And then we have the words of Tristan in an article from bizarre and grotesque.com.

Tristan has this to say. Quote, Betty's description of her abductors is strange and inconsistent. Over the years, Betty went from describing the alien's eyes as white with pupils to being entirely black like the aliens in close encounters of the third kind. The uniforms the aliens wore also don't make much sense. According to Betty, they wore heavy boots, but what would have been the point since the aliens apparently floated everywhere.

Furthermore, hypnosis sessions and recovered memories are notoriously unreliable and should not be taken as serious proof that an abduction actually happened. Tristan also says that, quote, in February of 2007, Betty and Bob Lucas' son, Robert Jr., announced that the Andreessen affair was a hoax.

In a 2,000-word email, Robert Jr. claimed that his father was a compulsive liar who had a drinking problem. According to Robert Jr., Betty had been experiencing emotional shock because her two sons had earlier died in a car accident. After meeting her second husband, Betty would write about every dream she had, as though it were an abduction.

And Bob encouraged her and even manipulated investigators into believing the story. So there's clearly more to this entire Andreessen affair than meets the eye. But I wanted to hear what someone who researched the alien abduction phenomenon with clear and objective approaches, having even worked side by side for many years with claimed abduction researcher Bud Hopkins. So now, to give us a bit more insight and his personal thoughts on the case, here is my mentor and our special guest, Peter Robbins.

Thank you for joining me today on someone in the skies to talk about this. Glad to, Ryan. So I guess let's start with what sort of knowledge do you have at this case, Peter? I know that it is from the peripheral, as it were, but this is one of the more fascinating cases. And you've been a part of some extremely fascinated in abduction cases, having worked with Bud Hopkins as well. But in terms of the Andreessen affair, where does this case land, in your opinion? Very high up. One thing that we need to take stock of here is where this case, T is the most dispassionate term possible for life-changing human affairs, to put it mildly, where it sits in the history of uphology, it was in 1967 that Betty Andreasen had the experience that ultimately became the core of the case. But she didn't contact anybody about it for another eight years.

It wasn't until 1975 that she wrote a letter to the best known person in the world regarding UFOs at the time, Dr. Alan Heineck. And Heinek, who I'm sure had a very busy schedule, demur, in that he simply put the letter aside, like many letters, and not unlike memories of working with Bud over the years when something didn't really seem to be a priority. Also in 1975, the whole study of abductions per se was in its infancy. The general attitude of the UFO research community internationally, as far as I'm concerned, was lights in the night sky, radar returns, physical traces, doing all you could, at best, to appear like a responsible grown-up because any responsible grown-up who claimed to have a serious interested in UFOs was already setting themselves.

self's up as something of a social oxymoron. And Heinek understood that there was ridicule attached to this factor. If one started talking about the beings inside of the craft, there was fuel for ridicule. And as Dave Jacobs once said to me, and I'm paraphrasing here, all of our attention was focused on the cars and none on the drivers. The fact is, this book came out in 1979, a full two years before Bud Hopkins' missing time, which puts it in a very special place. Also, it was researched, as Dr. Heinek tells us, by one of the original research team members that work with him when he returned his attention to that letter and realized this had potential tremendous importance. He asked Fowler, Raymond Fowler, if he would lead the investigation.

Fowler did a brilliant job, and his name is a very important one in UFO studies. your entry level and try to familiarize yourself with the literature or have a particular interest in the subject of abductions. Raymond Fowler, who is still very much with us, but retired from the work, was such a careful, analytical, scientific, pragmatic researcher in the way that he progressed in his work. At the same time, we learn years after the fact because he keeps writing. There is the Andreasen Affair, the Andreas and Afer, Part 2. the Andresen legacy and then a more general book on abductions inspired by the Andreasen studies called The Watchers. He lays out for us in very analytical terms why he takes this case so seriously and runs it

through rigorous testing. In fact, one of the things that caught me off guard was leading up to his stupendous research on the Andreson incidents because there are many of them. Dr. Heineck and his team did an exhaustive investigation of Betty Andreasen's claims, interviewing family members. Her husband, Bob, had had an experience when he was young and one later in life. Her daughter, their daughter Becky, had had experiences with her mom. And they looked at everything. The psychiatric examinations, stress analysis, checks on her character.

analysis of the weather reports of the days that she said the weather was such and such and supporting testimony of other observers. It turned out to be a 528-page single-space report. I mean, the initial investigation before Fowler began to focus in on it for years is really worth a great deal of respect. Also, again, this is 1979. Now, in general UFO studies, the abduction subject is taken very seriously. In, I guess, in a way, UFO counterculture, there's a strong trend, which I understand to look at things from more a Jacques Valet pioneered point of view, or the more anomalous aspects of the theories of what UFOs. are and the intelligences behind them. Ultimately, Fowler in his work has no where to go except to marry, to a degree, the world of hard UFOs, so to say, and the world of parapsychology.

And the confirmed and reconfirmed and reconfirmed facts that in the Andreessen and other significant cases, those two aspects of individuals' lives often intertwined. I wanted to read just one quick quote from the introduction to the Andreasen affair, only because now it seems so passe, but at that time, even for a figure as respected as Alan Heinek, I think it took great courage to say, which is, a former book by Mr. Fowler, UFO's interplanetary visitors, upholds this more popular concept of UFOs. And many of the cases he describes tend to give strong support. to that hypothesis. But here we have creatures of light who find walls no obstacle to free passage into rooms and who find no difficulty in exerting uncanny control over the witness's minds.

If this represents an advanced technology, then it must incorporate the paranormal, just as our own incorporates transistors and computers, end quote. He says, in short, that they have mastered the puzzle of mind over matter. And again, that was kind of re-shocked me up when I was just preparing for this interview, how different the times were. From here, Fowler and his team go on to document a brilliantly analyzed and researched life history. We also find that the watchers, the beings, as Betty describes them, have an agenda, that although their interactions are often very frightening to her. her, they have a message for humanity. It's not unlike certain biblical messages or contact tea messages. We're messing up. We need help and we're not giving it to ourselves. There's a fair

amount of what I would call channeling involved a great deal of regressive hypnosis that seems extremely responsible and well done. But it's quite an epic. And if you superimpose upon it, a book from almost 10 years later, Bud Hopkins Intruder's from 1987 about Debbie Jordan, Debbie Jordan Cabell's experience. You see almost template. Other important cases and analysis of claims of abductees have followed, of course, but I give a great deal of credit to Fowler. And I can't say I know Betty. We've met a number of times and have a very cordial acquaintanceship. I was scheduled to see her last month, but a health problem caused her to have to cancel out of the conference that she's going to speak at. So I am looking forward to seeing her again.

I know that she and Bob have their own book out now, which I am sure will add to the important contactee and abductee literature that we have available to us. One of the things I wanted to touch on a little bit, Peter, is that idea of the paranormal. You know, I know that you personally worked with Bud on a case where a woman was literally floated out of a solid wall, out of a window, and onto a craft. Now, we have this claim by Betty that her family, when she was in her house and being taken, that they were left in a suspended animation, that they all were just frozen and that one of the creatures actually stayed behind to watch after them. So this whole idea of the paranormal being involved within a UFO case really struck me. This is why a lot of people consider this case very bizarre. And many people consider Linda's case, Linda Cortillo, a very bizarre case as well. Do you see any sort of connecting or similar things between these two cases?

Sure. First, the obvious that these are two women who were repeatedly taken from their places of residence through solid walls or windows. In Linda's case, which is the subject of Bud Hopkins' 1996 book, Witness the true story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO abductions, it would be one thing if it was this woman's account on her own. And to add outrageousness that she lives in Lower Manhattan very close to the Brooklyn Bridge

and that the circular glowing UFO that she saw it but nobody else happened to, even though it's two in the morning, it's Manhattan. That would be outrageous. The fact is that several other, several dozen independent individuals who we were able to confirm were actual people observed that glowing disc over their building around Lower Manhattan. Bud Hopkins being a well-known figure in UFO investigation at that time and a public person would be a likely person to receive correspondence on this. And this was a case that I worked with him for longer and with a deeper involvement than any other event in the years that I was his assistant. In fact, it was six regular years. It was 89 that he began his investigation and again six years later that the book was published. published, when several dozen people write to you, you being Bud, and they say, were they making a

movie? I saw it from the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw it from the West Side Highway. I saw it from the loading dock of the New York Post or wherever. And this is what it looked like. During this investigation, one of the most exciting parts for me, and I think Bud in a very quiet, researchy way, is that many of these letters, all this again, you know, pre-internet, actual letters sent from different postal addresses with different handwritings, etc. Most of them or many of them included drawings. Bud and I, being trained artists, found it doubly moving because normally a witness drawing overwhelmingly, the chances are that it's done by an untrained hand. But one thing is almost certain. There's a great deal of intention in the drawing. If it's not, you know,

beautifully rendered. It's done with great integrity and attention to detail. Sometimes things are labeled. In this case, there was a specific color sequence to these craft, to the craft, and every single drawing captured the shape and the color sequence from different locations in lower Manhattan. Again, this is what we call circumstantial evidence, but when added to a growing stack of very credible circumstantial evidence and then physical evidence, etc. You have the makings of a very important investigation. All abductees that I've spent time with are told things in their heads. Some of them, obviously willing to share them. Many of them very much the same, seemingly word for word in certain cases. And I think that cuts across major abduction studies. If we wanted to dig and pick,

I'm sure we could draw quite a number of parallels between Linda's case and Betty's case, for sure. Right. And another big aspect of Betty's case, in particular, Peter, is this idea of spirituality playing a very big role in this. Now, a lot of people, they know that Betty is very Christian, a very practicing religious person, and that this played a big role in her perception of what happened to her, the being of light, you know, this godly figure almost. that she believes gave her these messages. Now, I'm sure you've come across this in your abduction research and working with abductees as well, that a lot of them do see this as either an angelic experience or something extremely spiritual. I know I have come across several experiencers who claim that even a UFO sighting was something angelic. Now, what do you make of this whole aspect of Betty's case?

And she said that last part, my first thought was a very important case, if you will, not so much for uphology, but for the Christian religion, is the famous miracle of Fatima. Yes. These uneducated shepherd children who observed what they called a vision of the Mother Mary, Virgin Mary, in the sky, has become a huge part of the miracles of the miracles of the. Catholic Church from the early 20th century in this case. However, in the accounts very well documented of the time, when they're specifically asked to describe what that vision looked like, they don't describe the face of a beatific, beautiful, shrouded woman in the sky. They describe a huge, glowing circle. I am of a mind after more than 40 years of looking at this subject from different angles, that there are variables that we may never be able to pin down. We know as well as we can

that they, these other particular intelligences, they have the power or the technology or the psychic abilities or whatever the mechanism is to put certain things in the minds of the human beings they interact with, either what they may be thinking, feeling, or seeing. Also, and if that's so, then perhaps that is what they, these individuals are seeing, what we would call a screen memory, rather than what is actually in front of them, or what is actually in front of them. But then there's a third variable that some of our colleagues don't really take into consideration. I do for more than 20 odd years because I worked for years in crisis intervention. And part of our training was to understand the physiology of human beings.

shock. And if you're looking at something that you absolutely cannot accept in a total shock situation, the mind is a powerful and in its own way wonderful thing and will mask that memory. Either it will become the repressed memory of your life or one of them, or it will emerge at a time that you can deal with it, either coaxed out or naturally making itself apparent. So with those three understandings, number one, I'm damned if I know which one it is for Betty or which combination of them. What I do know is that in the case of Betty Andreas and the person that I know a little and like very much, yes, she is a religious Christian, as is her husband. And they draw peace and comfort and positive aspects of their life from those deeply entrenched beliefs. I think in life, which can be

tough enough. If something serves you, it's not necessary to push too hard and ask questions as to why or how, especially in the spiritual realm. God bless Betty and Bob. I know that they have been through tragedies in their life that would absolutely waste other people and that their belief in Jesus and the tenants that he taught have helped get them through and move on and live full lives. So I almost don't care. It's interesting because there was a time in my work that That was the driving force. Which are these things, is it? Well, any of the above and all.

And that's what we have here, a situation where the paranormal, the hard reality of UFOs, traditional Christian beliefs come together in a matrix. It's important to note also that during the writing of these two books, that in his investigative work with Dr. Heineck beforehand, Raymond Fowler never made public the fact that he did later in life, that he was an abductee, very much in the spirit that Kathleen Martin did not make that public earlier in life. I think they both understood innately that it would be a distraction, it would be something that naysayers and ankle biters would pick at and try to find. Meaning in also, Raymond Fowler is also a very Christian man.

And I say that with a capital C and with all respect. And for me, part of my admiration for him as an investigative writer in a very complex subject, to put it mildly, is that his work straight through his career is completely analytical. It reminds me of one of the most important lessons I felt that was passed on to me by one of my three major mentors when I started, Colonel retired Coleman von Kovetsky, which as a, Hungarian, I think 99% of whom are Catholics. Coleman went to church on Sunday. He practiced his religion religiously, but he had no patience for people having their scientific UFO research informed by the kind of mysticism that he felt did not help us understand the nature of the subject that we were dealing with. Again, if anything now, an even more complex subject with so many people.

looking at the whole UFO phenomena from a decidedly religious, quasi-religious sort of matrix. It is, it's an eternal struggle and battle, I believe, between science and religion that, again, if you have one of these experiences, it really is the lens in which you choose to perceive it, whatever you decide and choose to accept in your life as this is what happened to me. I would have to agree, Peter, that at this point in my research, I don't necessarily care, one way or another. This is what Betty believes happened. That's the story she's going to tell. And it's up to the listener and the other experiencers to decide if they choose to believe that or not. The other small thing I did want to bring up in terms of this case is that one of the family members came forward in the

last few years or so claiming that they believe that this entire incident was a hoax perpetrated by Betty, unfortunately. Now, in terms of family members coming forward and making these claims, what would you say to someone who is a severe skeptic and would believe that someone would make this entire thing up and spend the rest of their life talking about it? Like you mentioned, Betty went through a lot of hard times after this event happened. Family members were lost and whatnot. What do you make of the idea to the skeptics who say, nope, none of this. It's all complete bullshit. Well, um, for starters, if somebody has an intention to deceive and they come off as a basically sincere person committed in every respect of behavior and language and pronouncements

and, um, working to make it seem the deception they want to perpetrate is actual. It's doable. For whatever reasons, it seems to be part of human nature that some people are intent on deceiving other people. And some people are very good at it. So let me put it this way, much as I like, respect, admire, Betty, if it could be proved to my satisfaction, which is fairly high standard, that this family member's allegation were true. I go, gosh, that's kind of sad. And it happens. It does not make other cases or other individuals who have claimed similar things and have them backed up scientifically, et cetera. Wrong. It just means that this person wasn't telling the truth and was good at it and

perpetrated a fraud. Yeah, those things happen. I think in euphology, they're well in the minority, but they certainly happen. I think that's a good point, too, is I spoke to a gentleman recently about being the first person to ever have witnessed the black-eyed children phenomenon. And he told me, you know, if someone could come forward and tell me that they're, you know, pulled a prank on me that day or that this was all, you know, part of some elaborate hoax. He said, please do it.

Please tell me. Please prove to me that what I saw was not a genuine experience. And I will accept that and I will move on. I think it's important that Betty has never claimed that, oh, try to prove me wrong. Try to prove me wrong. She will say, if you can back up my case with scientific evidence, I hope you can. But until then, this is what I believe happened to me. And that's what I'm going to continue to believe.

And I think that's very important. So I would have to agree with you. Anyone who believes that this case is 100% a hoax, I highly suggest that they look at the work of Fowler and take the opinions and the educated opinions by people like yourself and other abduction researchers that something definitely happened to Betty. What exactly that was we may never know. But again, we deal with that every day with this topic. Yeah, I'm remembering at this point, there's no hard statistic of how many of what type of beings abductees and experiences report having seen or interfaced or had exchanges with. And if such a statistic alleged to exist, we would immediately have to question it as problematic because there's no way of actually knowing. And maybe they'll never be.

In the years I work with Bud, I think we both agreed informally that of all the reports of beings, other intelligences, aliens, a word I've never been comfortable with in this realm, etc. I don't know. Three quarters, 80% of them maybe were in the very much in the range of what we'll call an archetypical gray. Also, it's interesting to note that in the Andreasen affair, the beings that we keep dealing with are these archetypical grays. But this book was written so long ago that that term didn't exist at the time. But the other 20% or quarter or so varied wildly. Once again, was this a function of a fact that there are a whole lot of them and they look really different

and maybe a range of them fit into the immortally wonderful Star Wars bar scene, or that they're, you know, pulsating bits of amoeba that have no relationship or appearance similarities to humanoids. Or is this something that is put in the minds of those involved by these intelligences, for whatever reasons, or is it informed by the physiology and defensive aspects of human shock or some combination thereof? I am completely sure that I have no idea. I could not agree with you more, my friend. And I think that's where I land on this case as well. It is fascinating. I have no idea yet what to make of it. I'm going to continue looking into it, as I'm sure all the listeners

will. And I have to thank you for taking the time to come on and talk through this with me today. I value your educated opinion on this, as I'm sure the listeners will as well. I guess to end, do you have anything coming up that you can let our listeners know about? Right now, it's funny, here in the Northeast, where the seasonal change is very visual as we have come into autumn. My schedule out there speaking in the world is now gone quiet for a while after a fairly intense late summer and early autumn. And so this is where I go back to finishing up the book that I have been working on for a while that will be out sometime next year, hopefully early next year, begin to look for speaking jobs also for next year, drafting out a project that I had in mind for some time but need to complete this one on. And the odd bits of weatherproofing and getting ready for winter here in central New York, nothing you can relate to, I'm sure. I will say you one thing, my friend.

Adapting to the West Coast has been difficult, but I will not miss this coming winter. I'll tell you that much. Got it, man. With that, Peter, again, thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies today. My pleasure, and looking forward to our paths crossing again next, wherever and whenever. Always, always.

All right, that is it for this week's episode. I hope this episode served as a detailed overview of this hotly doing. debated abduction case. Whether you believe, want to believe, or choose not to, I highly suggest checking out the work of Raymond Fowler on his investigation into Betty Andreessen's accounts. My thanks again to the listeners who shared their thoughts, and I'd still love to hear what you think of this case. Visit the website, someone in the skies.com, and use the contact tab. My thanks also to Peter Robbins. Anyone wanting to reach out to Peter, he is always available on Facebook. Just search for Peter Robin.

Remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching. Somewhere in the Skies. Greetings, everyone. Ryan Sprague here, host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Skies podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return.

If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of, you're Somewhere in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ

and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere's. or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support. And keep looking up. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host Ryan Sprague. Today's episode is directly inspired by an article written by Blake Ersk and published

in the Omaha World Herald on April 4th, 2019. My sincere thanks goes out to the newspaper for their generous contributions to this episode. The young patrolman took a drag from his cigarette, trying in vain to steady his nerves. Sitting in the small police station, mostly empty in the early morning, 22-year-old Herbert Shermer felt feverish and disoriented. As he later recounted, his body felt completely drained. His head buzzed and his thoughts raced. Did this really happen to me?

He asked himself. As an officer with the Ashland Police Department, Schumer said that he had been trained to take notes of incidents in his log, whatever they might be. So there, in the early morning quiet, he grabbed a pen and scrawled a short message in his notebook, summarizing the night's bizarre events. At 2.30 a.m., December 3, 1967, I saw a UFO at the junction of USA Highway 6 and Nebraska Highway 63. Believe it or not. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Herbert Shermer's gripping story of an alleged alien encounter would ignite a firestorm of news coverage,

and he would become a legend among UFO enthusiasts. His tale of a spacecraft and its inhabitants, soon becoming ingrained in American folklore for decades to come. Schumer gave a rare presentation of his experience, recounting in detail what happened that night. The following audio clips throughout this episode are directly from that presentation. Shermer begins by giving us some detail about himself, setting us up for the amazing story we're about to hear. I was born in Missouri, and I was brought up as a service brat. My father was a career man in the Air Force. I went to school in Japan, Germany, France, and France.

in Hawaii. I jumped around quite a bit, so I didn't get much of an education when I was young, but I did finish it all later. When I was 17 years old, I went into the military service, the United States Navy, and my first news station was in Jacksonville, Florida. And then from there, I went over to the Far West Command, and I helped serve our flag and fight for it in Vietnam. even though I felt it was an immoral act of a war.

Then, coming out of the service, I went back to Missouri and spent a couple of months there. And I went home to Nebraska, where my folks were. And I wasn't making very much money being out of the service. You know, $2 an hour being a clerk wasn't my bag, really. So I wanted newer fuels, so I always wanted to be in law enforcement. So I talked to my father about going into law enforcement and he decided that the state patrol in Nebraska would be a good idea. So we fill out the farms and everything and I had to go

to the Ashin, Nebraska, to the police department to get a police check. So I walked in and five minutes later I was a policeman. They hired me there. Shermer became an officer for the Ashland Police Department. On December 3rd, 1967, at approximately 2.30 a.m. After checking on two gas stations in the area, Shermer was driving his police cruiser along USA Highway 6 toward Nebraska. As he continued down the road, he noticed something hovering, partly above the highway. At first glance, he thought maybe it could have been a truck broken down on the side of the road. But as he approached, it became quite clear this wasn't a truck's lights. wasn't a truck at all or any conventional vehicle, it appeared to be a craft of some sort,

hovering in mid-air. As I got closer and put the high beams of the lights in the patrol car on this, this object started raising, these lights started raising up in the air to about 40 feet. I think I was something like 50 yards from this. These lights were flashing and they got, as they got bigger as I got close to it, it seemed like they were, red flashing lights coming out of a porthole, which sort of circled the craft. They had like a catwalk going around the center of it. It was shaped like a football, very metallic, like a very shiny bumper. If you polished a bumper on a car, had sort of a reddish-orange's glow coming from beneath it.

From the glow, Schumer could make out the craft. It was an oblong disc about 20 feet wide. 15 feet tall. It began to emit a loud beep which became faster, louder, and shriller. Suddenly, the spacecraft shot an orange-red beam toward the ground and quickly vanished. Shermer's initial account of the encounter ends here, with the officer approaching the craft only to see it rise and disappear. But having experienced missing time during the event, Shermer would eventually go under hypnotic regression. In doing so, he told a much longer story.

He had not just seen the spacecraft. He had met with the beings inside of it. Then there was this white flash that came on to me in the patrol car. It felt as if we were being pulled. And then it was being pulled. We were being pulled up the side of this bank to the left of the road. and up toward this fill, the car and I, I felt nothing.

At first I felt kind of stunned and shocked, and then I felt sort of tingly. And as the car and I moved up the bank to the top of this fill, this object landed, and some legs came out and it sat down. I was just seeing there really motionless. I couldn't move. This hatch.

came open. And this light came out of the hatch, and this farm came down, and looked the form of a human being. And this farm started walking toward the patrol car with an object in both its hands, appear to be hands. And he was walking straight toward the patrol car. As he was doing this, another form came out and started walking toward the patrol car also

as this being got in front of the walked up to the front of the patrol car with this object in his hand which looked sort of a squirish oval type it looked like it had a lens in front of it and the only thing I could think was oh my God what's going to happen now and this green light came out all of the car

and then so I went back in again and I felt a sensation then and then I felt nothing like I was just there and that was it and this other being started walking up toward the car I was sitting straight looking straight

I couldn't even move my head and he walked up to the car and the window was about three quarters of the way he rolled down and had an object in his hand a silver object that looked like a big pencil

with a round ball on the end of it and he pressed this against the side of my neck which I felt some pain from and said, ouch. Then he stepped back and I sort of sat there and he opened up the

car door and I sort of raised up out of the troll car and I was looking at him and he was looking at me and he said, are you the watchman of this town? And my response was, yes, sir. He said, come with me, watchman. The being then took him aboard for a tour of the spacecraft,

which was filled with lights, switches, cables, and other instruments. At times, the being appeared to communicate with him telepathically, with words Schumer didn't understand. The being explained. the spacecraft had come to Ashland to harvest electricity. Shermer would later describe the beings in detail. He would say that they had cat-like eyes and didn't blink. They had gray-white skin and long and thin heads with flat noses and slit-like mouths.

They wore silver-gray uniforms, gloves, and helmets, which had a small antenna on the left side of the ear. And at the left breast of each suit, they had the emblem of a winged serpent. Shermer had the impression that the small antennas were somehow part of their communication process with him. And is this particular being led Shermer through the craft? It was a grand tour of cosmic proportions. And we walked a complete circle in there, and I said, what is this? And he said, this is how our craft operates, and he said it operates on electrical, reversible magnetism.

And we walked back over to where I came up in with him, and this glass sheet came down. And we stepped on to this, which I felt. And we moved up into the second level of the craft. And lo and behold, I've never seen anything like it before in my life with so many different types of instrument panels and computer type things. You just wouldn't believe it. This cone thing was right in the center of the floor. You can see half of it from on top and half of it from the bottom, but it gave off a red glow that sort of not flashed,

but kind of died down and then came back up again. And he says, watchman come with me, and we walked over to a screen that was up on the side, I say wall, and it was sort of like a TV screen, and he pressed some buttons, and I guess flipped some switches. I wasn't paying too much attention to him. I was looking at the screen.

And some stars in the sky appeared on there. And he put his finger up like this, and he said, this is where we're from, watchman. And then he put his hand back down. He didn't say where, and he didn't say the name. The purpose that we're here is to get electricity. And there was another being standing a little distanced away, and the man turned to him, and they both looked at each other, and he started depressing buttons.

And he says, watch, watchman. And there was this antenna on the outside of the spacecraft, which angled toward a power unit, and this bolt went out, a color I've never seen before my life, and I don't even think I could describe it, went out and came back, and this stayed like this for about three minutes, And then it went off. And he turned and looked at me. And I felt as I was getting a very, very, an awful lot of role of input of words that I couldn't understand. And he reached up and he touched me on the shoulder.

And he felt real when he touched me. And I think at that time I did touch him. And he felt real to me. And he says, watchmen come with me. we walked back over to the exit, I'll say, where we came up, and the glass sheet came down again, and we went up into the third part of the craft, which was the observation deck, he said. As we stepped off, he said, Watchmen, come with me, and we walked over, and we was standing there, looking out of a big plate glass window type thing, and there were a control panel right in front of it,

and there were two chairs that looked like Dennis chairs, you know, I've ridden to a dentist, a chair, but really a superstructure of a chair, better than a dentist chair. We looked out the window, and I could see this one being walking back and forth by where my patrol car was. And I think I said, wow. He turned to me, and he said something, I don't understand. and he said some more things that I didn't understand or couldn't make out, and I still don't. And then he pointed his hand toward the plate glass window, as I say, refer to, to the stars out there. And he says to me, Watchman, one day you yourself will see the universe as I have.

And he reached up and he touched me on the shoulder. And he says, come with me, Watchman. And then he stopped and he said, Watchman, and I turned around like this to look at him. And I thought I was like I was getting more input of something that I couldn't understand. Then he says, Watchman come with me. We walked over and we went down all the way out of the craft. As we got outside, this other being started walking back toward the spacecraft and boarded it. as we were walking toward my patrol car.

And we stopped right by the patrol car, and I turned to look at him, and he was looking at me. And then again, it felt like I was receiving input of words of some kind that I couldn't understand. He sort of lifted his hand, and then he turned and walked back to the spacecraft, floated up inside. This catwalk thing started spinning. The light started flashing off and off.

This red-orngedged glow came out from beneath it. It started lifting up in the air, and I guess it got about 100 feet high and it shot straight out of the side. Let me tell you, I was scared. I started feeling me again. When I was aboard the spacecraft, I had hardly no feeling at all. My body was tingling. I was perspiring. I was hot.

I felt nauseated. I got back into the patrol car. I turned it around and I hit it back for the police station. Schumer drove back to the station, visibly shaken. He went into the station, looked at the clock on the wall, and noticed it was 301 a.m. He immediately went to the bathroom to guzzle down a hefty amount of water. He was very hot and felt dehydrated. After that, he came back out to his desk, not quite sure what to do. next. I sat there at the table and I lit a cigarette and I said, wow, what the hell happened? Something happened to me. Did I really see a flying saucer? Did this really happen to me? I looked at my report log and I remember through all the training and everything I went through

that regardless of the nature or what it was, put it in your report book because you just might need it. So I looked at my report book and I got my pen out and I wrote at 2.30 a.m. December 3rd, 1967, I saw a UFO at Junction 6 and 63. Believe it or not. After logging the incident to the best of his knowledge, another officer entered the office around 6.30 a.m. that morning. He could tell Shermer was distracted and looked shaken. He asked Shermer what had happened. to him. But not remembering the entire event at this point, all he told the officer was that he'd seen a flying saucer. The response he got back was a little unexpected. The fellow officer says, I believe you heard. He says, I don't think you should tell anybody heard because I don't think anybody's going to believe you. Matter of fact, you're going to lose your job. But if you tell the

people, but I said, Paul, it's the truth. He said, well, you know, he said, a lot of people won't even accept the truth. I said, well, I'll wait for the chief. He says, no, I'll go on home. So I went home, and I was, you know, I really felt like everything was drained completely out of my body, and I laid down the couch. And as I laid there, I started getting a buzzing feeling in my head.

And I felt like I was being, I had pressure on my body. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't, you know how you try to open your mouth and you can't say help? I was trying to say help, you know. And then I went off to sleep, and the phone rang, and it was a chief. And the chief says, get your butt down to the station right now. What is this?

You mean you've seen a UFO? I said, I don't feel good. I'm sick, and I'm not coming down to the police station. He said, I'll be right over. So the next thing, the TV came in, press came in, you know, newspapers, radio stations, and telephone calls started coming in. The story had now made its way across the nation, the local Omaha World Herald, being one of the very first to cover this story.

The original article by the Herald attracted the attention of many readers, but it also attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force and the government. And soon, they wanted to investigate. The United States Air Force Conn Committee Blue Book Project, or however you want to say it, investigating team came down to Ash from Nebraska

to investigate me. A gentleman by the name of John Arons, who is a friend of mine, and a gentleman by the name of Roy Craig, who was a physicist. John Arons, he'd probably hit me, but he was a shrink. A psychiatrist. Him and I had long discussions, and he told me to tell my story over and over and over and over, and I told it over and over and over and over, and then they found a 25-minute time lapse in my log.

And John says, Herb, what happened to you between 2.30 a.m., December 3, 1967, and 3 a.m. And I looked at him, and I couldn't say anything because I didn't remember. So he says, you got to come to Boulder. I said, okay. So they took me up to Boulder. And I met a UFO. team there of a lot of people who run a lot of tests on me and a hypnotist by the name of Dr. Leo sprinkler administered time regression hypnosis on me which

found out a small detail that I had been aboard the spacecraft and that I had actually communicated with them they played the tape back to me and it shocked me I didn't know what to think. I said, are you, is that really my voice on that tape? You bet it is, boy. I says, my God. What do I do now? The members of Project Blue Book were intrigued but cautious of the story.

They would continue to assist in Schumer being put under rigorous hypnotic regression. His story never changing or swaying. After Shermer heard the tapes of his hypnotic regression sessions, he didn't know. what to do. The missing time had now been filled with a story almost too hard to believe, even for Shermer. And as this story started to surface, the ridicule back home in Ashland only intensified. Locals weren't letting the officer off easy for spinning this unbelievable tale that was making their town laughingstock of the entire state. They harassed him aggressively. So while I was up in Boulder, the city got real cute, you know.

Matter of fact, the night I left, they went down to our beautiful cemetery there in Ashon, Nebraska, and took this dummy and hung it by the neck and a tree, and put a big star on it, shot a hose through it, and paint the hose with red like blood, and put herb across the star with a cowboy head on it. And they really may look big because they went down to the mortuary, and they got the amos out, a Code 3 Run, sirens, red lights, the whole works. Went over there, and they very carefully took it down and put it on a stretcher and covered it up and took it back to the morgue.

They thought they scared me, but they didn't, you see. That's what they were trying to do. They were trying to scare me, but they didn't scare me because I thought it was kind of funny, and I laughed about it when I read it in the paper and seen all the pictures and everything. but while I was in Boulder they blew my car up with dynamite and that really made me mad

I just got too paying for it the harassment continued and Shermer tried to take it in stride but things only seemed to get worse his own wife didn't believe the story and after many long nights of arguments and the unwanted attention put on Shermer she left him

and so had many of his friends. Meanwhile, the Kanting Committee, in offshoot and response to the work being done by Project Blue Book, gave their conclusions in their official report on Schumer's case, stating no materials or trace evidence was found at the site of the claimed incident. The area also tested negative for traces of radioactivity. Though the analysis of Dr. Leo Sprinkle and several other hypnotherapists concluded, that Schumer sincerely believed in the events he described.

The official conclusion by the Conting Committee investigators finally declared they had no confidence that the officers reported UFO experience was physically real. The Conding Committee would later apply the same logic to UFO sightings in general, concluding in 1968 that, quote, nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to the scientific knowledge. end quote.

Shermer eventually left Ashland, living for a time in the Pacific Northwest, trying to cope with his experience, the aftermath, and the eventual fallout. He continued to make headlines in Omaha throughout the 70s, when the World Herald noted his appearances in TV specials and books about UFOs.

Such a sentiment might have been comforting to Shermer in the volatile period after the story spread. In those days, in weeks, he saw counsel from friends and family, rarely getting it. But one fellow officer in particular remained steadfast in believing Shermer. Due the whole crisis, I had one very good friend in Ashland, his name is Leroy Dimett, a very close friend. And he helped me a lot in Ashland. He was one of our relief officers on the police department. And I was really proud to have him as a friend in his way he stuck by.

Herbert Shermer died in 2017. And with him, he took a story so unbelievable yet so genuine in his recounting that we may never really know what happened on that desolate road in Ashland, Nebraska, in 1967. The truth remains with Shermer. And perhaps the most important vindication for Shermer himself came from his very own. father. Words that Schumer would take with him, but also leave with us to keep searching somewhere in the skies. I went to my father and I said, Dad, I said, I know you have 20-something years in the Air Force, but I asked my father point blank. I said, Dad, what do you think of? UFOs? My father never said no,

and he never said yes. He just said, son, if you're telling the truth, stay. with it. So I stuck with it. 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. Do you enjoy true stories of the supernatural from the people who experienced it? Well, then you might like my show, Jim Harold's campfire. Hi, I'm Jim, and we've been doing the show since 2009. And we talk about ghosts, cryptic creatures, UFOs, head scratchers, you name it. And you tune in and you might hear a story like this one.

And as he was driving home, he encountered a shadow person who seemed to be dressed like a monk. I know that sounds very strange, but it was a solid black form. And it was wearing a hooded cloak tied at the waist with the cloak up. And it had glowing red eyes. He sees this thing. coming out of a really teeny abandoned cemetery. If you haven't tuned in, I hope you'll check us out. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever podcasts are heard,

it's Jim Herald's Campfire, and you can find it at Jim Herald.com. Thanks so much, and stay spooky. Hey, friends, it's Daniel Noah here. I'm the director of Spectrevision Radio. So many of the ideas that permeate the genre stories we tell are actually based on real paranormal phenomena. The way we've represented these powerful experiences really only begin to scratch the surface, not just of the way they work, but of the way they feel. When the fine folks at Oni Press approached Spectrevision about creating a comic book series based on real paranormal

phenomena, we jumped at the chance. High Strangeness is a series of five interconnected stories created by actual experiencers, committed to portraying the reality of paranormal experience as it truly is strange, disorienting, beguiling, frightening, and awe-inspiring. It's got UFOs, cryptids, men-in-black, and I mean the real men-in-black, not the other men-in-black, synchronicities, interdimensional portals, a deep underground military base, and so much more. This October, Oni Press and Spectrevision are proud to present high strangeness, a five-part experiment in comic book storytelling, boasting an other-world cast of comic book talents. Like Christopher Cantwell, Christian Ward and Jock, Chris Condon, Ringo Award-winning

artist Dave Chisholm, Cecil Castellucci, Timothy Renner of Strange Familiers, named Jim Perry of Euphemette. Look for high strangeness book won on shelves October 8th at a local comic book shop near you. But be warned, when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back. in the skies with Ryan Sprague. Next stop. This is Ozzy Graham reporting on StarCross support group for people who believe

they've been abducted by aliens and meet in a Catholic church for some reason. Just to be clear, we're all of you abductees. We very much prefer the term experiencers to abductees. It just gives us a little more agency.

Reptilians live amongst. us almost every U.S. president was a reptilian. This is off the record, right? Mm-hmm. I'm the VP of a major tech company. I'm a homemaker, okay? I moved to this retirement community after my husband died.

Yeah, and I hated it at first, but... Now you love it. The sex here is amazing. Hmm. And what can you tell me about your alien experience? Oh, it was pretty late. And I thought I'd just go to bed. But for some reason, I just kept waking up.

I saw this dark shape. In the corner of my room. But this time, it wasn't my ex-husband. Sorry. Went down to the kitchen for late-night snack. And I sensed this presence behind me. We can't help you unless you let us in Ozzy. When we woke up, we were in some kind of examination room.

I will never forget. They looked me. Right in the eyes. You will never believe what he said. You are special. Okay, he's looking right at me. I know my frigger job, Jeff. Oh, eat a dick.

It's not like he's going to remember anything. of this. We're just going to wipe his mind telling me special and send him on his way like all the others. Welcome to another episode of Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprigg. Having spent years diving deep into the UFO phenomenon, which inevitably leads to the abduction and experiencer community, I found a special place in my heart for those who claimed such events in their lives, no matter what actually did or did not happen to them. In fact, their stories took up a good portion of my book. It wasn't so much what happened to these people, but why? I focused on the individuals and how the events affected their lives moving forward, and that's exactly what today's guest

has done with his hit television show, People of Earth. Now, People of Earth admittedly gave me pause when I learned it was a comedy. But as I watched the show, I realized this wasn't an attempt to exploit the alien abduction controversy, nor those experiencing it. It was a character exploration with compassion, heart, and most importantly, understanding. Today, I speak with the creator and executive producer, David Jenkins. David received undergraduate degrees in political science and philosophy from Boston University and an MFA in acting from New York University. While working as an actor in both New York and Chicago, he began writing plays, eventually

founding a theater company called Human Animals. People of Earth is his first television project. David and I talk in depth about how the show came to be, how he conducted his thorough research into the alien abduction phenomenon, and what we can expect in season two, which, which, if you're listening to this upon release, is premiering tonight, Monday, July 24th, on TBS Network. So, without further ado, here's our conversation with David Jenkins. David, thank you so much for joining us today on Somewhere in the Skies. Sure, thanks for having me. When your show first came around, you know, us in the quote-unquote UFO field, we were a little hesitant. You know, these topics of alien abduction are often handled, not in the best of light. I mean, granted,

it is an extremely fringe topic to begin with, but you're always hesitant when you hear about a new show or a new documentary and how they're going to handle it. But your show is, it's one of the most human and heartwarming alien abduction experiences I think we've ever encountered on mainstream television. Oh, that's, that's nice. That's a really nice compliment. Absolutely. And I was so excited to hear that it got picked up for a season two. So we will definitely talk about that.

Okay, cool. I kind of want to start with. You and I have an eerily amount of stuff in common. Like we mentioned earlier, we both live in Queens. We were playwrights. We're both obviously fascinated by the whole alien abduction phenomenon. Yeah, that's weird. That's a lot of crossover.

That's more than just a little bit of crossover. You hear that your doppelganger is usually in another country or continent, but we're literally blocks away from each other. We might be in an orphan black situation. I don't want to get too deep into it, but let's just put it out there now that this could be an orphan black situation. Absolutely, yes. We'll leave it at that. So, David, you, like I mentioned, you're a playwright, and that really caught my attention. You even founded your own theater company.

Could you tell us a little about that theater company and how that all came to be? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, I grew up in Chicago where a lot of people have their own space. A theater company would have their own space and they'd have people. It would be a place they rent and they'd show up and they'd put plays on. In New York, it's kind of different where you almost, you just, you're creating a name that you're going to put plays up under. So the name of the company was human animals. And then we would rent theater space. I would produce my own plays through that.

So it was just kind of like a banner or something that I could use to produce my own work and hire my friends and work with my friends. And my wife directed all of my plays. So it was, it was, it almost felt like a garage band or something, you know, when you, when you do theater in that way. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've, I've been down that same road.

A lot of people don't realize here in the city, you know, obviously we have Broadway. we have off Broadway. But there are so many artists making their own work. Oh, yeah. It's most important. Oh, yeah. In that dark and dingy world called off, off Broadway. Yeah, times five.

Yeah, yeah, out as many off one. Yeah. Ceilin is leaking in the middle of a play. Yeah, it doesn't matter. You can be in a basement somewhere, and it's still off, off Broadway. That's a big category. That covers a lot of different experiences of making theater. Yep, and that's where you get your street credit.

I think that's right. I agree with that. I mean, it definitely is where you get your kind of grit and making something for no money. And it's almost like you're starting a little restaurant in your basement or something. It's quite an undertaking for the amount of money that you're basically losing to do it. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Now, one of your plays I've actually heard of this one,

It's called middlemen. The premise of this was really interesting to me. Would you mind giving us a brief synopsis of what this play was about? It's called Middlemen. It's about these two guys who work in an office building. And the building, we find out it's a very white-collar job. And we find out they're in kind of an Enron situation where there's been some kind of a malfeasance at the company.

And for whatever reason, these two guys really didn't get the memo. So they're kind of like Go-Go Indeatio. from waiting for a good-o. They're trying to figure out why they're there, what happened, why no one else showed up to work that day, and they have this sneaking suspicion that they might be deeply involved

in some kind of in the malfeasance that maybe brought this company to its knees. But it really is like, I think somebody described my play at some point as existential free fall. I think that it's fun for me to put two characters

into a kind of an existential free fall and all they have is each other. It's a two-hander to kind of try to figure out what's going on, why they're in this situation, and maybe question why did they take an office job to begin with? What does that mean? What does it mean when you sign up for something like that? And it's a comedy. I guess it's, I guess you could call it a comedy. I like when you can take something like an office play and it's something that we all know and you can abstract it a bit too. to me that's that's a good mix of things to put something very abstract up against something very square and recognizable so yeah we produced that god i think we produced that in like 2010 at soho reps space

old space now and yeah it was my it was my first play i've been acting for a long time and finally decided that i i'd try to write some plays and um that one for whatever reason did pretty well. They've performed it in a bunch of countries, and it's been translated into a bunch of different languages, and that was kind of the first piece of full-length writing that I did, and I think to produce it and see it all the way through from writing it to actually making it and getting reviewed and doing all of that was, that was a big deal for me. I can imagine. I mean, it's terrifying. You know, it's one thing to write the piece, but then to actually let go of it and let others, you know, interpret it, judge it, critique it. It's a lot. It's

a whole other beast. Yeah. Yeah, it is, isn't it? I can only imagine how that is multiplied for you. Well, it's funny. It doesn't change that much. I thought it would because this is that with like a nuclear warhead strap to it, just, you know, the TV show, just because there's more money.

But the feelings don't change. I mean, in a weird way, it feels less personal because there are so many more people involved. I think when you're doing a scrappy little piece of theater, there's like five of you. And, you know, you've all lost weight because you're stressed out. You're, you're, you know, it's such a small group of people. With the TV show, it's, to me, I don't know. It's kind of, it feels a little abstract to see a poster of something that you made, you know, in Times Square. Right.

It's exhilarating, but it's also kind of like, oh, oh, yeah, I guess I made, I made that. I have something to do with that, I guess. It's maybe too abstract to feel that kind of, I guess, totally blown away by it. It's just kind of like, oh, huh, I'd see that show. Right. It's almost like an imposter syndrome of sorts. It's like, wait, what? I was, I, when did this happen?

Where was I? Yeah, yeah, it's very, it's very strange. Well, I mean, you know, sort of focusing on that idea, David, of, you know, an existential crisis or digging deep into a character. I got to ask you this, because this is one of the most existential questions for a lot of these people in your show. How did the idea of people of earth come about? What made you want to cover the alien abduction topic? Yeah, I don't, you know, I, again, I think what you said is right.

Like, it's a really good way to talk about existential thoughts and people struggling with something that for most people isn't real. but to them is very real. And so you're constantly asking yourself, geez, did this happen to them? Did it not? We know what happened to them because the aliens are on the show. But I read an article about John Mack,

who is the famous kind of PhD who started writing about experiencers and people who had these. And it was pretty interesting to read about it from his perspective because he's a guy who was a neurologist and wasn't into this phenomenon at all. And then he actually got drawn into writing about people who believe they had alien experiences.

And he was just trying to describe, he was trying to explain the neurological thing they were going through. Why did these people think this had happened to them? And the more he wrote about them, the more I think he started to believe that there could have been something, actually, that happened to them that we don't understand. In reading the article about this guy, I thought it was fascinating. thought he was a fascinating character. And I thought the other people in the article were great because they were just normal people. Like one of them was a realtor and she sounded like a grounded normal person you'd meet. Except she swears that she was taken up in a beam of light and very open about talking about it.

And to me, something about that kind of, I found it very moving that there are groups of these people that would form a, support group and talk to each other about something that no one else would ever believe had happened. That seemed like a really interesting setting for something. And immediately, I kind of imagined myself, if I were one of those people, how deeply unfair it would feel to have had this thing happen and really not be able to tell anyone about it. Or they'd look at you like you were crazy. I think most of us feel like we're a little crazy to begin with. So, maybe that's why this is a good show. It taps into that a lot of people, I think, where it's, people are looking for community and we're looking for people we can share our experiences with.

And then these folks have very normal lives and they've had something kind of fantastical happened to them. I don't know. The whole, the community, I think, just kind of made my heart leap in terms of I hadn't seen them portrayed that way in TV or film. Every time you see an alien thing, it's like fire in the sky, really, really messed up by it, as one would be. But in the article, it just seemed like, oh, no, they lose their keys in the couch, and they buy groceries, and they're not here to make fun of them. They're just fascinating people, because if they're right, the universe cracked open to them

in some way. And then they're having to deal with it while holding down a job and trying to meet someone. To me, that seemed like a pretty fascinating mix of things. Absolutely. That's a great point. I mean, I talked to one gentleman who was on his way to a military base. He was, you know, starting his service. And he had a UFO sighting.

And I asked him, I'm like, well, did you go anywhere, tell anyone? He said, no, I had somewhere to be. Like, I had to get there on time. So he had this life-altering experience, but life goes on. And you have to sort of integrate that into your existence. I've interviewed so many people. They're everyday people, priests, you know, doctors, everything you could think of. Yet they've had this one, like you said, incredible, hard-to-believe experience, but it's there and it's real to them.

Yeah. And what are you going to do? I mean, that's right. I mean, he had to go to work or something. I mean, it's, in the movies, it's like, ah, aliens, and now we must fight them. And I'm going to put everything on pause. And I think that's what I like about the original Ghostbusters. You know, you get a sense, it's like, oh, yeah, these guys, this is just like a means to an end for them.

You know, they're into this stuff, but it's also just kind of like a job that they do. And I think if you're really going to fictionalize something like this and go super fantastical, we have a lot of like sci-fi and fantasy stuff that isn't grounded. To me, to really ground it and to really make the characters believable and to really honor them in that way makes the sci-fi a bit more interesting. You found a good mix with the people that you, your creative team and the people that you've involved in the show. And I remember you once described the show as Greg Daniels-style human comedy mixed with J.J. Abrams' magic box show. Now, you have to please decipher this for me because I'm fascinated by this description. Well, I wrote this script on spec, and I was very lucky that all of these people found me. But when you write something on spec, it means that, you know, no one's paying you to write it.

you just write it. And, you know, for people like you and me who were just writing plays and we're broke, you know, that's not on spec, you're just writing. So I had this idea for this show and thought, geez, you know, this could be really like anything that's interesting to me. I kind of feel like, oh, this could be really bad. I better see if there's actually a show here and if the tone is right. And then I wrote the entire thing and on the back of it, I did like a one page just explaining about like what happens in the show what is this thing you just read what does each episode kind of look like just very breezy and fast but when i was writing it you know i was thinking i was writing a half hour and i'm a huge fan of the british office and the u.s office

and i really like the idea of the i love the u.s office because you know like the british office it's very grounded it feels real i guess it's mockumentary style i mean it is um and it's style that's been done to death, but it's almost something that has been done so much that you don't really have to explain it anymore. The way I describe that as a Greg Daniels human comedy, the thing that's funny in those office scripts, and actually a great thing to do, if anyone is listening to this that is going to write a half hour of TV, and they like that stuff, you can find those office scripts online and you read them and they're very spare. They're very economical and there's not a ton of like, hey, jokes in them. But at the same time, they're very funny. So all of the comedy is actually coming

from behavior. It's not that like Michael Scott says funny stuff, but it's more like the stuff that's going on inside of him while he's saying it. That's the genius part of Steve Carell's performance. Or it's the stuff he's thinking and not saying that makes Steve Carell so funny on that show. So I described what I had written. Like I like those qualities to me that tells me those people are real. So I had described the scripts that I had written in that one pager is a Greg Daniels human comedy mixed with a J.J. Abrams' magic box show. And the J.J. Abrams part was you set up a mystery. And the mystery is the aliens that we see at the end of the pilot and the deer and all these things. And all these things that you can't quite explain, but they're really interesting. And they kind of hook you in

and you say, oh, wow, this guy's seeing deer. What the hell? His boss is kind of weird. What's going on? At the end of the pilot, his boss turns out to be an alien. Oh, my God. And those are all the things that are very fun to me in terms of making me want to watch a show and making me want to watch another episode, that if you can pepper those things into a comedy and really honestly do them and also make the characters believable and not just a bunch of people you're making fun of. I think that's a cool show. So to my mind, that is mixing a Greg Daniels human comedy with the JJ Abrams Magic Box show. That is a wonderful pitch. And I know, you know, it's also known that the minute Conan O'Brien got a hold of your script, like he said, I want to make the show. That was crazy. Yeah, he read it and really

liked it. Yeah, that was, that's one of the most, I mean, the fact that Conan read it and really enjoyed it and that Greg, you know, liked it so much that he agreed to do it is humbling. I mean, it is, it is a, it just, I'm, I'm like stuttering talking about it. You know, it's an amazing thing. In terms of your research, where did you start? I mean, yes, you mentioned the article on John Mack, but how did you even begin to view the abduction phenomenon? Had you had any interest in this beforehand?

Was this happenstance? What did you, what were your personal thoughts on? the topic before you even began to write this spec script? You know, I didn't think that much about it. And I remember, I do remember, fire in the sky was on HBO a lot when I was a kid. That's a terrifying movie. Yeah, I watched it a few nights ago. I haven't seen it in years.

Did it hold up? No. You know what? The practical effects in that movie are incredible. We can always look back on that. But my girlfriend described it as a lifetime movie meets a horror movie. So there you go. I just think of the scene that the only scene,

the scene I really remember is when he is under the kitchen table and he's freaking out and he knocks the bottle of syrup over and the syrup drips on his face and he has that flashback. Yeah, yeah, man. Wow, like what a cool moment. I mean, to me, that's a very Steven Spielberg. moment, like early 80s, Spielberg, Close Encounters has that too, where just filmically, it's like very grounded, feel very real, people's homes feel real, the characters feel real, and it's almost less about the aliens than it is their experience, the experience of them

seeing what happened to them. Absolutely. I mean, it's maybe, if you look at that film as a whole, there's maybe 10 minutes of the abduction experience, and that's it. It is a very human story. Well, after 10 minutes, I guess you kind of have to go to like, they have to start talking or something, you know, to have to be like, hey, we got this guy. I think like the thing that I wasn't, I kind of was aware of this stuff and was, you know,

I guess it was on the periphery, I was kind of peripherally interested in it. And then I had read this article I really liked. And then I remembered that the, uh, that the, there was this book Communion that was written by Whitley Stryber. And so I picked that up and I read that and I thought that was fantastic. I think that's just an incredible book. Yes, that book definitely changed my entire perspective on the abduction phenomenon. Even as a UFO researcher, you know, our BS meter is there when we need it.

And there are many cases where it is clear. This person is either delusional, they are making this up, or something genuinely happened to them. in the case of Whitley Stryber. I believe that something happened to this man. You know, whether or not it was in the physical realm as we view it, who knows. But that book changed my life. I agree. Yeah. I felt that way, too, that something had to have happened to him

just because of the details that he put in the book are weird if you're making it up. You wouldn't put those details in. I often say the more bizarre the cases, the more I actually tend to believe it. It's not so prototypical. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think he's an incredible writer, just period, even if he was making it up. His prose is pretty damn strong. He's very good at telling you, walking you through what his just mental process is while these fantastical things are happening to him. And then the details that he puts in are details that would be like on the periphery or you would leave out if you would. were just kind of BSing.

And he's able to tell you where he is emotionally when these things are happening and it feels credible. It's like, oh, yeah, I'd try to maybe do something like that at that moment. So that book, you know, I guess I agree with you. I guess I'd say it changed my life too. It's a piece of writing and just a kind of like, how do you really ground something fantastical and make it credible instead of just some kind of empty video game experience? It's a wonderful point.

And I mean, the front cover of that book will forever haunt my mind as well. And we, you know... What was the cover? Which cover? It was the tanish gray alien. Yep. Yeah, just staring at you. Yep.

Do you have that? I do. I've got a few copies of it, actually. I need to track that down. It's funny you say that because that, me too. I remember seeing that in a supermarket when I was a kid. And that was the one that stuck with me. And it really was like, oh, geez, that's an arresting image.

And I mean, so many people after that, after seeing that covers, you know, came forward saying, that's what I saw, that's what I saw, that's what I saw. So you do have to wonder. Is that your reaction when you saw it? I mean, I've never had, I can never pretend to claim I've had an abduction experience of any sort. But when I first saw that cover image, it was so captivating. I briefly looked at the abduction phenomenon. I saw sketches that people had drawn in, you know, local newspapers and whatnot.

But it just something about it just grabs you and it's so iconic. And now we have that gray alien image all over the place. Every product you can think of uses it. It's just so culturally iconic now. Yeah, there was something about that image, though. You're right. And it's funny. I hadn't thought about that book until I started thinking about doing this.

And it came back immediately. It was like, oh, yeah, I should finally, I shouldn't read that. A great thing about that book. The last thing is there's really good interviews or interviews. They've transcribed, he's transcribed alien abduction support group meetings. And they're just fantastic. They're so good. I mean, it's reading those, the entire thing is like, oh, yeah, this is a show.

This is very interesting. There's your script right there, yeah. Kind of, yeah. I can only imagine. Well, let's sort of touch on that, David. the alien aspect. No, we're skipping ahead a little here, but you have three major alien races, I would say, in your show. Would you mind briefly running us through these? Because these are ones that we, in our field, as it were, quote unquote, we hear about all the time. And you've done a wonderful job of

not only creating these three races, but giving them very specific personalities. And I thought that was really, really interesting. Well, I'm nervous now because you know what you're talking about. You'll know where I've deviated from Canon. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you'd be surprised. Just when I think I know something, it's out. So I went with a reptilian and a gray and a Nordic or a white.

And I like those three because they seem to be the most prevalent, kind of in inexperience or culture. And I think with a show like this, it's very easy to get to a place where you're like, ooh, and then there's like a purple alien. And he cries blood and he flies. And you get into, you know, you're just kind of, you're dead at that point. I like the idea of using things that actually exist and kind of, I guess, I guess tropes or races that exist and keeping it to that because it gives a show a kind of shape where you just can't go out. there into bonkers land. So the reptilian I kept is, you know, somebody who's, I guess, what we might call Machiavellian or at least very adept at kind of manipulating people and

kind of has an ability to almost hypnotize people and get what they want and rise to the top of hierarchies. I have to say that TV show V is something I've been thinking about quite a bit. that was a big show for me when I was a kid where they're all wearing human skins and they were actually lizard people I thought that a reptilian is great because you get to talk about so many things if you're talking about reptilians

you get to talk about a lot of the same things you talk about when you talk about the Illuminati and people's idea of all the system's rigged and there's actually a superior race at the top of it so I thought that's why that would be fun Nordics I like the idea idea of one of these aliens just being benevolent, just being very good, superhuman in their ability

to be an empath and be very open. And kind of following that line, taking it to its comedic place, it's like, oh, yeah, they're so open that they're almost childlike in a way. Hi there, humanity. My name is Don. I'm an alien, but don't worry, we come in peace. You don't speak for us. I definitely don't come in peace. Exactly. A peace happens then. Fine. Then what should I say? You know what? Tell them we come in peace and then they won't be expecting an invasion. Tell them we come in peace. And then the gray, I, you know, I never really knew what to do landing on a characteristic for that.

It's like, oh, gray's never really have any personality. If you read the Whitley Striber book, they're all like, they're not robots, but it's like, I think he has them all using one brain that's controlling all of them. It's like a drone situation almost. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's like they're all linked up to the cloud or something. But I thought for the show, like, it would be good to have the gray be the one that's got a, he's, you know, at first I started thinking he'd be the banal face of evil or something.

But the more we looked at it, I think he turned into somebody who's just very work, very, he's a workaholic. He's really concerned about the mission. You know, he's a pretty defensive fella. And I kind of feel for him because I think that he's somebody who would like to be laid back but can't pull it off. He's a very uptight little alien. John, we got to finish those reports. John! Did you hear me?

When you're done pretending to be a human, I need you to be an alien up on this freaking ship and do some freaking work. But yeah, I think it was just, you know, after getting those types, it's like, oh, what three personality types would kind of wind each other up in an office somewhere? Right, this interstellar office that you've sort of created, you know. Yeah, I like to think that it's kind of like an office park in Omaha or something. Except it just happens to be a spaceship. In terms of the people back on Earth, David, you've got one character that I found really fascinating. And this is a struggle that we in the UFO field come up with time and time again. We have the field of uphology.

You're looking at it scientifically, very nuts and bolts. But many people argue that ufology is nothing but religion. It's belief, that's it. And you have this character of Father Doug, played by Oscar Nunes. And I thought he was just such a wonderful addition to the show because you've captured this idea of this struggle between faith, belief, and this extremely French topic of alien abduction. Do you believe in clients?

All these many years, we really don't have solid... I don't really want to get into the discussion because I don't want to alienate the Star Cross people. They are a support group. They meet here, and they are abductees or experiencers, as they prefer, of UFOs. I personally feel that they are going through some... some sort of trauma or traumatic experience or trying to figure things out in their life.

They could be loud at times. There's a neighbor, Mr. Eskadeer, he lives across the street. He's 86 years old. He's deaf, completely deaf. And he's complained twice about the yelling. So it's very controversial. It's a hot potato. But again, if these people are hot potatoes, then I will wear the oven mitts of the Lord and

cradle them and hold them because they're... their lambs, and I am the shepherd. What are your thoughts on that, how religion ties into this whole alien question? Is this like something you'd want to continue exploring on the show? Yeah, I love that. I mean, to me, that was kind of my way in. And I think it's, Father Doug is not in there as much. I mean, we have 21 minutes to tell a story.

But when I was going to write this initially, I was going to write it as a play. And I like the idea, if you do it as a play, and I like the idea, if you do it as a story, a play that, you know, if it's in the basement of a church, you've got the support group, maybe we don't know what they're talking about, and slowly it becomes apparent, you know, that they're talking about their alien abductions. But I think the reason that I had it in a church basement is that, yeah, I view it as a kind of religion too. I mean, they're talking about something we can't see. They're corroborating each other or arguing about each other almost the way that people would argue about religious canon.

And they all have to lean on each other and form a community of belief, essentially. And I really liked the idea of somebody like Father Doug looking at what they're doing and being uncomfortable with how much it's like theology and actually being a little drawn to it in a way. And I also love the idea of a priest having to defend an alien abduction support group

using a community space and kind of getting into trouble for having these people there with the church because they they feel a little offended they feel like it's somehow on some level a little blasphemous but to me the idea of trying to understand something bigger than yourself trying to um you know I don't know how different it is to me it's like okay I mean I there was a burning bush that talked to me I don't know. Is that that different than I was brought up in a beam of light? There's a good Carl Sagan clip from the 60s on YouTube. You can find it. It's probably around the time he was working on Project Blue Book. And he was talking about how aliens are a very modern way to have religion and science too. And I think at that time the fear was in some way science is going to kill religion. And I guess we still feel that way in some way in this culture. But he was saying that aliens, in a way, are a lot like people's conception of God. And, you know, you can believe they're very benevolent and they really care about us and they're really interested in us.

And in a way, we think that about God, too. So I think they're linked. I think if you push on it not so hard, you're going to get to a point where it's all a way that we're trying to understand why we're. here and what's out there beside us. Whatever is out there besides us, I want to ask you, David, what do you think would be their motivation? This idea of missing time and screen memories that you bring up in your pilot episode was awesome.

It was like right off the bat, you know, seeing the, you know, the deer head and everything. Like people have actually claimed these sorts of things where they see a four foot owl outside their car before they're abducted or, you know, stories of this, like that they're, they're seeing something that they know isn't real, but it's there and this, that, this, that. And then they have no memory of what happened. They black out and this and that. What do you make of these topics of missing time and screen memories? And how did you come about your research in that?

I don't, you know, I just find it fascinating. I mean, or reading about the Betty and Barney Hill incident and they lost time. I think the thing that appealed to be most is they seem like glitches or like a workaround where it's like really what benefit would you have to showing somebody a four foot tall owl? That's not going to do anything. That's not going to help you. How does that help you cover up a memory of being abducted? But for whatever reason, I like the idea that it makes absolutely no sense.

But they still, for some reason, you have to have to. explain why they have to use these things. And to me, it just seems like, oh, their technology is imperfect. They can't wipe a memory completely. They have to, you know, they have to have some weird hack. And in a way, I think in this show, most of the time we see aliens, they're totally in control and they know what they're doing. And that's maybe a little bit of our God fantasy, too. So the idea of a bunch of people wondering what happened to them and they have a conspiracy theory And then we see the perpetrators of the conspiracy and they're just as clueless and frustrated as the people on earth It seems fun to me that they're like oh yeah

We have to do something to this person's brain and well we'll use a deer this time Yeah, okay, good good put that put that in there They're kind of like shucking and jiving trying to figure out how to cover their their footprint but they can't do it. You are special. Oh. What is this? The attitude.

Oh, my God. I'm trying to do my job, all right? Because we often think that these aliens are, you know, vastly more intelligent, centuries ahead of us. And maybe they are technologically. You know, they did travel this far to find us for what purposes, you know, your show is exploring. And we continue to, in the abduction field, I guess.

but this idea that they're not perfect. You know, everything doesn't go according to plan. And there's many actual documented cases where people are like, why the hell did they try to trick me? Like, it's clear that a four-foot owl does not exist. Like, I know this. Now you're just making me remember this more. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

I love the law of unintended consequences with stuff like this and the fact that, you know, really, if they do exist, They're all on these little ships together. There's got to be beef. Yeah, right. You know, inevitably. I mean, I don't care how elevated the living being is. If you're confined to a small space hurtling through the galaxy, someone will have, like, declined to do the dishes.

You know, someone will be eating something that smells bad. Like, these things are probably constant throughout the universe. I can only imagine, yeah, what that would be like. Well, in terms of being on set, are there any interesting stories you'd mind sharing with us from the set about any of the actors or crew members? Did any of them ever come up to you and say, dude, don't tell anyone, but like I saw something when I was a kid or this or that? Has this at all, this whole experience, opened the floodgates with other people that you've creatively been involved with on this? You know, I thought it would And actually

No, there haven't been There was one grip That was on last season And he was very upfront about it It wasn't embarrassed at all He was like, yep, I saw a spaceship And it was like, oh, oh cool Well, tell me about it

And he was like, yep, it was in We shoot in Toronto And he said what street it was on It was on a busy street And he was driving down the street And he saw a ship It was cigar shaped and there were porthole windows,

and then he said he was on another shoot, like seven years after it happened, and he was telling somebody the same story, and the person went, oh, yeah. And he gave him the guy, the other person, told him, were you at such and such and such street at this time? And the guy was like, yeah, yeah.

He's like, oh, yeah, I saw that too. That was kind of, that was pretty fascinating. Right, and I'm sure it will only, people will get more comfortable as the show goes on, maybe hearing about their experiences. I mean, we have people like, and I'm not ripping on actors, but only an actor would say this, David. Kurt Russell is now coming forward and saying he is the reason we all know about the Phoenix Lights incident, that he was the pilot who first reported us, having seen it.

Really? He did, yeah, this is maybe a month during their press junket for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. He was in England and he just out of nowhere spilled his guts about having seen the Phoenix lights and having been the first person to report it. Huh. Fascinating. That's interesting.

Why not? Why not? I guess, you know, we had someone come in once who was a writer who actually had very detailed memories of what he said were several encounters with aliens. And that went on for quite some time. That was like an hour conversation. That was the only one that was a little like, whoa, this is far out.

Everyone else is very matter of fact about it. But no, I thought I'd be overwhelmed with people. I mean, the thing I was really worried about the most was people in the experience or community being upset by the show or feeling like judged by the show. but that that really hasn't happened so i'm very happy about that well i can attest to that everyone i've spoken to and i'm talking hundreds of people have all had nothing but positive things to say about the show you know oh that's cool that's great you know a respectable representation of something that could easily be laughed off or ridiculed uh yeah i think you guys have done an absolute wonderful job uh in terms of that so you've got the ufo communities backing for whatever that may

be worth it. That's great. No, it's worth a lot to me. I mean, if you're going to make a show like this, it's really important to, you know, we're lucky. We have really good writers and Greg is a really good, just kind of ideological head for something like this where, you know, if you're writing about people like this and they're kind of low-hanging fruit. If you want to make, if you want to make shit out of people, you know, you could write about a bunch of goofy, wacky people that you're just kind of like, ah, you're nuts. But I think to write about people in a way that have had this experience and you're kind of trying to be their lawyer in a way. You're the character's lawyer. That's the thing that people used to say when you act. It's like you're not there to judge the character. The character's doing

what they think is right. And your job is just to kind of honor them, whether their decisions are right wrong, that's up for the audience to decide. But I kind of, I feel that way with the experiences in the show where you make them in a cartoon character, that's not so interesting. And I think the writers do a really good job of just kind of honoring them and taking care of those characters. Absolutely. Well, I mean, have your beliefs or thoughts on this entire issue or topic, have they changed it all, David, throughout the course of creating the show? Yeah, I don't know. This is a a really boring answer, but no, I don't think they have. I don't, um, in terms of our, do aliens exist or in terms of what? Yeah. I mean, I guess not even the alien abduction topic, but what are,

what are your personal thoughts on just is their life out there? And if so, could it visit us? Yeah. I think so. Why not? I mean, it seems strange that there wouldn't be. And I don't, I don't, I don't I believe stuff, you know, something could have visited us. I think it's unusual that there are, there is enough overlap in people's stories that make me believe that something had happened. Someone might have been in touch at some point. And then I think there's, we cross over with a lot of Cold War stuff that was actual, you know, actual U.S. Air Force intelligence stuff that they were testing things and trying to cover it up.

So I think those things have an unfortunate overlap. But yeah, why not? I think so. You know, I've always felt like, why not? It seems stranger to think that there wouldn't be anything. Yeah, that's chilling when you think that there wouldn't be anything, and it's just us. Soorly depressing, to say the least. Yeah, like we're it?

Jeez, I hope not. Like, come on, there's got to be something else up. For the love of God, please. Well, in terms of the thing, show what what can we expect that the show this is going to air actually the day that the season two premieres uh cool yeah it just so happened to fall that way so i'm really excited about that what what can we expect in season two day what do you got coming up for us well season two we have a new cast member nassim quadrude who was on saturday night live and she's excellent and really funny um she plays

an FBI agent that kind of gets sucked into this, thinking she's investigating one of the main characters for insider trading in a white collar fraud kind of a thing. And she comes to town and finds to her horror that there's something unusual going on here that she can't explain. I think that we left a lot of cliffhangers in the season finale. So we get to find out what happened to Jerry. He gets abducted at the end of the first season, and we see what's gone on there. The aliens have a new visitor on their ship, and we get to see what that is, and it's a new character, and kind of see how they deal with that. I think they're in a bit of trouble after the first season, because they've kind of let the invasion go sideways, so they have to answer

for their sins in that way. And the group members all know they've been abducted, and they know that they'd been abducted together. I don't want to spoil the finale for anyone that watched it from last season, but they know a lot more about their situation. So it changes the show a bit in that, you know, the first season, they were less aware of what happened to them.

They knew something had happened, but they couldn't put their finger on it. This season, they have much more of a focal point in terms of, yes, aliens are probably among us. And yes, we have been, all been up on this spaceship and we remember a decent amount of it. And they're trying to figure out what to do about that. That's fascinating. And I'm sure it'll only add a whole new level to, you know, yes, maybe they have that closure with each other that this happened. But now what? What's the next

step? I can only see that going in a million directions. That's really exciting. Thanks. Well, where and when can we find season two of the show? It's on TBS on July 23. 4th at 1030 Eastern. Awesome. Guys, please check out People of Earth. Again, David, creator,

executive producer of the show. I can't thank you enough for coming on, man, telling your side of the story. For those who may not have seen the show, I highly recommend it. Check it out, endorsed fully by the UFO community.

And thanks again for joining us. Thanks, Ryan. All right, that is it for this week's show. Again, thank you to David Jenkins for joining me. And be sure to check out People of Earth on TBS Network

and at tbs.com. If you haven't already, please consider rating and reviewing the show on iTunes. It helps gain new listeners and moves us up in the featured podcast sections.

That's all I got this week, guys. Thank you again, and I'll see you next Monday. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. This has been a third kind production.

To learn more, visit thirdkind productions.com. I'm Ryan Spring, and I'm Andrew. Andrew Sanford. And we love pro wrestling. It's the best. Headlocks, elbow drops. Skathing promos and chair shots. We just can't get enough of it. So we started a podcast. You can join Ryan and me as we dig into the ins and outs of pro wrestling like the rabid fans we are. We've got interviews, previews, predictions, news, and so much more. And we're going to cover all of it on somewhere in the rain. Oh, yeah.

Is that supposed to be macho, man? No, no good. We'll work on it. Join us every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts, for all new episodes. And we'll see you somewhere in the ring. Somewhere in the Ring is part of the E1 Podcast Network. Welcome to Somewhere in This, guys. I am your host, Ryan Sprague.

And today on the show, we have a guest that I have wanted to have on the show for a very long time. You know him probably from his breakout in 1989 book Communion, which that book cover changed a lot of our lives. So today we're going to be talking to Whitley Streber all about his experiences, his experiences afterwards, after the events of the book Communion, and where he is now in his life with these experiences and where he thinks we're going in the future when it comes to both UFOs and human. So today, our guest, Whitley Streber. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Whitley Streber, welcome for the very first time to Somewhere in the Skies. Well, thank you for having me. I'm delighted. So for me, Whitley, you know, communion was a big part of my initiation into this field,

particularly the abduction phenomenon. And it changed a lot of perceptions of what this phenomenon is. It was a cultural moment for many out there, especially the cover of the book, which I know a lot of people have dissected as well. But I love if you could maybe run us through that initial experience in 1985. I know it goes a lot further back into your life as well. But that pinnacle moment, that communion is sort of based on. Could you maybe run us through that initial event in 1985 in upstate New York? Sure. I was, it was December the 26th, 1985, and what the event was, I think, was a trigger to cause me to realize that this had been in my life for a long time, and it didn't quite work that way at first.

The reason being that while it had been in my life probably as a child, I was not. at all involved in this at the time it happened. I had no idea about UFOs. I mean, I knew about them. Everybody does. But I didn't think about them. I didn't care about them. I didn't certainly care about aliens. And I would never have thought that I would wake up in a room full of them. Never. In fact, I would have laughed at anybody who made such a claim. Then suddenly, I did. And I'll tell you what I remembered pretty much over the next few days before it became more clear. And I, in the next morning, when I woke up, I was really disturbed and very upset.

and I hadn't had a good night's sleep. I knew that. I thought an owl maybe had gotten into the house because I could remember these big black eyes. And Annie, my wife, pointed out it couldn't have happened because there was no way an owl could have gotten into the house, which is quite true. So I became more and more concerned.

Then I began to feel rectal pain and a pain in my temple. There was a red mark appeared there. And I began to have some very strange and disturbing flashes of memory, really, as the trauma released me from traumatic amnesia. I began to recall these big eyes and a lot of movement around me. and by the end of the week, I had a memory in my head that was so bizarre that I really couldn't understand what it could be because I remembered being taken, I remembered waking up on a bed or a little cot in this round room full of bizarre creatures, some of which were dark blue and rushing around and others which one other especially which was the one that ended up on the

cover of communion who was older than the cover looks she must have been delighted by that in any case she i would get to know her very well over the next few years and so would many friends and members of my family because it reached a point when they were visitors were coming back all the time at the cabin and you know we we had a lot of people up there who would it would interact with them when they were there and it was a tremendously fun experience but initially it was not fun it was hard and i gradually pieced this together and i could not figure out what these memories might mean and i plus i was in agony i really had been very roughly treated. So I went to the doctor and I described the memories.

And he was the first one who sort of put it into perspective in a very bizarre way. He said, it sounds like you're telling me we're taking a board of flying saucer by little men. And it occurred to me at that moment that that was what I was saying had happened to me. And I thought to myself, my God, I'm going mad. I must be insane. And it was absolutely terrifying. So the next thing I started fighting with my wife, because it never occurred to me that anything like that could actually have happened. What did occur to me was that it was a psychotic break.

And I thought to myself, Anne's going to be trapped with a psycho, because if I become institutionalized, she won't be able to divorce me. and she would be with no husband with a little boy to raise and no source of income. So I kept trying to say to her, you should leave me, you should get me, you should leave the, you need to start again, you need a husband who can support you and things like that. And she was just frantic because we had a dear, good, sweet marriage and a very happy little seven-year-old boy. And there was no time for something like that to happen. So I went through all these tests, including brain and everything,

psychological tests. And the results came out that I was very healthy. I didn't have any seizure-related diseases. I didn't have anything wrong with me, except I was highly stressed. And I had read a book at that time while I was, this was happening by someone named Doug named Randalls called Science and the UFOs. And I, toward the end of it, my brother had sent it to me for Christmas, and he was interested in UFOs, but I thought they were, frankly, that was a stupid thing.

And he was notorious for sending out bad Christmas presents. And this had been classed as one of the worst. But then I thought, maybe I should read it, and I did. And at the end, it talked about Bud Hopkins and alien abductions. And I thought to myself as I read it, this is exactly what I remember happening to me. I want to talk to this guy. And he turned out to live just a few blocks from us in Manhattan. So we went over to his house, and I met this lovely man and very articulate and intelligent and very caring.

Oh, man. We had trouble later over various things, but I never had trouble with Bud. But I think he was rather jealous of the fact that Communion sold so much more than his book intruders did, which is very natural. And I never even, it never bothered me, and I don't have any grudge against Bud at all. I think he did a tremendous thing in this work. Anyway, then I realized, finally, that that was what had happened. I had been abducted by aliens or someone. I mean, they weren't human. I don't know if they came from another planet or exactly what they were.

But that's basically the story of that experience. Right. And, you know, this would eventually culminate into the book Comedionion that you would write. And, I mean, the firestorm. that the book created when it was released. You know, I can't even imagine what you could have been thinking or feeling the day the book came out. So I love Whitley. Put us back in that moment.

The day the book came out, what were you feeling? Were you reluctant, excited, scared, proud? What was going through your head when finally you're like, okay, there's no turning back? Like, this is real now. It's out there. What was that like? Well, actually, I had published a lot of books before, and since I didn't know that this would come down that way, it was just another book coming out. I didn't think about it at all.

I don't recall any particular thoughts on that day. But what I would like to talk about is what happened when I told Anne. Sure, yeah. And so let me back up a little bit from that day. Okay. It became clear that this seemed to have happened. And so I couldn't think, what in the world? I mean, my marriage was now very unstable.

She was afraid I wanted to leave her. And now, more than ever, that was the last thing I wanted, but I was afraid she might leave me when she heard this story. And so I told a close friend Timothy Greenfield Saunders, who's been on many shows and talked about this moment. He's on the travel channel documentary. In fact, the visitors, which is available now, I think, on YouTube in Discovery Plus. Anyway, I told it. And I said, I don't know how to tell Anne.

And he said, just tell her. just tell her and it's very flexible she'll she'll roll with it i thought i wonder if she will so i sat down with her and i said something i have to tell you and she thought of course he's going to say we need to separate her divorce and i said instead i told this story and she looked at me and she said i was so afraid she would the rules would now change and she would say, okay, it is time for a divorce. But then she said, oh, thank God, I thought I was going to have, now I don't have to get a divorce. And she ruled with it completely, just like Timothy said she would. And she took it over, too. She was the one, she was the total power behind communion.

She read every page of it. She's the one who titled the book. I was going to call it body her and she was the one who later collected all the thousands and thousands of letters and organized them that are now in a priceless archive at Rice University in Texas. So this, you know, I'm the one who still got a body, but Anne was the one who made this all happen. It's as simple as that. And I never want to, I never would talk about this and say it was all wittly, wittly, wittly, because there was a power there, a real power that was Anne who understood.

understood it better than I did from the first second and who was there for me and for everyone else involved throughout her life. Now, if you want me to go on, I can talk about what happened when it really did hit the fan, when I realized that the book was going to cause a fairly significant stir. Sure, yeah. All right. Well, this is a few weeks after they sent me on an author because they paid a lot of money for the book and they wanted it to sell, of course. So there I was on this author tour

and getting beat up, I mean, quite significantly. It was horrible. I walked on to stage after stage or into radio station after radio station to the tune of the X-Files music or the Twilight Zone music and was generally considered a complete boob for doing this and just being laughed at up and down.

But the public wasn't buying into that laughter. They were buying the book instead. And I got a call from my editor, Jim Landis, at William Morrow and Company while I was on tour and somewhere probably in the Midwest. And there were no cell phones then. And so it was one of these things where you just in the airport and a call for Ridley Streber. You think, oh my God, somebody's died. I went to the public, the phone airport. And there was Jim Landis on the phone saying,

How are you doing? And I said, well, I'm fine. I'm getting on a plane about 20 minutes or something. I said something like that. He said, well, listen, I've got some news about the book. And I thought, oh, my, what could it be? He said, it's good news and bad news. And oh, God, I thought it's not selling. So I said, well, I said, give me the bad news first.

He said, no, I'm going to give you the good news first. The good news is everyone at William Morrow now knows you're not lying. And I thought, what could that be about? He said, now the bad news is the visitors think your book is ridiculous. And I said, Jim, could you explain this a little further? He said, yeah, Bruce Lee is not the Bruce Lee, but another editor at Marl, had walked into a bookstore in Manhattan and seen two people rapidly paging through communion and laughing. And he went up to them and was sort of hovering to see if any books were moving off the shelves and stuff. and they stopped and looked up at him

and he saw these huge black eyes under their hats they were dressed in hats and overcoats and he thought oh my God it's Whitley's people in their real and he and his wife immediately left the store because they were scared the two people left behind them and walk down the street right in the middle of Manhattan with nobody noticing,

which you think in Manhattan, that's probably inevitable. But it turns out that there is an actual psychological state that we all share. If we don't expect something, we're quite likely not to notice it. There's a wonderful YouTube that illustrates this called monkey business illusion that was created by the psychologist who really has sphere-headed

understanding of this. And in it, you're asked to pay attention to how many times people in a little group pass a ball back and forth through each other. So you're looking at the video. And I'm not going to tell you what happens. In fact, I'm just going to say, go to the monkey business illusion on you. YouTube and you will understand why nobody noticed these aliens walking down the street. So there you have that.

And now I thought to myself, not only are they real, they know I'm here. What now? What will happen next? Right. Well, what will happen next? Now, that's fascinating, by the way. I'm going to check that out. Well, so the book becomes a big hit.

And then comes the movie, which is a whole other story. I know there's a lot of controversy behind the film. But what was that like, Willie? I know you wrote the screenplay. What was it like writing the book adapting into a movie in that entire process? I can't imagine it was easy. Yeah, if you don't mind, could you run us through some of your brutally honest thoughts on the film aspect to all this?

Well, sure. The script writing was something I didn't think I should do because, you know, it's hard for a novelist in the first place, a novelist, to write a script based on his own novel. But for someone with a nonfiction book that was so personally intense, being the screenwriter, I was I wasn't sure I could do it. And they never liked the script very much, I don't think.

But it works pretty well. There are parts of it that are intact in the movie. The movie's not all my script. But it works pretty well. The movie itself was troubled in the sense that it was an independent production and the money was insufficient. There was not enough money, and the director had a tremendous struggle on his hands,

especially with the special effects, which he did not get nearly the special effects that he had hoped for. And that sort of diminishes the impact of the movie, I think. But overall, the emotional content of it survived, the fear, the disruption of the family, all of those things are in the movie and they're pretty good. I did not like Christopher Walkins holding a camera on himself the whole time. I said it makes me look like a narcissist.

And he said, well, what I'm trying to communicate is that you're trying to get a video record of what's happening. And so he did that and I didn't like it. But other than that, I think the movie comes off very well in the acting in it, both of them, Lindsay Krauss and Christopher Walken are superb actors in his shows. They did a good job. Right. And, you know, we always wonder when these actors take on the role of an actual individual, like their personal thoughts.

Do they actually believe what is occurring? But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Like, they are creating a truth of something that they'll never truly understand. but live in that character. So did you ever have those conversations with Christopher as well, Christopher walking, of did he believe your story or what were those conversations like? I'm curious. I don't know whether he believed my story or not.

I never asked him. We did have some lunches and things, as I recall, during the early days of the movie, of making the movie, where he got sort of an idea about me as a person. and we didn't see much of Lindsay Krause. Interestingly enough, Ann and I were on the set most of the time. Only, and it didn't bother Lindsay and Christopher at all. They never complained about it in the least. They were perfectly happy to have us there.

Some actors wouldn't have wanted us anywhere near the set because, I mean, they were portraying us, and we were watching them do it. And we had a fairly, I had a fairly, I had a fairly friendly relationship with Christopher. I don't recall my relationship with Lindsay, so it must have been not very complicated. In other words, we must have sort of seen each other in passing.

Anne was glad of Lindsay playing her because she thought the world of her acting, and she wasn't some kind of someone very glamorous. She had a more down-to-earth appearance. This is the same to Anne done. or did in her lifetime. So that part of it was fairly smooth. Christopher was a funny guy.

We used to pal around a bit, and he said, you have to understand me. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm a wino. And I said, do you mean that you're drunk all the time? He said, not all the time. But he was a fun guy. He was really very much fun to be with.

I can imagine. Yeah. And he brought such a eccentric, just flare to the film that I think was needed. Whether that's true to your life or not, that's for you to decide. But I thought he did a wonderful job. I do. I'm very in private life. People are going to see this, who know me are going to laugh their heads off. I think of myself as being down to earth. But I am a parent. not down to earth at all. And I have, I, I, I love to laugh. I have a sense of humor and I love to laugh and tell funny stories and, listen to funny stories from other people. I'm not much into things like politics and I'm not, I don't really care about that stuff.

I, you know, it just comes and goes as far as I'm concerned. And, you know, my only concern is I don't want to end up in a, tatership because I'm no good at keeping my mouth shut and I probably end up in jail. But, you know, I don't worry about that stuff much. But I have a fun life, frankly. I miss my wife terribly, but she's still with me in many respects. The book Afterlife Revolution talks about that, and it's still very true. So, you know, it's an unusual life, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

one of the visitors called me the luckiest of the lucky. And I thought in the world, what kind of sadistic sense of humor is involved here? But now I understand it may be to a degree true. Interesting. Well, I'd love to touch on that afterlife aspect. A lot of your later work dives into this. And that's what I find most intriguing is how we interpret the visitor.

and what they could mean and how this could all somehow be connected. And I'd love to ask you, Wittley, one of our Patreon subscribers wanted to know this from you, one of our listener questions, and it has to do with that. In Leslie Kane's 2017 book Surviving Death, she details contact from Beyond the Vail with your mutual friend, Bud Hopkins. Did Hopkins ever get word back to you later in a similar fashion after his death? No. I know you talk a lot about and doing this as well.

So if you'd like to, you know, talk about both of them. And if they've ever visited you, I'd love to hear that. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of love between Bud and Leslie. And that's why Leslie, Bud could come back to Leslie. Because love is like a path that you can follow from the other side. I only had one brief encounter with Bud after he died. He just laughed at me and disappeared.

So that was it. And Anne was a different story. Anne, during the communion years, when she was reading all the letters, she came out of her office one day and said, Whitley, this has something to do with what we call death, which it does. It also has something to do with family in ways that we do not understand yet. And I discussed this extensively, by the way, in my new book, Them, which is coming out hopefully before Christmas.

I got to get on the stick. But in any case, hopefully before Christmas or right after. So what happened was she died. And she had become, she had a stroke and a near-death experience. And it read all of these letters and really understood. the relationship between the living and the dead and what the soul was better than anyone I've ever known. I mean, she was one of the smartest people I ever knew, if not the smartest. She could pick up things on the immense, very quickly.

So she passed on, and I was sitting in the living room about an hour and a half later, just devastated, wondering if I could even live through the night myself. I wanted to be with her so bad. We were so close, still are. Suddenly the phone rang, and I thought, oh, no, I don't want a call, because no one knew yet except of very few close friends. And this was not one of them.

This was a friend called Bell Fuller, who we knew. I mean, you know, we went out with her and her husband from time to time, but not well. And I certainly hadn't told Bell Fuller, a thing. And she said, I thought, I don't want to

answer this call. But then I did. I mean, because Belle was Anne's friend and Anne liked her very much and I'm just not going to just not tell her. So I answered the phone. And she immediately says not hello, but

quickly I just had this thing happen. I heard Anne's voice say to call you. And at that moment, I had been, when the phone rang thinking, Annie, if you still exist in any way, please, please give me a sign. And that immediately happened. And that shocked me. And I thought, could this be real? Over the next week, it happened again and again. And then I vaguely remember, and I'm still not

absolutely sure we did this, but I think we made a kind of pact at some point. point in our lives that the first person to die in the couple would would try to come back not to the other one directly but to friends so to get the friends to tell the person because neither one of us would believe it if they came if she'd just come back to me I wouldn't have even written the book because I would have assumed it was just my wishful thinking and imagination but she didn't do it that way and it became much more complex because in January before she died in August, she had been asking me to remember to memorize a certain poem called Song of the Wandering Angus. And I did not know why. Annie had never asked me to

memorize anything, let alone a poem. And when I sort of ignored this, she cried. And I thought, my God, this is really important to Anne. And I memorized that. poem. And one of the lines in the poem is when white moths are on the wing and the moth-like stars are flickering out. And that line is very important because about three months after, not that long, but maybe it's more like six weeks after Annie passed away, I went to a UFO conference in Arkansas. I was in invited to it. And as a speaker, and while I was there, the house had a lot of cameras in it. It still does, by the way, of course. This white moths started flying back and forth in front of the

camera in the living room. And I thought, what in the world have I now got moths? I had no moths when I left, but it didn't just fly past. It went back and forth, back and forth like it was showing itself to the camera. And I showed this video that the camera was sending out to some people at the conference. One of them was a powerful psychic, and he immediately said, that's no ordinary moth. And then another lady said, they don't do that. They don't just fly back and forth like that. There's something there.

There's something telling you something. And that was at the beginning of the white moth experience. then I realized that Anne's favorite of all my short stories was called the White Moths and it's about a woman who dies and is discovering that she has died. And I thought, my God, Anne not only is still with me, she has created an avatar to be in this world. And I began to write about all of this that was happening. And it's developed into a very strong and extraordinary relationship. Anne and I are still very much married.

The last time I had physical contact with Anne was last night at 11. And that happens every few days. She's here. And the contact consists of this vibration that will come into my lower lane. when in 11, I was meditating very deeply and I fell asleep in the chair. And this vibration immediately woke me up and I realized I'd fallen asleep in the chair. It's time to go to bed. And this happens not once or twice in a blue moon.

It happens six or seven times a week. I mean, it happens every other day and sometimes more than once a day. And it's always involved in sort of reminding me of things I need to do. And so it's a proactive presence in my life. And I frankly can't believe anyone would care that much about my life except Anne. And especially because when I'm in a public situation and I fall asleep, it happens immediately. And strongly it wakes me right up. And she was always very annoyed at me.

because when we went to plays and movies and things, I would fall asleep, and she would jostle me and wake me up. And sometimes I would snort, especially in the theater. And she said, Widley, if you snort, I'm going to just leave.

It's so embarrassing. So it still happens, though. She'll do this to me. I'm asleep in the theater. Like that. So anyway, I realized it was Anne. It had to be Anne.

And it still is. This is why I wear both rings. My ring and Anne's ring. Because we are still together, but we only have one body going at the present time. Wow. That's very powerful. I really like that.

I got to ask on a personal level, Whitley, if you're comfortable answering. Do you think Anne's visitations are connected in any way to the visitors? Or are these things that you compartmentalize and keep separate? I love to know. How does your experiences with the visitors influence these visits you get from Anne? Do they in any way? I know very precisely.

The difference between us and who is with us for the most part, there's lots of different forms here. I don't think they're maybe they're not all like this, but the little gray people and some of the others do not have any barrier between what we think of as the living and the dead. They can come in and out of bodies easily. And when they're out of the bodies, they're in the same state of energy that our dead are in.

And so they're together with our own dead in that state. And then when they're in the physical body, they're in the flow of time. We live in the stream of time. And we live here because our purpose is to gain the energy of life and bring it into our souls. And this is one of the oldest beliefs in the human world. In fact, it's described in great detail in the pyramid text, in the pyramid of Eunice, in Egypt, which is the oldest religious text in the world. But I think it's not a religious text. I think it's actually the first or the last text of soul science written by people who knew this and understood it.

But it's understandable again. And so that they are in both worlds very comfortably. we are in we are in the physical learning and gaining energy from what we learn and do in life this is also one of the reasons we're so scared of them i was terrified when they would show up for a long time and i gradually came to understand that they won't take me out of the time stream they won't i won't end up in a state of permanent deja vu which would happen if you were if you saw your whole future life. They're not going to let that happen. And people say, oh, they're terrible and they're evil and so forth. This is a school. And they are the teachers and professors. And our own

dead are involved too. Annie is certainly a teacher in this school because the white moth avatar is something many, many people experience. It's not hard to get involved with Ann. And is stands ready to get involved in the life of anyone who wants to. And she has a lot of fun. She's a happy dead person. I can say that for sure. So they're very much involved with our dead and with our living. And, you know, we're going to go through a hard time on planet Earth.

There's too many of us, and the planet will break down very profoundly over the next few years, which most people now realize. And they're here, I think, as kind of midwives to birth us into a new kind of life. I think that's what this is really all about. They're not evil. They're just very, very strict. and the military has misunderstood them because these you know they understood them in the context of the officers in the early days and the politicians who knew about it in the 40s and 50s in the context of their own religious beliefs and they were very scary the visitors and so they assumed they were demons but and they still live by that belief I think and still shoot at them a lot. The But the truth is that

We fear them Because we fear Being withdrawn from the stream of time in the same sense that a fish If it was withdrawn from the when it is withdrawn from the water And enters a completely new and untenable environment that it can't live in for long Becomes obviously very frightened and when they approach us from the edge of the stream of time and touch us, we react with fear. I don't anymore because I've learned over the years to trust them not to take me out of the stream of time where I belong.

And a lot of other people too. I mean, contacts working really well. but it's very much behind the scenes. You don't see it in the public, in the books, you know, the scary stories and stuff. Some writers, some people who are in the experience do wonderful books, but mostly, you know,

the ones that are trying to sell a story, tell horror stories that are largely not true. But it's going well. Contact's working fine. I'm not concerned about it, and I don't care about disclosure or any of that stuff. It's irrelevant to me. What matters,

is contact between us and them and making it work in such a way that is useful for us. That's what matters. I like that positive way of looking at it. You know, we had Mitch Horowitz, a friend and colleague of yours on the show last week. And, you know, he feels very optimistic about the future of the connection and the convergence of the occult and UFOs. And a lot of that was because of, you know, this post New York Times 2017 UFO world we live in. And you bring up so many good points of fear, fear, fear.

And that seems to be a lot of the, what's motivating the narrative right now in the UFO field is national security. And what could these be? And we need to open this office and have the military look at UFOs. So I love your personal thoughts on you. Yeah, what are your thoughts on all that? Because UFOs are bigger than ever. NASA is going to get involved. But the NASA thing is a new condon report because they started out saying there's no evidence it's extraterrestrials.

So what do they tell us? And why do they only look at UFOs? They never look beyond that. And they're very scared of that because they're afraid that they'll be made ridiculous in the public. And they won't get the funding that they are looking for that they can only get if they characterize this as a threat. They're children They're children But not all of us are children

There's lots of grown up human beings And a lot of them are in the experiencer movement Because it's a very sophisticated movement An awful lot of people in it Know a good bit at this point About what we're really here for And what is happening And they can

They can interact Usefully And so I'm Also, I'm very optimistic. I think it's working fine. Good. That's good to hear. Here's a good, I guess, listener question for you. Kevin on Twitter asks, in your book Communion, you said that one of the ETs tried to calm you down during an abduction experience

and that they said it was with a Midwest accent. I found that interesting. Have you had any other encounters where you detected an accent from your abductors? Yeah, well, I haven't, but Bruce Lee did. He said they had a distinct Jewish accent as they walked out of the bookstore behind him laughing and talking about the book. I don't know what that was about.

I didn't say, I don't think it was a Midwest. I don't think I said a Midwestern accent. When they tried to calm me down in the first in the night in the December 1985 of production, they turned on a machine that kept saying what can we do to help you stop screaming and it was the wrong question. It should have been something like we won't hurt you or what can we do to help you calm down.

But, and it was a gentle sort of mechanical female voice, but I don't recall. I may, it may have, when I was closer to the experience, I may have been aware of it having a Midwestern accent, but I don't right now recall ever saying that specific phrase. Okay. Gotcha. Thank you for clearing that up. A couple more listener questions here, Whitley, if you don't mind. Of course.

Great. Thank you. Let's see here. Todd on Instagram asks, how did you reconcile the trauma of your experience to come to a place of understanding? Was there ever forgiveness involved? I know there was some very disturbing traumatic things that happened to you. I mean, how did you find that closure or that way? Have you ever forgiven the visitors for what they've done to you and the path they sent you on?

or have you kind of come to terms with it? That never even occurred to me, the idea of forgiveness. I never felt a need in the sense that what I wanted to do was to understand what was happening to me and to make it work for me. And so I'm very involved in that aspect of it and not so involved in personalities. I don't even know if they can understand forgiveness in the same sense that we do.

Or anything, for that matter. I don't know how their brains work and therefore cannot know how their minds work. Acceptance, yes, I have accepted their presence in my life. And I know that they are difficult in many ways to be with, very difficult. And I also know that from long experience now, that they do have my and our best interests at heart on their terms and based on their understanding of what life is and what the world is. I think they are somewhat predatory and conceivably rather dangerous, especially perhaps to souls that die without, with a lot of weight on them. I think they may be very predatory at that point and may indeed be the reason we think in terms of demons, because that would be what they looked like to a soul that died that way.

But I saw Annie ascend after she died. I saw it. And there's another way, believe me, a good person, and most people are good. It's not rare. What's rare is the ones that aren't. That's very rare. We have to work hard to be evil on earth. It's not easy because this is definitely a school and there's plenty of latitude.

Yeah, you go through your life and you do things that you lay. regret and so forth. But it lies very lightly on your soul. You have to really work at it. You have to be a Hitler or Nazi or some of these people in the Russia. You don't really work at it to be an evil person to build weight into your soul. And then you can't get rid of it very easily either. Going to confession, for example, is a joke.

That's not how it works. you can't kill somebody then go into a priest and say bless me father prior to sin i killed somebody and walk out free no you belong to that person you kill somebody you are theirs until they let you go yeah interesting yeah i never thought of it that way you're almost tethered to the soul now whether you like it or not and huh you don't like it i wouldn't think right Exactly. Exactly. Last listener question for you, Wittley.

Besides your own, what other UFO or ET cases most intrigue? Which are the ones that you put a lot of credence into? Whether it's just a sighting or a close encounter, abduction. Any others really stick out to you? One, yeah, there are lots. I'm very, very involved in this. I'm writing my new book, Them, is not about my experience. experiences at all. It is in just one brief chapter at the end. It's about cases that came out of the letters that Anne saved and deep analysis of those cases and also deep analysis of where the military is and what their experience has been. Because it's it's an attempt to build a picture of what they have.

how they relate, the visitors relate to us. And therefore, from that, create some of the kind of an idea of what they want here, want from us and what they have to offer us. In other words, to build contact to another level and of clarity. So I, some of, I analyzed 10 letters and in the book, in the first part of the book. And these are all truly a remarkable experience.

You know, the abduction experience, which is such a big media thing, is actually fairly rare. They're much, much different relationships, not all of them pleasant and certainly not all of them unpleasant. Either most of them are rather neutral. they're the people trying to understand what's going on when these approaches occur. And they're very complex and very different from what has been put out there. So those are cases that I think are important. And you know, another case that's sort of lost is the Corina S-A-E-B-E-E-L-S. She wrote a book, I believe, called Taken.

and what happened, this was in the early 90s, I mean the early 2000s, she and a friend suddenly had an urge to go out into the, to take a drive and to go into this, down this rather lonely road and get out of the car and to look at the stars. And when they did that, they were abducted and they were conscious of the abduction. Being called to a place for interaction with the visitors is something that's not common, but it does happen. And they ended up with significant medical issues that had to be treated by doctors. So it's a pretty strong case, and Corrino's book is pretty good. But the thing that makes it special is that the UFO investigator Brian Fike at the time,

in British Columbia, was recording all kinds of science. that were happening in the area of UFOs. And in fact, the single best piece of UFO footage in private hands was recorded by someone there at that time off of their back deck. To me, that's an important case. I have a copy of the video where I was kind enough to give me it. So I use it in my talks quite often. And it's important because there isn't a single video that's ever been released by the government that's better.

Good. Very good point. Yeah, I know. The ones we have gotten our leave a little too much to the imagination to be completely honest. Well, you know, people have to realize if it's blurred, a video now is blurred. That's because it's a CGI effect, and it's easy to make CGI if you blur it a little bit, and then you don't see all of the, you can't identify. Because, I mean, my cell phone doesn't take blurred videos. Does yours? No is the answer. And that's, you know, so you see these fake cell phone videos of these blurred things. And you think, you know, on my website, we have a section called out there, which we will analyze videos.

and we don't even touch the blurred ones because they're all fakes. But there are occasionally good videos that are taken by normal people who aren't trying to create clickbait. And, you know, those are real. Those are real. And there are people. There's John Martin in, I believe he lives in Georgia, and Melinda Leslie, in Sedona, Melinda takes people out to see UFOs

every night. And they do. They see UFOs. John Martin's got a YouTube channel where he puts up his videos. He plays the classical guitar and he says, talks, oh, beautiful, beautiful. He's such a sweetest guy in the world. And he does this all the time. And often what he records are not satellites. They cannot be. they're not planes, so that leaves the unknown. The visitors are here. They're here in large numbers, and the next step is to get closer to them so that we begin to be able to use the tremendous store of knowledge that they possess to help us get along and aim the life of mankind a little bit more clearly so that we do survive as a physical species into the future,

because this process of being physical and going through physical life is very useful. And if we lose this on the earth, we don't go anywhere else. Our bodies, these bodies are part of the earth. Then we will realize too late that we have lost the treasure of treasures. We mustn't let that happen. here to try to help us not let that happen. They have uses for our souls to remember. Yeah, very good point. Very good point. Well, Whitley, to close things out here, you know,

you just came out with a new release of communion with a new intro, and I highly suggest everyone check it out. The intro is very powerful. But on a separate note, as a film buff, I'm curious. We have the newly released communion. Would you ever consider like a reboot of the communion film or a television series? Has that ever been, you know, going around in your brain? We worked on a TV series for a while and it was all, it was going ahead. But, you know, there are a lot of people in this field and on the shadowy peripheries of it who don't want communion to succeed. That's been true from the beginning. And the series was suddenly mysteriously canceled. I have a feeling that somebody in an executive suite got a whisper from somewhere saying,

you don't want to do this. We don't like this. And that happens quite often. I would love to do it. There are people who try all the time to get something up and it always fails. But maybe not forever. Maybe times will change and maybe something will happen. I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad you're optimistic about it. I'd love, love, love to, for your story to be introduced to a new generation, you know. Yeah, and I would love to see a movie that had a sufficient budget. It doesn't, it wouldn't take much. I mean, it wouldn't be a lower middle budget movie. But it can't be made on a shoestruck, not again. Exactly. Yeah, I don't think any budget really can really give you what you need of these experiences. You look at something like Fire in the Sky as well, who I know your colleagues and friends with Travis Walton. And he's gone on the record and said, yeah, movie just could not, couldn't get to the level of what I actually experienced.

The emotion was there, which is very similar to your own. Travis is a great guy. He's a classic example of the real deal type of contactee out there telling the same story again and again for years. years and years being trashed and still going out there and doing it anyway. That's that's that's the job. And I think all of us who are out in public have one personality trade in common. We're stubborn as hell. Single one of us.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you are. I'm glad you are because the story lives on. And I hope we get those answers. I truly, truly do. Yeah, yeah. It's not getting answers.

It's getting into useful contact. Then the answers will come right out of us. The government can't answer these questions because it doesn't know the answers, not the real answers. I love that. I love that. Each individual, I think, is going to experience their own disclosure, you know, that word we like to stay away from. But, yeah, yeah, I think it is a very personal thing. So, no, I'm glad.

Very personal. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Well, Whitley, thank you. Thank you for your time. You've been so gracious.

Before we go, obviously, let us know where we can find your work and everything. Yeah, if you'll give that to us. Yeah, well, unknown country.com is my home,

my website. I'm very personally involved in it. If you want to, you can subscribe to it for $5 a month and then you get a whole wealth of additional material. But if you don't want to subscribe, there's still plenty

on the outside. The visitors are not interested in riches and wealth. So I had, when I built the website, it was very clear that we needed to make it plenty of it free. And the subscriptions basically just barely support it or don't sometimes. So if you do want to subscribe, go do it. It would be very well. Okay, perfect.

And I look forward to the new book. Hopefully, hopefully we'll get to see that sooner than later. Whitley, thank you. Thank you for sharing all of your insights. And thank you for joining me on Summer in the Skies. Thank you very much. Greetings, everyone. Ryan Sprague, our host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Skies podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click, the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you

the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. Today on the show, Ellen Stevelman joins us to talk about his new film, Witness of Another World. Before I made this movie, I had two questions. One of them was if there is a connection between the ancestry or the lineage and the UFO phenomenon on people that had this kind of encounters.

And the other question was if there is a connection between the afterlife and the UFO phenomenon also. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host Ryan Sprague. A few months ago, I'd heard through several colleagues of a film coming out in Argentina about a man who had a close encounter experience. I'd seen every UFO or alien-themed documentary under the sun, and some were decent, some were mediocre, and some were just plain awful. So when I'd heard about this project, I originally brushed it off as just another fringe documentary.

But then, I saw the trailer. And then I reached out to the director. Having not spoken to many UFO researchers in America yet, he was very excited to hear of my interest. I screened the film that night, and then I watched it again, and again, and again. Testigo de Otro Mundo, or Witness of Another World, is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful stories to ever be told about the UFO, experience of phenomenon. It's a deeply profound and powerful journey through the art of Juan Perez,

a lonely farmer who secludes himself from society for over 30 years after having a UFO close encounter. But with the help of filmmaker Ellen Stievelman and the work of several Argentinian researchers and famed astrophysicist Jacques Valet, pieces of the puzzle begin to emerge. and it's piecing together the life of a broken man in order to find his purpose and place in the world. Today, Alan and I talk all about the film, his thoughts on the UFO phenomenon, and just how human these possible alien encounters can truly make us feel. Alan, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you, Ryan, for having me. It's a pleasure.

It is such an honor to speak to you after having me. having viewed your film about five times now. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. You know, before we even get to what the film is about and how you made the film, I have to say, it is probably one of the most beautiful documentaries and most heartfelt documentaries I've ever seen, especially within the UFO topic.

So I have to congratulate you, first and foremost. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you. And your work means a lot to me. Before we get to the film, Witness of Another World, Alan, I'd like to maybe ask you how you became a filmmaker. Where did your interest in filmmaking first start? It started when I was 15 years old. At that time, I was studying IT, and I was a programmer in my high school.

But after some time when I was in my literature, church or class. I discussed a lot with a professor about movies, about cinema, about messages in the movies. And he showed me a movie that changed my mind and my mindset completely. The title of this movie is El Topo from Alexander Hodorowski. And it's a very surreal film that changed my perception completely after I saw that movie. I didn't understand anything about what I was seeing, but I felt something inside of me that changed me. I don't know what. And after that, I said, I want to make movies that can change people in a way that it's not like a regular movie that has a story behind and ending. For example, in El Topo, it's like a big puzzle of images, of sounds, of actions, and I want to transmit that same feeling into my audience, and that's the beginning of my career and on my journey of filmmaking.

That's fantastic, Ellen. I mean, I have the same sort of feeling. I write movies, fiction movies, and I remember... my first film that really inspired me was by Alfred Hitchcock, which was Vertigo. And I had the same feeling of I didn't quite know or understand what I was seeing, what I was hearing, but I knew that it was affecting me in a very raw or visceral way. And that inspired me to then create stories. So as a fellow, you know, filmmaker slash writer, I know that feeling well.

Yeah, the same feeling here, yes. Absolutely. Well, that brings us to the film that we're going to be discussing today, witness of another world. So maybe before we get to a lot of what the film represents, you know, these bigger philosophical questions, how did you first hear about the story of Juan Perez and what has. happened to him as a child? Well, the long, short story is that it was 2013, and I was doing automatic writing by that time, and I was writing a story about an abduction, a couple that was abducted by strange entities.

And I was not involved in the UFO phenomenon nor aliens. At that time, I didn't know nothing about that. My only focus on my research side was just to dig into the mystery of a lot of civilization in the world, about what is below Earth, about my passion was archaeology. And it was strange for me to start writing about this kind of stuff. So then after 30 pages of writing, I stopped. it was a fiction story and then I started to investigate this

film, this new field for me and then I, when I was walking by my neighborhood I stopped onto a bookstore and I bought an I used book that it was about cases, abduction cases

in Argentina. It was written by a psychiatrist, Dr. Nesto Berlanda, who is one of the characters, of the movie. And then when I was in Rosario, a city near Buenos Aires, four hours away, I was presenting my previous movie, Humano. And what happened is that in the audience, was Dr. Nester Berlanda seeing my movie, and I was grabbing his book while I was speaking to the audience. And it was a hell of synchronicity. We looked each other, and we said that we need to

meet each other, we need to speak about this. This is not something by chance. And the next day, while we were having a pizza, he's starting to speak about his most significant case, that was the Juan first case. And he showed to me as a video that was when Juan was 18 years old, he was speaking into an audience and when he started to say like well what happened to me was he broke down it's one of the first scenes in my movie and then I realized that I was seeing something that was true

I was in front of a broken teenager that was like struggling between his own beliefs and he wasn't like allowed to to express himself and it was a UFO audience. They all want to believe him, but inside of him, he was saying, like, no one is going to believe me. So immediately after, I asked Verlanda, Dr. Nesto Berlanda, to meet Juan. And four months later, I meet Juan and it was one of the most significant encounters that I ever had. After that, you read the case report.

on Juan's experience and you decided to meet him. So what was that first meeting like? Was he what you expected or something completely different? It was something completely different because it was the first time that I met someone who had an encounter, who had a supernatural encounter. It was my first experience with a contactee. So I remember that I was recording the whole encounter with him. And then he suddenly started to speak to me about his case, about his encounter.

And then he broke down. He started to cry. And then I stopped my camera because I wasn't able to keep recording while he was crying. It was very emotional for me. And then I just sat down next to him. and just listened and I started to feel very not awkward, it's not the accurate word, it's more like I started to feel more like strange, I don't know what, but one is a very special person and something from his aura just to put a word, start to like embrace to me and it was

really, I spent like four or five hours with him and with Dr. Nester, Orlando and after our meeting he said to us like please don't leave me come back again we are now friends and those words like kept echoing in my head for three years but after that meeting but that time I only wanted to make a short film about this story but while I was editing this short footage, I wasn't be able to keep doing it. I don't know why, probably because I have to do this movie. But that time, I didn't know that. So I, like, step away that footage, and I started to dig into the UFO phenomenon.

I read all the books from Jack Ballet. I read plenty of books during the time of three years. And after that time, I started to... to feel more secure to make this film. And I went again to Beno Alto Alto, the hometown of Juan. And I asked him the permission to start making this project. And he said, yes. And that's the beginning of this little story.

This little story that becomes something very, very big and powerful. And in the official synopsis of your film, Juan is a self-proclaimed gaucho. So could you explain to maybe our American audience, Alan? What is a gaucho? What would that be considered here in North America? Well, the simple way to express is like the gaucho, they are like the cowboys from South America. A gaucho is a skilled horseman reputed to be brave and wild.

They are mainly they are mestizoes, persons of mixed blood, half blood. are indigenous and the other part are from Spain. So that's the best way to describe them. It sort of is almost the, what you would not expect want to be. You would expect him to be very, very manly, you know, very macho. Very rude. Yeah, yeah. Like we view the Western cowboys here in America.

and he is such a a man filled with emotion and it's clear that whatever happened to him as a child affected him very traumatically and I think that's what really, really brings the viewer into the film is whatever happened to Juan it affected him in many, many ways

and he's very forthcoming about his emotions and you were able to pull that out of him, yes, it was not an easy shop, but when I was having like plenty of meetings with him, I started to saw him as a broken child because in the outside, you see like a brave man very big because Juan is pretty big. He's a hunter.

He's a hunter. He also hands with his knife, only with his knife. He doesn't use any kind of guns. and he only hunt for eating purposes. He's not recreational. So you see like he's a brave man, but behind those sides, I was seeing like a broken child that was needing, he was asking or screaming for help.

And I think, you know, as the movie progresses, he finds that help in many ways, which we will get to. But I think for our audience, Ellen, maybe we should give them a little idea of what the actual experience is that Juan had. I mean, we don't want to give away too much, obviously, but this was, what would we consider this,

a close encounter of the second kind, maybe, the third kind? Well, it's hard. It's hard to explain because when I was discussing this case with Dr. Jack Ballet, it's not a typical abduction case. Because Juan voluntarily enters into this ship. So it's like in the middle from third or four. We don't know. But the real case, what happened, it's like it was 6 o'clock in the morning.

September 6th, 1978, Juan left his home to find the herd of horses to start the field. work in his farm. Every day he did the same thing because before going to the school, he needed to make all the works in the farm. That's the way his father

initiate him. So it was 6 o'clock in the morning. Juan writes his horse cometa, it's comet in English. And he, after some minutes, he looked about his head

and see and he saw like three lights dancing very frenetically and he his dog his dog sorry his horse was getting a little bit upset and he was really really mad and one got really scared because he he was afraid to fall fall off his horse and then he comes back to his house and tells his His father like, father, father, there are big lights in the sky. What should I do? And his father told him, like, I sent you to find the hurt, of course. Don't bother me with anything else. Just go and do your work.

And then he climbs again. He shows, he rides, and he saw like a big fog. Not that typically fog during the dawn. it was really strange fog and he he passes and after that he found

like a big it was like a big object a very very shiny white and he thought that he was seeing like a tractor or the house of workers from the farm

he wasn't afraid but his horse was really scared so he fell off he got off the horse and he goes into next to the let's say ship and a ladder went off the the door the doors opened and a big a big like being shows up and says not not not says sorry he like do with his hand an invitation to to climb up and enter that ship so Juan climbs that ladder it was really hard

for him to climb up because the stairs were really, really tall and then when he's inside of this ship, he saw two things. On his left side, there was a small beam like a meter or a meter and a half

that was cutting meat on a table. This small bean had, instead of hands, he had scissors and he was cutting a meat without blood. There was no blood in those meats that were in

that table. And in the right side, he was seeing this tall being that was like two meters and a half, three meters, and he was like doing some gestures with his hands and some monitors were in front of him.

He was like making some coordination. I don't know. But one of the biggest details in this experience was that in front of Juan there was like a mirror or a transparent mirror, something like an electromagnetic field, that Juan couldn't pass through that glass. When he tries to enter to the space of these things, he wasn't allowed. but at the small being with his because instead of legs this small being had wheels

so he was able to cross from one side to the other but Juan couldn't and after a while the door started to close and Juan realized that his horse was like really mad and was really afraid not from the beans

he was afraid of his father because his father was really severe and he was really strict with Juan and then he climbs down and he realized that his his horse was injured because he was kicking to the ladder and what happened

24 hours later his horse died Now I want to stop here because two things happen after this case. In the original reports, it says that the tall being helped Juan to climb up to the horse and then Juan goes back to his house with a globe that was a gift from this tall being. He told Juan that I want to give this to you because I want you to show to your family as a proof of our contact. But before he could go to his house,

three small lights came out of this big ship and took that globe before Juan could enter his house. But in our movie, what we did is a regression. We practiced for the first time a regression to Juan in order to see if some lost memories could come up into the narrative. And it did. There is a part that the distal being grabs the arm of Juan, the right arm, and started to squeeze it.

And after that, Juan started to have like a vision. Let's say a vision, because I don't know what happened to him. And I don't want to say what he saw. but what he saw was not part of the original reports. So that was a real surprise for me and for Dr. Nestle, also for Dr. Jack Ballet. And when he saw that, Juan started to cry a lot. It was a very emotional part, and we were doing like two hours of regression. And Dr. Nestor Verlanda decided to stop it right there,

and that's why we couldn't finish the original story from the report. But for me, it doesn't care because it was more powerful what happened to Juan and with that vision rather than that to stay focused on the original case report and make the recreation very accurate on that original report. And I think, you know, what he, this vision that he had is, plays a big role in how he interprets the experience later in his life. And I want to talk about that in a few moments. But, Ellen, you did mention the recreations. And my God, my friend, these things were stunning, the special effects that you used to do these reenactments.

So I have to ask you, who did your special effects? And what was it like working with actors to recreate as accurate as possible? What happened, along? Well, for me, it was an amazing experience, not from the production side, because it took us the half of our budget just at 10 minutes of the field. But it was a great experience. It was my first experience working with BFX. and a small team of BFX

did those scenes and when you mentioned the actor it was a great experience dealing with with little Juan his name is Lucas and I was doing like a casting because I was trying to find some child who can

ride a horse. It's not easy to find actors in Buenos Aires because it's a city that knows how to deal with horses. And Lucas was the last one, and he didn't know how to ride a horse. But why did I choose him? During the casting, this is a really funny anecdote.

During the casting, I asked the actor to see the sky and try to see that they are seeing like an elephant with wings. I didn't want to mention a UFO or a spacecraft. I just want to recreate an image that is bizarre for them and try to see their eyes, the way they look at this object. And Lucas was the last one, and I said to him, well, look, look an elephant with wings, but I was really tired because he was the last one.

And I said, you know what, in the sky, there is a UFO. There is a spacecraft. and you have to see it. Oh, a UFO? The one that my mother saw when he was 20 years old, I'm a really fan of UFO.

Look at my notebook and he showed me at his notebook and there were drawings about UFO, the materials that they had. He was doing like a very strict research and he was 12 years old. And I say to him,

you know what? You are higher. you are the one. Again, the synchronicities just keep coming back, it seems. Yeah, it wasn't a synchronicity. Yes. And when Jack Ballet came to Argentina, we made like a special meeting with Little Juan and Jack Ballet. And Jack Ballet gave to him a T-shirt from the NASA's letters. It was a really nice experience.

That's so cool, you know, meeting. And again, Jacques Valet is the rock star of Euphalic for no matter what country you come from. And we will definitely talk about Jacques Valet and how he became a part of this. But before we get to that, Alan, I want to ask you about traveling to Paraguay to interview several members of the Guarani people, distant ancestors of one. So how did you come to discover that this is... where Juan, you know, his lineage or his ancestors came from. And what did they have to say about one's experiences? Thank you for asking this because it's, for me, it's one of the most important things on the film.

Absolutely. Well, the story is that my first step in this project, in this project was to go to Paraguay. Because before I made this movie, I had two questions. One of them was if there is a connection between the ancestry or the lineage and the UFO phenomenon on people that had this kind of encounters. And the other question was if there is a connection between the afterlife and the UFO phenomenon also. So that was my biggest question while I was shooting this story. So I went to Paraguay because I wanted to have. the answer from the spiritual leaders of the Guarani tribe, the Guarani people that are the blood of Juan.

So I went there, I met three communities that are one of, they are very, very close communities because Guarani people are very strict with their connection with white people. They have the reasons, of course. Of course. I completely understand. When I was there, I met two wise men and one wise women. And it was a really powerful experience because when I met the first one, Lutarcho, he started to say to me that this phenomenon is real, but it's not real at the same time.

And I said, like, what do you mean by that? And he started to describe in his words because when you talk with shamans or with additional people, the way they speak, it's very abstract, very symbolic, and you need to decipher what they are telling you. So they were describing me of this phenomenon as an holographic phenomenon. And while he was speaking to me about this, I remember all the books from Jack Ballet explaining us the theory of interdimensional theory about that this phenomenon could come from another dimension. And they were telling the same thing. And another thing that they mentioned to me is that this kind of encounter happens to people with good heart. with pureness, with innocence. And that feeling,

and yes, that thing was one of the most significant things that Juan had. Because Juan is purely hard, it's pure heart, it's so innocent. And the other thing was like it's something that got me a little bit scared. It's not part from, it's not in the movie, because it was really hard to explain, but Sylvia especially told me that this phenomenon has two sides. One side represents the goodness, and the other side represents the evilness.

So she was trying to say, like, we don't have to be blinded by these things. we don't have to be blinded by the light that comes from the sky. We need to, we as human beings, we need to be able to, how do I say, decipher or decode which sides belongs that phenomenon that is happening for a reason, of course. but sometimes they have like bad intentions for us. So it's not good to make like a cult or a religion around this kind of phenomenon. We need to be very, very like practical.

And she told to Juan that this happened because Juan needed to believe. He was trying to find himself in that time because he was 12 years old. and for the shamanic world, the year of 12 is very important because it's the transformation into a grown man, into an adult. And there are plenty of rites of passage. To summarize, for them, Juan had an initiation, a shamanic initiation. But it was like stopped because by that time he hadn't a shamanian, could guide him into this world.

But 40 years after, he, 40 years after, thanks to our work with Jack Ballet, with Dr. Ernesto Berlanta, with all the shamans, one could integrate his experience and understand why this happened to him, because that was the only question that he had all the night. Why this happened to me? That seems to be the biggest question with any contactee or experiencer. It's not so much, what is the phenomenon? Who is in control of it? But why?

Why me? And I've spoken to many experiencers, and that is their first question, is, why was I chosen? Or why did this become a part of my life? And that is a question they may be asking themselves until, You know, they leave this mortal earth, but for Juan, I think you're right. He finally was able to finish the initiation that seemed to have been interrupted at such a young age. Exactly, exactly. And I know moving forward after the experience, Juan had many dreams, and dreams play a big role, both in Juan's own life and in the lives of the Guarani people as well.

So could you maybe tell us the connections you and Juan made in terms of the dreams he had after the experience? Well, that's a good question because when I, when Juan started to speak to me about his contact, his experience, I wasn't be able to find traces of the trauma because it was, it was not a traumatic experience. It was more like a, yeah, a contact with strange beings, but there was no surgery, there was no experiment, something very scary that could lead you to a very traumatic hole. So after a while of research, I realized that the most terrific part for Juan was the consequences of this encounter. because immediately after his contact, he started to have premonition dreams, precognitive dreams that was a truly nightmare for him because he was dreaming about accidents, about death, from relatives, from friends, and plenty of them happened, and he couldn't stop them. So it was really frustrated for him.

So I wanted to understand what was the process of those rooms. And Juan told me that if he dreams in his right side, the side of his mark, because Juan, after this tall being squeezed his arm, he had like a small scar in his arm. And when he dreams with his right arm, he tells me that he goes into a real dream, more real than our reality. That's the way he described them. But if he dreams into the left side, he will have like regular visions like we do when we dream. Interesting. Very interesting.

And then I realized the other thing that the waterney people, the way that they connect to the spiritual world is thanks to the dreams. They go to sleep and they dream about the question that some people had. For example, if I have an illness and I want to have an answer, the shaman goes to bed and the morning after he will tell me the answer of my... of my pain. So Juan, in a way, the phenomenon, the contact triggered him his own gift from his people, but he didn't know that. It's that discovery, that self-discovery, and having someone to help guide you. So the fact that he was now able to communicate with the shamans, that must have been a very special moment for both him. And for your film, I would assume. Yeah, indeed.

Because by that time, while we were shooting, Juan was thinking that he was the only one that had this kind of experience. He never knew that there are plenty of cases around the world. There are people that are having dreams like the Warreny. He felt that he was really, really alone in this. like this trip because around his people there were no one who had this kind of experience and Juan doesn't have internet now he doesn't use like a cell phone so it's really really simple the way he lives right and a lot of people believe that that you know that is actually a good

thing you know I know in the film many of the Guarani people speak of the distractions that occur. Yeah. You know, mostly, well, throughout the entire world, but here in America as well, we have so many distractions, whether it's politics or celebrities or any of these things in our day-to-day life

that distract us from opening that door to a shamanic world. And it seems so easy for someone like the shamanans or the Guarani people specifically to accept these phenomena that they just are a fact they exist when many in other countries

refuse to either believe that or accept that into their lives I mean here in America our own government is just now acknowledging the UFO phenomenon officially when for 70 years

they have denied it so I find that very interesting the difference between cultures and how they interpret and accept or reject the UFO phenomenon. Totally. Me too. Me too. Well, sort of the individual, Alan, that I would say was the bridge between cultures in this incident was Jacques Valet. One of the most important moments for me in the film is how did that come about? How were you able to get Jacques Valet, the man who did. does not do many movies, interviews, documentaries.

How did you get him to be involved with their film? Well, the story was that I wrote him a letter telling him that I was doing this film and that Juan was not feeling well after his experience. He got a big trauma and 30 years later he still has it. And my only request was to go to San Francisco and make an interview to him. And one month later, I received an email saying that he was really sad about Juan. And by that time, I didn't know that he would remember that case because it was one of plenty of cases that he studied.

But then I realized that he came to Argentina in 1980 with his wife, and his wife, Janine, was a child psychologist and was a truly special case for them. It was a very, yes, special because it was, it was involved, it involves a child. So they really care about this kind of cases. and he told me that he was really sad about Juan, that he couldn't integrate his experience. He was also inviting me to San Francisco to make this interview, and I said, like, yeah, I made it. And I started, and then I finished that letter,

but one sentence before I finish, it says like something like, I don't want to bother you or interrupt your project or your idea, But I think it could be a great idea if I come down and go to Argentina to help Juan and to stay with you guys. Oh, wow. And I say, oh my God, what a gift. And it was a truly gift for me and for all of us. And then I started to change my script, to change my points of view, my ideas.

and all my idea now was focused mainly to help Juan. That was the only mission on our movie. But I have to say that in the beginning of this project, the idea was to get answers of this phenomenon, to try to explain what is this UFO phenomenon, what we are dealing with. But I had to turn over because I was dealing with a broken man, asking for help just by the way he looks. And yet, I have to quit the other idea, the previous one.

And then I only focus on the human aspect of the UFO phenomenon. Which I firmly believe, Alan, I can agree that that is much more important. than what actually lay at the source of the phenomenon. It's how it affects us and how it changes us and how it humanizes us even, makes us more human than we were before. And I think that came across through the lens of your camera so well. And one of those ways I think you really helped one is you found other witnesses who had seen things at the same time as his event.

And, you know, without giving away too much, Carlos and Roberto were two individuals who almost vindicated or validated the experience of wine. Am I correct in my? Yeah, you are correct. And Jack Ballet was the one who encouraged me go to find them because they were under the radar. And after some research, I found them and I asked them to be part of my movie. I will do some little interviews and that's it. And the two of them were really open about that idea. But they are still really scared about what happened more than 30 years ago.

And the good thing is that Juan was the only one who go into the contact. He wanted to have that contact. But Carlos and Roberto, they ran away. immediately after because Roberto was like riding a bicycle and then a big light red light started to to to to like him and he was like stood and then he ran away and Carlos the same but one of the good things that I noticed from them is the innocence and then I remember I remember the word from Plutarcho that this kind of experience happened to people that are

like they have good hearts, they are innocent and I saw like a connection between Juan Carlos and Roberto because the three of them had like a child expression in their eyes

and I make like a reunion with there is a scene that it's not part of the movie that Carlos, the carpenter, and Juan meet each other. And it was a really nice gathering because they started to speak about their experience. And it was really, really, really fun to see each other. It was like an X-Men reunion. Talking about their powers.

Right. I can only imagine. I would love, I hope you'll do bonus content. we can see that scene. Cool. I will. I can imagine that was a very powerful moment for all three of them. And wow, that's fascinating.

Well, Ellen, I do want to ask you, a big focus in the film as well is consciousness and how that plays a role in all this. And that seems to be something you and Jacques Valet have in common when it came to your discoveries in trying to understand what the phenomenon is. And you personally in the film, you say that it's almost like projections on a movie screen. And that is a good analogy for you, the filmmaker, to say. So could you maybe elaborate on what you mean by this projections on a movie screen in relation to how consciousness may be a part of the UFO phenomenon?

Well, it's hard to explain. Yeah, one of the biggest. when I read the book of Carl Young, the famous psychologist that speaks about the UFO phenomenon, he tells us two things that the UFO phenomenon has a physical aspect and he's not an expert from that field but he's an expert in psychology. So he focused on the psychology consequences on those encounters. And it was really visible in Juan, in Juan's case. you can proceed that there was a specific consequence on his conscious

and after that he was able to have those dreams these pre-cognitive or premonition dreams but at that time he wasn't able to like to trace a connection between his contact and those dreams and apparently many of the witnesses are not able to to trace this connection. For example, in the case of Carlos, I ask plenty of things

that are related to some powers or some strange things that could happen to him after the contact. And he always told me, no, no, I had a normal life. Nothing happened to me, blah, blah. Every time the contact piece tells me the same thing

that they had a really normal life, that it was something that was random, perhaps. But after a while of chatting, he told me an experience that he was cutting wood on his machines. And suddenly one of his fingers was cut off, and he took the rest of his finger. And he realized that no block was coming out of his finger. and it was really strange for him

and then he goes to the hospital and the doctor said what the hell? Why is no blood in your finger? And he said that, I don't know and there was a common joke among his family that says like you were being helped by your friend the aliens because everyone was laughing at him

but the other part was that when Carlos told this experience to Juan and Juan replied to him like the same happened to me when when my leg was cut up no blood came out of my my leg and then I start to realize that plenty of contactees are not able to to make connections with these things because they they do that as an accident or a because they don't want to feel special when you have a real contactee, you know that they are telling the truth because they don't want

nothing from it. It's preferred to never happen to him. It's more like a curse rather than a gift. So I truly believe in Carlos, Roberto and Juan experience because of that, because they don't, they are not winning money doing some lectures about their contacts or helping others, etc. So after a while of research I started to see that the impact on their conscious is real but the bad part is that it's really hard for them to integrate that experience because it's more in a subconscious level the impact rather than in

a rational or the conscious level. for anybody, it's very hard to even begin to comprehend consciousness. We don't know what consciousness is or is not even. So, you know, if this is the only way the phenomenon can really communicate with us, or like you say, project certain images to us to convey their message, maybe that is the only way that we can ever connect with the phenomenon in the fact that it's happening through dreams or, do the subconscious.

It's fascinating. Now you are saying this. The shamans cut it like they perceive the world of dreams

as a much more real thing that our reality when we are wake up. So for them it's more

the dream world is way much more important than our reality. And we don't know what reality means.

We don't know nothing about what is reality. That's a very good point, you know, and we often think, you know, when we are asleep and we dream that we have to wake up from the dream when in reality, truly waking up could be in this other world. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's, I think we're on to something there, Ellen, for sure.

Well, I have to ask, in terms of, though. who do experience these things, Alan, abductees, experiences, they become, a lot of them become obsessed with the phenomenon after they experience it. I had a UFO sighting when I was 12 years old and I became completely obsessed. It consumed my entire life. You know, I now do a weekly podcast about UFOs. It runs most of my life, you know, to my girlfriend's dismay. But do you do you think it's our place to try to figure out what the phenomenon are? Or should we just experience it and appreciate it when it happens? Because for some people, that obsession can become unhealthy, I would say.

So what do you think? Well, I think the answer could be both, but the half of both. because I think an obsession is not good for anyone, any kind of obsession is not good, because no extremes are good in our lives. But it's not good also to just live that experience and that's it, to ignore it. Because I think it's just my own idea, my own idea, this happened for a reason. and each contactee or each experiencer had to deal why this happened to

why this happened to it I don't think that the mission is to figure out what is the phenomenon it's more like I will take the words of grandfather Francisco, the last shaman in the movie that said that Juan was asking to himself.

He was seeking into his inner world, trying to figure it out what is life, what is dead. Because remember, when Juan was 10 years old, he lost his grandfather. And his grandfather was everything to him. And at the age of 12, he was feeling really lonely, really lonely trying to get answers. and he got an answer from the spiritual world in a way that he couldn't integrate or he couldn't interpretate.

So I think that it's really important. It's like a carrot in front of us that lead us to find answers to our inner questions. And I remember now the scene from Morpheus in May. that he has two pills and you have to choose if you want the blue pill or the rose pink or the red pill. I think the phenomenon asks us the same thing. If we want to still dreaming or we want to wake up and see what is our reality, what is this phenomenon, what are this connection. I think the UFO phenomenon is the most important phenomenon that hacks.

our world, our reality. That's a very interesting, yeah, way to put it. It may be the only phenomenon or, you know, technology that was able to jump over that hurdle and communicate with us. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, well, I have to ask Ellen, do you still speak to Juan? Do you think he'll ever travel to America to talk about his story?

Is that something you could see as a possibility? Well, it will depend on him, but if he gets an invitation, I think he will say yes, because he loves to talk to people. He's really friendly. He's really warm. And now he has no fears. He now is a resoluted man. He can speak about his experience without crying. So it's a lot.

And yes, I'm still having plenty of conversation with him after three years. I used to speak with him twice a month or once a month. If I can speak with Juan, I will speak with his siblings because he has seven siblings. So, yeah, it's a big family. So I'm really close to them. I'm really close because it was not a healing process just to Juan. It was a healing process to his whole family, to his whole community. just to give you an idea when we showed the movie in the cinema from Beno Duerto, his hometown,

the half of the cinema was full of Perez family, the family of Juan. And after the movie was done, everyone was crying, and they went to straight into, to Juan, and started to embrace him, to say like I'm so sorry brother I'm sorry that I never trust on you now I understand you now I understand why you run away and live all of this life like in the loneliness so I'm so sorry and it was a really hard experience to witness that but it was really like healing it was really healing for me Alan I I cannot tell you just how powerful the film was and how important I think it is.

And I can say this, I have never once cried during a UFO documentary, and I cried on several occasions. So you definitely did something right. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that this documentary wasn't meant to cry, but it touched you. touch your heart because in a way after you see this message probably you will get some closure in your life

Juan could close a circle thanks to the movie and I have to tell you that Jack Valet also closed a circle because it was a really special the last time he came to Argentina was with his wife in some way he closed a circle about that intimate, how do I say, like idea or I don't know what happened with his wife,

but it was really emotional for him to be there again with Juan in Argentina talking about this phenomenon, that after 30 years, it got us like reunited altogether. It was really, really emotional for us. Absolutely. And I think you make a very good point that, you know, You know, while it affects the individual having the experience, those investigating it or interviewing the people also are deeply affected by the story, by the phenomenon, and by the people having it. So for Jacques, for you, for me, for every person who sees the movie, it's going to have a different effect and maybe answer some questions, but maybe pose new questions, which I think is even more important. Totally, totally. I think that that's the reason why we opened the door with this movie. We didn't want to get straight answers about what the UFO phenomenon is. So it could lead us to have plenty of new questions.

I love that. Well, I have to ask you, would you want to or do you plan on making any other films about the UFO phenomenon? Or was this it for you? No, it's not it. I have also a TV series idea trying to portrait plenty of witnesses around the world. And also my next project is not about UFO phenomenon specifically. It's about what is below earth, about this law civilization. But I know for sure that there is a connection between this UFO phenomenon and this law civilization also. Oh, that's great. So you're returning to your original interest in mysteries. I love that. It's all come full circle. Yeah, it's a full circle for me also. Yes, I wanted to make this happen because I will end my, like, let's say, trilogy of documentaries, and then I want to jump into fiction. That is my real passion. I completely understand that. Yep, I am the same way. Well, Ellen, when? When and where can we find the film Witness of Another World here in America? Well, the film will be released on October 22nd, on multiple platforms. And you can have the direct information if you go into our website.

It's Witness of Anotherworld.com. Perfect. And I kind of want to end saying this to, Alan. Juan represents something truly special. I think in all of us. And I left your film believing more than ever that the phenomenon has many layers and perhaps even many sources, motivations. But I think what is most important is how it affects us on a human level. And it's reflected so beautifully in the film. It puts that mirror back onto us. And I truly feel that witness to another world will be a very important piece in this very mysterious, weird. puzzle as we move forward. So I have to thank you, my friend, for the film and for also joining me

on somewhere in the skies. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you for inviting me and I'm really glad that you like the film. That's it for this week's episode. Again, you can be Witness of Another World beginning October 22nd on most all streaming platforms.

To learn more and to watch the film, visit Witness of Another World com. Please take a few moments to subscribe, rate, and review Somewhere in the Skies

on Apple Podcasts. Your Android apps, or wherever you get the show, it helps us out tremendously. I'm still looking for a couple personal UFO stories for the next volume

of witness accounts. If you'd like to share your story on the show, contact me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or through the contact tab on the website, Somewhereinthes.com.

We're on Twitter at SomewhereInth Skies, and Instagram at SummerSkies Pod. Thank you as always to E1, Roke Planet, KGRA Radio, 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, SummerSkies. Hey, friends, it's Daniel Noah here. I'm the director of Spectrevision Radio. So many of the ideas that permeate the genre stories we tell are actually based on real paranormal phenomena. The way we've represented these powerful experiences really only begin to scratch the surface, not just of the way they work, but of the way they feel.

When the fine folks at Oni Press approached Spectrevision about creating a comic book series based on real paranormal phenomena, we jumped at the chance. High Strangeness is a series of five interconnected stories created by actual experiencers, committed to portraying the reality of paranormal experience as it truly is. strange, disorienting, beguiling, frightening, and awe-inspiring. It's got UFOs, cryptids, men in black, and I mean the real men-in-black, not the other men-in-black. Synchronicities, interdimensional portals, a deep underground military base, and so much more. This October, Oni Press and Spectrevision are proud to present high strangeness,

a five-part experiment and comic book storytelling, boasting an otherworldly cast of comic book talents. Like Christopher Cantwell, Christian Ward and Jock, Chris Condon, Ringo Award-winning artist Dave Chisholm, Cecil Castellucci, Timothy Renner of Strange Familiers, and Jim Perry of Euphamette. Look for high strangeness book won on shelves October 8th at a local comic book shop near you. But be warned, when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back. Travis Walton is 22 years old. He was working a logging contract in central Arizona in the Apache Stickgreaves National Forest. While driving home one evening with his fellow loggers, they came across something burning bright in the distance. Fearing it was a brush fire, they drove a bit closer to get a better look.

As they approached, they realized it was anything but a fire. Above them, they witnessed a hovering. disc-shaped object in the night sky. Walton jumped out of his truck and approached it, curiosity, getting the best of him. It would be the decision that would change the course of his entire life. As he walked directly below the hovering object, the other lockers begged and pleaded for him to get back in the truck. When he got within close proximity, the object shot a bolt of light down, striking Travis and sending him over 20 feet in the air.

knocking him unconscious. The other loggers, fearing the same fate, fled the scene in pure terror. They phoned the local sheriff, and soon they all went back to try to find Travis. They could not. A search was soon underway by the local law enforcement and the neighboring towns of Snowflake, Arizona, where Travis called home. Days passed, and Travis was nowhere to be found. Fearing he was dead, locals began to be. to speculate that the other loggers may have killed Travis, whether on purpose or by accident, and hid the body. This was now turning into a murder case when the men started to tell their story of what they'd seen happened to Travis that night. The entire case now went international, and reporters from all over the world began to descend on the sleepy town of Snowflake. For five

days the other loggers stuck to their story, taking lie detector tests to prove their innocence. Meanwhile, the story of the UFO brought many believers and debunkers to town as well. One noted skeptic, Philip J. Class, even offering the loggers a hefty bribe to admit the UFO event had never happened. They refused, and they passed the lie detector tests with flying colors. As the case spun more and more out of control, something had to break, and soon Travis Walton returned. And the story he told of what happened while he was gone will forever be remembered, as perhaps the most famous alien abduction account of all time. In 2016, a documentary was screened in New York City at the Philip K. Dick Film Festival.

It won Best Documentary of the entire festival. That film was titled Travis, the true story of Travis Walton. It was directed by Jennifer Stein and co-produced by both her and best-selling author and UFO researcher Peter Robbins. The documentary was an intimate examination of the entire Travis Walton event, told through the eyes, mouths, and hearts of everyone involved, where the 1993 Hollywood film adaptation, Fire in the Sky, took a fantastical and horror-driven approach to telling Travis's story, this documentary dives deep into the very factual and very well-documented accounts of what truly happened in the woods that night. Upon viewing the film, I was able to sit down face to face with Jennifer Stein and Peter Robbins to discuss it in depth and the incredible

developments in the case that continue up until today. So, without further ado, here's my conversation with Jennifer Stein and Peter Robbins. I hope you enjoy. So guys, why are we celebrating? We won the best UFO, or actually the best documentary or the best science fiction feature film of the festival. And we're scratching our heads and delighted. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Very exciting news. Thanks for joining us today. Glad to. So Jennifer, I guess we'll start with you. What made you want to make this film? Well, I felt that Travis's story really needed to be remembered and understood, certainly by younger generations who don't seem to pick up books anymore. They're becoming a thing of the past.

And if anyone really wants a perspective on one of the top 10 best, you know, documented UFO stories, Travis's story is amazing. There's a lot of evidence to it, a lot of people involved in the case. It's not one of those stories that could easily be buried and shoved under the rug. There's polygraph involved in it. It made international news because it was a homicide story, a missing person story, and a UFO story. The story was heavily attacked and debunked. These guys' lives were destroyed by this.

There was a huge story there. And after I read his book and Peter introduced me to Travis in 2010, I just felt like if I could produce something like it would be amazing. And I wasn't even sure I could do it. I didn't actually even start out to make a documentary. And that's another story. But I just felt like if it could happen, it would be a great coup for Travis. And for myself as a filmmaker, if I could do a decent job,

I would have had made a contribution to maybe shifting the awareness or the consciousness of the planet to remember and be aware of Travis' story. And that's why I put the time and effort and money. into it. Had you ever done a documentary before? Yes, I've done a couple. I started documentary filmmaking around maybe the late 80s, early 90s. A friend of mine was killed in a terrorist bus attack, and I was motivated to her memory and to raising awareness about the beginning of the antifada and actually the very good relationship that Arabs and Jews had in Israel, because a lot of people think it's bad, but in actuality for thousands of years, they've lived very

peacefully and collaboratively with one another. And my friend had gone to Israel and was caught a terrorist bus attack. And she'd made the nightly news because she survived the initial attack and then died later. So I made a documentary about her, used the documentary to raise about $100,000. And we built a legal aid bureau in Central Israel and Karmiel, Israel, that helps both Drews, Arabs, Muslims, women seeking political asylum. It was a women's organization that we funneled the money through. And that was my first documentary film. So I'm a purpose-driven filmmaker. And I'm a social activist. And I think that we need to all kind of pull up our bootstraps and do what we can to heal the world. I mean, it's a Jewish theme, Takun al-Lum. What do you

do to make your life matter and what impacts you in your life that you want to remember and try to change. So I wanted to do something that was non-retalatory in nature and honoring my friend Ria Levine was the best thing I could do. So that was my first film. And I really got my boot sweat. I literally did it with a video camera and a VHR with a jog shuttle where you could lay a soundtrack and then an audio track and that was it. So you had to lay stuff, wind back your jog shuttle, lay more stuff, wind back your jog shuttle. Oh, my gosh. I can't imagine how long.

And that's how I started. Awesome. Wow. Well, that's fascinating. Like the dichotomy of your subject matter in your documentaries. But it all seems to somehow be connected and moving the world forward. Yes. The consciousness, the collective consciousness.

It's consciousness and awareness. So how did this man get involved over here, to my right, Mr. Peter Robbins? Well, I'll tell you, Peter is the one that. introduced me to Travis. I came to a Roswell UFO conference that Peter was helping to orchestrate and offered to be Peter's assistant and help. I wanted to kind of get my feet wet and understanding how the Roswell conference worked because I'd run a lot of UFO conferences myself in Philly. And Peter was kind enough to say, oh, gosh, yes, come and you can help. So I was there that year with Jesse Marcel Jr., assisting him and helping, and that's where I met Travis,

and that's where we had the conversation about Travis hosting his own conference, possibly in Heber at some time in the future, because at that point it was 35 years after his event. And we said to Travis, Roswell is a huge economic boom to the city of Roswell. Your conference and your story could be just as important for northeastern Arizona, Why don't you put a conference together? And he said, well, I've been thinking about it. And Peter and I sort of self-volunteered ourselves over a bottle of wine. I don't think we knew what we were getting into, but we volunteered to help him.

And we started then working towards the 40th anniversary and trying to have conferences building up to that. And the rest is kind of history. That's how I started making this film. I said to Travis, if you want to do it in November, November in northeastern Arizona. And one of the main things Travis wanted to do at a conference is take people to the actual forest where the event took place. But in November, it could be snowing. It could be raining. The road to get up there is a switchback and it's steep and you need a four-wheel drive vehicle. You can't necessarily get a bus in there in November. What if it snows? So, you know,

I'm a former event planner. So I said, you always have to have a plan B. So what will be our plan B, it's natural. Let's go there in the summer when we know we can get there. Let's shoot. Let's get the guys back in the forest. Let's do a virtual filmed, you know, tour of the site. And in the event that it snows, we have a backup. You get everybody that shows up, put them in a conference room, show a film of a tour of the site. So that's what I did first. The summer of 2013, I flew out there with a co-producer of mine named Bob Terrio, who was willing to really help me get this project underway because I was like going, oh my gosh, how can I do this?

It's a huge nightmare to pack your camera equipment, everything you need, fly to Arizona, then drive three hours north, then schlep all this equipment up to the forest, hike it in a mile, carrying tripods and mics and all this stuff. And he helped me. And after we got that virtual tour done, which is called Tracking SkyFy, and it's something that Travis has for sale and also Bob Terrio and Philadelphia has for sale.

It's a virtual tour of the forest. After we looked at that, when we finished that in time for a conference that we'd hoped that would have happened, the 38th conference, I realized, you know, with a little more work, I'm halfway to a really decent documentary. Why don't I take that virtual tour, shoot some interviews, try to get a few more interviews with a polygraph person and try to find the police chief and whoever else I can find from the town. Maybe make another trip back out there and see what I can do.

And the other unique thing is, since I'm involved in Mufon, I happen to be organizing the National Symposium for the Mutual UFO Network in Philadelphia and Sherry Hill in the summer of 2014. And we were bringing in, you know, Lee Spiegel and Stanton Friedman and Kathy Mark. and George Knapp. We had all these wonderful speakers. We even had James Fox. And I said, wow, I'll take over a hotel room, set it up like a studio.

I'll shoot all these interviews. And then I'll have these core interviews. Then I'll get a couple more. And then I'll edit my tushy off, right? And try to create a new film. And that's what I did. So actively I started working on this documentary, reshaping it. in probably around August of 2014.

And like, it's unheard of to do a, to edit like this. And I had a lot of help. I had some great guys in California that helped me. Zachary Weil and Adam Stein, who took my four-hour film in October and pulled it tightly together in time for the Open Minds Film Festival. Right. Which you also...

Which we won both award categories, which I was really honored by. Congratulations. again. Seems to be a running theme. I'm very happy. You know, when you look at the Internet and you look at what people really want to know about, the UFO topic is still one of the most highly researched topics next to porn. You know, so I don't know if that puts it in a good light or a bad light, but it's... It's been that way since the birth of the Internet. Yes, it has. It's the people are most curious about who are we, where are we, where did we come from, what's the nature of reality?

And sex. And sex. Of course. I mean, these are the core questions. They are. And it doesn't matter what nationality you are, what religion you are. These are the human conditions that we need to really wrestle with. We need to understand our nature.

Right. That's great. I want to get a little back to the film itself that I viewed last night. And I had the privilege of seeing at the Congress as well last year. You mentioned earlier you had spoken to the sheriff, Gillespie. Yes, Marlon, Marlon. Chief Investigator during the investigation. What was it like hearing his side of the story face-to-face?

When I was interviewing Marlon, he was still very skeptical, very much on the edge of his seat, and very cautious with his words. He never wanted to admit that he believed that this had happened. happened. He said, I believe they were trying to tell the truth. He never said, I believe they told the truth. So I was amazed that still, after 40 years, he was really on the fence about everything. But when we turned the cameras off, he told us his own UFO story. Really? Which was I mean, he's had more than one. Okay. And in fact, he had had some events prior to the Travis Walton incident. So he didn't discount the boys. And he didn't. disrespect him because he'd seen enough

odd stuff himself. Yeah. At the same time, as a law enforcement officer in a business where there's a lot of macho bantering and posturing, the ridicule factors amped up tenfold.

And at the same time, he knew that this could be real. Yeah. So when you see the film, the Hollywood film, I think one of the things that works best about fire in the sky is the human dynamic.

You know, forget about the special effects and the alien experience. The late great James Garner playing the sheriff was wonderful. And the actors playing the deputies, what they were wrestling with, we can only imagine in terms of, you know, we're free to think. It's not like we work in law enforcement or the military or whatever and would have problems expressing opinions in a public forum. When I saw the footage, I was dumbstruck with that as a backstory. It makes perfect sense knowing what we do

and that these things do happen. And Arizona has a fairly high ratio of authentic, truly anomalous UFO situations over the decades. But for me, that was one of the really most quietly exciting parts of the documentary. and you just said it, he's in his 80s now, and yet you could almost smell the woodburning in terms of him choosing what for him would be the right word rather than the almost right word to sound objective, to sound open-minded, but to still protect himself. Of course. Within his greater community in the way that he is perceived to seeing the world.

And there's another important point to remember. and a lot of people seem to forget this. It's well mentioned in the film, but we don't beat you over the head with it. This is a Mormon town. Right. They're most everybody in the town is Mormon. They're very conservative.

And we had, we went and visited the newspaper man who was 11 years old at the time when his dad was running the newspaper. I think it's called the Holbrook Tribune. And when I went and looked at those articles, I photographed them all, there's over 40 articles, almost one a year. There were certainly more during 1975 to 1995.

But when you read those articles, you would think that this really didn't happen because the newspaper was so conservative and their approach was so conservative. Oh, everybody wanted to protect themselves and nobody wanted to be ridiculed. And, of course, this story was heavily attacked by Philip Klass. Yes.

We won't get started on class. But piggybacking off of that, someone like class who is a professional debunker, as it were, what we need is physical evidence. And this case is the epitome of physical evidence when it comes to the abduction phenomenon. You brought forth some of the most compelling evidence that I personally didn't know about. I think 90% of the people in the audience didn't know about. And I heard literal holy S-H-I-T's when you brought forward the tree growth in the area. I mean, the guy next to me almost jumped out of his seat.

Is there any other evidence that you'd steer skeptics towards in terms of this case that you found while making the documentary? Well, obviously, the polygraphs. Yes. You can't have seven, eight, nine people take polygraphs and all pass and not have something very significant there. And in fact, it's one thing to take a polygraph once, but to take them multiple times and pass, your numbers start to go exponentially off the charts. So if anyone wanted to look at that alone, it was huge. The other fact that there were probably roughly 250 to upwards of 500 people that looked for Travis, I've heard different people give different numbers, so that's why I give that kind of a range.

People were looking for him for five days over a five-mile radius. There was helicopters. There were dogs sniffing hounds out there. And the only place they could find traces of Travis's scent was where he had been working that day. Where he jumped out of the truck, where he walked up to the UFO where there was a slash pile, and where he landed. This dog's noses don't lie. There was a fellow who showed up, unidentified, who was doing Geiger counter readings. And he got huge Geiger counter readings on the fellow's helmets and on the truck.

Now, they had washed their clothes. But where Travis had been struck, where Travis landed, and the truck and the helmets went off the charts. Once he got those readings, he packed up his equipment and took off. And nobody really knew who he was. Somebody said he was from the Forestry Service. Other people said, you know, he was from the FBI. Naturally, yes.

So we don't know. To me, the other thing that's really interesting is there was an awful lot of men in black that seemed to show up and track and follow these guys in Hebrew. they were standing outside waiting for them. Who were these people? Like Steve Pierce was talking about his mother observing the government cars, the guys in the suits who fit into the snowflake scene like a fish and a bicycle. It also occurs to me that for some people who you watch something as compelling

and as loaded and as effective as this documentary, If you have a problem with the subject, and you're not quite at the point of turning and trying to attack the character of the witnesses, most of us know that in the great majority of states, polygraphs are dismissed in courts of law. They're interesting. They may add something. You know, people will often say, well, I know I'm innocent. I'm going to pay to have a polygraph just so that it's on record, et cetera. Ben Hansen, who did such a wonderful job of being a participant.

Ben, of course, started in his own television show a few years back on sci-fi. And he's not, you know, he's a fairly young guy. A former FBI agent. Yeah, that's just it, who did profiling work. And I mean, you know, he's a great-looking guy and he's up there and he's talking. I think it's lost on some people that this is a man who speaks with real credentials. and interestingly, even if it's not admissible in a court of law, the statistics that they were talking about for me were as quietly effective

as the animation on tree growth or the close-up on the ring, severeing in the direction of the event, that the most conservative, and I'm sure it's an extremely conservative number of the odds of six people, seven people being polygraphed one of them multiple times and the way the example he gave me a few years ago was if there were two crooks and they plot a crime and they're caught and they're subjected to a polygraph the chances are very good that one of them will screw up the story and then certainly in a follow-up that

will fall apart but that figure of 78,000 to one I've also heard closer to a million to one, whatever it is, it's very compelling. And when you're looking for ways to negate or dismiss or belittle, this will dog you. This is just one more brick in the wall and a very important one as well, I think. Yeah. And I also think that when you look, I know we don't really want to get into Philip class, But why was the story so adamantly attacked for 25, almost 30 years? Why did Philip keep trying to put it in the garbage?

Where did that $10,000 bribe come up from? Exactly. When something's really true and you need to bury it for whatever reason, if the government's trying, you know, has informants like this that try to bury things, they are going to go after this stuff. that really doesn't have holes in it. And Travis's story does not have holes in it, but you have to dig to know that.

And the more you dig, the more you find. I mean, even I uncovered stuff I didn't really know about when I started. Yeah, I mean, you've connected some dots in terms of Philip class in his connections to some three-letter agencies. We won't go into specifics. We'll let people see the film to see those fascinating connections you made with that. But you're right. Yeah.

I mean, 25 years, the contention with this case continues and continues. And again, the most challenging thing is that it has more physical evidence than any abduction case out there, perceivably. Perhaps only the Betty and Bernie Hill case being the exception. I wanted to touch on, this is for you, Peter. The film was part of the Philip K. Dick. Science Fiction Festival. You brought up a good point at the panel last night. I didn't mention there was a panel after the screening with Peter, yourself, and Lee Spiegel of the Huffington Post.

You were interested, Peter, in the perception of a nonfiction documentary being part of a science fiction festival. Could you elaborate on that and what that meant to you? Yeah. Over the decades that I've been doing this work, and I know for both of you as well in your time, you become a focal point for views and stories and things that people will confide to you that they might not to the next person over because they know you take it seriously. And, you know, your eyebrows won't go up and no wink, wink, nudge, nudge reactions, etc. Anyway, like most people, I've enjoyed science fiction on and off since I was a kid. I wouldn't call myself a major science fiction fan, but then again, by the time I was five or six,

I was given my father's hard, bound, very wonderfully beat up copies of 20,000 leagues under the sea. and either the time machine or another really great classic. And I read them when I was very young. And in the early 50s, Walt Disney had done, they really hopped the whole studio. It could have gone under when they made their first live action film, which was 20,000 leagues under the sea. And I saw it as a very young child,

and I still have watercolors and drawings that I did that afternoon when I went back to my grandparents' house and couldn't get the idea of this submarine in ancient times, the 1800s. To cut to the chase, though, what I've observed is in the pantheon of science fiction fans, and they can be generalists or people who, you know, are just major fans of the first two seasons of Star Trek or Star Wars fans or whatever, or the classics, or Philip K. Dick or any of the other great, great science fiction writers, the ratio of taking the UFO-related subjects seriously, which in some ways one would think they might be more predisposed to because they're into all of this futurism and science fiction is about the same as the general

populace, that they don't. They think, you know, UFOs are real in science fiction. But you really think this is serious, which I find in a Mr. Spock kind of way, fascinating. And so I was curious as to how this brilliantly documented, very heartfelt, very professional documentary on one of the most shatteringly challenging, authentic, true UFO events and this major disappearance and all the attendant drama upon it. would resonate with the crowd that didn't really think much about UFOs and came to a science fiction film festival for science fiction films. I realized later on in the evening that we probably had because it was a screening of Travis the documentary,

most of our audience were there because they are into this subject. I recognize many faces from, you know, in the field. But there were people in there who, after the conference, came up to me and said it really did challenge my thinking. I found it very exciting. I had to remind myself that this was real. And I thought that was a great compliment for Jennifer and for Travis and for the film in general. A testament also, the head of the film festival, viewed the entire documentary, remarked on it. And I remember there was a documentary two years ago or perhaps last year.

I was on a path then as well. I think that was the very first non-science fiction when they had ever had there. And it also was a very lively discussion with good question from the audience as well. James Carmen's film. And then last year, there was Mori Island. Okay. I was here. Oh, I didn't even realize that.

Well, good for them. And again, the director of the festival, I think he shows. a lot of guts in beginning to integrate this material into a world where there's more than enough enjoyment, satisfaction, excitement in reading the wonderful work of a writer at the level of Philip K. Dick, who many people have no idea the tremendous impact he's had on a culture and the number of his books and stories that have been made into films over the years and influenced other science fiction films over the years. Remarkable character.

So I felt doubly proud because his name is one worthy of great respect. Science fiction, Shmian fiction. He's a great American writer. And he knew how to tell a hell of a story that will be retold in variations as long as there are people on Earth, I think. He's one of our great, great writers. And he happened to work in science fiction. That was his genre.

Dan actually shared something. interesting with me last night. He's the director of the Philip K. Dick Festival. He said that somewhere in the Philip K. Dick literature, or maybe it was an interview that was done, Philip admitted that he believed he was communicated with, that he'd had his own sightings, and that he was being directed or communicated with by a higher intelligence. I wasn't aware of that. And I wasn't aware of that either. I was profound to me. I said, really? And that That's, I think, one of the reasons why Dan was attracted to hosting films like this that are true stories. But, of course, the nature of the story leans towards the surreal or the science fiction.

I would bet you that anybody who is seriously into his work knows that wonderful story about him. And if so, here's an example of how a writer's experience in a very challenging realm can impact itself tremendously unpopular culture. The actual a film that I just included in my general favorite films. It's just fun from beginning

to end was back to the future. The original film. It's just lovely. It's great fun. It's great science fiction. Beautifully drawn characters. A great dramatic arc. A lot of humor with the Bathos.

And the character of Michael J. Fox's father, who is, you know, when we meet him originally is just this loser, nerd, you know, milk toast kind of guy. But when we go back to the future, and, well, when we go back to the past, and he and his son develop a relationship,

there is that moment where Michael J. Fox panicked that his mother is going to fall in love with him and that he'll never get home again and all that stuff. He does something, which is literally lifted from, I think, the reality of this Philip K. Dick experience in a way. He gets into his father's bedroom at night, wears his radiation hat, puts his headset on his dad, and blasts heavy metal at him.

And, of course, it's hysterically funny, but at the end of the film, when we see how things really did work out, and we find out that his father is a tremendously popular. science fiction rights. Yeah. It happened because of a transcendent, life-changing experience. Yes, of course, it was staged, but it didn't matter.

Yeah. The reality sunk in, and he went forward from there. You know, I wonder if Philip K. Dick either wrote about this at any place, and if we have any Philip K. Dick fans in your audience, if they'd let you know,

because of you really interesting to see whether or not that was recorded in an interview you ever wrote about it. It was just something people know about him from anecdotes and what have you. Absolutely. We run into this all the time. We take Willie Streber, for instance, the adbin flow of what was his fiction writing and what was his nonfiction writing. What chicken or egg, let's be honest. Well, I mean, bringing up, you know, the sort of that blurred line. I wanted to share this with you guys, because I don't know if you were aware. During the film, there was a couple in the audience who was having a very heated argument midfilm. They were pretty audible. And I could hear one of them arguing the validity of several of the loggers and some of the individuals in the film. And the other one, just a back and forth, back and forth. Of course they're telling the truth. No, it's through. He's with them. on this, this, that it got so heated that they eventually left the theater because they were

disrupting the people around them. So I think it was a good thing that they did that. This is an indicator that, Jennifer, you most definitely hit a nerve and started a conversation, even mid-film. So I have to commend you on that. Most of these conversations take place after the film during a panel, but you know you've done your job when it's mid-film. So I definitely had to bring that up. Thank you. I heard them. And I wondered what was going on. I didn't. I thought, why are they talking through the film? They were obviously annoying the people around. I was like 10 rows back. I saw them leave and I went, well, that's two we've lost.

What an uphand compliment that's so interesting. Yes, I thought, oh, well, either they really hated or they have to be somewhere. Right. Or they, yeah, exactly. But again, a testament to the film. Both of you have spent countless hours with Travis. I've met him on two occasions, and the guy, he's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. He's a straight shooter, and he admits that he wishes this event never happened to him. Do you think that the abduction phenomenon or euphology in general, would it be set back if this incident never occurred? What are your personal thoughts on that?

Again, this seems to be one of the preeminent cases that has that evidence that we strive for and we search for. Where do you think we would be as a community, as a field, had this case not happened? I think probably very much where we are right now. Things have a way of filling space if something is missing. Perhaps there would have been that much more. more. Historic study and debate and media projects focus on the hills or on Debbie Jordan, the subject of Bud Hopkins intruders or Linda Cortille. There's plenty of information and plenty of good casework out there.

And if one major case, I think, were displaced, it would hardly put a hole in the field. ranks would simply close and people would argue about or argue for other case materials, other evidences, et cetera, but who knows? Again, it's all what-if stuff, isn't it? I think the fact that it did happen and that like it or not, Travis was thrust into not a national, but an international spotlight. whatever his reflections on it now, he has been of tremendous value as a rational representative of what for most people is impossible, crazy science fiction, a fabrication. The mantra there for me, and it's a skeptics mantra, is it can't be, therefore it isn't, therefore it's something else.

and the job that I've chosen in life is to explain to you, you poor deluded person who actually believes this nonsense, what it is in the real world that you were misunderstanding. Now, whether or not that person actually believes that pose or, you know, they've got ulterior motives of some sort, Travis Walton is very difficult to take down. He literally radiates a certain integrity. I saw him speak for the first time more than 25 years ago.

It was at a conference in North Haven, Connecticut that Larry and I were speaking at during the period of time we were working on Left at East Gate. We both had tremendous admiration for this guy, but we're both a little bit starstruck at the same time. Concurrent with that, watching him on stage, there was no question in my mind that he was not only, not enjoying the process of communicating with an audience from a stage, which is something I do enjoy, even when you're dealing with loaded material, but that he was there for a very different reason.

He was there because he felt it was his responsibility to be there. The other thing about Travis, which I try always to remember, is from the get-go. It's not like this arched up over a period of time. walked into an absolute international storm of controversy, dehydrated, in shock, hadn't eaten in five days, completely, as he said, borderline catatonic at first. And he could have tried, he could have become a recluse. He could have, you know, just gone off and been a mountain man or something. over the several decades he's been a lecturer. He has become one of the most articulate spokespeople we've ever had for unusual stuff happening to regular people.

And I get the sense, and I mean this in a way with no negative or positive value added. It's simply a fact he is always overwhelmed by requests from people. It's a problem. I don't know anybody who is or will ever be more behind in their emails. There's thousands behind. He can never keep up with it. I think he walks around with a certain sense of, I wish I could keep up with all this stuff. And it still happens with him.

I mean, bless his heart, he is a hard guy to get hold of and confirm. And I think it's deeply conditioned going back 40 years now of people wanting a piece. of him. And that's another interesting thing to observe. He's a very generous person. I've rarely seen speakers who when there isn't a time constraint at the end of a program will not just take questions from the audience, but repeatedly, and we've done quite a number of appearances together since the film came out with and without Jennifer, he will answer every single question, every single question until there is no questions left in that audience, then he will, for the countless number of time,

take photographs with anybody who wants to take pictures, sign anything. He will inscribe things in ways that I find thoughtful, poignant, fun, and treat everybody as an individual with respect. respect, whether they're a senior citizen or a kid or what have you, that's really worthy of respect in itself. I don't know if he's ever going to get out from under this sort of psychic load. It may just be part of his destiny. I'll tell you what, though, a year or so ago, we were sitting and talking, one thing leading

to another, and I asked him, we can never know the answers to these questions for sure, had this never happened, how he thought his life might have gone. He thought about it for a minute. And he said, you know, I had a year of college. I was 22 years old. I think I might have gone back to school and become a pharmacist. What? I said, well, you know, it's a profession.

It's, you know, a good living. My intentions were to stay in my hometown. And I thought, well, how about that? I'm probably would have been a very good pharmacist. Yeah. And I'm glad in a way that fate has given him to this extraordinary community where I see us all in our own ways finding our path to be educators in a manner that maybe for some of us is unconscious. For others of us who remember that special teacher or that amazing lecture or that extraordinary film. or that book you can never forget.

And whether you're answering a question or giving a full talk, knowing you have to walk a line, something that Jennifer had to consider every day working on this project, where for everything in the film that was educational and fact-specific, it has to be done in a manner,

and I use the word with great respect that is entertaining and has a certain dynamic that will carry, an average viewer from point to point. It seems every year, overall, people have lower and lower attention spans. And like you said, there is this plague of people reading less and less for pleasure

or if possible even for business and listening and watching more and more. It's not bad and good, but, well, it is in a way. Reading especially for book lovers like us is integral to our lives. well, I mean, I could go on, but that's a basic thought. I'm not glad this happened to him. You know, I would have much preferred in an abstract kind of reality that I never heard of him. That there was somebody somewhere else in the United States living a life where they were enjoying themselves and not feeling terribly pressured and, you know, playing with their kids and being a good part of their community.

but the fact that things happened the way they did. I remember many years ago sitting with my mother and her saying, her reflecting on the impact that my sister and my UFO sighting as kids had on us. And just wistfully, almost thinking out loud to me, I wonder if your lives would have turned out tremendously different if you've been playing in the backyard

rather than in the front yard. And I thought about that on and off for years, I think, because Helen had had experiences, and that was one of them, they would have found her in the backyard. Just fine. And at the same time,

I can see how both of our lives would have been very different had this subject not entered into it. I probably, I overwhelmingly would have stayed on my track as a gallery painter and a professional photographer. I might have ended up, you know, with a PhD in fine art and teaching at a university or something. My sister could have easily become a oceanographic biologist or

something or a mathematician or a poet. But that's not the way it is. And Travis Walton is Travis Swalton because he was at the wrong place at the exact right moment for something to happen to change him and the lives of everyone he was with and everyone who knows them and everyone to a degree who knows about what happened to them. Exactly. I mean, Jennifer, you mentioned in the panel very eloquently that he was, he did not have the luxury of not coming forward about his experience. Five days, it became international headlines when the UFO story became a part of it. So what I think the film does- The UFO story coupled with the potential of murder and hiding the body. Exactly. And then after that, it became a hoax. Right. So that was another spin.

Where's the cabin in the woods that he was really staying at, please. So what I think the film did, and I heard this word specifically afterwards from someone, not only was the production quality good, but it had heart. And I think what you did... Well said. What you did best in the later half of the film is show Travis as a person disconnected from this incident. We do not identify ourselves because of our one experience in our lives, whether it's a sighting, paranormal, a trauma, a anything, there is much more to human beings than that.

And I think you focused on that and show Travis as a person and that although this may have shaped him into the person he is, there is more to this man than that. And the title aptly being Travis shows us that. So yeah, I think that was. Thanks. I will give credit to Zachary Weil and to Adam Stein. who worked with me as editors on this, really guiding me towards that kind of closure. And to making it as much and even maybe more so a human interest story about how this man and the logging crew that he was with dealt with this over their lives. And in actuality, I think Travis may not have actually written his book if he wasn't so angry.

angry about being accused of hoaxiness. Yes, good point. When Travis first came back, he really wasn't involved in the media or answering the media. It was his brother, Dwayne, and the crew boss, Mike Rogers. Mike was the one who really dealt with most of the communications as well with Philip Glass, because Mike was accused of coming up with this elaborate scheme to get out of a logging contract with the Forestry Service, which wasn't true, because if you didn't

finish your contract, you didn't get paid. You didn't have to get out of it. Either you finished it by a certain deadline and you got your payment. And if you didn't, and you missed that deadline, you didn't, you had to submit a new contract. It's just the way they worked. So I think this whole story actually ended up coming more to light with the details that it came to light with Travis finally writing his book. And Mike Rogers was intimately involved in the early part of writing the book because Mike and Travis were best friends. So Travis was right there at Mike's side with all these letters and affidavits that had to be, you know, filed to prove that they were telling the truth. So if the story hadn't been debunked and attacked as much as it was, the book may never have been

written. The Hollywood film may never have been produced and I may not be here having made this documentary. So the effort to squelch the story and the anger that it created from within that logging crew is what eventually led to us knowing about it in the detail we do today. Yeah. And still ongoing, Travis is still searching for answers in his own experience. That being said, for the future, what's next for the film? Well, my goal is to try to find a distributor who's interested in taking the film to some networks. I think it has network potential. I'm in the process of doing some re-edits, doing a 43-minute re-edit so that I can sell it as a one-hour television episode. And then also

maybe honing it even a little more tightly. I have new interviews to add in with Mike Rogers. We have some live footage of Philip class. Very interestingly calling Mike. Goddamn liar. Oh, naturally. On national television on Larry King Live, which is wonderful. We have Don Walton, Travis's older brother, and I have Deputy Ellison and Leo Sprinkle to edit in. I was able to get these additional interviews. So I am reworking the film.

As you saw last night, we showed a film with some CGI in it. I am making a new piece that will be exclusive for television and for possibly some art houses or what they call four-wall distribution. I'd like to distribute it in a major way. As a business person, it's logical that I want to be able to repay myself with the outlay and the investment I put into making the film so that I can make other films in the future. So my goal is to market the film nationally, internationally,

and then eventually release this newer exclusive version on probably Vimeo, Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu and DVD as well. If that will still be around in six or seven years, we'll see. But my goal is that more and more people around the world know this story because I think it is a human interest story and it explains what it's like, what you go through when you have this experience. And over 50% of the world's population has seen something. So I think there's a market for it.

I agree. And, you know, the percentage probably is going up and up. It's that challenge we always have of people reporting it. So where can we find out more about the film? There's a great website, Travis Walton, the movie.com. You can go there. There's also the trailer is on YouTube. You can, you know, Google Travis Walton, the movie.com. You'll get right to the trailer. There's a lot of insight and background information at the website, photos of our shooting. And I'm looking for testimonials as well from anyone. Of course, I'm looking for important people. I've just gotten a wonderful one from Paul Hellier, the former defense minister of Canada, who has seen the film and really liked it and contacted me. So I'm collecting testimonials. I have a great testimonial from Edgar Mitchell as well,

which is really beautiful. Oh, fantastic. And Mr. Mitchell's been a friend for many years. So I'm trying to use the social media as best I can to get the word out there. And I'm really interested in the public communicating with me and letting me know what they think. I'm interested in doing screenings.

If I can, I'll drive anywhere and 50, 60, 100 mile radius of Philadelphia. I'll do a screening. I'll show up and talk. So I'm just hoping to continue to get the word out there because it helps Travis. And it helps expand our awareness as human beings. I think it begins to open our consciousness to the seriousness and the reality.

What we know now, how many planets are potentially life-inhabiting planets that have suns with planets orbiting them. As we begin to grow more and more in our awareness, I think this film will only help. And what's that website again? Travis Walton, themovie.com. Well, we look forward to hearing the progress of the film. And we're just so happy to see the UFO field thriving. with credible, well-made films like this. So thank you, both of you, for inviting me last night,

for being with us here today. And again, we look forward to what comes next for the film and for Travis Walton himself as he continues to search for answers. So thank you so much for joining us. Glad to, Ryan. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you for doing what you're doing. Oh, my absolutely pleasure.

All right, that's it for this week's episode. Thank you again to Jennifer and Peter for coming on the show. Again, the film can be purchased at Travis Walton the movie. I'll see you here next week. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Where 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. Welcome to Beyond the Fray Publishing, where we take you beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary. We are a traditional publishing house that represents dozens of prestigious authors, researchers, content creators, and influences, all of whom share one passion, exploring the unknown from the mysteries of the paranormal. The legends of cryptids, the enigma of unidentified aerial phenomena to gripping true crime stories and ancient mysteries. Our vast catalogue of non-fiction books dives deep into subjects that captivate the imagination. Our esteemed authors are not only storytellers, but researchers and experts in their fields, providing readers with fascinating insights and compelling investigations.

With a dedicated community of readers, our books inspire, inform, and take you on journeys through the unexplained that will challenge what you know and expand. what you believe. At Beyond the Fray, we believe that every mystery deserves to be explored. So whether you're fascinated by the paranormal, intrigued by ancient civilizations, or drawn to the mysteries of the universe, we have the book that will take you on that journey. Beyond the Fray publishing, our books take you beyond. This is somewhere in the skies. with Brian Sprague. Diana, welcome back to somewhere in the skies. So happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Now, it's been a while since we actually last spoke. I had you on to talk about American Cosmic, obviously, when it first came out. And then I had the rare opportunity to have both you and Leslie Kane in conversation on the show as well. But now we are back. You are back with a brand new book encounters. But I want to ask, before we,

even dive into encounters your new book. What has that journey been like since American Cosmic? I know so much has happened since the book came out. And what ultimately led to kind of this, I guess, American Cosmic Part 2 in so many words. Yeah, what has the journey been like since we last spoke about American Cosmic? Yeah, sure. All right. So I started the research for American Cosmic in 2012. And I had, I must admit I was not a believer in UFOs and I had been studying religion my whole life. And so when I came into UFOs, I had seen some parallels between aerial phenomena that was

described like, say, in the 1500s by European Catholics and then what people were describing today. And I thought it would be a really, you know, very uncomplicated look at this topic. today, you know, what's been going on. The more I got into it, though, the more I recognized that people were actually seeing actual real things. And that made me like reinterpret what I had been seeing in the past. And it was very shocking. And so again, also, I met people that I didn't expect to meet. And these were the people that I didn't actually have language to describe them at the time. they needed to be synonymously referred to, right?

I couldn't use their names. One of them was Gary Nolan, and he's now out as himself, but he's James in American Cosmic, and the other is still, you know, under pseudonym, although people, you know, say they know who he is and things like that. So one of the things that I learned from American Cosmic, and that I now, when I look back on, I recognize the last. language that's being used today, like the legacy program language and the language of the, you know, some of the things that are that were being done then, like biologics, these are

things that I actually didn't know that I was studying at the time writing American Cosmic. That's exactly what I was doing. So I was working with people in what are now called SAPs or special access programs. And they were teaching me about biologics. And biologics now is something that is talked about at space research conferences and things like that. It's now open. But back then it wasn't. So this was prior to 2021.

So now I know because the language is all over the place, I'm like, that's what I was doing back then. And so American Cosmic actually caught that. So it caught the language. It caught the – I actually published some peer review articles about biologics. and things like that that are that are up on academia at you. And so what did I learn? I learned that there was a program and people were involved in studying this in our government through SAPs and that they were making some headway and that the headway they were making

included this new discipline and called biologics, you know, working on these things. A lot of it having to do with taking stuff into space and using that zero gravity environment to conduct some experiments that then help us with biotechnologies on Earth. And so this is what I was learning about. And then after American Cosmic was published, it was still secretive. The topic of UFOs was still something that people didn't talk about openly. And it wasn't until 2021 where, as you know, the Pentagon report came out and then boom, you know, all of a sudden American Cosmic, everybody wanted to talk to me because they had read American Cosmic and said, well, what do you know? I guess she was telling the truth. And so that's what I learned.

And so Encounters is the follow-up to that. I love that. Yeah, it's kind of like your research was running parallel independently to a lot. of what would eventually come out in a lot of the media post kind of 2017 and onward. That's fascinating. And the fact that like it all kind of melded together now and converged into this new euphology. We've sort of seen birth since then. Yeah.

Yeah. Really, really interesting. Okay. So here's here's something I find interesting. When your first book came out, I can't tell you how many read. threads or Twitter threads were out there trying to figure out who these pseudonym people were in your book, whether it was Tyler D or the other pseudonyms that you used understandably at the time. You have a new one in this book that I think is really going to get the conversation going again,

and that is the gray man. And I know this is a pretty big portion of the book, actually. Is there anything you can sort of tease to us about the gray man and their contributions to the book, why you felt it important to really tackle it in the way that you did? Yes. Okay, so that's the only pseudonym in the book is the gray man. And the reason I had to do that is the exact same reason that I did that with Tyler. And, okay.

So if I'm using a pseudonym, it's because the person has to have one. You know, it's not like we want that to happen, but it needs to happen. And this person is, you know, a work, works worked with similar types of programs that, okay, so Tyler was in. And the reason why I use Gray Man is because, first, he has some information that I think hasn't been explored. I start to explore it in American Cosmic, and it's the worldview, and not just the worldview, but the belief system of the phenomenon that, you know, the belief system that a person who's in associated with working in these programs, how do they view this phenomenon?

This gets to that Jesse Michaels' Grush interview where they actually get into talking about it. And they do talk about what is this? You know, what is the nature of this, this phenomenon that we're dealing with? And it goes beyond just the kind of science that we assume, like the nuts and bolts. And I did begin to get that, scratch the surface of it with Tyler D in American Cosmic, where he actually came to me and said, I'm doing the study. And I believe, you know, I've been told that your field is going to help me understand this phenomenon. And I couldn't understand it at the time. I was like, it doesn't make sense to me.

Well, okay, now that I've been doing this, I totally get it. So with that new understanding of what this phenomenon can, what, how it exceeds our scientific understandings, I'm, I'm talking to a bunch of scientists again, right? One of whom is gray man. One of whom is so. one of whom is Dr. Whiteley, okay? And I'm fleshing out what it is about the phenomena that is really defies what we consider science to be. And so what I do for a gray man is I basically talk about his own experiences, which he has. And he's not the only scientist, by the way. There's like Dr. Kerry Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, had a very famous

UFO experience. He called it a UFO experience, but he said, I don't know what it is, but we call it a UFO experience, so I'll use that language. And so he reminded me of gray man. And so the gray man, his experience is very, very strange. And so he relates it to religion. And he also has a lot of spiritual experiences regarding this phenomenon. And he, you know, a lot of people, there's a lot of good and bad associated with the phenomena. Some people have really amazing spiritual experiences like Tyler D. Some people have experiences where they think that this phenomenon is really bad and they are not. They don't like it. Okay. And so, um, and it's, you know, they consider it to be harmful. All right. So both sides of this are in encounters. Like,

I'm not going to just focus on the good and say that the bad doesn't, the bad is as much. much there as the good. So, so Grayman basically talks about his experiences, which he considers to be aggressive, aggressive, you know, that this phenomenon is aggressive. But he also has experiences of things that he said, if he didn't have those experience, he wouldn't have been able to deal with the phenomena. You know, so he talks about he has an experience of St. Michael, the Archangel, which, by the way, he didn't know what it was.

but to me, as a person who knows the history of Catholicism and also of Christianity, there is a being in Christianity called St. Michael the Archangel. It's very specific. It has a sword. And it's like, you know, it slays demons and things like that. Well, Gray Man didn't know the history of this at all, but had an experience of this that he thought wasn't a dream. and that was such an amazing experience and the experience that, you know, associated with it, I felt like people should actually know about this.

And I actually know that he's not the only one. So what I did with encounters was I took the experiences of people who's, like, for every one experience in encounters, I've read 200 experiences very similar to that for each one. Interesting. So it kind of, it's kind of like an amalgamation of this one, I guess, theory or concept or perception of the phenomenon. That's fascinating. They're exemplary. So these are the examples, like each person's example.

Yeah. You know what? 200 other people who have. I was just going to say, Diana, in terms of the St. Michael thing, I interviewed a woman not too long ago. who had seen some sort of crash retrieval program going into action out in the desert. Something had crashed. She never said she thought it was a extraterrachial craft or anything like that, but something it crashed in the deserts out on the West Coast.

And when the military came in, she saw several of the individuals who went off. to the site where this allegedly happened, and she saw the insignias on their uniforms, and they actually had patches that had St. Michael on them. And that really stood out to me. Right then and there, I'm like, okay, what is going on with this alleged UFO crash retrieval and this insignia on a quote unquote crash retrieval unit, I guess, using a relationship. religious symbol, you know, as their insignia. So right then and there, I mean, there's your connection kind of tying the religious aspect to UFOs. And that's very, you know, just in your

face with it. I know with gray man, it's a lot more ambiguous. But yeah, does that ring any bells? Have you ever heard anything like that of these UFO programs? Okay. Is that something you could touch on? be like I don't want to do the thing that a lot of the people do who are you know in this field they say well I can't talk about that it's you know I get it yeah but it's true so I'll tell you this though yes absolutely so like I said the reason that I put so this is a follow-up to American Cosmic Encounters is like American Cosmic 2 okay where I go more in depth into the people and their experiences because I think that that's really what we need to

to focus on. You know, that this kind of stuff doesn't just, it's not just a crash. It's something that actually impacts people and they're having experiences. And even the people that are in the programs are having experiences. And if they're wearing St. Michael or, you know, something that looks like a super power with a sword, you know, that shows that they want protection or they're, you know, they're indicating protection. And I think that this is something that isn't interesting and important. And I don't know the full significance of it to tell you the truth. I mean, I'm just being honest.

But I do know that it is a pattern and we should pay attention to it. And that, you know, looking at the symbolism of the iconography, at least in the Christian tradition, you also see it in other religious traditions. You see a similar type of entity, I guess. you know, a protective entity. I think that, you know, I would say that there's a really interesting letter to the bishops that John Paul the second wrote in the 1980s that I didn't actually take a look at until I was doing this research and then I looked at it because I had heard of it and I thought, I wonder if this will

have anything to say about this. And it's called the treatise on the angels. And it's, It wasn't for public consumption, actually. It was for the bishops of the Catholic Church. And Pope John Paul II comes along and basically says to them, you all don't believe in these things today, but they exist. And they intervene in human history. And they still do.

And I was like, wow. And he said, you know, and then he went on to talk about what these, you know, bad and good, you know, what they were. And I thought that was really interesting. and it does speak to, you know, these people's experiences of things that in secular society we don't believe in. Right. Now, I spoke to a, this is so funny, I spoke to an astrophysicist literally yesterday about this idea of in other, in, let's say, a non-human intelligence from somewhere else, another time, another dimension, what have you. there's always this, I feel it's a misconception that they would be peaceful, you know,

that they would be so highly advanced. They've moved past warfare, this, that, this that. And this astrophysicist told me straight up, he's like, I'm so sick of scientists saying that. Because they have absolutely no idea, you know, let's say they are a million to or a billion years older than we are. there's no evidence that would state, you know, that they would be good or they would be bad. And the reason I bring this up, Diana, when it comes to someone like the gray man and that individual taking these experiences as some sort of religious experience and whether good or evil, is that up to the observer or the individual when, it comes to good or evil because even someone like David Grush has recently said, you know, some of these individuals were left physically scarred by a UFO event. Clearly, a lot of them

emotionally scarred, but some even radiation poisoning or marks left on their bodies or injuries. Now, to me, you know, like that could be completely just periphery to the experience itself. It doesn't mean that the intelligence or the UFO or the occupant behind it was trying to hurt that person, but it just happens to be an effect of the

experience, I guess, the encounter. So I guess my question for you is when it comes to good and evil, is that truly a thing in the work you're doing? Do you personally think, you know, that some of these encounters are inherently good or

bad, I guess. Yeah, so what an excellent question. And, okay, so when we talk about the experiences that people have, so I consider evil to be something premeditated, a person intends to do a person harm, right? And that's evil. Okay. So the question is, is this just collateral damage of an encounter? Right.

Is this intentional evil? I mean, intentional damage, or is it just collateral damage, right? All right. And, okay. So one way my work gets interpreted is that I'm looking at the history of this stuff back in the day, right? Before we had cameras, before we had, you know, any kind of, you know, technology that we could, like, really look at what's happening to people when they're burnt and stuff like that. Okay. So a lot of people then say that what people experienced back then, Diana says, is still happening today. Therefore, they bring this idea of angels and demons into the present.

And they say, these are just angels and demons. But I'm not actually saying that. okay i'm not saying that it's not what people consider i'm saying that whatever's happening yes there's a progression you can still see it today but i think that we need to be really careful and not be so quick to define what it is so your question gets to this and it's that of course when people 300 years ago saw something in the sky hurt their friend their neighbor they're going to say it's evil because it is, you know, it's bad, right? Today, when we see a pilot going down or, you know, something happening to this person who has had then reports this experience,

we're going to say, I don't want that to happen to me. But we don't necessarily say it's evil because there's a whole baggage, that traditional baggage, that comes with this idea of evil. We just don't want that to happen to us, right? It's just, I don't want to be burned. I don't want to die, you know, that kind of thing. So we can honestly say these are the effects, right? But are they evil?

That has value judgment attached to it. And it also has a whole history of what evil means, at least in the Christian tradition, which is the tradition we've inherited usually in the United States, a good portion of us, right? This European Christian tradition of evil. So no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying let's try to put on, let's try to leave the baggage beside, you know, away, and let's take a fresh look at what's happening. Now, when we take a fresh look at what's happening, I use gray man as an example.

He's saying, this is not, I'm not going to let this happen to me, you know. In American Cosmic, Gary was trying to find some type of intervention to stop these things from, from messing with people. He wanted to invent a drug that we could take so that they could stop interfacing with us. That means that he didn't view that interface as positive. Okay. I don't know what he's thinking now. I actually do talk to him about it, but I haven't had an in-depth conversation with him lately about that. So I guess another, here's another anecdote I can use to describe an answer to your question.

I cleaned out my office the other day, you know, how you accumulate stuff. And my life is very incredibly busy. And I do try to answer emails about the topic. And I also try to, when people send me things in the mail, the hard mail, I literally do try to answer it all. But it got to the point where it was almost impossible for me to do that. and I have some mail from when the book first came out, which was, you know, in 2019. So I've mailed from 2019. And I opened it and I read it.

And one was this long letter of about, it looks like about 10 pages of written note from a person who's most likely in their 70s, maybe 80s. And they had experiences when they were young and throughout the whole life. And they read my book. And they wanted to thank me. And they said, and what struck me in the letter was they mentioned that they'd been following when pilots see these things. And they said, and then one pilot was killed in an altercation with one of the saucers or, you know, whatever they called it. And then I stopped paying attention because I realized how dangerous these were. And I was like, wow, you know.

So that's just one of so many, though. But, you know, so was that altercation just us not understanding, collateral damage, you know, but it's certainly something we wouldn't want to happen. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it is fascinating. Yeah. Again, that lens in which you look at the experience truly means everything, I think, from individual to individual.

Another chapter in the book that stood out to me is in your first book, many of us in the UFO field knew this term from the work of ballet and whatnot, The Invisible College. But for those new to it, your book was probably the first time that they had ever heard what that was. And I'm sure it opened up a huge door for these people to realize, whoa, like there have been credible scientists looking at this topic for so long,

kind of in the shadows, you know, and not through official channels, as it were. But in the new book, you take that even further. You have a chapter called The Children of the Invisibles, which I thought was such a cool term. Perfect band name, by the way. So I think someone's got to definitely get that one going. But what was this chapter, Diana? What made you decide to kind of cover the evolution, I guess, of the Invisible College? Yes, so of course the Invisible College are the group of scientists led by Alan Hineck,

who were needed to study this in an invisible way anonymously so that they could do, you know, so that they could keep their jobs and, you know, their scientific affiliations and things like that. And they borrowed the term from the early modern time period when the same thing was going on, when, you know, when people like Galileo and Copernicus, you know, were being basically suppressed and their science was being suppressed. This has been the case, okay? So it's still the case. So there's a group called the Invisible College.

Everybody probably knows who they are by this time. And they've been doing this work. And so I'm lucky to know them and to observe their work and to work with some of them. But I also met extended Invisible College people. And this was the group that they were more involved with the perception management side. So there's the scientific side with people like Jacques Valle and Howe put off Eric Davis, right? They're doing science on this topic. And then there's the perception management side.

And they are invisible, more so even. And they're not, let's put it this way, they won't be writing a book called The Invisible College about the stuff that they do. But their work is as important for our understanding of the phenomena because they are involved in the public management of the perception of it. And I met people like this and they were also involved in the scientific study of it as well. And what I found was that, strangely enough, I had known a person. my whole life, who was the child of one of these scientists. And I did not know this.

Although she had mentioned, she didn't even know it because, you know, you don't know it when you grow up in it. And I had met her pre-UFO study when I first became a professor at the university where she was a professor too, a little bit ahead of me and in philosophy. And so I had met all of these people after American Cosmic. And it was, I would call it almost a traumatizing experience because, well, let's just say traumatizing. Not almost a traumatizing experience. Because I not only did like I learn about, you know, the programs to study the phenomena, but I also learned about the management of that. And that was more traumatizing to me because I was like,

Whoa, these people are so organized. They have such incredible tools at their disposal, basically. They apparently seem almost above the law, right? And that's really amazing. And I met the kids of the people in these programs. And the kids are either recruited into the program or they're really, what's the right word to describe it? They're really confused, okay?

And because, you know, they'd lived their whole lives constrained by their parents' clearances, constrained not to have certain friends, not to do certain things, not to go internationally, you know, they were basically put under the similar constraints as their parents. and lived a certain very interesting life. And I actually could not write about these people, but I wrote about my friend, because my friend's father has been dead for many, many years, like 40 years or something, maybe even more than that,

or I'm sorry, maybe less than that, but many, many years, 30 to 40 years. I say so in the book. I just can't remember. And she is retired. she was fine with having me talk about her experiences as a child of what she would call. She used to tell me it was called the secret space program. And, you know, this was in the 50s and the 60s. And I mean, that was not when she told me because it hadn't been born yet.

But she told me this when I became a professor at my university. And, you know, we both had kids and our kids were older than mine. But we'd go out and we'd like, you know, go to the strawberry patch or something like that. And then I'd take a picture of the kids and I'd send it to her. And she said, wow, this is so great. I don't have any photos from when I was a child. And I was like, what? What?

And she said, yeah, my dad was in the secret space program. Never occurred to me to ask about it. I thought it was just weird. I thought, okay, that's weird. But I didn't think to say, what are you talking about? I didn't think to say that because I thought it was just a one-off weird thing. But she'd say it occasionally. And so later, as I met these people, I thought,

I really need to ask her about that. But I felt that I would overstep if I did. Finally, I just asked her. And she said, I'll definitely tell you about it. And so what I recognized was that, you know, there's this thing that people talk about the Secret Space Program, and it's absolutely a clown show, right? And it's completely ridiculous what people say about it, you know?

And but I guess there's an unacknowledged part of the space program. Even the Space Program says so. If you go to, you know, the historical documents on their website, they say, we leave it to future historians to discuss what is now classified because we can't. And they're really honest about that. So there's a way to talk about it without making it the clown show that it's become, but it's probably become a clown show to keep people from looking at it because who would want to be associated with looking at it. So that chapter is about those children because I personally have some. issues when I met these people who were, you know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, and had been the children of these people that were scientists in this program, they didn't

have normal lives. And it just seemed like it was, to me, there was an ethical issue at stake here. And I wanted to bring that up. Interesting. So in terms of those ethics then, Diana, do you see with the individuals you interviewed for that chapter, I know it was primarily your friend, do you see that perception management playing out at all

with everything that's going on in the world of UFOs right now? I mean, again, like we could talk from 2017 on. A lot of people believe that there's some like crazy sci-op thing going on with all of this. And then you have this gentleman, David Grush, come forward and really put out in front that, yeah, there's these Claddenstein UFO crash retrieval programs, no government oversight, things we all have been talking about for many, many years. But here we are in front of a congressional hearing and hearing these things, literally.

So do you see that perception management playing out right now? Are the children of these invisibles possibly becoming a bit more visible as Congress gets involved? And, you know, whistleblowers come forward and all of that? Yeah. So I think that we would be naive to think that it's not happening, okay, because it's been happening. And we'd be naive to think that everything's really transparent right now. Hey, it's all transparent. We should take people at their word.

That said, I also, this is my just my opinion, okay? So my opinion is that there's truth out there right now that has to be out there because of AI doing, I don't know if you saw a tweet that I tweeted the other day based on a person who is a really good researcher, identified that because a couple, like two years ago, I taught a class on UFOs. And I talked about redaction, right? And I said, when AI is able to, and it probably is now,

it's going to redact all these documents. It's going to anti-redact them, right? There's going to be anti-redaction AI tools. And all the history is going to be out there. So we've got a few things going on. right now, Ryan, we have not just AI in a sense becoming, you know, revealing things that have been hidden. We also have other countries in space other than the Russia, United States, who have been an alliance, by the way, in space, at least, if not on the ground. And so with that,

a lot of those countries like won't abide by any kind of secrecy that we might want to impose upon our own population. They might say, no way. We're not going to be. So there's a few things that are impinging upon us, the United States at the moment. And those two are probably the most, you know, one and two. Therefore, there has to be transparency. And I think that this is that the hand is being, you know, you have to show it now. And so I think that a lot of the transparency is out there.

But with that said, there's still a lot, there would be a lot of misinformation as well. You also have these pushback tactics, you know, that are happening to Grush and, you know, some of the whistleblowers. After they see what happened to Grush, no, they're not going to be public, you know, and who would want to. Yeah. So, yeah, so that's what I think is happening. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions.

Your support truly makes the show continue. grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Kind of wrapping up the book because I do, I've got some more general questions that I'd love to talk to you about because so much is going on. With encounters. Len Philpoo, am I saying that correctly? Okay. This was interesting because this took place in an area called Brockport, which I'm sure you and I are both familiar with, you having been to Syracuse and me being from there. I had never heard about this incident, which was fascinating. I remember when you first sent me the book, you were like, you need to go to this chapter and look at this case.

It happened in Brockport, New York. And I was, what? So, yeah, I would love if you could touch briefly on this chapter, if you don't mind, why you decided to include it. And yeah, a little about Len in those experiences. Yeah. So Len, so this is such a fascinating case because it has all the elements. First of all, Len is just a normal guy, right? So he doesn't have a clearance.

He's not a space scientist or anything like that. He's just this normal guy who likes UFOs when he's a kid in the 19, I think it's the 1960s. Yeah, the 1960s. He's about 16 years old when this really. really well-known UFO flap happens in Brockport, New York, in 67. And it's actually in the wonders in the sky, Jacques Valet's reference book. It's actually included in that reference book. So I was able to talk to a couple of different people who were firsthand witnesses, and it was witnessed by over 30 credible witnesses in several miles, right, having seen

this thing. And so Len is a guy who attended the Rice university conference on the archives of the impossible. And he had written to me prior to that conference. And he had shared with me a vision he had that he said he didn't feel like it was a vision. He's an atheist, by the way. He was an atheist. And he had this vision of Fulton Sheen, who is this really well-known. For Catholics, he's this really well-known Catholic bishop who,

I think he was also in New York. And he's a really well-known guy who had a TV show called Life is Worth Living before our time. But it's an amazing show. It's still being a radio show and a TV show. It's still being played in various places. Lots of people love it. My daughter watches it.

She loves it. And he's just this really eccentric guy, Fulton Sheen. And he talks about how life is worth living, right? And, you know, and life is an amazing thing. And so, so Len has this experience. First, when he's 16, he has this experience of the Brockport UFO. And so when you go back and you look at all the records, it had been examined by NICAP. You know, it had gone through all, because it was such a widely seen UFO.

And it conformed to all of the things that. that happened during UFOs that are so people can't explain. A lot of people saw it, but they saw different things. Okay, one person actually saw it land and little beings get out. And believe it or not, Nycap and others discounted that sighting, just because it was weird. But they were all in on the sighting when it looked like the Stephen Spielberg close encounters of the third kind, kind of really cool looking craft

with the little thing on the end of it, you know, trailing behind. Like, so it was really interesting to have all this knowledge today and to look back at that sighting and the various people's interpretations of it, even trained euphologists looking at it and saying, that's just too weird, that guy really didn't see that.

But he was actually the first one to see it. Right. And he was the first one to report it. He was a night watchman. So Len saw this when he was a kid and he had the experiences where he went to his buddy's house and his buddy was like, something really weird

was in the sky yesterday. I felt like he was watching me. You know, something really eerie. And so they all decided they were going to sleep outside of his, the buddy's house and try to do UFO watching. And surely a UFO showed up. And it just didn't show up for all of them. It showed up for lots of people along Brockport throughout Brockport and also some towns near

there as well. So I tried to do a lot of that kind of analysis in there of like. known flaps, not just here in the United States, but also in Australia. And, you know, and the very common patterns that happen with these. And so, Len, this was the first encounter that he had where he recognized that this was real and that it changed his life. And then after that, he had very, he had a lot, this is reported for people who have these encounters. He had other types of encounters of like the vision of Fulton Sheen. and, you know, he then became spiritual.

He shifted from being an atheist to believing in God, but he doesn't necessarily have a religious tradition, like he doesn't have a Catholic tradition or he doesn't have a Jewish tradition or Hindu or anything like that, but now he completely believes in this other world and that we can have communication with intelligences in that world. And he has, you know, lucid dreams and things. like that. So I thought he was a really great example of a person who has this

sighting and then has these experiences afterwards, but he's not religious, but he's also not an atheist. And he doesn't have a clearance and he's not a scientist. Right. I know, which is for, I would say, a majority of the population, the type of person we can relate to. Yes. So I think, again, that lends a lot of credence to the vast array. of individuals who seem to be having these encounters, as it were. So, yeah, it was really cool to see you highlight that. Well, I do want people to read the book, so we won't give away too many more of what's in that, Diana.

But I do want to move to a few other things that you have been involved with lately, if that's cool. Awesome. The first would be the Soul Foundation, this new organization that is being spearheaded by Gary Nolan and a few other individuals. individuals, but you are now also a member of the Soul Foundation. Is this something you could tell us a little about what is the foundation and what role will you be contributing to the Soul Foundation? Of course, yeah.

So it's a foundation that will look at the phenomena, basically, and try to do really amazing research with the people who are, you know, Gary obviously is doing this research. has been doing it. And now the organization will provide, you know, the means to carry on with this type of study that is unencumbered from, you know, from basically oversight. So it's not a government foundation and it's not attached to a university. So it's basically free, you know, to explore. Gary is a well-known scientist. He has a lot of connections in the community. So he is able to recruit people who are going to be instrumental in looking at this phenomenon. My role, and it makes sense when you think about it, since American Cosmic was published, I've been asked by university presses like Columbia, you know, Oxford to Rutledge, you know, to look at the new scholarship that's coming because now academics are feeling free to be able to study this topic because before it could harm their reputations and they weren't free to study it.

Now they feel a lot more free. So there's a huge body of scholarship that's on its way to being published. And it comes to people like me who've already published in the field to look at the scholarship and I'm actually a peer reviewer. So I look at it and I suggest to the press whether or not should be published based on what I know. So I'm in a position and by the way, there's a lot of the scholarship that's coming out. So I'm looking at it from the humanities and social science aspect, right? So like anthropology and, you know, religious studies, political science, that type of thing. So this stuff is coming to me.

So I'm already in a position to suggest people to the foundation who would be really helpful to the group that Gary's putting together, Gary and Peter are putting together to do this. So Peter Scafish and Gary, you know, asked me months ago if I'd be interested in doing this work for them. And of course I would. So that's my position. I'm like an advisory council on, you know, if there's – and plus I could also, you know, add my own scholarship to that where it fits. So that's my role in the foundation. I love that. Yes. And you are seeing this topic starting to show up in various university courses and even online courses as well, such as independent ones that you do.

And just across the world. I mean, I know for a fact that your book and my book are currently required reading in two separate college courses in the, in the United States, which I still blows my mind. First of all, that it's, yeah, the fact that like not only is it required reading, but for various different reasons, which again, I think ties into the social science aspect to a lot of this. This is no longer just UFOs for science sake or academic sake. Like, this is something that affects all of us in many different ways. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. I think it's pretty cool. that right now you can go to a college course and find a UFO book in the curriculum for different reasons, not just, you know, one historical aspect or political aspect, but for many different reasons. It's kind of what UFOs have always represented everything, in my personal opinion. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Well, I can't wait to see the evolution of the Soul Foundation.

It's very exciting. The other thing I wanted to bring up is you were brought up in a recent interview that David Grush did with Jesse Michaels, a very well-known YouTuber, dropped this documentary that I don't think anyone was expecting. But lo and behold, there it is since, you know, David Grush had come forward and spoke before Congress. He hadn't really done any other interviews other than News Nation and whatnot. And then boom, he shows up in this like two-hour documentary. And Grush brings up and Jesse bring up your book, American Cosmic, within this conversation. So I got to ask, what was that like? And how do you think they handled your material when they were discussing?

Okay. So, all right. So I have actually spoken to some whistleblowers about their experiences. They were interested in it. you know, they, they were confused about what it meant. And so I have talked to them about it. So it wasn't necessarily, and I know, I know Jesse and he's a great guy, super intelligent, and always does great interviews.

And so he had actually sent me the link and said, hey, check it out. And so I did, of course. And I was like, really surprised that they featured American Cosmic. And though I do know that Jesse does agree, he likes American Cosmic and he thinks it's, you know, like he said, he's convinced, right? And so the way they interpreted it, which I think, I mean, it's literally how it happened to me was that, you know, they said, oh, whoa, all of a sudden we're going to be biblical literalists now. You know, that stuck out to me as something that how they interpreted it, interpreted it. And honestly, that was part of what really shocked me when I was doing the research for American Cosmic. I was, you know, I had been an academic looking at this from an academic perspective, not necessarily seeing it as real.

And then I was, you know, I was saw these as, you know, placing them in their historical context thing. You know, that's what we do. We place them in their historical context. You know, Virgin Mary apparitions. You know, they are, you know, because of the Cold War. You know, UFOs are because of the Cold War type of things like that. You know, they represent anxieties. But I knew there was something more.

And I am, you know, I do believe. But my belief was never to the point I was a believer, but I wasn't like, oh, these things are like, you know, angels are literal things that like hurt you or scare you to death and, you know, this kind of thing. Or show up and, you know, you weren't expecting it. But then when I saw that the same encounters were still happening to people today and people were interpreting them this way and they were like, no, these are real. And look, I have this burn, you know, and Gary Nolan's looked at it kind of thing, you know. I was like, what? Like, I was really, let's put it this way, it made me a lot more religious, frankly. It made me a lot more aware that our world is super mysterious.

and I had not, you know, if I think I know what's going on, I'm wrong, basically. So, so, yeah, it kind of was a wake-up call for me. And I felt that Grush had a wake-up call, you know, and Jesse had a wake-up call. And I felt like that's what they were transmitting out there to younger people who were watching it. You know, that, hey, you know, there's some weird things that are happening and, you know, wake up. to it. I felt like that was how the work was being used and I was approving of it. I thought it was good. I was like,

okay. The thing about it, though, is I'm not saying, like, they showed, they did show Francis of Assisi and, you know, he is known as the first person to have the stigmata, which is, are considered to be the wounds of Christ,

right, on his hands, right? So I've done the now the primary research for that, like looking at primary documents of that, the originating ones. And I see that, you know, there's references to how the angel dealt with him. He interpreted it as an angel. But the angel looked pretty weird when you look at the primary documents. And of course they're going to interpret it as an angel. But it dealt harshly with him. And he developed, you know, wounds.

from that interaction. So, but I'm not, you know, it's really a difficult position for me to be in to kind of try to analyze this from the perspective of what's actually happening there. And then basically concluding, oh, that was just a UFO. No, no, no. I just know that whatever it was, it dealt harshly with him and that it had gone through redaction, Just like almost all of these things in history, they get redacted for devotional purposes. And just like they do today, you know, I talked about that in American Cosmic when people have experiences.

Like Ray Hernandez's experience, you know, was reinterpreted by Mufon in Hangar 1. And that's a redaction. That's a rewriting of his, you know, and he went on to talk about it and to say how, he felt about it. And for him, it was a very positive experience, but it was made to be a bad experience. Whereas a lot of times they're bad experiences that are made to be good experiences. So there's this process of what I call redaction. We call it redaction in our field. We use that term. Okay. See, and again, I think that kind of circles back to your new book encounters. And even a lot of the work that I do with experiencers is we strive.

to put forward the raw, uncensored voice of the witness and experiencer themselves. Yes. You know, not through the, the prism of Mufon or, or Netflix or anyone. Even like the person who originally took down the report. I want to hear from that person. Yes. I want to know what they believe they saw, how they interpreted it. Because how else do you get to the truth when.

And like you said, these quote-unquote redactions or biases get put onto an experience from an outside perspective. So, yeah, I think that is. That is a great example of, you know, interpretation, perception, kind of skewing an experience in so many words, I guess. I feel like I'm rambling. That's right. that doesn't get, I think it's the, in my opinion, it's the best way to do this work, is to go to the source as much as possible. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's talk about another project that you recently took part in, which has a strikingly similar title, I might add, even though we both know your book came first. Encounters on Netflix recently aired, produced by Stephen Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment, and you were a consultant on this project, but not only that, you appeared in it as well. So I have to ask, how do you think it went?

It seems to be very well received by the mainstream right now. It's still trending in the top like five on Netflix right now. Yeah, how do you think it went? And what was that process like working with them? Sure, yeah, yeah. Okay, so remember, I think we always have to understand that there's the scholarly work that is done about the UFO topic and UAP topic. And then there's entertainment. And within the, you know, within these two categories, they often go to, I mean, they often get mixed together, right? So it's, it's really difficult to kind of, you know, they asked me to be a consultant to give them my view of, legitimately

anomalous reports and places to go and people to talk to. And I said, yes, I'll do that, right? So I'll tell you the ones that I believe are worthy of looking into, definitely. And that appear to be anomalous. But then how that gets then put out there is entertainment. Okay. So you're and so I can't actually ever get angry if I am agreeing to be a consultant for say the conjuring, you know, and then it goes out there and I'm like, oh, they should have said that. They got that wrong. They may have got it wrong, but you know, they're selling a movie, right? And, you know, so they're doing, you know, entertainment really. So and people love you the topic of UFOs right now. So a lot of, in people's minds, the entertainment gets mixed up with the reality. Okay. So that's. So that's, That must be said. I think we have to say that. That said, I thought they did a really good job.

So when, you know, and I was criticized by a lot of people who are my friends who said, you should not be a part of that project, you know, for these reasons. And I was like, gosh, maybe you're right. You know, maybe that was a bad idea. But it actually turned out really well. There were a few things in there that probably I wouldn't have put in there, you know, especially regarding the aerial school and things like that. But, you know, this is their point. project. It's not my project, right? So they made those choices. They're, I mean, they're not telling me how to write my book. So I'm not going to tell them how to create their, you know, docu series. But I thought they did a really good job. I mean, they did concentrate on what people said and how they're, how they felt and their experiences just exactly like you and I discussed, right? Just, you know, in the last five minutes. The people that I worked with, they listened to me. So I said, I think you should go here or this country. I think you should focus on the military UFO. I think you should do this, you know, and I think you should,

you know, go to Japan where they have a completely different idea. And, you know, that costs a lot of money, but they did do those things. And I was really impressed with that. So I had a really good experience doing this documentary or docu-series and working with the people involved with it. And from what I can surmise, a lot of people find it to be compelling. And I know a lot of experiencers, obviously, and they are telling me that it helped them. Like they, you know, it helped them understand their own experiences. And so to me, this goes beyond being just a docket series. It's actually something that's helpful.

And I feel actually okay with being a part of, very happy about it. That's great. Yes. because I know you and I have probably been a part of some projects that we don't feel as similarly about in terms of how they end up. And again, that's what I like to call infotainment. Yes. When you as the researcher or the academic, you're trying your damnedest to get the most accurate, credible information out there.

But then it goes through that entertainment filter. and it's, you know, it's your baby's gone out into the world at that point. So yeah, I think you're right. I think they did a really good job. They handled the material very empathetically, which I thought was fantastic. You don't see that often in a lot of these UFO docu-series. It's either sensationalized or it takes a very, you know, dark kind of horror-esque thing when you're dealing with like abductions or close encounters.

But I think they really, I agree, they did a good job of focusing on the individuals who had the experiences, the aftermath of the experience, which is very important as well. I got to ask, were there any cases that you would wish they covered that they didn't? Aerial school obviously is a big one right now. And it was, it was surprising to see them tackle the, you know, the UFOs that have been seen in Japan. But any that really you'd hope that they had done in the series that they hadn't? Oh, so I did propose the Westall Australian school. Wow, yeah. It happened in the 1960s.

And it's as compelling as the Rua school. And in my opinion, but, you know, Australia is halfway around the world. And of course, my focus has been there. looking at, you know, what's, you know, Australia is a fascinating place, a lot of activity there. And that one was really fascinating because the people are now, I think in their 60s, and they are adamant that happened. And they have the same story. There were teachers involved who were still alive and are talking about it.

and they go really in depth into the various aspects of it. So, you know, they couldn't cover everything, right? But yeah, so I suggested that they do that one. And a couple of others I suggested. There was a lot that happened to Japan that I think had been really historically interesting that they could have, you know, they actually did get that footage and they did interview people and they did do kind of the history of extraterrestrial intelligent beings in Japan.

I won't call them UFOs because they just have a completely different understanding than we do that I thought would be really helpful for people in the United States to learn about. And I think maybe that was just too much complexity for a docu-series, a Netflix docu-series, which is fine.

But they did have an amazing amount of stunning footage that didn't make it in to the final cut of the series. But again, it's their call. You know, this is not my, I'm not doing that series. I'm not the producer. I mean, I'm a consulting person, but that's, you know, that's not the producer.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, who's to say there's not going to be more? I've heard some rumblings. Yeah, I think most likely there will be. Once they say, you know how that goes. Once they see those ratings, they're like, we got something here. So hopefully. Oh, your ratings were excellent.

And, you know, my family, my family didn't even know I was in it. But my brother had texted me and he said, oh, you really need to watch this. This is really good. This is like one of the better ones. You need to watch this. And I laughed. And my husband said, wait, don't tell him you're in it because he'll get so surprised at the end of it. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, yeah, I was the consultant on that, you know, because I really wanted him to know. But he loved it. And, you know, so a lot of people. who are not, you know, who are basically new to the topic and, you know, it was really interesting for them. And people, my brother is not new to the topic, but he's certainly not in, you know, doesn't know all the, you know, the ins and outs like you and I do. He didn't even know it was in the thing. So. But like you said, like this is going to reach an audience that far transcends the UFO community. And that's what's most important.

And I think that's, that's, that's where. where we're at now. Like the topic we've been spending, at least me personally, half my life, researching and advocating for more information on, is seemingly going mainstream. And you either embrace that or you say, no, I want this to be that indie punk band that never sells out and makes it out in the world. And I think for a lot of us,

seeing Steven Spielberg get involved, again, with the topic of UFOs in such a serious manner and just having his stamp of approval on how legitimate this topic is, I think that means a lot to a lot of people out there who have experienced these things. And yeah, it's going to open a lot of ice. Yeah, I mean, think about it, Ryan. You know, we met way back when none of this was out in the open, you know, and, you know, we were, accepted our, you know, fringe research position or whatever. And now it's completely mainstream.

Yeah. You know? And I mean, it's like it is. It happens so fast, too, I feel. Yes. It has happened alarmingly quick, you know. And I always tell people, like, I'm, I will embrace it for as long as I can. If we finally get the answers to all this, awesome.

Like, that will be great. So will we like those answers? That's a completely different conversation. But I tell people, Diana, I'm just riding the wave right now. And just picking up those gems when I can and learning, learning each day. And I just feel like that's what this topic has always been. Just a constant evolution and thought and aspiration and everything in between. I love it.

I love UFOs. May I ask you a couple listener questions before we wrap things up here? Okay, cool. Yeah. Cool. So this comes from one of our patrons. They actually get priority to ask our guest questions. This comes from the Tree of Life on Patreon.

And they ask, religion and culture seem to affect how people identify what they've encountered, something we discussed earlier. Are there also preconceived biases that affect a person's emotional experience or interpretation? Is a person raised on stories of demons more likely to report their experience is negative than a person raised on angels? Or is it the quality of the experience itself that determines that? I feel like we really did dig into that, but is there anything you want to elaborate on when it comes to that question? Yeah, that's such a great question. So this is where I'm diverging from John Max's view.

So in John Max later research, of course, he's the Harvard psychiatrist who did an analysis of people who had these experiences in the 90s. And he was at Harvard. And he had been investigated by Harvard for doing this. But it found to be completely fine. You know, his research was fine. So he felt that the experiences, were definitely determined by one's almost spiritual evolution. And so he liked to take the experiences and compare them to what he called shamanic initiations, right?

Which could be brutal, basically. But he said that these brutal experiences, if one accepts them, will transform one and make one better, right? Okay, so I tend to actually think that in every universe of the human, we're going to think, think being, you know, being shot down if we were a pilot is going to be a bad situation or being kind of like, you know, this is not going to be good, like in every assessment of it. We don't have to be raised on angels. We don't have to be raised on demons to say, I don't want that, right? So, so some of them I would say we could call them for humans, at least, objectively not good.

So in that sense, I diverge from the idea that it's your inner orientation that's going to determine this experience for you. So I think that we can objectively say some things we don't want, some things are okay. That's fair. Yeah, I think, again, you stressed intent earlier, which I think plays like a key role in that as well. Cool. This is a good one. DM Peli on Twitter asks, with the rapidly increasing interest in UFOs, is Dr. Fasilkas, is she concerned about people manipulating this interest into a cult like following for political gain or control? Yeah, I think so.

So I think I just wrote a history of the topic for Oxford University Press. and I actually, because that's a job that's almost impossible for any one person to do, I solicited the help of people that I know who know the topic really well, like people from the Invisible College, people from, you know, NASA, you know, people who've been doing this work for a long, long time. So it was like, although I wrote it, it was really a group effort to make it accurate. But some of the things deeply concerned me. So I went over a lot of the cults that had been founded by people who were experiencers,

who had experiences of, you know, UFOs like Heaven's Gate and such. And even people that, you know, other people too. And so the beings would tell them things that were found to be, lead to unfortunate circumstances like mass suicide or something like that. So I think that this, and I actually reiterated this in a tour, Twitter space that I did with my colleague, Simone, and we had talked about AI and the phenomena. And I, you know, I mentioned this because somebody asked, and I said, well, yeah, there will be the trickster element. Some people call it the trickster element of this, that you should beware.

Like in, you know, cultures where there's been a continual history of transmissible history of dealing with the sacred or dealing with paranormal things or supernatural things, there has also been ways to do that that have been passed down, right? So if you go to, you know, let's say Ireland, right? So they have like, and you're near Ireland. So there's a Catholicism that's been passed down that helps you understand supernatural things when they happen to you. you know, if they're bad. And there's kind of protections that you can take and things like that.

But people who were brought up in the U.S. as secular people without, you know, even people who are religious, still we have this secular ideology where we don't believe in the supernatural. But when supernatural things then happen to us, we're like, we have no clue about how to deal with them. And so I think that we definitely need to be careful about people coming in and basically saying, I have the answer. I know what this is. They live in this galaxy. you know, and you should like follow me because I, I'm in direct contact with these beings and I know what they want. And I can tell you what's going to happen in five years. And it astonishes me how many people believe that. Like how many people, and we're talking about like

rational people even and people with like good jobs and lots of money, you know, and and they go on the bandwagon of these people who say these things because they're so sincere, right? And they're sincere because they honestly believe these, that this is happening. But does that mean it's really something that you should believe in? You know, these are questions that would need to be asked at this point. And there are, there's definitely some danger there. Absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest struggles in this field. And with dealing with experiencers specifically is, um, that fine line between enabling something and accepting something. And, you know, there will be individuals who, like we mentioned earlier, can take advantage of that, the uncertainty or the ambiguity of the phenomena for some sort of personal gain.

Or, like you said, it gets to such a point that the delusion becomes real and they actually believe what they're saying and imparting to people who are willing to listen. So I do always find that a huge struggle in this field, one I contend with every single day of dealing with this topic and kind of being a voice in it. The struggle is real. I can put it that way. And there are cults and there are, there's an unfortunate side to a lot of this. But on the flip side, there's a lot of revelation too. Oh, absolutely. I do I do want to say something too

a person really in this field and Ryan you will be a person I'm talking to here there will be what I've observed okay in doing this and concentrating on some of the misinformation and the information and the information management aspect of it you you could be approached

and be made flattered be made to feel like you're super amazing and special and you should be like a star and you know we can do this for you but it's a trap because once you do that you've been set up to fall and there have been many many many people in the field um we know about mirage men and uh benowitz and what happened to him you know he was a person who was vulnerable you know and you know stuff was said to him by misinformation agents and things like that. Seriously, I mean, this happens in this field.

And this is a very, this is something that you have, you cannot search for fame in this field. You know, you cannot want to be the UFO star. There shouldn't be a UFO star, right? And I've had people come to me and say, oh, you should do this, you should do. And immediately I'm like, I never talk to those people again because I know that this would be a doubt.

This would be a bad thing. So everyone should be on their guard who starts to put out content that's actually good, you know. And if you start to put out good content, you are going to be on a radar. So you have to be, you know, you have to be on your, you have to discern, you know, the motives and the agenda. It could be a good thing, you know, like the encounter series, you know. A lot of times you don't know until you go into it, how it's going to get, how it's, how it's, going to turn out. Very true. Again, I really do think it comes to intent with all of this. And I've been promised answers to things that my curiosity is always sought. And that's when I run away.

Because like you said, that's the trap. And if these phenomena wanted us to know the answers, they would make it abundantly clear, in my personal opinion. So the fact that they or it or has not done that, there's a reason for that. So I'm not going to take one person's word who promises you access to all of these answers to life's questions for reasons unknown. So, yeah, I would have to agree with you.

Just be careful. That's, like you said, discernment is key, for sure. All right. Let me get to this one here. Grant Lavak on Twitter asks, could you kindly comment on the Seoul Foundation's plans to engage with national governance on the UAP issue? Now I know for fact Grant lives in Australia. So is Seoul going to be an international organization? Yes, definitely. And so I do know that they are in conversation already with different governments. because different governments have different policies with respect to, say, crash retrieval or the phenomena. And they're not necessarily our policy. But Seoul is doing this completely above board, transparently, and with the knowledge of, you know, and oversight of our own government. So it's not going to overstep, you know, if our government is saying, no, you know, you can't work with Canada on this or something like that. Gary is like, you know, he's been a scientist at Stanford and we have to go through what's called internal review boards in order to do like interviews of people and things like that.

So we already have this established that we need to go through the hoops in order to do things on kind of like the up and up, right? So they are, they're going to be reaching out to various governments. They already have. And they're going to be trying to make an international effort here as well as an effort that's more diverse. So part of what they're hoping to do is to bring in, you know, the UFO field has pretty much been non-diverse, right? We can, I think, agree on that. It's this, usually this guy right here. Yeah, I know what you mean.

But so, you know, but there are a lot of people that are diverse who have very important information and, and also contributions. You know, they have skills and contributions. So I know that this is also a priority. And I think it's important. Awesome. That's good to hear. I know Grant is all for international relations on this topic. I mean, how else do you get to the answers to a global phenomenon without involving other?

other countries. It mystifies me a lot of the time. But awesome. Well, kind of in closing, Diana, there's some other stuff you're working on as well. There's a sole conference coming up. There's also a class that you're going to be teaching and conducting. Are these two things you could touch on briefly before we go here? Yeah. So I do teach online classes occasionally. And usually I teach them through a place called the morbid anatomy, which is there are these PhDs who work with medical schools to do, you know, accurate anatomy of, you know, like making wax and all kinds of sculptures for medical doctors to, like, basically do research to, so they don't have to use humans to do this. So anyway, so this is a really interesting group. And I'm a,

affiliated with them. And so I teach a class on UFOs for the group, but I also teach it independently. And I also teach a class on the texts that I think are really important to our lives right now, which would be texts like Plato's Allegory of the Cave and, you know, things like that. And it's called, these are the original red pills. That's what I call the class, the original Redfield. So I'm teaching that class. And also, I'm going to be speaking at the Seoul Conference. And I think I'll be giving a history of basically right now we're seeing a really interesting, this is an interesting time in history, right? So we're seeing the coming together of two parallel types of research into UAPs. And that's the invisible college research that had to be done

invisibly, which I know the history of that. And we also see now this academic research that's been going on in parallel, but hasn't been really rigorous because of the stigma attached. These are finally meeting. And I'm giving the history of those two traditions. And I'm going to propose how we can work together. Okay. I love that. I love that. Oh, man, sign me up. I'm in. I'm in. Well, last question, of course, Diana. When and where can we get your upcoming book? Okay, so wherever books are sold. So it's McMillan, its imprint is St. Martin's Essentials,

and it's going to be on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you know, bookstores, things like that. Awesome. Well, I have to thank you again. It's always refreshing and invigorating to have you. come on. It's always a conversation unlike any other we have here on the show. So,

thank you. Thank you for joining me once again on Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you, Ryan. It's always a pleasure to be on your show. Somewhere in the Skies is part of the Somewhere Podcast Universe. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. To learn more about all

of our shows, visit thespu.com. Now receiving frequent. Last night, I was standing across the street from a bar smoking a cigarette and these kids were leaving the bar,

some young people, four of them. And this little tiny Chevy Sedaya next to me beeped because someone unlocked it. And I took a step back and I looked at this tiny little foredoor and these kids were watching, towards it and as they got closer one of them goes oh my god the car got bigger since we were

inside and then another one goes oh holy crap it's a SUV now and so I took another look at the car and I had to sort of take their word for it because I was looking at a tiny little car and I thought I think that thought creates reality because to these kids, the car was really big. I'm not going to argue with them. Mostly because they were so excited about it.