Somewhere in the Skies - Owls, UFOs, and a Deeper Reality

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

On episode 49 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan speaks with author, Mike Clelland, about his recently released book, Stories From the Messengers: Owls, UFOs, and a Deeper Reality. This book is a companion to the groundbreaking ideas that began with Mike Clelland's earlier book, The Messengers. It is a further exploration of the connection, both symbolic and literal, between owls and UFOs. There is a strangeness to these accounts that defies any simple explanation. Each chapter tells a deeply personal story where these mysterious experiences are explored in depth. The ancient mythology of the owl is repeating itself within the modern UFO report. What plays out is a journey of transformation, with an owl at the heart of each story. And in this episode, Mike tells some of those incredible stories and where they may fit in the entire UFO mystery and beyond. Guest Bio: Mike Clelland’s 2015 book, The Messengers, was met with high praise. In it, he explores the mysterious connection between owls, synchronicities and UFO abduction. It was his first-hand experiences with these elusive events that have been the foundation for his research. The book is also a personal memoir and a journey of self-discovery. His website, www.hiddenexperience.blogspot.com, explores these events and their connection to the alien contact phenomenon. It also features extended audio interviews with visionaries and experts examining the complexities of the overall UFO experience. Mike is also considered an expert in the skills of ultralight backpacking and is the author and illustrator of a series of instructional books on advanced outdoor techniques. After 25 years living in the Rockies, he now lives in the Adirondacks. Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Official Store: CLICK HERE Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment   Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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 Sprigg. After reading the work of today's guest, there was, in my opinion, a deep connection of the symbolic and literal between owls and UFOs and individuals who've experienced both. There's a strangeness to these accounts that defies any simple explanation. In his work, the author I'll be talking to today brings forward personal stories from people around the world where these mysterious experiences are explored in depth.

The ancient mythology of the owl is repeating itself within the modern UFO report, and I am personally sold, primarily by the sheer amount of reports. What plays out is a journey of transformation with an owl at the heart of each story. Today, I'm talking to Mike Cleland about his latest companion book

All About These Connections and the incredible things that happen when the owl and the UFO converge into an exploration of reality itself and beyond. This is stories from the messengers, accounts of owls, UFOs, and a deeper reality. Now, let's talk to Mike Llellan. Mike, thank you so much for joining me again today on Somewhere in the Skies.

You were my first repeat guest, my friend. First, no way. Yeah, can you believe it? No way, you must have had someone else. Not yet. If you can believe that I've been able to get that many guests to talk about UFOs without repeating, I'm... I'll repeat myself, you know, the floor of the car. So it'll be a deja vu a little bit, I think, when people listen to this.

I think so. If they heard the first one. Right, right. Well, it was one of my most downloaded episodes. for sure. Right on. Yeah, man. So I'm currently making my way through your new book, Mike.

Stories from The Messengers, Accounts of Owls, UFOs, and a deeper reality, which is a companion to your massive undertaking of the first book, The Messengers. So before we dig into the book, I would love to know what was your motivation, to write the companion after the first book? It clocked in at over 400 pages. My God, man, to even continue after that, I can't imagine. So what was that like? Well, it actually clocked in it, I think, two pages under 400 pages.

I think it's it's 398 pages or something like that. So I say 400 pages. I think I'm allowed to like round up a little bit. But when I wrote the first one, I was beholden to to edit things down, to boil everything down. Because I was the points I was trying to make were these, I mean, I was trying to make how to say this. I mean, I felt like I was going out on the limb. I was presenting this idea that owls and UFOs are somehow connected. And not only they're connected on one level, they're connected on this other level and this other way and this third way.

There's like this shocking volume of stuff where owls and UFOs are somehow co-joined. And to make that point to a fault, perhaps, I crammed a lot of stories in there. And I had to boil those stories down. So what would happen? I know you know just what I'm talking about. You talk to, so you've talked to someone on the phone, right, who's had these experiences. And the conversation lasts an hour. And then it goes into two hours.

And it gets to about six hours. And then you call back and do that again a few days later. And so you've, and what I ended up, you know, this amazing, powerful stories that are so interwoven with synchronicities and strange experiences. Like seeing the UFO is often the least of it. You know, there's all this other stuff. You know, I was fascinated. I listened attentively to all these accounts. And this novel needed to be written about nearly every person that shared a story in the first book. And I just, it broke my heart to edit this stuff down just to snip, snip, snip, and boil it down to just the bare sparsest couple of sentences. And it bugged me and it haunted me. And I was like, I don't, I got to tell these stories more completely. So even before the first book was done, I knew I was going to do the second book. In the footnotes, it even says things like, You know, this story will be further explored in the companion book to the messengers. And it felt good to, I basically wanted to cram every possible curious thing.

Tell these stories completely. Obviously, I still had to edit out, you know, these things. But I wanted to tell one story as completely and thoroughly as possible. And I guess I did that 19 times because there's 19 chapters in the book. Yeah, exactly. And I know that feeling all too well, Mike, of, you know, these people, they spill. their souls to you when they come out with these things and you know sometimes it only takes that one person to listen and then to have to go and like you said sort of snip and mold and make it as you know

as neat as you can is it's hard because we both know that these stories are not neat they're yes they're a mess you can't tie them up in a bow you know exactly they're very rarely in any chronological order and uh it's chaos it can be chaos And, you know, I would imagine that would be a huge challenge. So I'm so happy that even before, you know, the first book came out, that you were, you knew that this was the road you were going to take. That these stories definitely had to be explored further. And I think that's awesome. And just like the original book, in your introduction to this one, you give us a sort of a four-point overview of kind of what was covered in the first book of, you know, The Owl as alarm clocks, archetypes, initials.

and a totem something, which I've always loved, because it kind of gives you an idea of where we're heading and what the owl might mean in terms of what we're about to hear throughout the book. And I think that's very important to consider when you're weaving through these experiences. So I would love, could you possibly run us through those four things that I mentioned, what these things are in terms of the owl so that we sort of get an idea of where we're headed with this conversation? So this is what happened. People would say, wait a minute, what are you talking about? What owls? Why owls? And they would ask me that. And I would correctly reply, you know, I have no idea why owls.

That's the mystery. And that didn't really fly. So I realized I had to formalize my thoughts a little bit and took two books to formalize my thoughts to this degree. So I came up with four points. These are all blurry. I'm not locked into anything. And these are as open-ended as they can be.

Yes, number one would be they owls are alom. clocks. The simplest answer to why owls is they are here to wake us up. And then you immediately have to ask, you know, well, wake us up to what? And then you're back straight to like, I don't know, the mystery, you know. So what are they waking us up to? I mean, the cover of the books is owls, UFOs into deeper reality. So I feel that part of this process of interacting with UFOs, and I would also say interacting with owls. I've had a lot of people tell me owl stories that are profoundly powerful and have changed their lives. And it wakes them up to a deeper reality.

So yes, so alarm clock wakes you up to a deeper reality. Maybe. That's tidy. It's simple. I feel like I can wrap my mind around that. Owls are an archetype. That would be number two. An archetype is one of those words that, you know, I'm sure, like you sit around in the dormitory

at the philosophy department of some Ivy League school with the bong and stay up all night and try to define what archetype really means. And you're just... So that's one of those terms, right? So within our shared memory bank, our genetic memory bank, is this stored meaning. The meaning of the owl isn't in a book. It's in our stored memory bank. It means something deeper. Luke Skywalker, he means something more than just a guy who flies around in his starfighter there.

He is an archetype of the hero, right? So the owl is an archetype for this deeper reality. And we think in terms of symbols, right? So even on the cave walls, some of the earliest drawings in the world known to man, the earliest drawings known to man are of owls. And so it's there. It's part of us. It's part of our genetic makeup.

The question, again, what is the archetypal meaning? I don't know. It's linked to this deeper reality. The third thing would be the owls are here to announce initiation. Initiation into something, right? So the initiate, like in a ritual, in a ceremony, there's the beginning of the ceremony. The initiate is going to take on a new role at the end of the ceremony. I mean, that might be joining the Cub Scouts.

It might be, you know, your first holy communion. It might be taking ayahuasca in the jungle, you know. So there is a ceremony. An initiate is then ushered in to a new realm. Now, a religious scholar would say that the initiate, you know, the initiation rights are completely metaphoric and the profound change is just a symbolic, right? But the true believer would say, no, no, the change would be entirely real. So once again, an initiation into what? So, I mean, I have so many stories of someone sees an owl, owl flies off, and then they see a, you know, flying saucer land nearby.

Like, it's endless the number of stories I have like that. So the owl is there to announce initiation. The UFO landing is an initiatory ritual. It is a right. I'm going out of the limb there and I'm being purposely provocative, saying it so forcefully. But that's my sense after doing all this. Then the question again, an initiation into what? I don't have an answer.

A bigger umbrella idea would be the owls are a totem of the transformational experience. So seeing a UFO can transform someone. You see a UFO. everything you thought about reality goes out the window. Yeah. Right? There's a new paradigm. You are thrust, it is thrust upon you.

You are every, you know, the New York time, I guess until last December, the New York Times said UFOs are not real. And we are expected to like live by that dogma. Sure, they show up in fiction, they show up in fantasy, but that's, but we are told that UFOs are not real by, by the, by the gatekeepers of our consensus reality. As soon as you see one, all that crumbles. and you are forced to rebuild your own self. So you have a transformation.

Now, there's other transformational things. You know, death, I'll show up around death. That's the ultimate transformation. And as I said before, I have spoken to people who have had owl sightings that are so profound that they have changed their lives. So again, if it's a transformational experience, if the owl is the totem of the transformational experience, a transformation into what? So all four, so one, two, three, four, all of them get asked, all you have to ask a question at the end of each of them and everything is open-ended. So what I'm saying is that I wish, I wish, I wish I could latch on to something. I've given up trying to find that elusive answer.

Like I've just, like, I know I ain't going to find it and I'm not stressing over it. And it's made me a much calmer person in a way. But what I can say is that we are confronted with a genuine mystery with this, especially with the owl stuff. I mean, the UFO thing on its own is a genuine mystery. the owls showing up at symbolic times, not even involving UFOs, other things too. Shamanic initiation is, they show up all the time. And that's just understood and respected within other cultures. Right.

And it's, you know, it's not recognized in the West in any kind of meaningful way. So, yes, that was a long answer to a short question. Oh, no. I mean, I mean, these four things are, you know, it's kind of what we sort of weave our way through with each of your chapters, with each of these experiences is how does it transform the person? That has always intrigued me most is that human aspect to all this of how it how it changes a person from everything from their mind, their body, their spirit, even physiologically, you know, I mean, these things, they can do things to you that you would never imagine

and open up that reality. And the fact, Mike, I think that you don't have answers is good. I mean, you are the only one out there connecting these things. I mean, the individuals are as well, but you're the only one writing about it. And I think that's... Well, that's, I mean, that's not quite true. I mean, there's in many, many books, especially the books of Whitley Streeper. Yes.

He addresses these issues, often in a paragraph here and there. And so, yes, so I'm picking and choosing. You know, I had a, you know, I had a, what do you call it, a buffet table of books and resources where people would mention the owl. And what I did is, you know, just filled my plate up with a lot of other people's research and then did some of my, you know, and then really wrestled with these ideas on my own. So, yeah, so I was, I recognized this pattern within the literature before I ever, and other people had too. But I kind of went all wiggy on it and just kind of fell off the cliff in a sense. As far as transformational, here's something to think about.

And this I talk about in the conclusion a little bit and talk about within the text. And I even mentioned it in the first book, too. I should, it's funny because if it's, there's 19 chapters, right? And each chapter is a singular story. but then there's multiple people in some of the stories. So it's not like I can count out how many people are in the book and how many people are healers. But I'll tell you, it's the vast majority. I think there's only like one or two people within the book that wouldn't qualify as a healer in some sense.

Oh, wow. And I mean, Reiki, rakey straight up, boom, people, you know, like I just, I don't even bother. I just write it down on the, when I talk to people, I write it down on the page during the conversation we have on the phone. when I talk to people who've had these experiences, and I just wait for them to say it. It's like, oh, by the way, I'm a Reiki Master. I'm a practicing Reiki Master. I do energy healing. If they don't say it like that, they say, you know, my wife gets migraine headaches, and I have the ability to touch her head and make her headaches go away. Or they have, you know, are someone straight up a nurse, you know? There's one of the stories in there. It's a guy named Mike

is a nurse, you know, in a hospital. So people are healing. They are healers in these, in this in this, particularly in this book, in the context of this book. So people have had these long, convoluted, mixed up, swirling, unending, tangled up owl and UFO experiences are also healers. Now, what that means? I have no idea. That actually gives me, like, how, what do you say? It's like, it's like an optimistic way of viewing it. Yeah. And I, and I, I did not set out to write like a fluffy, feel good book. And in, in at some level, it is sort of a fluffy feel good book. You know, it's got to, the overall message is optimistic. And I, and I, I wanted to be unattached to that.

But that's what emerged. And I had to sort of pull on that thread and let, and let the stories tell themselves. Yeah, yeah, let it fly, man, for sure. Well, I would love, I mean, the fact that you got to expand on each of these stories, I would love to run through some of those with you today if you're comfortable with that. Sure. I know you haven't read the entire book. So which ones are you, I mean, let's talk about something you've read.

Yes, yeah. So there were some that really stuck out to. me. The first was in Chapter 2, and this was the awakening of Susan McLeod. Yes, Susan McLeod. Susan McLeod is the most big-hearted, wonderful. She's this

Canadian. She's got a thick, funny, Canadian accent, and she talks really fast, and she just operates from this heart-focused center. She's one of those healers. She does. Yeah, she does. Hands-on healing. She does, yeah, so yeah, she's fits that. She is the quintessential

example of that healer. Right, right. And I mean, you know, going off of that, again, this isn't just about UFOs and owls. Susan experienced many different things when the owl came into her life and when she realized that. So I'd love to hear more about that if you could run us through that. Great, yeah. So Susan, Susan McLeod is a, she lives in Canada, and she, this is going back a few years, I think she's actually moved since this point. But at the time, she was living in a house in the woods of Ontario. and in the back of the house she had a teepee. It was down by the river and she would use it for, you know, herself.

It was her little, you know, she would perform little traditional ceremonies back there. She's part McMak. She's native, well, I guess First Nation is what you would refer to it in Canada. And the Mick Mack tribe is the tribe from the East Coast there that she can trace some of her ancestry back to. And she's also Scots-Irish or Scots-Irish, which is wonderful because there's another, that's another part of, are the lore where you know you have little people and myths of and lots of uh psychics seeming to emerge out of those those three lineages i guess so the you know the celtic the gaelic and the in the native american actually a friend of hers had died a friend named berry about 11 o'clock at night she went out

to her teepee and she wanted to perform a ceremony so she built a fire she burned some sage she pounded on a drum and while she's in the teepee she feels something press against the fabric of the tepee behind her and it seems big she's like oh no there's a bear out there that was her first thought so she's kind of like oh so she so she peeks out the door and she doesn't really see anything so she takes a couple steps out the door and and she's confronted by five Sasquatch standing in the path the way back to the house so she she she had this feeling like oh oh like is this my time you know like it was kind of she was so she said she wasn't quite frightened but she was shocked let's say She carefully backs into the teepee.

Now it really, now she's freaked out. When she got back in the teepee, she got scared. And she puts more wood on the fire and she bounds the drum really loud. Then she says, okay, now I'm going to try this again. I'm trying to get out. And I'm going to walk back up to the house and are they out there? And she peeks out. She doesn't see them.

She walks up to the house. And as she's walking, she sees that they've moved away. And they're in the exact same pose. They're posed like a family portrait. There's two big tall Sasquatch in the back. And three, what would seem to be immature Sasquatch, standing in the foreground. This mimics her own family, her and her partner and the three kids.

So she runs into the house and she wants to tell her kids. Oh, she's like, I just saw Sasquatch in the yard. I'm super excited. And she gets to the house and the kids are like, mom, mom, something's going wrong. Everything's going crazy. And she's like, what is it? What isn't? She's like the kids are crying and freaking out. And there's these black shadow beings that are flying around the house. So she's kind of, I mean, I don't think she would call herself a shaman,

but she does shaman like things. So she gets out the sage and she runs through the house and she burns the sage. and she commands these entities to leave the house. And she says, I can't tell the kids about the Sasquatch. They are already freaked out. What am I supposed to do? So I got to tell my husband. He's in the garage, which is a woodshed.

So she runs down and she tries to open the door, but the door's locked. And not only is it locked, he's like jammed a piece of wood into the door so it can't open. And she pounds in the door. And she's like, let me in, let me in. Because she wants to tell him. He opens the door. And he goes, what the hell is going on? You know, what were you doing in that teepee?

Basically implying that she like, and she's like, she's like, What, what, what, why? He's like, there are these black beings. They are flying around the room here. They are peeking in through the window. There are black beings in here. It's like, what? So she can't tell him either. He's totally freaked out. So she's like kind of like at a loss, even know what to do. And it's there at the garage. And finally she says, I need to just take a step away. So she steps out onto the driveway and praise to God. She prays, she looks up to the heavens and praise to God for some sort of answer, some sort of solace, some sort of understanding. And she's looking out. And she's looking out. this is so powerful to me. She prays to God and she looks up and she sees a triangle-shaped UFO form out of the inky blackness. All of a sudden, these three stars are moving above her, and there's no way to see the stars through the blackness of this form. And then it gets a little lower, and then it's just above the trees. But she describes it as kind of flitting in and out between this reality and something else. She says it's like a hologram kind of on static.

she can see right through it. So it's not a physical craft in the way we understand it, and it hits her. And it hit me too. You know, Sasquatch are not big, hairy beasts that live in the forest. There's something more. Shadow beings are not evil ghosts that live in a haunted house. There's something more. And a UFO is not a big metal spaceship from another planet.

It is something more. So she's hit with all of this stuff. And if we back up, she began the whole thing with a ritual. The question I ask when I talk to people who have had these experiences, what were you doing just before the event started? What were you doing just before the, and I'll say it for an owl, too. What were you doing before you saw the owl? What were you doing before you saw the UFO?

She was performing a ritual, a ritual connected to death, which is the lore of the owl. Now, one of the questions I asked her is like, this is how we met was through the owl stuff, is in a way because she saw my Facebook page and it's like, oh, my God, the owls. I love owls. She's got owls all around her house, and then that's, so that's the first half of her chapter is telling that story as completely as I can. And the rest of the chapter is telling a bunch of her own experiences, many of which involve owls. She has an amazing story where she was in her yard and she was waiting for her daughter to come home from town.

And she was in the yard. She had built a bonfire in the yard. And she was like, why isn't my daughter coming home? This doesn't seem right. And this owl flies over her head. And she knew right away. She was her first thought like, oh, my God, someone's dead. She just knew it.

And then her daughter pulls in the driveway and says the roads are all blocked off. There's been a terrible motorcycle accident. Later, a man was killed in a motorcycle accident. The man's brother just looked around and tried to figure out the closest place to call someone. And that was the gas station where Susan's son was working at the time. So this guy randomly calls the gas station and says, I'm the brother of the man who died on the motorcycle. I just want to know any details of the event. And he says, well, here, I wasn't working that night, but this fellow was working here that night.

So it gives her the house number. Phone rings. Susan McLeod picks it up, who saw the owl, and they start a conversation. And leading up to this, leading up to the phone call, and after the death, Susan had been hearing. And she imitates it. She goes, who, woohoo, whohoo. She'd been hearing this funny call in the woods. And they were, they were like, someone's out in the woods.

There's like somebody out partying in the woods. It's like teenagers. There's somebody out being rowing. in the woods. But it was this really happy, joyous, who-hoo, who-hoo! And she later realized it was an owl. But they first thought it was someone out there having fun and partying. And she says, you know, like I saw an owl fly right above me. It was a bard owl. And the guy says, that was my brother loved owls. And the bard owl, that was his favorite owl. He loved owls. And then she said, and you know what else I've been hearing is this noise? And she mimicked. He just did what I just did. Hoo-hoo. She did it over the phone.

And the guy starts crying. He said, my brother would make that noise every time he was at a party. He would get so joyous and he would get rowdy and he would make that call. And that was his kind of, that was his signature call. So how do you, you know, like, so how do you, how do you back engineer that? Yeah. What's going on? I don't, so the way you do, you can't back engineer, right? So you can only like say like, wow, that's a beautiful story. And there's, there's several more in that chapter that are equally as powerful. Right. There's one where they, she had people over for Thanksgiving and they, they went out into the back and they were taking walk and She's somewhat of a shaman.

She's very spiritual. And both of these people were widows. It was a man and a woman. The woman's husband had died and the man's wife had died. And they said, can we like ask for a sign? You know, like, well, what do you think we should do? And they said, well, let's just have an owl show up. They both said, yeah, let's do that.

Because my husband loved owls and the guy says, my wife loved owls. So they get down on their knees and prey. And this owl lands in a branch right next to him. And they take pictures of it. I didn't put it in the book. They're not really that exciting of a picture. But, you know, so this is normal. I'm at the point now where these kinds of stories are real.

They're normal. They're happening to real people. Right. And the string of events for each of them, it's almost, it's overwhelming in the sense that, like, you want to make connections, but we don't truly know if there are any. But again, like, it's the connections, I think, that the individual makes with them all, like, too. And I think that's what I love about what you do with these is you let the people tell their stories. Just allowing them like the space to tell it and then giving your own comments on it, I think is very important, you know.

Susan's stories, it was almost too much for me to handle. But then it just gets crazier and crazier as the chapters go on in terms of like how many different experiences these people are having. This is funny. Oh, yeah. Do you know Miriam Delacado? That sounds very familiar. She's a, she's a, I'm stealing her line, basically. We had this conversation.

We kind of, I asked her the question. And so I'm going to ask it of myself and I'll give the answer that she gave me. So how do you know this shit is real? You know? And like, how do you prove that to someone? How do you prove it? How do you know? And my answer would be, look at my email inbox.

Yeah. Like nobody, like the CIA is not sitting in the basement trying to like mind control, you know, like mess with me by making up these stories. There's too many. There's not enough people. in the basement of the Pentagon to flood my inbox like this. So, like, something's going on because, I mean, like, the stories are all, I, they're not the same. They're not identical, but they have the same flavor. Yeah.

So, like, I may not have the exact story, but I certainly get stories that feel, that have that mood, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that eerie haunting mood. I get those stories all the time. Well, another one that really stuck out to me, Mike, was in chapter nine. This was the story of Denise Lynn and the three white feathers. Would you mind running us through this one? Again, another healer. Yeah. So, and funny, it's Denise Lynn actually, she's got some Native American heritage,

and she looks like Susan McLeod. They look like sisters. So Denise Lynn is a very popular writer and author, and she's done a lot of books. And a lot of, she's kind of at the forefront of that, of the, a lot of books on on animal totems and things like that. And so Denise Lynn was shot and killed when she was 16 years old. I think that's right.

And it's the Summer of Love, 1967. So she was on a little motor scooter and she was riding down the road and some guy rammed her and she ended up in the ditch. And he stopped his car and rolled down the window and pulled out a gun and shot her. And later a car came by and found her in the ditch. And this is in 67. So they had to, someone else ran and called the ambulance. And when she was at the hospital, she died.

She went into the light. Classic, perfect near-death experience. And she felt she had this magical vision. She was just flooded with love. And she was awash in this golden light. And she was at this river, this magical river. And she was like ankle deep. And she was walking across this crystalline magical river.

And she knew if she got to the other side of the river, she wasn't coming back. And then all of a sudden she felt like this rope around her. Like she had she had this vision of like being lassoed. She had cousins that were in Oklahoma that had a horses and would practice their lassoing. And she was like, oh my God, I'm lassoed. What's happening? And she heard this voice that said, you know, you are not done.

You need to go back. And she's like, no, no. And then she wakes up in her hospital bed. And so this shows up, this near death experience multiple times in the book. And it also shows up in the messengers too in the first book. Some people would say that to be a shaman, you need to have first died to travel to the land of the dead. Oftentimes shamans do that metaphorically, right? They'll go through a ritual, they'll go in a cave and then come back out, you know,

or they'll go through a ritual with drugs or ayahuasca or mushrooms or something like that that will mimic death, you know, symbolically. But she really, she is, and I, it's funny because I actually called her a shaman in one of the rough drafts. And she got right back to me and she said, I am not a shaman. I do not use that name. And I very cautiously in the chapter say she does do shaman-like things. I think that's fair. But she's very clear that she's not a shaman. So later on, she's with her husband and they're going fishing and they're in northern California.

She's living in San Francisco at this point. And she, they're driving home and she's like, what's that light? And the husband can't see it. It's like, I don't know. I can't see it. It's on your side of the car. It's like, well, there's this light. wait a minute it's turned it's telling us to follow it he's like what no you it's not telling us it's just a light in the sky

and she's like no no no turn up this road right here we got to follow this thing and he's like ugh they drive down this all of a sudden they're off the main highway and then this little tiny rural road and they're in the forest and and then he's like i'm not driving any farther she's like we'll get out and look at it so they stop the car and he's like uh-oh as soon as he sees it he's like oh so she looks at it they're standing there together and she says it she says teleph she says in her mind she says in her mind mind, she says, can you blink your lights? And it blinks its lights immediately. And then she says, can you blink him again? And it blinks him again. And she felt a presence into her mind that was like soft and kind and questioning. And and then she had this wave of love and homesickness and compassion. This

sounds like the near death experience. She's got the same emotions. So in her mind, she looks at this flying saucer way off in the distance and she shouts like, tell you. Helopathically, please help me be of service to others. Help me to help others. She shouts this over and over again. And this flying saucer goes and flies right up and hovers right above the trees right close to him. And eventually she's like, she's like screaming in her mind like, you know, I want to help others. Help me to help others.

And then a little airplane flies in the sky nearby and the thing flies off. And she feels like it wanted to go farther up the road. And she tells her husband, let's go farther up the road. We need to see it again. He's like, no, uh, we're getting out of here. And so they drive back and she kind of says, I think that thing wanted us to follow it up the road farther. And he was like, I didn't want to drive up the road. And they get this huge argument, the worst argument they've ever been in.

And the next morning, they all is forgiven. And the husband and wife, they make love and they, and she says, I'm pregnant. Now, she had been told repeatedly by doctors over and over and over again because of the severity of the gunshot wounds, which were in her abdomen, that she would never be able to. able to have children. And he said, you can't have children. She's like, I am pregnant. I know. I know I am. And then nine months later, their daughter Meadow is born. And now she is also working with her mother doing, writing books together. They write books together. And the UFO literature is, is a wash with strange UFO sightings and pregnancies. So here's a mysterious pregnancy, right? So this is, she shouldn't be able to get pregnant. She is, you know, the daughter is now a spiritual healer and author. Later,

She goes into the woods to find her true name. And that's her intention. She's Native American. She wants to find her true name, her spirit name. So she walks into the woods and she finds this nice spot. It's hot out in the sunshine, but the woods are cool in northern California where she lives. And she sits down and she meditates for a little bit and she says, I am meditating to find my true name. She opens her eyes.

And there's an owl on a branch right in front of her, close enough to touch. They're staring at her. They lock eyes. And she says it's straight up. I had a telepathic download. And I've heard this many times, both from people who've locked eyes with aliens, as well as people who've locked eyes with owls. I had a telepathic download. And the owl flies off.

And then when the owl flies off, there's like, there was, there had been an eerie silence in the forest. And all the little cricket noises and rustling leave noises gently come back after the owl flies off. When the owl flew away, there were three little feathers. in the branch where the owl had been sitting. So she picks these little feathers up and they're a little downy white feathers and they're in her hand. And she hears a voice in her head that says, put the feathers in your medicine bag. She's like, I have this nice medicine bag back home. I don't have it with me right now.

She hears this voice that says, you are your own medicine bag. Put the feathers in your medicine bag. So she eats them. She eats the three feathers. Right then in there. Boom. Now other questions is she said, like just it's not, it's really hard to eat a feather. Just you know, they're really dry.

that's hard to swallow. So now this is the Eucharist. This is, this is the, this is the Holy Communion, right? She has been confronted with a mystical being, right? And this, it's not Jesus, but in this case, it's an owl. It plays out like a UFO sighting, you know, telepathic messages and silence. And so she took on the name Whitefeather. Now, she later meets this fellow named Crettoe Moutoir. Crettoe Moutoir is a shaman. He shows up. He is all over the book, passport to the cosmos. That's the book where Dr. John Mack, the Harvard professor of psychiatry, compares and contrasts UFO abduction with the rights of shamanic initiation. And Kratomutwa is a South African. He's a Zulu, I think, Zulu Shaman.

And I have this thing written up. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so cool. And do you know Joshua Cutchin? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he wrote a book on weird foods. Right. And I sent him a draft of this. It's like, oh, here's a great one.

you know, like this, here's an owl that's like, she ate the feathers of an owl. How's that for like, you know, eating weird food? And then he read the whole chapter and said, you know, Credo Mutwa ate, ate an alien, don't you? And I'm like, what? And it's like, it's like there's like legitimate articles where he like is interviewed. He's, I think he's still alive. He's ancient. He must be 95 or something.

And he said, yeah, he tells this story. And he just tells it as plainly as can be. And it is so far out. And I include it in the book. And I even have like little caveats that say, You know, even John Mack said it is hard to talk to certain indigenous, you know, to be a westerner and to listen to the stories that are shared among shamans in what we would call a primitive culture. But, you know, that's kind of, that might not be the right word. But, you know, he says, it's like, they say things that like, I, it's how do you fact check this, you know?

So he said that someone came to him and had a little blob of ugly gray flesh and him and several other shamans went through a ceremony and ate this little. blob of flesh. They came near death. Once again, the death, they basically, they couldn't walk. They were bleeding out of all their orifices. They were completely on the verge of death, hallucinating like crazy. And then this, then they came out of it and then were basically, the way he describes it is like an LSD trip for the next month, nonstop. And I mean, this is ayahuasca. And ayahuasca is referred to it. I mean, it's not ayahuasca, but this is like the, you know, there's these rituals of psychedelic initiation. rooms in ayahuasca. And, you know, I talk about that there's something called eating the God. And this is like straight up an ancient right that seems to have been co-opted by the, by the Catholic Church into, or the early Catholic Church, and has become communion. So like,

we're in the West. Every Sunday, Catholics all over the world are, you know, kneeling down in their church and partaking in this ancient right that is repeating itself within, I I mean, I don't even know. Like, within the UFO lore and within the, I mean, in this case, within, in the story, there's a UFO component to it. And within the owl component. It just, I know, yes, this is where to tell, I had no choice, but to tell this story as fully and extensively as I could. It brought a tear to my eye, to be honest, Mike, especially when, when she found out she was pregnant.

I mean, like, what could be, you know, even besides the events that happened to her, just, the idea of like wanting that to want wanting to have a child your whole life and then finally after all of this powerful transformational things in your life finally getting that one thing you've always wanted to be a mother it's it's beautiful it really is yeah and and um and so one of the things she had a hard time with creedomuchwa because crater mutua looked right at her and said you my child have had interactions with the aliens you have been taken many times And she's like, I have not. She said, yes, yes, yes, you have.

And so I, in many of these stories, I dance around the question, right? Because there's no way to answer this. Like, you know, I asked Denise Lynn straight up on a telephone call. Like, are you, do you think you're abductee? And she said, no, I don't think I am. But Kratom Wuchwa thinks I am. And then I'm like, yes, but you are sure acting like one, you know? So I don't know what happened that night when the UFO flew right up to your house.

but I mean, right up above the trees, above your car, not your house, above the trees near her husband's car. So it's not up to me to come to a conclusion, but all the puzzle pieces fit together for that one. The other one that really caught my attention to, Mike, moving back to UFOs for a minute, was chapter 16 of the book, Owls and the Road at Night. This brought forth a very intriguing UFO sighting, ushered in by many, many owl experiences, heavy on the owls of the owls of this one. And that came, by the way, of the prime witness, Maggie and how she reacted to it all. That was also very interesting. So I'd love if you could sort of run us through the string of events with Maggie. This one was great. So Maggie, that's how this is like Christmas of right after the book came out, right? The book came out in 2015 on the 5th of December. And before Christmas,

I'm getting, and you might, I'm getting long letters through email, from this woman Maggie who lives in Scotland. And they're long, they're dense, they're just, and they're kind of frantic. And I recognize that frantic quality. And she says straight up, like, I feel like I'm going crazy. This is frantic stuff and all this owl stuff.

And I had this all thing here and I had this all thing there. And it's just like, you know, she's going to buy a little owl. And then she goes out and she's walking the dog. And the guy says, oh, there's owls over there. And then she's, you know, the next night she's, she's on the beach with her husband. And somebody else says, oh, there's owls with babies over there. And so it's just like one after another after another, boom, boom, boom, she's getting hit with these owl synchronicities.

And then she's driving a friend home from basically from a date. And, you know, they had way they went to, they dropped them off at a restaurant. Her and her husband dropped her their friend off at a restaurant. And that sounds like he didn't have a car. And so and then they picked him up later. And they were driving home and they turned this corner and there's this thing hovering above the street. And it's funny because I talked to the talk to the, talk to. Peter and he, the husband, and he, I kind of said in one of the lines of the things that I said, like, you know, and then Peter was shocked and he said, I was not shocked. I was a little surprised, but I was not shocked. The only thing that, you know, just it was a startling to turn that corner and see that craft. And then she's trying to describe this thing, but every time she describes it, another memory enters her mind. And then finally she's like, she knows, I was on board that craft. Like, I was outside the car. I was on board that craft. I have memories of being on board the craft.

And it's this, I try to, I say it early on in the chapter where there's something frantic about it. There's something frenetic about it. And at one point she says she found an owl feather. This is early on. She found an owl feather in the inner yard. And she told me over the, over this, this is going back. This is in December of 2015. Right after the first book came out, she said, you know, like, oh, my, my husband, he knows a lot about all feathers.

And he knows the significance of it. And I knew as clear as anything I knew, I just got right back to her. I said, is your husband a shaman? And she said, yes, he is. He studied with this Canadian natives, and he's a shaman. And it doesn't sound like it's very well accepted in his community. And he keeps kind of hush-hush, his present community in Scotland. And then they were, they couldn't figure out whether they were both sort of so mixed up that didn't,

they didn't understand whether they had dropped the person off already. Or if the person that they were dropping off was still in the back seat of the car, they called him up and said, do you remember when we turned the corner, we saw a UFO. And he like roared with laughter. and it's like, we never saw a UFO. And they were like, ooh, I guess he didn't see it. But I don't, and there was missing time. And her kids started drawing pictures of aliens and writing like UFOs are real or aliens are real on things and without any prompting.

And there was just all synchronicities up one side down the other. And I felt connected in a way to this story. I mean, I felt like it was, it was so personal for me some of the things that happened in that story. in the conversations going back and forth across the ocean. So that one was, I felt so vitally dedicated to that story in particular. There was a point when I felt that they were going to back out. They were going to say, oh, I don't think we should have this story in the book. And I never pressed them.

All I did was sent them a final draft, and they said, yes. They made a couple very small changes. One of them was that Peter said that he wanted that one line taken out, that he was shocked, or that he was startled or something. Frightened, I think is what I said. And that was about it. Yeah, I mean, and when you can feel that connection, I know I had that a couple times in my own book

where something just, it resonated more than other aspects of things. That's when you know you've really tripped on to something when you're so deeply embedded in the material that it does start to open you up as the writer as well. I think that's awesome, like. And, you know, there's a trio of chapters towards the end of the book that I'm starting to make my way through right now. And you categorize them as owls and gratitude. I thought that was really interesting. So I'd love to know, like, why did you decide to group these together?

What were some of the connections about? Well, there was all one chapter. It was all going to be one chapter. And I was working with Suzanne Chancellor. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, I'm working with Suzanne Chancellor. And she's like, Mike, this is turning into its own book, this three chapters. This is like, you can't make this one chapter.

Like, no, it's one chapter. I want to make it one chapter. I'm like, I'll make it one chapter in three parts. And she's like, well, I guess. And so we eventually made it into three chapters. And so the first, this is, okay, the first chapter is, and I'll, oh my God, it's like, it's a long winded telling this stuff. So this guy, Don gets a hold of me. And he sends me this letter.

And, I mean, you must know what I'm talking about. You ever getting long letters? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm like, up, brace yourself. Like, okay. And I feel, I mean, like, so the.

So he said, here's a, here's a story for you. And he had lived in this little town in Missouri, grew up there, and farm town. And he knew everything about it. So he left town and moved to Florida as a young adult and then came back. I think he was in his 30s when he came back. And so he's back in his hometown. He runs into his brother, his younger brother. And his brother's got his like camouflage, camo gear.

It's hunting season. And his brother's got, you know, he. kind of makes fun of his brother a little bit. Like, you don't need all that stuff. You don't need the camo gear. You don't need that dough scent to sprinkle on that, you know, so that to attract the bucks. And he's like, well, you haven't been around here for years. Things have changed.

Hunting's not like it used to be. It's a little harder than it used to be. And he said, listen, I'm going to go in the woods in a half hour. I'm going to come out with a deer. So he goes into the house and he gets his dad's old 30-30 and walks into the woods. And he knew just where he was going to go. He said he knew a little trail that the deer is always used. So he climbs a tree and he's in the tree.

And he does something, this is again, there's this thing that showed up, and I am not like a churchgoer and Christian. And this Christian imagery is all over this book. I didn't know. I mean, I don't know what to. I couldn't, I kind of want, part of me was like, you know, wanted to very cautiously edit that out. And I was like, oh, I can't, you know. Like, so he says a prayer. And he says, I am praying with gratitude in advance.

I want a quick, painless kill. And I want to feed my wife and family. family. So he's in the tree and then this, everything gets quiet. Everything gets eerily still. Very strangely silent. And he looks off and there's this dot, this white dot coming towards him, off in the distance. It's bobbing a little bit as it approaches him. It's getting closer and closer and then owls fly very slowly. He realizes it's an owl. Owls have great big wings and the reason they fly so quietly is because they have these big wings and they fly slowly. So very slowly, this snowy owl, which is very unusual to see in the lower latitudes around Missouri. A snowy owl flies past him,

and as it flies past him, he locks eyes with this thing, and it flies on. He turns his head, and this thing flies down just above the open area, and the owl flies right over a deer, a doe, standing broadside in the meadow right below his tree. So he picks up his gun, and he carefully aims, and he fires one shot, and the deer runs off. And he said, I'm not a hunter, so this is, I'm paraphrasing him. He said, any hunter knows that you don't chase a deer into the woods because you don't want it to run for miles. You want it to lay down and die peacefully. He said, I may have even fallen asleep in the tree for a moment, which is a powerful. I mean, this is, I couldn't have written.

If I was writing fiction, I wouldn't have written this. Climbs down the tree, he walks into the woods in the direction of it. He says, it's got to be in here somewhere. I know it was a clean kill. And he walks around, he walks around, there's no deer, there's no deer. he's like, I need help. And the squirrel goes, the squirrel runs up to him and runs right up to him, looks in the eye, and then the squirrel turns around and runs off into the forest a little in a different spot.

And he follows the squirrel. And he realizes he didn't, he finds the deer. The deer is in a slight depression. The squirrel leads him to the deer. And as soon as he sees the deer, the squirrel, like, gives him this look like, okay, job done, takes off. And he's standing there. Couldn't see the deer because it was in a slight depression, but he had walked rather close to it when he was searching before.

and he looks up in the tree just above the deer, and there's the owl. Now, I, this story, he told it so beautifully, I basically just cut and pasted his story and let him tell it. And he had been studying remote viewing at this point in his life. And he said he was like living in this kind of like nonstop synchronous cloud of, of attachment to this greater realm. And so I discussed the, within that chapter, I discussed the, um, the, some of the issues as far as remote viewing, you know, military remote viewing. He was working with Joe McMonigle. Joe McMonigle, he met him over email and Joe McMonicle was his mentor. So there's, and just, there's all this connection to this stuff. And there's just,

it just goes on and on and on. And this is, I couldn't rein this in. I had to like really explore the, the aspects where he's doing remote viewing. And, you know, he, he met Jesus while remote viewing. And it was like the most profound spiritual thing in his life, you know, So now, okay, so this is, he's got a story of meeting the green man or the green man peeking in through his window as a little boy in the farm. So he met as his Scottish grandmother was the psychic in the family. And she explained that, you know, he was very frightened of the green man. She said, the green man is not here to hurt you. You know, he's, and how would you describe the green man?

Her grandmother says around the breakfast table the night he was at his grandmother's house saw this green man made of leaves standing out the window and freaked out. out, screamed. And if grandma and grandpa ran to the room and like, oh my God, what's wrong? What's wrong? And then he described it to his grandmother. And she knew just what he was talking about. She asked, you know, how would you describe him? And he said something he said rather sophisticated. Like he is of the forest. He knew that was sophisticated as even as little boy. He said, he is of the forest. And a little while later, I get another email. This guy named Joe. He tells a story of going deer hunting. He's got a deer stand. a tree. He's walking to the tree and it's nighttime and he looks up in the sky and there's a UFO.

He pulls out his camera, his phone and tries to take video of it. It's all black. There's nothing to see. He can't really take photographs of the nighttime sky with a camera like that. And he's, he's, he's astonished. It's scary. He flies off. He's doing a little voiceover on the, on the video. And he goes into his tree stand and as soon as he gets into his tree stand, so he feels something touch his head. And then he turns his flashlight on and there's an owl on the branch right across from him, eye level in the tree next to him. Owl and UFO. It's perfect, right? And then there's the same vibe to this. He was like grateful in advance for the hunting and he's had, you know, there's the same, it's basically mimics Don's experience. Joe and Don, those experiences are so close. So I spend

these two chapters comparing and contrasting these two stories. Joe, the second fellow, he's struggling with his spirituality. And he's basically saying this is a, you know, this owl stuff is producing synchronicities in his life. He woke up and there was a, he was reading the supernatural by Whitley Streber and Jeffrey Criple. And there's a point in that book where someone says, where Whitley Streber says that this experience is the, is being, is the, is the, is winking back from the unknown.

So there's a reference to winking. And, and as soon as he reads that, he hears on the radio. that this woman is saying like, oh, this woman tells a story where she's driving with her daughter, and a red cardinal lands on the road, and the mother says, oh, that's grandma, winking back at us. This happens at the same time he's reading that story. Boom, boom, boom. He tells his wife, I had this weird synchronicity about winking, and a red cardinal, boom, a red cardinal lands on the tree outside the house. So Joe is at this point.

He's on the back porch, and this is later. a little bit later. He's like, I need, I need, I need to pray. I'm all mixed up. Like this owl stuff, this UFO stuff, it's like oppressive. And then he says, I can't formulate my prayer. I can't formulate my prayer. It's like, wait a minute, I just, am I on the right path? And right at that moment, boom, boom, boom, boom, five red cardinals land in the snow right in front of them. He said it was remarkable. They're red, the bright red color and the white snow on a gray day. There was no color around in these bright bright red and then they go boom boom boom boom they all one after another fly off cardinal look it up in the dictionary cardinal means something of the up most

importance it's per i mean like i can't how do you make this stuff up and and it just so there's a third story and this is the problem right yeah i had to formalize this story like i so the third story there's a woman named kelly and she she puts a note on facebook like you know like magical nature day And she tells this story, like, I had been hiking the day before, and I just wanted to see an owl, and I wanted to see an owl. this was yesterday. All I wanted to do was see an owl. I was hiking with my friend and I was whining. I want to see an owl. And they even heard an owl and tried to find it. They couldn't. And so the next day, she didn't know she was supposed to hike. She didn't have a, she was all of a sudden this like, oh, I have some time to hike. I'm going to go run him and do a hike. She had this big

thing planned, and then it kind of fell through and she just kind of went to this little trail near her house that she hikes all the time. And she sits on a rock and she's like, I am so grateful for this beautiful fall day. And right at that moment, an owl flies right above her head and lands on the tree across from her right at eye level. All three of these stories, the owl, they lock eyes at eye level. That's important to me. And then so I explore her story and her memories as a child and missing time and UFOs. And she's in the first book. She's in the, one of my favorite stories in the first book is Kelly's story where she is on a hammock in her yard. And I'll tell this. I'll just, you just cut me off if you want. I feel like I'm on her. I drank a lot of

coffee, so I'm on the roll here. No, I love it, man. Cut me on if you need to. So Kelly's, this is in the first book. Kelly is in the hammock in her backyard, and she is alone, and she's trying to find some sort of proof

that these things are real. She has all the earmarks of someone who's had direct contact, but she has no conscious memory of it, but she has all kinds of things that imply it and hint it, and she's looking up into the sky, she lies there, closes her eyes, and counts down from 10, and opens her eyes,

hoping to see something. She said, you know, I just was trying it. I was just playing around. Her son, who was 10 at the time, runs up and hops in the hammock with and says, Mom, what are you doing? She's like, I'm playing this game. I close my eyes and say, oh, oh, let me do it. Let me do it. And he, without any prompting, they both lie there. They close it. It's like, we're going to close our eyes. And the boy says, dear God, can we see a UFO? Three, two, one. And they open their eyes. And there's this crystalline, sparkling ship like hovering out at the edge of the property above the tree. Like far away, but I mean, that's their line of sight. And she's like, she's like, run inside and get the binoculars.

So they're a little boy, bumma, bum, bum, bum, runs the house, turns around, bum, bum, bum, runs back to the hammock. So they're out there looking at this thing in the sky, in the very, and her husband, who's very skeptical of this stuff comes out with this. So what are you doing? It's like, we're looking at this thing. Here, look through the binoculars. And the thing is gently moving.

So he has to walk on the deck to get it in there. They stay in the hammock and he has to walk on the deck to watch this. So that happened on one day. I'm jumping. now we're going completely to another book. So we're in the big blue book rather than the green book. So I got that story on one day. The day before, I had sat and talked with Susan Kornacki.

She is very outspoken about her experiences. She's out. She's talking about it. She does interviews. And she contacted, like I, she hinted years before that she had an owl story. And I always took me forever to get a hold of her. And when I finally did, this is the story she told. she was at a Easter party.

And the day, a couple days before on Good Friday, this is so beautiful, on Good Friday, she felt this like surge run up and down her spine. And she kind of even blurted out like, oh my God, am I being crucified? And I had to interrupt. Like, wait a minute, you said that like two days before on Easter party? That was like Friday. You said that on the Friday? You said, yeah.

It's like, do you know what? I mean, it's the day Christ was crucified on Good Friday. And she said, I had no idea. I didn't know that. I was like, well, yeah, okay. So this is like, this imagery, like, I think it's, my sense is that we are, in the West, we have the Bible as our mythology, right? Maybe in Athens, they have a different set of mythology. Maybe in, you know, the Pueblo communities of the Southwest, they have a different set of mythology.

But we're stuck with this Bible mythology, and it emerges in these stories. So she's at this Easter party, all of a sudden, her spine is going crazy. And she's like, oh, my God, I, she said if she feels like a Tesla coil, like exploding in her spines. She says this Kundalini type experience. And she says, I got to go. And she leaves her daughter with her husband. She said, I'm going home. I just got key.

I got to go. So she drives home. And she lies in the hammock. She's in the hammock in the backyard. And as soon as she lies in the hammock, trying to chill out, beautiful spring day, Easter, springtime, New England. As soon as she lies in the hammock, boom, an owl lands at one tree, hammocks tied between two trees.

Owl lands in the tree behind her at her head and lands at the tree in front of her at her feet. And these owls start talking to each other. And she feels this electric surge. churning through her body. I just get the clear image of a of a circuit on a, on a circuit board, right? You know, it's got this little thing. It's plugged in with two things in each side. It's a little circuit is like recharge. It's getting zapped. So like her batteries are being recharged by these negative and positive owls. Her husband comes home again, skeptical husband comes home. She says, what do you see? So well, there's an owl on that branch and there's an owl

in that branch and there's hooting. It's like, yeah, okay, just got to want it to make sure. she said after that she had been wanting to do hands-on healing. She doesn't call it Reiki, but she's been doing hands-on healing. And right after that, people just started calling her out of the blue. So do you do hands-on healing? Because I have this thing I need to work on. And so she started became a healer right after these owls kind of zapped her. And then if you have Kelly and Susan sit next to each other.

I have a photograph of them together. It looks like sisters. Like I almost want to say twin sisters. It's not quite twin. But, I mean, they look like they are, it's remarkable. So here's the two stories, you know, basically one on a Monday, one on a Tuesday that arrived in my lap without me trying. I guess I did try because I'd been trying to get a hold of Susan to hear her story for years. So, okay, now we're going to go back to the new book.

So they have these three stories, the same thing, right? They didn't arrive day after day after day like that. But these three stories paralleled each other so much. And one of the subtext of these stories was this sense. of gratitude. And I, those three stories are the, are the least UFOE, if that's a word, that's not really a word. They're the most powerful to me collectively three in a row because there's, there's like this magical lesson that's in those stories that emerges out of these three experiences.

And that's the culmination of the book in a way. As I said before, I did not try to write a touchy-feely book. but that's the book that emerged. There's some, there's other stuff in it too, but it is a very sensitive book. The book was originally had it did an original cover that was blood red. It was so striking. It was so like graphically powerful. And I kind of realized like, this is not a blood red book.

This is a soft book. This is a, this is not a hard book. This is a soft book. So I changed it to this kind of nighttime green, the cover. now. So it's like the owl lit by the moonlight. That's kind of what I was trying to do. Absolutely. And I mean, the colors just blend so well together on both your covers. But the new one, like the eyes, ah, my God, it captures you unlike anything. And I know that's what people experience when they see the owls in real life as well. So you evoke such a powerful

feeling just with a cover, Mike. And I think once you actually get into the words of the book, it's only, it just gets better. Well, there's words in there too. You open the cover. Don't judge a book by It's covered. There are some words in there. Yeah. Well, moving away from the book for just a sec, Mike, certainly we're not going to move away from owls. I still find myself going back to the idea of owls playing a role in paranormal. And in a recent essay you posted on your blog, you even connect it to the supernatural in the work of someone we all know, Charles Fort, and Kenneth Arnold.

Now, this is something I had no idea about. So would you mind touching on this for us? So Kenneth Arnold, father of the modern UFO. era. He's the guy in 1947 flying in his private plane above Mount Rainier in Washington sees nine shiny objects. They're not saucer shaped

but he says they skipped across the sky like saucers on water and that's where the term flying saucer came from. And that's what people started seeing afterwards. He did not see flying saucers but that's what people reported. By all accounts he is a stoic, trustworthy

guy. I literally say like if you wanted to cast a guy in a in a Hollywood Western, who is the upstanding citizen of a western town. You would just, no one could be more perfect than casting Kenneth Arnold. You know, he lived on a ranch, in Idaho, and Kenneth Arnold had a pet owl. I talked to his daughter Kim some years ago. She had mentioned this in an interview. And I was like, I just like, she kind of just dismissed it.

Just like, oh, we lived in a great house. I had a great child. We grew on a farm. We had horses. I even had a pet owl. When she said that, it was like, what? Kenneth Arnold had a pet owl? So his life was a wash in every thing that has since come to define, in my opinion, not everything, but a long list of things that define the UFO contact experience.

Later in his life, he said that he had telepathic communication during that initial sighting. He said it was very distressing to feel something invading your mind. He did not, for obvious reasons, 1947, he had every right to shut up about that. about it, I think, in the early 70s. I think he died in 1986 or so. So he had telepathic communication. He saw orbs in his house. He felt he was being followed and monitored by the government. He had a book on his bookshelf that he pulled out. He got really frustrated trying to explain how hard it is to deal with mainstream UFO researchers. He said, and he was with this journalist. He said, you want to hear it. He pulls out the complete books of Charles Ford. It's

great big, thick, fat book. And he sets it down and says, this is Charles Fork. He's finding the same things I'm finding. Now, what you were alluding to is, and I had this written in the book, and it didn't work at all. I couldn't figure out a way to conclude it in. And I said, damn it, I'll just put it as a blog post. So in the book, The Supernatural, there was a chapter written by Jeffrey Krippel. The supernatural came out less than two months after my book, The Messengers. Both of them feature the eye of an owl. I have two eyes on my cover of the book that came out in 215. Whitley Streber and Jeff Crapell have one eye on their hardcover book.

So in the book, Jeff Crapple talks about all the weird stuff surrounding Kenneth Arnold. One of the things Kenneth Arnold said was that he felt that UFOs were alive. He saw one UFO, which he compared to a jellyfish floating in the sky the same way a jellyfish would float in the ocean. And he flew above it in his plane. He could look down through this giant jellyfish. There was another one that was, he said, was solid as a Chevrolet, metallic UFO, flying side by side with this jellyfish. He said he could fly above it and look through the translucent body of this flying jellyfish and see the trees below. Now, when Jeffrey Krippel wrote about that in the supernatural, he wrote the quote, which I paraphrased poorly there, about the creature from the ocean being seen in the skies by Kenneth Arnold.

and in the book they also Jeffrey Krippel they jump back and forth and they talk about Charles Fork a lot and Charles Fort was an author from the 19 I think he between the 19 teens and the 1930s he wrote five big fat dense books that are almost impossible to read they are so dense

about comparing and contrasting all this outlying paranormal stuff and that's where you get the term 14 in or 40in and you know frogs falling from the sky those kinds of stories as well as UFOs So Jeff Kriple reads this quote or includes this quote about the jellyfish in the sky from Kenneth Arnold. And he said, I wonder if he was reading Fort, question mark. And I read that.

And I was like, I know. He was reading Fort. And I'm friends with Jeff Kriple. And I send him an email. I said, look at this. Look what I found. Look what I found. I'm so awesome.

And I found a quote where he pulls the book of the complete works of Charles Fort off his shelf and shows it and says, this is what I'm finding. like I'm finding the same thing Fort is finding. So, so I felt so cool that one of my heroes, Jeff Kriple, had asked a question, sort of, sort of to the wind. Like, I wonder if he was reading Ford. I had the answer. And when I did that, I kind of, so when we exchanged those emails, it happened all in one day, I looked up on Wikipedia. It was Charles Ford's birthday. The day we exchanged these emails where I said Charles Ford was having this, you know, he had ask the apocry question and and and i had the answer and and it was all happened on one day and this is this is the the cloud of synchronicities that sort of surrounds this kind of stuff i if i don't get

these synchronities i'm kind of disappointed you know so i kind of get i'm addicted to them in a way and i and i'm yeah if they ebbed down i feel like i'm like off the path or something right right and i mean the whole idea of synchronicity just in general mike like you know digging into that awareness that comes with synchronicities and possibly that deeper reality. Something I really want to get deep with you as we sort of wrap things up here is one of my favorite researchers out there, he had this to say about your work. And I love to just quote this. This is what Nick Redfern said.

I get a strong sense that Mike Leland was guided to write this by the UFO intelligences. And I think the reader will get that. This is the first time I've seen this level of. of both a book and its author being inextricably linked to the phenomenon itself, since Streber and Communion. I believe the phenomenon intended it to be written, published, and read on a large scale. I think Mike's book is another example of this. Wow.

So, now, while he was talking about your first book, Mike, the fact that Whitley wrote the foreword for this companion definitely, it builds for the case for all of this. So what do you think? Do you feel that there's some sort of intelligence or something kind of guiding your work as you're going along with this idea of a deeper reality? What do you think of that all and what those people said about you? The question you asked was, do I feel is a guiding intelligence leading me? And the answer is unquestionably yes. So, I mean, I have no proof.

Right. When I read that, so that actually came in a private letter to me. And I kind of said, Nick, and I had to change like two words because he was saying you. He wasn't saying Mike Cleland is inextricably linked. He was saying you. It was a letter to me. It was a direct. So what happened was I gave Nick one of the, I paid him.

I gave him the initial draft of the book and I said, can you read this? I just feel like I don't have a, I can't figure out which way is up. And he gave me some totally pragmatic stuff. He said, at the end of this chapter here, you need to kind of write a little summation and that leads into the next one. And then here you define something, but you don't define it thoroughly enough. You've got to fill that out. So it's just a handful of very straight, pragmatic editorial things that I need it. And then at the end, he kind of slips that in there, you know.

And it was like you. Mike, you are inextricably linked to this phenomenon. This book, your book, will, is guided by some grander intelligence. Two things happened. Like I was kind of embarrassed in a way. Like I'm from the Midwest. I don't take compliments very well. But I also recognized, I understood it and I felt it in my bones and I felt that he was correct.

And I had felt that during the writing. I cannot tell you how many times I would be working on something like, oh, this chapter isn't working. I just need some little thing. I just need to plug in one little story that'll coalesce that'll congeal these disparate thoughts. And ping, the email rings. I open the email. It's like, oh, here's the perfect story. Let me just drop that right in.

It's a little more complicated than that. But that first book, less so the second book. The second book was hard work. This first book was also hard work, but it was written in this synchronistic cloud where it just felt like it was unfolding. Like every time I took a step forward, the path would just lay itself out for me. Again, it was hard work. And it would be incorrect to say that first book is channeled.

It wasn't channeled. But it was, oh, God, I'm so cautious saying this. I can only say I got to give all the caveats. I sense or I feel or. or perhaps I sense that I was guided in some way by some intelligence beyond myself to do that work. And the owls themselves, I mean, how the owls showed up in my life initially. So, you know, I basically said, like, I didn't pick the owls. The owls picked me.

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that's a good way of looking at it. I mean, while we want to have this idea that, like, we're in control of everything, you know, there seem to be greater powers at work. And I think by just sort of accepting that idea and letting it sort of pull you, like that's going to be a much more rewarding journey, no matter where it takes you and no matter what kind of answers you find, at least in my opinion. Well, that's the thing. I mean, you know, there's a researcher named Alan Green and he said synchronicity is like a compass on the open ocean on a cloudy day, right? So you're in a boat, the open ocean on a cloudy day.

How do you travel? You need a compass. right so that's how I've been trying to lead my life synchronicity sometimes the lesson is very clear the message is very clear and I've been trying to follow those messages follow those clues I love it man well I mean we I clearly am going to keep following as well because you've tapped into something that so many of us

we kind of had an inkling of like you mentioned earlier there's been references to the owl and UFO connection throughout the literature, throughout television, throughout pop culture, everything, everything. You can think of philosophy, religion, blah, blah, blah,

going on and on. But, like, the idea that we can now turn to something to really find those human experiences, I think, is vital. And I know you're not done. I know there's probably more yet to come. Well, I'm in no hurry to write another owl book.

I think it's, you total it up to, it comes out to about almost, I think it's like 670 pages. That sets a lot of pages on owls and UFOs. I was going to ask if there was any, you know, that always bothers me when, you know, you spend two years of your life writing a book. And so it's like, cool, what's next? It's like, come on. Well, I do have some other things planned.

I was thinking about doing it. I'm trying to do a book on the audio book version of the stories from the messengers. It's on godly slow. And then I'm also thinking of doing a little fiction work or something like that. But I'm not backing out of the research. But, I mean, I don't know what else if I could say about all. I'd just worry I would just repeat myself. You know, I can do a blog post now and again and such.

Well, there is, you know, before we leave here, Mike, there's one more aspect to all this that you brought up that, you know, people like Jeffrey Krippel or, you know, Jacques Valet, a lot of these people have sort of tapped into this idea. And you do as well is mythology and folklore. And you write about this several times. Do you believe that these are, I guess, sort of like a tool to help connect us to the owl and UFO experience? So when I was working on the book, right? So the first book especially, you know, I was people had sort of like, hey, Mike, what are you doing these days? And I'm like, well, I'm working on a book. Oh, that's interesting.

What's the book about? And I would have to size a person up. Like, I'd have to like, oh, my God, am I going to drop the UFO bomb? And I'd kind of, every once in a while, I'd be like, I ain't going there with this guy. And I'd say, it's a book on mythology. It's about owls. and they're like, that's interesting. And then I could talk easily.

We could have a perfect little dinner table conversation about mythology and owls. And I could go on and on and on. And I would never have to bring up the UFO thing because there's plenty without bringing up the UFO thing, mythology and owls. And my sense is that the same archetypal powers that have been interacting and shaping mankind since the very beginning are still there. They're there. They're there. It's my email inbox. I mean, I get these mythic stories day after day after day.

The stories I told at the end there of owls and gratitude, you know, people seeing owls while hunting and while in the woods. And there's, these are kind of bland stories in the sense that there's, there's, but it's, but to me, they're very powerful. And I tried to address that. These archetypal experiences, these mythic experiences are still part of our human drama now. We had a way to formalize them back around the campfire when we were, you know, in a primitive village. Presently, in our fast-paced Western society, we mythology, look up mythology in the dictionary. It says fake. It says false.

It says like a fairy tale. That's our definition of mythology in the dictionary, something that is false. And I am saying, no. Mythology is something that is alive and vital and plays an important role not only to ancient man, And not only in the dusty books on the shelf in the philosophy department of some college, they are playing a role right now, real time, with us. The book, it is not by accident that the book is called the messengers. There are messages being delivered.

They are elusive. They might not be clear. But I am convinced that the symbolic appearance of the owl is a message and that we have to listen. Absolutely. I could not agree more. So where can we find stories from the messengers and all of your other work? You can go to my, you can just Google my name, Mike Clelland Owls, and my blog site will come right up, and it's all over the blog. I'm not being shameless. I'm trying to promote the hell out of this thing for I've got to eat. Yes, you should. So yeah, so you put everything on hold for two years and do this. And so, yes, and go to Amazon. You can look up the messengers. You can, and it's interesting, I could go on and on about. I was going to go, you don't need to hear more synchronicities. But just look up my name.

My website is hiddenexperience.blogspot.com. Once again, you just type in my name Owls. It comes right up. You type UFO Owls. It comes right up. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I've done it many a time.

It's amazing. It's all there in front of you. I love it. Oh, Mike, your work, it never lets out, man. And it is both, it's inspirational, but more importantly, at least to me, and I know hundreds, if not thousands. of other people, your work is integral to trying to sort of, I guess, dismantle these mysteries and repair them in some way, shape, or form. And I know it changes from person to person. And the owl,

it continues to sort of weave in and out of these phenomena, you know, with that message that you just talked about. And we have to keep listening. And I hope that everyone who listen to this will go grab the book. I'm going to furiously digest the rest of it after we get off here. I'm interested in the cardinal aspect. We'll talk about that after this, but the whole cardinal aspect plays a very pivotal part in my life as well. So that might have to wait for an extra bonus episode of Summer in the Skies. But I do want to thank you so, so much for coming on today, man. It was my pleasure.

All right, that's it for this week's show. Again, Mike's books can be found on Amazon, and all of his work can be found at hiddenexperience. Dot blogspot.com. We can be found on Twitter at SummerSkies. and on Instagram at SomewhereSkies pod. To contact me personally, and to find all past episodes, and to submit guests or topic suggestions, visit somewhere in the skies.com.

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