Somewhere in the Skies - THE EXPERIENCERS with NK Kranda

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

On episode 113 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan is joined by experiencer researcher and witness testimony preserver, NK Kranda. She walks us through her process of interviewing witnesses and experiencers of both UFO and anomalous phenomena. How has her work in psychology, PTSD, and trauma helped her in speaking with witnesses? What are her thoughts on hypnosis regression when trying to uncover suppressed memories? We also hear a few anonymous stories from her archives and just exactly where experiencer preservation lay in the overall study and investigation of UFOs and beyond. It's a powerful interview you won't soon forget. Guest Bio: NK Kranda is a southern California native now living in Texas. She went to school for Horticulture Sciences and graduated with highest honors. She then continued her education in the fields of psychology, PTSD and trauma therapies, art, biology, psychics, history, and shamanism. She currently works in experiencer research and preservation and has the honor of interviewing some of the most incredible people the field has to offer. Her interest in contactees and experiencers began when she volunteered as a MUFON chapter secretary in San Antonio. After writing way too many reports, she found her true interests were in the people that quietly came to meetings to tell an incredible story. She taught them to fight stigma, to never stop telling their story, and to honor themselves because they survived. If you've had an experience you'd like to share with her, you can email her at: [e-mail] Use Promo code: SKIES for discount tickets to ALIEN CON Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies To watch ROSWELL: MYSTERIES DECODED for free, CLICK HERE  Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is sponsored by HelloFresh. To receive 50% off your first order, use promo code: SOMEWHERE50 at checkout by visiting www.HelloFresh.ca 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

Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. Today, we're talking to NK. Kranda, experience a researcher and preserver of witness testimony. I do a lot of research with trauma and PTSD. That's kind of where I'm coming from, is that these people already have their story, and they've already had the stigma, and they've already had the heartache and the shame and everything else. It's time to just listen. And sometimes just listening is, like, more than these people could ever have imagined.

I'm like, well, you know, your story was amazing. Would you like me to preserve that? And they're like, no, I think I just wanted someone to listen. And then they disappear forever. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan's bread. For those who know me or have read my book, you know that I hold witness testimony in very high regard when it comes to investigating and researching the UFO phenomenon.

Without a witness coming forward, we almost never have anything to work off of. The scientists have nothing to test, the journalists have nothing to report. The investigators and researchers have nothing to investigate. When it comes down to it, the people having these experiences are the only reason you're listening to this show. It's the only reason UFOs are in conversation all over the world.

It's because someone looked up in the skies and saw something they couldn't explain. Or they had a close encounter experience with something many believe is. otherworldly and non-human. And today, we're going to talk to one of the people who listens, who records, and who preserves these stories. NK. Kranda is a Southern California native, now living in Texas. She went to school for horticulture sciences and graduated with the highest honors. She then continued her education in the fields of psychology, PTSD, and trauma therapies. She currently works and experience her research and preservation, and has the honor of interviewing some of the most incredible people this field has to offer. And today, we learn all about her work in where it fits into this giant puzzle of mystery that continues to elude us somewhere in the skies.

I'm so happy we finally made this happen. I feel like we've been trying to do this for a while now. I know. we would kind of play tag as far as comments on Facebook goes. And then we're like, oh, we should have an interview. And then another six months went by. So finally. It's one of those every six month things.

We're like passing ships in the wind. But no, we're finally here. We're finally doing this. And I'm so happy to finally have you on because you represent something that really, really attracted me to the UFO topic and phenomena as well. And that's experiencers. Now, I wrote a book all about this in 2016, where I interviewed hundreds of individuals who claimed everything from lights in the sky up to abductions and close encounters.

And it was interesting. It was extremely eye-opening for me. And I know we're going to get into how it's sort of impacted your life. But before we start to get to that, I always like to get the origin story of how people became who they are in this field. So would you mind maybe telling us a little? about yourself and how you got involved with the UFO topic? To be perfectly honest about myself, I'm a very normal, regular, boring person. I'm pretty much 90 years old. I have an office job. I like to knit. I think that when my toddler was teething, I watched Finding Nemo about 7,362 times.

You know, I've never had any major psychiatric disorders or anything like that, so I think I'm doing pretty well on that end. Yeah, I can blend in with the crowd. You know, I'm just, I'm really just a normal role. I'm looking at your bio here and you were a horticultural scientist. Is that true? Yeah, that's what I went to school for. I studied horticultural propagation, diseases, and I wrote my paper on the effects of interior escapes and live plants inside of hospitals. And I found that people that had live greenery to interact with or even to look at would heal from surgeries and recover much faster. That's like something I never really thought about is like how we can sort of communicate with plants or like how they can be mutually beneficial and whatnot. That's so cool. Absolutely. Yeah.

And I mean, you also have education in the fields of psychology, PTSD and trauma. So I got to ask, in all of this stuff that you've done, how did UFO experiencers play into all this? How did that happen? To be honest, I'm going to blame my daughter because every parent does. She had just really worn me out one day, and when she had finally collapsed for a nap, I was watching one of those YouTube top ten videos, and it was top ten mysterious disappearances in national parks. They're quite addicting. And of course, a lot of the missing 411 cases came up, and a name that kept coming up was David Politis. So I researched him, and I noticed that he went to something called a Mufon Symposium, and I had no idea what that was. And I did some research on the organization, and I was like, you know what the hell?

I'll go to a meeting. Maybe I can talk to somebody about missing 411 or get to know some other people. I didn't, but I actually got to meet some pretty cool people. I ended up becoming their secretary, so I was there for every meeting. I was writing a whole bunch of reports. It was very boring. I was very overqualified. I found that a lot of the subject matter was kind of pretentious and speculative. But the most fascinating part about this is that at the end of every meeting, these people would come in, people that looked like they had just gotten off work or just a normal mom, like a waitress would come in and then they would like very quietly and almost like they were ashamed, they would come in and tell an incredible story. Like either they had seen a UFO or they had been having this reoccurring nightmare ever since childhood about these things that would come into their room. A couple of people had seen cryptids and things like that.

And rather than being supportive and kind of taking these people, you know, in their arms, I found that a lot of the members of that particular Mufon chapter were more investigative, where they would start picking apart the story or picking apart the person. And they just really didn't give a crap that they were under like some serious stress and also possibly trauma. So what I started doing was at the end of meetings, I would kind of sneak up to these people and say, hey, you know, we're really supposed to be a service to the community. and how can I help you, like, how can I support you better? Like, is there something I can do?

And more often than not, we would end up staying late after the meeting, and they would open up to me a bit more because I would just talk to them, you know, person to person, experienceer to experience her. I was like, man, these stories are amazing. Somebody should really be writing them down. Like, are you writing them down? And they say, no, I've actually never talked about this in my entire life.

So eventually I became the person that started writing those down and preserving them and starting to do my own research. That's where it comes in. I mean, firsthand testimony is sometimes all we have to rely on when it comes to these cases. I mean, yeah, dates, times of events are important, obviously. A scientific approach to uphology is very important. But none of this would happen or none of this would progress if it weren't for the witness themselves telling this story. So it's so good to hear that someone is doing that, especially within Mufant,

sort of the most visible UFO research organization out there. So I'd love to touch on that briefly with you. When you joined Mufon, how does this work? Because I'm not a Mufon member, never have been. I've spoken to many people who have been. But when somebody reports a UFO sighting or even an experience or close encounter with Mufon, how does that go? Like you report it and then what happens?

There's two different ways to go about it. Either you can report a siting, and that's through their website, and you'll be assigned to, your case will be assigned a number, and then it will be assigned to a local chapter where it will be investigated. Unfortunately, it's not a perfect system. I've seen many at times where cases have been investigated, and then there's been no follow-up with the witness at all. They have no idea what happened, and they probably never will. The best that we can do sometimes, the good investigators that really are passionate and care about what they're doing, like Earl Gray Anderson is a fantastic investigator. Oh, yes, absolutely. He actually takes the time to call them and go over photographs and things like that and try to give them at least an idea, you know, whether or not he debunked it and said, hey, you know, this is a balloon and this is why you thought what you saw or, you know, hey, this is actually a very cool picture. Thank you for sending it in. And then you can go the other route, which is their ERT program, which is the Experian Research Team.

And that's held up by Ms. Kathleen Marden. Is that how you say your name? I believe so, yes. Yeah. So what you would do then is then you'd go on the Mufon website and you would fill out their experience or questionnaire. And it's very short and very simple. And you can choose to either be anonymous or you can choose to have them contact you back. And when they contact you back, if you should so choose, they'll do an interview with you and they'll find out exactly what your experience was. You know, did you feel that you were an abductee or were you a contactee? And what they're going to do is while they're going through these interviews with you, they're going to be looking for certain. And these markers are what they're going to be taking to compare against other cases for their research to get those patterns of research going. So I can't speak that it's like they can't guarantee 100% confidentiality. They just can't. Like we've had leaks happen all the time.

But if you're if you're interested in actually being part of a study that's pretty big and only getting bigger and sharing with other other organizations that do that as well, I can recommend the Mufon experience. research team. They're pretty good. Now, is this at all connected, Nikita, to the free organization? They're separate entities, but they do work together from time to time. They do share information. The free study just published a wonderful book. I don't have it with me. I know I mentioned it in Hysteria 51. And I do believe that MoveOn is working on their own book. I don't know when it will be ready, though. Interesting. Yeah, because I remember I had Ray Hernandez. briefly wants to talk about that. And it's so interesting to see that there's like different groups that are doing this, but

they're sharing their information. And I think that's what's most important is a lot of UFO researchers, whether they're scientists or culturists or psychologists, like they hold it so close to the chest, you know. They want to save that one case for some rainy day fund, as it were. And like it's theirs. but I feel that changing now within the UFO field is a lot of these younger people getting involved because they're so privy to the internet and with texting and emailing and all this stuff we live in the digital age with, they're willing to share stuff with one another.

And I think that's super exciting to see that even Mufon, who, let's be honest, they haven't gotten the best reputation in the past decade or so, that they are stepping up and progress. and sharing their information and becoming more transparent. I think that's very important as well. Right. There's a lot of strong opinions about Mufon, but I think that it's fair to say that, you know,

they are out there and they are doing something. And I believe that they're a wonderful platform to meet people. I'm a freelancer. I don't share any of my cases with Mufon or the free program or anything. They're mine. They're private. However, I would not have met many of my most. cherished mentors like Peter Robbins or Earl Gray Anderson or Michael Rightout without Mufon.

So if you're looking for people that have a similar mindset and, you know, they're not going to back away slowly before they turn around and run, it may benefit you to sign up on a Mufon Facebook page or attend one or two meetings. Just kind of feel it out. You don't have to be a member to do that. Absolutely. And I mean, you mentioned two names right there that I'm very familiar with. Earl Gray is a close friend of mine and colleague. We have been working on a case that he investigated a while back, and just to see his reports and to see, like, the investigation that he did. I think Earl writes those reports with his own heart's blood. That's passionate. He is about experience or research in UFOs. And Peter Robbins, too, just two amazingly well-educated,

a well-read gentleman. Michael write out as well, you should get to know him. He does UFO cold cases. Okay, okay. I'll definitely have to look into him. Yeah. I mean, I can tell that these people you're mentioning, these are a lot of the more empathetic people, I would say, in the experiencer sort of realm. And Peter Robbins being a close mentor of mine as well, you know, I meet with them at least once a month here in New York City because we are both theater nerds at heart. We've spent our whole lives growing up in the theater. And then we just happen to have this UFO thing in common as well. So he always taught me when you are interviewing people, you have to have empathy. It doesn't matter if you believe them or not. Like you have to cast

judgment aside and just record what they're telling you. Do you agree with that? Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why I kind of moved away from those organizations because some people within them were starting to become almost exploitative of experiencers where they were just getting whatever whatever interviews they could, they were kind of cherry picking which facts they kind of felt would go along with their book or whatever, and then they would ignore the rest of the story. So when I do the preservations that I do, you know, there's going to be a lot of stories that maybe most of it is very hyperbolic, but there's going to be one or two of those little gems in there that I would never have known if I hadn't paid attention the whole time. I guess I'd love to hear

your personal approach. Okay. So like how do you find these people that you talk? talk to you. Do they come to you? Do you go to them? And how does that first interaction go? And where does it go from there? My approach is very, I feel like it's very gentle. I'm an experiencer as well. So when I approach someone, I don't approach them like I would a doctor. I'm not there to diagnose you or find out what's wrong with you. I don't come at you like a psychologist. I'm not there to study you or to write a book or anything like that. You know, and I'm not there to investigate you and to rip apart every detail of your story to see if you're telling me the truth. I'm there. You know, I just want to have a cup of coffee with you. I want to learn them a little bit about you. And, you know,

if you want, I'll turn on my reporter or I completely turn it off. And we just have a talk about, you know, where your life has been and where you're going and what are some of the interesting things you've seen that you can't explain. And that's where the term Experiencer come from is just it's someone that experiences. Yeah. And that's a good point. I mean, Experiencer is sort of a new term that a lot of us have been using in contrast to abductee. So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Like what is the comparison between what we consider in? alien abductee and an experiencer. Generally, I think the nomenclature abductee seems to be like you were taken against your will versus a contactee where you were kind of asking them to come contact you. I prefer experiencer just because it sounds a lot nicer and more palatable than like, yes, I am a local werewolf survivor. It's nice to meet you. I am a completely normal sane person who had the job.

No, you can be an experiencer. and I believe John Mack used it quite a bit, but I don't know the origin of the term experiencer. But I think, again, it's responsible and it's healthy to use these sort of terms, because like you said, a lot of these people aren't claiming that they were taken against their will. They were more than willing to experience these things with whatever they might be, whether it's a non-human intelligence or something multidimensional or I don't even know. The possibilities are endless. And it doesn't put it in that small, tiny box of we are dealing with little green men kidnapping people. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

And people don't even like to say UFO anymore. They like to go, oh, well, some people see anomalous aircraft just because the term UFO has so much stigma behind it. Years and years. I mean, when you really think about it, the term UFO was coined by Edward Rupelt, the guy who started Project Blue Book. So right there, it was already to sort of kind of. calm the nerves and be like, we're not calling them flying saucers anymore. We don't want people thinking these are like nuts and bolts, alien craft. So yeah, I do see that changing. You hear the term UAP a lot more. I'm going to admit it's really hard after being conditioned for so long

to say UFO. But I guess we just got to move along with the times. I also, one of the things that I do, which a lot of people don't do, is I also interview kids. Number one, I love talking to kids because they just have no social boundaries and they always tell the truth and I think they're hilarious. But when I come up to them, you know, I don't use any jargon and you can't because they won't understand. I was just going up to them and I say, hey, sometimes your mommy talks to me and she says that you saw something weird. Can you please tell me about that? And just the things that they'll take off with can be amazing. If you just leave it open ended like that without any suggestion or any parameters for how this story has to go, if you actually just sit down and listen to a kid, I think

that they're the most incredible experiencers I've ever talked to. Yeah, I guess I never really thought about that. We always have this image of like someone middle age having these experiences, but these things happen to kids as well. I mean, I spoke to many experiencers who they were recalling events that happened to them when they were kids. So that's fascinating. So is that, would you say that's a big percentage of the stories you've been told were

from children? No, but I do try to keep, I try to keep. I try to keep it well-rounded. I interview mostly adults within their late 20s to early 60s. But the people that I find that are mostly ignored are after 70 and under 10. And I think that, you know, they think that either they're making it up or it's for imagination purposes or maybe they just want attention. But I've talked to some to some three- and four-year-olds that have just explained to me these objects and these sites. And I'm like, you don't even have a TV. I know that you didn't see that on TV. And I know that your friend isn't coming up and telling you and describing the exact shape of a cigar UFO with a falling leaf motion. It's amazing. And especially the guys that are older than 70, they have some really amazing stories too. Like the veterans have incredible stories about the things that they've seen. I guess now that they're older, they don't really care about the government coming after them.

They're like, ah, fuck it. You know what? If they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. It's time to talk. That's a really good point. deathbed confessions are often some of the best stories we come across in this field. And you do have to, you got to listen because there's going to be some that could ultimately change all our work moving forward for sure. Yeah. Are there any stories or anything, Nikita, that you would feel comfortable

sharing with us in terms of people you'd interviewed? I know, you know, there's a lot of rules when it comes to confidentiality and these people confide in you. But anything you could sort of talk to about with us on a broader scale in terms of people you've interviewed? Absolutely. And I do take confidentiality very seriously. Sometimes if I take notes and then they're kind of uncomfortable with the notes, like I'll rip my paper out and I'll give them the notes, you know, I'll show them that my phone is off. But to also tie in your previous question of how people find me, it can be, you know, I'm a mutual friend on Facebook or just completely random. And when I mean random, I do mean random.

And this is probably the funniest experiencer story I have, is that I was filming in Austin for the Travel Channel. I don't know if I told you this already, Ryan. Christopher Geratano has a new show coming out called Strange World. Yes, yes. And it's premiering on the Travel Channel in October. Well, he asked me to come up to Austin and bring in Experiencer because he had a whole episode about the midnight hour

and the things that come out at night and, you know, things like that. Very cool. incredible integrity. If you ever get the chance to work with him, I definitely recommend it. Yes, I love his work. So this experiencer and I were like, you know what, we're away from the kids for the day. Let's just go to a beach. So, you know, we got our swimsuits. You know, we very subtly packed a cooler with some adult beverages. And we went down to the beach. Well, we're kind of looking around and we realized that we had ended up at Hippie Hollow, which is a nude beach. Nice. Okay. I like where this story's going. Not many nude beach, but like much, much older people nude beach that were hippies that just don't care anymore. But we're like, whatever. So I'm just laying there getting a tan.

And a guy comes and sits next to me, very, very polite, just kind of casually chatting about the water. And I was kind of talking about the way that there were shadows in the waves. And he's like, you know, when I started experimenting with lucid dreaming, I started seeing a lot of shadow people and things were attacking me at night. and we got into this great conversation about lucid dreaming and control and the way that you can explore your consciousness without drugs. And I was so professional and I was so intrigued. And I just tried very hard to not pay attention that his junk was like only 12 inches from my head. You're weird or if your story's embarrassing, you're never going to top him, I promise. Yeah.

Wow. That is, that's, I don't even know. know what to say to that. I'm speechless. I can't say that I have ever interviewed a nude experiencer. Yeah, I'm just that kind of a professional lady. But yeah, seriously, sometimes they just they'll find me in the grocery store and tell me about a near-death experience. And then other times, they'll usually contact me through either a friend or a mutual friend. And those are the ones that are fun because I get to do the really in-depth meeting and talk to them sometimes for several different sessions. And one of my favorite experience or stories ever was about a kid that was going

to school on a school bus in the 60s. And he was sitting very close to the back. All of a sudden, he said the bus pulled over for no reason and all the lights out went out on the bus. And he said that the lights went out outside too. Like the clouds had just gone over the sun very suddenly and everything was very dark. And when he looked all around him, all of his classmates and the bus driver were just asleep and slumped back in their chair. So he kind of crouched down. And he kind of crouched down. because he immediately started to feel very scared. And he said he didn't know what it was at the time, but he started to smell like that ozone heaviness in the air

and that the school bus doors opened and one of those big hooded cloaks jumped up onto the school bus. Okay. And he said it was so tall that it completely overcame the double doors that opened. It caused the bus to slump over and nobody woke up. And that he started pointing out different kids. And then he had the tiny graves, like the ones that are only two or three feet tall, pick out a select two or three kids, took them off the bus. He said that they were gone for about an hour, brought them back.

And then just like that, the lights came back on the bus. The sun came back out. The kids started talking again. And nobody mentioned it at all. And he's like, did you guys, did you guys see that? Why were you all sleeping? Like, what happened? And they're like, why are you freaking out?

Be quiet. They said that they just ignored him. but when the school bus actually got to the Air Force base where it was going, because he was going to school in an Air Force base, the guards ripped the bus driver off of the bus because they had four hours of missing time. Whoa. And this wasn't a remote road either. There was run road to the base and run road away from the base. Like you know that they had been backtracking looking for him and these 20 or 30 kids and they were just nowhere to be found. So that one scared the crap out of me.

Yeah. That one's my favorite. But some of them are overwhelmingly positive, like where they feel like they're talking to like almost the energy of Gaia and the earth. And they kind of, they look at it that way. Other people have had experiences with what they feel are like shaman experience. Other people I've talked to, the cryptid people are always cool because they're not lying, but they just do some incredibly dumb things. Like, oh, there's a six-foot-tall dog man over there, and I really want to take a picture of it. I'm like, why would you walk towards it?

Yeah, that's a good point. You do hear that often that, oh, there's a big foot. I'm going to throw a rock at it and see how it responds. Yeah, I guess that's just classic human behavior. My other favorite ones are I always like to ask people about near-death experiences. And I think that that's pretty common amongst experiences stories is that once or multiple times in their life, they've had some instance where they were like, yeah, I should have been maimed or I should have died. And for whatever reason, I'm okay. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of people turn to NDEs in terms of abduction experiences. Have you found any sort of correlations between these two different things? Some of the correlations I found is I had one experiencer that literally fell off of a cliff. And he has no idea how he survived. He said he woke up in a very comfortable position and he was just snuggled up in all of these cactuses. He said that it didn't hurt until he got up, but he fell over four stories. He should have died. And then Earl Gray recently wrote about a near-death experience as well where his parents got into a car accident. And back in the day, you know, seatbelts were not a thing.

They did a rollover and he was thrown from the vehicle. And when he woke up, he was in between three different rocks. He said that should have mashed my brains very prettily against the grass, but I was fine. So it's almost like something protects them or watches over them. Other ones, I have no idea. That's a really good point. There is a gentleman I talked to that was in the, I believe, the Navy, and he had a close encounter experience on his way to his first ever,

like where he was going to be stationed when he was in his like early 20s. And he had a close encounter experience. And he kind of brushed it aside. He had a couple beers after and went to the, the local bar and then did his work. But he attributes this experience that he had in his 20s to many really life-altering close calls throughout his life. He said, I should have died like at least five times now. And every time something either like miraculous or completely coincidental has saved my life. And I feel like that all started when he had this, when he

says it all started when he had this close encounter. So that's really interesting. And it's extremely prevalent. And a lot of people say, like, oh, it's just coincidence. It's just coincidence. I'm like, if it was just coincidence, I would believe you at the sixth or seventh time that you would have died. Like, either you're very lucky or very unlucky. I haven't decided. Yeah. Yeah, the debate's still out on that one. Wow. Yeah, those cases are really interesting. Sort of, I guess, switching gears. All right. So these are the people who you genuinely believe and you preserve their stories. But there is that. that other side of all this that we don't ever really want to talk about, but we have to. And that's the people who clearly are either delusional or exaggerate or just straight up lying to our faces. So have you ever had that experience where you had to like stop them and be like, I'm sorry, I can't do this? Have you ever had that awkward moment? Because I know I have. I have. Thankfully, it's only happened to me once. I feel like I have pretty good. people skills. And it's

a rule of thumb. And Peter Robbins helped enforce this into my brain. He said, stay away from fame and fortune seekers and stay away from somebody that's got something to prove and just hope you don't get stuck in an elevator with them. That sounds like Peter Robbins. Yeah. And I had a guy,

I agreed to a pre-interview. And in our pre-interview, in under five minutes, he told me that he was the one that was astral projecting to Whitley Streber that Whitley Streber was writing about him. that he had worked at Roswell. He had been in the underground bases of Roswell, that he had worked, he was a Montauk boy,

he had had his mind changed around with the gorilla. And I was like, I was listening very politely, but I was like, you know, like something just feels really off about this. And it's so important as an investigator to trust your gut and just say like, you know what, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I have some other things that I have to go do. And then I never talk to him again.

And I'm pretty old school when it comes to, you know, the art of interviewing and the art of journalism. Like I'm sure that you learned through trial and error where people are going to tell you a story. And sometimes you're going to ask them questions that will either trip them up or you're going to start at the end of the story or you're going to start at the beginning of the story. You're going to purposely switch around a couple dates and then see if they stop you and correct you. So it's very easy to lie to someone when you go from beginning to end. But when you start taking apart their story in different parts, and having them put it back together, if they start really tripping up and having a hard time,

I know that it's not a truthful account. That's a really, really good point. A lot of the times you can tell, because you're right, it's a script that they've basically memorized at that point. So if it's real, if it's genuine, you would hope that you could start from anywhere and have them tell you the same story. So I agree to those same sort of journalistic approaches is, let me see how accurate they can be when I mix things up and put the pieces all over the place.

And most of the time, they can do it. And that's when you know you've got like a genuine experience or at least in my opinion. Absolutely. And then I also pay attention to body language, to tonal intonation. I prefer just having a manual voice recorder rather than a camera because I think cameras make people very fidgety and uncomfortable. But yeah, fortunately for me, You know, I'm not famous. I'm not rich. Like, I rarely have people that seek me out that want to lie to me for some sort of personal gain.

Right. Right. And you know what? I think that's your biggest strength is you're not out there writing a book based on someone's experience and making all this money while they're getting the ridicule and the baggage that comes with coming forward. You know, it's tough. And when I wrote my book, I told every single person that I've supposed to be. to. Like, are you sure? Are you sure you want to do this? Because once it's out there, there's no turning back at that point. And I would say 99.9% of the people in my book said, yes, I want to do this. I want to use my real name. I trust you with my story. And when they say that, I don't know about you, Nikki. When they say they trust you with their story and nobody else, that was enough for me to be like, wow, like, this is real now. Like, I'm about to publish this thing with these people's accounts and that's going to impact their lives. You know, their co-worker is going to read that.

Their doctor is going to read that. Their kids are going to read about this. It's crazy. It is. And you do the same thing I do. You've given them the incredible gift of their own voice back to them. And it's not so much that you and I work to have other people believe these experiencers.

We work with the experiencers so that they can believe themselves. You're not crazy and you're not weak. You just saw something that you can't explain, and that doesn't mean that there's any deficit that has to do with you. And those are my three big things that I always try to tell experiencers is that, you know, number one, just because something weird happened to you, it doesn't make you weird, and that you should honor yourself because you survived. And I had an experiencer that when he was eight years old, he was being just constantly harassed by these entities. I don't know what they were. They may have been the children with the black eyes or they may have been something much more sinister. But they kept trying to get him to lure other kids out into the forest.

Tell them like, oh, you know, your friends will believe you. If you bring them out here, you know, we'll show them our ship. You don't just bring your friends. Everything will be fine. Don't you want your friends to like you? And he said that because he wouldn't bring any more kids out there, that these entities made his life a living hell. And I had to stop him. And I said, you know, we really need to take a second here and honor an eight-year-old you.

We need to honor him because he survived, and we need to honor him because of what he did. Because if he didn't do it, you wouldn't be here today. And there would be a lot more harm to it would have been and done to all those other kids. And he just started to cry. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. It reminds me often of the work that people do with victims of trauma. I should say survivors. Victim was the wrong word. Excuse me. No, you're on the right path there. That's my other specialties. I do. a lot of research with trauma and PTSD.

And that's kind of where I'm coming from is that these people already have their story and they've already had the stigma and they've already had the heartache and the shame and everything else. It's time to just listen. And sometimes just listening is like more than these people could ever have imagined. I'm like, well, you know, your story was amazing. Would you like me to preserve that? And they're like, no, I think I just wanted someone to listen.

And then they disappear forever. Yeah, it's closure. It's closure for a lot of people to just. just get it out there, you know, no matter what sort of stigma or ridicule they may have thought would happen, just getting the story out there, whether it's written down or not, is enough for some people. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Well, what do you say to those people, Nikita, who don't put much stock into witness testimony, you know, when it comes to, like, investigating UFOs, they want evidence, they want trace evidence, they want that nuts and bolts, flying saucer? what do you say to those out there who put absolutely no stock in witness testimony?

I always tell them, and it makes them mad, and I don't know why. I say, if you want to know how a car accident happened, stop staring at the tire treads on the ground and go talk to the people on the sidewalk that watched it happen. So I think that it's good, that it goes hand in hand with as much physical evidence as you possibly can. But I think that a lot of these things that people are interacting with, they don't leave much of that evidence. behind. And we just, we just have them and their story. Well, I mean, in terms of that, what is sort of your goal in preserving these stories? You know, can they work in tandem with physical evidence? And what do you personally hope to, I guess, what do you hope will

happen with these stories when it comes to UFO in experience or research? I'm just so sad at how much testimony and how much evidence has already been lost because of stigma and how many people have passed away, you know, never telling their story or, you know, swearing someone else to secrecy. And, you know, as experiencers, you're not as alone as you think you are. There are other people out there that have seen what you've seen and that have felt the terror that you have felt, and they've felt that loneliness. And I think that the only way for us to really explore that and to learn more about it is to start really just recording these the best that we can and start preserving them so that

even if we're not getting much out of the research now in the future, I could meet one experiencer that has one story that could blow up my whole board with all my pushpins and make me go hallelujah that's such a good point i'm talking to a witness right now and as i'm going through all the things he told me it just it dawned on me and i had to go back to a case that i've been looking at like almost eight years ago and finding these connections between them and those are the moments in this research where you're like holy shit like either these events could have been or were possibly dealing with the same phenomenon. So those are the moments, like you said,

it doesn't matter if the case happened 20 years ago or today. If you can find correlations and even a common ground between witnesses, that's more than you could ever truly ask for with such a, like, complex phenomena, in my opinion. Absolutely. And for us, phenomena was different things back then. Like if you start researching laylines or you start researching. the Faye and, you know, people that were drawn away by ferry portals. Like, these are incidences that were happening hundreds of years ago, just like missing 4-1-1, where kids would

just disappear or people would cross a river and never to be seen again. Like, where the heck are they going? We used to call them fairies. Now what are we calling them? Aliens? Good, good point. It's very valet. You're right. It's like the phenomena repackages itself as we sort of move forward, whether it's like technological. or I don't know, what do you think? I think it's an interactive phenomenon and that it enjoys cat and mouse. It's like just when you think that you're on the cusp of something, it'll disappear for six months. What I find is that the more I ignore my work and the more that I'm not preserving experience or stories

and I'm not kind of, I've just kind of ignored it and put it aside for other stuff, they'll just start popping up to me. Like the people in the grocery store or people at nude beaches or people in bars. Yeah, yeah, they just keep coming. Whether you like it or not. Like, hey, you know that thing that you're not doing? You should be doing it. I'm like, okay, phenomenon, fine. Such a good point.

It push and prods you sometimes when you least expect it. And you're right, I love it. It's very junkie-esque, if you really think about it. Let's turn to something that you and I discussed off-air that is kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to, researching alien abductions or experiences, and that's hypnotic regression. I can't tell you how many experiencers I've talked to who have said that they were put under hypnosis, and that's when I don't discount their experience by any stretch of the imagination,

but that's when I really start to get worried when they tell me, oh, yeah, I've been going to these sessions for the past two years, and I'm just like, okay, who did it? What are their credentials? What did they say to you? What do you make of hypnotic regression in the work you do, Nikita? Professionally, the way that I do it and the way that I believe the science is finally catching up, it's that I just don't think it's necessary to do the hypnotherapy. There's plenty of other evidence-based therapies, and I've talked with several psychologists

and psychiatrists about this, and they say, you know, so many people run to hypnosis to try and figure out like, oh, there's these things that I don't understand and I want to remember and I want to remember. And they say, imagine that a lake is about to flood. Would you rather tear down the whole dam or would you open up the valves slowly and let the water come out as it would? And I think a lot of people go to hypnosis. They go to someone that doesn't know what they're doing. They don't have any training in post-traumatic stress disorder. They don't have any training in suicide prevention or anything like that, you can still call yourself a hypnotherapist without any form of accredited degree in psychology or counseling. And it's just extremely dangerous. And when these people do end up

having these recovered memories or dreams that they think are recovered memories, you know, they'll be fine after the session, but it could be days or weeks later. Unfortunately, they end up committing suicide because they just can't come to terms with what they feel happened. And that's not just me saying that. I've had. had several experiencers and people from Mufon say like, yeah, we have followed up a few of those leads and they did commit suicide after hypnosis. We think that's what really tipped him over. So one thing that I do like to suggest instead is that if you really want to learn more about your experience, like, you know, you know something happened, but part of your mind is just

blacking it out, whether it's to protect you or whether it's something that the phenomena did, you can try something called prolonged exposure therapy and you can do it at home. just get a recorder or use your recorder on your phone. Tell your story. Tell it with as much detail as you possibly can. If you were a little kid, how old were you? What color were your sheets? What color was your wallpaper? What does your room smell like? You know, what kind of pajamas are you wearing? As much detail as you possibly can and just go through this whole experience from beginning to end. And then every night before you go to bed, just get really nice and calm, you know, no alcohol, no sleep aids, nothing.

and listen to it on recording at least five to ten times. And the more you listen to it, the more details you're going to start to remember slowly. And the more you talk about it with friends that you trust, and the more that you listen to this story and you prolong yourself to that exposure, the more you will remember. You just have to be patient. Your mind is not meant to be, like, cracked open like a walnut. You need to be careful.

Yeah. You're suppressing those memories for your own safety. That's what your brain does. it keeps you safe. 95% of the time I'm against hypnotherapy. And then I talked extensively to Peter Robbins about his work with Bud Hopkins. And, you know, they worked with a psychiatrist. Her name was Aphrodite something or other. Yeah, they had very, very good controls. He worked with some amazingly talented and qualified people to do it safely. And I, I'm going to have to give it to Peter Robbins that you know what if you're ready to do it and if you're prepared to come with the

consequences of knowing all of those details of what happened to you you know then go ahead and try it after you've tried these other evidence-based therapies. I love that. I mean, it's so good to hear that someone who is working directly with experiencers say that because it's so hard when you're in this field and you make friends and you make colleagues and there are of those people out there who are known to be hypnotherapists in the UFO field. And that's the first moment where I'm like, run, run for the hills. If they already have this preconceived notion that you were abducted by aliens,

it's going to influence the regression. In my opinion, again, that's nothing against those people who are doing it. I do feel that they have the best intentions in mind, but they already come to it to the table with, you know, with preconceived notions. I can't say it any simpler. Yeah, and you can, you can, it's so easy, Ryan. I can be interviewing someone just with my body language.

I can give them suggestion and they're altering their story a little bit. If my body language is too tight and my arms are crossed and my legs are crossed, they think that I'm unhappy and that I'm not enjoying the story and then they start giving me more details and they start getting more nervous. And I'm like, okay, first of all, calm down. You're taking way too much suggestion. So I have to be very careful, you know, that you don't hurt people more than you're trying to help them. That's the whole point is you're trying to help them remember what actually happened, not suggest what very much could have possibly been a dream.

Yeah. Do you, do you, have you come across that often where you've done these sort of things and you're like, I think I don't know if this actually happened to them. It sounds like a really vivid dream. Or could it be both? I think that sometimes I work a lot with trauma and PTSD and as you know one of the side effects of like a head injury like traumatic brain injury is hallucinations and they sure as hell feel real and they smell real and they hurt just like a regular experience but that doesn't necessarily mean that it happened so I do a whole bunch of research I reach out to professionals and as often as I can and I feel like hey I understand that you really want to get to the bottom of what happened to you but you need to go to a doctor first because I don't want you to feel uncomfortable or starting to get stressed out. It's a delicate line you have to walk, especially with people that have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, and then sometimes they'll have blackouts and sometimes they'll have false memories. And sometimes you'll just be trying so damn hard to remember what that alien looked like. Your brain will just feed you an image that you saw when you were a kid.

It's why I do so much research is because I refuse to ignore the parts of the experiencing that I don't like. I refuse to ignore that, you know, not everybody is going to tell me the truth. You know, there are going to be liars. I refuse to ignore that, you know, sometimes hypnotherapy does help people and it does help them get a better story. And I refuse to ignore, you know, that sometimes people will just add in extra details when they don't necessarily mean to. The intention isn't to mislead the person interviewing them.

It's just, it's subconsciously you're just trying to, you know, fill in those gaps. but yeah, it's got to be tough. But what I will never, ever, ever shut up about is the exploitation of experiencers. Like, I hate it. I hate the people that just rip out their innards and their heart and soul because they're trying to write a book

or get a good TV show or something else. You know, that's their life. They have to live with that. For you, it's just 30 minutes of a show or a chapter and a book. Yeah, I don't have very much respect for some of the investigators in the field because of that, but people like you and Peter Robbins,

Christopher Geratano as well, they're respectful. They're always doing continuing education. They're very gentle in their approach. You don't ever give anybody gotcha questions. There was a gentleman I spoke to recently who's, you know, a pretty big name in Hollywood. And he was hired to do a TV show where he would go out and talk to alien abductees and firsthand witnesses to UFOs. And they said, okay, good. Like, you already have the knowledge and you know the people out there who've had. had these experiences. So like, we're just going to go in with a little, you know, a light tone. And he said, what do you mean a light tone? And like, you know, like, we just want to make it

kind of lighthearted. And he's like, what do you mean lighthearted? These people's lives have been completely altered by these things. So it was so good to hear that a person in Hollywood, who is known to be a comedian, wanted to do a legitimate UFO TV show and cast these people in the right light. And he said, fuck, no, I'm not doing this. He's like, and they were ready, I'm not kidding you. They were ready to like greenlight this thing, give him 10 episodes, and they were going to start filming in like two weeks. And he said no. He put the whole thing behind him. He said, now is not the time. These aren't the people I want to work with. And I really had to respect him for that. Definitely. And true integrity in the field of UFO research, it can be hard to

find. It can be extremely hard to find. And, you know, being one of those people who is now kind of in that wave of UFO television, it's not easy. I'm not defending production companies or TV networks. Their job is to entertain. And these topics can often be entertaining. But when it comes to actually putting people on television in front of a national or international, grandstand to tell their story, you have to respect that and you have to do whatever you can. I mean, I have fought and chewed my way up to be like, no, we are going to do this serious.

Do not edit me and make me say something that I did not say or that the witness did not say. And we need to just do this the right way. And I know there's a lot of people out there who regret having done television because of those reasons, the reputations in the field are gone because of it. So it's such a fine line because, of course, you want to get it out there. You know, you want the topic to become legitimate and to get it out there so more people can get involved and it can become normal.

But at the same time, it's just such a fine line between entertainment and what's actually happening. Absolutely. And for people out there that are experiencers and you want to actually start talking about, story and telling people about it, what you can do is just take aside one person that you trust and say, hey, I'd like to talk to you about something. You don't necessarily have to have an answer or an opinion, but I would just really appreciate it if you would just listen to me. And then go ahead and tell them some part of your story. You don't have to tell them the whole thing. And then just see how they react. You know, are they supportive? Are they judgmental?

you know, just kind of try and gauge their reactions versus the experience that you have. And that's very important because the more you start to tell your story, the more that you believe yourself. That's a really good point. Sometimes it takes, like, one person to listen. And what I really respect about what you're doing to, Nicky, it is I've heard you say that, like, you don't really care about the UFO field or these, if we ever get, like, a disclosure. For you, it's about preserving these stories so that these people can move on with their lives. Am I sort of on the right track with that? Absolutely.

I care about people and I care about them one-on-one and I care about, you know, not just writing down a good story, but, you know, how can I help you in a way to process this so that you can kind of come back to some sort of equilibrium or at least an understanding with yourself that something happened that you couldn't control? And you're okay. You're still going to be okay. And not to play this card because so many women do, but being a young woman in the field of UFOology, like, I'm a phenomena in a field working with phenomena. People are like, oh, my God, what do you think?

What do you think? I'm like, I'm not an expert on UFOs. I'm not. No one is. Yeah. Nobody. You go to that guy. Yeah.

Peter Robbins always told me, you want to be a euphologist, spin around three times, touch your nose, and you're dead. Exactly. Like there's there's no degree for UFOology. There is not. So like if you want to talk to someone that's that's very empathetic and accessible and willing to listen and I'm not going to sell your story for some stupid book, I encourage you to email me. I read all of my emails. It may take me a while to respond. I am a single mom to a young child and I do work. But if you just want somebody to read it and then disappear forever, or if you want me to read it and you know, send you response, if you want me to read it and add it to my archives, you know, I would love to. I love hearing all different types of experiences. And if you want to send me hate mail and tell me that

I'm ugly and I smell bad and you're a hypnotherapist, you're welcome to do that too. The world is your oyster trolls out there. I mean, are you really successful if you don't have haters, Ryan? That is such a good, oh, don't get me started on that. We could have a whole episode about that. Well, I know you and I are going to be talking to one another in a couple weeks. We're both going to be attending AlienCon Los Angeles. Yes, I'm on the experiencer panel. That's Friday, June 21st at 1 o'clock. And I'll be sitting next to Kathleen Marden and Earl Grey Anderson and, yeah, a couple of other, like, really good experts in the field with some good information. Yeah, I'm super excited about that. I think you and I are doing our things at the same time, unfortunately. Ryan, you're just going to have to miss it. I'm sorry. Yep, yep. I'm going to leave my own. Yeah. Sorry, guys. I got to take a five-minute break here. I have to go watch Nikita not talk because other people more important than her have to do all the time. Welcome to the UFO conference circuit. That's kind of what it is. Yeah, I know we talked about that as well. Like, I'm not a huge fan of conferences. Like, I don't feel like we learn much there.

But if you want to go meet your cool internet friends or stuff like that, I recommend conferences. It's a good point. Yeah. And I mean, with AlienCon, you know, it's such a fine line because a lot of us in the field, we don't tend to veer towards the whole ancient alien theory. And that's the people putting on this huge event. But you got to admit they know how to do a conference. And there are thousands of people that show up to this thing. And, you know, I struggled when I went to the first one because I'm like, this isn't really my thing. Like, it's more of like, like, a Comic-Con thing and people are dressing up and whatnot. But the more I thought about it and the more people I talked to while I was there, I'm like, oh, my God, I got through just so many people. And now they can, like, dig deeper into the field of research rather than watch this TV show telling them that aliens built the pyramids. So it is such a very interesting relationship between the conferences

and the actual work being done for sure. Yeah, I agree. I know that we can't all just get along, but hey, at least we're trying. We're moving towards the phenomena, I think, instead of away from it, and that's good. That is a really, really good point. We're always moving forward. Whether we'll ever catch up is another question, but I think the journey is more important, in my opinion. So what comes next for you and your preservation work, and where can we find out more about that?

Right now, my archives are not available to the public. I do take confidentiality very seriously. I do have a couple of them that have agreed to disclose. I'm actually working with Christopher Cogswell this week. He's helping me to, we're actually going to start creating our own database full of markers and things like that, trying to figure out why so many people are more active than others. Yeah, and I will be on Strange World in October on the Travel Channel. I might be on there for 30 seconds.

I don't know, but yeah. Yep, welcome to the world of television. Like, if I see you post them on Facebook and your website, that means you're not working. Exactly, exactly. Well, I'm super excited to hear that you're working with Chris Coxville. I will be on a panel with him at AlienCon. He is one of the best people in the field right now. So to hear that you guys are working together, I can't even imagine where that's going to head.

So I have to thank you so much for coming on somewhere in the skies today and sharing all of this with us, Nikita. Yeah, thank you, Ryan. And can't wait to see you guys at AlienCon. And yeah, just remember the last thing. And it's the last thing I always tell all my experiences before I give them a hug. It's because I like to hug. But it's just honor yourself because you survived. That's it for this week's episode.

If you've had a UFO sighting, a close encounter, or any type of anomalous experience, and you're looking for a safe place to share it, you can email NKranda directly and confidentially at Preserve Your Experience at Gmail. Again, that's preserve your experience at gmail.com. You can also seek her out on Facebook by searching for NKKranda. If you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review someone this guys on Apple Podcasts, your Android apps, or wherever you listen to the show from. It helps us gain visibility and find new listeners.

We're on Twitter at SomewhereSkies and Instagram at SomewhereSkies pod. I want to take a moment to thank all of my Patreon subscribe. You are the reason the show continues, and your support means more than I could possibly tell you here on air. If you'd like to help the show and receive bonus episodes and many other rewards, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. For more info and to contribute, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Alien Kong, Los Angeles is a mere four days away. It's being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 21st through the 23rd.

I really hope to see you there, and trust me, this is going to be the biggest one yet. I'll be speaking all three days of the event with fellow rogue planeteer, Jason McClellan. And I'm also taking part in a panel on Roswell, Mysteries Decoded, along with my co-host, Jennifer Marshall. We'll be joined by producer Alejandro Rojas, executive producer Gary Tarpinian, and a special appearance by Denise Marcel, the granddaughter of Major Jesse Marcel, the first military officer on site at the Roswell UFO crash. We'll be discussing our investigation some behind-the-scenes moments and what's next for mysteries decoded on the CW.

I'm also taking part in a massive podcast panel called UFOs in podcasting. Feature podcasts are the Blurry Photos podcast, The Monsters Among Us podcast, Hysteria 51, the Mad Scientist podcast, and Stuff they don't want you to know. It's going to be an epic panel all about why we do our shows and cover the topics we do. Later that night, we'll be hosting a listener and podcaster meetup in downtown L.A. at the Scum and Villany Cantina, a super cool alien-themed bar, so I hope to see you there as well. In addition, I'll be giving my personal solo presentation and doing tons of other fun events,

including live recordings of Somewhere in the Skies with an audience. So, be sure to get your tickets now because they are going very fast and they will sell out. Head on over to thealiencon.com and use the promo code, Skies, for discount tickets. Thank you, as always, to the E1 podcast network, Roke Planet, KGRA Radio, and a very special thanks to you for listening. I'll see you here next week, and remember, keep your feet on the grind, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.

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