The Confessionals - 633: Seers Of Realms

Starting point is 00:00:01 Merkel Media This was all circulating around the base that a giant had to kill but no one was supposed to talk about it I saw three long, bony fingers reach up underneath the door, curl up to grab it, and then disappear.

Starting point is 00:00:26 When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me. Giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen and he starts running and finds running and firing at this giant. With a giant moves, he's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast. And spears, Dan, holds him up like this.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face. They basically decapitated. And I look over, and there are two small, because I know I'm seeing a monster. Welcome to the show, everybody. You're listening to The Confessionals podcast. I'm your host, Tony Merkel. Thanks for being here. If you have a crazy, wild experience you want to share with me on the show, go ahead and shoot me an email.

Starting point is 00:01:56 My email address is Contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com. That's contact at the confessionalspodcast.com. Or go to the website, theconfessionalspodcast.com. Hit the contact section and you can reach me that way as well. I think it works for me. Just get a hold of me. If you want more shows on a weekly basis, we got you covered. All you got to do is go to the professionalspodcast.com.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Hit the join button and become a member to the website. And then you will get access to the app as well. But also, we are now opening up memberships on YouTube. same content in both locations, but we are opening up memberships on YouTube for the YouTube audience who do not like just listening, but they like watching as well. So now that is an option for YouTubers as well. Same content, just two different locations. Also, friends, go ahead and check out Merkelfilms.com. That's where we host all our documentaries and movies.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Exhibition Dog Man and The Shape of Shadows are available right there. And soon we're releasing our new documentary, Sasquatch and The Missing Man. We went out to do a big foot film in Washington State where we featured West Gürmer and his encounter location, and we stumbled across a missing person case that's all intertwined into this new documentary coming out here very soon, probably sooner than you realize. All right, today we have Mike Clelland coming on the show, and Mike studies owls and their connection to UFO encounters, UFO encounters, and their connection to owls. Mike believes that when people are saying they saw a five-foot owl after a paranormal encounter, usually that's a screen. memory in place of something that was more terrifying than the owl itself. So let's get to Mike and this conversation about the connection between owls and UFO encounters and possible abductions right now. All right, today we have Mike Clelland on the show. Sir, how are you?

Starting point is 00:03:52 I'm very good. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. I was telling you earlier I had stumbled across your work on YouTube. And often when I'm driving back and forth the office, I'm listening to something, and usually it's off the same YouTube channels. It's just a feed that's curated or curated. And so when you popped up, it was with a channel that I remember I had never seen before, and I clicked on it. And I don't know what caused me to click on it, but I was just absolutely fascinated that there was somebody out there. And I had never known of your work before, but there was somebody out there that specifically looked into owls. It wasn't like, oh, yeah, let me tell you about owls and then let me tell you about,

Starting point is 00:04:39 you know, Bigfoot. It was just like, let me tell you about the owls and how everything stems from there. And it was such a fascinating thing to hear. I was like, man, I got to have this guy on. And my next thought was, what if you can't hold a conversation with it because you don't know anything about owls? I'm like, who cares? Like, just have a conversation and see where it goes. because, you know, I was telling you earlier, we had, we've had several people on the show throughout the years who are relaying paranormal encounters. Some of it is more generically paranormal to alien, ET, abduction type stuff, and owls pop up every once in a while. And sometimes there, these owls are, and I don't know, maybe this is a good question to ask you,

Starting point is 00:05:26 even though it's not the direction I necessarily was thinking, taking it. Sometimes, and I've known it, I know it's more than once, I've heard people talk about owls that shouldn't exist as far as size goes. You've heard of this? Oh, yeah, very common. Yeah. Old hat, huh? Yeah, I've got to be careful.

Starting point is 00:05:44 I sound really callous and cavalier, but like once you hear that straight 500 times, you kind of get the point, yeah. Well, I mean, so let's just go there because I don't want to bring that up and then not get back to it because I know there's probably a few people who have had that experience. Is there anything that you recognize with that that stands out as far as why that would be? I mean, because to me, it seems like when you're talking about not just an owl appearing, but something that we don't have on record as far as size, we're talking like three, four, five feet tall, do you think that that owl then is an actual owl or an image that is being projected or something more paranormal?

Starting point is 00:06:24 How do you view that stuff? Okay, so I'm in a funny position where I have a very difficult time saying anything with authority, right? Like, I cannot say I know something. I can say, this is what people report. Oh, I feel fine saying that. But what the source might be is anyone's guess. And I'm, and I will do my very best. If I'm speculating about something, it'll be really clear.

Starting point is 00:06:46 I'm speculating about something. If I know something, boy, I'll let you know too. So we're starting right with the four-foot-tall owls. Yeah, why not? Yeah, let's do it. So I get four-foot-tall-owl accounts all the time. So, okay, then we're going to just go right into the deep dive. In the UFO lore, there is something called a screen memory.

Starting point is 00:07:11 It's pretty well understood by it through the researchers who are specifically doing abduction research or direct contact research, people who feel they've been contacted or taken or abducted by the UFO occupants. Now, we're already on thin ice talking about this kind of stuff. So let's walk further out into the thinner ice. Here's a common, very common story. Someone's driving down the road at night. They turn a corner and there's a four-foot-tall owl in the road or on the side of the road. And oftentimes it is dead center in the road and they have to stop and the owl is tall enough to look over the hood of their car. Very commonly recorded. And I'll tell you what, you take the smallest car in the whole world and the biggest

Starting point is 00:07:56 owl in the whole world, and that owl cannot look over the hood of the car. So people are driving their big Ford F-150s, and this owl is looking at them in the eyes from the road standing in the headlights, right up against the owl. So then afterwards, let's say, now I'm going to generalize and kind of morph a lot of stories into one kind of apocryphal story. And someone's driving down the road, they see a four-foot-tall owl, often a white owl or a gray owl, and then they'll say, huh, that's really odd, I saw this owl, and then they'll get home, and they'll arrive home, and they'll say, I was supposed to be home at midnight, and it's two in the morning. Golly, I wonder what happened. And then perhaps they'll have a handful of other odd life

Starting point is 00:08:43 experiences, and they'll confront a researcher, and the researcher will say, let's go back to that night you saw the owl on the road. And the hypnotherapist will say, okay, just, you know, put in, put the person under hypnosis. And then they'll ask, describe that owl. And they'll say, well, the owl's about four foot tall. It's skinny. It's bald. It's got big black eyes. It's wearing a tight fitting little Chinese space suit. And I don't think that was an owl. So what they will describe, under hypnosis, is a gray alien, the prototypical gray alien that's on like every snowboard bumper sticker. So the implication is that if you turned that corner and saw a creepy, skinny gray alien, like a being from beyond our normal comprehension, you would

Starting point is 00:09:39 be pretty freaked out. But you're instead seeing an owl. And the implication is that, is that the owl is, or excuse me, that the gray alien has, whether it's technology or it's a psychic ability, can somehow put into the mind of the observer. They have the, that power to put in something into the mind of the observer. Now, let me step back a bit. It's not just owls. It's deer. It's raccoons. A lot of squirrels. A lot of, it's four foot tall squirrels. I turn the corner and there's a four foot tall squirrel. Or like, I'm, I woke up in the middle of night and there was a four-foot-tall squirrel at the side of my bed. This gets very murky and very bizarre and very easy to dismiss as madness.

Starting point is 00:10:25 But once you see the consistency in the pattern of the reports, you've got to be, you've got to just trust the reporting and trust what people are saying. It could be like you're trusting a hallucination, right? So someone says, I had this impression that there was an owl in the road or an owl in the bedroom or an owl on the back porch or an owl looking in the window. But things get very murky, very quick when you try to give a hard and fast answer. Here, I'll tell you one quick story. A woman I know very well was working at a girl's school for kids, and this was a camping

Starting point is 00:11:04 in outdoor school. So she was taking the kid's wilderness camping, and this was in the Pacific Northwest. and so she was out in the woods and she was there was a set of girls and there was one campsite here and one campsite there this is just the available campsites and there was a path between them and you had to walk a little ways and so she left one campsite and was walking to the other one full daylight

Starting point is 00:11:26 now this woman was well aware that she had been having contact experiences at the time she was 19 years old she's around 50 now and but at that time in her life she knew she was having contact experiences Like, she's, like, they were abduction experiences. These were not nice experiences for her. But they always happened at night. Now, she's full daylight, bright sunshine.

Starting point is 00:11:50 She's walking down this path. She's all alone. She can hear the girls behind her laughing in the woods. She turns a corner. There's a gray alien standing on the side of the path. Like bright sunshine, chalky white, creepy skin, bald head, big black eyes, skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, standing right on the side of the path. Now, I'm not sure how up to speed your listeners are, but pretty much all communication with these beings, whether they're gray aliens or these angelic Nordics that look like supermodels, is telepathic.

Starting point is 00:12:25 There's nobody moves their lips when they're talking to these beings. It's just straight mind-to-mind communication. So she turns a corner, sees this gray being on the side of the trail, and she's got this immediate psychic reverberation in her mind. and she hears this kind of message, like this kind of freaked out panic message going, owl, owl, owl, owl. You know, she's hearing it, it's hearing her. And she watches this gray alien

Starting point is 00:12:52 morph into an owl. And it turns around and walks into the woods. She actually, this is very interesting. To tell the story completely, she said it like traveled like a little hovercraft, which is also very commonly reported. Oftentimes people don't, describe the gray beings walking like this,

Starting point is 00:13:11 they just kind of hovercraft along. They float a few inches off the ground. And, which is very dreamlike, and I recognize that, and that makes us all the much more mysterious. So she saw this owl, which had seconds ago been a gray alien,

Starting point is 00:13:26 just going to the woods. And she went and followed the trail, the path that it would have taken afterwards. And there was a big ditch that you couldn't see. It was in the tall grass. But if it had walked, it would have had to walk, go down the ditch, and go up the other side. But that's not what she saw.

Starting point is 00:13:42 She saw this thing go right into the woods. So here we have an example of an event that messed up. I have the same type of reporting where someone saw a, like they saw a break flash outside, their home, went outside, and there were four gray beings standing right next to their house. And she watched them all turn into deer. which is also very commonly reported, and then they kind of walked backwards and around the corner of their home.

Starting point is 00:14:13 So I would say about 25% of the reports I get, maybe less. Let's say 20% of the reports I get are the four-foot-tall owl. That's interesting. I wonder, and I'm sure you have thoughts on it, and I appreciate what you said earlier as a precursor that, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:30 there's speculation and everything. But I'm sure you have plenty of thoughts on a lot of this stuff. I do wonder what it is about the owl that seems to be a pretty consistent thing versus these other creatures. And when you're talking about screen memories, I think it was episode 17. I mean, this was seven years ago. I had a guy on talking about when he was a kid in his room.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Something was in his room. I don't remember the whole story, but it started flashing imagery to him until it actually settled in on the cartoon character Fred Flintstone. and he's like, I don't know what to tell you. And this is, you know, seven years ago, my perspective and my thoughts on things have expanded greatly since then. But I didn't know how to react to it. I'm 17 episodes in.

Starting point is 00:15:17 And he's like, I'm telling you, I don't know what it was, but like it was Fred Flintstone standing there. And then I think it was like episode 78. I had a guy on who, and I've had several people talk about this stuff throughout, but these two stick out in my head with the screen memories. He said that he had an action figure in his room that was a toy that he often played with. than he loved. And one night, he woke up and that action figure was now standing at the bottom of his bed, but it was three times the size. And so in my head, hearing that stuff, I'm thinking,

Starting point is 00:15:49 okay, both of them are children, children giving them images that are they're familiar with and give them comfort. But what would it be about owls that would give people comfort? Because quite honestly, they're kind of creepy at night. Yeah. Yeah. So if you talk, to a UFO researcher, and I've talked to many of them, abduction researchers, people focused on the abduction content, but Hopkins, who's since passed on Leo Sprinkle, I could name a handful of people, they all give the same answer. They say, well, the owls sort of look like aliens, right? The great alien, if you take a, especially the barn owl, the very, it's, that's one of the spooky or looking owls, a very friendly owl, actually. If you want to have a pet owl,

Starting point is 00:16:30 that's the one you want. But it's a, uh, it's a very, it's a very, very, eerie, spooky owls. So they say, oh, the reason they use the owls is because the owls sort of look like the gray alien. And that all falls apart when, you know, squirrels and raccoons and deer. So, Fred Flintstone, and Jesus actually shows up a lot, not a lot, but people will say, oh, I woke up and Jesus was at the side of my bed. And then they'll have a typical abduction sort of narrative that will play out. So, yeah. So that, so my, sense is. Oh, yeah, so, but let's go back to Fred Flintstone.

Starting point is 00:17:09 You've had it in a sense of, it feels like the beings have some rapid fire way to just go into the person's consciousness and pick out what would be most appropriate. For a kid, it would be a toy or a cartoon character. I have a story of a husband and wife. This was on the day he proposed to her. They were driving down a lonely road, and they passed, and it's really funny, they said they passed a streetlight. And then they talked about it afterwards. This was like a, this was like, there should be no street light on this road. It's a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. There

Starting point is 00:17:43 shouldn't be a street light. So they passed a street light and under the street light, the woman said, what are those kids doing out at night dressed as ghosts? And the husband said, honey, those are owls. And they went right past them. It wasn't like they were far off in the distance. It was right on the side of the road. So here you have what seems to be two separate you know, they chose something out of the hard drive of the wife, and they chose something different out of the hard drive, the internal hard drive, the brain of the husband. So it gets very murky. Okay, my answer, and let me tell you what, this answer I'm going to give you, I am outside the bounds of, let's say, what would be normal euphology. Uphology is funny. Let me just tell you,

Starting point is 00:18:34 with that, what you just said, you're home. Because that's what I do here. I go way outside the bounds of what even the UFOology or anybody said. I prefer to have people thinking outside the box, even if we've never heard it before. I'm like, that's what we're here for. So feel comfortable. Okay. So you ask a UFO abduction researcher, why did they pick the owl as the screen memory?

Starting point is 00:19:01 and they'll say, oh, it's because they look like owls. But now my strong sense is, doesn't make it true, but it's my strong sense is that the owl is an archetype. So an archetype, I mean, this is funny. I meet a lot of people who are professors and doctorates, and they have doctorates and philosophy and stuff like that. I always ask them the same question. Like, give me your definition of archetype. They always give me a different answer. Like, it's like, there's no good answer for archetypes.

Starting point is 00:19:30 So my answer would be an archetype is something that we have as humanity in our collective knowing. Like we have an appreciation and understanding of a symbolic meaning of an owl that is sort of embedded in our DNA. So cultures all across the world have a similar mythology around owls. There's a similar pop culture content around owls. So we have embedded in our minds an ancient, symbolic definition of what an owl might mean. So my answer would be, that is why they are presenting us with an owl. They are presenting us with an archetype. Now, a deer is also a powerful archetype, too.

Starting point is 00:20:19 It has a different mythic meaning, as does Jesus. Clowns are commonly reported. This is funny that everyone in the UFO research community knows that clowns are often reported. And then their next thing is like, doesn't that like play out like the weird fear of clowns that so many people have? And then like this clown archetype, don't they like know that like that's the worst thing they can have show up in a little kid's room at night? But so my argument would be that they are presenting us with an archetype just because I'm saying that doesn't make it true. But wow, do the puzzle pieces sort of click in place when you when you use that as a way to frame just the screen memory aspect? Oh, so let me add now.

Starting point is 00:21:02 I wrote a big fat book called The Messengers. It's all about this owl and UFO stuff. And I've since, that came out about, oh, yikes, nine years ago. And in the intervening years, I was, I'm less locked into some of the ideas I put forward very forcefully. I still, I still, those are strong ideas, but I'm a little more nuanced in them. So what I can say is, as I said earlier, once you've heard. the screen memory story, the four-foot-tall owl, 500 times, you get it. There's something there.

Starting point is 00:21:38 I would also say that's about 20%, 15, 20%, 25%, I can't give a good number, but it's a smaller proportion of the overall reports I'm getting. The overall reports I'm getting are of real owls. And so real owls showing up at the time, not just around the time of a UFO contact experience. We've got plenty of those, but also around the time of other highly charged experiences in someone's life. And if I get on a roll and you want to interrupt, you just butt right in. No, I'm actually, I enjoy when my guests actually talk. So feel free to talk as much as you want. So there's plenty of things we can pull out here. And at some point, I would like to just kind of lay

Starting point is 00:22:25 the groundwork for the audience to understand who you are as far as how you got. involved in this because I do think that does help define why you're so invested in this, because it clearly was the launching point for you. But I want to say this, a couple of things. One, I'm going to bring this up not knowing how to go forward once I bring it up because I don't know much about it. But I have a friend who is one of my cameramen for my documentaries, and he came out with a docu-series called Dark Holler. And a lot of it has to do with Lilith. I don't know if you've heard of Lilith. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:00 Okay. And he's constantly pointing out birds to me. I'm like, I've never said this to him and stuff, but just thinking about it. Like, he's my bird friend. But it has something to do with Lilith. I just don't totally understand because he hasn't sat down to tutor me on it. But he brings the idea of owls up, Lilith up. And he even brought this up with me just yesterday.

Starting point is 00:23:26 We recently started a private discord between him, me, and a couple other guys where we're just jotting down things that come across our path just to kind of keep a journal of it almost together. And I wasn't sure if I was going to say this, but I'm going to say it. I'm going to kind of tell you what just happened last night. It's not. Okay, bring it on. Bring it on. Yeah. So I do want to, because there's more owl stories I have for you.

Starting point is 00:23:56 All right. Actually, let me just start from the beginning. And just give me a few minutes here. So the audience listening right now, by the time they hear this, they will have known this. Well, if they're members to the podcast, they'll have known the story because this is going to be a members episode. I had a guy come in studio two Saturdays ago, and he was telling me different stories and experiences. He was originally on my episode 510, and it was a good conversation. And then he said to me, he was really hesitant, and he's like, I have to, I want to tell you something else. I have one more thing to tell you. He's kind of like just kind of dawdling around with it. And he's like, it has to do it with you. And, you know, I get people telling me a lot, you know, hey, I had a dream about you or I think you should because, you know, God told me or I have a feeling or whatever. And a lot of times, like, I'm a Christian. And I, I, the way I live my life is if God isn't kind of telling me first, I try not to put too much credence in what a man is telling me God is saying for me. And so I'm already kind of hesitant with what he's gearing up to do.

Starting point is 00:25:06 Now, mind you, this guy is here in Tennessee. He's a worship leader at his church. He's a deacon at his church. He's a more spiritual person when it comes to his Christian faith. And he says, and I will tell you this, before I tell you this, his previous story he had just shared with me is that he had for the first time ever in his life after his initial story that he was on the show with since then he had an experience where he had like an out of body experience where he was lifted up in his bedroom or his his inner man was not his his physical body is on

Starting point is 00:25:38 the bed and he's up towards the ceiling and he looks to the side out of his window and there's a great alien entity standing there and then he tells me this this this story that involves me where basically he asked me if a certain number meant anything to me. And immediately it did. I looked at my brother who's live producing the show. I look back at the guest and I tell him, we can't talk about this here. And I think I said we can't talk about the number here or something like that. And he said, okay, so it kind of starts talking without talking about the number.

Starting point is 00:26:10 And he starts describing a dream that he had where he saw me at my house outside. and he proceeds to accurately describe my driveway, the way it's shaped, my house, the house color, the way my road is leading up to my driveway and how my driveway cuts off, how my house is positioned on the property, and my mind was blown at this point. And then he later confirmed by sketching my house on paper.

Starting point is 00:26:36 Like he drew my house. I was like, holy cow, this isn't even just like similarity. Like he had the door placement down everything. So, in that story he says that he saw two black cloaked figures walking behind me into my house as they followed me to my house that night. I say these two stories because after he had left, I don't know what it was. Maybe I knew you were coming up this week, but I said to him,

Starting point is 00:27:07 hey, I text him after he left. I said, do you remember seeing owls at all since you started having these experiencing, he said, you know, we have an owl outside our house that my kids hoot at all the time. It's always there hooting. And I was like, interesting. I don't know what that means, but that's his experience. And then just last night, you know, I know I have you coming up because I plan ahead for these interviews. I know who I have the next day. And I'm sitting in my kitchen. My wife goes out. We have pigs in the backyard. And so we save food scraps for the pigs. And she goes to dump the dinner scraps into the bucket that we have outside. And she comes in and she goes, I know you're going to think I'm crazy because if, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:55 your interview tomorrow and everything that's been going on, she said, I just heard a weird-sounding critter that I'd never heard before. And she said it was a mix between a weird-sounding critter. And this is pop culture reference. But she said it was a mix between a weird sounding critter and the seagull from the little mermaid trying to sing. And then immediately following that, she said a very large owl flew by her hooting. And then she comes inside and tells me this. And she told me that it was a big owl. She sent me a picture and she said, think of this owl only flying.

Starting point is 00:28:36 And then just this morning, I wake up and before I even leave the house to take my son to school, I venture onto the good old Instagram and the very first sponsored ad that comes up on my Instagram I was like I was shocked and kind of be like you got to be kidding me and I don't know if it's like me

Starting point is 00:28:56 just seeing owls everywhere now but the first sponsored ad was for a media company that I don't want to say the media company's name out loud because I don't want to put them on the spot with this conversation if they don't want it but it has owl in the name of it

Starting point is 00:29:10 and it's a woman advertising their media company next to my town in Knoxville. And so, like, I'm thinking to myself, is that a coincidence? I don't know, but Owl's sure to seem to be popping up a lot since I scheduled Mike Clellon to be on my show. So I say all that, and I don't know what got me going on that stuff, but I just kind of want to share that with you because it, I'm sure you've heard it before that owls tend to kind of pop up where you, where you tend to tread your feet. Oh, like if I, oh, oh, what you've just shared is like, I don't want to say a, so I do a lot of podcasts, like a lot.

Starting point is 00:29:55 And so like I got books and I'm self-published and like someone asked me like, what's your media plan? What's your marketing plan? I'm like, I say yes to people who want to do a podcast and that's about it. So, but I'm going to be really careful to say 100% because that would be. wrong, but it's a lot. Wow, it is a lot of people who tell stories just like that. I had one guy, so that my, my, my, my, the core of my research, it goes, it spreads out a little further than just this tight little thing at the center, but it's owls and UFOs, specifically UFO contact.

Starting point is 00:30:31 And then so this guy, his name is Juan, he's got a pod, and how he got a hold of me is a funny story. It's like Phil. Is it one on one podcast? One on one, exactly. Yeah, he's a friend of mind. He's just here a few weeks ago. Oh, so Juan, so gets a hold of me. It's funny. He actually, I won't tell you how he got a hold of me. The story will go on forever. But so, we're going to do a podcast. It's the next day. It's the night. He's with his wife and his kid. He's got a very young kid. I think he's like five or so, a little like a boy. And he's in the backyard. It's nighttime. And he's like, you know, I'm going to interview the owl guy tomorrow. I'm going to interview that

Starting point is 00:31:04 owl guy tomorrow. Maybe else? Maybe. And then his son goes, dad, look. And an orange orange orb floats through the backyard. So he's thinking, I'm going to see an owl. His son says, hey, look, and they're confronted with a UFO. This is like, this is like straight out of my research. This is 100% the kind of thing I'm finding. You're looking for an owl. You see a UFO.

Starting point is 00:31:29 I got that other way around, too. You're looking for a UFO. You see an owl. It's just, so there's this flip-floppy, blendy thing that goes on. And I could tell that story in one form and other. I could fill up three hours. of podcast hosts, seeing owls before or after the recording. Wow. Wow.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Or having some sort of like playful, absurd owl synchronicity. Yeah. Jack, a quirky producer with a passion for baking apple pies and setting them on his windowsill, found himself in a peculiar situation. His pies kept vanishing. Suspecting mischievous neighborhood kids, Jack turned to simply save's 60-day risk-free trial to catch the culprits. He was all about saving a buck, but he was ready for a lifetime commitment if Simplisave could solve this mystery. Equipped with Simplicef's advanced tech,

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Starting point is 00:33:40 Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something that stood out to me and when I text my group of guys, they found it interesting as well. And so before we get too carried away with everything, which normally I dropped this stuff in the beginning, but I had forgot about. I'll do it in the intro.

Starting point is 00:34:01 You are an author of several books, the main book you already mentioned, which is the messengers. And people can check that out at my cleland.com. You are my cleland. And if you could at this point, though, kind of, this is how I normally would have started out the show, but I had to bring up the four-foot owls and jump right into the deep end. Could you let the audience know your background, though,

Starting point is 00:34:26 with how this kind of came together for you? Because it's not like one day you woke up and you were always just interested in owls and you decided to try to connect owls to your other fascination, which is UFOs and aliens. This was something that kind of almost sought you out in a way. Sure. Oh, yeah. So I've told the story many times. And I can kind of go on autopilot, but I'll try to tell this quick. I could tell this story. I could take an hour to tell this story. And there are coincidences and synchronicities and deeper meanings and all these little threads are tangled up in this one story.

Starting point is 00:34:59 But, okay, 2006, that's 18 years ago. I was 44 then. I'm 61 now. I think I got that right. So I was living in a little town in Idaho right next to the Wyoming border, and I was working for an outdoor school. I was doing a lot of outdoor work. I was going to Alaska. I was teaching month-long courses.

Starting point is 00:35:24 I was teaching skiing in the winter and the outdoors. I was teaching mountaineering and wilderness travel in the summers. And so I had been in Alaska all summer. I got back down to the lower 48, and I was in my little town, and I met this woman, and she had been living in the town too. So the town I lived in is right next to Grand Teton National Park. It's gorgeous, really. So we had this conversation, and I was like, I just got back into town, and I'm like, oh, you must have been camping all summer long.

Starting point is 00:35:51 She's, no, I never went camping once. And it's like, that's terrible. It's beautiful here. I'll take a camping. Total stranger. This is like a first date, which in a camping culture like that is well understood. It's no big deal. But I've told that to other people.

Starting point is 00:36:03 It took someone camping on a first date. Sort of, yeah. So her name is Kristen. we're still good friends. And I also teach a form of like really ultra-light backpacking. I used to teach it. I haven't done it in a few years. So we went out for one night.

Starting point is 00:36:25 It took very little gear, light packs, beautiful night. I knew how to wait, the weather, the weather report, and it was going to be a gorgeous night. So we didn't take a shelter. We didn't take a tent. We're just going to sleep out under the stars. So I go with Kristen and where we go with a light pack and starting the afternoon, we go deep into the mountains, and we're in this beautiful. beautiful spot in the titans, which is a fantastic, glorious place. And the sun is setting,

Starting point is 00:36:49 and I'm sitting on a big flat rock, and I've been out all summer. I'm totally in my element. I'm cooking on a little camp stove, and we're talking. And I get this moment, I'm like, whoa, this woman is really smart. This woman is really thoughtful. This woman has a depth that, like, I did not expect. And I'm like, I'm impressed. And at that moment, an owl flies over. and then a second owl, and then a third owl. And for the next two hours, as the sun sets, these owls fly around us. So we were in bear countries. So what we did is we cooked in one spot.

Starting point is 00:37:23 And then we cleaned everything up, and we walked another half mile or camped somewhere else. So we just found a spot to camp, and these owls are following us, and we lie down on our backs under the stars. Now, this is the northern Rockies. This is way far away from light pollution. This is a trillion billion, glorious stars. So we're lying in her back, and these owls are like going right over our faces, and they blot out the stars for one microsecond. It was absolutely magical.

Starting point is 00:37:50 Owls are very quiet in flight. So there's nothing to hear, but just this like blink, blink. Like the heavens were blinking. It was remarkable. The next morning we get up and like, wow, that was cool. And I said, hey, let's go camping again. Anytime you want, let's do it. So four days later, we go camping again, totally different part of the mountains.

Starting point is 00:38:07 as the sun setting, three owls appear. Now, I'm convinced they were the same three owls. We're miles away. They certainly could be, and there's no way I can prove it, but that's my very strong sense of the same three owls. These are normal owls, a little 11-inch, 11-inch-tall owls, or kind of owl called a short-eared owl, pretty common, and three owls fly around us.

Starting point is 00:38:30 Now, before, they were kind of off in the distance. and and this second time they were like landing at our feet. I have this memory of Kristen seared into my mind where she's just like astonished, just absolutely astonished that this owl is standing at our feet. Now, let me back up a little bit. Leading up to this, I had been looking into and reading a lot of UFO literature. books written by UFO researchers

Starting point is 00:39:09 books written by people who claim the direct contact experience who claim abduction. Now, I had a series of events in my youth that sure sound like UFO contact. I have a missing time event that is with an associated

Starting point is 00:39:25 bright light in the sky. I have a I saw a UFO out a window which seemed to be very close when I was about 12 years old. And then I have, this is a little more telling, but I have a memory when I was 30, half my lifetime ago, when I woke up in the middle of the night, sat up in bed, looked out the window, bright light pouring in, and there were five gray aliens walking towards the house. And I just said, I had a voice in my head that said,

Starting point is 00:39:52 ooh, now is the time to shut down, put your head on the pillow and black out. And that's exactly what I did. And the next day, I dismissed it all as nothing but a dream. But wow, am I skeptical of what may or may not have happened that night. Now, so, so I was at a point at this point in 2006 with Kristen where I was, I was like, like, I got to someday look into this, right? I got to, I got to, I got to look into what may or may not have happened in my life. At the same time, I was, no way, no way, not me, uh-uh, not going there, full denial, like I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to look into this, nuh. So, but a boy, I could tell these stories around the campfire around a dinner table and like, isn't that interesting?

Starting point is 00:40:37 Yeah, isn't that interesting? I like saw this weird orange flash and then came home and I was two hours late and my parents were angry at me. I would have been 12 years old at that time. And so when I saw the owls in the mountains with Kristen, two times, three owls, two different parts of the mountain, four days apart, both times I had this thought in my head that said, this has something to do with the UFOs. Right now, now I'm at a point.

Starting point is 00:41:04 where I'm like, was that my own voice or was this like an outside projection? But it was a very clear voice in my head. This has something to do with the UFOs. I'm looking at real owls, little cute owls. And I was well aware that owls show up in the context of UFO events at that point. I didn't invent that. Other people have articulated that very clearly before I came along. I didn't know one who went kind of wiggie about it and wrote four books on it. So, so I So afterwards, after these of owl events, Kristen and I both, this was in the early days in the internet, this 2009, or 2006, so we're like Googling like, like owl mythology and owl symbolism.

Starting point is 00:41:48 And it's like just, we're both making ourselves crazy. And because I had that voice in my head, I was not only looking into the owl mystery, I was reaching out to UFO researchers. That was the beginning of me looking into my own direct experiences. And now, I started a blog in 2009 that was three years later. After that event, Kristen was only spending the summer in the valley where I was living. So she moved out, but we've kept in touch. And so I started a blog and I told exactly this story, the story of camping with Kristen.

Starting point is 00:42:30 Now, I get on the phone, I call her up. The blog post is already up. it's a second blog post on my blog. I call her up and I say, the first night, the first night when we were talking about those owls, or before the owls appeared, you were talking about something.

Starting point is 00:42:53 And I remember I was impressed. I remember you're talking about something spiritual. What were you talking about? I can't remember. And she said, oh, I remember exactly what I was talking about. I was giving my deepest, most heartfelt definition of what God means to me. And that happened at the very first moment.

Starting point is 00:43:13 Now, this is three years after I had totally taken the deep dive. And like I will say, an unhealthy obsession into these mysteries. I was, I was, I was a, I'm a much calmer person now. I was not that way at the time. And so she hits me with this. with this thing about like, oh, we were talking about God, right when the owls appeared. Now, I'm not at all churchy. I grew up going to a Lutheran church.

Starting point is 00:43:41 I stopped going to church when I was 15. But I fully recognize, let's say, the archetypal power of what she said. Like, I recognize the power in that statement, the mystical power in that statement. And it took my research that I was doing kind of haphazardly at that point. I'm a little more formal about it now. And it made me say, no, no, no, I have to, like, there is something here. Like, I have to be open to the biggest ideas. I mean, I think that there would be other UFO researchers that would hear that.

Starting point is 00:44:23 And they just put that in the, they put that in the grave in. And they're not going to worry about that claim. but that, that, so there was a long, long, long thing about how I got into this. So what happened is I started looking to my own direct set of experiences, which involve UFOs seemingly. I started looking to the owl thing. So I kind of doing those simultaneously. So when I talked to a UFO witness or an experiencer, I say, hey, by the way, let me add

Starting point is 00:44:51 one question to your, like, have you ever had any odd experiences with owls? And they'll go, whoa, man. Like, that's so funny you should ask. No one's ever asked me that. I have the weirdest story. And then they would tell me a story. And I'd figure out a way to write it down. And I kept a little files.

Starting point is 00:45:08 And then I had a blog and I put a little thing in the blog said, I want to hear your owl stories. It didn't take long before. If you were anywhere, anywhere in the world, and you sat down on your computer, you can do it right now. You can just type in UFO's owls. I'm the first thing that comes up. I'm about the next 15 things below that.

Starting point is 00:45:23 And so anyone with a mouse, I'm two mouse clicks away. Anyone who has a profound owl experience that involves a UFO, I'm about two mouse clicks away. And they're going to find me. At the top of my blog says, I want to hear your owl stories. So it used to be I'd get like one or two a week, and then it was one or two a day.

Starting point is 00:45:42 And now it's about, I've got to be really careful. It's been crazy. It's about six a day. Six, like powerful owl stories a day. Maybe that's a little high. I'm going to say most days of the week I'm getting three plus. People say, hey, I saw a pretty owl on the fence in my backyard. It's really neat, really beautiful.

Starting point is 00:46:01 My husband and I saw it. I'm like, okay, that's nice story. That's not going in. That's like, that's not going in the files. I'm talking about like absolutely mystical, powerful. And I would say the majority of the accounts I'm getting, none of them involve UFOs anymore. They're just owls that have, that have a mystical resonance to the observer. Do you think that the increase of.

Starting point is 00:46:26 reports that you've been experiencing is just a mere consequence of you being out there long enough? Or do you think that there is an uptick in this stuff that people are looking into it because it's standing out to more and more people? I think it's more that it's easier to search. People have heard my name. You know, like all of a sudden I'm out there a little bit. Yeah. So I think it's just a matter of, it's basically the internet is allowing this to percolate in a way

Starting point is 00:46:50 that would have been impossible a decade ago. Yeah, I guess as time goes on, it recognizes who's being most traffic for certain things and then just automatically recommends them. That's good. The owls that people are seeing big, small, have you noticed any kind of synchronicities with certain stories? Like, you know, this person over here said they saw a four-foot owl and then this happened. And this person said the same thing and then something similar happened to them. Have you noticed the situation with the owl experience towards an experience any kind of synchronicities with that? So there's the real owl events and then there's the

Starting point is 00:47:34 four foot tall owl events. So the four foot tall all events sort of fall into the to the category of screen memory. The real owl events, wow, those are tough. I mean, once you wrap your mind around the fact, well, okay, someone saw four-foot-tall-aw, they're in this lonely road, they're probably a missing time event, you know, it fits over here. The real owls showing up at the time of a, well, here, let me back up a little bit. There are five things. One of them is UFO contact or UFO events. Owls are most certainly seen around the time of UFO events. Not 100%. Just because you have a UFO event doesn't mean you're seeing an owl. Just because you have an owl sighting doesn't mean you're going to have a UFO sighting.

Starting point is 00:48:18 There's like, but there's a consistency. Wow, there's a consistency enough to make a pattern. That was the premise of my first books, but there's more. So the other ones would be owls in meditation. People meditating. I've got a lot of stories about people meditating and seeing owls. Owls and shamanic initiation. This is well understood in the community of shamans, which exists.

Starting point is 00:48:41 There's practicing shamans. There's a there's a mentorship process that takes place. But people going through the. shamanic initiation will see owls, very consistent. Owls and psychedelics, most particularly mushrooms, people will see owls. And often in like a ritual kind of mushroom experience where they're taking it as a sort of spiritual thing. I got a lot of stories of that.

Starting point is 00:49:11 And then lesser other psychedelics. And then owls and death. Wow, if there's one thing that if I was going to write a book about something else, I would write, well, let's actually be careful what I say, but owls and death would be the big one. And this is well understood by people doing death research, that owls show up at the time of death. Now, what the lore is, what the mythology is, is that owls, like the hooting of the owl will be a precursor, will foreshadow someone death. This shows up in Shakespeare, it shows up in movies all the time. It's right there.

Starting point is 00:49:47 It's in our folklore. That's not what I'm finding. I get some reports like that, but the majority of the reports I'm getting are where someone's parent, it's usually a parent or a loved one, will die. And shortly thereafter, an owl will arrive at their home. And they'll talk to this owl, and they'll talk to this owl as if it is their dead parent. And I have many stories where the grieving process will be eliminated as they talk to a physical, like a regular owl,

Starting point is 00:50:22 lands in a branch in their backyard. They go out and talk to it, and their grieving is eliminated. I have a story of a guy whose father died of a heart attack. He's leaving the hospital. He walks out the doors, the automatic doors open.

Starting point is 00:50:34 Middle of the night, he spent the whole afternoon day at the hospital. He's leaving in the middle of the night after his father died of a massive heart attack. He's on the sidewalk and right on the grass next to the sidewalk. He's all alone, middle of the night.

Starting point is 00:50:48 He's a little owl. And he walks up to this owl, and the owl looks up at him, the owl doesn't fly away, and he says, Dad, I love you. I'm honored that you could have been my father. It meant so much to me. I'll always treasure your role as my father. I have that story with such consistency.

Starting point is 00:51:11 That alone, like so the owl has an ominous, lore. But wow, this beautiful stories I've heard like that kind of just make it's a much more nuanced totem than just the spooky owl and a haunted house movie. So your question was, how do I separate or what patterns am I seeing? So the pattern is that these five events, owls in UFOs, owls in meditation, owls and shaman initiation, owls in psychedelics, owls in death. I would call those highly charged human experience. So the owl is not connected necessarily with the UFO. It is connected with a highly charged human experience. The owl is connected to a highly charged human experience, of which

Starting point is 00:52:05 UFO contact certainly is one of them. So if that's the pattern I'm seeing, that's what it's connected to. So that's what I'm much more interested in. There are outlying things that sort of show up, But, wow, for instance, the near-death experience feels like it should be on that list. I've got no evidence. I've got no stories of, there might be out there, but I just don't have them. And I have to have a handful of them before they turn into a pattern. And a couple things. People who have UFO an owl expense.

Starting point is 00:52:37 UFO owls. That combination. When I talk to them, a couple things. very common they'll say, oh, I had a spiritual awakening just after this stuff. Or my life changed direction in a much more spiritual way. I could say that about my all experience with Kristen. I was doing one thing. I transferred into another whole different career. And I have a sort of spiritual bend to the way or mystical or whatever. Spiritual is a funny word. It's a tough one to pin down. But I certainly am open to that spiritual side of it. Now, the

Starting point is 00:53:14 another thing that shows up, you know what Reiki is, Reiki therapy. Yes. Okay. People have UFO contact in connection with an owl. I would say this is a,

Starting point is 00:53:31 I haven't crunched the numbers. It's tough. But anecdotally, 50% of the people who have owl and UFO experiences are Reiki healers. Like, I'll tell you what, 50% of the normal population are not Reiki healers.

Starting point is 00:53:45 so you ask there's a weird one like and if it's not reiki directly it's another form of very similar uh energy healing that they'll be doing a modality of energy healing so so this is this is very mysterious to me that that that that that's not a little blip in the in the statistics that's a big impressive number of yeah that's okay that's huge that's a huge number um get outside of the number one on that list of five UFO, the other four traditionally are easily viewed as spirit world, interdimensional, other realm, transcending realms. And now, you know, it used to be considered crazy talking to the UFO world, but even the government and these whistleblowers coming out are putting more, they won't say it the way I say it, but they say it in almost

Starting point is 00:54:44 their own code way. It's like, we're telling you what's going on without actually saying it because we don't want you to hear it from us. But it seems like these UFOs have an interdimensional quality to them as well.

Starting point is 00:54:57 And the way they're talking about them just appearing through, even at times I've heard this happen a lot where it's almost like a slit of light and this thing comes out of it. So with those five lists, I think that we can comfortably say, given the definition of UFO that I just gave,

Starting point is 00:55:18 there is some kind of spirit realm, spirit other dimensional type aspect to this whole thing that you're talking about. And if I remember correctly, and this might be way more than just the Native Americans, but I think the Native Americans, they viewed owls as like messengers to go in and out of the spirit realm.

Starting point is 00:55:42 Is that correct? Or is that maybe the wrong culture? Oh, that's, that's so Native American is tough, right? Because it's like, you know, there's tribes in the Atlantic coast, which are very different than tribes in the Pacific Coast. There's tribes in the desert southwest, which are very different from the tribes up in, in the Yukon. So, but the, the, so here, the consistent consistency, it's tough, right, because it, because

Starting point is 00:56:07 there's lots of mythology about owls. There's lots of mythology about, you know, sunrises. But the owl mythology, the owl can see in the darkness. The owl can see in complete darkness, right? So ancient man would have known that the owl flies at night. Now, just a few generations ago, the night must have meant something totally different to humanity. Before the electric light bulb, the night had a powerful mystique to it that is sort of lost now that we can generate our own light. with electricity. But our mythologies rose out of that ancient lore so the owl could fly in

Starting point is 00:56:53 complete darkness was completely comfortable flying in the forest at night. This is different than the eagle that flies in the bright sky, the bright empty sky during the day. The owl flies at night in the darkness. And that very quickly turned into, let's just say quickly, that within the The lore within the mythology is the owl travels to the land of the dead, travels to the land of the ancestors, travels to the land of the gods, travels to that other realm, and returns with a message. And so in Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, had a companion little owl. It's actually a little owl. So if she's seen with an owl, it's like a little seven inch tall, six inch tall owl, often on her wrist in artwork and in statues and such. So in the, the, the, the, That's where we get the owl as wise. The goddess of wisdom had a companion owl. Now, present day, the most popular series of books in the history of publication is Harry Potter.

Starting point is 00:57:58 Harry Potter has an owl that delivers the mail. It is perfect. It's perfect. It's the owl as messenger. It's right there. It's not in some dusty book on a shelf in an old library. it's present day pop culture right now owl as messenger. Not like often it's right there at the forefront of our pop culture.

Starting point is 00:58:23 So the owl would be the intermediary between our realm and that other realm. And that is, that's all the things on that modality, including the UFO contact things. Wherever the UFO occupants are from, it ain't from here, whether they're from another planet, I'm open to that. but let me tell you, like, how to say this. I talk to people all the time who claim to have had direct UFO contact. If you watch a late-night documentary, right, or I'm kind of using, you know, cable TV,

Starting point is 00:59:01 if you stream a documentary on UFO contact. At noon on a Wednesday. Anytime you want, you watch it on your phone while you're waiting in the bank. Yes, they're waiting in the line of the bank. So if you watch the story that emerges, oh, the people are taken from their car at night and they're taken on to board UFO and they're put on a table and creepy medical exams are being done. I've heard those stories. The conversations I've had with people and they tell me that is essentially never. I mean, it's sometimes. It's

Starting point is 00:59:31 like less than one percent. What I'm hearing is I had a powerful UFO sighting and then afterwards, I had mystical events, I had psychic events, I had, this is the one that's overwhelming, I had synchronicities, coincidences of such magnitude that it has forced me to rethink the fabric of reality. Wow, that is the consistent thread. It's not lying on a table in a flying saucer. So that's the thread I'm pulling on, is that mystical. thread. Part of it is I'm completely

Starting point is 01:00:13 like this is my own research. I don't have to. Like I want to be a I want to be a competent journalist in the way I give the information but I am not subjective. Excuse me, I'm not objective. I'm totally subjective. I am doing

Starting point is 01:00:29 this for completely selfish reasons. I have my own direct owl and UFO type experiences. I want an answer. I got a lot of questions. I've got a lot of questions. I've some interesting data points. I'm very shy to say that, like, what answers I may or may not have.

Starting point is 01:00:48 Yeah. And I think as you've done this, as long as you have been, you've come up with a lot of answers, but do you still feel like there's questions that you really don't have answered? Like, you've had questions that over the years have either answered. You have a pretty strong inkling that this is how you feel like this is going. Has there been? things over the years that have popped up that you're just like, I just don't have an answer to this yet. Oh, yeah, yeah, six times a day when I open my email inbox. I got you. So, so that was a little bit provocative.

Starting point is 01:01:27 So here, let me just, I'll just, okay, two stories. I'm going to tell two stories back to back. I get these funny stories, they arrive back to back, like they marry each other. So these, this two stories. this guy, Bert Jansen, he's a Dutch researcher, and he does Crop Circle research and has been for decades now in England. And he, this is going back in the 90s, he's walking through the fields, sun is setting, he's in the Crop Circle country, he's thinking like, I'm done.

Starting point is 01:01:59 I've been doing this for a few summers now, research in the Crop Circle, like, I'm done with it. Like, move on. Like, what am I going to learn? What am I going to learn? And then there's this orange orb that floats through the field. And he's standing there in the field and the sun is setting. And this orange orb is floating the field. It gets tiny like the size of a ping pong ball and grows big to the size of a beach ball.

Starting point is 01:02:19 And it floats around and it floats along the edge of the field. And there's a shed there. And it goes behind the shed and he's kind of watching it go along. And it kind of, and it goes behind the shed and it doesn't come out the other side. And he's like, could it be that the, did the orange orb go in the shed? So he goes up to the shed door and it's locked. And he puts his ear to the door and he hears this awful noise. Here's this awful horrible noise.

Starting point is 01:02:46 This grim, creepy, he's noise. So he goes around the back. So the back, it would have, and then right at the height where the orb would have been floating is a window. And there's a broken, the glass is broken in the window. He's like, did the orb go in there? And he comes back, and so he can't get in, and it's nighttime. So he comes back the next day. And he puts his ear to the door, and it hears that, he says, okay, he breaks the door.

Starting point is 01:03:19 This is like, I love this. He said, I broke the lock. And he went in, and there was a ladder in a loft. And up there was where the window would have been. And he hears this hiss up in the loft. And he climbs the ladder, and he peaks over the edge. And it's a family of barn owls. and they make an awful noise.

Starting point is 01:03:38 It is like haunted house, creepy as it gets noise. Baby barred owls. Let's Google it. It's awful. So he looks, he's like, wait, I saw an orange orb. It led me to these owls. Could it be that the owl and the orange orb are essentially the same thing? He said it.

Starting point is 01:03:56 He said it clearly 25 years before I started, or 15 years before I started my research. So another story. this woman Maria Wheatley she does Cropsockle research and more of ancient sites, ancient mystical sites in Europe and the UK and such and so she goes to ancient sites and does this research. Now she was with a friend and they were going to go on a walk

Starting point is 01:04:27 and his sun is setting and they walked down this path and they parked a car and they get in the car and they start walking down the path and as soon as they get a little ways down the path and owl flies in front of them and crosses their path and they both get the same, they both 100% feel the same thing. It's like, we're not allowed down this path. We can't cross that line.

Starting point is 01:04:44 The owl crossed our path. We can't cross that line. So they turn around and they say, let's walk up to the top of this hill site. So they walk up to the hill site, which is called Oliver's Castle. And there's no castle there,

Starting point is 01:04:56 but that's the name of the hill in England. It's right in Crop Circle Country. And they're at the top of the hill, and it's beautiful. And then all of a sudden off in the distance, what is that? And this orange orb starts floating towards them. And then it gets big, and then it turns into the size of a giant huge cigar, and then

Starting point is 01:05:10 poof, it disappears. And they're, like, they're freaked out. And they run back down and Maria says the guy, he was like, oh, he couldn't get a key in his car, he was shaking so bad. So they went to the pub, England, they go to the pub, and the guy says, I can read the mind. I can read everyone's mind. Like, I know what everyone's thinking. I know, I can read everyone's mind in the pub. That lessened over time. Maria was doing Toro reading. Right after the event, she was continued to do trotering. Her ability to do tarot readings was like amplified enormously.

Starting point is 01:05:47 So here are two separate things. Maria has an owl that leads her to an orange orb, a UFO. Bert has an orange orb, a UFO that leads him to an owl. Bert was saying, I'm going to quit. What can I learn? What can I learn about you? Excuse me, what more can I learn about crop circles? He's at the point, I'm done. That was close to 30 years ago.

Starting point is 01:06:13 He's been added ever since. Maria Wheatley has been full-time research into esoteric mysteries. So this is the pattern that I'm seeing. You know, I wanted to make sure I hit on something here. And I know there's plenty of imagery out there, but why do you think that people use owls in their marketing tools for logos and things like that?

Starting point is 01:06:49 Do you think that there's an absolute deep understanding of what the owl is that they do that? Or, you know, like, and there's things like the musician, well, if you want to call them musician. That's fine. His name's Drake. And he's, uh, his whole thing is owl. Like he has, he has, uh, the owl as his logo. And, you know, there's, uh, even, even to the, um, uh, what do you call it in, in California, uh, the Bohemian Grove. Oh, Bohemian Grove. Yeah, the giant statue, the owl statue. I mean, it seems like there's this, um, I don't know, like this, uh, um, symbolization that is understood and utilized. I mean, surely, I mean, you finished my sentence for me with Bohemian Grove.

Starting point is 01:07:41 I mean, what do you make of that? Why would a secret society be so interested in having a giant statue of an owl on their property and things like that? So I can't answer exactly why they would have chosen it. I can speculate and say that the owl is directly tied into Athena, the goddess of wisdom. She's also the goddess of commerce, the goddess of warfare, the goddess of arts and crafts, she's most known as the goddess of wisdom. So you have a men's society that's like a bunch of rich white guys in, like this is a hundred-year-old society that they're well-versed in the classics of literature and

Starting point is 01:08:17 classicism. And so that they picked an owl traces right back to the goddess Athena. So on the door to the Bohemian Club, there's a little plaque. it says, weaving spiders come not here. And that traces back to the myth of Arachnia, which was a woman who was a, she was making tapestries. She was weaving tapestries.

Starting point is 01:08:44 And so she weaved a tapestry more beautiful than the gods could weave. And so Athena, the goddess of arts and crafts, was weaving a tapestry. Arachnea, this other woman, was made a more beautiful tapestry than the goddess Athena. And the goddess Athena,

Starting point is 01:09:01 turned her into a spider. So that's a direct, right on the door, it's a direct representation of a, of Athena, the goddess Athena. So, and I'll also say, so we have the, it traces back into our ancient lore, the goddess. As far as Drake and kind of haunted houses, and the owl is a symbol of the night,

Starting point is 01:09:26 and not just the night, but the shadow element, the spooky side of things. there's a plaque of what seems to be lilith. There's no good answer, but often people say that is lilith, and then there's not a good answer if it is or not. But there's a plaque in the London Museum, and I've stood in front of it, and it's a tiny little plaque, and it's terracotta, and it's a very, very old Babylonian image

Starting point is 01:09:56 of this goddess. She has talons for feet, she has two lions next to her and then she's flanked by two owls and so that that that that and that lilith is not a like a like a lilith is like the shadow side of of femininity and so in lots of lore lillith was a vampire and she could fly around and drink the blood of babies. She would turn into an owl, like modern vampires, we have them. They turn into bats, but in the ancient lore, Lilith would turn into an owl, go and drink the blood of babies. So it's a really, really dark mythology. And I think that has stayed with us. Owls show up in the Bible, depending on the translation, about 17 times. Each time it is in, it is exactly the same

Starting point is 01:10:55 way a modern storyteller would say, oh, there's a spooky story, and I walked into the woods, and there was an owl looting. You're setting the scene with an owl in order to make it seemed frightening or barren or empty or the wilderness or that empty shadow thing. So, as I said before, the owl flies at night. The eagle, which is also full of mythology and full of resonance, flies in the bright sunshine. And they have two totally different meanings as far as their mythic meaning. I'm not sure if I answered your question.

Starting point is 01:11:31 I do this thing where you ask a question. I go around the block a few times. You're fine. You're absolutely fine. No, that's great. I often hear the god Moloch described as a chicken, but I've heard it talked about as an owl too. Have you come across like ancient gods being described as owls, like Moloch or whatever? Well, depending on the, I mean, the Moloch is a, also.

Starting point is 01:11:58 also a bull, which is another mythic animal. I mean, it's all over the world. It's mythic in ancient Greece and Rome. It's mythic in the east. So, yeah, the owl is all over mythology, but so is a lot of other stuff. I got to be really careful. Like sometimes I'll walk down the street with people and they're like, look, there's an owl lunchbox. Oh, that lady has an owl t-shirt on. There's an owl calendar in that window. And I'm like, you know, take a deep breath, buddy. You know, like, it's there all over the place. I think it's like, if you want to go knick-knacks, trinkets, like refrigerator magazines, it's cats, dogs, horses, owls. Like that's it. That's the order of popularity of like, of like cutesy pie things.

Starting point is 01:12:34 So, I mean, if you just, so, so there's a lot of owl symbolism out there. The, yeah, so what it might mean, this is, that's what I like to do is, I like to pontificate as little as possible, though I certainly can be long-winded at times, but I love to tell the stories that would imply a, like, apply, so stories that aren't my own. So here, this is one that, that I used to be a one-off. I've since gotten a few other examples of exactly this story. There's no UFO in this story.

Starting point is 01:13:10 Woman, she contacts me, she says, begins her letter, I am a happy grandmother. And she said, when I was a teenager, when I was 16 years old, I was terribly, terribly depressed, terribly depressed. And I was going to kill myself. And I was going to commit suicide, and I got in my car, it was my parents' car, excuse me, got of my parents' car, and I took the hose, a hose, and a pillow. I was going to lay the pillow in the back seat. I had a spot all picked out. I was going to lay the pillow in the back seat, lie down with the hose in the car from the exhaust.

Starting point is 01:13:46 So she's driving down this lonely road. She had a little turnout that was all picked out. It's snowing. And she's just about to turn into the turnout. So she's got to slow down. So she slows the car down to turn into the point where she was going to die. And an owl flies right up to the windshield. She said it was the most mystical thing.

Starting point is 01:14:07 It felt like it just hovered there for what seemed like 15 seconds. We locked eyes. Very common. Locked eyes. And it flew off. And I turned around and came home. And things got better. Like there is no way.

Starting point is 01:14:26 I can read that story in any other way than the owl saved her life. I've got lots of stories about people driving down the road at night. There's a little owl, normal size owl, 10 inch, 12 inch tall owl, standing the road, whoa, whoa, whoa, they got to slow down, or they got to kind of drive around it. And then as they proceed forward at a car, sworews around the next corner, and if they would not have stopped for that owl, they would have been in a head-on collision. that's very common. So there's a, you could go down,

Starting point is 01:14:59 well, you could cherry pick the data and come up with the creepiest, most nightmare stories, you could pull old mythology, but the modern lore of the owl, which I think represents a human experience that has been with us through the beginning of time. This owl mythology rose for a reason, came up in a rose for a reason, because people, in my opinion, were having real life, powerful experiences. that were connected to highly charged human events. And from that arose the ancient mythology of the owl. Now, our new mythology, our modern mythology,

Starting point is 01:15:36 is people seeing a big metal spaceship in their backyard, and then they turn psychic or they'd start channeling or they start a cult. I mean, there's all kinds of things that can go loopy after the event. But why is that any different than the farmer in Ireland that sees fairies dancing a circle in their wheat field? Or why is it any different than the Native American who walked off into the prairie and spoke with a talking buffalo? Or why is that any different than the devout Catholic

Starting point is 01:16:10 who has an appearance of Mary in their garden? I mean, I think all of these things are beyond what we would call normal reality. I think it's just wrapped up in a shinier. disguise now than it was, you know, as opposed to a fairy or a buffalo or a or a bigfoot or these other mythologies that are that are just that are just running parallel to us all throughout our human history. There we go. I had it muted. I started talking and it wasn't coming through. That's that's yeah. I mean, that's incredible. So let me ask you this last thing here. And because you just brought it up and just it just, it literally just popped to my head.

Starting point is 01:16:54 you brought up Bigfoot. So you did this yourself. I've heard people describe, they say Bigfoot tries mimicking owls. And I don't know if, I think most times when people say that they hear the owl that sounds like it's something trying to be like an owl,

Starting point is 01:17:21 but it's not in there connecting the dot to Bigfoot. I can tell you that, and this is, this is, so with my documentaries, we're going to be doing a lot of different types of documentaries, but to start out the documentary process, you work with what you got. And because my show is so heavily experienced base that we started going out to places that people said they had experiences, and we started going those places for a week at a time to see what was what. And I had, and I can't talk too much about it because it's a documentary that hasn't come out yet. But I had a very dramatic experience in the woods last November in an area that was highly talked about when it comes to these cryptid sightings. Me and my friend were charged by something in the dark. And it came up to us. I had to pull my gun out. I thought something was going to blow through me.

Starting point is 01:18:26 it scared both of us. And up to that point, we were out in the middle of the woods, and all you hear is some bugs, nothing. You don't hear anything. That happened. And about 20, 30 seconds later, all of a sudden, we hear this loud scream from behind us. And it sounded like a monkey.

Starting point is 01:18:50 And then I pick up the camera. Then we catch it on camera, this whole thing. but I pick up the camera and we start walking out. We're like, okay, time to go. And as we're walking out, the base camp heard this interaction. They could hear the yell that happened. They heard the scream that happened. And then they hear what's going on in the moment.

Starting point is 01:19:17 And you hear my friend Joel say that there's monkeys going off around us. and when I listen back to that recording, it doesn't sound like what I think I remember hearing. What I remember hearing is is monkeys. But on the recording, it sounds like owls. And I don't quite understand that as to why I heard something in the moment versus what I'm hearing on the recording. But, yeah, we had that experience.

Starting point is 01:19:58 And you hear people talk about, you know, Bigfoot mimicking owl sounds. I just bring it up because you briefly mentioned Bigfoot. Have you had people bring this up to you at all? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a lesser pattern, but it's consistent. So I'm not involved in the Bigfoot research at all. I'm open to it.

Starting point is 01:20:19 But wow, I got a lot of stories of vows and Bigfoot. Wow. And mostly it's similar to the UFO thing, the son-a-all at the same time. Now, and then to be fair, I know some researchers, I'll say Joshua Cutchin, Timothy Renner in particular, and a few others. I'll say David Weatherly. They'll, they, what people are reporting, so owls and, you know, sometimes, there's a pattern, it's minimal, but there's a pattern, people will bring it up, but owls and, But owls in, excuse me, a bigfoot and UFO. People will often report UFO sightings around the same time, in the same place.

Starting point is 01:21:01 So there's this. Now that the, there's a bard owl, which is the largest, excuse me, loudest North American owl. And they do make the sound, like it sounds like chimpanzees in the jungle in a Tarzan movie. That barred owls can make this. And they're loud, if you're close to them. And I've been around a lot of owls. I mean, like I hear them every night here.

Starting point is 01:21:22 But I'm in a place with a lot of owls. That's not too paranormal. And I lived in a house in upstate New York, and wow, did we have some barred owls? And wow, were they loud? And the call sounds just like chimpanzees in the jungle. Or similar. You can go on Google. You can Google them.

Starting point is 01:21:38 There's lots of examples of them. So, yeah, that's, I mean, we're dealing with a, so is Bigfoot a giant ape? that we simply haven't categorized zoologically that's living in North America. Like, uh, that's, you know, like, maybe, but there's so many paranormal things that are associated. I mean, just the stories of, of like, people following the tracks in the snow, and then they get to a big meadow and the tracks just disappear. Like, there's all these aspects to the big, I, a lot of, and I have, there's a, there's a, there's a researcher named Kewoni. it's a Native American name, but his real name is, he was given this by a tribe, this name, he was anointed with this name, and so he, Keone, did a lot of research of people having psychic

Starting point is 01:22:34 interaction, just what I was talking about with the aliens, where there's communication, but nobody's lips are moving, people communicating with the Bigfoot's telepathically, there's a sense of people feeling a profound sense of fear in the presence of a Bigfoot. These are paranormal events, right? These are, so that the owl is connected to a big foot makes total sense when you see it's also connected to, to the UFO as well as these other highly charged human experiences. Yeah, I mean, just hearing all the stories with these, with the Bigfoot stuff, I personally, I feel like there's more to it than just an upright, walking, hairy creature that we just can't keep up with. And I, oh, and I would say that there's something much more going on than, little skinny scientists in a flying saucer.

Starting point is 01:23:25 That's far too simplistic, the same way that a big hairy ape living in Ohio is far too simplistic. I agree 100%. Well, Mr. Mike Cleland, I appreciate you joining me today. And I want to just give you an opportunity to let people know where they can find you, what's the best thing to do when they want to reach out to you and things like that. Great. The easiest way to find me is to Google UFO Owl.

Starting point is 01:23:51 I'm the first thing that comes up. If you want to, you can type in my full name, Mike Cleland, all one word, Mike Cleland.com. And my website comes up. There's a home page that can then take you to Amazon pages and my blog and my podcasts and some illustration work that I've done. One, I want to do, so I got four books. Three of them are nonfiction books on owls.

Starting point is 01:24:16 One of them is a fiction book. It just came out last year, and I've been really pushing this. Um, people seem to like it. It's getting really wonderful reviews, selling pretty well. It's called the unseen. And what, so you, so you must have tapped into a little bit like as I talk about this stuff, there's like a mood and a vibe of these owl stories. I tried to create a fiction book that, that incorporates that mood and vibe. So that was the, that was the premise of that book. So, um, and once again, I'm going to say this very clearly. I want to hear your owl stories. Anyone out there, if you've had an owl story, please send. them to me. I apologize in advance. I may not be able to get back to you in any meaningful way just because of the flood of them. But please know, I do make a very real effort to archive these and keep them. Like, I don't share anyone's name. I don't share the files with anyone, but I am looking for overall patterns in the research as far as what it may or may not imply. If you got Al's stories, you know where to send them now. Mike is much more qualified than I am.

Starting point is 01:25:18 So, Mike, I appreciate you joining me today for sure. This was great. Thanks so much. Well, that's the show, everybody. I really hope you enjoyed it. And if you did enjoy, please share the show with your friends. I don't care where or how you share the show. Just share the show. Any platform you listen on, just take that link.

Starting point is 01:25:36 Share it around. Text it to people, I don't care. Just share the show. That's the best thing you could do to help the show grow. Share the show. And until next Tuesday, stay safe, take care. And remember, the truth will set you free. But first, he'll piss you off.

Starting point is 01:25:47 Bye.

The Confessionals - 633: Seers Of Realms

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