The Confessionals - 653: Super Soldier's Teleportation

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

In episode 653: Super Soldier's Teleportation, James Szubski, from episode 591: The Secret Guardian of Hanford, shares spine-tingling tales of paranormal encounters in the region. Inheriting Margie's Outdoor Store, James has collected over 300 reports of strange phenomena, including sightings of Sasquatch, UFOs, and a mysterious black panther creature. Notably, there are accounts of an 11-foot-tall Sasquatch-like being. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to James's story. With a military background that endowed him with extraordinary physical and cognitive abilities, he navigates the rugged terrain with ease, almost as if her were a real life Captain America. His adventures include a personal experience of spatial displacement in Brokeleg Burrows, an area notorious for strange occurrences and disappearances, like that of Chris Zitzowitz. He also mentions sightings of cloaked triangular craft and whispers of covert military operations. James's relentless curiosity and willingness to explore the unknown create a sense of wonder and adventure, inviting others to join him in unraveling the mysteries of the Columbia River Gorge.The Confessionals Members App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZBecome a member for AD FREE listening and EXTRA shows: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinWatch The Shape of Shadows: merkelfilms.comWatch Expedition Dogman: merkelfilms.comAFFILIATESPrepare with Valley Food Storage: https://alnk.to/2uG55AOGet your Nephilim Blaster 2000: https://alnk.to/9mnHak1Bluecosmo Satellite phones: https://alnk.to/e769EipSee Bigfoot with Sionyx night vision: https://alnk.to/bEhxr3FEmergency medical with My Medic: https://alnk.to/dpr6QM4Black Beard Fire Starters: https://alnk.to/4BFcIbeEcoFlow Power Generators: https://alnk.to/flvpAQwGoDark Faraday Bags: https://alnk.to/5jke3rkEMP Shield: empshield.com Coupon Code: "tony" for $50 off every item you purchase!SPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletterMAILING ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelProduced by: @jack_theproducerOUTRO MUSICJoel Thomas - MissingYouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

Hey, guys, before we get to this week's show, I want to let you know about a special live event we're doing on August 3rd in Nashville, Tennessee, called Squatchella. It includes the Confessionals, Blurry Creatures, Ninjas of Butterflies, and Expanded Perspectives. All four shows, one stage, one day for the glorious show called Squachella. If you want early access to these tickets, you've got to be a member to the professionals on the website or on the YouTube channel, because on May 8th at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, we are posting how to get those tickets for the members. on the website, the TC member app, or in the community section on YouTube for the YouTube members on May 8th at 10 a.m. Easter standard time, you will have that early access to those tickets. If you're not a member, tickets go live for the public on Friday, but if you want to ensure

you get a seat at Squatchella, you want to be a member to the professionals so you can get that early access to those tickets. I hope to see you on August 3rd in Nashville, Tennessee for Squachella. Media. This was all circulating around the base that a giant had been killed, 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. When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me. And this giant comes out of the cave, and they're all frozen.

And he starts running and firing up this giant. With a giant move, he's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast. And spears, Dan, holds him up like this. Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face, they basically decapitated. Got spursor, got closer, got spursing, got spursing, when he got about this, blow his head off. I feel something pulling at my leg, and I look over, and there are two small gray in the teeth. And they're literally, I'm getting pulled off the bed. I reached my hand into this bush and I touch air.

Couldn't breathe and I couldn't move because I know I'm seeing a monster. Welcome to the show, everybody 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. My email address is Contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com. That's Contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com.

Or go to the website, thecafessionalspodcast.com. Hit the contact section and you can reach me that way as well. Either way works for me, just get a hold of me. If you want more shows on a weekly basis, we got you covered. Whether you're a member on the website, the professionalspodcast.com, or a member on YouTube, you can get the Thursday shows for members only. And you can get the overtime segments to the Tuesday shows when they are available. Right there on the members website or on the membership section on YouTube.

Also, merklefilms.com. That's where we have our documentaries. And Sasquatch and The Missing Man will be available very soon on demand at Merklefilms com. Stay tuned for that. If you miss the world premiere, it's okay. It'll be available on demand at Merkelfilms.com very, very soon. All right, today we have James Schubsky coming on the show today. He is a returning guest, and we had a great conversation. The first time was a heater. This time was awesome, too. He was talking about investigating certain areas and seemingly being teleported back to locations, wild stuff happening in his neck of the woods, and he also talks about his time in the service.

and he didn't want to say it, but I'm going to say it. James Shubski might be a super soldier. When you hear this story, you might agree with me. So let's get to James right now. All right, today we have James Shubski on the show. How are you, sir? I'm doing great yourself. Man, I'm glad you're here.

And listen, I just got to get it off the chest right off to start. I told you I was going to do this. Episode 591, you were on episode 591, and we called it the Secret Guardian of Hanford. And that episode was, like, I remember sitting there thinking, I don't know if I've had this much fun doing an episode in such a long time. Like, it was such a, it was such a good episode. And I just feel like the audience didn't respond well to it because I titled it bad. And so I, every once in a while, like, especially if I have a really good episode, sometimes I tend to overthink the title. And because I want to tell people what it's about and really kind of grabbing them with the title, right?

And looking back at it, I'm like, the secret guardian of Hanford. Hmm. If people don't know what Hanford is, they probably don't even care if it has a secret guardian. And then on the show art for it was a giant cat. I'm like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense to anybody. And so I just want to tell people, the reason why James is back is because the first time I had him on, it was a really good conversation. So we're doing a round two.

And if you missed out on that first one, you got to go check it out. episode 591, The Secret Guardian of Hanford. And before we get into today's conversation and stuff, maybe let's give them a brief overview as to what the Clicky Tat ape cat is, because that's what they're getting into. So, as you know, my wife and I inherited businesses here in the Columbia River Gorge, which is southern Washington, forms the border between Washington and Oregon. And this is a huge paranormal hotspot. we came to find out.

You know, so we inherited these businesses. One of them is an outdoor adventure store. Right away, you know, as soon as we started kind of getting ourselves settled, people started coming in and telling us all kinds of amazing stories about encounters with Sasquatch and UFOs and glowing orbs. And so we put up a big sign in the window. It said, file your paranormal reports here and gave the employees really, I think, a very important instructions that we're going to take everyone seriously. We're going to treat them with respect.

And in just a little over two years, we have now, I think it's 312 reports that have been filed at the store. And it's an amazing range of, like, spans the whole gamut. You know, we've got ghost stories and portal stories. And the one that really kind of captured my attention, we have over 100 reports of an enormous, very mysterious Black Panther creature creeping around here. in Clicket Tad County. And so everyone describes a very muscular, very large blackbird cat. So, of course, we have cougars out here, but cougars are never supposed to be black. And so that's a weird thing. About half the reports explicitly state that the creature is enormous.

And we're talking about four to five feet tall to shoulder. So that's bigger than, way bigger than a cougar, which might come in at 24 inches, way bigger than a tiger. And in fact, the only creature that ever lived on Earth that matches that size is an Ice Age American lion called the Panther Atrox. This was a 1100-pound cat that lived here in Washington State and supposedly went extinct 10,000 years ago. But yet we have all these reports of it. In fact, after I did the show with you, a guy came into the store because he had heard about this cat on your show. and he was up by Mount St. Helens, and he was driving home,

and an enormous black cat jumped into the middle of the road, looked at him, then jumped over the guardrail and down a hill. He said that the cat that he saw was as tall as his Honda Civic. So that's four and a half feet tall right there. So tons of reports, like I said, about half of them described this enormous size, and then a very small percentage of maybe 10% described that it has a face that looks like a monkey,

so ape-like features. And so right now it's a huge mystery. There are some leads that have to do with some of the Native American traditions in the area and a race of supernatural panther protectors, sometimes described as looking like a black panther with the face of a man. And then there's also a really compelling story from the other episode. that says that this creature may have escaped from the animal testing laboratory at the Hanford Nuclear Siteup River. And Hanford was a part of the Manhattan Project, so ground zero for America's exploration into the atomic frontier.

And the story is really amazing and a lot of fun to talk about as we discussed last time. And so we've got this huge array of really astonishing things that people are recording. And, you know, there's, the gorge itself is 80 miles long. To the north, we're sort of bound by two stratavolcanoes, Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams, both of which, so St. Helens erupted in the 1980s. Mount Adams has been a UFO hotspot basically since the 1940s. In fact, some of the very first UFO reports in the country came from that area. And then to the south in Oregon, we're bound by Mount Hood.

Another strata volcano, over 10,000 feet. And so the area is ruggedly wild, stunningly beautiful. We've got 90 waterfalls on the Oregon side of the gorge alone. Some of those are 600 feet tall. We've got brooding and mysterious Pacific Northwest rainforests on the west side of the mountains here. We've got this dry and sort of austere, almost spiritual desert area. on the east half of the gorge. And so it really spans this amazing

instead of climates and biomes. There's over 600 caves in the area. Whitewater rafting, rock climbing, mountaineering, wind surfing. It's a true adventurous paradise. And so for a guy like me who has, you know, I was a decorated infantry soldier, wild and force firefighter, mountain guide, nationally certified search and rescue EMT,

like this place is heaven. and then come to find out that it's populated by mysterious creatures and strange craft. I tell you, I feel like I'm living in heaven. This is the coolest, most interesting adventure exploration place I could possibly have imagined finding myself in. It's awesome that the store has kind of got this reputation within the GORs. We are the sort of the hub of information about people bring their reports. here, and we just opened up, we call the Gorge Paranormal Info Center. And I've picked up a replica skull of that Panther atrox.

It's 18-inch long skull. It's humongous, and we put it next to it, like a cougar skull, so people could tell the difference. We have a replica skull of gigantapithecus, which is a creature in the fossil record that most matches Bigfoot. This creature was lived alongside human beings 200,000 years ago in China. and it is an ape that was seven to nine feet tall, very much seeming to be a creature from the fossil record

that's like the creature described by many Sasquatch accounts. And then my favorite part in this little paranormal center, we've got a big map that shows, you know, where people have seen things, and some information posters about the different phenomena of people have experienced, but I built an 11-foot-tall hairy Sasquatch, and we put them up in the store. And so people can get a chance.

You can come up and we named him Jeff. Why, Jeff? Because it seemed like the most innocuous white guy name we could come up with. I love it. And so I have to tell you this kind of funny story. So I made it out of like this two inch insulating foam board. You know, it's like this pink foam you can put in buildings when you're insulating it. And it allowed me to cut out this really big, you know, 11 foot tall frame.

and then I bought the big bolt of fur, and I was trying to figure out how to, you know, attach it. And, like, staples would just pull out of this foam and, like, glue with all that hair would have been a disaster. And so I realized that if I, like, carefully trimmed a small portion of it, I could, like, get a screw to drill in, and that would hold it in place. And so I spent, you know, a whole Thursday afternoon, you know, carefully trimming spots of this saucewash out.

And I had to make a choice like, is he going to be facing you or walking away from you? And anytime you're facing, if you don't get the face right, it just looks cheesy and fakes. We said, I was going to be walking away. There's some slack areas in the fur. And so I stuffed his buns with this sort of cotton batting. So he's got this nice big round rump. He's sort of walking away from you. And so people love coming in and patting squatches.

But the kind of the embarrassing part about it is, you know, I had to get this fur attached to it. And so I actually had to spend time trimming squatches. crack in order to get these screws into this full board. You know, the things you do to show people what they're getting into. But it is really amazing. Like, there's nothing like you can hear about an 11-foot-tall creature, and you can imagine what that might be like. But I really wanted to give people a sense of, like, if you're in the woods and you

encountered an animal that was 11 feet tall, like you just come up, like, even a tall guy like myself, I'm six foot five, I just come up to his hip. Like, I'm looking like at his belly button, maybe. And it really is, it really brings it home. And we've had so many reports. Most of the reports are really, he's like between seven and ten feet tall. And then there's a few stories of alphas that we've heard where they can get as tall as 14 feet, which is, if you've never stood next to something 14 feet tall in the shape of a human, like you really can't, it's so overwhelming. And it's also a really good case study in that if you're not looking up,

like it just looks like tree trunks in front of you, you know? So we have a lot of fun with it. We love sort of being a safe place for people to come and tell their stories. And, you know, like I said, we've had over 300 of them. And some, you know, we can look at and, you know, some have photographs and things like that. and we do image analysis to determine, you know, is this authentic or not? And there are sometimes things caught in the trail cam that look strange, turn out to be, you know, a bird and weird physician or something like that.

But for the most part, you know, we didn't know how many people would just come in and file fun reports and how many people would file legitimate reports. But I would say it's easily 98 to 99% of the people are serious and genuine and they're not fooling around and they have had an unusual encounter here. in the Columbia River Gorge area. It's been a remarkable and glorious and just incredibly satisfying experience so far. Yeah. And I think that's the thing, man. I mean, when you present an environment for people to come and talk about their experiences and be taken serious, it allows them to come forward. And when word starts spreading around, you become a landing

spot for that stuff. So Columbia River Gorge, if you're in that area, I mean, definitely check out the store. And what was the store called again? It's Margie's outdoor store. So Margie was my mother-in-law. And so she started all this trouble. And gosh, we're just so lucky to be, you know, a part of it. And what's really great is that the Gorge maybe has 80,000 people who live here, you know, over thousands and thousands of square miles. And so, we do a lot of advertising and we're involved in a lot of community projects. We, you know, support public arts. We've got public art at our location. And a lot of people have come to know us and know me personally. And so I'll be at a restaurant and someone will stop me and tell me their

story or the grocery store at the post office. And, you know, it's one of the true joys of living in a small town is sort of this community. And, you know, having a, You know, those kind of connections. I can't tell you what a joy it is to be trusted in that way. Absolutely. Well, listen, let's get into some of this stuff here. We talked about the Columbia River Gorge. And, you know, one, does it, I'm assuming you didn't grow up in that area, right?

No, I grew up in Ohio. And my first real contact with the Gorge was way back in 1988. I was a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis, and my buddies and I, when we weren't training in the field, we foolishly would head straight out to the field and go like rock climbing in the gorge and exploring the area. And it is, like I said, you know, back then I was 19, and it was coming from Ohio, just mind blowing, you know, that there were these, you know, glacier-clad mountains and these, you come to the gorge and there's these soaring like 600. hundred foot tall cliffs. And you see things here that, you know, every day I drive to work, I see deer and turkey and bald eagles. And sometimes you'll see bear running across the road or stunk like river otters.

It is like a wildlife preserve out here. And it's, like I said, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Right now, the wildflowers are just rioting all over the hillsides. And you get up, especially into some of the more desert areas. And it's just splashed with color. the air is perfumed. It's like living in a magical wonderland. And so, yeah, came out here way back in 1988.

And then we moved down here after Margie passed away about three years ago. And these reports have been coming in. You know, I think you've seen pictures of my rig. We call it the cryptid. And so when something recent or interesting comes up, I'll hop into the vehicle. And, I mean, you'd absolutely need a four-wheel drive to access some of these areas. And because we're talking about deep, thick forests or, you know, trackless deserts and things like that. Like, once you get out of the thin ribbon of humanity, that's the river, beyond that, it's like an ocean of trees that just goes on as far as the I can see.

And so some of these places are really fascinating to me. And the one that's really got my attention right now is an area where, we call Brook Lake Borrow's. So about 8,000 years ago, the whole area north of the river is this gigantic volcanic complex. There's like, aside from the big mountains, Adams and St. Helens, there's over 250 volcanic vents out there. And it's been active for a long, long time. On maps, it's the Gifford-Pencho National Forest. So it's public land. And then there's certain areas within that, and Broccoli is located in an area called Indian Heaven. This is maybe, oh, I don't know, 12 miles from the store, not too far away, really.

And so the way to imagine it is, like, some volcanoes form big mountains, right? Other ones just sort of just have lava pouring out of it. And so there's a small sort of cinder cone in the north end of this lava field. It's about 22 square miles. So imagine an area this side. of the island of Manhattan, right? So, size will,

like 1.7 million people live on Manhattan, so it's got a carrying capacity, like a stretch of land like this. And it's almost like, so, like this lava just sort of pours out, and it just sort of fills the whole mountain valley. And you can go from side to side.

Some places, it's eight miles wide. And it's like, when you get out there, it's utterly silent. It's really a bizarre place. The rocks have formed like this giant jumble. It's sort of like this giant bulldozer of the lava

that is pushing forward and it just rolls this rock into these giant slabs. Sometimes it creates what they call a lava tube. So the lava will begin to flow. The top of the lava will cool and harden and form an insulating layer. And then the lava will continue to flow through. this straw-like tunnel almost. Some of these can be miles and miles like, you know, there's some that I think are over 20 miles long. And so then the lava will then flow all the way through it and then leave behind this empty chamber. It's almost like a gigantic, you know,

like blood vessels of the earth. And so you get these astonishing caves. Like I said, there's over 600 of them in the area. And so sometimes those caves are 40 feet tall when you're inside of them. But with all the seismic activity around here, oftentimes they'll collapse and they'll form trenches. So you've got this huge mass of land, which has got this convoluted rock structures. There are these micro-canions and hidden caves. It's, you know, I've been doing land navigation at a professional level since I was 19 years old. You know, I joined the Army. And, of course, you know, that's one of the key things. Way back in the 80s, we were not relying on GPS.

It was all map and compass word. So you had to do old school, you know, it's kind of iron sights. We didn't have, you know, any of the fancy optics that they have now. And so it was very much like you have to know your skills to be able to, you know, be effective as a soldier. And so I have navigated through swamps and rainforests and deserts and mountains and glaciers, like, you name it. I have, you know, at a professional level, navigated through those types of terrain.

And this place is easily the scariest and the worst terrain I've ever seen in my life. Like, there's nothing, your movement isn't completely slowed. It's a really challenging place. A few months ago, so I've been trying to, I had heard that there are ways to get into this, like there's supposed to be this old four-by-four track that leads into it. And so you have to understand the reason why I'm so fascinated by it is that we've had numerous Sasquatch reports in the area. We've had many missing person reports in that area.

We've had strange UFO activity in that area. And so as I've been exploring it, I had this really astonishing what I'd call a spatial displacement experience where I was traveling. traveling and then somehow transported to a different location. Very unsettling. And so just kind of want to give you a sense that this place is, for me, my current, like I said, it's my fascination. The reason why is that compasses don't work reliably in this area. Cell phones absolutely don't work. You get GPS satellites.

I've taken my drone out there. and the drone has trouble acquiring GPS satellites in the area. Local hunters are terrified of going in there, and they refuse to hunt in there. There are no trails, save this one crazy four-by-four scratch that, you know, maybe it's maybe a quarter mile into this thing. And it is a completely almost unearthly environment. You know, it was laid down about 8,000 years ago. And so there's these four-thousy,

had tried to form there, but it's a hard living. There's not a ton of water. And so they're kind of scraggling weird. They're all covered with moss. The rocks themselves, you know, think about the Lord of the Rings movies. And there's a point at the end of the first one where they're getting ready to head into Mordor, and this is when the whole fellowship is together. And the dwarf Gimli talks about this place called Amun Weal.

And he says, it is an impassable labyrinth of a razor sharp. Bronx. And that is exactly what this place is like. Like, it is, it's almost impossible to describe it if you haven't been there. And so this has been sort of my focus. And like I said, I had this really astonishing experience out there that I, um, I can't account for. Like, like I said, having been a professional land navigator with the military and then again, as a search and rescue EMT, um, You know, I am the kind of person that you call when someone else is lost in the woods and to have had this experience. Really kind of, well, it was very unsettling at first and then kind of amazing that I had had it. You know, and I guess it might be helpful to talk a little bit about my military experience to give people some context.

Yeah. So I joined the military when I was 19 years old, way back in 1988, and I specifically joined a special unit. It was an experimental unit called a cohort unit. And I was to be assigned to Fort Lewis and the 9th Infantry Division, which at the time was known as the Toys Arrest Division, because it was the place where they tested new weapon systems, new vehicle systems. if they were doing something unusual with troops and training. This was sort of the Army's sandbox to test stuff out. And they loved Washington State because it's got Fort Lewis, which is sort of in the rainforest part of it.

And then there's this Yakima firing center on the other side of the mountains in the desert area. So you can train someone to be both a desert warrior and a forest warrior here. And so it gave them wide bearability. And so the idea behind this cohort unit was the Army had done studies, and they looked at situations where soldiers performed heroically. You know, like they charged a machine gun nest or they dove on top of a grenade or they did these things that seemed like it was completely counter to self-preservation. And they wanted to like, why do soldiers do those kind of things? What are the conditions that puts a soldier in that place where he would do that? And they found it, it has nothing to do with your love of your country.

It has nothing to do with how hard you train or the discipline of the unit. The number one answer that every surviving soldier gave was that I thought my friends were in trouble. And so the idea behind the cohort program was that we were supposed to, they created these unique situations that sort of forced us into becoming a band. of brothers and really to enhance those relationships between the troops in a way that we were compelled to look at our squad mates and platoon mates and company mates as our most important social connections. And so there was all kinds of crazy stuff that they did. There was six bathroom stalls, three facing three, and they took the doors off.

the bathroom stalls so that in basic training, if you're going to go to the bathroom, you were looking your buddy in the eye. And so that and a whole number of other weird situations that they put us in. And normally when you go to basic training, you go to basic training with a bunch of guys, and then you go to your advanced individual training. And that initially unit gets broken up, and then each person goes to their, you know, advanced school. And then when you're done with that advanced individual training, then you get sent across

the world to different duty stations. Well, in the cohort program, everyone went to basic training together, everyone went to advanced individual training together, and then everybody went to the same duty station up in Fort Lewis. And so already we were in this place of, we were in an experimental unit in the Army's most experimental division. And so, you know, we had a lot of, like, again, unusual training protocols and things that definitely weren't normal. And we would always, they always were giving us injections or something. You know, and I'm inoculated against, I think, five different kinds of plague and every jungle disease that's out there. And so you get a lot of shots, is what I'm trying to tell you.

And, you know, back when I was 19, I joined the army to be in the army. Like I wasn't there to, you know, half acid. I was there to, you know, be a soldier and do. all the soldier things. And so anytime there was something to volunteer for, even if it sounded like the lamest, you know, maintenance duty, I would always raise my hand. I was always there to do whatever the unusual thing was. And I remember one time, you know, you get a lot of shots. And one time they wanted me to sign certain paperwork before this one series of them. I don't even know what it said, but I was like, sure, whatever, who was, and he's on the paper, we can get the shot.

And so you have to understand, before I joined the Army, you know, I went to private Jesuit all-boys school. I was a huge Dungeons and Dragons nerd. I barely passed the strength test to get into the Army. Like, it was the doctor was like, could you try that again? And I wasn't a great student when I was in high school. And so that's the sort of context of me going into the military and then joining this experimental unit voluntarily and then having these unusual experiences. Well, what began to happen was suddenly there were a lot of things that seemed not to be in a straight line from where I was coming from. So not long after signing on those injections, my running time went to five minutes and 20 seconds in a mile, which is unusually fast.

And I got assigned to this what they called a super squad running team. And so we would go out and, you know, just this whole unit is probably 10 guys. And we could all run that fast. And I found that there was a number of other, like, strength things. You know, I'd go to the gym and I'd sit down on, like, one of the nautilus machines. And for certain machines, like, the whole stack of weight on it was no problem for me. And, you know, you could chalk that up easily to, you know, your body's still maturing or whatever. And hard to say exactly what was going on.

And, and again, I don't want to oversell this idea because I don't have. You were a super soldier, but it's okay. Keep going. Well, it's like Nick Fury and I chat on the phone at all. And then I think there was two, so like those are kind of subjective things like, okay, well, you were running kind of fast and, you know, you were doing okay in the gym. But there are two tests that soldiers take. One is called a skill qualification test. And basically they give you a phone book of information. It's, you know, eight and a half by 11 and probably three inches thick.

And it covers everything that a infantry soldier is supposed to know how to do. Everything from nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, urban operations, identifying enemy vehicles, first aid, radio work, you know, all the different skills that a soldier needs to know how to do. And so, you know, I, everyone had to study for that test. and they told me that I got the second highest score in Fort Lewis that year. So there are, I think, 40,000 troops on Fort Lewis at the time. And in fact, they said, well, you got every answer right, except one of the questions that you answered had an answer that was more right than the one that you gave.

And so there was another guy on the base that got that question correct. So there was this, you know, objective score of, yeah, you maxed out this test that they give to every soldier. There's also the U.S. Army's highest peacetime award is called the Expert Infantryman's badge. And so while the scale qualification test is, you know, a written exam, what do you know? the expert infantryman's badge requires there's 34 different task tests that you have to do and they include

qualifying expert with your rifle 12 mile road marches with 90 pounds you have to move under laser simulated direct fire you have to range estimate you have to do first aid and treat sucking chest wounds like there's this whole series of tests that you do if you get any task wrong

you get, I think you get two chances to retest. And if you don't, then you're out. And less than 1% of all soldiers ever earned this award. And in my first year there, this was after the injections, you know, this skinny kid from Ohio who was playing Dungeons and Dragons in his parents' basement just a few months before, earned the U.S. Army's highest peacetime award. And it's, like I said, it's all task-based. So you have to actually perform the tasks.

It includes running and push-ups and setups and all the physical requirements, plus the shooting and land navigation and day and night. And with the land navigation, basically you're given a compass and what they call it, direction, a distance and an asthma. Asthma is short of your compass reading. And you're sent out at night. and the course is several miles large, and you literally have to walk around at night

and find coffee cans pinned to trees in the middle of forest. And if you get the first one wrong, you're never going to get the rest of them. And you're not allowed to carry a flashlight. You have to go out there and use the glow in the dark spots in your compass and what you've figured out in terms of your map headings,

how to get there. So it's a long story to say that There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that something happened to me when I was in the military that changed some sort of way that my body and mind operate. And, you know, again, for the longest time, I thought, oh, that's kind of weird, but I really couldn't make any for sure kind of conclusions about it. Then I was out of the army for about almost 10 years, and they called me up and asked me if I'd be willing to participate in an intensive physical. So this is weird because none of my army unit mates and another of the guys that I was in with got the same request.

And they paid for my transportation to another city. They put me up for three days, and they ran this exhaustive battery of tests. And so they were doing things like testing my nerve velocity and cognitive abilities. They determined that my lung capacity was at the top 2% of all human beings on Earth. And they also found that my pain tolerance was exceeded their instrument's ability to measure it. And so they have this strange spring-loaded contraption, and they push it into the soft joints of your body. And they say, as soon as you start to feel pain, give us an indication and we'll stop pressing it. And they could measure the amount of pressure that they put into that sensitive joint spot.

And I remember them like pushing it all the way in and it maxed out their scale. And he was looking at me like, are you feeling into this? And of course, you know, you can feel it, but it's not painful. And so he thought that there was something broken with the device he was using. So he went and got another one. and that one maxed out too. So then he went and got another doctor to help him administer the test. And again, like I could, you know, there was data that I was receiving that something was pushing on my joints.

But in terms of pain, it wasn't there. They seemed pretty freaked out about that. And so after that first day of testing, during the second day of testing, this sort of group of nurses and doctors started following me. around and, you know, watching the testing that was done, they got to this battery of cognitive tests, which have to do with how you organize information. And they were all kind of wild by the results there, which were indicating, you know, this unusual ability to quickly organize information and sort things and things like that. It's kind of complicated to explain exactly what the tests were like.

And so it was really this kind of strange thing about, you know, coming back and then finding these verifiable sort of extremes of human ability were the results of these, you know, 10 years later test after getting out of the Army. The weird thing is that, so I was in the Army during the 80s right at the end of the Cold War. and during my first year, the wall in Berlin fell. And so the funding for my unit actually dried up. And so they were talking about letting us out early and doing a bunch of other stuff. And then the whole thing with the first Gulf War flared up right after that. And so my unit was desert ready and combat trained. And so the unit changed designation a couple of different times, you know,

after we lost funding. And we eventually became the 199 special battalion. And it was the strangest thing because they gave us these patches. And the patch looked like there's a devil's head. You know, you could see its eyes and its mouth. And there was a spear going through the head, and then there was these sort of yellow angel wings behind it. And so we got issued all these patches.

and then I think someone in the higher up in the military said, oh, that's a problem. And so they made the patch, they made them take the devil's eyes and the devil's mouth off the patch. So it just sort of looked like this, you know, spear going through an explosion, like this red devilhead explosion kind of thing. But I remember it was the strangest thing that they didn't want there to be,

they wanted to make these alterations of this devil, head would not appear in our patch as explicitly a devil. Anyway, we wound up, we were combat ready and desert trained during the first Gulf War, and they told us that we weren't going to go because we were being held in reserve for some other potential military action. And so my unit trained thousands of National Guardsmen who wound up going over to fight in Desert Storm. But for whatever reason, this unit, which was, like I said, combat ready and desert trained, we were not deployed with the explicit instructions that we were being held in reserve for some other potential activity somewhere else in the world.

Never did find out what that was. Eventually, we won the Gulf War fairly quickly, and it was the strangest thing. I had a precognitive dream about having a meeting with my first sergeant. And in this dream, he said, I've got four slots. I can let four of you guys go early, you know, leave your military contract early, but you need to give me a good reason as to why. So that was the dream that I had. And then two days later, that exact experience happened with the same soldiers that were in my dream.

And I knew exactly what to tell them, you know, I want to go to college and I've got this, you know, the semester starting. And so I got one of the slots to get out early because of that pre-captative dream. And so, you know, it's one of those things where, even now it's I don't have any proof like no one's calling me up and asking me to join the Avengers or anything like that

but there are still times even now I'm in my 50s and I'll go to the gym and have that same experience with the stack of weights or I will stupid little things like play a Sudoku Sudoku game like that numbers game or your logic

trying to figure out what's going on. And I'll set it to the highest setting and typically will beat 100% of all other users for speed on the most difficult setting. And again, I'm not trying to make any giant claim that I've got

some kind of legitimate super soldier thing or whatever. But it is, there's a lot of strange coincidences that don't seem to make sense under other explanations. Yeah. Well, listen, you sound like Captain America. And so, I mean, when you started describing it, I was like, did they let him down in like some weird pod where he grew and because I was like, I'm ripped. But I mean, like, it's, it definitely sounds like whatever they put in you,

it had a serious effect on you. And it's a lasting effect. So did you, have you had, have you ever felt like there's a digration of ability, strength, intellect, or anything? Because, I mean, you're saying you weren't great in school academically and now, like, you're able to do things on a mental level that maybe you traditionally wouldn't have had the ability to do. Has there ever been any kind of reverse effect where you start feeling like you're getting dumber or something? I will say that like after I got out of the Army, my buddies and I did a lot of mountaineering.

And, you know, like, so if I got out when I was maybe 23, something like that, when I was 30, I climbed 6, 10,000 foot mountains in six months. And one of them was Mount Rainier, which is considered the most grueling endurance climb in the lower 48 states. And so on that particular mission, one of the, two of the people bagged out at 10,000 feet from altitude sickness,

and so then we were climbing with a good friend of mine, I think two good friends of mine, and then two people I didn't know very well that hadn't ever climbed before. And one of them, he spilled all the fuel out of his stove, and so he couldn't make water for himself, but he was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. And so he stopped drinking water. And eventually he went into, he got dehydrated and then went into shock.

And so we had to triage him and get him sort of stabilized. And so, you know, we did the summit. And I'm laughing because one of my army buddies was with me, Marty. Marty hadn't prepared for this climb, and he almost died on it as well. But anyway, we got to the summit, and my goal was to do 50 push-ups of the summit, and I started doing that push-ups. And Marty looked at me, and I realized that that was going to be, he was going to kill me if I continued. So I had to stop that point. But we got this one climber who was compromised back down to base camp, and we had planned to walk off the mountain that day.

but he couldn't move and the rest of the crew was exhausted and so that day I did 18 hours of continuous mountain travel and so that was 10 years after this initial injections right and so even 10 years after there seemed to be significant advantages

in terms of respiration and endurance and all those other kind of things because I don't know if you've ever climbed mountains before but 18 hours of continuous bond travel is a pretty significant ordeal. And so I would say that the only thing that's really happened is that, like my knee joints are creaky now, and so I don't do as much running and swimming in those kind of things as I used to.

But in terms of cognitive abilities, throughout my career, you notice, So one of the primary benefits is being able to make a vast field of information and condense it down into the full crumb of what's the most important thing. And to be able to do that at extreme speed, right? And so what happens a lot of times in my professional life is I will be able to see an outcome clearly through extrapolation long before anyone else in the room arrives at that conclusion. And so that can be a little frustrating. And then oftentimes you just have to wait for the inevitable thing to unfold as you predicted it would before people understand that, okay, you knew what we were talking about. But I feel weird talking about all this stuff to begin with just because, like, I don't have any proof.

You know, like, there's no way to verify it. And everyone thinks they're smarter than they probably are. So, well, not me. I openly admit I'm stupid and dumb and people shouldn't listen to me. I'm like, here's a new theory, but don't take my word for it, please. No, I mean, listen, I think it's fascinating. And I mean, shoot, you're like 18 hours. 18 hours doing anything is crazy. You know, I mean, I don't remember the last time I walked for 18 hours. Probably never. So, but it's a way. When's the last time you did any kind of physical testing? I mean, like you mentioned about the mile, how you did 520. When's the last time you did a mile?

I mean, I know your joints are creaking and stuff, but I mean, was it like 10 years ago or what? You know, I remember I was going to the gym regularly three years ago before we moved down to the gorge. And it was even then that, you know, working at the like the weight. machines in the gym. I was still, I was like, wow, I'm still kind of maxing some of this. And it's weird because there's not all muscle groups, like triceps, absolutely, abdominals, absolutely, thighs, you know, those kind of things, are all easily maxed. And that was like, I said, three, four years ago that that was going on.

And there's other, like, weird things. like, it's not uncommon for like a metal tool that I'm working with to break in my hands. So like a hammer will break, you know, if I'm, you know, or pry bar will bend or whatever. And that's, you know, it could be cheap tools. But it's just one of those kind of things that. You're trying to be so humble right now. Like, you're like, it's probably, it's probably hard for it is. I mean, listen, man.

I don't bend tools. I don't break hammers. Even the Harbor Freight ones, man. Like, you know. So when you say maxing out certain muscle groups and stuff, what muscle groups aren't the ones that tend to get maxed out on certain exercises? So, like, biceps aren't a maxing one, but triceps easily, you know? And so it's weird stuff like that.

And again, like, who knows? I mean, it could be a dozen things. And I'm not a small guy. You know, when I joined the Army, I was 6.3, and now I'm 6.5. And so, you know, part of the package would be big, I guess. But anyway, you know, we could go on and speculate about things that I have no proof for, and there's no way to go back and figure it out. I mean, it's interesting, but I'm not, like I said, Nick Fury isn't calling me at

I don't hang out with Tony Stark. I run an outdoor store in Columbia River Courage. Yeah, you're having a great time. You're hanging out with Tony Merkel, not Tony Stark. Wrong Tony. You know, I think you're probably more fun, but just my opinion. I appreciate it. I wish I had Stark's money, though.

So I just want to say that, you know, I've heard stories like this over the years that you're sharing. and I do wonder just no proof of anything, right? But I do wonder if it was just some kind of, because, you know, I don't know how it was to say it other than, you know, when you're in the military, you kind of, you're their property. That's what I hear. And so since you're their property, they're maybe testing some things on you. Maybe that's why, you know, certain things were enhanced and other things weren't, because they were literally testing out certain things.

And maybe, maybe no proof of anything like you would say, but maybe there are, is somebody out there that got the full dose of the whole package and they're running around just absolutely jacked to no man's end mentally, physically, they're flying through the sky or something. I don't know. But it's, I think it's a, I think it's a really interesting story. And, you know, it just kind of sheds light on this idea that, you know, when you're in the military, you know, weird things can tend to happen. I mean, we've had different things like that happened on the show where people are sharing stories from their experiences in military. And those are, I find those stories just very interesting.

But you lay that groundwork. We went into this direction, but because of, I think because you mentioned about the spatial displacement that you experienced. And you're like, let me, let me lay the groundwork with my military experience as to why it's so weird that I will lose place. Now I'd understand. Like, you don't just get lost. No, no, no, no.

Yeah. And so, you know, a part of it, so, you know, you, how do I say it? Well, I know that I've had capabilities that are at the edge of the bell curve. We'll just say it like that. And so that's why I volunteered to be a search and rescue EMT. You know, it was one of those things where if you have capabilities, you have a responsibility.

to use those in a way that helps others. And so, of course, we had intensive land navigation training. Like in the Army, land navigation is literally a life and death skill. If you're successful, people die. If you're not successful, people die. And so the level of training that we had on that was pretty intensive. And then, of course, in search and rescue, there's a whole other set of life and death consequences to not having your act together when it comes to land navigation.

You really have to be no mistakes, right? You can't be out there trying to help somebody else and get yourself into trouble to a point where you need rescue yourself, right? And so, and then even within that, within my unit, I was recognized as one of the best navigators. and this may be a previous genetic thing. We talked during the last time we chatted about magnetite crystals in people's brains and how that's a physical mechanism by which things like magnetic navigation occurs and migrating animals and things like that. And I'm fairly certain that people in my family have just that magnetic navigational sense

is just part of our genetic package. My daughter, I'll take her out for a hike around the house and we'll go into the woods and I'll have her hiking for 45 minutes, and I'll say, okay, point to where our houses. And within, you know, 10 degrees, she knows what we're at. And so it's kind of one of those family traits of knowing where you are. And so because of that, I was often put in the role of navigator on, you know, training missions and then search and rescue, obviously the same thing. And there's a number of things you do when you are an experienced land navigator.

Like you are always, you're keeping a pace. count, you're setting down, you know, sort of mental markers about where things are. You're building mental maps. You're keeping an eye on where the sun is at. So there's this whole constellation of like background routines that are running always when you're in the forest. And so because of that, I literally cannot remember a time that I was lost in the woods, in the wilderness. Like I've always known where I am. And more importantly, if there's ever a place that I've been, I know it, right? Like, it's sort of like if you seen a face before, like, you recognize the face.

Some people are really, really good at that. Others less so. For me, that's what it's like when I'm in the wilderness. Like, I always know if I've been in a place before and which direction I approach it from and which direction the exit is and everything else. Like, that's just part of the package, right? So, I'll paint a little more of a picture of, like, just how mysterious this, area called Broke Lake Borrow's is.

So back in 2014, a guy named Chris Zitzowitz was out with a friend of his, and they were looking for caves in Brokelet Boroughs. On some maps, the area is called the Big Lava Bed. So folks are looking for it. It's in between Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams, about seven miles north of the Columbia River. And so they were out there looking for cave entrances, and they got separated by about 20 yards. And then Chris banished from the face of the earth. Not a single clue has ever been found as his whereabouts.

And so this gets kind of a really weird. So he went missing. His partner called the Sheriff's Department immediately. They immediately began a search. The search wound up eventually, including hundreds of searchers, right? They had dogs. They had choppers. And they found nothing.

Not a Snickers bar wrapper, not a shoe lace, not a scrap of clothing, not a footprint. They found no trace of Chris, completely vanished from the face of the area. And in fact, they had done so much searching that they began to suspect his hiking partner of foul play. And this guy passed several truth verification tests that he had no ill will towards Chris and had committed no crimes or done anything untoward. And, you know, I've talked to several folks in the store who've come in and told me their experiences. Some of them were on the search and rescue team. This was, I was in a search and rescue team up north near Seattle, and I wasn't here in the gorge when this person was missing. And they said, there's a really strange story about military involvement with this particular search.

A whole army unit showed up claiming that they just happened to be in the area doing training and they figured they'd help with the search. Now, I've been both a soldier, a ground pounder, one of the guys that would have shown up in this particular scenario. And I've also been a search and rescue guy. And I can tell you, from a search and rescue perspective, I've been on dozens and dozens of missions. The only time the military ever shows up is if they're bringing a chopper. And then you just, you know, see the guy giving you the two fingers flew through the window and that's about it. In this case, they had a whole unit out there searching. and they said that they were from some kind of special forces unit and they thought that they could be of assistance, which is wildly suspicious in my mind.

There's really no reason why the army would ever get involved in that. You know, typically, you know, my unit, we wound up fighting forest fires in Yellowstone back in 88, but that was because all the forest fire fighting units were exhausted at that point. And that was when Yellowstone was on fire and it was a huge disaster. And so we got sent out there to help out with that effort. But you never deploy the army for a civilian person missing. Like that's just one guy. It didn't make any sense. Well, you have to understand that just probably three weeks ago now, a woman came into the store and she said that her and, excuse me,

her and eight of her friends of nine witnesses. They were laying in a field just south of Brooklyn Borrow's. And they were watching, this is September of 2023. Yeah. They were watching shooting stars. And then they see these two lights that look like satellites, so two white spots. And I don't know if any of your listeners have ever seen satellites in the sky, but basically they just look like a star that's moving fast.

So they see these two satellites moving fast overhead. There are no navigation lights, no red and yellow lights that you'd find on an aircraft. And as she's telling me this story, I hope this isn't one of those Starlink stories. Because a lot of folks will come to the store, excited that they've seen some kind of UFO, and it's just Elon Musk's satellite array, which is kind of a letdown. So I was hoping that she had a legitimately cool experience. And then she said something that I had never heard before. she said as those satellites got directly over us, a green sheet-like laser shot out of it, scanned the tree line, went down the trees across the field, over them, and then back up the other trees, and then disappeared.

And she said, we were totally freaking out. And so this is a thing that was co-witness by nine people. and very bizarre experience. So we started to investigate what was going on with that. And it turns out that there are some LIDAR mapping missions, right? So the Washington Department of Natural Resources will use LIDAR, which is a kind of radar that allows you to see things terrain without the vegetation on it. And so I called up those guys.

And I said, hey, did you guys have any missions last summer in this area? And they said, well, no. And number two, the lighter we use is infrared. And so you would never see any kind of beam coming out of our aircraft. And we always fly in the early morning or during the hours of daylight. So they're not a nighttime type of flyer. And they said the only time that you see a green laser is when someone is doing bathometric studies. And so they're trying to determine the terrain underwater.

And so the green laser allows you to see underwater. But in this area, you know, it's, there's no bodies of water where they were getting scanned. And they said, you know, so it definitely wasn't our guys. And we talked to our vendors who do the LIDAR flights. You know, there's civilian contractors who help them with the stuff. And they said, yeah, we never fly at night and we don't use green lasers. They said, the only place that you might find green laser use would be in the military. And you're not going to get any answers out of that.

And so we've got this really weird situation where we had nine witnesses scanned by a green laser, just south of Brokelylegg Barrows. and the one governmental agency who might have had anything to do with is saying that it wasn't them. So this is, again, building a little bit of the strangest of the area. As I mentioned, there is one four-wheel drive track

so scratch into the southern quadrant of this thing. And I have been driving around the outside of my vehicle for months trying to find this access point. I don't know because I heard rumors about it. People came into the store talking about it. how neat it was. And so I finally found it and I drove in there. And a part of this area was apparently hit by lightning or something because none of the trees are alive. And it's almost like you're driving through this crazy moonscape, right? It's utterly quiet because these jumbled rocks with moss

on them like just eats the sound. And you get this really eerie sense when you're in there. And this track leads to these pools of water that are, sort of in these volcanic depressions. And there is no other reason for this road. Like normally, you know, we've got a lot of like forest service roads out here where they'll send out, you know, logging trucks to go extract timber or mining vehicles to extract minerals. But here, there's nothing of economic value.

This road just leads to these mysterious pools of standing water in these volcanic crevasses. And there's a campfire site out there. So I'm poking around at this campfire, and I find a bunch of 5.56 NATO cartridges laying on the ground. And so an M4 and M16 uses 5.56 casings, bullets or cartridges, I should say. And what was weird is that as I'm looking at these old cartridges laying on the ground, it looks like they were firing in all directions. And I was like, hmm, that's unusual. but not inexplicable.

Good old boys, if they've got an AR-15, it'll fire either 223 or 5.56, depending on how well the weapon is built. And so it could just be, you know, regular folks out there having fun shooting in the woods. But the weird thing was that I found metal belt links. And so when I was in the military, I carried a squad automatic weapon, M249,

they called a saw. And it is a belt-fed machine gun that fires, 5.56 rounds. So basically, it's a squad gun that fires the same type of bullets as everyone else's rifle, which you can lay down massive amounts of suppressive fire with it. And I found, and so the bullets are carried in a belt link. So they have these metal links that holds a bullets together. And then once you fire them, the links fly apart. And I found a handful of those belt links in and amongst these 5.56 empty spent cartridges that look like they had been fired in all directions.

And so that's really kind of what made me start scratching my head because no civilian in the United States is allowed to carry on or use a belt-fed machine gun. And here we have apparent evidence that there was some type of military activity going on here, firing belt-fed machine guns in the strange volcanic spot. So again, completely inconclusive evidence. I can't really say anything else about it. There could be a dozen explanations as to why that was there. But to me, one of those things that you put in the column of,

okay, something may have happened here and we don't know quite what. So to get to my personal experience, I was out there, and there's a road that goes alongside of this thing. And it's almost like, you know, like if you go to like a wildlife park and the road drives and you can look in and see all the critters, like, sort of like that, where there's this road and it's a deep forest road. So like there's no other cars on it, typically. And then you can see like these crazy crumpled up rock formations and these strange slabs and all of this utter wildness that is the Brooklyn boroughs. and I wanted to get some drone footage in there. And so I parked my car when I walked 200 yards into Brokelyde Boroughs.

And rough terrain, you couldn't put two steps in front of each other without having to change the position of your foot. And it chews up boots like it will eat a boot sole and you'll have to get them replaced if you spend any amount of time in there. And I found this trench. So this is again one of those lava tubes that the roof had collapsed. and you get this really cool trench, probably running 60 yards, right?

And so I flew the drone up and down this trench a bunch of times, you know, trying to get that GPS lock, not getting a GPS lock. And then at the south end of the trench, the drone hit a branch and fell to the ground. So I went down there, picked up the drone, and figured I'd do a little more exploring,

see it was going on deeper in Brook Lake Burroughs. So in order to understand this spatial displacement experience, I'm going to try to set up some basic landmarks. So imagine that I am standing in a trench. We'll call it Trench 1, and I'm starting at the south end of a north-south trench, right? So I walk to the north end of Trench 1. I take a left turn 90 degrees, and now I'm going to go deeper west into the, into Brook Lake boroughs. See what else is out there, right? And again, now this is a place where we've had these reports of Sasquatch footprints vocalizations, trees getting knocked over.

We've had Chris Zitzowitz going missing. We've had this strange military presence, both during his search and apparently over the pools, which are a couple miles south of where I was at the time. And I walk 300 yards west, right? So I took this, went from north, from south to north, turned west, walk 300 yards west. And then I find another really cool trench. And I think, oh, well, I better fly the drone here.

And so I'm flying the drone and I'm there for about five minutes. And I look over my shoulder and I see my car. Well, wait a minute. How can that possibly be? I should be 500 meters away from my car. And here it is 150 meters away. What that'll happen? And then, like waking up from a dream, I realized that I was at the south end of Trench 1.

So the place where I had started from, I thought that I was 350 meters and probably 110 degrees different direction than I was. And I have no idea, no clue, no, it's a seamless mental edit of how I got from what I thought was 300 yards deeper west into Brooklyn boroughs to being bounced back to place where I started at the south end of the first trench that I had walked through. completely blew my mind so utterly discombobulating I can't even explain to you how for a guy who

always knows where he is in the woods always knows how far I've traveled in a particular direction to suddenly find myself in a place that I had already been with no recollection no even beginning of a clue how I had arrived back in the

place where I had started and even crazy I was standing there literally flying the drone up and down a place where I had already flown that drone, like, had already paid attention to this landscape and having no idea that I was back at the place that I already was. Like, again, the only reason why I told you that whole story about my military experience and my search and rescue experience is to let you know that it's not some noob running around in the woods, mistakenly getting lost. This is a situation where I cannot explain in any way, shape, or form how I was transported, what I believe to be 350 yards from where I thought I was, utterly just confounding. And, you know, at first it was unsettling.

And then I began to think, you know, this place is so large and so remote. There are no trails in there. Like, you could literally have three Ewog villages of Soswatches living there, and no one would ever know. And I thought, you know, if this was some way that they were protecting their territory and they didn't want me to go deeper into this place, this is probably the most benevolent way to have done that to sort of shut down your consciousness, lift you up, transport you back to go, and then set you there, no harm, no terrifying experience, just a, benevolent, bouncing you back to the starting point. And of course, I get into my car and it's hours later than I thought it was. So a really fascinating experience, but also super exciting. Like you have to understand, I've been hearing people report these things for years now.

And to actually get out there into this place, mysterious and weird and amazing as it is. and then immediately to have this kind of off the charts experience of spatial displacement, I was thrilled. Like, I thought it was really amazing, just what a neat experience to have. I was thrilled. It was amazing. I loved it. Well, let me think about it.

The reason why I do this is because I love living in a place where all the questions aren't. answered, where there's still things to experience a sense of wonder about, right? Like, that we've got 11 foot tall creatures walking around in two feet. We've got these four-foot-tall giant cats that there are orbs that I've taken pictures of. And now to have this experience where something which, like I said, as a professional land navigator, I know my shit, right? Like, that is not a James got mixed up or James got disoriented or there was something about this guy that he just got lost in the woods. No, like, I am the person that you call when someone else is lost.

I am the person that has the skills and the experience to rescue other people who are in really, really dangerous situations and oftentimes hurt. And to be that guy and have this experience where even in this small scale kind of thing where we're talking about a couple hundred, yards to have been completely bounced and relocated. I mean, like, again, it's one of those things. It's a personal experience. I can hope that you guys understand and believe me and take me at my word. But to me, it was utterly game-changing. My family was sick of me talking about it for weeks.

It was like, oh, my gosh. And, you know, against my better judgment, like, I would never, as a search and rescue person. You have a responsibility to not put people at harm's way. I would never recommend anyone go into this place because it is like you will get yourself hurt. Like there are razor sharp rocks out there. Like it is and the terrain is unpredictable and compasses don't work and self-phones don't work. But I have to tell you, I am so fascinated by this place. It's like sort of my new white whale. Like it's the one thing that I definitely want to go into deeper and, you know, maybe camp out there and see what kind of strange things.

will happen next. Oh, I totally understand that feeling. I have my own little white whale area, and we actually experienced spatial displacement a little bit. We're not sure what exactly happened, and that's why I don't get too excited back, because I'm like, well, maybe we were just stupid, and we just didn't exactly understand what was going on. But the, so when you were out there, this is the area that the military had, you know, questionable activity.

This is the area that the green lasers were being shot, right? So, and this wasn't the, like the same time, though, right? Like, you weren't out there searching for the missing person that they were searching for? No, no, no.

These are three different events separated into. Gotcha. So, you're out there, you have the spatial displacement. What does your gut tell you happened there. I mean, because like some people might say, bro, you might have been abducted. You might like, and they put you back at your car and that's why there's hours later and all that stuff. I mean, what, what's the lot? Because it seems like you're, you try to be as logical as

possible, everything, but you had this, excuse me, I just choked my own, my own, my own spit there. There's a first for everything. So, but you had this kind of like, a illogical experience that that you went through that took you by storm. And as somebody who runs a store that's taking illogical experiences from the local public, for you to have that own personal experience, how do you personally define it for yourself? I mean, is it just something that you just can't explain? Or do you have this suspicion as to what exactly kind of might have happened there?

You know, it's a good question. And like the fun ideas are that a mystical band of Sasquatches, snuck up on me and edited my memories and gently placed me in a place where I couldn't hurt myself or discover their home. Like, that's fanciful, obviously. Like, I have zero evidence other than wishful thinking that this would happen to me. But, you know, it's, to me, it's a huge mystery. I can't even begin to explain it.

Like the notion that my memories were so seamlessly edited. And the sensation that I had that, like, once I recognized that I was actually in a place that I had already been, it was almost like that fog of waking up. You know what I mean? Like, I have no recollection of falling asleep. I have no recollection of waking up. I just have the feeling of, wait a minute. You know, they're sort of like rubbing your eyes and like, am I where I think I am?

Like, how did this happen? And so, yeah, It's something, whatever it was, that has the ability to erase memories. And not only that, like, seamlessly edit the experience. It's not like there's a missing piece. It's not like I was like, oh, okay, well, I'm walking. And then suddenly there's like this moment where I'm, you know, there's black and then I'm at this place. It's like, nope, I thought that I was happily marching myself west, you know, staying in

asthma, doing all the land navigation things that you're supposed to do. And lo and behold, I am back at go and utterly befuddled that I'm looking at scenery that I had already studied and already understood. So I wish, that's kind of why don't want to go back out there. I need more data. Like, I can't explain what happened to me with any theory that I currently have or an understanding of, you know, how cognitive processes work that would allow. That was the last time you were out there? No, no. Well, and it gets snowed. Right now, the snow is just now melting off the area. And so this happened late last year, right before the area got snowed in. And so now I am starting to poke around the edges. One of the, so like I said, this place is just filled with these wondrous things. Like right now, there's this area that it's just northeast of the boroughs, like literally like across the road. from the northeast corner of it.

And every year, this place called South Prairie, the forest fills up like a lake. And so you've probably seen like videos or pictures on the internet of people swimming through a forest. Well, like that happens right here at South Prairie, which is at the north corner of Brokeleg Barrows. And so this seasonal lake forms, and it's literally the kind of thing where you can swim through the forest.

And then every year, in a single day, that lake, which is like a half mile wide, suddenly disappears. And no one is sure where it goes. And there are theories that there is a labyrinth of lava tube caves that run underneath Brokelegg burrows and that they get clogged with ice and then that ice like dam breaks and then the entire thing drains because you don't see the water like fill up any river or anything like that. It just suddenly one day is gone.

and it's things like that where again, like this is a place where there are all these wondrous things that occur that we still don't even have a clear understanding of what's happening. And like, I've heard people say that they were walking out in Brokeleg Borrow's and they were stepped on top of like sort of a large, like rocky mound.

And then they hear something underneath their feet, like they had knocked a rock, loose in a void and they hear it fall for a couple of seconds, hit something, and then fall for a couple more seconds and then hit the ground, like some kind of gigantic cavern underneath their feet. And so what happened here? We don't know. And, you know, Chris is not the only one that's gone missing. There have been, you know, mushroom pickers and firm pickers and other folks that have just,

over the years, have just vanished. And no clue, no trace. And to me, like, that's, like, there's some. something happening out there. I don't know what it is. But man, I am sure how to figure it out. Like, to me, like, that's like one of the grand mysteries of, um, it sounds like a really satisfying project to, to get into. Yeah, for sure. Uh, so it sounds like, it's almost like with what they're describing underneath their feet, like, maybe even the earth just kind of like somehow opens up and swallows people at times. I mean, if the water is just going somewhere, it's not

well, I'm assuming it's not going up. The logical explanation would be is going down. Somehow it's draining down into something. I'm going to get weird with you now. I'm not here for you. Like, I can't let the episode go

without bringing up portals. And like, I mean, what, so you have this guy, Chris that went missing, no trace. You experienced this spatial displacement where you should have been three, I think you said, 350 meters away from where you

found yourself. And so what are the odds, what are the ideas? I mean, feel free to disagree or, you know, say it's crazy, but like, what if it's a portal location and there's like this, this area has some kind of portal sensitivities where

it displaces people or just, you know, takes them into somewhere else? I mean, shoot, if the ground is, if the ground is empty and hollow, I mean, now we're talking about portals to the upside down in stranger things. I mean, like, who knows? The notion of portals, like, we have had reports of portals in the store several times.

Several folks have had that experience. And so we've had reports, so there's a story that in Mount Adams, some people can see a physical hangar door open and clothes and craft flying in and out of it. But one guy came into the store and said that he saw what appeared to be a portal hovering in the sky next to the summit of the mountain. And other folks have had strange experiences like that lost time. Sort of in that same area

at a place the locals called Monster Mountain. We get reports, other people have reports of spatial displacement where they're traveling and then suddenly they find themselves back at their car and they should have been hours hiking away from it. And then recently we've had this rash of really interesting reports. So we have reports of triangular-shaped UFO flying over the area, typically moving fairly slow. Commonly, it's reported that it's a black-shaped slab triangle.

One guy said back in the 80s he was driving down 14, he saw it flying above the river. When he was driving on the road with other folks in the car, it was 400, feet away. Like, that's really, really close. It's like a little bit more than a football field. And then the whole car, all the witnesses saw this thing dive into the river and they could see its lights underwater. They thought that they had witnessed some kind of plane crash or something like that. And, you know, they called the FAA and the local airports and there was nothing to report. But the reason why I bring it up now is that several people have come into the store recently and said, I've seen a triangle shape in the sky at dusk.

but it looks almost like it's cloaked, like the starlight is wrapping around it. And so you get this sense of, you know, like movie cloaks or like the predator cloak where it distorts the light around it. And so the first report is like, oh, that's interesting. The second report is like, oh, that's starting to see a pattern. And so we probably had five reports now of these craft that look cloaked.

And in the best way to, like, you can be standing there And this woman's husband right next to her couldn't see what she was seeing. Which said, oh, it's so clear. I can totally see that there's this thing. And so originally, we had received reports like that of people seeing what appeared to be an area where the background was different than the surrounding background. So imagine you're looking through a portal into another realm or world. You would see the normal background of your everyday world. And then you'd see something different in the area of the point.

portal. And so over by like the Lyle Tunnels, which will maybe 12 minutes east of the store, we've had reports of that kind of phenomenon where somebody sees something which looks like some type of weird visual disturbance. The background of a certain area is not like the rest of the natural scenery around it. And I still don't know whether the phenomenon of cloaked craft is related to this phenomenon of what appears to be a portal. You know what I mean? Like some type of thing that you can walk through or be a place of transport. Now, I will say that there are numerous, they look like rock nests in the area. And these are found both on like Wind Mountain and over by Horse Thief Butte.

And it said that the first peoples who lived here, you know, prehistory, would create these rock nests. and kids as young as 12 would go to these places on vision quests. And so you'd sit in your rock nest exposed to the elements and you'd wait to be visited by your spirit animal or be transported to another realm. And so, like, that kind of thing has been going on here for thousands and thousands of years. And there is archaeological evidence all over the place

that the first inhabitants of this land were having these extraordinary encounters by simply creating a space, confined space for themselves, and then waiting for visitations. And the tales are wild when you look at the, you know, the anthropological studies and the sociological studies of the people who were recorded the Native American traditions and stories and things like that. of people seemingly going on these wild adventures in realms that are similar to our own earth, but in many ways very different. And so, like I said, all I got for you is there is more mysteries here than I have answers for. You know, there seems to be hot spots. Let's just keep

it in our country that have this kind of stuff going on. And I feel like you and I are very similar in that sense where we live in areas that have mysterious things going on. I mean, Tennessee has a lot of stuff, but like East Tennessee, but East Tennessee where I live has a smoking mountains, where you live has mountains. There's something to do with mountains and even into ancient texts, you know, like even in the Bible, it talks about fallen angels descending on Mount Herman. And like there's a lot of talk and idea of portal locations, mountain tops, things like that. it's very fascinating. I want to end on this final question.

I'm very serious about this question. If there was a portal that opened up, would you walk through it? Oh, definitely. I love you. See, you and I are just the same. Like, I love it. That's great. I love it.

I mean, I've spent a lifetime of training and preparation, right? And so part of what's so exciting to me out here, is, you know, like, there's a point at which, like, you could have your 10 out of 10 experience climbing a mountain, but then you have one experience saving someone's life, and your form of 10 out of 10 becomes a 5 out of 10, right? And so in search and rescue, like, it was like rediscovering the wilderness when I was out there doing work to reunite families and to save lives and to bring closure to families who had lost loved ones in the wilderness. And I'll never forget, like, it's sort of like having amazing outdoor experiences of me just going there was

going to be, there was diminishing returns. And then to join search and rescue and to save lives and to help people. Like it sort of renewed my love for the adventure of where you've got something that you're doing that has meaning and purpose, right? And now that I'm here in the gorge, and there are these true mysteries that are arising, and they're like in my backyard, and I'm fortunate enough to be trusted with people's stories and get a sense of, like, where some of these things are, to me, like, the next challenge is, okay, do you have, you have the skills to survive in the wilderness?

You have the skills to save other people's lives and lives. Now, like, what challenges are going to be presented to you if you walk through that portal? Like, do you have the capabilities, capacity to survive that and to survive it with, you know, grace and, you know, some pluck? And to see what's around that next corner. Like, to me, this is like the new frontier. And science, because it's got a materialist paradigm, has sort of left this whole realm of astonishing discoveries and wondrous things to citizen scientists like ourselves. And so we've got this wide running field where we can go out and explore. You know, like we might have talked about Benjamin Franklin back in 1750,

total whack talk. He's out flying kites in lightning storms looking for this mysterious electricity power, right? But even like Thomas Jefferson, who sent Lewis and Clark out here in 1805 with the Voyage of Discovery, he sent them with instructions to look for cryptids. He told them he was looking for, he wanted them to find proof of a living mastodon, and he wanted them to find proof of an American lion of all things, right? So Thomas Jefferson was aware of creatures like the Clicketat Apecat

that had existed here in the United States, and he was excited to send these guys out to explore, like Lewis and Clark archetypal explores. You don't get any cooler than these two guys who are, you know, exploring the land at that time, which was completely unknown to Western minds. And that portal opens. And, you know, my wife makes me very, you know,

one of those in-reach satellite things. So, like, you know, and I, we have a protocol, my wife and I, me calling in night, I'm about to do something really weird. So here's where to look for the body. But 100% I'd walk through that thing. Like, that's like, that's what it's all about, right?

It's like that exploration and discovery. It's having the courage to see what's around the corner. And to be the joy of a new discovery like that, I can't think of anything cooler. You know, it's funny because I have the in-reach as well. I don't use it often, but I do have this habit. And it's funny you say that because it's not, not even a conscious thing, but now that you mentioned, it's a subconscious thing. It has to be.

Before we go out and we do something stupid and crazy, I tend to text my wife, I love you. It's just, it's funny because, like, my kids are young. I mean, my son's six, my daughter's three. And when I'm out there, before I go out there, actually, I think it's before I go out there is when the most hesitation is for me. A lot of times, I'm like, okay, we're getting ready. to do this trip and, you know, it's like all of a sudden I don't want to do it. And it's because, like, I don't know. It's pretty cool. We're talking about it, but.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, because I think about, like, I look at my kids. I'm like, gosh, like, I, it always happens. I, I think back to my childhood. And I know everybody else has, like, their own memories and stuff. But I don't remember much from when I was six. I don't remember much nearly, hardly anything when I was three.

And so I think, man, if I go and I, and I, and I, I don't come back, these kids are never going to remember me. And so I'm like, I'm like, man, I don't want to go. But then I get out there and I'm like, okay, we're here. We're going to do it. And then I'm just texting my wife. I love you. You know, because it's just like, I don't know if I'm coming back. But, you know, if I don't, just know, I loved you. Quick plug, you know, as a search and rescue guy, we found so many people because we would triangulate on their last text. Or there's some folks that we would find because they would take a picture before they got lost,

and then it would get sent to the cloud. And so there are certain things, even if you don't have coverage in wherever you are, sometimes your phone will find a beacon, a tower. And if you send a text and it doesn't go through, it can still bounce off the tower as you're moving. And it's,

like I can't tell you how many folks we found using that exact method of triangulation on cell phone towers. So as my plug for public safety, is always send a text to tell your loved ones where you are and when you expect to be back and where your car is parked. And then, if you are lost, continually text, don't call because you'll burn your batteries, but text.

And like I said, it saves lives. It really, really does. But yeah, I hear you. There's that question. And I think for my wife, she knew what she was getting into when she married me. That, you know, I'm an explorer and an adventurer. and that's where my passion is.

And so, you know, and she knew, like, when I would go out and get called at 3 o'clock in the morning to go on a search and rescue mission, like, yep, that was, the thing that I was doing was a good thing. And it was worthy of a little inconvenience in our personal lives to be out there. And so, and she wants me to have this satisfying full experience, you know, and utilize my skills and capabilities. And so, yeah, I hear you, though. It's a, you don't ever want to come back, or not come back at all, I should say. Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to come back. I don't care how I come back. I just want to come back.

So, no, but James, man, listen, I appreciate you, spend some time and talk with me. Fascinating stuff. And the way you weave the whole story with through, listen, man, you're a super soldier. but, you know, that's my interpretation. It's not you saying to me, but to the spatial displacement and the weird things in the Columbia River, Columbia River Gorge, just fascinating stuff. People that listen right now that maybe are being introduced to you to the first time, let them know where they can find the store and, you know, if they want to come and report the bizarre stuff or check out the outdoor store and all the good stuff that's going on in there.

Sure. So my store is located in Vingen, Washington, which is about 60 miles east of Portland, Oregon. So if you're heading to the gorge, fly into the Portland Airport and head east down the gorge about 60 miles. And we're right across the river from Hood River, Oregon. The Hood River is a popular vacation spot. You can go to Margie's Outdoor Store.com, and you'll see some information we've got up there about some of the things people have encountered. There's also our forms for we've got an online form to fill out a paranormal report. We're posting more and more on social media about some of the reports are getting in the store. So it's going to be Margie's outdoor store on Facebook, on Instagram, and on YouTube are the primary places where we post. Yeah, I'm looking at the website. It's got to be one of the few outdoor stores that has a paranormal section, which is awesome. I love it. And you know, you have a spot here, follow your reports, so people can just do it online as well. But I definitely recommend going in and checking it out.

James, man, it's always a pleasure. It's a joke. You're my favorite. Well, that's sure, but I really hope you enjoyed it. 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. If you enjoyed it, that's the best thing you can do to help the show grow. Share the show.

Also, shout out to my good friend, William Bond, over at Permiculture Consultant. I'm wearing his shirt right now. Go ahead and follow his YouTube channel and his Instagram. Instagram channel. Thanks in advance. See you next week. And until then, stay safe. Take care. And remember, the truth will set you free, but first we'll piss you off. I almost forgot that part. Bye. On the sidelines trying to be the highlight Right all the guidelines, yeah

Missed a boat with no lifelines, yeah Screaming, I don't need you, uh And lights make a path for my breath like smoke In the cold every weekend I'm missing