The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Brian Laythe | Ghosts, Possession, and Shadow People

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

-Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code BASEMENT at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://whyfileslovegold.com or call [phone] now. -Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/thewhyfiles to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. Dr. Brian Laythe has spent fifteen years pointing cameras and EMF meters at haunted places, and he'll tell you straight when something's explainable. Then there's the rectory in Cincinnati. Two people, two nights, the same thing coming through them — and a team that never fully recovered. We get into the blue flame, the beach balls, and the one room he refuses to go back to. Bring coffee. LAYTHE LINKS: www.israenet.org Book: "Ghosted!: Exploring the Haunting Reality of Paranormal Encounters" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland, the hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The other Harrogans don't know than yet? In Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the ladder? I won't combat dead. Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren.

Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! I'll give you a... Moblad. New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Today I'm talking with Dr. Brian Lane. a social psychologist who spent years hauling truckloads of equipment into haunted houses that did the thing almost nobody does in his field.

He published the numbers. Three studies, and in all three, the electromagnetic field shifted right before something happened. Shadow figures out of a basement with no other exit. Beach balls off a bed 11 times in an hour, and nobody knows why. Beach balls off of bed? That's not a haunting human.

That's a bachelorette party losing their damage deposit. I don't get it. Anyway, how do you know what goes on at a bachelorette party? It used to be an exotic dancer. My stage name was Magic Pike. Okay. Oh, you're so jelly on my wrist. Today we're covering what ghost hunting shows get wrong about those blinking meters,

why Brian isn't convinced hauntings are dead people, and a personality scale that predicts who has these experiences. Not dead people, huh? Well, I guess grandma's off the hook. Off the hook for what? Well, every noise in the attic we blamed on Earth for like 20 years. Turns out it's probably just a raccoon or a squatter. Who knows?

And there is an abandoned rectory in Cincinnati where he told the owners to shut down. That story ended his fieldwork. And after hearing it, I wouldn't go back either. After our conversation, I'll come back and break everything down. Let's go down to the basement. Okay, I read your dissertation. Loved it. you hired actors to insult fraternities to attack their beliefs.

Yeah. What was going on there? When I was in graduate school before I officially got into parapsychology, I was really interested in the idea of social identity theory, which is, in essence, a theory that says, when you label groups and make them different, you will instantly get bias. you'll instantly get prejudice.

And it's silly because it's not talked about a lot, but it is a hugely robust area of social psychology research. It's not two or three papers. It's a couple of hundred. I bet. And so the whole point of the dissertation was, if I bring an actress or an actor into these groups, and I basically tell the group that they're a piece of crap, right?

Well, put us in the room. Who's the group and what are the attacks? Well, I, man. 20-something years ago. So I did religious groups. I did fraternities and sororities, and I did a couple of political groups. And I actually had to extend my dissertation time

because I actually ended up going to, I think, I want to say at least three, if not four colleges or universities to get enough groups to do it. It was a chunky paper. Yeah, yeah, and I'm surprised you pulled up a dissertation. So we would...

Well, hang on. Your dissertation is the whole theme of your career. that dissertation. You think so? I do indeed. It's all about beliefs and how if someone has a belief that's strong enough, no matter how much you insult or attack it, they will not waver. Yes. No, I mean, you're absolutely right. That was incredibly insightful. I should have caught that. Well, yes, because the reason I even got into graduate school was I started in psychology of religion, right? So the idea was let's look at group differences. Let's look at what has. What has a, happens when you bring a actress in who says, I am mad at your group, you did this to me,

you did that to me, which was essentially what they would do. They would claim to be from another student organization. Tell us what specifically. Give the attack. I am trying to remember. It's like, make it up. Did make it up. Okay. You look funny and smell. No, there was. If I remember, like conservative kids, liberal kids. Yep. Several sororities, several fraternities. The claim was they came from a rival student organization. Sure. And that they had complaints about people's behavior in the group. And I did keep the, I did actually keep the manipulation rather generic because I didn't

want them to be able to track or trace. Sure. Right. By the way, ethics review for that one was not fun, getting that approved. Oh, Lord. So they would just basically come in and make very generic complaints about other people's behavior in the group and how they should know better and you shouldn't treat people this way, etc., etc. And I set up like a three-stage assessment, right? So how much did you like the group

before we did this? Then I'd have the person come in and give the complaint and I'd be like, now that you've heard this complaint, because my whole claim for making this believable was I'm a representative of the student council and, you know, various bureaucracies of the college. This is a new technique we're trying out because, you know, we want to give people voices and let people respond to complaints, right? So I tried to make it sound bureaucratic and believable. It does. Yeah, I tried. I think some of them saw through it, but you did the best you could.

It was a pretty overt manipulation. So then I'd give those same ratings again after the complaint. And here's what's interesting. So I'd have the actress come out. Then I would do a complete debunking, right? Guys, I'm full of crap. And I'd literally say that. Like, guys, I'm full of crap.

None of this is true. This is Talia. She's an actress. That was one of her name was Talia, a lovely person. You know, come in and say hi, and she'd wave and kind of bow and walk out. And I say, now, but before you go, I want you to fill out this sheet one more time. Because one of the variables I was interested in was what's called belief perseverance. And it kind of ties into confirmation bias, which is more popular nowadays.

But there were earlier studies that basically showed that once a person buys into an idea, right? And of course, we see this in marketing and everything else, right? You see this everywhere. Yeah. And also, of course, you know, where campaign money goes to affect you, right? Democrats never try to influence Republicans and vice versa. You go for the middle. But belief for severance research basically says once you establish that somebody is good or bad at a thing,

and it's given not even really have to be given by an authority figure, they tend to persist in that belief. The early studies were interesting because they divide groups into people who are going to evaluate suicide notes. Wow. Whether they were, and I'm a bad academic. I can't remember the actual names of the authors of that study. But they would come in with Group A and go, you know what? You were really good at distinguishing these suicide notes. And then they'd come into Group B and they go, oh, man, you suck at this.

You're only getting like 10% of these right. And then at the end of it, they do the same thing I did in my dissertation, which was, guys, we're liars. None of this is true. We're academics. We're the experts that told you this. And by the way, we just lied. Does everybody understand that?

Right? And they're like, uh-huh. Before you go, how good do you think you are at evaluating something? suicide notes, they completely persisted in their belief. They did. Yes. So the people that were told they were good at it, even though the whole thing was a sham and proven to be a sham, they're like, I'm really good at evaluating suicide notes.

And the other group was like, I'm bad at it. It just persisted. True to form back to the dissertation, I do ramble. I used to be a professor, sorry. When I'd look at the change. Your student ratings, by the way, do you mention that? The student ratings? Yeah.

Have you read your ratings from students? No, I don't look at, no. You don't look at, do you look at your comments? Absolutely not. Exactly. Your reviews are very good. Oh, thank you. They say you're snarky.

You will insult someone, but you can take it. You ramble, but it's always brilliant. Well, that is awesome to hear, and I'm still not going to look at my comments. It's been about seven, eight years now since I've been a regular professor. But, no, the point of the dissertation, and I am rambling again, there was about a 15 to 18% shift, if I remember, in negativity. So what was your value of the group, you know, beforehand? to after my actress insulted you, and you'd see about a 15 to 18% drop.

And then, of course, after we said, hey, this is all BS, their ratings didn't change a bit. That 15 to 18% drop persisted, even after we gave them every excuse in the world, not to believe it anymore. And it was a cross ideology. And that was one of my major claims,

and it's not a unique claim, but I was kind of driving home the point, which was, you know, this stuff happens regardless of whether we're dealing with religion, whether we're dealing with politics, whether we're dealing with affiliation with a sorority or fraternity, this appears to be a generic phenomena. Like this belief perseverance tendency and group ideology is just something, it doesn't matter what your belief system is. You can be pro-red cross, you can be pro-feminist, you can be pro-Maga, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. The group effect is the group effect. Well, you had an

interesting hypothesis that I think turned out to be wrong, which was if you are attacked from within your group, it will sting more. And that turned out not to be the case. Yes. So what was that like with a committee watching? It's midnight. I'm three hours deep into research for next week's episode, cross-referencing declassified documents and half-crazy witness statements, and my brain is starting to fog. That's usually when I'd reach for coffee, except coffee at midnight means staring at the ceiling until 3 a.m. instead of sleeping. That's the exact trade-off. That's the exact trade-off. if Ultra was built to solve. Ultra-focused pouches use something called

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after you purchased, they're going to ask you where he heard about them. Please support the show and tell them you heard from us. Well, okay. Now, there's some exceptions to that because there is the scapegoat effect. Because what people don't think about is I belong to group X. Well, actually, the easiest way to think about this is Protestant religions, right? 400 years, 4,000 denominations. Why did that happen?

You start with one church, somebody decides that God's toe is blue, a subset decides that God's toe is green. let's fight about it and what happens you get a schism and you get a new denomination. And this is one of the really big points about the power of belief systems which ties into conspiracy theory

and all the stuff that you guys carry on about which I love is whenever you get a disagreement within a subgroup you have this risk of creating a new nested in group out group and depending on how severe it is you may end up getting that

schism and a split. And of course, organizational psychologists and really anybody in business or anybody with an organization knows this as well. But the data is pretty clear on that. So, yeah, you know, that unity and that need for unity drives, I think, a lot more than people realize in terms of what people advocate and don't. We were talking before we went to air about academic gatekeeping. It sounds like this applies there as well. Oh, God. Yes. And, you know, It's like it's almost, it is religious. You know, how dare you speak of the heresy of non-objectivity? But it's never been objective.

And I think, and to be fair to academia, is there really any business, any group, anywhere in the world that is truly objective? And everyone from experience, whether you're working at a Walmart or whether you're working for a large corporation, I don't like that mythology that we promote, that somehow there are these groups, these organizations that are pure and clean of human nature and behavior. Yeah, exactly. But no, academia is political. And even though that's heresy to say, we shouldn't be surprised by that. Everything is political.

So, yeah, you know, I will say you can publish parapsychology-related topics more easily today, particularly in the last 10 to 10. 12 years, more mainstream journals will accept, you know, anomalies, right? Anomily psychology, anomalistic psychology, or parapsychology. And now you do have to jump through a few more hoops. And if you've got a decent editor, they may just desk reject it. You won't even get to peer review. They're like, no. And in some ways, you're like, thank you, right?

Because, but it can be done. You know, I think maybe 20 years ago, if you had an anomalous topic, you were going to have to go to the parapsychology journals or the anomalistic journals, you know, JSE, PA, all of those, right? Nowadays, there is a select set of maybe 10 to 15 different journals that if you don't get too ridiculous in your claims, they will take your manuscript and the peer review will not be atrocious. There are sometimes exceptions. Dr. Eric Wargo sat right there and he's a pretty accomplished social scientist and he said psychologists were the most. aggressive, most heinous on the subject.

Yes. Almost like we're attacking their belief system. Yes. Yes. It has been my, this is just my personal experience, so I'm not trying to judge the entire field. I find that there is more ideological capture in the social sciences than there is, like in STEM fields.

I think I've even seen some. some surveys that suggest that the physicist and the, you know, biologist is like, yeah, ghost, maybe. But you get over into psychology, sociology, even anthropology. And they're like, no. This is left brain, left brain, right brain drift. That's what's happening. Yeah.

I mean, social sciences are emotional. They are. But I would still expect them to do the things that scientists are supposed to do, which is, I don't care what your topic is, what your research design look like and what is the data. say. Yes. But that, I think, has probably been a myth in all science. But again, it's not a condemning thing for me to say this. Where are you not going to find ideological bias in a social human system where everyone has attached belief systems that they prefer to use? And then, of course, monetary and reward and everything else structures that are piled on top of the funding. Yeah.

And to pretend that that doesn't matter. Like, the ethical person will, you know, kill their family and go without a job so that their kids starve. No, they're not going to. No. So it's, it is a political game, not one that I enjoy, and I try to stay away from it as much as possible. Yeah, it's like, what's the NSF into this year? Yeah.

Tell me about the VHS tape that you wish you still had. Oh, oh, the fire experiment. Okay. Man, you dig. This was, okay, so story time. This was when I first decided, I think it was 2009, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to grab me some community college students and we're going a ghost hunt. I'm going to do it. I'm going to go all in. You know, so I got the equipment, you know, because I'd loved parapsychology for years. I was in the closet, you know, on the down low reading it, you know, reading a bunch of books. And of course, had a strong religion background. It had already started studying various religions and various magical and esoteric practices as well. So we went to this house that. the story was, and I think it was our first official investigation, had a nice camera set up, had some EMF meters, I'm like, yay!

And the lady had a disabled child, and she told us that there were toys turning on and off, right? Nothing, you know, that happens, right? And that her kid was seeing scratches. Wow, okay. They couldn't account for some of the wounds and scratches that were on the kid's body. and so they asked us to come and do an investigation. And of course we did, and we set up cameras. At the time, my dear friend Kay Owen,

who kind of trained me on the ways of ghost hunting back in the day, was with us, and she had old school VHS tape recorders, right? Yep. So honestly, not a super eventful night. I think in particular, nothing just insanely crazy happened. But of course, we assigned the footage and started to do the review. One side note, did see a kind of a shadow person, like figure, in one of the films,

but this is, and I've never seen this since. And on our scale, this is one of the rarest things to see. On the SSE, this is like, you know, you do not get a high endorsement of this. I get a call from her. She's like, you've got to see this. I'm like, okay, Kay, what's going on? She's like, you just got to see this. So she pops in this VHS tape.

And I want to be clear, this was a double wide, like a double wide trailer, right? So we were in the kitchen, dining room was, I use my hands, I hope that's okay. Dining room was right here, kitchen was right here. We had the setup right here. We're talking six, seven feet away. We had eyes on that dining room the entire time. There was never a point in time that anyone was just because that's where the base camp was, right? So we're watching this video.

And I did not see this. Like I said, we watched this the entire time. And on this video, I kid you not, there was a four, I'd say probably a four to six foot gout of blue flame. Blue flame. Blue flame. Yes. No lie. Blue flame, I'll swear to it, to my dying day.

Strought, and this had carpet in the dining room, shot straight up out of the middle of the dining room carpet, I'd say for about two and a half seconds. Just tall. I mean, I gout, like somebody had stuck a fireworks nozzle, right, or a gas nozzle, and shot straight up. And never seen it since. and what was interesting was it was only on film. What was the room like? The room was, again, it was one of those small, you know, kind of dining room areas that you see in like a double-wide trailer.

But was there residue? Was there a smell? Nothing that I can remember because we saw it post hoc. It was only on the VHS tape. Blue Flame is a chemical fire. Wow. So yeah, I wish you had that tape. I wish I had that tape.

And it's probably gone by now. And so, you know, it's an anecdotal story at this point. But no, to this day, I'm like, how the hell did that happen? You know, and I would definitely put that as, you know, that was anomalous. Because, again, we walked back and we had wires set up. And we walked past that room and into that room probably 50 times that night. We would have seen a scorch mark and it would have left a scorch mark because there was four, six feet high. Yeah, there was no tube or, like, in other words, it wasn't like it appeared above the grave.

It was like straight up out of the carpet. So I would imagine, you know, certainly. And certainly the owner would have been like, hey, who's. who's been smoking cigarettes in my house. Right. Right. Um, no, nothing. And again, now, Kay at the time was like, this is a bad sign. She said, I've only seen this three times. She had like a 20 year history at that point. She's like, normally people's houses burn down when this comes when I'm like, oh, luckily that didn't happen. Within a month and a half or so, she said, right? Yep. Yep. The house stayed standing? Yep. No, no problems. What, did you ever

figure out what was going on in that house? Um, well, you know, that that's kind of a loaded question. because even from the get-go, we never tried to do overt explanations. And I have to admit, looking back on it, I wish I'd have done more care support. Because, you know, at the time I was young and eager and I wanted to capture objective phenomena, and I was trying to devise a method for kind of reliably separating this stuff kind of objectively, right, you know, into core classifications. To my knowledge, you know, I don't know if it ever resolved. I do know she had two friends

and they were like drinking margaritas on the front porch. I mean, I also remember Keshe's TikTok had just come out, which is an odd memory to kind of put together there. But no, we never had a clear explanation. We did go through the toys. They did turn on for us, kind of by themselves and behave oddly. So, you know, a little bit of anomalousness there. But in terms of finding any source for where the scratches or cuts could come from

or, you know, deep voices, you know, from Beelzebub telling them that the child was possessed. Nope, nothing like that. when you're doing the research like that, especially when you're blown away by, I guess it would be pyrochinesis. Yeah. Do you forget that there's people there? There's people in distress there. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things we ended up doing fairly early on in those days was we moved away from residentiales, residential hauntings because they are.

And of course, now with more years and experience, you know, you need a lot more support for those individuals. You know, what happens on the television shows. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it is promoting a particular point of view. And nowadays, I would say absolutely, you need to ask what their expectations are and you need to investigate what their state of mind is, you know, psychological history. And then really just ask, what do you want us to do here? Right. Do you want us to try and debunk this? Do you want us to just document the evidence?

If you're looking for a cleansing, we don't do that. you know, in hindsight, you know, it could have been done better back in the day. I bet most people just went validation. I just want someone else to see this. They do, but that becomes problematic with residential investigations, because if you don't get the evidence or you go, actually, this is really explainable. They don't tend to like that. No, because we're back to your study again. Yeah.

And in those days, I really, really tried to say, you know, we're being scientists here. We're going to come in. We're going to, you know, try and get the best. data we can and we're going to try and rule out whatever we can. And beyond that, we'll let you know if we found something, but we'd say up front, you know, we don't do exorcisms, we don't do cleansings, we don't do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, the belief component, obviously from Ghosted and other papers is such a powerful component. There's almost quasi-therapy going on. Yes. And that raises some ethical issues too. Mm-hmm. Well, before the vocabulary

and transliminality and all of that, before you knew what any of this was called, what happened to you, like, as a five-year-old? I have had a long series of, you know, and to make the skeptics happy. If you want to say hypnagogic episode or altered state of consciousness or, you know, whatever, fine. I don't even really care.

But I've had a series of kind of paranormal experiences from a young age, including some pretty negative encounters in my early years, like say 12 or 13, that actually led me to become religious because it scared me so bad. I was like, okay, I need to have a talk with God. Yes. And I won't lie. I think that's probably shaped a lot of the course of my life. Now, if, you know, it's tricky.

I don't know if I'm really different or not, but I don't know if I'm really different or not, but I, I, I try to make a distinction between explaining the thing doesn't tell you why it occurred in the first place. Of course. But I don't think that distinction is commonly made in science and I don't think it's commonly made in a lot of discussions of the paranormal. Let me kind of tangent and give you an example. Let's say I had a Star Trek tricorder, right? Cool. And so I got to time travel and I'm going to go back and I'm going to witness the resurrection

of Jesus, right? And so I put my tricorder out, and hopefully this isn't offending anybody with blasphemy. And I, now suddenly, I have all the information, right? I'm like, oh, look, the cellular structures did this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can explain this now. Well, okay, great, but the guy still came back from the dead. We tend to think the money in our bank account is always going to be there when we need it, but your bank can close an account. And depending on the agreement, they may not even need to give you much of a reason. Now look at what's happening on the other side of the financial system. Central banks just bought a record 289 tons of gold last quarter. J.P. Morgan is predicting

gold could reach $6,000 an ounce, and Citibank C. Silver potentially hitting $90. That's one reason I like physical gold and silver. You actually own it. And that's why I've been telling you about Goldcrest metals. Goldcrest offers widely recognized coins, transparent pricing, zero buyback fees, and free insured shipping. And when you call, you talk to a real person, not a call center. Right now, you can get their free 2026 precious metals info kit with no obligation and no sales call required or schedule a free, no pressure portfolio review. Plus, qualifying purchases can receive up to $25,000 in free silver.

Go to why files, loves, love's goal.com, or text files to metals, 638257. That's why files, lovesgold.com or text files to metals, and do it now, while you're thinking about it. Right. Right. I mean, so. He still did it. Yeah, the why is not the how.

Right. So, you know, I had. That's exactly right. That's a great way of putting it. You could show the data and people would say, yeah, but he did it. Yeah. That's neat, but he did it. Yeah, because really we're digging into what are the fundamental mechanisms of the universe.

Right. In the sense of, and, you know, here's a bit of a bender, and I promise I'll come back to paranormal experiences. We talk about chance all the time, right? And there may be some philosophers of science. answer and get mad at me about this, how do you know its chance? I can talk about the normal distribution. There is a distribution of odds for dice, right? And we say it's going to perform in this certain way, and we know there's a certain odds of getting, you know, two six-sided dices.

There's a certain odds of getting two. There's a certain odds of getting 12, and those are universal. But with a particular role, I got a seven. Well, that's chance. How do you know his chance? What's the actual mechanism? What's the actual thing that gave you a seven? And the honest answer is, we don't know. You can call it God. You can call it chance. You can call it, you know, probability gremlins. There's no answer for that mechanism. So I separate this idea of, you know, obviously laws and probability and math works. Another way to think about it. We know there's a relationship, a really well-done relationship between depression and anxiety. And you might see in a research paper, you know, depression is significantly related to anxiety.

Well, what happens if I change that language to sadness demons bring anxious demons? I just change the words. I can't say it for you're wrong. Yeah, I mean, the math doesn't change. The statistical outcomes don't change. The methods don't change. As someone who has depression and anxiety, it does feel like demons. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that, well, that's a whole other tangent. But, and again, I'm not doing this, you know, to engage in sophistry. I'm not, but one of the things that I've really had to struggle with over the decades is making sense of God, the universe. It's something that I've just kind of been obsessed with for a long time. I'm not claiming to have those answers, but it is something that I think about all the time. If you claim to have the answers, I wouldn't believe you.

Well, and you shouldn't. You know, I don't require anyone to agree with what. And that's the point. You don't have to agree with me. And you might not want to. But I do recognize when humans pretend to know something versus when we're like, we have these rules, we know these rules work well.

But the map is not the territory. And that's not even an opinion. That's objectively demonstrable. Yes. So full circle. You know, I had an experience when I was 12 or 13. I had some hypnagogic episodes when I was younger. Hypnigodiguan, meaning before sleep?

Yeah, yeah. or waking up or I actually had a spiritual experience. Who knows? Too young and it's not like there was psychologists to do a checklist at the time. I had one too and we're going to talk about it a little bit later in this show. Well, I remember before that happened, being nine or ten and waking up and I swear to you, there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex downstairs. Downstairs?

Yes. So you got out of bed? No, I didn't. I sat up and I heard a T-Rex. Whole roar, big footsteps. Roar! how do you know it wasn't like an allisaur or a triceratops? Because I'm psychic.

Okay. Never mind the T. The hallway was only three foot wide. It was a T-Rex, damn it. And honestly, it was freaking me out. And I remember screaming. I remember screaming for my mom at the time. Now, I did start to catch on after about the 20th footstep. I'm like, wait a minute. There's like 12 steps here. Right. And then, of course, the next thing I know, and that's why I think it was a hypnagogic experience. is my mom was in the doorway. I didn't see her coming to the doorway. Just, pf, right?

Right. And for the listener, if you're not familiar with these, either hypnagogic or hypnipompic episodes, it's stage one sleep, right? So you're kind of in the sleep stage, but you're kind of awake. It allows for full auditory, visual, and kinesthetic hallucinations.

This audience knows this is the land of the shadow people. Yes. But by the way, when they say, we know this occurs, they've classified it this way. But in terms of deep research that's gone into this, you know, I think about Hufford's classic book about Nighthag, right? And the curious note that in some cases there'd be very weird, objective paranormal phenomena in association with Nighthag that was independent, like, oh, the dresser drawer

moved by itself. Again, I'm not a fan of, oh, look, we took something mystical and turned it into a science term. Now it's all better. I'm like, bullshit. There's... That's what they do. Yeah, but that's a problem. Because here's my thing. I don't think that science can't do it. I think they can. I tend to look at that as if you really wanted to do it, you'd get down and dirty. And you would do a series of papers and you would figure out how to operationalize this stuff. And you would separate the wheat from the chafe. But I don't think that gets done. I think we very often will take a term was it mass psychogenic illness?

No, sick building syndrome. You ever seen the papers on sixth building syndrome? They're like, oh, all this weird stuff occurred. Well, it's sick building syndrome. What's that mean? What does that mean? Yeah, good question. Because the paper isn't really going to tell you either.

There's no explanation for why this phenomenon still occurred or why it was isolated to a certain area or why this entire group of individuals you know, had these weird, you know, physical problems and illnesses and everything else. They're like, nope, we'll just call it sick building syndrome and we'll move on. And I think that's where there's areas where parapsychology is basically bled into the mainstream. It just hasn't been sufficiently covered. Just my two cents, and I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on that.

But I am rambling. Do we want to go back to my experience or we want to let that go? If I need to bring you back, just trust that I will. Okay. Everything is fine. I trust you, AJ. Just trust me. We talked a little bit about that you were pre-seminary. What's your relationship with God like now?

I have a very, when I say good, I have a very, very intense relationship with God. But most probably a line, I'm less heretical when it comes to Catholicism. I think the standard Catholic would accept me a little bit more than a Protestant would. but I'm definitely a heretic in the sense of... What way? Well, again, I've dabbled with a lot of spiritual systems, and I have a lot of... I've been heavily influenced by Kabbalah,

particularly, you know, Victorian Kabbalah, after Golden Dawn got a hold of it and everything else. So Theosophy as well? Indirectly. You know, of course, Blavatsky kind of fed, I mean, they don't say it a lot, but Blavatsky definitely fed into, you know, the Golden Donors. I'm not a fan of Crowley, for the record,

but that's a whole other story. And I don't take golden-dawn material at face value. But I will say that, and forgive the butchry, the Otscheum, you know, the tree of life, if you really look at it as a structural metaphysical system, you know, 10 manifestations of God, each representing different aspects, conveniently tied to various planetary influences,

which are universal, and, you know, of course, the tarot applications where you see the various paths of the tree, and then you apply as above so below and the four systems of them. And I'm like, this is an insanely good classification system. It is. The Emerald Tablet is right behind me. Yeah.

And I've never been able to let go of that. So I think in some ways I might be more of a Jewish mystic or a butcher Jewish mystic or a bad Jewish mystic because, of course, I'm not Jewish. But no, I think a lot of my view of God and Christianity and religion in general is very Kabbalic in nature. And Gnostic as well. Yes, yes. Although I don't know to what extent, Gnosticism is complicated.

It is. And again, I tend to get a little gun shy when people are like, yes, I've seen heaven. It's got 72 layers. Here's the 72 names, right? You know, 72 angels of the shamhamophoresh and all that. But an ancient Jew would say Jesus was Gnostic? Yeah. Yeah, he would.

And I wouldn't go against basic Gnostic principles. And if you've ever kind of dived into the history of that, Elaine Pagels, I think is not a bad source. And of course, I never say this right, Nag Hammondi or Nag Hammadi, I can't remember. You know, I think the idea of Nazism early on before the more orthodox side of Christianity decided to, you know, structure the churches, was kind of close to Protestantism. okay well i mean think of it this way i not modern protestantism no if you think about the idea of we're not going to worry about structure where we know god is an individual searching sort of thing right you must look inside god is in here yeah he's not in that building um which if you think about it if you're trying to make an organized religion that's a little tricky yeah we need to leave

those books out yeah well and to be fair right um how How do you create a unified church if you're going to say, hey, here's a few rules. You need to find, you need to find God on your own. No good. Yeah. You're not going to, you know, and in fairness, you know, with young Christianity and, you know, unfortunately a lot of Christians are not familiar with early Christian history. They're not even aware of how the Bible was formed, which frustrates me some days.

Why? Would you have, would you have included all the books, the apollo? Pacifan, Enoch? No, man, you're about to make me say several controversial things, so I guess I'm going to say them. What's the worst that can happen? Oh, you'd be surprised. Actually, you probably wouldn't. Let me think about how to say this.

Pseopigrapha. I love it. I love all those books, but maybe I'm a little bit of a snob in the sense of if you are a person of faith and you care a great deal about your faith. And by the way, I don't have any judgment about whatever faith a person has. I really am. Neither do I. I really am a, if God has called you, God, quote unquote, universe, you know, right? If God has called you to something, I believe there's a purpose for that. It's not my business to muck with your relationship.

We're just having a conversation. This channel knows. I have great respect for religion, all of them. Yeah. So I don't, you know, if a person has been called to traditional, traditional Catholicism, in my mind, that's your path. You should follow it. But I don't have any sense of exclusionism with religion, which gets me in trouble. Why? Why would they get you in trouble?

Well, because a lot of people's fundamental religious beliefs require that exclusionism, right? I mean, even modern, actually Catholicism has some loopholes they get around. They do. But particularly with Protestantism, which is, you know, the younger form of Christianity, this is the way, this is the path, and this is it, and this is best. and if you don't follow this way, you don't go to heaven. Yeah, right? I don't like that. I don't either.

But again, if that's where a person is, that's where a person is. I think... Everyone can get to heaven. That's your way. Yeah. I've got my way. Yes. Now, I would say there are universal morals.

You know, don't be an asshole. Right. Sure. And, you know, but I also think there's a distinction between what we might call the social morals that we have. And, of course, as a social psychologist, understanding that religion is not the same. You know, the rules, the rules we follow now in various religions are not the rules that were followed 60 years ago.

Very much a difference between dogma versus the core books upon which a religion is established. All that having been said, I love the apocrypha. I certainly love the Catholic apocrypha. And I like the Gnostic texts. But we also, I also want to be balanced in say, if Paul and the various, you know, the various future bishops, you know, those New Testament books, all of which came before the Gospels. Yes.

You know, they did have a goal, which was we need to keep this alive. And I do have to, I do have to give due credit and say, how else were you going to do that if you weren't going to unify under churches and rules? That's a great point. And how were you going to survive? You know, because at the time, early, early Christianity was a cult. A cult, not occult, right? Right.

you're going to go mainstream if you're going to spread this good word, so to speak. There's no difference between a cult or religion. Well, just numbers. Just numbers. Now, in secular conveyance, right, that's, you know, people hear a cult and they're like, yes, and we kill children and goats and do like, you know, but no, in a very technical academic sense, numbers is what makes you religion. Sure. So, no, I'm kind of open-minded about both sides of it. I see why it happened.

I see why Orthodox religion, right, so to speak, occurred the way it did. did. But I do think going back to the Gnostics, that some of that introspection and personal enlightenment, and if I remember Pagels correctly, the fact that various people would take turns, being the priest or the minister or the rabbi. And the way Pagel sets it up, this just was not going to work for an organized religion. I'm just a fan of the Gnosticism. Not so much the modern form where there's, I can't remember, 36 layers with passwords that you have to get through. I think that might be a little too much. I agree.

More like the book of Philip and book of John. That's more of my speed. So you're in social sciences, psychology, and you start to talk about parapsychology, and someone said you will never speak to another human being again. Who was that? Who told you that?

Well, actually, I'm not, I don't, did I say that? Someone said that to you. Oh. Don't go into the field because you'll never be taken seriously again. Honestly, that was my undergrad advisor. Mm. And in fairness, the degree of bias when you're looking at the 80s, early 90s towards Parasik was significantly more robust. Oh, sure.

We've gotten, you know, society as a whole has gotten a little more loosey-goosey in the last 30 years. I'd call it open-minded. Yeah. That's fine. In terms of, you know, psychology, religion lit, there's been about a 10% decline in Orthodox religion, adherence to it in our society, really, I think, persistent now for about 30 or 40 years. So we are seeing a cultural paradigm shift. That's interesting because church attendance is up.

It is now. It is now. And if, man, because I am not going to go into politics on here, but if you objectively, if you objectively look at what has occurred in the last 10 or 15 years, we have had a lot of challenges to what we would call the unified social fabric. That's not left or right. That's all of them. Yeah. But as a result, you know, if you're kind of familiar with the dynamics of it, if you don't have a message, many messages will compete.

Yes. Back to social identity theory. Now you have your in groups and your outgroups. So I would say that the onboarding of religion recently is a counter move against the 2015, right, kind of left-leaning material. And so I don't even know how that's going to pan out. I don't either, but I'm glad it's happening. Balance is good.

It is good. I think were you a professor by day and then giving ghost tours at night and terror readings? Because you started, I guess, a student club, right? Yep. And I think it had a terrible acronym. Was ASAF? Yes, ASAF. Yes, yes.

Asaf, okay. Okay. In my defense, in my defense, and I'm going to own this for the entire field. Social scientists are shitty at naming things. I see that. We have multiple names for the same theory. We're bad at it. I will own my sin. Yeah, it turned into Israel, which isn't necessarily the best name either. I noticed that. We went from ASAP to Israel. Yeah, yes, in 2014, I believe. Yeah.

So what were you doing? Where were the tours? Well, actually, we did the tours as part of fundraising for when we actually filed for nonprofit status. So the whole nonprofit started originally as just students volunteering and me kind of showing them the scientific method and us, basically me having a gaggle of research assistants. What were you teaching at the time? Sociology and psychology. So would you have students coming during office hours with ghost stories? Actually, what I would do is I'd just make a pitch every semester with that caveat of this is, this is, work, make no mistake, if this interests you, it's available, and with all the appropriate

ethical caveats of this will not affect grade, there's no brownie points to be had here. I do this if you're interested, you want to learn about science and poke ghosts, so to speak, come see me. And we never, I never had a problem recruiting a gaggle of people. Of course not. Yeah. You were teaching first years? First and second.

First and second. But I also did university. I'd do junior and senior level classes, too. because yeah I think I was a social psychologist but they basically asked me to do sociology and I'm like yeah sure why not right

most of the stuff in sociology comes from social psych anyway I'm like let's go so you know for a long time for about 10 years it was really just a student organization and then we did local historical tours down in Jeffersonville Indiana

where we collected all the stories and we would actually do some investigations on the site and then we give tours as fundraisers to get a little bit of money because anyone who does investigations knows that the cost of actually buying equipment is insane. And I had the amount of money you would expect

of being a community college slash adjunct university professor. Well, take us to one of the stops in the tour. Tell us a ghost story. Well, okay. There is a nice little bistro free advertising called the Red Yeti. Already love it.

Yeah, it's in, It's in downtown Jeffersonville on Spring Street. And their owners reported, in fact, somebody stole our material and was doing a recent report on them about a year ago in a newspaper. I'm like, how dare you? Content thieves. Tell me about it. Whatever. So there was an apartment upstairs, if I remember correctly.

And they were reporting shadow people and various weird disturbances. The restaurant itself reported some pretty strong psychokinesis. So these things were moving. Yes, yes. Cycoconet glass, glassware being flung off a shelf. And we're not talking about like oops tinkle. There was several reports, if I remember correctly, of flinging, objects being flung. Okay.

So at the time, we were a local organization, right? You know, student, professor, whatever. And I can't remember if we asked them or if they invited us to investigate. But anyway, there we were. interestingly we set the all you know we set the equipment up and in those days I had you know a full range of data logging EMF meters multiple cameras hotspot method right because again my goal was let's capture objective phenomena right there's a whole discussion there but I wanted to catch weird spooky shit um which interestingly enough did we see objects move no uh did a couple

of our members have psychosomatic effects and we had some members that you know like oh I kind of nauseous, I feel weird. Yes. The interesting bit was, and I'm mad because again, this was almost great evidence. We had three people in the kitchen. They swear up and down. They saw roughly an 18 inch to two foot orb glowing blue. Wow. Pop through one wall and popped through the other. Now, I can say this. We did have a camera in the kitchen. and I did catch the corner of it. You did? We caught the corner of it.

We didn't catch the full... So in other words, if this was the screen, right, you could see it, like you saw this bright light, like just round the corner, but it wasn't a full capture. So, I mean, it definitely corroborated their experiences. And there was obviously some sort of light anomaly that we captured on video. But yeah, that was... They saw a full-bodied, quote-unquote orb. Crackling blue, solid...

Popped right through it, all of about a half second. Did something happen on that property? What did they think it was? Trying to remember. Well, okay, Jeffersonville was known both for illegal gambling and a fair amount of, if I remember correctly, and I hope I get this right, mob activity? There's a fair amount of murders.

Okay. And a fair amount of burnings and a fair amount of people dying under suspicious circumstances. And I can't remember the specifics of that because it's been like 15 years, I think. But it did have a history of something. some kind. I just can't remember what was specifically the case. Supposedly it's still haunted, because like I said, I saw a report on it six months to 12 months ago

in some newspaper advertising to Justin Villar. Maybe it was a Facebook ad. But no, we never got any of the objects moving, but we did have three witnesses that saw a full-blown orb, you know, not like a bug, but like a, oh, look, this is emitting its own light. It just flashed through the kitchen. What the hell is that? Pretty spooky. Very spooky. Let's take a quick break in when we come back. we can talk about the gear, the science, and how K2 meters may be a waste of your money. Yeah, they are.

We'll be all right, bye. Okay, the dumb question. Here's the dumb question. Hit me. Everybody sees on TV. The ghost hunters with the box, with the lights. Oh, he's rolling his eyes. And it's spiking.

What is the box? What is it measuring? Usually with an EMF meter, like the K-2s and stuff, they're measuring mains frequency. EMF, which in America is 60 hertz, and in England, I believe, 50. It's 50 in England. So this is just electricity in the walls.

Well, it's not. So, you know, any electrical current will give off. By the way, I am not a physicist. This was me doing side research to figure out how to put together meters back in the day. So not an expert, just the one that's read on it. The experts are then in the comments. Don't worry about it. Okay.

Of course they will. Well, actually. So any electrical field is going to give off. a magnetic field, right? So the vast, you know, so anytime you have mains frequency, 60 hertz, right, EMF, it's coming from, yes, the electricity's electricity in the walls. Now, where people make a mistake is that electromagnetic fields decay on an exponential rate. So something that is 100 millagous up close will be 10 milligram 1 feet away.

Inverse square law. Yeah, exactly. And that gets, sometimes you'll see people make claims like that. Well, the power lines, I'm like, well, the power lines after about 10 feet go to nothing. Right. But in terms of EMF spikes, in my experience, you know, back when I did field stuff, we rarely would get spikes. And you do see on the shows, you know, they're like, oh, you know, 1.8 milligouse. I'm like, well, okay, but that's not really abnormal.

Now, I mean, there are some time. 1.8 milligouse? Yeah. Isn't the earth somewhere between 200 and 500 million? Well, but that's geomagnetic fields. Yes. And those are down at the 2 to 10 hertz range, if I'm remembering correctly. They are.

And I think somewhere between 1 and 2 milligram is the norm. Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Okay. Because it's been a while since I've dug into that. But no, not a high field. Now, and this is like Stan Corrin's, would be the person you'd want to talk to on this one in detail. If he ever watches this, he's going to be mad at me. But yeah, you can.

have various geological features that will increase or decrease geomagnetic activity. In fact, he did a whole series of studies suggesting, are you familiar with the Persinger effect? Yeah. Yeah, right? The God Helmet? Yes, the God Helmet. And the claim for a while, and I personally do not agree with this. Doesn't mean I'm right.

I just don't personally agree with it. You know, the claim was, look, there's naturally occurring geomagnetic fields at these haunted locations. Yes. But I believe in the papers he did, looking at 40 or 50 locations, maybe two of them actually met criteria. But it gets more problematic because for you to get a god helmet effect, you need, if I remember correctly, 6 to 8 hertz applied to the brain consistently. 6 to 8 hertz at the temporal lobe. Yeah, consistently for several minutes. And that is going to be a tall order in a natural geomagnetic field.

Right. The God Helmets got magnets right next to your brain. We did buy one of those, by the way, and set them up back when we did the Black Moon Manor study way back in the day. And we had people, because ghosts are perverts. They were wearing the helmet and they felt an earthquake and then they got fondled. And it was a very messed up day. So we're like, okay, let's not mess with that here too much. It's freaking people out.

Didn't Persinger say that people were creating those? ghost phenomenon? Yeah, the idea was you're basically having a hallucination, or if you like vernacular, tripping balls, off of a geomagnetic field. Yes. I don't think that explanation is sufficient. Okay. And I've also done several studies now at this point showing, and I can't tell you why, there's just a relationship, there is a time-synced relationship between objective and subjective paranormal phenomena and EMF wiggle right before the event occurs. And it's time-sink. Well, yeah, I would say, if I'm going to be formal about it, a correlation in time with either suppression of EMF or expansion of EMF right before observable paranormal phenomena, like objects moving, right? So this is why you want all your video, audio, everything time synced.

Yeah. And that was really the original goal of Israe back in the day. We're like, okay, I want to see if all the shows with ghost hunting are true. Let's test the EMF theory, right? And to be fair, the research we did, I mean, in fairness, I did three papers out of it, and they replicated across the board. What frequencies? If I remember correctly, we got the effect both with geomagnetic and mains frequency. So the phenomena is affecting frequencies that exist already. So you don't have to filter anything out. They're not living on their own part of the spectrum, or are they? When you say they, are you referring to like ghosts, discarnate entities?

Whatever caused the wiggle. Okay. I'm not a believer, to be honest. Okay. I'm a hopeful believer. Like, I want to believe. I actually do fully believe in discarnate agency. I also believe in SI.

That doesn't mean I can prove it as a scientist, right? And I want to make that distinction clear. There's what science can demonstrate, and then there's what anyone particularly believes about it. The science answer, and then we can get to the ghosty answer, is, in the first study at Black Moon Manor, no electricity generating fields at all half mile away from power lines. This was a nearly abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. We captured three videos of shadow people coming out of a basement with no exits, right?

So there's no entry or exit to this point. And I'm proud of this one. This is one of the best phenomena we ever captured. The video sucks, unfortunately, because it was 2009. I'm just going to ask you if this is available. Well, it is. And I could find it. And in the video, it's clear.

I have some pictures in the book, but the book pictures don't capture it well. Right. And I'm sorry. But the point is there was three videos where you would see a scenario. Camera here. Camera here. Okay. So this camera, and this camera is pointing the opposite direction.

So obviously for criticism or skepticism, nobody could have been behind this, right? Everyone was accounted for in the house. They were all outside at the time. In fact, we were doing. sweeps around the house to see if there's anything we needed to be aware of, right, that might be influencing what was going on inside of this location. So the front cameras here, it's pointed to one door. The door only goes to a basement with no entry and no exit.

And we had three episodes. We had about an eight foot tall shadow come across the door. Then we had an eight foot tall shadow come back across the door. And it's very clear in the video, right? It's this tall, like, stripe, kind of humanish. And then five of various heights come out. And in each instance, there was either an expansion or suppression, when you look at the data, of the electromagnetic fields. There was.

Yes. So it was correlated with this. And when I say compression, this is the one caveat we found if you want, if this thrice done research is solid, right? Could have been wrong. Could be a null finding of somebody else did it, but three times, not too bad, right? What we found was not a spike, right? Oh, God, the milligoths went up. What we found was wiggle.

So the only way you're going to find this stuff is if you were data logging. Is this wiggle like amplitude wiggle or compression of the sine wave? Amplitude, right? So you would get, like if this is the average wiggle amount, you get with EMF over time, you're sampling one, two, three, or 15 times a second. whatever the sample rate is, right? We would either get an expansion, so the peaks and the trials get higher, or we get a suppression.

And we found that to be the case in all three of the studies that we did. So quality EVP in the 2013 study, those shadow figures, which, oh, and by the way, the shadows were in infrared. They were an infrared. They were in infrared. Because actually, it wasn't bright enough for full-color video, so it was the black and white infrared that picked up the shadows. Wow. So, well, that means there's heat. This was a place, I kid you not. I haven't seen appuritation happen very often. This was a place where I personally

witnessed, I can't prove it. You know those five pound plastic chairs? You can buy at Walmart. One was just in the middle of the room out of nowhere. Poof. Five pound chair. Just disappeared. Yeah. Like I look away. I'm doing my thing two minutes later and it's not like somebody brought plastic chairs to the site. Next thing you know, there's a damn chair in the middle of the room. Were you rolling camera on that? No, got no video for that one.

Also, there was a milk crate in the basement that people were sitting on. That, again, there was only one exit and entry, and it's not like you can, you know, the old milk crates that, right? Not like you can shove that under your shirt. No. That thing disappeared. It disappeared.

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Visit Hymns.com. Yes, and it was all bullcrap. What do you mean? It was, when we went there was a place called... This isn't Black Moon, right? It is Black Moon. So Black Moon, Black Moon is fully debunked. Yes.

But stuff still happened. Yes. Yes. Yeah, because the claim back in the day was like, oh, the tuberculosis. I think of tuberculosis. Sure. Kids in the back and people are dead people in suicide. We actually, and I'll be fair, I have never been, it's good to do the history, but I've never

been big on the history because, again, my focus at the time was like, no, I want to capture spooky shit, right? I want to capture the weird stuff. But we did in that one do some historical research and debunked all of it. It wasn't like there was no historical evidence of dead bodies or anything like that. I'm not even sure the suicides were true. I don't think they were. And my understanding was that the owners of the property got so mad about the legends

that that's what ended up getting it bulldozed and torn down and everything else. Yeah, that's what I got accounted. That's what I got told anyway. But no, that place also change, change in candy would show up on the floor. Change? Like coins. No, I know what you mean. Check the dates on those?

I didn't. No. Well, because again, honestly, me being skeptical, I'm like, who's got a hole in their pocket? Right. I just didn't take anything after the milk crate, the chair overcomes us like, maybe change. Coins appearing happens in all kinds of phenomena. It happens on Skinwalker Ranch all the time. You're finding coins.

And a fair history of it with poltergeist phenomena over the years too. So, no, I would call that place legitimately active while I was around. Like, you're going to have a hard time debunking some of that stuff. Did you feel anything? Yeah. There was a lot of a sensation of a presence thing. There was. Yeah.

And again, now, I guess there's, I guess Pershinga would have agreed. Well, I mean, although if I remember the readings, I'm not sure really it would have qualified for a Persinger effect in terms of the Hertz rate that was going on over there. Not at 60, but at 5. Maybe. I mean, you know, but again, and I'm not saying it can occur. I think under controlled laboratory conditions, you absolutely get that Persinger Helmet effect.

I'm just, and I could be, you know, somebody may write me and correct me, but I find it suspicious that nature would provide such a sustained hurts rate over an extended period of time to produce that effect. And it's certainly not going to account for psychokinesis, and it's not going to happen. No. So for subjective events, absolutely. No, that's been, that's been proven in testing third man syndrome, to stimulate the temporal lobe, the frontal lobe, and you suddenly feel a presence. And I think something like one out of five or maybe 10% and people actually had full-blown visions, if I remember. And although this makes me a bad researcher,

because I can't remember the name of the researcher, but there's a fair amount of studies into mirror gazing where vast majority of participants, after about a minute, we'll see distortions of the face. And then a small percentage of those will actually go on to see additional. I suspect that's correlated with transliminality, but that's another sidebar. I've read those studies and quite a few subjects bailed out.

They said, I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah. Well, we had that in the Seon study. Part of the EMF relationship we're talking about, I actually got permission to set up a Seon study. So we had 10 or 11 participants each do 10 sessions, 5 and 4, 5 and 6, 10 sessions. And we set up the cameras and the EMF meters. And we didn't actually capture any phenomena.

But my goodness, they verbally. reported an insane amount of phenomena, and lo and behold, we got that suppression expansion effect with EMF in time to their verbal reports. What were they talking about? Well, we went whole hog on this one. This one was almost as bad as my dissertation. I had them purposefully do an invocation and meditation, and even a kind of a small, slightly occultic summoning.

Wow, okay. And then the rule was, anytime you're... experiencing something, we want you to verbally report it. Because we were also interested in contagion effects. To what extent if you're saying you have a chill, will other people who are like, yeah, come to think of it, I'm having a chill. By the way, massive contagion, right? So a lot of that can be explained by conventional psychology in that sense, unless you want interject a little bit of spiritual wiggle inside the contagion, which... You can. Yeah, you can. I actually think that might be the case. But I think with the Ouija

Board is just contagion. Um, maybe. Okay. Maybe. Well, and I say maybe because nobody's really dug that deeply into it. No. You know, two or three cool studies does not a thorough investigation make. And I'd say the same about my EMF data. I would stick to that and really be like, yes, that is real if I had three or four other

researchers decide to do their own study and replicate the results. But I have to own that this was me doing repeated studies. So it's not independent verification. So I would say, yep, I think something's there. I'm not going to die on that hill over it. I mean, it is replicated three times. That's, you know, so I'd say, hey, look, it happened. But I'd love for somebody else to pick it up and give it a try.

Sure. But no, with the Seance thing, no, they would report all sorts of phenomena. We even had one who swore that they saw a spirit and it freaked them out so bad that they were out. They left the study. But no, we'd have people get exhausted, head. headaches, put their head on the table, a whole range of subjective psychosomatic phenomena, if you will. What about EVP?

Did you ever get into that? Not from the sound study. It didn't get a thing that would be objective. Ever get anything on EVP? Yeah. But I'm pretty snooty about EVP. Go ahead. In the sense of I'm like, I want to hear a voice, damn it.

I don't want, sure, sure, sure, sure. I'm like, okay, Paradolia, which also hasn't been sufficiently studied. Also ticks me off. But yeah, no, the Black Moon Matter case, we had a couple of very clear voices. You had voices. Yeah. Saying what? I remember this one we didn't include the study because it got shown later.

But evidently, there was a recorder that got some grandpa-like voice, being like, dang, kids walking around here. Thumb, thumb, thumb. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I'm like an awareness of you guys. Yep. I've been lucky enough to run into some stuff that's just outright creepy.

Go ahead. Well, I mean, you know, between what, between the fire, between the shadow people. Let me think. The EVP is what creeps me out the most. I don't, I have some designs that if somebody wanted to help me with it, because this is, I'm starting to get to the age where I'm like, I am not carrying this 400-hour project on my own. I'm not doing it. I'm like, I'm too tired. One of the things I would love to see, and actually I might be moving towards this the next couple of years,

is starting to study the common myths of investigating. And there are several designs I could think of off the top of my head where we could start to crack at EVP in a very meaningful way. Paradolia is tricky, right? I mean, not to get too geeky, but you can set a baseline for the average amount of noise. You would get on an audio recorder. Sure. Then you could, right, start statistically sampling.

if you get a significantly different rate when people are asking questions versus when they're not, when people are present, versus when they're not. The whole radio interference theory of EMP, of which there's not a single freaking study to test. And that annoys me because it's like,

it's called a padded soundproof box. Right. Put one near a radio tower. Put one in your house. Are there noises? You know, that's not hard. No. That's a citizen science project.

If enough people, wrote me and said, hey, I'd be willing to do it. I'd be like, let's go, because it's not hard. But again, that's where we get pseudo-sceptics who don't really have a background in science making very grandiose claims about things that can't happen when they haven't ever cracked open research article ever. But no, stuff like EVP, you could do certain protocols with ghost boxes that would at the idea of, are you getting an abnormal amount of response? Are you getting responses that are, you know, deviations from what you. you might hear, that's modelable.

Have you heard a ghost box that worked? For everyone listening, the ghost boxes on YouTube is all nonsense. Don't listen to those. Okay. Those are nonsense. Have you ever heard a real one? This is like the Tesla or the Edison Spirit radio. Now, when you say a real one is in like one that just rotates through frequencies?

That you heard something. And my next question would be on what frequency? I haven't dealt with them extensively. I have played with some generic ones. And there's been one or two times where the response. it seemed relevant. I had one time I did have an obulus that we were investigating, believe it or not, a police officer training building.

And that obulus went off four or five times in about three minutes and it said gun, danger, officer. And I'm like, holy crap. What is an obulus? And good question. What how does the obvious action? And that's one of the problems with research. An obulus is basically a device that's got a pre-programmed set of, I think, 2,000 words.

Yep. And now they have all these apps. Yes, they do. They're doing all sorts of complicated stuff. And I've also watched some of those videos where they evidently have a very complicated ovulus slash ghost box slash combo that's selecting. Of course, the problem for science is what's all that math and technology behind what you're getting. Right.

Because if I don't know that, there's no way I can test whether you have something. normal or abnormal in the first place. So why I don't like them is how did you teach the ghost, how to use your machine? Well, but I might counter and say, you know, Nelson's Global Consciousness Project. That's a fair response. So, and all the micro-PK studies nowadays are done with electronics. We just finished, we just finished a set of studies where we were looking at enchantment and ESP, and that was all done online.

Now that one was a null finding, by the way. we did a, our sample, our original pilot, we got suggestive results, but we didn't get it, we didn't get it with the main sample study. But there's been a bunch of other micro-PK studies, right? So the idea of influencing small, you know, electronic random number generators are true random, but those are all electronics. You know, technomancy might be a thing. I mean, it seems like it's all manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum.

somehow. Yeah. Why? Good question. Let's talk with some physicists. I mean, that's why I wanted to have you in here is because you have a lot of, I don't know, but you have a lot of research that shows that something's happening on the spectrum. It is. I think it is. And I will say for whatever GPT is worth. And by the way, when I use GPT, I specifically say, use peer reviewed studies only. And then double check. And when you do that, actually, you tend to get much more. better responses. But I did go down a rabbit hole one day and say, okay, you know about these three studies. What is dark matter and dark energy I have to say about this?

And evidently, and again, GPT, so count it for what it's worth, and I'm not a physicist, so count this for what it's worth. There have been some physics studies that are showing basically electron-like charge with possible dark matter. So, you know, you want to go out there for an unsubstant. theory, maybe, and if you want to accept the research that I did, maybe EMF is some sort of secondary effect of dark matter interactions. I hadn't considered that. That's very interesting. They have to prove dark matter first, but that's very interesting. Exactly, right. When we have numbers that don't

fit in this formula, hey, I know. Let's call it. Yeah. Let's put it over here. Again, labeling. And again, for the listener, that is a completely unsubstantiated theory. So don't, you know, I'm not, I'm not just having a conversation. I'm just interested in this stuff. I'm just keeping it, keeping it on the, keeping it real. There is. You have an IMDB page. I have an IMDB page. You do.

It's Portuguese film, Portuguese documentary. Oh, yes, the bile, yes. Macro, macro scioscience? Yeah, I did not. Tell us about beach balls. Well, that relates to the EMF study. Yes, it does. Have you ever heard in your time of The Whispers in Mitchell, Indiana?

So, okay, now it's got a controversial history, but I have been there at least 10 times. Well, tell the story. So the haunting background story of it is supposedly there was a doctor that performed abortions, right? And of questionable nature. And there was a girl there named Rachel who died in a fire. And the legends go that supposedly the police have gotten some phone calls from her. I've never been able to verify that, but it's awesome story. I read the same thing that there were police reports about that, that they saw her.

Yeah. And actually, again, K. Owen from back in the day, swears up and down, she saw her. Yep. And even had an audible conversation once. I have been there. I've never heard, Rachel. And they also nowadays believe in something called Big Black, which depending on who you're talking to, is either an alien or some sort of... I don't know that one.

I'm not sure I do either. But supposedly a big dark mass energy with claws. Here's what I will say about the place. Whether the history is true or not, I have been to that. I have been through that place top to bottom. I've looked at the vents for, you know, wires. I've looked for airflow. I've looked for, you know, microphones.

And I think there were a couple of people that claim they caught some hoaxing at some point. I've never caught it. And I have been there multiple times, and I have seen a ridiculous amount of phenomenon out of that place. Like what? It came a go-to. It came a go-to. Yeah. Actually, and in fact, the 2019 paper, where we have the beach balls, was a direct result of Rachel's room. That was in Rachel's room. That was in Rachel's room. Yes. Yeah, you have to tell us that story. It's wild. So it's, and in fact, when I used to go there, EMF meters scooting on their own across cases. Were you seeing a wiggle while they moved?

That was before I was doing the wiggle. That's before I designed that whole system. But the beach ball thing was, I think, 11 beach ball movements in an hour. With two EMF, GMF data logging meters, two cameras, one in Rachel's room, one in the adjacent room, which I can't remember what it was called. So you've got beach balls, what, on the bed? Yeah, there were two, and those are regular trigger objects they keep there. I've been there and watched those for nine hours not move a bit. Right.

We pick them up, we poke them, wait, look for them, we hit, you know, when this started happening. And in fact, I have the whole video of it, right? People knocking on the headboard, people jumping on the bed, the ball don't fall off, right? Everything was blowing on it, you name it, we tried to do it. And still, over about 60 minutes, there were 11 instances of one or the, the other falling off the headboard or slightly projecting off the headboard, about a, or I'm sorry, baseboard, about a foot and a half. And of course, looking at the EMF data, you have the suppression expansion effect.

Interestingly, the other room, no change in EMF, 10 feet away. Really? Yeah. So now, if you know anything about fields and vectors, right? EMF traditionally, right, any energy traditionally, either is a field that comes. from a source or it's a projected beam, it's a vector, right? That data in the other room suggests that, one explanation, spontaneously generating fields with no means to produce them because there's no additional electronic devices or anything

else in that room. Yet, we still saw the changes in EMF localized to that room. And this is the adjacent room. There should have been some residual falloff from... Yeah, you would have expected the other room. If it was a very room, if it was a vector, right? If it was a bean, or if it was a large field. Or if it was a field, you should see at least the inverse square, but you didn't get that. Nope. What the hell is going on in that room? Good question, right? And that's where you, I mean, you know, anomalistic psychology. Well, it's not even psychology, anomalistic physics, I guess. Um, nope, I have no conventional explanation for that. And that's how we wrote it up. We're like, we don't have an explanation for this. It looks like,

you know, putative psychokinesis. And there was an EMF association. And we made a point in that paper to be like we could be wrong, but we've ruled out X, Y, and Z. We did all of these things. And here you go. But related to that point, I've had groups in there. I used to be a little rough. And for anybody who's listening to this that used to be on the team, I'm sorry. You are on your team. But we would get, we would have new individuals that would come in. And my attitude was a little bit military. Get on in there. Going up in that room, sit by yourself, right um and we actually had a person uh have a pretty bad experience up there they started shaking and crying um and so we immediately ran up to rachel's room because that's where it happened um and

you know as a team we got her out because we're not cold-hearted right and you know and everybody's like oh right because there's tears and there's like shaking what is she just sitting in the in the room yeah in the dark yeah yeah okay hey hey it's a boot camp you sign up for it well you got to get your sea legs if you're going to do this i mean because whether you believe or not, these spaces are spooky, and you've got to get used to spooky. Have you ever been in a dark room and you had to get out? Not personally, but I've just seen a lot of creepy shit. Not personally, just throw the kid in there.

Yeah, I have a buildup. But that's kind of the point. It's like a hazing. It's like, we got you back. We got you on camera. You're good. She can never see another beach ball again. No, no.

She made her get back in. Okay. She stuck around for years. She wasn't permanently traumatized. I was an ethical psychologist. But the point is we got everybody in, and this is what the weirdest, I can't explain this, we're pulling her out and we're walking, maybe, you know, there's like four of us, we're walking back down the steps, you know, we're going to get a break, let I have some coffee or whatever,

and I kid you not, I heard a wookie. What? Everybody, there's this weird, and I'm about to make this noise, forgive me, like, mm-hmm, right? And I remember looking around, and we all go, whoosh, what the was that? and some sort of audible noise out of that room like an audible voice. Now that I had recorded. You did?

Yes, I have it recorded. I got to find it. It's God, I got so much stuff buried on hard drives. You have to get that to us. It didn't sound like a wookie. I heard it and it sounded like a wookie. It did sound very audibly like some sort of odd voice coming out of the room. And it was very clear.

Like there was no mistaking it. It wasn't a thump or a bump. It was an absolute voice coming out of that room. I've seen some EVPs, I don't know how real they are. It's almost like a data burst where you just hear this noise, but if you slow it down, there's voice in there. And I don't know how legitimate that is or isn't. It's fun, though.

Yeah, I mean, because as a scientist, it's fair to say. It's like how many layers of compression and variables and, you know, oh, so it's hard to get at that. But I do know in the case of that, that Whispers instance, that we all heard that voice and that voice showed up on the audio recorder in there. psychosomatically or subjectively, I've seen a person knocked flat on their butt in the whispers. I mean, slammed to the ground. Did they fall or did they feel pushed?

They got slammed. Wow. And in fact, it was interesting because back in the day, it was, again, I didn't expect to bring up K.O. in this much. But K and I were in the- Oh, I've got questions about K coming up. In the whisper. Oh, good Lord. You get hired as a private detective.

But no, we were basically taunting the supposed doctor for a good hour. How do you taunt the doctor? Oh, we were like, this is back to your study again, man. I told you. It's all about that first thesis. Well, we were in that room in The Whispers where supposedly he was doing his stuff. And again, I don't even, yeah, I know he existed. I don't know if that was really him or not.

At the time, I'm like, sure. So we were just talking trash. We were provoking. We were like, did you kill babies? You know, like we were going out for like an hour. or just basically daring it to, because in those days I was, I was just like, do it, do it. I'll be okay, do it. I'm ready to bleed.

And nothing happened. And then we had another person walk in five minutes later. He touches the headboard, and I cut this on camera, and he's just like, oh my goodness. He gets up, he looks around, like, but that's not entirely in common for the whispers. Cuts and scratches are all over the place. And some of them go well beyond what you might call a conversion disorder or a psychosomatic reaction. I mean, you can diagnose it that way, but trixie, complicated, might be a good word for that. I'd love to see the video on that because you'd be able to tell if it was a push or a fall.

Well, and, you know, that's something we wrote about in the book because I actually bring that up specifically when that happened, which is, you know, if the resolution was high enough, could you go and maybe look for a handprint? But even if you did, you know, that's not going to convince a diehard skeptic. No. You know, subjective phenomena at the end of the day is really beyond our technology or science to measure in a significant way. In the old days, when we did the three-class system, I always called those class twos. Weird, creepy, but I can't prove it. Right. It just goes in a maybe category, right?

It will freak you out, might have a nightmare over it, but in terms of being able to really give it a good proof label. Had another colleague who's very much a friend of this day. were very, very close. She swear she got punched in the gut. And then she vomited. So, you know. This was on an investigation? Yep.

Also in the whispers. In the whispers as well. Yeah, all that's the whispers. And then, you know, we can talk about the Saddam'sville rectory, which is a whole another cup of tea, but... Go for it. I don't want to. I have a science question.

We're definitely getting back to it, but I have a science question. I understand how the spectrum can be manipulated by whatever this is. I get it. I don't understand how telekinesis or psychokinesis works. How, what is this? Let's say something pushed the beach ball. Okay. What is the science that could make that possible?

Good question. Let's speculate. And to be fair, you're not going to find a parapsychologist or a physicist or maybe even a metaphysicist or that there's not a mechanism for SAI. There's not a mechanism for a P.K. And that is one of the criticisms. That is a fair criticism. We're observing secondary data.

Or I should say tertiary outcomes, right? We can see the effect. We can't see the mechanism that causes it. To be fair, dark matter. Gravitans. Dark energy. Gravitons, right? So we're not the only field to do that.

But oddly enough, we get all the crap for it. Nobody else calls the other people into account. I hadn't considered dark matter, but that or gravitons? would do it, but now we're talking hyper-dimensionality. Yeah, but I mean, even gravitational lensing, which is the case they make for, I believe, dark matter, right? That is a secondary effect.

Yes. You're not measuring the particle or the wave itself. And, you know, frankly, gravity. But that would mean there's black holes connected to the ghosts. Maybe. It's, you know, this is, here's a weird mind bender about all this stuff.

We talk about how physics has these laws that are absolute. But are you a few, Are you familiar with sample to population? The idea of, right? So if I want to know about all daffodils on the planet, I can look at one daffodil and make a conclusion. Right.

And what people don't understand is this is the method for all of science because literally it's impossible to measure everything, right? I can't measure every man and woman in the world if I want to look for subtle IQ differences. I have to take a sample and infer from that population. Right. Or that from that sample infer to the population. Well, here, and again, I'm not. denying physics. I'm not denying quantum physics in any way, shape, or form. But the truth is,

we're like, well, gravity works like this. Well, that's, no one knows how it works. Well, yeah, but you could say from the measurements, this is the law. Well, look at the entire EM spectrum and let's realistically say, do we measure everything that goes on in the EM spectrum everywhere in the world? No. And it's impossible to do it. So, so one of the, when we talk about oh, it's paranormal, I'm like, or there could be all sorts of stuff going around. and I'm not trying to make excuses for it. It's just, it's a, this is a true thing. We simply don't measure all the variability

of various energy spectrums. Could there be repeatable, intelligent patterns somewhere in the spectrum anywhere? There could be. I'm not saying there are, but there could be because we sure as hell aren't measuring it. So we have to understand that with science, they're not absolutes.

This is why the scientific method and inferential statistics and all the mathematics very clearly say, absolutely non-negotiable, you don't ever prove anything. You get more and more evidence that makes it likely. But literally because of the phenomenology, you know, our limited perception, our limited power, our limited ability to perceive, our technology limits, all of these are very real non-controversial things. And that means there's only so much we can study in sample and then we generalize those findings to everything else going on.

Everything comes back to Goodell's theorem of incompleteness. Yeah. Like you'll never fully know. Yeah. And I think the key point here is this isn't me giving you a tangent philosophy. I'm like, no, no, here are the facts about how human beings work. Here is the technology. Here is factually what we can measure.

And here's factually what we don't. So, you know, anytime people are making these claims like, well, we know, we don't know. It just works really well. doesn't mean it always works really well and it doesn't mean it works well in Timbuktu because if you really want to answer that you're going to have to go take a lot of sampling and data in Timbuktu

I believe in Si I just don't know how it works one of the great remote viewers like Joe McMonigle is wrong most of the time but he's right sometimes yeah yeah and I think the sum of of Cy data would say useful but not necessarily

something you want to always put a bet on right and that's Okay, right? I do think related to, you know, studies with magical practice and et cetera, I think there are some probably methods in esotericism that would probably improve that. What methods? Well, you know, this is the thing is, you know, people sensationalize the occult, right? But they really shouldn't because...

It just means hidden knowledge. Yeah, and to be fair, Buddhists probably think Catholicism was really weird and creepy. I bet they do. Right? A lot of this stuff, and I think it's because of horror movies and everything else. They're like, oh, right? It's like, well, no, if you actually read it, it's not that much more different than some of this stuff over here. It's a different maybe belief system or it makes different, you know, metaphysical or theological claims.

But it's not actually that spooky. Or I say that as a person who's like, yeah, I sit in the dark and the thing. But, but, you know, if you get used to it, it's not. It's not overwhelmingly mind-blowing. It's not like the movies. You're not going to crack open a book and suddenly going to come out. Well, we all picture like Jack Parsons' basement with Elron Hubbard and there's a pentagram and Crowley and there's someone. Is that where you're talking about?

Yeah, sure. Sure. Absolutely. And that's not, I don't want us to do that. Let's not mess with that. Why not? Because you said, I don't know a lot during this segment. So I don't know if we should have candles and sheep's blood in the basement.

Yes. I did not advocate sheep's blood in the basement. Kate Sheep's blood. Granted, I know Parsons got a little iffy, and Crowley definitely got a little ify. But the core processes of magic aren't that different than prayer. True. And in fact, you know, if you look at a mantra. Or a mantra.

And if you look at the Catholic Mass objectively, right? Wow, a whole lot of magical implementation, symbols, pieces and objects that have spiritual meaning, right? All around Latin or a very codified set of rituals that are supposed to produce an intended effect. Yes. Hmm. Hmm. Magic is no different. Now, in fairness, you get into the grim wars, right?

Yep. You start going into particularly from like the, you know, 15th century on, and it's all like, I'm going to call these demons. I'm like, well, you're an idiot, but okay, fine. If you want to mess with a chaos creature, hypothetically, whether it's a Jungian archetype in your mind or not, you go do that. But in terms of the actual procedure of magic, it's not much different than religion. it has some variations.

It certainly has influenced religious history throughout in a very profound and powerful way. But the trick with modern esotericism is not so much you're doing this method or ritual. It's that you've been training your mind in certain forms of altered states of consciousness. Yes. Visualization.

Right? And single-mindedness. In fact, you know, everybody loves Peter Carroll the chaos magician, and he even came up with a mathematical formula, which, you know, spoiler alert, I'm actually working on doing some, maybe some actual studies that tease that formula apart because I've found some ways to operationalize his formula. Oh, that's interesting. And I'm hoping I get to do that.

You found ways to do that mathematically. Yeah, sure, absolutely. A lot of issues with science are just operationalization, right? When you really think about science, all you're really doing is, I need a reliable way to measure this. And I need to make sure that what I think I'm measuring is what I'm measuring. And that's a lot of scale design of mathematics. And you can do a pretty good job if you have a sufficient background to make sure that you're measuring what you're supposed to be measuring.

Which is why I don't like it when people who don't have backgrounds like in paranormality or hauntings or esotericism or religion sitting in a white tower in academia being like, I'm at the scale. I'm like, well, there's no guarantee that what these questions you designed with a tertiary knowledge are actually measuring what you think they're measuring. So who's the right person for that job? What background do you need? For any given field, you need someone probably with cultural experience and the thing they're trying to measure. You know, the current go-to measure for paranormal belief is, and I can never say this gentleman's name right, I think it's Tabach, or Tobiochuk, I'm not sure which is paranormal belief scale. But when I did the study with magical practitioners, they hated that scale. Why? Because it's basically built in

1980s, satanic panic Protestantism. Okay, so what's on the scale? So then like, black cats are bad luck. Really? I believe in witches. And it's like, oh, man, for 2026, 20, like, it does not fit. Now, from 1980s, where, you know, you had the satanic panic and Protestantism was much more, you know, that would kind of make sense. But it's not culturally. irrelevant anymore. In fact, I would personally... Ozzy Osbourne's on that list. Yeah, I would make the personal criticism and feel free to disagree, anyone can, that we probably need to retool paranormal belief measures. Because frankly, the culture has gotten a lot more broad. You know, what mediums think versus UFOologists think,

versus occultists think, you know, they're Venn diagram overlapping, but they're not the same. And if we want real assessments of that belief in terms of what it predicts, I think it's probably time for researchers to get together. Each of them with a respective background in the actual culture they're trying to sample, because it is kind of culturally specific. We probably need to go back and retool those and do new scales. I think you're right. Do we go to heaven when we die? Sure. The reason for the question is how are we pulling discarnate entities out?

of wherever we go after this. How can you insult an abortion doctor and bring him back from... He's in hell. How do you bring him back from wherever he is? I don't have... I personally do not have fixed beliefs about the afterlife. You don't? In the sense of, I do think there is an afterlife.

At the same time, I think that is one of the great metaphysics questions. And I won't lie, I've spent probably thousands of... of hours at night, trying to think about models that might make sense about the idea of what happens when we die and how that happens. Do I think there is a heaven or a hell or maybe some version of it? I mean, yeah, I'm not sure I'd use the word heaven and or hell. I think depending on the religion you look at and the tradition you look at, it gets different. I do think we persist.

I'm not sure how much personally, and I allow for discarned agency, and by the way, the Catholic Church did too for a long, long time. You know, modern religion, particularly Protestantism, turned all of spiritual entities into God, angels, demons, maybe dead people, and that's it. Historically, the Catholics did not look at it that way. And frankly, they couldn't because, you know, for several hundred years, they were Roman around converting pagans and they just kind of fit stuff in. In terms of that kind of answer, obviously I don't have one.

I wish I did. I think all the time about various models that might account for various major faiths and minor faiths and hierarchies. And again, I tend to turn back to as above so below. Personal take, everything we see with our own naked eyes has hierarchy. We see ecosystems. We see larger and smaller. It would make sense to me that if there is a spiritual structure to the universe,

that it is likely to follow a hierarchical structure. What that looks like. Well, if prayer works, mantras work, meditation works, you're tapping into some universal consciousness. Manifestation, I believe that works. I mean, we're sitting here. This is manifestation in practice. And there's a fair amount of studies that support it.

Yes. Across the board. Yes. The government studied it. Yeah. Then maybe these entities are part of that, maybe we're pulling them back out of the universal consciousness. It could be.

It may also be that there are levels of closeness to physical reality. That, you know, if you, well, the Kabbalic system, you know, angels, archangels, you know, astral realm, lower critters, higher critters, you know, cliphotic chaos entities, you know, it's a model. Is it the right model? I don't know. But I would say from personal experience, I'm not sure. I think we overestimate how much genuine haunting,

where there's like anomalous phenomena, if you want to accept, you know, if you want to accept that there are, you know, intelligent agency, and I do personally believe that. I'm not so sure that it's dead people as often as we think it's dead people. That's interesting. Well, you know, if you look at, you know, all of the folklore accounts of the she, you know, with Ireland and Scotland, and even, you know, Native American myths, a lot of cultures account for nature spirits, middle spirits.

And again, if we're going with an as above so below sort of hierarchy, there's going to be a tier. There's going to be a system of lower to higher entities. And I don't mean that like a evil good sort of sense. You know, basic critters just like frogs are not human beings, right? or animals, or slightly intelligent, or maybe possibly, you know, if you move to animism, certain degrees or levels of consciousness, you know, up to, you know, big boss management level, angels and archangels that are handling the cogs of the universe, if you will. I'm not so sure that, you know, it's very popular to go, oh, it's a ghost.

It is a dead person that is hanging around for some reason, and they're angry because they didn't get a Snickers bar before they died. Give them a Snickers bar. But if that was the case, I would expect to see a higher correlation between highly traumatic events and a history of a location and actual verifiable phenomena. And I have not found that relationship. I don't think that relationship is as solid as people think it is. Could it be something that's really just the intelligence of a critter that's just knocking glasses around? Just a disturbance in the force?

I don't think it's entirely unintelligent. And in fact, I would even say, like, in a lot of experiences I've had in hunting, houses. If again, you want to take it at face value, right? It is weird how many times there will be phenomena that will kind of ramp up that will be kind of spooky until someone flips their litter, freaks out, cries, screams, strong emotional feed reaction, and then it goes quiet for the rest of night. Almost as if it got fed. It got fed, but it got fed by negative energy. Mm-hmm. Why would it want to eat that?

Well, you know, if, again, we're going with an ecosystem of spirit, things have got to feed on something. And it, yeah. I mean, this is demons, this is fairies, this is gin, this is in the east, they have spirits. Yeah. It's all the same stuff. They all feed on negative energy. Yeah. Or some kind of energy or some sort of output or, you know, there is some sort of interaction between the human and the spirit.

In fact, I'm not sure I'll ever get to it, but I would love to start doing cross-cultural comparisons and actually getting large scores of accounts of various entities from gin, demons, angels, fairies, right? Strip the labels off. Look purely at the interaction, the behaviors, the consequences, the outcomes, the phenomenological pieces. They're going to line up. And, yeah, to what extent do they mathematically line up? And then when you put the labels back, do you get the hierarchy you think you would? Probably not. That's an interesting turn. You know, again, that stuff's doable, but also that's several hundred hours even with AI.

Right. You know, and that's always an issue when it comes to this stuff, which is labor and funding. Sometimes, you know, Jim Horan and I have put in insane amounts of time, and it's not our day job, just to do the work that we have. But, man, I would love to get my hands on a project like that. Because I think, because it makes the skeptic happy and the believer happy. If you want to treat it purely as an anthropological or sociological cultural comparison of spiritual beliefs, great. That works. If you want to infer that it's somewhat real, does that give us some implications about theological or metaphysical structure?

Sure. I wouldn't take much funding to do this. It wouldn't. It'd be more, it'd be more time and labor. And in fact, I've dug with AI a little bit, be like, how much can you actually get a hold of to where we can actually get, you know, actually database the raw accounts? And it's like, I can get a hold of a fair amount. And I'm like, hmm. But again, I'm trying to slow down right now.

So. But yeah, I mean, I do have, aside from, you know, the mainstream research, I have a lot of theology questions. And I have this burning desire to dig into it. I don't know how far I'll get. I don't know if it's good for me, but, you know, I'm just going to keep praying a lot and thinking about it and seeing where things go. Yeah, keep praying while you do this. Kay Owens, you talked about her pulling up with a truckload full of stuff.

What was in the truck? Oh, that's the original rig system. That's right, the rig. Yeah. What is all that stuff? Okay, so rigs is basically, you know, back in the day with the tech in the early Notties, you know, you had to, oh, good. what's the tri-filled meters, right?

Well, you had to specially pay just to get those connected with a jack. And then you had to run actual wire to an actual computer box with very specific software to data log the EMF. And so Kohn was the first person who actually, by the way, kudos to her

without a whole lot of educational background. She's like, by God, I'm just going to teach myself. Internet was young back in those days. She put together the first system and then I put together an improved system based on her tech. But yeah, when we were doing, by the time we were doing Black Moon, it was a full truck bed of equipment. What made her go to EMF in the first place all those years ago?

Did she start in like the 70s, 80s? I think she was active. I want to say she was active in the late 80s to the 90s. Okay. And, you know, again, I don't want to tell, I guess, too much of her story, but she was originally tapped to be the Ghost Hunters Group. it would have been great but they they they went with the plumbers yeah so um but no she she kept meticulous records for the time i was you know i i owe her a fair amount she she taught me the ropes

of the original investigation and i kind of went from went with her yeah you guys did scientific method yeah um and that was our deal because she was like i can collect this data i need help with the math i'm like i can do the math um and so that's that's where that started and it built on from there Tell me about Nell. Nell. You're going to have to contact me. Which one of the studies? Oh.

She's the retired health care worker. Yes, with the San Antonio disturbances? Yes. Yes. So that was one of our haunted people syndrome case studies that we did down in Texas. And that is a complicated story. I mostly want to know about Nell. Well, I want to be careful because I don't want to break ethics in terms of...

Don't do that. Just what kind of person she was. She was, and I don't think it's unethical to say this, haunted by a lot of difficulty. You know, as we say in the paper, she had moved in five locations over, I think, 10 years. The reported phenomena that she said she experienced, you know, went with her every time. What happened to her? Let me think. Man, it's been a while.

Because she could not get away from it. No, she had a whole lot of physical signs. She reported a lot of personal apparitional experiences. She reported a fair amount of psychokinesis with smaller objects. If I'm remembered correctly, don't quote me on this, a fair amount of physical illness. It did spread, the phenomena spread to her daughter and her granddaughter. Her husband was involved with it. Even after they left her, this is hitchhiker effect?

Yep. And in fact, I was talking to Jim, and she has moved a couple times since. We did that paper, and the phenomena has still continued. Wow. So, you know, and in terms of how much of that was verifiable, you know, when we deal with that case, that is very much more of a cultural psychological manifestation

of haunted people syndrome, right? What are the conditions by which this person is persistently? haunted and what are the disease or psychological effects that are happening as a result and and she is as persistently just continued to have problems did she have some early trauma when did that she reported and I believe this is also in the report so I think I'm safe there she reported very negative spiritual experiences in childhood yeah which I by the way there's not a lot of good studies on this but I keep

getting this is trauma related to right in fact we have another reporter who's who's kind of digging into that right now. I really do think there is a relationship between childhood slash supernatural, spiritual, and normal trauma and people being kind of prone to anomalous experience. Could this be parsing here again?

I don't think so. You don't think so? And actually in Nell's case, I believe her family, if I'm remembering correctly, oh man, I hope I'm not wrong on this, man, you take cognitive psychology and then proactive and retroactive, memory interference and then you never trust your memory again.

You're like, I want the certainty back. Yeah, let me know how that works for you. I'm looking for mine too. Well, middle age doesn't help either. But no, if I remember, because I think we were in the car and we were talking about it, we were driving around one time, both her grandmother or her mom reported a whole lot of spiritual negative experiences, and she reported childhood experiences that were near terrifying. Yeah.

So these were not hypnagogic experience. No, no, I believe they were awake. And then there might have been some that were. But no, I think spiritual intrusion, if you wanted to find it that way culturally, was very much part of her life and has been since childhood. No, her story is very sad. Yeah. And I feel bad that we weren't able to provide her better methods for relief. I have some more questions about her, but let's take a quick break and we'll come back.

We'll talk about haunted people. Okay. I'm going to get a little random now, all my questions that don't fit into the structure. Ask your questions, bridgekeeper. I'm not afraid. Well, the first one's kind of scary. Tell me about the baby and the gas demon. Put us in the room. The baby and the gas demon? Oh my goodness. You're going to have to give me some reference for that one.

It was kind of like an exorcism. Oh, I don't even know. that you're referring to something I saw when I was like 15 or 16 years old. I am. Back in the day, I used to spend time with various different churches, denominations. And some of those were Pentecostal. And Pentecostals are so interesting. And I remember specifically I was at a friend's house.

And the individuals were very devout. And they picked up the baby that was crying. and they literally did a prayer over the baby to exercise the gas demon from the baby's tummy. Did they mean that? Yeah, no, no. Seriously? Yes, they were very serious. They were very serious.

And at the time, I was very devout too. But I mean, I was a Methodist. So, you know, I was like, okay. You know, I did spend some time with Pentecostals. I saw some very awesome instances of Glossolalia, right, where the speaking and tongues occurred. I even saw in those Pentecostal churches people, you know, taken over by the spirit, slain in the spirit, where, you know, the preacher would be like, and the spirit is upon you and they would flop over and roll around and laugh and, you know, bubbles in their stomach. And in fact, I even had an episode. Now, looking back on it, I'm like, wow, that was some just interesting suggestion persuasion effects.

But I actually had an episode back in those days where the preacher hit me and I'm like, huh? What? Oh, and it worked? It did. What's happening there? If I remember the sensation, it really did create some moderate psychosomatic symptoms.

I felt very kind of lighthearted and kind of bubbly. I felt strange, almost tingly, for a minute or two. And then I came out of it. But I do remember being kind of ambushed. I think I ended up going up, I mean, this was several decades ago. And of course, you know, the preacher hit.

By the way, for the record in college classes down the road, I would use this in terms of suggestion and hypnosis responses, right? Well, I was going to ask, do you need to be suggestible for that to work? Like, if I don't believe that's, like, I kind of don't believe he can do that. Okay. I kind of think you did that. So if we move into the psychology of it. Yes.

And on. But let's wrap up the baby demon. Oh, okay. How do we solve the baby gas demon? Oh, they actually praised God. after the baby farted or belched. I can't remember. And demon was expelled.

Evidently, yes. Okay. Well, there's some parenting advice. Yeah. So. Okay. When intestinal distress gets bad. It's just a demon.

And just fart and you're fine. I need a young priest and an old priest. Yeah. But no, you're, now you're talking about hypnosis. Yes. Right? A conscious suggestibility. And of course, you know, the funny thing is with production and television,

it's not like those effects aren't used in various ways. to create various effects. Sure. But suggestion is insanely powerful. Now, the official, you know, the official data suggests that maybe about 10% of the population is fully suggestible. So in other words, you know, I can run routines. And in fact, I used to have a hypnosis class in psychology where we would, for, you know,

poop and giggles, I would do conscious suggestion effects. And we even do exercises. We do the balloon exercise. Or the balloon exercise. Your left hand has a balloon tied to it. You're right. Well, we've all been to those shows. I've been to one here in Vegas,

and one of my friends, she went up there and was clucking like a chicken. Yep. And she swears that she wasn't playing along. She actually did that. Come on. Yeah. No, no.

It is real. I did that. I stopped doing that class after a while because one person went fully under. Really? Just from a suggestion exercise. Like I would do. mild induction just to see if they were suggestible. And that student went completely under and blacked out for like five minutes.

And I'm like, okay, time to stop. Yeah. I mean, no harm, no foul. She was fine. Nothing inappropriate. Got her out. No, no side effects. Yay, right?

But no, you can do with, I used to use the balloon exercise, balloon brick exercise with hands with deep breathing. I'd turn off the lights and everything else to see who was suggestible. And then I'd say, you know, are there students who are willing to go further with this. And I do the whole, you can't pull your hands apart. Sure. And it's not hard with a person that has a mild degree of suggestibility. And of course, no doubt, being an authority figure as a professor adds to it, right? So there's all these components. A lot of that has to do with belief. What makes someone suggestible? Is it physiological? I don't believe they actually know.

Is it, does it have to do with intelligence? I don't think that would be the case either. Really? Now, again, this is me talking outside my area of expertise. But to my knowledge, they've never really done a whole lot of neurological correlates or physiological correlates with hypnosis, which, you know, notably as a side note, is pretty much an occult technique. They ripped from, you know, esotericism and then slapped a label on it. I bet the military has studied this. Oh, I'm sure they have. And that's one thing I'm discovering the more I try to dig around on data.

That's proprietary. I'm like, son of a buck. I have a feeling a lot of social, psychological, and odd effects are sitting either in the military

or a corporation or a marketing firm, and we're never going to see that data. Yep. Which makes me sad because I really want to see that data. But, you know, they did it.

They have rights to it. But no, there is, and of course, you know, that also raises the question. To what extent you're like,

oh, well, you're just consciously affect sub, sub facial cues, and you're actually, are causing, I'm like, is it? You know, I have questions about contagion effects.

Is there possibly SI going on in a contagion effect? Because when you look at the way it's measured, same thing with suggestibility and hypnosis. You can't explain the mechanism. You're looking at person A, trying to influence person B, and then you observe the effects of person B, but it is very unclear in any objective sense. What is going on in between there? We don't have any brain scans of someone who's under. who's under?

We do? No, no, because, and this is, this is. Why not? Well, but, okay. You're making me talk way outside my field, so I'm sure. I do that for a living. Yeah, the comment section is going to be unpleasant. Nobody wants it.

Here, to my knowledge, and actually, I feel fairly confident about this, technology in terms of neuronal structure, right? What can we actually do in terms of measuring the brain? They're still using EEGs, and EKGs, and maybe MRIs, But there's only so much you can do with a person in a $2 million donate. Right. True. And it's only so fast.

Mm-hmm. Right? Offhand, I can't remember how many times a neuron fires per second, right? If you want to get at the hard problem of consciousness, you want to get at all this stuff, then you're going to have to have technology that not only fits on your helmet, but it measures at a resolution and a frequency so much beyond what we're currently doing, unless the military or the grays have it. Because who the hell knows? You know, you're going to, you have to have a resolution of technology that we're not even close to. And I respect, I'm not saying that brain chemistry functions or that neuroscience is incorrect.

I'm just owning that the technology in terms of what we can really claim about it, which essentially still relates to this area lights up and this area lights up. Right. Now, what's going on in those areas, right? it's on or it's off. There's still a bunch of neurotransmitters. They have no clue about what they do. And I'm not saying it's not a noble field.

It's a good field. I think the claims that get made about, we've proven that the brain, I'm like, have you? Yeah, it's like you've found evidence that supports a theory to a certain percentage extent. Yep. Which is a true and fair statement.

It is. But it's good research. But it's not, you know, again, I keep coming back to this theme. There's a whole lot of stuff that we haven't dug into sufficiently to, I would say, merit some of the claims that get made, particularly when it comes to this idea of materialism

and the brain is consciousness. I don't think, we're no, we're close to that. In fact, I've made some people angry, and I'm sure there's some that would disagree. They're like, well, this proves the brain causes. I'm like, well, unless it's a receiver. What do you think? Is it a receiver? I personally, not being an expert, think it's a cloud model.

So universal consciousness, and we're at a terminal? Well, yeah, very similar to, you know, if you use Google products, right? If you use Google sheets, right? There's a little bit of software that's in your browser. Yep. And then there's a lot of processing going on somewhere else. And I've seen some theorists suggest that some quantum behavior is now possible in the brain. Like before they were saying that it's just too hot and liquidy in there.

No. But I think the new research is suggesting, or at least the theorists are suggesting, like, oh, contrary. Oh, contrary. outside my expertise level. No, quantum processing and warm, what animals has been proven? Yeah, that's a fact. But if I was going to put money on something, I would say, I think, more of a cloud model. I think there's some processing, I think, that's going on, but I do believe in a soul.

So, you know. An individual unique soul? Yes, but I've been influenced by like Dion Fortune and some other thinkers who are like, well, you kind of shed part of the personality and there's like a core component that goes up. I'm not saying I buy into that. I'm not saying like, that's it. But I'm like, okay. I lean there.

Maybe. Yeah. You know, fitting in reincarnation and all this other stuff into a universal model. Good luck. I kind of feel like we log out. We take our whatever we learned back to wherever we go. Yeah. Your soul group or whatever says, how was it?

You go, it was okay. Let's try it again. And you come back and you do it again. I will say, since I'm giving controversial opinions today, I do get nervous of the spiritual messages that conveniently only reflect moral values that we only gave a crap about for the last 50 years. Like what? Well, you know, if aliens or medium spirits come down and they're like, you must care about the environment. The environment is, you know, it's like, okay, so no deep spiritual truths, no, like, be nice to one another.

We all need to hug and recycle. I'm like, no. Not so much. And I only say that because as a social psychologist, I'm like, how is this not just a reflection of current social values manifesting? It is. Yes. Now, you start to show me accounts where people are showing me sort of like kind of deep and sustaining moral tendencies or belief. I might tend to take that more seriously.

But I tend to get suspicious as soon as I hear a trendy moral response out of a person that's, you know, either channeled a UFO or had a UFO experience or had a UFO experience or had. or mediumship sort of of responses. But that's my bias. I think that seems to be more of, well, I'll reframe. We're dirty test tubes. It's obvious we're dirty test tubes. And so I think if you wanted to go into like a metaphysics model or a spiritual model, there's the idea that we can have this divine, pure, right, you know, channel come down.

But because we are dirty test tubes, and that's not even an opinion. Right? We know that we don't perceive everything around us accurately. We know, you know, I can't know what's going on in your head. We have to use language symbolically. We've got limits. We have our belief systems, our culture, right? That shapes how we're going to interpret this information. I think it's difficult to assume that a person is ever getting a pure message. Personal take, but I mean, there's a fair amount of good philosophy and evidence that would support that claim. There is. So, yeah, I'm not sure what to make of the modern revelations. over the last hundred years. I'm not saying there's not some legitimate cases, and I certainly wouldn't debunk all of them as not paranormal or not having some sort of, quote unquote, truthiness to them.

But my general rule with all this stuff is we should critique ourselves. You know, the difference between a Jim Jones cultist and someone that is spiritually seeking is their ability to look inside themselves, be introspective, and go, hmm, this might not be. a good idea. In fact, if you go back to magical practice, one of the, you know, one of the things the Victorians consistently said is, yeah, get in the therapy. Go get you some therapy. In fact,

the golden dawn, not that it's the end-all be-all, but they're like at some point you need to go see a psychotherapist. And I think the reason for that was very clear cut. You need to be able to go, you know, if we accept that people are getting spiritual messages or messages in general, but let's be clear, these are internal to the mind, right? So, These are some form of, if you wanted to convert this completely outside of spirituality, and go, let's just go Jungian. Let's accept that the unconscious can split off. Yep.

And it can. We know that. Multiple personality. Right. So that's not a stretch. So let's say that you've, and I think that's a good part of magical practice, which is you're getting these conversations or intuitions or information almost like a dialogue. And, you know, the rule of thumb is if it's telling you you're awesome, it's probably

bull crap. And I think this is also why people that move, that can move into mediumship or magical practice of any form, if they're not, and this isn't easy, I want to be clear, this isn't an easy step to take. In fact, I think it's difficult. If you can't develop the ability to critique yourself and your own internal thought mechanisms, that stuff is dangerous. you will look at a lot of, you know, once you get past the grimauders into the Victorian age, you will see a lot of people making claims going, this is not for everybody. It's not. And I don't think they were, I mean, yes, they were all rich, so it probably was a little bit of elitism.

But aside from that, I think there's an underlying message, which is the case. Not everyone is mentally prepared to dig inside their psyche and go on a voyage. And if there's a lot of denial in your life, if there's, you know, if you have, you have, haven't come to terms with the fact that you can be an asshole sometimes. Because a lot of people don't like that, right? A lot of people don't, you know, and our culture doesn't value that either. You know, everyone else is the bad guy, but not you, AJ, you're special. And in every human being, you know, you know, classic Jung and classic Freud, right?

Everybody has a dark side. And, you know, and that's why, particularly with Jung, he was like, you're not going to become enlightened, individuated, right, until you embrace your shadow. was the shadow, all the repressed crap you do that you don't want to earn or own. Right. You know, so if you want to look at spiritual experiences as a, just a union psychological journey, I don't care. You know, if it works, who cares?

That is a serious journey and it does have dangers. And it requires a degree of honesty with the self that our culture doesn't engender. Our culture does not teach people to be selective and critical of their own thought processes. So let's say I'm not mentally prepared to do it. I do it anyway. What could happen? I think you are going to end up in a state of existential crisis. I think depending on genetic proclivity and the degree to which you are in a state of denial, you may end up in a breakdown state.

I think it might facilitate anxiety. I think... So don't mess with this. So is this why Golden Do you? John says a therapist, because we need to rule out everything else. Yeah, I wouldn't even say rule out. I think it's more of, you know, the magicians in those days, they're like, the left-hand path and the right-hand path.

I just do it for spiritual enlightenment. Like, ooh, practical magic is dirty. I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. But the truth is you are messing with your own mind in this process. Whether you want to accept the spiritual component or not, You are still internally going into the imaginal state, into your own internal thought processes, and poking around at things that we don't train people to poke around at. And yes. This doesn't need to be parapsychological at all.

No. This is just you messing with your own head. No. And I've had volunteers back in the day who frankly just were not a fit to do investigations. I remember there was a minister who joined for a little while. and the phenomena did match the belief system and it was causing crisis and he got out. My guess would be people that are highly suggestible

would not be good on an investigation. As subjects, bohaha-ha-ha-ha. As subjects, they're good. Yes, but no, in terms of their mental health, no. No. And we've had a couple of situations over the years where that has gone very, very south. So...

Do you want to tell us one of those stories or no? Okay. Drink your coffee. Mental courage. I'll have some nicotine or buckling up. So the reason we stopped doing investigations. Oh, you stopped? Oh, yeah.

Oh, boy. Yeah, is we had what you can either call a dissociative fugue or amnesia or a full-blown possession. This is associative fugue, so you don't know what's going on at all. all. Yeah, blank out for 30 to 45 minutes with radical change in behavior. And here's what's interesting. It happened to two different people on two different occasions. One went into a full-blown, you know, again, I'm sorry, I always whiffle-waffle

on terminology. One went into what would look like a full-blown possession. Did this happen in the same place? Yep. Same place. Yep. And in fact. Same entity?

with two people? Looks like it. What? And this is where you just throw science out the window. And you're like, well, this happened. Interpret it as you will. Is this the place where you said I'm not going anymore? Yes.

And in fact, that place was so bad, we called the owners and said, you need to not let people in here anymore. What happened to those people who went into a fugue state? So, okay, we did four investigations of that place over a period of about a year and a half. It was an abandoned rectory. I think it's actually been on a couple of ghost hunting shows back in the day. It's in Cincinnati. I think it was called the Saddam'sville rectory.

It did produce knocking and rapping. It did produce really loud, weird noises. But I think it was the second session, the second time we were there. My very good friend, and we're still a great friend, she helps me with the business. I remember sitting across from her and I looked over and I know her really well and she got this look in her eyes that said

I'm about to beat the living crap out of you I mean like it was just seething anger I know her really well Was this a switch or was this just just sitting there doing nothing not talking to nothing and all of a sudden just this and I'm like did I do something wrong

and she got up walked out of the house with a five-pound flashlight which is why I was kind of being careful with her because I'm like, that's brain damage if it hits. And basically for about 10 minutes was just roaming around

in this state of extreme rage and anger. Half out of it, half in it. By the way, historically, psychologically, never saw that behavior out of that individual before. Not her nature. What was she saying? She didn't talk. If I remember correctly, she was kind of gritting her teeth.

Did she hit anything? Do anything? No, she just was an awful. And it was outside, it was cold that night, I believe. And after being away from the building in about five minutes, she basically said, I was going to murder you. Wow. She's like, I felt.

Now, here's what's interesting. The owners of this location were suffering from similar problems. The marriage, evidently, if I remember correctly, was a great degree of discord because either the husband or the wife, and I think it was the husband, was going into these fits of uncontrolled rage. And it was becoming a persistent issue. But only him.

If I remember correctly, yes. And so, you know, and again, there was no, there were no triggers to this whatsoever. There wasn't a conversation. I wasn't poking her. The other team wasn't insulting. Like, in other words, there was quiet we were doing our shift. In those days to minimize interference, I was like, look, we don't roam around. Okay?

We set up our hotspot areas. You pick the spot, sit your butt down. Yep. And that's where you're going to be. If you're going to get up, great. But say, hey, I'm leaving this area for the auto recorder. And then, you know, go to the new area and then sit down. Let's not make shuffling noises.

Let's not make, right? Let's minimize contamination as much as possible. Yes. And so, yeah, for about, I think it was about a duration of 15 or 20 minutes. That's a long time to be in that state. I mean, you have to be, when do you start to panic? Like, is she ever going to be okay? again. Well, that, I wasn't worried on that one. It's the next one that scared us.

Okay. Because she did come out and then, yeah, basically, you know, long story short, was like, I really felt like murdering you. So she wasn't fully disassociated. She was. No, but she was somewhat disassociated. So she said she felt kind of detached and that she wasn't herself and that getting out of the house helped. So move forward and we had another member who was perfectly fine. going up the stairs, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And then they went into a full dissociative state, except at this point, same anger in the eyes, except, and this is completely personal, something else appeared, seemed to me to be there. Like, my intuition went off bad on this one.

I was like, okay. So you weren't questioning, did I do something? You saw, you recognize this. Yeah, yeah. And if I remember correctly, I don't. still have these tapes and I'm almost afraid to go through them. We need to see them. Well, this was mostly audio.

I don't think we caught a whole lot of it on camera because here's what went down. This person started behaving completely opposite to their nature. This is an old directory? Yes. And at that point, I actually went, and I never did this in the group. I kept it scientific, but at this point I'm like, and. you know, kind of growling, angry. At the time I had, I still have leg issues,

but at the time I had to use cane because I blew out my hip on my leg a little bit. So I tried to actually kick my leg out from underneath me. And was proud of it. It was like, I'm going to kick your leg out, right? So interestingly enough, because we had had this episode before, I actually took the time to make Holy Water.

Black of better words. Old school with salt in it, right? So I actually made a circle around her. And it took her five minutes to get out of it. Holy Water Circle? A couple invocations made a circle. I'm like, because I was like, this might be serious. So I took it as kind of serious.

And so, yeah, I made a circle. And she struggled with her for about three to five minutes. And when she got out, she was proud. She said, I broke your circle. Wow. And I was like, you know, me being a cocky bastard, I'll just make another. But it was, I was dealing with a different person. Now, whether you want to call that, you know, dissociative identity, whether you want to call

that, you know, some sort of psychological condition, I'd end up, by the way, consulting some other PhD clinical psychologists to be like, what was this? And the one guy in particular was like, I was a possession. I'm like, well, shit, that doesn't help. But we at that point, it went from a scientific investigation to a, a, we may have a possession on our hands, what the hell are we going to do here? And so this individual, we finally got them outside. They were physically resistant.

Physically resistant. Yeah, so they were combative. One of the members there who had just come with us started asking some questions in Latin to which she was responding correctly, even though she didn't have a Latin background. Oh, no. And interestingly, there were some reports. And again, you know, you don't have to believe in it. I'm just telling you the story.

There were some members that were claiming that they were getting impressions from her, even though they weren't in the same room. So there was a lot of weirdness going on. And to this day, we're not entirely sure. But at the end of the day, she was outside for about 30, 40 minutes, and 20, 30-degree weather. We were chasing after her. She remained violent. She remained obstinate.

She was cussing. She was. And then finally, with a fair amount of prayer and a cup of. holy water on her head she snapped out of it. To which she blacked out. She said she didn't remember a thing. She didn't remember any of this. Nope.

Now interestingly, post hoc, she would find herself, if I remember correctly, the stories correctly, she would find herself coming back to the website of the location and not notice that she had gone to the computer and pulled up the pictures. And she would report feeling a longing to go back there. Wow.

So, you know. I don't know why that bothers me, but it does. It lingered. Symptoms of that lingered for, I want to say, almost two to three months. And I'll be honest with you at that point, because up into that point, I'm like, I do science, right? Right. And, you know, and the members were aware. I dabbled with some, you know, Tom Fullery, so to speak.

But I never went in that direction, right? It was always we're here for the data. You know, that turned into basically a religious exorcism. episode. And it was so disturbing to the members that we, it just broke everybody up. Rumor has it, the one person that came with us as a guest, never talked to us again and went to the priesthood. So I don't know if that's really true, but that's, that's, that's the rumor. It fundamentally shook the entire group to its core. And pretty much broke the investigation team up for quite a while.

Is that the only place that you said not going back? Oh, yeah. I mean, I've seen, you know, a lot of it. So it takes a lot to scare you off. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I could confront that again, but, you know, I do have a sense of ethics. And I'm like, I'm not, I was not comfortable putting people at risk.

Well, that's really the thing. You could confront it, but if you're not the one chosen, you put someone else in danger. I mean, at the end of the day, I was the one that tried to push it out, if you want to believe it, right? And it worked. Yay! Wouldn't want to do it twice and one night. No.

And again, this is all personal. Certainly outside my realm as a scientist. But no, the phenomena that occurred from that was mind-boggling. And to this day, I mean, I'm not throwing shade on the person that happened to. I can't prove that that wasn't a dissociative episode. I can't prove she was prone to kind of psychosomatic effects. But this was certainly beyond her normal mode of behavior. And, of course, we called them and said, you all need to get rid of this place.

You need to get rid of the furniture. You need to not let people in here. It's dangerous. Do you think if they knock that building down that the entity would still be there? My understanding is they did shut it down. Now, I don't know if the building's still there. I mean, knock that. You got to knock it down.

I would not disagree. And probably salt the earth. Salt the earth. From the spiritual perspective, I'd say salt the earth. Because something not nice is there. You know, the funny thing is, and again, to take this for what it's worth, it was either the first one or the second one, you know,

they looked at me at some point and they're like, well, they really want you. And I'm just like, okay. Okay, that's enough. Yeah. So it's, and, you know,

if you want a frame for it, acted like a demon. Was it a demon? I don't know. What do you think? But seemed to be a demon that very much fed on sexuality and emotion. So if you were going to go,

Kabbalic classification, the clipeth corresponding to Nietzsche. So nature. If you don't, then you say dissociative feud or a brief psychotic episode, but not necessarily history of that. If you have no history of that, then I don't buy that. Yeah. And again, I don't formally lean one way or another.

I'm like, this was a very weird, liminal thing that happened. And it was sufficiently weird and disturbing enough to prevent us from moving forward. How is she doing now? Not entirely clear. It calls splits. So I very much hope they're well. But yeah, that was a bit of a bender. I told you I'm not really a believer, but kind of, but not really, but kind of.

I had a nighthag experience without knowing the lore of that before. Maybe mid-30s happened on vacation at kind of an old hotel. and it was the scariest experience of my life before and since. And it felt very real, like this old woman climbing into bed, pressed down. There was sexual violence. I've said this story on the channel, so you could find the whole thing in detail.

I couldn't go back in the room. My wife had to pack us up. We had to leave the building. And I'm not really a believer. You did a lesson on Udeme on the night hag. Yes. Yes. What is going on with her?

Okay. Before I go into that, I'm going to back up and make a general statement, which is, you know, and we kind of touched this earlier. Well, I can explain this. Well, I was still terrified. Thanks. You know, like, so there's a point where if it brings comfort to explain it in scientific terms, you know, we're almost moving to a clinical psychology realm. Great. I tell myself it's hypnagogic.

Yeah. But it didn't feel like it. it, man. And, you know, in terms of the research of sleep paralysis slash hypnagogic episodes, they're, one, overlapping, and again, not well defined. You know, their case studies, their post hoc accounts, again, in terms of slapping an EEG, I mean, they have done EEG studies with sleep paralysis. But when you get that combination of the night hag and everything else, those accounts you can label them scientifically we can see a set of symptoms that are likely with sleep paralysis in particular why her i wasn't i had no prime i wasn't primed for that at that time well

were you um were you poking around with anything ghost no nope okay um you know and again if we go beyond the you had a hypnagogic episode with sleep paralysis And your mind created it. I mean, if you want to go with pure scientific explanation, maybe you watch some sort of horror movie or film that unconsciously embedded in your mind, but the real question is why are we, why is it this old woman that a lot of us see?

I don't watch horror movie. I don't like horror movies. So why do we see this? Why not an old man? Why not a red demon with horns? Well, I would, have you read Hufford? No. You might want to get,

terror that comes in the night. Oh, great. By Hufford. Well, what he does is he does a cultural comparison of nighthag experiences. So you might actually find some psychological comfort in that. And what he does is he makes a separation between what's called the experiential source hypothesis and the cultural source hypothesis. And his whole premise was either this phenomena has some sort of, this experience of the

night hag, has some core actual phenomenological reality, right? some sort of core real experience that, you know, culture is laying on top of it, or it's purely a cultural source, right? Now, we know that sleep paralysis and versions of the night hag occur cross-culturally. Yes. Right? So Cheyenne's a good resource for that. There's a couple of others that have published the last few years, but I don't remember the names.

After I told this story to the audience, email just went crazy. Yeah. A thousand people. We all saw the same thing. And I'm trying, and I'm trying not to apply. I'll apply my belief. I'll be like you. I'll apply the belief. I'll do the opposite. I'll apply the belief at the end.

Okay. So we know sleep paralysis, right, essentially is the motor cortex shuts down at night so you don't act out your dreams and jump out of window. You know, yay! And then, of course, when it comes back, you know, it's not on yet. So that's the paralysis. Yep. By the way, neat trick for anyone that goes through this. If you have repeated sleep paralysis, the trick is not moving your body. The trick is moving a single digit.

Okay. I've had one episode and luckily, luckily, I learned this before I had the episode. So you focus on your finger or your toe. What was your episode? I didn't have any sort of phenomena with it. I just woke up and couldn't move.

And I remember it took about 45 seconds until the panic sets in because in fact the panic is a very common feature of this occurring early on, unreasonable panic. Sure, I'm a lucid dreamer, so you learn to get past the buzzing. Yeah. And I've actually got better with lucid dreaming over the years.

But anyway. But I remember in my episode, I'm like, picky, figure, picky, figure, piggy figure, pick you, and within like 30 years, because I knew the panic was coming, right? I'm like, I know it's coming. I got to get it. And I managed to get the finger wiggling and I snapped out of it in time. So there is obviously a biological component to it. Sure.

A neurological component to it. But Hufford did show that there are very much cross-cultural comparisons. And of course, Cheyenne in South America showed this as well in Mexico, that some version of the nighthag. has different representations across multiple cultures. Now, you can say that this just is a combination of sleep paralysis, which is very obviously measurable, plus a hypnotogic episode. Right, right. And in fact, I believe in hypnagogic episodes to the point that

if a person reports haunting phenomena coming out of sleep or into sleep, I tend to be like, well, probably hypnagogic. Sure, right? Or hypnipompic, depending on whether they're awake or sleep. Right. But again, from Hufford and other sources, there have been both subjective and objective paranormal phenomena that can be associated with those episodes that are more difficult to explain. Oh, boy.

So if you want me to tell you with 100% certainty that that was just you in your head, I'm not going to tell you that. You know, back to our earlier conversation, when I was 12 or 13, I had a visit from something. something. I do not remember a specific trigger. I do remember I set up out of bed and then there was just something in the room that I couldn't see positioned at the doorway. Couldn't see but knew it was there. Yep. Absolute feeling of evil. Oppression? Yes. And again, I'm in the doorway you can't get out. And it stayed with me all night. All night. Which frankly was responsible for my religious conversion. It terrified me so badly that that's that's what ended up leaning me towards thinking about seminary as a teenager. Of course it would. Anyone who's had this

experience knows how real it feels. Now you know related to what you experienced I subsequently found out that where I grew up had a lot of not friendly things around. I don't have a better word for this. Some land is friendly. Some land less so. I happen to live next to a Boy Scout camp with a 30-year history. Oh no. A very, very, very, very crazy phenomena. But the funny thing is where I live is about as peaceful and kind as you can imagine. But I kid you not, you drive seven miles. And suddenly you're like, did I just send her to the set of hocus pocus? What the hell is this? You could feel that? Oh, yeah. And you can almost even see it. in the terrain.

It just, it feels fundamentally different. There was a church about a mile and a half from where I lived, and there was a road that goes all the way around. And by the time I was of driving age, none of my friends would drive around that church. Because we used to do it. I remember particularly I had a friend.

We drove around it. We were sitting in the car. I get this overwhelming feeling. Something nasty in the backseat. In the back seat? In the back seat. Like something was hitching a ride. Yeah.

It was, and I remember looking over at my friend and going, and I didn't say a word, he's like, yeah, I know. You just gave me chills. Yeah, he's like, yeah, no, I know. And from that point forward, there was another route to my house. We just, everybody just took that route. And I didn't even tell my friends, take that route. You know, one crazy hypothesis I can't back up is that whatever was there from that church could get just far enough that it came to visit me and my teenage years. Yeah.

You know, if you want the non-psychological explanation, Yeah, I don't know. But back to your case, you know, if I was you, I'd be inclined to start looking in my family history to see if you have practitioners, see if you have people with curses, see if you have lineages of people that dabbled with stuff they shouldn't. Oh, I'm from Southern Italian. They did all that stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, you're screwed. I'm screwed. Folk Catholicism.

I mean, you know, sometimes they didn't just stick with the saints. Yeah, I wear St. Michael every day. Yeah. And also keep in mind, you know why the grimoire survived, right? Why? Because priests kept that. Yes. So you might want to look a little bit into your family history.

I might just leave it alone. Or just, yeah. I'm just going to leave it alone. But no, I mean, you know, you want the standard answer? Yep, you had a hypnagogic episode with sleep paralysis. That's what I'm going with. Or some hot old lady decided to have her way with you. There is.

Is sexual violence part of the, is that common? It can be. I've seen accounts that have definite sexual content to them. And I would imagine that that is, because I make that joke, but I would imagine that is even more horrifying and terrifying. We had to leave, and I'm not afraid of anything. Well, I mean, from a clinical psychology perspective, right? I'm not a clinician, but I play one on TV.

You know, good move. Why not? What do you have to prove to anybody? Right. Like, I just had a traumatic experience. I know, I'll confront that right now. Nope. Or go home, re-Cupid Base Camp.

Interestingly, I did, in the last year, get contacted by a person who repeatedly was having very traumatic succubis, incubus experiences. And they reported a lot of that. It happens, evidently. There's a reason that succubis and incubuses exist. Yeah. So, you know, and again, all of this comes. down to it's some kind of real. You know, if you want to, if you want to debunk it or you want to find, you want to find mainstream explanations, you can and you probably will. There's an overlap there.

At the same time, I think sometimes we don't pay enough attention to the fact of, was it real to you? Sure was. And what were the consequences of that? And how did, you know, much more in a clinical psychology perspective. And it's why we've written some papers on haunted people syndrome for clinicians, right? How do you address this without, you know, because it's not good, clinical psychology, you'd be like, you're full of shit. No, that's not helpful. Like, you just broke rapport, bad mood, right?

You're crazy. Like, okay, that's not how you start a therapy session. You know, if these people believe it where it's rational, you know, whether it's debunkable or not, if it's not about I'm right, you're wrong. And honestly, I think sometimes we get too far into that with some of this stuff. You know, it is about what did you experience? What did you perceive? How are you processing it?

And are you okay? And if you're not okay, how can we help you cope with what you're experiencing in a way that makes sense to you that fits with your value system, that fits with your belief system? And I don't care whether you're right or wrong. I don't care whether other people agree with you or not. That's really not the point. The point is, here's where you're at. And really, that's the heart of good therapy, period.

Right? It's, you know, good therapy is not, let's look at this external standard and make you conform to it. Good therapy is selfish. Where are you at? Where would you like to be for you? How do we take steps in your life? It's also true with anxiety and depression, right? The meds don't fix much. No, they don't. And of course, now they have that whole line of research coming out where they're saying they've never had a good relationship between anxiety and depression alleviation and psychotropic meds. Not shocked by that. I worked a psych ward for two years.

But again, if we come back to therapy, removing politics, removing ideology and certainly removing non-data-based interventions are it does come down to let's be selfish let's talk about you let's talk about what you're experiencing let's talk about are you willing to look at what you're doing how's that working for you right that's the critical question but again introspection yeah because you know rule number one of therapy if you don't want help nobody can help you right if you don't want to look at things and change things and do some work it's just like

physical therapy. If you break a leg, you want to fix it, that physical therapy is going to suck. Well, unfortunately, therapy has a suckiness component to it because over time the therapist is going to have to get you to a point where you're willing to confront uncomfortable things. And, you know, in theory, in a supportive environment where you're not alone and go, okay, now that we've looked at this, what do you think we can do together to make it better? And the whole goal for therapy should be not that you match group A, B, or C, it should be how much have we improved your well-being on a day-to-day basis? How many techniques and strategies have we given you? So that, you know, if we can't get rid of it, we can help you mediate it, moderate it,

make it, and give you back, really, because I think a lot of issues with psychology and psychological disorders is that theft of control. That's true. Human beings need a sense of control. And that full circles back to our belief system. Why do people stick to these belief systems? Because they're using them to make sense of the world around them. Right. And human beings do not like it when they don't have control. No, they don't.

And prediction is a form of control. That's true. Prediction is a massive form of control. Right? That's the appeal of mainstream religion. Here is one book. The book has a complete set of answers. Yep.

And it gives you a world view and a map of the universe by which you know what the hell is going on. And you know how it ends. Yeah. And by the way, no judgment there. No judgment there, I'm jealous. Me too. I'm a questioner. I'm born.

I'm not a Judas. Oh, my goodness. I'm a doubting Thomas, right? Sure. I'm a believer, but I'm a Thomas. And I envy people. People who know for sure they're going to heaven, God bless them. And more importantly, I would never want to take that from anybody.

Never. Because I'd love to have that. Because that's what they use to make peace with a world that is not a kind world. And those people are very kind people. They can be, or sometimes they can be mean and aggressive. They can, but still. For the most part, in my experience, people who are very faithful are very, very nice. My hero is my grandmother, who had a fourth grade education.

When stoic is all get out, if she talked, she had something to say. Otherwise, she didn't. The smarter than most people I've ever met in my life. I miss her dearly. She's passed away for, what it been, 10 years now, 50 years? She lived a long time. 11 years. Yeah, she made it to 90. She made it to 90.

Yep, she made it to 90. And in fact, when I had those experiences back in the day, I'd end up spending a lot of time at my grandmalls because my room got a little tainted, right? Of course. But she was insanely wise. Did you know how lucky you were to have her that long? Oh, yeah. No. Now, she's missed.

What a gift, man. But full circle. Yep, you had a weird experience. I did. But here's the other thing, too. throwing this out here why not engage in some spiritual protection measures

if it works who cares it can't hurt you know if it works who cares right the old Pythagorean yeah why not couldn't height I mean you know

Crowley with his heroin mind breaking soul destroying history I definitely believed he did don't go down that route but yeah you know and that

I think sometimes that's where I'll frustrate my colleagues who are much more skeptical than I am. And they're like, but it can't be. I'm like, does it work? I don't care. You know, it's... The wife will be like, why is there salt and chalk everywhere? What do you do?

What are you doing? It's like, that situation. You remember. She remembers. This is almost 20 years ago. Yeah. If you need to put a full size, you know, Solomon Circle with the Hebrew and everything else, and it makes you sleep back.

Do it. I think she may have even come back about a week ago. I'll tell that story at some point. Transliminality. Okay. You have a test on your site. What is, we should plug your site.

Where do they go to find this test? Israynet.org. So it's Israel without the L. Yeah, is Ray, I-R-A-N-E-T dot org. You need acronym health. I know, I do. I do.

It's a problem. I might have a tumor. So this is a survey to see, I guess, how psychic you are. No, okay, transliminality, and here's where we do go full-blown science, because we've been doing a lot of my loosey-goosey-fruity stuff. So let's... Now, before you explain it, you max out on this test, right? I'm pretty high, yes. All right. So what is this testing? All right, so transliminality is, and really, Jim's been the majority validator. He's done the bulk of research with this. I love this variable because it's interesting.

Transliminal, right? So this is a measure that addresses... is the extent to which a person has thin psychological boundaries. Okay? So no one would debate at this point. We have a conscious self and an unconscious self. And in a kind of a Freudian vein, we have a nice, thick barrier between the conscious thoughts and all the stuff that we bury in a Freudian sense

or union-wise, you know, put down there that we don't have access to. We also have a pretty thick barrier between our ego, our conscious self and the environment around us. People that are highly transliminal or high transliminal, or high transliminals have thinner boundaries. So material from the unconscious to the conscious passes more freely, and material from the conscious to the environment and back go through more freely than the average human being. And what we have found is that transliminality, this kind of thin boundary structure,

is very much in multiple studies significantly predictive of anomalous experience. It is. Yes. And we've replicated that with our own scales. It's been done in previous scales. And we've done a fair amount of research, including previous research I wasn't involved with, that suggests they may be a little bit better at ESP. So I had a friend growing up who swore that she could see ORAs.

Everyone thought it was nonsense. I don't think it was. I think she could. Yeah. I think she could. Now, I'm going to go, well, let me give the official diatribe. So it's a well-researched scale. It's been Rosh validated, which is a.

a very high level of statistics. It's actually what the SAT uses, right? So, and trust me, the SAT wants to be predictive, because they got money. If the colleges decide to use it again, but that's a side note. They're starting to. Yeah. Like, oh, shock of shocks. You take that away, performance goes down.

Guess what? Surprise. But no, the point of the scale, and it's also been significantly linked to actual temporal lobe liability. It has. Yes. So it's, it's a, it originally was Michael Thalbill that designed it. Jim has done a lot of revisions on it, taken a lot further. Standardized scale.

We use it all the time because it is reliably predictive of anomalous experience. In fact, I just put up a survey with another podcast I did about a month ago, and we're collecting data on that. We have something like 270 responses. So we're looking at that from kind of like a podcast listener community. And I'm going to see how that data turns out. Do you want more responses? Oh, yeah, sure. I'll post. I'll get it up. I'll get it up on the internet. We'll see what we can do. You got it. Okay. Everybody go to Israel without the L.org. I'm sorry, everybody, for my poor acronym. And see and see how psychic you are. In fairness, Institute for the Study of Religious and anomalous experience sounds fancy until you're abbreviated. Didn't you find that

certain people, maybe it was magicians or something like that, scored low? No, high. They score high transliminals, yes. And in fact, I'm of the opinion, right, because transliminal, are going to get more sensory information going back and forth from the unconscious and the conscious, right? And also they're going to be more susceptible to environmental effects. And to be clear,

very high levels of transliminality can definitely be associated with diagnosable mental illness, right? So there's a certain degree of it, like say probably one standard deviation, a little bit above the mean to about one and a half where you're in kind of a sweet spot of

you are just more sensitive to environmental stimulus, you're going to be more responsive, and you're going to have more reactions from your unconscious to your conscious. You're going to get feelings and impressions. Well, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. So I tend to think of it as a bit of a proxy measure for psychicism. I don't. And so far, our direct tests have had some support for that, some statistically significant responses. But with the magicians, they actually went sigh missing. They did significantly worse. They did worse.

Then they ought to. And I had them actually do... They did worse than random, if I remember. Yeah. Now, in fairness, two caveats to that. One, I had them do an online ESP app. And online digital ESP is not the same as, look at me, I let candles, I have a circle, right? Right.

But I did have them do one with any ritual of choice and one without. And, yeah, the findings went, I think were null. We're null in one condition and sign missing in the other. So they went worse than they ought to. And I can't tell you if that was because I'd love to replicate it. But honestly, I'd love to replicate it to more organic structure. And then the things get real complicated because now you're talking to lab. And I don't have $200,000 to pay everybody to, right?

Although if anybody wants to send me $200,000, anybody? But the point is they, I think in organic environments, and this comes back to what I was talking about, like maybe finding ways to make. measure the actual meditation and visualization components involved in ritual magic. Because I think we might have a bit of a cookbook recipe for how to enter an alternate state of consciousness that might facilitate micro-PK or ESP. I think Buddhists may agree with you. Yeah.

And the thing is it's not that other researchers haven't said, do you have meditation experience? I'm like, well, okay, great. I just measured a bunch of a cultists. And by the way, there were mild correlations between daily meditation and visualization exercises. I bet. It wasn't, I mean, it was significant. It just wasn't an insane variance accounted for. But there was a lot of preliminary evidence with these magicians that suggested that, yes,

these various techniques that they're actually using, because there's a big separation between, look at me on the wizard versus, no, no, no, really, I'm practicing X, Y, and Z every other day, and I'm actually doing it, right? And by the way, that's not a criticism to that community. That's the same with religion, whether we're dealing with exoteric or, exoteric or, I'm sorry, not exotoric. Yeah, no, intrinsic and extrinsic, religiosity. That's true with every group.

If you've ever run an organization, there's two or three people you can absolutely rely on. And there's a bunch of people that you're saying, why am I paying you? Everywhere. Yeah. So the point is when you're dealing with, and that's why I used Ruin Soup, because a lot of those are really avid practitioners. And I got measures. But, but, dang it, I lost my train of thought. Well, do you want to be more transliminal, and can you teach it, can you teach yourself to be?

Well, the theory, yes, it's both a state and a trait variable. Right. So you have the trait tendency of transliminality, which the data clearly showed magicians were pretty high on compared to the population. And the theory is that actually the exercises taught in esotericism are helping to train magicians to control the transliminal tendencies. Because think about it, if a lot of your practice is this altered state of consciousness, where you are trying to get impressions, voices, intuitions, you're going through complex rituals to try and get in contact with. the force, a spirit and energy, okay? Having thin boundary structure, hey, that's a good thing. That is a good thing.

Right? But what if it's uncontrolled? What if it's intrusive? And that's where you move from some subclinical symptomology into, uh-oh, this may actually be problematic for a person's well-being. Could this be those possessed women, maybe transliminal, uncontrollable? I think they were moderate transliminals because I think I had them sample at some point. But transliminality itself is not necessarily a leaning towards psychosis.

Very high levels of it, if I remember correctly, were in fact associated with schizotipal tendencies. That would make sense. Yeah. But keep in mind, one of the myths out there is that a person can magically hallucinate and just go back to normal. That doesn't happen. That doesn't happen. No. I've been around hundreds of schizophrenics back of the day.

And I promise you, the hallucinations are just one bit of a very pervasive. set of crippling symptoms. But yeah, high, high transliminality without any form of moderation or technique to deal with it, because really what are you dealing with? A lot of sensory information coming from different sources that you're not dealing with well. I would say one model of magic is

how do I control and create rituals to control the impressions that I'm getting, to have a shutoff switch. Well, especially if you're dealing with trauma that you kind of want to keep down there. it's good training to have. And that is, you know, again, we come back to trauma because a lot of people do have trauma.

Sure. And again, I think in the paranormal community, there is probably a significantly greater amount of trauma than you find in the average population. I agree. Your day job is forensic psychology? I can't really call myself a forensic person. What do you do during the day?

Courtrooms, evaluations? No, no. Actually, I just work with, I have clinical psychology, and we help veterans get disability benefits. Where can we find that online? I'd love to support. Well, I mean, I work with law firms only. I don't work individually with veterans because, and honestly, as a pitch,

we recommend veterans who need to work with the VA. I wholeheartedly recommend they just get a lawyer because it's easier. Really? So we work with lawyers to help do assessments, to help get better ratings. So we work only through lawyers. And that's, you really have to. because there's a whole lot of work with VA processing. So you're trying to get, I guess, PTSD diagnosed so they can get help?

Yeah, we only do with psychological disorders. We don't do with medical. And again, no direct referrals. Like, there's no point in contacting me because all of the, there's a whole lot of steps before you get to a clinical psychologist assessment. And I'm not a clinical psychologist, right? I have clinical psychologists to work for me. I help with the research and the paperwork and the submission.

Well, how did the lawyers help? Well, the lawyers actually are proficient in VA law. So rather than a veteran trying to tackle all the paperwork required to get disability through the VA, the lawyers take it on for them. And it's kind of like a disability claim. And from my personal opinion, it's almost always better to have representation just because the mountains of paperwork and all of the appeals. And most people don't have the time to read the 25 books. necessarily necessary to understand what all this paperwork entails. I really think it's just better off to get a lawyer. You're 100% right. I'm glad you said it 100% right to all the

vets listing. That's how to deal with the VA is through representation. It's the only way. Yeah. And I mean, I don't remember I don't hate the VA or anything, but again, it's a complicated procedure. You know, it's government. It's government. Yeah. So it's just better to get representation because, again, that way it's taken care of because then they contact you and go, hey buddy we need to do an interview hey this is happening here's what we need to do next and you don't have all that stress and trauma of trying to be a person working that large bureaucratic system can the vets afford this yeah actually because just like disability law the lawyers don't charge until after the whole thing's settled and then there's back pay that occurs right because

there's your date of claim and it's true with disability too right and so whatever your date of claim is however long it takes for you to get accepted um you get that chunk of change and the lawyers get compensated by getting a little bit off the back end. Sure. What's the name of this organization? Oh, you mean the law firms? Yeah, how could the vets get help? Woods and Woods would be a good one.

Woods and Woods. Also, national vet help. We have a lot of vets listening. Yeah, I mean, save yourself the drama. Totally agree. Last question. Is it, is it really? The last question.

Everyone go get ghosted. This is on Amazon, right? Yeah, it's on Amazon. But Amazon get ghosted. You don't love it. Right now there's someone, there's thousands of people who like me are dealing with trauma, but not handling it as well as I did. Advice, what can they do to deal with it?

So when you say trauma, are you referring to like trauma related to maybe some spiritual? Whether it's night hagg, night terrors, sleepwalking, they just can't get, they're afraid, you're afraid to go to sleep for a little while. Sure. Okay. So noting, I am not licensed or a clinician, but from... But you could talk like a friend. Yeah, and also saying, but I do have a lot of clinically adjacent experience.

The first thing is proving it is irrelevant. I've seen a lot of people who are like, but if I don't get this document, And if somebody doesn't come and say, this is real. Now, by the way, that can be dangerous in the sense of every night 15 demons come to me and fairies, you know, like, okay, maybe you need to go talk to somebody, right? So barring a tendency towards psychosis, I don't think that proving it is actually the best thing for mental health. I think instead you need to maybe do a little bit of therapy shopping, you know, because again, I'm not going to, I'm not critiquing. therapy but all doctors are not good doctors all therapists are not good therapists true all everything are not good everything all teachers are not good

teachers even chemistry is important for the therapist yeah and you know honestly the you know better help and the other online therapy you know it makes it easy now and so you may have to do some shopping but I think you should be talking to someone and I think the goal should be engaging in safe appropriate behaviors, right, that help you cope and feel better. No one, there is no version of psychology where feeling like a victim is a good thing. You know, when you steal power from an individual, and there's all sorts of studies that demonstrate this, when you take away your sense of autonomy, your sense of power and

choice, when you feel victimized, that's not. a good psychological state to be in. It's not healthy for the human being. I think I've learned helplessness back in the day where they shocked the dogs to the point in the cage where they no longer even tried. But this is, and this is going to sound a little bit like a self-help book, you're never truly a victim. You always have choices. They may not be good choices, but you always have choices. And if that means finding a therapist or a support group where, if nothing else, you can just practically say, okay, whether it's ridiculous or not, or whether someone else would approve of this or not,

if it's safe and it's not dangerous, what can I do to make me feel better about this? That's what you should be doing. You know, again, your personal experiences, if they're traumatic, are your personal experiences, and you have the autonomy and the right to confront those in hopefully a helpful way. And again, get consultation, you know, Get a therapist. Talk with them about what steps could I take. You know, just anxiety.

EMDR works pretty well. EMDR? Yeah, I can't even remember what it stands for. Essentially, faking rapid eye movement. Really? Yes, that you do in your stage four sleep. For some reason, tends to help people delodge anxiety. That's interesting.

Well, because if you think about what anxiety is, it's a persistent state of fear that you can't, it's broken tape. Right? It keeps replaying. You know it's not rational. You know it's not rational. But it keeps hitting you. You can't seem to get rid of it. EMDR seems to help some people, just spending two minutes, closing your eyes and doing that back and forth eye motion. I'll go through three days where I'm just living on cortisol and it sucks. Yeah. There's meditation techniques. You know, you don't have to go into esoteric meditation. There's a whole lot of studies showing that meditation will help with some panic. And in some cases, even alleviate some PTSD symptoms. What would your grandmother say?

Pray about it. She'd say pray about it. Yeah. Yeah, Grandma would say pray about it. And then Grandma would be like, well, what are you going to go out and do about it? That's something I think that is missing from our culture nowadays, which is you still get to make choices. You still get to make choices. And even if they're bad choices, eventually you'll come to some options that aren't bad choices.

Because, you know, this is certainly my personal perspective. the world has suffering in it and none of us are going to escape that. Not all of it. And in kind of a broader philosophical perspective, we wouldn't like the world if we did alleviate suffering. Because for any grizzled individual that you've ever talked to with wisdom,

they will say that sucked, but I learned some of my most valuable life-changing lessons through that. 100% true. And by the way, I'm not justifying what happened to someone, any way, shape, or form. Like, bad things happen to people, and it's not fair. But I think whether it's paranormal or otherwise, we can't let people take our ability to choose and make choices. And if we remember that and we have agency again, you know, work, it's work and its effort.

There is no magic pill, despite what, you know, Pfizer might tell you, there is no magic pill. But, you know, if you've had a series of terrifying paranormal experiences, then make yourself be motivated to learn more about it and learn possible techniques that you can use to take control back over the agency that you feel was taken from you. Well said, Dr. Brian Lay, thank you for coming in today. It's been fun. Everybody. That was Dr. Brian Lay.

He said he won't die on the hill of his own EMF data until somebody else replicates. So I went looking. Nobody has yet. But it's in print. In 2013, he and Kay Owen published the first study in the journal of Parapsychology. A house had no electricity, and the electromagnetic field still wiggled before weird things happened. Two more studies found the same pattern, both his. He told you that before I could, which is my favorite kind of guest. Now, the rectory in Cincinnati, Ryan says a teammate went blank and fought her way out of a saltwater circle he drew around her. When she got out, she'd She said, I broke your circle. Now, the possession I can't check. The building I can. Ghost Adventures shot there in 2012. Brian told the owners to close it, and last I could find, the current owner was turning it into an Airbnb.

Hard pass. I'm not a complete believer, but Brian debunked his own haunted house backstory and published anyway. That's a believer I'll listen to all day long. His book is ghosted on Amazon, and his institute is at isrianet.org. That's Israel without the L. And everything I mentioned is linked down below. Until next time, be safe.

Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. Inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing the like I should. And it never ends. No, it never ends. Oh, with M.K. Ultra.

Being only two of. the shadow people name was cold the undergrampestations planets are both and with a dark watcher