Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 127: Mountain Oracle Radio (w/ special guest Ken Layne)

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

This week we're joined by Ken Layne (@KenLayne), host of Desert Oracle Radio, to talk about cattle mutilations, the Pentagon's UFO problem, and Oumuamua. Please sign up for the Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Hello, Trillbilly family. This is Terrence here. I hope you're having a great week so far. I have two announcements today before we get our show started. The first is that we have a show coming up on December the 27th. The Incomparable Street Fight Radio Variety Show with our good friends Street Fight Radio with special guests Lindsey Martin and Garbage Brain University. That'll be in Columbus, Ohio

at Ruby Tuesday, December 27th. That's a Friday. It starts at 8pm. You can get your tickets at store.streetfightradio.com Doors are at 8. Show starts at 9. So come out and see.com. Doors are at 8. Show starts at 9. So come out and see us.

It'll be me and Tom. I don't think Tonya's able to make that, but it'll be a good show. And then the second announcement I have to make is that we are taking the next two weeks off of the main free feed. So the episodes you get on your iTunes or Spotify, we will not be publishing anything until January the 2nd. Or wait, January the 9th. I'm sorry. We're off the 26th and the 2nd, but we are going to continue doing Patreon episodes during that time.

So if you want to sign up, you want more Trailbillies content weekly, we will be doing Patreon episodes every Sunday during that time. So thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for helping us round out a great year and for supporting us. Support us more over at patreon.com, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash Trillbilly Workers Party. Today's guest is someone I think you'll really enjoy. He's got one of my favorite shows, one of my favorite podcasts out there right now and radio shows. He's got one of my favorite shows, one of my favorite podcasts out there right now, and radio shows.

That's called Desert Oracle Radio, and the host is Ken Lane. So we're going to be talking with you about all kinds of weird stuff that happens in the desert, but not just in the desert, in the mountains, in rural areas, in the world, really. I think you'll really enjoy it. It's a great way to round out the year. So I hope you all have a great holiday season, a great New Year's. We will see you on the main feed in two weeks. Welcome to the Trailbillies. This week's guest, we've got Ken Lane from the Desert Oracle Radio. Ken, long time, first time, been a big fan of yours for a long time. Been trying to make this happen for a while, so I'm glad we've finally made it happen.

How are you doing? I am doing all right, and I'm glad we're doing it. Hey, Ken, I don't want to be like the Simpsons meme where Milhouse walks into the cafeteria, but will you give us a night has fallen, but instead of saying the desert, maybe say like the Cumberland Plateau or something like that?

Oh, yeah. I can do that. The problem is this time of year, how can you tell, you know? The sun's only above the trees for about an hour and a half a day. That's true. Yeah, so you've spent a little bit of time in East Kentucky, right, Ken? Or your people are from...

Let me do the thing. Okay, yeah, do it. Go for it. Night has fallen on the cumberland plateau i love that i love that so good harry coddle would be proud yeah so you're ken'm the the first one born outside of floyd county since uh i guess about 1800 wow jesus Wow. Jesus. Are you akin to Don Lane, the former basketball coach at Transylvania University? I most likely am.

You know, there were only four or five lanes that came over the mountains at the end of the Revolutionary War, and apparently their sperm was healthy. A feckin' bunch. Yeah, we're very virile people. It's good to be good at something, is what my grandpa always said. Well, so, you know, it's a good time of year to have you on. There is something I wanted to talk about just out right out of the gates um i think something that you've been preoccupied with the last couple of episodes

the last couple of months is um something that tends to crop up every now and again in the desert, which is cattle mutilations. So I'm from New Mexico, and we always grew up hearing about them. They're happening all the time in New Mexico and Colorado, but just recently there was a new round of them that happened in eastern Oregon. So what's going on in eastern Oregon, Ken? Tell us about this most recent round of cattle mutilations well you know cattle mutilations are one of those things that is kind of easy to scoff at because it sounds like such a uh such a redneck thing right to to be a concern but when i was a agriculture reporter in the 1980s it was going on a little bit and i realized oh they don't really care about the

the the science fiction et angle these bulls are like seven eight thousand dollars a piece right so it's it was a a serious thing and what happened in oregon this is in eastern oregon on the dry side this rancher who bought the ranch a fairly big ranch he's a large animal vet and put some money into a ranch, as people will do if they can afford it. He had five big bulls all found dead over 24 hours a day and a half. And they were were in a one square mile area, which sounds big, but you look at a normal ranch and it's hundreds and hundreds of acres and it usually spreads on to thousands of acres of public grazing land, federal land. And all these bulls were dead, but they had no wounds. They had no blood.

There was no broken bones, they weren't stuck in anything, they were just placed there a quarter mile apart and every one of them was missing their sexual organs and their tongue. Which is also a sexual organ, but we like to break it up.

Certainly. You know, livestock. Certainly. What the fuck? Yeah, well yeah well um so they were missing they're drained of blood right there's no blood left in them and they're missing certain organs but another thing is that there's no blood around them and like carrion you know scavengers buzzards vultures won't go near them. Is that right? Yeah, they don't touch these. So the ravens, the vultures, the coyotes, anything that kind of tugs on roadkill,

if there's roadkill around, just leaves it alone. And that tends to make it stand out when you find it. Because if you find a dead animal on a farm or a ranch somewhere, it's usually going to be all dried up because it's been dead for a while, or it's going to have a cloud of black flies on it. Yeah. And in these cases, they're just sitting there. And so this, they never stop, the cattle mutilations.

You can do a news search, and you'll always find one somewhere in the world. If you're just searching in the English language, you'll find something going on in New Zealand, in Australia, wherever it is. going on in New Zealand and Australia, wherever it is. And in the West, in the Western U.S., they've been happening pretty consistently since the 1950s. Yeah. And I think that, so there's a few sort of explanations, right? I mean, people have all kinds of ideas what they might be. There is the sort of extraterrestrial

explanation, right? There's the cults, like we talked about on the episode. Yeah, there's the sort of human explanation, whether it might be cults or maybe just pranksters. Tanya doing some sort of, could be our coast

witchcraft. I mean, I could find a use for a steer tongue for sure, but this is fucked up and really creepy. Well, part of... Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, well, it's a lot of work to get something

you can get from the butcher shop. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Certainly does seem ritual. Yeah. I mean, there's an idea that maybe it's true. Certainly does seem ritual. Yeah. I mean, there's an idea that maybe it's ritual, and this came about as far as I can tell, because this idea was not connected to cattle mutilations of the 50s and early 60s. But by the 70s, the occult revival in the United States,

70s, the occult revival in the United States, all of a sudden the rancher in his sort of bag of theories also has, well, there were some hippies moved out here and were acting peculiar, you know. Right. Next thing you know,

because cops love a theory like that, because then it's like, well, what can we do? It's a satanic cult. That's one thing of the episode that i really love that you hit on ken is just the like sheer ineffectual like nature of policing these matters and uh yeah no i thought that was that's that's interesting to point out but there's never been any no one's ever been caught in the act never a suspect never an arrest never a name connected to anybody never a location search

this is over all the western states for almost 70 years now yeah and jesus fucking crap and the thing that's so mind-blowing to me about it is how common the sort of features are. You know, like I said, like we were saying, scavengers won't go near it. The animal's drained of blood. The exact organs are missing almost every time. So it's like everything going back to the 50s is like kind of the same tale well pretty much yeah yeah correct me if i'm wrong kim but it's like it's almost like and this is where i think people think that aliens might be involved or extraterrestrials something not human um is that

the incisions usually look like they're made by some sort of cauterizing instrument, something that can simultaneously cut but also stop the flow of blood. Is that correct? Then where does the blood go? Well, sometimes the blood is still in the animal. Sometimes the animal is completely drained of blood. Right. But whatever the case when and there's a there's a misperception

that that ranchers are excited about being known as the rancher that that the flying saucers visited for some you know steak bits right and they're not nobody wants that on them you know you end up getting harassed by everybody really for the rest of your life you know you'll get some nickname like you know martian max or something i've spent enough time in winnemucca nevada to know that's definitely true oh yeah yeah and it yeah you you go to some and now they do have a a cowboy poetry thing up there in northern nevada that's about the only time you can get away with being called martian max or something yeah um well so i think this also leads some people to think that perhaps the government might be involved.

And obviously, if you spend enough time out in the West, really, if you spend enough time in any rural place in this country, you really will come back to the conclusion that perhaps the government is involved. And, I mean, this is something that I thought about all the time growing up in New Mexico, is just how sort of present the government is, but simultaneously not present. Like, they use the West and the desert

sort of as their testing grounds for all kinds of weapons, but also you've got Area 51 and stuff. Like, I guess does that contribute to this sort of atmosphere of never really knowing what the fuck's going on? It does. It does very much. And one reason is because of the secretive nature of government contracts and military operations.

So you often see people out there up to something. What are they up to? Why is there a convoy of medic tanks or something going through a highway in rural Arizona? Because while they might actually announce this stuff to school bus drivers and train operators and everything, it tends not to get announced in a way that everyone's going to hear it. It's not on Facebook from the Defense Department or something. Right. And in the West, you've got these, you you know almost everything's federal land in the West so

Nevada is 97% federal land I believe and Arizona New Mexico Eastern California Eastern Oregon Eastern Washington all all the the Western states just have immense public land reserves that are everything from national parks national monuments Army Navy Air Force Marine training bases nuclear test facilities nuclear dumps like Yucca Mountain Yucca flat so you've got all this kind of eerie stuff around, and the people who work there tend not to be the same people who live in the area and don't have anything to do with the base. Right.

Ken, have you ever heard of the Whip Site? The Whip Site? Yeah, W... No, I mean, tell me about it buckle up cam uh w all right i'm ready spelled w-i-p-p it's the whipsite it's so it's right outside of the town that i grew up in new mexico um but it's an underground nuclear waste storage facility um and outside of it, they've built these massive columns that are intended to

convey a message to future generations that what is buried underneath the ground is highly dangerous and radioactive. But also makes some endowments. I remember these. Yes. Yeah.

And they're hieroglyphs, and they're supposed to tell future people, no, no, don't drink the water here, and they've got a lot of skulls on them and that kind of thing. Yes, that's exactly right. It's incredibly— I want to put some of those around my house. Yeah, same. It's incredibly disturbing. Just when you think about it, these. It's incredibly disturbing. Just,

when you think about it, these massive columns in the middle of nowhere just with hieroglyphs. What I think is so hilarious about it, but also dark, is just the sort of,

like, pre-admitting that we were a failure as a society that comes along with the website. Like, we're getting out in front of it. We're in our radioactive dust.

Right. Now, you know, you have sites like, it's the, any kind of government, military power structure is going to look for these places to exploit within their borders and then without their borders when they can. So Appalachia is full of these secret vaults and hidden government cities for the apocalypse. And you know, I'll ever see a movie called Kissing Cousins. I have not.

No. Elvis Presley. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've not seen it, but I know what it is. Elvis Presley. Oh, it's kind of like a Twin Peaks kind of season three Elvis Presley movie. There's two Elvises.

And one is a country boy from the mountains. I can't remember if it's eastern Tennessee or eastern Kentucky. And then his doppelganger is a military officer who's trying to put some nukes and in outside this little holler town. And somehow there's incest with a cousin. It's just magnificent. I had to slide that in there. It was right there in the title. Right.

And it's a, it's a, it's a real weird movie, but it, the, And it's a real weird movie, but what you're expected to already know going in is that there are weird government, military, Cold War installations outside of every quaint location in the United States. Right. I think that's kind of, honestly, when you look at it, I think that's kind of almost the idea behind the Mothman.

I mean, it seems like you see some, like, Mothman sightings are always around. We were talking about this before we called you, Ken. There's a, is it Greenpoint, Tanya? Green Bank, West Virginia is where the huge satellite is. Yeah, and you mentioned it. Oh, the radio telescope. Yeah, the telescope. Right, right. I've toured it before.

And in the little, yeah, it's awesome. In the little van that they drive you around the property in, they have a little green alien hanging from the rearview mirror. So they're good humor you know that they may be one of the first ones to get a good message yeah i follow them on on twitter and whenever they've got a lot of breakthrough listen project sessions going on i try to pay a little more attention to see if things have gotten weirder around the world you know know, it's kind of like a first alert. Right. Yeah, I used to have them set as a Google alert.

I need to again, just because I was like, oh, man, I was so intrigued after the tour. It was so cool. It's a good, mysterious Twitter follow. It'll never make you angry, which is unlike pretty much any other Twitter account. Yes. Excellent. Amazing. Yeah.

You even can't, they can't even, in Green Bank, West Virginia, like they can't have any other waves, like radio waves and stuff. They only have AM, like local. I think there's even like Wi-Fi restrictions. Yeah. In the whole town. The same at a place called Goldstone in the Mojave Desert, one of the three NASA listening stations that were originally built for the Mercury and Apollo flights because it was before we had satellites in the sky.

So you needed a chain of space antennas around the world so there's one in spain outside madrid and there's one in australia and then there's one just south of death valley national park and you have it's it has a wall of mountains around it and there's nothing in there as far as people except for the people who work there. And it's just kind of radio silence. Yeah. Earlier, Ken, we were talking about, you had mentioned the 70s and how, you know, you had a sort of explosion of occult activity in the 70s. And that was kind of convenient for cops when they were talking about cattle mutilations. that was kind of convenient for cops when they were talking about cattle mutilations.

But I think that like, I've listened to your show for a while, and I think a theme that you come back to a lot is how turbulent the 70s were and how important they are for understanding our current moment. And, you know, and you talk about this a lot, especially with UFOs and other weird things that we can't explain that we kind of seem to be in another similar moment um just in the sense that there's things going on around us that we just can't explain we can find no explanation for them um could you talk a little bit about that would you say that's accurate i believe it's accurate i mean there's there's some bias and how i look at it because i grew up in that time and i just remember how

weird things were all the time and how the ensuing decades didn't seem to have that level of of of constant kind of voodoo around everything as as they did then and it was especially growing up in in the south i grew up in new orleans and the local news would be on of course everybody had the tv on all the time, the three channels. And the local news would come on and they'd start with the scary crime of the day. And then kind of right after that, they would go into gas station lines. And then the previous week's insane UFO encounters all over the South. encounters all over the South. And it was, you know, it was terrifying because they'd show these drawings that people made of, of the things that they saw coming out of whatever these apparitions were. And you're, you know, I don't know, five, seven, eight, nine years old, kind of that whole mid seventies period. I kind of watched the local news with my hands over my eyes because you knew they

were going to show another picture of one of these monsters from vicksburg or something and it was it was it rattled you because everybody was seeing stuff all the time and it wasn't just on tv you'd hear the adults at a fourth of j July party or something kind of quietly over in the corner of the yard. Talking about what they saw, you know, driving from Lake Charles to New Orleans last week. And, you know, Aunt Ray's car broke down underneath the beam of the thing. So I think it's, I mean, there's a lot of just weird parallels in general. We're in an impeachment again. We have what seems like a resurgence in union interest.

You know, that was like the first time I'd ever heard of unions in the 70s. And all of a sudden there was advertising, pro-union advertising with songs and things. Yeah. Yeah, the unions were actually being crushed, and it was kind of a last publicity attempt to bring some attention to American garment makers. But it's a number of odd things. So you've got cattle mutilations. things so you've got cattle mutilations you've got um a russia resurgence a kind of cold war resurgence it's just a it's just a weird time i i would guess that the main difference is nobody

seems to be having nearly as much sex as as people in the 70s had. Because in the 70s, it seemed like that's all anybody was doing. Whatever their job was, it was just a time of a Garden of Eden, I guess. Well, poppers were more available back then. Maybe that's why they're not as available now. That is a good point, Ken. Usually in times like these, everybody gets on some free we're becoming uh we're going the opposite way with it but yeah yeah we're too we're too nervous that's right anxiety you know i think it's that that is a good point about the 70s i was thinking about when i wrote this little thing for Popula, I guess probably a year ago now, about the Ouija board and some among other topics.

And one of the interesting things I came across is that Ouija sales outpaced Monopoly right around the time you had this rash of race riots break out in Newark and Detroit and other places. And so, you know, we kind of talked about this, too, with Hannah Gaze when we were talking about like Russian psychics toward the end of the Soviet Union. Right. Like during these uncertain times, this kind of weird stuff just kind of pops back up and becomes, you know, sort of present in our in our everyday. And I think that that, yeah, we said that those parallels are definitely there here today and so forth. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I believe I read that on Popula.

I didn't know that was you. Was that in 18? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about bone thugs and harmony in the Ouija board. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was me. So, all right, yeah. And I think it was around Halloween time. Yeah, yeah. Editors love to run that stuff. Yeah. And I think it was around Halloween time.

Yeah. Editors love to run that stuff. Yeah. It's spooky time of year. Had the key on it then. That is very much happening on a, well, we're almost out of this decade, so we can just start calling it the 20s in another couple of weeks right thank god instead of whatever we call it but so like the pattern right the the pattern app is a ouija board for today and do you have you all used the pattern app no i haven't. No, no, please, please tell. Do tell. All right, so it's kind of a personalized astrology numerology app thing,

and you get your friends and your relatives and your potential love interests and your boss or whoever. You get their time of birth and date of birth and location of birth, and it draws up star charts for all these people in your life and then gives you kind of daily advice on how to deal with them oh this is like co-star co-star is the gay version of this that's what i have yeah yeah co-star is i guess more flippant maybe i. It kind of, like, gives you a little weird remarks and things. And the pattern is more, like, it's very much in the voice of modern therapy.

Yeah. So it's, but both of these things are booming, and they both take kind of slightly different approaches to the same thing but it's very you know it's again very 70s because that's when all the love signs books were out and ouija boards were in every sears catalog and drugstore you had the exorcist everybody wanted to get an exorcist over for somebody. Terrence needs an exorcism, in fact. I would love one.

Oh, yeah. He's begged us for a lobotomy for years. Oh, yeah. So, like, I guess it's because, I mean, it kind of imparts a little bit of a narrative or framework for understanding things like and ufos kind of serve that function in in many ways um you know at one of the weird things that's going on right now there's a lot of weird things we were just talking about them cattle mutilations and whatnot but one weird thing that's going on right now is the sort of government's on right now is the sort of government's re-interest i guess maybe that's i don't know if that's the right word but um this new footage that's come out um about over you know with these ufos the department of defense released it or the pentagon did or i don't know if it was ever

official that the pentagon released it but the new York Times and the Washington Post reported on it. The thing about these things that's so weird, and you've pointed this out on an episode, is with all these stories, there's always just one detail, though, that's like a little off. It's just kind of, I think you call it like the goofball factor. It just makes it, you wonder like what is going on here, and this adds to the weirdness of it.

It wouldn't be be it would be weird enough if we were just seeing these videos and wondering what they are what's behind them but it's even weirder when we consider that the government might also have its own vested interest in putting this footage out there and that the media institutions are running stories by just random freelancers just to put us on skates a little just to put us on skates a little bit. Just to put us on skates a little bit. Right, right. It's, so this current UFO narrative involving the Pentagon, this starts two years ago when

the New York Times, seemingly out of nowhere, runs this front page story, including these stills apparently from a cockpit video recorder of these strange things that were bedeviling the pilots during a USS Nimitz carrier training thing off the coast of San Diego many years ago. And the weird thing was the story itself was not even really new. The story had come out on a Navy pilots blog maybe 10 years previous. And it had been knocked around. This is what happens when you start following this stuff. You follow all these weird boards and everything. Right. And this is what's in your mind instead of useful knowledge.

You know, when you see the New York Times and you recognize the UFO story from a message board from 10 years ago, it's time to get a new interest. Maybe donate some time to the library or something. But it's too late for me. So it wasn't a new story, but it was packaged as if it was a new story. Right. And then the story comes out.

And then Harry Reid, who had been very quiet since since his retirement comes out and this is what he comes out of retirement to talk about before he comes out to talk about trump or anything he comes out to talk about this program that he and ted stevens former republican pork master from al, had come up with. And they got this program funded, one of many programs that ultimately it's like crumbs of the defense budget. But it's enough to show that there's been consistent interest all this time. an interest all this time and the idea was they were going to put somebody in the basement at a desk and they were going to collect pilot reports from the military about what they are now trying to call uap instead of ufo so unidentified aerial phenomenon make it sound a little more legit right

i guess combat the stigma. Right. Yeah. And that's what all the names of UFO initially was kind of pilot idea because flying saucers sounded so stupid. You know, it only took UFO a decade or so to sound just as goofy to a lot of people. Right. While other people are just fine calling it whatever but yeah there's a lot of perception management on many levels

so last week at the end of the week the Pentagon comes out and clarifies almost two years later and says actually the UFO program wasn't about UFOs. It was about man-made drones.

I don't know. And then Harry Reed crawls out of his desert tortoise hole and says, no, that was my program. I started it and it was specifically about non, what appeared to be non-man-made craft and that we

were considering a security threat. So that's the, there's the goofball factor. No matter how cut and dry it seems, there's always a bunch of stuff that never adds up, that never makes sense. And there's people who pointlessly lie,, not, you know, White House press secretary sort of lying, but kind of pointless. Like, yeah, I'll say this,

but then I'm going to say it a little bit differently down the road, and I'm going to disavow everything that was based on the first very clear statement. That's the way Tom lies. So maybe he can shed some light on it. I'm very familiar with this. Those are layered lies.

You can't let the truth get in the way of a good story. Yeah, what possibly could have motivated them to call a press conference, release a press release or something about this. It's just so bizarre. It's baffling because at this point, this company that has sprung up in the wake of, well, not in the wake, the company was in place before the revelations of December 2017, a for-profit company that's also going to help disclose the you know alien whatever

and so what do they do they do what any good scientist would do they immediately sign a contract with history channel for a ufo series which you know and and they take money like if you go to their website you can buy some penny stock for the UFO company. So it's all just very, it seems designed to break your brain. Right. And to run off the people who just aren't going to tolerate that kind of, what's the word we're using again? Malarkey.

Malarkey, yes. That's the newest. The malarkey express. Hogwash. Yeah. And it's unfortunate. It is hogwash. It is.

Total hogwash. I mean, because this is also, so in this story, they also had this very juicy detail that there was alloys recovered from, you know, UFOs and people were getting sick while they were handling them. And, I mean, who knows if that's real or not, but it kind of does hint at something. I think in this story, weren't they also testing this stuff at, was it Skinwalker Ranch? No, they threw some of that in there too. They did, right.

My friend here in Pioneertown, Jeremy Corbell, makes these UFO documentaries. So he made the Skinwalker Ranch one I guess two years ago. Right. And his last one was

this Bob Lazar story from area 51 and this the story with skinwalker was that bob bigelow the hotel developer who would think that hotel developers would kind of be in charge of everything. I guess it ultimately makes sense based on our civilization. But Bob Bigelow, Robert Bigelow, he had all these hotels, extended stay kind of things, made a ton of money. He funded a paranormal department at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This was in the 90s he funded the original version of the art bell program which was called um pre-coast to coast right that was syndicated and he backed that and then he ran an organization called nids national institute of discovery science and i

encountered them about 20 years ago when i had a event that was weird enough that i wanted to report it to somebody and i looked around and these people were taking reports. So I talked to a couple of their former defense investigators, whatever they were. And he collected all kinds of material from all kinds of people who specifically saw the one kind of thing that I'd seen. And then he shut that down. And then he starts an aerospace company building inflatable habitats for NASA. I mean, from hotels to NASA. It's a natural. It's a logical leap.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very Elon Musk. And then the next thing you hear is that he's the contractor for the Pentagon for Harry Reid's UFO program. It's incredible, really. It's incredible. And he's got a big warehouse outside of vegas you drive by it guess what's on the side of it a big alien head naturally you know this could be you know how like in tennessee like even the republicans are environmentalists because like that's their like bread and butter right maybe Maybe UFO tourism is just such a cash cow in Nevada

that they have to sink resources into stuff like that. You know what I mean? That's how it is in Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell, yeah. The industry is the alien nostalgia industry. Yeah, it is so big in Nevada. When I lived out there, it was crazy. Yeah.

But this is the... It is. Go ahead. No, go ahead, Ken. Well, I was just going to add that an attempt to do something like that happened with this Storm Area 51 Facebook meme. Right. Yeah. And it ended up turning into, I don't know, 4 million people said they were going.

They were going to go to Area 51 in September and rescue E.T., I guess. And then the actual day when it was going to happen, there were four or five different kinds of festivals and events up and down the E.T. Highway up there in Lincoln County, Nevada. And hardly anybody showed up. And the Ancient Aliens show on it, which I must disclose I'm briefly on, for like 30 seconds at the end. But the event didn't end up happening. It was kind of like a wash. Like a few people showed up here and there. And it turned out that they aren't really set up in that very rural area where Rachel and Alamo, Nevada are, to have more than a couple of hundred people.

So they're not really set up to exploit it. There was a guy who tried. He has the Alien Research Center on the highway. Yeah. And he had, you know, glamping sites and everything. He was ready to rake it in. And then nobody showed up. So ancient aliens, this was their theory.

They said the government scared people from coming. Otherwise, there would have been millions. Oh, I see. And, you know, maybe. They did release a statement. They did say, like, I see. And, you know, maybe. They did release a statement. They did say, like, don't, no, do not do this. Well, let me tell you what happens when you try to go to Area 51. Because I lived out in Clark County for a year, Ken,

and stories abound from everybody that I ran into about if you try to go to Area 51, I run into about if you go try to go to area 51 once you get close enough for discomfort invariably some sort of off-road vehicle will come and admonish you to go the opposite direction and nobody ever really gets that close you remember what those guys were called locally I forget now no I just people would tell me those stories i never made the trick myself they used they called them the camo guys really because they yeah they were in camouflage but with no badges no flags no anything and in unmarked uh white four by fours so are they like uh what agency do they work for? It's unclear. They won't tell you, but they seem to be Air Force security.

Although some of it's contracted out. So Area 51 is actually part of Edwards Air Force Base, which is out here in the western Mojave. And that's its administrative mothership, I guess. And because a plane gets up, one of these supersonics gets up from Edwards, which is only about an hour plus north of Los Angeles. And it's across those couple hundred miles in a flash. So it's just the adjunct, the far eastern end of Edwards Air Force Base. Not that they don't have UFOs. I don't know that.

Well, this is the thing that's so complex or frustrating about all this, is that quite often with UFOs and UFO experiences, or even at Skinwalker Ranch, the people who once lived there, people have real experiences and they can be very traumatic. And they're certainly real to the, you know, as you've mentioned, they're real to the people that experience them. And so that kind of gets lost in this large portrait of people trying to exploit it for whatever their own sort of money-making purposes or the government doing God knows what. So that kind of adds to the sort of kaleidoscopic sort of disorienting effect of the whole thing is that there are people who have experienced things.

And what are we to make of that? And that's, I guess, what I struggle with the most. Yeah, I do as well. And I agree. The experiences are real. And when they're close up of a certain variety, they are life-changing. And not always for the positive positive but sometimes for the positive sometimes uh john mack out of harvard in the 80s interviewed and did sent questionnaires to

thousands of people who believed they had been abducted that had these like communion experiences in their homes you know with a the the weird little buddies come in and float you through the wall and all of that. And those people had really noticeable changes in their personalities. For instance, they tend to become vegetarian. They tend to become very interested in active in environmental causes. They had a different, longer view of history. Their perceptions just seemed to change from more of a micro to more of a macro, large-scale concern with humanity and the health of the planet and everything else.

It was very interesting because there's not necessarily anything in the experience that would make you think, oh, well, the obvious result. You know, driving down the road home from Thanksgiving or something in the country and you see some sinister black triangle hovering over your car for five minutes and everybody's crying and the kids are freaking out and grandma has a stroke and whatever and you get you get home and it's that should not be the obvious result i think i'm gonna join sierra club you know so there's something very heavy that goes on that we don't really understand at all. And while some eyewitnesses and experiencers, percipients, as Jacques Vallée calls them,

have a memory of something very intense that they're shown like a film you know like they see this kind of scene most people don't remember anything specific like that but they will still report these these life changes these philosophical changes yeah well i, it could be like a lot of folklore and a lot of the things, the sort of monsters or spirits or demons or whatever that populate our folklore. A lot of it could be, and UFOs could be subject to this as well. It could be a sort of rationalization or a narratization of a traumatic event that does help us explain the world a little bit better. And, you know, the Mothman is that for some people. Where I grew up, it's Chupacabra, you know,

or La Llorena or whatever. And so that could be part of it. I'm not sure. The Blair Branch Booger here. A lesser known cryptid. Sorry, Ken, go ahead. I'm sorry. The experiences do seem to be tied to place,

which is my deep interest in them, the way that these experiences become the sort of community memory of a place, experiences become the sort of community memory of a place, even if it's kind of exploited in a trashy way, like the Roswell festival or something, but even where it's not, it's just kind of like, it gets in your blood that these weird things happened in, in the, in this area. And they are, you know, they, they're a way that if you meet somebody from out of town, like if you don't have a sports team or something in common, if you're from the same place, you might know about this or that odd occurrence. What are your three of the three of you,

what's the weirdest thing you've seen out in eastern Kentucky? The only time I think we've ever seen you were with me is when we were in boone county west virginia we were doing the batonading oh yeah and the thing that was floating over town and everybody was running out of their storefronts and their apartments and their houses like looking at this thing that looked like wasn't like quite like a hot air balloon right but it kind of looked like that. And then nobody knew what the hell it was. And then later on, I guess the explanation was that, oh, the Pepsi bottling company or something was doing some kind of promotion. It was supposed to be like a Pepsi thing, but there was no Pepsi branding on it.

And it's like, what the hell would Pepsi bottling company in Boone County, West Virginia? You know, it was just strange it was just strange but that's that's the one thing that sticks out to me is not that's you know local issue right all right are a lot of people around here experience um bigfoot sightings i mean that's a big one around here but around here it's called wood booger right the wood booger yeah right wood booger yeah um i don't know have you anything ever happened to you tanya like that i can't think i mean i've seen some real trippy bird migrations near water near lakes but right yeah just like hundreds of birds suddenly where you are that's fucked Well, me and Tom used to host a radio show. Like thousands, suddenly.

Me and Tom used to host a radio show on our local community radio station. And we had a guy call into us one night who had seen a UFO in Pike County, in nearby Pike County. And there's one in Floyd County. There's a really famous one in Floyd County From about 10 or 15 years ago That people talk about all the time Really? Yeah

What's the name of that one? I don't remember the name But if I remember it We'll find out for you I'll send it to you There was one on Lotz Creek One time That a lot of people in Perry County saw

Yeah I was with God damn what's his name You wouldn't believe him if he told you he saw something cleve cleveland i was with cleveland there was some really weird just like dark i don't fucking know object yeah object in lots creek and like everyone in lots creek saw it right right well i mean i think that places like this and places like the desert are very amenable to that kind of mysterious experience right like there's not a lot of

people around and there's not a lot of technology in general around and so well also i feel like in cities people don't look up people aren't looking at the sky as much there's a lot more stimulus uh that's true closer to them and they i guess you kind of have to be looking around because there's so much shit going on right well with the phoenix lights you know supposedly thousands of people witnessed various uh phenomenon phenomenon reported on that night in 1997. And a lot of the reports, if you read them online, it's very haphazard that they saw it because it was during kind of the drive home, you know, people stopping at the grocery store after work and sitting there in traffic.

And you see it again and again somebody would say i just happened to look up there were hundreds of cars around me everybody had to have seen it yeah but they were the one who looked up there's an incredible video of this by the way i mean phoenix lines yeah youtube you can find all kinds of videos it's uh really captivating what what about you ken if you don't mind divulging what was the thing that was strange enough that you felt like it was reportable that that was uh one of these black triangles and that was in Eastern California, driving up the 395 on the desert side of the Sierra Nevada. And it's the main road through there.

It goes up to Reno and then up to Idaho. Yeah. But it's not like bumper to bumper or anything. So I was driving up there for the holidays in 2001, and there had been this light on the horizon that caught our attention. And kind of as soon as we started talking about it, the light kind of grows and then zips to right. I mean, it looked like it was 10, 12 miles away. We're trying to figure out, oh, is that a radio tower? Is that the next

town? Whatever. And it just moved from the horizon to next to my Jeep I'm driving and was hovering off the the side of the road divided highway maybe i don't know 200 feet off the road i mean it was close enough that it had a big white spotlight coming out of the the belly of it and you could see the individual desert plants you know the brush and stuff the sage on the ground in this beam of light it's incredibly bright yeah yeah it was nuts and the thing itself was kind of indistinct it was matte black and it had uh red lights on the points and it was kind of from the intensity of the light coming out of it, it was hard to make out any real details above it. But you could see the definite triangle shape.

And you could see clouds behind it because it was still a little light in the sky. And so I pulled over. I went over a cattle guard because it's the range, you know, cattle country. So it was fencing on the side. So I waited until I saw a little dirt turn off, and I turned off, went over the cattle guard, and jumped out to get a glance of the thing kind of directly, not through a windshield or through the passenger window.

And I saw it just for a little bit, and it was close. I mean, it was, I don't know, like a four or five story building high you know from where where you were on the ground and as soon as i got a good look at it it just blinked off like a light and it was gone and it was no sound totally quiet and you just kind of standing there like a dope, looking at the sky. Where'd it go? Then he saw a little kind of like bent arc, like almost like a shooting star,

but with a trail going southeast from that direction, kind of over Barstow. If you're looking at a map or know the area. And it just kind of arced over this cumulus cloud that was over the valley there and thought, well, maybe that was it. That also is kind of but the the the meat of the thing was this just monster silent thing that it wasn't flying it was just sitting in the sky you know very close to the ground and it yeah it was it was unnerving i i was already interested in the subject i'd seen some weird lights in the skies my family members had seen things my dad was a pilot and he'd kind of make offhand remarks sometimes he never reported anything because they'd start treating you like you were a nut

right at the local airport so that was it and i almost forgot about it for three or four years. Which is weird because now I think, how would you forget about something like that? It would be like forgetting that, I don't know, that the Incredible Hulk smashed your house or something. It seems like one of those things that you, you know, items of note and a life. Yeah. Yeah. But I really did pretty much forget about it. And then when I'd make that drive again, every time I got around that area, it would all kind of come back.

Like, oh, it was right around here, wasn't it? So that was that one i can't really guess uh if you know it sent me a secret message or anything it did not send me lottery numbers it did not send me anything that would have kind of changed my finances. Too bad. But, you know, one thing that it did change is that it took a couple of years, but I'd been kind of a straight journalist previous to that. I had lots of weird things I was interested in, but, you know, pre-podcast and blogs and all of that,

you know, pre podcast and blogs and all of that, you didn't put a lot of your personality into covering the farm board or whatever. Right. So, uh, and after that time, I did find that I kind of moved into, you know, to the point where, where this is what we're doing. This is somehow what we do for work. What in the hell? Talking about UFOs and Wood Booker and et cetera. Well, I, for one, I'm glad you figured it out because Desert Oracle is, without adding that, it's number one with a bullet for me, my favorite podcast. And I just, yeah, it's just so good to have you out here yeah and before oh thank you i appreciate that no we're we're huge and oh it makes me very

happy to have you guys doing what you're doing from you know it's it's like i think it was uh anna merlin who turned on you to to your show um a while ago and it's just it's so fun you know to it it feels like I'm connected to you know places that I've I never have lived there but I was there enough and as you know you you can move away from eastern Kentucky but it doesn't move away from you. That's exactly right. Very true. Yeah. Well, Ken, before we let you go here, there's one more thing I wanted to talk about, and we can cover it briefly.

But at the beginning of this year, you wrote something for Popula called Happy Year of the Alien Invasion. And it was about Oumuamua that's right which passed by earth uh in october 2017 we've been talking about weird stuff that have been going on uh not just in the world of ufology or or cryptology or cryptozoology or anything like that, but also just in the broader world, in the world of politics and culture and everything else. So right smack dab in the middle of all this, you have this mysterious object that just scoots by Earth,

about 15 million miles from Earth. Could you tell us a little bit about it? You know, what it is, why it's important, and what some people are saying about it. Hold on, is ufology real? Did you just make that up? No, it is a real thing.

Ufology? Yeah. Ufology. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's real, like, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses or Presbyterians are real. I mean, if people get together and swear, it's real. Not any more kooky, more or less kooky than anything else. Yeah, true, Billy.

No, it's theology. You're basically going over a handful of really wild reports. Right. Experiences that people have had, and you're trying to somehow duplicate that experience in the minds and hearts of the followers, and you hope something's going to come of it. Right, right.

So Oumuamua, that's a Hawaiian word for a visitor that comes from far away. And that is the name that the astronomers at the big telescope on the big island, I think, is it Big Island or is it the one on Oahu? I think it's the big one. Okay. So we'll just say it is. A visiting astronomer picked up something weird and picked it up after it had already done its closest flyby of Earth.

But what was weird was the trajectory of it. And so what was able to be figured out, and this was the shocker, is that it was not like the usual stuff we see in the sky, comets, meteors, etc., asteroids. It wasn't from our solar system. And so by kind of backwards engineering the track, because then they followed it, including the West Virginia Observatory followed it, they were able to figure out that it had dropped in from above our solar system above our sun it kind of just dropped straight down and then it got a gravity assist from the sun and then shoots pretty close to us and we don't notice until it's long gone. Isn't this so concerning? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You think. It was in. What else do astrologers have to fucking do? Then observe. Rocks that come in and out of the solar system. Well, you know, you follow the news long enough and you get these things pretty often.

Like, oh, NASA has just discovered a near-Earth asteroid that's going to make a near-miss in three days. Right. So there's a lot of things that we're seeing for the first time because we finally have the imaging capability and the radio telescope capability to do it so maybe there have been quite a few of these things that have dropped in from outside the solar system but maybe this is the first one we noticed so we've since noticed another one i say we like i'm you know an astronomer up there at JPL and Caltech just going over the data. Good boys! All of these.

But what was especially weird about Oumuamua is that it appeared to be a cylinder. It wasn't a comet. It didn't have a dust and ice trail. It wasn't a comet. It didn't have a dust and ice trail. It was rotating in a way that was very familiar to people who had enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama, because Rama was an interstellar probe that was a long cylinder that was noticed dropping into the solar system

and noticed as it left Earth. And then the Earth characters in the book jump in a rocket and they go chase the thing as it's headed out to Jupiter. And then they board it and it's this mysterious relic of an ancient civilization. They can never quite figure out what it is. It's a very, very disturbing story because it doesn't really end in any way that is comforting. And so the astronomers in Hawaii, they originally wanted to call this thing Rama for the Arthur C. Clarke book. But in deference to being in Hawaii, they gave it a Hawaiian name.

Life imitating art. It really is. It really is. And like that, it is kind of disturbing because there is no conclusion to it. It's this mysterious object that we're just left to sort of speculate as to what it is. One thing I did see, you had mentioned, I think, this in your piece, the Harvard, I think, astronomer Avi Loeb. I read an article, I read an interview with him in Horowitz kind of recently,

and he sort of speculated that it could have been like a solar sail. But then I read on, and I think this is because he sort of has his own business where he's trying to create these solar cells that are powered by solar power, and they send them out. And theoretically, they can reach another galaxy in 50 years, and we can take photos and stuff like that. Right. It's like near light speed travel. Right. Once they get up to speed over a period of time.

Right. And he admits that, that that's an interest that he has and that he has contributed to the development. A couple of these things have been tried, little flocks of them. And it's too early to know how it's going to work. But he was interested in that part but i think that amua amua is completely weird and and compelling without any of that other stuff just because you know you saw the pictures of it that accompanied the articles yeah oh yeah that was just that was a artist at i believe at the european space agency who drew who they told them okay it's cylinder shaped it's probably an asteroid and so he said okay well asteroids aren't cylinder shaped so I'll make it cylinder shaped, but I'll give it like rocky edges.

Right. Yeah, just to dress it up a little bit. But there was nothing from what little observation that we really had. The only picture we have of it, it's just a point of light. It was that far

gone, even through the biggest telescopes we have. Hubble pointed at it. And was it Hubble or Kepler? One of the two. I think it was that far gone you know even through the biggest telescopes we have hubble pointed at it and was it hubble or kepler one of the two i think it was how they turned around and got it and it's just a it's just a dot of light so we don't know if it looks rocky you know we don't know it it might have like fins and racing stripes on it right for all we know. Dale Earnhardt's number three. Dale Earnhardt's number three. That's what you want, yeah. Well, money's on it being phallic. That's just a gift.

It is very phallic. It was tumbling in space, so this is an interesting way to travel because if it was tumbling, it could have its own artificial gravity within. Ooh. Wow. Holy shit. So you could stand on it. Right.

So like in 2001, you know, they're jogging in the circular space station, which is also Arthur C. Clark wrote that. Right. So maybe it's just all of Clarke's weird things. Maybe he was just a prophet. He manifested it into the universe. Yeah, yeah. Well, Ken, so as the story was titled Happy Year of the Alien Invasion,

we didn't get an alien invasion this year, at least not one that we know of or at least not a master we got a little time oh yeah that's true we still have a few weeks to go weeks to go but um but if it's true if it doesn't turn out to be this year hopefully 2020 will be the year it would be fitting for it anyways um it it would be fitting, and it's also a lot to expect that if something like that were to occur, which at some point for some civilization on this planet, it probably will occur, that it would be announced. I mean, you know, this whole argument like, well, why don't they land on the White House lawn? Would you land on the White House lawn?

well, why don't they land on the White House lawn? Would you land on the White House lawn? I would stay as far away from those people as possible. Yeah. And, you know, try to find, like, somebody good, like the little boy with the E.T. or the little girl in Poltergeist. You know, you want to try to communicate with something a little more pure of heart.

Right. So maybe it's already here and we don't know. Maybe it's like the Lord said. You know, it's the kingdom of heaven is here and we do not see it. Yeah. Well, let's hope so. Let's open our eyes and hearts. That's right.

Ken, given your growing area of expertise i wonder if you're an octavia butler fan oh you know i've had it suggested but no not yet to give me tell me where to start well lilas brood um it's a trilogy so there's three books in that i think um but it's a lot of uh well it's uh futurism for sure but uh just a lot of wild details of other beings and how they interact with humans really cool shit oh i'm gonna i'm gonna get into that right now. You know, we have a local used science fiction store here in Joshua Tree called Space Cowboy Books. And it was, I think it was named before Casey had her big hit with the same title. Yeah. And he's got all the good stuff and uh she's a california writer so i would expect he

would have a collection so i'm gonna i just put that on my list yeah good well speaking of uh when we were talking about uh these things um running in motion with you know oddly paralleling uh with cultural things like sex movements our last episode was about sex cults but um i was turned on to octavia butler through adrian marie brown who writes about pleasure activism uh so yeah so there's a lot of anyway i think you'll enjoy it. It'll take you down a few paths. Oh, good, good. Yeah.

Just, you know, because the, the whole science fiction world that I grew up in was a bunch of, you know, white suburban guys who played Dungeons and Dragons. And mysteriously, a lot of the, the women's sci-fi writers or people of color sci-fi writers did not get mentioned a lot in that world except for ender's game guy right orson orson scott card who turned out to be a conservative yeah that's right who turned out to be very yeah yeah maybe that makes sense now yeah yeah um well ken it's it's been a blast i i want to do i mean i could talk for hours on this but um we got to let you go um so hopefully we can do this again very soon um oh we'll do it again we'll have to figure out how to get you

on desert oracle radio oh that'd be a dream. That would be a dream come true. We might need to take some calls about this this wood bugger? Wood bugger. Is this thing's name? Yeah, wood bugger. Wood bugger. There's a whole festival. Wood bugger sounds a little nicer than the wood bugger who

seems like more of a demon-like entity. Wood bugger seems like Baby Yoda, you know? Yeah. Yeah, well, we could do Woodbooger. We'll do the website. We've got all kinds of stuff for you, Ken. Oh, good. All right, all right.

Well, let's plan it out, because, you know, hungry for content over here in the desert. Same here. Can relate. Well, before we cut cut you loose tell folks where they can find you at if they're not already initiated oh sure uh you can find desert oracle the printed field guide in stores around the desert and in places like skylight books in Los Angeles or online. We have a website of course is a desert oracle.com and we're on the

Instagram and everything else. We post lots of, lots of pretty and or weird pictures of the desert and the stuff we do out here. And then the radio show, uh, it's on four stations now and the podcast is everywhere on iTunes and Spotify and Pandora. It's called Desert Oracle Radio, and they are either half-hour or one-hour episodes about the mysteries and history and lore and kind of odd characters that

tend to collect in such places. Great. Well, subscribe to the show, subscribe to the magazine, and, Ken, it's been a blast. We will see you next time, huh? Yeah. Come visit us, Ken. Thank you.

Come visit your homeland. Oh, I'm going to come visit. I'm going to come visit. I'm going to come visit. Yeah, we'll put you up. I got a road trip planned. I'll let you know. Excellent. Excellent.

Well, we'll talk to you later, Kim. All right. Thanks for having me. Thanks, man. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Now it's dark.

Now it's dark. Into the night. I cry out, I cry out your name.