Tonight we talk about the film that really kicked off the Bigfoot phenomena in earnest — Roger Patterson’s Bigfoot film from 1967.  Author and expert Jeff Hilling talks about the film, the clues to its legitimacy and why it is so important.

You can find Jeff’s site on the subject at PattersonFilm.com

SPONSORED LINK

ON THE SHOW, I MENTION OUR PARANORMAL PLUS COURSES…SIGNUP AT JimHAROLD.NET 

For your reference, here is the Patterson film (note, I did not say video — it is a film):

Three heartfelt stories highlight this edition of Campfire, two are poignant and one is downright terrifying.  It is all on this week’s Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured 77 Shadow Street

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

While loyal TPR listeners are awaiting the return of the new version of The Paranormal Report, please enjoy this edition of Weird News Radio.

If you like what you hear, you can find all the episodes at WeirdNewsRadio.com

Also, you can subscribe to get the show for free & automatically via iTunes, click the graphic below:

Here is the feed to use for non-iTunes software: http://weirdnewsradio.com/category/weird-news-radio-podcast-episodes/feed/

Click below to hear the show:

Great news, though the personnel lineup has changed, The Paranormal Report will resume production on the weekend of February 4th with Jim as host.

TPR 2.0 will bring you the best paranormal video and audio on the net!  Listen to Jim’s announcement and thanks for all of your support!

Philip Coppens

Author Phillip Coppens joins us to discuss The Ancient Alien Question!

You can find his book on Amazon.com:

The Ancient Alien Question: A New Inquiry Into the Existence, Evidence, and Influence of Ancient Visitors

The Ancient Alien Question – KINDLE EDITION

Check out his website at PhilipCoppens.com

Thanks Phillip!

A man meets the girl of his dreams literally in his dreams!  A strange and elaborate story from the UK and Jim’s wife tells a short story of some strange activity in the Harold household!

Enjoy!  Please RT, Like & Share if you are a Campfire fan!

Looking for a show with two hosts, great chemistry and witty repartee?

Find all the best in weird news with Jim Harold & Kate Botello!  Check it out at WeirdNewsRadio.com

Audio statement on TPR

Maria DeSimone

Astrologer Maria DeSimone joins us to discuss what is in the stars for 2012 and she takes listener calls!

You can check out her site at InsightfulAstrology.com

-AUDIBLE-

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

The mythical god Pan and three Ouija stories highlight our little fireside chat this week!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Great Classic Ghost Stories: Sixteen Unabridged Classics

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

We’re back after a long holiday. Enjoy!

Birds Fall Dead From Sky…Again!

NASA Naysays 2012 Doomsday Talk

Historic Hypnotic Alien Abductee Study Revisited

New Year’s Utah UFO Sighting

Please LIKE, RT, and +1 the update if you enjoy the content.  Thanks!

A trip to a “lunatic asylum”, an entity that made sure it was noticed, a home where strange things had a way of happening, and a Mother and Daughter who shared a very strange experience.  All this on the first Campfire of 2012!

Time to get back to some paranormal goodness.  Happy Holidays everyone!  Since paranormal reportage is on a bit of a vacation this week, I’ll be back on Monday, Jan 2nd with a new update.  Happy Holidays everyone.

Note: A new Campfire episode will be released on New Year’s Day.

Scientists Mount Volunteer Effort To Find Alien Life On Moon!

Yeti DNA Test Results

Can A Hamster Have A Ghost?!

2011′s Top UFO Stories

Please LIKE, RT, and +1 the update if you enjoy the content.  Thanks!

Our last daily update until Tuesday, Dec 27th.  Merry Christmas To Everyone!

We Hear A Major UFO Sighting Is Due On The Early Morning Hours Of December 25th, Track It HERE

Metallic Ball Falls From Space

Invisibility Cloak…Not So Crazy

Chupacabra Spotted In Canada?

1,100 Year Old Mayan Ruins Found In Georgia

How Paranormal TV Has Evolved

Please LIKE, RT, and +1 the update if you enjoy the content.  Thanks!

The paranormal never takes a holiday, but Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you & yours!

West Virginia Thanksgiving Bigfoot Sighting

Maryland “Seven Cone” UFO Sighting

More Than Three Wise Men?

Mayans Celebrate, Not Fear, 2012

Please LIKE, RT, and +1 the update if you enjoy the content.  Thanks!

Today’s update on our strange world.  Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!

Earth Sized Planets Found, Says NASA

Shroud Of Turin Is Supernatural According To New Study

Death By…Shapeshifter?

Child’s Fears Prompt Santa Friendly Chimney

Australian Air Force Flying Saucer Mystery

Please LIKE, RT, and +1 the update if you enjoy the content.  Thanks!

In this Parnormal Podcast Christmas special, we revisit a previous episode from 2009 on Haunted Christmas and end the program with a visit with the Harold Family and St. Nick.

Haunted Christmas

When we think of Christmas, ghosts are usually not top of mind…but perhaps they should be according to our guest Mary Beth Crain.  We talk to her about her book on the subject.

You can find the book at Amazon.com:

Haunted Christmas: Yuletide Ghosts and Other Spooky Holiday Happenings

Haunted Christmas: Yuletide Ghosts and Other Spooky Holiday Happenings - KINDLE

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to everyone!

Please LIKE us if you enjoy the daily updates.  This one has some science thrown in for good measure.

NASA Announcing More Planet Discoveries Today

Angelic Encounters

Scientists Find Source Of Stonehenge Stones

Kansas Main Street UFO  Is…

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays.

Stories of note in our weird world.  Happy Holidays – Jim

Say Cheese, Speed Of Light – You’re on Candid Camera!

Chinese “Waterway of Blood”

I Saw The Funniest Thing While Out Spacewalking

What Doesn’t Kill You DOES Make You Stronger, Scientists Say

2011 Passings In Cryptozoology

Please check out over 400 of Jim’s free audio and video podcasts on the world of the weird here at JimHarold.com

A listener’s Mom makes herself known after a dream, a woman tells of meeting a shadow person as a child, a very strange Mothman-like experience from West Virginia, and we reprise a favorite Christmastime story of the weird.

All on this episode of the Campfire!  Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Skipping Christmas

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Stories of note in our strange world.  Happy Holidays – Jim

UFO Driven Down Main Street In Kansas on an 18 Wheeler?

It’s Raining…Apples!?

Voynich Manuscript, Cracked?

Homeowners Puzzled at Simultaneous Failure of 40 Garage Door Openers

Please check out over 400 of Jim’s free audio and video podcasts on the world of the weird here at JimHarold.com

Selected stories of note in the paranormal world today – Happy Holidays!

Lie Detectors Back Up Roswell Eyewitnesses!

Miracles Of The Season

Cryptozoologist Of The Year

New Jersey “Cloaked Triangle UFO” Sighting

Will we all become “Dr. Doolittles”?

Please check out over 400 of Jim’s free audio and video podcasts on the world of the weird here at JimHarold.com

Paranormal author extraordinaire, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, joins to talk to us about her latest book Talking To The Dead.  Rosemary thinks we are making great progress in communicating to the other side!

Find her book, co-authored with George Noory, at Amazon.com:

Talking To The Dead

Talking To The Dead – KINDLE

Also, don’t forget to check out Rosemary’s many other Paranormal books: Rosemary’s Amazon Page

Here is Rosemary’s website: VisionaryLiving.com

Author Geoff Holder takes us on a paranormal tour of the British Isles.  We talk about stone circles, Loch Ness, and all manner of the strange and supernatural.

You can find many of his paranormal books at Amazon.com: Geoff Holder Amazon Page

Geoff’s site is at GeoffHolder.com

Thanks Geoff!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Raising Stony Mayhall

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

A first responder tells of a patient’s NDE, an unwanted guest visits a couple after watching a spooky movie, a man finds eerie pictures of dead people and more on this edition of Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Join us in our encounter with the one and only UFO Phil!  An “experiencer” since early childhood, Phil shares his philosophy and alien-inspired music.

Note, in case you didn’t notice, Jim’s tongue is firmly in cheek on this one.  Enjoy!

Check out Phil’s music and site at UFOPhil.com

Thanks Phil!

A ouija board, a strange dream, a family with paranormal happenings across several generations and a shadow person who is a peeping Tom?  It is all on this edition of Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured a special Hugo Cabret promotion

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at this special URL!

Cancer survivor and author Seth David Chernoff talks about his latest book in the Manual For Living series Connections.  We discuss those connections, how we deepen them and get beyond a superficial way of living.

You can find his books at Amazon.com:

Manual for Living. Book Two, Connection : a User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life

Manual For Living: CONNECTION, A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life – KINDLE

You can also visit Seth’s website at SethDavidChernoff.com

Thanks Seth!

A woman recounts a teenage memories of two haunted houses, a little girl’s strange memory that hints at reincarnation, and a book that made itself know without help of human hand.  It is all on this edition of Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured 11-22-63: A Novel by Stephen King

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Dr. Richard Wiseman says that we see what isn’t there when it comes to paranormal activity…in other words, we see what we want to see.  He discusses his perspective on this edition of The Paranormal Podcast.

You can find Dr. Wiseman’s book on the subject at Amazon.com:

Paranormality: Why we see what isn’t there

Paranormality: Why we see what isn’t there – Kindle

You can also visit Dr. Wiseman’s website at http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/

Thanks Dr. Wiseman!

Native Americans have always been associated with spirituality.  The Iroquois continue to have this connection to the present day.  We discuss the matter with authors Michael Bastine and Mason Winfield about the mystical tie this group of people have maintained through the generations.

You can check out their book on the subject at Amazon.com:

Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People – KINDLE

Visit Mason’s website at masonwinfield.com

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Steve Jobs

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

We hear a touching tale of a grandmother who lets her granddaughter know that she is not alone, a vision that pre-dates our listener’s birth, and an encounter with La Llorona.  This and more on this week’s Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 100,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Steve Jobs

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Erich van Daniken’s latest book is on Greek gods and how they may not have been gods at all but ancient aliens.  His editor for the book, Philip Coppens, joins us to talk about the concept and his work with this legend in the paranormal field.  Happy Halloween from JimHarold.com where its Halloween every day of the year!

You can check out the book at Amazon.com:

Odyssey of the Gods: The History of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient Greece

Odyssey of the Gods-KINDLE

You can also check out Philip’s website at philipcoppens.com

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Steve Jobs

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

For Halloween, we share some of our spookiest stories from 2011 so far!  Happy Halloween!

Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Insomnia

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

–Jim’s Book Now On Nook–

Jim’s Book Is Now On The Nook. Go HERE for more details.

The legendary Brad Steiger regales us with stories and the lore of the werewolf and other shape shifting beings.  We also discuss his latest venture into electronic publishing with a regular series of new ebooks!

Here are is Brad’s Werewolf Book at Amazon.com:

The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings

The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings-KINDLE

Here is the first of Brad’s exciting new series of ebooks!

Real Nightmares: True and Truly Scary Unexplained Phenomena

You can check out Brad’s site at BradAndSherry.com

Thanks Brad!

A Doctor makes the rounds — after his death?  Grandma (or something else) visits her family after she has departed this world.  A young woman encounters a weird creature while exploring some local tunnels plus a shadow figure chases down a listener from the UK but he is saved by his — cat!  All this on this week’s super spooky Campfire!

Christopher Quaratino has a unique distinction, he was one of the Lutz children who lived through “The Amityville Horror”.  Chris feels that the story has been horribly distorted in books and movies. He plans to set the record straight!  He also discloses what he thinks brought on the strange happenings at his childhood home.  Find out how he plans to make his side known on this edition of The Paranormal Podcast.

Check out his plan at AmityvilleHorrorChallenge.com

Thanks Chris!

-Dreamcatcher Entertainment-

New York area listeners, check out these plays, part of the Ghost Light Series, that are perfect for the Halloween season!

The Death of Emily Webster: October 22-30, Saturdays 3pm, Sundays 3pm

East in Red: October 20-30, Thurs-Sat 8:00pm, Sun 7:00pm

WHERE: Roy Arias Theatre Center; 300 W. 43rd St – 5th Floor

For more information, go to dreamcatcherentertainment.biz

A phantom boy who brings mystery…and possibly healing, a UFO sighting and a listener who died and lived to tell about it on this Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Catching Fire

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

-Dreamcatcher Entertainment-

New York area listeners, check out these plays, part of the Ghost Light Series, that are perfect for the Halloween season!

The Death of Emily Webster: October 22-30, Saturdays 3pm, Sundays 3pm

East in Red: October 20-30, Thurs-Sat 8:00pm, Sun 7:00pm

WHERE: Roy Arias Theatre Center; 300 W. 43rd St – 5th Floor

For more information, go to dreamcatcherentertainment.biz

A spooky yet touching story of a Mother who did not let death stop her from coming to visit, a grandfather sends a signal from beyond, phantom smells, and a haunted house.  All on this episode of Campfire.

-Dreamcatcher Entertainment-

New York area listeners, check out these plays, part of the Ghost Light Series, that are perfect for the Halloween season!

The Death of Emily Webster: October 22-30, Saturdays 3pm, Sundays 3pm

East in Red: October 20-30, Thurs-Sat 8:00pm, Sun 7:00pm

WHERE: Roy Arias Theatre Center; 300 W. 43rd St – 5th Floor

For more information, go to dreamcatcherentertainment.biz

Some time ago, we had put out a call for an essays to be considered for Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories.  We received a lot of great entries but the winner was “Herman” by Janese.  Here it is for your edification. Prepare to be freaked out, thanks Janese!

Bonus: Campfire Essay Contest Winner

“Herman” by Janese

About eight years ago, I had an experience I’ll never forget. I was 22 years old, a military wife and a new mother. My husband was deployed, so my 11 month old daughter and I were living with my grandparents. Both of my grandparents were in failing health so it worked out for us all. The house was only about 50 years old, having been built by my grandfather in the 1960s. My daughter and I shared a bedroom in the finished basement of the house.

I am no stranger to the paranormal. My mother has a farmhouse a few miles away from my grandparents. The house is nearly 200 years old and we have had many paranormal experiences. Everything from levitating objects to disappearing/reappearing objects. Cold spots, footsteps, music that has no source, full body apparitions – all of these and more became routine growing up on the farm. The paranormal doesn’t shake me, it does make me more interested to find out the truth, however.

One clear summer night, I was lying in bed, not yet asleep. My daughter was in her crib a few feet from my bed. The top 3 feet or so of the basement was above ground, windows high up on the walls allowing for the moonlight to shine in the room. The windows were open, it was a warm night that is typical for early summer in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Suddenly, I became aware of a very uncomfortable feeling. I couldn’t quite establish what this feeling was, just that I was feeling very, very uneasy. I glanced down toward the bottom of the bed and saw what I thought was my daughter toddling along the bottom of the bed. I could only see the shadow of the top of her head and I remember thinking that she must have crawled out of her crib and was coming to get in bed with me. I smiled and laid my head back down, waiting for her to come to the side of the bed. I felt her grab the bedspread to pull herself up on top of the bed and I thought I would give her a little help. When I tried to reach over to the side of the bed though, I found I was unable to move. My first reaction was that this was very strange but as the seconds passed, I still couldn’t move. I could feel her tugging on the bedcovers, climbing up the side and I became alarmed, thinking I was having a stroke or seizure…any explanation for my sudden paralysis. Just then, the little figure made it up and crawled over to me and I fought a panic I’ve never felt before. It was not my daughter. It was not human at all. I don’t know what exactly it was but it was roughly 24” tall, greenish-brown and resembled what I can only describe as “Yoda.” I was in full-blown panic and I could feel my heart pounding, my breath heaving and I was shaking like a leaf. This “thing” crawled up onto my chest and sat down, cross-legged, and just studied my face. I still couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. I remember feeling my heart beating harder and harder. My breath was coming faster and faster and I began to think that if this continued, I was going to go into cardiac arrest. I have no idea how long it sat on me, just looking at me with a quizzical expression, 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes….it felt like an eternity.

Just when I thought that my heart was going to hammer right out of my chest, the little figure got a sudden look of complete surprise on his face. He never sad a word but I distinctly felt him send a wave of emotion over me. It was as if he was telepathically apologizing for frightening me to such a degree and he didn’t mean to scare me. With that, he hopped up, jumped off the bed and scampered out the door of the bedroom. Instantly, I could move and I flew out of bed. I grabbed my still sleeping daughter out of her crib and ran with everything I had out through the apartment and up the stairs to the main house, flipping on every light I passed.

I spent the night in the recliner upstairs that night with the lights on, my daughter curled happily in my arms. For the next 6 months, I slept with all the lights blazing in the apartment at night. I figured if I gave it a silly, non-threatening name, I could make it a little less scary. Each night before bed, I would stop at my bedroom door, look around the apartment and say “No visits tonight, Herman.” It helped….a little.

I still don’t know what it was. He’s never returned and for that , I’m glad. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. I have been through some pretty distressing situations in my life but I’ve never been so afraid of anything.

JANESE

PENNSYLVANIA

Paranormal author, radio host, investigator, TV host and all around good guy Dave Schrader joins us to talk about how he got into paranormal radio, how his philosophy has changed over the years, and why we are so fascinated by the paranormal.

Check out his book at Amazon.com:

The Other Side: A Teen’s Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal

Here are Dave’s sites that we mention on the show:

DarknessRadio.com

DarknessEvents.com

Thanks Dave!

Dr. Bob Curran

Dr. Bob Curran regales us with stories of the world’s creepiest places as only he can.  One of our favorite guests on The Paranormal Podcast and he does not disappoint.  You can find his book detailing these creepy places at Amazon.com: The World’s Creepiest Places

Also, check out his many other books: Bob Curran’s Page at Amazon.com

You can also check out some of our previous shows with Dr. Bob:  CLICK HERE FOR MORE BOB CURRAN SHOWS

Check out Dr. Bob Curran’s website HERE

Thanks Dr. Bob!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Killing Lincoln

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

–Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories–

Also, please check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories. 73 tales of the strange and supernatural…pick it up at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

CLICK HERE for links on & info on how to get your copy signed!

A guardian angel, messages from love ones from beyond and a school project gives a student more than she bargained for – a possible possession!   This and more on this week’s Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Reamde

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

–Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories–

Also, please check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories. 73 tales of the strange and supernatural…pick it up at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

CLICK HERE for links on & info on how to get your copy signed!

Jeff Belanger

Jeff Belanger joins us once again to discuss the world’s most haunted places.  Jeff is a paranormal expert par excellence and he gives his insights on the globe’s spookiest sites.

You can find his book on the subject at Amazon.com:

The World’s Most Haunted Places, Revised Edition: From the Secret Files of Ghostvillage.com

Thanks Jeff!

–Audible–
They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Snakes In Suits

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal
—-
–Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories–

Also, please check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories. 73 tales of the strange and supernatural…pick it up at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

CLICK HERE for links on & info on how to get your copy signed!

A ghost driver, a haunted ambulance service, a son’s story of the possession of his Mother and much more on this super sized Campfire!

–Audible–
They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Ben Behind His Voices

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire
—-
–Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories–

Also, please check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories. 73 tales of the strange and supernatural…pick it up at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

CLICK HERE for links on & info on how to get your copy signed!

John Kachuba

John Kachuba takes us on a tour of one of America’s most divers, and it turns out most haunted, states — my home Ohio.

You can check out his books on the subject at Amazon.com:

Ghosthunting Ohio On the Road Again (America’s Haunted Road Trip)

Ghosthunting Ohio On the Road Again (America’s Haunted Road Trip) KINDLE EDITION

You can also check out John’s site at jkachuba.com

–Audible–

They support us, please support them!  Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured The Gray Man

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

We have a hot one tonight!  Stories of demons, failed attempts to connect with a caller maybe influenced by an entity (?), an urban legend come true and a service man who has a weird encounter with a dark being that can run through steel doors.  All this on this week’s Campfire!

–Audible–
They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured The Omen Machine

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

—-

–Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories–
Also, please check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories. 73 tales of the strange and supernatural…pick it up at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

CLICK HERE for links on & info on how to get your copy signed!

Jim is furiously working on publicity on his new book, so he is taking the week off for Campfire and Paranormal Podcast.  Rest assured, he’ll be back next week with new content for both!  In the meantime, please order his book Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories.  Thanks!

Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories

Mary Ann

Famous for being the basis of the TV series, The Ghost Whisperer, Mary Ann talks about her life time of psychic involvement, being part of a big time Hollywood production and we discuss her new book which mixes the paranormal with cuisine!

You can find it at Amazon.com:

Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer’s Cookbook: More than 100 Recipes from the Dearly Departed

You can also check out her website at MaryAnnWinkowski.com

Thanks Mary Ann!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them!  Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Monster Hunter International

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

The show is named after one of my favorite stories of all time Campfire stories which debuts on this episode, plus there’s a haunted dorm, the tale of the haunted hut and some real ghosthunt EVP around our jam packed electronic Campfire!

Don’t forget about Jim’s new book.  Here is the link to pre-order at Amazon.com:

Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Aftertime

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Marie D Jones

Is our life planned by someone or something or is it all personal choice?  That is the question on tonight’s Paranormal Podcast with on of our favorite guests, Marie D. Jones.  You can find her book on the subject at Amazon.com:

Destiny vs. Choice: The Scientific and Spiritual Evidence Behind Fate and Free Will

You can also visit Marie’s website at MarieDJones.com

Thanks Marie!

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Stories revolving around childhood spookiness highlight this week’s Campfire.  A Ouija Board that provided a young girl some scary answers, a spirit that visited a listener when he was a young boy, prescient dreams visited upon one woman and we also talk about a haunted workplace, but in a good way!

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Kenny Kingston

Psychic to the stars, Kenny Kingston, joins us to talk about his famous clients and his latest book, “The Moment”.

You can find the book at Amazon.com:

The Moment: By Legendary Celebrity Psychic Kenny Kingston as told to Valerie Porter

Thanks Kenny!

A dangerous visit to a crypt, shadow people and a blessing from fate?  Gather around this week’s Campfire!

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They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Second Grave On The Left

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Caitlin Rother

Please enjoy this free bonus episode from Jim’s Paranormal Plus Club…for more info on how to get every Plus Club episode go to jimharold.NET

A middle aged couple sets to sea on a private yacht, it sounds like a fairy tale but this ending was not happy.   We talk to author Caitlin Rother about this tale of deceit, near fame, and murder.  Her book on the subject is at Amazon.com:

Dead Reckoning (Pinnacle True Crime)

Dead Reckoning (Pinnacle True Crime) – KINDLE

You can also visit Caitlin’s website at CaitlinRother.com

Thanks Caitlin!

Note: This podcast contains adult themes.

Shonna Smith

She’s experienced death up close and personal – she is Shonna Smith the star of the A and E TV Series, Family Plots.  Shonna talks about the show and what has happened since the series has ended its run.  We get her inside perspective on death and she shares a spooky story with us.

I enjoyed this show immensely while it was on the air and it was great to chat with Shonna.

Thanks Shonna!

This is the “unofficial” first episode of the show that has never been on the Campfire feed.  As an experiment, in 2009 I did a Paranormal Podcast centered on listener ghost stories.  It was so well received, so we started Campfire.  I realized that these stories had never been part of the “Campfire” family plus they are great stories.  I hope you enjoy this look back at the beginnings of the show!  We also announce the winner of the Campfire essay contest at the end of the program.  Thanks to all who entered!

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Lamont Wood

A painting from 1460 depicting a toy helicopter?  A computer from ancient Greece?  Lamont Wood talks about these and more things that seem very much ahead of their time in this edition of The Paranormal Podcast.  You can find his book on the subject at Amazon.com:

Out of Place in Time and Space: Inventions, Beliefs, and Artistic Anomalies That Were Impossibly Ahead of Their Time

Thanks Lamont!

On this Campfire, a young man tells about growing up with the “Lizard Man” legend in the Carolinas, a young girl sees a long dead “angel” and more!

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They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 85,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Crush It!

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

DB Cooper

I interviewed author Robert Blevins on my “Crime Scene” program on my Paranormal Plus Club in May 2011.  Robert believes he knows who Cooper was.  With the new developments in the case, I called Robert up tonight and on the spur of the moment he agreed to be interviewed.  I find his theory fascinating.

If you want to catch more great true crime (and paranormal) content you can sign up for my Paranormal Plus Club HERE

You can find Robert’s book on the case at Amazon.com:

Into The Blast – The True Story of D.B. Cooper – Revised Edition

Into The Blast – The True Story of D.B. Cooper – Revised Edition -KINDLE

You can check out Robert’s website at adventurebooksofseattle.com

Thanks Robert!

Nick Redfern

Men In Black aren’t just the topic of a series of popular motion pictures, they are real.  Nick Redfern tells us about these mysterious “men” and their connection to the UFO phenomena.

You can find the book at Amazon.com:

The Real Men In Black: Evidence, Famous Cases, and True Stories of These Mysterious Men and their Connection to UFO Phenomena

You can also check out Nick’s site at NickRedfern.com

Thanks Nick!

–PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

This week’s show is brought to you by The Paranormal Plus Club.  For content and interaction you can’t get anywhere else, check out Jim’s Plus Club at JimHarold.NET

• An archive of over 40 audio programs (and growing)
• Two new audio shows each week
• Shows cover the “other side”, conspiracy, UFOs and true crime
• Email Newsletter
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• Members Only Webinars where you get to talk with Jim
• Monthly Subscriptions Available
• Yearly Subscriptions Available, where you get 12 months for the price of 10

An unexpected night visitor, a visit to Grandma’s house, yet another weird nighttime visit, and more on this episode of Campfire.

–PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

This week’s show is brought to you by, The Paranormal Plus Club.  For content and interaction you can’t get anywhere else, check out Jim’s Plus Club at JimHarold.NET

• An archive of over 40 audio programs (and growing)
• Two new audio shows each week
• Shows cover the “other side”, conspiracy, UFOs and true crime
• Email Newsletter
• Members Only Forums
• Members Only Webinars where you get to talk with Jim
• Monthly Subscriptions Available
• Yearly Subscriptions Available, where you get 12 months for the price of 1o

Dr. Michael Shermer

America’s preeminent skeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer, joins us and explains why we believe in things that, according to him, do not exist.  You can find his book on the subject at Amazon.com:

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

or

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths – KINDLE

You can also check out everything Michael and his fellow skeptics are up to at Skeptic.com

Thanks Dr. Shermer!

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A great-grandmother who didn’t believe in ghosts yet had a doozy of one for her great-granddaughter, a listener has a guardian angel experience, a father’s spooky story surrounding a birthday party.  This and much more on this edition of Campfire.

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With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Immortality

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Maria DeSimone

Astrologer Maria DeSimone, one of our favorite guests, returns to tell us what is in store for the remainder of 2011 and to share with callers what’s in their stars!

Check out Maria’s site for video horoscopes and much more at insightfulastrology.com

Thanks Maria!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them!  Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Sex On The Moon

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

A mysterious story where the program itself is involved with poltergeist like phenomena, this and much more on this week’s Campfire!

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This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.com, the fast and easy way to publish a high-quality website or blog.  Campfire is brought to you by SquareSpace.com.  For a free trial, go to Squarespace.com

Sign up for a free account. Then if you decide to purchase it, use the offer code JIM7 for 10% off your new SquareSpace account for 6 months. We thank SquareSpace for their support.

Micah Hanks

Researcher, podcaster and author Micah Hanks talks about his take on the UFO phenomena, the paranormal in general and his contribution to the new book UFOs and Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There?  You can find the book at Amazon.com:

Exposed, Uncovered & Declassified: UFOs and Aliens – Is There Anybody Out There?

You can also check out Micah’s programs and website at GralienReport.com

Thanks Micah!

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We encounter a haunted computer, family pets who reappear after their death, and a haunted holiday.  This and more on this edition of the Campfire!

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They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com

With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured In The Plex

As a Campfire listener you can get this or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

Hi all,

I just took a couple of hours to update my Amazon “aStore” — Jim Harold’s Emporium of Paranormal Delights. All of the latest books on “The Paranormal Podcast” are updated, there is a new section for Kindle Books going back to our earliest shows in 2005, and for Kindle e-readers. Your Amazon purchases from these links help us greatly! Check it out by clicking “SHOP” at the top of the page. Thanks for your support!

Unfortunately, all of our slots for Maria (first & alternates) are filled for this taping. But, stay tuned. We have Maria on the show about twice a year. Thanks for tuning into the program!

Best regards,

Jim

Dr. Synthia Andrews

We talk to neuropathic physician Dr. Synthia Andrews about utilizing the energy that she says we can all access in order to live a more empowered life.  You can find her book on the subject at Amazon.com:

The Path of Energy: Awaken Your Personal Power and Expand Your Consciousness

The Path of Energy: Awaken Your Personal Power and Expand Your Consciousness – KINDLE

You can find Dr. Andrews’ website on the book at ThePathOfEnergy.com

Thanks Dr. Andrews!

-Audible-

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.  With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Dead Reckoning

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

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Legal Disclaimer

An invisible growling something chases one of our callers, and multiple experiencers tell us stories of loved ones who communicate with them from beyond the grave. All this and more on this week’s Campfire! Happy Birthday America!

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Brad Steiger

Legendary author Brad Steiger returns to the Paranormal Podcast to discuss his latest book on UFOs.  It really is an exhaustive look at the phenomena.  We chat about how UFOs and the general paranormal field are very much intertwined.

You can check it out at Amazon.com:

Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds

Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds – KINDLE

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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Note From Jim: We monitor our transcripts as closely as possible for any typographical errors; however, these may happen from time to time…for the final authority on what was said during a podcast please refer to the audio file.

JIM HAROLD: … I’m talking of course about Brad Steiger, and if any of you have followed the paranormal for any time at all, you know that name.  He has written, I believe, over 170 books, he’s been on about every talk show, radio and TV that you could possibly imagine.  He’s been honoured in various and sundry ways.  Last time I checked I think you had over 17 million copies in print; but then again, that’s probably even gone up since then.  I know since 1956 Brad Steiger has been bringing us the paranormal.  We’re so pleased to welcome him back to the Paranormal Podcast to talk about his latest book:  Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds. Brad, welcome back.

BRAD STEIGER: Well thanks Jim.  I always enjoy coming on your program.  It’s just… we kind of sit, and just talk, and it’s enjoyable for me.  I like your style, brother.

JIM HAROLD:  Well, thank you. I like yours, too.  And this book, I’ve got to ask — somebody might ask this question, and I think you have a really unique vantage point to look at these things, and you’ve kind of seen and heard it all when it comes to UFOs and aliens — is there anything new under the sun from your point of view, when it comes to real alien space beings and creatures from other worlds?

BRAD STEIGER:  Excellent question, and that was the motive for writing the book.  When you have a field as vast as UFO research, which I see, and Sherry agrees, as largely involved in the paranormal, as well, they are many ways one in the same.  And so is there anything new?  What we wanted do is, because people just coming to the field, just getting into it, will read about someone sees the greys and abduction experiences and they say “wow! This is really new”.  So,  I don’t know, being a history buff and recognizing how most Americans get their history from movies, whether it’s the Civil War or World War 2 or UFO research, we thought — we really feel the obligation, the mission if I may be presumptuous, to have each chapter begin with, “the beginning”, because no one knows where that is.  Let’s say 1947, 0r 1940, or 1840, or 40 AD, and bring it forward until we are in, when we had to make our final deadline, 2010.  So each chapter, Jim, does exactly that. It gives you as complete as you can be, in one volume.  And as people have been saying, “wow, this is really a big, fat book”… yes, it had to be, to get all this information in, and that’s where people are really appreciating it, because if you’d never heard about UFOs and you didn’t know when all this started, this gives you like a panoramic historical approach to the phenomena.  If you’ve been or consider yourself well informed, and we have those who have reviewed the book who have been in it almost as long as we have, who have said, ‘this is an encyclopedic, progressive approach to the subject, and is valuable whether just getting into the UFOs or have been in it for 30 years. It’s here in a progressive way for reference and for study.”

JIM HAROLD:  Really, I mean I have a shelf full of books that people have sent me over the last several years doing this program, and if I had to pick one UFO book, this would be the one that I would pick, and I’ll tell you why:  exactly what you said.  There’s a cross section in here; Roswell… everything from Roswell, association with the Apollo landings, and so forth and so on, I mean it just runs the gamut.  I do agree with you, it’s 370 pages and it’s not triple-spaced here, it’s dense text and lots of nice illustrations.  It looks like a fantastic book.
You know, another thing; because of your — and by the way, I should have mentioned this book as been co-written by your wife, Sherry Hansen-Steiger, I neglected to say that, so I wanted to make sure to get that in there — the other thing I would say is, not only is there the question “is there anything new under the sun”, the question is, how has this field, what have been the big developments since you started in 1956.  I’m sure there have been many many of them, but what are some of the key developments that you have seen with UFOs, aliens, and how we look at them in the last 50-something years?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, that’s one of those questions, and thank you for the kind words about the book, by the way.  That is the question that we’re trying to really focus on, because now I think, Jim, we have to say, well, okay, this has been happening all this time. What does it mean for us?  What does it mean for us as a species? Are there aliens coming across the cosmos from other worlds? When did they arrive? Have they always been here? Are we products?  We hear currently a lot of researchers talking about hybrids.  Maybe they’re interbreeding.  Maybe this started 100,000 years ago.  Maybe it started a billion years ago.

JIM HAROLD:  Maybe we’re all hybrids.

BRAD STEIGER:  Exactly!  Maybe we’ve met the aliens, and they are us.  So that’s, at least, a point for a theory, and then we have to say, if we’re starting now, I mean, how many people do they have to abduct?  How many people do they have to contact, if they’ve spent all this time and all this energy, and I suppose they have some monetary system, spent all their monetary, you know, whether it’s kumquats or pine cones, they’ve spent that getting here, so why don’t they make contact?  The idea of contact might be superfluous, because maybe it’s an inter-knowing.  Maybe it’s a mystical experience. We tend to look at the majority of experiences as individual mystical experiences,  because they are so mystical in their orientation. Now, even the contactees, which I particularly have been following since the early 60s, and Sherry in her capacity, with Doctor J. Allen Hynek, she was assigned going through the contactee information.  What is the message?  It’s largely a semi-religious message, or it’s ‘take care of your planet’. Again, it kind of beggars reality to think of a species, an extra-terrestrial species, coming here simply to give us a little sermonette. Or to advise us to get along.  Now this is something that the great teachers and avatars throughout history have been emphasizing.  So then you have a whole idea platform of have the prophets throughout history made contact with this intelligence?  We come down to the very focus of all this, what do we mean when we say ‘alien intelligence’?  Not denying that we are alone… excuse me.  We believe there is a possibility of life in outer space.  Okay, we’re not arguing that.  That’s not the question of what we are dealing with and have been dealing with throughout all of our sentient history as a species. What is this alien intelligence that makes contact with us?   That seeks to guide us?  That gives us information and is seemingly pulling us into the future?  And then, are there good guys and bad guys among the alien intelligences that contact us?  That is really the basic question that we try to face in the book.  You ask about things, moments in UFO history, and it’s very interesting to see how we simply replicate some of the carbon copy, going back to earliest days of sentient species, when we first began saying that we had contact with angels, we had contact with demons, and it seems to be almost the same prototypical drama, a prototypical pageant play that keeps repeating itself with these generations.

JIM HAROLD:  Well, it is a fascinating topic with a fascinating guest. Brad Steiger is on the program tonight, and we’re so glad to have him.  We’ll talk to him more right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.

…

Well, we’re back on the Paranormal Podcast.  Our guest tonight is the legendary — and that word is often over-used and misused, but certainly not in this case — Brad Steiger.  He is… well, he’s done over 170 books, and his latest book is Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds.
Now, Brad, when you think of the UFO phenomena, one word comes to mind.  At this point, in the last 20 – 25 years, it’s been that of Roswell, but unless you want to talk about Roswell, I don’t necessarily want to get into that too much, because we always talk about that. Not you and I, but in general — everybody talks about it.  Although you do an admirable job of covering it here in the book. But what stories do you have in this book that you think may be on the level of Roswell, but under-appreciated  in the UFO community?  Or are there any like that?

BRAD STEIGER: I think there are experiences, and I choose to call them that, that are integral to the development.  I think we have to see, first, Roswell as a kind of portraying the cast of characters.  Based on the cast of characters we’re going to be dealing with, we’re going to be dealing with: a government that many people are convinced are hiding things from us, the truth; we are presented with what became a pejorative term for anyone in research, “little green men,” which is a term that I don’t think anyone ever called them “little green men”, but they did call them “little humanoids in green jumpsuits”, so that’s where the “little green men” came from; and then we have of course the researchers who are valiantly trying to get to the truth.  This presents us with the format that will be employed throughout, whether it’s the  Betty and Barney Hill… now there people say we had our first abduction, not true.  We go way back in having abduction.  We have contact experiences, but no, that goes way back to the 1800s, where people are making contact with individuals that seem to come from light and speak to them.  We have mediums who began speaking to them, who claim to be from outer space.  In the nascent Nazi party as it was beginning to formulate its concept of Aryan supremacy, we had entities channeling from Aldebaran through a group of female mediums, and we have illustrations of them. We have pictures, and they had their artists draw them.  And they were, you know, by today’s standards as we think of, well, they always look kind of strange and out of context, but these were really attractive women, and they began channeling — and Hitler was in the group, and Goering, and a number of them were the members of the Vril society, the were members of the Black Sun, that was their symbol, which became then the swirling Nazi symbol, which they borrowed from the Aztec and other cultures, which is simply the changing, and this was the symbol then which became the swastika, which we are familiar with.  So we have channeling going all the way back to the beginning of the Nazi party, claiming to be from outer space. We’ve had this consistently.
Then we have the counter.  Equal to Roswell, I put the Philadelphia Experiment.

JIM HAROLD:  Ah!  Fascinating.

BRAD STEIGER:  Now, here we have — now this is… Sherry and I, we, for a time, we were gone three weeks out of the month lecturing, for many many years.  And because I kind of stoked the fires of the Philadelphia Experiment back in 1967, when I wrote an article for Saga Magazine about the Philadelphia Experiment.  It had kind of lain forgotten for many years, and then as a result of that article I was flooded with letters saying “I’m glad you’re bringing this up, because my father has been locked away since that time, he was on board”, and then there was, “my son has been in an asylum” and on and on… “my uncle disappeared and we never saw him again.”  This lead then to a publisher saying ‘good grief, you have to do a book on it’, so we did, The New UFO Breakthrough:  the Allende Letters.  Well, then this was based on the Varo letters, now it seemed when Robert Goerman found out the he was living, I remember he wrote to me and said ‘what about this’ and I think he  said, ‘what is the address you have for Carl Allen, or Carlos Allende’? and I gave it to him, and that was his home town.  So he went there, and there was the family, the Allen family.  It seemed to be then totally exposed that Carl Allen had faked this, but then on his death bed, someone sent to me information that on his death bed he said, “no, no it wasn’t a hoax.  I really saw it.”  So Sherry and I still to this day, but whenever we went out we talked to people who claimed that some member of their family was in this, the Philadelphia Experiment.  It’s kind of like a Trojan horse, you know? It’s kind of like… it lures you into the field, it gets people to extend their opinions and sometimes their reputations, and then seems to vanish into nothing.  It’s like a great big suction cup that takes people’s reputations and destroys them as they really get involved in it.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing that I remember, you know, 20 -25 years ago there was a lot of interest.  There was even a major motion picture that came out about this World War 2 era ship that was supposedly made invisible, or cloaked, then supposedly when it rematerialized, wasn’t the gist of it that some crew members were physically fused into the ship itself, and some had gone mad?  I found it fascinating, but all of a sudden, as bright a light as it got, and as popular as it got, it just seemed to go away just as quickly.  I’ve heard very little on it, I’ve been wanting to do a show for years on it, I believe one of the main proponents of it is either very ill or has just passed away.  I can’t remember his name.

BRAD STEIGER:  He’s very very ill. You’re thinking of Al Bielek.  Al Bielek was the man who provided me the information for the article I wrote, that kind of started everything up again.  Now, Al was a good friend and he was an objective scientific researcher. Tim Beckley — Tim Green Beckley, I’m sure you’re familiar with him.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes, he’s been on the show.

BRAD STEIGER: He was planning to do a UFO conference in Phoenix, and I said you really have to have Al Bielek on, he’s living here now.  You know, he comes over, we had him for dinner, you know?  Sherry got to calling him our oldest son, you know? But he’d come over frequently, and we were watching the movie The Philadelphia Experiment, and Al seemed to be really taken by it. Didn’t say anything.  So Tim and Al and I have lunch at a Denny’s, and Tim said, ‘okay, I’ll have you.  I mean, people are still… there’s still some interest in the Philadelphia Experiment.’  Al then gets up on stage, begins his very objective presentation on the Philadelphia Experiment, the physical laws and all of it, was Tesla involved, was Einstein involved, et cetera, and then all of a sudden Sherry, Tim and I are sitting, and our mouths drop, because that’s when Al announces that he was a member of the crew.  He and his brother were on board ship. And he, he moved forward into the future and became Al Bielek, but he really was then an entity from… and we just sat there with our mouths open.  From that time on then, Al literally turned the continent with the story.  He would check in and he would say, “I’ve met family members, they’d recognise me”, and every time we’re thinking, our dear friend, what has happened to him?  He gets this… what seems to be substantiation of his stories, and there were many people who seem to substantiate his story, and we’re really caught with again, a scenario right out of a Hollywood movie, of going back and forth in time, being one person 40 or 50 years ago and being another person today, and everything just seemed to be very convoluted, but again it fits right in with so much of the UFO phenomena.  I was warned when I began, I came to the field from psychical research, but I was warned if you really get in to the UFO research, it’s a magic theatre, and you enter a new reality.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing is, I’ve often said, and again six years is but a drop in the bucket, but six years ago when I started this, I thought, this will be great! I’ll learn all this paranormal stuff, and in 6 – 12 months I’ll have it all figured out. (laughs)  Not so much…

BRAD STEIGER:  Not so much… (laughs)

JIM HAROLD:  Anyhow, you talked about time travel.  In your book, I believe it’s Bruce Goldberg — who has also been on the show — talks about the idea of maybe visitors being not space aliens but time travelers.  What’s your take on that?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, you know Bruce and I go way back, we’re buddies.  We support one another’s research. This is certainly an area that I don’t think can be denied, but yet… I love time travel stories, but I’ve not yet seen one that I satisfies the demands of our reason, our intellect, and the rules of science… I mean, because if you do go back, almost anything you do is going to alter the future, then how to explain if you disappear in the 1860s… there just seems to be so many internal paradoxes.

JIM HAROLD:  Yeah, the grandfather paradox.

BRAD STEIGER:  Yes, the grandfather paradox. And innumerable others.  There’s this great science fiction story where they go back and hunt dinosaurs, but you’re not supposed to step off the path. Well,  someone steps off the path and says, “oh, I only stepped on a little moth or butterfly, that shouldn’t alter anything” and when he comes back to the present, the letter E is not in the alphabet.

JIM HAROLD:  It’s like a rippling.  You don’t know what one action will do, and that’s true in our daily lives.  Just imagine if you put that back thousands and thousands of years ago, and all the permutations of changes that one stepping off the path might very well cause.  What are a couple of your favourite stories in the book?  A couple of things that you discovered or maybe rediscovered while doing it.

BRAD STEIGER: Ah, boy, that’s hard.  Very difficult. I suppose when… the realization that came to me:  timing is everything.  You know that, Jim.  And my first book, Strangers in the Skies, came out in 66, right after Doctor Hynek was in Michigan and said it was swamp gas, all the manifestations were credited to swamp gas, and there was just an enormous reaction from the people in Michigan, who said I can’t … so that put my book in two weeks, it was on the best seller list, because of timing. Because of timing.  So, when that book was out and everywhere and printed overseas, I just got an enormous amount of mail from people claiming contact experiences.  And I set out, because again at this time those of us in research were wrapped around the nuts and bolts aspect of UFOs.  They’ve come, they’ve arrived, they’ve landed.  What we’ve been waiting for as a species is contact… the greatest story in history.  So I was very much involved in that: going out and speaking with contactees.  and then witnessing, sometimes, poltergeist phenomena in their home, for lack of a better term; going to another… being in one farm home in Ohio, and another one in Illinois, and then going to Vancouver Canada, and hearing the people tell the same experience.  And that’s before internet, that’s before radio programs.  That’s before television programs.  So I’m thinking: what’s going on here? I know they don’t know each other, I know they haven’t got in contact with each other.  I’d convinced myself and satisfied myself of that.  And then I began, always the phone would act up.  Check into a hotel at random, find I’d already been registered.  Be walking down the street, a pay phone would ring and ring while I’m standing waiting for the light to change. And then part of me, not being able to resist, picking it up and hearing “Brad, are you there?”  And I would think: what is going on?  I came to see then that, in my opinion, this was the same phenomenon of mediumship that I’d been dealing with.  This is the same… my second big book was on the poltergeist phenomenon, Strange Guests.  This is what I’m writing about in Strange Guests. This is poltergeists, this is hauntings, this is phenomena, this is mystical experience.  Or, is it portraying itself for my benefit? And this became an incredible conundrum.  At the time, a lot of pilots — a lot of farmers who had been pilots in the Korean war — they had been intrigued.  They had raced UFOS.  They’d had UFOs contact them over Korea. So they were interested in my research, living near by. I had the advantage of having a flying farmer take me, fly me there, because they wanted to investigate.  I had people who had been in the service, in the Korean conflict, who again helped me with the research.  We traveled all over, we saw these things, we saw the scorch marks, we saw the lights in the sky, we saw the lights doing incredible things that no craft that we know of could do.  And it seemed to me at that time to be mystical experiences.  It seemed… I couldn’t believe that a sentient civilization would travel all the way to Earth to go into someone’s bedroom and throw their underwear around. To tip tables and break chairs and… I mean, these are aliens doing this?  Or is this then an energy phenomena that we’re dealt with throughout our evolution?

JIM HAROLD:  You come up on something that I’ve talked to other guests recently about.  There’s kind of the Stanton Friedman school, that these are craft and they’re visitors from another planet, then other people are saying — and we love talking to Stanton, he’s a great guest and a great researcher — but there are also other people out there saying, maybe visitors from other dimensions, maybe some kind of spirit portraying themselves.  Maybe something like the Djinn, possibly falsely portraying themselves.  Or poltergeists. Again the poltergeists.  “Little green men” or government experiments aren’t the only explanations.  And then you get into things like Men In Black.  I think in general, most people think that Men In Black are some kind of governmental representatives meant to erase your memory so you forget what you saw.  But what if they’re creatures or spirits or just representing themselves in a way that we can relate to?

BRAD STEIGER:  Right. Exactly.  So I began talking this way and writing this way in the late 60s, and of course was met with all the enthusiasm of being served a mud ball instead of a cupcake.  We were still so much in the nuts and bolts era.  Only a few people, and I had the pleasure of saying to Phil Imbrogno recently, “remember how you laughed when I talked?”  Of course, he’s come to the Djinn and he’s come to the entities and so forth.  And he chuckled and said, “yeah, well we evolve in our thoughts.” And we certainly do.  When we began to go into UFO research again, Sherry and I were walking, going on a nice walk for our exercise, and I said to her, “you know, if we get into this, it is like entering a magic theatre, and we have to resolve now that we love each other very much, and we want that love to continue.  there will be seemingly energies that may try to pull us apart.”  And we just really looked at this, that we were about to enter the magic theatre and we have to be prepared. We have to be as one spirit.  Well, we initiated at that time what Sherry calls our “paranoia night”.  This is when we’re living in Phoenix, and any researcher, anyone from NASA, anyone from anything scientific, we’d invite to our home once a week, and we had quite a group, a very interesting group, that would share these kinds of experiences.  And then we went on the road with lectures and had the most extraordinary experiences.  Which again… to blame it on government spies, to blame it on extraterrestrials… it’s an energy.  You truly enter an alternate reality, that’s the only way I can truly describe it. You have to maintain balance, you have to maintain a spiritual equilibrium, we believe, which is why we practise our spiritual going, which is perhaps not a conventional one, but it keeps us strong and it keeps us focussed and balanced.  And you have to have that if you really go into research.  Now, people ask about Men In Black, and Nick Redfern paid me the tribute of dedicating the book to me, his Men In Black.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s great.  He’s going to be on in a couple weeks to talk about that book.  That’s fantastic.

BRAD STEIGER: Yeah, I was… I mean, I did not know this until I saw the galleys of the book.  And a lot of the things we discussed in his book, and aliens we can’t ignore in a Men In Black type of thing.  But it truly is an incredible aspect, and when it began I was teaching in college then, and people asked me if they’d interfered with me.  They’ve interfered with me in the sense of taking my, at that time, nearly all of my friends away.  They began getting calls, they began getting harassed, until people would say, “I’m sorry, but my wife just doesn’t want me to hang out with you anymore. Doesn’t want me to make contact.”  And I had such incredible sources there, like a naval officer would have sightings while he was in service, and he was giving me information.  Others were giving me information. It was only, fortunately, a couple really hard-nosed tough guys had been in the Rangers, and special op groups and service, who stayed by me, because these were guys who just weren’t afraid of anything. But they got harassed, they got harassed by individuals, bizarre-looking individuals, because of one… a friend of mine’s contact with the police, he’d been a police officer, he took down the license number, and there was no such license number in the bureau, he verified.  Plus the cars that they were driving, he said — and he was very astute mechanically — it was like combination of half a dozen models and makes put together in one.  All these things began to happen.  And one of the experiences that I shared with Nick, a friend of mine I had during the Vietnam conflict, he had been in World War 2 and he wanted to visit his son in Vietnam, which I guess they let parents do at that time, and he stayed in England —  because he’d never been in England — he stayed in London — and he was followed, he’d noticed, by three kind of Asian-looking individuals in black suits.  And they had dark glasses on and they would follow him wherever he went.  He was standing in front of the railroad sign… he was taking a trip up north in England, and they stood there and they asked what time the train came in, and he said “there’s the board right behind you” and he was getting annoyed, who were these guys?  He went back to his hotel one night and looked out and there they were, standing on a corner.  Finally they confronted him on the street and they said, and you have to understand, this is a friend of mine from New Hampshire, who’s in England, going to visit his son in Vietnam, and they came up to him and said, “you know Brad Steiger, don’t you?”  And my friend was completely nonplussed. He said, “Brad’s a friend of mine.”  They said, “tell him, we’ll visit him at Christmas”.  Now he went right back to the hotel and wrote me a long letter, told me all the experiences he’d had and said what they’d promised was a Christmas visit.  Well, unless they were the three wise men in the Sunday school pageant, I wasn’t visited by any three men that I know of that Christmas. But again, it was harassing my friends.  And this guy, again, some people can’t be scared, and others, their children, their wives: “stay away from this Steiger guy. He’s bad news”

JIM HAROLD:  I’ve got to say, I mean, that’s just amazing that halfway across the world they would run into your friend and say, “oh, you know Brad Steiger”, that’s extremely, extremely suspicious.

BRAD STEIGER: Extremely.

JIM HAROLD:  So, we certainly want people to pick up on the book, I think all you have to do is see a little bit of this book to really appreciate it.  It is the… I mean, there’s no possible way we could cover even a small piece of what’s in this book.  I recommend you pick up this book; I’m actually going on a trip and I’m going to take it with me and this is going to be my reading for the trip. Of course, we’ll have links at jimharold.com to your site and to the book on amazon.com, but can you tell folks where they can go on the web if they want to access your site directly?

BRAD STEIGER:  Yes.  We would like people to visit our site.  It’s simply www.bradandsherry.com.  Easy as can be.

JIM HAROLD:  And we certainly recommend that people go there as well to see everything that you are up. And any last words of wisdom for our audience when it comes to the UFO/alien phenomena?

BRAD STEIGER:  I would like to leave people with this, and it’s something Sherry and I believe intensely.  Some people put their tongue in their cheek and sigh, but we mean this seriously.  We feel the UFO enigma, the UFO phenomena, touches each one of us in a very special way.  It is a part of our existence on this planet. We are obviously engaged in some kind of contest with some undefined entities and they obviously know more about the rules to this game than we do. But it does effect each of us in every aspect of our lives.  Stay open in your research. Stay open.

JIM HAROLD:  Words of wisdom from Brad Steiger.  I’ll not add anything more, but thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Paranormal Podcast.

A law enforcement officer shares his story of a haunting at a crime scene that he was staking out!  Plus, much more on this edition of Campfire!

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Steve Volk

Journalist Steve Volk talks about his journey to “explain away the unexplainable” and how he couldn’t!  Steve has written for Rolling Stone, Philadelphia, VIBE and many others.   Join us for one man’s journey into the unknown.

Check out Steve’s book at Amazon.com:

Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn’t

Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn’t – KINDLE EDITION

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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Note From Jim: We monitor our transcripts as closely as possible for any typographical errors; however, these may happen from time to time…for the final authority on what was said during a podcast please refer to the audio file.

JIM HAROLD: … I know I say I’m always excited about the show, but I’m really excited about this, because I’d seen a link somewhere to this new book, and it’s called Fringeology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable — and Couldn’t, by Steve Volk, and I’m like, I haven’t heard of Steve, but man, this really looks good. And I did a little more research, and found out that he’s been a long time staff writer and regular contributor for a bunch of magazines, including Philadelphia Magazine, he’s written for Rolling Stone, Vibe, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, The New Republic, Philadelphia Weekly, The St. Petersburg Times, so many magazines, and very accomplished, and I was looking at what he was talking about, and I’m like, boy, that’s very much kind of the way I think. And what was interesting was that I had contacted him, and he got right back to me, he’s like, I’m a listener to the show! I was so, so flattered. Steve Volk, thank you for being a listener, thank you for being on the Paranormal Podcast tonight, and we’re so excited to talk about Fringeology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable — and Couldn’t. It’s a fascinating book.

STEVE VOLK: Jim, thanks so much for having me, I’m really excited about it.

JIM HAROLD: So, let’s kind of start from the beginning here. Now, when I think of a writer, — you know, even look at your picture: you’ve even got the hat — a hard boiled journalist, just the facts, ma’am… how did you go from that to becoming interested in something like fringeology?

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, that’s the central question. I had no choice in the matter in some ways, right? That’s the thing about people who have some sort of experience that may have been paranormal that happened to them… they didn’t really create it, so to speak. So, as a kid I had grown up with this family ghost story, and I have fragmentary memories of it myself. It happened when I was around six years old, that we started hearing this big booming thumping sound sometimes late at night, that sounded to my sisters in their bedroom like it was coming from high up in the walls of their room, and to me and my brother in our room it sounded like it was coming from the roof over our heads. And that was weird, because we didn’t share an adjoining wall, so it was tough to say where the sound was coming from, but our parents downstairs would hear it — it was this big sound — and so it would wake us all up, and we’d end up all in the hall, sort of like tenants flooded out of our apartments, and this went on for about nine months. And the sound would go on for a long period of time. It was tens of minutes when it it would happen, and it might go away and some nights it would come back, and it didn’t fit with any of the sort of mundane explanations my parents looked for, because of course that’s the first thing they looked for. And so it didn’t fit with any sort of known water-pipe type malfunctions, it didn’t seem it could be the house settling in such a traumatic way, right? And my sisters were complaining of actually more dramatic things going on in their room. They were complaining that the blankets were pulled from their beds, their beds would shake at night like someone had grabbed the frame and was shaking it. They said that they saw an old woman walk through the room and through the wall… and my parents, as I think a lot of parents would, and maybe even as I would, disregarded that part of the story, because they weren’t seeing this sort of thing for themselves, all they were encountering was the noise. So they concentrated on that, and they tried to find ways to recreate it and explain it, and they couldn’t, and they started to get really tired of waking up in the middle of the night to sound, and being woken from their sleep. They were parents with five kids, you know? And they needed their sleep. So, we were Catholic at the time, and we were practising Catholics, not sure we were that good at it, but we were practising, and they eventually… my father went to the family priest and the family priest said, well, I’ll come over and bless the house. So he came over, and it’s the same kind of ceremony Catholics do when they move into a house. The priest comes over and throws holy water into the corners, that sort of thing. And so the priest came over and did that, and as he left he said, ‘hey, I’m sure everything will be fine’… only everything wasn’t fine. That night, the noise was longer and louder than ever, and it was awfully dramatic. We went running downstairs, and my parents were considering leaving for the night. All the sudden the noise did something it hadn’t done before. It moved. So, instead of sounding like it was coming from this sort of amorphous place somewhere up on the top of the second floor, it hit at the top of the stairs, and then it came down the stairs, one step at a time. And when it got to the bottom there was this pause, and then it hit the landing on the first floor with this big, ground-shaking kind of blow, and we never heard it again.

JIM HAROLD: And this is very reminiscent of the Campfire show that I do. We have people who are level-headed; they’re normal people, they’re professionals in many cases, but they’ve had a striking occurrence — many times in their childhood — that stays with them the rest of their lives. So it’s not necessarily… it’s certainly a very vibrant story, but it’s happened to many, many people, and I’m sure you found that in your research.

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, and for me it presented a sort of particular problem, because as a six year old at the time, I now have very vivid memories of this. And yet, because I was six, I can’t really trust those memories. Childhood memory in particular is notoriously fallible, it’s very easy through power of suggestion to develop these sorts of memories, so maybe I remember these things because my family told me that it happened. So I have to rely in a lot of respects on the testimony of the people who are older than me, and so I mean I’ve even interviewed my mother and my father about it, and it left me in a position, Jim, where the only thing I think that’s really left to me, like the most rational position to me, seems to be one of cognitive dissonance, right? Where I can’t believe the details of that story, because it just doesn’t fit with my experience, and yet I think it would be entirely unwise and rash to disbelieve it. Because I trust these people, I know these people… my dad — I can’t tell you how unimaginative he is. And I say that with great love, you know what I mean, and affection. But he’s not fanciful guy. And the idea that he and my mother somehow imagined this noise started moving and came down the stairs, and scared the bejesus out of them, and was hitting things so hard it was shaking the floor that final night, I just don’t see that. So, what was it? It leaves me in a position where I really think that to say “I don’t know” is a justifiable position. But, you know, obviously from the really hard-core skeptical point of view, that’s not enough. I should somehow just be able to explain this away. I just think that that doesn’t make any sense.

JIM HAROLD: I agree, and we’re going to talk more about it, right after this…

[break for commercial]

So, Steve. I know some of your early work on this that you talk about in the book was with a friend of yours who has since passed on, and you went out on some ghost investigations. Can you talk about that a little bit?

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, it was fascinating to do, because a lot of people… if you’re flipping around on cable, boy oh boy you’re going to come across some ghost hunting shows. They’re out there, and of course you never know what to make of them. I think if you’re thinking critically, you’ve got to wonder what the producers are up to, and what’s happening off-camera, and what they didn’t show you, and all that sorts of things. And I got some insight into that, because Lou, we would go to a place… it seems on the shows they’ll go there and they might spend several hours, where it seems like if you try to pay attention and track it, we would go to a place for two nights, three nights, come back the next week, you know, for another night. We did long investigations, sitting there waiting for something to happen, and you know, I’m here to tell you that the majority of the time, nothing did. But sometimes something did happen, and that’s sort of part of what kept you coming back. The other part of it was just the psychology of it all, right, getting this sort of insight into people, because I do think that a great majority of cases can be explained away according to imagination and misinterpretation of, you know, natural phenomena, so to speak. But I just don’t think that comes anywhere close to explaining it all, and I became really fascinated and Lou and I would talk about this stuff sometimes, with some of the more exotic, materialistic theories. Like infrasound, if you’re familiar with that one?

JIM HAROLD: I’ve heard of that one before, yes.

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, it’s sub-audible — just below the range of human hearing — 20 hertz — that has the capability to directly effect even our visual perception, and to make us feel sort of creeped out, like that sensed presence.

JIM HAROLD: That’s right, I know exactly what you’re saying. And it is interesting, because there’s been this one mysterious thing — maybe not a direct correlation, but this hum that people hear in some parts of the world in the country. Unexplained, we don’t know what it is, and that’s always fascinated me. And this idea that yes, sound can be at such a level it can freak people out, basically.

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, and I think one of the things I’m trying to use in conversations with skeptics is that, you know, when you say you’ve explained all this away, do you ever think that you might — and I’m just trying to appeal to them on the ground they’re standing on, right? — be missing some things about the natural world by doing this?

JIM HAROLD: Exactly. I’ve often said, you know, all of this may be explicable by science, but maybe the science of five centuries from now. And speaking of authorities on science and so forth, interesting… I thought your chapter on Elizabeth Kubler Ross, and how she came from a very erudite background, very acclaimed author on death and dying and so forth, and how her transition came and she became more interested in the spiritual and the paranormal and so forth. I thought that was fascinating.

STEVE VOLK: As someone, and I write about this in the book, too, who’s seen relatives, like my mother, pass after an extended terminal illness, I’m really in touch with what Elizabeth Kubler Ross meant to the world. On Death and Dying was just this pivotal book over the last century in galvanizing the hospice movement, nationally and internationally. And she sat there at the bedsides of the dying and listened to them, and heard them out at a time in Western medicine, when that was just not even a consideration that you needed to tend to their psychological needs. They were just treated in a sort of — I hate to say it — animalistic fashion. Just keep their heart beating as long as you can, but otherwise people were sort of ignoring them, because being close to them made them reflect on their own mortality. So Kubler Ross stepped up and she sat at their bedsides, and she talked to them and she engaged them, and got them to go on living — helped them to go on living — until they actually did die. And it’s really a beautiful story, but in the midst of all this, there was all that research that became On Death and Dying, which was published in 1969, but as she was doing all that research in the mid 60s and late 60s, she was also hearing other kinds of stories from them. She was hearing these stories of near-death experiences before that was a phrase, right. Raymond Moody didn’t come out with the phrase until 1975. And this was just not anywhere on the medical radar, or really anyone’s radar. And she would have patients telling her about floating up out of their bodies, they would seem to witness everything that was happening below accurately, and she was just sort of knocked from her moorings by this, because all she knew of death was that that was that, you know, and not that people were floating around the hospital. So she and her research partner, this Reverend Mwalimu Imara, decided that since they were writing down things that the patients said, and they were particularly paying close attention to things that multiple patients said, they needed to stop ignoring these stories, and they needed to start taking notes on them. Lo and behold, by the time she wrote On Death and Dying, she actually had a whole chapter on near death experiences and these things called death bed visitations, where the dying would claim that somebody who had gone before was there in the room, sort of preparing, I guess, to receive them in a lot of the instances for when they died. And so she wrote an entire chapter about this that she was going to include in On Death and Dying, just think about that for a second. Here was this book that was challenging the greatest taboos in Western medicine and Western science already, just by acknowledging and addressing death, and pointing out to doctors that they were doing a really lousy job of taking care of the terminally ill, and then she was going to throw into it, ‘oh, by the way… patients claim to float out of their bodies, and see what we’re doing, and they seem to describe it accurately.’ It was sort of a non-starter if you think about it, and Reverend Imara, in fact the night before Kubler Ross was going to send this chapter into the publisher, talked her out of including it. And I think that it was the right call.

JIM HAROLD: Right, because that book would have been buried because it would have been thought too — pardon the pun — “fringe.”

STEVE VOLK: Yep, but I have to say, and here’s the part where I think the skeptics need to check themselves, and when they stigmatize these sorts of subjects to that degree, just consider this now… in the years since she decided to withhold this chapter, it’s become very clear that this is a real phenomenon, that many, many people report reliably, predictably. And we disagree on the source of this, certainly, but when you’re dealing with human psychology and you’re dealing with how to take care of your patients, the source of this experience is not really the important thing. The important thing is the fact they’re reporting it. So here she was, conducting real science, developing real data, and yet that data was so stigmatized that she couldn’t afford to bring it out. And I think that shows this sort of dysfunctional relationship we have as a society with paranormal stories. And that was the point for me.
For me, the title “Fringeology” is deeply ironic, because yes we push these stories to the fringe, but in my mind they’re fundamental. 20% of the population believes that they’ve had a direct experience with a ghost. 20% of the population or thereabouts believe they’ve seen an unidentified flying object, 30% report a psychic experience… this isn’t the fringe, for crying out loud, this is normal, right? On a statistical level it’s common, and so we should be able to talk about this stuff without feeling embarrassed by it, and I think we should be willing to consider all the possibilities, from the prosaic and materialistic ones on through to the more — I hesitate to even use the word — paranormal possibilities, but the possibilities that, say, blow some holes in our current understanding of the world. We should be willing to consider them all.

JIM HAROLD: You know, it’s interesting, what you say resonates with me. I was talking to someone the other day who’s aware of what I do, these programmes, and they said, “well, I don’t really believe in a lot of this stuff” — but here’s the phrase — “… but there was this one time…”. And I don’t know how many times you’ve run into that, but it’s very common. You’ll talk to somebody, and “well, I don’t really go into that stuff too much… but there was this one time.” And I think most of us have stories like this, and I think also something that’s very intriguing to me is the idea that this “paranormal” activity that’s supposedly on the fringe, might very well tie into something like quantum physics, which you talk about in the book.

STEVE VOLK: I do, though I have to tell you, and I gave a presentation in Philadelphia last night, and toward the end somebody asked me — and this is somebody who hadn’t read the book, and thankfully he bought one on the way out, which I was very excited about — “hey, do you get into quantum physics at all?” And I said that I do, I deal with it to some extent in chapter three, but I have to tell you that there have traditionally been two things that we don’t talk about in society, right? We don’t talk about religion and we don’t talk about politics, because we’re going to fight over those. I think we should add a third thing to that list, and it would be quantum mechanics, because people get so fired up about it. And the tact I take in the book — I don’t know if you’ve read this part — is that ‘look, we do not yet know what quantum physics means for our philosophy’, and so I find when someone like a Lawrence Krauss is trying to say that, oh, we do understand it, and it’s not important to how we understand things in a sort of physical sense, because all that stuff happens on such a small scale, and it doesn’t open the door to all these things. That thinking is just as wrong as Deepak Chopra is when he says that we’re not looking at the moon, it’s quantum soup. I think they are… equally incorrect is the wrong word… they’re equally presumptuous. We don’t yet know what to make of this, and when you look at a lot of the cutting edge quantum physicists, like an Anton Zeilinger, who’s in the book, you find out right away that we’re still sorting this out. Is there going to be another revolution in physics that supplants both the Newtonian way of looking at things and quantum physics? Are we going to find out somehow that we’re all connecting in this way that quantum physics seems to suggest at times? But there’s a lot of… there’s just so much emotion invested in it that it’s very hard to have that conversation about what the different possibilities are.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s just an interesting point that you bring up, and I just… I never thought about it quite this way, but if you look at the scientist or the skeptic, and then you look at the true believer, both of them have a need to be able to say, “I know what’s going on”. The true believe says, “I know those are space aliens from Zeta Reticuli”

STEVE VOLK: (laughs) I love that one, by the way.

JIM HAROLD: The skeptic says, “I know those are the imaginings of a crazy person or a hoax” and they have to be able to explain it. But isn’t there some room, and don’t you talk about this, isn’t there the possibility that we can just say, “hey, we don’t know yet”?

STEVE VOLK: yeah, and it would actually be the most rational and accurate position, right? I mean, think about the UFO. It’s an unidentified flying object, people. If we had enough evidence to convince a majority, a great majority of reasonable people, that it was an alien space craft, it would no longer be a UFO. And if we had enough evidence to firmly convince people that it was a weather balloon, you know, it would no longer be a UFO. But it doesn’t matter whose data you’re looking at, some of these sightings end up in that UFO category. It doesn’t mean it’s an alien spacecraft, right? It just means it’s an unidentified flying object, and I think we need to get back to that definition instead of equating UFO with flying saucer, because there’s so much stigma attached to that conversation that it’s like we can’t even have it anymore. People start smirking right away, the giggle factor kicks in… all it means is that someone saw something in the sky that they couldn’t explain. But we try and sort of force a conclusion sometimes before there’s enough information to make that conclusion. And like you said, the believers start talking about Zeta Reticuli, and the Betty Hill map, the star map, and the skeptics start to say, ‘no, no, no… we already know enough about human psychology, we know people can fantasize this’, but one of the points that I try to make in the book is that I think that scientific evidence is the best evidence there is, and I think it’s the best way we can get to establish a collective base of knowledge, but I also think we need to acknowledge that if we waited for a scientific level of evidence to emerge to believe in anything we choose to believe in, society would grind to a halt, and the first thing that would grind to a halt is the justice system. I’m a city reporter, I’ve covered lots of trials. If you go to a murder trial or a shooting trial, the first thing the prosecutor does here in Philadelphia is to talk about how CSI and those crime scene investigation shows are complete fiction. And in a lot of ways they are utter nonsense, they have nothing to do with reality. They’re television. And in a vast majority of those high-level criminal cases, there is an absolute dearth of scientific evidence. So what do we have to rely on then? We end up relying a lot of the time on eye-witness testimony. And of course this is seen as not reaching a scientific standard of evidence.

JIM HAROLD: It’s notoriously unreliable.

STEVE VOLK: You know what, though? While it is notoriously unreliable, it’s far from always unreliable, right? And so we need to accept that as well. That sometimes when these people, like people in Stephenville, Texas in this UFO story I describe, sure, maybe somehow human psychology played some role, and made them blow this up into something it wasn’t… and maybe they saw exactly what they’re describing. And we don’t have really enough data to know for sure, and we’re got a genuine UFO case there, because something showed up on radar, and there are multiple witnesses from multiple angles, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that uncertainty, and I think that a lot of people — let’s put it that way — aren’t. So they try to force that kind of conversation to some conclusion, and to me it’s a false conclusion. There’s not conclusion available to us yet in Stephenville.

JIM HAROLD: You know, one person who I think is fascinating, who you cover in the book, is Doctor Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, one of the few men who went to the moon, and has kind of broken off and had a very kind of singular place among astronauts in the way he looks at the universe and looks at UFOs and so forth. Can you talk about him a little bit?

STEVE VOLK: Yeah, I loved meeting Edgar Mitchell, and I was so thrilled when he agreed to meet with me. Very impressed by the guy, because he went ahead and just followed his heart, so to speak, for lack of a better word; he followed his instincts. He had an epiphany in the space capsule, and all the astronauts talk about this — I don’t know if you’ve read this part — they talk about this thing called the “overview effect”, that when you’re up in space and you’re able to see the planet earth from that vantage point, the fragility of it is so profound, the sense of it as just a part of this great, vast galaxy/universe, this star field, is so impressive that the idea of national borders becomes laughable. And the idea even of borders between people, based on their beliefs, comes to seem laughable. and you’ll find that for a lot of the astronauts that there’s this sense when they come back of wanting to do things that will unite people in some way, but only Edgar Mitchell has followed it down this kind of paranormal path, and he’s the only one who’s tried to relive that epiphany in the space capsule over and over, reworking it from different angles through meditation and contemplation, and through reading and philosophy and science, and various religions, trying to find what the source of that is, because he felt himself to be suddenly connected to everyone and everything, and he’s pursued that in all the years since. And I find it just a really remarkable and beautiful poetic story, and somebody needs to make it into a movie.

JIM HAROLD: Do you think… I mean, did you speak to, or did you get into the fact… does he feel separated or ostracized from his fellow astronauts because of kind of the dramatic turn he’s taken?

STEVE VOLK: It’s funny… I talked about this, of course, and he feels a tremendous brotherhood with his fellow astronauts, but he’s also aware that they’re not thrilled with what he’s been up to over the years, you know? And he just accepts that, and he thinks that over all they accept him, it’s not as if he is ostracized, it’s not as if he doesn’t go to see the launches when they happen when he wants to, and it’s not as if he doesn’t get invited to the reunions. I mean, they slap him on the back when they see him. He is well-known and well-liked, but it strikes me as something they don’t talk about. And I found that when I tried to make calls to other astronauts about him, I’ll just say this: none of them would talk about him at all that I tried to reach out to, and I think it’s because he’s become this sort of lightning rod, you know? I just couldn’t get calls back and who knows what all the reasons for that might be, but I just happen to believe it’s gotta be related to the fact that I was going to be discussing the work he’d done since landing back on earth, because I can’t think of another reason they wouldn’t want to speak up for him.

JIM HAROLD: There’s so much in your book. I’ve got to say, folks, as I may have said, I haven’t had a chance to read the whole book, there’s so much in this book and I really legitimately love this approach, and I’m going to be sure to go right through this, and I’m going to have to see if you’re on Audible, too, because we always love audible books as well, but…

STEVE VOLK: Get me on Audible, I love Audible.

JIM HAROLD: We’d like to do everything we could to do that. Something you talked about in the book, though, is this idea of telepathy, and how there are main stream Nobel Prize winning scientists who say, “yeah, this could be true.” Can you talk about the idea of telepathy, and I’m going to read your mind and say yes, you that can.

STEVE VOLK: You’re right, that’s incredible!

JIM HAROLD: See there? We’ve proven it!

STEVE VOLK: I’m now convinced that telepathy exists… that’s pretty dramatic, Jim. I have to say that, as a reporter, I was actually afraid to write that chapter in a lot of ways, because once I’d looked into it I’d realized that there was a greater level of evidence than I expected for telepathy, and I’m not talking about John Edward and Allison Dubois and the sort of mediumship kind of thing, the sort of star psychic. I’m talking about me and you being able to guess the right card, say… 1 out of 4 cards, we’d have a 25% chance, and yet we tend to be right for some reason, if enough trials are conducted, more often than that, to a degree of great statistical significance. There are different ways they construct these tests and do them that seem pretty well controlled, and when I saw that there were hundreds of studies and that other people had looked at this before me, and reached a similar sort of conclusion, that there was a small telepathy effect has pretty good evidence for it. I was troubled by this, because as a main stream journalist this isn’t something I particularly cared to write, but one of the things that really helped to put me at ease with it… it’s not only that… look, I write things I’m uncomfortable with all the time, that’s part of the job, but the other part of it is that the skeptics themselves, a couple of them, have grudgingly admitted that by the standards of any other area of science, telepathy’s proven, right? So if we weren’t talking about this sort of paranormal claim, and we had this level of evidence for some sort of pharmaceutical drug or something, we’d put it on the market, and that was pretty amazing. It was Richard Wiseman and then Chris French who I quote in the book was saying that he agrees with Wiseman. Of course, they hold out and they say that this is an extraordinary claim, and because this is an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary evidence. And there’s a lot of problems with that to me, number one that there’s a presumption there…

JIM HAROLD: It’s a judgement. It’s subjective

STEVE VOLK: That’s the second thing I was going to say… you’re beating me to it, you’re a psychic! But the presumption to me here is that this will somehow undo physics. That if telepathy exists, it punches such a major hole in our vision of the world that it’s an extraordinary claim and therefore we have to kind of hold a line against it. Well, who’s to say that it it punches this huge hole in our understanding of physics? Right now, this level of evidence exists and it’s a level of evidence that if it was any other area of science, we’d accept it. And yet, if I hit a billiard ball, according to the laws of Newtonian physics, it’s still going to move the same way. That’s the position we’re in, right? Where we have this level of evidence for telepathy and a rocket will still take off tomorrow, according to Newtonian physics, so couldn’t it be, isn’t it possible, that we’re talking about a small amendment that needs to be made in physics that might allow for this, something we just don’t understand yet, isn’t that a possibility that we need to consider? And I just find it curious that they don’t seem to consider that possibility.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it is amazing when people shut themselves off on either side of the fence, and sometimes it’s so irritating because one thing I worry about, sometimes when people listen to this show, is that one time they might think that I believe A, and the next time I believe B. The truth is, and I’ve said this many times, when I started this in 2005, and my goodness we’re about a month away from our 6th year anniversary, which I cannot believe — and tell me if this mirrors your experience — my thought was, “this is going to be great, I’m going to research this stuff, and six months to a year I’ll have this figured out!” I have more questions today than I had the day I opened up the mike and started the first show.

STEVE VOLK: That is also true for me, and I’ll tell you, Jim, for instance with telepathy, I’m content, ultimately, to let things play out, and to see where we end up with this debate in five years or ten years. I don’t feel a personal need to try and sort of force that conclusion. I continue to see it as kind of an open question, there’s way more evidence for telepathy than I had expected. And so, in that sense, did I resolve a question there? (laughs) No! And when I met with the witnesses in Stephenville, Texas, I have to tell you that I expected that I wouldn’t believe them, right, but I certainly believe that they believe that they saw things exactly as they described it. Because you know what? I’ve had the experience of meeting people who would claim Zeta Reticuli and all that sort of stuff, and would talk about an implant they had, and had no interest in anyone removing and observing to verify that it was one… I met with these kinds of people and realized that there were folks out there who like the status that that seems to confer upon them. They like to be able to go to a conference and walk around saying that they have an alien implant, and if they were to have somebody remove it and find out that it’s a shard of glass, they wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. You know what I mean? They want to believe it, and that’s why they believe it. It’s a very human thing, and I get that, and I have compassion for that. But the people in Stephenville? They did not ask for this, and they have tried to just sort of move on with their lives since then. They’re not looking to make this their new identity, and that carries a lot of weight with me, and a lot of credibility. And it opened my mind a little bit more. There’s some more questions there.

JIM HAROLD: Before we go, I want to ask about this idea of after death communication, because — I’ve said it on the shows before — I think I had kind of a one-way communication to me from my brother. Again, it could have been because I was in mourning and I did the ink-blot thing where I tried to kind of meld everything in your mind to make it fit what you’re looking for at that particular time, but for me I felt that I had an experience. What did you find on after death communication?

STEVE VOLK: This one’s complicated. I have a chapter on something called “induced after death communication”, and there are other forms of it that crop up in various places in the book.

JIM HAROLD: Did you work with a psychomanteum at all, was that part of it?

STEVE VOLK: No, no I didn’t work with that. I worked with a guy called Doctor Allan Botkin, who was working with a very traditional — well, not very traditional, I shouldn’t say that, it was a little controversial itself –

JIM HAROLD: I think he was on the show before.

STEVE VOLK: Has he? I missed that one.

JIM HAROLD: Paranormal Podcast #72, I just looked it up, from 2009. Interesting guy.

STEVE VOLK: yeah, he’s a very upright guy. I like him a lot. He worked with something called “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing”, which is accepted at this point by the American Psychological Association, by the Pentagon, as a treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And he found that some of his clients were starting to report these experiences. He made some changes in the protocol, so he wasn’t really using traditional EMDR anymore, he had made some changes himself that he thought were benefiting his patients, and then he found that these people were starting to say that they were having these spontaneous visions, sitting right there in a chair in his office, of people they’d killed, that they’d felt guilty about killing, about loved ones they’d lost, of fellow soldiers that they’d seen killed, and these incredible healing visions. And the point I try and make here, and this is something I do know that the skeptics really have an answer for, is that… so, I met with a bunch of these veterans, right, and talked to them about their experience, and these were people who were really tortured by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for years, and then this came along and it gave them the greatest sense of peace that they had since returning from the war. And I just make the argument that… um… I don’t really care if it’s true, in the face of these guys. I don’t really care.

JIM HAROLD: It’s therapy.

STEVE VOLK Yeah. And what I care about is that they were helped by it, and that these really wonderful guys who sacrificed so much, have a greater sense of peace. And I didn’t feel it was up to me to start raising doubts in their mind about that. And I’ll stand by that, and I know a lot of people would think that it’s sort of cowardly of me to not express my own doubts about the veracity of what they were reporting, but I think that belief itself is powerful, I think that life is hard, and it can be very, very difficult to get through the night, and what I’m for, first and foremost, is seeing everyone on the planet get through the night. And that may involve believing in different things for different people, and I just think that kind of tolerance is necessary, and I try to write the book from that point of view of just engaging with these things with an open mind, but not so open that my brain falls out. And seeing what’s useful here, and it turns out that belief in after death communication is tremendously useful, and so if there’s anyone listening who finds that it’s helping them? Good.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, well you know, again… as long as you’re not hurting anyone, as long as it’s therapeutic to you, it makes sense.

STEVE VOLK: Not hurting you and not hurting yourself, right? Because I met people along the way who seemed to get caught up in this stuff, and once they got one taste, they sort of wanted more and more and more, and it became this kind of strange part of their life that maybe kept them from engaging with the rest of their life. But I met a lot of people who are interested in these things, in particular with the after death communication thing, where they had this experience — and this describes the vast majority of people — where they had this experience and they don’t go chasing after it like a heroin high, to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. They carry it with them, forward, through the rest of their life as something that gives them some sort of courage and faith, and just sense of healing, and they get on with things, you know? And that was the story with the Vietnam veterans, and in that case, when it doesn’t seem to be doing them any harm, doesn’t seem to be doing anyone around them any harm, you know, just get out of the way.

JIM HAROLD: I think it makes a lot of sense.

STEVE VOLK: It doesn’t mean that skeptics shouldn’t do their thing, right? Like I do some skeptical things in the book. It just means that in the face of that, I can’t sit there and self-righteously tell anyone that they’re wrong and they should find some other way of looking at things. I just find that ludicrous, especially when, again, we don’t have an answer to this stuff and the ultimate reality of it, whether there’s life after death, all these different topics. I just think at times we’ve got to stand down, get over ourselves, and use a little humility.

JIM HAROLD: I guess that to close out, you’ve been very generous with your time and we’re really enjoyed this talk tonight with Steve Volk with his new book Fringeology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable — and Couldn’t. What do we do with this? Since we can’t put this necessarily in this science cubby-hole, we can’t necessarily put it the paranormal/spiritual cubby-hole, what do we do with this information? There’s just people trying to get by on the planet.

STEVE VOLK: Have fun with it. Use it when we can, and there’s this concept I’ve seen some parapsychologists use called Plato’s Lifeboat, where when there’s compelling reason to consider an idea, but not compelling enough evidence to take it as a given or proven, or something we should all believe in, we just stick it in the life boat, and we carry it along with us as a culture, and I think that’s a beautiful idea, and I think it’s a beautiful way to carry this stuff along with us. And here’s the thing: whether we choose to put this stuff in the lifeboat or not, guess what? It’s already in the lifeboat. I think I quoted some stats before, about the 20% of the population believes that they’ve seen a ghost or had some experience with ghosts, 20% believe they’ve seen a UFO, close to half believe ghosts are real, around 40% — or more, actually — believe that some UFOs are alien space craft, around 30% believe they’ve had a psychic experience… these ideas are coming with us, whether we want them to or not, so we might as well stick them in the lifeboat and say, you know what? Let’s hang on to this, let’s consider this, and see whether evidence develops as time marches on, and we’ll decide when we have enough information what we should do with these things. Until then, they’re just… they’re here.

JIM HAROLD: Words of wisdom from Steve Volk, he’s been our guest tonight. Fringeology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable — and Couldn’t, and Steve, where can people go on the internet if they want to find out more about the book, more about everything that you do, all your other writing.

STEVE VOLK: So glad you asked, Jim. (laughs)

JIM HAROLD: I knew I was supposed to do that.

STEVE VOLK: stevevolk.com. All one word… come check me out at stevevolk.com, and gosh I hope that people have fun reading the book. I have to tell you something else, Jim; I wanted this book to be fun, and I found in the paranormal literature, that so much of it is devoted to argument that, even though there are parts that might raise a smile here or there, or be entertaining here or there, I wanted even the parts that involved argument to be fun, to be entertaining, because that’s definitely something we can do with these stories now. They’re a great fun stories, and so anyway, I hope people read my book and have a blast doing it.

JIM HAROLD: I have to ask… if you haven’t seen the cover, it’s black and white, and there’s a picture of… oh! Spoon-bending, right? That’s what that is? It took me a minute, it’s like… “oh! Spoon-bending! Uri Gellar!”

STEVE VOLK: Yep.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you so much for being on the show tonight, it’s been a blast.

STEVE VOLK: Thank you very much for having me.

–

Legal Disclaimer

Tonight’s show is chock full of stories of one of the most popular paranormal phenomena of all…haunted houses!

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Paul Kimball

What’s it like to produce a ghost oriented TV series?  Filmmaker Paul Kimball tells us of his experience behind and in front of the camera for Canadian TV’s “Ghost Cases”.

Check it out an episode of Ghost Cases at RedStarFilmtv.blogspot.com.  You can help him with his next project, Beyond Best Evidence, by going to HERE

Also, you can check out his other site at RedStarFilms.blogspot.com

Thanks Paul!

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An Ouija board seems to have a death defying personality of its own, a listener tells us about his own ghost adventures, another has a vision of life as a wolf during childbirth and more on this 70th edition of Jim Harold’s Campfire!

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Stephen Hill

Imaging being a normal person with no strong interest in the paranormal and then one day finding that you have the ability to directly communicate with the dead who have not crossed over.  That is author Stephen Hill’s story and he shares it with us along with some compelling EVP samples.

Check out Stephen’s book on the subject at Amazon.com:

Something Unseen: Paperback

Something Unseen: Kindle Edition

Check out Stephen’s YouTune Channel: youtube.com/user/WindStalker57

Thanks Stephen!

-Audible-

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.  With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured 2030: The Real Story Of What Happens To America

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

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A dream of The Grim Reaper, strange visitations from a listeners’ parents, and a Close Encounter highlight this edition of the Campfire!

-Campfire Essay Contest-

Go here to check out the details on our Campfire Essay Contest, but hurry up the deadline is June 14th!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Interview With The Vampire

As a Campfire listener you can get a free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

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Legal Disclaimer

Aspiring writers, here is a chance to be included in Jim’s upcoming book –  Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories.  My publisher, New Page Books, came up with the  idea to feature a listener’s written essay in the book!  I think it is a great concept.  Hopefully, we’ll discover some new talent!

If you’d like to have an essay based on your paranormal experience featured in the book to be published in September 2011, you can enter this contest.  One winner will be selected based on merit and we reserve the right not to select a winner if there is not a suitable entry.  Here are the details:

1. You must be 18 years of age or older

2. You must be willing to have the story included in the book

3. One entry per contestant

4. The essay should be approximately 1,000 words in length

5. You must complete this form AND email a copy of your essay in .doc (Word) format to jim@jimharold.com.  Failure to do both will disqualify you.

6. Winner will be selected based on merit of the essay.  Judging will be totally subjective.

7. Write away & good luck!  The deadline for entry is June 14th at 12 Midnight (Eastern Time US)

My new show on this week in the weird is now up and available at weirdnewsradio.com and on iTunes.  I am co-hosting with the Emmy Award winning Kate Botello (of Tech TV/The Screen Savers fame).  Please check it out.  I think you’ll like it!

Stephen Wagner

His site is the most popular of its kind on the Internet, I am talking about paranormal.about.com and Stephen Wagner the Paranormal Guide there.  In this episode, we talk about the paranormal — what interests and frustrates Stephen about its study.  We talk about all types of paranormal activity including “Black Eyed Kids”.

Check Stephen’s paranormal.about.com out for all kinds of paranormal goodness!

Thanks Stephen!

Audible-

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.  With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured The Believing Brain

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

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Are you ready for Freddy?  Hear the story of a listener who actually saw Freddy Kreuger decades before any of us heard of him.  Plus, we recognize America’s Memorial Day by spotlighting past and present Campfire stories concerning the military.  To all of our listeners from around the world serving and to those who have served, a HUGE thank you!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Wicked Bugs

As a Campfire listener you can get a free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

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Timothy Green Beckley

We have a wide ranging discussion with Timothy Green Beckley, Mr. UFO!   We talk about everything from the real origins of UFOs, his onetime work in tabloid journalism, and we discuss false prophesy.  You can check out Timothy’s site at ConspiracyJournal.com

Thanks Timothy!

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A frightening Friday 13th story, a red-eyed monster, memories of a beloved Grandma and Jim’s take on the rapture that wasn’t makeup this edition of the Campfire!

–Audible–

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com
With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Area 51

As a Campfire listener you can get a free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/campfire

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Joe Nickell, Paranormal Investigator

Joe Nickell says he is the world’s only full time, professional paranormal investgator. He has a take on paranormal activity that may be controversial to many listeners of this program but he is a fascinating guest on this week’s Paranormal Podcast.  Also, Jim makes a BIG announcement on the show this week!

You can check out Joe’s latest book at Amazon.com:

Tracking the Man-beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More

Also, you can find his website at JoeNickell.com

–Weird News Radio–

I am so excited to announce my new free show called Weird News Radio with Kate Botello & Jim Harold is launching on June 1.  Each week we will go over the biggest weird stories of the last seven days, not paranormal but it will definitely be strange…that much is guaranteed.

I am thrilled to be working with Kate, whom many of you will remember from her time at TechTV hosting Extended Play and, one of my all time favorites, The Screen Savers (with Leo LaPorte).

You can get a feel for what we are doing at WeirdNewsRadio.com

The first full show will be up on June 1!

Audible-

They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.  With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured In The Garden Of Beasts

As a Paranormal Podcast listener you can get this book or another free audiobook at audiblepodcast.com/paranormal

–

Legal Disclaimer

I am thrilled to announce that starting on June 1st, I will be co-hosting Weird News Radio with Kate Botello.  As many of you know, Kate is an Emmy award winning broadcaster who achieved national prominence at the TechTV cable network where she co-hosted Extended Play and The Screen Savers.

This show will be in addition to all of my JimHarold.com and JimHarold.net programs.

Each week, we’ll cover the weirdest and wackiest news out there in our new audio podcast.  Join us starting on June 1 for Weird News Radio.  You’ll find the show at WeirdNewsRadio.com, in fact, there is a sample there right now!  Check it out today!

Weird News Radio Press Release 051611

One of the creepiest stories we’ve ever heard around the Campfire headlines the show, a college ghost, and a boyfriend who draws in evil spirits round out this episode of Campfire!

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Dr. John B. Alexander (Ret. Col. US Army)

Dr. John B. Alexander is not only a Ph.D. but also a retired Colonel in the US Army. Dr. Alexander has had a life long interest in UFOs.  Neither a “debunker” or a “true believer” he says that UFOs are real and a phenomena worthy of considerable study.  We discuss his work on this edition of The Paranormal Podcast.

You can check out his book on the subject at Amazon.com:

UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (Book)

UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (Kindle Edition)

You can visit Dr. Alexander’s website at JohnBAlexander.com

Thanks Dr. Alexander!

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Stories of Mom highlight this Mother’s Day edition of the Campfire. Happy Mother’s Day to all of the Mom’s out there!

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With over 75,000 downloadable titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured SEAL Team Six

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Ben Radford

Paranormal investigator Ben Radford looks at the supernatural scientifically, the most recent target of his attention has been that of the Chupacabra, the goat sucking monster that has caught the imagination of cryptozoologists around the world.  We discuss his investigation and also have a wide ranging discussion of science and the paranormal. You can find his book at Amazon.com:

Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore (Paperback)

Tracking the Chupacabra (Kindle Edition)

You can check out Ben’s website at RadfordBooks.com

Thanks Ben!

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They support us, please support them! Of course, I am talking about our show sponsor Audible.com.  With over 75,000 titles it is a great way to get your spoken word fix!

This week we featured Rawhide Down

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Many listeners of the shows at JimHarold.com have asked for a free sample of shows from our Paranormal Plus Club. So, here is an episode of selected Plus Club excerpts FREE for your enjoyment! If you like what you hear you can sign up for more at Jim’s Plus Club at JimHarold.NET

Not only do you get 8 audio episodes per month for your Plus Membership but you also get much more which I describe in the show!

Campfire will be back next Sunday on its regularly scheduled release schedule!

Thanks for tuning into the show, I hope you like it.

Jim's Book

Proud to announce my book, Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Tales, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.  Release Date = September 2011

Jim Harold’s Campfire: True Ghost Stories

David John Oates

Do our utterances disclose our true feelings, thoughts and secrets when played backwards? Is “backward masking” much more than some weird lyrics in Rock Music?   Find out on this week’s Paranormal Podcast with reverse speech pioneer David John Oates!

Note from Jim: This is one of my favorite episodes in nearly six years of shows!

You can check out David’s website at reversespeech.com

Thanks David!

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A spirit in a long flowing gown, Bloody Mary, a listener has a personal connection to the Betty & Barney Hill alien abduction case, plus a favorite call from 2009 about, who else, Peter Cottontail.  Happy Easter!

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This week we featured Crash Course

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Geoff Crocker

Can an atheist believe in anything?  Author and atheist Geoff Crocker believes that western societies have lost something important along the way by absolutely turning their collective back on religious tradition.  We discuss his seemingly opposed viewpoints, atheism and the value of the metaphysical, in this fascinating episode of The Paranormal Podcast.

You can find his book on the subject at Amazon.com:

An Enlightened Philosophy: Can an Atheist Believe Anything?

You can visit Geoff’s website at

AnEnlightenedPhilosophy.com

Thanks Geoff!

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A caller from Australia tells us of a spooky ghost hunt, one of our most frequent callers returns to talk of meeting up with a highway specter, a vision of Mary plus more highlight this Campfire!

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Bill Birnes

The UFO Hunter himself, Bill Birnes, joins us on this week’s Paranormal Podcast. Jim & Bill talk about various UFO cases, reverse engineering, his current show “Ancient Aliens” and why “UFO Hunters” was taken off the air. You guessed it, the UFO Hunters uncovered too much!

You can check out Bill’s magazine and other projects at UFOMag.com

Thanks Bill!

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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Note From Jim: We monitor our transcripts as closely as possible for any typographical errors; however, these may happen from time to time…for the final authority on what was said during a podcast please refer to the audio file.

JIM HAROLD: … and I can’t think of a better guest to talk about the subject [of UFOs] than tonight’s, and I’m honored to have him on the show.  I’m talking, of course, about William J. Birnes, and he’s a bonified triple-threat.  A New York Times Best Selling author, a publisher of UFO Magazine, and as many of you may know him, a TV star in his own right who headed up the crew at UFO Hunters for The History Channel.  Of course, now they call themselves History, but I still call them The History Channel. He holds a law degree and received his PhD from New York University in 1974 and I could not be more pleased to have him on the program.  Doctor Birnes, thank you for being on the Paranormal Podcast.

BILL BIRNES: Well, it’s my pleasure.  Thank you for inviting me.

JIM HAROLD: Let me ask you this:  with that kind of erudite background, a law degree, a PhD, what in the world got you interested in UFOs?  How did you get into the field?

BILL BIRNES: Well, one, I actually had my own sighting back in the 1950s.  When I was a kid in New York City I saw this craft, it was a light, a big circular light, that at night blanketed out the entire sky over our city block.  Obviously, growing up in the 1950s you’re really  growing up in the era, right? The summer of the saucers.  The summers of the saucers.  It’s almost as if every year in the 1950s, some newspaper, somewhere — of course, they treated it with derision and disdain, but nevertheless these were news stories — would carry the story of some UFO sighting. It was UFOs over Washington, and that was in the newspaper. It was in all the major newspapers, and it was in the Movietone newsreels, so you went to see movies like This Planet Earth and Earth vs The Flying Saucers and Invaders from Mars and things like that, you’d be hearing stories and seeing some of the footage of UFOs over Washington DC. So, I mean, you’re growing up in that era. It’s hard not to be interested.

JIM HAROLD:  I know, and I’m of a bit different age — I’m in my early 40s — but I remember being fascinated with it as a kid.  We had our own mini little blip in the 70s, and there seemed to be a lot of interest in the popular culture in it, and also interest in things like the Bermuda Triangle with Charles Berlitz and those types of things.  Now, let’s go through your career as a UFO investigator.  Of course, I think probably most people listening to this program are most familiar with your work on the UFO Hunters program, but tell us how you got into publishing the magazine and where you started your professional engagement with the UFO phenomenon.

BILL BIRNES:  Well, I was and am actually a true crime writer, and when my wife and I were living in Hollywood I was working with a number of… just law enforcement officers, police officers on telling their story, one of whom was the very famous and celebrated Bill Roemer who was the FBI agent in Chicago who broke the big organized crime cartel from the Bonanno family.  One of the places that I was pitching his story to, as ideally a movie or television series on the fiction he was writing, was a motion picture company who was also dealing with — and it was a round-about way of doing it, but a television movie on the fates of the prisoners of war of the Vietnam war era who were kept behind by the Vietnamese.

JIM HAROLD:  I think I saw that… was that a TV movie?  Because I think I saw that.

BILL BIRNES:  There were a number of TV movies on that.  This was not that, but I was hired to write the book.  Basically to edit a book on this, and one of the people we were working with was Colonel Philip Corso who was, as most people know, the person who negotiated operation Little Switch/Big Switch for the United States and President Eisenhower at the end of the Korean War during the armistice.
Well, in subsequent conversations with Corso and the motion picture company, as it was developing the story, he really dropped the bomb that he worked for the government on the R and D in the 1960s and he was in charge of the Roswell debris and bringing the reverse engineering into American industry, and he gave me a copy of the memoir, the biography of his boss, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, also very famous, played by Gregory Peck, I think, but very famous as the general who led the charge up Hamburger Hill in North Korea to rescue his men.  So, I mean, the guy was very reputable, very credible, had a lot of history, and the story about the Roswell debris and the reverse engineering was really a fascinating story.  He was dropping names, dropping devices, and we checked a lot of the circumstantial stuff out, right, and it all checked out.  Indeed, some of the technology he talked about really had a jump start in the 1960s, and he said the jump start came from the fact that he had taken, for his boss, General Trudeau, bits and pieces of the Roswell crash.  Fiber optics, integrated circuitry, a strange memory metal, things like that, he had taken that… oh, a laser cutting tool, he had taken that to various industries and laboratories: IBM Monstanto, AT&T, Bell Labs, and this had been done prior to his own involvement in the late 1940s.  So, I mean, fascinating stuff. I checked it out and the circumstances were there that there probably was some reverse engineering going on, and sure enough, documents he pointed us to existed, and I basically sold the book for the movie company, called The Day After Roswell, they asked me to write the book and became a New York Times best seller, and the people who then owned UFO Magazine came to me, and we did an interview about the book and about Corso, and said, ‘look, we’re in some real financial difficulty here, we really can’t  meet our bills.  It’s a very sad thing. We want to stay in the publishing business.  Do you think the movie company would invest in them?’ Well, the movie company — I set the meeting up — heard their story, and they invested, and said ‘ look, though, for us to do this’ — and I liked these folks, they were very nice folks, good UFO researchers — ‘you would stay on in an advisory capacity. If the magazine ever does well we’ll compensate you, just be around, kind of the emeritus publisher’, and I did, and it didn’t do well.  It suffered under their business management, and ultimately they said, ‘look. We’ll sell it to you if you want it.”  And I bought it.  My wife, who was a professional New York literary editor, took over the magazine, turned it around financially and it began to get successful, and during the course of that, as we began to publish ebooks — electronic books — on various UFO-related topics and paranormal topics, the production company that worked for The History Channel came to me and said ‘would you be part of a show we’re doing on the Russian Roswell?” and of course I knew about that from articles in UFO Magazine, and so to make a long story very short, we did the piece on Russian Roswell for UFO Files for History, which was very successful, had very high ratings.  They asked me back to do something on underwater UFOs, did that… so I did about five UFO Files. The old UFO Files for The History Channel.  It was very successful. Finally, Pat Uskert, who was one of the UFO Hunters, lived in Venice California near us, and he had a UFO sighting over Venice Beach, wrote to my wife again to do an article for the magazine, so she suggested to him, because he said “gee.  I don’t know if it’s a balloon or UFO.  How do you tell?” So Nancy said, “listen.  Why don’t you get a metallic balloon”… you know, one of those birthday balloons?

JIM HAROLD: A Mylar balloon, yeah.

BILL BIRNES: A Mylar balloon. “Why don’t you get one of those, and launch it” — and Pat actually took a video of the UFO that he saw, he ran back to his house — he lived right near the beach — and he took a video, so he had this video of something.  We couldn’t tell, really — what was it, a balloon? A flying saucer? We didn’t know. But it looked intriguing, because it was moving against the wind.  You could see the wind pushing something one way, and here was this object going another way.  Well, everybody knows that sometimes the winds aloft do flukey things, right?  So Nancy said, “look.  Why don’t you get yourself a Mylar balloon, launch it, and then compare the flight of that Mylar balloon with the flight of the object you saw?”  Well, Pat did it, and — this is interesting — he edited the video so that it was a split screen, so you could see the balloon on one screen, and the object that Pat saw and  originally video taped on the other screen. Well, it was so compelling that I’d just done a motion picture, a television motion picture for Hearst Television.  It’s called “When Husbands Cheat” and it still runs today.  It was a motion picture based on a book that I represented in New York, when I was a literary agent in Manhattan, based on a personal story.  So I brought the video and Pat Usker himself to Hearst Television.  And they said, “wow, this is great. Let’s do something called ‘UFO Roadtrip’, get some friends, and why don’t you guys go on the road?” and they did, and shot some video, and ultimately Hearst decided that they were not going to make the television show.  They were getting out of the UFO business.  But the company that was doing UFO Files for The History Channel said to me, “we’d love to see this video and what you think you can do.”  Showed it to them, and they set up one of the UFO segments on USO — you probably saw that as well — one of the UFO segments called “Code Red: Deep Sea UFOs”.  We went out onto Santa Monica Bay in a dive boat, and basically we were trying to find any trace evidence — was there radiation under water?  Was there anything we could find that was trace evidence that maybe there was some kind of inner Redondo Trench or UFO? — of an unidentified submerged object. And of course it was great, because Pat was a dive instructor, a scuba-diving instructor, in the Phillipines, so Pat really had a lot of experience doing scuba diving.  So Pat and his friends were in the water, and the ratings of that particular show were off the chart.  I mean, the network loved it.  So based on that, we put together a pilot.  They saw a lot of promise in the pilot for the show. This is basic TV stuff, right?  You do a pilot, and they saw a lot of promise in the pilot and  based on the pilot they took an order for the first series, 13 episodes, for a show which they then re-named UFO Hunters. And of course, that was how the show started.  It was very successful in the first season.  We enjoyed a lot of success and they renewed us for two more years, and at the end of it I think we went a little too far — a lot too far, actually — with one of our segments on Dulce, New Mexico, showing the hybrids… and of course, a lot of that’s come to be a story in and of itself, of what happened at Dulce, and then the show was transformed, believe it or not, from very intense, interactive, kind of  three amigos UFO Hunters into a show that’s now on I also host called Ancient Aliens.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes.  Ancient Aliens is a fascinating show, because I love the idea that the technology that the ancients enjoyed, pyramids and so forth, may have been given to us by other civilizations.  And we’re going to talk about all of that right after this break on The Paranormal Podcast.

…

Well, we are back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our very special guest tonight is William J. Birnes; Bill Burnes, as you know him, the host of Ancient Aliens and also UFO Hunters, and an author, a publisher.  He’s kind of done it all, and is one of the top names in UFO investigations, and he was telling us about this transformation of his career.  Now I do want to get onto that question of the Dulce Base a little bit.  I do a video podcast with my good buddy….every week, and we’ve talked about the Dulce Base phenomena several times on that program. Tell us about that episode, because I remember that disturbing picture of some cross breeding with a human and cattle and things.  Explain to folks what the Dulce Base is, and what its implications may be, because wow! (laughs)

BILL BIRNES: The Dulce Base — first of all, there’s a lot of controversy over whether it’s a base, it’s not a base, real, not real… the Dulce Base — what we’re calling Dulce — is an underground, inside-the-mountain facility run by I-don’t-know-who, okay, in Dulce, New Mexico, on the Jicarilla Appache reservation. There’s a lot of controversy about it… is it really a base?  Is it not a base?  Over the years, the story of the base came to be, real quick, because somebody who identified himself as a former security guard there, named Thomas Castello, said that he was working there and that during his tenure there he saw astounding things in that area.  He saw aliens, extraterrestrials, whether they were reptile ancient aliens, whether they were aliens that looked like us, gruesome aliens, he said they were there.  They were working on scientific experiments, in some cases side by side with Americans, in other cases they were working on their own.  There were places where human beings could go, places where only extraterrestrials could go… but the experiments, as he described them, and then actually drew images of them, were these horrible grotesque experiments, kind of like out of the movie The Island of Dr Moreau. Body parts floating in vats, human heads, human bodies, like something out of a Jeffrey Dahmer movie. It was really gruesome.  And he said these experiments were going on to blend humans and extraterrestrials.  They were growing a whole new species there.  And these stories were so compelling, so frightening, that people were actually drawn to them, and drawn to his sketches.  Well, Thomas Castello disappeared, shortly after going public, and telling his story, not only did he disappear, but the people he told his story to disappeared.  And so we went to the base, and of course if you talk to people like John Lear and others, they will tell you, that yes, this is a true story… John Lear, John Rhodes; it’s a true story, really awful things are going on there.  Another story, told to us by these two retired police officers who investigated Dulce — Ken Storch was one of the names, told us about literally a “fire fight”, pretty well known in UFOlogy circles, a fight between US service men and guards at the base, and the actual extraterrestrials, in which a number of scientists and US soldiers were killed in the fire fight, because the aliens were using very exotic weapons, weapons that we had no defenses for.  So this was the story of the fire fight. And this has been going on for years, and then, of course, could we have build a base deep inside what is basically a large hill?  What happened to all the dirt?  How do you get there?  All these kind of technical questions, you know?  Apparently, according to John Rhodes, we have the technology. Bechtel had these huge earth boring machines, he showed us the patents, so the more we investigated this, the more fascinating it became.  And of course the Native Americans who live there, the Jicarilla Appache, they told us stories about hybridized animals and people they call the ‘little people”, “the shadow people”, who lived in the area.  They showed us photographs — I have one of UFOs hovering over a mountain top.  One of the tribal police officers told us about a three-headed rabbit and strange black vans leaving Dulce in the wee small hours before the dawn. Well, it was compelling.  Finally, we met the very famous legendary Gabe Valdez, who was a retired New Mexico State Trooper, who showed us the photographs of what looked like a human head on a cow’s body.  And that was stunning, and of course the very famous Nancy Talbott of BLT research told us, “you know, don’t you, that bovine blood serum is used to culture human cells.”  And so it’s a very close serum.  And so if someone were to create a cross species, based on using cow parts for human organs, that’s something they would do is manage to blend human and bovine DNA in such a way as to create a hybridized entity that could be used as an organ machine, creating organs.

JIM:  Ah, that was my question:  what would be the percentage in trying to create hybrid, possibly dangerous crossbreeds?  What would be the benefit of that?

BILL BIRNES:  That’s the benefit.  That’s the whole point.  Now imagine, why would the military would be involved?  Just think about it. Imagine you needed a stockpile of organs for soldiers in battle. Somebody loses an organ, somebody gets shot in the lung, somebody gets shot, you need organs. What if you had the ability to grow human organs in a factory?  And what if you could take that person’s stem cells, or that person’s genetic materials, and from that, by blending that with a cow, create organs? Imagine the pharmaceutical companies… what a boon for pharmaceutical companies.  Think of this. Think of human beings having organ replacements; those that can afford them, obviously. It is… you’re looking at the possibility of immortality.  Or at least of living hundreds and hundreds of years. As organs give out, you have a heart attack, you lose heart tissue, but you can grow a whole new heart and have it implanted.  And it’s your heart, so there’s no rejection. I mean, imagine the pharmaceutical  market for that.  Well, we’d evidently stepped on the big one, because we were told, “what did you do? You’re off the air.  You guys are bad guys, you shouldn’t have done this.”  Weeks after… months after the show aired, three republican senators, Grassley, McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, went before congress and submitted a bill — I don’t know if it ever passed — it was a bill to criminalize the interbreeding between humans and other animals. So, interspecies interbreeding criminalized. Well, so, we knew we’d done something and of course we were contacted by — I was contacted by — someone who represented himself as a member of a not-so-friendly intelligence agency, though he was pretty friendly…

JIM HAROLD: With three letter, maybe?

DOCTOR WILLIAM J BIRNES: A three letter agency… who said, “what you did was just really… you could have stayed under the radar, but you wouldn’t do it, and now you’re off the air and now ABC and Disney and The History Channel have to do payback to the boys upstairs. The guys on the ground liked you, but their bosses didn’t.” And so that’s the story of how we did UFO Hunters and why we got off the air.  And so the network had such high ratings with the show — and television is such a ratings business, as you know — that they didn’t want to lose the show.  So what they did was they took one of our episodes from season three, out of the segment on the ancients with Giorgi Tsoukalos, in which we were the ones that took his model of what looked like — a bird, some kind of strange thing…

JIM HAROLD: Yes!  I remember seeing it!  What was it… a thunderbird-type thing…?

BILL BIRNES: Yeah, we were the ones who took that, went to our special effects producer Rick Price, in Hollywood he does special effects stuff, and he modeled – he took the exact scale specifications and scaled up a balsam wood model of that, launched it from a catapult, and lo and behold it flew like the space shuttle. From that one segment, The History Channel went to another production company and said, “do you want to do a two-hour special on Ancient Aliens?” and that was the segment, they re-did that segment on that show, and from that they grew the series, then the production company came to me and said, “Bill, we’d like you to be one of the hosts of that series” and I’ve been doing that show for three seasons as well. So I’ve been six seasons on The History Channel hosting UFO shows.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s fantastic. Well, I’d like to talk about some more cases.  That Dulce case is fascinating.  And I’ll put this one to you:  let’s say you had a skeptic before you… now, we know there are those people who call themselves skeptics who are really debunkers, and you could almost walk them up to a UFO with an alien and they wouldn’t believe it.  But let’s say you had somebody that’s skeptical but intellectually honest enough to be open-minded.  And you had to take one case to them that you’ve investigated and say “this is the best case where I have the best chance to convince you that something’s really going on here.”  What would be that case and why?

BILL BIRNES: Let’s start about what is a skeptic, okay, in terms of a UFO case. Believe it or not, a skeptic would be somebody from MUFON (the mutual UFO network).  Most serious UFO investigators and researchers — serious ones — are bigger skeptics than anybody, because they know how easy it is to mistake something for a UFO and build a whole story, when it’s not really a UFO at all. It’s something conventional.  So that’s first of all… if you’re looking at a skeptic, you’re probably looking at — an honest skeptic — you’re looking at a UFO investigator.  So that’s one.
Two, there are so many cases that I look at a case that would have a number of things about it, things such as multiple credible witnesses.  That’s one.  Two, is there some form of physical trace evidence that remains from that case, whether it’s photographic evidence, soil, something like that.  Is there any official documentary history on that case, not just ‘Joe writes to Sam’ or ‘Mary writes to Joe’, but really a documentary history where the government or some official agency like the military seems to get involved to make statements about the case.  And finally, the final thing for me is, is there a history of an extraordinary attempt to debunk the case by doing things that in themselves are more implausible than the fact that the case might involve an unconventional craft or otherworldly manifestation. So those are my prongs of what makes the kind of case to respond to what you were talking about.  And there are many many cases like that.
One case of course is Roswell, but I’m not going to dwell on Roswell too much, but Roswell is one such case. There’s physical trace evidence, there are multiple eye witnesses, there is official government documentation in the form of memos from the head of the Air Force Material Command.  We have deathbed affadavits from various people, and the attempts to debunk the case — oh, it’s a weather balloon; oh, it’s a project mogul balloon; oh, these are crash dummies — are so implausible it’s ridiculous. So, Roswell fits the bill on that.
The other one for me is the 1952… I’m calling it ‘The Summer of the Saucers’.  It’s UFOs over Washington DC, where there’s actual film footage and still photographs of these objects hovering over the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building… I mean, you can see these things.  We have eye-witness testimony from various pilots, radar operators, air traffic controllers. And then you have the book by Edward Rupelt, who was the former leader of Project Blue Book, saying flat out, these were not temperature aversions, clouds, malfunctioning radar, these were real objects that our planes were chasing.  So, the 1952 Summer of the Saucers.
Then there was the 1997 Phoenix Lights.  Thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw these, great video footage, great witness testimony.  The governor of the state of Arizona,
Symington, who was an air force officer who himself had a sighting back when he was in the air force, I mean, he said this was real. I mean, these weren’t just sightings of strange lights in the sky.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing about that one that was interesting to me, was that Governor Symington came out right after that and they had that ridiculous press conference with the figure dressed up like an alien, but then later on he recanted and said, ‘look.  I shouldn’t have done that, and this is real.”  And if I’m not mistaken, he saw the lights, too.

BILL BIRNES: Well, he saw the lights… that’s the interesting thing that you mention here, is that it wasn’t just the lights that he saw, and a number of other witnesses saw, he actually saw a structured craft.  He came on our show, UFO Hunters, to make that confession, and that was part of the show.  James Fox and I introduced him, and he said that not only did he see lights, what he saw was an actual, structured triangular craft. It had a kind of shimmering, wavy surface to it, and he felt a real sense of awe and majesty as this thing hovered by.  I mean, it just floated by as if it were a kite, but it seemed to be intelligently guided. And thousands of other people up close and personal saw this triangular-shaped object, bigger than football fields, float by them literally a hundred or so feet in the air.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing I love about it is, well, we’ve had Doctor Lynne Kitei on the show, and she’s written books and done documentaries as well, and the thing that I love is when the military comes back and says, “oh, it was flares from an exercise.” I mean, come on.

BILL BIRNES:  And you just mentioned that fourth prong.  When the government does something that’s so ridiculous in order to debunk it that it’s more implausible than the fact that it’s a flying saucer or something.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s like in the 90s when the government, 50 years after it happened, came out about the mogul explaination for Roswell, it’s kind of like… they drew attention to it.  “There’s nothing to see here.”

BILL BIRNES: Right. And the reason they came out with the Project Mogul statement was not in response to anything, but was in response to congressman Steve Schiff, who mysteriously died of cancer shortly thereafter, but congressman Steve Schiff from New Mexico, who raised the question, “what really happened at Roswell?” Well, the government on the 50th anniversary of Roswell came out with, “oh, it’s really a Project Mogul balloon” and they made it absolutely clear that it was a top secret project designed to detect the residue of nuclear waste from Soviet nuclear test explosions.  Well, the ludicrousness of that was, they said ‘we were doing this in 1947’ and the materials were so exotic that either the officers at the Roswell 519 air field couldn’t identify it, or guess what?  That wasn’t true at all. The Project Mogul balloon, believe it or not, was simply a series of weather balloons — conventional weather balloons — strung together so they could reach extraordinarily high altitudes. What were weather balloons made of in 1947?  neoprene rubber.  Not Mylar, not cellulose acetate, but regular old-fashioned neoprene rubber, the same neoprene rubber used in World War 2.  Everybody at the base could have identified neoprene rubber.  And, to make matters worse, the weather balloon factory was — if you’ve ever been to the Roswell base — right across the street from the base.  So even enlisted personnel knew what a weather balloon was… they saw them being made at the base.  So that was implausible, right?  So that fits that prong of extraordinarily implausible statements than the fact that it was a UFO… well, that’s the Phoenix lights.  After Luke air force base said ‘no, we had nothing in the air that night’, suddenly, suddenly the next day it was, ‘oh no, we really did, it was the Maryland International Guard, they were down here doing maneuvers, they were doing flare maneuvers.’  So now it was flares.
Well, analysts of that video footage — and we have plenty of video footage of the Phoenix lights — measured the colour spectrum — remember, flares give off a specific colour because we know what’s burning in them, it’s phosphorous, it’s incandescence, right? — looked for the various traces of flares and lo and behold when you look in split screen, and we did an episode on this, when you look at the split screen of what a flare looks like — and again this goes back to what Nancy was doing with Pat Usker — if you look at what a flare looks like and the Phoenix lights look like, they’re totally different. Then the location that the air force base gave for where the flares were being dropped didn’t match. They said they were being dropped over at the Goldwater Range, because why would you drop incandescent flares over somebody’s house? No, they’re being dropped in the flare test range.  But the flare test range was behind various mountains.  When you analyze the footage, these things are actually in front of the mountains. And so on and on… but once the flare explanation got out there, how easy it is for everybody to say, ‘oh, they’re flares! You UFO nuts, you guys will believe anything.’

JIM HAROLD: It seems they always have one of those.  Somebody put on my facebook the other day a great thing, and you’ve probably seen it I’m sure.  It’s a chart of US Air Force explanations for UFOs and it shows all different shaped UFOs including one that looks like the USS Enterprise, and everything under it has “weather balloon” “weather balloon” “weather balloon” “swamp gas” “weather balloon”… and I said the only thing they were missing was ball lightning.

BILL BIRNES: Right, and they used ball lightning to explain actual UFO sightings in World War 2 that were called “foo-fighters.”

JIM HAROLD: Well, I was actually going to ask you about that, because that’s always fascinated me; because that predates the Kenneth Arnold 1947 “flying saucers” phenomenon… but gremlins and foo-fighters and all that, talk about that a little bit.  Because that’s fascinating.

BILL BIRNES: Well, foo-fighters — again, we have photographs of these — were real phenomenon from World War 2. They intercepted our fighter pilots that were escorting our B-17s over in Germany, in the Shweinfurt raids and Dresden raids, and the thing about these is that we thought at first that they were German secret weapons, and the Germans thought they were Allied secret weapons.  Nobody knew what they were.  They didn’t fight with our planes, they didn’t shoot back at us, they simply observed.  They were basically orbs, just like the orbs that people see in places like Marley Woods in the midwest, but people think that they only were observed over the skies over Germany, of Europe,  in World War 2.  Not true, because in 1945 one of our B-29 bombers saw a foo-fighter over the South Pacific and fired on it, and apparently hit it, and it split into a number of objects and disappeared. And foo-fighters were taken seriously enough by journalists — journalists had not yet been told ‘do not write about UFOs’ — that it was a cover story in one of the national news magazines in the 1940s.  So these were real phenomena.

JIM HAROLD: It’s fascinating to me.  I want to be respectful of your time, and you’ve been very generous with your time.  I have a couple of other things I wanted to ask you, though. One is this idea, and you talked about it earlier, of reverse engineering, and that has always fascinated me because when I look at the progression — and I’m not the only person that feels that, in fact I think you mention this on the episode you did on it that talked about the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane — but if you look at the progression of technology from, let’s say, 1900 – 1950, there were obviously, you know, the atomic bomb and so forth, but it kind of went on this curve that looked pretty reasonable. And then, from 1950 ‘til today, it goes exponentially.  You know, I was just telling somebody else I was interviewing earlier, I have a computer that I just built for myself about a month ago; it probably is as powerful as a military super computer from 15 years ago, or maybe more so.  And just the idea that we can do this show, which would have taken millions of dollars of equipment and we can do it with consumer-grade technology… the way that technology has progressed, and it seems like it would have had to come from somewhere. And that kind of explosion fits pretty nicely with Kenneth Arnold and  with Roswell and so forth.

BILL BIRNES: Well, the fascinating thing about reverse engineering is that, after Roswell — this is in 1947 — as the story goes,  our president Truman told his military Chief of Staff, his — I forget the person’s name, I want to say it’s George Marshall but I could be wrong — to take the lowest common denominator of technology that came out of that crash — because nobody knew really what that thing was — and take it to whatever industry they thought might have been working on something that was similar.  And that’s the secret of reverse engineering.
The argument against the possibility of reverse engineering, and reverse engineering obviously existed — I mean, when one of our B-29 bombers had a forced landing, in the Soviet Union at the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union actually took the plane apart and rebuilt their own Ilyshin bomber, which is physically identical to a B-29, probably bolt for bolt.  We’ve done that with some Soviet technology, so reverse engineering is a common thing; it’s not some magic thing, it’s common. The big skeptical argument about reverse engineering from UFOs is ‘oh, let’s just say we’ve gone back in time and left a cell phone in ancient Sumeria.  Now, not only would they not know how to reverse, they wouldn’t even know what it was. How could they tell?’  Well, I mean, again:  implausible argument because, in the case of the Roswell craft, some of the technology — and this is always my argument against it being a very advanced craft — some of the technology was technology we were already working on. So, when you look at it, it wasn’t that far ahead of us in terms of the electronics; in terms of, we were already working on lasers at the army lab at Columbia in the 1940s. So we were already working on this stuff. But the point is, you just create this unbelievably hypothetical situation and then take what people say is the reality and overlay it to that situation, so of course it’s illogical. Reverse engineering was that we were already working on some of this technology.  In the case of the integrated circuit, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs all the way back in the 1930s were looking for a way to create a switch, a way to pass current through a circuit without having to use this nineteenth century device.  By the way, this same nineteenth century device is called a light bulb, which was invented by Thomas Edison. Like the incandescent bulb, which we’re only now beginning to replace with other kinds of light bulbs, because you realize how energy-inefficient it is… but when you go to the store and buy an incandescent light bulb and put ‘er in a lamp, you’re basically using technology that’s almost two hundred years old. I mean, 150 years old, right?

JIM HAROLD:  Getting away from tubes, I even remember as a kid we had tube TVs, and they had to come and fix them.  The tube would burn out, they’d take the tube to the store…
BILL BIRNES:  Right.  And it’s funny, because then in some of the pharmacies and super pharmacies, they had tube testers, and if you could look inside your TV see which tube wasn’t lit, like a light bulb you’d pull it out, take it to the tube tester and you’d plug it into the sockets, and you’d turn it on and see if the tube was working or not. Well, in the 1930s, Brattain and Shockley wanted to find a way to create a level of circuitry that didn’t rely on Edison tubes, ie light bulbs, to pass current.  And to use these devices they were working on as switches — on other words, could you pass one electron through and shut it off.  So, on/off.  A binary circuit. And they were using silicon as a base for the two nodes to pass it, but they couldn’t do two things with it: they couldn’t only generate or pass one electron at a time.  I mean, when you watch electricity, right, it’s the flow of electrons through some conductor. They couldn’t pass one electron at a time. Either you’re passing a bunch or you’re not.  And the electrons would flow both ways. So you couldn’t do a singular directional circuit. Well, when they received the pieces of debris from the Roswell crash — this would have been in Fall, 1947… over the summer of 1947, actually  – they looked at the chemistry of the base of this circuitry, and they saw that is was a combination of silicon and certain amounts of arsenic — when they used arsenic and silicon as a base, suddenly they were able to direct the flow of electrons and use this device as a switch, and that became the transistor.  And thus the modern digital computer age was born. But, the evidence for this, look at the reach:  there was a crash at Roswell, the crash was of some kind of crash that was otherworldly, pieces of that craft went to Bell Labs with Brattain and Shockley already working on the transistor, suddenly… well, Brattain and Shockley had no work bench notes in the 1940s.  In other words, there was no documentation of their work. Only after the transistor was patented by Bell Labs in 1948, and then re-patented in 1949 and then suddenly by the end of ‘49 people had these little transistor radios, these little teeny radios… I remember their first appearance in 1950 as a consumer device.
Well, after these were in consumer applications, and of course they were in military applications as well, suddenly Brattain and Shockley reverse engineered their own notes to account for how they discovered this. In other words, their notes we’re using didn’t exist in 1947, but suddenly by 1949 they did exist, reverse engineered from the 1930s.  That, to me, is another case of reverse engineering. Every item that Philip Corso said he brought to various industries were things that the industries were already working on. So, fiber optics:  the army technologists basically flashed a light through this kind of Y-shaped set of glass-looking filaments, monofilaments, and sure enough it was in different colours, and they realised that they could use light to carry signals and that became fiber optics, and that went to AT&T Bell Labs.  Kevlar, that substance went to Monsanto and the University of Colorado, working on trying to reverse engineer the substance in spider web; one of the strongest substances, by the way, on planet earth, if you look at what spiders do.  That’s what they were doing. So here’s a case where those substances were actually being used. Those inventions were already being made.  The army was already working on powered light, a maser, and they were doing it at Columbia University, and of course, proof from history we now know that the general of the army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the president of the United States, after he retired from the army, was the president of my alma mater, Columbia University, and that was where the army lab was. So, fascinating that it would go there. You have General Douglas MacArthur in 1952 at Sperry Rand saying that our next major battles will be in outer space.  He told the New York times. So there’s a lot of evidence for reverse engineering of something, whether it was from alien technology or not, I would love to see the memo, but circumstantial evidence really supports that.

JIM HAROLD:   Yeah, I think so.  One last question, then I want to ask where everybody can go and find out about UFO Magazine and everything you’re doing. I do a weekly video show, as I said, and a lot of what we do is feature a lot of video from youtube and so forth, and you’ve been doing this for a good while now.  Is it becoming more difficult because of the proliferation of different video devices, that there’s almost too much UFO video and it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff?

BILL BIRNES: Well, first of all, anybody can create a UFO video, as you know.  And certainly there have been some very famous UFO film hoaxes. You don’t need a consumer grade camera or a cell phone camera to create a UFO hoax. I mean, so we know that, right? The more sophisticated you get… so you’ve got to be careful.  But on the other hand, the prevalence:  why would there be so many hoaxes? Why would people waste time creating a hoax? Well, as one person from the military told me, they’re put up to it by the very three-letter agency that keep us safe in our beds at night, because the more hoaxes you can show on youtube, the less likely people are to believe they’re crying wolf. The less likely people are to believe that there really is something out there.

JIM HAROLD:  That makes a lot of sense.  Well, thank you for being so generous with your time. Tell folks a little bit about UFO Magazine, where they can go; obviously, watch you on The History Channel — I can’t just call it History, to me it’s The History Channel, probably always will be in my mind. Where can people go on the web to find out everything Bill Birnes is up to?

BILL BIRNES: Well, if you want to look at UFO Magazine, if you want to get a free sample issue of UFO Magazine, we give them away.  You pay for the postage, we pay for the magazine; send it right to your door, first-class mail, go to www.UFOmag.com.  That’s the website. And you can see all of our past issues. You want a real bargain, order one of our past issues or our current issue, even before it comes off press you can order the current issue of our magazine electronically; that will be in a PDF file that you can read on your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, whatever you have, you can order that. $2.50.  When you order it using our shopping cart, it downloads right to your computer. So it’s the fastest way to get UFO Magazine, and if you don’t want to have a bunch of copies sitting on your bookcase, and wait for them in the mail or wait for the post office to deliver them, order it electronically. So that’s how to get UFO Magazine.
When you’re on that site, you can also pop over to our radio show, every Saturday night we go live at 6 o’clock with some very interesting guests, not necessarily from the field of UFOs, although many of them are.  We do a lot of conspiracy and alternate history topics as well.  It’s called Future Theatre, and the radio show is there.  We’re on talk stream live, and folks could download all of our past shows from UFO Magazine, just click on “Future Theatre”.

JIM HAROLD:  Good deal.  Thank you, Bill Birnes, for being on the Paranormal Podcast.

BILL BIRNES: You’re more than welcome.  Thank you.

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Dr. Stephen E. Braude

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