She is so prominent on UFO Twitter/X that you might call her the Mayor. Our first guest today is author and podcaster Kelly Chase.

As the host of The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast, Kelly has her finger on the pulse of all of the latest developments in the news and she joins us on this edition of The Paranormal Podcast.

In part two, Tim Ellis joins us to discuss Great Lakes monsters and Michigan Paracon, one of the biggest paranormal gatherings anywhere! As a broadcaster, podcaster, investigator, author and conference organizer, Tim is a true Renaissance Man of the paranormal.

You can find Kelly’s website at https://uforabbithole.com/

And, you can find her podcast on all major podcast apps.

Here is a link to Kelly’s recent book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/44jGp1Y

You can find a link to Tim’s book on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/44lRI9K

And, for tickets and more details on Michigan Paragon go here: https://miparacon.com/

Thanks Kelly and Tim!

TRANSCRIPT
Please note we do not guarantee 100% transcript accuracy. The below reflects a best effort. We start with an automated transcript and then perform best effort human review. Thank you for your understanding.

Jim (00:00:00):

The UFO Rabbit Hole. Let’s go down that with Kelly Chase. Plus we’re going to talk about Great Lakes monsters and Mysteries with Tim Ellis. All on this double header edition of the Paranormal Podcast.

Announcer (00:00:27):

This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

Jim (00:00:30):

Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again and we’ve got a big double header show for you today. We’re going to start off with Kelly Chase and take a trip down the UFO Rabbit Hole. She is a great podcaster and author and researcher on all things UFO. She has built a big following on UFO Twitter, or X now I guess you call it, and we’re going to talk with her then followed up by Tim Ellis. He’s the co-author of a book along with Brad Blair called Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries, and also along with Brad, one of the main people at the Michigan ParaCon, which is coming up this week. So we wanted to get his interview on. We actually recorded that a while back and we got log jammed with interviews.

So we aired it a little bit later than I would’ve liked. I would’ve liked to have gotten Tim’s interview on a little bit earlier, but better late than never. And he talks a lot about these strange monsters from the Great Lakes and about the Great Michigan ParaCon event, which I highly recommend and he’ll be along shortly after Kelly. And here we go. It is a double header Paranormal Podcast.

And they say an old proverb is, may you live in interesting times. A if you’re an adherent to that, boy do we live in interesting times for the UFO question. My goodness, it seems like there is new news every single day. And one of the people who really has their finger on the pulse of all of this is Kelly Chase. She is a podcaster with the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. She is an author with her book, the UFO Rabbit Hole Book 1, and I know more are coming, and a media personality and we are so glad to have her with us on the program today to talk about her own experience, about the UFO question in general, and get down to some specifics on what we’re seeing now with the congressional hearing and all of the aftermath.

Kelly, welcome to the show. So good to connect with you.

Kelly (00:02:42):

Oh, Jim, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been a fan of your show and I’m thrilled to be here.

Jim (00:02:46):

Well, thank you so much. And you are the queen of UFO Twitter, I guess UFO X now.

Kelly (00:02:55):

I mean, I’ll take it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I spend a lot of time there, certainly. I am probably at least the mayor.

Jim (00:03:01):

There you go. There you go. I’ll take that. That sounds good to me. So let me ask you, people will say, well, why are you interested in this? And it comes from a very honest and sincere place, authentic place. It all kind of started with the UFO experience, didn’t it?

Kelly (00:03:22):

It sure did. So I had a UFO sighting when I was a kid. I was at the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my family on vacation, and I saw this light in the sky that did impossible things and I ran inside, told my family what I’d seen, and they didn’t believe me. And I think like a lot of people, I didn’t really have anything to attach that memory to or anything to kind of make it sense and have it make sense in my life. And so I just sort of forgot about it. And it wasn’t until 2021, it was like we were coming out of the pandemic. My family was going on vacation again to the Outer Banks. I’m not great at spending time without a project. And so I thought I had just sort of become aware of some of the news stories and I thought, you know what? I’m going to try to get to the bottom of this. And I thought a week would do it, and I was very wrong. I was very wrong. But that was where the podcast really began for me, was just out of my own honest curiosity and trying to make sense of something that had happened to me when I was a kid.

Jim (00:04:18):

Now when it comes down to the UFO question, we’re seeing so much coming out these days, how much do you think is real and significant, and how much of it do you think is sound and fury signifying nothing, I guess kind the signal to noise ratio?

Kelly (00:04:41):

That’s a great question and I think it’s hard to tell right now, right? I think this is something that, like you said, we live in very interesting times and maybe 50 to a hundred years from now, we might be able to look back and get a better sense of how much of this was real and how much of this was trumped up. And I will say that I am a firm believer that we have plenty of evidence to suggest that the UFO phenomenon is real. But in terms of, I mean, I think even people who are really deep in the field will tell you that of all of the UFO sightings and things that are reported, that probably fewer than 5% of them actually represent something anomalous that we can’t explain. Most things that people see do have prosaic explanations. This is an extraordinary situation, and it’s hard to know exactly how much of it is just lore and how much of it is just stories and how much of it is real. And I think for those of us who really love this field, a lot of what there is to love here is that there is so much mystery, there’s so many different paths to follow.

You can study this forever and not get to the end of it.

Jim (00:05:50):

It’s true. When I started this podcast 18 years ago, and it wasn’t just UFOs, it was a whole host of anomalous phenomena, ghosts, UFOs. I’m interested in all of it, and I thought, I’ll do this for six months. I’ll have it all figured out and not so much, not so much. In fact, that’s why it resonated with me when you said, I’ll figure this out in a week or two. It’s so funny because people have spent lifetimes chasing this stuff, and I hope we’re getting closer. I hope we’re getting closer. I think of Stanton Friedman who I actually had the opportunity to be on a panel with a couple of days before he passed, unfortunately, and I wish that he would’ve been able to see everything that has happened in the last year or two or three years and just wish he were here to see it. And so many others, not just him, John Keel, for example. 

So what I wanted to do is talk about some of the themes in your book. I thought you really kind of laid it out nicely talking about some of the different hypotheses about UFOs. And a lot of people say, well, yeah, they’re UFOs and that 5%,  that’s just secret military testing. And that’s just now the big thing is Russia and China, it’s Russia and China. It’s Russia and China. And I have no doubt that Russia and China have secret aircraft and those things, but I don’t think they’re doing what the Tic-Tac video does. That’s just my bias though. What’s wrong about people who say, look, yeah, these things exist. This is just super secret like the SSR 71 was at one point, it’s Skunkworks, it’s Area 51. It’s all secret technology. Yeah, we’re seeing stuff, but they’re not little green men. What’s wrong with the idea that it’s just simply human military technology?

Kelly (00:07:44):

Yeah, I mean, like you said, I think that probably a certain percentage of it is, but there are those cases, the tic-tac incident that are so far outside of not just what we think. It’s not just a matter of we don’t think our government has that. It’s that the top minds in physics and propulsion technology around the world say, we’re not anywhere close to this. We wouldn’t know. We can’t get there from here. And so we have that, and we also have the indication that if this was Russia or China who had this kind of technology, or even if it was us, it would make so many of the world conflicts right now moot. If a country actually had their hands on this kind of paradigm-shattering technology, it would change the face of global politics literally overnight. People wouldn’t just keep this in the garage and fly it low over residential areas at night to spook people. They’d be using it for real actual aims. And so I think it’s hard to argue that that’s all that’s going on here.

Jim (00:08:45):

I think that is a tremendous point. For one minute, does anybody think there’s reasons, for example, that Vladimir Putin won’t use nuclear weapons? It would have so many other ramifications, and he may still, let’s hope that he doesn’t in Ukraine, but the point is there’s a reason you wouldn’t use that. But if you had something like what you were saying, these craft that were so exponentially superior to anything any other country had, you wouldn’t really care about what anybody else thinks because in the hands of somebody like a Putin, because it’s like what are they going to do? You train the weapon on them next. So if Russia had it, for example, do we think for a minute that they wouldn’t use it on Ukraine? If China had it, do you think for a minute, Xi wouldn’t use it on Taiwan because the idea is the reunification of China.

So your point is very well taken. And I’ve interviewed Annie Jacobson, the great journalist about, for example, Area 51 when she had her big book out on it, and yes, absolutely things like the U2, things like the SSR 71, probably things like the stealth bomber and so forth, those kind of things. Yes, people have said, I’ve seen A UFO and it ended up being them, but that does not mean that there’s still room for an X factor, something we don’t understand of non-human intelligence. I think some people try to conflate that intentionally. It’s almost like a misinformation tactic. They say, well, look at the U2, look at the SSR 71. People were mistaking that for UFOs. That can be true, and it can also be true that there’s something else. And I think sometimes there are people in power who want to confuse us with that. What do you think?

Kelly (00:10:27):

I completely agree. I mean, the thing that I talk to my listeners about all the time is that there are no easy answers here. Nothing is straightforward, and we have to be willing to, if you think you found an easy answer, then you probably haven’t found the answer and you need to dig a little deeper. This is all very nuanced, it’s very complicated, and it takes a discerning mind to really sort through all of the evidence and to come to some kind of conclusion. And those conclusions, like I said, are very rarely straightforward.

Jim (00:10:56):

Now, the ETH, the extraterrestrial hypothesis, I think most people who consider themselves, I guess for lack of a better phrase UFO aficionados gravitate towards that. They’re aliens, aliens are here. And I find myself guilty of that too. I assume when David Grush the whistleblower talks about non-human intelligence, he’s talking about aliens. But that might be too simplistic when we look at an explanation, let’s say, yes, UFOs are absolutely real. As you say in your book, the Pentagon says UFOs are real, so they are real. And let’s say that at least a portion of them are of non-human origin, is it simply too much of a step or too simple to say, oh, they’re aliens?

Kelly (00:11:45):

Yeah, absolutely. I think that in fact, if there’s anything that makes me the most suspicious of the ETH, it’s that it’s basically the only version of that story that has ever been acknowledged by the government, and it’s been the predominant theme through media. And so just given the history of disinformation around this, it makes me put an asterisk next to the ETH. But I think that there’s a lot of other evidence that we have that it might not be that. I mean, number one is just the ubiquity of this around the world. This isn’t something that’s just happening sometimes or here and there in a way that you would expect if these were some sort of probes that were being sent here, maybe for research reasons or something like that. These are being seen all around the world in all different places.

And so it seems like this has been going on for a long time and that it’s everywhere, which seems to suggest more of a presence on this planet. We also have a lot of reports of not just UFOs, but USOs that are these submerged objects that are coming out of the water, which could also indicate there’s a presence here. And I think also perhaps the most intriguing and confounding part of the phenomenon is that so often the entities that people report seeing associated with these craft are humanoid in nature. They may not look like humans exactly, but they have our basic body schema, two eyes and nose and mouth, two arms, two legs. It’s all very familiar. And it suggests that perhaps there is a much deeper connection between us and them than maybe we have recognised and that perhaps they aren’t coming from a different planet because what are the chances that something, an intelligent species that evolved on a planet far away from here would end up looking so much like us? And so I think there’s a lot of clues that the ETH might not be the best explanation, although I wouldn’t rule it out.

Jim (00:13:32):

What do you think about the idea of some kind of hybridization program that at some point in the far distant past, either we are the offspring or they visited here and cross breeded, I guess for lack of a better phrase or something, that we are the aliens, they are us, we are hybrids of some type and that they’re basically our distant cousins from way out there.

Kelly (00:14:00):

I mean, I think it’s possible. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I think that the history of human evolution is much more complicated and that we haven’t come to any real clear answers on how that happened. I remember even just about, not to date myself but almost 20 years ago now, in college I actually took a few classes on human evolution. And I remember even 20 years ago thinking this whole one point of origin for the human race coming out of Africa, it didn’t match the data points even then. And now suddenly we have all of this new stuff and research emerging and discoveries over the last few years that let us know that the human race and the human hominid family is much older and was advanced much earlier than we thought. And so it opens up the possibility that all kinds of things could have happened. And there are things about humans that are beyond just our intelligence, that differentiate us very much from our brothers and sisters and the hominid family. And so we do have to ask ourselves, was all of that the result of just chance and evolution, or could there have been something else going on there that’s above my paygrade? I can’t answer that question decisively, but I think it’s worth asking.

Jim (00:15:17):

Now since we’re kind of almost on that topic, I might as well throw this out here because I know you cover this in the book and we’ve had Nick Pope on the show who obviously is involved with ancient aliens. We’ve interviewed Erik Von Daniken who was basically the progenitor of the ancient astronaut theory with Chariots of the Gods back in the sixties. So where do you come on this question of ancient aliens? I mean, some people are saying, oh yeah, you see these different artifacts and they look like the Vimana, they look like airplanes, they look like ancient astronauts. On the other side of the fence, you say this is almost in some way kind of putting down ancient peoples, kind of minimizing their ingenuity, saying that they would need aliens from out there to help them do these engineering marvels that they did. Where do you fall on the question of ancient aliens?

Kelly (00:16:19):

I’m really fascinated by it. And to me there are kind of two major clues. There’s tons of evidence that people can point to, and I’m very fascinated in all of it. But to me, the ones that you really can’t deny and that you can’t get past are number one, our whole story of how human civilization came to be is just incorrect because up until very recently, we would’ve said that human civilization didn’t appear until around 6,000 years ago. But then in the nineties, we had the discovery of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which shows this right at the end of the last ice age, this very advanced megalithic site that shows evidence of really complex geometry and even calculus and an awareness of astronomy and all of these things, potentially even language, some would argue, definitely high art, all of these indications of high civilization at the end of the last ice age, which was an extremely tumultuous time.

So the idea that hunter gatherers just out of nowhere right at the end of the most tumultuous thousand years that we had encountered would just suddenly have the ability, the capacity, or even the desire to do such a thing is a little bit hard to believe. And so it makes you wonder what could have happened before. And to me, the other big piece of evidence is that when we look at these megalithic sites from Gobekli Tepe to the pyramids to down in Peru, in South America and in Central America, what we see again and again with these megalithic building civilizations is that the most stunning and almost seemingly impossible buildings are made first and then slowly, that sort of architecture and the skillset seems to decline over time. And what this would, we also see that when civilizations pop up, they seem to pop up all at once out of nowhere with writing, mathematics, art, all at the same time.

And so it makes you wonder if perhaps human civilization hasn’t been seeded at multiple points in time in different places. So what this would seem to indicate is that we don’t have a great idea of our history, that there may be someone else who’s involved in this, whether that be a non-human intelligence or whether it even be maybe a breakaway civilization from before the ice age. But I think that there’s a lot of evidence for us to start to take these things a little bit more seriously and to start questioning history as it’s been handed down to us.

Jim (00:18:46):

Well, one thing that interests me is when you see common themes in societies that are separated by geography or time that are very common themes across the board, that almost kind of tells me there’s some kind of common root, and I think that’s another interesting piece as well, and I’m kind of like you. I mean, I’m not definitely saying it is, but I’m definitely not saying it isn’t. I remember when I was in college quite a few years before you and I was writing a documentary, the communication department was working with the archaeology department and they recruited a couple of communications students, myself and another gentleman to put together a documentary about the burial, the mounds in Ohio and southern Ohio, which are fantastic, by the way, Serpent Mound and things like that. And I was talking to the head of the archaeology department at my college, and this was before ancient aliens, but it was after Chariot of the Gods. So I was tangentially familiar with Erik von Daniken and his theories, and I said, well, what do you think about the Chariots of the Gods/ancient astronauts idea? And he kind of looked at me like I put something in his soup.

It was not well received, it was not well received. Well, when we get back, we are going to talk more about other possible explanations for UFO/UAP phenomena. Also, we’re going to talk about the latest news, the UFO hearing, the aftermath, some of the disclosures that have come out since, and we’ll be back with Kelly Chase from the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast right after this on the Paranormal Podcast. 

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Announcer (00:23:36):

If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harald’s campfire where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune into Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now we return to the Paranormal Podcast.

Jim (00:24:00):

We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest today is Kelly Chase. She’s the host of the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast and an author as well. And we’re just having a good old time talking about UFOs and UAP. So Kelly, before the break, we’re talking about some of the different explanations possibly for UFOs. Now, aside from ETH, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, there are a couple of other ones that are very interesting, and I just did an interview, which will be on in the next couple of weeks on the Paranormal Podcast with Mike Ricksecker about time travel. And to your point about these aliens or whatever they are visitors as Whitley Strieber would call them, being humanoid. Maybe they’re just, as you say in your book, one possibility, humans from the future. Can you talk about that idea?

Kelly (00:24:53):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll admit that that’s one of the theories that I had the most trouble with at the beginning, but the more I learn, the more credence I give it. There’s like you mentioned, just the idea that they look like us. What are the chances? And there’s in the field, Dr. Mike Masters has done some incredible work on this from the anthropological point of view, talking about both culturally and through evolution, how this might be the case. But I think it’s also really interesting to note that around UAP experiences, that we have a lot of indications that these things are already potentially manipulating space time. And if that’s the case, then suddenly time travel doesn’t become such a crazy idea. It could be that people report losses of time and that sort of thing when they encounter UAPs, but there’s also the idea that I’ve come across recently that I find really fascinating that it could be that these impossible maneuvers that are being pulled off by these craft are maybe not as impossible as they seem that it could be something like what we see in relativity where it matters what your frame of references, and if they’re manipulating space time in a certain way with a very strong gravitational force or something like that.

But to them, what looks to us like an impossible maneuver might be a very leisurely bank. We don’t know, but it does seem that that could be a possibility.

Jim (00:26:20):

Yeah, but is it Arthur C. Clark, and I always get this quote wrong, but sophisticated enough, technology is indistinguishable from magic. That kind of fits that well. Now this next one, people throw this around, I don’t really know that they know what it means, and I’m not sure that I know what it means. Interdimensional and ultra terrestrial hypotheses that you cover in your book, can you talk about those a little bit? Because the other ones I can kind of understand, I think a lot of people understand, okay, time travelers, aliens from another planet, another star system, human technology, all those you can kind of wrap your head around. To me, in many ways it’s harder to wrap your head around the idea of interdimensional travelers or fellow travelers here somewhere on earth, and we don’t know about them ultra terrestrials. Can you talk about those two a little bit?

Kelly (00:27:16):

Absolutely. I mean, I don’t think we have great definitions around all of this stuff, it’s hard to have great definitions around all of this stuff. I would say starting with the ultra terrestrial idea, I think that sometimes that can referred to things we’ve talked about, maybe a breakaway civilization or people have hypothesized about maybe an aquatic intelligence civilization in the oceans, that’s something that could potentially be. The interdimensional hypothesis is complicated in that we have all these theories about dimensions and what they might be, but we have never actually encountered or proven the existence of alternate dimensions, and there isn’t even an agreement on what that would look like. Some people, if you look at string theory, they would say there’s exactly 11 dimensions, and then you also have people talking about the many worlds interpretation where there’s an infinite amount of dimensions where everything that could happen does happen.

And so a lot of times people are talking about different dimensions, they’re not even talking about the same thing, but all of that stuff is very possible. I would say that there’s a new idea that’s emerging that I find really interesting, which is that if we look at our own sensory perception as humans, we tend to think that our senses give us this objective window into the world. But really we only see a very, very, very small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can only hear a very, very small sliver of the vibrations that cause sound. And so we tend to think that everything that we see and experience is everything that is. But if we aren’t tuned to or if we haven’t evolved basically to interact with something and we don’t have that overlap in our sensory experience, there could be things that are very literally right here, right now in the same room with you that you don’t know about. And so that’s an emerging idea as well that kind of flirts with that line between interdimensional and ultra terrestrial.

Jim (00:29:13):

Yeah, and it’s interesting because people say, ah, that isn’t the case. That kind of thing can’t exist. And then I say, okay, DNA, did we know it existed 200 years ago, a thousand years ago? No, but it’s been in play the whole time. It’s been an acute crucial part of us and how we’re made up, but we didn’t know about it. So again, paranormal phenomena in general, and I include UFO in that, I mean some people equate paranormal to just ghost. I talk about all anomalous activity, the Big Tent philosophy. Much of it may be explained by science, but just the science of the 24th century or something.

So let’s get down to brass tacks a little on what’s going on now. Okay, you had the UFO hearing, which unfortunately I think was too short and kind of shoehorned in there, and I sometimes question if that was intentional, but at least we got one. And Tim Burchett came out and said that there’s been a decades long coverup representative, Moskowitz, a Democrat,  Burchett’s a Republican. The Democrat said, it’s time for disclosure, the time for disclosure is now, if I’ve got the quote right, you have David Grush with all of his revelations, but I was more impressed in some ways by what the seriousness of the congresspeople. And with one exception, the gentleman from I think Missouri who was kind of annoying, I thought that they all took it very seriously, particularly people like Burchett and Moscowitz. What did I just want to get your general impressions of the hearings as they stood that day. What were your feelings that evening?

Kelly (00:31:02):

I was thrilled. I think that so many of us in the community, we get used to downplaying people’s expectations, downplaying our own expectations, trying not to get too far ahead because this moves at kind of a glacial pace, and that’s what we’ve been used to. And so I think that it was really surprising and exciting, like you said, to see that the Congress people came to this very interested and very prepared and very serious, and I think that that was incredible to see. So often this conversation over the last several years has really continued to get stalled in this place where the people who are coming forward and talking about these things have to spend the entire time justifying why we should be talking about this in the first place, and is this thing even real? And it seemed like there was none of that in this hearing.

We were going straight to what is going on? Where are these programmes being hidden? How are they being hidden? How are they being funded? Who’s involved? And now granted, David Grush wasn’t able to say a lot of those things publicly because it’s still classified information and there’s no way for him to do that. But he did have a willingness to talk to congresspeople in a secure location where that would be allowed, and Congress seems extremely interested in doing that. I was also really encouraged to see that they were signaling so strongly that they were not going to be tolerating any intimidation of whistleblowers, which we have indications has been going on. Marco Rubio said that he and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have heard from whistleblowers who have corroborated David Grush’’s claims and have also told him personally that they are in fear of their careers and their lives. And so it’s really encouraging to hear that Congress is taking this seriously and seems to be intent on holding these people to account. And those two things we couldn’t have asked for more, I think. I mean, obviously we could, but I think for where we are, that was about more than we could have hoped for. Honestly,

Jim (00:32:59):

I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, that evening I was very enthused,  so much that I did a live stream with Ryan and some other folks, and it was just very much like, wow, I can’t believe what we just saw. But a couple things really annoyed me. First of all, News Nation has been all over this story, and I’m sure that there are business reasons for that. They used to be the old WGN America, and now they’re trying to make a name for themselves. Why not grab onto the biggest story of humanity if it comes to pass? So pretty smart positioning on their part, and I would love to see a comparison of their name recognition before all this and after, I think they become very much in the awareness of a lot of Americans. But that being said, the day that that was on, I was watching it intently on my big screen tv, but I had my phone out and I said, I wonder what CNN’s doing.

Donald Trump’s terrible. I wonder what Fox News is doing. Joe Biden’s terrible, and so on and so forth. And it’s like, wait a minute, can we take a minute? Because regardless of what you think, I think most of the major cable news outlets these days have decided to stake out a political path, and they have their target audiences. You have some that are geared totally to the right and say everything the right does is right, and everything the left does is wrong. And then you have the other folks that say everything the left does is correct, and everything the right does is wrong. So that’s kind of their target audience, and they play to that audience and they just berate the other side. No room for conversation. That’s just my opinion. I don’t get political in these shows. I by and large think both sides are full of crap. But that being said, why weren’t they covering this story? Why didn’t we see more from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the major networks ABC, NBC, CBS? Why didn’t we see more from the New York Times? Why didn’t we see more from the Washington Post? Why is it left up to the Debrief, the News Nation and all of these fine institutions, but they ain’t the New York Times? Why? What do you think?

Kelly (00:35:21):

I mean, I think it’s for a few reasons. I think obviously the stigma around this topic is still alive and well, but I think it goes far beyond that because we have a lot of real evidence here. So the fact that they’re refusing to cover it, these are the things that the American people should be questioning. I think probably part of it has to do with things like these larger outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. They have relationships that they nurture over time with the Department of the Defence, with the Pentagon, with the intelligence community, and sometimes the intelligence community, that there’s a give and take in that relationship for them to get certain information. They do sometimes kill stories or not run with something because they’re told not to. And so we have to understand that, those relationships exist and that it does directly impact the news and the stories that we’re actually told.

And beyond that, I think that we need to start asking larger questions about exactly what you were speaking to. I remember when the news used to be the news, and now it’s this sort of 24 hour outrage machine. And how much are they hiding by distracting us? Right after the hearing, you heard all about who was mean to who in Congress that day, and yet nothing about the revelations in this hearing. And it’s like what is more important to the interests of the human? Well, the American people, but also just the human family. They’re distracting us from the things that matter the most. And I think that as we move through this process, I hope that more and more people become aware of exactly what you’ve spoke to, that it’s a lot of it’s theater.

Jim (00:36:56):

And frankly, I mean, I felt like I was living in an alternate universe because you go to UFO Twitter, you go to the sites that cover these sorts of things and so forth, and everybody’s excited and oh my goodness. And almost on the major networks and things, you would think that it almost didn’t happen, or if it did happen, it’s a UFO thing. Again, those kooky people, those kooky kids, it’s kind of a feel you get. Now, something happened last week or so that was disturbing the many people, and I want to get your take on it. The Intercept, which is an online outlet released information that talked, I believe it was from a Virginia police report that talked about David Grush, talked about some difficulties he had had, that he was threatening or wanted somebody to kill him, that he was kind of unstable. Some references in there, I believe about him in the past having been an alcoholic and so forth. I know I have my opinion, but I’ll ask you for yours, since you’re the guest, you’re the important person here. Is this just a journalist saying, look, this person has made some big allegations and we need to know his background so that can help us judge those allegations? Or is this just a plain old hit piece? What do you think?

Kelly (00:38:26):

I think it was a hit piece. I think that questioning David Grush’s credibility, or at least asking the question is fair game. And I don’t think that anybody with any kind of a reasonable view on this would argue otherwise. The reason I say that it was a hit piece, though, is because number one, he went after all of these deeply personal and went in really kind of gross detail about things that the public didn’t necessarily need to know about to get to tell this story. And then he countered it with nothing. There was no other side to the story. We weren’t hearing about the Schumer legislation that’s speaking directly to information that they’ve gotten from whistleblowers or members of the Gang of Eight saying that they’ve spoken to other whistleblowers who’ve corroborated Grush’s claims. We’re not hearing about the fact that he has an open retaliation case against him, which the Intelligence Community Inspector General has called credible and urgent. These are all very important and very readily available data points that he could have included in this story if he was trying to be in any way objective, about 30% of the story was spent on just a rehashing of the Roswell case, which is completely irrelevant what you’re talking about.

Jim (00:39:35):

Exactly.

Kelly (00:39:37):

So he had every opportunity, the word count was there. He could have done it, and he didn’t. And we also know if we want to talk about people’s credibility, the reporter who did that piece is a known internet troll. There’s a whole section in his Wikipedia page about the online pranks that he’s played on people. And he immediately went and further discredited him the day that himself, the day that article was released by number one, admitting to the fact that he was tipped off where to look for that information by members of the intelligence community, and also saying outright that he called David Grush a drunk, and basically said that he was looking for reasons to discredit this man. These are the words that came out of his mouth. And so we can’t take this seriously as a piece of journalistic anything. It was a hit piece, clear and simple.

Jim (00:40:27):

And I think Grush came out and said, I did have struggles with PTSD as have many veterans who have been in combat situations and so forth. And I think maybe it was you that made the point on X/Twitter, it’s hard to say after all these years, something, and maybe it wasn’t you, so if I’m misquoting you let me know. But it’s kind of like, does everybody want their dirty laundry out there? We all have skeletons. We want our worst moment to be shared with the world. Something along that line, I think you were saying maybe it was someone else, but the point being that, yeah, he’s not a perfect person because guess what? There isn’t one.

Those of us of the Christian faith would say there was one perfect one, and we know what they did to him. So I guess what my point is, is that I’m not saying Grush is the perfect vessel, and I’m not even saying I’m a hundred percent convinced of what he’s saying is true, although I think he believes it to be true. He could be being misled, and that takes us down another rabbit hole in terms of disinformation and so forth. But to discredit this man who from everything I could tell, has more to lose by bringing this out than just keeping his mouth shut. I just think, and to your point, what put the lie to the whole piece is when he went into the litany of all the stuff you hear from the debunkers, not skeptics, debunkers, it was like a laundry list. It’s like I could replay it by heart and it was like, oh, okay, that’s what this is.

But to your point, I think it brings a bigger issue out. No2 people, I think it used to be when it came to the UFO question, people talked about, I’m using air quotes here, the government, you know THEY and I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it, especially now. I think there are different factions within government, some who are time for disclosure now, representative Moskowitz for example, or probably like a Rubio or a Burchett, and then you have people who are maybe more, let’s play this kind of safe. And then I think there’s people who are hard liners like, we don’t even touch this stuff. It’s none of their business. We have the keys. We know what’s going on. We are the only ones that should know on, and even our other colleagues in government shouldn’t know what’s going on. Is that your read of it?

Kelly (00:42:59):

Absolutely. And I think that this is a really interesting situation where you can actually see that happening in real time because you can see different factions kind of struggling and trying to figure out, you could really see it around the sort of balloon gate earlier this year that it seemed like the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. And I think that people tend to think of the government, like you were saying, is this sort of monolith that’s like they all think the same thing, but you have to recognise that the United States government is a multi-trillion dollar organization that employs millions of people and that there’s no way, they don’t have just one objective. There isn’t just one plan. And that you can clearly see that there’s, like you said, factions who have different objectives, different opinions on this, and in some ways they’re at war with each other on this right now.

Jim (00:43:47):

Yeah, and Nick Pope said there may be people who don’t want the truth to get out, who know the truth because maybe it is something too terrible to be shared. I’ve heard the rumors, and again, I don’t know if this is true or not, but after Jimmy Carter got his big UFO briefing, supposedly he cried. If you know the truth on that one, please let us know. But I mean, maybe it might be the case that we find out the truth and we wish we didn’t know. Do you think that’s a possibility or do you think it is for all of our betterment to know what’s going on?

Kelly (00:44:25):

I do think it’s a possibility. I think about that sometimes and how I might feel about myself and the work that I’ve done been pushing for disclosure, and maybe we won’t get an answer that we like, but I think that I am ultimately of the opinion that if there is such thing as an inalienable human right, that the right to understand the nature of your reality and the nature of your existence has to be one of the most fundamental of those rights. And I think that we as the American people and the people of the world, that we have the right to know what we’re dealing with and if there’s something else here on this planet and what its objectives might be, we deserve to know that, whether the answer is one we want to hear or not.

Jim (00:45:10):

And I meant to ask you about this earlier, but I have to ask it because it just comes up time and time again. What do you think about the trickster aspect of all of this?

Kelly (00:45:20):

I mean, I think it’s really important. I think that we know that whatever this thing is, if you just look at the literature and the encounters that people have had over time, that there is kind of a distinctly trickster element to this. And we also just think about how much we pour into intelligence, not just our country, but countries all around the world. We go way out of our way and the government goes way out of its way to make sure that we don’t know what it’s doing, make sure that our enemies doesn’t know what it’s doing. And so we have to assume that if we came into contact with another intelligent civilization, that they would have lots of reasons to not necessarily tell us what they’re up to either. And so I think that probably even a lot of what we’re seeing of the phenomenon is probably being controlled and curated in some ways by the intelligence behind it.

And so I think it’s very possible that part of the reason that the government doesn’t want to talk about this is because they don’t actually really know what this thing is either, and that they’ve gotten a lot of different conflicting information, and I think it’s very possible that they’re not totally sure what they’re dealing with. And that’s not a message that you necessarily want to deliver to people, especially when you’re spending close to a trillion dollars a year allegedly on defending the country. Or you’re going to go tell people, by the way, we don’t actually know what this thing is or what it wants and we can’t protect ourselves against it. I think they might not want to tell us that story.

Jim (00:46:48):

That’s a great point. That’s a great point. So we’re running long but it’s so interesting, so much to talk about. Where do you think we go from here? I know that Burchtt wrote to the speaker asking for a select committee, that to me seems like a heavy lift. That’s tough to get, I would think. Where do you think we are about that specifically, and what do you think is going to happen in the next six to 12 months? Any thoughts?

Kelly (00:47:18):

Great question. I wish I knew. I do think that I’m very hopeful, especially with what we’re hearing out of the Senate Intelligence Committee and with the Schumer legislation. This hearing was in the House. I’m hoping that we’re going to see one in the Senate that would be great, especially in front of the Intelligence Committee, potentially more hearings in the House as well. That’s what I’m definitely hoping to see. And I think that from there, we’ll just see where it goes. It’s really going to come down to how willing Congress is to really hold these people’s feet to the fire and to really chase down the evidence that’s been put in front of them. Another X factor here though is that we know that David Grush has turned over the evidence from these over 40 whistleblowers that he spoke to multiple inspectors general, including the intelligence community inspector General.

So it’ll be really interesting to see. You have to imagine that that must have sparked some sort of investigation behind the scenes that we have yet to be privy to. And so I think it’ll be really interesting to see what comes forward in the next few months if Congress is able to properly signal that they are able to actually protect whistleblowers. I’m hopeful that we’re going to be hearing from more of these firsthand whistleblowers, and I think that that’s really going to change the game in a lot of ways. So I’m hoping that we’re going to see all those things happen, not even necessarily in the next six to 12 months, but hopefully in the next three to six. But it’s impossible to tell until it happens.

Jim (00:48:43):

Well, you make a good point, and one thing that struck me when you hear the congress people talk, you heard Moscowitz, Burchett, Rubio, the list goes on, even Schumer, it’s like they know something, they know something. They can’t tell us they’ve been briefed on something. You just don’t do this just for the fun of it because it’s political dynamite. I mean, your opponent could say, that guy or that woman is a kook. You got to get him out. They’re worried about little green men and we’ve got inflation and immigration and defense and China and Russia and all these big issues, and they’re focused on UFOs. So they’re really expending some political capital going after this. And if you know anything about politicians, they tend, their number one priority is self-preservation. So to have these people go out and limb like this, they must, they must’ve been briefed on something. They must know something we don’t know. And when I hear them talk, it’s like they know something. Do you have the same feeling?

Kelly (00:49:48):

Absolutely. And I think, like you were saying, just looking at the politics of all of this, we’re heading into the most contentious election cycle of probably anyone’s life who’s alive right now. And so for these politicians, career politicians and people like Marco Rubio who have clear presidential ambitions for them to be working together in a bipartisan manner on something that is, like you said, it’s dynamite, potentially, to their career. If they’re wrong, they must have a very, very solid reason for believing that this is true and that it’s urgent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be touching it. Why would they?

Jim (00:50:24):

Well, we could continue this conversation for hours, but you can continue the conversation by following Kelly Chase and her UFO Rabbit Hole podcast, getting her book, the UFO Rabbit Hole Book 1, following her on X, formerly Twitter. Kelly, tell people how they can connect with you in various and sundry ways.

Kelly (00:50:49):

Absolutely. So you can find the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m also on YouTube, and you can find links to absolutely everything and all the different episodes on my website, which is just uforabbithole.com.

Jim (00:51:03):

Kelly, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope that we can talk with you again as all of this progresses.

Kelly (00:51:10):

Absolutely. Jim, thank you so much for having me. This is an absolute pleasure.

Jim (00:51:14):

What a fun discussion with Kelly and love her insights and look forward to everything she’s going to be doing as the UFO/UAP subject heats up, and it looks like it certainly will even more than it is now. And next, we will have Tim Ellis. He’ll be talking about Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries, and the biggest paranormal convention of them all. Michigan ParaCon coming up right after this,

Announcer (00:51:47):

Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram 2TheJimHarold and join our virtual Campfire Facebook group@virtualcampfiregroup.com. Now back to the Paranormal Podcast.

Jim (00:51:57):

Today we’re going to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart because I’ve always been fascinated with water monsters, lake monsters, and I happen to live very close to Lake Erie in Ohio, one of the Great Lakes, of course. And today we’re going to talk about great lakes and monsters and mysteries with Tim Ellis, one of the authors of the book Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries. Also, we’re going to talk a little bit about Michigan ParaCon, which is his kind of co-creation with Brad Blair, who we’ve spoken to recently on the show. And not only is Tim an author, he’s a conference organizer, podcaster, he’s also a radio station owner, which I think is just the coolest thing I was telling him off air, that it’s something I’ve kind of always toyed with in the back of my mind. If there’s a way I could get a small radio station and kind of own and operate it. But he’s actually done it, so hats off to him. Tim Ellis, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today.

Tim (00:53:05):

Hello, Jim. Thank you so much for having me. And let me just say this, you’ve already found a way to break away from the constraints of the FCC and do your own thing and have fun. Stay there, my friend. All right. Don’t come back into the world of the TCC. Alright?

Jim (00:53:20):

Yeah, I know. And people don’t understand. That is some serious stuff and I’m, I’m sure you know this firsthand. If the transmitter goes down at 1.30 in the morning, either you or your engineer or somebody’s going to be out there to get that back online. There’s a lot of responsibility with owning a radio station.

Tim (00:53:41):

Yeah, there really is. And just because you have a big tower and a transmitter doesn’t mean anything. I’d rather have this all compiled into a nice, this wonderful world that you have created. I’d much rather be pushing our radio station through something like that, but we’re just not there yet. Eventually, I do think local radio, we’ll find a place on the web. And we’re streaming, obviously we’re streaming, but we’re just not there yet with getting rid of the big towers and the expensive equipment.

Jim (00:54:09):

Well, there you have it. There you have it, but it’s all kind of a variant of broadcasting and you have that love for it, and I have that love for that and it’s very cool. And another thing I’m assuming you have a great interest in are great lakes, specifically Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries. And before we get to that, I always like to hear about origin stories. You were asking me offline, how did I get into the paranormal? And I explain going back to Leonard Nimoy and In Search Of. How did your interest in the paranormal start?

Tim (00:54:39):

Well, it’s really not that different. That’s why when we were talking before we went on the air, I was laughing to myself because the journey is very much the same. I’ve been doing this since I was a child as far as being interested in being involved. And I know you interviewed Brad Blair, one of my childhood friends that I’ve been lucky enough to grow up and do this with. And he and I, and another friend of ours growing up were the weird kids who like to tell the ghost stories at the slumber parties. And we had half the group would be with us. The other half wanted nothing to do with us. And we were just those kids. We’ve always been asked, did you live in a haunted house? Did you have that experience that made you get into this field? And the answer is no.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t know the affinity of why I love the subject matter so much, but as most young kids are afraid of it sometimes, and it scares ’em, folks like you and myself, we just had this fascination. And as much as I might’ve gotten frightened by a scary movie or a scary book, to me the fright was more of that adrenaline rush that I think some adrenaline junkies look for when they skydive or bungee jump. I don’t want to do that stuff. This is my extreme sport, is the field of the paranormal and everything strange. And that’s really much to the dismay of my parents and now my wife, I just never grew out of it and I’m still here and loving every minute of it. So I never had the haunted house experience. I mean, have I had strange experiences and houses and buildings? Absolutely. But I never grew up in that traditional haunted house. And it just was something that was a part of me from the youngest age I can remember.

Jim (00:56:20):

Yeah, it’s very, very similar. And it’s interesting because I was telling Brad, kind of like your story, I grew up, well, it’s a different kind of place, but I grew up in a very kind of a gritty industrial area. I could look out one window and see railroad tracks and the other, I could see a smokestack with literally fire belching at it out of it from the local steel mill where my dad worked. But the thing was, I went to elementary school with kids who were very interested in this subject, and strangely enough, we lost contact over the years, regained contact in the last several years through Facebook. But one of them, one of his main things in life that he does is he’s an internet horror host, kind of like the old movie host we used to have back in the day because we’re similar ages.

(00:57:10):

He does that on the internet with his wife and does a great job. And then there were two sisters who I went to school with in elementary school, and a big part of their life is making different crafts and stuff that are spooky themed. And then they sell them, I think online, and then they go to local fairs and stuff and sell them. And I’m thinking that there must’ve been something in the water down in that neighborhood where you’ve got these kids who grow up to pursue this in adulthood. And I just think it’s so cool. So I love those kind of parallels between our stories. Another parallel are Great Lakes. Now again, I am near Lake Erie. I’m assuming, if I remember, you guys are near Lake Michigan. Talk to us a little bit about Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries, and what inspired that book?

Tim (00:57:58):

Yeah. So yeah, growing up, so we’re in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, and we’re actually, we’re closer to Lake Superior than we are Michigan. We’re right on the Canadian border.. But Lake Michigan is a 45 minute drive from us. Lake Superior’s in our own Backyard. Lake Huron’s a 45 minute drive. So the Great Lakes region has been a part of our life and part of our upbringing, and very proud to be from this corner of the world. We’re a different breed around here in a good way, and I love that. And growing up in our area, we weren’t as industrial as we are rural. And the history and the legends, especially from the Native Americans that came out of this area is second to none. And we grew up with those and the ghost stories that surrounded it and the Great Lakes monsters and the UFOs and the woodland creatures, and it was never ending.

And that’s where we really cut our teeth, riding our bikes to the local library as kids and checking out every book we could over and over. Because as you know, Jim, that was our internet back then, was the local libraries. And that’s where we got all of our information. And then as Brad and I and our other friend Steve grew older, we really started to focus on the ghost and haunting side of things. And that’s when in the late nineties we started the early days of creating the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society. And that’s where we really focused the majority of our work in those days and up until now was really on ghosts and hauntings, never forgetting about the UFOs and Michigan Dog Man and Bigfoot and all the great stories, but hauntings is just kind of where we fell. And then all of a sudden, Brad and I, because Brad and I travel a lot and give a lot of talks and lectures, and we wanted to create a lecture on the Great Lakes monsters and mysteries, we wanted to go back to what we loved about this field along with the ghosts and hauntings, but what we loved as kids.

And that was the great stories. And the monsters, don’t take my monsters away. I want that legend. And so we went back to that and created this presentation. And then from there we knew we really wanted to dig into it more and really get the stories from the people experiencing stuff like this. And then that’s where the basis of the actual book, Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries came from: really going back, really digging into our childhood again and the things we loved and then reaching out and getting some amazing stories. And when we say Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries, our field of research was any state that touched the Great Lakes. So any state that touched a great lake was our boundaries of where we wanted this book to focus on. And that really was the creation of what became Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries.

Jim (01:00:54):

I have to admit, sometimes I get a little skeptical about something like Bigfoot, even though I think it’s possible. And certainly the thing that makes it potentially real for me are people who, of good will, who put in reports. I don’t want to discount them, but I’m probably a little more skeptical about something like a land creature, like a Bigfoot than I am, say UFOs or ghosts or those types of things. Maybe a little more skeptical. But to me, in terms of cryptids, the thing that makes the most sense, the thing that I’m not really skeptical at all about is the idea of sea creatures or lake creatures. Because for example, if you take the oceans and just recently in the news, it’s kind of been brought home, we know less about the deep ocean than we do about space. So to me, it just makes sense that there are creatures down there that we don’t understand, we might not know about. Creatures have been found that we thought were extinct previously that are still around. What did you find about sea serpents and those kind of sea monster creatures in the Great Lakes?

Tim (01:02:00):

Yeah. Well, again, that goes right back to the earliest stories being shared, which would’ve been the Native American tribes and some cave drawings that have been found on the northern shores of Lake Superior up in the Canadian territory. And each great lake, what I love about it is each great lake has its own monster. The one up here in Lake Superior is known as Pressie, the Lake Superior Monster. And Lake Michigan has its own, I believe that one is Maeci-Pesew and every lake just has its legend from the tribes that were there. But then from there, when we were researching, especially for Lake Superior stories that were spotted right in the St. Mary’s River. So where we live, we’re on the St. Mary’s River. That’s what connects Lake Huron and Lake Superior. We’ve got the Sioux Locks here, the world’s largest locking system, and for the boats to get up and down.

And right here in our St. Mary’s River, there is a newspaper article that goes back, of a mother with her children on a little island in this area called Sugar Island that is residential. And there they saw this three humped creature as they referred to it, going right through the St. Mary’s River. So we’re not even talking like the middle of Lake Superior or Lake Michigan or Lake Erie or Huron or Ontario. We’re talking about this St. Mary’s River where there’s a three mile span between us and Canada. And so that’s what I loved about it is they go back as far back as earliest recorded history, but then still that story was in the early seventies. And so that’s what I found fascinating about it. Now you mentioned the Bigfoot and whatnot and being skeptical about it, and I don’t blame you at all.

One thing we say in our book is we wanted to tell the stories of the people who witnessed it, whatever these were. This book is not meant to sway anyone one way or the other. We just want to share the stories. And the one thing Brad and I found more so in researching Great Lakes, Monsters and Mysteries than say Youper Natural Haunts, because that book was based on our own accounts and our own investigations. But Great Lakes, monsters and Mysteries is all about people we interviewed and the experiences that happened to them. And one thing we found, boy, when you’re sitting there and listening to their stories, if it happened to them, you’re not changing their mind. That person believes there’s a Bigfoot. That person believes they had three gray aliens in their bed. And it’s so powerful when you sit there and listen to their words and listen to their emotions put into it.

Jim (01:04:41):

Oh yeah, I do a show called Campfire that I’ve been doing since 2009, which is probably my most popular show. And I never discount somebody’s story. And that’s part of the reason I’m not a hardcore skeptic on Bigfoot because a lot of people have told me they’ve seen it. And I know other reports by forestry workers and people who are used to hunting and outdoors, people who swear they see something. And I don’t think all these people are lying. On the other hand, I go, why haven’t we found a body? And I know the reasoning for that and the justification for that the people give and so forth. So even though I’m somewhat skeptical, I’m not a total skeptic. In fact, I just saw down in West Virginia not too far from where my family was from originally that there was a big Bigfoot conference. I’m like, man, I wish I were there. So I mean, when I say skeptic, it’s with a small s.

Tim (01:05:34):

Yes, I agree with that. And I think the most healthy investigator or researcher has to have a skeptical side to them. We got to look at everything with a little bit of an eyebrow raise and make sure we’re doing our due diligence on it.

Jim (01:05:50):

And I’m sure some people have goodwill have been mistaken and it’s been like a bear or something. But I also think there are people who would know a bear if they saw it. And that’s what my, when somebody says, I’ve been in these woods for 30 years and I know a bear when I see one and I know a deer when I see one and so forth and so on, and this was neither. That gets my attention, that gets my, and there are plenty of people like that who have said they have seen it. So who am I to doubt them? I really do hold out hope. I’d love for there to be proof of a Bigfoot. I think that would be awesome. Now, another thing that I want to get across to people who are not familiar with the Great Lakes region, Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes, but I was just there a couple last week and I looked at it and I said, man, that looks like an ocean. And of course it’s much smaller than an ocean, but it gives that feel for people who aren’t familiar with the Great Lakes, these aren’t some little lakes. These are truly great lakes, aren’t they?

Tim (01:06:52):

Oh, they are. And Superior being the largest of the two. But as you said, even Erie, when you’re looking across and you don’t see land on the other side, I mean that just gives you an idea of what you’re dealing with and the amount of shipwrecks through the years and in life loss on these great lakes, it’s always a reminder of the respect you have to show them because they are that big and that powerful.

Jim (01:07:21):

Yeah, I think about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and of course the great song by the late, great Gordon Lightfoot, who just recently passed away. But that song really speaks to the power of the Great Lakes. Really, they are nothing to be toyed with. Not that those folks were toying with them. I think there were some actual physical defects in the ship. But yeah, a lot of people go boating. And I’ve never been boating on lake gear just because it’s like, ehhhhh.

Tim (01:07:55):

Yeah, I mean, we are lucky enough, like I said, we’re right on the St. Mary’s River, which connects the two. So we’ve got beautiful area for boating. It’s not wide open Lake Superior. It’s not wide open Lake Huron. I mean, take a 20 minute drive northwest and you’re going to hit Lake Superior. But if you stay right in the area we’re at, it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. You still got to respect it, obviously. But yeah, once you get out into those big open waters, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Jim (01:08:22):

Nothing to play with. Nothing to play with. Now another thing that’s interesting, I know we have a lot of sightings over Lake Erie, for example, UFOs. What did you find about Great Lakes UFO sightings?

Tim (01:08:34):

Well, and that was actually one of my favorite chapters to work on because, and you’re now starting to, seeing a little bit more information coming out, whistleblowers are talking and more information’s coming out, and more and more people are finally starting to talk about USOs, unidentified submersible objects. And these are objects that are coming in and out of bodies of water, whether it be the oceans or the Great Lakes. And those have been spotted quite often. As a matter of fact, there was a really cool story, What’s in the Skies over Erie PA, which is one of the chapters I wrote in the book, which was a really unique story that I had never heard of until I did some digging and paper pushing and found this really unique story out of that area or out of the Erie PA, which is right on the shores of Lake Erie. So it’s just really, really interesting. The amount of sightings of people who see objects going under or as they’re coming out. It’s absolutely amazing the amount of stories we have with that. Of course, as you had said coming into the show here, Jim, the reminder we’ve had, unfortunately with the disaster that just happened with the Titanic and the Titan submersible and how big these bodies of water are and what could be under there.

Jim (01:09:57):

Indeed. I mean, let’s theoretically say that there are ETS or non-human to quote David Grush, non human and non-human craft. If they wanted to hide somewhere, what better place to hide is in the oceans and the Great Lakes? It would be perfect.

Tim (01:10:19):

It would, I mean levels that we haven’t even been able to touch yet at their deepest point we haven’t been able to touch yet with our own machines. How better to hide if you want to be right on the planet that maybe you’re looking over or investigating or researching or whatever, why not? Right in our own backyard, but in a place we can’t get to.

Jim (01:10:41):

Another thing that I didn’t think about, I think I’ve heard of some of this living in this area my whole life, but ghost ships. Can you talk about the concept of a ghost ship and maybe tell us about some of the ghost ships that are rumored to sail the Great Lakes?

Tim (01:10:58):

Yeah. The Gryphon is the oldest of the stories, of the Great Lakes ghost ships. They’re spotted quite often, well, I shouldn’t say quite often, but the stories and the legends that are passed down is usually involving fog. Fog banks. Of course, the skeptics have their, it’s easy for them to discount it that way. But again, when you talk to a couple people that have actually witnessed it, which we did for our book, they are fully convinced of what they saw. One lady, a husband and wife, were out on a beach up here in our area of the upper peninsula of Michigan at the Whitefish Point Lighthouse, which is the home to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. And it’s this beautiful old structure that was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln, and it’s a wonderful place if you ever get to stop and visit, if anyone’s ever in this area, the light still works.

(01:11:51):

It’s still an operating light, but it’s a beautiful grounds, beautiful museums and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is one of the best ever. As a matter of fact, in there is the actual bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald, which anyone who knows anything about maritime, the bell is considered the soul of a ship. And when they pulled the bell up from the Edmund Fitzgerald, the government legally shut down the Fitzgerald for diving after that moment. It’s not allowed to be. No one can go there and even just look around if they want it to. It’s illegal now. And so this beautiful bell with it’s displayed as soon as you walked in, and it is kind of breathtaking when you first see it, but right there on the beaches of Lake Superior. And our team has investigated Whitefish Point Lighthouse a couple of times, and I’ve always said, we’ve investigated up in this area a handful of lighthouses.

I’ve always said Whitefish Point’s Lighthouse has a different feel than all the other ones, and it’s much heavier. And I’ve always attributed that to the fact that they do have this great lake shipwreck museum there that has so many artifacts from ships that took life. So if you’re a believer in the energy and things that, the energy that can follow certain objects of a disaster or something like that, I believe there’s a lot of energy at this lighthouse for that reason. But it’s not, when I say heavy, I don’t mean like a negative or an evil, it’s just heavier. There’s something different there from other places. But right there on the beautiful beaches of Lake Superior, a husband and wife were walking one night and they said, all of a sudden the winds picked up and no rain came through, but it felt like it was just going to downpour.

And this fog bank rolled in to the point where they saw this ship coming right towards, looked like it was going to run a ground at the beach where they both started to run to get off the beach towards the grassy area. And when they turned around, the ship was gone. And this is a little bit more of the current story that happened probably 20 years ago there in the beaches at Whitefish Point. So a lot of it is considered to be ships that were lost at sea in a big storm. A traumatic event, as many people know, can be linked to hauntings. Is it the actual physical ship or is it kind of like a residual haunting where it’s just energy that has been absorbed into the water and the certain conditions allow it to be seen again, who knows? I mean, the theories are multiples, but the idea of these beautiful old ships that can all of a sudden appear out in nowhere, a lot of ’em are the schooner types with the big sails that are seen seen, which just, unless it’s the few that are around that are out there promoting the old days of sailing, you just don’t see ’em out there. So when you see ’em, it’s very eye-catching.

Jim (01:14:41):

Well, the thing that I think about is even the possibility, some kind of time slip because that too, yeah, maybe even the idea that because of the conditions, maybe because of the water, who knows, that there might be certain conditions at certain times that make you be able to look back in time. That’s always an interesting thought to me. Not saying that’s the explanation or the like they used to say in search of these theories are not the only explanations for the phenomena that we explore or something like that, which always used to frustrate me as a little kid. I’m like, give me an answer, give me an answer. And now I find out 18 years of doing this answers are very hard to come by.

Tim (01:15:27):

Yes, they are. All we can do is keep looking and stay open to the different theories. And maybe someday, I don’t know, but maybe someday.

Jim (01:15:36):

I want to get to Michigan ParaCon in a moment. But before we leave Great Lakes, monsters and mysteries per the Campfire, we love stories on these shows. What is one of your favorite stories from the book that you could recount for us briefly?

Tim (01:15:51):

Oh, there’s a couple really good ones. Oh man. Oh man, there’s a handful of good ones. One chapter in the book is based on the stories that the listeners of the podcast that Brad and I have share with us. And we did a couple from there, but I think that I really liked. But I think the one that sticks out to me and the one I’ve gotten the most comments on, as a matter of fact, I had one guy come up to me at a lecture and he had seen us at a lecture a few months ago and about our book there, and he came up and he says, man, you got to have a warning label on that story about the black-eyed kids. He says, 

Jim (01:16:31):

Oh, black-eyed kids. Yeah.

Tim (01:16:33):

Yes. He said it gave me nightmares. And I actually shared with him, I said, I can tell you right now of the chapters I wrote in the book. I said that particular story over a few days of work, laying it out, figuring out how I wanted to present it, then writing it and editing. I actually had to stop a few times, take a night off because I was getting so into the story and the idea of, again, this lady swears this happened to her, it was creepy as all get out. I had to step away from it for a little bit a couple times to finish that chapter and it’s about her and her son on a hot, hot July night, were on one of the beaches of the Great Lakes, and it was getting late and she noticed as the beach was clearing out and she was trying to get her kid ready to go, it was a busy day, but now they were one of the last few.

She noticed three strange kids further down on the beach wearing clothes that you wouldn’t wear on like 85 degree muggy day and on the Great Lakes. They were in sweatshirts, long jeans and just kind of standing there and she didn’t feel right having those kids near them. So she hurried up and got her son to the car. But to get to the car to get from the beach to the parking lot area is kind of one of those through a wooded area, trails and picnic tables around. And it was the only trail from the beach to the parking lot area. And as she’s taken her son up the trail, she notices those three strange kids still down the beach standing on the water near the water. 

So she hurries up and gets her son up that path and starts to get to the car. And as she sees the car, she says, I start to feel better about the situation but then she turns to her right and looks, and those three kids are standing right there in the parking lot. And fast forward that story, she gets in the car, she’s all panicked, the son doesn’t realize what’s going on. He’s young enough to not really be picking up on what’s happening. And he’s playing with his toys. She’s all panicked and gets out of there. And at that point too is when she says it was the first contact that was made, one of the kids came up and wanted to know if they could have a ride, and she says, absolutely not, and gets in the car, floors it and starts driving, driving, driving. They’ve got about a 45 minute drive home and she realized she starts to calm herself down. She’s like, all right, there’s got to be an explanation for this. She calls her husband, he’s talking her off the edge, the boys getting hungry, so they’re going to stop for a bite to eat before they get home.

And they go to the restaurant, they eat, she’s feeling better. They get done with the meal, they get back in the vehicle and they start to pull out, and this has probably been a 25, 30 minute drive, and she’s pulling out of the parking lot of the restaurant. And she says, I look to my left to see where the traffic’s at. And those three kids are standing right there. Same three kids. And at that point, she’s in complete hysterics. She doesn’t know what’s going on, she just knows the feeling she has is of complete dread. And she gets out of the parking lot, starts going at this point, the little boy realizes something’s wrong. His mom’s starting to lose it. And so he starts crying and she starts trying to calm him down. And then something right out of a Hollywood movie, she looks down and she realizes she’s almost out of gas and she has to stop one more time. And all she wanted to do was get home to her husband. 

So she pulls over at a gas station, only wants to put 10 bucks in, enough to get him home, puts in 10 bucks, runs into pay, she comes back, gets in the vehicle, goes to pull out, looks in the rear view mirror, and she doesn’t see her boy, but she sees one of those kids and she just jumps out of the vehicle, opens the door, rips her son out, freaking out. Why is he in this vehicle? Why did you do this? He said, mommy, all he wanted to do was have a ride home. She grabbed her son, runs into the gas station, calls her husband, her husband has to drive to the gas station to get her. And when the husband finally gets there, they go out, look in the vehicle. No one’s there. Now, that is just the abridged version. There’s a lot more details than the actual story. But what this one went through and then how she explains what happened to her life after this situation is an absolute nightmare.

Jim (01:20:43):

The Black Eyed Kids phenomena, that’s one that gets me up. I’ve talked to David Weatherly about that, and he’s been on the shows, and I actually got to speak to Brian Bethel, who is the person who wrote about his encounter, which was really kind of, I think the first known encounter or the one that is best documented that kind of kicked the whole study of the phenomena off that happened to him in the nineties.

Tim (01:21:10):

Was that the one outside of a movie theater? Yeah, I know exactly which one you’re talking about.

Jim (01:21:14):

Yeah, and you know what? The guy’s a journalist. I totally believe him. I totally believe it happened. And it is just an odd thing. It kind of smacks to me of something demonic. And what was always interesting, and it was interesting, our common friend, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, used to talk about the djinn, which is another freaky subject, but the djinn always, they couldn’t be like a perfect duplicate of someone. There was always something off. And the same thing with the black eyed kids. Like a black eyed kid might knock on your door and say, can I have some mayonnaise for my hot dog? They don’t get it quite right. So,

Tim (01:22:00):

And the clothing is always just a little bit off. And the monotone tones of the voice, they’re very off-putting to people. And anyone who’s ever had an experience with them say the feelings are almost identical. They get this fight or flight moment where they just are in a complete state of panic

Jim (01:22:18):

Let me put it this way. I’d rather talk to other people about it and read about it than experience myself far from it.

Tim (01:22:24):

So true. Couldn’t agree more.

Jim (01:22:26):

Well, one thing I’m sure that people are going to want to experience is, I believe it’s the 13th, am I right? The Michigan ParaCon is coming up.

Tim (01:22:36):

You’ve got it. Lucky number 13. Yeah.

Jim (01:22:38):

Yeah, I thought about that. And I mean, this has just been a success. We talked to Brad a little bit about this, but give us a little bit of the history because I think this is amazing. You guys kind of created the biggest paranormal convention that I know of going out there pretty amazing.

Tim (01:22:55):

And we did it not having an absolute clue of what we were doing, but we knew we wanted to try something. Again, not sure what Brad got into, but I’ll keep it brief on some of this in case it’s the same thing he said. But Brad and I were traveling around a lot at the time to go to other conferences and conventions. We were our team, the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society was very young, and we were trying to learn as much as we could from those in the field. And so we were traveling and we’re flying home one day. And I remember looking at Brad, I said, what do you think about doing an event like this in Sault Ste Marie? He said, why not? It would simply be a matter of finding the right place at the right time. And lightning struck and we caught it in a bottle and it worked.

And then we knew we had to build something good for people to come to Sault Ste Marie, because Sault Ste Marie’s not on the way to anything. You drive by us, you’ve got to be coming here for a reason. So we knew we had to put something together that would get people here. And we happened to approach the local casino at the time, and their entertainment department was at the very moment looking to do something other than just their regular music concerts that they were doing in the theater. And one thing led to another, and here we are 13 years later, and when we first did it, it was two speakers on Friday night, and I think we had four or five on Saturday with one vendor room that wasn’t even open or full. And now we’re at, it begins Wednesday night. It’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday, four full vendor rooms and vendors spilling out into this mezzanine area.

And every year we put it on Jim, we take a step back and we just kind of take a deep breath and we’re like, wow, what did we create here? In all humbleness, it’s a wonderful place where people come together and of like-mindedness, want to learn, want to share. You don’t have to. I guarantee we’ve got the lawyer who Monday through Friday back home isn’t going to talk to anyone within his law firm about the ghosts that he believes in or experienced. But he comes to our event, and you’re darn right, he feels comfortable and he can share his experience. And that’s what we’ve got. And it just continues to grow. And it’s pretty special considering two guys who didn’t have a clue where we’re going to start with this and here we are now.

Jim (01:25:16):

No, I agree. I think it’s awesome. And it’s that kind of collegial experience where again, like you said, you’re an accountant, you’re a lawyer, you’re a nurse, you’re a doctor, you’re a plumber, whatever, and your friends at work it’s very hard, many of them talk about this and they’re like, ah, you believe in fill in the blank at these places. Everybody’s on the same page. Everybody has an interest in the supernatural. Maybe some are more towards the ghost side, some people are more the cryptid side, some are more the UFO side, but in general, people who have open minds to the unknown and the unexplained, and it is so refreshing. It really is. Even when I’ve gone to different events, I always feel like I can exhale. It’s like, ah, I can be myself and I could talk about these things and not get the funny looks and the little smirks and all that. Plus you’ve done a great job of getting a lot of great people. So the important question is asked, how can people get in? I know that it’s a very popular event. How do they get information on getting tickets and getting there?

Tim (01:26:23):

Yeah, the best way is going to, if you just want to go to the website, it’s www dot mi as in Michigan, so mi and then ParaCon, P A R A C O N.com. So miparacon.com is the official website. You can also find the Michigan Paranormal Convention on Facebook as well. We’re very active on that. We keep that updated almost daily with presenters and who’s coming through. And you can get all ticket information and all presenters’ information right on the website and through the Facebook. And we’re Twitter as well too. But I always push people to Facebook. I know that one’s the most active of them, but we’re on Twitter as well, but we’re out there. You can’t miss us.

Jim (01:27:08):

Well, if you’re interested in the supernatural, you certainly should make a trip to Michigan ParaCon 2023. That’s MIparacon.com, miparacon.com. And Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you being a part of the Paranormal Podcast.

Tim (01:27:27):

Yeah, Jim, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I’ve been a fan of your work as well, and I’m glad our paths have finally crossed, and I appreciate the time.

Jim (01:27:34):

Thank you. And of course, you can get the book that we discussed today about Great Lakes Monsters and Mysteries. I see it right here at Amazon. And we’ll have a link in the show notes. Tim, thanks so much once again.

Tim (01:27:46):

Thanks, Jim.

Jim

 (01:27:47):

Well, thanks so much for tuning into this super-sized double header Paranormal Podcast, and occasionally when we get so many interviews and we need to get them in a timely manner, we will do this. And a lot of it depends on what you have to say. Do you like the longer Paranormal Podcast? Do you like the double headers? If you do, we will try our best to do more of them, but we need to know if you like ’em or not. So please let us know and please check out Kelly’s work. And of course, Tim’s work and Michigan ParaCon. Again, I apologize. It took us a while to get that interview out, but I thank you for tuning in. We will talk to you next time. Please keep up to date to everything we do. We also have Jim Harold’s Campfire, which is free for the most recent episodes, the most recent 13 episodes at any time.

You could get that for free. Wherever you listen to the Paranormal Podcast, You Won’t Believe What Happened to Me. The show that I’ve been doing with my wife, Dar Harold, where we talk about weird news and weird things have happened to our listeners, and then Unpleasant Dreams, that is the classic horror podcast that my daughter Cassandra does. I think she does a fine job of bringing a lot of life to those classic stories, Lovecraft et al. So check that out as well. Free wherever you find the Paranormal Podcast. It’s called Unpleasant Dreams. Well, we’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week everybody, and as always, stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-bye everybody.

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