In part one, we discuss the 1994 Ariel School mass UFO sighting with filmmaker Randall Nickerson in an all-new interview. It really is an amazing case.
Thanks Randall!
In part two, we climb into the time machine and replay our first interview EVER on this podcast. Loyd Auerbach joins us to talk all things ghostly on the inaugural edition of The Paranormal Podcast which originally aired July 29, 2005! We hope to have Loyd back on the show soon and thought reairing this interview would be a fun way to celebrate our 17th anniversary a little bit early.
You can find Loyd on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and you can find his books at Amazon: Loyd Auerbach Page
Thanks Loyd!
This post contains Amazon affiliate links that benefit Jim Harold Media when you make a qualifying purchase. Thank you for your support!
TRANSCRIPT
JIM HAROLD: A large group of schoolchildren see a UFO, and some even see a being. It happened in the early ’90s, and we’ll talk about it. Plus, we’ll get back in our time machine and go back to 2005 and listen to the first interview we ever did on this show, with Loyd Auerbach. It is the Paranormal Podcast.
[intro music]
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold, and so glad to be with you once again. First up on the show today, we’re going to talk with Randall Nickerson. He is a filmmaker, and he’s done a very important project on the Ariel School UFO sightings from the early 1990s. fascinating case, and looking forward to it.
In Part 2, we are going to get into the time machine and we’re going to listen to the very first interview ever recorded for the Paranormal Podcast, aired on our first episode, July 29th, 2005. It is Loyd Auerbach, Professor Paranormal, talking all about the supernatural. He was great. Me, not so much, but it still holds up after all this time because Loyd is so fantastic. And that is this week’s Paranormal Podcast.
So let’s get to the discussion with Randall first about this amazing case of the Ariel School UFO sighting.
UFO phenomena, absolutely fascinating. More in the news than ever, and today we’re going to talk about one of the most famous mass sightings, and I think one of the most important sightings that there has ever been. We have a great guest on the line to talk about it today.
Our guest is Randall Nickerson. He is the director and producer of the film Ariel Phenomenon that tells the story of the 1994 Ariel School UFO encounter. In addition to being a filmmaker, he’s also an acclaimed professional commercial and nature photographer, and we welcome him to the show. Randall, thank you for joining us today.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Hi there, Jim. Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: What got you into this? With that background, obviously you’re into photography, videography, all of those things, but why did you choose this particular case?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I saw the interviews the year after they were recorded over in Zimbabwe in 1994. My initial – I was struck by the fact that they seemed to be telling the truth about something that wasn’t supposed to exist. That led me further into – and it was years later, about 12 years later, that somebody said, “Would you like to make a movie about this particular incident? We have the footage.” I’m like, “Sure. Absolutely.”
But I started off with just Dr. Max footage, and then I figured, “There has to be more information here to tell a story, an awful lot.” And I had a lot of questions, to be honest, in the beginning. Then I found the school in 2007 with the help of a reporter from Africa and started to collect even more archival footage from people that interviewed these children at the time, and adults as well.
JIM HAROLD: To set the stage for people who are not familiar maybe with this sighting and this event, can you just explain to us the setting? Where it was, how many kids we’re talking about, and exactly what happened?
RANDALL NICKERSON: There were multiple calls and reports during – I’d say it was a week period of time, over a week, throughout southern Africa, around things people were seeing in the sky. Some of those probably were space debris or things, but there were others that were making turns, doing strange, bizarre behavior.
Then on the 16th of September in ’94, the children on the playground at this small rural school called Ariel School in Zimbabwe saw this craft, this silver thing in the sky, and then they saw it come to the ground. Then a large group of them gathered and just watched it. Kept an eye on it. Then these small creatures got out from this vehicle and started to approach the playground.
There was a moment – I don’t know how long of a period of time this particular moment happened when this creature was staring at the children and the children were staring back at it, and then there was a moment very soon afterward when all the children got very terrified and ran into the staff meeting that was going on at the time.
There were 62 kids that did drawings. That is not the amount of people that witnessed it. There were 100 kids that ran to that staff meeting. I found plenty of witnesses that were there that, for whatever reason, they didn’t participate in the drawings of what they’d seen. Yet they can still draw it today. That’s really interesting too.
JIM HAROLD: From watching the movie, they’re drawing many times the same thing. It’s not like it’s changed. Are there any other comparable sightings? I know there’s the Phoenix lights, but those were general lights in the sky. Isn’t this in a way probably the most powerful mass sighting ever, specifically of a being?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I think what makes this story unusual other than what you just said is that there were people there at the time, documenting their testimony, which should be done in any case, in my opinion, if it comes to the nature of this type of event. If it wasn’t for the documentary archival footage that was shot in ’94 – it was shot three days after they saw it, a week after they saw it, somebody interviewed them again two weeks after they saw it, somebody interviewed them again two months after they saw it, then six months later, then a year later. It just goes on.
So from a study perspective, from a witness testimony perspective, I’ve got them all the way up to the present day in seven different interviews saying exactly the same thing. In a way, that to me marks it as one of the most extraordinary cases because of the people that documented it originally and the media outlets and people that decided to interview them. BBC, you had John Mack from Harvard, you had all the local news stations in southern Africa. You had some people that were interested from other countries go to the school to interview and find out any more information, even way after the fact.
I think that’s what makes it extraordinary, because these events happen all over the world, and unfortunately we don’t take them seriously enough to cover them.
JIM HAROLD: You talked about Dr. John Mack from Harvard and his role in all of this. That had to be a crucial, crucial role. For those who aren’t familiar, can you tell people a little bit about who Dr. John Mack was, why he was important, and why he was specifically important in this Ariel case?
RANDALL NICKERSON: Dr. John Mack’s history is really pretty interesting. He started off in the Air Force very young. Did I believe four years and then started studying psychiatry. But his work was just incredible. He had written many, many books that are still referenced today, papers as well. Hundreds and hundreds of paper. Became a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Then I believe it was 1990 he started to take an interest in these stories that people were reporting these things and they seemed to be sane. They weren’t crazy, they weren’t schizophrenic, they weren’t all the typical things you would classify these people under if they had a mental issue or psychological issue.
His involvement – the BBC called him to say this had happened at Ariel School, and he went over there and interviewed the children. I think what he added to the case was that he had 20 years’ experience in interviewing children. He worked with children for 20 years. There was nobody who interviewed those children with his skillset, so to speak, as a psychiatrist.
I think some of the things he brought out of those interviews were really important. They were repeated, but nobody was like him as far as being able to get the further information out of them.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, and he made the point – some people might say, “Opportunist who comes in to interview these children.” I think he made the statement something along the lines of, “Only an opportunist if I want to commit career suicide.” Because when you’re at someplace like Harvard, they don’t necessarily look favorably on one of their big-deal academes talking about UFOs and aliens, or potential aliens.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Correct.
JIM HAROLD: Tell us if you can – first of all, let’s give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find the film, because whatever we talk about today, that is just a little side dish. It’s just a little appetizer. The movie clocks in well over 90 minutes. There’s a lot there. So you’re going to get a taste of it today. We’ll do this again at the end, but let’s take a slight pause here and tell people where they can find the film.
RANDALL NICKERSON: You can find it at arielphenomenon.com. Just go to that website; you can watch the trailer. Our platform right now is on Vimeo, and it goes directly there. So that’s how you can see the movie right now. And it’s doing really well. I don’t know if you’ve seen the ratings, but wow.
JIM HAROLD: I didn’t see the ratings, but I saw the film and it’s very, very good. I highly recommend it. So what did the kids say about this being? I know you said it sounds like it was almost a telepathic communication; they became very frightened. There were other messages, weren’t there, and other things that were imparted?
RANDALL NICKERSON: That’s correct. Not to every single person. I think the children that were closest to it, who were looking directly at it – it had to do somehow with eye contact. But the messages they were given from this thing were about our planet. Not saying what we should do or anything else; just showing us images of what we were doing. That’s pretty profound, especially back in ’94. That really has struck me, and it still lives with those witnesses today. Some won’t even discuss it because of the ridicule factor that has existed in our culture for a while.
JIM HAROLD: Has that made it difficult for them as they went through their growing up years and into full adulthood? Has this experience made it difficult for some of them? If they tell somebody about it, they get ridiculed, as you said? What’s it been like for the survivors as a group?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I think it’s been difficult. I think it was difficult from the moment they told the story. Right away I think their fellow schools near them, other people in town just sort of chuckled, and that’s been going on for a long time. Finally we’re seeing some kind of change in the way we look at this, which is great, but I don’t think it’s been easy. Normally people won’t talk about it because they don’t want to get the chuckles or get the laughs or not be heard.
JIM HAROLD: Did you find that it ran the gamut when you approached these people – some people saying, “Yeah, I want to unburden myself, I want to talk about this,” or other people saying, “Hey, I’m past that. I’ve got a spouse, got kids, got a job. Don’t bother me with this stuff”?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I’ve run into that. To be honest with you, I interviewed more people who didn’t go on camera than I interviewed that did go on camera. They were willing to talk about the story, but they were not willing to share it publicly because of repercussions to their family, their children, their reputation, religion. You name it, all down the page, all different reasoning. And I understand it. Everybody that did go on camera took a risk, and I fully support them because I understand that. That can’t be easy.
JIM HAROLD: You talked about the art. I remember there was one young woman who still draws to this day. It sounds like she finds it cathartic. Can you talk about that artwork? Because that’s really interesting to me, having real depictions of what people saw.
RANDALL NICKERSON: With the children’s art – I mean, her art is amazing. Emily, her art is amazing. You very rarely see somebody so – there’s a word for it, where they just wake up in the morning and they start painting. Nonstop effort into creating. It’s a real gift.
But what was fascinating about the drawings the kids made at the time was because it was all coming from their perspective. Whatever their drawing/art skills were, their interpretations of the world at the time – and they’re in Africa, where you’re educated very well about what’s out in the wild. You’re not going got mistake a leopard – everybody knows what that is. Everybody knows what cobras look like, or snakes. You have to know because it’s your life.
I have other drawings of things they’ve done, like their teachers and stuff like that. It’s kind of interesting. And then all of a sudden you see their drawings of this bizarre, crazy thing, craft, this creature that none of them had ever seen before – it’s just fascinating how it got translated from them, their minds, onto paper. And there’s other people, too, other of these kids that draw today as well. It’s something you just don’t forget. One of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences, so to speak.
JIM HAROLD: We’re talking with Randall Nickerson all about the Ariel School UFO case, and we’ll be back right after this.
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JIM HAROLD: One thing that struck me as I was watching your film was some of the interviews of the children at the time. I remember that one scene, I think it was a boy and I don’t know if it was another boy and a girl – it was three kids together. The one boy was speaking, and he came across so credibly. He came across more credible than most adults. I was just struck by – they weren’t making up a story. They were just saying “We saw this thing.” Did you have the same feel looking at that archival footage and then talking to experiencers now?
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yeah. I know the interview you’re talking about. It was the BBC reporter who was asking them questions. Those were the first interviews that were done of anybody. The BBC reporter was saying – you don’t hear it in the interviews because we had to cut it for time, but he was like, “You sure it wasn’t a helicopter? You sure it wasn’t a Zimbabwe Air Force plane?” He went down the list. And the BBC reporter wouldn’t let it go. He was so convinced that they did not see what they said they saw that he kept asking them, “Are you sure that it wasn’t something from our military or something from this or that?” The kids were just like, “No. That’s not what it was. It was something different.”
So yeah, that’s one of the things that hits you over and over with these interviews of the kids. They’re not lying. And they’re not in on it together. That’s also evident in the documentary footage because they don’t look around to their fellow students to check in with “Is this the right story?” Nobody does that. One of the teachers said if they were going to make this up, they would’ve had to rehearse it for years.
JIM HAROLD: That’s a lot of kids. It’s not two or three kids.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yeah. My guess at this point, because I’ve interviewed so many that didn’t draw, it had to be at least 100 kids. But the 62 number came from the amount of drawings that were done.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, the 62, I think you said.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: The craft – there have been other sightings and there were reports that there were possibly meteorites and those kinds of things. Can you talk about physically what happened? They were looking at the sky and something comes out of the sky and lands? What exactly did they say happened?
RANDALL NICKERSON: They said they saw this thing in the sky first. Not everybody saw it in the sky, just people that happened to pay attention and told another kid, “Hey, what is that?” They stopped and watched it for a while. Then it was a short time later where all of a sudden that thing was on the ground. They didn’t see it come down and land or something; it was all of a sudden there, slightly above the ground in the trees. That’s when everybody started to gather.
What was initially seen first was this thing in the sky doing bizarre maneuvers and behavior. Appear, disappear, move from one location to another location without being seen. And then all of a sudden it was on the ground, and that’s when everything proceeded from there. And according to the headmaster, according to the students, this was a 15-minute event, which to me seems like an awfully long time, to be honest with you.
JIM HAROLD: That is a long time for a sustained sighting and experience. It’s not like a flash in the sky. And then you have the being, which is amazing to me. Did they describe it as we think of Alien Greys? Is that the way they described it, or was it something different?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I don’t think they knew what an Alien Grey was, to be honest, but their description was three and a half to four feet tall, very tight-fitting, skin-tight black, like a leotard or a diving suit. Large head, big eyes. It’s very similar to that same description. What was interesting to me, because I studied all that to find out the background of everything that I could find out to do this – what was interesting to me was that they were in black because that was not recorded in all the history of this phenomenon. It was only reported two other times that I’m aware of.
Their lack of access to media also – it raises your hair a little bit when you think this is the same story as people are talking about in the Western world. Same type of creatures. What’s that about?
I found their descriptions really interesting, particularly from the native tribe, Shona, the indigenous culture, because they didn’t describe it in a way we would. They described it as a basket with another basket on top of it, or an oval rock, a rock that was oval. When you hear descriptions like that, they don’t have any knowledge of the term “flying saucer” or any of the stuff we do.
JIM HAROLD: And that’s huge because if somebody in America, Canada, Western Europe, someplace like that – almost anywhere these days – if they describe something, it’s going to be using cliches from movies, TV, and other sightings. Like “I saw an Alien Grey.” It’s almost like – you know how they capture fossils in amber? Kind of the same idea. It’s modern enough; we’re only talking about 28 years, but it’s far back enough that things weren’t dispersed. It’s pretty much, except for rudimentary internet, it’s pre-internet.
So it was almost like the last chance, I would think, to catch such an authentic group of experiences. Even now, I’m sure if that same thing happened in that same area, the people would be much more exposed to media because of the internet and streaming and all of those things.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yes, I agree. I think that’s what drew Dr. Mack over there at the time – the fact that it was in Africa, that it was sort of an untouched place in the world. Yeah, I agree with that. I think there still are places in the world, believe it or not, that aren’t connected – mostly in Africa and some places in South America, Russia. There’s places that are still isolated from what we’re all doing here, the internet and everything else.
Also, I just want to say in 1994 I doubt there was even a camera at the school. I mean, really.
JIM HAROLD: Well, yeah. We take cameras for granted now. [laughs]
RANDALL NICKERSON: Even in 2008 when I first went to the school, the kids would come up to me and I would show them their picture on my camera screen, and they were shocked.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
RANDALL NICKERSON: I couldn’t believe that. And that’s in 2008.
JIM HAROLD: Not that long ago.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yeah, it wasn’t long ago. I’ll never forget that experience. Actually, I have it on camera because it was just like, oh my God, they’ve never seen a picture of themselves. That’s crazy.
JIM HAROLD: That’s amazing.
RANDALL NICKERSON: It is a very mixed school. You had every race there, every religious belief. You had animism to Catholicism. It was actually a fascinating location for whatever these things were to arrive at. Of any school to pick, it was a very interesting school because of the diversity.
JIM HAROLD: That’s interesting. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.
RANDALL NICKERSON: I really don’t know the answer to that.
JIM HAROLD: Have any of the experiencers grabbed this with both hands and said, “I’m going to talk to other experiencers outside of this whole situation who have seen things” and really gotten into the UFO community? Is that a thing? Or are most of them – even if they’re willing to talk about it, they don’t want to get involved in all of that?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I feel like they really don’t want to – I mean, I think what’s happening, what I’ve seen is they’re taking it in and just processing it themselves at this point. This film, I didn’t share a lot with them because I wanted to present the film to tell them, the actual witnesses, “this is how things went down.” They didn’t know. Nobody really understood the sequence of events, who came when. Some of the kids haven’t even watched the movie. That should tell you something. Because they don’t need to.
JIM HAROLD: But in the West it’d be “Let me see my picture. I’m in a film, look at this!” So the humble nature of that says something about the authenticity of the experience.
RANDALL NICKERSON: True.
JIM HAROLD: It reminds me of the ghost hunting shows, because I personally believe there’s something to all of that, but then you’ll get people, “I want to get on TV with my ghost! I want Ghost Adventures to come over and do a whole show around my haunting!” You kind of think, hmm, is it really authentic or is it just a leaky faucet?
RANDALL NICKERSON: I think you see a lot of that in this field, too. People that are trying to be the one that’s going to be everything. You see it in every aspect. But that tells you right there that something’s off. When people really go through something like this, you’re not going to see them out there screaming for attention.
JIM HAROLD: Have any of the experiencers said they feel somewhat vindicated with all the news in the last five years? And granted, most of that news has come from America, so I don’t know how much they pay attention, but if you had taken this story let’s say 10 years ago and put it out there, I think you’d have the hard core debunkers who are never going to believe anything unless the aliens land on the White House lawn. Then you have people who are true believers who will believe any of this.
But you have the people in the middle who maybe 10 years ago would’ve said, “Eh, those kids were just mistaken. Not bad kids, but just mistaken.” Those same people now, though, with all the reports, say, “Wait, let me take a second look. Maybe there’s really something to this.” Do the experiencers feel vindicated and realize that there’s an increasing group of people who are taking this phenomenon seriously?
RANDALL NICKERSON: Yes, I think that’s true. Vindicated, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, from everybody I’ve talked to. But there’s definitely a knowledge that, “Okay, it’s finally coming forward. It’s really likely now that I’m going to be able to tell my story to somebody who actually is a scientist, somebody that has power, that can actually make things happen to find out more of what’s going on here.” That’s where people are at. Vindicated, I wouldn’t say quite so yet. But in my opinion, it’s going to happen. I’ve been following the Senate Intel Committee and pilot after pilot after pilot that are flying our best stuff coming out and talking about it. It’s just a matter of time.
JIM HAROLD: In my opinion, if you’re interested in UFOs, UAPs, all of that, you need to watch this film because it really is an incredible case study of a lot of people seeing one of these craft, seeing a being, making artwork of it. It’s just fascinating. I highly recommend it. Randall, can you reiterate to people where they can find the movie, where they can watch it, how they can check into it? Because I certainly think they should.
RANDALL NICKERSON: Sure, I feel that way too. Not even the fact that I made the movie; it’s just the topic I think is really relevant to all of us. You can see the movie at arielphenomenon.com. You can see the trailer there and also see the movie. But I highly recommend we all see it, just for the fact that maybe we have to get used to something that we’re not used to at all, something we need to learn about and understand before we get surprised.
JIM HAROLD: Very true. Very interesting indeed, and certainly check out that film. That is such an important case. There are so few mass sightings, especially something so relatively recent, and there’s a record of it. Just an amazing case. So by all means, do check out Randall’s film.
After the break, we’re going to get in our time machine, go back to 2005, and revisit the first Paranormal Podcast episode ever, with Loyd Auerbach, Professor Paranormal himself. We’ll be back in our time machine right after this.
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JIM HAROLD: Well, get ready. Strap yourself in, because we’re getting in the time machine here. This is a recording that we released on July 29th, 2005. It was the first episode of the Paranormal Podcast. As you will hear, I sound extremely young, a little bit nervous, but we got through it and really had a great person with us who gave us some great content. I was listening earlier today; I’m like, Loyd’s part of this is excellent. [laughs] Mine, not so much.
But the thing is, I was looking today, and I think the Paranormal Podcast may very well be the longest running paranormal podcast in existence. I know there were a bunch of podcasts that started around the same time I did; some before, some after. A lot of the ones before, or most of the ones before, went away. I know there was one that – I don’t know if they predated me or not as a podcast. I know they had an internet radio show, and then they stopped producing for several years and came back.
So I believe the Paranormal Podcast may very well be – and I’m willing to be corrected on this – the longest running, continuous running paranormal podcast on the internet. And if we’re not, we’re darn close. So I thought since July 29th is our 17th anniversary – I know it’s a week and a half early or something – it’d be kind of fun to go back and take a look.
Let me see if I can get the dials here set right back so we can go back in the time machine. Yes, yes, yes. [machine whirring] Ah, there it is. All right, we’re ready to go. Loyd Auerbach, coming in from 2005.
[July 29th, 2005 interview begins]
JIM HAROLD: We’re really very fortunate tonight because we really have hit a homerun right out of the gate, I think, with our first guest. Loyd Auerbach, I’m talking about. Loyd is one of America’s foremost experts on the paranormal. He’s appeared on countless radio and TV shows with the big guys, including Hard Copy, Oprah, Late Night with David Letterman – my personal favorite; I’m a Letterman guy – and Larry King Live, among others.
Loyd is Director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations, which he founded. He’s been an adjunct professor at JFK University since 1983, and along with HCH Institute in Lafayette, California, Loyd recently launched a new basic certificate program in parapsychology studies. Over the last 23 years, he’s taught courses in parapsychology, anthropology, altered states of consciousness, science fiction, magic, public speaking, and mass media.
In his spare time, Loyd’s an accomplished mentalist and psychic entertainer, and I think he just finished a term as president of the Psychic Entertainers Association, a four-year term. An accomplished author, Loyd’s first book, ESP Hauntings and Poltergeists, was called the “sacred text on ghosts” by Newsweek. He’s written several books since. His latest, Paranormal Casebook: Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium, is coming out this September from Atriad Press. Thanks so much for joining us tonight, Loyd.
LOYD AUERBACH: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: First of all, my first question is: how do you have a chance to sleep with as much as you have going on?
LOYD AUERBACH: Well, that’s a really good question. I don’t know that I do. [laughs] Somewhere I have a clone, I think.
JIM HAROLD: Maybe it’s your ghost from another dimension.
LOYD AUERBACH: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Somebody who’s carved out a career – probably when you went to high school and college, this wasn’t something that you talked to your guidance counselor about, becoming an expert in the paranormal.
LOYD AUERBACH: You’d be surprised.
JIM HAROLD: Really? Well, let’s talk about that, and let’s talk about how you got into parapsychology.
LOYD AUERBACH: Actually, I was interested – not only interested in high school, but I intended as of high school, even before that, to become a parapsychologist. My interest goes back to when I was a little kid, probably because of all the TV and movies and comic books and science fiction I was catching. A lot of that had some overtones of the paranormal. But I came at it from a couple different directions because I was very interested in science. I was a little science geek kid, interested mainly in astronomy and geology, but also was very interested in folklore and mythology.
So when I noticed on the TV show Dark Shadows something about the study of parapsychology, it first kicked me into the library to start reading the books. I found J. B. Rhine’s books on the field. They really pushed me into that. Then I was fortunate in high school to have a couple teachers – both of whom were science teachers – who were interested enough to sponsor a club that myself and some friends put together. So we actually had a parapsychology club in high school.
From there, I went on to Northwestern, where I worked in anthropology and had some advisors who were very interested, and was fortunate enough to get into a graduate program at John F. Kennedy University in parapsychology when there was one, in the late ’70s, early ’80s.
JIM HAROLD: That was some fortuitous timing there.
LOYD AUERBACH: Yeah, it’s like the universe pushed me in the right direction.
JIM HAROLD: We talked about the bio at the beginning, but how do you explain what you do to people? If I meet you for the first time on the street and I say, “What do you do?”, and you say, “Parapsychology,” and I say, “What is that?” – how do you explain what you do?
LOYD AUERBACH: First thing, when people ask me that I usually say, “What day is it?” [laughs] For all the different things that I do. But I will say I’m a parapsychologist, meaning I study psychic phenomena, psychic abilities, and that goes everything from ESP to mind over matter to, of course, things that go bump in the night, ghosts and poltergeists and such.
I mainly work outside the laboratory, although I am in close contact with a number of my colleagues through journals and email and such to make sure I’m aware of what goes on inside the laboratory as well and where things are and where things stand in the field of parapsychology.
JIM HAROLD: What was your “eureka!” moment? When did you realize this stuff really exists, this isn’t a fairytale?
LOYD AUERBACH: Interestingly enough, when I was a kid – for some reason it didn’t seem to me that this was weird. It didn’t seem to me that people shouldn’t have these abilities, that they were outside the realm of human possibility. Maybe because I read superhero comic books and I was interested in science fiction, but for some reason it just felt that people should be more than what we think we are. In other words, it seemed like we were setting limits on ourselves. Even when I was a little kid.
That may also have partly come from the fact that I grew up in the ’60s during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. We really were stretching ourselves as a people at that point. Plus my father, from the mid-’60s on, was a sports producer, and I met a lot of folks who were beating limits. He was with NBC Sports. So when it comes right down to it, it seemed like we were setting limits on ourselves and our abilities, and coupled with my interest, it just felt like the paranormal was real.
But it really was encountering a few people in probably my late teens, certainly early twenties, where they were able to pick up information – specific things about me or about other folks around me – and then meeting researchers and talking about their firsthand experiences. All of those things really cemented it in my mind that this was absolutely real.
JIM HAROLD: The thing that’s interesting that you said to me is that there seems to be – among some people, not among you and probably not among myself or people interested in the paranormal – but among more people who think along conventional lines, “if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, if you can’t measure it in the traditional ways.” The thing that’s interesting to me – there are many phenomena throughout history – everybody thought there was ether, for example. So isn’t it the case that we don’t know we know something until we discover it?
LOYD AUERBACH: Yeah, and even then we can only sometimes see the effect of things. We still don’t know how aspirin works. The placebo effect is commonly accepted all over the world in every field of science, and yet nobody knows how that works. In fact, the placebo effect would be an effect considered part of parapsychology. You’re talking about an effect of the mind on the body, and the placebo effect often is just a little bit better sometimes and just a little bit worse than pharmaceuticals.
How is it we can be accepting of some effect in medicine, in pharmaceuticals, that is what you match the performance of drugs against, that is mind-body alone, and still say that there’s no mind-body connection?
JIM HAROLD: Let’s take people a little bit into your daily work and ghost hunting, because I think that was one of the hot buttons. Everybody wants to know what ghosts are and about things that go bump in the night, as you said. Tell us a little bit about your work in the field as a ghost hunter and some of your experiences.
LOYD AUERBACH: I’ve been doing the investigations pretty much since about the third week into my graduate studies. One of the first courses I took was on spontaneous case investigations, and in parapsychology we call situations that happen with psychic abilities and psychic experience outside the laboratory “spontaneous cases” of psychic experience because they’re not under the controls of a laboratory.
And actually, what most people who are in the ghost hunting biz completely ignore, unfortunately – and it’s partly because a few of the so-called experts out there have told them to ignore it – is that you need to know and understand about psychic experience, such as ESP and psychokinesis, mind over matter, to really fully understand what’s going on even in a ghost case. Because we are dealing with human minds.
When I’m doing my investigations, we’re looking at things from a couple different angles. First of all, most of my investigations – not the ones you see me doing on TV, but most of my investigations are with families, with private individuals where we can’t talk about who they are because of essentially privacy concerns. In the majority of those cases, those people tend to want to have something resolved. It may be an explanation they need; it may just be they want to get rid of the phenomenon.
But we go in with two perspectives and two thrusts. One, to look for every possible explanation that is not paranormal first. We always find something non-paranormal, even in the most paranormal of cases, because people make mistakes once they get a little freaked out.
The other side of it is, for those private cases, our main goal is the people. We’re not going to run into a house and start taking pictures and say, “Look, we got orbs. You’ve got a ghost. Goodbye.” Because that’s not why we’re there, and that’s not why most folks in my field are there. We’re there to help the people out as much as we possibly can. And if that means finding that there’s no ghost there, that it’s completely normal, that’s what we do. If it means that we find a little bit of both, that’s what we do also. We really try to focus from all aspects.
JIM HAROLD: The thing that strikes me in what you’re talking about here – it’s a serious business. I think everybody thinks about Casper the Ghost and “boo!” and “haha, funny,” and certainly humor can be brought into anything. But people who call you up, they’re really in need.
LOYD AUERBACH: Yes, they are. They definitely are in need. It’s an emotional need, of course, typically. It’s very rarely a situation in which there’s anything about the phenomenon that can hurt them, but that emotional need is absolutely there. They need to have an understanding of what’s going on.
In fact, a lot of what we do is education. We really are trying to find out what’s going on with these situations, and we have to educate them about what the possibilities are. There’s sometimes cases where we can’t come to any definitive conclusion, unfortunately. We try our best in these situations. We continue as best we can.
JIM HAROLD: I was wondering, could you take us into the field with you and tell us the technology and what goes into going into the field and doing a ghost hunt?
LOYD AUERBACH: Sure. I think the key thing that someone who’s an investigator needs to know, besides obviously knowledge of what the stuff is, what the phenomena is and what it isn’t, is interviewing skills. In general, we are going into places where we’re dealing with people. In fact, to be very honest, we don’t go to places where there are no living witnesses. Legendary places are all fun and games, you can go to a cemetery if you want, but it really doesn’t provide any data other than some possible unusual readings in the technology. There’s nothing to check that against. You can’t compare it against somebody’s experience, so it’s irrelevant for most of us.
So interviewing skills is probably the key tool, and obviously observational skills along with that. But for the hard tech, we use, of course, tape recorders or digital recorders to record the interview sessions. I think it’s really important to get everybody’s story down on audio if possible, if not video. We use video cameras to record things as well. It’s not that we’re trying to get, typically, EVP, electronic voice phenomena, or unusual things on video. We are trying to make a record of what’s going on in the investigation and what the people have experienced as much as possible. Cameras, for that matter, still cameras, taking pictures is also very important.
The tool that has seemingly provided some of the best correlation, some of the best consistent data, has been a magnetic field detector. They’re called electromagnetic field detectors, but we actually work with a magnetic range. There are two types of magnetic field detectors we typically use. They’re both called tri-field meters because they both measure three fields each. The thing a lot of folks are unaware of is that there are different frequencies of magnetic field, like there are different radio frequencies.
One of the devices, the standard tri-field meter – it’s frequency weighted for 60 hertz, meaning it was designed to pick up technology in the home and around the home to determine if you have electromagnetic pollution. That was what it was designed for. It will pick up unusual things with wiring and it will pick up the coffee machine being turned on in the next room because there’s a sudden spike of magnetic field put out by that. So that’s one key tool that we use.
The other one is the natural tri-field meter, which measures low level changes in the magnetic environment. It does not pick up technology, typically. It does pick up sometimes people, because people can cause a shift, a change. The two of them are very different. The standard tri-field meter, you can actually walk around like with a tricorder. The other one, the natural field, because it measures change, as soon as you move it you create a change. Like if you move your hand through water, you’re creating a shift.
JIM HAROLD: So it’s not just psychics walking around trying to pick up a vibration, per se. You have actual hardware.
LOYD AUERBACH: We have actual hardware. But the psychic piece of it, honestly, can be given in some respects more value with the right psychic than the technology. I consider the psychics to some extent detection devices as well. The folks I work with, we kid each other back and forth; they are my detectors in that sense.
But with the psychics, seeing what they can pick up is compared to what the witnesses have experienced, because that’s why we’re there to begin with. The people in the home, in the restaurant who have experienced something, it’s their key experiences. Those are the most important, compared to what the psychics get, compared to what the meters get, compared to temperature gauges and everything else.
JIM HAROLD: I take it you do not consider yourself to be a psychic?
LOYD AUERBACH: A psychic, no. But everybody is a little psychic, and one of the things I’ve learned over the years is to pick up things a little better. I’ve actually begun to pick up things myself, and I have a particular feeling – I don’t put a lot of stock in my experience. I mean, I can sense when something’s happening. It’s interesting when my feeling gets compared to let’s say one of the high readings on the electromagnetic field detector or when one of the psychics says they see something. I keep that close to the vest, but I wouldn’t make myself a primary detector because I’m the investigator. I’m trying to gather all the data and compare it.
JIM HAROLD: You’re maintaining some impartiality, then.
LOYD AUERBACH: Trying to.
JIM HAROLD: It’s got to be tough.
LOYD AUERBACH: Sometimes it’s really hard. It’s admittedly very hard sometimes because things do start happening. You do experience things from time to time. It’s kind of rare, but you do. And sometimes the stories that people tell you are so engaging that you just get sucked in.
JIM HAROLD: In terms of your own experience, for those of us who have not “seen” an apparition or – I think we’ve all had things happen to us. I know I’ve had things happen to me that are inexplicable. Not as far as seeing a ghost or feeling a ghost per se, but you have a little bit of a strange feeling. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a ghost. What have been your experiences? What have you sensed when your other data tell you that you’re in the presence of some kind of apparition? What is your experience, what has your sense been?
LOYD AUERBACH: What’s kind of interesting is that everybody can perceive things differently. I also have never seen a ghost, but I have felt and smelled and even heard, at this point. Last fall I actually heard something of a paranormal nature. It’s kind of interesting that we don’t all process psychic information visually. And this is all psychic information. When you see a ghost, you’re not really seeing the ghost with your eyes; it’s in your mind. It’s your perception.
What I’ve experienced – typically, when I go into places, I personally get either a sinus headache or sinus pressure in or around the front of my head. Sudafed will sometimes take care of that. [laughs] But it does compare favorably to what the psychics are picking up sometimes.
With one particular case – there’s a place called the Moss Beach Distillery. It’s a restaurant that’s been on television quite a bit. It’s south of San Francisco. I’ve been investigating the place since ’91. You might say I have kind of a relationship with the ghost in that I am the long-term investigator, so I’m the one she knows the best. I’ve brought in some other psychics over the years, although there are a couple in particular that she’s connected with very well over the last couple years, Annette Martin and Neva Turnock.
It’s interesting that I kind of know when she’s around. I get this unusual feeling, not quite a cold chill up my spine, but this feeling in the back of my head and sinus pressure. It’s been interesting. I was at a conference earlier this year in January; the ghost, whose name is Kate, has popped outside the restaurant. She’s appeared in other places. I was at this conference, and actually Neva Turnock was at the conference, too, one of the psychics.
I was reporting on the place, and during the session, during my presentation, a couple people in the audience who were spirit mediums who were at the conference – this was a conference on mediumship put on by the Parapsychology Foundation – apparently a couple of women in the audience besides Neva, because Neva saw her also, saw the ghost. And they saw her standing next to me, and I had this feeling the entire time I was presenting about this.
Neva and I talked afterwards and she said something to me without me saying anything to her, and then these two women walk up and described exactly what Neva had seen. So she was following me.
JIM HAROLD: So it’s possibly to actually build in some ways a relationship with a ghost?
LOYD AUERBACH: Well, if ghosts were people, then they still are. In parapsychology, we define ghosts as consciousness. A ghost is a mind. It is consciousness. It just happens to be the consciousness after the person has died. If you want to call that a spirit or soul or whatever else, that’s fine, but it is at its root a pure consciousness. And the way a ghost communicates with people is on a telepathic basis, mind to mind communication, because they don’t have a mouth to talk with or anything else.
So you can connect with them, and people have established friendly relationships, very long term sometimes, with the ghost. And sometimes they’re ghosts of relatives, so the relationship continues after the death.
JIM HAROLD: There’s a perception out there in popular media that ghosts are tormented souls. What’s your take on that?
LOYD AUERBACH: Well, that comes from so many of the old ghost stories. It’s not from reality. They’re tormented perhaps because they can’t find anybody to talk to sometimes. We certainly have cases like that. Another one is that the ghosts have unfinished business, and you know what? Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes they have a message they’ve got to get to somebody. Sometimes they feel like they didn’t finish off their life’s work, whatever that happened to be, or take the garbage out or something like that.
And sometimes the ghosts don’t recognize that they’re dead. That does happen from time to time. They’re in total denial, and that’s a normal psychological reaction we’d expect from some of these folks. In other words, why ghosts are around – they’re very mundane, normal psychological reasons. You’d expect these reasons based on the people they were when they were alive. The personality does not change or shift.
JIM HAROLD: So the conception that we necessarily need to be afraid of ghosts is possibly not accurate?
LOYD AUERBACH: It is really not accurate. I think the only real thing a ghost can do is invade your privacy. Which for some people is pretty scary.
JIM HAROLD: It seems to me that the reason people are afraid of ghosts – and I’ll be honest with you, if I were sitting here and I saw something that appeared to me to be a ghost, I would be frightened – is because it’s the unknown, and the whole question of the barrier between life and death and what happens to us. In your own experience and that of psychics you’ve worked with and you respect, do you have a sense – have you had any communication from any ghosts about what happens after we pass, when we shuffle off this mortal coil?
LOYD AUERBACH: Not really. Here’s the problem; unless you talk about mediums talking to people who have passed to the other side – and we have certainly talked to mediums about that – the general situation in these cases with apparitions, with ghosts, they haven’t gone to the other side. They’re still here.
Actually, I had a case in Livermore, California a number of years ago where the ghost, through a young boy she was communicating with, expressed her fear of what was on the other side. She didn’t know. She had the same fear of the unknown that we do. So she decided she wanted to stay in her house, and that’s what she did. She stayed in her house.
JIM HAROLD: That’s a great story.
LOYD AUERBACH: So basically there’s a fear that we take with us to our grave, so to speak. She didn’t feel light, she claimed. She just wanted to be home because she was freaked out about it.
JIM HAROLD: So you conduct a ghost hunt and you have established – I think in us talking off air here, you said that many times you come up zeros and it’s a perfectly logical explanation. People are mistaken. But let’s say it’s one of those occasions where it is a real infestation, for lack of a better term. What’s the next step?
LOYD AUERBACH: It depends on what’s actually happening. We have to more or less diagnose the problem. Let’s assume that we’ve gotten rid of all the normal explanations first. We have to determine what exactly is happening, because there are three key or main types of phenomena, and sometimes they occur in the same place at the same time.
One is the traditional idea of ghosts or apparitions – that people, their personality, their consciousness survived the death of their body and they’re sticking around in this location, or any location. They’re capable of interaction, and it’s that interaction that’s crucial. You have to have consciousness, more or less, there.
The second category would be called hauntings. They’re also sometimes called residual hauntings or imprints. Place memory is a term we’ve used for a number of years in parapsychology, and it’s the idea that the location records living people’s activities, and just because those living people die or move, doesn’t mean the recording goes away. For example, if I have a recording of somebody and the person dies, I still have the recording.
In haunting cases, where we find high static magnetic fields, quite often – static meaning they don’t move around, whereas in the apparition cases they tend to move around because the people move around, the ghosts move around. But in the haunting cases, we find repetitive patterns. There’s never interaction. In other words, you could stand in front of the ghost and they’ll continue to walk through you every single night as if you’re not there because there’s no real person there. It’s just a recording.
Then the third category would be poltergeist phenomena, where physical activity is happening. It’s usually physical activity of a messy or destructive form, and it’s very different as it happens than the paranormal activity that could happen with a ghost. In some ghost cases they do move things; sometimes they can drop things or break things. But it’s nothing like in poltergeist cases because poltergeist cases are focused on or come from a living agent, from a person’s unconscious mind.
JIM HAROLD: So the poltergeist is actually not a function of a ghost.
LOYD AUERBACH: No. Although there can be ghost cases. We actually had a ghost case in which the family was so stressed out and freaked out about the ghost that there was a poltergeist.
JIM HAROLD: So they were causing it themselves.
LOYD AUERBACH: The stress of experiencing the ghost is the stress that caused the poltergeist phenomenon. What we find in these cases is that there is an individual undergoing some emotional or psychological stress, and by dealing with two things – dealing with the stress gets rid of it no matter what, but dealing with accepting responsibility also can get rid of it first before you even deal with the stress.
JIM HAROLD: The thing I was going to ask that occurred to me – you were talking about ghosts have different types of personalities, and I think we’ve all run into people who have a prankster mentality. Have you ever run into a ghost that maybe is a little bit of a practical joker?
LOYD AUERBACH: Yes, we have. There’s a ghost – in fact, an old bartender and owner of a place called the Banta Inn in a town called Banta, which is near Tracy, California. It’s east of San Francisco. And Tony, the bartender who died of a heart attack behind the bar in 1968, likes to mess with people. Which meant changing the songs on the jukebox to Patsy Cline, which is what he liked. Sometimes it would be flipping the CDs in the jukebox while somebody was standing there. Sometimes it would be moving a glass out of somebody’s reach.
The owner told me a number of years ago that a couple of guys came in and started teasing the bartender about her experiences with the ghost. They were big skeptics, they claimed. And in front of them, the change they had on the bar, like a quarter in front of each of them, stood up on end. The guys ran screaming form the restaurant. They just ran screaming.
JIM HAROLD: I could kind of understand that, actually. But I wanted to get back to some unfinished business before the break. We were talking about the different kinds of manifestations – ghosts, poltergeists, and so forth. How do you deal with those different manifestations once you find them?
LOYD AUERBACH: Going backwards, the poltergeist phenomenon we deal with by playing detective and determining who is likely to be at the center of it, who is the poltergeist agent, and try to figure out what the stresses are and have them deal with the stresses, whether it’s through counseling or just changing their lifestyle a little bit. But we also try to get them to accept that they could’ve been causing it, and that does work, and it works quite well. The phenomenon typically doesn’t continue as long as they deal with the stress and they’re aware of that.
The haunting cases, where we have imprints, we often deal with in very odd ways. Sometimes we have psychics who can do house cleansings or clearings. In one case I had where people clearly felt something weird and bad in a couple spots in the house, the psychic I was working with did a mental visualization of a white tornado, like the old “white tornado” commercials, clearing up all the bad psychic stuff. And lo and behold, after she got done – which was only five minutes later – everybody said the place felt lighter, and the magnetic field readings we got went away. They were completely gone.
JIM HAROLD: Amazing.
LOYD AUERBACH: We also use magnetic fields, magnets, like a Degausser, a big tape eraser which I got at RadioShack. Those tend to delete or interfere with the magnetic fields in the environment. We have no idea why that works. It’s probably like aspirin.
JIM HAROLD: That’s the thing. Couldn’t there be some X factor here that science just isn’t able to measure yet?
LOYD AUERBACH: Yeah. It’s likely there is. That’s the thing; we’re dealing with something – it’s likely the magnetic fields are not the thing itself, but like a byproduct. It’s kind of like the wave the boat leaves behind when it goes through the water. You’re not detecting the boat, you’re detecting the wake when you see the wake. You see the footprints, but you don’t see the thing that caused the footprints in that sense.
JIM HAROLD: Wrapping up this segment of our talk, if there are a couple key points you really wanted to get across to people – and also, let’s talk a little bit about the new book here – if somebody came into this conversation and just had all these misconceptions about ghosts, what key points would you want to get across to them? And also work that into the new book that’s coming out in September.
LOYD AUERBACH: I think the key points are that this phenomena is part of normal human experience, and for the most part normal human experience is not harmful or dangerous, except sometimes on a psychological level, and that’s the case with ghost type cases. There’s nothing a ghost can do to hurt you, other than to scare you by jumping out and saying “boo!” out of nowhere. That’s going to scare you whether it’s your brother jumping out of a closet or a ghost. It’s the same kind of thing. They really can’t hurt you in any other way, shape, or form.
My paranormal casebook, which is called A Paranormal Casebook, which will be out mid-September, is a book that covers a lot of my favorite cases. Not all of them. My previous book, Hauntings and Poltergeists, has a couple of my very favorite cases, one haunting case of a couple who had experienced something left behind by living people, not dead people – so it was an imprint of living people – and the other was the case of the 12-year-old boy I mentioned who talked with a ghost who was afraid of going on, Lois in Livermore.
What the new book has is a whole bunch of my cases, including a really lengthy chapter on the Moss Beach Distillery and my investigations there. In fact, it’s about 10,000 words. It’s about a sixth of the book. And there’s a huge section on the USS Hornet investigation and a couple of my favorite cases, both paranormal and normal. I’ve got a couple cases in there that were based on unusual but normal explanations.
JIM HAROLD: That’s the thing that really appealed to me when I talked to Loyd: his willingness to accept and believe in the fact that many times there’s not always a paranormal explanation. Sometimes there’s a quite normal explanation. I really applaud you for that, because it seems like that might not always be the case, that there always has to be some ghost in a closet. I think that’s very refreshing. It’s an academic approach and really much appreciated.
LOYD AUERBACH: Basically, if we don’t remove the normal stuff, how are we going to be able to study what’s left? We have to understand the normal explanation. And there have been some unusual things that skeptics have been pointing out the last couple years, such as magnetic fields have been proven to cause people to have hallucinations in some instances, and low frequency sound can cause people to see things out of the corner of their eye.
But you know where that came from? It came from the field of parapsychology. It came from within the field. It wasn’t the skeptics who came up with these explanations. It was parapsychologists who did the studies first because they were trying to determine what else might cause this so that we can really study what’s left. We get co-opted constantly by the skeptics who say, “See? It’s not ghosts.” We know that because we’re the ones who told you.
JIM HAROLD: It’s kind of easy to say “this is all a bunch of bunk” and reject it out of hand. I think that’s an easy approach. I do believe in going in with somewhat of a skeptical nature, but boy, I think it’s taking the easy way out just to reject everything out of hand.
LOYD AUERBACH: Oh yeah, and that’s not scientific at all. That’s anti-science, in fact. Regardless of what you believe, to reject things out of turn is totally not the scientific way.
JIM HAROLD: Wrapping up for tonight – and I do appreciate your time, again – I want to talk a little bit about the fun side. Not that the other stuff isn’t fun, but a little bit of the lighthearted stuff you do in terms of being a psychic entertainer, a mentalist. When I think of that term, I think of somebody like Kreskin. Tell us a little bit about that side of your life.
LOYD AUERBACH: I actually got into it because of parapsychology. One of the courses I took as a graduate student was called Creation of Illusion, and it taught us how magicians and mentalists, psychic entertainers, can fake things, simulate psychic ability. As researchers, we needed to know something about that, or at least the spread of possibilities.
I just happened to enjoy – I learned it, and at the time I was bartending my way through graduate school, so it was a fun thing to learn to do. But I felt really drawn to it because I wanted to have fun with the field. I mostly did, honestly, comedy magic through the 1980s in comedy clubs. I eventually came to terms with “I’ve got to bring it back around to the psychic entertainment,” because that was really my focus to begin with, and because it makes more sense as a parapsychologist to really focus in on that.
So in the mid-’90s, I started a new performance as Professor Paranormal. Still keeping tongue in cheek because there’s nothing wrong with a little humor. In fact, humor is a very powerful tool that we use with our clients all the time. It’s about entertaining people in a way that makes them imagine everybody can be psychic, because everybody is to some extent.
It’s very interactive. It is Kreskin-like, although I tend to take a more lighthearted approach to it. I wouldn’t call myself Professor Paranormal otherwise. It’s a lot of fun for me. It also has increased my knowledge level incredibly by performing. You can read all the books you want about this stuff, but when you perform it with people and see their reactions and interact with them, you’re leaps and bounds above any of those armchair skeptical magicians, the guys who say “I know all this stuff” but they never perform.
You really understand, and you really understand that people don’t get fooled purposely by psychics. There are some phony psychics out there, clearly, but in these cases we deal with, this has enabled me to understand how people misperceive or misunderstand ordinary occurrences and sometimes not-so-ordinary occurrences, but non-paranormal occurrences, and make them paranormal in their own minds. It’s not anything stupid and it’s not anything that they should be ashamed of; it’s just because we’re trained to perceive the world in a certain way that we think this way sometimes.
[End of July 29th, 2005 interview]
JIM HAROLD: Loyd was just great, and he still is. We’re going to get him back on the show. We’re working out dates and hope to have some word soon, and hopefully we’ll talk with him in the next few weeks. I took out the section where we talked about his previous links and so forth because obviously, those things have evolved over the years – 17 years.
Loyd told me to tell you that you can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn under Loyd Auerbach. Also, his books are on Amazon, I might add. So be sure to check those out, and we’re looking forward to getting a new interview with him. It’s been a few years since we spoke with him. He’s been on the show several times over the years, but it’s been a while, so this reminded me to finally reach out and say, “Hey Loyd, let’s talk and see what’s new in your world and your take on the paranormal in 2022.”
In terms of what you heard, that was the show pretty much as aired. We took the open off, obviously, we took the end where Loyd was promoting some older links, and I took out a couple of breaks that were no longer necessary because they were very dated and that kind of thing. But the interview itself, aside from a little bit of audio tweaking, is as it was back in 2005.
It just reminds me – thank you so much for all of your support over the years. When I did that first interview, I had a $45 headset on and a kind of crappy Windows computer, and I had no idea that it would become my life’s work. And that’s because of you, so thank you.
If you say “Hey, I’d love to go back in that time machine from time to time myself,” guess what? It is available to you: jimharoldplus.com. Just go over there, click on the banner on that page, and you can find out how you can get access to the whole Jim Harold time machine, and your first month is only 99 cents if you use the promo codes we have over there. So, jimharoldplus.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another all-new show, and I thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next time, and as always, stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-bye, everybody.
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