We talk with investigator Greg Lawson all about Mothman, premonitions and paranormal experiences.
You can find Greg’s recent book, Messages from Mothman, at Amazon: https://amzn.to/4bZzzUl
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TRANSCRIPT
Jim Harold (00:00):
Mothman. That’s the subject of this week’s Paranormal Podcast.
Announcer (00:17):
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim Harold (00:20):
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again. And today we’re going to talk about Mothman. Our guest is Greg Lawson. He is the author of Messages with Mothman, and I think it’s going to be a fascinating discussion. Always great to talk with Greg. He’s fantastic. And look forward to seeing you at Michigan Paracon, coming up in a few months here.
Greg Lawson (00:46):
Yeah, I’m excited about that. I love Michigan Paracon, man. It’s like a family reunion up there. It’s great.
Jim Harold (00:52):
Yeah, this will be my first time. I can’t believe I’ve not been there. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I’m going to be there in August and I am just so excited about it. It is the big mack daddy of paranormal conferences. So looking forward to that. So you’ve written this new book here, and I’ll show it again, Messages from Mothman, Interpretations of Premonitions and Other Paranormal Experiences. So I mean, when most people think about Mothman, they think about the Mothman prophecies. They think about John Keel, they think about the Silver Bridge collapse in West Virginia in 1967, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It goes back further and many more reports and so forth, correct?
Greg Lawson (01:37):
No, that’s pretty much it. (both laugh)
(01:41):
Yeah. It’s funny when you look at it and you start digging into it a little deeper. The interesting thing I found about it was how many other places in the world had similar kind of circumstances. That was very, other than the description of the creature, a little bit was kind of the same behavior and the same interpretation that people got. So that was the thing that really interests me, because when you go to Point Pleasant and you go to the museum and you go see the statue, and you cruise around and drive across the Silver Bridge and pull into Piggly Wiggly and buy a t-shirt, because everybody needs a Piggly Wiggly t-shirt, for those of you don’t know what Piggly Wiggly is, that’s a grocery store chain. And that’s kind of, there you go. You could try to wander out to the TNT area, but most of that stuff is torn down and it’s just, it’s like me visiting my old Austin, Texas.
(02:47):
There’s nothing left for me now. It’s just kind of gone. So when I was looking at Mothman, and I was specifically looking at how people interpreted what this creature or what these experiences were for these different people, it was really interesting to get their perspective on. Some people believed that it was a harbinger of doom. Some people believed or believe that he was there to actually warn us about something, or other people just believed that he was there to observe. And all these different interpretations or beliefs are kind of grounded, I guess, in some very small stories. It’s not a lot of information on that particular thing, but like you said, you pick around and you see the different people that were saying, I saw him here. I saw him there. And it scatters you all over the place, and you’ll go down the rabbit hole real quick.
Jim Harold (03:55):
I mean, weren’t there reports from Chernobyl, before the nuclear accident?
Greg Lawson (04:00):
That’s right, yeah. And that’s kind of when I first decided I was going to write about Mothman. While the book is about Mothman, it became something very different. In other words I was going to investigate Mothman, Lynn and I, my behavior modification unit you met when we were in Kent.
Jim Harold (04:24):
Yeah, Kent Ohio.
Greg Lawson (04:27):
And so we took a drive and we went out to Point Pleasant there. And I did as much research as I can, and most of it is in tabloids or in newspapers, and there’s a little bit of law enforcement reports, but that’s pretty much it. It’s very much legend and it’s very much movies. Everybody loves mothman. I mean, what a cool cryptid that would be. And you can go down that realm of is it encrypted? Is it an alien? Is it time traveler, a shifter? Was it actually a person actually in some sort of suit, like a Marvel suit or something? What was this thing? It’s kind of like a Roswell. There was a crash. I’m not sure what it was, but there was that, well, there was sightings of Moth, man, I don’t know what it was, but you can’t get around the actual sighting. So that was the amazing thing for me is to really, let’s go really deep. And I did, and I just kind of wandered off in all these other directions because there were so many similarities and so many people making their own interpretations of what the message was.
Jim Harold (05:54):
So maybe I should back up a little bit. When we talk about this book Messages from Mothman, we’re going to show that a lot for folks. So tell us what it is as a book, what people should expect.
Greg Lawson (06:07):
So what it is, is I cover basically everything that is germane or pertinent to the investigation for Mothman on what it was or what it is. But I tied in from beginning to end with a whole bunch of different stories that are very similar to that. It may be the, like you said, the Chernobyl sighting, but also these premonitions that people were having. And I look at all kinds of things throughout history that are very, very reminiscent of Mothman or very similar to Mothman. And so I go down that side of it, and I mean, I can summarize a whole book. Well not summarize, but I could say that the book ended up turning into this. It’s not a self-help kind of thing, but it’s a sort of encouragement. When I grew up, I grew up with a lot of people that were very smart and very dedicated, and these kids, they believed what their parents told ’em. They believed what their religious leader told ’em. They believed what their coach told them and their teachers and all that. And they went through high school and they graduated and they went to college and they got their degrees and they married their high school sweetheart, and they bought a house and they lived in their town and they raised kids and they have grandkids now, and everything’s happy. It’s rough being all of that.
(07:42):
But they never asked questions. And that’s not at all me. I’m like, okay, that sounds okay, but why? And typically when you go down that road, you meet a lot of pushback and you’re argumentative. I’m not argumentative. I’d just like to know where this comes from.
Jim Harold (08:06):
Well, I think that comes naturally because we didn’t mention it here. I mean, if you’ve seen Greg anywhere on various shows, TV shows, seen him at conferences on this show, he has a huge law enforcement background, multiple decades. It’s over 30 years. So being in law enforcement, I think tends to make you want to look a layer underneath. You just don’t want to look at the surface. You want to get the whole explanation. You always figure what’s missing, what’s missing. Is that true? I mean, do you think that’s a big reason you are the way you are?
Greg Lawson (08:41):
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the Wizard of Oz was one when they yanked the curtain back and I was like, oh, is that dude, what happened? No, the wizard, he is awesome. And that’s not what it was. And so I remember that. I’m like, oh, well, that was a trick. They were fooling me about this thing. And the other thing is, when I do, people ask me about paranormal investigations and what kind of evidence I find and all that stuff, we can go down. That’s multiple shows to discuss that. And in my investigations, I’ve tended to lean toward what is not there more than what is actually there. And I do most of my investigations by myself just because I find that if I’m working with a team or other people, they’re often trying to get my attention on something else and interpret something else in a certain way, and it muddles the whole thing, right?
(09:36):
So that’s very important for me to ask those questions. So you said I have 32 years law enforcement and 10 years military and of the military side. Now I got to work in different facets and different levels and the travel I got in, that was a great exposure because when I would go to other countries, I wasn’t going as a tourist. And you see the countries in those places very differently when you’re boots on the ground as opposed to getting on and off your tour bus. There’s this very, very different perspective. And a lot of people think, well, I’m well traveled. I did this. Yeah, you went to the tourist spots. Life is much, much different. So it’s a little bit of that law enforcement, a little bit of that travel. And also being a recovering Catholic, I have these beliefs that I grew up with that influence all that.
(10:37):
So I watched those friends of mine just grow up and do this stuff, and they never asked the questions. And when they have a sign, when they get that message, when they have that synchronicity or that deja vu, they just immediately shake it off and go back to work. They got to pay for their mortgage, they got to pay for their kids going school. Right? Exactly. You got to eat right. Well, this whole book turned into this thing of what if in your life you actually assigned meaning to the things that happened to you? Something recently just happened with Lynn and I. We had this Hawaiian vacation planned and we paid for everything, and I paid for multiple scuba dives on a reef, multiple scuba dives at some wrecks there from World War II. Going to do some great stuff, right? Well, the day before we get frozen out here in Austin, just one day out of 365 days a year, it freezes. It cancels, cancels our flight.
(11:47):
I used to not be a math guy, but I’m a math guy after I got out of the Navy, and you run the stats on that, and it’s all right, well, there’s one in 365 chances that that’s going to happen. But also her very good friend and cousin became very ill. So because we couldn’t go to Hawaii and we had our vacation set, why ask questions, get in the car, drive to North Carolina and see your cousin, and it was the best thing. It was so much better than a Hawaiian vacation for the simple fact that we got to spend a few last minutes with him before he passed. And so she got to talk with him, and it was cathartic. It was huge. If we actually, instead of brushing off those little things like, yeah, I’m going to call grandma. You look down and grandma’s calling you and you just go, oh yeah, it’s just weird. And you just answer the phone. No. What if we actually assign meaning to those things that pop up, those little red flags in our life that pop up? How would our life be different?
Jim Harold (12:56):
I got to tell you my story, and I’ve told this on the shows before that happened to me. Me and my wife were dating in the nineties. This would’ve been ‘94. So I’m dating myself. I ain’t a youngin’ anymore.
Greg Lawson (13:09):
Well, you look good.
Jim Harold (13:10):
Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s all smoke and mirrors. But anyway, the point is, so I lived in the city of Cleveland. I lived in an area that was kind of like a European, Eastern European area, a lot Polish, a lot of people. Slavic Village, it was called, it still is called. The area was going downhill, but it was still considered a stable neighborhood, but it was in the city of Cleveland. My wife lived with their folks in eastern suburb of the city, a much nicer area. Anyway, we went to Cedar Point, which was far west, and we drove all the way back and we closed whenever the park closed, midnight, whatever it was, drove back. By the time I got back to her house to drop her off to go back to my apartment, it was about two o’clock in the morning. I was exhausted.
(14:03):
You ride the ride, even when you’re 20 something, early twenties, you’re riding all the rides, you’re doing all this stuff, you’re exhausted. And she said, you know what? And we’d only been going out maybe three or four months at that point, maybe five. And she said, you know what? You are exhausted. Something is going to happen to you. If you drive home, you’re going to fall asleep. Something’s going to happen. So I insist that I go in and ask my Italian father if you can sleep on the couch. And I went, well, I’m like, I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t think so. They barely knew me, right? So anyway, she said, no, I’m going to ask. And I said, okay, whatever. So she goes and asks, and he graciously said, sure he can sleep on the couch. So I slept on the couch.
(14:50):
Next I go back and I just signed the papers that week, coincidentally, to move out by her because it was close to my work, was a better area, nicer apartment. But anyway, so long story short, I go back, it’s an old eight frame style house. This was not a fancy apartment. I had the front half of the house. He had the back half. Don’t mean to monopolize, but this is a perfect story for what you’re saying. So anyway, I see the landlord’s son outside the house pointing across the street towards our side of the street, and I’m in a good mood. We had breakfast, and it’s like I’ve found this second family, and I’m seeing possibilities. So I was in a really good mood, and I said, oh, hey, what’s up? He said, I’ve got to talk to you. There’s been a drive by. I’m like, A drive by.
(15:42):
He’s like, yeah. I’m like, whose house got hit? Oh my goodness. He’s like, our house got hit. Several rounds of armor piercing. AK 47 fire one took out my first appliance I ever bought for myself, a microwave, direct hit. I’ve got shrapnel, I’ve got pictures. My uncle, when I got the apartment, gave me one of those old avocado gold double door refrigerators. A bullet went through one side, hit a bottle of ketchup and out the other. And what happened was our house was dark blue. The next door house was light blue. Well under the amber lights, our house looked very blue. The one next door looked white, they hit the wrong house. Turns out there are a bunch of unsupervised teenagers over there. And I told my wife, not at that time, but my girlfriend, I said, those kids are problems. I grew up in this neighborhood my whole life.
(16:36):
I know when there’s a problem. She’s like, oh, they’re just kids. And I’m like, listen, suburbanite, I know problems when I see ‘em. So anyway, long story short, if I had been there now, all the rounds hit the bottom floor. I was on the top floor, but what if I got up or what if they were lying in wait or whatever. It was funny because I guess the cops came and they said, what does that guy do for a living? And they’re like, he’s an assistant at a classical music radio station. But they thought he was some kind of drug kingpin. But the point is, a long way of saying to your point and your story is that sometimes I really believe things happen for a reason and we are protected or we are rerouted. It’s kind of a weird way to do it, but it did the job and it potentially saved my life.
Greg Lawson (17:28):
If you don’t fight it as those changes come in and you don’t fight it, and you just navigate your environment without those obstructions or whatever’s getting in your way and you figure out a different way or you allow it to reroute you, I think a lot of people would, one, you’d have a much calmer life. You’d be a lot less angry all the time as far as, yeah, this happened and that happened, and I can’t get ahold of this. And no man, you just kind of go with it. And I’ve found that in a lot of paranormal investigations. I won’t go into it, but I did an investigation in Hong Kong, actually, it was in Lantau Island. It’s an island off of Hong Kong that has the last Shaolin monastery is over there, one of the schools. And I went to this location, it was supposed to be a pirate fort, and it was way out in the, you call it jungle, it was out in the woods.
(18:33):
And I thought it was going to be like a museum kind of thing, but it wasn’t anything. It was overgrown just in the middle of nowhere. Nobody cares about it. Great history, great crazy stuff happened. And I get there and this little bluebird jumps out of the woods and it’s right in front of me. And it’s jumping around, jumping around, jumping around, and I’m like, yeah, this beautiful little blue bird. And I’m looking at my recorder, I’m getting my camera out, I’m taking some pictures and the little blue bird’s jumping around. He’s right in front of me, man. He’s right there. And he’s jumping around, he’s tweeting and doing all his things. And I’m like, yeah, okay. So I’m trying to get away from this blue bird. I thought maybe I was near his nest or something like that. We have killdeers here in Texas, these little white and brown birds that act like their wing is broken whenever you get close to their nest and they flop around and try to get you to chase ’em to get away from their nest.
(19:21):
And I thought that’s what he was doing. Anyway, so I spent a few hours there, and I think I found a graveyard there, and it was a great experience by myself and this jungle with all these ruins. But this bird was jacked with me the whole time, man. I’m like, this is crazy. So anyway, I won’t finish the rest of what I did there. That’s another story. But I leave and about two years later I’m doing some reading and find out that the earth mother sends a blue bird to you with a message how often we miss it. So I was so focused in on trying to find the ghost, trying to find an EVP or whatever, that I wasn’t taking in what was happening right in front of me. And that’s something that I’ve learned about paranormal is so often you pack up all your stuff and you go someplace and go, I’m going to go do EVP work. Yeah, you probably need to shut your mouth, and when you get there. Pay attention to what’s going on, and then decide then whether you’re going to do EVP work, whether you’re going to do some spiritual stuff, whether you’re going to do a camera or whatever. But we often try to round peg, square hole, everything.
Jim Harold (20:42):
Yeah. Well, go ahead.
Greg Lawson (20:44):
No, that’s it.
Jim Harold (20:47):
So here’s the other side of it though. I often think about this. People talk about 9/11 and people who normally would’ve been at the top floors of those buildings and they had a dental appointment or their kid was late for school and they were saved. And I think that’s great, and I totally believe that’s a thing. I think many times we’re spared or we’re rerouted, just as I said. Here comes the flip side of the question though. What about those people that weren’t spared? What about the people that didn’t get rerouted? What do we say about that? Was it just their time? I mean, what are your thoughts?
Greg Lawson (21:25):
Well, and I am going to go down fighting no matter what. I’m not going to give this thing up, just because I’m petulant and irritable. I’m not going to do that. The people, Neil deGrasse Tyson talks a lot about just chance and belief and the cosmos and everything, right? And he’s got some really good perspectives on evidence and his observation of all good or all evil and the things that he sees in the world are pretty bad. And if there’s an all good thing, it probably should stop these things. And the thing about it is, I don’t think we’re ever going to get any of those answers to those questions. I don’t think we’re meant to know. And I think it’s one of those things where it’s like, if we can say we don’t know, that’s pretty powerful. When you start just fabricating things and just making belief systems up and doing all that, that’s a coping mechanism. That’s something that we naturally do. Our brains naturally are looking for danger and looking for food and looking for mates. And that’s natural for us to do that. But I really think that, I don’t know what to say to your question on how is that rationalized? I had an experience when I was in the army and you watch decisions being made, and it was so easy. It could have been the exact opposite. I’m going to go, or you’re going to go. And somebody’s spared and somebody’s not.
(23:24):
And it just kind of makes you wonder. It’s like, wow, if I would’ve made that opposite decision, would that have delayed me another seven seconds where that outcome would’ve been different? I think people run that in their mind for the rest of their lives, but there’s no way to change that. And yet, you have to go with what your experience and training is and what your knowledge and your education to try to make the best decisions you can. But then there’s these other things that influence where we are, what we do, who we talk to. And I think if there’s a spirit realm like that, maybe that is something that is trying to send us those messages.
Jim Harold (24:21):
Well, we are talking about messages from Mothman. Our guest today is Greg Lawson. We’ll be back on the Paranormal Podcast right after this. (24:30) We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is Greg Lawson. He is the author of Messages from Mothman. Now we’ll tell you a little bit more about Greg, since you’ve gotten to know him a little bit. He’s traveled to over 40 countries visiting some of Earth’s strangest sites in conducting his own paranormal investigations. As we mentioned, he’s a 30 plus year law enforcement officer, professional investigator, police academy instructor, college educator, and former expert witness for investigative procedures. There’s so much I can barely get it in. Greg is also a 10 year military veteran with the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. He holds a master’s degree in education, and he’s written multiple books including this latest one, Messages from Mothman. And I should say, Greg, you also have an album coming out. Can you tell people, I know it’s not out yet, I love that background you have there. You have an album coming out pretty soon. Where can people follow you to find out more about that as that progresses?
Greg Lawson (25:29):
Yeah, so on my website, the Paranormaldetective.com, you can find it or you can see my stuff there. The album, I’m not sure when it’s going to be done. We’re probably going to push it through CD Baby or something like that and take it to a lot of the different paracons. But I’m working with a guy named Blind Dog. Blind Dog Cook, Robert Cook. He’s a really great musician, great singer songwriter, and we decided, you know what? It’s time to do an entire paranormal album. So that’s what we decided to do is work with a bunch of different people in the paranormal field and then do some songs about it and see how that’s received.
Jim Harold (26:09):
That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. So back to Mothman. Now, did you get to talk to a lot of experiencers? I mean, for example, if I think about the West Virginia case that’s going on 60 years now, a lot of those people have probably passed off the scene. Did you get to talk to any experiencers of that event?
Greg Lawson (26:31):
No. What I try to do is I try to go in and if there’s any kind of transcripts or statements that they’ve made, I try to go in there and I use, it’s an FBI technique, forensic statement analysis. And you go in and there’s commonalities to the way people talk. I’ll give you an example. A guy reports his wife missing and he says, yeah, my wife’s missing. I got up this morning. We had a great breakfast. We went for a drive, we went to church, had a great sermon. It was really nice. We left. And then I couldn’t find Becky anywhere. I walked out and was like, where is she? Becky’s gone and blah, blah, blah. Well, there was a fundamental change in what I just said. He referred to his wife, his wife, his wife, and then Becky. So I can confirm that somewhere,
(27:23):
but by the time he left the church and wherever else he was going, is when he killed Becky because he would never kill his wife. Now, Becky on the other hand, is a jackass and she’s really hard to get along with, but the idea of his wife, he can’t imagine doing that. And it’s these little subliminal things that people say that they don’t really realize what kind of triggers those are. So I’ll go into these old archives and those sorts of things and look at these transcripts or statements or interviews, and I will try to pull that. The problem with doing interviews and newspapers, is newspaper reporters always change. They don’t ever stick to a transcript. Somebody says one thing. It’s rare that they will quote them, they will pick out a little blurb or whatever quote, but when they’re telling the person’s story, they tell it in the reporter’s language, not in the experience’s language.
(28:23):
So that’s very difficult to do. I did talk to quite a few people, contemporary people, just that I know in the paranormal field of little things that happened to them that are those little flags, those little messages that we have to, it’s up to us to recognize ’em first and then two, to actually interpret them and to see what it’s all about. I had an experience over, this was Ireland at Leap Castle. I can’t remember what year that was, but we were there and we went in with those I refer to as VABEs. They’re the values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations that we all take with us when we go into an investigation. And we try to force our investigative procedures and methods into that. And so we go to Leap Castle, if those of you don’t know what Leap Castle is, it’s spelled LEAP- leap.
(29:26):
But fantastic backstory, very good documentation of what happened at this castle, who owned it and that sort of thing. And so there was a young man that was killed by his older brother. His older brother had taken over the clan, and the young man was the priest, and he started the sermon before his brother got to the service and his brother stormed in and killed him. On the altar is on the top of Leap Castle, what is now known as the Bloody Chapel. And so that’s what I was really interested in. So I go up there and I set up a bunch of equipment and people that I’m with, they’re kind of milling about and going to different parts of the castle and that sort of thing. And we’re there for a long time, nothing really happened, wrapped everything up, went down and talked to the owners, Ann and Ryan, and then we all go outside.
(30:25):
We take a picture with the owners, and then we all leave. And as we’re walking across the yard there, we turned around and I was with a couple of other people, and this one friend of mine, Tammy, she took a picture and then we left. About two weeks later, she goes, oh my God, look at this. And she sees it. She hadn’t looked at her pictures since we had gotten back from Ireland. And she looked at it and there was a priest standing in the upstairs window. It’s the little things, man. And it’s like, I am a rational guy. I get called in on depositions. I get called in on court cases or used to, and I’m now a director of training. And I look at those things and those are the things that keep me coming back to this stuff just because, okay, so let’s say it’s completely random. That was pareidolia, visual pareidolia. Somehow the clouds and some trees across the street or whatever, just so happened to look like a priest with his two fingers up. Like he was doing a blessing.
(31:40):
Why wasn’t it a mechanic? Why wasn’t it a cook? Why wasn’t it a cop, a fireman? Why wasn’t it a normal looking person? I was there looking for a priest. And there are however, thousands of occupations, hundreds of thousands of different types of people, the way they dress. Why when I was looking for a priest, did my pareidolia – bink! – pop a priest up there, and I used this picture, I’ve used it over and over and over again because that’s one of the very few signs I’ve had in my life that just popped up in my face and went, there’s rules to all this, but this is all we can give you. Boom. And it’s gone. And it’s like, wow, what just happened? So when you look at that, it is truly miraculous that I can show you or anybody else, I don’t have to tell you, look for the priest in the photo. He’s right there. And it’s just amazing.
Jim Harold (32:42):
So in a sense, you can have a message from Mothman, so to speak, without ever seeing Mothman. Part of it is the concept that they are these messages that come from wherever they come from that are meaningful. Do you think when people delve into this stuff, and I found this for me, once you delve into it, you become, I don’t consider myself psychic in the least. I’m psychic as a board. But do you think that when you look into this you become receptive to it and more things tend to happen? Maybe just because you know to look out for it?
Greg Lawson (33:20):
No doubt. There’s no doubt in that anything you do, you’re going to probably get better at, unless there’s some sort of physical limitation or mental limitation that you have, you’re going to get better at whatever you practice at. And that’s the rub, right? Is it a psychological thing? And it’s just you’re stimulating parts of your brain that most people normally don’t. Most people would, you agree, suppress any spiritual experience, they push it away. Something scary. Ooh, I don’t want to talk about that a dream, what that was all about. It was just silly, that sort of thing. Because most of us were raised in a sort of a Christian environment in the United States, and that’s what that’s suppression. And so if you just kind of sit and watch and pay attention and listen, I think you will start getting a very different perspective of what’s going on around you.
(34:29):
There’s so much stuff going on around us that our eyes are only picking up the visual spectrum out of this huge spectrum of stuff that is flying around right now that we can’t see because we weren’t designed to see it. Because in reality it kind of doesn’t matter or we evolve that way, whatever the situation is. And I think when you broaden your mind a little bit and just accept a little bit of what happened, and when you see it, you acknowledge it, kind of see if you can make sense out of it and take that little thing like it is something valuable, and tuck it in your pocket as it might resurface later.
Jim Harold (35:16):
I do believe when anybody does a project like this, and we’ll bring it up again, messages from Mothman, I’ve got to believe that it really, you learn things. You’re very knowledgeable about all this, surely. But I believe when somebody does something like this, they learn something that surprised them. What surprised you about Mothman and doing this book?
Greg Lawson (35:40):
What surprised me about it was how that this is not a wow Mothman. That’s a phenomena. No, it’s everywhere, man. When you start looking at it, you look at, you brought up Chernobyl, you look at people were having dreams about Mothman. So you start looking at that. I was planning on getting a degree in psychology until I decided, I don’t want to hear your problems.
I was like, maybe I need to study something else.
Jim Harold (36:14):
That sounds like a good decision.
Greg Lawson (36:18):
Yeah. The sociopath sitting there listening to you, yeah, I’m tired of hearing you. So I looked a lot at dream interpretation and to me that’s really, really fantastic. So when you look at Mothman, you got it all. You got cryptid, you got UFO, you have alien, you have metaphysical dream stuff, you have… it’s everything, man. Everything pops up at one time or another. And so out of that, like I said, I just kind of followed the rabbit trails on what other things were similar. What kind of dreams were soldiers having in World War I? How were they relatable?
(37:06):
How did assassinations happen when people knew they were going to happen? They had the dream and they woke up that morning and they’re like, oh my God. And then they don’t tell anybody. What would our world be like if we actually decided that we were going to act on these things? Now, it could be really, if you were very unstable, that would be a really bad thing to do to act on your dreams when you wake up. But if we assigned meaning to them and followed that, how would that affect our relationships? Would we be truly the guy on the corner screaming that Satan’s coming, end of the world’s coming, what’s going to happen? I don’t want to go that far with it, but at least acknowledge it and not fight it so much. I think we really fight. I think Americans really fight metaphysical experience. I think they really try not to have that.
Jim Harold (38:07):
So do you think there’s a lot of times when Mothman shows up and we just end up calling it something else?
Greg Lawson (38:14):
Yeah, and that’s the other thing, is this thing that happens, just our interpretation of a similar thing? You look at the movie It, it’s portrayed as a clown, right? Well, there’s that idea that these things, these creatures, spirits or whatever they are, will manifest themselves in a way that is most terrifying to you. And I talked to Rosemary Ellen Gueily for a long time
Jim Harold (38:44):
The greatest.
Greg Lawson (38:46):
About the djinn.
Jim Harold (38:49):
I was going to bring that up.
Greg Lawson (38:51):
When you sit there and listen to her and it’s like, okay, well you solved everything because the djinn, I dunno whether they hate us, they don’t particularly like us, and they get enjoyment out of confounding us and tripping us up and tricking us and doing that sort of thing. They get enjoyment out of that. And so maybe it’s that it’s not just a big Mothman. Maybe it is something else in the projection that we see in the visual spectrum that we can do. It looks like Mothman, I return to this a lot because I see it in law enforcement. I see it in eyewitness testimony and that sort of thing. Our eyes are not the windows to the soul. They’re not lenses like a camera to where you, you’re projecting light onto film. That is not how our eyes work. Our eyes are organs that pick up on this electromagnetic spectrum, and then they turn them into chemical and electrical responses sent back on some nerves to the back of our brain. And our brain then reassembles what we believe we see. So there are plenty of visual tests that you can do on people that your brain will fill in the gaps.
Jim Harold (40:26):
The blanks. Well, it’s like that one video, right? Isn’t it, with the gorillas and people in gorilla suits and the ones with the basketball, and you don’t even see it because you’re so focused on other things. I mean, and as a law enforcement officer, obviously isn’t eyewitness testimony one of the weakest types of testimony because people might really believe they see what they say they see, but they’re just not reliable.
Greg Lawson (40:54):
Yeah, it’s really good testimony, unless. When it’s unless, it’s very flawed. I mean, I’ve stood there and looked up and witnessed a robbery happen in about four or five seconds and the guy run off. And because I had another individual under arrest at the time, I look up, I see this, go back to this guy on the ground, I realize, okay, I know who this guy is. I can arrest him right now or I can let him go and I’ll get a warrant for him later. So I unhandcuff him. I get on my radio, I tell him, I’m going to get a warrant for you later, have a nice evening. And I take off running. I can’t catch up to the guy that just did the robbery over there. I come back and I talk to four people that saw exactly the opposite of what I saw.
(41:47):
But I work in that environment. That’s the environment I’m comfortable in. And so my time goes much slower than a lot of other people’s time. When you get very stressed out and you’re in an unfamiliar environment, I tell people all the time, it’s like typically a healthy American will probably be in four or five family disturbances in their life. And the family disturbances will probably only result in screaming and something being broken. As a cop, we’re in two or three family disturbances a week or up in New York, I don’t know how, or Baltimore or something. Maybe a day. Those things become very normal and we process the time much differently and we’re all different. But it just kind depends on how you get to know your environment and how well you can navigate it. And so it has a lot to do with how your brain is putting things back together. And when it’s under stress and those visual stimulus is coming to those organs and those organs are turning that into chemical and electrical responses, and it’s going to the back of your brain and it’s putting it back together, there is a time lapse there, and your brain is under a lot of stress. And if you go midbrain on it, then you’re going to lose a lot of ability to recreate what you saw and your brain will fill stuff in. So yeah, it’s a very complex, very frustrating thing.
Jim Harold (43:20):
We’ve only kind of scratched the surface here, but I’m wondering, we talked about the djinn as Mothman. On the other hand, if Mothman appears and then something bad happens, maybe it was a warning of some type. So at the end of the day, do you come down as Mothman is a good guy, as a bad guy, or to use a law phrase, the jury is still out. What do you think?
Greg Lawson (43:44):
Yeah, so I’m going to say good guy. I’m going to say he seems to be more of an observer of what we’re doing as opposed to being involved. Now, the young couple that was chased by Mothman out there in the TNT area, that’s a little bit of a different involvement. Obviously he could fly faster than the car, so if he wanted to go down and grab him, he could have done that. That didn’t happen. Just kind of cruised along and made everybody really nervous. And then you look at the multiple cases of Indrid Cold, he pops in several times, but only on one particular individual. And that individual was later labeled as he was having cognitive issues. So the question was Indrid Cold a hallucination? Was he something that was fabricated or was he something else that actually caused the perturbances of people that were trying to relate what he was talking about or what he was doing? Because all of it’s very bizarre. None of it was like, Hey, give me your driver’s license. It was nothing like that. It was all this really obscure, well, you can speak English. Why don’t you just tell me what you want? And once again, with my priest in the window, there’s obviously these sets of rules that these things go by. And I don’t know whether those sets of rules are in the cosmos or as John Tienney would say, maybe those sets of rules are in here and we’re experiencing all of this in here, and none of this, my glasses, none of this is real. I don’t know.
Jim Harold (45:47):
Brain in a vat, right? The brain in a vat. Well, we’ve had a great time talking with Greg Lawson tonight. The book is Messages from Mothman, Interpretations of Premonitions and Other Paranormal Experiences. Greg, where can people find the book and more information about everything you do?
Greg Lawson (46:08):
So you can go to my website, the Paranormaldetective.com, or you can go to Amazon and look at Greg Lawson Messages from Mothman, and it’ll pull up and it’ll pull up my author page with my other books, which would be Roswell: the After Action Report. I’m very proud of that one. The Diaries of a Paranormalist detecting Paranormal, and possibly you might even be able to find Zommfudo, the Way of the Undead man.
Jim Harold (46:37):
There you go. I like that one. That’s cool.
Greg Lawson (46:40):
Why not just learn how to fight like a zombie and be pretty successful?
Jim Harold (46:45):
There you go. There you go. Our guest tonight has been Greg Lawson and Greg, thanks for the time and look forward to seeing you in Michigan and hearing that album.
Greg Lawson (46:54):
It’s my pleasure, my friend. Thank you.
Jim Harold (46:56):
And thank you for tuning into the program. I appreciate it. And if you like what you heard tonight and saw tonight, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and share the show with a friend. We’ll talk to you next time. Stay safe, share the show, and stay spooky. Bye-Bye.
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