The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is touted as one of America’s most haunted locations. We talk with Vince Kelien and AJ Ramper about their experiences as tour guides at the haunted location and the spooky history of Waverly Hills.
Find out more information or to book a tour at Waverly go to therealwaverlyhills.com
Also, be sure to follow their social media outlets.
In part two, we are joined by filmmaker Caroline Cory about her popular UFO documentary, A Tear In The Sky, which features William Shatner and Michio Kaku.
Go to atearinthesky.com or you can watch on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes and many other platforms.
Thanks Vince, AJ & Caroline!
-EVERLYWELL- Everlywell at-home lab tests give you physician-reviewed results and personalized insights so you can
take action on your health and wellness—all at an affordable and transparent cost.
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TRANSCRIPT
JIM HAROLD: The very haunted Waverly Hills Sanitorium and UFOs, a new kind of investigation – a great combo on this week’s 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. Since 2005, we’ve been talking about spooky stuff. UFOs, ghosts, cryptids, the whole range of paranormal activity. We’re not locked into one subject; we try to do it all.
Today we’re going to do a little bit of that. We’re going to start off talking about Waverly Hills Sanatorium, that very haunted place, and a couple of their tour guides and investigators and talk to them about the place, Vince and AJ from over there. Then in Part 2, we’re going to talk about a new documentary on UFOs with the filmmaker Caroline Cory.
If you enjoy our flavor of Paranormal Podcast, I hope that you will rate, review, and follow on the app of your choice. Please do that today. Also, just maybe hit “Share” and share this show with a friend who you think might be interested. Text them a link. It really helps a lot. We appreciate it. And now, let’s get to the spooky and Waverly Hills.
We’re going to talk about today one of the most haunted places on Earth. I’m talking about the Waverly Hills Sanitorium. As we head into the spooky season, it is the perfect place to take a tour. We’re going to talk with two gentlemen who know it intimately: Vince Kelien and AJ Ramper. Vince is the social media manager for Waverly Hills; he also guides tours when he has the opportunity, and AJ Ramper – AJ is a tour assistant, and he helps lead historical paranormal and overnight tours. We’re glad to have Vince and AJ with us.
Gentlemen, thank you for talking to us about the Waverly Hills Sanitorium today.
AJ RAMPER: Absolutely
VINCE KELIEN: No problem.
JIM HAROLD: I want to find out a little bit about Vince and AJ before we plunge into the mystery that is Waverly Hills. We’ll start with Vince. Before we get to Waverly Hills, how did you get into even the subject of the paranormal?
VINCE KELIEN: I was never actually into it. I came up to Waverly with no inclination of religion or paranormal, having no idea, no belief in any of it to begin with. I saw an ad for a haunted house audition for Waverly Hills and had used that to essentially get up here, as I knew that the building was gorgeous in its own right, just from seeing it from the outside. And with my house being a 24/7 Halloween décor for my own home, I wanted to include Waverly just to add to my bucket list, I guess. It just took off from there.
JIM HAROLD: So you were more of a fan of the paranormal more from the motif and the genre – for example, horror pictures, that kind of thing. You didn’t really put much stock in it. You just thought it was cool.
VINCE KELIEN: Yeah, exactly.
JIM HAROLD: We’ll get to it in a moment, but I think something may have changed that. But first we’ll talk to AJ a little bit about his background. AJ, how did the paranormal become a big part of your life?
AJ RAMPER: The paranormal has been a big part of my life since I was about nine years old, spending a summer with my uncle on a beach house in Massachusetts. There was a lot of activity that would go on there. Me and him both saw the same apparition just having a conversation one day. Growing up, it’s been a fascination of mine. Done more research into it, and then I worked for a hotel that was extremely active. We were in the middle of a hurricane and there was no power, no generators were working – except for one clock radio, which was pretty cool to me.
So when I saw that Waverly Hills was accepting volunteers, I graciously donated my time, for lack of better phrasing, up here, because I knew about its paranormal history and the history of the building itself – it being a beautiful building. Just couldn’t be happier to be up here.
JIM HAROLD: Very cool indeed. I’ve got to have Vince tell us: what made you go from a skeptic to a believer?
VINCE KELIEN: I came in on my first day of working at Waverly, doing some work for the haunted house on the first floor. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon; I was done, I was tired, I was sweaty, and I was packing up everything to go home. I headed down the hallway with all my tools and went to the glass staircase, unlocked it, locked everything back, and went out to the back side of the parking lot.
At the time, we didn’t have 24-hour security like we do now. It was volunteers who were watching cameras and stuff like that. So at the time, I was the only one on the property, as everyone had gone out to eat. I walked out to the back side of the parking lot and I heard what sounded like a dodgeball hitting concrete. It’s a pretty obvious noise. We’ve all been to high school, we’ve been in Phys Ed. We know what we’re talking about.
I looked up at the back side of the building and I saw a red dodgeball bounce out of the fourth floor solarium and down into the gulley. So I left all of my tools in the parking lot and pulled a Fast and Furious, Tokyo drifted out of the parking lot, headed down the main gate. Once I got down to the bottom, I got the gate open and I heard laughing. I turned around and that same red dodgeball that had gone down into the gulley behind the residence houses down there was coming down the road this time.
I left the gate open; I called the owner at the time and told them that I had left the gate open and my tools were in the parking lot, and if they would grab those and put them up for me, I would be back in the morning to explain why all the ridiculousness had happened. It’s essentially been that way ever since.
JIM HAROLD: I guess this is as good a time as any to go over Waverly Hills. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening have seen it on the TV shows and are familiar with it, but let’s just pretend that somebody hasn’t. Explain what Waverly Hills was, what it is, where it’s at, and its history. Both of you can chime in on this.
VINCE KELIEN: In 1908, a clinic was in the middle of construction. They opened in 1910, housing 40 to 50 patients. Realizing that wasn’t going to be enough, they constructed another building, housing about 150.
JIM HAROLD: Was this for tuberculosis specifically?
VINCE KELIEN: For tuberculosis. The white plague was sweeping the nation, and Jefferson County being one of the biggest hits for tuberculosis in the country. It took a lot of years and a lot of funding to realize that all of Jefferson County was not going to be able to be held in a 150-bed hospital. A little under $1.7 million came into play from the state as they constructed what I like to call a beautiful monstrosity of 187,000 square feet. Broke ground in 1924, opened in 1926. The first thing to do in October was to have a two-day Halloween party.
JIM HAROLD: When we think about these huge hospitals, a lot of times we think about things like insane asylums or things where maybe people weren’t treated the best. What do we know about the lives of the patients at the Waverly Hills Sanitorium, and also how they were treated?
AJ RAMPER: What I can say off of just working up here and doing research on this place, they were treated very well. There was a morale aspect to it. Nobody wanted to be sad, upset. Nobody wanted to know that this could quite possibly be the last place that you lived.
JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting because you’ve got to think about, even though the patients were well treated – I looked at some of the materials; they had gardens; it seems like a very picturesque place – still they had this knowledge that they had at that time this uncurable disease, and that they were kept away from their family and their friends and their regular activities. So even though they were well treated, I have to believe there was a lot of sadness at the institution.
AJ RAMPER: Oh, absolutely. Just like anyone, when you can’t see your family for a long time, that wears on you for a while. But then at an extended stay, you think maybe you made some friends while you were here. Maybe you made the best of a bad situation while you were inside of it.
JIM HAROLD: I was pretty impressed they had their own post office, their own water treatment facilities, gardens. They raised their own meat for slaughter. I was really impressed. This really was a little city, almost, in a way.
AJ RAMPER: Absolutely. It had its own zip code up here. A whole self-sustaining community. You came up here, they were your friends and family at that point.
JIM HAROLD: The good news was tuberculosis was cured in the early ’60s, so they closed it as a tuberculosis facility. What did they do after that?
VINCE KELIEN: In 1962, a doctor came up with the name Woodhaven Geriatric Services. Came up with contracts for the first, second, and third floors. Was told to stay off the fourth and fifth floor, as the state was going to use those two floors for medical records. From past patients, past staff of Woodhaven Geriatric Services, it wasn’t a very fun place to be, as morale was not as desirable as it was when it was Waverly. Finding patients locked and chained in rooms, being neglected, not being cared for. Just a completely bad turn from what Waverly was.
AJ RAMPER: Instead of being a person, they became a paycheck.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah. That sounds more like what we hear from the other places, large institutions like this that seem to be highly active and highly haunted. Do you feel that the activity that you all see at Waverly is mainly coming from the tuberculosis era? Or do you think maybe it’s coming from this later era when these people were in great, great distress and mistreated?
VINCE KELIEN: We get all kinds of different – what we like to call energies and residents, as we try to be respectful to those who still linger in the hallways. We have some people who are not exactly happy, or maybe they weren’t happy in life, and then we get others who are playful. We have an entity that our overnighters like to call Timmy who likes to play with balls and make them roll down the hallway with our overnight guests and things of that nature.
So we have a slew of different energies running through this building to the point where sometimes it can be overwhelming.
JIM HAROLD: We love stories on our shows. I also have a show called Jim Harold’s Campfire, and all that is is people calling in with their personal stories of the supernatural. Not everybody works at a place like Waverly, though, so I’d love to get one story from each of you of one of the wildest things that has happened while maybe you’re doing a tour. We’ll start with Vince.
VINCE KELIEN: I gave you one big one just a second ago. Going up to the fifth floor – I want to say it was probably about six years ago, maybe seven. Walking up to the fifth floor, as you go up the staircase, a lot of the times it’s a tad bit exhausting if you’re going from the first floor all the way up to the fifth floor. I was taking up tools, and the worst thing about working here is when you are taking a bag of tools from the first floor all the way up to the fifth and getting up to the top and realizing you forgot something. [laughs]
Getting up to the top of the fifth floor, I stepped out onto the patio. I don’t smoke anymore; I did back then, so I had stepped out onto the patio before I was going to track all the way back down to the first to grab the drill I’d forgotten. As I was standing there – and take into consideration this is around two o’clock in the afternoon, so it’s bright out, birds are chirping, the middle of spring – I put my cigarette out and turned around, and I looked into the corridor and I saw a woman standing there.
Now, this is cliché, as people hear about a “woman in white” that goes around throughout the country. This is a really odd situation for anyone who actually watches shows and stuff. They hear about this entity. A lot of the guests here just assume that our what we call “woman in white” is a nurse because that’s what she looks like.
It started to walk from the corridor towards me. As I turned around, thinking that maybe it had been Charlene, I called out to Charlene and said, “Hey Charlene, how’s it going? You doing okay?” As she got to the middle of the children’s ward, she dissipated. She completely disappeared.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. How many of these people who are known – you talked about Timmy before. How many different “characters” do you have? Like identified spirits or “ghosts” that you guys see repeatedly. Are we talking about 5, 10, 15, 50? How many would you say?
VINCE KELIEN: I would say that, as there’s no real way to count the entities here as so many people passed away here, we have a few that are known for their daily and normal occurrences if that makes sense. One is called the Creeper. The Creeper is an entity that likes to crawl on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor.
Just as a normality – because you never know who you’re talking to when you’re taking to a recorder or you’re talking to a spirit box or anything else – in 1981, a man in a wheelchair rolled off the second floor loading dock and killed himself by accident. It was a freak accident. It wasn’t on purpose. Where other haunted locations have a creeper, they tend to think that that entity is evil, inhuman, or demonic; I like to think that our creeper simply is the man in the wheelchair. If you don’t have a wheelchair and you’re bound to one, what would you do?
Another one that had an almost daily occurrence is what was known as the Blob in earlier years or Big Black in today’s era. It’s essentially a giant entity that likes to completely black out the hallway, making it to the point where you can’t see the hand in front of your face. You can’t see the ambient light coming from the solarium, from the moon.
There’s a slew of others. There’s tales of doppelgangers, there’s tales of little Timmy. In early years – it’s not anything that I’ve ever encountered personally myself – a little girl named Mary Lee is seen throughout the building. Now, I’ve seen small apparitions before and just chalked it up to obviously just a child, but Mary Lee is a small girl apparition that makes herself known when things are about ready to get very interesting, I guess.
JIM HAROLD: Interesting to know you’ve got that cast of haunted characters. AJ, what’s one of your favorite stories that you’ve experienced while at Waverly?
AJ RAMPER: Where do I begin with Waverly?
JIM HAROLD: Give us one of your favorites. We’ll start with that.
AJ RAMPER: One of my favorites by far is actually one of my very first overnights working here. My counterpart Vince here can actually back me up on this one. We were all in the lobby, doing an Estes Method. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Estes Method, but it’s a sensory deprivation method where you block out your sight and you go in noise-cancelling headphones and essentially become the spirit box while everyone around you asks questions.
We were all doing that, and a couple of guests came down, ready to leave. Being one of the tour assistants, we all drew straws and I drew the shortest and was taking these guests out. Once I informed security they were on their way down, I shut the door, locked it behind me, and started walking back down the hallway on the first floor from the body chute. I get about 5, 10 steps down the hallway and this loud, blood-curdling scream comes out of one of the rooms.
On goes my flashlight and I’m looking to see if anybody’s hurt, because it sounded painful. Nobody’s in any of the rooms in the hallway that I’m in. One of the doors happens to be locked, so I know there’s nobody behind that one. As I’m coming out of the double doors and standing in front of the morgue, out runs Vince.
“You all right, man?” “Yeah, I’m good.” “What about down that hallway?” “Nobody’s down that hallway anymore.” He asked what I mean, and I was like, “Well, I’m standing in front of you and I just came from that hallway.”
Me and Vince, we check other floors. I get off at two, and I come in to a couple of guests and I’m like, “Hey, are you all okay? How’s everything doing?” “Yeah, we’re fine. What’s going on?” They can see the panicked look on my face. I was like, “Oh, we just heard a scream. Just making sure everybody was cool.” They were like, “What scream? We didn’t hear a scream.”
JIM HAROLD: Interesting.
AJ RAMPER: That was by far the coolest, best experience I’ve had here out of the many experiences I have had here at Waverly.
JIM HAROLD: We’ll be back with Vince and AJ right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.
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JIM HAROLD: In terms of the kind of hauntings, how much of the hauntings at Waverly – and you both can give your own opinion on this; it may be the same, it may be different – but how many of the hauntings do you think are replays, residual hauntings versus how many of them do you think are sentient and they interact and they know what’s going on? What are your thoughts on that?
AJ RAMPER: My thoughts, I’d say it’s probably a good 75 – I’m trying to think of the other number to make 100.
JIM HAROLD: 25.
AJ RAMPER: Yeah, 75/25. Sorry, it’s been a very long day for me already. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: No problem.
AJ RAMPER: So 75/25. 25 residual, 75 active sentient, there’s interaction there. There’s a good number of times where we’ll ask questions and get responses. We’ll ask to play with the ball, the ball will start rolling. And then there’s plenty of times where a door will just kind of shut.
JIM HAROLD: Vince?
VINCE KELIEN: I’m here a lot during the day and during the nighttime as well. I’m here for just about everything that you can come up with, whether we have a storm and we have to evacuate people into the tunnel going into the laundry room or into the body chute, whatever the case – being in the building during storms, having a lightning strike while being on the second floor and the entire building lighting up, to figure out that there were about 30 more guests than what we actually had. All the way up to walking down the hallway and seeing what we like to call shadow people peeking out of doorways, walking across the hallways, walking down the hallway toward yourself.
A lot of the times, if I can go off of a TV show, there’s an episode on Supernatural – I can’t remember the name of the episode, but it shows that Sam is waking up every single day, kind of like Groundhog Day, I guess, where he is trying to stop his brother from being shot to death. I feel a lot of the times, I see a normality with some of our what we call residents, our shadow people, where I’ll see them at the same spot the day before. And then the next day see them do the exact same activity.
So I think a lot of it may be residual. I make jokes all the time with some of our YouTubers and our TikTokers and everything else coming through the building. They’ll leave like a residual with our residents. Sometimes we get some ridiculous things over recording that came from one of our TikTokers or one of our YouTubers months prior. Our residents like to joke and play around and make fun of people that were here before, and a lot of the times they’ll tell us whatever name we ask for. “Who just walked in the room?” “AJ just walked in the room.” Or whatever the case.
So a lot of it is residual, and then I think a lot of it is like replaying out their day, maybe back in their era, back in their time period.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah. I would think that if I were going to visit Waverly or any haunted place, I would personally want to treat – if you believe in ghosts, you’d believe the idea that they may be people who lived before, and I’d want to treat them with respect. I wouldn’t want to make fun of them, I wouldn’t want to be nasty to them because ghosts are people too. I wouldn’t go in somebody else’s house and start making fun of them. At some places that wouldn’t work out so well for you. So I wouldn’t do that if I were to visit Waverly or any haunted location. I would always try to treat the entities with respect.
VINCE KELIEN: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: In terms of the tours that Waverly does, can you explain the different kinds of tours and what people can expect to experience if they decide to partake?
VINCE KELIEN: We have two-hour paranormal tours that are housed on Fridays and Saturdays. We have a public overnight which consists of 60 people. They typically go on a walkthrough on the public overnights, and the private overnights for that matter. As long as they want to. If they don’t, we essentially let them go as they go on to a free-roam aspect, so they have complete free roam of the building.
Then our two-and-a-half-hour historical tours on Sundays consist of a guided walk through the building during the daytime, which a lot of people don’t get to do. It’s kind of a “Hey, you get to see the front side of the building,” which you don’t get to do on any other tour that we provide. So it’s kind of a treat, I guess, if you come on a Sunday historical.
Our public overnights run from 12:00 to 6:00 in the morning, so it’s quite a long time. This is for essentially people who don’t want to go on private overnights by themselves or maybe paranormal investigators that are just getting into it or are amateur at the point in time. And then our private overnights are from 8:00 till 4:00 in the morning, and you have eight hours, and you have complete free roam of the building.
A lot of the times we’ll have our reoccurring guests who come once a year. A lot of the times we have a revolving door of guests who are loyal to the building and come every year and things like that, and they don’t want the walkthrough. They come in with all kinds of equipment and they’re ripping and raring and ready to go. For a lot of the times, they want whoever is the guide for that night to go in and investigate with them, as they have never done it or maybe just want some kind of guidance.
During the daytime on Tuesday – they rotate every other week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. One week will be Tuesday, the next week will be Thursday. We’ll give a two-hour guided walk through the building during the daytime as well, but it’s still just like the paranormal tour as we keep that route. So that’s what we do here.
JIM HAROLD: Very interesting indeed. It sounds like a great time if you’re interested in the paranormal and history. I love history; that’s a big thing for me. I love history just as much as I love paranormal. I’ve heard people say, “I love the paranormal, but I’m not so much for history,” and I think, wait a minute. [laughs] I think one ties into the other.
I guess that’s the next question: tell us about what Waverly Hills has coming up this fall because, as I understand it, you’ve got quite a bit going on.
VINCE KELIEN: We have a slew of events heading our way. We do an annual fundraiser every single year where we run a commercial haunted house through the first floor. I believe this year we are doing our normal VIP tours. If you pay the VIP price, you go through on what we like to call a mini tour through the second through fifth floors. Then once you’re done, you are shot directly into the commercial haunted house on the first floor.
We have different events coming up through our media director, Ken Daniels, starting from now all the way up until December. Everyone should be on the lookout for that. You can check our social media platforms for all announcements heading up that way.
We just got done with some very notable YouTubers called Elton Castee and Corey Scherer.
JIM HAROLD: Yes, I know them. I’ve interviewed them.
VINCE KELIEN: Very successful two days. They actually just left on the RV about 30 minutes ago. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Very cool indeed. So the question is, if people want to book a tour, they want to come, whether it’s in the Halloween season or any time, how do they go about doing all that?
AJ RAMPER: You thinking about coming up for a tour, Jim?
JIM HAROLD: Well, we’ll talk about it. [laughs]
AJ RAMPER: We’d absolutely love to have you. One of the good ways is on social media, checking that, clicking the link through there and going to the website, therealwaverlyhills.com.
VINCE KELIEN: TheRealWaverlyHills.com/reservations in order to book whatever kind of tour you would like to do, whether it’s an event or whether it’s a tour.
JIM HAROLD: Very good. I think it makes a lot of sense for people to check it out because hey, it’s one thing to watch it on TV, one thing to listen to a podcast, but to be there and experience the history and the atmosphere and maybe even your own supernatural experience – I think it makes a lot of sense. Can you give us that website one more time?
VINCE KELIEN: TheRealWaverlyHills.com.
JIM HAROLD: TheRealWaverlyHills.com. Everybody check it out. Vince and AJ, thank you so much for being a part of the program today. We appreciate it, and I hope you have a great spooky season.
AJ RAMPER: You as well.
VINCE KELIEN: I’ve got one more thing left for you, Jim. One of our guides wanted me to let you know that she absolutely adores you. Her name is Val, and she looks forward to you coming out and letting us give you a tour.
JIM HAROLD: You know what? We’ll set it up. Val will know what this means – stay spooky, Val. And thanks again, Vince and AJ.
AJ RAMPER: Thank you.
VINCE KELIEN: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: It was great to talk with the guys about Waverly Hills. Certainly do check them out, and check out Waverly Hills. And now we turn our attention from hauntings to something even more otherworldly – maybe aliens, maybe ETs, and certainly UFOs. An interesting film has come out just recently, and it’s something you can watch. It is called A Tear in the Sky, and it features William Shatner and Michio Kaku and Travis Taylor and many others on a unique investigation. I think it’s really something very different.
Joining us today is the person who’s responsible – and I only mean that in the good way – Caroline Cory. She wrote, directed, and produced this. She was the mastermind behind it, and we’re so glad to have her. Caroline Cory, thank you for joining us today to talk about A Tear in the Sky.
CAROLINE CORY: Hey, Jim, thanks for having me.
JIM HAROLD: Caroline, if you could explain to people what the concept of the movie is, because I think it’s very unique and very different from the things we see. Typically we see people who go after the fact, and they try to investigate something that happened; but you really tried to do something in real time, didn’t you?
CAROLINE CORY: Exactly. That’s precisely the point. As a filmmaker, you try – I mean, I do, anyway – I try to see what’s out there and try to go to the next step, the next level. I’m very interested in the scientific approach. I’ve done that with my previous films. So when we came to the UFO subject, I thought, how can I make this from a scientific perspective?
Instead of studying other people’s footage, whatever’s out there already, I thought we need to set it up from scratch scientifically. And that’s exactly what we did. We teamed up with scientists and experts and device inventors. Even in the trailer, people can see we got a whole array of very sophisticated devices and we set it up scientifically to try to capture these things in real time, which had never been done before.
JIM HAROLD: How do you go about doing that? For example, you get this great idea, “Let’s do this.” Where do you begin? What’s the first step? Because it would seem to be a very daunting task, and something you’d have to be pretty brave to take on. So how do you do that?
CAROLINE CORY: It was a very daunting task, again, because I looked around and I realized that no one had ever done anything like this before. So I had no frame of reference. I couldn’t see or learn from other people’s experiences, so it was really a first-ever. The first thing is I started investigating who else out there has a team or has done anything scientifically in the UFO space, and also who had the devices, because I knew we had to go to a whole new level of devices.
The problem with ufology is that we always see footage taken by regular cameras, one camera, few witnesses. That’s just not good enough. So I started to research with my production team who out there was set up to do such a thing, and I stumbled on the UAPx team. At the time, it was precisely what they had put together, but they had never done it. It was just their hope to try to do something like that. So I thought, let’s give it a try.
We were so, so lucky to have David Mason on the team. David Mason, people will see in the film, is responsible – he’s the owner of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of military-grade equipment. So for us to have access to that was incredible.
So it kind of all fell into place. It was a very difficult production. It was a big production, too. We really lucked out with having already two scientists on board and also David Mason with his inventions and his technology expertise.
JIM HAROLD: The UAPx team, tell us about them. Who are they, where are they from, and a little bit about them?
CAROLINE CORY: I first stumbled on Kevin Day. Kevin Day is the radar operator who was on the USS Princeton. People may have seen the whole TikTok videos obviously leaked since 2017. Made a huge splash all over the news. Well, he was the first one who captured them on his radar. He’s been out there in the news as well. Since then, that experience literally changed his life because when he started talking about it, he was ridiculed. Basically it ended his career. It was very devastating for him.
After that, he went out and tried to put something together to try to prove or verify, validate, that what he saw and all the witnesses that followed since then are not crazy. He called Gary Voorhis, who was also on the ship and who was responsible for data collection – he’s the one who was collecting the data. Between the two of them, they founded the UAPx team. They also had similar ideas as I did, which was we need scientists, we need experts, we need technology experts on the team.
So they had put that team together, and when I spoke with Kevin Day, he told me, “Hey, this is my dream. I’ve been waiting to do this.” And I said, “I want to make a film doing that, showing that.” That’s how we ended up teaming up for that first expedition.
JIM HAROLD: When you talk about the equipment – on these shows we cover a lot of different topics; we cover ghosts and all different things. In that world, there’s REM pods and there’s spirit boxes and EMF meters and K-2 meters and all these different specific things that people have probably seen on the shows. Seems like to me, for UFOs, people might know a camera, but they don’t know – a camera is not a camera is not a camera. So what kinds of cameras and devices more specifically did you guys use that you just don’t see anywhere else?
CAROLINE CORY: Exactly. Of course, that was part of the preproduction meeting. “How do we do it? What is needed? What’s necessary? What’s missing?” The biggest thing that was missing is multiple devices – recording something on multiple devices using different spectrums. We had regular cameras, multiple cameras, plus we were filming using the red cameras. For those who know, these are 5K cameras.
So we had multiple regular CCD cameras, we had the night vision, which are infrared range, but then we had the FLIRS. For people who don’t know, there’s different types of FLIRs. The FLIRs that we had – David Mason had, actually – are industrial grade. These are very, very sophisticated. Basically, each camera is about $50,000, and we had eight of those. These measure 10 times the infrared range of the regular night vision. The night vision is up to I think 3 microns or something and these go up to 13 microns.
In terms of optical capture, we were not only covering the entire sky because we had multiple cameras – that’s also unprecedented because usually it’s one camera, this angle or that angle, trying to follow the object. But now we had the entire sky, and on different spectrums. So that was that.
Then we had radiation detectors, we had RF detectors, magnetometers, oscilloscopes. Pretty much everything you can think of across the spectrum of physics. And that was precisely the idea, and that’s what was missing, because then you start to have correlations between the different devices, and then you start to collect actual data.
For example, if something is observed on a regular CCD camera and night vision and FLIR, we get more data of what this object could be. At the same time, if there’s a radiation that happened exactly at that same time, that also gives us more information about what this object could be. You see? So that was the idea, and that’s exactly what we did. Again, this was totally a first in ufology.
JIM HAROLD: And not only the people that you got with the UAPx team and Mason and this great equipment, but you got people like Michio Kaku and William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, who now is a space traveler after the Bezos mission. What was it like working with those two? I would think different, obviously, but I think in both cases pretty neat.
CAROLINE CORY: Yeah. First of all, Michio Kaku was amazing because he’s so reputable in this field. People love his perspective. So it was amazing to have him. Plus, from a production standpoint, I have to say he is so eloquent. He knows his stuff. He delivers the lines – he blows my mind.
JIM HAROLD: Like sound bites. Yeah, I know. I’ve talked to people like that. It’s like, oh my gosh, you’re perfect.
CAROLINE CORY: Yeah. I had to do very little editing with him because he would give me more than what I was expecting. When I told him, actually over the phone before we started filming, I said, “This is what we’re doing. This is what we want to do. What do you think?” The first thing out of his mouth, he says, “It’s about time for science to take it seriously. You’re going to make history.” Coming from him, just talking over the phone, I was very encouraged and very flattered. So he was amazing.
I wanted to have his commentary as a scientist, and that’s exactly what he gave us. But then as a filmmaker, what I’m trying to do with this film is not only validate in a completely new way the ufology, the UFO subject, but I’m also trying to bring it to the mainstream so we stop being this fringe group, these crazy people who see things in the sky without any sort of measurable anything.
So then we were already in postproduction and I was thinking, if I could invite someone that people would gravitate towards, that’s relatable, that will allow the mainstream to open up to the subject and to watch the film and go, “This is a legitimate phenomenon, this is real stuff, this is good stuff” – that’s how I thought of inviting William Shatner. I told him what we were doing. I said, “Michio Kaku is in it.” We had already filmed a lot of it. I told him, “This is what we’re doing, and we would love to have your sci-fi” – and also, he’s very much into the paranormal.
JIM HAROLD: I was just going to say, he does his other show, The Unexplained, which is hugely popular right now. But the thing about him is that you sense that yes, he’s an actor, and he’s a very good actor, and he’s a good personality and good talent, as they say in the biz. He’s great talent, some of the best ever. But you feel that there’s a real interest behind that when it comes to things like space and UFOs and the paranormal. You really sense that it’s not just “I’m a great actor”; it’s “I’m a great actor and I’m really interested in this stuff.” Is that right?
CAROLINE CORY: Yeah, totally. Actually, I’m also in the show The Unexplained on the History Channel. But yeah, that show is scripted, but in my film nothing is scripted.
JIM HAROLD: That’s neat.
CAROLINE CORY: Yeah. I was like, “Just tell me what you personally feel about the subject. What do you think?” It was amazing. Also, we were speaking in the green room before we started filming and he was telling me stories and things that happened to him. He’s very much into the mysteries of life and the paranormal. Actually, a little bit more than science itself because he believes there’s something mysterious about the universe, something we still don’t understand, and he’s fascinated by that.
So when he comments, it’s really coming from himself. He’s not repeating a script. So because of that, it felt very fresh. I did not want to invite him to be a host outside the story, but more as part of the story, like, “Hey, this is what we did. What do you think? This is what we’re doing.” He was totally into it. I was very happy with that, and I’m hoping it’s going to help bridge the gap to the mainstream as well.
JIM HAROLD: Tell people how they can get this movie. We will tell them again, but let’s tell them now. We’ll tell them and then tell them what you told them. So let’s tell them for the first time: how can they see A Tear in the Sky?
CAROLINE CORY: They can go on Amazon or iTunes. But the best way is probably to go to the website, atearinthesky.com. That way they’ll see all the platforms where it’s available.
JIM HAROLD: Our guest today is Caroline Cory. She’s the filmmaker behind the movie A Tear in the Sky, and I must say, it is a very unique movie and I highly recommend that you check it out. We’re going to get to some of the things that happened during the investigation and give you a little taste of what you can expect if you watch the movie.
But first, Caroline, I wanted to go back in time. How and why did you get involved in this UFO subject to begin with?
CAROLINE CORY: Since I was a kid – I was five years old – I had very weird experiences, paranormal experiences. I realized that I could see beings, I could communicate with beings, like imaginary friend type things – except that I could see them very clearly, and they were more angelic types. Eventually, as I grew up, they became more extraterrestrial types and things like that.
So I was always open to anything that’s beyond the physical body, the physical world. That got me into asking the questions – how is it possible? How does it work? What is reality? In the beginning, I didn’t think it was anything special. I thought everybody did that, it wasn’t anything like a gift or anything like that. I didn’t really take it that seriously in that sense.
But what intrigued me is the mechanics of how things work for one person to be able to see something – for example, I could see something that was going to happen the next day and it happened. I would look at someone and I knew what was going on with them. Things like that. So that got me in the field of consciousness, the mechanics of consciousness.
But to me, it was like, what is it in the universe that allows these strange things to happen? And this is where the UFO anomalies also started to happen. I would see things – you know what UFOs may look like. It was all part of my understanding and me being open to these worlds beyond the physical.
I developed all sorts of methodologies to help other people, for example, do regressions, to help them figure out what happened to them, if they had missing time or this or that. Meditation techniques, all sorts of consciousness expansion techniques and healing techniques and things like that.
Working with hundreds of people around the world, having very significant results, understanding how consciousness communication happens and things like that, I started working with scientists and doing experiments – remote viewing and telekinesis and affecting the pH in water, changing the structure of water with the mind and things like that. But with scientists, doing controls, things like that, and having real, amazing results.
That became my angle as a filmmaker. It was, let’s not just keep talking about the problem, but let’s see if we can bring that angle to start to explain the nonphysical. That’s how it all came together, and the UFOs were just part of this whole experience, pretty much lifelong experience.
JIM HAROLD: I used to think of all of these different things – UFOs, ghosts, all these different “paranormal” phenomena – as very siloed and very different things. Over the years, the more people I talk to and the more great thinkers like you I speak with, I get the sense that there might be a connection. Do you think that UFOs and UAPs may be connected to other paranormal phenomena?
CAROLINE CORY: That’s precisely the point, Jim. It’s more, what is it in the universe, in the fabric of space–time itself, that allows an object to appear and disappear, that allows you to see a disembodied ghost, that allows things to be heard when there is no source of that sound, if you will, visible source? I believe it’s all connected, and it has to do with the mechanics of space–time itself.
That’s my theory, obviously, trying to prove that. I feel that within the fabric of space–time itself, it’s kind of like a grid patterning around the planet. We can only see a small spectrum, but within this grid patterning of space itself around us, there are specific points, like hub points, hotspots as people call it, above us, around us, below us, not just on the surface of the planet, where the magnetic field is warped or can be warped. When that happens, it’s kind of like the light also can bend. If you’re looking at an object in the sky, it looks like there’s nothing there, because we can’t really see the fabric of space–time.
But actually, in those specific spots where the magnetic field is warped itself and light is bending, you can pass through – it’s like now you’re outside time–space. You go through these hotspots and you’re in a different dimensional space. I feel that that’s the point where these experiences can happen, where something could appear, then disappear. You could hear something that is not physically here and then you don’t.
So it’s all about dimensionality, like a multi-dimensional spectrum that coexists with us right here on Earth.
JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Your investigation – obviously, if people really need to access the movie to understand what the results were and so forth and all that, but just maybe give us a little feel for how the investigation went. Were you excited about the results? What are your thoughts?
CAROLINE CORY: In the beginning, and the closer we got, the more I thought, oh my God, what if we go and do all of this and nothing happens? How many times have you heard of people who go on investigations and nothing happens? Especially this was a very expensive production. We decided to try to attempt to get triangulation, meaning get the same capture from different angles. We were simultaneously at three different locations with cameras.
Anyway, as we got closer, I was just hoping for one really, really significant, irrefutable sighting. The first couple of days, actually, we had so many problems – power failures, the software didn’t work. Because it was the first. We had never done it. No one had ever done it.
Anyway, but then I knew – I kind of felt, plus I was doing my own solicitation – the third day we had the first sighting. We couldn’t record much of that, but then it got better and better and better, and we ended up capturing incredible footage. I mean, we got some of these objects that had erratic motion. We captured those on camera. We had some amazing things that I’ve never seen before, objects that were literally falling, raining down, dropping in the water.
Of course, people have to realize, we’re working with scientists here, hardcore scientists. The first thing we look at is a camera glitch, of course. We want to debunk ourselves before putting out this information because that’s the point of the movie. So for people to look at something and say, “Oh, this is a camera glitch” – we’ve already looked at that. We’ve looked at birds and planes and all of that.
We took the footage that we’re 100% convinced are anomalies, some of which, like I said, were these crazy things dropping down in the water. In fact, if you slow down the movie, you’ll see that they drop and illuminate the water. Some of them actually go out of the water. So that’s pretty mind-blowing. We captured those on FLIR, meaning infrared range, meaning we couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but we could see them through the cameras.
And of course at the end – that’s even in the trailer – this whole wormhole thing. That’s like, what is this? It’s basically an opening and closing, a cloudlike thing that opens and closes and reveals actual reflective objects. So, hello. [laughs]
To this day, I have to say – this is the latest update, actually – since the movie, the scientists are still looking into what this could be. Other scientists have looked at it; they did a presentation at the SCU conference, Scientific Coalition of UAPs. 200 scientists in the room, more scientists remotely. No one can give a plausible explanation to this phenomenon so far.
JIM HAROLD: So essentially, it appeared a wormhole opened up on camera?
CAROLINE CORY: We’re calling it wormhole-like. Obviously, scientists don’t even know what a wormhole should look like. They know in theory that that could be possible. So we captured something that we call a wormhole because it opens and closes and stuff is popping out of it. What do you call that?
We’re open to any explanation – some atmospheric anomaly that is poorly understood or anything – and so far, nothing explains both the opening and closing and reflective objects popping out of it. It’s pretty fascinating, and we’re still investigating, trying to get data, satellite images from governmental agencies and private agencies to see what else. We want to collect even more data.
And guess what? We are finding that I think we stumbled on something that’s classified.
JIM HAROLD: Ooh. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.
CAROLINE CORY: Uh-huh. This is a cliffhanger. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There you go. Check out atearinthesky.com. Do you think whatever it was – you captured, as I understand it, this “wormhole” incident on film – it seems almost like whatever you were capturing was maybe performing for you and the cameras, in a way?
CAROLINE CORY: I would love to think that. I cannot prove that, obviously. I have to tell you, again, and for those who are listening, I was working with scientists who are, again, hardcore scientists. They were not into or interested in investigating the idea that we were actually in communication with some extraterrestrials or whatever was out there. They didn’t want to go there. And I respected that. I think it was good because the purely scientific investigation had never been done. There’s a lot of CE5 and this and that, but the way we did it had never been done. So I kind of went along with that.
However, because of my personal experiences my whole life, knowing that there is a connection with whatever’s beyond, whether it’s extraterrestrial – maybe these are other humans, who knows, from another dimension or something – whatever they could be, there is intelligence behind these things. Not all of them. Some of them are very mundane, prosaic, explainable things.
But some of them I know for a fact – in fact, do you remember in the USS Nimitz encounter, the pilot, Commander Fravor, when he was chasing this Navy Tic Tac thing, he was even saying –this is a Navy pilot, and he was saying, “The object knew what I was doing. It was kind of behaving as if it could understand and predict what I was thinking.” And he’s not the only one. There are many people who report some sort of connection. But for a Navy pilot to be saying this validates the fact that there is some sort of communication.
Anyway, long story short, I was kind of on my own in this production. In my hotel room, I was like, “Okay, you guys, do something. Show up. Give me something. This is a huge investment and very important production.” Whether they heard me and they performed and they showed up exactly at that time – I hope so. [laughs] I can’t prove it, though.
JIM HAROLD: I agree with you, though; I think it’s great to have people who are pure scientists who say, “Hey, we’re going to do this by the book. I’m not into the” – I’ll just use the phrase because people use it towards me – “the woo-woo stuff.” But then I think it’s also good to have somebody like you, who is more spiritual and has those experiences and has that belief, that there is that element.
Not that one gets in the way of the other, but you work side by side, cooperatively, in your own niches, I guess you would say. I think that’s great. So you’re not interfering with the scientists, but the scientists weren’t interfering with you dealing with this in the way you felt appropriate.
CAROLINE CORY: Exactly. Nobody can tell me otherwise. I know what I saw, I know what I experienced, and so do many, many people. Again, I’m just naming Commander Fravor because he’s one of the most credible and most vocal out there that everybody can relate to. There is something. The fact that science hasn’t caught up or doesn’t know or cannot figure out the science behind some sort of communication with invisible things, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means they don’t know how to explain it.
It can’t be that thousands, millions of people around the world are all crazy. So I think there is a valid communication pattern of something, a mechanism in place. There’s way too much evidence as well. I’m just hoping that science will be open to it someday.
JIM HAROLD: Well, Caroline Cory, it’s been so great to speak with you. Please once again tell people how they can watch this important film.
CAROLINE CORY: They can go to Amazon. If they don’t have Amazon, they can go to the website, atearinthesky.com. All the platforms are listed there, and I hope everybody will watch it and leave a review.
JIM HAROLD: Caroline Cory, thank you for joining us. I hope everybody checks out A Tear in the Sky, and atearinthesky.com.
Enjoyed speaking with Caroline about her project. Very neat. I love it when people think outside the box, and certainly Caroline has done that with this documentary.
Also, big thanks to Vince and AJ from Waverly Hills Sanitorium for their time today. We appreciate that, and we hope that you’ll check out all the projects and places we talked about today on the show. And please, support today’s sponsor, Everlywell. They’ve got a great product and they help us out a lot.
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We thank you for listening today. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and as always, stay spooky. Bye-bye.
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