One the most interesting UFOlogists in the field is our guest today, Rob Kristoffersen. Rob talks to us about some of his favorite cases and what he thinks might or might not be behind the phenomena.

You can find his Our Strange Skies podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you can listen to The Paranormal Podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

Please note we do not guarantee 100% transcript accuracy. The below reflects a best effort. Thank you for your understanding.

Paranormal Podcast Announcer 0:13
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

Jim Harold 0:17
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest today is Rob Kristofferson. And he is the chief cook and bottle washer over at Our Strange Skies, the Our Strange Skies podcast. And I’ve got to tell you that Rob is one of those people who has forgotten more about the UFO phenomenon than I will ever know. He knows, you know, where the bodies are buried, so to speak. He, he, you know, you name it. He’s encyclopedic in his knowledge. And I’ve gotten to meet him through some of the things we’ve done with astonishing legends for their holiday parties and things I said, I have to have Rob on the show. We’d love to talk about UFOs amongst the other topics that we cover, and I thought he’d be the perfect person to do it. So Rob Kristofferson, welcome to the show.

Rob Kristofferson 1:08
Thanks for having me, Jim. It’s, it’s a great honor and you have like, talked me up probably better than anybody ever could, because like, it’s either a blessing or a curse, like being able to retrieve information or being able to know where you can retrieve information, has its own downfalls in the fact that you have to go find that information before your brain can see any kind of piece at all.

Jim Harold 1:35
Well, you’re certainly the man with the knowledge when it comes to UFOs. I guess we’ll start at the beginning. How did you get so interested in something that you would dedicate so much time and effort to the subject,

Rob Kristofferson 1:49
I’d always grown up with the paranormal and UFOs and all this kind of weird stuff. And I kind of absorbed a lot of it through Unsolved Mysteries. And growing up specifically, with like the paranormal, it kind of seemed to be this semi taboo thing, and in my family, and we almost talked about it like, you know, kids on the school yard, just giggling, trading back ghost stories every now and then. But the catalyst for my interest in UFOs was in 2015, I had a really close encounter. As you could say, a while I was at work with a coworker of mine, he had grabbed me to go out on a 15 minute break. And we were just standing outside. This was like, June of 2015. So it was a nice, sunny day, we look up and we see this egg shaped object that’s pretty relatively low in the sky. And it’s kind of it was moving parallel to where we were. And when it got to direct damn near directly where we were standing, it stopped midair.And then it turned 90 degrees, and it took off in a different direction. So that was pretty much the catalyst. And after that I just started devouring books after that.

Jim Harold 3:13
Now this is something I like to ask because it seems to me that the phenomena has a trickster element to it, you know, it’s like you notice them and they notice that you notice them? Do you think that is the case? Or do you think that’s overblown?

Rob Kristofferson 3:29
No, I definitely think that’s the case. I think the more that you notice it, the more that they notice you and I think in a lot of cases, especially with those that really get into the intense investigations and stuff, I think there is a force that kind of guides them i i have definitely felt that especially with the work that I do with the podcast right now. Um, if I’m reading something and generally, I’ll be going through old kind of UFO journals and stuff, I’ll find the case that I didn’t expect to find in there, but it somehow relates to something that I had been researching or that I am researching for something in the future. So I definitely think there’s some kind of like, Hidden Hand in all this that definitely guides people, probably to a level of madness, because you don’t get any answers with this stuff. You only get more questions and you kind of have to have a love for the question to really dive in and research this stuff. And you can you can try and dive in only so far, but generally it kind of sinks its teeth and takes you along for the ride.

Jim Harold 4:41
Now, I think most of the people listening know of the cases, the seminal cases that everybody kind of knows about: Betty and Barney Hill, the Roswell case, the Rendlesham Forest case, but is there a case out there that appeals to you that may not be as well known, but you think rises to that level of importance or maybe even beyond.

Rob Kristofferson 5:04
There are a lot of kind of not as well known cases that really took a lot of boxes for me when it comes to the validity of the witnesses the validity of what they’ve seen. One is the Lonnie Zamora, the Lonnie Zamora incident is, is one of those that is kind of well known within the UFO community, but it may not be as well known outside of it. Lonnie Zamora, a Socorro, New Mexico police officer he was, it was towards the end of the shift, and he had pursued a speeder toward the end of town. And he ended up seeing this, like, hearing this roaring sound and seeing this blue flame in the sky. And his first assumption was that there was a dynamite shack in the area, and he was figuring that it was about to blow up. So he went in that area to observe what was happening. And in this Arroyo, he sees this elongated egg shaped craft, with two short figures outside of it were in what he describes kind of like white coveralls. And the moment they saw him, they kind of got — he said that one of them appear to be startled, kind of lost sight of them for a second until he got closer again, and he noticed that they were gone. He says at one point, he heard kind of like what sounded like a door slamming almost and shortly after that the craft lifts off. Listen to the air moves away, rather quick. There are corroborating eyewitnesses in this case, but a lot of what drives this case, the validity of this case is Lonnie Zamora himself, who seemed to be, you know, an upstanding, really well spoken man who was very down to earth. He was very about the facts. And this was something that startled him and the gentleman that arrived on scene after he radioed in Sergeant Chavez, he noted how he was like, white as a ghost. He was clearly in some kind of shock. So there’s that there’s physical evidence, in this case, there were landing marks, there were bushes that had burn marks on them, they’d been singed. And it’s one of the few cases that Project Blue Book, which was the government’s official UFO study project that lasted from the 50s all the way up to 1969. It’s one of the only cases involving what we call humanoids, so you know, figures associated with UFOs. That was labeled as unknown in their case files, they didn’t really mess with those kinds of cases all that often. And even when they did investigate, like, for instance, they project Bluebook investigated the Betty and Barney Hill incident. They didn’t investigate the abduction per se. They investigated the light that they had seen at first while they were driving in New Hampshire. So it’s a special case because of that, because the government basically said, well, we don’t have an explanation for this one as much as we’d want to. That’s, that’s an important one. I think another important one that doesn’t really get talked about is the Stonehenge incident is what it’s called. And it took place in New Jersey in 1975, January of 1975. This this liquor store owner named George O’Barsky, he was closing up late at night it was about 2:15 in the morning. And he owned a liquor store in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. And he was driving back and he cuts through North Hudson Park, which is kind of a semi decent sized park that you can drive through it has a bunch of different sporting fields on it and stuff. But as he was cutting through, he, this object approached on his left hand side and it pretty much followed him until it stopped, hovered over this portion of the sports — I think they played soccer on this field in particular, but they they this craft hovered. Every other 10 beings that got out of this craft, they started to take soil samples. In George O’Barsky saw it of all so they get the soil samples. And he said that they had like, these little bags that they would put them in and kind of like in order almost like they were like soldiers in a way they would pile back into their craft and take off. And what makes this case, even more interesting is that the Stone Henge is this apartment building that’s right across the street from North Hudson Park. And during that, at night, there was a night I think he was a security officer, who was watching things right from the front doors, he saw a light in the park. Not only that, after this light had departed, the force of them leaving apparently ended up breaking the window in the door. So there’s corroborating eyewitnesses. Not only that, there was UFO activity in the days following up to this event. So that’s another kind of landmark case that I absolutely love. And it’s it’s definitely one of the most legit cases that I’ve ever read. It’s, it’s fascinating.

Jim Harold 11:13
Why do we glom on to some cases and not others? Do you think?

Rob Kristofferson 11:19
I think there are certain, I think people glom on to a lot of the sensational aspects of a lot of cases. Regardless of how legitimate we may think them to be, like, a lot of people know Kenneth Arnold’s name because he was the first he was the guy that’s allegedly saw the first UFO, first UFOs in the sky. I think what makes him is so fascinating is the fact that while he was in the air flying in his plane, he was doing everything possible to get as much data as he could he, he tried he, he was measuring the objects with what he had with him on the plane, he was, you know, clocking their speed, he was doing everything to try to explain what he was seeing, because he didn’t have a good enough explanation. But I think when it comes down to it, like the Roswell instance, incident, when you get into that, it becomes more and more sensational over time. Because at the start of it, when Stanton Friedman had first started investigating when it was put on his radar, it didn’t start with alien bodies, it started with a downed craft of some kind, no alien bodies involved until the story kind of started to evolve. And that’s what people attached to is that there were dead bodies recovered, allegedly, and they were taken across the United States. And really, when it comes to the more conspiratorial aspects of you know, when you get into things like majestic 12, which is this, you know, alleged secret government team that was responsible for, for kind of putting a lid on UFOs and stuff like that, that became a big thing in the 80s and such but Roswell just became this sensational thing to hang your head on for just about everything and unless you can really show us the bodies it’s just this huge speculation ground in with you know, something like Betty and Barney Hill the fact that you know, these beings allegedly took them on board their craft, it’s it’s very sensational in its in the idea of that. But even when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, the details there. They’re very interesting. So I think sensationalism has a lot to do with it.

Jim Harold 13:48
We’re having a fascinating discussion. Our guest today is Rob Kristofferson. He is the host, and creator of Our Strange Skies podcast. And we’re so glad to have him to talk about UFOs. And we’ll be back right after this. The Paranormal Podcast is brought to you by Start Mail. And it’s a very important message, because it impacts most people that are listening to me right now. Did you know that free email services like Gmail and Yahoo aren’t really free? You pay with your privacy? In fact, Internet giants like big tech bank on exploiting your data by selling it to the highest bidder, there’s an old saw in tech products.: when something’s free, you are the product. For example, your business plan? Google has it. Your medical records? Well, the folks at Start Mail tell me that Yahoo can sell them to drug companies. Wow. It’s just so important. These days with everything going on in the world that we should be concerned about things like email surveillance and the risks that come with these free email service providers. They can sell your data. And you can be targeted with intrusive ads, you can be opened up to identity theft, phishing attacks and those sorts of things. And that’s why I’m so glad that I’ve started using Start Mail. It makes me feel safe again. Start Mail keeps my email private period, every email can be encrypted, even if the recipient doesn’t use encryption. And when you delete an email in Start Mail, it’s gone forever. And did you know when you delete these free email services, they’re not really gone. That was a shock to me. And Start Mail uses their own servers, not Amazon’s, so that means they can’t be put out of business. Like a lot of services you hear about if a particular vendor like Amazon Web Services, they don’t like you, they can put you out of business. But Start Mail is totally self reliant. Switching to Start Mail is seamless to you can easily transfer all your current email data so there’s no starting from scratch. And Start Mail is also backed by the most stringent privacy laws in the world. You get unlimited anonymous aliases. And I think this is really really cool because this feature protects your main email address from spam and phishing attacks. So when you’re giving your email to a company you know you want to sign up for something, a newsletter or whatever it might be. Well, if you want to protect your identity Start Mail can generate that shareable alias email, so people can’t sell your information, and they can be deleted at any time. Now, I’m so glad that I set it up for my personal email. It makes me feel safer. No question and I think that you need to consider ditching spy mail and switching to Start Mail. I hope you will we’ve got a great deal for you. You know, your cybersecurity has never been more at risk. Email snoops and scammers are taking advantage of the pandemic as phishing has skyrocketed in the last year. Take control of your privacy with Start Mail before it’s too late. Start securing your email privacy with Start Mail. Sign up today and you’ll get 50% off your first year. Go to Startmail.com/paranormal That’s Start Mail with a T — S T A R T mail.com/paranormal for 50% off your first year startmail.com/paranormal And we thank Start Mail for their support of the Paranormal Podcast.

Paranormal Podcast Announcer 17:52
If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire: where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune into Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now we return to the Paranormal Podcast.

Jim Harold 18:13
We’re talking UFOs. Today our guest is Rob Kristofferson. He is the host of the Our Strange Skies podcast. And we’re so glad to have him on the program. Many people who are quote believers and say yes, there’s definitely something in our skies. It seems like most of them gravitate towards the ET hypothesis. You know, the idea of these are aliens, they come from a craft, nuts and bolts kind of people. What are your thoughts on that theory? And do you think it’s too simplistic?

Rob Kristofferson 18:52
It’s, it’s a theory that is still wholeheartedly embraced in the United States and always has been, when you look at other countries, and particularly the United Kingdom, for instance, the 60s 70s 80s, they were kind of ahead of their time, like, it seemed like those in Europe, were really looking into alternative theories to combat the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis because in many ways, it’s it’s a bit flimsy, you know, because it requires like a wholly physical nature to these things, in order to be kind of 100% legitimate, at least in my mind, as I think of it. But for me in looking at that particular aspect, there are cases in which there are metaphysical aspects. I’ve read abduction accounts in which the witnesses are talking about when they’re coming back from their experiences. They can see their own bodies, not a screen in many ways. It’s like, it’s as if, you know, their consciousness has been ripped out of their body and it’s being returned to it. There was one case that I covered, called the Buff ledge incident that took place in 1968. In Vermont, right on Lake Champlain. And these two witnesses that were working at this all girls camp, they were counselors, they ended up having this abduction experience, while the entire team is away competing in, I think it was like a swimming competition or something like that. But the main witness, his name was Michael, he talked about how he could see these this like, round bank of screens, and he looks up at it. And he can see his body lying on the dock where he was taken from. And even the there’s a case, a case that terrified me utterly terrified me when I was a kid, watching it on Unsolved Mysteries, called the Allagash abductions, in which these four guys were remote it were camping in them, like this remote part of Maine, like the remotest part, you had to be flown in certain areas, and you basically got around by canoe. And they have this abduction experience. And I think it was, with Jack Wiener, one of the witnesses he describes coming back down from the craft, and he and he’s in this kind of light tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, you can see his body sitting right there in the the boat. So there are aspects to this phenomenon that while I don’t totally discount the ETH, specifically, it makes me doubt that that is the primeanswer to whatever this phenomenon is.

Jim Harold 21:58
What do you think some viable alternatives are? If it’s not aliens? Or if that’s only part of the explanation? What do you think the other plausible explanations or explanations could be?

Rob Kristofferson 22:15
I think that there’s definitely an advanced intelligence out there, that kind of has the ability to manipulate the way that we see reality. Because in many ways, human perception is very easy to manipulate, you can do it with drugs, you can even do it just, you know, when it comes to like driving at night, and you see something off in a distance, you may not be able to fully, you know, perceive all of, you know, its height, or, you know, how big it is? Or, or any, like specific details and such. It’s, it’s baffling in that way. Because when you think about it, what, why does an advanced intelligence want to mess with us in this way, because the more cases you read through, there are those that, you know, have agendas that say, you guys are messing up the planet, and you need to stop doing that; you should really think about, you know, what you’re doing with nuclear weapons and stuff like that. The majority, the vast majority of cases don’t have any point to them. There are just experiences that people have, that are baffling that just kind of people either forget about for a period of time until it just like pops into their memory, or it changes the course of their life. So to me, the tricksters element to this and wondering why some kind of advanced intelligence would want to mess with you in a way that would just utterly traumatize you or just send you off down this path is baffling. But regardless of intent, I don’t think that’s ever going to be something that we really get to. But on the base of it, yeah, there’s just some advanced intelligence that has the ability to manipulate how we observe things, and it seems to enjoy doing it.

Jim Harold 24:25
Now, when it comes to the idea of let’s call them beings, let’s not call them aliens. But some people believe, well, the government is coming out now and saying that they know something’s going on. They don’t know what it’s going on with what things we’re seeing in the skies. And some people take that as total face value, that there has been no official contact with anything and the government really is just as much in the dark is everybody else. And when I talk about this, I’m referring to the US government. But then there’s other peoples who say, Oh, do not be misled. Not only does the government know they’ve known for decades. Even up to possibly meeting with other worldly beings, Now, where do you fall on that continuum? Where Where do you think the government comes in? And how and again, when I’m talking about the government, a lot of times you talk about like it’s a monolith. Now there could be some parts of the government that have a lot more knowledge and then other parts. So realizing that though, in the whole, how much knowledge do you think the government has? And do you think they know these things are absolutely positively real? Are they feeling their way through the dark?

Rob Kristofferson 25:36
I think they’re, they may know slightly more than the rest of any of us do if you sift through all these cases and stuff, but I don’t really think the government has a leg up on this at all. It’s just that idea of government cover up has been there since the 50s, when the Robertson Panel back in 1953, which was the CIA led panel came in to project Bluebook, in response to a series of sightings that had occurred over Washington, DC in 1952. And they came in, and they wanted to do an assessment of their UFO program. And what they came to the conclusion on was that they felt that the government should downplay this all. And they should not take it as seriously, whether that’s because they don’t want a public that is panicked, because we’re in the middle of the Cold War, or if they really have, you know, all this information about aliens, the latter part of that just doesn’t seem viable. But that element of a cover up has been there since the 50s. It’s kind of evolved over time it in the 70s, it starts to become a, you know, kind of like a nesting ground for, you know, the government having deals with aliens for, you know, abducting people for the advanced technology, which, on the face of it kind of just sounds ridiculous because, I mean, while we are pretty advanced, I don’t think we’re so far advanced in UFO terms, that that seems viable in any way. But that elements of the cover up, I think, that cover up nature of things kind of just lends itself to the idea that the government just has to know what is going on. And they’re just keeping it from people. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. But I tend to think that they probably know a little bit more than we do, not necessarily the nature of what they’re dealing with. But maybe they’ve studied it a little more than any of us have and maybe they’ve come to some conclusions. But yeah, I don’t think the government really knows much of anything.

Jim Harold 28:15
One theory that I read that appealed to me if that was really interesting is that sometimes the pushback may not be the cover up, but it’s almost a denial. We don’t want to believe this, for whatever reason. We are afraid we realize that if for example, if there were aliens are coming here, they’re by definition, way more advanced. And there’s nothing that our military can do to stop them if they had nefarious plans. Other theories are people don’t want to believe this, because of religious reasons, that it would totally put their worldview on end. So I guess there would be more reasons to not be forthcoming than just a straight cover up. There might be people just not wanting to believe it.

Rob Kristofferson 29:01
Absolutely. Especially the you know, the the very devout and not only that, the way that with some folks, especially in the last few years, who’ve come forward and said that, you know, with their time with the government, claiming that those in charge did not want to pursue this believing that these aliens were quote, unquote, like demons, it feeds into kind of that religious aspect. And I definitely think there are, there’s part of that. Absolutely. Because, you know, I’ve talked to people they’re like, I don’t want to believe that it’s not really within my spectrum of belief, which I can completely understand. I think that definitely makes up part of it. But yeah, it’s just it’s interesting how much that idea of how would change people’s worldviews. And yet, Ancient Aliens is still one of the most popular television shows of all time, which, you know, basically gets at the idea that, you know, aliens have been visiting us for 1000s of years and has shaped mankind in so many ways. And I don’t think now just given how different pop culture is from, say, like the 60s or the 70s. I don’t think that it would have that big of an impact on people as some may seem, but maybe I’m wrong. But I just don’t see it being that big of a thing. If it did happen.

Jim Harold 30:45
Now, you brought up the topic of Ancient Aliens, since you brought it up, I’ll ask you your opinion. Some of the now not saying I necessarily agree with everything, chapter and verse in terms of the, you know, the ancient astronauts theory, and I’ve been lucky enough to interview Erich Von Daniken a few times. And although some people take great objection to his theories, he certainly has had a huge impact whether you agree with him, or disagree with him? Do you think there is something to the Ancient Aliens theory that some of these things we see in ancient carvings and artwork and things are depictions of, of ancient astronauts or even depictions of things in the Bible? What are your thoughts on that?

Rob Kristofferson 31:35
I definitely think that maybe at certain points in history, that people have seen things in the sky that they did not understand that may or may not have been some type of object or some kind of celestial event, or whatever that is. But I think the problem of history, especially when it comes to a history that’s not written, or a history that is, in imprinted on a wall in a cave, or on a petroglyph, or something like that, it’s so subjective. And it’s easy to put our modern concepts of what, you know, aliens look like, into those kind of carvings and stuff like that. Because if you look at kind of what they promote, because, you know, you’ll get the Oh, always flashy graphics of, you know, any alien, a grey alien, you know, kind of superimposed on on that, on those, you know, carvings and stuff like that. My problem with that is that the gray itself, and the idea of the gray really didn’t become prevalent in our society until the 1980s. So it’s, it’s heavily subjective at that point is that’s not to say that maybe there aren’t other points in time where that image was significant because the cover of Communion affected a lot of people, Whitley Streiber’s Communion. It had such a big impact that a lot of people started to come forward with their stories after seeing the image on the front of that book. So it speaks to a lot of people. But if it’s a purely cultural thing, it doesn’t seem to line up. But I’m open to the idea of that. And especially with Philip Coppins, in the way that he approached the subject, his belief was that they did have contact but it was through, you know, like ayahuasca and other means like that, not maybe necessarily like a physical thing, because, you know, like, we know what the Nazca Lines, we know that the Nazca people walk those lines, and essentially, it’s consumed substances. They believe that were hallucinogenic. And it was kind of religious for them. So I’m open to the idea, but I just don’t think that the evidence that they generally present lends itself to the idea that aliens have visited us in the past.

Jim Harold 34:33
And you kind of touched on it there. Do you think, and it’s quite a kind of a chicken or egg question. Do the way that quote aliens or the Others is Whitley Strieber would call them is the fact that the depictions change is that that they really do change that these are maybe different species of, quote aliens or beings? Or could it be a shape shifting situation? Or is it simply that, you know, in the 50s, when he talks about the contact these people assume that aliens would be blond haired and blue eyed. So that’s what was reported. And then once we started seeing kind of gray, like aliens depicted in the popular media, that people say, Oh, that’s what an alien supposed to look like. So that’s what I’m reporting. What side? Do you think truth lies on there?

Rob Kristofferson 35:36
I think one of the unsung questions that a lot of researchers probably never asked is what the witness thought and an alien looked like before they had that experience. And I think that’s kind of telling in how people interpret their sightings. It’s it to me it’s one of those endlessly fascinating, kind of gray areas in which is it the idea that they can change their form to suit whatever it they the witness wants? Or is it that they can just do it and make themselves appear however they want that’s, that’s kind of the thing because on side the reports of, you know, the contactees, blond haired Blue Eyed Venusian and types the Adamskys and, and such, during that same time period, but not necessarily reported in that time period, a lot of these reports started to come out and like the 1960s, the mid to late 1960s is kind of when the humanoid wave in the UFO community kind of caught on in in UFO publications became a lot more comfortable with publishing stories of people’s encounters with beings of certain kinds. But if you go through and one of the best kind of visual representations regardless of what you think of him, Joe Nickell has this alien timeline if you Google it, it’s this, you know, chart that has all these different beings that people have interacted with over from the 1940s to about the late 1980s. And they’re all kind of drastically different. But there are similar archetypes like, what we call the Michelin men there are these beings that people interact with that are wearing these kinds of outfits that have these kind of wrinkles and folds on them that make them look like Michelin men, like the Michelin Man itself. You have reports of like Bigfoots, or short hairy humanoids, near UFOs you you have these kind of archetypes. And then once you get to 1987, they all start looking like the greys. They the picture of what we have of these beings kind of streamlines we, you know people are reporting, you know greys, kind of reptilian type creatures, mantis type creatures, tall blond individuals. It’s, it’s interesting to me and it’s where I like to dwell in my podcast is these past accounts of people reporting encounters with, for instance, a gentleman by the name of Lee Parrish. He was from Kentucky, in in 1977. While he was leaving a friend’s house, he had an abduction experience. And when he later relived this abduction experience, regardless of how you interpret evidence, or lack thereof, from hypnosis, he talks about how he interacted with robot like creatures. One of them was an extremely tall wall, probably close to like 20 feet, it was black in color. There’s another machine similar and shaped to kind of like a Coke machine. And it interacted with him and there was another one in front of him that was white and it kind of looked like the depiction makes it look like an overblown adding machine. Those kinds of accounts are fascinating because where does that come from? Because if you’re going off the idea that aliens can make themselves appear how the witnesses want them to, to be seen, I don’t think any witness would say I want this thing to appear like a wall to me. So it’s one of those baffling things where I can’t really put my finger on it, but I think they do whatever this advanced Intelligence is it has the ability to change it’s form.

Now we were kind of enjoying this way, a little bit. And something’s really interesting to me is the idea of screen memories for experiencers. I think of the work that Mike Cleland has done on owls. He, what are your thoughts on screen memories, perhaps, whatever these things are, that they are implanting memories to distort what we’re really seeing and what we’re really experiencing at the time.

It’s one of the most interesting things because generally, screen memories that are associated with time lapses, they are a prominent feature of the abduction phenomenon in that they have this ability to edit what you have experienced, they just kind of cut out the stuff that you had gone through, and it’s almost like a really bad cutscene. You know, you go from being in your bed to being in your bed again. I think what’s interesting, especially in the in the case of screen memories and witnesses from UFO abductions, is that sometimes the aliens mess up when they’re bringing these people back from wherever they take them from. So sometimes, they’re wearing their pajamas backwards. And inside out. You know, I read one account of this, one woman who was tucked in her bed so tightly that she couldn’t have done it herself. And she had no clue of how it happened. There was one and this is these are from largely the case files of John Carpenter who, not not the not the director, but the abduction researcher, who he documented this one case in which this one woman would go to bed, and her husband would consistently find her outside, the doors were locked in everything every time he went up, every time she was pounding on the door, but these aliens just kept stealing her nightgowns for whatever reason, every single time. So I think in terms of those, I don’t think they necessarily work that well, most of the time, because there are elements that people detect that are just kind of missing, there are moments in their life that are missing. And it seems really easy to kind of retrieve these memories, if that’s what hypnosis really does. I don’t know, I’m kind of sketchy on hypnosis, in terms of its role in in investigating UFO and abduction cases, but it’s, it’s one of those elements of the phenomenon that I think kind of lends a little credibility to the experiences that people have and in the way in which they tried to describe them. But yeah, just, I always enjoy when the aliens just mess up at some point.

Jim Harold 43:12
That’s funny. And again, I was gonna say, well, they’re just human, but now not necessarily. But if they’re beings they could very well be fallible, just like we are, you know, there could be you know, the someone who’s assigned to earth and they don’t really know what they’re doing. That’s, that’s always possible. I think a great way to kind of end this week show, of course, we’re gonna tell people where to find the podcast and more information on everything you do. But before we get to that is one last story for me one of your your favorites. And again, maybe again, one of those ones that are a bit off the beaten path

Rob Kristofferson 43:51
They’re always the best ones, because you kind of have to, you know, dig forum. And that’s really what I enjoy doing the most is digging up these very strange and unusual stories. And on my most recent episode that I did, I have, the way that I do things is I generally bring on a guest co host. And they help me go through a case or a specific element to this phenomenon and the most recent episode that I had, I had with John Tenney, I had him on and we dubbed this figure the Catman/Batman of Argentina because if you look at the sketches of this figure, it’s a very tall eight foot tall figure but it the way that its ears kind of project up in kind of its chiseled face. It looks a little like I initially said Batman but John and I went back and forth online about this one point and he said it looked like Catman so you know we dubbed it the Catman/Batman of Argentina. But uh, around this automotive processing plant in Argentina, in the city of Cordoba, there were three witnesses that had encounters with this figure. The first one was a guy named Marlow. He was the kind of like he was like the night janitor in this one portion this one washroom that was associated with this one part of the plan, he walks into this, this washroom to get it ready for the next shift, he turns on the lights, and he’s like dropping off some towels and he sees at one end of the washroom, this one figure just standing bracing itself against the washbasin and sketch of this figure. It’s kind of making this it’s got its legs extended back. And he’s kind of bracing himself on this, but he has his finger up towards his nose, as if he’s smelling it, which is which is great, though when you look at the sketches of these things, but he has this experience. And this figure just kind of disappears and kind of this he hears this like metallic cracking sound, and a light goes out and this figure disappears. And less than a week later, this the Catman/Batman is spotted by this one guy who is a he’s kind of the courier for this plant, this plant is pretty large. So he drives around this motorcycle, and near these car chassis sees, he sees this tall figure standing up, just looking directly at him. And, you know, he stops dead in his tracks, he actually loses control of his motorcycle. And eventually, it takes off on its own to this like security office. This witness brings the um the security guys out to where this figure was, there’s a footprint, a rather large and a very rectangular looking footprint on the ground. And he’s like, hey, there was this thing here. I don’t know what it was and the security’s like, No, it wasn’t and they just started to take over the whole or take over this prints. And it’s like, Okay, guess dismiss it and why not. But this same witness has another encounter, but this figure a day later. And not only that, there was a third eye witness from that was that didn’t even work there. He was actually delivering I think, like sheets of metal or something like that. And the same figure was walking alongside his truck that was parked. And when it came to the cab, it stopped. It looked in his window, and then it just proceeded onward. So I don’t know what it was about this automotive manufacturing plant that this being was interested in. But if you want to know more about the story, it’s episode 88. The Catman/Batman of Argentina.

Jim Harold 48:04
Excellent. And that’s a perfect segue. Because now we need to tell people how to find the podcast and more information about everything you do.

Rob Kristofferson 48:13
Yeah, absolutely. So if you kind of want to connect with me, the best places to do it are either on Twitter @YerUFOguy spelled y e r UFO guy. Same with Instagram. I’m pretty active over there. As for the podcast, you can find it pretty much everywhere on your favorite podcasting apps. Just search for the Our Strange Skies podcast and look for the logo of me running away from an alien that I just recently had done. So you find that logo. You’re you’re at the right podcast.

Jim Harold 48:47
Rob, thank you so much. I hope everybody checks out the Our Strange Skies podcast. Thank you again for coming on the show. Thanks so much for joining us today on the paranormal podcast. I certainly appreciate it. And I hope that you will tell a friend you know, there’s so many shows out there these days, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And we definitely I think we’re pretty wheaty, you know, we really focus on trying to bring in high quality guests like Rob today he was great. So if you value what we do, one of the top things you can do is tell a friend, also please make sure that you rate and review and follow us on the podcast app of your choice. That’s very important as well. Because when you rate and review us other people looking for spooky shows, they take a look and say Well, boy, there’s a bunch of them out here. But these ones always get high ratings out, I’ll check this one out. And then you have done your job. And then it’s time for me to do my job and put on a show where they’ll say yeah, I got to listen to this. And that’s the way the calculus works. Basically, you spread the word, you get them in the door. My job is to keep them in the door. So if you enjoy what we do, and want to help out, that’s one of the greatest ways that you can do that. So we would appreciate it very much of course, please support our sponsors that’s incredibly important. They make the free shows possible. And if you want to take a deep dive, check out our plus club at jimharoldplus.com. We thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and stay safe. Bye byeb