Brent Rains for Alternate Perceptions Online Magazine. It's Tuesday evening, September 5th, 2023. It's a little after eight o'clock my time, just a lot after six. My guest, Daniel Drazen, out in San Francisco. It's Drazen. Drazen? Drazen. Nobody gets it right the first time. It's fine. Sorry about that. No problem.
So anyway, Dan, I wrote a book back in 2000, it came out in 2019, Johnny Keel, The Man, The Myths, The Ongoing Mysteries. And I just happened to connect with you, thanks to Nancy Talbert, before I wrote the book, which was a real blessing because there are very few people who could have told me about being in Point Pleasant back in 1967 and what was going on from their perspective and been a part of that whole scene there.
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And of course, you just come out with a book, you know, on paranormal events, A New Science of the Afterlife, Spacetime, and The Consciousness Code. And you previously, as a documentary producer for many years, also with your interest in paranormal, Calling Earth, I think came out in 2017. And with Tom Coleman, you produced Skoll, The Afterlife Experiments, with a group of mediums over in England, Skoll, England. And that was quite an extraordinary thing there.
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So there's so many areas to cover, but I thought the best thing to do would be to discuss about meeting John Keel and the things that happened there. And we can, you know, that was all paranormal, too. And I know that you in, I guess, early 1967, you and a young lady had seen a UFO in New York over, I think, the Hudson River at the time. And so then someone told you John Keel was doing a talk. Would you like to attend?
(0:02:13)
Right. And the rest was history, as they say. Yeah, we were up, there's a wonderful medieval museum on the Hudson in Upper Manhattan. And my friend and I were up there one day and just happened to be looking across the Hudson River at the Palisades in New Jersey, these sheer cliffs on the other side of the river.
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And I had been a student pilot at the time. And so when I noticed this object that was kind of passing from south to north over the river, and it immediately changed direction and moved the other way without slowing down or looping around, it caught my attention.
This is obviously no ordinary aircraft. So I was puzzled by this. I had been interested in the UFO question for many years.
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But this was, I think, my first actual sighting of some an aerial object I couldn't explain. Anyway, I mentioned it to a friend who told me that John was having a doing a presentation in New York. So I went and attended it and met him afterwards, and we hit it off immediately. He then invited me to accompany him on a trip to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which was Mothman Central at the time.
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And I think I took a total of four trips there, three of them with him and one with a man who was the science editor of a TV production unit in New York, who became very interested in what was going on in Point Pleasant. And, you know, we had proposed doing a documentary about it, which eventually kind of it was mysteriously canned at the last moment.
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That's a whole other story. But anyway, I did I did spend quite a bit of time in Point Pleasant, had some interesting experiences, acquired a great respect for John as a researcher. And he was very thorough. He didn't jump to conclusions. He was always very curious. And, you know, he had his own particular viewpoint and his own biases, I suppose, but he never took them terribly seriously and was always willing to open his mind when new experiences or new evidence showed up.
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So we became quite good friends. And... OK, well, do you have any other questions? I've kind of gotten ahead of myself here.
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Go ahead. That's quite, quite interesting. The, you know, the I know that you had the last time when you went down there, you were a science guy from the television station out of New York City who was they were going to do a documentary. They seemed very interested.
And I understand toward the last minute, the word came that it was that it was not going to happen.
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They pulled the project, which seemed really sad, because I can just imagine because you got to talk and meet with a number of quite a number of the witnesses, I think, in Point Pleasant, even had some sightings yourself while there. And, you know, this question years later, there's all kinds of things back and forth. And if only, you know, there had been a documentary back then in 1967, where we could actually see and hear the people on video telling their stories, you know, what a great contribution that would have been.
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I was disappointed, but I was also relieved at the same time, because it was such an overwhelming experience. And I don't think I was personally ready for the notoriety that might have accompanied that, had it had it been done. The science editor who visited Point Pleasant with me was really keen to do this. But I think that, you know, without getting conspiratorial about it, I think the rest of the outfit just considered it to be a little, you know, a step too far at the time.
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And, you know, I'll never know, of course, but, you know, it was what it was. And there were some documentaries done after the fact.
A couple of TV documentaries, I actually participated in one, was interviewed for it.
And of course, there, you know, the books and so on. And the feature movie, which hardly did justice to the story, as I think you probably agree, it was, to me, it was kind of a teaser.
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You never really saw the Mothman, the UFOs were really not featured. It was basically an excuse to hang a love story on it. But yeah, so that's, you know, it was what it was.
I think you know that about this experience I had meeting John's friend, Joe. Right, yeah, you had told me about that. And you even gave me a copy of the letter.
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Oh, right.
Of the letter you got from John Keel announcing that he had spoken with Joe's wife. And she informing him that Joe had died in July of 1965. And he was in Keel's apartment. You met him in December 15th, 1967. And so there was a problem there.
Right, it was, this was one of the most, I think, interesting days of my life.
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And I think of John's as well. This was the date that on our previous visit to Point Pleasant, John had been informed by a psychic in the town that, quote, there would be a disaster on the river, the night that President Johnson lights the White House Christmas tree. That's all she said. So John and I were back in New York at the time.
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And we had planned to meet in the evening and I was going to, went up to his apartment and we turned the TV on to watch the White House ceremony and so on. And that was that for the moment. But when I arrived at John's apartment, his friend Joe was there, whom I had not met for, whom John had not seen in years, who had just shown up at his door that evening.
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He was a tall guy. I'm pretty big, but he was taller than I was. Well built, dark hair, mustache.
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And the thing I remember about him, most about him, was the firmness of his handshake. He was like this, you know, this army guy. And anyway, John and I turned on the TV, nothing was going on.
So John and Joe went out to dinner. There was also a UFO conference that evening in Manhattan, which they went to.
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I simply went back home. I got home, I turned the TV on, and just as I turned it on, the network feed was interrupted by the news from Point Pleasant that this bridge had collapsed into the Ohio River. So this happened on this very fateful day. And so, you know, obviously I got in touch with John the next day and we talked about it and he said his friend Joe had gone wherever he'd gone.
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Subsequently, John couldn't find him. Tried to track him down. His phone had been disconnected. It was very strange that he showed up that one night and then John, you know, John couldn't find hide or hair of him, you know, until he ran into Joe's wife a few years later, as he mentioned in this letter.
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And, you know, I had heard about these materializations of people who had passed and I was rather skeptical about it, but I'm not skeptical anymore.
I mean, Joe was as solid and physical as anyone you might ever meet. And so I was actually grateful for the experience because it helped me understand things which I later was reporting on in my documentaries. Yeah, the psychic materializations and those sort of things.
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And by the way, I wonder if the psychic there in Point Pleasant, if it might have been a Virginia Thomas. I spoke with her on the phone back in 76 and she told me that she had predicted something happening on the Ohio River and she'd had other psychic impressions too over the years.
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I think that's probably right. I remember her name. We thought there was a chemical plant on the river, a Panasonic chemical plant, which I think produced explosives for the military or something like that. And we had assumed that something that the disaster she predicted would have to do with that plant, but it turned out not to be the case.
Okay. And I know that one of the stories that Kiel describes in Mothman Prophecies is one you you also recall.
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You said you were actually there that day, I guess, in Merrihyre observing an airplane. I mean, at first it wasn't an airplane. Right. Well, the funny thing, I think the funniest thing was that we're up on this hill that sort of overlooks the town of Point Pleasant and we're just kind of scanning around and it's a beautiful, sunny, cloudless day, except for one little kind of perfect cloud that could have been taken from a child's story book. It was a very strange little white cloud.
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And in the distance, from the distance came this sort of vague oval object, which went directly into the cloud. And when it emerged from the cloud, it was no longer this vague object. It was a small twin engine airplane, which flew directly over our heads. And, you know, it was just, you know, just an amazing little experience.
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You know, like whoever was behind the scenes kind of tweaking us and playing a little prank on us. But yeah, it was one of those things that you don't forget.
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Right. When it went into the, when it was going into the cloud, was it coming from a different direction than when it came out of the cloud as a plane?
It made a straight line. It came from the, from the, the, from the distance to the left of our field of vision, came into the cloud and continued on the same trajectory when it, when it came, came out as an airplane.
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And it had, you know, sounded like a twin engine airplane. There's no, no, there's nothing strange about it in that way. It was, it materialized like Joe materialized, I guess you could say. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, what do we know?
Well, I've been talking to quite a bit recently with a Peter Jordan, an investigator, paranormal investigator in New Jersey, and he knew Kiel. He used to visit him and spoke with him.
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And he asked him about, you know, some of these UFOs appearing as other things, you know, and he claimed that he had seen that apparently more than once in his investigations. And that would certainly be one of those incidents. I remember reading it in, in the Mothman Prophecies. And then my first exchanges with you, you described that.
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And I thought, oh, well, that's the same, the same story he describes. So now I've actually spoken with someone who can remember those same details. And wow. And yes, speaking of airplanes, just, I just remembered another, another little anecdote from one of my visits to Point Pleasant. Went across the river to the Ohio side and went to the Galapagos, Ohio airport and interviewed some pilots there. And one of them is local. These are salt of the earth folks. They don't make stuff up.
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And pilots, you know, they have a certain integrity to them. I used to be a student pilot.
I was part of that community. So I really get this. So this guy, a local private pilot tells me, he was flying along, not too long ago by the river. And I saw this thing flying along. And I thought it was a very strange looking little airplane.
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So I kind of approached it and it was this flying critter. The Mothman. It was the Mothman. And this is a guy who, you know, I wouldn't imagine would make this sort of thing. And he seemed, he seemed genuinely, genuinely taken with this experience.
And that was, he saw that in the daytime, I assume. Broad daylight, broad daylight. And there have, you know, there have been a number of sightings of the Mothman in broad daylight, as you might remember. Quite a lot of them.
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I, when I, I did some research not too long ago, I, some friends of mine in Boulder, Colorado invited me there a few years ago to do a little presentation on this experience. And so I did some research at the time and I found that there were dozens of Mothman sightings before the four teenagers in the car, you know, were terrified by this thing and reported it to the sheriff and so on. Then that, you know, that whole chain of events started with them.
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But that the Mothman had been seen by quite a few other people in the area prior to that.
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Yeah. And I know that by 1993, I got a letter from John Keel saying he was no longer really interested in the Mothman, that these kind of sightings he'd found happened worldwide. And he got hundreds of letters from other people from different areas of the country, different parts of the world. And, and in fact, I remember seeing some stories from like 1947 when the whole flying saucer era started up, you know, like out around Oregon and Washington, where people were putting flying people in the air, you know, with wings.
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So it's just really very, very high strange. But... Well, you know, we think we think these things are strange and we label them paranormal. And I sort of, I bring a little skepticism to that notion.
In the sense that, you know, if we can't talk about these things openly, how do we know how normal or not normal they are? My sense of it is that these things are a lot more normal and a lot more frequently encountered than we might suspect.
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And, you know, by labeling them paranormal, we kind of, in a way, put them in the closet. In my experience, when I, you know, when someone earns my trust and, you know, feels at ease to speak with me, I report all kinds of things.
And, you know, which normally they would, they would be inclined to keep secret. So, you know, now that I'm, you know, in the business of being an open afterlife researcher and author, I'm finding that a lot of people are contacting me with their stories. I got a beautiful publisher just forwarded me a beautiful little handwritten note from a little old lady in rural Ohio. Last person I would think would be drawn to my book with science in the title.
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And may I read you this note? Sure. Yeah. She writes, Dear Daniel, what a wonderful book, A New Science of the Afterlife. I sit here just, I sit here just finished it with tears. Compelled to write you a note. Please forgive the writing errors. Emotions and age has me, 81, just a bit older than you.
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My one of a kind husband of 60 years, high school sweetheart and 57 years married, lives in the afterlife now four and a half years. He is with me so often, still with his sense of humor, has apported many things, means manifested physical objects, and have heard my name at odd hours of the night.
Your words have opened me to more of his existence. Thank you.
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Yeah, you know that that sort of thing makes it worthwhile. I mean, here, here's someone who probably has not been able to entrust these words to maybe know anyone else.
I go ahead, sorry. I was gonna say that reminds me of how one experience that was quite interesting eye opening for me was back in 1973, when there were a lot of UFO sightings.
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And I was in Florida at the time. And there was a woman and a young lady who was married, she was married to a military guy. And her home was just down the road from Jacksonville Naval Air Base. And two nights in a row around the same time, she claimed she'd seen a disk type object with a ring of lights around it, flying overhead.
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It ended up as a brief note in the Jacksonville newspaper and a friend of mine, Ramona Clark, who is a researcher and experiencer and used to write to John Keel too.
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We went to visit this girl and she told about her sightings. I'm writing it all down. And then Ramona says, have you ever had any other unusual experiences through the years?
Just anything unusual? No, not really, says but I do.
She's saying all of a sudden, she says, Oh, yeah, but I remember one time, I got this weird phone call.
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And it was a friend, the voice just sounded exactly like this person I had known who died a few months earlier. And they wanted to come visit me. And she said, I started crying and I told him, no, no. And then suddenly, you know, she thought of another experience. She'd been involved like in a seance and it was like an apparition that appeared.
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And then there was something else about being in a graveyard and a bird was following around, you know, and maybe that maybe that was. But anyway, the point was that she normally didn't dwell on this, that just being asked that question, we were there to talk to her about UFOs. And this brought up all these other stories.
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And Joyce Keel found that, yeah, when you follow up on these stories, you may find that these people are experiencing a whole lot more than just seeing, having this one single experience. And, you know, how many investigators over the years have just gone to follow up on that one story, say a flying saucer flew over their house and they didn't bother to ask, you know, and find out maybe there was a Bigfoot if they said, oh, there was a Bigfoot in our yard the next day.
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Well, I'm not here for that. You know, that's. Well, yeah, that's, you know, that's when you're when someone has already had a so-called paranormal experience that they're willing to talk about. They may be, you know, open to other questions.
What I wonder is all the people who haven't been asked.
Right. You're right.
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I know this Albert Rosales lives down in Miami, Florida. He's been collecting thousands of reports around the world from different publications, sometimes direct correspondence. He's on Facebook. And he, you know, we were talking and I says, all these sensational cases of landings and beings and stuff that you've collected, you know, it's, it's, I wonder if the investigators was to, you know, a lot of those cases that hit the newspapers or the magazines or the books, if there was a whole lot more in the background to a lot of those stories than just that one that was focused upon, you know, the report of alien occupants, whatever.
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Because again, again, when you actually do meet these people, the rule is there's more than that one story there. There's, there's a potential whole lifetime experiences. And, and yeah, I know this, you know, they're having these UFO hearings in Washington. And I guess that's a good thing, but you know, the, they're, they're looking at this as just from a certain perspective, they, they, you know, the events of like Point Pleasant or Skinwalker Ranch and such, it's not on their, their list of things to look at.
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Well, you know, you know, I, Brent, I, I curiously, I kind of feel for those people, because, you know, you, you and I and others know that there's so much beneath the surface.
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And I try to put myself in the position of, you know, these government and military folks, some of whom may realize how diverse and, you know, amazingly bizarre the, what's going, really going on is. And, you know, in the light of the fact that this, this has been denied for over a half a century, where, you know, where do you begin to disclose without risking the whole, the whole kit and caboodle coming out? How do you, you know, the, the longer, the longer the denial has been going on, the harder it's, it is for any of the things to come out. So, you know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying that, that, you know, I'm not letting these people off the hook as it were.
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But I'm just, I'm, I wonder how, even if they wanted to disclose, how could they do it at this point without, without upsetting so many apple carts?
Yeah. And, you know, maybe that needs to happen, but, you know, how do, you know, government is in the business of managing reality. That's, that's part of its nature.
And so I, you know, this, this, it seems like an insoluble problem.
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I don't know. I'm just kind of venting about this. I really don't know what's going to happen. You know, how much is going to be disclosed, you know, whether they managed to put the lid back on. I mean, the way that this goes is usually once every 10 years, something happens like Leslie Kane's book, right? And this whole generation says, oh my goodness, UFOs. And then, and then it's, you know, and then it's under, underground for another 10 years.
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And then a whole nother, something happens, a whole nother generations, oh my goodness, UFOs. So, you know, I... And there's rumors that the truth is about to be disclosed.
Yeah. And, and, and these, these cases, you know, military personnel having these experiences, they've been going on since the beginning, you know. Of course. And it's, it's really not anything new. It's... And we know, and, and it was all out in the open until from the forties to the fifties.
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It was really, there was no mystery about it. I recall, you know, growing up in the, in the late 1940s in New Jersey, listening every night to a news commentator on the radio from New York, Frank Edwards. And he would just give these UFO sighting and landing reports. It was no, you know, no big deal.
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I mean, well, it was, it was, it was a big deal, but, but this, this is before the curtain came down. And it was, this was considered a, you know, a proper subject for civil debate. And I remember one time I'm, I'm listening and he reports a sighting and a landing near the Fort Dix military base, which was not far from where I was living in New Jersey at the time.
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And I was this kid, right? So I hear this report. And my first, my, my first reaction was, oh, my people are coming back. Now, I don't, where did that come from? You know?
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You know, so, you know, our, our, our people like us who are, who are fascinated with these things, are we from somewhere else in some other incarnation? I don't know.
Yeah. Well, the Hopi Indians out there in Arizona would probably, some of them would, they believe that they're, the Kachinas were from other planets, other worlds, and they drove flying saucers.
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I remember there was some sightings back in the 70s, 71, and it was some of the elders that were talking about that. Yeah. That's our people.
So maybe you got any Hopi Indian in your ancestry?
That's a good question. I don't know about the Hopis, but there, there are two places in Arizona. They're 30 miles from each other. I visited both of them.
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And I can't be there. I have to get away. I discovered this the hard way. I was visiting one of them with a friend. And all of a sudden, I start having this feeling of, I don't know, this feeling of being in danger or something. It was just a feeling of discomfort and almost pain.
And I have to get, as soon as I got a little bit away from it, I felt fine.
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About three years later, I was in the same general area of Arizona, about 30 miles south of this first place. And I had a similar, very similar experience. I had to get away from there. And as I was driving away, I got a call from, actually, it was my girlfriend back in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time.
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I was traveling on my own. She was, she stayed home. And she called me and said, Dan, are you OK? And I said, you know, why do you ask? She said, I just had the feeling you were in terrible danger. She, she was psychic. I already knew that. But it didn't surprise me that she picked that up because I had this feeling of being in danger.
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So, you know, was this a past life as a Native American where I came to a painful end or something? I don't know, but I do identify with that culture. Yeah, well, that wasn't Sedona area, was it, by any chance?
It was not far from Sedona. The first instance happened at a place called Montezuma's Well, Montezuma Well, it's called.
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It's a big, it's just off the freeway there, the north-south freeway that comes north from Phoenix. It's not I-25. It's one of the main interstates. The Montezuma's Well, it's like a huge sinkhole, maybe 100 feet in diameter or so, and maybe 50 feet deep.
It's got cliff dwellings in the walls. And you can, there's a stairway you could actually go down.
And there are the remnants of Native American fire pits and other things.
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And so that was the first instance where I was down in this sinkhole, and I had this feeling I got to get out. And the friend I was with actually had the same feeling.
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The second place was, are you familiar with the Arcosanti community?
No. It was sort of a new-agey community that was created by an architect, Paolo Soleri, Italian architect. It's sort of a commune. And it's right off the freeway where the interstate branches off toward, I think, Sedona in one direction and Prescott in the other. It's that general area.
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And there's a canyon behind the community. And that's the place where I found myself that I just had this terrible feeling I had to get away. So it too is a place below ground level, interestingly. Yeah, I know there's a couple of people who have had experiences and told me about when they were in Sedona, they had unusual kind of disturbing experiences.
And they attribute it to one of, I think, the quartz crystals in Sedona seemed to affect them.
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Interestingly, I read in a Frank Waters book, Book of the Hopi, which I remember John Keel mentioned should read, and talked about the Hopis and the fact that the elders, the shamans, would use quartz crystals to look through at people and look at their chakras to determine, you know, give them kind of health reading.
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And they identified really a lot of the psychic centers, the same as like the Buddhist research over in the east, the crown chakra, the third eye, you know, and the heart and so on, which was, I thought was quite, quite extraordinary.
Got a little visitor here.
Name's Yo-Yo. Oh, what a sweetheart. What a sweetheart.
She keeps wandering in here.
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My wife come to take her back to the other room. But anyway, yeah, and I just thought that was interesting that, and they identify with UFOs and such.
Native Americans, some of those stories are different cultures. Fascinating. And I remember a psychologist who had been traveling in other countries saying that that was an area anthropologists were missing out on was the fact that some of these people in different cultures report, you know, UFOs and feel a connection with them. But anyway.
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Well, that's tough, you know, for if you want to stay in good graces with the academic community, you don't talk about UFOs. Yeah. And that's a shame, you know, that, you know, we claim to be an enlightened civilization.
And yet we we have these taboos.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyways, as I said that the, my, I was really fortunate to connect with you as I was about to work on this book on Keel and try to, you know, talk with people and interview people who had had experiences with Keel and and there you were going back to 67. And I, it was Nancy Talbert, she posted a video of you and this gentleman over in the Netherlands. You had been over there and you had been filming with him and you used all these safeguards to make sure that this young medium guy who would predict where crop circles were going to appear got all his unusual photographs, even some of, well, he did this for a lot of people, he would take pictures of their relatives.
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And he did this with Nancy, you know, she had pictures of her deceased brother. And I remember asking her, was there any way that he could have, you know, playing the devil's advocate, gotten a hold of these pictures? And she got mad at me there at first. Don't you think I know, I would know to, you know, safeguard against that? I'm just, I'm just asking.
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I think some of the, you're talking about Robert Vandenbroek, who's seen in my film, Calling Earth. Yeah, I think that one of the most evidential aspects of his work are the distortions that take place in the images.
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Some, within a single image, you might have part of the image that's very naturalistic, and then you'll have distortions that cannot be accounted for, certainly by the technology involved. It would be extremely difficult to pull these things off with Photoshop. You know, anyone who's done photo manipulation or illustration can tell you right off the bat that you can't take a camera, snap it, have the picture come out with these distortions in it.
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They would take hours or maybe days to replicate with the subtlety and the detail that exists in these images, and sometimes with a combination of naturalistic and distortion effects in the same photograph. And you can see some of these in my film.
Yeah, I was very careful with Robert to preclude any sort of trickery, and he didn't disappoint.
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And he also, I left out of the film, there was a certain amount of, he did some sort of spontaneous channeling for me, which I hadn't asked for, and including reference to a niece of mine whom I had hardly ever spent any time with, didn't even know her very well.
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And he said, first he got her name first, and then said, yes, you'll see more of her soon. And in fact, that's what happened. There are other things like this that transpired. I was there for a short week, and I was very impressed. He claims that there are these ETs that are actually behind all these phenomena that go on around him.
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And he claims to have been teleported and so on. I can't say one way or the other, because I wasn't there. All I can say is that within the safeguards that I set up personally, he certainly performed remarkably and produced those pictures that you can see in my documentary. And if people want to see the film, there's a short link.
(0:38:41)
It's B-I-T-dot-L-Y-slash-callearth. One word, C-A-L-L-E-A-R-T-H. B-I-T-dot-L-Y-slash-callearth. And there's also a five-minute trailer, which is at B-I-T-dot-L-Y-slash- callearth-preview. You get a little taste of it there. But the film runs an hour and a half, and there's some quite remarkable material in it. I hope your viewers tune into it and enjoy it.
Yeah, I think they will.
(0:39:18)
And I know that when I communicated with Nancy early on, she was telling about first meeting this young medium. And before he really became well known, and she was investigating, focusing mainly on, I think, the crop circles. And she was there at the house, I think, on the second floor. Her bedroom looked out over these fields, and there was this bright beam of light that came down, she said.
(0:39:45)
And she was quite startled and ran downstairs, looked out, and I can't remember if the beam was still there, but she said the next day when they got up, they walked out there, and there was the circle on the ground there, right where she had seen the beam. So that always impressed me that she had that experience, and then all these other experiences over the years.
(0:40:09)
And she shared some of these photographs of of beings and such. And then there was some that were almost, as I recall, like a cartoon character, you know? It would be like, there'd be Nancy and I think this young man's mother in the house sitting, and there'd be like this weird cartoon type character, you know? And it just appeared in the pictures, you know? Well, one of the most impressive ones that Robert did was a series of images, which Nancy just took a bunch of photos of an open field near where Robert lives there in the Netherlands. And when the pictures came out, they had, each photo had included a representation of her late brother.
(0:41:02)
And there were like at least a dozen of these, and each one was slightly different. And the representation of her brother was kind of abstract. It had a very curiously pointed ear on it. And she got the, if I remember her story correctly, she got the impression that he wanted her to play a particular piece of music that they both enjoyed together.
(0:41:30)
And after she played the music, the ear went down a normal size in the next photographs that were produced. And I may be getting the story slightly wrong, but it's something like that. And Nancy did some tremendous work. Unfortunately, she suffered a stroke a few years ago. And it's out of the game. It's very tragic.
(0:41:49)
But she did some very, very fine work in the crop circle field in general, and then also with Robert. And it was through her, she had arranged my visit to him, and it all worked out really well.
Yeah, when I first, you know, I remembered your name from the Mockman Prophecies, and I wrote to her after seeing that video.
(0:42:14)
And I says, is this the same guy who is Kiel's friend? And she says, I have no idea, but here's his email. So that's how that developed.
So we connected quite a while ago, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it's been a few years. But it was, yeah, and I hated that. I got to sit down.
We were both speaking at a conference, a UFO conference over in Virginia Beach, Virginia at the Association for Research and Enlightenment. And just got to spend pretty much a whole evening just sitting there with her and talking with her and some friends about all her different experiences.
(0:43:01)
Extraordinary stuff. But so, and also you, I picked up on watching your episode with Jeffrey Mishlove. And he told me when he interviewed me about my book on John Kiel. And I, you know, he wanted to hear that story about the Joe, meeting him in Kiel's apartment. And he, so I told the story as you had told me.
And then I, he said that he had known you for a number of decades, I think 30 something years, and always knew you to be very credible. And that was just an extraordinary account there.
(0:43:35)
And, but you also, I heard in the interview, had a site where you had friends who were mediums, although when you spoke at a parapsychology conference, they tended not to like to hear those kind of stories, but you had found them quite intriguing.
Yeah, it was an interesting experience. Yes, I presented my film, Calling Earth, at a parapsychology conference here in Northern California that was sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And I sort of learned the hard way that parapsychology, it really does its best to be acceptable to the academic community.
(0:44:26)
And so if you can't, if you can't put something in a lab and do formal experiments with it, so they don't want to know about it. Now, maybe I'm being a little unfair to them, but, and as individuals, they're interested, but as an organization, they need to be very careful and as academically proper as possible. So anyway, I presented my film, did a Q&A afterwards.
(0:44:54)
And in the course of the Q&A, I mentioned these two mediums that I have been working with.
And they're best known for having channeled the crews of the NASA space shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, the two space shuttles that had been lost. And in the first instance with the Challenger, the first of the deceased crew to come through was the teacher. She was trying to think of her name, blanking on it at the moment.
(0:45:38)
Krista McAuliffe. And she was the first one to come through. And I had also learned that she had come through to a number of mediums at the same time. She was obviously shocked, distraught, realized that she had died, and was mainly concerned about her kids and her students back home. And she came through immediately to my two friends that I work with, Gene and Regina, but also to others, as I say.
(0:46:07)
And one of them happened to be in the room when I was doing this presentation to the Parapsychology Association. And after my presentation, she came back and talked to me and said, yes, Krista McAuliffe came to me too. And I had to send her away because her emotions were so intense. I could not deal with it. So and that was, you know, unfortunately, interesting. In any case, Krista did contact other mediums, including my friends.
(0:46:36)
This woman who came to me has herself since passed and has been in touch with me through my team of mediums. Yeah, these are two quite remarkable women. The website that we have created is called Cosmic Voices Network, and the link is cosmicvoices.network. It's not dot net, it's dot network. So cosmicvoices.network. And it includes the page with the messages on it, includes dozens of these messages that have come through this team of mediums.
(0:47:23)
One of them, Jean Love, lives in Los Angeles, and she is herself a trained classical singer.
(0:47:30)
She has an affinity for artists and actors and so on. And so folks in the Hollywood community that pass over very often contact her. I mean, she's apparently well known on the other side in that community, and they will often contact her shortly after they've passed. And a number of these communications are on our website.
(0:47:55)
There's two columns of messages. One is names you might recognize, and there's another one's names you might not recognize. And some of those messages are quite interesting and intriguing. One was from the man who was the New York City fire captain at 9-11, who was killed along with his men on that day. And his message is just quite amazing.
So definitely, if anyone's interested in this sort of afterlife communication, and also to see the variety of experiences that different individuals have as they pass over.
(0:48:36)
Because there's as much variety in that experience as there is in our physical lives. And anyway, I won't say too much about it, but I would definitely recommend to your viewers to check this site out. You can also click on about, and you can see biographies of us, the participants. Yeah, that's very interesting.
And your new book, New Science of the Afterlife, is available on Amazon. And I imagine we've probably touched upon a number of things that's in that book already.
(0:49:13)
But is there maybe a kind of an overview that you might want to give our listeners as to what the book presents? And I'm sure it probably mentions about, like what we were just talking about, the mediums and what was and how to look at it, not as as paranormal, but more as a natural phenomena. Right, that's I think that that's one of the one of the core messages of the book, that we tend to pigeonhole these things as paranormal or supernatural.
(0:50:00)
And when we arbitrarily label something supernatural, we're presuming to dictate the limits of nature. Like we know what the limits of nature are.
Well, sorry, you know, we don't know enough to say that. You know, from my perspective, it's all nature. I mean, there's nothing weird or spooky about it. Once you get familiar with these processes in the sense of the greater reality, it's all very natural.
(0:50:25)
And I think the more we regard it as natural, the more we will be able to tune into these experiences in a positive way. The more we will be able to be comfortable with communication across the veil.
Which is, as far as I'm concerned, a natural process that we've just simply been cut off from mostly culturally and psychologically.
(0:50:53)
There's no there's no inherent reason why these this should be mysterious or strange. One of probably the longest chapter in my book is actually about language and how language tends to influence our sense of reality and how we can begin to turn language around a little bit to be able to see things in a new way. One very simple example is, you know, in our English language, we use words like somebody, nobody, everybody. And with every repetition, don't these words reinforce the idea that we're nothing but our bodies? Somebody, everybody, it's, you know, it's that's that we're putting people in a box there. If we say someone, everyone, then we're talking about the one, you know, the the soul that inhabits the body, not so much the body itself.
(0:51:45)
So there are little tricks of language that influence us and influence our thinking and our perception that I think we need to begin to look beyond these things. Another, another, I have a lot of fun in this chapter with with words, and one of them is with phrase we'll call objective reality. Well, is there any such thing as objective reality? You know, we tend to equate it with with the materialist view of reality, that it's it's all just matter, which is itself strange, because the physical world is more than just matter.
(0:52:26)
It's matter, energy, space, time, but the whole materialist framework tends to focus on matter, right? As if all of matter were solid, you know? Yeah. You know, we forget about liquids and gases, right? So psychologically, we are focused on the most, you know, on the most dead aspect of reality, you might say.
(0:52:50)
The least energetic aspect of reality, which is, we would say, solid matter. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, please. Well, it just kind of reminded me of a book that Joseph Chilton Pierce had written some decades ago, The Crack in the Cosmic Age, and a lot of the lot of the language, a lot of the things he was writing about was the language barrier, you know, and how we're often short circuiting our abilities with all the roof brain shatter, you know, going on, as he called it.
(0:53:24)
And he discussed about Aboriginal cultures and children and, you know, how children are actually, you know, often very psychic, but we condition their abilities out of them. I remember John Neal even kind of touching upon that, you know, with like, how many of these various cases of Virgin Mary apparitional appearances and how children were involved in so many of them.
(0:53:56)
And, you know, there, he felt children were often more attuned to psychic things, but it's conditioned out of us as we get older.
(0:54:03)
Yeah, some of that is kind of natural. If you follow the best studies in reincarnation memory, we find that most past lives are remembered by children, usually under the age of seven, and they start when they're very young. And then by the age of six or seven, when the mental faculties begin to develop, the memories tend to subside.
So, that's, you know, that's a, you know, a problem, a problem we face, particularly with kids when we fail to recognize what they're reporting.
(0:54:46)
And what does that, what does that do to them emotionally as they're growing up to not have their experiences validated?
You know, the case, the reincarnation case that I mentioned in my book of James Leininger, which I'm sure you're familiar with, this is one of the most well-researched cases, modern cases of reincarnation. This young boy was born in northern California. His parents moved to the southern states for work.
(0:55:24)
Before he could speak, he was having nightmares and drew pictures of air battles. And long story short, it turns out that he remembered his death as an American fighter pilot in the Second World War, who was shot down in the Sea of Japan near Iwo Jima. And once he could talk, his father took him to an air museum, and young James was able to identify a particular airplane, the Corsair, the American fighter plane, and told, described to his father the features and shortcomings of this particular plane, claimed to have flown one, and so on and so on.
(0:56:11)
So his parents began to do some research in the online military databases and found that James really knew what he was talking about. James remembered the name of a ship, an aircraft carrier. He said Natoma. So his dad went online, looked at the Navy database, and discovered there was an aircraft carrier named Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Sea of Japan at that time.
(0:56:40)
Long story short, they tracked down a surviving member of his squadron who had witnessed James, the first James, also named James, being shot down.
They took James to a reunion of surviving crew members from that aircraft carrier, and James recognized many of them, one of them by his voice alone.
Wow. And he remarked that he felt sad because everyone looked so old.
They also tracked down, they were able to track down the sister of the original James, the pilot, who confirmed everything that young James was saying about his family.
(0:57:29)
So many details about the family. So this was very well researched. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia Medical School did a whole major research project on this and wrote up a paper. It's footnoted in my book. And it pretty much nails the whole question of reincarnation. And it's amazing that we've overlooked this. Now Ian Stevenson, who's also connected, had been connected during his lifetime with the University of Virginia, investigated hundreds and hundreds of reports of reincarnation, many of them in the East, in India, where these things are accepted. And it's obviously easier to do research in that culture.
(0:58:19)
And some people dismiss it. Well, yeah, of course, these people believe in such a thing.
(0:58:24)
But his research was really quite impeccable and thorough. So, you know, skeptics love to dismiss things on the basis of generalizations without actually investigating them. But that's not science. So there's been some remarkable science applied in this field, if you know where to look.
And my book describes a number of these fields, one of which is instrumental transcommunication, communication from the other side through electronics, which has been going on since, as far as we know, since the 1950s. When in the 50s, that's when tape recorders first became consumer items.
(0:59:16)
And occasionally, people would hear voices on their recorded tapes that shouldn't be there. And initially, these things were dismissed as well, maybe the machines picking up a radio station, that sort of thing did happen from time to time. And in the United States, these things were pretty much dismissed in that way. But in Europe, a number of researchers and even physicists got involved in this, in this research, and did some amazing work.
(0:59:40)
Friedrich Jorgensen, a Swedish artist and filmmaker and well known in his time, he was actually, he discovered this phenomenon on his own. He was out one night with his tape recorder recording nocturnal bird sounds for a documentary.
And when he played back the tape, in the spaces between the bird sounds, he heard faint voices discussing nocturnal bird sounds.
This is quite a coincidence, you know.
(1:00:17)
And then not long after that, he heard the voice of his deceased mother calling him by his childhood nickname, Friedel. So this, you know, at that point, he sort of threw up his hands and said, hey, we need to investigate scientifically.
So by the time he passed away, he had recorded many, many hundreds of these voices. His work was followed by that of Konstantin Radov, a Latvian researcher.
(1:00:42)
When he died in 1974, he had recorded between 60,000 and 70,000 of these voices. He actually put out a phonograph record with quite a number of these voices answering his, responding to his questions.
And then Radov and Jurgensen themselves began appearing as guests in their colleagues' experiments of communication from the other side. And this is all documented in my film Calling Earth. You know, the film could have run five hours with all the material we had, but we cut it off at an hour and a half.
(1:01:25)
But, you know, all of these experiences really point in the same direction. And to me, the bottom line, the bottom line question is, what's the veil?
We speak about, you know, the veil between this life and the afterlife. Well, in my opinion, the veil is our physical senses, which are just tuned to a very narrow slice of reality.
(1:01:52)
You know, we know that our eyes can only register certain frequencies of light. Our ears can only register certain frequencies of sound.
You know, our physical touch can only register, you know, a very limited number of phenomena.
So, and, you know, surely the, you know, scientific instrumentation that we've developed over the centuries has enabled us to, you know, to see beyond the narrow window of our senses.
(1:02:22)
It hasn't broadened our senses, but it's given us an important message, which is that what we think we know is, excuse me, is not all there is to know.
(1:02:32)
And that, you know, people ask, well, where is the other side? Where is the greater reality? Is it off in some heaven somewhere? Well, when I address that question, I ask, you know, where's Channel 4? Or Channel 5. We swim in this sea of electromagnetic transmissions, you know, wireless communications, radio, television, and yet they don't exist to our senses. They don't exist unless we have something that can resonate with them.
(1:03:09)
And I think that when we do communicate with the other side, as it were, what's happening is our consciousness is kind of releasing its grip and opening itself up to a wider range of, being able to tune into a wider range of frequencies. You're probably familiar with the classic problem in philosophy of monism versus dualism. You know, is mind and matter the same thing? Are they two completely separate phenomena? Well, this view kind of resolves that question.
(1:03:56)
It's no longer either or. You know, matter may well be just a lower frequency manifestation of mind. You know, this is what philosophers call downward causation.
And it's confused with kind of crude creationism or biblical creationism. It's not quite that.
It's the idea that consciousness at large is creative, and it can produce any number of levels of reality, including our own physical plane.
(1:04:25)
Materialistic science believes in upward causation. It believes that little particles, that the smaller the particles you find, the closer you are to reality.
So somehow these little particles, which aren't made of anything at all but energy, somehow they are responsible for this grandly creative act that we call the universe and everything in it.
(1:04:57)
And that presupposes that the smaller, you know, that the detail is responsible for the whole thing. And that's kind of like expecting, you know, believing that if you put enough bricks together, the bricks can design a beautiful and structurally sophisticated building.
Well, it doesn't work that way, you know. Bricks don't have that inherent quality of intelligence, creativity, and all that.
(1:05:22)
And it's, in my opinion, it's the same with particles, you know, that huge investments are being made in trying to smash the smallest particles into smaller particles to find out what they're made of.
And it reminds me of a funny poem, which I cite in my book. And that is, big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
(1:05:56)
Amen. So where do you stop? You know, where do you find, you know, God in the particle? I don't know. It's not my pursuit. But a lot of physicists seem to look in that direction. I don't think it works that way.
Yeah. What makes sense to you in all this?
You know, I know that, you know, I look at kind of like what people are saying, quantum physics, non-local reality, you know, the two photon particles, they can be wave or they can be a particle, you know, depending on how they're observed and how once they're, two of them can be like, united, despite the distance, supposedly, you know? I mean... It's a step in the right direction, I think. It breaks down the materialist paradigm.
(1:06:50)
Yeah, it shows that there's something real wonky about it. If we go by the normal scientific paradigm, you know, really high-strange. And again, as you pointed out, high-strange may be actually normal. We're just not looking at that way. But anyway... Isn't life itself, you know, if you believe that physical reality is totally mechanistic, which is the current paradigm, how do you account for, you know, novelty and imagination and so on, except by saying, well, it's all an accident?
(1:07:30)
And, you know, all these things that we see in nature that interact, the systems interact with one another. And these accounts of, like, a pet that gets lost in a vacation, but it travels 100 miles, 200 miles to get back to its owner. How did it do that, you know?
(1:07:54)
Well, yeah. It's, you know, how do birds migrate?
Yeah. Well, it's been discovered that they can, you know, they have magnetic materials in their brains so that they can orient to the Earth's magnetic field, but you can't navigate on a compass alone. You also need a map.
Yeah. I mean, they can be, they can actually be navigating over terrain they've never actually been to in order to get back to where they're, you know, the ones before them went.
(1:08:25)
Yep. It's a lot to think about, which most people just kind of, too much for them to think about.
But it's an area that we need to think about. And I find it fascinating. But, you know, it's, there's a lot of people that want to just push it aside. And I had a young man, teenager, recently tell me that, Brad, they've proven that ghosts don't exist. I said, who proved it?
(1:08:55)
There you go, listening to, you know, what someone else said instead of deciding on your own.
But anyway.
Yeah, I think I read something like that. And I don't know, are you familiar with the website, skepticalaboutskeptics.org?
No, no.
Check it out. I think, I think you'll love it. I have one of my old essays is on there. It's called Zen and the Art of Debunkery. And it's, it's, it's sort of a how to guide for the, for the irrational skeptic. And it's, I had a lot of fun writing that.
(1:09:35)
This will be, listeners will also be checking that out. And as well as your book and the videos, the documentaries. Well, I know I've taken up over an hour of your time here. And I really, it's good to talk with you finally face to face here. And, you know, review some of these ideas and these stories. And that's quite compelling.
And I haven't read your book, but I'm going to, I've got to dig in.
(1:10:08)
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, let me know. And, you know, maybe we're going to have another conversation sometime.
Okay. I appreciate that. Sounds great. I'll do a review and my little book review section I have each month. So, so anyway, well, thank you very much. And as they, they say on, I want to take care of this today on Ghost Hunters at the end of each episode on to the next.
(1:10:41)
Okay. Take good care of Brett. Okay. You too, Dan. I appreciate it. Bye-bye.
(1:10:41)