Radio Misterioso

There is no doubt that more than ever, the study of UFOs and related phenomena is in need of definitive change. I had a roundtable discussion with Nick Redfern, Peter Robbins and Richard Dolan about what forms that might take. As many know, the so-called “Roswell Slides” and the fallout from that episode reminded some that eagerness and the will to believe should never trump even a normal amount of research. Nick criticized the method of release of the slides as clumsy and secretive. Richard maintained that the information was controlled by Adam Dew, the producer who located the slides, and not the researchers. I brought up the subject of egos, media, and the rush to be first with information and how that should change. Peter suggested that UFO study should be an academic pursuit with the same checks and balances inherent. He uses his own conscience as a guide. Rich talked about peer review, of which he is skeptical because of the lack of standards in the field to begin with. Nick said that we can’t peer review a phenomenon that many people can’t even agree exists. Nick went on to talk about peer pressure and how it shouldn’t affect UFO study. How do we get rid of UFO=ET? It’s one of many theories, but always takes center stage. Richard acknowledged that no one theory accounts for all the data. Nick and I argue that other theories (such as those incorporating interdimensional and psychological approaches) should get more time. Is the emphasis on degreed professionals needed? Peter offered that it is, but they also need backing for their work, but agreed with Nick and I that we don’t need to require people to be officially trained professionals to do good work. Nick wants to see more alternate viewpoints represented in conferences, such as psychedelic drug studies and occult issues. He also mentioned that almost all researchers have had other weirdness and synchronicities enter their lives. Richard mentioned Mike Clelland and his alternate views on the abduction phenomenon and his upcoming book. He also pointed out that we come from a materialistic culture and that determines the direction of research and agreed that it should and will change. How do we categorize witness testimony? The instrument (humans) which we use to record and report things is fallible, and some of the answers are encoded in the questions. Rich called this a “psychological approach.” My point was that everything with UFO witness testimony is “psychological.” Mundane things like direction and speed may not be, but Nick and I were concerned with UFO reports, how they are gathered, and what categories they are placed in. Nick brought up the fact that people see what they expect to see in different eras, which suggests a phenomenon that adjusts it appearance as some sort of control system. The take away from this show is something like this: People who have integrity will continue to contribute, we should ignore or refute bad research and thinking and any new techniques/ theories will come from outside the establishment. Get to work. Show suggested by Michael Reynolds and Radio Misterioso listeners.

Joe Berardi and I have been trying to set up this interview for a few years. The reason I wanted to have him on the show is that he has been the drummer on some of my favorite music ever since he was a member The Fibonaccis, who were active in the 1980s in Los Angeles and remain my favorite band. Soon after that, he was working with former Wall Of Voodoo frontman Stan Ridgway. Along with vocalist/ musician Kira Vollman, he has also been half of the avant-garde duo Non Credo for over 20 years, and finally, he holds down the percussive duties for the uncategorizable sonic party that is Double Naught Spy Car. We talked music, influences, highs and lows throughout his career, and the time the Fibonaccis had a rain of gym socks thrown at them onstage. We forgot to play “Second Coming,” the Radio Misterioso favorite by the Fibs with lyrics about “swamp gas saucers,” so I added it at the end.

“Smiles” has been a close friend for many years. We met during the ‘zine “revolution” of the 1990s and have been encouraging each other in our pursuits for about 20 years now. Miles helped Radio Misterioso in the early days by maintaining and providing a home for the show at his Anomaly Radio network. His Anomaly Archives has recently been the recipient of a large collection of books and other ephemera from the collection of the late Bob Girard, who owned the mail order book giant Arcturus Books. We talked about the legacy and relatively little-known interests of Girard, which varied from UFOs to the paranormal and esoteric religions. Miles was also a member of the Roswell Slides Research Group which discovered the real source of the image that was claimed to be an alien. We talked about what we have we learned from this episode. That led to a discussion of UFO percipients and what the phenomenon may be doing to us. Does this mean we should “reboot” UFO research? Miles suggests that we should make information more open source so that all may participate Miles also discussed the effects of non-human and non-local consciousness on paranormal witnesses. We reminisced a bit about our history together and our early forays into study of the strange with a group we formed in the 1990s, called the “Texufonia Illuminaughty” comprised of zinesters, writers and artists from Texas and California, hence the name. Later, we talked about a study of African-American abductees and Adam Gorightly messaged in to tell us that Jim Moseley had a black girlfriend in the 1960s. We ended with a short discussion of our hopes for future of UFO study.

On Friday May 29th, I received a text message from Bruce Duensing that said “I am in the hospital with crappy WiFi…open heart surgery on Monday.” His daughter posted on his FB page that he passed away on the morning of June 4th, presumably from complications. This was a shock to my guests “Red Pill Junkie” and “Burnt State” (aka Robert) and to me of course. We were just beginning to communicate on a deeper level with Bruce, sending messages and posts to each other about ideas we had either never thought of or hadn’t developed fully. We got together on the night of June 6th to talk about Bruce Duensing’s ideas and what little we know of his personal life from videos he posted online. His basic philosophy is the idea that we are not equipped to deal with the paranormal on its own terms, since our perceptions have so many filters before they reach conscious and cultural awareness. The show centered on many concepts: – You can’t study Ufology with Ufology. UFO study hasn’t kept up with the latest science. – Energy and information are the same. – How does the observer effect change what we are thinking about with UFO witnesses? – Strong emotion inhibits randomness and entropy. – UFO waves seemingly follow worldwide emotional events. – Abnormal mental states and shamanism as windows to understanding of the unknown. – Set and setting as factors in paranormal encounters. The program opens with a pulled quote from the RM interview of February 1st, and ends with a segment of Bruce from one of his online videos that were located by Robert. Illustrations of Bruce Duensing’s ideas courtesy of the talented RPJ. The Cafe Tacuba song at the end of the program is Olita Del Atlamar (Little Wave Of The High Seas.)

Gorightly was is town for a couple of days and I couldn’t get in the house because it was full of posion gas, so I invited him for a friendly chat on the show. We have known each other for about 20 years and it shows in the almost (or actually) annoyingly informal nature of this show. Adam had the great idea right off to use the inevitable sirens that come by the studio as the basis of a listener contest, which of course turned out to be A HUGE FAILURE BECAUSE THERE WERE NO SIRENS THIS TIME. So it was changed to a song guessing contest. Informal! Since Adam’s latest is entitled Historia Discordia, we talked about the connections between Discordianism founder Kerry Thornley and former New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison. At one point Garrison believed that the Discordian religion was a CIA front. We then read Thornley’s “Epistle To The Paranoids,” which makes vicious fun of paranoids. Many years later, Thornley became one himself. Beware. We also spoke on the 1990s ‘zine revolution and how we met through that, and how it allowed us to interview the famous “Unicorn Killer” Ira Einhorn in the pages of my old magazine. We went on to talk about the “Varo Edition” of the 1955 book The Case For The UFO by Morris K. Jessup. I also found out from Adam that Jack Parsons’ wife Marjorie Cameron lived a few miles from the Integratron and knew famous UFO contactee George Van Tassel. We  played some Frankie Laine songs and announced the winner of the song-naming contest before escaping. Above: Gorightly with Robert Anton Wilson. Photo credit: Greg Bishop

Taking a break with no scheduled guests, a listener from New York nicknamed “Farusha” answered my call for calls. We quickly dove in to a 45 minute discussion about inflexible opinions, her experience with Russell Targ and his remote viewing class, and her own experiences with non-human consciousness. This was all sandwiched between two thick pieces of wacky music tracks. Nice interlude before getting back into it again.

(Note: This interview, recorded on May 10, 2015, was the first and exclusive talk with some of the group who deciphered the placard writing in the so-called “Roswell slides.”) The week of May 4, 2015 was perhaps a watershed time for the UFO research world. Images found on old slide film were claimed to be connected to the Roswell Incident and showed what the promoters and researchers they represented said were the dried body of an alien being. Experts were consulted and concluded that the body shown on the slides was not human. After two years of changing stories and claims by the “Roswell Dream Team” researchers, Mexican TV journalist Jaime Maussan announced that the slides would be revealed to the world in a highly-anticipated presentation in Mexico City on May 5th. Tickets were sold for the show and live streaming was offered for a fee of about $20. Our guest “Red Pill Junkie” actually attended and on this show he describes what transpired. Three days after the public reveal of the images, a group of researchers announced that they had solved the mystery and that the slides were pictures of the mummy of a two-year-old child found in the Southwestern US in the early 20th century. The vast majority of those who were interested in the mystery of the “Roswell Slides” now agree that their conclusions are correct. In an exclusive interview, my guests Curt Collins, Paul Kimball, and Lance Moody described the events and cooperation that led to this revelation. The “Roswell Slides Research Group” (RSRG) used freely available image-enhancing software to decode a blurred placard that was visible in one of the images. They also produced a video showing how anyone with a computer can reproduce identical results. TV producer and slide promoter Adam Dew currently maintains that the image was either tampered with by RSRG, or was not processed properly. While I do not agree with all of my guests’ opinions, it is important to note that a wide variety of viewpoints exist in the RSRG as well, ranging from the strict skepticism of Lance Moody to respected UFO researchers such as Chris Rutkowski, and my friend S Miles Lewis, whom almost no one would categorize as a “UFO skeptics.” The important thing is that they all agreed on this issue. I will mention that the opinions expressed on the show are not necessarily those of myself or the killradio collective.

The title refers to the fact that as of the date of recording, it has been ten years since the  first episode of  Tim’s legendary show Binnall of America. For this go-around we again started out with a little “shop talk” about what we do to produce our respective shows, how we conduct interviews, and who were the most influential and conversely, worst guests Tim has had. He also recalled one of his favorite interviews which was about the Dyatlov Pass Incident in which nine hikers were found dead under apparently mysterious (and very creepy) circumstances. We talked about how large UFO groups (specifically MUFON) should rebrand themselves to guard against irrelevancy and bemoaned the prevalence of stupidity and non-critical thinking in general and on the internet in particular. Favorite TV shows were discussed as well as the good and bad stars of the remote viewing world. We ended up half-jokingly calling for  UFO conference of our own, to be held during the eclipse of 2017. Photo above was taken by Tim while he was actually on the program.

The blogger known as EsoterX (aka Aaron Dabbah) is a rarity. He looks at the world of the anomalous, and instead of asking “Who?” or “How?” he asks “Why?” Trained as an archaeologist and information specialist, he turns his intelligent eye on such conundrums as “Fairy Fishing,” disappearing islands, and why unicorns are jerks. Aaron asserts that anomalies are not so implausible if you are willing to suspend your disbelief. We started with his premise that the search for the meaning of the anomalous is the important part of the equation and our reaction to weirdness is more important than the actual weirdness itself. Moving through subjects at a leisurely pace, we also discussed the strangest of strange stories, such as an account that Charles Fort repeated about a cat who appeared before a crowd and asked “Hot enough for you?” before disappearing in a puff of smoke. We also dealt with the decline of quality humor and satire before he concluded that “Looking for respectability [as a researcher] is a losing game because you’re playing by rules that don’t apply to what you’re looking at.” Many words and ideas to live by in this episode. He will be back.

“Burnt State”‘s own artwork provided for our Easter day interview “Burnt State” (or simply “Robert”) is the online alias of a man who has looked deeply into our relationship to the paranormal. After my last appearance on the Paracast, I noticed his comments in their forums and asked him if he would consent to an interview on RM. Robert is interested in the way that we use storytelling to make sense of the world; particularly the stranger parts. Any witness to something that shouldn’t be has to find a way to make sense of it and in many cases communicate the experience to others. In this  insidious way, weirdness remains locked in a context that we have created. We started out with Robert’s own dramatic UFO sighting from childhood and how it still affects him. He made the case that trauma can be experienced as abuse, violence, or just something that doesn’t make rational sense. Our brains either cover it up or make sense of it with a story that we can handle. We discussed the problem of schizophrenics and how simple talking therapy may help them and others with buried issues. Robert is a high school teacher and he described the pressures that children and teenagers are subjected to in an age of almost total digital sitmuli and aggressive marketing. He has some novel ways of making his students aware of this and taking back their individuality. He also had an amazing story about his Ouija board experiments. There is just a sample of our wide-ranging conversation, so I’ll shut up now and let you listen. P.S. The audio of UFO witness testimony discussed during the show is available here, track 15. See also the story of “Conjuring Up Philip,” mentioned during our talk.

The most important connection we have to examining the paranormal are the witnesses. For too long, researchers have concentrated on how testimony can fit in to preconceived notions of anomalous abduction episodes, psychic occurrences, and ghost sightings. Fields of inquiry are neatly divided into UFOs, cryptozoology, paraspychology, and ghost hunting. The aim of  Project Core is to do away with strict categorization and let witnesses tell their stories without filtering. People who experience apparent entity visitations often report psychic episodes, strange animals, poltergeist phenomena and many other weird events, and the project’s anonymous online reporting format allowed participants to report their experiences without fear of ridicule or censure. Three of the directors of Project Core are credentialed scientists with doctorates in their fields. Jeremy Vaeni and Jeff Ritzmann both have a history of extraordinary paranormal encounters and Dr. Tyler Kokjohn is a biochemist with a keen interest in these areas not normally examined by science. They joined me for a discussion of what was found, and what it might mean for our understanding of these seemingly disparate subjects. This may be one of the first glimpses of future paranormal research. Jeremy made a music request for “Stay Hungry” by Twisted Sister, so that’s at the end!

Mike is the author of the touchstone book about a forgotten side of Golden State history, Mysterious California. Published in 1988, it predated the “weird” travel book craze by almost 20 years, and started me on a path to meet him in 2006 when we were co-authors of Weird California. He has been studying the history of non-scheduled religious movements and groups in our home state for more than 20 years, and now chronicles these strange groups and people at Califia’s Children. We discussed what makes a “cult.” While he is careful to label only the most dangerous groups with that name, Mike pointed out that all religions start out as a cult. People join mainly for a sense of belonging –  to be part of a “tribe.”  Many of the groups minister to the rejected and the marginalized, and not all have negative effects on the members. We talked about the strange connection that the Santa Susanna Pass area has in the lore of  the Los Angeles area. Krishna Venta, a former convict turned religious prophet whose story bears eerie similarities to Charles Manson, settled there in 1948. He was dead by 1958, killed by suicide bombings by two disgruntled members. We embarked on an extensive discussion of occultist Manly Palmer Hall and his influence on Los Angeles history and society. We also discussed the notorious Children Of God group and their sexualization of Christianity. Mike gave a unique perspective on Scientology’s concentration on Los Angeles and the power of celebrity endorsement. Near the end of the program, we mentioned the bizarre Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe, which at its peak had perhaps 4 acolytes.

Bruce Duensing has been writing about UFOs and anomalies for many years now. His old blog, Intangible Materiality, was decommissioned, but A Transit Of Contingencies carries on his explorations into the nature of time, memory, cognition, and language as they relate to our relationship with the anomalous. If the study of UFOs is to continue, and we don’t want to run the same scripts forever, we need to take a look at the instrument (our minds and the way we experience things) that is gathering and interpreting the data. In a completely informal conversation, we discussed the problem of identifying something of unknown origin for which all of our frames of reference are from ourselves and our culture. Duensing asked how we might escape the trap of our senses, memories, and subconscious filtering, and suggested some solutions. He also lamented the fact that most people prefer simple and uncomplicated explanations. He introduced the concept that fear may be a sort of “carrier wave” for experiencing the unknown, both from our perspective and perhaps more importantly, from the view of any non-human intelligence behind it. We discussed what we might ask an “alien” if given a chance. “I’d ask it what it thought I was,” he said, which might give us a perspective from outside of human experience. I thought that I might instead tell the entity that I didn’t believe in it and see what happened. During the interview, Bruce said “There is a lot of unspoken nihilism going around UFO research” which is something I want to put on a T-shirt! I gained much hope and perspective during this 2-hour talk, and would be quite interested to see the comments.

The Zorgy awards are solely curated, voted upon, tallied and announced by Paul Kimball, and what he says is an alien explorer but looks like a fat, fuzzy stuffed duck. It’s basically an excuse to go over the previous year in the UFO biz. Here’s a full list. Our buddy, author, author, and history professor Aaron Gulyas joined us with his incisive commentary and supplied many good laughs and bon mots. After a short discussion about how we shouldn’t be afraid of criticism, first up for examination is the recent “disclosure tweetstorm” which attempted to bludgeon the US Government into submission with requests for UFO info. We covered Best Paranormal Facebook group, Best Paranormal News Site, and then a little on the death of print magazines. We also reserved some criticism for the Hangar 1 TV show. We continued with Lamest Paranormal Story of the Year and Biggest Paranormal Moron, and finished up with the Best Paranormal Researcher. At the end, Paul listed off new inductees to his halls of Shame and Fame. Let the discussion begin. P.S. Radio Misterioso won for best Podcast. Thanks Paul and Admiral Zorgrot!

After a long absence, the legendary Mr. Fab returns to educate us on the best of the worst. Music, that is. Mr. Fab is the meister of the long-running blog, Music For Maniacs – a site from which I steal much material for my music shows. Better to get it straight from the source. The evening featured a few space and UFO songs, and even Frank Sinatra Jr’s version of the Gumby theme. Gaze upon this mighty playlist and despair/ enjoy! Jean And the Esquires – Space Race Travis Wammack –  There’s a UFO Up There Monte Johnson – Flying Saucers In The Air Billy Vaughn & Orch – Telstar The Chaperones – Man From The Moon Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra – Where Can He Dood It? The Noctures – 3rd Star to the Left Iggy Pop – Monster Men Moog Cookbook – Hotel California Marlin Wallace – That Flyin’ Saucer Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra – Frankenstein’s Laundromat The Tiger Lillies – Snip Snip Michael Douglas & William Shatner – Keep It Gay Twink – Breakfast Machine Survival Bomb Shelter Ad Fritz Guggenheimer and his Sauerkraut Band – Stars and Stripes Forever Marlin Wallace – Millipede Little Bang Theory – Garden Party Rich Little – Real Live Girl Frank Sinatra Jr. – Gumby 7 Singing Sisters – William Tell Overture Jack Hodges – Everything Is Fresh Today Homer Henderson and The Dalworthington Garden Boys – Lee Harvey Was A Friend Of Mine Spike Jones – Ah 1 Ah 2 Ah Sunset Strip Blarney Stein (Evolution Control Committee) – 1999 Spike Jones – The Wonderful World Of Hari Kari Ronald Vaughn – Jennifer Love Hewitt Senator Sam Earvin Jr. – Bridge Over Troubled Water E-Cousins – Elvis On Terrorism George Formby – When I’m Cleaning Windows Peter Pringle – Indian Love Call