All About the Woo

In the aftermath of the latest government UFO file release, Bryce and Brent decide to zig while everyone else is zagging. Rather than parsing another slow-drip document dump, they ask what may be waiting beyond the photos, videos, craft, crash retrievals, propulsion theories, and “show me the saucers” frustration. This episode turns from the nuts-and-bolts case for UFO reality toward the stranger territory of the woo factor — the part of the phenomenon that includes telepathy, synchronicity, remote viewing, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, orbs, time slips, prophetic dreams, poltergeists, cryptids, hitchhiker effects, and the unsettling possibility that the phenomenon may respond when we pay attention to it. 

Using H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallée, John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, Skinwalker Ranch, and a shelf full of deeply weird movies as portals, Bryce and Brent explore whether aliens, the paranormal, and the afterlife may not be separate mysteries at all. Brent lays out his theory that consciousness, energy, sound, light, and frequency may be the connective tissue between them, while Bryce recalls his own eerie Mothman Prophecies encounter in an Agoura Hills parking lot, when a menacing stranger in a long black duster walked past him and his young son carrying the exact obscure book Brent had just urged him to read.

Then the episode goes intensely personal. Brent describes a lifetime of impossible-to-file experiences, including witnessing six strangers die violently in front of him, a death outside the Dark Skies production offices that seemed to involve a soul or life-force passing through him, and a terrifying daylight bedroom attack by an Old Hag/Witch Rider entity that he insists was not sleep paralysis. Bryce adds his own uncanny “power of three” story from writing A.D. After Disclosure with Richard Dolan, before the conversation widens to Twin Peaks, Phenomenon, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Annihilation, Solaris, Coherence, The Nines, and A Ghost Story. The result is one of the show’s strangest and most revealing hours: an argument that the UFO mystery may not only be about what flies above us, but what looks back through consciousness itself.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, please note that this episode contains discussions
of suicide, mental health struggles, and related topics that some
listeners may find distressing. Listener discretion is advised. If you
or someone you know is struggling, help is available. You
can call or text nine eight eight to reach the
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for free. Brett I didn't actually

(00:24):
see the Friday document video photo dump coming from the
Trump disclosure movement or whatever. I didn't see that coming
until it was almost upon me.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
How about yourself.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm actually more intrigued by two specific reactions. One was
from one of our congress people who said, Yeah, this
initial stuff is not that exciting, but there's some big,
holy crap revelations that are coming down the pipeline. And
I'm thinking, what a strange thing to say, Yeah, forget
about the stuff that you're getting on Friday, there's other

(00:57):
stuff down the road. What is he talking about and
why would he put it in that context?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
That's number one. Number two.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
If you remember, earlier in the week before the dump,
there was this story about again some congress people giving
a private briefing to a bunch of pastors, getting them
ready for the revelations that were coming down the pike,
and it provoked a bunch of content on the internet
about pastors coming out and saying that they were scared
about what was coming but wanted to be prepared and

(01:24):
prepare their flock. And I thought, wow, whatever is that
holy crap revelation that's coming on the pipeline. Somebody felt
it was important to go to a bunch of pastors
and give them a heads up. So this first dump
of documents not that exciting. Like you said, we've seen
and heard a lot about it, but what's to come,
I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
We'll see, And of course people are talking about the
fact that these will be coming out regularly. Listen to
my friends who don't know a lot about this. I
wouldn't want to put down what has happened. It may
not be full of the greatest content that you've ever
seen on this topic, but at least there's a process
underway that hasn't quite ever been in existence like this.

(02:05):
So that's somewhat hopeful, and I do enjoy that. But
my emotional reaction to it, with this thirty years that
I have and you have on this topic, is really
I mean, okay, I am one hundred percent sure, one
hundred percent sure that the US government and probably governments
around the world have HD quality video and HD quality photos,

(02:30):
and they have all the supporting data that supports those
videos as being real, and that some of those things
would be just shocking as hell to see, For example,
an anomalous craft inn HD quality that clearly doesn't look
like anything that you've ever seen before and is just
feed away from an F eighteen aircraft or something.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Don't you feel though that this is just more slow drip, right?
We've been in this slow drip mode for deck aids Now,
and now that we're actually into disclosure, it's just more
slow drip. When we talked about this episode, we said,
let's zig where everyone else is zagging this right, And
I think that going back to that quote about there's
holy crap stuff coming, what I believe is coming is

(03:15):
going to be the more unsettling aspects of disclosure, and
I think we're going to go deep into the phenomenon.
So I think this episode for us is a chance
to look ahead at to some of the things that
we think may be coming down the pipeline.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
I just want to reiterate what you just said or
underline it, because the truth of the matter is, there
are hundreds of UFO podcasts out there and they're all
over this topic. And the one thing that has differentiated Sound,
Light and Frequency is that we have a different lens
that we look at this thing through, which has been
film and TV. So when you say zig when everyone

(03:49):
else is zagging, I'm all in favor of that. But
and this is where we land today for this episode. Brent,
there are some cases where the deeper you go into
the literature, the more that cases and the personal testimony
pile up. And you and I have had some cases
like this that the more the phenomenon refuses to stay
in the box, and that's where the WU factor begins.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
I'm Brent Friedman. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?

Speaker 1 (04:36):
I'm Bryce Sable. You're listening to Sound, Light and Frequency.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Today we're going to venture off the beaten path and
wide headlong into the phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
It's called WU. Researchers often don't like to talk about it,
but we do. Okay, Well, first, we've got to define
our terms when we talk about WU in terms of eufology,

(05:07):
That often refers to these strange mystical, parapsychological, spiritual, occult, symbolic,
and consciousness based aspects of this UFO UAP mystery. And
so it includes all kinds of things that aren't flying
around in our skies looking like metal objects, such as
telepathy and synchronicity and remote viewing, out of body experiences,

(05:33):
apparitions orbs, time slips, prophetic dreams, poltergeist coincidences, cryptid encounters,
Hitchiker effects. We could go on and on, but all
the stuff that doesn't fit in that neat category. And
what's so interesting about what we're going to talk about
today is we've had some experiences. You've had a couple

(05:53):
of barn Burner experiences that we're going to get into.
But there's also some movies that are all about WU.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
My favorite movies actually to jump on what you were
just talking about, I have my own personal theory about
the WOO and it goes like this. Most people look
at three big categories. You've got aliens, UFOs, you've got
the paranormal, and you've got the afterlife, and those are
all three different areas of interest and research and their

(06:21):
different genres.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
In movies and in books.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
And my contention is, having experienced a little bit of
all of that, is that it's all part of the
same thing, and it's all The continuity is both kind
of consciousness, which is what we bring to the table,
and the fact that, as our friend JC said, the
universe runs on sound, light and frequency. It's about energy.
We are energy beings. I've experienced that firsthand, and we

(06:49):
experience the world through our consciousness. And that means that
I don't believe there are discrete lines between aliens, ufo
paranormal and the afterlife, and so some of that is
it's hard to imagine, it's hard to explain, and I
know that there's people in each camp that would prefer
to be siloed. But I think we're talking about some

(07:09):
version of quantum entanglement. As you said, you read off
all of these things that are part of the phenomenon,
and people call it the WU factor, which is oftentimes
I've heard it used in a derogatory sense. Oh well,
that's just the WU factor, right, that's just weirdness and craziness,
high strangeness, as if to dismiss it and say this
is that doesn't that's not real.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
It is real, and I agree totally about how people
have been concerned about it for many, many years. There
was a sense like even my old friend Stanton Friedman, right,
he was all about the nuts and bolts because he
felt that if he started talking about that kind of
stuff that we're going to be talking about here, that
people would.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Tune him out.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
I remember talking to a fellow ufologist who believe strongly
in these various paranormal WU things and said, yeah, but
if I start talking about that, then I won't be
taken credibly about this other stuff. So I guess what
I'm saying, and you're saying, is well, screw that. You know,
facts are facts. The fact is there is something going

(08:14):
on that isn't just nuts and bolts. Sometimes it is
nuts and bolts, or it looks like it's nuts and bolts,
and sometimes it's not. And then the other thing that
is clear too, and this has been reported for a
long time. Why do UFOs or flying saucagers in the
fifties look one way and now they look another way now?
And why did they look like airships in the eighteen nineties,

(08:37):
And why are people being abducted now but hundreds of
years ago they were abducted by fairies. Were these people
crazy or were they describing the same thing only with
different words.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, just to be clear, were they describing what they
understood culturally at that time, what their filter of consciousness
would allow them to believe. Right, So, if you were
having an experience in eighteen forty, you weren't thinking about spaceships.
You weren't even thinking about airships. You were thinking about

(09:10):
something that felt more supernatural, probably because that was what
the cultural reference point was at the time. So again,
I don't know that it is the full explanation, but
I think it is definitely part of the equation.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
I guess you could look at it this way. The
costumes change, but the structure of the encounter means SIMI
well said. So, for example, a lot of what happens
in these kind of WU effect things are there's a
rupture in ordinary reality to see a craft in the air.
But we see craft in the air, we see airplanes,
and now we see missiles and we see other things.

(09:43):
So to see what is a UFO that's going faster
than our stuff is really isn't rupturing reality. It's just like, oh,
I wonder if they're from another planet. But there's a
lot of other things that go with this distorted time,
some kind of message that goes with it, beings that
appear human or almost human, all of that stuff, strange
coincidences before or after the encounter. And I want to

(10:05):
get to some of the film and TV versions of
it because it's fascinating. But let's do a quick jump
through time on this thing, and let's go all the
way back to our man, HP Lovecraft, who When I
first met you, you were talking about HP Lovecraft, and honestly,
I didn't know that much about him. I know a
lot more now because of our association, but I would

(10:26):
be wrong to try to explain who he is when
you're on the show, so please take it away.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
So HP Lovecraft is one of my personal favorite authors.
He wrote in twenties and thirties and maybe the forties,
but early twentieth century. He wrote science fiction, but more
from a science fiction horror, like a fantastic point of view.
And his worldview was there are things around us at
all times, and we can't see them, and when we

(10:53):
do see them, it will be so mind blowing that
we will probably go crazy. That was the through line
of many of his stories is people would see unspeakable,
unnameable things in ancient entities that were all around us,
and they would end up in a psychiatric hospital. And
in fact, I adapted a HP Lovecraft story called The

(11:14):
Case of Charles dexter Ward, which was one of the
few novels he wrote. He wrote mostly short stories. It
became a movie called The Resurrected that was directed by
Dan O'Bannon, who was the writer of Alien and Total Recall.
And I'm going to save it for another episode, but
I spent a lot of time at Dan O'Bannon's house
when we were working on that film, and going into
his house was entering the phenomenon. So put a thumbtack

(11:36):
in that. We'll come back to that later. But Lovecraft
had a contemporary, actually, someone that was writing fiction. So
he was writing fiction. There was a nonfiction writer named
Charles Fort who was someone who collected strange stories from
press around the world. And I believe his first book
was called The Book of the Damned. If I'm not
mistaken and write what was at the nineteen twenty yeah,

(12:00):
And he literally was someone that just went across every
publication through history and found anomalous stories and collected them
into a huge volume that became the inspiration for several
more well known writers and investigators into the WU.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
A couple of quick hits on both of those men.
The Lovecraft thing always struck me as interesting because right
now we are talking a lot about nhi non human intelligences,
which is very lovecraft in right, because he's basically in
his writings, in his short stories, primarily saying that humanity
exists alongside some vast non human intelligences. Yes, that we

(12:45):
can't possibly understand, and you mentioned ancient entities, but there's
this sense of forbidden knowledge and these cult transmissions and
dreams and madness and hidden dimensions. And at the end
of what makes Lovecrafts so oh fascinating, I think for
people is the terror, and I use the word appropriately.
There absolutely terror of discovering that reality is much larger

(13:09):
and less human centered than we would have thought.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
I think if I look back on Lovecraft, I did
not have the word at the time, but I would
have said what his characters largely experience is onto logical shock.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Yeah, so Charles Fort goes at it in it. I
think Lovecraft is going at it as a writer, he's thinking, well,
what would be good to write about that will scare
their pants off people? Right? But Charles fort was a
little more ground based. As you said, He's going through
newspaper articles primarily, and tales that people tell, and he

(13:42):
just kept turning up things that you'd read it and
you'd go it was in the freaking newspaper. Yes, right.
It wasn't like he made it up like Lovecraft. He's
talking about things that are falling from the sky that
probably ought not to be falling from the sky, objects
that shouldn't exist, mysterious lights, which we have plenty of
right now, disappearances, bizarre weather, but also anomalous creatures, everything

(14:06):
that comes to an event that doesn't fit a preconceived model, right,
which those are the guys that are the classics, if
we will. But there are two people that have worked
in our lifetime and one of them is still alive,
and that's Jacques Valat, who is considered such a great
UFO researcher. But his conclusions that he's made in a

(14:29):
series of books all through his career do not fit
nuts and bolts. The more Valet went around the world
and asked people to tell their stories. If I was
to describe what Jacques Valat has discovered for himself, his
essential Valay idea, if you will, is that UFOs may
not represent a new phenomenon at all. We may think, oh,

(14:50):
we're civilized and we have technology, and so people are
coming to look at us from elsewhere, and he basically
is saying, the UFO UAP thing is to use the
costume metaphor, it's a new costume for an incredibly old one.
And the phenomenon that we now like to use that
word to talk about UFO's up. But all this other

(15:11):
stuff around it. He has always seemed to maintain that
it is something that is interacting with our sense of
myth or creating our myth.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Absolutely, there was two seminal books for me that, outside
of Lovecraft, which was fiction, one of them was Passport
to Magonia by Sachvila, where he really dives into the folklore,
the mythology, how this has all been tied to something
much deeper into our culture and our psychology, getting into
fairies and what we believed our interactions with them were.

(15:45):
There's so much, as you said, structural similarity to those
experiences that were reported centuries and centuries ago to the
structural similarities of a modern day UFO abduction. And so
I find that incredibly fascinating, and his contribution to this
part of upology is absolutely indelible, and because I believe

(16:08):
he's someone that has a lot of respect, but I
think a lot of people can't quite make sense of
what his basic thesis is.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
If you read his books over the years, he would
basically be the guy to argue in a religious age,
this non human intelligence, this phenomenon, this whatever it is,
is interpreted as angels and demons going back to Biblical times,
but that in a technological age it appears as craft
with pilots and laboratories and star maps. In essence, his

(16:37):
conclusion is the content changes to match the era, but
the pattern of destabilizing content and contact remains. So that's
been his way to look at it. But now if
you go on X and start reading about Congress, people
like Luna and Bobert, or in Bobert was just like, Nope,

(16:57):
it's angels and demons. So even as some of the
people in Congress are taking sworn testimony about craft and
occupants and bodies and reverse engineering, there are other there's
a countervailing thing going on at the same time that
goes back to what Valet was saying about angels and demons,
which you know, listen, someday we will talk even more

(17:19):
about Jacques Valais. But now let's bring in the guy
who I think is the closest analog to Charles Fort Yes,
which would be John Keel.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
And since I was the one that brought him into
our lives while we were early in the development process
of Dark Skies, and I was a little bit intimidated
by the sheer volume of UFO books you had, and
I was furiously trying to catch up and read a
bunch of the things you had on your bookshelf. And
then I was so thrilled to find a book that
you didn't have on your bookshelf called The Mothman Prophecies,

(17:53):
which was that was a book by John Keel that
was based on a true event. It's a nonfiction book,
but when you read it, it's hard to imagine that
this really happened. And yet, but you read enough of
his books. He has a very kind of sober, investigative
journalist approach to everything. And I remember reading that book
and I was both terrified and exhilarated. I had just

(18:17):
had a whole new point of view on what was
going on, mostly because it opened a bunch of doors
that I just had never really considered before. So we're
going to talk about the book a little bit and
the movie because they've made a movie out of the
Mothman prophecies, and I think we both have opinions about
the movie. But one thing about the book that I
found absolutely fascinating is just like Lovecraft, one of the

(18:40):
things that Kiel is positing is that there are nhi
and they take the form in ways that you can't imagine.
It could be someone calling you on the phone that
sounds like a human, but if you break it down,
it's actually a computerized voice. Doesn't make any sense. The
Mothman itself was a huge, huge kryptoid that was I

(19:01):
think eight feet tall, a flying kind of moth man,
burning red eyes that looked and sounded like a demon.
And this all was based around I think a little
more than a year of high strangeness that took place
in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and John Keel, being a reporter,
started to hear of strange things going on, and he

(19:22):
started to investigate. What I loved about the book was
the central idea that when you start investigating, when you
put your intention and your attention onto the topic of
the phenomenon, it pulls you in and pretty soon you
find yourself inside the phenomenon, and now, rather than just
objectively observing events, the events start to happen to you,

(19:45):
and you start to become part of that narrative. I
think that's exactly what happened to John Keel in the
course of that book.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
But it happened to us, which happened to us? I
need to unpack that story, but I will say this,
when you were admiring my book collection, I was a
nuts and bolt sky at the time, not completely, but
certainly not to the level of the Mothman prophecies. So
when I read this thing, I was like, wow, that
where's the UFOs in this thing? You know? And it

(20:19):
involves the book, which was written in seventy five. It's
his first person account into this investigation of a wave
of strange events that happened in nineteen sixty six, in
nineteen sixty seven, where people reported that large wing creature
the Mothman, and it ends up with a bridge collapse
that ends the book. Anyway, this is a real story, folks,

(20:43):
This really happened. Brent tells me, I need to read
the Mothman Prophecies. So I go buy a copy of
The Mothman Prophecies, and I'm reading it. I may be,
you know, halfway through it. And so it's in my car.
It's writing around in the back to my car because
I'm reading it.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
And if I.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Catch a few minutes here and there, I'm gonna grab
it out of the car. If I'm at the car wash,
I'll read it whatever. Okay, this is during dark Skies,
So this is ninety five, ninety six, somewhere in there
where you tell me to read this thing, and I
am reading it, and I take my oldest son, who
is still a young kid at the time. I think
he was about ten years old, and I take him

(21:24):
to the movies at our local movie theater. And so
it was like a seven thirty movie or something. So
it got out around nine thirty, which you know, was
allowed him to stay up a little later, allowed me
to get to bed in time to get back to
Dark Skies and work early.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
In the morning.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
And so we're coming out after seeing this probably goofy
kids movie, you know, which I've seen thousands because of
having three kids. And we're walking into a dark parking
lot and it's not particularly well lit. There are a
couple of lights in it. I mean, it's not completely dark,
there's some lights. And as we're walking out to our car,
my son is by my side and we see a

(22:00):
guy at the end of the parking lot and he's
walking toward us. No big deal there, people look for
their cars. Although generally most people were walking out of
the theater. This guy is from the other side, walking
toward the theater, so he's going to intersect with us.
And as I get a look at him, he's wearing
a long black duster jacket, you know, almost like a

(22:20):
western duster thing. Not good, not good, and I think
he's got a hat on, so he doesn't quite look
like a man in black. It's not a nice suit
or something, but it's a duster jacket. It's down to
his past his knees, and he looks formidable and a
little scary. And because I thought, now this isn't quite right,

(22:41):
I take my son, who's sort of he's on my
right side, so he's going to intersect with this guy,
and our car is on the other side. So I
moved my son Jonathan over to this side and I
said to him, let's just go to our car. Don't
make eye contact, right, This is just caution that you
have in a big city.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Of course, you're a parent.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
At him, because then maybe he'll talk to us. And
this guy does not look like someone we need to
be talking to it this particular moment. So my son says, okay,
and he's looking down. But we're walking to the car,
and now this guy is and me are intersecting, and
as I look over at him, he really looks menacing
in his own way. But this is the thing, and

(23:21):
it's absolutely the truth. There's no embellishment here whatsoever. As
the guy passes me, I realize he's holding a book,
and the book is the mom Man Prophecies.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Now, let me just ask you one question.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
Before I had even brought this book to your attention,
had you even heard of it before?

Speaker 1 (23:41):
No? Okay, I don't never hear maybe, but I don't
think so.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Okay, so you've probably never even heard of it. I
give you the book, you start to read it, and
now in the middle of a parking lot in Agora Hills.
You see a guy and he's carrying the exact book
I asked you to read and that you have in
your car and steal this copy out of your car
that's still in Okay.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, And let's face it, one of the things that
has come up on this topic, Brent, which people debate
all the time, which is does investigating the phenomenon cause
the phenomenon to see you and interact with you? And
this is one of the things that the people who
have investigated Skinwalker Ranch are always talking about because there

(24:25):
is a thing that Skinwalker has noticed which is called
the hitchhiker effect. Yep. So if orbs are following you
at Skinwalker Ranch and you fly across the United States
to your home, the orbs are still following you, and
you go into your house, and now the orbs are
following your wife and kids. Yes, right, that kind of thing, absolutely,

(24:46):
And I think most people hear that and they think, oh,
this is just the WU, this is high strangeness, this
is the paranormal, this is I don't believe any of it.
But I think if you step over onto the science
side of the fence, I think you can explain that
through quantum and tame. Yeah right, we don't need to
go deep on that, but I think that's partly the explanation.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
But going back to this book and the effect of.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
This book, I had actually over the years recommended it
to several other friends. And not everyone has had strange experiences.
But you were not the only one that had a
strange experience. Other people noticed strange things like that, and
I did actually have one other friend where the exact
same thing happened. They had never heard of the book.
They went into a coffee shop, they started to read it,

(25:29):
and across the way in the coffee shop was someone
else reading the book.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
I have never heard this story from you. Wow.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, So you could say, oh, that's just a coincidence.
It's a popular book. It actually wasn't that popular when
I found it. It was an obscure thing. It certainly
had not been made into a movie yet.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Which is why it was from nineteen seventy five, and
when this is happening to us, it's twenty one years later.
So no, it wasn't a popular book at that time.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Right now, let's talk about the movie, because there was
a movie that came out that was an odd choice
in casting, which was Richard Gear plays John Keel and
you know what a.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
Different name, John Ryan in the movie.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yes, when I heard they were making a movie out
of it, you know, sometimes you have your favorite book
and they oh, we're going to make a movie out
of it, and you go, oh, no, you're going to
ruin it, Like, how would you make a movie out
of this? But I was so excited that I thought, no,
you know what, I'm going to be optimistic, and I
think there's some great things in the movie, but there's
a couple of things that I felt the movie didn't

(26:30):
do well or did not do the book justice. So
before we get into my point of view, let me
hear your point of view.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh listen. I think there are few cases where a
book and its movie are so divergent. There are cases
where books have been radically reinterpreted, but not as much
as this one, because the thing is structurally the book
The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel is sort of about escalation.

(26:55):
These sightings be starred as a local weirdness. Then they
become an epidemic of anomalous experience. People start gathering in
locations to see them. And as Keel tells the thing,
because he is a guy that he in the same
way we use movies as portals into larger discussions. That's
what he does in his book. So he's covering this

(27:18):
bridge disaster that happened on the Ohio River in nineteen
sixty seven, but he's also covering the Mothman thing and
all of that, and he's constantly using that to ask
whether the phenomenon is physical or psychic, or symbolic or
deceptive or all of these things at the same time. Okay,
so he's got a mind expanding book on his hands. Here.

(27:42):
Part of the reason you recommend it it is it'll
blow your mind. Yeah, that's probably what you told me
in words like it. Just read it. It'll expand your consciousness.
So that's why I was reading it. Now, what's I
found so bizarre about the film is there's no Mothman.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, it's well, it's a weird point of view right
where they go to kind of the point of view
of something flying. And what I found too, is that
they didn't capture the high strangeness as much. They kept
it more around the mothman or the idea of a mothman.
But in the book they had men in black in it,
they had strange ambulances, they had strange voices, they had

(28:17):
much more kind of hauntings and things that were paranormal.
And it brought up this idea which, as you referenced
Skinwalker Ranch, is this was all happening in a little
town in Virginia Point Pleasant, or was West Virginia right,
West West Virginia right, And so this idea of convergence
is super important, where everything becomes localized and there's no

(28:39):
explanation for it. You know, why was it all happening
there in this little town? They never explain it. Why
is it all happening on Skinwalker Ranch? There's some Indian
lore around the place, but there's no scientific explanation for why.
It's a convergent point of a high strangeness. So amidst
all of this high strangeness, one of the things that
I found so fast about the book was it all

(29:02):
happened simply because there was an investigative journalist who was
curious and wanted to know more. In the movie, they
bring in a whole subplot about the lead character's dead wife,
and I know why they did it. We both know
why like that makes it more compelling. You can relate
to this character and he's feels like he's getting messages
from his dead wife, and it's all about ultimately, it's

(29:24):
a story about him letting go, you know, to some
degree of being haunted by his dead wife. Where I
felt that diminished the movie and to a degree the book.
The source material is that in the book it wasn't
about that. It was simply about putting focus and attention
on this strangeness and becoming immersed in it. And there

(29:44):
was a key point for me where the movie lost me,
and that was at about the eighty eighty five minute marks.
So we're towards the end of the movie. The character
gets rid of all of his notes and his note everything.
He gets it out of his life, right, but all
of the strain continues because why he hasn't let go
of his wife yet. In the book, the whole point

(30:05):
of the book was the only way for John Keel
to put all of this strangeness behind him was to
get rid of all of the work, over a year's
worth of work and reportings and recordings, and burn it
and get rid of it and throw it away. And
once he did that his life slowly returns to normal,
and to me, that's a perfect microcosm of how the

(30:28):
phenomenon works. You have to literally close that door physically
and mentally to have any hope of escaping it.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
I find that story riveting, though, about burning your work,
because you and I have already had this conversation on
the show where part of the reason we had the
detailed Dark Sky's timeline that we have is because I'm
a collector of the shit that comes from doing a
TV series. I've got most of it, and you were
a giver away of stuff, so you have less of it.

(30:57):
And I will say there have been a couple of
time times in my career since the Dark Sky's days
where I have been tempted to just say, you know what.
I don't know if paying attention to this UFO issue
is attracting weird stuff to my life, but just in case,
what if I get rid of everything just like he did?
And I've never brought myself to do it, so I

(31:19):
guess I'm still stuck with it. The writer of the
movie read the Mothman Prophecies twenty times, which is about
eighteen times more than I've read it, so you can't
say that he threw the book out. Now, he was
obsessed with the book and trying to find the essence
of the book. But there aren't people going out to
watch the Mothman in the movie. To the best of

(31:39):
my knowledge, I don't recall that they're doing that, right,
But what does happen? I think his car breaks down
and he goes to this guy's house, a guy named
Gordon Smallwood, who reacts as if he has already been
to his house previous nights. Yes, now that's weird and strange,
and I thought that was kind of an intriguing thing.

(32:00):
Really pay it off, ever, though, I mean, it's just
like a lot of anomalous behavior. It's like, well, that
was weird. I wonder what the explanation is. And there
are things like this Gordon Smallwood, who says you were
here the last few days, claims that he's been hearing
voices from a being named Indrid Cold. Love that name

(32:20):
Indrid Cold. And so now our main character, John Klein
aka John Keel starts receiving these phone calls from Cold,
who knows all these facts about his private life that
he wouldn't ordinarily have. And there's things in it that
are just strange, Like he hears the phrase wake up
number thirty seven. Yes, remember that. So I'm not going

(32:43):
to spoil the ending because I think some people may
want to see that. But what they've done in the
film is turned the bridge disaster into the big Act
three thing.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
I do think you should watch the movie, But what
I would do is watch the movie, then read the book,
and the book will resonate in a different way you
want to feel it, Yeah, so that's that would be
the order of preference.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Then it means that people could accept the film for
what it is, rather than every time I've seen the film,
I go, that's what and I have to say, it's
not a terrible film.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
No, it's just compared to what my expectations for it were.
That's where I think.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
That don't We've been going on and on, and honestly,
we must get to a couple of your stories here,
because they're the ones that I think, Look, WU is
one thing when it's happening to somebody else, right, But
when I saw that guy with the book that was
happening to me, it didn't freak my son out because
he didn't read the book, you know what it mean.

(33:41):
He didn't have any context for it. Yeah, right, but
it freaked me out, and I remember telling you the
next day and you were freaked out. We're like, how
could that be happening? So fire away when ready, my friend.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
Yes, let me segue into the first set of stories
that I'm going to tell by putting a bow on
the Mothman prophecies. Of the big takeaways for me was
not just the high strangeness, but also the nature of
the Nhi, which is that they were tricksters. They often
seem to enjoy sending you down a dead end or

(34:14):
into a dark alley, or of sending you off on
a wild goose chase and then mocking you. And so
that I think is fascinating because it raises the question,
if these are aliens, why are they just here to
be amused by humans?

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Right?

Speaker 3 (34:29):
If they're angels, then well they're being kind of mean,
but it's hard to even call it demonic. It's more
just that they're tricksters, and that is, you know, something
that Jacques Valet touches on extensively in his writings about
going back into the lore of the tricksters and the
fairies right at any rate, let me get into something
that kind of sets the table for a few things

(34:52):
that I'm going to share. The first is that, as
I mentioned early on in one of our episodes, I
have been an experiencer since pretty much the age of five,
and starting at age five up until I was around forty.
Amongst many other things, there has been a continuing line
that has happened to me that is beyond explanation, and
that is I have seen six people die in horrible ways.

(35:17):
We're talking final destination ways, and they were all strangers,
and they all happened right near me. And I've never
worked in a hospital. I was not in the military,
I was not a paramedic. I had no reason to
be in a place where I would experience six different
horrific deaths.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
But I was.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
And so then you have to ask, well, why why
would that happen? I don't know if I have the answer.
I have a theory.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
I'm assuming you have dwelt on this quite a while.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yes, this is something I come back to over and
over again. I'm not going to go in why though,
Brent give us I'd love the little meat on those bones.
What are these in short. What are these six? I'm
going to touch on a couple of those. The first
one happened when I was five years old with my father.
We were driving in the Bay Area, coming down a
very steep hill called Marin Boulevard, and we saw there

(36:08):
was a woman on a motorcycle in front of us,
and we saw her get into an accident and she
was beheaded and my dad slammed on the brakes and
I literally saw her head roll out into the street.
I'm five years old. Being five years old, my first
thought was, how are they going to put it back on?
Like I It didn't. It struck me as very surreal.

(36:30):
I remember my dad like turned my head and said,
don't look, and he jumped out of the car went
over to try and help, and of course my head
was on a swovel and that's all I did was
look and just take it all in. So in that one,
I don't it's hard to process like I. You know,
what do you make of that? Skip ahead a few
years now, I'm a teenager. I'm walking down Telegraph Avenue
in Berkeley, right on the cal campus or adjacent to it,

(36:52):
and I'm with a girl on my first date with her,
and it's a Sunday evening and we are going there,
I'm not proud to say, because we were seventeen years
old and there was a pizza place that would serve
you beer if you looked close to twenty one, right,
So this was our destiny.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
You plan, that was my plan.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
And as we're walking, we're talking and everything's great, and
our hands kind of brush and suddenly I'm holding this
girl's hand, first date, and everything is right in the
world until there's a whoosh, like there's a there's motion
in front of me. I can't even process. It happens
so fast and the most horrific noise I've ever heard
in my life. And while I'm trying to make sense

(37:34):
of it, my arm is yanked backwards and the girl
is holding onto my hand as she's running away, and
I let go of her and I watch her just
sprinting the opposite direction, and as I turn back to look,
there's a man laying on the sidewalk and he is
half naked. His head has been completely crushed because, as

(37:57):
I will find out very soon, he just jumped from
a third story window and landed a foot in front
of us. Now, what made The whole thing surreal was
that this was about seven o'clock. There had been a
big kind of street bazaar there and everyone had cleared
out and there was really nobody on the streets. And
so I'm standing there by myself looking at this flailing,

(38:18):
horrific body, and I don't know what to do. So
I walk into the building that I look up and
I see the window open and the curtains blowing, and
I put two and two together and I realized this
person just jumped and almost landed on us. I go
into that building and it's a hotel and there's a
person on the phone. He sees me come over and
he's in the middle of a conversation. He goes, yes,

(38:40):
can I help you? And I said, somebody just jumped
from your from a third story window. And he's like, well,
what did they look like? And I said, well, their
head is not I can't tell you. And he goes,
what did he have a beard? I said, I think
So he puts the phone back in and he says,
you know what, Carl jumped again.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
I can't believe it. Why would this sad? You know what?

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Hey, listen and thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
I'll call it in and he went back to his conversation,
and I didn't know what to do, so I walked
back out and I just stood there waiting for cops
and an ambulance to come. Eventually they did. They asked
me some questions. No one seemed that concerned about it.
And years later, as I would go on to Telegraph Avenue,

(39:21):
I remember watching the blood stain just get smaller and
smaller and smaller until it wasn't there anymore. And when
I think about that story, it reminds me that you
can be in a situation where something happens and for
you it will haunt you to the rest of your life,
and for everybody else, no one cared.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
It was insignificant.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
It was just another person that lost it on Telegraph Avenue, right,
another student who couldn't handle things and jumped out a window.
To me, I will never get the sound of his
head hitting the asphalt out of my memory. All right,
I'm going to skip ahead a little further because the
next one was the last one. And this is why
I think there was meaning in all of the things

(40:03):
that I saw. Because I'm going to give you a
little kind of preview of what my theory is we
talked about in episode four my encounter with death right
where I was in a hospital, I was dying of cancer.
I had sepsis temperature of one hundred and five point
five and I had light beings come to the foot
of my bed, and I wasn't scared. In fact, throughout
most of my whole cancer experience, I wasn't scared. You

(40:25):
talked to me a number of times, I was just
kind of accepting of the whole thing. Why because I'd
faced death, I'd seen it a number of times, not
through a loved one, right, not through it like a
controlled situation, but in the worst possible way. You could say, well, oh,
I'd become desensitized to it. Maybe maybe that's one way
of looking at the Other way of looking at it
is it was preparing me for my own moment where

(40:49):
I had to face death right, and I faced it
with as much strength as I could at the time.
This last example, or this last story that the sixth
person happened when we were at Dark Skies were writing
something late at night one Friday, I think probably for
a Monday shoot. I was there with my assistant Adam,
and there was a huge explosion that happened outside, and

(41:12):
the power flickered for a moment, and we went outside
and there was a car across the street that had
flipped and gone into kind of like an auto construction yard,
and the car alarm was going off, but it was
behind a fence with barbed wire on it, and it
was like, okay, we can't help that car. The other
car was down the road. And this is in North Hollywood,

(41:32):
so it was not a residential area. It was very industrial,
and it had veered off the road into a parking
lot and kind of like stopped right in front of
a building. And as I started to approach it, I
said to Adam, go call nine one one. I start
heading down.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
To the car.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
The driver's door opens and a teenager runs out and
runs away like hit and run or whatever this was.
And I thought, oh boy, okay, this is not good.
But just to make sure everyone else was okay, I
go all the way to the car. I go to
the passenger side and there is a man, a Hispanic man,
slumped without a seat belt on in the front seat,

(42:07):
and he kind of raises his head as I come
to the window, and he looks at me and he's
got blood coming out of his ear, which is never
a good sign, and he does not look well. And
so I reach over to the door. I open it up.
It's unlocked, and I kneel down and I said, I'm
trying to talk to him, and he's looking at me,
but he's not super responsive. And I'm saying, you know,

(42:29):
I called nine on one, it's going to be okay.
I'm trying to reassure him. And he reaches out this
trembling hand to me, and so I take his hand
and he squeezes it and he's just looking at me
right in the eyes, and all of the sudden, I
feel this electric shock coming through me, like his energy
is moving through me. As I'm watching it leave his body.

(42:51):
And as it's moving through me, I am seeing images
from his life in wherever, Mexico or whatever. Hearing Spanish,
I'm like, and it all happens in like four or
five seconds. It's like that moment when people say your
life flashes before you. His life flashed before life. And
next thing I know, he's gone. He's dead. He's holding

(43:13):
my hand, his hand goes slack.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
He's a husk.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
There's nothing, he's gone, and in that moment, I hear
from the back seat popa oh, and a little five
year old kid without a seat belt pops back up
as if he knew. Right at that moment, nothing was
said between me and this man, and somehow this kid
knew that his father had just died. At any rate,
I say all of this because there are certain aspects

(43:38):
of that story that are going to inform the next story.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
I'll want to tell you. I actually wanted to just
vouch for that story. I obviously I don't know the
part about the being at the car and all that,
but there were a number of us who were outside.
We were in this warehouse, yes, and a number of
us were outside as the ambulances and the police cars
and everything came, and we were all watching it. And wow,

(44:02):
that's pretty pretty crazy.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
It is.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
And I think again, I feel, in a weird way,
I used to think there was a time when seeing
these deaths was a curse, right, and I actually feel
in a weird way that it was a blessing that
it again prepared me for my own moment years later.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
It's like, instead of you having a near death experience,
you experienced his death, which is exactly if I've had
a near death experience. But the thing about it is
it could be explained. You can explain a near death
experience you've got orphans running through you or whatever, but
this one not really not really.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
As we move into the next story, I think one
of the things to take away from this is that
this notion of what we touched upon earlier and as
part of kind of the WU, is that we are
energy beings, right, and what our Nhi people talk about orbs,
you know, whether it's someone like Chris Bledsoe who's had

(44:59):
his own range very metaphysical, spiritually tinged experience, when you
talk about orbs, people are oftentimes wont to say, oh,
those are entities. Those are you know, plasma beings or
or whatever it is. But I think we've also heard
stories of Foo fighters that were in World War Two,
these orbs or entities that were attached to kind of

(45:21):
planes up in the air. There have been reports that
that's how crop circles are made, that these orbs or
these energy beings come in and actually inscribe them in
the wheat. So I don't know what any of that
means other than it's clear there's something else going on. Here,
as you said, beyond the nuts and bolts, I think
the tendency is too. If it isn't nuts and bolts,

(45:42):
it's angels and demons, right, and it's one of the two,
like you gotta choose, and I think there's something else.
I think there's this third rail where it's just not explainable.
So this next story I want to tell you is
one in which, going back to the hitchhiker effect in

(46:04):
Skinwalker Ranch, a lot of it was the investigators themselves.
They would go in and they would spend time at
the ranch, and then, as you said, they'd go home
across the country sometimes and the phenomenon would follow them.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
And just to give our satelite and frequency connections, secrets
of Skinwalker Ranch is a big show on I believe
History Channel, and it's because Brandon Feugel bought the place
from Robert Bigelow.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Robert Bigelow, yes, Robert.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Bigelow, and they're attempting to quantify wu. You know, they're
bringing all the technology that they can bring to bear.
Some episodes are disturbingly authentic, and some of them are
time fillers. Yes, you can't do that many episodes and
find out the secret of the universe. In every episode,

(46:53):
you can't always predict when strangeness is going to happen, correct,
So anyway onward, Yes, So that hitchhiker effect, though, as
I think is demonstrated so nicely in the Mothman prophecies,
it doesn't have to just be about your in one
location and you move to another location.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
It can also just be about what you study. It
can be about what you put your attention on. And
this is a story that happened to me when I
was in my late twenties. I was living in LA
I was a budding screenwriter. I'd already sold my Lovecraft
story The Resurrected, and I was working on a ghost
story that happened to be a comedy. And I was

(47:31):
really having trouble with the scene where the main character
met his deceased wife, and I wanted it to be funny, right,
but at the same time, I wanted it to feel real.
And I kept thinking to myself, Okay, in order to
make it funny, I have to know what would really
happen so I can put a comedic twist on it.
I need the baseline. So I started reading some ghost stories,
and you know it was like everything was boring and

(47:54):
nothing really inspired me, and I couldn't make this scene work,
and so my whole script was stalled. You've been there, Yeah,
So I kind of put it on the back burner.
And at the time, I had this very nifty ritual
where I would write until probably three or four in
the morning because at that time, and this was probably
the mid to you know, it was the late eighties,

(48:15):
I had money, so I didn't have to get up
at any specific time. I just worked at home. But
there was something cool about work writing from around midnight
until three or four in the morning because everyone else
was asleep, there were no interruptions.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
And then I would.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
Sleep in until ten eleven, sometimes even twelve, and I
had a whole morning ritual.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Or every morning.

Speaker 3 (48:33):
I'd get up and i'd walk out and i'd get
the La Times, and before I even had breakfast or
anything to eat, I'd come back and I'd sit on
my bed and I'd start reading the La Times. And
I'd often do it with my cat, who I had
at the time. This one morning, I am sitting there
reading the La Times. It's probably noon, I mean it's
broad daylight, and I'm in a little bungalow apartment on

(48:55):
off Melrose Avenue in the middle of LA I'm reading
the paper and my mind riffs back to this script
that I'm writing, and I'm thinking, is today the day
am I going to try and do it? And meanwhile,
I'm just kind of like browsing the headlines in the paper,
and all of a sudden, I hear a voice say
to me, I'm right here.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
I'm right here, I'm right here.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
And I was kind of taken aback because there was
no one else in my apartment with me, and there
was no one else in the room. But the voice
was very clear. It came in one ear, and it
wasn't a male or female. It was I always say,
it was like pure information. It was just I just
knew that I'm right here. And then I sensed something
like almost like a weird chill in the room, and

(49:37):
I lowered the paper and at the foot of my
bed there's a woman standing there. And this woman is
completely three dimensional but translucent. I can see through her,
and she's got long, stringy blonde hair, and she's in
kind of a tattered like sun dress type thing, and
she's a little frumpy looking and She's just standing there
and I'm looking at her, and what immediately jumped out

(50:00):
at me or her eyes. Her eyes looked as though
if you gave like a three year old a piece
of charcoal and you said draw a circle, they would
do this really rough thing. Her eyes were these rough
black holes that were undulating, and that was very unsettling.
And as I'm focusing on this, there is a rush

(50:20):
of movement, just like when the man jumped in front
of me. The paper fell out of my hand. My
cat jumped off the bed with such force that it
left huge divits from its claws in my leg. I
felt my whole body being slammed back against the headboard,
and I felt tremendous pressure on my biceps. And as
I'm trying to orient myself, I start to feel a

(50:42):
tickle on my neck and I'm having one of those
rack focus moments where I'm like, wait, what is happening?
What's going on? And I look up and this woman
has jumped on me. She's pounced onto me. Her knees
are on my biceps, and she's holding my arms down.
Her head is right over mine, and bryce I looked

(51:03):
up into those swirling black holes and I saw the cosmos.
I saw stars, a starfield. That was the most beautiful
thing I've ever seen in my life. And I felt
myself lifting up out of my body. Now I've had
out of body experiences before, this one was completely different

(51:24):
because this one felt as though I was being sucked.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
It wasn't just me kind of floating, It was me
being sucked like.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
In a vacuum.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
And I felt myself being pulled up into the cosmos
through those eyes. And then I heard the voice again,
and the voice said to me, just look.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Away, just look away.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
And it was so insistent, that voice that I took
it as like a supreme command, like everything depended on
me being able to look away. And I, with all
of the energy I had, I turned my head and
it was gone. The spell was broken. There was no
one there, but I was surging. And in that moment,

(52:07):
I looked around and this was a nineteen forties kind
of la bungalow, so it had all of that stucco,
you know, on the roof and on the walls, and
it was like looking at the Grand Canyon. Anything I
put my attention on, I was like zooming in on it,
and I could see the dust particles that were as
big as sage brush. It was absolutely amazing, and all

(52:28):
of the sudden, almost involuntarily, I yelled come back, because
in that moment I had never felt more alive. I
felt as if I took my fingers and I put
him into an electrical outlet. I was so charged up,
and I wasn't scared, even though there was a component
of the whole thing that felt strange, I was not scared.
After this happens, I do what any responsible person would do.

(52:51):
I call every person I know and I say, oh,
you won't believe what happened, and everyone says pretty much.
To a friend, oh you just fell back asleep. No,
I did not fall back asleep. I slept until noon.
I was wide awake. I was halfway through reading the
La Times, and this thing happened. They said, oh, you
just imagined you were working on a ghost story. It's
all your imagination. And enough people told me that where

(53:13):
I started to believe it, And after a couple of weeks,
the whole thing went away and I was back to
writing on my story. And that was that until one
day a friend called me up and he said, hey,
remember that story. You told me about that woman at
the foot of your bed. I said yeah, and he goes,
I want you to walk down the street Melrose Avenue
to a place called Soap Plant.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
I don't know if you remember this story.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
Soap Plant was this esoteric kind of stuff where they
had candles, very new agy, but they also had a
whole book section.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
I bought moth.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
So I walked down there and he's the instructions he
gives me is I want you to pick up the
new Whole Earth Catalog. Now, the Whole Earth Catalog, for
those people aren't familiar, was basically it was before the internet.
So it was somebody had collected all of these strange
and out of print books and you could buy them
on the Whole Earth Catalog. And sometimes they were one
of a kind. Sometimes they were just hard to find,

(54:05):
but someone had come up with in all these different categories.
And he says, go to the Whole Earth Catalog and
go to page one eighty seven. I get to the
Whole Earth Catalog. I'm in this store that people all
around me. I start flipping through. I find page one
eighty seven. I started looking at the titles. I'm like, okay,
what's this and all of a sudden, I see this
one book and something. It was like something called Witch Writer,

(54:25):
and it's stories from Eastern Europe or Scandinavia or something
that were about the legend of a woman who was
sometimes called the Witch Rider, sometimes called the Old Hag,
who the legend says, would appear at the foot of
your bed and she would jump on you and steal
your soul if you let her. And the legend said,

(54:46):
if you didn't battle her and overcome her, people would
find you in bed the next day, deceased. And as
I'm reading this, all of the fear that I did
not have during that event came up through me at
that moment, and I remember throwing the book out of
my hand. I wanted nothing to do with that book,
or that story or anything, because I could not reconcile

(55:09):
how some spirit from centuries ago in Eastern Europe or
Scandinavia or whatever it is could appear at the foot
of my bed in Melrose Avenue on a Thursday at noon.
It did not make any sense. The world felt very
small and very scary at that moment. So I lived
with this story for years, and I have told people

(55:32):
about this story and people have then called me up
the next day and said, I hate you for telling
me that story. I saw something at the foot of
my bed. I freaked out. Now I can't sleep in
that room anymore. Like there's a transference quality to it,
which is similar to the Hitchhiker effect. Now, as we
come to the end of the episode, I just want
to share something before you do.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Though, before you on the Old Hag, you told me
that story. And then a few years later, I was
the showrunner of a show called The Crow Stairway to Heaven,
yes TV version. You even wrote an episode of it. Yep.
So I was running this show and so the Crow
basically is a guy that dies and he comes back
reincarnated a year later. Anyway, so I was studying up

(56:15):
on afterlife phenomenon and I had in the same way
that you've described, I had a bunch of UFO books
for this show. I had a bunch of books about
the afterlife and all that. When you told me that story,
I sort of put it in my head, didn't think
too much about it. And as I was reading those
books while doing The Crow, there is a description in

(56:36):
one of my books about the Old Hag or whatever
the same description. Black coal is how I believe they
described him jumping on people in bed. So clearly I'm
here to vouch for the fact that A. You told
me that story, and then I saw that, And frankly,
I was thinking about that very story just a couple
of days ago, because while I was off visiting my

(56:59):
daughter in Boss, we were just looking for something to
watch on TV. And there's a new series out called
Widow's Bay with Matthew Reese I believe his name is,
and it's got an old hag that jumps him in
bed one night. She didn't have the coal eyes, but
she's pretty frightening, and she did pin him down. There
is that storyline that's out there. So yeah, you consider

(57:21):
yourself a member in a long fraternity of people that
have been jumped in bed by old hags with coal eyes.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
Well, and one of the scientific theories is that it's
a form of sleep paralysis, right, somehow, it's a archetypal
nightmare that people have. They keep seeing the same woman. Now,
even that is strange. What is the chance that people
across centuries would be seeing the exact same entity at
the foot of their bed. But be that as it may.

(57:49):
I'm not saying that it's real. I'm just saying it
happened to me. Here's the last thing I want to
leave you with that. I think that's a dark story,
but there's actually a silver lining to it. There was something,
there was a component of it. It always discurbed me.
That feels like it's quintessential wu. The voice said to me,
I'm right here. In my mind, I always associated that

(58:09):
with the entity. Hey, you've been looking for a real
ghost story. Well I'm right here. You're about to have one, right,
But it didn't reconcile with the fact that same voice
said to me, just look away.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
That's cross purposes.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
Because on one hand, I'm right here, says I'm about
to jump on you. The other one says, you know what,
I don't really want to steal your soul. Just look
away and you can opt out of this. But I
never could make sense of it. I just always took
it at face value and said the whole thing is
just weird. There's no logic to it. Until about a
year ago, I was talking to a friend who happens

(58:43):
to be a medium, and as I start to tell
her the story, and I say, I'm right here, she goes, oh,
that was your higher self, that was your guardian angel,
as it were. And I said, what do you mean
She goes, oh, Well, when you were about to experience
something traumatic like that, if you're in contact with your

(59:04):
higher self, they were just letting you know that you're
not going to be experiencing it alone. The entity would
not give you that warning. The entity was there to
steal your soul. And what the voice was saying is
don't worry. I'm right here by your side. And that
was the voice that said just look away. That was
the voice that saved you. So when we come back

(59:24):
to this framing of it's either angels or demons or
it's aliens, right, there's this other lane where my higher self,
or maybe tied to my consciousness or something else that
is not angels or demons, that is not aliens, somehow
let my soul stay in my body and not disappear
into the cosmos. And that is very comforting to me

(59:48):
that I am some aspect of me is watching out
for me.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
I love that aspect of it. These are wild stories
and disturbing in their own way. I have one final
story I'm going to throw as a log on this fire,
yes please, because it's not as dramatic as being jumped
in your bed by an old hag who's trying to
steal your soul or whatever, and yet it's oddly disturbing

(01:00:15):
and it sort of fits in with what we've been
talking about where we talked about like the postcards that
came to us before while we were writing Dark Skies. Okay,
this is after Dark Skys, it's after the Crow, it's
after all that. It's twenty ten and I'm writing this
book ad after Disclosure with Richard Dolan, who many people know.
I'm currently hosting Need to Know with Dolan, and we

(01:00:38):
wrote that book together and it took about a year
and for over off and on during the year, we
would have phone calls where because he lived on the
East coast, I lived on the West coast, and we'd say, hey,
I was just thinking what about this? What about that?
And so we had our own sort of research that
we were doing, and then we would compare notes and
I had a thought, just so you know, I had

(01:00:58):
my own file. There was nothing like Google docs right now,
where you know, you and I share files and I
can write on top of you and you can leave
comments for we didn't have any of that. We basically
wrote I believe back then I was on Max, so
I was using pages, I think, but I had my
own little pages file and occasionally I would turn it
into a PDF and send it off to Rich for

(01:01:20):
him to look at. But this one particular day, there's
no file open on my computer and we're just having
a shoot the breeze conversation and one of us, I
think it was me, it had some mentioned something about threes.
So we were just saying, well, is there anything two threes?
You know? Do these beings have three fingers? What about
these triangular craft with three lights? You know? Was there

(01:01:43):
what's the deal with threes? And we had you know,
maybe it was kind of an uneventful conversation because did
it really belong in an after disclosure book? Not really sure,
but it was just a divergence. We're talking about it, okay.
So that happens. The next day I decide, okay, well
this time to get back to work. So I open
up my pages file, which has all my research notes

(01:02:05):
in it. I'm thinking, you know, I had taken handwritten
notes from the day before, and I'm thinking, okay, I
got to write up these research notes, so open up
the file. They're on page one are my previous research notes.
But in the middle of the page are three lines
of threes, the number three, the number three, and it's
just if you hold the number three down on your keyboard,

(01:02:27):
it's almost like it's just printing threes. So there's three
entire lines of threes. I didn't put them there, Rich
didn't put them there, we didn't share the file. Nobody
snuck into my house to put them there, but there
they were. So I've over the years said, well, what
would explain that. I guess one would be it could
be the phenomenon, you know, expressing itself. I guess some

(01:02:48):
more down to earth. One would be I was being
watched because of our dark Skies thing, and somebody who's
part of whatever the cover up is or whatever is
messing with me. It's the equivalent of the postcard that
said we are watching you. This one is a different
way to say it. But I definitely felt like somebody's
watching me or something, because there it was. I can't

(01:03:10):
explain it other than those two options. But those things
happen to people, these synchronicities. But this is more than
a synchronicity. It's not just a coincidence. I guess you
could almost argue it's a coincidence that the Mothman prophecy
book is in the hands of the Dark Stranger, if
you will. I'm not sure what explains this one, and

(01:03:31):
so I guess as we have to wrap this, it
appears that the central question for WU at this point,
because it's starting to be studied with people with technology
and data and all that, as we discussed with Skinwalker.
Maybe somedays somebody will have some better answers for some
of these kinds of things. I'm not sure exactly what

(01:03:53):
the answer is to the old Hag, let's say, on
the one where you've seen six people expire in front
of you. I'm not sure if there is a phenomenon
that is a non human intelligence, why it chooses to
do this. To Brent Friedman, I ask myself that question
many times. Look, I think if I had to try
and summarize all of this, it's a version of the

(01:04:15):
quote we used in the Abyss, when you stare at
the Abyss stares back at you, yes, And I think
in this case you can say and it taunts you,
it teases you, it misdirects you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
And it's that sense of seeing the number three after
you've been talking about it. There's that trickster mentality again. Right,
It's not threatening, but it's unsettling. And I think, why
the old hag, Why have I seen these six deaths?
Why have I had a lot of strange experiences in
my life? I think it's all sending me a message.
I think that for whatever reason, I have shown curiosity

(01:04:48):
and at times I have investigated this area, and it's
acknowledging me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
Yeah, I see, that is exactly what the people speculate about. Listen,
we've already done this in incredibly long show. One of
the best TV series about WU is Twin Peaks. Yes,
it's not really about UFOs, although in the final season
there are some UFOs and Project Bluebook invoked. But it's

(01:05:14):
a great WU TV series if you're looking for that.
And look, we don't have time to get into these.
We're going to talk maybe at another episode later in
the season, or god forbid, maybe we'll come back in
a second season and do it. But just a couple
of things that people might want to consider. The John
Travolta film Phenomenon is about a download, and people are
telling about downloads that you're just along in your life

(01:05:36):
and you wake up the next day and you understand
physics right, and those things happen. So there's a movie
about that. I believe you're a Picnic at Hanging Rock fan,
huge fan of Picnic at Hanging Rock with the caveat that.
If you don't like slow foreign films, you won't like this.
But it's a Peter Weir film. The guy did Gallipoli,
Master and Commander The Truman Show. Excellent filmmaker, based on

(01:05:59):
a true story that happened in Australia. Highly recommend it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Super woo.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
A current, fairly current film is Annihilation, which is sort
of about some kind of alien presence that doesn't communicate
in a normal way but does it by transforming and
duplicating and mutating and all that stuff. Another good one,
of course, is Solaris, where the planet itself or the
ocean in the planet seems to be alive and interacting

(01:06:25):
with human consciousness. There's two versions of it, the original
Russian version and the George Clooney George Clooney version, and
a couple that I've seen recently. One is Coherence, which
I really it's a small budget film. It fits very
much within the film that we just had, the series
we talked about earlier. Dark it's kind of like, what's
going on here? The timeline shifting, who's doing what? And

(01:06:48):
I just saw another one on the plane the other day,
the Nines, which stars Ryan Reynolds. But it's fascinating and
it's definite wo going on. But my favorite that I've
always loved, and I wonder if you've seen it, is
the Casey Affleck Rooney Mara movie A ghost Story. Yes,
that is excellent. I find that interesting because it challenges

(01:07:11):
the essence of a ghost story. It inverts time and
what looks like initially a person who's died, who can't
move on or whatever, and by the end of the
thing it's cosmic. It's just a cosmic story and kind
of chilling. But again, if you want to go evil Woo,
you got to go Twin Peaks.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
One of my favorite lines from Twin Peaks was the
owls are not what they seem.

Speaker 1 (01:07:34):
Yes, they never are. And in fact, that goes back
to I believe Whitley Strieber was talking about owls in communion. Anyway,
I guess The essence of this is, yes, there is
certainly a lot of files out there, there are videos,
there are photos, there's all this stuff that's likely to
be coming out, and maybe maybe we are going to

(01:07:54):
finally at least acknowledge there's an intelligence out there that's
different than ours, that seem to be here and interacting
with us. And if we do anything with this episode,
it is simply to suggest that interacting with us doesn't
just mean flying around in spaceships and picking up people
to do biological experiments on them, which apparently has happened,

(01:08:15):
or at least is meant to look like it's happened
by something. But there's also this world that you've peeled
back for us with your stories and with these other stories,
and they're disturbing, and yet they happen. In fact, I
would probably argue more people experience the WU factor than
they do the UFO factor.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
Absolutely anyway, and maybe we'll have to do a whole
other episode a part two about the WU because there
are many other stories to tell, many other interesting movies
and TV shows to talk about, but this has been
a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman Watch the
Skies