Paranormal Spectrum #79 Fourth Wall Phantoms with Guest Joshua Cutchin

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 3 (03:01):
Good Jarning everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of
The Paranormal Spectrum here on the Untold Radio Network. I'm
your host of Barnaby Jones from Cryptid's Anomalies and the
Paranormal Society. We are live and in the studio this morning,
so welcome to the show. Flat Rock Land Good to
have you here, flat Rock says, fourth Wall is on

(03:23):
the top of my stacks of books I need to read.
Awesome sounds great man and Jeremy is here as well.
Welcome to the show. Those are our comments so far.
Thanks for watching, Thanks for tuning in and listening. Coming up, guys,
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(05:33):
very soon. But right now, guys, ladies, and gentlemen, we
are going to head on over for our guest. Always

(05:57):
a pleasure talking to my guest today. Josh Cutchen is
a full time musician and author. He has appeared on
hundreds of paranormal programs such as Coast to Coast AM
and is regularly invited to speak at paranormal conventions and
conferences about his work. He is the author of nine books,
including the twenty twenty two critically acclaimed two part series

(06:20):
The Ecology of Souls, a New Mythology of Death and
the Paranormal. His latest book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, Reflections on
the Paranormal narrative and Fiction Becoming Fact, was released in
twy twenty five back in April. In addition to his
own books, Joshua has regularly contributed to essay collections, most

(06:41):
recently doctor Jack Hunter's Deep Weird in twenty twenty three
and doctor Simon Young's Cottington Lee cotting Connington, Conning Lee.
I knew I was gonna mess that Up Fairies twenty
twenty four. He has appeared on the Hit History Channel
series Ancient Aliens, and was featured in the twenty twenty

(07:03):
four break out UFO documentary Cosmosis. He is a regular
guest on Where Did the Road Go Podcast and maintains
his online presence at Joshua Cutchin dot com. But today
he is here to talk all things weird and fairy
and paranormal with us. Please welcome to the show, Joshua Cutchin.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
Hey, it's good to see you. Good to hear you. Good,
good to It feels like I'm reconnecting with Wisconsin a
little bit through the through the screen. It's been a
minute since I've been back up there to my second home.
So hopefully i'll be up there sooner rather than later.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Absolutely, Man, you're you're not missing much though, But.

Speaker 4 (07:41):
Yeah, it's it's it's not like August to like halfway
through October window that's when I really miss it up there,
and then after that it's like, okay, we can have
it until like May.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
It's it was I got the chance to see a
lot of the fall colors this year.

Speaker 4 (07:54):
Oh nice, nice.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
It was really cool going up north and stuff, and
there's there's so much and it was more early November
that it hit then like October and stuff, so it
was kind of late this year, I think for me,
I feel, but it was pretty cool.

Speaker 4 (08:08):
So that was fun, nice, nice, awesome.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Man, is absolutely good to see you. I I love
your work. I love on the podcast like Where the
Road Going stuff. I've always been fascinated with all the stuff.
You were one of the most, in my opinion, like
the foremost person to go to on fairy and fay
lore and stuff, and I've always loved that. So it's
always a pleasure to get you on here. And I
think I don't think you've been on the paranormal spectrum.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
I don't know if we If I have, it's been
like forever, you know, we've we've been in contact for
for a long time, but I don't know if this
might be the first time.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah hear, yeah, I had you on Monsters Monday Morning Monsters.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
Right right, yeah, yeah, but I don't think you've ever
gotten come on. So well, I'm glad. I'm glad of here.
I'm even happier that I am glad to finally have
you on here. Man.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I'm so excited because you have. I didn't even know
this till I apologize. I don't know you're good that
you had a new book out, because I have since
the last time we chatted. I purchased all of your books.
I got them right from you, and I didn't even
know you had a new one. So you have a
new book out this year.

Speaker 4 (09:14):
Well, you know, it's this sort of thing in part
to me, and like you've probably experienced this. I think
anybody who has any inkling of creativity in their lives
has experienced this. And I think a lot more people
have recreativity in their lives than realize it. But like,
sometimes something picks you out, as opposed to you picking
it out, and it's just it. It won't leave you
alone until you get it done. So that's sort of
my experience with this book. You know, I'd played with
this some of these ideas before, and I'd even talked

(09:36):
to some friends that they are like, no, that's too
big of a topic, back off from it. And then
it just kept on, you know, knocking the door in
my head, and so I was like, fine, I'll do it. So, yeah,
it came together relatively quickly. I think it was about
a year ago that I finished finished the first draft,
and here we are six seven to eight, however, many
months after the release. So I'm really really really happy

(09:57):
with it. It's got some stuff off my chest.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, good, very good. No, I totally feel you. There's
certain projects that you know, it's just like I really
want to do that, but I can't, and then you
end up doing it anyway, and yep, yeah, get dragged
towards it. So what what is this book all about?

Speaker 4 (10:15):
Well, so there's something in here that that maybe you
have noticed too. So I think that a lot of
the stuff that we examine and interrogate in these spheres,
the paranormal spheres, has a lot of great evidence for it,
and I think a lot of it does conform to
the orthodox interpretations of them. Of these phenomena. You know,

(10:37):
ghosts are dead people, bigfoots really common in UFOs or
extraterrestrial craft. Right. But there's at least a subset of
these stories that you look at and you're talking to
someone who's you know, very sober minded witness, very is
giving off no hint of deception, right, And they will
say for it is that there's some way that our

(11:01):
fictions bleed into life or some way that reality is
even stranger than we would we would apprehend, right. I mean,
you've been hearing a lot in the disclosure space about
ontological shock, you know, the idea that aliens exist and
things like, to me, this is real ontological shock, the
idea that certain fictions can bleed into our reality. So

(11:22):
I wanted to, like, you know, a lot of my
journey has been trying to reconcile things that make me
uncomfortable with my view of these phenomena, and so I
wanted I was like, fine, then I've you know, I've
got to push where there's mush and see what you
really think about this. And so the book sort of
takes people through a series of different perspectives on the

(11:42):
paranormal that lead them to some pretty alarming possibilities. I
won't say conclusions, I'll say possibilities. The first of which
is this phenomenon that people, especially creative types, interact with
fictional characters. I thought that this was an isolated phenomenon.
It is not. There's an entire book by Chidambra Mesh
called Embodied Imaginations. It's a pretty widespread phenomenon where people

(12:04):
who are working on books and movies as such, will
have dialogues with their characters, and these go all the
way up, These go all the way from like, oh,
I imagine my character would say x Y Z all
the way through. No, I opened my door and for
a split second the character was standing in the doorway.
Not just crazy people say this either, you know, literary,

(12:26):
literary and artistic geniuses quite frankly, have have reported this
to Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, Irich Ibsen,
who wrote A Doll's House, you know, most famously Alan
Moore writing John Constantine so that he ran into Constantine
in a sandwich shop. Yeah, And and people who have
worked on the hell Blazer title have also run into
Constantine's still. So I don't know if those stories are true,

(12:49):
but like you've got to do something with them, try
to do something with them. The story has sort of
been my my my ethos. So I look at that phenomenon,
which I thought was going to be like, oh, there's
like fifteen cases. No, there's a lot more like even inclueable.
Look at those and then like, well, if that's happening
for whatever reason, that these fictional characters are sort of
bleeding into our reality. What does that possibly tell us

(13:10):
about the domains of euthology, cryptozoology, and parapsychology. And there's
been a little bit of discussion of that in regards
to euthology. Martin Kottmeyer and Bertrand may Used are two
people who since the seventies have sort of been looking
at the influence of our fictions on UFO encounters and
alien abductions and things like that. But I really want
to sort of expand that not only within the UFO sphere,

(13:32):
but say, like, Okay, well, how do our fictions impact
the way that Bigfoot manifest and the way that ghost manifests?
And some of that, I'm sure is people having expectations
from media who sort of like conform their reports to
what they were expecting. I'm sure that's part of it.
But I also think that there's an interplay or a
dialogue between whatever is behind these phenomena and our own

(13:52):
media and our own fictions, and that sort of like
tends to appropriate aspects of what we would expect from
UFOs into the UFO phenomenon, which then gets fed back
into our media. And it's just sort of the circle
that keeps on going repeating over and over and over again.
So yeah, just a really you know, light topic.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Oh yeah, just just late reading there.

Speaker 4 (14:15):
Yeah, this this, naturally, as you might imagine, does push
me into like discussions of philosophy, which I've kind of
been keeping at arm's length, but like this was the
time where it's like, okay, Josh, you've got to address
idealism and dual aspect monism and all these like you know,
topics that make smoke pour out of my ears, right,
but you know, I think that those have a lot
of bearing on some of these some of these questions

(14:37):
that we have. And anyway, it was, it was, it
was it was nice to be forced into that space,
I guess, because I certainly wasn't about to go there willingly.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
You were not joking when you said that was a
lot to bite off and take in there, So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:53):
Well, and so it's it's always about like this is
kind of like the whole ethos behind my last nonfiction project,
Ecology of Souls, which was if fairies resemble modern UFO
occupants and the dead resembled fairies for a lot of
the cultures that believed in fairies, then what does that
say about UFO occupants, Right, it's that sort of like

(15:15):
logical transitive power. What's the next step, you know, And
that's sort of is what you wind up with with
something like fourth wall phantoms, because if people see their
creations and if these have some bearing on the UFO subject,
then what does that say quite frankly about the nature
of reality? You know, sort of like that, Okay, well
and then and then and then, and you do wind

(15:36):
up in some really strange spaces that start to look
a bit like we are being authored in some sense,
so we are.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
All possibly someone else's short story or character.

Speaker 4 (15:49):
That yeah, I mean yeah, So it starts to look
a little bit like simulation hypothesis and like you know,
a paranoiacts dream right. But what I really wanted to
do was part of the you know, the book is
called fourth wall phantoms, is you know, there's this tradition
in the theater that there is an invisible fourth wall
between the people on stage and the people in the audience,
and if the character acknowledges the audience or realizes that

(16:10):
they are in a fiction, then that fourth wall has
been broken. So if you take these very literal versions
of fourth wall breaks, right, people seeing their fictional characters, right,
and the appropriation of fictional bits into the mythologies that
we create around our paranormal domains. What does that say
about our lives? And what does that say about you know,
something that I really was interested in, which was this

(16:33):
idea of the reflective factor. This is something that John
Keel talked about. You look at the paranormal, and the
paranormal looks back, you know, the phenomenon looks back. Your
mileage may vary, you know, I've had less of that
in my life than I would have thought I would
have had, But there is something to that, I think,
and that to me very much looks like this sort
of act of breaking the fourth wall, of acknowledging in

(16:53):
reality outside of your own surroundings. Right. And what's interesting
is if you look into that sort of line of
scholarship amongst like neritologists, the people who study stories, they
don't really call them fourth wall breaks. They call them
metal epsies. This act is called metalepsis, and it can
be from the narrator to the characters, or from the
characters to the audience. There are lots of different versions

(17:14):
and sort of calling it by that name sort of
removes the theatrical component, because it really is any sort
of disruption of hierarchies in art or media or fiction
or story. And it's funny because you read the scholarship
around that, and you could like swap out the word
metaalepsis for supernatural or paranormal, you know, for characters who realize,

(17:35):
for characters who have these metaleptic breaks, they have existential crises,
they view it with humor. They realize that they're embedded
in a greater reality. Sometimes they obtain powers that the
characters around them can't have because they don't realize that
they're living in a construct. And that sounds so much
like what extraordinary experiences do to people who have them often,

(17:58):
you know, I think, and so I really wanted to
play with that idea. And again I'm not sure how
literal this should be taken. I like to play with
ideas a lot. But the moment that I said, okay,
it seems to me that there is something to this idea,
to this comparison of fourth wall breaks in the paranormal,
is when I looked into some scholarship by a German scholar,

(18:18):
scholar by the name of greth Line. If you think
of like a Greek vase, right, the very early form
of art, Greek vase, the characters are almost always going
to be in profile, right, But Grethline noticed that there
were some exceptions to that, and the exceptions in Greek
art that tended to face the viewer. So the characters
that broke that fourth wall early on were sleepers, the dead,

(18:42):
those in altered states of consciousness, gods and monsters. And
I'm like, well, that's like the whole of the paranormal
right there, right, you know, it ticks all the boxes.
So I thought that that was interesting. You know, a
lot of a lot of our antecedents to modern art
sort of acknowledged this ability for the supernatural to look
outside the frame of reality.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
That is very interesting.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
Is that?

Speaker 3 (19:07):
Is that like just Greek? Or is that like Egyptian?
Is that follow like a lot of the older.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
Well, you know, it's interesting. My friend Mike Clellan pointed
out to me that the one character in Egyptian hieroglyphs
that isn't in profile is the owl. And of course
that's that's a very mic Clolland observation, right, because Mike
has done all that work on UFOs and owls, but
I'm like, of course that's the case. Yeah, And so
what's interesting is you sort of look at like that's
just sort of like the Western tradition of artistic representation

(19:34):
and some of these ideas. The idea is about the
way that fact and fiction interplay between these different uh
these in different cultures around the world, like indigenous cultures.
Is it sort of its own entire topic some a
lot of cultures don't make that distinction as clearly as
we do in the West. There's some really interesting lessons
that I share towards the end of the book about

(19:56):
things that we might be able to learn from indigenous
m and tribes and stuff about the way that they
view the conditions for which things like spirit phenomena are
able to sort of pop into an out of our reality.
So I kind of want to talk about that, but
it's also some of the last stuff that I addressed
in the book, so I won't go into that right now.
But yeah, it is a consistent theme that we are

(20:19):
the last culture to sort of understand this interplay between
fiction and reality. Another great example that I think maybe
some of your audience will really really dig this is
you're familiar with the stories of the Dogon right and
the ancient aliens trope. Okay, so it's this indigenous people
from Mali. The Dogon have been sort of the subject

(20:40):
of a lot of ancient aliens speculation over the years
because they knew, without presumably the aid of any sort
of modern astrological equipment.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
That.

Speaker 4 (20:53):
Serious was a binary star, right, And they said that
they knew because their creator beings, the Noma, had come
down and told them. And so there's this whole like
where do they get this knowledge sort of thing, And
the whole discussion of the Dogon and their belief in
the Nomo has been talked about ad infinitum in the
UFO space. But what doesn't get talked about is the

(21:15):
fact that the Dogon, like a lot of indigenous African cultures,
believe that words can impact how reality manifests, to the
extension that all magic is essentially word magic, and their
term for this is also Nomo, so the creator. So
in other words, long story short, these ancient aliens that

(21:36):
supposedly gave the Dogon knowledge about a star system that
could not be perceived with the naked eye are called
the exact same thing that the that sorry that the
Dogon used to refer to words manifesting reality, and I
think that's such an elegant way of pointing out how
some of these esoteric concepts sort of loop back on

(21:56):
some of the tired tropes that we've talked about in
places like euthology, an ancient astronaut theory, and all that
sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
It's a I was just thinking. I just read an
article yesterday online about a scientific research that they possibly
believe that the actions you do today are reflecting on
things that have happened to you in the past.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
I mean, so that's that's one of the big things
that I have to wrestle I had to wrestle with
and in Fourth Wall Phantoms was was the concept of retrocausality.
I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Wargo's work,
but you know, I'm I'm friendly with Eric. A lot
of a lot of Fourth Wall Phantoms is kind of
antagonistic towards some of the retrocausality work. But Eric has
done great, great work, and retrocausality is definitely part of this.

(22:46):
The fact that we don't understand how time flows is
one hundred percent a part of the paranormal. I think,
I really do, especially when you're dealing with side effects
and stuff like that. And yeah, it's it's really mind bending.
And like I read stuff like that and I'm like,
I don't know what to do with this, you know,
not only on an academic level, but on like a
practical level in my own life. I will say that

(23:09):
it's interesting to me how much we we we we,
how much we sort of gloss over how real manifestation is, right,
you know, I mean, like, uh, I fourth of All
Phantoms began as an idea, like it was, it was
in my head, you know, And there's a there's a
version of reality where I never I never wrote it, right,

(23:31):
Like anything that's creative like that begins as an idea
before it takes form. And yes, like you know, the
materials are there, and you know, Thomas Aquinas would have
something to say about whether or not those come from
man or from God. But but I guess the point
I'm trying to make is that whatever you end up
doing in your life, even if it's the trajectory of

(23:51):
your life, like you are making your own thoughts manifest
So while a more exotic version of that looks like
look like characters coming to life. It's still very consistent
with what we experience on quite frankly a daily basis,
even if you make yourself a sandwich, like the sandwich
was an idea.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
Yeah, do you now? I want to remind everyone while
we're going here, we are Live, if you guys have
any questions throughout the show, throw them in there. We're
kind of throwing out a lot of interesting stuff here.

Speaker 4 (24:20):
So yeah, I'm keeping one eye on your names and
friends and it's good Toms.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
A lot of a lot of positively really really enjoy
you and and stuff, so that's good. But yeah, if
you guys have a specific question for Joshua, we are Live,
you can ask and we will get in the show
for you guys. It seems like you're all pretty big
fans over there. So it just this whole this whole
narrative kind of reminds me of of the Tupa phenomenon.

Speaker 4 (24:48):
Right, Yeah, I mean, sorry, You've got to be careful
with me because you like say a key word and
then like it triggers this little line of dominoes in
my head. So what are your thoughts on toldas let's
let's let's flip the script.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
I mean, it's very much what you said, you know,
the whole thought form to reality if we can. You know,
there there were scientific experiments to to create a spirit.
I always forget the name of it, but there was
a university did an experiment to try and bring a
ghost to life, and they see, you know what I'm
talking about, experiment, Yeah, thank you, Yes, And they manifested

(25:30):
this whole character, wrote his own backstory and everything, and
then brought him to life as this ghost that eventually
interacts with him. So here you have this this case
that's almost exactly kind of what you're talking about about
authors writing into this stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Yeah, And I feel like, if any of this is
possible and true, I feel like Sherlock Holmes. I don't
know why, but I'm just drawn to that character as
being one that was you know, a lot of people
are not aware that he wasn't a real person, you know,

(26:04):
to even go down that road that they think this
was an actual historical figure and stuff. So I feel
like that one would come to life, all right, yeah, no, no.

Speaker 4 (26:13):
So this is this is all like, you know, we
have the rest of the rest of the interview sorted out,
because I'm just gonna ramble forever. Yeah, Charlotte does have
that sort of like lived sense of being a real person.
And here's the thing, like I I suspect a couple
of things. I suspect that Number one, there probably are
people who claim to have run into a Sherlock Holmes

(26:35):
or their version of Sherlock Holmes. But it's just it's
it's so it was there was. There were a lot
of barriers with doing the research for the actual cases
in this book of fictional characters coming to life because,
like most paranormal people don't want to touch it because
you look at that and you're like, oh, this is
this is bs. You know, this person's making this up.
You know it can't be This can't be real because

(26:56):
it's just just is it. It cannot be real, full
stop goes in the waste. So there's a lot of
challenges with that. Having said that, since this book has
come out and I sort of started to poke around
the margins with some folks that I've known, I suspect
that a lot of experiencers and again, don't take this
to the bank. I'm not sure, but I'm getting the
suspicion that a lot of the experiencers. UFO experiencers in particular,

(27:19):
have had something like this happened to them, something either
manifestational or quite frankly, something involving a fictional character or
fictional event manifesting in their lives. And that sort of
makes a bit of sense because these are kind of
second cousins to synchronicities, right, I mean essentially that's what
they are now, back to sort of the idea of like,
you know what's going on, and the Philip experiment like, okay,

(27:42):
I'm working backwards. So yeah, the Philip experiment is like,
I'm not sure it's been replicated. I know that my
friend Timothy Renner has started doing something similar, but I
have a sense that if enough people tried it enough times,
you would get replication of it. I don't know if
anybody has. I think that's probably one of the biggest

(28:02):
criticisms of it, is that no one's quite done the
same thing. But if true, then yeah, it's it's it's uh.
It has so many implications, right, I mean, especially when
you think about the fact that these ce five events,
you know, these these sort of events where people get
together and they try to like summon or bring down
or call in a UFO, like you know, it's a

(28:23):
it's not UAP unidentified and almost phenomena. It's UAP, it's
unidentified aerial Phillips right because the Philip Experiment, Toronto psychologists
decided parapsychologists decided that they were going to create an
entire backstory for a ghost from from from nothing, but
they gave it a lot of believable details. He was
a spy during the English Civil War, life, death, marriage,

(28:45):
you know, children, all those sort of things, big of
big events. They had his entire biography mapped out, and
then they held a seance who tried to address this
fictional ghost, and eventually they did get some responses, and
the responses, the wraps and knocks and stuff that they got,
his answers to their questions all almost always answered correctly
those questions that they had made up about Phillips. So
what is going on there? Did they all psychically download

(29:09):
the actual biography of someone who really lived and died maybe?
I don't know. Did they collectively create something that had
an outside existence from them? You know? Did they actually
sort of get together and pulpify something maybe? Or were
those responses part of their own latent sie phenomena that
was answering questions. I don't know. I think there are

(29:30):
a lot of different options to that, but it does
sort of emphasize the fact that like this internal external
fact fiction mind body sort of barrier is just so
thin and so permeable in that regard, and it does
really sort of you know, it's one of those things
where something like the Philip experiment either doesn't happen often
or it literally happens all the time, like it's almost

(29:51):
every encounter with the paranormal. Again, to be very clear,
I'm not saying these are hallucinations. I'm not saying people
are making things up. I'm not saying people are delution.
I'm saying that something within us has the ability to
create something outside of us and to interplay. That's the
power of the mind, right perhaps. And then finally back
to Tulpa's because that that necessarily, you know, comes into

(30:13):
the conversation here. Yeah, I I I ended up addressing
Tulpa's and thought forms in the book because you certainly
have to, because this sounds so much like that. The
thing that I will say is that number one, the
Tulpa idea is not as old as we have been
led to believe it is, by which I mean that

(30:33):
there are there are similar techniques in Buddhism. But the
idea as outlined by Alexander David Neil is very much
a product of her own theosophical beliefs and some some
of her like going through going through the Buddhist practices,
like she's in a cafeteria and like picking out things
bits and pieces that she wants. So that's part of

(30:54):
the problem with it. The other thing that I would
say is that you know, I I have found myself much,
very much of the idea that there's this quote that's
attributed apocryphally to either Hillman or Carl Jung, which is
people don't have ideas, ideas have people. It's this idea
that ideas are just existing out there and they find
us and they you know, if you want to get

(31:14):
really negative about it, they sound like we're hosts for them, right,
or we're incubators for them. But I think that that
ties much into a vision of reality that looks archetypal
in the way that Carl Jung would say. And then
again coming back to your idea of of Sherlock Holmes,
and why Sherlock has that sense of being a real person,
I think is because he is such a strong idea

(31:35):
that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle latched onto. And that would
explain to me why you get people like J. R. R.
Tolkien who like didn't feel like he invented Middle Earth.
He felt like he discovered Middle Earth. You know, everything
that he wrote was like, you know, an archaeological dig
more than it was you know, an exercising creative writing.
So I think that, you know, the Tulpa thing might

(31:57):
be what's happening. But the idea of the Tulpa puts
so much of the power in our hands, and I'm
not sure that it is in our hands. It might
just be that we are tapping into something that is
out there and this sort of sea of ideas that
are around us all the time.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
Interesting, do you you heard the the idea of the
phenomenon of you cannot create a person? Like so every
person that you see in your dreams is someone that
you've seen in real life at some time. Do you
think that you know when when people walk out? And
I keep going back to Sherlock Holmes or whatever, but
if people you know, Sir Arthur Gordon Doyle is walking

(32:33):
down the street and he sees Sherlock Holmes the person,
and he wrote this entire story and book based on it.
So when these other authors and stuff are seeing their characters,
it's literally because every time he goes to the deli
he sees this random guy walk in and he based
the character on him. What do you what do you
think of the reverse like that?

Speaker 4 (32:50):
Yeah, I mean I think that's I think that's entirely possible.
Because again, like so much of this, this, so much
of this conversation depends on this tension between how these
sort of abilities of hours are manifesting. You know, is
s is it siabilities in the sense that we're getting
transmissions from somewhere and like, you know, you see that
person and you sort of like what you think is inspiration?

(33:12):
Is at you actually learning details of their lives or
is it the idea?

Speaker 3 (33:17):
You know?

Speaker 4 (33:17):
How much of that power is in cide where you're like, oh,
you're being creative and you're thinking of these things and
you're bringing them to manifest I'm not really sure how
I feel about that. I mean, I do think though,
that's one of the confronting things about you know, even
before we had a lot of this AI generated video,
there was a website called this Person does Not Exist.
I don't know if you ever saw it, but like
you could just hit refresh and it was even this
is like maybe, gosh, this is probably seven or eight

(33:40):
years ago. It was a long time ago where even
back then it was sort of combining just different facial
features from people into a whole new person, right, and
you would look at it and there would be something
really kind of uh, there's some uncanny Valley aspect to it,
as you're like, oh, this person doesn't exist, but there
is something convincing about them. So, you know, I don't know,
I think that I think that that is a good

(34:04):
question and one that I had to consider it so
that you don't think about it.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Next book. There you go right back back to the
Philip experiment. You know, when when we do a lot
of paranormal investigations and stuff, we talk about how when
you go out to these locations and you say, you know,
is anyone here with me? I'd like to talk with
this specific person, and then you have something else come in, right,
you have a demon or a fay creature or whatever

(34:28):
you whatever, These things happen to be and it manifests
as the thing that you're trying to talk to. You,
I'm trying to talk to my grandma, right, yeah, and
then this other thing comes in and goes, knock knock,
I'm your grandma. Well you know were you were? You
born in the you know, the nineteen sixties. Knock knock, Yes,
I was, you know. So who is to say that
this Philip experiment is something else that just came in

(34:48):
and said, oh, yeah, yeah, I had this life, you know.
So you have to this whenever you go down any
of these rabbit holes. It's so difficult to get to
the bottom of any of this stuff because you have
these ideas and thoughts that play against everything. So, okay,
you create Philip, you think that you're studying Philip, and
now this other demon thing comes in and pretends to

(35:10):
be Philip, and your whole experiment is thrown out if
you believe that the demon is real and you believe
that the ghost is real and manifestation, and this whole
thing just turns into this big ball of Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:21):
I mean I totally agree with you. I mean I
know that some there's been constant, you know, talk of
you know, should you or should you not be afraid
to use weija boards? And it's like, it's not I
don't think it's the thing itself that is to be
afraid of. It's it's the idea that, like, you know,
something is masquerading as as someone else or something else.
And yeah, I think that that's that's something to be

(35:43):
very much aware of. And that does play into this
discussion as well. I mean, like that's that honestly kind
of keeps with a lot of the the aspects of
the thesis. As it is regarding you know, the UFO phenomenon.
It's like, well, there does seem to be something like
something is there. You know, it's it's leaving burn marks
in the ground and you know, depending on you know,

(36:03):
what you think of alien abductions and stuff, scoop of
marks and people's hands and things like that. But at
the same time, it does seem to readily adapt and
adopt what we expect it to be. I mean, you
don't have to look much further than the fact that, like,
you know, the UFO phenomenon started out as what you know,
signs and wonders in the sky and then it became
airships around the early twentieth century, and then our deco

(36:25):
flying saucers and then black triangles, and now like you know,
in the twenty twenties, we got drones everywhere. You know,
we've really conflated the idea of drone and UFO in
a big sort of way. So I think that that
right there tells you that whatever is on the other
side of this telephone, the other side of the TV screens,
but probably a better metaphor here, it's paying attention, you know,

(36:50):
and it seems to be able to tap into currents
that are individual and cultural. And so with that in mind,
then yeah, that's entirely something that could happen. That there
was something a free agent floating around the room in
Toronto that said, Hey, these people are trying to do this.
I'm gonna be fill up. You know. That's I cannot
never be able to roll that out.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
That's that's another good point. You know, you talk about
the manifestation of these things, and you know, with the
UFO phenomenon, you see that a lot. You know, we
first have you know, like you said, the airships, and
then it was discs, then it was triangles, then it's
the now it's these little silver balls. So is the
phenomenon changing itself to our modern view and understanding or

(37:31):
is it evolving?

Speaker 4 (37:32):
You know, you have this whole I mean, or there's
the there's the flip side barn of me, which is
something that I've thought about a lot, which is you know,
the thing, the one. There are a couple of things
that if you, if you're a pan paranormalist like you
and me, you notice these things over and over and
over again, like you know, buzzing sounds, poltergeist effects, et cetera,

(37:53):
et cetera. But like the lights, Like the lights are everywhere,
the lights are with everything, and they're almost always context dependent,
right like you know, a light in the sky's a UFO,
A light in the house is a haunted as a ghost.
You know, a light a light bobbing over an iron
age stone for it is going to be a very
you know. But the lights are everywhere, and the lights
are even there with crypti accounts, you know, people have
started opening up about that in the last seven or

(38:15):
eight years. That's say, So, what's really interesting to me
is this idea that like, well maybe maybe that's what
all this stuff really looks like and what we think
we see is something that we're meeting half We're meeting
with it with halfway, you know, like you know, and
that's why we get these things that do look like
pop culture versions of UFOs and aliens and stuff, is

(38:35):
because like we are sort of to the form of
your own destructoring this sort of phenomenon, Like we're meeting
it halfway and we're saying, oh, this is what I
expect to see personally, this is what my culture has
told me to see, and somehow this has the power
to make it actually, you know, make it manifest to us.
I think that's something that really needs to be considered
as well. Yeah, which actually ties into someone mentioned in

(39:01):
the chat. I guess I'm keeping an eye on it.
Someone mentioned, uh, multiple witness sightings where there's disagreement between.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Tag tare I was gonna come back to that. We
can hit it now here.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
Yeah, No, it's it's it's a great question, and I'm
always happy when it gets asked because it doesn't get
asked often enough, and it actually.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
People what happens when different people in a group have
the very different views of a fictional character object, How
would that manifest?

Speaker 4 (39:28):
There?

Speaker 3 (39:29):
You go carry out so so.

Speaker 4 (39:30):
I would I would sort of, uh, I would before
I before I go into that, I would sort of
address what we're talking about was sort of like this
co creation aspect, which so what I would say to that,
first of all, is that there are tons of uh
sightings where people will all agree like, yeah, we saw
an object in the sky and it was strange, but
like you know, oh it had blue lights. The other

(39:50):
person's like, no, it had yellow lights, and like so
there's always things like that, you know. Timothy Renner and
I have even collected stories of people who see a
big foot and they will disagree on the color of
the hair, which seems like something that would be relatively
easy to agree on. There are a lot of reasons
for this, the usual ones being mistaken, fabricating, lying, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. The question, though, specifically, is like,

(40:13):
you know, well, if people have different versions of a
fictional character in their head, which they certainly do, then
how would that manifest and sort of the ideas that
I'm talking about, well, number one, like the weird thing
is that like, yeah, like you might be standing in
front of mister Darcy at the checkout line, and not
even know it because he's not your mister Darcy. You know,

(40:36):
it's Barnaby's mister Darcy, or you know Barnaby's severa snape
is behind me. He is talking to me at the DMV, like,
I don't know. That's that's one weird thing to think about.
But what I like, too is this idea that if
if these ideas have some degree of autonomy outside of us,
and they're sort of looking for places to be, it
might help to explain some of these weird one offs
that we get, like their ideas that never found a home.

(40:59):
They're homeless, I right, like stray cats or stray dogs,
Like they're just they're just sort of looking in that
so you'll get this weird flap where I don't know,
you'll get in the mineral Point vampire or something right
like this one thing that's ducks in for a little
bit and then ducks right out and and so that
might have some bearing on it too. Now the question
really does come down to, like what will what would

(41:19):
happen if if you and I were together and we
you know, we both saw a character that we both
had different ideas of, Like would we see the same
thing when we see something different, I suspect we'd see
different things. But having said that, there have been a
lot of people who have speculated that eyewitnesses to the

(41:41):
paranormal have some sort of psychic sensitivity and that once
you are within their sort of field effect, you are
likely to see what they see. This is something that
Jenny Randall's talked about a lot. This is something that
John Keel talked about a little bit too. So I
think that there's there might be something like that going
on where it's like, well, who's who's the strong who
has the stronger psychic talents Josh or Barnaby? And then oh,

(42:04):
I'm gonna whoever is the weaker of the two is
going to default to seeing what they see again in
highly speculative Jenny Randall's mind, Monsters is a great place
to look for more information on sort of that line
of speculation. She, as ever, does a great job with
unpacking that.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
What about you know, you mentioned Mike Clellan as well,
you know, with the whole screen memories of owls being
aliens and that whole philosophy. What do you think about
You mentioned that these lights manifest with all these different
phenomenons through you know, the fairy, the UFOs, the Bigfoot,
all this stuff. Do you think that these entities as
we perceive them could all just be a screen memory

(42:42):
of what they really are?

Speaker 4 (42:45):
I no, I mean no, I mean I think that
I think that there's some very strong evidence to that.
I mean, like, so the light thing is especially compelling
to me because when people see the lights, how often
do they say things like, you know, it basically wasn't right,
you know, it didn't illuminate its surroundings. They'll say things like,
you know, it just looked like a different kind of

(43:06):
light than I've ever seen before. And then you know,
this is this is again We're we're sort of out
on a limb speculation land here. But you know, melatonin
and d m T are closely related. You know, they're
both produced in your body. Melotonin gives you really vivid
dreams and d MT can give you full on, you know,

(43:26):
hallucinations and as such. You know, h melatonin is reliant
on light for production, you know, for those cues. That's
one of the reasons that people are having trouble sleeping
with blue screens is because you know, they're getting that
blue light. So if d m T is also produced

(43:47):
through through light, you know, exposure. Then what if the
lights are like giving you this signal that your body
dumps this your body dumps the world's most powerful drug
from your body. You know, it's a signal that you
get this endogenous dump of d MT into your system,
and then that combines with whatever you're expecting to see
and then it's sort of you know, manifests in front

(44:09):
of you. I think that's that's something that really needs
to be considered. I don't know how you really necessarily
study that, and I don't think that, you know, it's
one of those ideas where like A to B and
B two C and C T D hold up, but
A to D I really don't buy. But it's an
interesting idea, and I think that's it really would speak
to the fact that, like, yes, the native form of

(44:30):
these phenomena is the light, and it's just what we
think we see is projection from us, which would explain
why you get you know, which would explain why we
have three hundred and seventy five different versions of Bigfoot
as opposed to something that looks like a singular species. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Interesting, we are live guys. If you have any questions
or comments for Joshua, throw them in the comments section.
I want to take a very hard right turn on
this episode, Okay, And I'm I'm fascinated with all this
stuff and it brings me down an entire line of
questioning different than where we're on here. So I just

(45:08):
want to preface this this way. Is a lot of
the times when we're researching this stuff, we have our
own experiences.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Right.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
So my first question, and this is a very specific
question for you and then broader, is when you've done
the research this and looked into all these phenomenon and
all the books that you've written and stuff, have you
ever had a hat Man experience? Personally, I'm gonna say.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
I'm gonna say no, but because I don't necessarily remember
the hat right, But I've had some shadow people kind
of things happen during periods of intense research. Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
Now, the reason i bring that one up specifically to
start with is because I've heard stories and my personal
experience when I've done an experiment with something really weird,
and some other people have talked about it too, that
this thing kind of shows up as like a man
in black, right, that he's like you're going down the

(46:14):
wrong path or you know, I'm watching what you're working
on kind of thing. Yeah, and I've had that personal
experience with my hat Man experience, so yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (46:24):
Should I should probably slip this in there to though too.
Is it like I feel like I'm just coming out
of like a ten year relative drought of having things
happen to me. You know, I've made this joke before
that like I just have this really good guardian angel
who doesn't know how to take a day off, And
like every time I got into the woods, he's just
chained smoking. He's like he's going out there again. I'm

(46:46):
just gonna got to pull an all nighter again. Just
gotta Josh, get get back, get back back home. You know. Granted,
like some things have started to change because I think
I've I've readjusted some of my mental approaches to these topics,
which I think is helping. But I'm not entirely I
said all that to say I'm not entirely sure I'm
the best sample for this particular data point. Yeah, I

(47:10):
know I have had some some very odd hypnogogic moments
with something that sort of wall. I've finally started keeping
like a log of weird things that happened to me,
And when you do, you're like, oh, stuff does happen
to me relatively often, right, you know, but maybe a
year or two ago it was sort of I was

(47:31):
half asleep, half awake, and then I heard a snort,
which I'm not entirely sure wasn't my wife. Don't tell
her I said that, But I heard like a snarl
or a snort, And there's there's a light that was
coming through our window that wasn't in the usual it
didn't look like a familiar light that should be in
our window. And then I got the very distinct impression of,

(47:52):
you know, a right to left movement of something kind
of reverse patty walking right to left across our room.
So like that's and it was sort of a shadow
of sort of impression. So like that's the closest thing
that I've gotten. But yeah, that is an interesting idea,
like the idea that there's something that is monitoring us,
which is sort of the flavor of the men in

(48:13):
black stuff. It's like reminding us of where the guardrails are.
You know, you don't want to do this, you don't
want to look into this et cetera, et cetera, which
again to me puts me in the mindset of an
observation that my friend and editor Barbara Fisher made, which is, like,
have you ever noticed some of these things just like
to watch, like they're always watching, and it's like, what
if they are those watchers, you know, those Biblical watchers,

(48:35):
and like their job is to prevent Their job is
to be the watchers. Their job is to be the
observers in the observer effect and make sure that the
universe remains operationally, you know, when no one else is looking.
I don't know, but there is something you do get
this idea that they're sort of reality police or like
the time variance authority.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
Right, So you've researched all this stuff. You put a
lot of this stuff in like the hypothetical of you know,
like well if what if this, if this, and then
that you know a equals B will see kind of stuff.
Where do you stand, Like, how much like have you've
You've obviously had like some paranormal background some like you said,

(49:16):
you go out in the woods and stuff like that.
So you've done actual in person boots on the ground
research and stuff. Along with the book research and the
learned stuff. So where do you fall on this? What
do you believe?

Speaker 4 (49:29):
Yeah, that's a really good question. And the thing that
I always trying to sort of highlight is the fact that, like,
as as far as whenever I speculate and hypothesize and stuff,
I can't overemphasize how much I sometimes don't want this
to be the case, Like how much I want Bigfoot
to be a big monkey, you know, cause I can

(49:50):
have and I told you so a moment with my
old college roommates and stuff, you know, like like I
really want that to be the case. I am sure.
I will say that a lot of the things in
Fourth Wall Phantoms I am deliberately backing off from because
it does lead you to that, like here there be
dragons kind of kind of space, right, and so there's

(50:11):
that to consider. I suspect that the the the pan
paranormal theory that still plays the best in my head
is something like ecology of souls, that this is all
death related and sort of centered around that other aspect
of ourselves. I think there's a way to make that

(50:32):
idea played nicely, so to speak, with some of the
ideas in Fourth Wall Phantoms, But here's what I have noticed.
And I mentioned I sort of alluded to this earlier
Barnaby about like, you know, the mind frame with which
I'm getting better results, and that's been that I've just
been overthinking this in the field, you know, Like the
overthinking is exactly what I need to be doing here
in my office, right. But you know, when you're on

(50:57):
the moon, don't worry about what the composition of the
moon rock is, Like that's a question for bringing the
moon rock back home when you're on the moon, like
be in the moment, experience the moon. And to that extent,
like I've started trying to view these I've started trying
to view my fieldwork in a more simplistic way. And

(51:19):
that sounds sort of negative, but I mean like when
I'm in the field, I am looking for dead people.
When I am in the forest, I am looking for
a big monkey. When I'm skywashing, I'm looking for an
alien spaceship that might not be what it is, but
I think that like something about that sort of simplicity
of perspective might help entice this stuff out. I mean,
here's the flip side. Man, Like about ten days ago,

(51:42):
now a week and a half ago, coming up on
two weeks, I guess I finally had class B bigfoot
stuff happened to me, and I violated one of my
cardinal rules, which was don't wear a damn bigfoot shirt
in you're bigfoot hunting, because it feels too on the right,
like you wear a bigfoot shirt, you're not gonna see bigfoot.

(52:03):
And I was cold, and I was wearing two bigfoot
shirts and a bigfoot hat, and I finally heard the hat.
I finally heard some very peculiar howls, you know, and
I finally had something thrown at me, stuff that I'd
wished for for like the past decade more or less.
So like I and I think that it was just
sort of that embrace of like, you know, let's let's
lean into this, that really sort of enticed that out.

(52:25):
Now that might speak to some of these more esoteric
ideas that I'm talking about, you know the fact that
my set and setting and my attitude enticed it out,
But I think that's important that I just sort of
like try to lean into that aspect a little bit
more so. That's kind of where I'm at is that
there's there's two ways to approach it. One is the
fieldwork version and one is the theoretical version. Yeah. Yeah,

(52:45):
that was a rambling response, but that's where I met No.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
I think, you know, to that point when when my
team goes out, or at least me specifically on these investigations,
if we get a report of a bigfoot, I'll go
to that location. But I'm not looking for bigfoot, looking
for what happens.

Speaker 4 (53:01):
You know.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
Do we see lights in the woods, do we have
fair we have paranormal? Do you see a UFO? Something
happened there? But by going in there to the aspect
of I'm looking for a bigfoot, you're missing out on
everything else, you know. So I try and go into
any you know, even a paranormal house. You go into
a with an open mind and just say what is here?

(53:23):
Not I'm looking for this because you you kind of
you put those blinders on and you're gonna miss a
lot of the other evidence and stuff that's going on.

Speaker 4 (53:32):
And I yeah, I mean yeah to that extent, Like, yeah,
I the one a few times that I've participated in
like a CE five, the best advice that I got
was like, you know, don't just look at the sky,
like look at the stuff that's going on around you
at at the ground level too, because again, like this stuff,
the older I get, the the older I get, the

(53:52):
less I care about offending anybody when I say this,
like all this stuff is somehow related. It really is.
I really think it is. You know, if you're out
there and you do and the fieldwork, and you're and
you're reading the literature, like there's the ven diagrams overlap,
there's some sort of connection there. You know, it might
not all be the same thing, but it's somehow related.
And so yeah, when you're out there, we're looking for bigfoot,

(54:12):
look for the look for the ghost, and look for
the missing time, and look for the UFO and all
that other stuff. That's great advice. That's great advice.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
I think one of mye of my favorite things that
I've heard about the whole Bigfoot phenomenon, came from and
I apologize, but it was either you or Timothy Renner
that said this, and I've talked to you about this
on the show before. But it's going to lead to
this question over here too, is with the whole Bigfoot phenomenon,
one of you guys has talked about the fact that
there's a woman in white archetype that travels with these

(54:47):
candila balls of light and a large hairy ape bigfoot
creature in the woods. And here you have all three
of these phenomenon that have been described with the Bigfoot
and stuff, and now you have the woman in white,
the balls of light, and Bigfoot all together this fay lore.
And I'll let I'll bring this question up too, because

(55:07):
it kind of falls with that too. But Flat Rockland says,
what do you think about Bigfoot possibly being a big
Harry fairy?

Speaker 4 (55:13):
Yeah, that was Tim's idea. When Tim came to me
with that idea, I'm like, what are you talking about? Like,
this is the nuttiest thing. And I'll be honest with you,
it's the gift that keeps on giving. I mean, we
could have written probably another three more chapters on the
whole the women in White Bigfoot connections that we've seen
since then. And really, what I think that's tapping into
is the sort of idea of like archetypes and sort

(55:39):
of like the idea that those are polar opposites and
Bigfoot's kind of like Bigfoot. It's kind of for all
I know, Bigfoot might be a physical embodiment of the Union.
Shadow because you know, it always likes to monkey see
monkey do with people like it paces you out, like
it seems like it's related to you somehow. But yeah,
that was that was Tim's idea and it's absolutely brilliant
and to that extent, yes, Patrick Harper has mentioned sort

(55:59):
of idea that Bigfoot could be sort of a big
hairy fairy and that's something that we talk about a
good deal and where the footprints and believe it's volume one,
although we talk about UFOs and volume two and I
have trouble distinguished distinguishing between fairies and UFOs, right. But
my favorite example of how, if nothing else, we've sort
of folded, we sort of folded in fairy lore into

(56:20):
bigfoot lore. And who knows, maybe it means it's the
same phenomenon, but at least the very least we've combined
and we synchronize these things is that one of the
things that people report is that, you know, they go
out to their stable stables in the morning and their
horses will have their mates braided. You know, there have
been pictures of this. This has been documented in like Montana.
There's even a story of a Russian researcher who supposedly

(56:43):
watched in al Masti their version of Bigfoot break into
a stable and braid a horse mate. But you find
references to that all the time, and like Dorset and
in Newfoundland and such, where it was believed that the
fairies would break into stables overnight and braid horses manes
because they wanted to make stirrups to ride the horses
at night. And sometimes this was blamed on witches as well.

(57:04):
So at the very least, you can pretty clearly say
that there are phenomena that we attribute to whatever the
monster dujure is of our culture, right, But I suspect
that it's also it's that and the fact that these
things like just engage in a lot of the same behavior.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
You know.

Speaker 4 (57:23):
Another favorite example of mine is the fact that you know,
there's no shortage of literature fairy literature that says like
knocks in the forest in Europe are attributed to the fairies,
and over here we say, if you hear a knock
in the woods, it's got to be Bigfoot. So the trick,
I think is to not say Bigfoot is a fairy
or fairies or Bigfoot or anything, but just to say that,
like we have a very poor list of ever slippery,

(57:45):
slidey terms that depending on our culture and depending on
what we've been exposed to, we apply to the strange
phenomena that we run into, right, And in the rarest
occasions you see something in front of you that conforms
to one of those ideas. But otherwise beyond that, we
can just say that there are anomalies that persist in
different parts of the world.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Are you familiar with the Ape Canyon story?

Speaker 4 (58:10):
Yeah? Yeah, I have access to grind with the Ape
Canyon story. And what did you want to say about the.

Speaker 3 (58:19):
I have heard from credible researchers that have looked into
that and researched the Ape Canyon stuff that going back
before they even got to the canyon, they were hiking
through the woods and met this woman in white who
told them where to go to find this vein that
they were gonna mine.

Speaker 4 (58:38):
Speaks speaks directly to Timothy's theory.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Right.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
So it's frustrating because our primary source for the Ape
Canyon story is Fred Beck. Fred Beck wrote a pamphlet
called I Fought the epe Men in Mount Saint Helens,
and that is a weird book. And the flesh and
the cryptologist with a flesh and blood perspective will say, well,
Fred kind of weird about this other stuff, and like,
oh it was his son who encouraged him to include

(59:04):
that in there, And I'm like, okay, well whatever, this
is our only source for the eight canon story. So
omitting those details because they don't conform to your perspective
of the phenomenon seems disingenuous to me. At the very least,
they should be mentioned. But I hadn't even heard these
until I actually read the Dad Gun pamphlet. So among
the anomalies, yeah, Fred Beck had some encounters that were

(59:27):
basically I'm not sure he might have. For all I know,
he might have been a spiritualist or a theosophist, because
a lot of his childhood reads like that, you know,
having toys that were go missing show back up, and
things like that. On their way when they went to
when they went to look for their mind to prospect,

(59:48):
Fred and his companions were led by a few different things.
One of them was the spirit of a Native American warrior.
One of them was Fred's female spiritual guider, whom they
named the mine after Vander White. Vender White Mine they
named it after his spirit guide. But they said that
they followed a white arrow in the sky to where

(01:00:08):
their mind should be. And again this is all in passing,
like it's just like that's as much elaboration as you get,
Like that's it. Then once they were there, the first
indications that there was something strange was that there was
this sound of like heavy machinery or drumming underneath the ground.
The first set of footprints they saw was a pair

(01:00:30):
of footprints that were in the middle of like a
sixty foot wide sandbar, and someone said, it looks like
they just dropped out of the sky and were picked
back up. While at the ap k insite, fred Beck
supposedly had a pencil a port into his hand when
he was in need of one. The pencil y City
recognized as one from back home, because you know, I
guess pencils get you know, they sort of getting marks

(01:00:51):
on him and like, you know, maybe he was chewing
on it or something, but he recognized the pencil from
back home. And there's even a passage in that in
that book where he he encounters like a little girl
miles from anywhere, and they go but he goes back
to the little girl's camp and the little girl's having
a conversation with this father that she says is there
that is not there at all, Like there's just nobody
else there at the camp but the little girl. And
he goes back later I think if memory serves, and

(01:01:13):
she's not there either, or the camp's there, So like,
this is all weird stuff to have happened at a
place where the most famous bigfoot attack ever. Right, and
him said something to me a while ago, it's kind
of been my rule of thumb, and maybe this is
there's a there's a logical fallacy behind it, but I

(01:01:33):
think it just feels right, which is like it's it's
rare to see a UFO or a ghost or whatever.
That's rare, and it's rare to see a bigfoot. And
how much how many more degrees of how many how
many more orders of magnitude rare? Ur does it have
to be to see both of those in the same
place or around the same time, and then to not
be connected, like you know, it's like I won the

(01:01:54):
lottery and got struck by lightning on the same day.
Like it just doesn't seem like, you know, unless is
giving you both though it's like, I don't, I don't,
I don't know how how I have trouble separating those
parts of the story out. Obviously a lot of cryptologists
over the years have not had trouble separating those stories
parts of the story out because you just don't hear
about them. But and in in conclusion, and what's really

(01:02:16):
sort of especially egregious about it is the fact that
in doing so and presenting just the sort of orthodox
and narrative, they're really stripping out Fred Beck's voice because
he concludes the book saying like, you know, these are
these have they have a physical presence, whatever they are,
but you know they also there's an aspect of themselves
that is spiritual. And it's like, well, that's that's you know,

(01:02:36):
kind of my working thesis too. But it's like, we're
gonna take we're gonna strip mine all the parts of
your story that that line up with our view of
what Bigfoot is and also not give you the final
say on what your experience was. It's a little bit
gross to me.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
You know, well, I am fascinated by that. I've I've
heard from well we call them like apors, right, the
people that blood, And I've heard that the woman in
white from those type of people, but all this other stuff,
you're the first time I've ever heard any of the
other phenomenon and stuff that's going around with that, And
that just goes to show, you know, I know people
who are part of the BFRO right and they get

(01:03:14):
these reports in and I've heard the unedited versions of
the posts of this, and there's so much more like ufful,
balls of light, strange sounds, all this other stuff that
goes along with some of these reports, but it's not
included because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Speaker 4 (01:03:30):
Well, well, I think a rule of thumb, and this
might be Tim's rule of thumb, but or somebody else
might have said it might have been Tom Powell. But
like the rule of thumb that I have have seen
to hold very true is that the fleeting encounters, like
the roadside crossings and the hunter who sees something from
his blind or something, those all feel very much like
a flesh and blood creature. And I do not fault

(01:03:52):
people who have had those experiences from saying no, it
was an animal, because that's the way those always read.
But whenever you get longitudinal experience with these things, whether
or not that's habituators, or that's people returning to the
same research side or whatever. Once once you start getting
that sort of uh interaction with these things at the

(01:04:13):
same place that takes place over a long period of time,
months or even years, things start to get weird and
they start to get weird quick. And that's been that's
been my experience, not only with reading stuff, but also
talking to habituators and some of my friends who have
had fieldwork in the same areas over and over and
over again. I've known some of them who have become
converted from being of the flesh and blood perspective to

(01:04:35):
it the very least opening up and saying something about
this is really strange. And that's you know, that's as
that's as confrontational and cambative as I like to get. Like,
you know, as long as you don't say that I'm
crazy or or ignorant or underinformed because I believe these things,
because I that that is offensive to me. But if
you say, hey, like you know, I don't I don't

(01:04:56):
think this is what's going on, but there's something odd
going on, then you will have a great dinner together.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
Yeah, we find this a lot in paranormal experiences too,
is we'll go to a location. Well, let me back up,
because I missed my whole beginning of that. People that
share their Bigfoot stories say what they hear, right, So
when they come forward and they say, I saw a
big hairy ape out in the woods, I heard it howl,
I heard the wood knox, and that's it because when

(01:05:26):
they've already had this experience and they're like, well, you know,
nobody's gonna believe me. If I add all these other
details of what really happened, no one's gonna believe me.
So they start out with this basic stuff and we've
had this happen in like paranormal cases and stuff as well.
People will tell us I think there's a ghost in
my house, and then that's it, and we bring in
our mediums and stuff and we start digging into this

(01:05:46):
and we're like, yeah, but what about this? And did
your you know you had a child that passed away?
And they're like, how did you know that? Well, if
you would have told us all this from the beginning,
this would have helped their whole investment, right, because you
left out all these details and in so many of
these phenomenon I think that people have these paradigm shift
encounters with whatever have you, and they don't tell the

(01:06:08):
whole story because they're so afraid that in the first
basic level, no one's gonna believe them. Right more when
you start adding the details of what actually happened.

Speaker 4 (01:06:18):
Well, which ends up having this sort of like reverse effect,
right It's like an you know, reverse card, because you
know I know that. So the late Earl Gray, who
was a move on director for Southern California, a great fellow.
He passed away recently, but he had said something that
I've always felt too, is like I believe a story
more when there's some detail that doesn't make any sense.

(01:06:38):
And I'm not talking about like I got you question
like oh no, but you said that you went out
to the seven eleven at eleven and this happened to
you at ten thirty. I don't mean that sort of
like logical discrepancy. I mean like when somebody comes to
me and they say, you know, they give me all
the beats of a typical alien abduction experience, and then
they say, but there's just one thing that I don't
really like to tell people that, you know, one of

(01:06:58):
the aliens was wearing a T shirt that said iHeart
New York. It's like, that's the sort of thing that
makes me go, why in the heck would you add that?
You know, That's the flip side is like why would
you add that? This does nothing to increase your credibility.
This does everything to undermine what you're saying, Like, why
would you say that? It's very similar to what you know,
Adam Davies went through with that whole portal experience, you know,

(01:07:21):
and the little ewok creatures, like you know, Adam Davies,
who at least up until that point, I'm not sure
if he's changed his stance, but you know, it was
very much you know, on the flesh and Blood train,
probably the person who's going to prove a Rangpin deck,
like you know, it's very much rooted in science. And
for him to come forward and be like, yeah, we
had this bizarre encounter where a portal opened up in

(01:07:42):
the woods and there were these little ewoks that were
spilling through that we had to repel with flashlights. It's
like that's the ontological shock, right. We were talking about
the UFO disclosure space and now they're saying ontological shock
all the time. Like I have a space on my shelf,
a space on the shelf in my head that's labeled
alien deduction or like you know, space invasion. I have
a spot on the shelf that's labeled you know, relic tominid. Right.

(01:08:06):
I don't have a spot in my head on the
shelf that's labeled fictions come to life, right that that
doesn't make any sense to me, or that like you know,
or ewoks coming through a portal in the Pacific Northwest,
Like there's that's ontological shock, right, And that's that's what
we should really lean into, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
You know, so going back to your book, we're gonna
we're gonna wrap up here on this. But coming back
to your book, fourth Wall phantoms just came out in
April for everybody interested as well. When we're talking about
the folklore and stuff like this, you talk about how
your perception of stuff is based on things that we

(01:08:48):
have seen. You know, if you see a big thing
in the woods, you go to bigfoot in that, you know,
you have this mindset of that's probably what it was.
If it was something that I can't explain. When we
talk about old folk and mythology and stuff like that,
they didn't have those pre existing stories, movies, tropes, and stuff. Right, Well,

(01:09:09):
where do you think that the idea of these creatures
and stuff and you know, extraterrestrials and you know the
humans with yeah, the humans with animal heads and stuff
in you know, Egyptian and other mythologies and stuff, where
does that come from them?

Speaker 4 (01:09:25):
Well, it's it's really interesting to trace the way that
some of these terms change. I mean, like, you know,
one of the things I've always been fascinated with is
the number of like newspaper reports, especially in America that
first called like you know, first it was like hairy Ghost,
and then it was like wild Man, and then it
was like eventually got around to Bigfoot in the fifties
or whatever. But like, and this is gonna this probably

(01:09:45):
will be an unsatisfactory answer for a lot of people.
But I think this is where a lot of this,
a lot of my investigation has sort of pushed me to,
is is to a space of archetypes, is to a
space of the collective unconscious. I mean, you know, a
good example of that is something like like the wild Man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:10:06):
I have historically had trouble believing that we have eighteen
different species of relic hominid that live alongside every community
you know, and sometimes have six or seven subspecies. Right,
I have so much trouble believing that, even though I

(01:10:28):
believe the people who see these things.

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:10:29):
To be clear, I have so much trouble believing that.
But I have no trouble believing the idea that, like
the wild man is an archetype, and being an archetype,
it appears in different cultures independently without any cultural transmission.
It's part of the software that we come uploaded with
when we enter this world. Right, So wherever you have people,
you're going to have a wild man. Wherever you have

(01:10:50):
a wild man, you're going to have manifestations of the
wild man that look a lot like Bigfoot.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
Like.

Speaker 4 (01:10:54):
That's sort of where I sort of land with a
lot of this stuff. So as far as like principles,
where do these things come from? I do suspect it
is from that archetypal, archetypal like substrata of reality. That's
what's so interesting about the archetype idea and the collective
unconscious idea is because it feels like you're looking at
like the source code of the universe, because you do get,
you know, universal food taboos across different cultures that have

(01:11:19):
not had any contact with each other. You get things
like like, you know, the idea that again like this
idea of the wild man, or or these trickster sort
of characters that appear across all these different cultures, but
the same set of talents and characteristics that to me,
really paints you into a corner where you're like, Okay, well,

(01:11:40):
either these things exist in some sort of objective way
and people are just experiencing these things, or we had
an international culture that traded all these stories, or you know, collective,
the collective unconscious and archetypes are are are real in
some sort of way. And so that's where I think
a lot of these ideas come from. And it really
is kind of once you start looking at it from

(01:12:01):
that way, it really is inspiring because it does show
you that everybody is the same, like all of our cultures.
People are just people wherever you go, right, because we
do have that same you know, Windows ninety eight software
uploaded with us when we when we first pop out
of the out of the birth canal. You know, another
good example of this is you will take this idea

(01:12:24):
that we call things instinct, like, well, what the heck
is instinct? You know, It's like you'll have a chicken,
a baby chicken who's never seen a hulk in their life,
who will like duck and run for cover when they
see a shadow go overhead. I think that is something
that is much more akin to this archetypal space, which
is probably where a lot of our folk tales come from,
and which is not just something that should be relegated

(01:12:44):
to that folk tale fictiony sort of space, but has
the ability we should grant it the autonomy to sort
of emerge into our physical dimension as well.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
Man, I absolutely yeah. I tell you, I love talking
to you. I love your work and your research and stuff.
You are probably one of the more fascinating people out
there to get because there's there's I love folklore, I
love mythology, and when it all comes together with you know,
the fairies, the Bigfoot, and it all ties together, and
it's just amazing the stuff that you've worked on and
your books, and I want to thank you for everything

(01:13:19):
that you've done.

Speaker 4 (01:13:20):
Well, thanks thanks for letting me talk at you, Barnaby.
I'm I was so excited. I was so excited. I'm
like you know, I was. I was amped up, so
thank you and I'm apologize if I steamrolled you a
little bit too much. Hopefully, hopefully in the future I'll
shut up a little bit more. But it's been a pleasure,
absolutely absolutely, man.

Speaker 3 (01:13:37):
You you got your brand new book out, came out
in April, fourth Wall Phantoms. If I before I do this,
if anybody has any last minute questions, we will get
them in right before we sign off here, throw them
in the comments and we'll do that. But anyway, fourth
Wall Fantoms came out, and you're also latest books, the
Ecology of Souls. You mentioned books Volume one and Volume two,

(01:14:00):
and then also the companion book there as well. The
latest stuff out available on your website and Amazon and
wherever you get awesome books. What else you got, Man,
tell them where you're going to be anything coming up?

Speaker 4 (01:14:14):
Well, I've got about five other books, probably in the
pipeline collaborations and stuff. But right now I'm just trying
to finish the year strong. I'm gonna be at Esslon
Institute at the beginning of December. I don't think I
can fully announce yet where I will be because I'm
sort of waiting for the organizers to announce that, but
I should be putting in appearances in New York, Iowa,

(01:14:38):
North Carolina for starters next year, so I'll be sure
to announce those as soon as that's available, and those
will appear on my website. Joshua Cutcheon dot com, j
O S H U A C U T C H
I N dot com. I have copies of all my books.
You can get them for me just as much as
at the same price as you get them from anywhere else.

(01:14:58):
Plus I'll sign them for you and I'll send them
to you as long as you're in the US. The
Post International has been kind of difficult with me lately,
so but otherwise, reach out to me. I've got books
for sale, and just reach out and say hi if
you want to. I do answer emails. It might take
two weeks, but I will answer them eventually, I promise.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Awesome. Awesome man.

Speaker 2 (01:15:16):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:15:17):
Dean Bertram says it great to see you josh on
the show. So it's hi there and this Horace Smith says,
book ordered.

Speaker 4 (01:15:27):
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:15:29):
Very cool. I gotta thank you again, man. It's been
an absolute pleasure. The link to your website is in
the show notes as well for anybody interested. And I
apologize for not putting the rest of your books up here,
but you know, as you would be here the rest
of the day, but the rest of your books that
are there, so I figured we just stick with the
most recent ones.

Speaker 4 (01:15:48):
But well, this has been It's been a real highlight
of my day. Thanks so much, barn Me.

Speaker 3 (01:15:51):
I appreciate it, man, Thank you, It's been a highlight
of mine. I've been looking forward to this interview since
we got scheduled. So always great chat. You take care,
have a great time. All right, guys, that is our
show for this week. Thank you all for tuning in.
Make sure you head on over and check out Josh's
newest book. It's amazing. I haven't read it yet. I

(01:16:12):
didn't even know it was out, so I'm gonna have
to get myself a copy of that as well. But
all the other books are fantastic, all the way going
back to where the Footprints End if you're interested in
Bigfoot and stuff, and then all the Trojan Feast and
so many more, Brimstone Deceit, all the other books that
he's got out on fairy and folklore and Mythology and
the Souls and everything awesome. Go check them out Joshua

(01:16:35):
cutchin dot com. Link is in the show notes, or
you can find all those books on Amazon as well.
Make sure you go and check out the Untold Radio Network.
Remember to like, subscribe and share all things here on
the Untold Radio Network. Share it with your friends and enemies,
everybody else, whatever, and all things cryptids, anomalies and the
paranormal Society if you want more about myself, my work,

(01:16:56):
and my team. So until next time, guys, remember we're
all part of the paranormal spectrum. Take care, be well,
and I'll see you next week.

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
You seem to know something I don't.

Speaker 6 (01:17:10):
Let's call me don King and tell me way, please,
I'm not. Let's go like you think streets. I'm bages
in the room and I can feed it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
Kan.

Speaker 6 (01:17:29):
I'm bringing under any cocaine canting talk always.

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):
Some tolbum baggage.

Speaker 1 (01:17:38):
I'm calling can

Speaker 4 (01:17:51):
H

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Paranormal Spectrum #79 Fourth Wall Phantoms with Guest Joshua Cutchin

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Paranormal Spectrum #79 Fourth Wall Phantoms with Guest Joshua Cutchin

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