What's that at the foot of my bed. It's spooky and kooky. I'm really sure it's dead. It's coming this way. Wait a minute, I'm goad. Tyrones ends, Hey boo, it's me Roz. Okay, this episode today. Okay, it's a lot. There's a lot going on. There are facts, there are stories, there are theories, there is just okay. I have on John E. L. Tenny and John Is. I believe John will go down in history as one of the great thinkers of our time on this this type of topic,
the paranormal world. I mean, John is such a deep thinker and someone that really knows what they're talking about. And I just I love I love getting to talk to him. It was so fun and we talk about a wide variety of things and I learned a lot and I think that you will as well. And so I have some more on Patreon that you can hear. We talk about cryptid creatures in Michigan. He does live in Michigan, so he knows a lot about Michigan creatures.
There's a do you know there's a dog man in Michigan. Yeah, we talk about it on Patreon, Patreon dot com. Slash Hiles dressfuls on my second tier. On my first tier, this week I do a little tour of my fun Divine Bathroom that is all themed around the drag queen legend Divine and a little bit of Angeline thrown in there too, So go check that out Patreon. And this is another episode that's like it's dent there are. We cover a lot of ground, so I'll keep it brief
in this intro and let's just get into it. Here is John E. L Tenny on with the show. All right, hello, John, weird question, but how are you?
I am doing as well as can be expected in this very odd and strange time, But I mean I'm always doing fantastic every day.
Is I'm glad that I'm not in the cemetery?
Yeah? Well, I mean we're both people that really like odd and weird things. But I think it's gone to a whole different level in recent times, not necessarily in the ways that I prefer. But we're hanging in there. We're doing our best. And I'm a hermit all along.
I love sitting in my house reading books, drinking coffee, drinking wine and not talking to people.
So a lot of this is okay with me.
Honestly same. Well, you're from, what I understand, a Michigander. Where do you live in Michigan?
I am fourteen miles north of Detroit.
So south, kay, I am.
You know.
I went to your website and I was looking through, I mean, so much good stuff on there, but I found the different lists that you've done of annual most haunted towns in Michigan, and I'm from the twenty fifteen number three most haunted town, Grand Rapids.
Oh well, congratulations.
Grand Rabbits is a lovely place, but a confusing and scary place sometimes.
We are we are very proud to be known as one of the most haunted places. I mean, I've lived in la for I think eleven or twelve years now, but I'm from there. Have you got there at all?
Oh?
Yeah, absolutely.
I investigate all over the state of Michigan, all over the country, but Michigan's the most easy for me, right and since I'm on the you know, I spent the early part. I've done this for thirty years now, So the first decade was all spent in my area, and then slowly I branched out and that east or excuse me, west side of the state is really crazy. It has lots of bigfoot and ghost hunting, and the lake makes a lot of UFO sightings happen over there.
So I was happy to discover that in my state.
So this podcast when it started especially was really just focused around people with ghost stories, and then now I've kind of like expanded a little bit more. I know, I mean, I know, I know things about ghosts, I don't know a ton about like bigfoots and UFOs. And do you have like a a favorite or you know, one that you focus most song because it seems like you know about all this stuff.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's great what you just said, because kind of my catchphrase for the past thirty years is that people should diversify their weirdness because you know, as I study a ghost encounter, like it starts to sound a lot like alien abduction, or sometimes I'll be studying a bigfoot encounter and It'll start to
sound like a haunting. And I realized a long time ago, at least for myself, that there are all these specific groups of ghost hunters, bigfoot hunters, UFO hunters, and they are investigating a single tentacle of an octopus. It seems like they're all interconnected in some way. And I think that's really where we can make kind of strides in this community is by thinking larger and more strangely about
what we're thinking about. When you see the image of your grandmother or your grandfather floating around in a house, we take it for granted that, oh, that's the ghost of my grandmother, But like, where are you seeing it? Because like when you look at me, you're seeing light bouncing off of me. It's going into your eye and then into your brain and then it's making an image
in your brain, so you're actually seeing in your brain. Now, if a ghost makes itself solid enough to bounce light, that should be very easily detectable by machines because that's a lot of mass coming into reality. But we don't ever catch that. We can't measure that. So is something else happening? Is your grandmother's ghost looking around in your head, finding a memory of herself, and then flipping the visualization
switch in your brain and then you see her. And if that's happening, it's far more intimate, far more weird, And it's not just when you die you become a kind of train lucent person who can walk through walls, which I think is way boring.
I knew you were going to do this. I knew that you from what I know of you. You you blow people's minds, and you're already doing this for me. So thank you. I feel okay. So, you know, a lot of people listen to the show. We have a pretty diverse audience of people that are you know, real into the paranormal, pair of nerds or you know, whatever you want to say, and then we also have people
that just like hearing about this stuff. So for anyone that doesn't know you, so so you've done this for thirty years now, just a couple of like, you know, the typical questions like how how did you get into this stuff?
So a lot of people in this community have stories about like when they were little kids and they saw a ghostore when they were a little kid they saw UFO.
I don't have a story like that.
My story is I was a you know, middle class, lower middle class kid just outside of and I hated people telling me what I could think about and what I couldn't could and couldn't do. And I grew up in the punk rock scene in Detroit in the eighties, and I think that it kind of stemmed from that. When people told me like, don't think about UFOs, don't
think about bigot, don't think about ghosts. I kind of rebelled against that, and so I sought out people who investigated ghosts and witches and ceremonial magicians and ufologists and I hung out with them, and that's really kind of where I started. And all of my friends knew me as you know, the weird guy who knew all that weird stuff. And when I was going to college, I thought I would be a history.
Teacher with a major in folklore.
This is nineteen ninety two, and a friend of mine called me and said, there's a television show on NBC called Unsolved Mysteries and they needed a researcher. Do you want to be a researcher for this television show? And I dropped out of college and became a researcher for Unsolved And.
Then wait, I did not know this one. Okay, what that's one of my favorite shows ever.
Yeah, So I dropped out of college and became one of their research staff and worked on Lizzie Bordenhouse's haunting cases, The Queen Mary certain big episodes, and then it was just kind of off to the races, Like once you get into that click of your researcher who works on weird shows.
Especially in the nineties when the X Files hit, it was huge.
There was sightings and very scary stories and all these other television programs that needed a researcher. And then you know, by the time that paranormal reality television came around in two thousand and two, two thousand and three, I was still relatively young, you know, I was in my early thirties and I had already had fifteen years of experience, and so it was off to the races.
Amazing. So did you move to LA when you were working on Unsolved Mysteries or where'd you do that?
I did it from Detroit.
I went to LA a full of times just to meet with other staff and you know, kind of get the feeling for the show. But the majority of our research we had researchers spread out all across the country. That way, if we had a case that was happening in the Midwest, I would run with it with a couple of other researchers, and same thing. They had researchers all over the country. It was really ultimately cool. I never went back to college.
That's so cool. What do you think of the new Unsolved Mysteries.
I think it's good. I like it.
I was concerned at first that they were going to try and replace Robert Stack, and I'm kind of glad they didn't try to do that. I mean, if they would have, I would have loved it to have been me. I still to this day like walk around in a trench coat and I wear suits and ties every day, so I feel like I would have been a good fit.
But there's no.
Matching Bog in the background.
With Bog in the.
Background, I will tell you here's some inside Hollywood stuff is to us. If you listen to those first seasons with Robert Stack hosting Unsolved Mystery.
He did a lot of voiceovers.
He is hammer drunk like he would really oh, he would do his voiceovers just gone, and a lot of the times you can catch him slurring and you'll catch him slipping on words.
It's really amazing.
And those walk ups that you were talking about with like Bog and smoke behind him and stuff, they would shoot a month of those in one day because they'd get him sobered up, and they'd get him like eight different ties and a couple of different jackets, and then they just, you know, let's do this one, let's do this one, and they'd hammer all them all out in one day.
Oh my god, I'm up. Those are I think about those every day and now I'm never going to think of them the same. But I'm always like, there's always a swing set in the background. There's always like there's just there's an alley way, like just these ominous locations with him talking, and I had no clue about any of that. Did you ever meet him?
I did one time when I was in Los Angeles. I was on the lot and we were at lunch and he was sitting by himself, and I thought, well, this is my only real chance to meet him. And I know he probably doesn't want to be bothered, but you know what, do I care. I'm twenty three at the time. So I went over and I kind of sat down and introduced myself and I said to him, I figured, this is my only shot. I just blatantly said it like this. I said, do you believe any of this shit that we're writing about.
And that you're talking about? And he laughed, and he said. His response was, I'll trying to do my Robert Stack. He said, I had a friend in the navy, and my friend in the navy told me that he once saw a UFO come out of the water, and he would have no reason to lie to me.
And my parents.
My parents used to have sances in the house and I used to watch them from the top step. They wouldn't allow me to sit in, but I would watch them from the top step of the hallway stairwell. And then he paused, and he goes. And my wife. When my wife moved to California, the first place she went was a fortune teller, a poem reader, and she asked
her will I be a famous actress? And the fortune teller told my wife, you will not be a famous actress, but you're gonna marry someone that looks like Robert Stack.
Oh my god, which is pretty close. Yeah. So when we talk about like do you believe this shit or whatever, I mean, I can't even imagine like thirty years of doing this, like where are you where are you at? I mean, obviously there's so many different things, but are there things that you're like I'm pretty sure I know what this one is.
It's interesting.
I think that a lot of people who come into this kind of community and world and meet me or discover me, sometimes people get really turned off because I tell people I don't believe anything. And that is really the hardest line to walk in this community, because once you believe something, all of your data gets skewed in that direction of that belief, and once you disbelieve something,
you skew your direction in that side. And so to walk the line and say like, I don't believe in any of it, I have a lot of ideas about it, but no one knows. I don't know. I think that's the hardest thing to do. And the longer that I've done this, the more you know, in a very tropish sense, like the longer I do this, the less I know,
the more I am just completely confounded. When I run across a case that seems like it's going to be very easy, something that is very discernible, and then it just introduces there's a whole new set of parameters that blows my mind and makes me reconsider all of this.
So, I mean, it's all real, and none of it's.
Real, right, Well, I mean there's there's concrete facts, and there's there's things that you can I always feel like you can be an expert on cases or theories or you know, there's a lot of things you can know, which you obviously do, but I'm sure it's hard to It's hard for me sometimes when I talk to people that are like, this is what that means and this is what that is, and it's like, it's, yeah, I totally agree with that bias that they that that that
has and it totally closes you off to other possibilities.
Well, and I tell people all the time, you're you're right, absolutely right. But like if someone in this field or in this field of study, if someone gives you a declarative sentence like that is a ghost or that is a bigfoot, that is a UFO, I really feel like that that person who's saying that has no idea what they're talking about, because if they did, they would know
that no one knows what a ghost is. When I do lectures and I ask, you know, there'll be a crowd of people and I'll say how many people here believe in ghosts? And they all raise their hands and then they put their hands down and I said, we all raised. Every one of you just raised your hand, agreeing with yourself because you don't know what the person
next to you thinks a ghost is. When you have a philosophical discussion, and talking about ghosts is a deep one, you start that discussion by determining the parameters of the word and what the word is going to mean. That way, everybody's on the same page. But we've never had that experience as a community. We've never sat down and said, Okay, a ghost is this, a shadow person? Is that, a phantom?
Is this?
A poltergeist is that? And then we can all agree or disagree on those parameters. We just oh, yeah, it's a ghost, Oh it's an org, Oh it's a bigfoot, And then we just agree with ourselves and it doesn't really get us anywhere.
So you don't have do you have like do you have a definition of what a ghost is for you? Or is that against what you against what you just said.
I mean, I have.
Ghostly experiences, but I really don't. I mean, I've had enough strange personal experiences to know that having a singular idea about what a ghost is is challenging.
I mean, I have.
Had conversations with people who vanished immediately, and I don't know if that's a ghost, or if that's a Guardian angel, or if it was a doppelganger, or if it was a Tulpa or an Aggregor. I've also been in a room where I've seen, you know, the shadow shape of a person disappear in front of twelve other people, and that seemed like a ghost too, But it didn't talk, and it didn't move, and it wasn't wispy.
It looked solid. But then I've also had speriences where you know, I got a figure walking on camera and it was solid and not whispy, and it didn't make noise when it moved though, and it walked through a wall. So, like, trying to define ghost as a singular thing is just very difficult, and I think you end up failing when you do it right.
Yeah, And I mean, I I think I really started being challenged by what is a ghost when I started hearing about astral projection and you know, like the quote unquote ghosts of a living person type story. I mean, can can you explain more of that to me? I'm still like wrapping my head around it.
Yeah.
So one of the like most well researched. Types of ghosts at the time were apparitions, and in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, this group called That's Society for Psychical Research. They put out a two volume set of books that was called Phantasms of the Living. They studied five thousand cases of aparitioninal sightings, and what they
found out really challenged back then. They were trying to study, you know, quote unquote ghosts, which just people who died and then you saw an image of them or a version of them. But what they found was that most the most common ghost that's seen is a crisis apparition, which is you see someone and then you find out that that person has died later on or they die relatively soon after you see them. But then what are you seeing if the person is still alive when you
see them. A lot of people will say, you know that the body goes out, that the soul isn't so much connected to the body. It goes up to say goodbye everybody. But if the body is still walking around, like what is the ghost? Then is that a separate thing? Like does that happen after the body dies and then the spirit that went out to visit people become something else and.
You become twins.
You become twins.
You never know and then you know if you asktro project, when you're an astral version of your own body leaves this body but you are still alive, do you technically become a ghost or are you still alive and you have an astral body, and then does that astral body have a ghost of its own? So I mean you really get into the weeds with it, and when you start thinking about ghosts like this is what I love.
I always have these really like.
Strange questions that I ask people because I think that if you really do deep dives into your thinking about it, you can start to find a lot of strangeness in your own mind, which is people always see ghosts wearing clothes, like they see a woman in a white dress or they see a Confederate soldier on a battlefield. Well, then my question is always well, if they're dressed, are they wearing underwear and socks?
Yeah?
Right, because if they're putting on clothes, and then do they have to put the clothes on or do they manifest the clothes as they manifest themselves? And then how specific are.
The clothes like a Civil War soldiers outfit has some pretty crazy embellishments on it, like who stamped the eagles on the buttons and who sowed the clothes that they have, And so you have to dive into all of that as well, or is it just constructed inside of your own mind from what you remember what clothes look like?
Oh my god. Well, I'm a dragquain and I think about what I'm going to be wearing as a ghost constantly, and it's a lot of steps, it's a lot of work. It takes time to get it all together. That's a lot. I hope when I'm a ghost, I don't have to deal with all.
That and just like snap and it's all They're done.
Well, that's what I like to tell people. Happens. But it's not the truth, you know, No, it might it might be your truth. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I'm keeping my mind open. What are you talking about when you say you've encountered what you believe to be a human and all of a sudden it disappears. When has that happened?
So that was probably ninety eight.
I was driving to a lecture of mine in Indiana, and I was driving through a kind of corn country. The corn was very tall at the time, and I had a day or so before the lecture, so I was taking back roads and just kind of every time I get in Indiana, I stop in Fairmount, which is James Dean's hometown. So I take all these little back roads.
And I was going through this kind of dirt road through a cornfield, and there was a crossing sign and there was this gentleman standing by the sign and completely dressed from like nineteen ten, like hat not top hat, derby hat suit vest. I could even see a little pocket watch fob. And I pulled up to this crust and it was hot out. He just looked like to the nines. And I rolled down my window and I said, can I give you a lift somewhere?
Do you need a ride somewhere? And he leaned in my window and looked me straight in the face and this horrified feeling, like I got chills through myself, and he said, you're not the one I'm waiting for. And he stood back, and I jammed on the on the gas and took off and I looked in my reary mirror and there was no one standing there. And I got super freaked out, and I called one of my friends in Detroit and told her the experience and she's like, oh,
you were at a crossroads. She's like, I wonder if that was the devil and then I was really fucked up for like the next week or so.
Well, do you think that you know, it's there's many reasons for such a thing, but do you think that there's Okay, how do I say this, like people that attract ghosts or is it a thing that because you, uh, you know you're looking for ghosts or you're open to it? Like, what is what is all that about? When it comes
to certain people having a lot of different experiences? You know, is it connected to the fact that you're a paranormal investigator and someone in this field and so you're around it and you're kind of asking for it, or you know, what is it? Why? Why do some people have all these experiences?
I think for myself, it's because I actively investigate cases and ask people, and I end up doing and going places that most normal people don't get to go to and get to do, and so I'm kind of immersed in it. So yes, I have more experiences, but I think that this stuff happens to everyone, and it's whether not people choose to kind of follow it and notice it. I feel like the universe, if it's ever shown us anything,
it loves to create and kind of play. And I think the universe is constantly tapping us on the shoulder, asking us if we want to engage with it, and most people just don't, And then there are people who do. And when you play, the universe plays back.
Mmm.
Okay, So is there are there ways of putting boundaries on that playtime because I'm like, yeah, I'm down to play, just not when I'm laying in bed that nothing is allowed in here? Like how do I how is that? You know?
I think your intention makes a big, big point. My friends know about my house, that I have a force field what I call a force field over my house so that nothing can get in here and nothing can follow me home and everything knows to stay outside. And that has just been a long period of setting my intention, of telling everything and thinking to myself, this is my home, this is where I belong.
Only loved ones and friends belong inside of it.
And it creates I feel like a bubble, like a force field to keep me safe, and it has for you know, many many years. I was doing an experiment with some friends and they wanted to do it in my house and I said, well, it's not going to work. Is the horse field to keep everything out? And they said, can't you just take down a section of it? And I said, yeah, fine. So I kind of went through my rituals and kind of pulled this force field, I know, it sounds crazy, force field down off the back of
my house. And within an hour, the foundation of my house cracked right where I had brought the force field down, and my crawl space flooded, and like people were in my house when it started to happen, they were like, holy shit, like you have to put that back up, like stuff is so you And so I did and
things got better. But there was just this like four hour span of time when everything that has been trying to get in my house for thirty years was attempting to get in at one time, and it was pretty crazy.
Oh my god, I'm picturing like all these ghosts and demons and stuff just like waiting outside for you. This could be a good business, you know, like a security installation business that you could do for people like me that just want to know how to keep everything out of my house.
Well, I'll tell you it's funny because whenever I go to this is cooked completely non scientific. But many times when I go to houses that are having trouble with ghosts or what they are calling a ghost or something in the house that's weird, the majority of the time, they have welcome mats in front of their front door, and they've built their house to look welcoming, welcome things in. And I feel like that mindset, like my house is it looks welcoming and nice and lovely inside. From the
outside it looks fine too. I mean I up keep my lawn and stuff like that.
But you would never.
Think of just like walking up to my house, Oh that looks like a beautiful house. I'd go inside. Uh.
And I feel like, maybe stop so much with the welcome matts in front of your door, Like maybe it's nice to welcome people once you've allowed them to enter your house, Like that's a start. And we kind of do things like that naturally.
You know, there's always a door in your house or some in some people's apartments where like we don't use that side door, and you built a feeling up around that door that no one goes in or out that door, and if someone comes in, if a neighbor or somebody comes in, you always tell, oh, we don't use that door. Like that's the way that you need to feel about all of your doors when you're thinking about spirits and ghos.
Okay, see, I'm in such an la mindset. I forget that people have welcome maths because here it's like do not I have had next door neighbors that I've never met for years. That's just very much our mentality out here. But way, I want to go back to when you were talking about this cornfield possible devil. So where are you at with that? With the devil, the demon, the evil, the all that kind of stuff? What do you think?
I mean? I don't.
Again, this comes back to just my personal ideology. But like good and evil are very subjective and they're very personal based. And so like when someone tells me that there's something as a devil or a demon, like I have to realize that that's coming from their place of
knowledge and their recognition of understanding. Because I've known a lot of people who have seemed terrible, but they are nice, kind people, and I've known a lot of nice, kind people who are absolutely terrible, and I feel like that is that is just our universe. And you know a story that I tell at my lectures is I went to a client's house one time because they said they
were having some poltergeist problems. And I walked in and I was there for maybe an hour, and while I was there, there were some juice glasses that were thrown and a screen door was kicked out, and I was scratched and my hair was pulled, and I told them I wasn't going to take the case because their children were terrible, and their children were the ones throwing glasses and breaking out screen doors and attacking me.
And the reason I tell that story, if I.
Wouldn't have known that there were children in the house, I would have thought that there were demons in the house. But those children weren't even bad or mean. Those children were trying to get someone to pay attention to them, and they were doing whatever, by whatever means necessary to get someone to notice them. And so I think when people go into a location and they're scratched or something breaks, or they hear a weird sound. Because of movies and
television and the way they're brought up. They immediately scream demon or they say it's evil without really thinking through the I mean, we're fine sitting here right now talking because we can get up and leave whenever we want. But imagine how frustrated or sad or angry you would be if you had to be sitting where you're sitting right now for ten years by yourself, or fifteen or fifty or one hundred.
You might get frustrated. And it doesn't mean that you've become evil or you're a demon. It just means that you're lonely and you would like some connection.
Well, I mean with having to quarantine. I feel like that's actually pretty relatable after just one year. I can only imagine decades and decades of this. I would be, yeah, an evil bitch, and people would think that I'm a demon for sure. And I think that, you know, I like that you said that about people's perceptions because I think you know, punk rock and coughs and you know, drag queens and all these counterculture people that I've always
been around. It's like there are always going to be people that view that as being you know, weird in a bad way, or evil or whatever, and it's like, those are some of the best people I've ever met, you know, like it's they're actually really good people. It's just people's perceptions of what they associate with being bad. I think a lot of times it's a lack of understanding. People say I don't understand that, so it means it's bad, is basically what it is.
I start, you know, my website is Weird Lectures, and I call myself a weirdo, and my old podcast is called Realm of the Weird and the reason they use weird so much, and I have a little story about this on my website. The first time that someone called me a weirdo was in high school, and it was while they were beating me up. I got beat up a lot in high school, and I thought to myself in that moment, a weirdo must be a person who gets beaten up, not a person who beats people up.
I'm okay with being a person who doesn't beat other people up. And then as I got older and started to become really fascinated with words and language, I looked up the word weirdo and where that stems from, and weird comes from a fourteenth century word wyrd, and it was a word that was thrown at people who lived on the outskirts of villages and towns, and people who didn't submit their wills to the kings and queens and land barons and baronesses. It literally means a weirdo is
a person who manifests their own destiny. And so when I call someone a weirdo, I'm giving them the greatest compliment that I have in my arsenal. I'm saying that you are the determiner of your life, and you are the manifestor of your own destiny.
Yeah. I love that. Oh that's good. Good, Yeah, thanks for that. I like that a lot. I also always feel like the opposite of weird is boring. That's just my own definition is it's a good thing.
I don't know why people want to live in a world that doesn't have bigfoot and elves and ghosts and UFOs.
Like what a boring world?
Right? Well, okay, can we talk about UFOs? So UFOs are something that I don't I like, don't I'm fascinated by. I haven't talked a ton about on this podcast, mainly because I usually have on you know, Hollywood types and they tell their stories and they have a couple of ghost stories. Very rarely we've had possible alien type stories, but so it hasn't really come up. And then I've
been trying to incorporate it a little bit more. But then I'm also I get nervous because I feel like these days there's conspiracy theories that like have really gotten out of hand and they've gotten kind of scary, and well, yeah, they've gotten real scary and dangerous, and I'm always like afraid that when I'm talking about theories that are involving the government and all these large, large ideas, that I'm going to be getting the wrong information or I'm not
going to actually know what I'm talking about. So how do I how do I do that? How do I know about this stuff without being you know, where do you get the accurate information these days?
I mean the first thing. The other thing is, you know, I started professionally. My mentor in research was a man named Craig Chaconi, who was a teacher a historian who studied political assassinations of the nineteen sixties and seventies. So my first lectures back in the late eighties early nineties were all conspiratorial lectures, and so to watch what's happened now is an outrage to my mental processes because conspiracy theories were always meant as a way to do mental gymnastics,
to strengthen your critical thinking skills. It was a way to think about history and challenge the ideas of history while figuring out what the kind of combined history actually was and not what it has become, which is just kind of high insanity when it comes to researching anything. I mean, you have to find as many various sources as you can. You pick and choose what you like and what suits you and what works for you, and then you challenge that belief with other people and hopefully
with a larger group you construct better ideas. That doesn't seem to be happening now in the conspiratorial world. But the good thing about UFO is is that it doesn't have to be conspiratorial. There are a lot of people who want government disclosure and the Air Force needs to tell us, and there are secret groups who know about UFOs,
and it doesn't have to be that way. Likes traditionally, historically throughout the ages have presented themselves to everyday normal human beings who tell their stories, and we have hundreds of thousands of those stories from credible people who talk about their interactions with what seem to be extraterrestrials and UFOs, And so you don't even need to get the government
involved in it. I don't know why the people would want the government to tell them anything anyway, Like, I'd much rather talk to a person who's seen a UFO than a government group who's getting millions of tax dollars to not tell me about UFOs.
Yeah, I mean, I've seen these articles that because of the COVID Relief Bill, there's supposed to be things coming out. I mean, is that legit?
They're supposed to release a committee document that's investigating Unidentified
Aerial Phenomena UAP, which is the new UFO designation. But the thing is is, again, like all of this might seem really new to people who don't know that much about UFOs, but you know Project blue Book, which was a government UFO group that was in the nineteen sixties, and that was born out of Project Grudge, which was based out of Project Saucer, which is based out of you know, there have always been government projects investigating this
stuff like the government investigates everything they you know, from the mk ultra experiments, testing LSD on people to doing remote viewing. The government is interested in weird stuff too, because it's filled with people, and people are interested in weird stuff. So I don't think that it's anything groundbreaking.
It's nothing that we haven't not seen before. They always every few years form a group that's going to study UFOs and then they release a report and then it's back on us to figure it out.
Did you going back to Unsolved Mysteries, what did you think of that UFO one from the recent Netflix Unsolved Mysteries? Did you know that's story before?
I did know that story. I thought that that story was handled pretty well.
I really wish I know that people are interested in kind of newer stories. I'm interested in like the old UFO stories because they are so much more fun. Like when someone you know lands in they're from Venus and they take someone to Mars and they eat dinner with the King of Mars and they have giant dogs that are like thirty feet tall.
That's a actual story.
Really.
Oh yeah.
Buck Nelson who was a farmer in Missouri, he got taken on a trip to Venus Mars in the moon and he saw giant dogs and eight with the King of Mars, and they're just these kind of lovely stories that always end with the message of extraterrestrials being be nice to your planet and be nice to your other each other. That's like the fifties and sixties, that's all the aliens told people was be nice to each other
and be nice to to the planet. And something happened in the seventies, eighties, and nineties where it became now it's little gray, black eyed humanoids that abduct people in their room and do experiments on them.
So something changed.
Wow. Okay, So have you seen one at any point or have you seen anything that's led you to believe that could be a UFO.
I've seen I've had three or four sightings of things that did not seem to fly like anything that I would recognize. And then the last time, which I think was three years ago or four years ago, there's an experiment that people can do. So if your listeners want experiment, if you think you're seeing a UFO, stare at it and think really hard in your mind, I.
Can see you, can you see me?
And then wait, for it to flow over your head, which is what I did when the last time I saw these three objects flying around and they were not flying like airplanes. I was actually with someone else, my friend Mike, and I told him, I said, we're gonna look at those UFOs and we're gonna tell him we can see him. And he was like whatever. And as soon as we started doing that, they moved from really far off they turned toward us and flew directly over our heads.
Wait, this is in Michigan.
Yeah, in the Upper Peninsula.
Does that kind of a thing work with ghosts too? Like I can see you like? Can you from your experience? Do you think that that kind of a thing, You can talk to a ghost in that way if you see like an apparition or you feel a presence, Is that effective? Do you think?
I do.
I think it's far more probably effective than speaking out loud. I have a little chapter. I wrote a book last year called Theoretical Weirdo, and one of the chapters is called the Discernible Brain. And I think that ghosts don't have physical ears, and so when I talk, I'm just making waves through the air vibrations. And the reason you can hear me is because you have an ear and so your brain is translating those waves into sounds. But a ghost doesn't have a physical ear. So then how
is it hearing my voice? I don't think it is. I think it's hearing the intention of my words behind my voice. And historically cross culturally around the world. Globally, the most used form of quote unquote spirit communication is prayer. People close their eyes and they speak inside of their mind and they know that their thoughts are being discerned, and so I do think it works with what we call ghosts.
Okay, well, let me just ask you a couple more questions. You've been so generous with your time. I so appreciate it. You, as expected, are blowing my mind. So basically, I know this is like kind of a basic question. But do you think that, say we know all the answers goes in UFO. Do you think that that's going to happen? And if it does, are we all out of business?
Oh?
I think that I really do think that we're not supposed to know. I think that knowing what happens after life, what happens to us after we die, I think that that makes life less beautiful. I think that really takes away from this experience. And I wrote somewhere, Once you know, Once, I wrote, once all of the stars have been cataloged and classified. Once the experience of life after death has been written down in endless books and stored on bookshelves.
Once we know how everything works, why it works, and how it's going to work, then humanity will exist forever, yawning like like the point of one of the points. At least for me, the idea that I have of being human is a quest to understand things. And I
tell people all the time. If there's no such thing as ghosts, and there's no such thing as bigfoot, and there's no such thing as UFOs, if those things are only a mechanism for us to talk to each other about our deep inner thoughts, then it's still vastly important.
Yeah, where do you see I mean, particularly like ghost hunting. I mean it's obviously gotten real big on television, and you know, where do you see it going? Do you see anything anything new happening? Or are we heading in a direction of being able to figure anything else out?
I think that we're moving into a realm of which I think is good. I think we're moving into a more philosophical realm. I think that we're moving away from you die and become a translucent version of yourself. Like, I think that that idea is going away, and we're starting to recognize that we don't understand the fundamental nature of being human.
We don't understand how our consciousness works.
We don't really understand every time we think we've solved the riddle of the universe, the universe play is when you try and play with it, and so it gives you a smaller or a bigger thing to look at, It gives you dark matter, or it gives you vibrating strings that are beyond the quantum realm. And I really think that where we need to be, whether it be with UFO's Ghosts, Bigfoot, whatever, I think we do need to be more philosophical, and so I think that's where
we're headed. But you won't see it in popular media. I mean, you're not going to see a television show of six people sitting around a table talking about the nature of life and death and Bigfoot place in it.
Yeah. I think that even when I started this podcast two years ago, I was still coming from that mindset that you kind of get from TV and movies and spooky and I'm happy to have talked to more and more people and just to expand on ideas. And I feel that what you're talking about, that shift that has been happening. I have felt as well with the way that we're approaching this stuff and the conversations we're having and and and heading away from the direction of this
is how things are and it's scary, and that's that. Like, I really like to hear different ideas and experiences and I want I'm excited to see where that leads us.
I mean, ten years ago, you and I couldn't have done this type of conversation, Like it just wouldn't have been listenable to anyone because people only wanted to hear stories. And there is something too that I love telling ghost stories. I have a lot of good ghost stories, and that's fine, but I feel like what people need to hear is that there are other people thinking more deeply about it than just here's a spooky thing that happened to me one time.
Well okay, but also I still have a little bit of that old mentality in me. And you just said ghost stories, can we just hear like one more like real, unexplainable, what the fuck kind of a story that you've experienced?
Sure, So I had a husband and a wife who had bought a house. They said that there was something wrong with one of the upstairs bedrooms. They thought that it was haunted. So they called me. I did what I do. I went there, and I couldn't find any reason that that room should feel weird. It didn't feel weird to me, but they said that they did feel
this strangeness in that room, a heaviness and darkness. So I started contacting all of the former owners of the house, and eventually I had got to a woman who had lived in the house just previous to them buying it, who wouldn't return my calls. And so I thought, well, either she doesn't want to talk about ghosts, or she's the reason, like she knows what's what went on in that room?
Were you leaving messages like I'm looking for ghost answers or.
I approach it a lot more serious.
Hey, I want ghost answers, lady.
But eventually what happened.
She did call me and she said, you know, I just I grew up in that house and I have a lot of bad experiences with that house and I just don't like to talk about it. And she related to me a story about when she was little, her mother and father would lock her in the closet of her bedroom for you know, hours on end, six to eight hours, sometimes overnight, damn.
And she would just sit in that closet and cry. And I confirm her.
I said, well, it's not that room because the room I'm talking about is upstairs and doesn't have a closet, so it's not that room. And that made her feel a little bit better. But that got me to thinking. So I went to the city hall and I pulled the original construction plans on the house, and I contacted the husband and the wife. I went back to the house and we tore down in that room one of the dry wall walls that was up because someone had dry walled over a closet, and we found the closet
behind the dry wall. It was the closet that the girl had been locked in when she was little. And when I went home that night, there was a message on my answering machine from her and it basically said listen. I don't know if it was because I talked about it for the first time in years or what happened. But this afternoon I felt like I had been released from that house. So thank you for whatever you did and just talking to me about it. The husband and
wife said that room had felt fine ever since. So when we were talking earlier about what a ghost is, this woman was haunting her house, her childhood home, but even though she was alive, she had left something in that closet and we let it out and resolve that issue.
Weird.
Oh that's a good one. Okay, Well, can you tell people where to find you? And all the stuff you got going on.
My website is weird Lectures.
And then I've tried to make all my social media very easy, so everything like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all that is just John John E L Tenny t E N N E y or I tell people all the time just go on Google, type my last name Tenny and weirdo after it, and then follow it wherever it leads.
Well, I endorse your Twitter. I think you're really funny on Twitter, and I love the stuff that you share. You also on your website talk about you do you do paranormal investigations and people can contact you. Can you just also tell us what that looks like for you how that process goes.
Yeah, so it's somewhat in depth. People contact me, I have them write down their experience and email it to me or mail it to me. I go over the little facts that they'll have given me, and then we meet in a safe location, maybe a couple weeks later, go back over the story. I'll determine if I need to do more investigations, and then if it does warrant a deeper investigation, I'll start pulling property records and contacting
former homeowners, and I'll even have clients. If I take someone out as a client, I'm going to make them go and see a therapist, I'm going to ask for permission to talk to their doctors and get a really full read on the family, and if it warrants investigation after that. So now we're probably by this time two or three months or maybe even longer in then I'll start investigating the house physically, but there's a lot of groundwork to do before I even walk in.
Wow, have you been in situations where they're like, no, we need you now.
I have, And those don't work out very well. And a lot of the times it, I mean, you don't really know what you're walking into. Sometimes I was working on a television show really quickly, and the whole crew was there. We had flown to the location, got to the location, and I had figured that the network had been doing you know, history and study of the location and the family and stuff, and they obviously had not.
I walked into the house, and within like minutes, I knew that there were massive non paranormal problems in the family, that there were addiction issues and abuse issues, Like as soon as I walked in the house, you could tell. And I went outside and I told the producer, like, we don't need to be here. They don't need a paranormal team investigating their house. They need therapy and they need to talk to doctors and you know whoever they
need to talk to. And the network said, no, you're going to go in there and investigate that for a ghost. And I walked off the set and that show never got made.
Damn you would think that they would. Yeah, I feel like that work needs to be done for sure. Yes, is that when you decided to do that kind of process or were you already doing that kind of a thing.
I was already doing that kind of thing. You know there were ten years when I first started where people would call it me and I just run out to the house or the location and start investigating. But you learn very quickly that people can be scarier than ghosts.
Yeah, definitely. Oh my god, so much to think about. Thank you to John. Please go check out everything that John does. I am a stun and go to Patreon dot com slash Roz dress Flees to hear me talking to John Moore about cryptid creatures in Michigan. Guys, this is you know, we're still in the pandemic. We're still doing it, but I am committed to continuing to give you some fun ghosty contents, so make sure you check
me out on stereo. Stereo dot com. Slash Roz Dress Fales join the Facebook group Ghosted by Roz dress Fales. You know what I'd love, I would love it so much if you could tell your friends about the show. I love when you post on an Insta story or just you know, word of mouth. That's always good. And another thing that's really good for the show is five stars on Apple Podcasts and leave a nice review, or if you leave five stars, leave a ghost story. Maybe
I'll read it on the show. At some point, I would love to do some more listener episodes, so send those over to ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com with the subject line listener episode and I don't know. I'm sure there's other places you can find me Instagram, Rose Dress, well as all the places I love you, all, both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me, don't haunt me. Came Back Star, a podcast network