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episode contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised. I've been wanting to do a real sort of off the cuff conversation with everyone since.
Honestly twenty twenty three.
But now that we've explored some new stories, and we have a lot of cool news stories that we're exploring still and have yet to share, this is the time we should just actually break down one or genuine thoughts on everything we've covered in two some of the personal experiences we've had that kind of paint the picture a little bit better, and to me, that matters the things
that kind of go unnoticed. There's a lot of nuance when it comes to when you're conducting an interview with somebody and you're talking about something that's kind of.
Kind of weird. Yeah.
I think something that people don't realize is so much gets left on the cutting room floor during these interviews, and like we use the best pieces, but there's still so much more that like you guys never see, but we know about and we desperately want to talk to anybody about it, and what better conduit to do that through than this roundtable. So I just listened to all five episodes just before we recorded this, So this is my first time hearing all five episodes, and they were
fucking awesome. I mean, I think what's really unique about this season compared to last is that the investigation really took us all around the world this time, and we got to see that this is a global phenomenon, that it's happening everywhere, and so many of the stories are so similar anywhere you are in the world, and that's
it's creepy, but it's fascinating at the same time. So I guess i'd like to start maybe just you know, we get right into episode one and just work our way up just so we try to cover as much as we can.
Yeah it Yeah.
So you know, kick us off, like where did the episode one start. It started with the congressional UAP hearings.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so you and I both we went to DC. This was I'm pretty sure we were at a bar together and we got a weird notice email from I don't know, a journalist's friend that was like tipping us off, there's gonna be a UFO conference congressional hearing tomorrow in DC.
Are you going?
And I was like, well, we are now, I think we can get a flight and we literally just we booked the earliest flight the next morning, and we arrived there and we were absolutely out of place.
I mean, it was.
Like a huge, weird college that wasn't really nice, and you're like, where's the not only where is the bathroom, but also where is the room that we should be in? And what are all these other rooms for?
You know?
Yeah, can I just say that I can't remember the reason why, but I couldn't make it, and I'm so jealous.
But what an experience I mean being in there. We weren't necessarily in that room, but we were in the room adjacent the extra fill room, I guess, with a bunch of other people.
Oh yeah, that part's interesting.
So, like I mean, this is they do this all the time, like every week Congress meets and stuff. They meet and do stuff that we just don't casually watch on TV. Yeah, I mean I don't.
But this was probably a very filled time for that time, you know. But yeah, this was the event people wanted to go to, and there was a line out the door when we got there. People wanted to sit in and listen.
Yeah, it seemed like, you know, to compare it to TSA, like it seemed like, oh my gosh, there's a lot.
Of people flying out.
This morning, you know, yeah it's Christmas break. Yeah, it's like, okay, it must be a Thanksgiving thing. And so when we got there, we like the security line itself took kind of a long time, and then when we got into the building, it's just kind of everyone's just doing their own thing. We had no clue where to actually go. And I jokingly said, I've played it in the tape in episode one. For a second, I was like, do we just ask for the UFOs are And I'm pretty.
Sure we actually just did that.
We just asked somebody as said hey UFOs, and they and they just yeah, literally yeah, And some person was like, ah, this way, and we just followed another person who was either there for the same reason or they knew what the fuck we were or knew what the hell were there.
He's like, third floor, I mean just kidding.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Yeah, not in this building.
Yeah, but yeah, we we got uh we got pushed into the to the.
Over the auxiliary room.
Yeah, over the back of the bus. Yeah, we're like, okay, yep.
But it was it was it was a much more like laid back environment. I mean, there was one hundred people plus in this room and it wasn't like, yeah, no cameras, just like the audio feed and the TV is coming in.
Fac Actually there were cameras. I only know that because my sister sent me. My sister sent me a clip of me on the news that day. Yes, weird, there's a picture of me and Dylan and like it's the most like I mean, I think it was the angle and we looked so unserious in our in our suits,
so we just looked like clowns. But all that to say, the experience in the the spillover room was actually unique because the tape you heard is raw from the actual congressional hearing, but in that room we were kind of separated from the tension of everyone else. And there were moments where towards the end when David Grush was saying things like crash retrieval programs and biologics recovered bodies, non human biologics.
Yeah, what was the reaction in the room you guys were in, Because I know, in like the main room, the like room on cameras, where everybody was, where Grush was at, where everybody that they were, there was a little bit of ruckus.
They literally started clapping.
In the main congressional room where the hearing is going on, it was just dead silence. People were very stoic. Nobody had any expression on their face at all. It was just give the facts, get it on the record. But in this room next door, people are clapping and gasping whenever something crazy would happen, and people were laughing, and just like it was such a different, unique experience.
It's such a cool way to experience it.
I looked, I remember I looked at you in the face. When people started clapping, it was like, what is happening? Because they felt just bizarre. I'm like, one we flew here on a whim to go to this random, suspenseful UAP congressional hearing where some whistleblowers going to give some bombshell information and turns out he does still a big mystery. But we're sitting in there and we're hearing this happen live, and it's like everyone in at least the room that we're in is basically it felt like.
We were in a room full of fans, yeah, fanboy stuff.
And a part of me was like, Okay, is this like UFO fan people? But then I kind of backtracked a little bit and was like, Okay, maybe maybe some yes, But there's also a level of people here who clearly weren't just UFO fan people who flew in or drove here from Virginia. There were other people there who seemed to have been people who probably touted this same sort of energy and the same topic for a long time and felt maybe vindicated or something.
Well, think about how popular Star Wars is, Star Trek is. You don't have to be necessarily a UFO fanboy to be excited for this news that you probably knew was coming at some point in your life. But Steven Spielberg, all of his movies e t close encounters like there are people who are just deep down fans of wanting to believe.
I guess that's why I felt weird because I was at Congress, literally in a suit, out of place. I felt like I was at a church on a Sunday where I didn't know if I had all the right things in order, and I was you know, I was at a place I was like, Okay, are we.
Doing this right?
And then when people were clapping and awing and owing, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on? I'm kind of split on what that meant. I think there was, Yeah, there was some people who were like, yeah, we told you so, but like, I don't really like that energy. But I'm also kind of like maybe they're right. Like I'm like, well, I mean I've always kind of thought that too. But either way, we're witnessing something that's
profound to happen at Congress. And regardless of whether David Grush is telling the truth or not, he testified under oath under penalty of law and made some very bold claims, and as someone who seems to say it in a very believable.
Way, yeah, I mean it. Being there it felt like a very historic event. I remember when when we were sitting in that room, I was texting all my family and friends just being like, wake up, go watch this right now. This is disclosure happening.
You're you're awake.
Wake up at ten am.
I thought it's like, get woke, you wake up.
Yeah.
I remember thinking like this is disclosure, Like this is he's the whistleblower. It's going to happen today and we're here, and I thought it was this and it you know, in a sense, it was I think the first step. It was the first step towards disclosure.
I mean that is what happened.
Yeah, it was a small step towards disclosure. But I think in hindsight, I mean that was what two or three years ago now, and I'd argue, we're really no closer than we were then. There have been maybe three other meetings that were similar with other whistleblowers that have come out in Congress. But it kind of sucks to see we're this far into it and nothing's really changed. We're really no closer to disclosure than we were at the very beginning a few years ago, or at any
point in history. I would argue, and that that was kind of a bummer. But I'm curious what you guys think about that.
I would first argue, is that actually true? I don't think that's actually factually true. I mean, I could see how it. I mean, one, the entire UFO narrative is exhausting, and it has been its entire existence. But I wouldn't say that David Grusha's test simony and all this happened since then is a dead end.
I would first say that I think everyone, everyone, to a certain extent, I think people do just plain and simple want to believe. I think more people than are willing to admit want to believe. To play Devil's Advocate with David Grush. As much as I love what David Grush said, it didn't prove anything. It didn't push the needle forward. Yes, I was so excited when he said the things he did. Biologics, pilots, recovered crash materials. These are all the things people who want to believe have
been waiting for someone of some credential to say. But there was no smoking gun, there was no proof, there was no video footage, there was no real right. It was nothing more more than what we've heard since the eighties, which.
This to me, brings me to the biggest question there is to anyone period about kind of anything, but especially this topic.
What is proof to you? Like, straight up, what is proof to you? Actually?
Because what if so and so went to Congress and said, hey, the same things David Grush said anything whatever, Hey, we have uh, we have all these spacecraft in Area fifty one, and we have we have uh non human bodies, we have non human biologics and aliens.
Here, here's the photos. Then what.
Does that become something where we just kind of debate whether or not it's true.
Yeah, I've heard you both say in the past. You know, even if with one certainty disclosure happened and UFOs landed on the White House salawn and said, hey, we're here, check us out, even then, fifty percent of people would say that's bullshit, that's AI, that isn't really happening. They'd come up with some excuse to not believe it, and
the other half might believe it. But I think what fascinated me to the most about David Gresher's testimony and you know, more recent testimonies, is that people say people in really high positions of power in the military and the government are coming out and saying these crazy things, and then there's just no real response from people. It doesn't seem like maybe people are desensitized to it in
a way, but it doesn't seem like people design. Yeah, and it could be by design, but it doesn't seem like people really were chaotic and afraid in the way that I think a lot of people were afraid that they would be. I think we almost went too far,
and now people don't even care about it. And maybe that's what I'm seeing more than anything, is that people seem so desensitized in our news cycle and everything going on with the media that when these claims are happening, it didn't even make the top news cycle of the day, you know, and that was a little disheartening. But also
so maybe it's promising for disclosure in the future. At some point, maybe we are ready to learn something more about what's out there in the world, if that information does exist.
To kind of shift gears here.
I want to say that in general, I've always been of the mind where the UFO topic a decade ago to me was always kind of tiresome.
It was just something.
But yeah, me personally, I would I want to believe tiresome because it felt like it was so fringe. All of a sudden, there was incredible stories from whistleblowers and people from the government and things connecting in ways where hey, this is actually just real reporting, not just fun semi fictional documentary kind of stuff you see on some TV network, right,
And that sort of mentality is gone. So what's here now is I feel like everyone in the world because they have a phone, And I don't blame them, I'm you too. We want proof of everything, But what is proof exactly? And I don't mean that in some like total weirdo abstract way, I really don't. I mean it in a way that's like, what is proof to you?
Like actually, and what does that mean? This whole topic has converged at a point in technology of us where it just so happens that AI can basically make everything that could be a drone that's AI, that's fake.
It's like everything's just kind of muddied.
With technology today. You can no longer believe your eyes or your ears, and that makes you question what even can be real, what can be classified as real, what can we even agree on as real? In today's media
escape And it's so hard to know. I mean, nobody has the answer for that, but I will say, bringing it back to high strange, what I loved about this season was that we focused on archival cases or cases from decades ago when the waters were much less muddy, when you had real recordings of people from the seventies and eighties, When you have audio recordings of Dave Davies and Whitley Streiber when their children are very young, telling exactly the same story decades ago that they're telling now.
For me, I think, especially in today's landscape, that brings so much credibility to their stories, and it gives you sort of like a baseline of something to believe that is true. And I love that we focused on those cases in this season because you just I think you guys did a really great job of like putting those stories together and telling them in a way that's like really manageable and understandable and give some real element of like truth and investigation to this field.
I would even counterpoint a little bit what you were saying Johnny Mack, who wrote, you know, the book on abductions and doing all of the research into people who are experiencers schackvall Ay they've been doing this for so long without anyone believing them.
There's been some legit people who aren't all fringe conspiracy right, who were just.
Hey, like look, no, they're on the matter of.
Just talking about this stuff and been researching this stuff their fucking whole life.
So like David is like, finally that like told you so, almost right, or it could be, could be. But you can also say, yeah, you know, all these people have been maybe making all this up. But there's just if you really really dig in and you really really research the topic, there are so much that points more towards that there is something versus in my opinion, pointing towards it's all made up.
That makes me think about the physical things that we've seen this season.
I'm talking about literally in Oregon.
We went to Oregon for the mcmainville UFO Festival, and we kind of all split off into different camps and we're recording different things, and then tilling you ended up in the middle of nowhere eastern Oregon. Literally, we thought you were missing for like twenty four hours.
We were like, okay, we'll give it what it was.
We'll give it about twelve more hours before we'd call the police.
The amount of times your phone just straight up did not like.
Should we be concerned. We're like, nah, it's stealing.
We're like, okay, in twelve hours, if he has not responded, we're definitely sending out an alert.
I'm glad to know you guys have my back, because I was fucking no.
It was like, okay, what was the last time he texted you.
We're all we're all checking each other like it, but he texted you then, and then then okay he last service?
Then okay, Yeah, it makes sense.
I did pull the mom move of being like, yo, you gotta check in call me when you get to call.
Me, and like we knew you weren't, like so we would be on a call with you and you're like, yeah, I'm actually about to.
Oh like Dylan Dylan dyn Yeah, man.
There was I mean, there was no cell signal anywhere in like the part of Oregon, this like one hundred square mile area that I was in an organ but yeah, I just you know, we went out there for the UFO Fest and I just decided to break away, take a rental car and just you know, with nothing but a dream, just go to a bunch of random little
towns and just like hope, I'd run into something. In the eighties, there was a string of cattle mutilations that happened all throughout eastern Oregon, and as the story goes, all of these ranchers all over the area would find these mutilated cows. And it's not necessarily weird to find dead cows on a property as big and as expansive as eastern organ Is and these ranches, which are hundreds of square miles each. But what was weird about this
subsect of cattle mutilations. It was that they all had the same type of mutilation. They would have the genitals cut off, they would have the tongue taken out sometimes like the cheek and the eye taken out. But what was weird about it is that happened in the eighties. It was written off as a satanic cult at the time, and that became the narrative, the global narrative, and the zeitgeist. And there were two camps of people, some who thought it was a satanic cult and some who thought it
was aliens. And that's why in today's pop culture you'll see things like cows being zipped up into UFOs, being tractor beamed up. It comes from these stories in eastern Oregon of these mutilated cows that were very unexplained and nobody ever really found an answer.
There were a lot of.
Theories, but it was never solved. But I was curious, you know, was that still going on? Is that still a thing? Or were these people around. Were the people who were there in the eighties still around? Would they want to talk? And luckily, you know, all three of
our brands combined, we figured it out. I went out there and I struck out a few times, and then luckily, you guys found a name online that led to one thing, it led to another, and then before he knew it, we had four or five interviews of just all these people telling the same story across hundreds of square miles, which was we own cattle, we're multi generation cattle ranchers, and we're all seeing these weird, mutilated deaths of our
cattle and they're completely unexplained. Nobody's helping us. The police can't help. We have no answer, and we need help. And that was the through line of all these stories. And it was creepy to be out there on the ground seeing that and documenting it. And we didn't talk about it in the season. Maybe it'll be next season, who knows. But yeah, So I went to one ranch and the ranchers wanted to remain anonymous, so I'll keep
them anonymous. But they told me when I got there, one rancher connected me to another and they said, hey, we actually have a mutilated cow on our property right now. She died nine days ago, and it has all the classic symptoms of everything. Tongue's gone, genital's gone, no blood on the scene. It's been flattened as if it were dropped from a great height and it just landed on
the ground. And there's a bunch of other weird stuff about, like the time it took to deteriorate, and you know, animals and predators wanted to scavenge the bones, and just a bunch of weird stuff. Generally you saw though, but I saw it. Yeah, I got to go there. It was pictures, right, I've got pictures and videos and we'll put those on social post them. Yeah, we'll get them on social. Part of this is probably a little illegal,
so I'm not going to say all the details. Oh God, but when when I saw this cow, my first thought was like I gotta collect some samples of this fucking thing. Like I'm probably two hours from cell signal on this ranch. I mean literally middle of the desert, nowhere.
No one's looking.
I had a knife and I had a cup, so I you know, I cut off some samples of the dirt. I cut off some samples of the cow, and then I shipped it to a through an undisclosed mail carrier called.
The United States. I don't think what matters to Portland, to the FedEx more.
Maybe though, that's actually that's surprisingly close to what I actually Okay, I mailed some pieces of this cow back to our office, and they still sit in this office. I gotta tell you where, but it's still stealed.
Up it here. I'm with him. We've sent this in for testing. We're waiting for results.
And we'll see.
But anyway, that's I mean, more or less, that's the story.
You know.
I traveled all over Oregon. I talked to I think in total, four ranchers and a sheriff, and all of them told me the same story, that this is a very real phenomenon. None of them have an answer for it, and they're all a little bit terrified of what the answer might be, and all of them, for the most part, I'd say four out of five truly deeply believed aliens were involved and that it must be UFOs involved.
So one thing I want to clear up really fast, because when I made High Strained Season one, one of my friends bought me this little Etsy thing where it was a cow being abducted by a UFO, the classic kind of thing, right, And it's kind of just a ridiculous symbolic it's a trope, right, But when you look at this for real, you have real farmers, real ranchers. This is their business. They're real cowboys. They're out there these animals themselves. They're not just pets. They're a business
for them. And so when you start kind of breaking it down when you have these ranchers saying something weird happened to my animal, which is like their livelihood almost kind of the equivalent of someone who has horses or something, and they're like, one of my horses is maimed or is hurt, and I raise horses.
I wouldn't do this to my horse.
It's kind of the same idea, and you're like, Okay, nothing to gain from them by making this up.
They're kind of like yelling into the void.
Maybe some journalists in Portland, Oregon will pick it up and they'll do it one time and they're like, yeah, there's some there's still weird cattle things going on down there, but what is actually going on. It's such an unbelievable thing that if you're not informed, I would totally understand why your first thought would be that this is entirely bullshit.
But it's not made up at all. You have real ranchers who were literally only saying I don't know how my animals died, and I want to know why, to the extent where I will call the Sheriff's office, I'll put up a reward, and ten years later, I'll talk to you about it. Because I still lose sleep about this. And they're hesitant about some extraterrestrial explanation, but they're also strangely like, but maybe because everything else becomes equally as weird.
Yeah, it's one thing to hear these stories on the podcast through the lens of like this beautiful theatrical edit with all these cool music tracks and sound effects and everything.
You mean, like high strange, like.
Something like a podcast called high Strange but you hear it through that lens and you think, oh, it's just like a story.
It's just like a movie, that's what I mean.
And it's like it's kind of fantastical fear, it's very fantastical. But under that lens, like under the service of that, when you're really sitting in the room with these people, you realize like they fully believe and it's not even a belief, like they are living this every day.
They're thanking us for covering this, like they were very thankful.
Yeah, we have no clue.
What the hell is going on, and we hope that we find out one day, So thanks for keeping this in the zeitgeist.
And the thing is like, none of them have answers. But when I think, when your brain doesn't have an answer, it tends to fill the void with something. You said this in you know, one of the episodes, and it's a very real phenomenon. And I saw that happen with all these people where they didn't have answers. So they did what any rational human being would do is go and google the answers, google the questions and see what
answers appear. And every time they all I think diverged onto the same place in the Internet, which was cattle mutilations in relation to UFOs, and it was all of the pictures and all the videos seeing cattles that have been mutilated all over the world in exactly the way that their cows were, and that gave them this understanding that oh shit, this isn't just happening to me. It's happening everywhere, and it's called cattle mutilations and it's UFOs
causing it. So I think it was like almost like a retroactive process where like these people saw their cows getting mutilated, had no idea what to think of it, asked the authorities they didn't know, asked their friends and family, who, by the way, also had similar things happen, but didn't
want to talk about it publicly. With me, it's happening all over the place out there, but I think they only could come to that final answer, which is the only thing that we have today, which is cattle mutilations in aliens. And who knows if that's real or if it's not real, but the facts are it's definitely really happening. Those cows really died. I saw them myself, and these people seem to believe that it is aliens, So make of that way you will.
Well, I mean they may seem to believe that, they also definitely don't know what it is. That's that's the that's the real thing is that they're not trying to sell any of anyone as story. They're basically saying, hands up, my animal got killed. Can anyone help me figure out how this is happening?
Yeah?
I would love to just push this thought experiment a little further down the road and bring up that Whitley was the butt of the joke of episode one of South Park?
Wait was he actually episode one? It was the this is when they did the probe joke. The probe joke.
This is one of the biggest turns out, one of the biggest cartoons in the history of.
I mean humans. If you don't almost hell pargoes, then you don't know what anything is.
But like, how much did that push the narrative? Like how much do these ranchers not want to come forward and be like, we think it could have been a we think it's non human. Right, you're now the butt of the joke because you're saying the thing that you actually just believe. Right, maybe Whitley is in the same spot where he's like, I'm just saying my experience what I believe, same as these ranchers, this is what happened to me.
How do you deal with that? I will say this, Whitley'streeber's story is polarizing.
When I look at Whitley's story, one I take into account that he's made several best selling novels based on his stories.
He's also made movies, and that's all good.
I mean to be honest, if this ever genuinely happened to me, I would hope to have done the same thing. So I'm not gonna use that as some sort of discounting factor here, but at the same time, as a storyteller myself and as a kind of journalistic mind, the first place my mind wanders is and I kind of asked him this sort of off the cuff, where does this sort of fictionalized version maybe blend with the real version?
Not in some way where it's that I'm trying to disprove anything that That's where I think that this becomes a stupid debate. Whitley Strieber believes that that happened to him. Now he also made blockbuster movies and novels about this.
I do want to ask two things. I want to ask about the implant in his ear?
You felt it?
I did?
What did it feel like?
What?
Like, describe the shape of it? Did it feel like anything? Or did it just seem like it was like a sister? What was your take?
I mean, I'm not a doctor, so to me, it felt like a BB, like a from a BB gun. Imagine like a slightly smaller BB maybe fine.
It wasn't like a.
Skin tag kind of thing where it was like I'd like, oh that he's like right here, and I'm like, oh, under his skin.
Under his skin like in his ear lobe hm.
I do wonder that.
So he says in his interview that it activated thirty minutes ago. Did he give you any more information about like what the hell he was talking about?
Like he did?
What was his theory on what that was? It sounded like he was saying it was like recording or it was listening right like what was going on with that?
He basically told me that he believes this implant of his in his ear makes him smarter, more creative, and that is not always on, and that when it does turn on that he's more active and more in tune and can access more of his own brain, and I kind of challenged it, and then his response was actually
kind of neutral. He was basically saying to me that he wishes other people had this same thing, and not like in a I'm better than you kind of way, in a way where he's like, it's a shame that this is like some technology that would benefit other people. There are parts of Whitley Strieber's story that, from a human standpoint, maybe I have trouble seeing between the lines of where his incredible fiction narration blends to his real life.
And I don't know what those lines are. I don't know what that gray area is, but without a doubt, I do think something did happen to him. We have so many stories we've researched and people we've talked to, insane ufhone encounters that we've not even included in this first installment, to the point where.
We just said, Okay, screw it.
We're doing an entire season three as well, dropping in June. I Strange is a production by tender Foot TV in association with iHeart Podcasts, created, hosted, and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Roney, Cooper Skinner and myself. Original scorer by Makeup and Vanity Set, sound design, mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Roney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, and Meredith Steedman.
Our cover art is by Polygon.
Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group Station sixteen in Beck Media and Marketing. Check out the show's website at Highstrange dot com, and if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share it with your friends.
Thanks for listening.