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But I sometimes think that there are some things that can't be explained in the ordinary way, and I want to warn you you'll best be prepared to cope with something perhaps supernatural. Oh but Inspector Craig, I know what you're going to say. There's no such thing that. From the viewpoint of science, all phenomena have a material basis. I've never yet met a case of ghostly interference that wouldn't stand investigation. That's why you're the man for the job.
I'm Toby Bald and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode eleven the Ranch. You've probably noticed that there's a resurgence of interest in UFOs. There are a few reasons for this, including the number of UFO shows on cable television, the sharing of stories and footage on social media and so on. But the biggest reason I think is the US government's acknowledgment that it was to some degree investigating the topic. The interest was exposed in twenty seventeen through the national news,
most importantly in the New York Times. When I talk to people about UFOs, they often point to this apparent official interest as validating the probable existence of mysterious craft, possibly not made by humans in our skies.
Our initial goal was to basically talk about the United States government's kind of interest in the UFO topic and really dive into why UFO became such a popular thing in twenty seventeen after the New York Times article dropped. My name is m J. Baniyas. I'm a journalist and podcaster. I'm the host of Alien State, which is a podcast
from Something Else and Sony Entertainment. I'm also a journalist with The Debrief as well as a whole host of other news outlets that set the UFO world in motion for the last five years, and what it evolved into was a much deeper dive into the fact that this UFO program that we all heard about via the New
York Times was nothing new. What we learned as a result of doing the investigation in the podcast was there was a lot more to this UFO Pentagon program than we initially thought, and it really kind of muddied the waters of what was true and what was not true. When that article came out and just kind of the subsequent UFO news that's been released since.
The article that spurred this renewed interest ran on the front page of the December seventeen, twenty seventeen edition of The New York Times. Its authors were Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper and two other reporters with a deeper interest than UFOs, Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal. We heard from Blumenthal earlier in this season talking about John Mack. In addition to writing a biography of Mac. Blumenthal is retired from a long career as a New York Times reporter.
Leslie Kane is a researcher and reporter with a lengthy history in the UFO world. She wrote the twenty ten book UFOs Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. According to the obituary of abduction investigator Bud Hopkins run by The New York Times on August twenty fourth, twenty eleven, she was Hopkins' companion at the time of his death. She also wrote the twenty seventeen book Surviving Death, a
Journalist Investiga Gate's Evidence for an Afterlife. The Times article, which you can find on the Internet under the title Glowing Auras and Black Money. The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program describes a Pentagon program that had received about twenty two million dollars from two thousand and eight to twenty and eleven to look into reports of UFOs. That money was largely used to pay a contractor, an aerospace research company
called Bigelow Aerospace to oversee the work. Bigelow Aerospace was owned by Robert Bigelow, who we heard about earlier this season when he funded John mac and Bud Hopkins' alien abduction survey. The story also reported that Bigelow had augmented some storage facilities in Las Vegas to how's materials recovered
from UFO crash sites. It quoted an engineer named Harold put Off, who had done research on esp for the CIA, as saying our understanding of these materials was like, quote, if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage door opener. It's a good line, definitely, But none of these materials have been shown to the public anyway. Time has dampened
the initial enthusiasm for the claims in this article. Specifically, there was initial excitement that this was the first step in what was referred to as disclosure with a capital D, a government acknowledgment that it has evidence that UFOs are real and aliens have visited Earth. This hasn't happened, but at the time it seemed as though things might be changing drastically.
The whole New York Times article, as well as the subsequent releases, kind of are indicative of that. You know, there's a lot more to the story than people realize, and it's been going on for decades and decades now with kind of a similar cast of characters who all have been in government work at some point or another, but also are fascinated by the UFO topic in some way.
When Benias and others began to tug at the strings of this story, they found a connection that suggested that the government effort included more than just an investigation into UFOs as physical craft in the skies. Like John Keel, the modern government funded investigation was looking at a broader range of phenomena, which they theorized were all connected.
I don't think it's unusual all in this world for people to have these eufology theories of everything, right that they kind of tie all of these phenomenon together, whether it's like Bigfoot or ghosts, or UFOs or cryptids. I'm Travis Tritten. I'm the Pentagon Bureau chief and the deputy
managing editor for Military dot Com. There's this tendency to try to find some universal solution, and the way that you phenomenon started, I think was with a group of people who thought that they had found that universal solution, specifically in Skinwalker Ranch.
Skinwalker Ranch is a mainstay of shows about the paranormal. It spawned books, podcasts, movies, and television shows. It's a huge tract of land in Utah that some people claim as a setting for a wide wide range of paranormal phenomena, including UFOs, but other strange things as well, as we
will see. The ranch's supposed paranormal properties first became publicly known when it was owned by Robert Bigelow, the same Robert Bigelow who, according to the New York Times, was creating storage spaces in Las Vegas for UFO crash debris. He doesn't own the ranch anymore, but he originally bought it in order to study the strange events that supposedly occurred there.
Well, yeah, I mean it seems like fairly obvious that it's not just simply UFOs the researchers are talking about. It goes far beyond that. The simple data point is Skinwalker Ranch. There's just so much intertwined with Skinwalker Ranch and Robert Bigelow in particular. My name is Mick West, and I'm a UFO investigator. I also investigate a whole bunch of other things, like conspiracy theories and strange phenomena, but most recently I've been into investigating UFOs, which I
really enjoy doing. My background is that I'm a video game programmer. I worked on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series like a long time ago, and I kind of semi retired and just kind of been pursuing my own interests, including writing and investigating things. If you look at Robert Bigelow's interests, they're not just UFOs. They are life after death, and they are entities like ghosts essentially, and the supernatural, yeah, essentially magic interests of the people associated with those, people
like Bigelow kind of naturally like include those things. They entertain, these broader aspects. So there might be some kind of reality distortion field or some kind of essentially Poltergeist type activity.
Travis Trittan.
I think that project really began with book skin Walkers at the Pentagon. I had just kind of a personal interest because it involved the military and being somebody who covers the military. The Pentagon. It was it was really just kind of the way out there. It was so far out. The answer kind of put together some of the pieces and the answer some of the questions that I had had before about where's all this UAP stuff like coming from? And I thought, this is just too good.
I need to get to the bottom of this. I need to figure out what is the truth here and like what is the fiction as were it guarded.
The twenty twenty one book Skinwalker's at the Pentagon by James Lakatski, Calm Kelleher and George Knapp, begins with the experiences of a senior aerospace engineer in Naval Intelligence who is given the pseudonym Jonathan Axelrod. Axelrod we are told was quote well versed in investigating anomalies, utilizing a thoroughly professional approach. The book opens with him accompanied by two
other military men on Skinwalker Ranch. They reportedly are struck with feelings of fear and dread as they are hiking at night. The source turns out to be a dark oval shape quote radiating a menacing presence, only visible using a night scope. We'll hear more about the consequences of
Axl Rod's visit to the ranch later. Suffice it to say that Skinwalker Ranch was reputed to be the site of a wide range of paranormal phenoma, including UFOs and glowing orbs, crop circles, poltergeists, huge animals, impervious to bullets, and so on.
It's a fun book, right, It kind of gives you, like the creepy tingles. It's like Stephen King novel or something where you know it's a little bit cheesy, but still you get a little bit creeped out. And that's kind of the feeling I got from that. It was like a really like fun read. But you just have to ask yourself. I mean, people are seeing were wolves in their backyards. There's just a variety of just really
crazy stories. There's cryptids, you know, strange creatures. There's the blue orbs that travel through people's bodies and caused health effects.
MJ.
Benaias investigated the Skinwalker Ranch in the late twenty teens.
Skinwalker Ranch has held a really long history within the UFO lore, but it's been fairly silent. Skinwalker Ranch entered the UFO picture in the nineties, but not a lot of people talked about. It was kind of whispered about, sort of hush circles.
The ranch became more publicly known with the two thousand and five publication of the book Hunt for the Skinwalker by Colem Kelleher and George Knapp.
My journey there occurred after twenty seventeen. There was a documentary that was released called Hunt for the Skinwalker, and it was released by a filmmaker named Jeremy Corbel, and it basically explained that the ranch was sold by Robert Bigelow, who was the original owner of the ranch in the nineties, and he sold it to a sort of mysterious player and nobody knew who he was, and to be frank, the documentary films kind of discombobulated it weird, but it
kept the owner secret and it didn't really expose what was going on on the ranch. It kind of maintained the mystery of the ranch and it created the drama of the ranch, but it didn't really get into like
what Skinwalker Ranch actually was as a thing. At first, I didn't care very much, but I was able to look There's a picture that was posted online of a private aircraft that was owned by the owner of the ranch with a tail number two missing, and I was able to use that photograph, as well as some other clues that were in the documentary, to basically figure out that the owner of Skinwalker Ranch was a Utah real estate mogul named Brandon Feugel. Connecting those dots. I just
simply reached out to him. And I was a journalist for Vice at the time, and I just simply reached out and said, listen, I know you're the owner of Skinwalker Ranch. I'm writing an article about it. Do you wish to comment?
This resulted in a series of conversations during which Fugal offered benaias a couple of exclusives and an invitation to visit the ranch.
My editor and I took the deal and we decided to run an exclusive feature about the ranch, which was my first trip out there in twenty eighteen, I think. And then a few months later we did an exclusive interview with mister Fugal where we sort of exposed his identity and he gave us the exclusive there. So that was my first trip out to the ranch.
Let's take a step back. How did the Skinwalker Ranch become so prominently connected with the Pentagon funded investigation into UFOs? Well, not too surprisingly, it results from a confluence of power, money, and a paranormal experience. Initially, it was set up when a Pentagon official approached Harry Reid, who was then the Senate Majority leader. The official had been to Skinwalker Ranch and had had what Mickwest describes as quote essentially a mystical experience.
He was in the kitchen of this house there and he's awesome. What looked like tubola bells the materialized in the middle of the kitchen, and then he realized that there was something freaky was going on, and so he kind of persuaded Harry Reid to set up this program.
MJ.
Benaias you had one individual in the entirety of the DIA, which has thousands of employees.
The DIA is the Defense Intelligence Agency.
He had one individual who was interested in the possible security implications of a phenomena he personally witnessed at Skinwalker Ranch.
This individual then went to a senator who he was he sort of knew was also interested in the paranormal and the UFO phenomenon and had that senator broached a sort of contact with Robert Bigelow, who owned the ranch at the time, to kind of work together, and the three of them patched this plan to create a proposal and a contract with the DIA to study what they called advance like weapons and weapons application systems.
The idea was that they were going to be researching the weapons of the future, or at least that was the story.
What they were really doing, though, was using the government money to investigate anomaloust phenomena on Skinwalker Ranch as well as other locations around the United States, chiefly a handful in Brazil, to figure out what UFOs were, with the intention of returning to the DIA and saying, listen, you know, we've spent this money and we've figured out that UFOs are some sort of advanced technology that we can utilize and weaponize.
Again, Mick West, the real aim of the project was to investigate what was going on at Skinwalker Wrench and investigate the ghosts and the UFOs and the strange happenings. So somehow the government, the Pentagon ended up spending money on this high strangeness, that skinwalker wrench, which is some degree kind of normalized that type of thing the government might spend money on the UFOs.
The funding for this program was short lived MJ. Benias.
Actually that never happened. Quickly, various other parties in the DIA, who are responsible for making sure the job you've been contracted to do is getting done, realized what was going on with the money and decided, after the initial sort of surge of twenty two million dollars, to cut funding and just say there's no intelligence value here. Generally, there was a consensus sort of at the top levels of the DiiA that this was a silly thing to do.
Chasing werewolves, for example, in Utah is not a good use of taxpayer dollars, especially from an intelligence standpoint.
When The New York Times picked up the story, the Pentagon not surprisingly did not emphasize the skinwalker ranch aspect of the program. Mick West.
When it came out in the New York Times that something had been happening, they didn't really talk about the ghosts or anything, and they just talked about possible foreign craft in ours Bace and how it's a national security issue, but really underlying it at all, it's this really weird, deep strangeness that drives the current push over the past
few years. Has grown in momentum because there's been more and more interest from the press, there's been more lobbyings, and more politicians are being convinced that they should do something about it, which I don't really think is based on good evidence. I think it's based on compelling testimony from compelling people.
Compelling people whose beliefs about UFOs and the paranormal are not what you might expect. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. Coverage of the Pentagon funded UFO program that came to light in twenty seventeen focused on what you can think of as traditional UFO physical craft buzzing around in the sky. Again, MJ. Benias.
With any subculture, you're gonna have divisions in ideology, right. Everyone within the UFO subculture kind of has similar linguistic background, right. We all kind of use the same terms when terminology to describe what's going on. But you know, there's different
ideologies that exist within the UFO community. You have some individuals who believe in a sort of very nuts and bolts technological these are aliens from other planet and they're flying here in spaceships that are, you know, constructed like we would construct spaceships with fancier, shinier technology than we have. But you know, they're just more advanced and that's it.
This belief was exemplified by a number of the classified Pentagon videos that were made public, videos that showed fuzzy images from specialized cameras, often accompanied by the pilot's audio transmissions.
There's clean up.
I looked on the assay, Oh my gosh, are going.
Against the wind?
The winds one hundred clients in the west.
Oh.
But there is another school of thought about UFOs.
You have other people within the UFO community who believe that this is sort of a much more spiritual or mystical concept, that whatever the source of UFOs are are a manifestation of some larger system, not just space aliens for another planet flying here in a space ship. So I would say the founders of the DIA program, the ones who kind of brought it to fruition, have some sort of interest in all aspects of the paranormal pantheon of beliefs, whether they believe in like a consciousness being,
you know, you know, I don't know. I mean, there's going to be kind of divisions amongst all of them, but they all clearly view the phenomenon not as a nuts and bolts thing, but as a spiritual thing that could be utilized and reverse maybe not inered, but reverse spiritualized for some sort of gain, whether it's technological gain, monetary defense, whatever.
As we saw last episode when we looked at John Keel's beliefs. The idea is that there is a phenomenon that presents itself in different ways, and it has been doing this for centuries. Its manifestations the result of people's expectations of what the paranormal would look like.
The same things that are the sources of ghost sightings or sightings of elves back in the fifteen hundreds, or vampire sightings or werewolf sightings or all of those things. It's a merger of spiritual concepts that present themselves in different ways at different times.
But Nias is about to mention pan spermia. We're not going to get into it, but briefly, it's the idea that life is distributed throughout the universe and can be spread by space, dust, comets, and so on. It also suggests that life on Earth may have started with microscopic organisms from space. It's definitely fringe.
Whatever the phenomenon is in this, like panspermia, like UFO concept, like the unified theory of everything. Paranormal UFOs are just a manifestation of whatever the phenomena is. And it's just today manifesting itself as UFOs because we are more technological as a species compared to let's say, four hundred years ago when people would see ghosts and monsters roaming around in fields and imps and whatnot.
And it's not just four hundred years ago. Earlier in this episode, we heard about the naval intelligence officer given the pseudonym John Axelrod. He had encountered a mysterious presence at Skinwalker Ranch. But if you believe it's a count, physically leaving the ranch didn't end his interaction with strange forces. About Axelrod, Benaiah says.
We know, for example, who that individual was. I'm not sure how public his name is, so I won't say it on this podcast, but he was employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, he's well established and well respected within the intelligence.
Community and within the sort of the US.
Government is a high ranking civilian intelligence official. But there's also that aspect of belief, and I think that that's what really plays a role in all this. I've been to Skinwalker Ranch twice and not had an experience at all. Nothing's followed me home. People, for example, told me stories about hitchhiker effect and all these things where if you try to upset the whatever is on Skinwalker Ranch, it will purposefully try to come after you.
The hitchhiker effect. This is the idea that even once you've left the ranch, there's a possibility that the phenomenon will attach itself to you, that it will follow you and make its presence known. According to the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the family of the pseudonymous Jonathan Axelrod experienced this effect at their home in suburban Virginia. His wife reportedly saw a dark figure in their bedroom and
herd footsteps in the house. One of his teenage sons saw glowing orbs in his bedroom that he felt were under intelligent control. More bizarrely, his wife looked out the window to see a quote huge wolf like creature unquote, standing upright and leaning against a tree. Days later, the two sons saw the same creature again, standing on two legs and then dashing into the forest.
We were doing all that stuff, walking around the ranch in the middle of the night, you know, insulting it, being mean, calling it names, like trying to get some sort of reaction, and nothing occurred. But I also don't believe that Skinwalker Ranches home to anything but a couple of cows. Actually a lot of cows. There's a lot of cows on the ranch, to cows and sort of a caretaker couple as well as just the people who work there. You know. I think it's just a plan old ranch in Utah.
So here's the thing. When you take a look across the field of paranormal phenomena, there is such a wide range of beliefs and experiences that it is really hard to see how they connect to each other. Just narrow it down to the UFO stories that we've looked at over three seasons of strange arrivals, and you see that
it is hard to reconcile them with each other. The idea of hundreds of thousands of alien abductions doesn't seem to square with a sighting on a school yard in Zimbabwe, which seems different than Betty and Barney Hill's encounter with a crew of fairly friendly aliens. And then Lonnie Zamora's flying egg and the Roswell crash and so on and so on. The idea that all of these things are just different parts or different views of the same single thing.
It's a way to reconcile all of these different conceptions. Then you add in other paranormal phenomena like poltergeist, cryptids, esp near death experiences, and myriad others. In fact, it sounds a lot like John Keel's conception of the super spectrum and ultra terrestrials. It can encompass all paranormal activity because it is just one big thing that takes the form of the observer's unconscious choosing.
You have again, this nice, packaged, unified system, which is I think from it's kind of lazy, but from a kind of a euphological perspective, I think it's for people who believe it's really nice and tidy, because you can then allow for all of the anecdotes to exist cohesively together and say, hey, man, everything goes because it's just a system that's occurring all around us that we're part of. And whether you saw a UFO or Bigfoot, it's all
the same, you know. Again, unfortunately, it's not falsifiable in any way. It boils down again to faith and belief.
This is the way we talk about religion and spirituality, not observable phenomena that we want to study scientifically. Yet that's the area of investigation that was funded by the Pentagon, and that's how the people receiving the money conceptualize what was happening.
So for sure, I think it's become a big part of how this particular group of individuals views the UFO topic and just in general kind of paranormality as an idea overall, that it is some kind of universal system that crosses a whole bunch of different ideas of what paranormal is or isn't, and it kind of governs us in some way, or it exists next to us in some way, and yeah, it just kind of messes with us, and it's a mind right.
While viewing UFO encounters as well as other paranormal activity through a spiritual lens isn't very useful for scientific studies, it works better when looking at white p people believe in UFOs, and if belief in the reality of UFOs is like a religion, who are the priests next time? On Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima il Kyali Jesse Funk, and Noami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manke, and supervising producer Josh Thame. Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals.
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