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Welcome to Talk Is Jericho, the pilot of Thunder and Rock'n'Roll. And let's bring on Duff McKayton and his illustrious, quite studious joke on the week! Chris Jericho, tapin' the cake and callin' ya. Hey listen, hope you're doing well and everybody out there's doin' well. Listen, I come out of my house now in the morning and this bike hits me. Every time I come out of the house, yeah, it's a vicious cycle. How do I have so many of them? How's it possible? Okay.
I don't know where you get those Duff for how you keep coming out of them but thank you so much for delivering every single week for 7 years straight. Go see Duff on the lighthouse tour 24. DuffOnline.com is all the dates and ticket information and come see Quarantine in a couple weeks. My 80s kiss non-make-up tribute band celebrating our newest top 10 single Good Girl Gone Bad from the Crazy Nights record.
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Alright, today in the show I got Mitch Horowitz, the cohost of the new Discovery series Alien Encounters, a fact or fiction. I just started this past Wednesday on Discovery and Max. Mitch and his cohost, Chrissy Newton, dissect real life encounters with real life people who've had extra terrestrial experiences. They talked to the people, analyze the cases with the help of the science, data, experts and technology.
And then decide if there's a reasonable explanation for the experience, was it real, was it not, was it a satellite launch, the space station passing over your head or the proverbial weather phenomenon or weather balloon, like whatever, right?
Does the evidence support a true Alien Encounter? Mitch shares the details about some of the cases on the show including a husband and wife, a big-foot hunting team who believe they found proof of aliens' existence on Earth, a lobster man on Maine who had a crazy experience while camping, an alleged abduction in California desert, a geologist who believes he recovered otherworldly metal material from the infamous Roswell crash site. Mitch actually got to touch the material as well.
He tells us all about it. He also discusses recent UFO, UEP events, house sightings and experiences of becoming more and more accepted by the mainstream, why the US government has been more open about them in recent years and what all this means for us in the future. Of course, he answers whether he believes there might be something out there. Here we go, Alien Encounters, factor fiction with Mitch Horowitz, starting now on Talk is Jericho.
Mitch Horowitz is here and there's lots of stuff to discuss including the Alien Encounters on Discovery. Quickly before we jump into that because there's a lot to talk about, I was reading your bio and something kind of stuck out to me. It says that your reporting is called Attention to the Worldwide Crisis of Violence Against Accused Witches. Please explain that a bit because I wasn't aware there was still violence against accusers.
I believe it or not, it's going on all over the world in the South Pacific and India and Latin America, the Middle East, particularly Saudi. I started to notice in the early 20 teens an uptick of news stories about women getting tortured, beaten, banished, even burned alive by mobs. I was very worried about Papua New Guinea and I realized that there was an uptick of coverage about violence against women and children mostly accused of being witches.
There were very little stats on it and so I made every effort I could to cover the story, I had a piece about it in the New York Times in 2014. Since then, there has been more attention brought to the issue but it's real and it's out there. I was going to say it sounds like something that you would hear about in the Salem Witchtiles Trials and Puritan Times. I didn't know that still existed in this day and age.
It blew my mind and it exists in the West too because when you have immigrant communities, people come here and they bring their grudges with them. You know, seeing communities from say West and Central Africa where this also were problem and it repeats sometimes in Western Europe and in the West. It's definitely real and it's out there. Something we'd have to discuss. On another show, Prashantz, this show, like I said, Ailing Encounters.
We've talked a lot about that on talk as Jericho over the years. I'm just about sightings and encounters and that sort of thing. So kind of telling what the story is with your show and kind of how you go about talking about these encounters. Well, the setting of the show was based in Roswell, New Mexico and we bring in people who claim experiences with close encounters or alien abductions.
They generally come to the table with some kind of evidence. They might have videotape evidence if they're claiming an abduction. They might have medical records that show lacerations or radiation burns on their body. A couple of people even stepped up with physical evidence of debris from alleged craft sites. And we try to evaluate the evidence as best we can using outside experts, whether it's chemists, medical doctors, people who are experts in astronomical or aerial phenomena.
We try to rule out that there's something mundane going on in the skies above wherever the encounter was reported, whether it's starlink or satellite launch or plasma lightning. Or something of that nature. If we can rule out everything that's mundane and the individual seems to be bringing to the table a mature, reasonable story that adds up that might include other witnesses.
We're willing to say that they've had an unknown encounter. Most of the people who come to the table bring us stories for which there are mundane explanations. But there is a nagging percentage who bring stories that can't be punctured by any straight evidence or explanations. And these are really unknown encounters. So what are some of the situations where you're finding that people once again, they're thinking their town at Duke.
But how do you kind of discern if it's real? If it's like you mentioned one of these things that's kind of a hoax or something else. Yeah. Well, for example, if they bring video footage, the first thing we do is we test the video to make sure that it's not spiked. That it's not, you know, it's completely unblooded by tampering. And if that's the case, then we would sort of move on to the next stage where you ask the question, what are the mundane explanations that could cover this?
Were there test pilot launchings? Were there satellite launchings? Were there starlink launchings? Was there weather phenomenon that could explain any of this? Is it just, you know, a smudge on the lens or something ordinary like that? If all of that can be ruled out, we start to raise a question of whether there are other witnesses. Was this a mass sighting? Can this be corroborated? Does this person have a background where they come across reasonably?
Would you believe this person if they were seated in a witness stand and you were seated on a jury? Would you say, okay, this is a credible person? So we marched through all these things and in some cases these people are actually bringing to the table hard-court physical evidence. People are hungry for evidence and they want evidence that you can hold in your hand and I feel that same impatience.
There's one guy, he's one of my favorite guests, Frank Kimbler. He's a geologist and he's a professor of Earth Science at New Mexico Military Institute. Frank combed what he believes is a debris field that still exists around the alleged Roswell crash site and he found fragments of aluminum that show signs of manufacturing and of distress,
of having been blown apart in some explosion. But this aluminum is not a compound aluminum of the kind that we generally use for manufacturing or ironotics in our day-to-day industrial lives. It is an untreated aluminum that's not used for any of those things. It's a natural alloy. It's really weird and it's the kind of thing you shouldn't expect to find there. And I think it constitutes a legitimate piece of evidence that's worthy of debate.
So for example, when you mention that because I've heard about this before, why isn't this something that's more universally known? We're talking about some sort of an alien manufacturer and aluminum, like you mentioned. It's not from this Earth. Why isn't this something that's more discussed, do you feel? Yeah, it's weird to me the things that get overlooked like for someone. I'll come back to that point.
I was sent a 2010 recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report that identified radiation burns on the bodies of Air Force personnel who had reported flyovers by crafts of an unknown technology.
I thought, no way, this is bullshit, I'm being hoaxed. So I look it up and it turns out it is of honest to goodness real Defense Intelligence Agency report from 2010 that uses language that's straight out of the UFO discussion and that reports this fairly widespread phenomenon of radiation burns on Air Force and Navy personnel reporting flyovers by crafts of unknown tech.
And I'm saying to myself, why hasn't this been reported? It has appeared in a few places. There was an article in USA Today. There was an article on the Daily Mail in Great Britain, but other than that zero, zilch. And it's really surprising to me that in our UFO crazed society, something that legit wouldn't have gotten reported.
We had a guest on the show, Jessica Blunt, who's a math teacher from Utah. She also had reported burns and lacerations on her body after some sort of an unknown flyover. It looks like exactly what was in the 2010 report. And I'm asking the same question, where is the mainstream media on this? There's been some reportage, but very, very little. Sometimes it's the most obvious, most remarkable stuff that just for whatever reason doesn't get validated and picked up, at least not broadly.
Is that kind of changing now with all the inquests of the UAPs, the government kind of inquiries into these sort of things? It's definitely changing. We're seeing a lot more reports and I think that's because there's no longer the same degree of stigma attached to it. If you're in the military, if you work for a military contractor and you file a UFO UAP report even 10 years ago, that would have been the breaks on your career.
You know, you're in a red flag, does a weirdo. And that's no longer happening as much. There has been some protection pass for whistleblowers within the military, within contractors. There's been improvement. There's a long way to go. We need more sweeping protection for these people, but there's been some progress. And so with the destigmatization, the additional protection for whistleblowers, and just the expansion of tech, we're seeing more reported.
We're all carrying around high-deaf video cameras in our pockets all day long, drones. Everyday people have software that's really outstanding. They can help you identify right off the bat. RA was this a satellite flying over my house, was this an experimental launch or something of that nature. And what's more, you know, backyard astronomers who are some of the best in the field, these guys have tech that's the equal of what you'll find at the university very often.
These backyard astronomers in many cases are impeccable. So we got the tech and we're all less embarrassed by it. So there is a lot more reported. I just saw the rolling stones in Orlando, Florida. I was front row man, and I bought those tickets. I usually do so I can get a front row spot and support the stones. And here's another lesson from the learning tree, my branches, game time with killer last minute deals all in prices views from your seat and their lowest price guarantee.
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So before we get into some of the specifics of the things that you dealt into this season, the show, how did you get involved as kind of the host and lead progNostigator on this show. I have not been an area focused for me. I'm an historian of alternative spirituality. I've written about, I've documented unknown phenomena historically more recently and so forth.
And when discovery approach me to do the show, I was very high on it because, first of all, I think there's a convergence between the discussion around spirituality and UFOs in that I think we're all having the same discussion in a sense. Some people will say near death experience, somebody else will say alien abduction. Somebody will say alien or tall white or gray. Somebody else will say poltergeist or ghost or 150 years ago might have even said goblin or something else completely different.
You go back into scripture, people are using language that demarcated that era. So when we're talking about encounters with unknown phenomena, nonhuman intelligence, what have you, we may all historically end today, be having the same conversation we're just using vocabulary. That's particular to our own era. My question is so that you have this background of studying these supernatural, shall we say, you get brought on, I know you have a code, it's Chrissy.
And so you guys, you have a system and when you talk to these people, because you mentioned some people are actually trying to fully, is there some sort of six sense that you have for this? Listen, every one of us, at least in principle, should be qualified to sit on a jury. And when men and women sit on a jury, look, they can be deciding a life or death case literally.
And they're expected not to have specialized knowledge, but they're expected to be able to evaluate specialized knowledge and asked, do I believe this person is just seeking sensationalism? Do they have veracity? A lot of the people who stepped up, I thought had veracity, I thought they were mature together people. Some of them had authentic technical knowledge, maybe they're Navy or Air Force vets, maybe they're in tech and they understand satellite technology.
Or they've just never shown any hunger to be the center of attention in their lives, but they're stepping up with this story. So I thought a lot of the people were together mature people. So let's talk with some of the specifics of the cases that you've discussed, because there's a lot of interesting topics here. And I know even in the premier episode, you've already mentioned the aluminum from the crash site. What?
There's a talk about the other cases that you discuss on the show, just in the premier itself. There is a lot of streaming from Maine named John Levin, who had a story that I really liked. John and a group of friends went camping on an island off the coast of Maine in late summer. And the people that were with him, again, trained people, marine biologists from one of the local universities, they split into two groups.
One group wanted to hang out back at the campsite, the other wanted to do a hike around the island. Although these groups were separated by a little over a mile, they both reported the same encounter, which were these orbs of light that came down from the sky and seemed to hover just above them, and events to kind of force on them where they felt like they were forced to the ground. And it scared the hell out of them.
None of them could identify what it was. And when the hikers got back to the campsite, the people at the campsite, even though they were a mile away, said they had had exactly the same encounter. There's a history of these kinds of encounters on Richmond Island off the coast of Maine. They didn't have any physical evidence other than their own testimony.
But the fact that it was a mass encounter and the fact that these were well trained people, and they had kept it silent for some years for the usual reasons, worried about embarrassment, professional disgrace, and so on. The fact that they were all willing to step up at John in particular, I thought spoke to the fact that something unknown happened to them. It was a scary story.
When you mentioned before about some of these things that are happening and what they can be kind of described as, and you mentioned a few things to talk about whether it captures. I mean, you still hear these stories about the weather balloons. And I don't think I've ever seen a weather balloon in my life ever. Like, why do they still even use that one? I've never seen a weather balloon. I've never seen a swamp gas. I've never seen a smudge on the legs.
That's the most to explain this worldwide phenomena. You know, trouble is, it's human nature. People who believe in something, including those who claim to believe in rationality, get so wed to their point of view that they can't be moved. I know people who are rejectionists of the UFO thesis to such an extent that they are almost willing to resort to explanations that are more bizarre than just saying we don't know.
We don't know. It's all a UFO is. We just don't know. We've checked every box that we can check, and we can't figure out what this phenomenon was. But there are people who are rejectionists to such an extent that it almost becomes like a religious belief. They call themselves rationalists, but there is much a believer as any fundamentalist from any walk of life. They're hard to reach.
Let's talk about the lady that you mentioned that is on this episode where she said that she suffered burns and neurological damage, which is very interesting to me. Tell us about that case. Yes, that's Jessica Blunt. She's a mom. She's an athlete. She's a math instructor from Utah. She was driving some of her kids to a movie one day, daylight, and saw weird lights passing over the car. They stopped.
They got some video footage of it on her phone. When she got to the movie theater with the kids, she started feeling like she was going to pass out. The next day, she went to her doc, and she was describing symptoms as you were saying that would suggest some sort of neurological damage.
She was having blackouts, seizures, lapses in memory, almost something that you might experience if you got a really bad concussion, for example. But she had no sign of bodily trauma except for the fact that there were burns on her body, which bore similarity to radiation burns. She sent us the full medical data, photographs of the burns, the neurological exams that she got, and these things reveal trauma, but without bodily harm, without obvious physical assault or elacerations.
There was no sign that she had been the victim of any kind of obvious assault, no sign that she had been the victim of industrial burns or anything of that nature. This is really an SUV driving every day, mom from Utah, and her medical authorities were basically stumped. They said we validate the symptoms, we don't know the cause.
It reminded me a lot of the material that one can find in this 2010 Defense Intelligence Agency report that talked about radiation burns on the bodies of Air Force Enable personnel. If that's not physical evidence, I don't know what is. Our friend, what's his name? Dyson, the astronomer, will joke about abdictees, should bring back an astray. The fact is, we do have some physical evidence, we really do, and it's getting better and better.
How could you not believe this lady when she has these physical evidence? What else could it be pond off as being? That's the thing. If you start to arrive, it's funny. There's an English rationalist philosopher David Hume, and every rationalist claims to view him as their main man. David Hume didn't believe in miracles. David Hume didn't believe in strange lights in the sky, but they're wrong.
What David Hume said was that if a miraculous encounter occurs, and the explanation against it, the opposing explanation starts to get more barfetched than the claimed encounter itself, then you start to have evidence going on the side of the encounter. That's what I'm about. If somebody can step to the table and show me that Jessica's experience could have occurred this way, this way, and it really stands up, then I take it off the table.
If they have to get weirder and weirder in terms of explaining what happened to her rather than just conceding, we don't know. Is it so hard for people? Is it so hard for the skeptics just to say, we don't know. I don't know what's as wrong. I don't believe in flying saucers, but I'm willing to concede there's a question. That's a great point. Like you said, when the evidence to prove it wrong starts to be more preposterous than the actual claim itself, you've got something there.
You mentioned something right now talking about your horrors as wrong. I feel that you're like I am, and that you're open to the concept that there is life out there. But you also have to be weighing both sides of the coin. Do you believe that there are the UAPs and UFOs existing out there? I am a critical believer. I think that we have to hold ourselves to a high standard. I don't want to get carried away with credulity.
I always tell my kids, if you want to argue for something and it's remarkable, then you've got to have remarkable evidence. We can't just have supposition where we're sitting around saying maybe this. It will be a lot of things. But when you can rule out all the mundane stuff, then you do have an authentic mystery.
We have to be willing to look at it, listen to the people involved, and not twist ourselves into knots, saying, well, it can't be. The big step is not saying, I believe, the big step is saying, there's a question. There's a legit question. So how do you balance that open-mindedness and the skepticism on the show?
Well, first of all, I think we do apply good standards of examining the evidence. We're not technicians in a laboratory, we're not scientists. But it's decent lab evidence that I think would stand up in a court of law. A lawyer could use it to say, look, my client is innocent, and members of the jury could evaluate it and say, I buy that, I believe that, or I'm not so sure here.
I think it's legit evidence, and I think we can always go deeper, but I think we bring on experts that know what they're doing, and I think we put the facts on the table. Let's talk about some of the other cases on the show. What are some of your, I don't know, favorites is the correct word, but some of the best ones for evidence that there was something strange out there that people saw.
Well, let's see, we've got some video evidence that I think is really extraordinary that shows sightings over some of the Western slings and shows objects moving in ways, just like the so-called tech tech video, that really, we just don't have our arms around.
And if there is some sort of a technology and earthly mundane technology that could be used to understand some of the videos that we show, it's going objects that reflect a tech that we don't get, whether it belongs to the US, the Russians, the Chinese, the kind of secret weapon thesis can be taken seriously, has to be brought to the table.
But we've got video evidence that I think is pretty fantastic that just can't be explained by ordinary terms. We have a photograph that a woman who was on vacation to Machu Picchu in Perutuk that shows what appears to be a flying saucer, and we analyze the hell out of it. And the truth is, if the photograph is real, it shows something really remarkable, but I think we've kind of cracked that nut, and viewers will be able to see what we've come up with.
There is one story that's a particular favorite of mine. There's a couple, they live in Western Pennsylvania, they're bow hunters, but they're also interested in big foot and cryptids, and they found some weird tracks in Western PA, kind of claw tracks that were like the same. They didn't find big foot, they didn't find an alien, but they found something really freaking weird, and it was the big foot hunters that found it rather than everybody else who just looks during at their phones.
And I really dig these people, because there are a couple of feral, freaking animals running around Western PA that are all going to be there, and they found them. They found them. They found them. Gloves on Pac with what you just said, let's just continue on this, because what are you saying that they found? Let's put it this way, there's a local dude who collects some exotic animals, and two of them are scaring them.
Oh my gosh. And they are proud, damn dangerous. And they should not be wandering around parks where people are having picnics. That's cool that you actually had a resolve to the case. Because there's so many times when you watch finding big foot or something, there's some noises in the woods, and then all of them maybe next time, but this thing actually had the case was solved.
I love this case, because these are feral dangerous animals, and Mr. Gamefarmer out there on a Fix His Fences, and they escaped, and it is no joke, and it was the big foot hunters who found it. It's interesting too. I've heard quite a few theories of people that have talked to you that big foot, the Sasquatch, that sort of thing are actually aliens, which explains why they come and go so many times.
It's not like forests filled with primitive creatures, there actually are evidence of these otherworldly races being our Earth. It's interesting. I learned recently here in North America, we have more than 500 distinct Native American tribes with their own language, custom culture, I mean literally from the perimeter of the Arctic Circle down through Eugene, Oregon.
We have got hundreds of Native American tribes in this country. Every single one of these tribes, which is an ancient civilization, has its own term for big foot. We most commonly use big foot Sasquatch Yeti, why would all these tribes going back in some cases, in some cases, millennia, from more tropical parts of the country on the Pacific coast to parts of the country that just touch on the perimeter of the Arctic Circle.
I'm talking North America here, US Canada. Every one of these tribes has their own name for big foot. That's something to us, man. It's got to say something. Also, you mentioned the photograph from Mach-P-Chu, from Peru. How do you analyze the photograph to see if it's real or not? Is this an actual print it up? Photograph is it a digital photograph?
If the digital photograph that was printed, the first thing you do to see if anybody spiked it, was it photoshopped, was anything done to it? Is it a deep fake? Is that easy to find out? It's easy if you have a sophisticated software. You've got to bring it to somebody who could really pick this stuff apart. I couldn't do it on my desktop. But there are people you can pay to do it, who have the appropriate software. We ruled it was uncluded, ungrubbed, it's not a fake.
What the hell is it? I couldn't wrap my mind around it because it looks real as hell. Yet it looks so real, you're saying to yourself, God is it too real. I'm not going to give it away or the men in black will come out of it by which I mean the network exists. But we did crack it open. It's one of these things where you say even the stuff that's most vivid, most real, sometimes it has an ordinary explanation which in itself can be weird because it teaches you how our eyes play tricks on us.
And they do. So was the lady trying to perform a hoax on you or was she convinced as well? No, I think she was convinced. She's from spiritual background. She was totally real. We tried to have people on the show who were like purposely. And if we thought, you know, they're sincere, then we'll hear them out. So tell us some of the evidence that you found on the show that convinces you that you've seen some weird stuff.
Well, there was a gentleman who's a retired military defense officer. And he and his friends experiment with very high tech that they're in possession of audio visual recording high tech. That they have possession of in a pouch of wilderness that they're trying to keep secret because they don't want to attract a bunch of gockers to it. I think they're not trying to start the next skin walk or rent.
And what they found basically were what I essentially would call sonar interruptions in the landscape that suggested certain humanoid shapes or forms in this one area that they've been studying. And they showed us the evidence we reviewed it. And although we can't determine what it was, the evidence itself is unpluted and it does show something that doesn't show up visually but was showing up in terms of the sonar and the high tech emissions that they were using.
And it's one of these cases that you go over it back and forth and you run through the checklist and I have to call it unexplained. And that's interesting to me that you can have these things that you can't explain to me. That would be like one of the most challenging parts of doing the show is really tapping into these things that I don't explain and trying to wrap your mind around that.
Yeah. I mean, I think that the problem with our culture is of course everything gets divided into take it early. Take it early. No, just absolutism on everything. And the fact is I'm not really interested in the people who are super-credulous who want to believe every UFO story they hear. And I'm not interested really in the rejectionists who reject every story because the point is getting ourselves to that stage of a question.
a question, do we have a theory? Do we have repeat evidence? I tend to favor the repeat evidence because I think that, look, we favor it ever or else in life. Every time I'm popping a pill, you know, whether it's over the counter or psychopharmacological, I'm dealing with evidence that in, you know, some reasonable percentage of the people, this stops a headache. Okay, I'm willing to go with that. I just want to apply that same evidence to weird phenomena.
And I'm not saying that a person should jump into the deep end of the pool, but I'm saying that this stuff is worth funding. It's worth researching. And it is really important that we don't demonize or make fun of people who step up with a report if they're reasonable people. That's what you have to do. I've always had that attitude on my show. It's like, I'm not going to make you feel stupid to come on my show and talk about whatever it is
that you've discovered. You know, I mean, that's not the role because then people don't want to come out and say anything. You want to give them an open forum and kind of a safe space to tell their stories. Absolutely. You know, it's funny. I'm reading a book by a friend of mine right now. And he talks about discovery of meteorites in the 1600, 1700s. This is supposed to be the age of enlightenment. Most scientists at that time did not believe
in the existence of meteorites. People would step up with the stories of meteorites and scientists would say, you know what you're talking about. You're being superstitious. It's an old wives tale. Then eventually as evidence of mass, then a mass, we realize, oh, there are meteorites striking Earth all the time. This is happening. It doesn't matter whether it's coming from, you know, a farmer in central Maine. What this guy saw is absolutely
real. But there was a tendency at that time to kind of piss downward on ordinary people who stepped up with accounts. And we've passed through a cultural moment like that recently. And the public is just not having it anymore. That cultural moment has passed. So the rejection ists, you know, they may hold sway on Wikipedia and academia and so forth. But sometimes I say, you know, culturally they've won. But intellectually they've lost. This is the age
of questioning. And anybody who steps to the table, you know, pissing down on people who report experiences or bring forward evidence, who themselves may have technical training, we don't live in that age anymore. I mean, you can get away with it, but not on my show.
Well, I'm not the thing to you. Like we discussed earlier with the government inquests and there's more acceptance to the possibilities of life, you know, in another galaxies and universes and planets where like you mentioned, 20, 30 years ago, it was still kind of like piss down on. But now it's almost like, well, tell us more. What can you, you know, what evidence is there and where do you think is going from here?
Well, I think it's really exciting. I mean, the uptick in reports and the uptick in the quality of evidence is something that's absolutely real. UFO studies may be the one area where most everybody in this country can agree we want to know what's going on. Everybody moans about how divided we are as a country, but you bring up UFOs. Suddenly that division is gone. Yeah. Everybody from every background, every state, they've got a story. They want
to know what's going on. They want to talk about it. And I think that's really positive. It may be the one area in our national life right now where that's actually true. So let's nurture it. And I think the quality of the evidence is so strong and the forums where the evidence is being reviewed are so public and so mass. I believe we're at a point where
we may see real physical evidence in our generation that stands up across the board. As far as I'm concerned, Frank Kimballer, the geologist who I mentioned, his evidence, it's going to be debated and it deserves to be debated, but it's real. It's solid. It's something we can all talk about. We can wrap our arms around. Did this guy find some piece of off-world metal? And if he did, where is it from? Is it right that it shows manufacturing marks?
Is it right that it shows marks of having been blown apart in some combustion explosion? I think that's worthy of debate. And I think we're going to get better and better evidence because events tend to follow consistency. And as soon as we start amassing evidence for something, it grows just like any other science, like any other cultural bully. And does he still have those pieces of loom? Because a lot of times people will take it and it's
gone. Oh no, he does. I've held it in my hand. In fact, I might post pictures online later today of holding it. I get to tell you, man, it was a thrill. It was one of the thrilling experiences of my life holding this fragment in my hand. That's cool. I mean, you could be holding something from another planet. It's possible. And look, I'm wearing something from another planet. You know, this is moldevi, this stone on my ring. Well,
came for a meteorite in Eastern Europe. There is some connection in our Maxwell sphere here. Yeah. All right. These days, I do a lot more kickboxing and bicycling. Then I do straight gym workouts. And I'm wearing the right gear. Makes all the difference no matter what I'm doing. I'll tell you this because greatness wins athletic clothing is completely transformed my workout game. It's soft. It's breathable and it's comfortable. It's moisture
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it kind of helps me because I come to the table without partisanship. I am a critical believer. But one of the problems with UFO culture is that people get so divided up into these factions. There's the faction that thinks, you know, parowitz is a dupe of the defense department. And you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's another faction that, you know, believes that they're their star guests who are sending us messages and everybody's got a factional
story. I don't have a factional story. I'm a critical believer. I'm a questioner. But I come to the table. I hope without partisanship. Let's talk about some more of the encounters. Did anybody have any abduction stories? Oh, yes. I kind of go through that. There were several abduction stories. There's one young woman who came on. I think she's on the first episode. She talked about an abduction experience. She's talked about how he had seven abduction
experiences. And she was very emotional. And I knew that whatever it was that was going on with her, there were some deeply felt trauma or a psychological encounter that had gone down. She believed she had implant material behind her ear. The implant material was extracted. We tested it. I'll say this, you know, it's something naturally occurring. It was not implant material that had some other worldly proposition floating around it. But at the
same time, her stories have been intense. They have been emotional. And I felt she was a person worth listening to as I feel about a lot of people who claim abduction experiences. There's so many different narratives. They occur so broadly across our culture. There is psychological evidence of trauma in some of these people. Look, one of the people who I'm close friends with who's well known in the UFO field is a good example. Whitley
Strieber wrote the book Community. First time I met Whitley was on the Pacific Coast in 2009. We're at a retreat. He was standing out on a porch somewhere. And I went out to approach him to say, Hey, how you doing? Want you to know I admire your work? And as soon as I approached him from behind, he jumped out of his skin. And I said, this is a man with PTSD. So whatever else has happened to Whitley, I've witnessed up close the symptoms
of PTSD. And we got things like that seriously. I had a guest on a few years ago. I had a time displacement maybe 30 years ago. And she was like, would you like to be hypnotized to see if you remember? I was like, I don't think I'm really ready for that. I don't mean like I'm not saying it was inducted, but it seems like he mentioned that would be a very traumatizing experience to have to go there and relive for sure.
The regression hypnosis is really interesting. I think John Mac did a lot of good work in that area. And one has to be careful with it because obviously people under hypnosis can respond to suggestion. But at the same time, when you've got regression hypnosis, producing story after story after story that's very similar of alien encounters, you've
got drawings, you've got memories that seem to sink. I think we have to ask ourselves is there something going on here beyond what people call sleep apnea, which is I guess the swamp bass of the 21st century. You know, everybody claims, oh, it's just sleep apnea. It's just this. It's just that. And the truth is we don't know that. That might cover
some of the cases. And that's useful knowledge. But the rush to judgment that because we've not explained one case a certain way, this must cover all the cases or it's the only thing that's going on. It's a mistake. It's like blind men describing an elephant. You know, one guy grabs a tail and says, it's a snake. Well, he's right about something, but he's not right about the whole picture. What is kind of the most challenging thing about hosting
this show, investigating these encounters? I guess really the question is which sources do you trust, which individuals do you trust? Are people coming to the table with these stories because they've been looking and looking and this is the lifelong passion? Or is this something really strange that's just happened? And there's disputes about the data. There's disagreements about the data. We have one guest on a great guy who's a cannabis
farmer in northern California. And he had an encounter. The data showed that it was the international space station passing overhead. But he insists and he's a guy who knows the land as a farmer that he wasn't facing in the direction where the arc of the space station would have showed up. And we had a serious disagreement. And there's probably still disagreement
about what he saw. So you can have good data. You can have good report as you can have earnest people and you can still have a legit argument about it. So you're saying that there's, once again, you can actually be standing there and see the space station going over you. It can happen. You can absolutely on a clear night where there's not light pollution. You might catch the space station. You might catch a starling
launch. You might catch a satellite launch. You might even catch a glimpse of what people sometimes refer to as orbs or ball lighting or plasma lighting, depending on the weather. All these things can happen. You might see a drone. There's new tech that we're not accustomed to yet. I mean, drones are super popular, but they're getting better. They're weirder looking. They're flight patterns are more sophisticated. So sometimes people are seeing
this stuff. And they'll, I mean, we have arguments about it on the show. There are a Navy personnel who say, listen, I know damn well what a drone looks like. This was not a drone. Whereas the offsite expert will be saying, I call it a drone. And, you know, that's where the viewer has to make his or her own judgment. Well, a lot of his faith, too, right? You can't explain faith to somebody. You can't, you can't make somebody believe in, you know, Jesus Christ or Buddha or whatever. And you can't
make somebody believe they didn't see a UFO. If they really thought they saw one, vice person. Yeah. It's probably very difficult. These are super important experiences to people. I mean, the person who believes feels like his or her integrity is being insulted. Right. His or her like maturity as an adult is being insulted. And the same is true of the rejection as the hardcore rejection as who's like, oh, this is ridiculous. Little green man. It's
smudges on the lens. Yeah. Those people are as orthodox and as shut down and as credulous as the most hardcore believer. And it is hard to negotiate between those two streams, but it's got to be done. Write your summer road trip at Midas and get up to $30 off your next repair service. Plus get a free, closer look vehicle check to make sure your road trip ready. So if you need to break service in alignment check or tune up, hit up Midas for up to $30 off.
For more details, request your appointment at Midas.com. There's something else that I was reading about that said one of your subjects, I guess, believe that they captured video evidence proving that the afterlife is real. Oh, what did they capture and what did they see? This was the farmer I was describing the cannabis farmer. Okay. He and his wife and he's a very candy capable dude. And I respect him tremendously.
He and his wife have experienced UFO sightings in conjunction with the death of his dad. And he feels and I think he's correct that there is an intimate connection between the UFO conversation and the life after death conversation. A lot of experience or feel that, I mean, there are probably hundreds of thousands of people in this country capable together
people who would nod their heads and say, I'm sure there's a connection there. I think the conversation that we're having about near death experience after death experience and UFOs has some connection. Maybe it's connected to the abduction narrative. We're just using different vocabulary. I wasn't sure about his sighting because he's had several and we looked at only one and the one sighting that we looked at the data in that case pointed
to the space station. But he disputes that. I take his dispute seriously and he's at other sightings that may well be absolutely the real McCoy, which is to say unidentified. So that was a tough needle to thread. I think he's an important witness. So what is the, you mentioned that I'd be a connection between, you know, UFO encounters
and the afterlife. Can you go into that a little bit more? Well, I think that, you know, my contention is that we've got enough evidence to support the belief that we lead obviously physical lives, flesh and blood lives like we're conducting right now and extra physical lives. There's no question. We've got sufficient evidence to point to some non-local, extra physical quality to intelligence. This starts to get into the field of psychical research
or ESP research, which I'm very deeply steeped in and interested in. We have bulletproof stats that have stood up for more than a century that have proven replicable, proven replicable of our ability to exchange information in a laboratory setting in a way that goes beyond the five senses or any known technology. So that alone tells you that flesh and blood just strict physicality and motor skills cognition are not the only game in town. There's
something else going on. There's something else going on. When you start to marry that's the UFO thesis, the thing that gets me really excited is that we actually have better models. We have better theoretical models for inter-dimensionality, which relate to quantum theory, which relate to string theory, which relate to psychical research that I was just describing. We have better models for that than we do for intergalactic travel, which is a really tough enough to
crack because the distances are so advanced, it's hard to even mentally conceive of. We have certain theories as to how interstellar travel could occur. People talk of cosmic worm holes where you're bending time space and there's the ability to travel distances in a best period of time that are no longer linear because of the effect of a black hole or something like that. Those theories are important, but they're very exotic. We have better work
through theories for inter-dimensionality. I'm wondering if the whole E.T. thesis is really about inter-dimensional encounters, which starts to get into the experience of our psyche, maybe, moving along different intersections of time. We call it ESP, starts to get into the experience of people who report fatality and they have extraordinary experiences in encounters that we call near death or after death experiences. These may be all one ball of yarn and that's what I'm really interested in.
So you start to wind down here. There's a couple other encounters and experiences that you spoke to people about. One of them is interesting is the story of the lobster man from Maine and the experience that he had. Can you tell us about that? Sure. He is a trip. That's John Levin. John in a group of his friends went camping on an island off the coast of Maine and his friends are marine biologists from one of the local
universities, well-trained people. These are people who reported being pursued by warbs of light on this island and they were kind of pinned to the ground almost as though a physical force were exerting like a push on them. Their camping party was separated by over a mile and both people had the same experiences. They kept quiet about it for a
long time because nobody wanted to be called a nut or a crank. He didn't have any physical evidence but there have been a lot of encounters that have been reported on this island, Richmond Island, which is a recreational island off the coast of Maine and they were there at a time of year old. It was very thinned out. It was in the fall and the experiences that they reported were shared by every member of the party down to a person even though they
were separated by the distance of more than a mile. We were unable to find any aerial phenomena, experimental launching, satellite launchings, weather phenomena, fall lightning or what have you that spoke to it. I consider it an authentic unexplained encounter. That's interesting when you start talking about areas of the country that have a lot of UFO activity. Is there an explanation for that? It seems like certain parts of the
country have so much more of these encounters. I've never fully understood it. There have been more encounters clocked by air force bases and nuclear power plants which will hope you sleep at night. In cases clocked, say, I'm not far from the Hudson Valley in New York State. That has been ground zero for UF Book writings in the Northeast at least. Whitley streamers from Hudson Valley, the woman who reported multiple abduction experiences, lots
of other people. I've lived in the Hudson Valley. I've never fully been able to grasp it, but it's always been a place like very, very rich in folklore, including going back to the colonial days of the nation. In fact, the Book of Mormon was written in Central New York State in an area that's adjacent to the Hudson Valley. A lot of people felt that what Joseph Smith reported in the Book of Mormon reflected folklore in the area. Now
some people will say, oh, that's because Smith clipped and pasted folklore. Other people say no. That's because Smith identified in his religious text folklore that was circulating among the Native American tribes for hundreds of years. You find this weird matchup sometimes between history and phenomena. It's hard to tell, wow, we all talking about the same thing here. Last few questions you mentioned. There's another one driving through the California
desert, a couple of friends who believed they were abducted. That always kind of creeps because driving through the desert, you know what I mean? Like, you'd totally see that be an easy target for a creature that they wanted to grab you. Yeah, this was a California couple and they experienced what's, I'm sure you know about
this, what's known as lost time. They had like a UFO encounter. They had this encounter of strange noises and lights and then that they resumed their driving and they lost two hours or so. Somewhere along the line, they didn't talk about it too much. They went back home and they were both kind of keeping to themselves going about their business, going to work, doing this, doing that. But they both found that they were drawing things, craft
like structures that were very similar. And when they talked to one another about it, they were pretty shocked. They were a couple at that time. They're no longer, I don't believe together as a couple. This was about 15 years ago, but they came back onto the
show to talk about that shared experience at that time. And again, very capable people with details that are reminiscent of the Barney and Betty Hill encounter, where time was lost and there were weird details on their clothing, weird details in their dreams, drawings that they were constructing that matched up, even though they hadn't discussed the experience
with one another. I mean, it seems that the potential for this show is limitless. I'm sure there's hundreds of people who've had experiences that would like to talk with you about them and see what they think, what they saw was real, or if it was, if they can be explained. Yeah, I was touched by the nature of the guests because I didn't want to do some Jerry Springer thing where next thing, somebody's getting a chair in the head, but I wanted it to be
capable together people. And I think that's what we got. I think viewers are going to look at these people and say, you know, if this person was on a witness stand, I would take them seriously. Last question for you, Mitch. What's your experience on the show that maybe moved you the most or, you know, not freaked you out, but kind of hit you the most? The experience that moved me the most was being able to hold that piece of aluminum recovered
from the crash site in my hand. You know, I saw that, you know, Frank Kimbler, the geologist who came in, he sat down and was like, Frank, where is it? And, you know, he produces, you know, a couple of vials with the fragments. And I asked him if I could touch it. I thought I was going to get a no, you know, if you would smack down, but he gave it to me and I held it in my hand. I have photographs of it. I may share it today. I was moved as hell, you
know, I just moved this out, you know, I thought, this could be it. And to hold it in the palm of my hands, that's something I'll be able to tell my kids about. It's great talking with you, it makes the show sounds amazing. I'm excited to check it out. And if you do more of them, we'll have to head back on again. Likewise, man, pleasure. Thank you. Thanks you. Alright, thanks.