Linda Sigman’s Illustrations of her Experience

Illustration of red flying orb by Linda Sigman.

I wanted to do a post sharing these illustrations, because while you hear Linda show them to us on Episode 4 of our podcast, you can’t SEE them, and that seems a mite bit unfair to me.

The recording software we use, Squadcast, has a video component that is only there to facilitate ease of communication between hosts and guests. It helps the hosts, who are in three different houses during the pandemic, communicate non-verbally with each other, and if the internet connection lags with anyone, it gives us a visual cue to keep everyone from talking over the laggy person.

It also really helped out with the concept of a “Virtual Kitchen Table” when we talked with Linda and Michael. Seeing each other’s faces and gestures made it feel very like we were just sitting around chatting, and it seemed to put us all at ease. (We also got to say hello to their dog and cat, which is always a plus for me!)

The video isn’t recorded; only the audio is, so that also gives it the ephemeral quality that a face to face meeting would.

Illustration of the dark flying creature Linda witnessed on the night she saw the UFO and orbs. The UFO is on the left with the red lights on the bottom. Art by Linda Sigman.

The other reason I wanted to make sure that our listeners could see these illustrations is because of what Greg Bishop said in his presentation at the Strange Realities Virtual Conference this September.

He said that he thought it would do more good to give art materials to UFO witnesses and leave them alone for a while to see what they could express visually -before- talking with them and asking a lot of questions, many of which may not really be relevant to the crux of the UFO phenomenon.

I happen to agree with him. I’m an artist and have done a lot of therapy work with art journalling that has lead to a deeper understanding of myself and my life.

What I found in that art therapy journey, was that sometimes words couldn’t reach the intense feelings produced by an event that lay dormant in my memory, but lines, symbols, textures and especially colors could bring meaning to those memories. After the images came, -then- the words followed, and integration of the experience was much more complete.

An image of the creature seen close up by Linda after undergoing hypnotic regression. Illustration by Linda Sigman

I think that Linda’s sketches helped her solidify the images she experienced in her mind and I think they help those who hear her stories understand what she went through on a more visceral level. You can hear by the sound of her voice in the podcast the emotional impact of these experiences. With her art, the colors tell other aspects of her story, adding to the clarity of her remembrances.

I like the idea of sending an art therapist along with a UFO investigation team to hand out art supplies and then step back, and let the witness process and pour out what they saw onto paper. Then after the art is created, let the art therapist ask questions along with the investigators, to see what other information can be gleaned with a different investigative approach.

Gifts from the Gone

Photograph by Kendra Maurer

Every ghost story is a tragedy.

Post script to letters unfinished, loves unrequited, stories not quite finished, because they never really are. There’s always more after The End, no matter how much we want outr endings to be Happily Ever After, or even just...Ever After. 

Even a death at the end of extended illness, the kind we think we’re prepared for but really we’re not. We will always have more words, because that’s the nature of being human. To be human is to be unfinished.

Equilibrium not achieved. 

Our end is an ellipsis, not a period. 

Sometimes they stay focused on that One Thing they didn’t quite get to, like me at 3am focusing so hard on my morning’s To Do list that I can't sleep, but I can just get up and do The Thing. They can’t. They need our hands, our help to know that The Thing is done, or will be or can be or The Thing has moved on, too and it’s time to rest.

When we, the living, are lucky, the deceased will have the energy for a final goodbye. To let us know they’re ok, that they made it, and not to worry, we will be too because they will be there for us. That is a parting gift, and maybe that’s a gift to themselves, too. One less dot in the ellipsis of the end of physical life.

I don’t know what’s over there.

No one does and that’s what makes life so precious. We don’t know if we get to jump on this ride again, or get to take a nap or experience some perfect afterlife or impotently watch our loved ones struggle. But those goodbyes...those few afforded moments I’ve been given have helped me be less afraid--and in that more bold. 

Call the boy, kiss the girl, get in that stupid van and experience the drive. This life is visceral and sanguinary. Grab on, keep hold and feel that wind in your face. The ghost world will be there when you’re done.

Book Review: Magonia

If there was a novel that was written for me, it would be Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley.

It has everything. A veritable fountain of Fortean weirdness bursts fully formed from the pages, causing me to giggle aloud with delight—something I haven’t done while reading a book in EVER so long!

Flying ships (with anchors!), cities hidden among clouds, flocks of strange birds, changelings, men in black, and a very sarcastic main character who also happens to be dying of some strange disease where she cannot breathe and is slowly suffocating.

Aza Ray Boyle is her name: she’s fifteen years old, and she’s spent her life literally drowning in air.

Her doctors have no idea why that is, and the only reason she’s alive is because her medical researcher mother created a drug that helps her nearly non-functional lungs take in and absorb oxygen. She’s well enough to go to school, though she often has to be taken from class to the hospital in an ambulance, where she is stabilized and released into her parents’ care.

Then, she eventually returns to school and reconnects with her best friend, maybe boyfriend, Jason Kerwin. He’s a genius who invents marketable gadgets in his basement and so has become independently wealthy. He uses his money to try and come up with ways to help keep Aza alive longer.

The two are nerdy companions who have spent most of their days together researching interesting things like giant squid and whistle languages, and their relationship is rather cute, though thankfully not cloying. I do have to admit to thinking at first that Kerwin was a bit too much of a boy wonder for me to suspend my disbelief easily.

It’s the whole genius thing that’s just a little bit too convenient, but since I knew a young man very similar to Kerwin in my own life, I give him a pass. Such boy (and girl!) wonders do exist in the real world, so I loosened up and went with the flow, ESPECIALLY after he started talking about Magonia.

This happened because during a fit of breathlessness at school, Aza heard something outside the window calling her name during a storm. When she looked up, she saw part of a sailing ship in the sky before she nearly passed out and was taken to the hospital. She of course told Jason what she saw and he began looking up sailing ships in the sky on the Internet and found Magonia.

Yes, Magonia. I’m sure you noticed that was the title, and yes, that is WHY I bought the book and dove right in. I was easily captured by the first person, snarky, unsentimental voice of Aza Ray, but it was the promise of Magonia that grabbed me and compelled me to read it in the first place.

For those who are unfamiliar with what Magonia is—it is a mythical kingdom in the sky peopled by humanoids who look mostly like us. Known primarily from a tale told by St. Agobard, the Bishop of Lyon, in his 815AD treatise against the practice of weather magic called “De Grandine et Tonitrui” (On Hail and Thunder),

Magonia is well known to those of us who study UFOs and other Fortean subjects. This is thanks to Dr. Jacques Vallee’s foundational book, Passport to Magonia, where he set forth a very compelling series of comparisons between ancient magical and fairy lore and modern UFO encounters. Written in 1969, Passport to Magonia is still highly relevant to the field of UFO research today, and as such is probably on the bookshelves of most serious Forteans.

Along with the Agobard story, Kerwin also learns about an incident that happened in Ireland in 956 AD when an anchor attached to a rope fell from the sky and struck a church. Parishioners ran out and beheld a ship in the clouds above from which the rope had come. The anchor was stuck by one of its flukes in the stonework of the church, so they saw a sailor “swim” through the air to cut the rope. and they saw the ship sail free and disappear. (I remember reading that story for the first time in John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, then later again in Passport to Magonia.)

Almost immediately after Kerwin finds these stories about flying ships and Magonia, poor Aza has another episode of breathlessness and is taken back to the hospital in an ambulance during a freak snowstorm. She had just heard her name being called out in the storm again, and looked out to see her yard being covered by an anomalous mixed flock of birds—blue jays and owls, and crows and a hummingbird and hawks, all together on the grass as it is quickly covered in snow. Her lungs give out again, and she falls to the floor gasping.

A heart-wrenching scene occurs—I’m not going to tell you what—because—SPOILERS!—-but it made me cry.

And then, Aza wakes up able to breathe in a sky ship.

In the land of Magonia.

And the adventure begins.

And that’s all of the plot I will give you, because any more and it’s too spoilery and I don’t want to be one of THOSE people who write book reviews that tell you the whole story.

Let it suffice to say that I had so much fun reading about things I knew about. I knew about the sky ships, the anchor stuck to the church, I knew about the sounds coming from above, crops being stolen during storms, all of the tales of Magonia that survive to this day. It was a joy to read those combined with some of the ideas of Trevor James Constable. His book, The Cosmic Pulse of Life, postulated that UFOs were some sort of living plasma beings that populated the sky and were nearly always invisible except under certain conditions.

In Magonia, Headley masterfully mixed these historical, folkloric and Fortean ingredients with a heavy-handed dash of her own imagination, and created a modern high-fantasy young adult book that is just a plain old cracking good read. It’s a fun frolic through a well-realized invisible world that lives symbiotically with our own, full of its own politics and peopled by a cryptoterrestrial (cryptoaerial?) race that lives removed from humanity, but dependent upon us for its survival.

There is a sequel, Aerie, which is a novella—and it is good. However, Headly added more elements to the story that seemed to muddy the plot a bit. If the story had been longer, those additions could have been fleshed out and they would have added depth to the plot and world. As it was, however, these elements seemed just sort of tossed in offhandedly and in my opinion, could have been left out.

My only real critique of Magonia has to do with it being a young adult novel—it was too simple a narrative. It could have done with more development of the world, more character development among the secondary characters and more fleshing out of the reality and culture of Magonia.

Headley’s world-building is superb, but it all seems written in shorthand. And then, there’s the question of genre—is it fantasy or science fiction?

For all that science is an important part of the lives of the main characters—Aza’s mother is a medical researcher and one of Kerwin’s mothers is an ecologist and agronomist, while his other mother is a doctor—the Magonians and other beings peopling their world make very little evolutionary sense. Climate change plays a large role in the plot, as does weather, as does technology—but the biological realities of Magonian physiology are more poetic than biological.

Aerie has even more of this tension between science and magic, a tension which is so great it nearly tears the narrative asunder in places.

You see—the imagery used to describe the world of Magonia, the endless sky and sea, the clouds and the beings that live there, the ships that ply the storms—all comes across as more of a poetic dream. A heavy, surrealistic dream, painted in broad swathes of brilliant sunset, twilight and night sky colors. It’s this beautiful descriptive language with which Headley brings the narrative to life that saves the novel from my mind worrying it apart at the scientific seams as I tie my willing suspension of disbelief into sailors knots to keep from breaking the spell she’s woven.

That’s why I call this a fantasy novel rather than a science fiction one, though, I think it’s truly neither of those.

It’s Fortean.

And it’s grand.

Dismembered Wallabies Bring Me Joy

A thankfully not-dismembered kangaroo. Photo by Barbara Fisher

I have been reading Stalking The Herd: Unraveling The Cattle Mutilation Mystery by Christopher O’Brien. Much to my delight there are a scant handful of cases in which wallabies were mutilated.

Do I enjoy torturing animals, or their pain? Of course not.

But I DO love a good bit of Forteana-and mutilated wallabies very much fit into that category. 

What is Forteana you ask?

In the words of Charles Fort, who first categorized it in his books, Forteana can be characterized as “A distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness” pertaining to the oddball cases he recorded.

This was a man who sought out the truly strange things that science at the time ignored or denied.

Rains of fish and frogs, strange airships that plagued North America, fairy sightings, dinosaur encounters, ghosts, psychic abilities,

YOU NAME IT, HE WROTE IT DOWN!

He was recording High Strangeness before High Strangeness was a thing. (The term “High Strangeness” was coined by Project Blue Book scientist J. Allen Hyneck in 1969 to denote UFO cases with multiple factors that couldn’t be explained conventionally. By contrast, Fort began collecting his scientific oddments into The Book of the Damned in 1917.)

His books are a magpie’s assemblage of newspaper accounts, scientific journal articles and historical records from all over the world, and are a delightful-if massive, list showing the world is much weirder than we think. He was also a clever critic of scientists of the age-calling them to task for ignoring and dismissing the MASSIVE amount of inexplicable goings-on that occurred around the world.

I would have loved to have met him and picked his brain about all of this.

John Keel draws on some of his accounts in his own work-though Keel didn’t always give credit where credit was due-I can recognize the cases he mentioned in several of his books. (Yes I have read all of Fort’s books, in delight and wonder.) 

Why do I love Forteana so much?

Well, one, I have a taste for the bizarre, and I responded with glee to Forts tongue in cheek writing style and his own joy at poking fun at what was accepted reality at the time. He had a passion for what he was doing, and it shows.

I also LOVE the purely WEIRD nature of some of the cases he recorded. They MAKE NO SENSE. They are like a real life Alice in Wonderland of the paranormal, or possibly normal natural phenomena that have not yet been explained by science. They are a glorious romp to read about. Where else can you find fascinating stellar phenomena right next to skyquakes, sandwiched between hairy monster sightings and stinky ghosts? 

His work has also inspired other researchers, and publications like the Fortean Times, which is a delightful magazine from the UK packed full of strange deaths, a conspiracy theory column, and examinations of old and current cases from around the world, book and film reviews, and general oddness.

The Fortean Society was formed in the US in 1931, and published a magazine called Doubt-an organization that counted cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller and as members.

This  eventually became the International Fortean Organization which continues on to this day-publishing their own magazine called The INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown.

I, personally, am deeply pleased that there are still people continuing Forts work of hunting down strange tidbits from all over the world. Where else can I read about current Blessed Virgin Mary sightings, spontaneous human combustion, and out of place artifacts? 

If you haven’t read any Fort, I encourage you to do so.

Curl up in a chair, pop some popcorn on a chilly night, and enjoy a titillating journey into the annals of Earths’ creative ways to puzzle us humans. It’s a fun journey-and if you wish to read NEW Fortean cases, delve into the current publications I have mentioned-the Fortean Times has a free blog as well, so you won’t have to have a subscription if you don’t want to.

What Does The Fox Say?

“From the Shadows” Mixed media painting by Barbara Fisher

Animals have always been central to my life.

I grew up with a guardian Siamese cat who slept in my crib with me when I was an infant, letting no one but my parents pick me up. Her purrs were my lullabies, and she slept on my pillow as I got older. She also protected me from the dreams and visions that began haunting me by the age of three, and I was comforted by the fact that she seemed to see some of the things I saw, even as my mother told me they were nothing but nightmares.

At the age of four, my first dog appeared as a blond Border Collie puppy who came trotting out of the woods on my grandparents’ farm, and followed us home. She grew up to be my best friend, companion, consoler, confidante and protector for 18 years. I loved her dearly and she loved me, and I still choke up when I think of her.

And on that very same farm, I was happiest among the animals. I wandered the woods with my dog and my uncle’s dog, a half German Shepherd, half Collie, and the neighbor’s Collie, and the four of us rambled for miles. It was with them that I learned the trick of sitting silently in the forest, listening, watching and waiting. I learned to become part of the forest, to sink into the leaf mold and fallen trees. When that happened, the wild animals would come out and make themselves known, and I could seem to appear out of nowhere and surprise my uncle, the hunter, or the neighborhood kids who’d come looking for me.

And of course, I was friends with the livestock. I helped hand-raise calves, and used to spend mornings singing with the chickens. (Yes, the chickens would sing with me. It was very strange. They particularly liked old Latin hymns. No, I cannot explain it.) And my uncle’s pony was a special friend. He could be cantankerous with most everyone else, but he was always gentle with me.

To this day, we have a house full of pets, and though we currently live within city limits of a small town, my household has spent an inordinate amount of time living in country, often in houses either adjacent to the woods or in the woods. Even now, within Athens city limits, our house is only a few steps away from the woods that weave through our town, connecting to the woodlands that surround the city and then connect to the state and national forest land which mantles our civic home.

And those woods are populated with wildlife, and so it isn’t unusual to see deer walking on the sidewalks in our residential areas on foggy mornings.They stroll along, getting in a nosh in a series of yards, before bedding down in a thicket for the day. Or to have a red-tailed hawk swoop low over your head as you walk your kid to school, because in the oak tree across from the school building, there’s a nest with hungry fledgelings. Or to catch a glimpse of a red fox crossing the street as you drive home late from the movies.

Or, if you, like me, leave your upper-floor windows open at night to catch cool breezes, it isn’t rare at all to hear any number of sounds that our wild neighbors make in the darkness.

And that’s what I’m hear to talk about today—the creepy sounds wild animals make.

If you grew up in the city, you may not be used to the many vocalizations that I hear on a daily or nightly basis. And some of those sounds are bone-chilling, if you aren’t used to them. The calls can startle you, and frankly, sound like something out of a ghost story, fairy tale or horror film.

For example, my younger child and I had parked our car up at the top of the hill, around the corner of our house one night, coming from shopping. We parked up there because contractors were re-surfacing our driveway and there was a gigantic pit of broken concrete in front of the house.

So, we were walking down the hill in the darkness, and from the woods we hear what can only be described as a goblin cackle. It sounded like a high-pitched evil giggle and for a second, it made my heart race.

My kid froze in the middle of the road and hissed, “Mom! What is -THAT-?”

After my breath caught and I dragged the kid along across the road, (since standing in the middle of the street isn’t a great survival strategy), I answered, “That’s the grey fox that lives over in the woods there.”

The kid relaxed and let out their breath and we walked on, though admittedly a little bit faster.

He knew I had seen the grey fox just the week before one morning when I returned from driving them to school.

”Ooooh, okay,” they said. “It sounded like some creepy little goblin in the woods.”

”Nope, just a creepy little fox.”

Foxes can make a bunch of sounds.

They’re very vocal and for fairly small animals, are exceptionally loud. And some of those sounds are very eerie and sound like something paranormal.

They can cry like babies, scream with the shrill timbre of children playing, and they can giggle, chortle or laugh.

If you don’t believe me look up fox sounds on the Internet and get ready to have your mind blown at the diversity of strange sounds these beautiful creatures produce.

Then, look up the sounds of raccoons, and be prepared.

Yes, raccoons., those cute ring-tailed bandit-masked garbage can raiders, sound like demons when they argue over territory. Or when they’re mating.

When you see them on TV, you get to hear the cute churbles they make. Or, the little trills coos and snuffles that are their usual Disneyfied voices.

What they don’t share with you on the nature programs is the horrific screeches, howls, growls and snarls they make when in the throes of passion or aggression.

The first time I heard that coming from the woods right outside the window, I nearly wet my pants. It truly sounded as if a gang of harpies was arguing in the ravine over who got to eat the liver of an unwary traveller.

Instead, it turned out to be raccoons arguing over fishing spots in the creek.

Deer snort loudly and their fawns can bleat like goats when they call their mothers to come from grazing to nurse them. Bucks challenge each other with grunts the stamping of feet and the clatter of antlers scraping against trees.

Barn owls hiss like snakes, only louder.

Cougar and Bobcat mothers and babies chirp at each other like songbirds.

And after they make the cute chirps, they also scream like a woman being murdered.

Because, you know, that’s a thing you want to hear out in the woods at night.

Screech owls whinny like miniature horses high up in trees.

That one threw me for a loop the first time I heard it; I was like, “What the hell is Rainbow Dash doing up in my trees?”

Coyotes make a whole panoply of creepy sounds: howls, growls, yips and barks with some moans and manic laughter thrown in for fun.

Loons make crazy whooping calls, even in the dead of night

And many of these sounds, if you’re not used to them, can sound like the classic poltergeist or ghost sounds—-crying, moaning, screaming—or even worse—like spectral creepy laughter.

But that isn’t what they are. Most of the time.

We live in an age when you can hear a weird noise, then run to the computer, type in a description in your search engine of choice and come up with a video or sound file of that very sound, with a description of the animal that made it.

I’m lucky—I grew up traipsing around the woods as a kid, and have lived in close quarters with dense forest for significant chunks of my adult life. And now, I live in a town blessed with a well-integrated wildlife population, so I am used to these sounds, and in fact, love hearing them—even when they surprise me and make my heart race for a second.

But you know, even in strictly urban areas, wild animals have adapted to living close to humanity.

When we lived in Maryland close to Baltimore, we saw within city limits, not just literal herds of deer, but bald eagles and great horned owls. A friend of ours who lived downtown had a fox who came up on her porch and peered in her front door fairly often. Those little glowing eyes peeking through the screen door answered her question as to what the heck was giggling under her window at night.

So, if you hear a chortle, shriek or snort at night, don’t be scared.

It’s probably just one of your nocturnal neighbors going about his or her wild animal business and telling you and everyone else all about it.

Interview on The High Strangeness Factor with Steve Ward and Andy Mercer

If you haven’t had enough of our stories in our first two podcast episodes, on this episode of The High Strangeness Factor with Steve Ward and Andy Mercer, you can hear more about our experiences, Mothman and John Keel.

It was a very fun UK Paranormal Radio Network podcast to participate in, and we hope to be asked back sometime. I never got to tell my story about my cousin and the cow, which is a classic family story that concerns High Strangeness and farm life in West Virginia in the Age of Mothman.

Thank you for having us, Steve and Andy!

Miss Manners’ Guide to Ghosthunting

The old Athens Lunatic Asylum, now called The Ridges: one of the most haunted places in our very haunted county of Athens, Ohio.

I was raised with strict Southern Company Manners.

When out in polite society, one said “Yes, Ma’am, No, Sir, Please, Sir and Thank you, Ma’am,” and called your friends’ mothers Mrs——-and fathers Mr.—-.

One held one’s hands behind one’s back, one shook hands when introduced, one sat quietly (without slouching) and didn’t speak until spoken to, and generally did everything to avoid drawing attention to one’s self.

And when one wanted or needed something, one asked politely with many pleases and thank yous.

Generally, I have found these Company Manners serve well in most interactions of any social nature, whether official or unofficial, and that includes matters of the paranormal.

So, here we are with a few simple guidelines on how to go about doing your onsite paranormal investigations in a respectful, socially aware and polite manner.

1. ASK PERMISSION before you arrive, especially if you are going to be on private property.

I would think that this one is so obvious that it goes without saying, but, apparently it isn’t.

Ask. Ask. Ask. Whether you do it by phone, text or email, ask. I would suggest email or snail mail so you have an answer in writing, and I would suggest printing out your permission from the owner of the property in writing, so if someone calls the authorities, you have something resembling proof that you have permission to be there.

Being arrested for trespassing isn’t fun.

Being shot at by neighbors is less fun.

In fact, if the owner of said property isn’t on the property habitually or when you are going to be there, I suggest stopping by the nearest neighbor to show them your permission from the owner so they know who you are and what you are up to BEFORE they start seeing strangers mucking about in the dark with strange colored flashlights bouncing around in the woods across the road.

Remember, the last thing you truly need to worry about when tramping around in the woods at night is ghosts, Bigfoot, goblins or aliens. Or dogmen. You have more to worry about from other humans in the woods than any paranormal critter you can imagine. (And, of course, you have natural creatures to worry about as well, snakes, feral dogs, feral hogs, deer in the mating season, the terrain itself, electric and barbed wire fences and groundhog holes—those are also things you should worry about more than paranormal stuff.)

2. Don’t trample on people’s landscaping, tear down fences, bother dogs, neighbors who the people who live there.

I would also think that this is obvious, but……maybe not.

Leave the area nicer than when you found it—just like you do when you go camping, right? Also—-if you come up to. fence that has a “No Trespassing” sign on it, then you’ve come to the property line and you are done. Unless you’ve obtained permission from the owner of the land on the other side of the fence, you’re done.

Stop there. Turn around. Don’t be that guy who doesn’t respect people’s boundaries, whether those boundaries pertain to physical fences or personal relationship boundaries. Just. Don’t.

3. Even if you are going to be investigating in public spaces or on public land, it’s a nice idea to inform someone that you’re coming.

OK, so you don’t need to ask permission to be in a public area, but you know, it’s a nice idea to give the people who work there a head’s up that you’re coming and what you’re up to. Especially if you’re walking around taking EM readings or looking through night vision goggles or what have you. That kind of stuff might make people nervous, and it makes you look less scary and freakish if you tell people what you’re up to before they get worried about you.

Besides, it will help make your way in the world more smooth if you’re polite.

Also, people who work in haunted places will often have a story to tell you and are more likely to tell you if you ask nicely and politely.

4. Try appearing as professional as possible.

No. I do not expect you to wear business attire while doing paranormal investigations. Tempting as it may be to wear a black suit and sunglasses, please don’t try and give off that Mulder and Scully vibe (unless that’s actually how you really dress all the time in real life, in which case, more power to you) or look like a MIB.

When I say professional, I mostly mean neat and tidy, and dressed appropriately for the area you’re investigating.

If you’re on a Bigfoot hunt, or clambering around in a haunted woodland setting, wearing a suit and tie is foolish. But you know, don’t wear your most tattered, outdoorsy wear, either.

And if you’re investigating a haunted former lunatic asylum that is now owned by a university (Like the Ridges, which is now owned by Ohio University, pictured above), then clean, neat casual wear is probably sufficient.

It’s just like how your Mamma made you wash your hands and face and comb your hair really well before going to visit your dear old Great Aunties. Company manners includes company grooming.

And it makes a Good Impression.

5. Finally, be courteous, and ask permission before photographing witnesses and get release forms from witnesses who tell your stories.

Do not break confidentiality or reveal witness identities if you promised not to.

First of all, it’s just plain wrong to do that, but secondly—it goes against your own best interests to do so.

Witnesses will not talk to investigators they don’t trust. And if you get a reputation as someone who breaks their word, eventually no one will talk with you.

A release form is simple—you can find various versions of them online, but basically it’s a statement that the undersigned gives permission to the investigator to use their testimony in their research and for possible publication and has a place where they can check whether or not they want their name used, It needs to be signed and dated.

Just make a habit of carrying some with you whenever you investigate, even if you aren’t planning on talking to a witness, because you never know who you’ll meet out in the woods. A neighbor may tell you stories of their experiences, and if you can get them to go on the record and sign the release go for it.

There.

I’m sure there are more little rules based on the Company Manners that I was raised with that would pertain to paranormal investigation, but these are the most important ones.

At least, I think so.

If you can think of others, please feel free to add them in the comments below.

Film Review: Beyond the Visible

This film is about art.

It’s about the story of abstract art.

It’s about how the story of abstract art has left out the work of a pioneer of the movement.

It’s about a woman who was never given her due in her lifetime.

I hear you all now, saying, “How nice: what’s this got to do with the paranormal?

Ah, yes.

This film is about communion with spirits.

This film is about channeling.

This film is about divine inspiration.

This film is about painting for the future.

There we go!

Now you see why I’m telling all of my friends and family and paranormal peeps to watch this documentary which you can rent on Amazon for a few dollars.

This is the story of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, a daughter of a naval commander who was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm at the age of twenty. There she studied portraiture, botanical drawing and landscape painting, and for a time made a good living as an illustrator and portraitist.

And then, she became involved in Spiritualism and the Theosophy movement. She formed a group of young women artists who called themselves “The Five” and began holding regular spiritualist style seances where they came in contact with spirits who they called “The Higher Masters.” One of these beings named Gregor stated to five artists that, “"All the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being...the knowledge of your spirit".

”The Five” diligently recorded the words of “The Higher Masters” from their seances and all of them experimented with automatic writing and drawing as early as 1896.

Hilma began drawing and painting in a symbolic language based both in geometric forms and the languid curving lines extent in nature. Spirals, triangles, quadrangles and intertwined whorls began expressing a host of unseen forces from both the inner and outer realms of her experience. Mathematical and scientific concepts such as atoms and the spectrum of visible and non-visible light were expressed as well as spiritual ideas about the immortal soul and the spirit that imbues all life.

“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”

— Hilma af Klint

Eventually, “The Higher Masters:” assigned to Hilma her life’s work: she was to begin a series of gigantic paintings that were to be hung on the walls of “The Temple.”

Huge sheets of paper were prepared and laid upon the floor of her studio, and Hilma walked barefoot upon them, her skirt rucked up to her knees, drawing with a pencil mounted on a long stick so she could work from a standing position.

Then, she ground her own pigments and mixed them with fresh eggs, creating a palette of colors never before seen in art, and painted on her hands and knees in bold swathes of color, line and form.

Her work was intensely graphic, and utterly new and abstract.

She painted these works between 1906-1915; Wassily Kandinsky, who is widely considered to be the father of abstract art, painted his first works in that style in 1910.

Hilma considered herself not as the originator of these works, however, merely as the vessel through which the art flowed. This is true of many visionary artists who worked both before and after her, yet in her case, it has caused some art historians to disregard her work.

This was corrected in 2018 when the Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective of her works entitled “Paintings for the Future..” There, finally, her illustrations of invisible realms were revealed in their full glory for the eyes of all humanity.

The film beautifully expresses the story of Hilma and her art, while also perfectly showing the grand scale of her paintings done for “The Temple.” It’s well worth a watch, and my only negative comment upon it is the choice to make all of the subtitles in white. When they appear on some of the paintings, they blend into them and they are hard to read; I had to read aloud as they were unseeable for some of my household.

It is a small flaw, one that can be overlooked. I never was bored or distracted in watching this film, and all of the art historians who narrate the film have very interesting things to say on the artist, her work and her visions.

When Weirdness Calls….

“The FBI and the CIA hate each other, and they both hate the telephone company. The telephone company, in turn, seems to hate everybody.”

— --John Keel. The Mothman Prophesies

Last night, Morganna, Kendra and I were interviewed for the High Strangeness Factor with Steve Ward and Andy Mercer, talking about John Keel, pancakes and experiences of weirdness.

Steve had asked why the three of us decided to name our podcast after John Keel and we all had our answers, but what it really winds up being about is Keel was one of the first researchers to seriously look into the lives of experiencers, and he was the first to really understand that few people just see one UFO and that’s it.

There’s a whole raft of other weirdness that comes along with that UFO besides, and not just during and after the sighting.

Often, long before the UFO was even a glint in the experiencer’s eye—years before in many cases—they had encounters with any numbers of oddities: bedroom apparitions, hauntings, orbs of light, precognitive dreams and the like.

This is the sort of reality a lot of us experiencers live in.

A malleable world where strange things happen, just as an every day sort of thing. And these little things that happen, these oddities are likely the most common weird happenings that occur throughout the world. I’d bet that everyone has had one or two happen to them, and they’re so small, they just forget that they even happened.

One of the subjects we got to in the interview was the 2002 film, “The Mothman Prophesies.” Steve asked us what our favorite part of the film was and I answered that my favorite scene was the one where Indrid Cold calls John Klein at his hotel and tells him what’s on his bedside table. It sounds distinctly ordinary, but it’s scary and to me, that captures the essence of fear, paranoia and strangeness that is at the heart of the book upon which the movie is based.

And it brought up an oddity that I thought only applied to me, but later found out seems to be common among readers of the works of John Keel.

The phantom phone calls.

Keel once said “Everyone hates the phone company.”

Of course this was back when there was ONE monolithic phone company, back in the distant Stone Age of analog telephone lines, party lines, switchboard operators and physical wiretaps. (Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that shit.)

In chapter 17 of The Mothman Prophesies, entitled, “Even the Bedouins Hate Their Phone Company,” he talks about the weird phone harassment he was subject to while investigating the high strangeness that was swirling around Point Pleasant in 1966-67. He got all sorts of phone calls—his phone in New York would ring twice and then stop, or he’d answer the phone and no one would be there. He’d get phone calls with electronic beeps or whistles and clicks, odd voices speaking in foreign languages—the details of the types of phone harassment he and others endured at the time are detailed here.

The phone calls followed him wherever he travelled—he’d check into a hotel that he hadn’t planned on staying in and find messages left for him at the front desk. Or he’d check in and before he opened his suitcase, the phone would ring.

Mind you, some of these calls were likely practical jokes.

Fellow UFO investigator and editor of Saucer Smear, Jim Moseley, and Gray Barker, author of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, loved to prank Keel and they’d team up and try and pull one over on their friend fairly often. Keel eventually figured out their tricks, but still found that left plenty of anomalous telephone calls unaccounted for.

What does this have to do with me?

I found, from the age of about 14, that whenever I read John Keel’s books, our family telephone would start acting strangely.

We’d get calls with no one on the line. Over and over, to the point where my mother would slam the receiver down with enough force to make the cats jump and run away. Or, it would just ring twice or three times and then stop. Ten minutes later, it would do it again.

Or, Mom would answer the phone and it would be clicks and beeps. Or, she’d pick up the phone and there’s be no dial tone. She’d call the phone company and they’d come out and there’d be nothing wrong with the phone or the line.

If I stopped reading the book, the calls would stop. I’d wait a week, start reading again, and then it would start.

If Dad picked up the book and started reading, it’d start again.

Then, I’d lend the books out to my friend, Diane.

And she’d get the calls.

Decades later, it still happened. It happened to my friends who I lent books to. It happened when I’d reread Keel’s work. Not as much—I’d get one dead air call and maybe a couple of calls with two rings and silence in a row.

When Morganna read the books, it happened.

It has slowed down in the years of Caller ID and cell phones. It still happens, just not as often.

The funniest and most recent incident of the “John Keel Weirdness Calls” as I think of them, was the case of a Facebook friend who asked me what Keel book I liked best, because she’d only read The Mothman Prophesies. I told her to pick up The Eighth Tower because it’s the most mature iteration of his theories on Ultraterrestrials, and it lays out his ideas in a very concise and readable fashion.

She picked it up, started reading and came back to FB a week later with the question to our private group of High Strangeness Peeps, as I call them: “So, does anyone else get strange phone calls when you read John Keel?”

Bunches of folks in our merry band related stories of the times they got phone calls from no one when they read Keel. People I didn’t even know about. Story after story came out and I had to laugh.

I reckon that wherever John is right now he’s laughing too.

And he probably still hates the phone company.

But What If It’s a Shapeshifting Duck?

Photograph by Kendra Maurer. To the best of our knowledge, this duck does not, in fact, shift shapes.

On our first podcast, I believe I stated that if something looks like a duck, it is probably a duck. To which my mother made the reply “But what if it’s a shapeshifting duck?” 

Well damn, Mom, how am I supposed to know? 

I firmly suspect that all the odd things that go on in the world are related somehow, but I don’t know how.

This is annoying, because humans like to put things in neat little boxes.

I am not immune to this. I like categories, I like pigeonholes, I like things to make sense.

However, I am also capable of going “Well, we can throw that right out the window when it comes to High Strangeness, because sense doesn’t exist here.”

But-and this is a BIG but-I also think that there are some differences in phenomena happening. These aren’t hard and fast rules or boundaries, but in my personal experience, different things seem to act differently. 

Let’s look at a few examples.

First-let’s take the lights in the sky.

I’ve seen more than a few: some big, some small, some closer than I’d like—especially recently.

These lights seem to just.... Be There, at a reasonable distance, going wherever they are going, and I just happen to be outside at the right time.

They don’t look the same as the little fairy lights I see. For one thing, they are up high in the sky, not down near the ground in the trees or in a field. They are brighter than the fairy lights, and don’t tend to dance around,

They either zip past in a straight line, or hover before suddenly zooming away or going out. When they go out, they pull into themselves, contracting to a central point before disappearing. Or, in the case of three large orbs, they look like they go into an invisible slit in the sky, passing out of view gradually as if they are passing behind something in stages.

I don’t get a feeling from them, except excitement or in the case of the recent red ones, nervousness because they were pretty low in the sky and awfully near my house. That’s all they do, they appear, move around in abnormal ways, disappear, and that’s it. 

The fairy lights tend to appear in specific locations, for days at a time, are smaller, multicolored little globes or points of light. They dance around, blink on and off, get closer or farther away from me, and seem to “live” in patches of woodland or fields. They occasionally are accompanied by larger orbs (ranging in size from a shooter marble to a tennis ball) that meander closer to me and my deck.

They typically start showing up in spring, peak for a week or so, then calm down a bit. Then, they flare back up around October. They don’t wander over to my deck until the garden is planted, but once it is they will drift right up to it.

They come in blue, red, silver, green, purple, and  yellow/gold. They make me a little nervous if I’m outside, but not too much, since I’m used to them. They are a soft glow, not the bright hard glow I have seen from the lights in the sky. Before anyone goes “Fireflies!” , I know what those look like, and I have seen these little guys in November long after the fireflies are finished in Ohio. They don’t blink in a set pattern, hold steady light if they want to, and are bigger than a firefly. 

Fireflies also don’t come in blue, red, silver and purple. Or emerald green.

If I see lots of the fairy lights, I will tend to have a few days where small things in my house go missing and then reappear.

If I see lots of UFO type lights, I start to have issues with my computer or phone and the smoke alarm will go off for no reason. Both make me a little nervous, and also excited that I have seen them.

The only time I’ve ever kept forgetting I’ve seen something strange was when my friend and I both saw the three large golden orange orbs in the sky that disappeared into nothingness. We both forgot about it several times, only remembering it hours or days later until we finally told someone else.

I have never forgotten a fairy light or experience, only a UFO type one. 

To me, these things—fairy lights and UFOs--are probably related somehow.

But they each appear, act, and cause a different effect on me and my house. So why should I act like they are the same thing, when I can see that they are not?

This is why I hesitate to call the duck a goose.

Rather, I like to say, this is possibly a duck, and it is related to the goose.

I’ll always keep an open mind, but for me, it is easier to conceive of these things possibly having a common source,  while still noting the differences. Because, when I experience them, I experience similarities and differences, and I cannot remove what I am experiencing from my conceptions of the phenomena as a whole.

Perhaps that makes me a less than perfect researcher, but I don’t quite know another way to be.

Podcast Submitted to Aggregators

Six Degrees of John Keel has successfully been submitted to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. Give it a couple of days for them to update their information and approve this, that and the other thing.

Then, you’ll be able to listen to the first episode and all following episodes where you pick up all your other podcasts.

That wasn’t as hairy to deal with as I feared it would be.

Onwards and upwards!

The Witch’s Well

Photograph by Kendra Maurer. From Shale Hollow Metropark in Lewis Center

In the house I grew up in, there was an open sump pit in a corner in the basement. The laundry water drained into it, so it smelled good and sometimes had a soft foam from the soap my mom used. 

But my parents were constantly cautioning me to stay away because it was dangerous. To them, it was obvious: there’s a hole in the floor in the corner, and if you trip you could hurt yourself. But I never asked why, and they never told me. 

Besides.

I knew why.

I knew that there was a witch in there.

I’d lay beside it for hours, gazing into that portal...into a room on the other side. There was a window in her house; I could tell from the way the witch’s room was lit.  And there was the dark reflection of a table beside it. I waited for her to look. I wondered if she even knew that if she just peered in that she’d see me looking back. 

Then I wondered--what would I do if she did? I realized that maybe I didn't want her to look back because then she would know I was there, and who I was and what I looked like and what my scream of terror would sound like and WHAT IF SHE LIKED THAT SOUND? 

So I stopped visiting the witch for a while.

Until my dad died. I went back to that well, and asked her questions about life and death. About God and heaven and all the Big Confusing things I couldn’t process…

And then I asked her for my dad back. I asked her to tell him I missed him, or at least to tell him hi.

She still never showed. Not even a peek. And I gave up on her.

Years passed, and I had pushed her so far out of my memories

I had forgotten about her and her traitorous act of silence.

I remembered her when I built my own house, and I looked in the sump pit and saw my own reflection looking back at me. I laughed at myself and I forgave her for never answering me. I came to a place of peace with that witch in the well.

And now, when I’m in the woods on walks with my children and I happen upon strange little puddles,

I peer inside and talk to her. I tell her to say hi to my dad, and I let her know I’m ok.

Announcing the Humanoid Encounters Project

“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight. ”

— Carly Fiorina

About a year ago, I started reading researcher Albert s. Rosales’ extensive book series (17 volumes) entitled Humanoid Encounters: The Others Among Us.

The books are fascinating collections of encounters with non-human entities in a myriad of both physical and non-physical types, arranged chronologically from 1 AD to 2015. Dates, places, times and witness descriptions are listed for most encounters. A panoply of seen and sometimes touched beings—apparitions, fairies, demons, angels, aliens, hairy hominids, dwarves, giants, merfolk, elementals, spirits and zoomorphic creatures—lurk, slither and cavort through hundreds of pages of descriptive text.

Reading these books is like thrusting your hand deep bag of mixed Halloween candy with your eyes closed—you don’t know what you’re going to grab onto until you pull your hand out and look.

Thrilling as that is, the sheer amount of data presented is overwhelming, and I found myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could put this together into a database and do some heavy analysis on it?”

Because, of course, I had questions.

What does all of this information represent? I mean, other than the fact that humans are apparently apt to see creatures that, while human general shape, do not to appear to actually be human, and that these sightings have been going on throughout history?

I mean, what is the most prevalent sort of being sighted? Where are there more beings sighted during a given year? What are the ages, genders , religious affiliations and education levels of the witnesses? How many are sighted in conjunction with UFO’s? In what settings and contexts are these creatures seen?

I have a very good memory and am quite able to correlate strings of information and data in my head, and piece together trends and connections, BUT—I’m human. What was needed to answer these questions was a computer and a data scientist, which I most assuredly am not.

Enter Dr. Christopher Diltz. A friend who most assuredly -is- a professional data scientist. I asked him if he would be interested in creating a database of these humanoid sightings so we could answer some of these questions and he enthusiastically said yes.

So, I contacted Albert Rosales, in May of this year, and asked for his permission to build such a database using the information presented in his books, which we would then share with him and eventually make public for other researchers to mine. We wanted his permission to undertake this project because he gathered and published the data; it is his, and if he didn’t want us to touch it, we would have left off with the idea. (We would have been disappointed, but the data belongs to Mr. Rosales, and he is the one who decides its dispensation.)

Luckily for us, Mr. Rosales was happy to share not only the data contained in his books, but his entire data set of sightings—over 18, 000 in all, and growing every day—which was exceedingly generous of him. This data set includes information beyond what is contained in his published works, and Dr. Diltz was able to marshal his 10+ years programming experience to create a useable database.

By development of robust software programs that apply machine learning, deep learning and analytics to both spacial and time series data, he has already completed Phase One of our project and achieved preliminary results which have been shared with Mr. Rosales.

Dr Diltz has successfully been able to extract descriptive summary statistics on the years of peak humanoid sightings, countries with the most humanoid sightings and peak times during the day and year of humanoid sightings. He also successfully extracted time series data of the humanoid sightings based on both country and US state. This information shows flaps in humanoid sightings and can be correlated with peak ufo sightings in both the United States and throughout the world.

Together with Dr. Diltz the 6DJK team plans to develop a comprehensive database so that other paranormal investigators can access the data and use it for their own research.

Phase Two of the project has already begun and is ongoing, with Phase Three in its planning stages.

This is a very exciting endeavor and we’ll have Dr. Diltz on episode three of our podcast to talk with Kendra and I about the project, how it is going and what we will be able to do with the information that is extracted from the mountains of raw data.

Fun times ahead—stay tuned!

Thank You Mr. Criswell

Photograph by Kendra Maurer

I don’t remember the first time we met.

Just that he and his wife were the neighbors to one of my dearest friends, Kim.

She had insisted we meet because we all believed in the same weird shit. Ghosts and UFO’s and BigFoot and all the things that people don’t like to admit they believe in. I felt at home there, and I can close my eyes right now and recall every detail of the house; the way the vaulted ceilings played with light and sound, the way his wife’s collected angels were arranged in unblinking congregations. The chill when the front door would open and a stiff, Indiana wind would rip through the house. The smell of carpet and fried food.

His collection was information, stored in overstuffed envelopes, audio tapes, VHS, DVD, thumb drives, floppy discs...a labyrinth of curiosities where I first heard people speak seriously about cryptids in first person.

“I saw a BigFoot,” and “The dogman was right here.”

I suppose that’s why I felt so comfortable with him, but it still took me a while to tell my own first person tale. Some nights we would watch some footage and talk about what we saw, what it meant. Admittedly, some accounts were so hard to believe because the teller seemed so lost, but in the end, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what the teller believes.

Some nights, I went back to Kim’s place terrified of the hundred feet of darkness between their back doors.

One night, everything synched.

We figured out he grew up a half mile where I lived as a child in Fairfield, Ohio. Along the same creek hemmed in by back yards. He had just graduated from the same high school a decade before I was born (the building he went to was the freshman building when I was there). The priest who married them was the very priest my parents would take us to visit in Oldenburg, Indiana and we talked about the horses and the pond near where the priest had lived.

All of that, and we had never met until Kim. But Kim is her own magic and her own story of love, loss, ghosts, and synchronicity.

In the months before his passing, he had started a small data collection group called IPUS, or International Paranormal UFO Society, and he had asked me to be a part of it.

I was for a short time, but life and my own fears took me in a different direction. I suppose in some ways, I was trying to leave “all that” behind and pretend I could be taken seriously if I talked about grownup stuff all the time. Plus, there were people far more passionate, and much more organized who would take up the reins when he passed. I don’t honestly know what has become of all of that, but I hope they’re still out there.

It took a decade or so before finally just surrendered to the notion that being taken seriously is too much work, and leaves little room for creativity and wonder.

That’s my jam. Wonder. That’s what Dick brought out in people: the wonder of it all and I miss him and the plans we made. 

So, in many ways all of this—my embracing my weird and being public about it is in his honor.

I’m left with a few things he gave me. An ice cold rock that never warms, and this license plate that I am now nailing to my wall to remind me to always wonder. 

Take me seriously or don’t. The choice is yours.

But if you take my hand, I will wonder with you.

The Psychic Friends’ Network

Photograph by Koi Kramer

No, I’m not talking about Dionne Warwick’s “Psychic Friends’ Network” informercial-driven psychic telephone hotline.

Though, I did steal the name for this phenomenon from that infamous money-making enterprise. It is a funny, lighthearted name for something that has been an enduring part of my life since I was. a kid.

I’m talking about the thing that happens when you have a group of family and friends who are closely connected. At the risk of sounding hokey, I’ll say, deeply connected on a spiritual level.

(I’m not fond of the word, “spiritual.” It sounds so……woowoo. But, in this case, it fits.)

It’s a weird thing and when it happens, it can be subtle, or it can hit you like a hammer. It’s the kind of thing where you’re minding your own business, cleaning the house, or working on a painting or teaching a class or something and you get a niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right somewhere “out there.”

And sometimes, that’s where it ends.

You get a weird, uneasy feeling and before you can figure it out, you get a text or a phone call from your best friend that someone you both care about is sick.

Or it’s more specific. You get a feeling and then you just know one of your friends is in trouble, because you see their face or “hear” their name in your head and you call them and find out that their apartment’s on fire and they’re running out the door.

Or, you’re on the way out the door to go on a road trip and the phone rings and you almost don’t answer it because you’re on the way out, but something hurts in the pit of your stomach and you answer, and you find out from your best friends’ partner that they’re in a coma.

Or, in a lighter vein, you’re doing genealogical work on your family and find the exact Bavarian town your great-great grandparents were born in. You don’t tell anyone except your husband because it’s right before bed. The next day, a friend posts a photograph of a cuckoo clock museum in that very town on your Facebook page, because she’s right there visiting it, and she thought of you.

Or, you’re the one who’s having a hard go of it and out of the blue, you get a message on Instagram with a video of the cutest little fennic fox you’ve ever seen, sent by your kid who just knew you needed to see it right that very minute.

That’s how things happen in my world. (Yes, all of these things have happened with my circle of family and friends.)

I think it’s because our energies coalesce together, and we just—-we psychically click. We know each other so well that information flows back and forth on a subtle non-verbal, long distance communication hotline, and it keeps us connected.

Sometimes it’s scary. Sometimes it’s sad. Sometimes it’s funny.

Mostly, I find it comforting.

But at least with my group of friends and close family, it’s always there. It’s the etheric glue that holds our relationships together. And it works whether we’re getting along or not—thought it’s glitchier when you’re not in sync with each other emotionally. I also find that it extends itself outwards every year. I’ll meet a new friend and pretty soon, they’re on the Network, and I’ll think of them and bam—there’s the email they just sent. Right in my inbox.

I suspect it’s more common than most people think. I know I have not only the examples of my own personal Psychic Friends’ Network, but have heard of and read of examples from other peoples’ lives.

The most recent iteration of it for me was between my husband, Zak, and I.

Zak’s a soft skeptic. He knows things are weird, but he’s not as apt to experience the strange as I am, and he’s not as likely to credit psychic things like the ever-present Network. I mean, he knows its there, he’s seen it work, but he doesn’t talk about it.

He had a doctor’s appointment early in the morning. He left without waking me up. And, once he got to the doctor’s office, he realized he’d left without his insurance card. So, he called me, but I had my cell phone in the other room on “Do not disturb,” so it didn’t ring.

Since it didn’t ring, I didn’t hear it. I was only half asleep by that point, so I was drifting comfortably along when I heard a meandering line of melody, very soft, played on Native American flute. It wasn’t in my head. I swear I heard it with my ears.

Zak plays that instrument.

I woke all the way up, rubbing my eyes, thinking he must have been home. But of course, he wasn’t.

I got out of bed and felt compelled to see what time it was. So, I crawled out of bed, padded to the living room, picked up my phone, opened it and saw a missed call from Zak from five minutes before.

I called him and he said, “Oh, there you are. Hey, can you give me my insurance number for the doctor? I left my wallet at home.”

And I gave him the information and then blinked and said, “I didn’t hear the phone, you know. I heard you playing flute.”

He laughed and said, “Psychic Friends’ Network.”

I laughed too, and shook my head.

Saying goodbye to him, I went to make coffee, with a smile on my face.

You see, the Psychic Friends’ Network works, even if you don’t particularly believe in it or take it seriously.

As Morganna later said to me, “Well, the Psychic Friends’ Network believes in you, even if you don’t believe in it.”

Yeah, I find that pretty darned comforting.

“Why Didn’t You Just Take A Picture?”

Photograph of blobby, indistinct red light in the sky by Morganna. Are you convinced now?

So, there is this sentence that crops up when somebody is talking about seeing something-be it a hairy monster, a UAP, or anything else weird.

It seems to be brought up in a variety of ways-either as an honest question, or as a way to “debunk” what someone says they saw. It is even said by fellow experiencers in a sorrowful cry for lost opportunity. It frustrates me when this comes up as anything other than an honest question-for one thing, random human, you are not the arbiter of truth and for another, it’s just a bad way to “debunk” anything. I feel for the fellow experiencer or investigator when they ask it though-even if I feel like they are chasing a Holy Grail that may never be found. 

“Why didn’t you just take a picture?”

When an experiencer asks this, it feels more like an expression of frustration, of loss, of missed opportunity. We always want some form of proof-to show we aren’t nuts, to have something tangible to study, to gain some legitimacy for the fledgling field of study that is High Strangeness. We like evidence. Evidence is something you can sink your teeth into-something you can show others and say “SEE, I told you there was something odd out there!”. You can break down a photo, enhance it, study it, compare it to other photos. All of that is laudable, valid, and good.

Evidence is good.

But then there are the skeptics.

Which-let me be clear-I think skeptics are perfectly nice individuals and are quite correct to be suspicious and ask for proof. That makes sense to me.

However-there are skeptics, and then there are skeptics.

Some don’t WANT proof-they want to tell you that you’re wrong no matter what.

In the hands of those type of skeptics, the question becomes weaponized. It becomes a smug denouncement of not just what you saw, but of you-for how could you, an otherwise reasonable, rational and intelligent  individual, BELIEVE this sort of nonsense? How could you be so silly as to think you saw anything uncanny? No no, credulous person, you are simply mistaken-and if you can’t prove you saw anything-I mean really, you don’t even have a photo!-why should they believe YOU? 

I think of these folks as “debunkers” more than skeptics.

Skeptics come across as sensible humans who are scientifically minded. They really WOULD believe you with some proof-sometimes they suspect something must be going on, but all the theories surrounding high strangeness are just too out there for them.

And that’s fine. I don’t mind skeptics too much. They are rational beings, and I can’t fault them for not believing things right off the bat. These are the skeptics we try to take photos for, try to gather evidence for.

They may be scientists, family members, or just the world at large. I think they are a needed sounding board for us freaks who delve into this stuff to have-they reign us in when we get all wild eyed and leap ahead of ourselves. I have one in my life who slows my roll when I get too excited and race ahead, with theorizing, heedless of my lack of data. Bless the man. 

So why does this question bug me so much?

Well-weaponized debunker questions aside-it can be a dumb question.

Seriously. How many of y’all reading this have seen something odd, WANTED to take a picture, and found you didn’t have a camera on you? This problem is mitigated now that we all have smartphones, but even then sometimes you don’t have your phone, or it’s out of charge.

The other practical problem with photographing things you see for a short period of time (and why I suspect so many photos are blurry) is: You are taking a photo in a hurry. You may not frame it well, the light may be bad-if you are on a phone and taking a picture of something in the sky it can be a pain to find the damn thing if it’s not huge.  Several encounters with high strangeness are over and done with before you can even get the camera or phone out and pointed in the right direction. 

Not to mention sometimes you simply don’t think of it until it’s too late-I have personally done that. I’ll be staring up at something in the sky, trying to gauge if it’s moving, then WOW it does something astonishing!

And then I just stare at it like a gape-mouthed fool instead of racing for my phone. For which I kick myself, every time, and then it’ll happen again. Sigh. I have bad reflexes on that. 

Then, after all of those perfectly mundane reasons, it’s a bit of a dumb question-we get into the shenanigans surrounding the denizens of the land of strangeness. Cameras, both film and digital, recording equipment, trail cams, phones, car engines, TVs, and even electric lights all go haywire around some of these things. That makes getting a photograph hard. Then, if you have managed to catch SOMETHING on film or in pixels, it doesn’t usually do what you saw with the naked eye justice. Or it’s blurry. 

So, it’s a frustrating question.

It’s also a frustrating quest. Plenty of people have managed to get recordings, audio or video, pictures, you name it, of weird things in action. We all go “YAY! Proof! Now people HAVE to believe us!” And, to their credit-many do. But many don’t. They dig in and start picking apart the evidence, declaring it a fake, declaring you a fake, and you shuffle off, angry and embarrassed.

That’s the other reason it bothers me so much-you cannot get enough evidence to convince the debunkers.

They don’t really WANT it. The mainstream folks doesn’t WANT monsters to be real. They want you to be an easily dismissed fraud and kooky faker. You can never have enough proof for them. (This is why I feel really bad for the Bigfoot researchers who are trying SO HARD to get enough proof-they just keep getting laughed off.) 

So there you have it.

Am I saying give up and don’t try to get evidence?

Hell no. I always have my phone on me now, and I even managed to take a picture of something in the sky a few weeks ago. It looks like crap, (as you can see above) but hey, I guess I get to join the ranks of experiencers with sad, blurry, blobby evidence.

We should keep gathering what we can. I guess I’m saying-accept that some folks will laugh in your face, and throw your evidence right back at you. Which is a pile of bullshit, but there are plenty of people who won’t laugh, who will believe you, and who might even have some ideas about what the hell is going on. So take a picture if you can, for you, and for those who will listen, and not for the ones who you can’t ever convince.

And the next time someone asks you that question as a “gotcha”? Blow ‘em a big ole raspberry and say fuck ‘em, from me. 

What is Real?

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

— Albert Einstein

“Schrodinger’s Cat” Acrylic on canvas by Barbara Fisher, 2019

As we were re-recording our first podcast episode last night (The first recording was a bit of a mess, so we decided to start over), Kendra and I had an exchange that touched upon the nature of reality.

She had previously described her experience of seeing Mothman with a friend. And I had said something along the lines of “spirits like Mothman….” and she said, “But Mothman isn’t like that. At least, not to me. It was solid. It took up space, it was physical.”

And I said—”Until it isn’t physical.”

While Kendra’s Mothman didn’t fade into nothingness like an apparition or a spirit, other witnesses have seen it do just that. Such a sighting, however, is no less real than Kendra’s—they just are at different ends of a spectrum of experiences that encompass both the physical and non-physical aspects of reality.

And that’s the crux of the issue. To say that something is Real doesn’t mean that it necessarily has to be made of matter. It doesn’t have to take up space and have weight. Reality is not determined by mere physicality.

Light is energy.

Energy isn’t matter—it has no weight, nor does it take up space, but it most certainly -is- real. We can all agree that light energy is demonstrably real. We can see sunlight; we can feel the heat that is radiated by its rays. Our skin can be burned by it. Light can interact with photographic film and create an image when focused by the lens of a camera.

Gravity is a force—it doesn’t take up space, nor does it have weight, but it is most assuredly real. You can’t see gravity itself—but you can see its effects when you throw a ball into the air and it falls back down for you to catch in your hand.

You can’t feel gravity itself, but you can feel its effects when you fall down a flight of stairs.

Gravity is quite real.

Ideas are real.

What is the Constitution of the United States? It’s an idea. A foundational idea that frames our government and legal system. It’s made of words, and is written in ink on paper, but the heart of the Constitution itself isn’t encompassed by the physicality of that ink and paper. The reality of it isn’t bound by the materials that were used to record it. The reality of the Constitution is in the ideas that it articulates and the framework of the United States Government that would not exist without it.

Reality can be both physical, and non-physical at the same time.

And there are objects in reality that can also be both physical and non-physical, or can phase between the two states of being.

There’s a liminal space between the physical and the non-physical, and that’s where mysteries like Mothman exists.

Mothman and UFO’s, Bigfoot, fairies, ghosts and other apparitions can encompass physical and non-physical aspects of reality. They are betwixt and between, and I tend to see them as being both physically present as well as being non-material images of projected light, beings made of energy or perhaps even ideas manifested by some unknown intelligence.

They are both real and unreal at the same time.

A paradox, I know.

Kendra and I agree that we didn’t want witnesses and other experiencers to think we were saying something is only real if it is physical. Nor do we want to give the impression that we favor a strictly non-physical psycho-social explanation for all of these mysterious things we and others experience.

There is no one right answer, as near as I can tell for any of these experiential oddities.

Both understandings of reality are valid and true at any given moment. Kendra’s Mothman at that moment when she experienced it was physically present and real. But to another person, were it to appear to on that lonesome stretch of road a few minutes later, it could have just as likely been a shadow, an apparition lacking physical substance.

And both of those experiences would have been equally valid and dare I say it—equally real.

And, I think that is why I will never lose my fascination for these impossibilities—they are like Schrodinger’s Cat—they exist in two opposing states of being at the same time.

Film Review: Lights in the Sky

Krista Alexander’s documentary, “Lights in the Sky.”

Listening to the Cryptonaut Podcast( Episode 144) I heard Krista Alexander talk about her documentary “Lights in the Sky.” It tells the story of  her investigation into the spate of mysterious drone sightings over Colorado, Nebraska and Nevada that occurred last December and this January, and her theories as to what is behind those sightings.

A professional journalist and videographer, she took videos uploaded onto a FB page of the sightings and using her editing software, boosted the contrast and the brightness of the videos, and was shocked by what she saw.

These were not drones; there were no physical objects attached to the lights. They were just--lights. Not only were they lights, they didn’t behave the way conventional lights do; there were no beams, and they moved---in very odd, seemingly intelligent ways.

So of course, I had to see the documentary. Available for streaming for a modest price via Amazon Prime, the documentary is well worth watching. The first twenty minutes of footage where she shows the lights after she zoomed in, boosted the contrast and brightness left me speechless. The color changes, the organic way they move--almost like microbes or worms--the way that they come together and then separate---this is fascinating. They look very like lights that my daughter and I saw over Athens Christmas night--though we never even thought to video them, because they weren’t as close as the lights the witnesses out west saw.

Her analysis of the footage is spot on and I cannot argue with it. The rest of the documentary however, I found to be--while interesting, less convincing. This is in large part due to the rapid-fire and shallow nature of the connections that she makes between the lights and other phenomena. Her theory as to what the lights may be rings true to me, but the connections made in the documentary are not strong enough to convince someone who isn’t as familiar with the material she presents as I am.

My husband watched it with me and he was spellbound by the opening twenty minutes or so of the documentary--and he was convinced that those lights are absolutely not any sort of unusual atmospheric conditions or conventional flying aircraft.

But when she started putting together evidence for her theory as to their nature, in his eyes, it was scattershot and not convincing. This all said--I do not regret watching it and I think Alexander is on to something. I think a more fleshed out effort would be more convincing to those who aren’t already well-read on the subject of UFOs or UAPs or LITS or whatever you want to call them. 

Mothman and Burial Mounds

“UFO activity is concentrated in the same areas year after year. In the Ohio valley, they show a penchant for the ancient Indian mounds which stand through the area. Could some UFO’s be mere tulpas created by a long forgotten people and doomed forever to seneless maneuvers in the might skies? ”

— John Keel "The Mothman Prophesies."

This is just a series of thoughts; nothing too developed.

Just the result of having been reading about five or six books all at the same time, and having ideas swirling all around in my brain simultaneously.

So, we all know what happened (in a general sense) during the years 1966-1967 in Point Pleasant.

Mothman happened.

To recap: a dark, winged creature with red eyes and uncanny abilities was seen repeatedly in the general vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia by a great many (a hundred or slightly more) witnesses, some of them in groups of four or more. The being could fly, though it didn’t seem to bother flapping its wings to do so, which pretty much lets out it being a misplaced, misunderstood natural bird, because even if birds soar habitually and ride air currents without flapping their wings, they -must- flap their wings in order to take off from the ground.

That’s just how aerodynamics work when we’re talking about living, breathing, physical birds. They don’t come with fixed wings and jet engines. They can’t just leap up into the air and commence to gliding swiftly the way Mothman was reported as doing, over and over by a multitude of witnesses.

And then the Silver Bridge fell and Mothman went away from Point Pleasant, never to be seen again.

Except, that isn’t really how it happened.

First of all, it was sighted in places other than the immediate area of Point Pleasant.

It was seen as far afield as Mason, West Virginia—the town immediately across the Ohio River from Pomeroy, Ohio. It was also seen in St. Albans, West Virginia far from the Ohio River, up in the Kanawha River valley, and it was seen in the capitol city of Charleston, West Virginia, even further up the Kanawha River.

It was also seen in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania during the same time period, up the Ohio River.

And then, after the bridge fell, it was seen elsewhere, farther afield. I know of two sightings, both decades after the Point Pleasant sightings, both in Ohio. One was in the Ohio River Valley, the other in the Hocking River Valley. There’s another sighting of a very similar creature from the 20th century in the Susquehanna River Valley from Pennsylvania.

And then, it started being seen in Indiana and Illinois, particularly around Chicago. These sightings started long before the flap of sightings in 2017 that got dubbed “The Chicago Mothman,” These sightings didn’t stop in 2017; they are still ongoing. These sightings tended to happen along the shoreline of Lake Michigan or near the Calumet River.

What am I getting at?

Well, a couple of things. One—you notice how Mothman sightings tend to happen in or near river valleys or near bodies of water?

Yeah, I noticed that, too.

What else is prevalent in these river valleys?

Ancient burial mounds and earthworks. (As noted in the quote above, John Keel noticed that, too.)

Hartman Mound, Wolf Plains Mound Group, Athens County, Ohio. Photo by Barbara Fisher

Dating as far back as 8,000 BCE, the remaining burial mounds commonly found throughout the river valleys east of the Mississippi are impressive in number and scale. Created by pre-Columbian Native American cultural groups that have been dubbed the Adena (That’s my middle name, by the way), the Hopewell, and the Mississippians, among others, these mounds are most often circular in shape. Sometimes they were built in representative shapes like birds, snakes and alligators. They were used for community burials; with the ashes of cremated people mixed in with the bodies of apparently important tribal members.

There’s more known about the cultures of the people who built these mounds now than when Keel was writing, but he did make note that these earthworks were common up and down the river valleys where UFO and Mothman sightings were prevalent. He even mentioned that like the barrow mounds, earthworks and stone circles of Europe and the British Isles, that these mound sometimes mark spots of anomalous magnetic energy readings, which he thought may be connected to paranormal activity.

One of the most famous of the representational mounds, the great Serpent Mound, in Peebles, Ohio, does mark a spot of unusual magnetic activity. It is now thought that a meteor strike from long before the mound was built is responsible for the anomalous magnetic readings recorded there.

What I discovered in my recent readings, that Keel doesn’t mention, however, is that there is also a figure that appears over and over again in the art of the mound builders that may relate to the Mothman phenomena. The “Bird Man,” a winged human, is found depicted in various media, from copper plates, sandstone plaques and etched stones that have been excavated from these ancient sites. The being, whether it depicts a spirit or a shamanic human, appears in various different time periods and seems to be quite important to the cosmology of these ancient peoples.

Could the “Bird Man” and the “Mothman” be related? Are they the same spirit? Are they a tulpa—an energy being brought to life by the power of repeated human activity such as meditation or ritual? Were they created by the mound builders, or were the mound builders’ art depicting a creature that they had seen and experienced before building the mounds. Did they choose to erect the mounds near where the Bird Man was seen? And, which came first—the Bird Man/Mothman, or the mounds?

Or, are the resemblances between the Bird Man and Mothman simply coincidental, and they have nothing to do with each other?

As I said, these are just a series of thoughts roiling around in my head all at the same time—not a developed idea, much less a hypothesis. Such development requires more research and rumination.

But it does give me fodder for pondering.

Book Review: Dead But Dreaming

“I am dead but dreaming. I am dreaming of you.”

— Neil Rushton

“Otherworld” Acrylic on canvas by Barbara Fisher

Dead But Dreaming is a beautifully written paean to the power of folklore, and the relationship between dream, myth, life and death.

Set in the UK in 1970, the novel captures the flavor of the time and place beautifully and subtly, while telling a quiet tale of a young person finding their way out of grief and loss into a life of wholeness.

The young person in question is a graduate student in the study of fairy lore, who has come to gather the stories of the villagers in the countryside surrounding an insane asylum. The fact that they are offered a place to stay in the asylum isn’t ostensibly directly related to the trauma they suffered at the opening of the novel, however, that trauma is the driving force that propels the story forward in a mysterious unspooling of secrets and whispers.

Poetry and music combine lyrically, with consciousness research, evoking the Otherworld and her denizens--the beloved dead and the fairies, in misty swaths of watercolor, while the psychedelic, mind-bending, reality twisting effects of DMT are painted in delicate strokes of imaginative prose.

Set in an insane asylum and peopled by doctors, folklorists, patients and villagers, this novel creates a world that is familiar to those who have read the novels of Graham Joyce, the master at evoking the everyday magic of the English countryside in unsentimental terms.

What I found fascinating is that I felt echoes of my own magical world—Appalachian Southeastern Ohio— in Rushton’s words. His descriptions of the grounds of the asylum harkens back to the old Athens Lunatic Asylum whose beautiful Kirkbride building still looms over the river valley of Athens Ohio, where I have lived for lo these many years. The landscape of his novel itself is reminiscent of the hills, fields and woods of Appalachia I have roamed most of my life.

(This is probably why I felt so comfortable in England when I visited thirty years ago, and very much wanted to stay. It could also have been some ancestral calling; my great-grandfather and grandmother were both born in the UK and lived there through their teen years.)

Fairies comes across as neither quaint, nor whimsical, nor fantastical here--the book is magical without being unbelievable. The fairies are real, not metaphorical, or purely spiritual, with physical bodies (well, sometimes physical bodies) that can both live and die. They have their own culture with its own rules, all of which are very believable. The rules of the fairy Otherworld are based on the fairy traditions of the British Isles, but are not constrained by them, and represent the lived experiences of the characters throughout the novel.

These English folklore traditions are braided easily together with the spiritual and visionary shamanic traditions of South America, especially vis a vis the use of entheogenic plants.

The entheogen in question, which is clearly based on DMT, (one of the active molecules in ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic medicine native to the Amazon basin) , is the means by which the psychiatrist in the novel works his remarkable cures on his patients. The plant from which it is derived, however. was not gifted to him, but to the second main character in the plot—a transplanted South American woman who is a patient in the asylum. She is favored among the fairies, because she was born with the ability to see and communicate with them without the use of any particular drug or technique—which is what landed her in the asylum in the first place.

It's a fine line for an author to walk—writing a fantasy that is believably set not only in the real world, but one that also convincingly evokes a recognizable period in recent history. Rushton does an excellent job in Dead but Dreaming, making everything about this story viscerally real, while still retaining the rhythm and surrealism of a dream.

There is a great deal more I would like to say about this lovely little novel, but I don’t want to spoil any of it for anyone by giving away too many details. Suffice to say it is very much worth the read and will ring true to many who live enchanted, yet very real, lives.