Episode 66: The Secret Garden and the Ghostly Goat with Marco Acevedo - Part I

“The Secret Garden and the Ghostly Goat” by Barbara Fisher 2021 Acrylic on canvas. This painting is based on a piece of art that was made by the WOMBO Dream Ap when I inputted the words, “Secret Garden.” Interestingly, it included a shadowy horned figure in the middle, which I took to be a humanoid goat’s ghost. I’ll post a pic of the inspiration for this on next week’s show notes.

I realized when I was writing the show notes that the title of this episode, which is coming in two parts, sounds like a vintage Nancy Drew mystery.

But it’s not. It’s seriously an in depth look at one person’s experiences of the Numinous Other, as filtered through his life and the life of his ancestor’s lives. It’s mythical, mystical and magical, and it started out with Marco and I bonding over us both having scary grandfathers. Two very different cultures, but both were farmers and both were pretty horrifying, and yet—and yet—there is good in both of them.

That’s why I cut this episode in two: we talked for nearly three hours, but it’s deep and intense, and I figured it would be better digested in two chunks. I found a place almost exactly in the center of the recording that was perfectly logical to split it, and edited it. I didn’t want to chop it up to make it shorter; I didn’t want to leave it out. The way Marco tells as story is as important as the story itself, so I only cut it in half, and left it alone.

There’s a lot more to this episode that the two main stories evoked in the title. There’s seeking the history of UFO’s in Chicago. There’s discussion of Neo-Paganism and how many of the founders of the movement in the US came from Jewish backgrounds. There’s just a lot.

And, of course, there are books. Here are the ones Marco mentioned in the first part of this episode: UFO’s: Reframing the Debate edited by Robbie Graham, Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, Night Siege by J. Allen Hyneck and of course, all of the books by Jacques Vallee and John Keel,

Come back next week for the second half of the discussion. It includes a story that took place in….surprise! The Driftless region of Wisconsin!