72 – The Year In Weird News: 2015’s Most Popular Episodes
The last week of the year is finally here! And depending on how your 2015 was, well, that’s going to make the difference whether you’re excited or depressed this week. I’m a little bit of both, we did so many great podcasts on weird news in 2015 and I met a ton of new people in the paranormal field. That was pretty awesome. And consistently Sunspot wrote more songs than any other year, so that was pretty awesome.
But as a band, we took time off from playing a lot of live shows and so we didn’t get to hang out with as many people around the country as we usually like to. I was in awesome shape the first two months of the year and not so much at the end, ha. I had my best and worst marathons this year. I re-dedicated my life to my band, music, and our search for the unknown this year, and that was life affirming! But was always, figuring out the economics of being a full-time creative type is a constant challenge.
Highs and lows. Every year is a little mix of good and a little mix of bad and we’re all hoping that the next year brings more good than bad. Take stock and appreciate the great things that happened while figuring out ways to keep improving. Today, we’re focusing on the highs as we go into 2016. Wendy, Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts , and I discuss the most downloaded episodes of 2015 and what we loved about the weird news that they contained.
This was one of Allison’s ideas because she really loves the movie The Nightmare from these guys. It’s a tale of the legendary Old Hag and how visits from strange creatures when we wake up from sleep is something that happens cross cultures and in certain Southeast Asian cultures, has shown that it might be deadly. I shared my own story of being visited by little beings that I thought were aliens (but was really my twelve-year old imagination… or was it?!)
This is an important one for paranormal research I believe, because when you’re interviewing someone who’s had a strange experience, it’s not just about whether you believed something happened, it’s about whether you believe that someone else believes it. The mind will create its own narrative to match a certain view of events, whether those things actually happened or not. Eyewitness reports were considered “smoking guns” for a long time and now we now that memory can be very very deceptive…
Allison got to go to Hawaii and of course it wouldn’t be a vacation for her unless she got to visit some haunted sites. Her adventures with Lopaka from Mysteries of Hawaii were a lot of fun as she provided eyewitness reports right from several mystical and haunted locations. And you know that means we’re going to have to follow up and investigate some more of those haunted and spooky places!
This was one of my favorite episodes all year, not only because Robbie Graham really knows his stuff when it comes to UFO movies (and I’m a crazy movie buff that always enjoys a conversation with aficionado like myself) but it really had me thinking about disinformation. Is there nothing that our government wouldn’t do to gain some kind of strategic advantage during the Cold War?
Did the US Air Force give Bob Lazar the information about aliens at Area 51 on purpose because they knew he would leak it? It was to their advantage that th American people believed that we had access to alien technology because it meant that the Soviets might believe we had access to otherworldly weapons. One of the reasons cited for the fall of the Soviet Union was their desperate spending to keep up with the United States War Machine (they had a great military but people waiting in line for bread), could our extraterrestrial disinformation have something to do with it?
And if it did, what’s the disinformation now and who’s in on it? Who’s controlling the narrative, from Donald Trump to ISIS…
We knew that this was going to be a popular one because we get into the nitty gritty of ways that you can meditate your way into having an Out-of-Body Experience. Dr. Minero’s job is to train people how to do it. Allison has had an OBE when she was a teenager and she’s been trying to recreate it ever since. There is some research behind determining whether OBEs are people really leaving their bodies or just a feeling of dissociation from the physical self (I’ve definitely felt that dissociation in meditation but I have yet to actually leave the body.)
In the research, they’ll place something somewhere in the room that you can only see if you’re actually up at the level of the ceiling, the subjects can’t see it form a sitting or laying position. What are the results of that research? We’ll be doing a follow up episode to go more in depth on the science of Out-of-Body Experiences.
Hooray for Hollywood! A little bit of Terrifying Tinseltown and the supernatural stories of its most famous thoroughfare. In a town where stars are launched and thrown away, dreams and wishes get granted and crushed, it’s the stories of the colorful personalities that never wanted the movie to end. Most interesting thing I thought was that Americans were fascinated with the Orient in the first couple of decades of the Twentieth Century, so that’s why there are theatres called “The Egyptian” or the famous Chinese Theater (indeed, Milwaukee has its own Oriental Theatre as well – that’s where Allison and I saw Rocky Horror for the first time.) Asia and the Middle East were considered exotic and that was used in the marketing. What marketing today are we going to look back on in eighty years and wince a little bit? (I sure hope it’s aliens!)
From a little town in southeastern Wisconsin, Linda Godfrey established herself as quite an expert in the paranormal pantheon of authors and experts. The Beast of Bray Road and the strange red-eyed bipedal canine “werewolf” terrorizing the good people of Elkhorn, Wisconsin has led Linda writing books on cryptids and monsters all over America and the world. A true expert and a delightful person, this is the perfect place to start if you want to learn about what makes a great cryptozoologist!
Drunken young men are falling in the Mississippi River in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Why? The official story is that they just got too wasted and fell in. A “death by misadventure”. Two New York City police detectives believe there’s gang of serial killers roaming the Interstate 90 and 94 corridor and they’re targeting young men across the country.
The Deputy Medical Examiner started looking for a paranormal explanation. The investigation encompassed nineteenth century shipwrecks and ancient Native American legends of dangerous water spirits that call to their victims. The Lakota and Chippewa tribes both have stories of sirens that call to men from the water to lure them to their death. European settlers brought over their legends of “the water man” who is just waiting to pull you under. Something is killing young men in La Crosse, and whether it’s a killer gang, the demon alcohol, or something more sinister and paranormal (like Stephen King’s IT ), the mystery is still unexplained.
Hey, it was our first paranormal conference and we loved it! Whether it was interviewing the attendees to hear about their personal ghost stories, running into the speakers who were guests on our podcast (and there were many!), or just soaking in all the weird weird love, it was some of the most fun we had all year. Plus, Allison said that her favorite song of the dozens that we’ve recorded for the podcast this year was from the conference. The track was “The Bigfoot Polka” and we think it pretty much encompasses everything unusual that we love about the Brew City!
At that conference we also discovered that Bigfoot is real and we’ve got the proof right here…
We heard an Internet rumor in June that the Pope was finally going to reveal the existence of aliens and that we’ve already had first contact. Okay, well, Pope Francis does seem to be the most liberal since Vatican II after the hardline of Benedict. Gays, okay. Divorce, we can deal with it. Aliens… Come again? Needless to say, disclosure never happened.
Look, the Vatican owns to observatories and pays special attention to what’s happening in the night sky. Whether it’s because they’re all aliens (like the South Park episode where all the sexually abusive priests are from another planet with a gigantic spider leader) or its just because they’re looking for the next Star of Bethlehem (or the sign of the apocalypse like they find in Ahnuld’s millennial ( End of Days ) the Catholic Church is really into space and has their own scientists studying it. Why? Well, they say they’re studying the heavens but maybe they’re keeping they’re eye out for something that we don’t know about. John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness posits both Jesus and the Devil as extraterrestrials, does he and the Pope know something that we don’t?!
So all in all, it was a most excellent 2015 and we’re excited to bring you a lot more awesome content in the New Year, especially as we follow up on these topics and get you some new interviews and advanced discussions thwt really further the fun and your knowledge. We hope that your good things all outweigh your challenges over the holidays and don’t party too hard, that’s our job.
Goodbye 2015, see you on the other side!
Featured Song: Auld Lang Syne (arranged/performed by Sunspot )
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup!
and surely I’ll buy mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine†;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
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