 On this episode of Skeptico, who really knows E.T.? She's a speciale, Jane. This is a black knife. Not a good thing. Chew it on and lost it. People don't know reasoning like that. They're all going to die anyway. This is what's left of the church, always. And what are they trying to tell us? How about these cases of angels and such, where it seems to have a positive spin? And he says, yeah, but they always end up sour in the end. They're not just a Native American culture, but I mean, they're actually shamanic cultures going way back all over the world that have stories that relate to these kind of elements. We got a little bit of Harrison Ford getting dressed down by an Indian chief in that first clip from Cowboys and Aliens. And the second one is from today's guest, Brent Reigns, who's been looking into UFOs and E.T.'s longer than just about anyone I've ever run across. Hope you like the interview. Stick around. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sikaris, and today we welcome Brent Reigns to Skeptico. If you remember a couple of episodes back, I had a chance to interview again, Dr. Bob Davis. Love the guy, a lot of respect for him. He came on to talk about his new film, Unconsciousness. Afterwards, he sends me an email and he says, hey, you know, you seem to be interested in all this crossover, paranormal, E.T., UFO stuff. Have you ever heard of Brent Reigns? You really need to talk to this guy, friend of mine. Wow. Wow, was he ever right? I tell you, you know, I started digging into Brent's stuff and I just realized how absolutely ignorant I am of these fields that I like to talk about. I mean, this guy, amazing, amazing body of work. I don't even know how you talk about this body of work. 40 plus years, full spectrum researcher, author, excellent writer, but researcher. He knows everyone. He's talked to everyone. He's interviewed everyone. He's written about everything. It's just amazing. You know, I pulled up on the screen, apmagazine.info. Go check that out. There's a search, the tagline here. An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. That's pretty general. Published. This is the part I wanted to draw your attention to. Published since 1985, online since 2001. And if you really go into his work, he has published it long before he put out this magazine. So this is going to be a super great treat for me to tap into this guy's knowledge and try and pin things down. A lot of things I'm interested in. And the only problem is I have 100 questions. Each one could probably take about an hour to explore. But I guess we ought to just get right to it. Brent, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for joining me. Well, thanks, Alex, for inviting me. And wow, what an introduction. I hope I can live up to that. A lot of times I'll start out with an interview with someone and I'll have a list of things that I think we can... Well, I've got a list right here to the side. And we might get the two of them. It is so many areas that you can go into because so many things are... This is a lot deeper than a lot of... Even the ufologists themselves understand or want to believe. So it's... I've been at this actually a little over 55 and a half years. I started out at age 14. And I... Great, great origin story. You have to tell the origin story and swapping newsletters with John Keel. If that doesn't blow your way right off the bat, then... Well, yeah, when I started out, it was... I'd read Flying Saucers Serious Business by Frank Edwards. And that was a very hard-line, nuts-and-bolts E.T. type presentation of the evidence. And that was where he was coming from. And so that was... Like many people, that's where I started out at. But as a young man, I got really excited about all of us. I was obsessed. And I still have my bounce of obsession. And I was really intrigued by it all. And I started to represent... I was actually on the board of directors for a magazine out of St. Petersburg, Florida, called Saucer Scoot, which was very popular at the time. Even Brad Stegger was his public relations director. And he and the editor, Joanne Wittner, used to write articles and some books together at that time. And I noticed this journalist from New York City named John Keel was submitting articles. And they were very interesting. And there were things that were way beyond the things that I had read in Frank Edwards' book. I mean, these were paranormal things, contacting a lot of very high-strange cases, as we call them now. And I was quite intrigued. So actually, we initiated correspondence beginning in October 1969. Again, folks, you're 14 years old. I mean, initiated correspondence is not... I have four kids, none of mine at 14. We're initiating correspondence with the likes of John Keel or anyone else who was serious. I mean, John Keel is super smart, super... This is not like UFO... People who don't know are just so ignorant. There's so many people are ignorant of this whole field. They just think the guy's a kook. No, the guy's like a genius writer and thinker and all the rest of the stuff. And you're 14 years old and you're going to start up a correspondence with him. Great, great for you. Well, by that time, I was about 16. But I started correspondence. I even had a newsletter at the time of my own, a Mimograph newsletter called Scientific Sauceritis Review. And I had... He had his newsletter called Anomaly, so we were actually exchanging newsletters. In fact, he even quoted sometimes out of some of my newsletters. And if you read his first book that came out in 1970, Strange Creatures in Time and Space, he lists all these bigfoot cases and strange happenings state by state by state. And the main cases actually came out of one of my newsletters. So anyway, it was really quite a paradigm shift for me to become familiar with John Keel and correspond with him. And I even asked him, how can I investigate such phenomena on myself? Because I was interested in doing what he did, going out on the road and interviewing people. And I wanted to know what kind of preparations that I might need to follow. He suggested a book by a man named Terrell who studied apparitions. He wrote a book on apparitional phenomena. He felt a lot of your euthanauts, UFO beings, even the craft were often very apparitional-like. What's... Karla Young, the late great Swiss psychologist, called Psychoid. And they're somewhere, they seem physical in one moment, and then they're like paraphysical or boom, they just disappear, ghost-like. And in fact, he even stated in that book, Strange Creatures, that, you know, aliens, ghosts, what's the difference? Take your pick, you know. And so I always found that idea interesting. He even claimed that he felt, you know, ufology should have been a branch of parapsychology. Really, it's a shame that so many people get locked into one discipline. You know, it's either you're a parapsychologist, or you're a ghost hunter, or you're a Bigfoot Hunter, or you're a ufologist, and, you know, they keep themselves separate from the other fields when really, as Keele and even Jockvilly and others pointed out, there's evidence of a lot of these things being crossover, interconnected. And if we could just kind of put everybody's head together and compare notes, and, you know, like we're doing now, or, you know... See, you would think so, but I don't... I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. My experience is that that's not really the way it works. It's almost like this paradigm stuff, when we talk about paradigm as if you choose your paradigm, and I don't know that that's always the case. I think it does seem to me that some people, the paradigm chooses them. Again, I can't get over the fact that, Brent, you're this 16-year-old kid. I mean, there's two ways to look at it. One, you are predisposed to be this broad thinker. I mean, just to be able to be in this world of nuts-and-bolts UFOs and talking to a lot of people who are knowledgeable on that and then immediately be able to reach out into this other world of, oh, maybe there's this crossover. I mean, that's a different kind of person that can go there. Some people, they just can't go there. The other part of that is the extended consciousness part. I was going to save this question towards the end, but who cares? Do you ever think that maybe you were put in a place to be that person? I mean, it is a rather strange set of circumstances that brought you together with all these people. Are you just playing out some scripted role to be this conduit for all this stuff? Well, I've certainly seen not only myself, but others where you become to realize that instead of just being the guy who interviews experiences that you suddenly, it turns reflective, as Keele had said, and you begin to have experience, or you notice unusual synchronicities that occur and keep occurring sometimes. Sometimes it's based on some case you work in R, or some particular experiencer. And it's kind of like Keele had described. He felt sometimes the experience who was undergoing experiences that were actually demonstrations for him to take notice of. And I've kind of noticed that sort of thing myself I would, you know, well, let me give a, for instance, this was not too long ago. I was working with someone whose mother had had a traumatic experience out in Texas back in, I think about 1957. And this really changed this woman's world. She had seen, it was late at night, her husband was at work, she was home alone. Usually she, before going to bed, she'll read a book, you know, and relax. This night, a flying saucer showed up outside, and then this small being appears. And this was not something that she ever imagined could enter her world, you know. She went and talked to a, I think, a local minister. And what he said did not help her whatsoever. And after the experience, she also developed at the psychic level. And she had two daughters who I've been in touch with who now live fairly close by in the Nashville area. And they have had some UFO experiences themselves. And as their mother did also developed at the psychic level. And so I had had an experience back in, around October 1975, where I was, this is kind of a long story, but I was, I had already been across countries, spent a lot of my summer, most of my summer of 1975, traveling around from Maine to Florida and, you know, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, out into Indiana, down through Florida. I mean, down to Florida through Tennessee and Alibara, meeting different researchers, experiencers and doing the thing that, you know, John Keel had done going through different states, interviewing people. And it was, there was a lot of the things that he had, you know, had discovered. It didn't turn reflective right off. But when I returned to Maine afterwards, I'm in my parents' home and it's late at night. It's a little after 11. And I just was crawling into bed. And suddenly it's like I'm walking across the floor to the hallway door. And I get about halfway and I stop. And there's like something behind me that's holding me back. And, you know, ordinarily, I heard someone use the expression once, translogic, I would be turning around and saying, who's holding me back? I didn't. I continued to look straight ahead towards the hallway door, which was open and the light was on there. And my father was making, you know, late night pit stop to the bathroom. And all of a sudden I'm seeing all of these luminous glowing balls of light, tiny little balls, translucent, pulsating, white colored, swarming around. It looked like there were hundreds of them, just swarming around and going down towards the floor. And there they seem to be clustering together and forming like the shape of a four-legged animal. And then the next thing I know, I'm back in bed, laying on my back, staring at the ceiling, which usually when I crawl in the bed, I am right there under the covers, I'm laying on my stomach or on my side, you know. I don't just lay there looking up at the ceiling. And so anyway, I give that description so that I can now tell you how a few years ago I decided to try to do a kind of a meditation like Carl Jung had talked about, a technique that could be used, where you try to revisit some old memory or something. And so I read some books that he read and where comments were made and did the best I could to try to do this. And anyway, I didn't know what I was fishing for exactly, but it returned me to that bedroom and I found myself in that bed kind of hiding by it from people who were like walking around the bed, you know, who are these people. And then suddenly, about the place where I suddenly found myself stopped, my mother, who's been deceased for years, appeared to me and told me everything was all right. We hugged. And believe me, in real life, I was rather upset with my obsessive interest in UFOs. This is nonsense. You should move on. But in this dream, it was okay. Well, this one particular experience, an experiencer up at Nashville, this lady had written to me, she says, I had a strange dream about you. And in it, there was you and a group of people who were with you. And my mother, who passed away years ago, who was to contact me. And there seemed to be like some karmic connection, something between two, but she said that everything was going to be all right and that you're, you know, you've been concerned about your wife, who, you know, I had been thinking about, you know, my concern was there about her COP condition, COPD. And anyway, it was just also coincidental because it turned out when she looked up in her diary, that dream was the night before my dream. And then afterwards, a little later, there was another woman I had interviewed in the past who had a number of contact experiences and ghost experiences, the whole paranormal nine yards. And she sent me a message one day saying, Brent, I just had the strangest experience. I got sunburned from a dream and I said, okay, let's talk tonight on the phone. And so I called her up and she's telling me about this very strange dream where she's among a group of people in this room with all these class windows and her mother, who had been dead for years, suddenly comes to her, comforts her and they put the rounds around each other and there's this bright burst of light. All the other people that were around her are like laying or crouched down and it was like the bright light coming into the rooms like it felt like the end of the world or something but she was with her mother and everything was going to be okay. And anyway, with that first lady who's, you know, that dream I told you about, we've had a number of synchronistic moments since then, you know. And that's just an example of a number of the things that have transpired, you know. It just kind of makes you wonder what's going on here. Well, yeah, don't downplay it like that. I get what you mean. You know what it reminded me of when you were telling the story, Brent? It reminded me of the John Kill story in your book and John Kill was a pretty amazing guy, you know, and the fact that you had such a long-term relationship with him and close relationship with him, like you said, from the beginning, he recognized you, recognized that you had some talent, maybe recognized in the grander scheme, you had some role to play in all this. So I think it's very fitting that you wrote this book on him. But I love the story from the book where Kill, as you said, is really one of the very first people to kind of just have, not just, I want to say, an intuition, but it's more than an intuition. Again, it's this thing of, he's just able to look at the data in a more objective way and say, this stuff fits together in some way. I don't totally understand, but I got to start. I can't silo it like we're saying today. So many people still want to silo it and say, oh, you know, I'm in my little thing here and never the two shall meet. And I don't want to bury the lead on the story that you tell in the book. But John Kill writes an article for True Magazine and you can tell the story and they call him over and they say, hey John, come here. Can you help us out? You got some mail here and it goes in the back room and there's like six big bales of mail. And what I take from that story is for the, like you are, let me again digress but you'll pull all these pieces together for me. I know you are, because you've done this level of research and again, you're driving around all over the country. You're talking to people. You are somehow able to pull. If anyone reads your interviews and I read them from a couple of your different books, they're amazing. I can't even get through all this stuff. But I mean, you get people to open up and tell you a lot of stuff. You're so deep into it now that you have all these connections. John Kill was able to elicit that kind of reaction to people in his writing because no one else would talk about this stuff. So when he comes out and starts talking about abductions, starts talking about strange paranormal dreams, ghosts and all this stuff, he is flooded with mail and correspondence because there's this huge part of our population. Again, this is the living history stuff. If you're talking about 70s, if you're talking about 80s even or 60s, there's no outlet for these people. They are living, and I'm sure you have tons of stories about that. A people, you just told the story. You know, someone who's troubled their whole life from 1957 and has no outlet for it, goes to their local, you know, and he's like, you know, what? So there is that element to this that you represent in terms of what you've done and in your book about John Kill, you are telling how this is a validation for so many people that they need because it's a real experience. I know I hit on a million different items there, but pull that together and tell us about that story and tell us about it. I'm sure you've encountered that too. Well, I know that tobacco prior to, well, say when Keel came into the field in 1966, he thought he was thinking along the ET lines, but before long, he got out in the field and traveled to about 20 different states and soon realized, oh, this is, there's a lot of things that are here that the mainstream of ufology isn't paying attention to. And it helped him to get away from, he called a lot of the books on the subject cult literature, you know, they were misleading you from the big picture. And what he, you know, that incident with the editor calling him to his office, he had written a magazine article about, it was titled something like, something like who cares about the UFOs? Who's piloting the things? And so he wrote about some cases, you know, where people had seen the occupants or the beings. And he was in this flood of mail, he got letters from people who were what he called silent contactees. They'd had the experiences, but they never had anybody they could open up to. And they also had missing time. And at the time and background, you know, the 1960s, 1967, 1968, 1969, when he was making all these contacts, there was a really hardly anyone in the mainstream of ufology, the so-called respected ufology. And of course he was a journalist. And I think some of the people were upset that he got into the things he did because they expected better. I mean, he was corresponding with Coral Lorenzo, the Errol Phenomenon Research Organization, very big civilian group at the time. And they were certainly strongly advocating, you know, an ET presence and all. But Kiehl's lot, maybe this was some sort of earth based phenomena that was related to all kinds of other phenomena that had gone on for ages and ages from Marion apparitions, you know, some incredible stories there. And Poltergeist manifestations he found frequently after someone had a close encounter with the UFO, there would be a sudden development of psychic phenomena in their life. Poltergeist manifestations, noisy ghost, they may develop some sort of psychic abilities themselves, telepathy, maybe like Gary Geller, psychokinesis or something. And you know, I'm going through this stuff and my mind is like, okay, I was meaning to say something else and I'm off on this, but you know, I'll just go with the flow. But you know, the thing with Kiehl, when he brought it out in, you know, when he did in the 1960s, late 1960s, 1970 and in the early 70s, he generated some interest. But it took really about 1987 for the mainstream to really pay attention to the abduction phenomena, the missing time that Kiehl tried to introduce. It was Bud Hopkins and Whitley Streber when their books came out, you know, and then foundations were created, support groups. It was the Communion Foundation, the Intruders Foundation and they were inundated letters after their books came out. I think each claimed about 4,000 letters. And but it was Kiehl who actually first tried to blaze that trail and kind of got shut down by a lot of the mainstreamers. What is your speculation about that? So again, this is that lived history thing that I think you can do better than almost anybody because you lived through all that because you've been in the field for a long time and highly connected and deeply in the field. So Bud Hopkins and Whitley Streber in 1987 come out of this and I remember not that I was really tuned into it, but they were like laying the groundwork for this mass recovered memory thing, right? They go, look, we just do the numbers, which people have done the numbers since and it does come up with pretty extraordinary numbers no matter what percentage of people you think have had contact experience, the numbers range in the 1% to 2% or 3% range and that's a lot of people and they were like preparing that once this comes out, this is it. And to a certain extent that did happen, communion with that famous ET picture and people, the reports of people walking by the bookstore and falling to their knees and crying and having these recovered memory kind of things. But you got to wonder, you lived through the misinformation, disinformation thing to now where we don't even acknowledge that that whole period existed where they were working so hard to keep a lid on it and now they're working so hard to push it out and they're saying, no, no, it really is true and people are like, nah, we heard it's all. So I don't want to get too far afield though because the point is I don't think they wanted Whitley to come out in 1987. I don't think they wanted Bud Hopkins to come out just like they didn't want John Mack to come out. It's just these guys were just confident enough in themselves, but Hopkins an artist, I can do anything and you know, John Mack as I'm Harvard, I'm Pulitzer Prize, of course, just come out with the truth. That's my speculation. How do you think that message was managed, mismanaged, surprise? Because as you're pointing out, Keele didn't have a big coming out party. They kept him under wraps. Yeah, okay. One of the things I noticed was the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Washington DC, a civilian group that the retired Major Donald Keele had organized in 1956. It was a major civilian group and he wanted to generate a Make You Fall As You Respectable. He wrote a true magazine article on UFOs. He wrote a good book, more than one book eventually, but he generated a lot of public interest and he was onto the ET bandwagon and he was fighting the Air Force. He felt the Air Force was covering it all up and he wanted a congressional hearing where the evidence could be presented confidently to the American people and open this thing wide open. Find out what the government really knew. And ultimately in the process, he began doing was fighting the reports of anyone who claimed they had a contact. It was okay if a craft was seen by a credible observer, but when it landed and someone got out, especially if they got out and said, gave some sort of positive message, it sounded too out there. APRO was really more open to it. They allowed the beings to come out and act like scientists, but if they started preaching about brotherly love and we should discontinue using the atomic bombs where we're endangering the planet and some sort of thing, it sounded too fictional to them. So for a long time, they wanted to suppress a lot of these reports of human entity encounters. And they were doing really, even though like NICAB wanted to fight the Air Force, they were often using the Air Force's, you know, witness observation forms to fill out and they were practicing pretty much the same process the Air Force was. So they had a lot of respect for the way the Air Force did it. And they didn't also like the Air Force, they considered reports of entities as lunatic fringe, you know, flying saucer missionaries, different titles that were given to those people. And I think Rosemary Giley, who wrote the foreword to my book on Keele, was a good friend of Keele's. And she said she always suspected that Keele, well, she knew that he was aware that a lot of the experiences were somehow wired differently. And she felt that Keele was too. And it was interesting to find out that in Keele's early life, like age seven, he claimed that he had seen a, with his stepfather and his mother, riding out of the country somewhere in New York State, had seen this big barn-sized, spherical object rise up from a hilltop. At first they thought a barn was on fire until it cleared the trees. And then they could see it was this bright glowing sphere. And then it just took off at unbelievable speed off in the distance and out of sight. And also, not far from, I think, his grandparents' farm, there was, when he was age 10, people were reporting a gorilla in the area. And guys were, you know, the farmers were picking their shotguns, going out, trying to track it down. And as often happens with these big foot events, it just suddenly stops as mysteriously as it began. And so that gave him an insight into that. It was a poltergeist phenomena. He experiences a young man. And at age 19, he had an experience where there was illumination in his room. And he suddenly had the answer to everything like the answers to it. Everything you want to know was just downloaded in his brain. It was a strange glow. And then the next morning it was like he could only remember fragments of it, you know. So I think that those early experiences gave him some insight once he made that connection, you know, because he went from himself thinking E.T. in 66, and then going around the country hearing all these stories about these other phenomena that happened to the UFO experiences. And I think that helped him to connect the dots. It's all about connecting the dots as you go along. So Brent, what do you think about how they've managed the narrative? You kind of gave part of the story, part of the history, but then the story changes and there's a complete lockdown, complete denial. Then there's the whole disinformation, misinformation. There's the pretty aggressively going after people who report anything, will kill you, you will kill your family kind of stuff. And then 2017, there's disclosure. Here's a 10-year-old video, and I interviewed Kevin Day, who was on board the ship. It was in his email the next day, but suddenly eight years later, it's New York Times headline news. What's your general feeling about how they've handled this narrative? What is their agenda in trying to manage this? And what have you seen? What has it been like for you to live through that? And live through, you know, they poisoned the well of the UFO community. Did you get caught up in that at all? There's a million questions there. Well, I really saw it back around the mid-70s. I was seeing a lot of alternative activity going on and these things that Keele addressed, others were taken more and more seriously. And at one point, in an interview with Tim Beckley, Tim Beckley congratulated John Keele for his victory in, I think, largely writing in a magazine that had an international audience out of England called Flying Sauce Review for making a lot of other researchers aware of the paranormal psychic aspect of geophology, which was an accomplishment itself. And Keele didn't take a victory laugh. He said, no, actually, it's kind of a hollow victory. It's like opening Pandora's Box. He said, we've only made, you know, by doing this, the situation we discover is only much more complicated than we originally believed. So, I mean, it's, you know, and it seemed like back in the 70s, I really thought, okay, you got a parapsychologist named D. Scott Rogo, who is, you know, writing about all the things going on in geophology. He co-wrote a book with Ann Truffle of California on some abduction cases out in that state that several women, and he was putting up paranormal, you know, parapsychological spin on some of that. And he actually wrote, helped, turned out it was his distant cousin, Jeffrey Mishlove, of New Thinking Loud, who wrote the book The PK Man, a contactee named Ted Owens, who was quite an interesting character and could actually, you know, between the two of them, you know, Jeffrey and Jeffrey Mishlove and D. Scott Rogo, they pinned down a lot of testimonials from, I think, around 100 people who said they had actually witnessed UFOs. They had actually seen Owens make incredible predictions that come true. Even Jeff Mishlove has his own stories on that score. And even seen him go out and say, I'm going to make a lightning bolt during a storm, strike that building over there. And that was the only lightning bolt that struck the building. And he did that more than once. So, I mean, it's, I really thought, okay, you know, there's an awakening going on. And then people started pushing Roswell. It's in the area of 51 and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, where are we going now? Yeah. And so, I see some people now who are, it seems, quite promising. They're looking at this whole pair of UFO realm, but I don't know that it's got to be enough to break through the barrier that currently exists. Oh, that's what I'm asking about. You're not answering. What is the barrier? What is the barrier? We're going through, right now, we have to deal with Tom DeLong and Lou Elizondo. I mean, I always hammer on this and people don't care, but Lou Elizondo, Richard Doty 2.0, you know, behind the curtain, strawberry ice cream. Lou Elizondo, right, counterintelligence? That's the guy who's going to tell us the truth. Him and Peter Lavenda. Peter Lavenda, very kind of interesting past, very spook-related. So they're going to come out and they're going to say, hey, we got to find, we got to get to the bottom of this. Let's go talk to the CIA. I mean, the whole thing, if you step back, like you're laughing, well, come on, why are we laughing and why isn't, why are most people not laughing? Most people are like, really? What did Lou say on his Twitter today? I mean, you lived through all this, bullshit, over and over again. Yeah, you can't, you can't just put all your eggs in one basket. And probably one of the only, one of the biggest things to me was, was like Strangers, Strangers the Pentagon with all the, you know, the Bigelow site there, the Skinwalker Ranch and the fact of what they were describing, you know, and telling about and presumably very credible observers attesting to, in fact, they've seen and interacted with some sort of parasitic entities or whatever, paranormal events going on and UFO. And then it turns reflective and they're having poltergeist phenomena and apparitions that their homes with their families, their wives and kids are suddenly involved, you know, back in Virginia or wherever they live. And I thought, yeah, they call it the hitchhiker effect, but really that's what Keel called the reflective phenomena. And they're confirming that. I know other people, I'm not sure where they're headed with this, but I know there's a lot of people who are trying to figure out the propulsion system. I think it's a little, you know, that's still way on out there, but you know, I think everybody is entitled and needs to look at whatever aspect they need to, but let's not all jump on the same bandwagon and just say, oh, this is it, you know. And this is where... Yeah, they're, I hear you there, but I keep kind of... I'm gonna press you a little bit on this because like the skin walker thing is super interesting. Somebody go read... Go read Brent's book. Let me pull up the book, this one that I read. Go read this one. On the edge of reality, dream weavers, the mastering of space and time. All sorts of accounts of dream weavers, or skin walkers, right? I mean, you've had... I haven't even talked about this because there's so much more to talk about, but you've been very, very interested in the shamanic Native American traditions and they're telling these stories and it's not even telling the stories. They'll lived experience with these encounters and how they're even interwoven in their direct experience. Like, no, my cousin went out and was missing for four days and came back and said this kind of thing, but all as a community saw these four eagles and then they turned into spaceships and stuff. And then there was this shape-shifting beast that you have to be very fearful of because they have stolen children before. So, again, folks, like I said at the beginning, this is gonna sound scattered, but go look into Brent's stuff. There's a million different things to pull on here. I don't know if we wanna pivot over there, but we can't before I nail you down on the what's going on? What's going on with this so-called disclosure? They are, again, trying to control the narrative in an obvious way, you know? And it's like, you know, Grant Cameron and you know those guys, and, you know, Grant Cameron, this is another topic to talk about. Those guys have gone overboard on the consciousness thing or what your conversations are when you talk about the good ET, bad ET, the demonic, the evil, however you do that, I'm not a religious person, but why are we leaving that out of the equation? I mean, the Space Brothers thing plays great to a certain extent, but it don't play great when they're raping your wife. You know, I mean, that's that... Well, you informed consent at a different level in a previous life. Shit, that doesn't fly for most people. What is going on? What is going on with disclosure? Why would we trust these people? And the reason I brought up Grant Cameron, of course, is because he references the Wilbert Smith memo from back in the 50s when they go, hey, this is the most, you know, from the Canadians come down and write a memo back that gets released and the freedom of information, they say, I mean, you know all this stuff, they say this is the highest priority thing in the United States, higher than the hydrogen bomb. And by the way, there is this mental phenomenon aspect that they're very interested in. Hello, John Keel. Hello, John Mack. They saw it from the beginning. They've investigated it from the beginning. Why do we take this spoon feeding that they try and give us of showing a video here or that? What agenda do they have? Our United States government has in this latest round of disclosure, Brent, I'm nailing you down. What is their agenda? Well, I don't have a top-secret security level with the government, but I will say, it is a whole different position where we're hearing these days than back in the early days when it was there's no threat to national security and there's no evidence, no sufficient evidence to prove this is anything extraterrestrial. And now they're not saying extraterrestrial, but they leave the door open slightly, you know, that maybe it is their concern being that it is a threat to national security because there are craft and things in our skies we don't identify and they're doing things that seem extraordinary. Now, I just... Hold on. Hold on. Don't you think they're saying ET? They might not be using ET, but they're saying ET all over the place. And they're saying Skinwalker Ranch too. They're pushing that narrative out at the same time. They want you to let you know that all this stuff you've been talking about really is connected, but the... You know, they just released a dump to all the... And you know all this stuff, but they've released a bunch of documents on the genetic manipulation stuff, pregnancy stuff and stuff like that. So anyone who's really paying attention, yeah, they're not just trying to do the, oh, there's things in the sky thing. Yeah, there's not... I mean, we... Yeah, I was just talking with Greg Little, you know, I've been working with him since 85 with my magazine and many different projects. And he just came out with a book by Andrew Collins called Origins of the Gods, which is a real great book. And if you can interview either of those two we're both talking about that. They look at the shamans, they look at the modern UFO phenomenon, all of this quite deeply. And they're also both, like myself, had their own past interactions with Keel and all Keelian students, I guess you could say. And so a lot of their research investigations have always had Keel in the back of the mind too. But Greg had said that, you know, this whole thing with... And it's in a recent interview that's on my site for the September issue of AP Magazine.info. I was interviewing Greg about a variety of different phenomena. And he brought up about these Navy sightings and a lot of what they're seeing is in the infrared range. And he's thinking that maybe this was a black ops project and that they were able to, you know, like taking a flashlight and able to maneuver something this way and that way, making it appear like what you're seeing in the infrared is actually going at this tremendous speed when actually it's perhaps some sort of a plasma type thing or something. And it's not really, you know... I don't know about that, but I interviewed Kevin Day. I just mentioned him a minute ago. And he was the... Do you know who Kevin Day is? Was he one of the pilots or...? He was actually the radar operator. So he was directing the pilots. And his story is really kind of interesting in a couple of respects because number one, I like the term you used. I can't remember it, but I always think of Ray Hernandez and the thing where his wife is like this dramatic quasi spiritual experience with an ET. He walks down the stairs and he gets halfway downstairs. He goes, oh, there's nothing going on here. I should go up and go back to bed, which you are walking down the hallway and you're seeing these lights. Oh, nothing going on here. I'll go back to bed. Well, in the case of Kevin Day, he is the guy in charge. He's top gun guy running all the radar and really running all the planes that go up. They're on this operation for a week. These objects are trailing them for a week. He later remembers. And I asked him, I said, Kevin, don't you think it's curious that you didn't go to your CO before that? And there's a long pause. He goes, yeah, that is kind of strange. I mean, it's beyond strange. It's green memories. Strange. You are running this major drill out the ocean with all these ships and you see these things and they're keeping right alongside you for days. You know, and you don't do anything. And then the other part of it that I thought is interesting to remember this from the case or not, but there's this mental phenomenon thing. Like they have this meeting point in the sky that they'll go, right? And they go there and there's ET. So waiting on them. So there's something going on at the southern realm. And then the final thing about Kevin Day's story is he has the Valle Davis effect. He is devastated after this in a way that he doesn't even know. He comes back to San Diego and he winds up going to the VA and says, I don't know what this is, a post-traumatic stress, but it doesn't feel like that. Finally, somebody comes along goes, dude, you saw UFO. That's what it is. And you have all these, you know, strange kind of. So no, no, the tic-tac thing. And again, you know, the other thing Kevin Day, like I told you, it's in his security email on board the ship the day after all the videos. So I don't know. I mean, what intrigues me about it and the reason I keep pressing it is these are the issues we're dealing with today. You know, one world government, you know, you don't really have to worry about the United States anymore or we the people or any of that shit. This is the great reset. Global government really does make the most sense. It particularly makes sense from an ET perspective. From an ET perspective, it's the only way to go. You know, you don't need 147 little tribes out there with, right around with hatchets. It doesn't make any sense. The same thing with the global warming nonsense. Yes, the climate, I get it, all that stuff. But the only thing here about global warming is it's global. You've got to give up all your rights and we're going to track your carbon and get in line. Oh, that seems to be the agenda. And then the transhuman agenda, you know, take the jab, do what we say. We're going to, to me, they've kind of, that's the beauty of what they did with the pandemic is if there were any doubts that we had, they kind of laid out the plan and this is the plan. And to me, I just see direct parallels to disclosure again, because it's global. It's like as soon as they advanced that agenda, there's only one solution for it. It's not a US solution. It's not a Russia solution. It's a global solution. Is that resonating with you? You just don't like to talk about that stuff. Well, I, yeah, I, you know, it's like Star Trek, Federation of Planets, you know, and that's why that, I think that show back in the 60s had so much appeal to us because we're hopeful that that's where we're headed, you know, but here we are all these years later, thinking that we're becoming a more advanced society. You know, we've had all these good ideas that have sprung up from things like that. And then we see how people are, you know, are behaving, are misbehaving and other countries not wanting to get on board and be a part of what really needs to be done and bring all the tribes together. So I see you over there thinking. Well, you're not, you're not giving me much, which I get, you know, I mean, anything you say is going to be, well, number one, it's going to piss people off on one side or other. And number two, it's who knows, but man, I think we got to, we got to settle up and ride here and figure out, you know, lots of shit is happening really. Well, how are you processing the demonic part of this? Again, are you a religious guy or are you, I'm not, but I think the spirituality is fundamental to this. I look at people drawing parallels with near-death experience and other transformative spiritual experiences. And I'm like, I'm all for looking at the parallels. The next level is to look at the difference. Is there differences? Is there a moral imperative? Is there God? Is there right and wrong? Because the message that's being consistently, consistently fed into the culture is a crony and do-it-thou wilt. There really is no right or wrong. It's a moral construct. It's just, you know, transhumanism, no big deal. How are you, I don't know, how are you on all that? Yeah, I went and wrestled with a lot of these. You know, that's what's so interesting really about these experiences is they, they, it's not just the simplified version of you followed you that I initially thought it was. And I did it one time, decide to join a group up in Maine back in May of 1975, in Christ, in my life. And I'm sure it looks like I've backslidden since then. But I was, you know, Keel was actually a lifelong atheist, although said, said sometimes he, he told some that he thought maybe every once in a while he'd be an agnostic, you know, just in case you might be a little wrong. But he, he considered himself, instead of a ufologist, more of a demonologist because he was often trying to help contactees and experiences who thought felt that they were being manipulated and used by a devious intelligence that wasn't doing things for their best interest. And I asked him one time, and we were talking on the phone, I said, what about, and this is in my book, how about these cases of angels and such where it seems to have a positive spin? And he says, yeah, but they always end up sour in the end. He said, you know, in his view, so he didn't really see a lot of, a lot of hope there. But, you know, my wife is part Native American. We used to have a sweat lodge in our backyard. We've, in fact, when we first met, I drove her up to Pennsylvania. We met a Sikwana Hawk medicine man who claimed he was having ET encounters. In fact, they were part of his tribe's folklore, the Yiddishqor, he called him. They were very tall beings and they, his wife even drew out an envelope, a picture of the craft that landed behind their house, she said, and this was like back in 1961. And they came in, they had a bend over because, you know, they were so tall that they were going to bump their heads on the door. And he said, then they, they spoke to him and he told me, you know, a lot of his stories. And so I've been very interested since then and what Native Americans have to say, is shamans, medicine men or whatever. And not just a Native American culture, but I mean, it's, they're actually shamanic cultures going way back all over the world that have stories that relate to these kind of elements, contact with the sky beings, beings who came down from the heavens and communicated with the people, maybe prophets shamans and instructed them on how to try to develop a better, better future life. I taught them things about harvesting plants, how to build houses or pyramids or whatever. And, you know, trying to take all that into consideration along with people who claim to be channels and mediums and what they get. And then there's, you know, Chris, there's the trickster element, you know, and there's a being that as Greg would, that like in the, in the beginning of a vision quest or when someone's first encountering, say a UFO being or a spirit or whatever it may be, there's a trickster element where it seems like maybe it's testing you to determine what your intentions are. What's your worthy of true information or if you're just an egotistical person who has ulterior motives that aren't really exactly spiritual. So there's the test phase and he always felt that Betty Ederson Luca was perhaps a good contactee case example of that. In the beginning, her experiences were very frightening to her and then over time they seemed to strengthen her Christian beliefs and she had a level of acceptance. So he felt that as you, if you could navigate around the trickster, which he said that Carl Jung said that shamans were, that was their deal. They always tried to navigate around the trickster who could either direct them to higher levels of truth and understanding or could, you know, ensnare them in, you know, their own delusions and leave them where they found them. You know, I got really interested in the near death experience stuff and researching that again because I got interested in just the Christian stuff too because the Christian stuff, I don't know how you pack that back in but to me there's a history there that you've got to deal with. There's dogma that you have to deal with that doesn't square with history, you know, the historical Jesus. Like I am totally accepting of anyone who has a Christ consciousness experience. I'm not accepting of it because I'm a nice guy, although I am a nice guy, I'm not accepting of it because the evidence is pretty substantial that people have had these Christ consciousness experiences that they're transformative in ways that we can kind of measure from a social science standpoint, their life changes, everyone around them says their life changed and it stays for a long time. That is real. The history of Jesus just doesn't hold up. The books don't hold up. There's all sorts of Roman manipulation that's pretty clear when you look at it and writing a book with some other people on that right now. It's just clear. It's just clear that it was a PSYOP social engineering program that they did all the time. Why not? Better than using sticks and stones and swords to, you know, subjugate a population, give them the religion and this and that. But none of that doesn't mean that Christ consciousness isn't real, that whatever that means. So I'm interviewing this guy, David Ditchfield. Terrific guy has written a book. Saw Jesus in his near-death experience. Many, many people have seen have had a direct experience with Jesus. It always kind of confuses me a little bit when I talk to these people, I go, you experienced Christ consciousness and they go, no, no, it was Jesus. Like, okay, well, you know, Jesus is a historical figure that lived 2,000 years ago. So are you talking to me about like time slip or something like that? No, it wasn't. So you're talking about this being and this extended consciousness that's Jesus. Okay. I'm okay with that, but let's be clear that is Christ consciousness or you put another term on it. The point of the story is I go to David. I said, so David, Jesus countered it, had a mediumistic experience. They saw Jesus too. I said, David, you know, I've talked a lot of near-death experiences that have had multiple near-death experiences and some of them initially thought it was Jesus and then later felt that maybe there was something more and he paused for a minute, he goes, there might be something more. So this has been one of my areas of interest because like the only reason I do this frickin' show because I've done it for a long time, like you, I'm not a long, I don't have the history that you do, but I want to know how to live my life better. I want to know who I am, why I'm here, and what decisions I should make, you know, and fundamental to that is, is there a moral imperative? Is there a hierarchy to this consciousness? Is there good and evil? And I think there is, and I get pissed off when people do the Crowley, Alistair and we'll do it thou wilt because really there's no, I don't see the evidence for that. I see the evidence for hierarchy of consciousness, moral imperative, there is God, there is good. I see it all over the place, but I don't see it in a strict reading of Christianity. To me, you want to talk about trickster, it's like it's a history of tricksterism. So this is the stuff I think that we have to sort out and ET only confuses the issue even the shamanic experiences that you're talking about. I mean, you know, the starting point for the shamanic thing is great, you got all this info and they still came in and trampled over your culture and just destroyed you, you know, it just destroyed you. Why no heads up on that? And that's the question we could ask about God all the time, you know, why does God seem different but times when he should be joining on the side of the good. And those are questions we'll never answer, but I still feel compelled to try and poke at those questions and nudge closer about is there good or evil? Is there God? How is that working in the state we're collecting? There's physics and consciousness. It's the two areas that really we need really serious focus and attention, scientists the academics that are jumping on this, but yet, you know what is the x-factor that unites them? Like synchronicity, non-causal coincidence, there's something there that seems to connect, but yet it's, you know, we don't really know what it is yet. We haven't yet identified what this is. We know that when a person has an experience because like near-death experiences, Carlos Ossis and one of his colleagues wrote a book about cases of near-death experiences in India and then compared them to near-death experience in the United States and there were variances, you know, they would they would be the Buddha or something, and yet there were similarities and there were slight differences affected by culture. A person has a UFO contact experience or an in, you know, like all these other experiences and it seems to be like, it seems like an intelligence interacting, but also it affects, you know, it conforms to our expectations and things, and that's how it gets gets by us and embedded in our thoughts and our lives and so I think it could be an actual interactive intelligence and then it waits to see how we're going to react and yet it can read us and so then it, you know, it goes from there and we don't really know sometimes how much is it and how much is us like that, like a gentleman you just talked about, like, you know, you had to point it out to him, do you really think that is Christ or a representation of Christ's consciousness, something else higher or is it part of your own unconscious that's, you know, your expectations of what you've been told was the real deal here, what you were told or you're conditioned through your culture or spiritual background is the answer, you know, because a lot of people enter these experiences unexpectedly and their brain is like trying desperately, I'm sure, to put this in some kind of a context or framework and so I find myself trying to connect the dots but also at the same time I have a hesitancy to just jump in and say aha, it's this or it's that, you know, with certainty and Keel was certainly a good I realized a good springboard to use to actually delve into things and interview people who had known him and actually take my own involvement tutor to say, yes, these are really valid areas to look into and there's still so much we don't know and it would be, it's like a spiritual journey, you're going through it I'm going through it, lots of people are going through it and sometimes it's like beating our head into a wall trying to address the contradictions and the, yeah, I just read some discussions people had on Facebook about the Bible and different things it says contradict one another, it says a book of contradictions it's very very difficult to, you know, and then was a Native American who was telling my wife and I one time says Peter, Paul and Mary, you know, in the Bible those are really good Catholic names, you know why didn't they have names more like, you know, you would expect from that part of the world and there's a lot of a lot of good questions that sometimes it takes someone from another culture to really framework correctly where you say, oh, well yeah, I guess, you know, but when you grow up with it sometimes you're just sort of, you're too relaxed in your acceptance of different things and then something like, I know Key always wrote in different parts, you know, say you're out one day strolling around your yard and suddenly this flying saucer looks like a flying saucer lands and this silver-suited humanoid being walks up to you and tells you from Venus at that point you're going to say you're not real, you know you're going to become one of those space-age messiahs, you know, you're going to be you're going to be the local nut in town and how do you how do you process that, you know, so bravo, you know, like like you said, Brent, you know, you're on the spiritual journey Yeah, and I can't really advise, you know I think the you know, and I'm I still find it's hard for me to advise anyone else exactly, you know and a real clear path to take because I think you have to it's got to be a kind of a path where you have to allow yourself to kind of mix things up and ask the questions like you've been asking and the questions, you know, that a lot of people just get on one path and they stick there and I thank my lucky stars I guess that early on as a young man in my teens, I was able to interact with John Keel and that took me in a whole different set of directions and you know, Keel to the end, Keel wrote me and said after my book my first book, Visitors from Hidden Realms came out 2004, I sent him a copy of my book and he said that essentially I had followed a path that he had but he said in the end we don't know we really don't know anymore, I said churches are not really religions have failed us and all and we don't have any definite solid answers he said the best that I could offer in my writings was speculation and you know it was kind of a a heartfelt and somewhat depressing letter I felt that he had written, you know well, that's an atheist there's no hope and I certainly I always tell people I want to be a little more upbeat positive than Keel was, even though I highly respected the the direction that he took and I understand the complications and contradictions that that befall us all and trying to tie this up into a neat little package and they're really in their minds there's a lot of people think they've got that package but in my mind it's very complex and a lot of it is very tricker trickster like yeah, we'll head towards wrapping it up but I can't resist you know one of my favorite points on that is Albert Camus who philosopher this kid kind of interpreted a lot of different ways but there's only one philosophical question in suicide and that's what I always lay out to atheists really, you think life is meaningless you think you're a biologic robot in meaningless universe no you don't you got up, you took your head off the pillow today, you made that decision so don't tell me this agnostic bullshit you're not agnostic, you're here you took another breath you took another step you're a believer just like me you just want to play hide and seek with well I'm not really sure I don't really know kind of stuff I like the believers whether they're Christians or Cherokee whatever the hell what else could you be other than a believer it's just moving from one belief to another being fluid about it long as they're genuine and authentic not just trying to make money and be a televangelist or something yeah, yeah, yeah those are the ones you got to look up for so well, you're obviously not going to stop with this but let me pull it up here where are you going with this work and again there's so much here I do I have to come back and bring back folks to you can go read all those books but go to ap magazine dot info and just type something in that search bar anything you want related to this topic you're going to be amazed like I was it's like that was driving me nuts when I was preparing for this interview every time I did I had three or four other you know complete articles I had to read a million questions to ask go there and that will lead you towards these remarkable books we talked a lot about the John Keel book amazing and three of those books are mine the others are by Greg Little who has been working with me as co-editor publisher columnist for since 1985 when I first started this magazine as periophilogy forum which was a print magazine then we actually Greg was co-editing with me up to about you know 2000 we did have a print magazine which about 58 pages it was quite spectacular we had subscribers all over the world we had magazine distributors from coast to coast but you know everybody's gone to the internet book sales on set can you go to a bookstore now, Barnes & Nobles or you know books a million and find a UFO book it's very hard or magazine now it's like it's gone to you know high ching books or witchcraft or crystal or something it's it used to be able to go and there'd be all these magazines UFO universe or sagas UFO report and so on and fake magazine it's still published but it's very very I guess you just have to subscribe to it I never see it on a book stand anymore and it's a whole whole new world it is and it's pluses and minuses and the medium is the massage and the medium is the message to quote Marshall McLuhan and there definitely was I don't know enough to remember there was something about getting that magazine and I didn't read a lot of UFO magazines but sitting down and knowing that you were going to have that page turning experience and going through and just sitting in a comfortable place all that stuff we have lost that but we've gained some stuff too you know we can search now and that search bar that search bar is what we've gained so you know there's the there's the trade off so what's caught your interest lately where do you want to go where do we expect to see you go in the next year or two I am thinking about running another keel book describing maybe a little starting out with a little more of where I where I started from as a teenager bringing that forward you know some road trips I took and different things and what happened and how I became as diluted as I am today you know and and then present cases that additional cases that I did in the keel book that you know they just don't fit the mainstream nuts and bolts ET theme but they're out there and they seem to cross over to all these other unusual phenomena they seem to be a part of it it's just our mindset has tried to pigeonhole them where we wanted if it's not what we want to hear we shelve it away or put it in a circular file and forget about it but I want to be one of those people who keeps putting it out there under people's noses so they can't avoid it now we got and one of the good things about today these times is like you and I being able to sit here and converse face to face even though it's through a digital system it's more personal and you know back in the day you had to drive miles to get to see and talk with someone or attend a conference you know and of course we still fortunately have a few conferences they're coming back after you know a couple years of interruption with covid but anyway even during that we still had this and this is great and thank you for having me on to talk with you sorry I couldn't provide maybe the answers and insights that you were trying to get right I don't know you tipped your hand right there at the end which is I get it you let your writing do the talking you just put it out there here's another case and I love your interviews they're incredibly in depth and you elicit so much information in a very non-judgmental way and you just put it out there so that's what you're about now I get it it just took me an hour and a half you just put it out there let everyone kind of have at it but it's out there you gotta deal with it you know it's there I can't I can't say what it's all about I really don't know I'm still after 55 and a little over half you know years I'm still struggling it's still a challenge but I know there's something to it and I hadn't even talked about I guess you read it but you know I've after keels pass and I thought what a loss and so on and it was a contact experiencer I met named Brett Oldham a little over 10 years ago now and and he introduced me to this EVP method called EVP method electronic voice phenomena called ghost box which was based on the early Frank's box if anyone familiar with it I mean we were getting John Keel after he had died coming I read I read a little bit about the story you and your son and your wife right in the spirit box and please go back to John please go back to John Keel always your daughter I'm sorry please go back to John Keel right yeah I mean okay I was you know I had tried EVP things in the past and didn't have much any success really I was I was more the debunker than anything but suddenly we did these sessions with him and he was he was a person who from age five had seen a ghost age five had seen a gray which he first thought was a demon and had other contact experiences and psychics it was a ghost time that's how I met him first didn't even tell me in the beginning that he was a person of he had this method he seemed to be able to work with the ghost box which is a digital radio from Radio Shack you can get one and just adjust it where it goes on continuous scan and the idea is the white noise you'll pick up these voices and I let we got together one time and this was right after my daughter had a young boy named Connor and so I babysit so I sat out on the first session and let my wife and daughter go in because they're really interested in this kind of thing as well and go on ghost hunts and they told me that some voice said Joan and then said Jesse and Jesse was a deceased brother and so that was rather odd so I said okay I'll go and attend next time we have a gathering and next time I'm sitting there in the basement of an old supposedly slightly haunted church over in Fayetteville, Tennessee and we're doing this and I am thinking of John Keele well at the very end of it at the very end of this Brett Oldham says okay Joan I hear you know let's go ahead and see if we can get your brother Jesse we're about to wind this up and he even tells that on the tape and he says Jesse are you there can you say something to Joan I'm paraphrasing here but anyway instead of her brother coming through it's Keele, Johnny and and the thing is I was there I didn't hear that it was only later that I found a stack of cassette tapes and I was trying to figure out what's here and this is like five months six months later and I put it in the recorder oh that's a ghost box session I realized oh that's the first one we did and then I hear that that one little sliver and I'm like oh so anyway by that time I'd heard John Keele a number of times coming through the ghost box and suddenly I was you know I had to get one in my own hands now my daughter's husband likes technological challenges so he went to Radio Shack and he modified one and we had us a ghost box in no time and found out that we could be sitting at the house and from time to time we'd get John Keele one time got John Keele Brent and then another voice says Bert here and Bert was a psychiatrist who studied parapsychology and UFOs was a good friend of John Keele and I had corresponded with him for quite a number of years also several decades and he had just died shortly after I started this ghost box thing and so for a while we were hearing Dr. Swarth sounded like coming through and we were hearing John Keele so much that my wife one time said John I would like to talk to some of my people could you quit trying to hog you know and then I didn't hear from John Keele too much after I was afraid she ticked him off but you know just the idea I mean it was so clear and I even shared some of the audio with Dan Dresden who was mentioned several times in the Mothman Prophecy. Dan was a documentary film producer he had just seen a UFO back in 67 and he was interested in the subject and a friend of his said John Keele because they both lived in New York City is doing a talk on UFOs you just saw I wanted to go talk with him so he went talk with him ended up they they hit it off they became friends he traveled to Point Pleasant West Virginia four times in 1967 along with Keele to Point Pleasant West Virginia interviewed some of the you know talked with witnesses saw phenomena he was even this is this is Mothman location right just this is Mothman location yeah yeah and and you know he said the voice actually sounds kind of like John Keele to me such you know and he has he also by the way he has since produced a documentary on EVPs and such in a video called Calling Earth so just you know by this interest it is quite a quite a good video and that's how I tracked him down you know I was watching one of his videos and all that I've been on the radar for this guy for quite some time turned out this is the guy so I interviewed him for the book as well and he had seen UFOs he saw he saw one of the classic encounters described by Keele where they're all seeing a UFO I think they're standing in an airport around Point Pleasant and it goes behind a cloud and they're waiting for it to come out the other side instead of the UFO it's a noisy airplane that comes out of the cloud and Keele mentioned it in the Mothman Proxies too you know and so anyway, that's but I've had some very interesting to me anyway EVP responses it seems intelligent it's interactive but it's like it's it never tells me anything that's really revealing, just that it knows it's interacting with me, that it's teasing me like. And after four years of just being like doing two sessions a week and then spending hours going through the audio, it's like, Okay, I'm going to do this. But not as obsessive as I have because there are cases to investigate. You know, I got equipped and keel himself even talked about such things, wrote about such things. He he knew an instance where someone had been with a psychic medium and this voice came through and he said it's exactly like this person he knew. But keel said, No, no, it's, it's, it's a trickster phenomenon, they can mimic voices. So I can't say that this is john keel, I'd like to say, you know, maybe but oh, one of the things that did sound like john keel's voice was one time, knowing how keel told people exactly what he thought he was straight, he shot straight, he didn't mince words. And there were people he really argued with in the field. So I said, We're gonna play a game, john. I'm gonna mention some names and you tell me what you think. So I deliberately selected some that I knew would be juicy. And but what I didn't know is when I played the tape back at the beginning. I said, You want to hear what you'll say about him? This voice that to me sounded like john keel because I talked with him on the phone some. And it said, And what I'd like to say about you, you know, and it wasn't really a class A recording, but I had my headphones on. And I heard it, I heard it, you know, and to me, it was that was a pretty clear enough that I could hear it and identify it sounding like his voice and saying those words. And I just thought, Wow, but anyway, hey, Brent, find the final question can't resist, you know, from a spiritual perspective, you can get this from the Christian deep thinkers, as well as kind of more into yogic and non dual, but kind of not attached to anything I just, but don't mess with this stuff. You don't want you don't need this stuff. It's just a distraction. It's, I'm not saying that I'm saying, what do you think about that? What do you think about, you know, the stillness within is really all we need. And everything like that is a distraction is fundamentally going to remove you from the path. What you really got to do is, you know, go hug your daughter, go ahead to your grandkids, be nice to people, love everyone, tell the truth. And of course, we're fascinated with all that stuff. What do you think about that in general as a spiritual principle? Are we being distracted from what really matters? Yeah, I think sometimes, you know, that's the positive side of this that some people get and they, the people that are distracted, but, you know, people like myself and, and like you, I'm sure we, we like to analyze, you know, it deeper. There's some people that become like faith healers, very spiritual, and they're always saying and doing really positive things. And, you know, I try, but I know I'm no saint. I was in the Navy and I sometimes use, you know, kind of like a sailor, you know, but it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, you'd like to give a clear message, say, this is where you got to go and this is what you got to do, you know, it's what gurus and religious leaders, shamans are supposed to educate their, their tribe, their clan, their, their people. But at the end, I remember Keele was being interviewed in 2003, when he attended the Moss Man Festival in West Virginia. And someone asked him, I think that question, he says, something like, I think sometimes, you know, people are better off if they don't even get into this stuff. And I remember some Keele fans who were like, Well, why do you say that? This is great stuff. I love it. But yeah, sometimes I think if, you know, maybe it was, it might be better just to try to embrace a love for people and do things with integrity and honesty. And, and, but it's, I've just been so anchored into this, this subject and looking for the meaning and the, and the connecting the dots. Sometimes I think I'd almost like to depart from the and maybe work on science fiction, something where I could have finally, even though it's fictional, you know, I could present an answer. This seems Well, yeah, I think, I think, as I said at the very beginning, it's hard for me not to believe that you're not doing exactly what you're supposed to do. I mean, 14 years old, that you know, junk, that just is too remarkable for me. Well, at 14. And before that, I mean, I was into all kinds of things. And I was like, sometimes it felt like I was in a different thing each week, you know, but I was always kind of interested in, I mean, the year before UFOs, they'd been in the news a lot, I look out the sky hoping I might catch one, I was interested in astronomy, I was interested in dinosaurs, I was interested in all kinds of things. They even wanted to be, I even liked the idea of maybe having a carnival, you know, but for some reason, along came that book by Frank Edwinson. I decided I'm going to become what I later found out was a ufologist, whatever that is. But anyway, here I am, all these years later, 70 years old, still hammering away at, as John Keele said, this can of worms. Well, it's been just awesome having you on print. And I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me on. And, and I've, I've already thanked Bob Davis for putting my name in the hat there with you. So appreciate it. Thanks again to Brent Reigns for joining me today on skeptical. I know it kind of bounced around a lot in this interview. So it might be hard to pin down a question. But if I did, I'd kind of go back to the shaman Native American thing and just ask what your thoughts are in terms of how we should deal with that body of knowledge about ET about UFO, because it comes in hot, it comes in strange, it doesn't fit. And then in some ways it does fit with a lot of the other narratives that are getting forced down our throat right now. So if you're into a kind of level three discussion on that, come join me on the skeptical form or track me down and let me know your thoughts. As always, love to hear from you. Until next time. Take care and bye for now.