The iconoclasitc and prolific writer John Shirley has been a friend of mine for over a decade now. We first met when he noticed me laughing at a line in a David Jacobs lecture at the Orange County MUFON meeting in 1994. While most of the crowd reacted with disapproval, John walked over to my table and introduced himself.

He later wrote a ficitonal piece called “Abducting Aliens” for my magazine, involving a SubGenius wildman who grabs cattle-mutilating aliens and rams things up their rear ends for fun. He used to write a segment on his website called “The Skeptical Believer,” where he examined a multitude of paranormal issues.

Since then, Shirley has written a modern UFO novel (Silicon Embrace), and horror and cyberpunk novels such as Spider Moon, Crawlers, The Other End, and Black Glass. He has also written television, movie, and graphic novel scripts, most notably the script for the original Brandon Lee Crow movie. He was also the recipient of the Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers of America for his 1998 short story collection entitled Black Butterflies.

For this, John’s second appearance on the show, we talked about his frustration with UFO sightings and researchers, his belief that most if not all crop circles are made with boards and rope, and his interest in esoteric spirtituality such as the writings and teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. I don’t agree with John on many issues; he appears to take things with more of a grain of salt than I do, but so what? We also discussed the BP oil spill, drug legalization, and his musical accomplishments with Blue Oyster Cult and various punk bands.

John says that his next appearance on Radio Misterioso will be his interview of me. I can’t wait.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

L to R: Don Ecker, Rear Admiral Zorgrot, Paul Kimball

Two friends traveled to the studio to join Walter and I for a long (2.5 hour) conversation that ranged far. Don Ecker is best known as the research director for UFO Magazine in the 1990s. He currently hosts Dark Matters Radio, which airs weekdays from 10-midnight PST at Cyberstation USA. Paul Kimball returned for his fourth appearance on the show. Film writer/ producer Paul is probably best known to our audience from his film Best Evidence: The Top 10 UFO Sightings, and his website The Other Side Of Truth.

All of us are currently associated with the Paracast program in various roles as occasional guests or co-hosts. Walter is involved in a small controversy on the Paracast community forums, which we discussed last week, and should be posted soon.

The rare face-to-face meeting of thougthful minds who are all interested in the paranormal gave me an excuse as a host to guide the conversation to areas that I wanted to hear about, such as Don’s stories about middle eastern jinns, Paul’s journey from confirmed skeptic to near-believer during the filming of his latest TV series on ghosts, and Walter’s experiences in the Air Force and FBI. Praise and scorn was also heaped on various personalities in the UFO field.

The show was a lot of fun, Walter brought pizza, I brought beer, and we hope you enjoy the show.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Darren has been a friend of mine for a very long time. When we met, we were both embarking on journeys of self-discovery, mainly through the writings of people like Robert Anton Wilson and Israel Regardie. Most listeners of this program know Wilson’s work. Regardie is known as the great scribe and philosopher of the Golden Dawn system of Western Ritual Magick. Both Darren and I were enrolled in schools of Western Occult studies, and realized that it was one of the oldest forms of self-therapy.

Darren has also been a composer/ musician for most of his adult life. We talked about influences on our lives and thinking and Darren played selections from his new CD This Old Life. We also talked about (and listened to) his musical influences such as Captain Beefheart, Robrert Johnson and singer/songwriter Pat MacDonald (formerly of the band Timbuk 3.)

We ended with a discussion about the influence of comedy on our lives and philosophies. I played part of a recording I made of a performance from the legendary Tony Clifton from a couple of weeks before.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Mac Tonnies, Paul Kimball, and Nick Redfern, 2006.

On Sunday, November 1st, Paul Kimball and Nick Redfern joined me to celebrate the life of our friend Mac Tonnies, who was found dead in his Kansas City apartment on October 22nd, apparently of natural causes.

The sense of great loss was still with us as we discussed Mac’s sharp intellect, great sense of humor and his effect on us and others interested in the fields of UFO study, forteanism, and futurism. He was also a damn good science fiction writer. His ideas on the UFO subject were refreshingly non-dogmatic and evinced a refusal to toe the extraterrestrial party-line.

Mac had so much more to give, but we’ll have to be content with his memory, internet output and published writings and his forthcoming book on his Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis, due out in the spring. We hope this program was a fitting memorial to our late, dear friend.

The program begins and ends with recordings of Mac reading from the draft of his new book. For other Radio Misterioso interviews featuring Mac Tonnies, look here and here.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

If you read the description over at top left of the page there, this show is supposed to alternate interviews with “weird music and audio.” Here’s a great example.

Straight from his excellent blog Music For Maniacs, “Mr. Fab” joined us for two solid hours of musical strangeness on October 25th. Notable tracks played included a reggae song about Apollo 11, four or five old UFO drop-in songs (think “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman), sounds from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, elephants playing xyolphones and theremins, a mashup of the Muppets and the Stray Cats, Sad Kermit, and music from L. Ron Hubbard.

Enjoy!

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Peter Robbins and Nick Redfern. Not pictured: Tim Binnall

Three past guests joined us for two hours of conversation about the Mass Mystery Weekend which took place on October 16th and 17th in Boston. Tim Binnall was co-organizer and the MC for the UFO lectures, and discussed the joys and problems of running a conference. At the conference, Nick spoke on UFO crashes and also about his research into the chupacabras and Peter talked about his famous research into the Bentwaters UFO landing case.

We spent the show discussing the conference itself, the guests’ recent work, the divide between those interested in UFOs and those who follow other aspects of the paranormal, and possible directions that research can go in the future. We also debated the pluses and minuses of the Disclosure movement, and Peter spoke about the possible use of Reichian Cloudbusters by the U.S. military.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

This is Chris O’Brien’s fourth appearance on Radio Misterioso (since February of 2005) this time to promote and discuss his new book Stalking The Tricksters. The book is a thorough examination of the trickster archetype and its connection to the sort of paranormal events that O’Brien investigated for over a decade in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Chris’ theory is that most, if not all sightings of UFOs, abductions, cryptozoological creatures, ghosts, and other strange events that challenge our collective ideas of reality are the result of a control system that operates on a symbolic level to shock us out of our emotional and intellectual complacency.

We talked about the trickster archetype, more as a force of the collective psyche than a clownish imp prancing about the countryside. Appropriately, the importance of humor and the court jester figure came up–the comedian whose job it is to tell the truth, couched in jokes–so that we can recognize and deal with serious problems.

Chris also discussed his recent work with officials of the Zuni tribe of western New Mexico, and a strange sandstone tablet recently unearthed on the Zuni reservation which appears to have Tibetan or Sanskrit letters carved into it.

We concluded with a discussion of why the paranormal is so compelling and why people would spend their lives in pursuit of something that may never have any conclusion.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Sesh Heri is the author of three intriguing books. Two are fictional adventure stories based on (but extrapolating from) historical facts. The first title, Wonder of the Worlds, follows inventor Nikola Tesla, illusionist Harry Houdini, and author Mark Twain as they  wage interplanetary war against a shadowy Martian race. The next novel in the trilogy, Metamorphosis, looks at Houdini and writer Jack London as they try and trace the origins of a sinister extraterrestrial organization, and how this group controls Earthly events. The third novel in the trilogy is due this fall.

In this program we talked about the historical events that Heri used to construct his storylines, and the inner personalities of the characters. What forces control new inventions and how they are used? How are inventions created? Heri has a radical view of how these events transpire, and presents us with the idea that new ideas are not always due to endless trial and error, and may come into existence through inspiration or theft from others who cannot play the political games involved to claim due credit.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Micah Hanks is the man behind the Gralien Report, co-host of the pocast Speaking of Strange, and all-around interdisciplinary pararnormalist.

Micah has sent along a list of topics which we went through, which included stories of the strange “bloop” sound which was picked up by pacific ocean hydrophones in the 1990s (and which some attribute to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu!) and whose acoutic signature has been theorized as coming from “a mammal large enough to swallow a blue whale.” We also talked about other strange undersea cryptids, the “old days” of the Art Bell show, Micah and Josh Warren’s paranormal research group, “mothman” reports from around the world, the work of Nikola Tesla and the possibility that some fiction writers (like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) may have been “remote viewers” because of their prophetic stories.

Damn good show.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso

Meeting Keel in New York 10/28/02

Kenn Thomas recently sent along a recording of an interview he conducted with the late John Keel from 1992. I played the recording on the July 19th show. Due to many requests for a downloadable version, I have obtained permission from Kenn to post the file for free and perpetual public access.

The interview features Keel at his cranky best, skewering UFO fans in particular and paranormal dilettantes in general. He also mentions a few things that I found surprising, such as his contention that Kenneth Arnold originally witnessed only bright lights from at least 50 miles away when Arnold officially opened the modern age of flying saucers with his sighting on June 24th, 1947. Keel says that publisher Ray Palmer had Arnold add details that were not originally reported, and that UFO fans have been extrapolating the facts ever since. I believe that there are interviews with Arnold that include more details than just “bright lights” (or reflections) before he wrote about the experience for the first issue of Fate magazine ion 1948 and four years later in The Coming Of The Saucers, which were both published by Palmer.

Keel also argues for his fugo balloon theory of the Roswell crash, which should still piss off a lot of people, which is just how old John would have wanted it. Keel was in an adversarial position with the ufological rank-and-file from the beginning, which made him a bit impatient with those he thought were stuck in a hopelessly bankrupt belief system, but his theories are still valid with respect to things that have not been explained to everyone’s satisfaction. If you can find a copy of his landmark book Operation Trojan Horse, I would highly recommend that you read it.

The interview was conducted on July  12, 1992.

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Radio Misterioso

Radio Misterioso