The Paracast Newsletter
August 20, 2023
www.theparacast.com
Historian/Paranormal Researcher Neil R. Storey Reveals Details of Bram Stoker, Author of "Dracula," Jack the Ripper and Amazing UK UFO Encounters on The Paracast!
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive podcast, After The Paracast, plus an enhanced version of The Paracast with the network ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Flash! Use the coupon code ufo20 to receive a 20% discount on five-year or lifetime subscriptions. And PayPal now accepts cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in payment. And if you don't want to use PayPal, we now also offer a second payment option, from Stripe, which accepts major credit or debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. For "qualified users," you can also take advantage of Pay Later options, so act now! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode: Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present Neil R. Storey, an award winning historian, lecturer and adventurer with a canon of over 50 published books. He has led paranormal investigations at some of the most haunted and historic sites across Britain since 1988. After uncovering some fascinating new material, his new book (due for publication 2024) will chart the UFO phenomena in Britain from the early 20th Century to the present day. During the interview, he will reveal his own UFO encounter. He will also talk about his book "Bram Stoker, Author of Dracula: An Illustrated Biography" and, also, the Jack the Ripper legend. A popular speaker at paranormal and dark history conferences, Neil appears as guest expert on TV and radio shows and is a regular historian on the multi-award winning "Help My House is Haunted!" In his precious little leisure time, he enjoys good food and wine and is a keen swordsman.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on August 20: Historian and paranormal researcher Neil R. Storey reveals to Gene and cohost Tim Swartz details of his ongoing ghost hunting in the UK, and stories about alleged demonic entities, such as the so-called "Black-Eyed Kids." Does denying a request to enter your home from a suspicious being protect you from evil? Neal is also the author of “Bram Stoker, Author of Dracula: An Illustrated Biography." He has led paranormal investigations at some of the most haunted and historic sites across Britain since 1988 and is also the creator of the "Grim Almanac" series of books the first ever series of books to chart the ghosts, dark deeds and and folkloric history of Britain by county and the author of the ground-breaking "Dracula Secrets" and such volumes as "Jack the Ripper's London," "London Crime Death and Debauchery," "The Victorian Criminal," "The Little Book of Murder" and "The Little Book of Death."
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Visit our new online shop for great branded merchandise at: https://www.theparacast.shop, and check out our new YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheOfficialParacastChannel.
The Puppeteers of Ufology
Guest Editorial by Curt Collins
Anyone else feel whipsawed by UFO news from Washington, DC? The U.S. government shut down UFO investigations with Project Blue Book in 1969, forevermore, it seemed. In 2017 we were told the Pentagon had quietly gotten back into the game in 2007 with a UFO program still underway. After that, it was superseded by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), then the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) of today. The hype indicated that all these government efforts were in response to increased UFO activity, but the driving force behind it was a group of people with an agenda.
While working as a consultant for Blue Book in the early 1960s, Dr. J. Allen Hynek gathered an informal network with UFO researchers he called “The Invisible College.” Prominent among this group was French computer scientist Jacques Vallee.
In 1972, Vallee met Dr. Harold Puthoff, who conducted government-sponsored psychic experiments (later christened remote viewing). The network expanded in the years that followed as Puthoff introduced Vallee to Dr. “Kit” Green and other colleagues who shared an interest in UFOs and paranormal topics.
Flash forward to 1995, when this confederation was given key roles in the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), founded by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow. Two more key players came in then, biologist Colm Kelleher and physicist Eric Davis.
“Skinwalker Ranch” was the most notable thing to come out of NIDS, a Utah property purchased by Bigelow in 1996 as a living laboratory to study paranormal phenomena. In 2004, Bigelow shuttered NIDS, citing lack of activity. Hunt for the Skinwalker was published the next year, written by Colm Kelleher of NIDS and Bigelow’s de facto publicist, George Knapp. Two employees in the U.S. intelligence community were fans of the book, and with the help of Senator Harry Reid, NIDS was reborn as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Bigelow received funding in 2008 for paranormal studies with a government contract disguising it as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).
Overlapping this period, UFO advocate Leslie Kean published UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, in 2010. Kean’s book sought to rebrand UFOs as the more serious-sounding terminology UAP, and her venture was endorsed by AAWSAP contractors Puthoff and Green. To appeal to a mainstream audience, Kean eschewed the baggage of alien contact and the paranormal, focusing solely on conservative nuts-and-bolts UFO reports from credentialed individuals.
After the $22 million funding ran out, AAWSAP formally ended in 2012. According to Luis Elizondo, under his leadership the project was refocused solely on UFOs and renamed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), continuing as an unfunded project on a spare time basis.
Meanwhile, “The Invisible College” needed new funding. Tom DeLonge was famous for his music with Blink-182 but wanted to diversify and set out to create a UFO-based entertainment franchise, “a science-fiction Disney for millennials.”
DeLonge connected with Hal Puthoff, who became co-founder of To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They recruited some talent from the Bigelow circle, including Colm Kelleher, Dr. Garry Nolan (a Kit Green associate), and former government insider Chris Mellon. The real coup was landing Luis Elizondo, who resigned from his Pentagon job to join DeLonge’s team in late 2017 as “Director of Global Security.”
Leslie Kean joined her friend Mellon in promoting the TTSA message to the press, focusing on AATIP and Elizondo with UFOs as a threat, a National Security issue. The Bigelow connection was minimized, and the spooky paranormal Skinwalker Ranch stuff was omitted.
They scored big with a story in The New York Times, the most sensational aspect was the claim that exotic metamaterials had been recovered from UFOs. This was later enhanced when Eric Davis said he’d briefed officials about the retrieval of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
TTSA didn’t raise the funds they’d expected through investors and Elizondo and Mellon left the ailing husk to become independent activists. Elizondo gave lots of podcast interviews and courted a cult of followers on Twitter, but has since retreated from the public eye, supposedly working hard at finishing his UFO book. Behind the scenes, Mellon has been networking with politicians to shape the legislation establishing the goals of AARO.
To date, there have been three public events with testimony given to Congressional members. The first was with Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, the second with AARO’s director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, which is focused primarily on incidents involving military personnel and equipment that includes recorded data. They stated that while more data was needed, no evidence proved that UAP encounters represented anything extraterrestrial.
The third event was dramatically different, featuring testimony from two military UFO witnesses — and a whistleblower who claimed all the UFO evidence needed was being covered up. David Grusch was an intelligence officer who became interested in the UFO topic with the 2017 hype, becoming a participant in the UAPTF, part of the circle with Knapp, Elizondo, Davis and company.
When going public, it was Leslie Kean presenting his story. Grusch testified he’d heard from anonymous government program participants about billions of taxpayer dollars being used to fund secret projects, and about people being threatened and killed to hide the secrets of the extraterrestrial craft and the non-human bodies.
Grusch stated he hoped that “the Non-Human Reverse Engineering Programs I have reported will act as an ontological (earth-shattering) shock, a catalyst for a global reassessment of our priorities.”
However, Grusch’s secondhand claims are nothing new. It closely resembles the fraudulent material in Frank Scully's 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, about captured UFOs and the bodies of little men from Venus. Other portions seem right out of the 1990s, from Philip Corso's fanciful book, The Day After Roswell — or episodes of The X-Files. Reruns.
The most recent Congressional Hearing was driven by input from the network of UFO activists, with personalities, and their lobbyists, who are pushing to contaminate the inquiry with sensational claims dredged from the dustbin of UFO folk tales.
When it comes to UFOs, the government was not the answer in the past, and probably never will be. We've got some private UFO organizations, but they can be hamstrung by their own bureaucracy, their focus on unrealistic agendas, or by the pressure to maintain an audience to survive. Ufology’s greatest failure has been choosing the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the answer and trying to make the evidence fit that conclusion. That, and the belief the government “Disclosure” will reveal and solve everything.
It’s time to put emotions and expectations aside and follow where the evidence leads. I think our best hope comes from independent civilians, whether working alone or in collaboration, to keep investigating UFOs and researching with an open mind.
Curt Collins writes on the UFO mystery, as well as its legends and hoaxes, at the websites: The Saucers That Time Forgot and Blue Blurry Lines. He is also an occasional guest co-host at The Paracast.
Copyright 1999-2023 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
August 20, 2023
www.theparacast.com
Historian/Paranormal Researcher Neil R. Storey Reveals Details of Bram Stoker, Author of "Dracula," Jack the Ripper and Amazing UK UFO Encounters on The Paracast!
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive podcast, After The Paracast, plus an enhanced version of The Paracast with the network ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Flash! Use the coupon code ufo20 to receive a 20% discount on five-year or lifetime subscriptions. And PayPal now accepts cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in payment. And if you don't want to use PayPal, we now also offer a second payment option, from Stripe, which accepts major credit or debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. For "qualified users," you can also take advantage of Pay Later options, so act now! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode: Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present Neil R. Storey, an award winning historian, lecturer and adventurer with a canon of over 50 published books. He has led paranormal investigations at some of the most haunted and historic sites across Britain since 1988. After uncovering some fascinating new material, his new book (due for publication 2024) will chart the UFO phenomena in Britain from the early 20th Century to the present day. During the interview, he will reveal his own UFO encounter. He will also talk about his book "Bram Stoker, Author of Dracula: An Illustrated Biography" and, also, the Jack the Ripper legend. A popular speaker at paranormal and dark history conferences, Neil appears as guest expert on TV and radio shows and is a regular historian on the multi-award winning "Help My House is Haunted!" In his precious little leisure time, he enjoys good food and wine and is a keen swordsman.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on August 20: Historian and paranormal researcher Neil R. Storey reveals to Gene and cohost Tim Swartz details of his ongoing ghost hunting in the UK, and stories about alleged demonic entities, such as the so-called "Black-Eyed Kids." Does denying a request to enter your home from a suspicious being protect you from evil? Neal is also the author of “Bram Stoker, Author of Dracula: An Illustrated Biography." He has led paranormal investigations at some of the most haunted and historic sites across Britain since 1988 and is also the creator of the "Grim Almanac" series of books the first ever series of books to chart the ghosts, dark deeds and and folkloric history of Britain by county and the author of the ground-breaking "Dracula Secrets" and such volumes as "Jack the Ripper's London," "London Crime Death and Debauchery," "The Victorian Criminal," "The Little Book of Murder" and "The Little Book of Death."
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Visit our new online shop for great branded merchandise at: https://www.theparacast.shop, and check out our new YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheOfficialParacastChannel.
The Puppeteers of Ufology
Guest Editorial by Curt Collins
Anyone else feel whipsawed by UFO news from Washington, DC? The U.S. government shut down UFO investigations with Project Blue Book in 1969, forevermore, it seemed. In 2017 we were told the Pentagon had quietly gotten back into the game in 2007 with a UFO program still underway. After that, it was superseded by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), then the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) of today. The hype indicated that all these government efforts were in response to increased UFO activity, but the driving force behind it was a group of people with an agenda.
While working as a consultant for Blue Book in the early 1960s, Dr. J. Allen Hynek gathered an informal network with UFO researchers he called “The Invisible College.” Prominent among this group was French computer scientist Jacques Vallee.
In 1972, Vallee met Dr. Harold Puthoff, who conducted government-sponsored psychic experiments (later christened remote viewing). The network expanded in the years that followed as Puthoff introduced Vallee to Dr. “Kit” Green and other colleagues who shared an interest in UFOs and paranormal topics.
Flash forward to 1995, when this confederation was given key roles in the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), founded by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow. Two more key players came in then, biologist Colm Kelleher and physicist Eric Davis.
“Skinwalker Ranch” was the most notable thing to come out of NIDS, a Utah property purchased by Bigelow in 1996 as a living laboratory to study paranormal phenomena. In 2004, Bigelow shuttered NIDS, citing lack of activity. Hunt for the Skinwalker was published the next year, written by Colm Kelleher of NIDS and Bigelow’s de facto publicist, George Knapp. Two employees in the U.S. intelligence community were fans of the book, and with the help of Senator Harry Reid, NIDS was reborn as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Bigelow received funding in 2008 for paranormal studies with a government contract disguising it as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).
Overlapping this period, UFO advocate Leslie Kean published UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, in 2010. Kean’s book sought to rebrand UFOs as the more serious-sounding terminology UAP, and her venture was endorsed by AAWSAP contractors Puthoff and Green. To appeal to a mainstream audience, Kean eschewed the baggage of alien contact and the paranormal, focusing solely on conservative nuts-and-bolts UFO reports from credentialed individuals.
After the $22 million funding ran out, AAWSAP formally ended in 2012. According to Luis Elizondo, under his leadership the project was refocused solely on UFOs and renamed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), continuing as an unfunded project on a spare time basis.
Meanwhile, “The Invisible College” needed new funding. Tom DeLonge was famous for his music with Blink-182 but wanted to diversify and set out to create a UFO-based entertainment franchise, “a science-fiction Disney for millennials.”
DeLonge connected with Hal Puthoff, who became co-founder of To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They recruited some talent from the Bigelow circle, including Colm Kelleher, Dr. Garry Nolan (a Kit Green associate), and former government insider Chris Mellon. The real coup was landing Luis Elizondo, who resigned from his Pentagon job to join DeLonge’s team in late 2017 as “Director of Global Security.”
Leslie Kean joined her friend Mellon in promoting the TTSA message to the press, focusing on AATIP and Elizondo with UFOs as a threat, a National Security issue. The Bigelow connection was minimized, and the spooky paranormal Skinwalker Ranch stuff was omitted.
They scored big with a story in The New York Times, the most sensational aspect was the claim that exotic metamaterials had been recovered from UFOs. This was later enhanced when Eric Davis said he’d briefed officials about the retrieval of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
TTSA didn’t raise the funds they’d expected through investors and Elizondo and Mellon left the ailing husk to become independent activists. Elizondo gave lots of podcast interviews and courted a cult of followers on Twitter, but has since retreated from the public eye, supposedly working hard at finishing his UFO book. Behind the scenes, Mellon has been networking with politicians to shape the legislation establishing the goals of AARO.
To date, there have been three public events with testimony given to Congressional members. The first was with Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, the second with AARO’s director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, which is focused primarily on incidents involving military personnel and equipment that includes recorded data. They stated that while more data was needed, no evidence proved that UAP encounters represented anything extraterrestrial.
The third event was dramatically different, featuring testimony from two military UFO witnesses — and a whistleblower who claimed all the UFO evidence needed was being covered up. David Grusch was an intelligence officer who became interested in the UFO topic with the 2017 hype, becoming a participant in the UAPTF, part of the circle with Knapp, Elizondo, Davis and company.
When going public, it was Leslie Kean presenting his story. Grusch testified he’d heard from anonymous government program participants about billions of taxpayer dollars being used to fund secret projects, and about people being threatened and killed to hide the secrets of the extraterrestrial craft and the non-human bodies.
Grusch stated he hoped that “the Non-Human Reverse Engineering Programs I have reported will act as an ontological (earth-shattering) shock, a catalyst for a global reassessment of our priorities.”
However, Grusch’s secondhand claims are nothing new. It closely resembles the fraudulent material in Frank Scully's 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, about captured UFOs and the bodies of little men from Venus. Other portions seem right out of the 1990s, from Philip Corso's fanciful book, The Day After Roswell — or episodes of The X-Files. Reruns.
The most recent Congressional Hearing was driven by input from the network of UFO activists, with personalities, and their lobbyists, who are pushing to contaminate the inquiry with sensational claims dredged from the dustbin of UFO folk tales.
When it comes to UFOs, the government was not the answer in the past, and probably never will be. We've got some private UFO organizations, but they can be hamstrung by their own bureaucracy, their focus on unrealistic agendas, or by the pressure to maintain an audience to survive. Ufology’s greatest failure has been choosing the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the answer and trying to make the evidence fit that conclusion. That, and the belief the government “Disclosure” will reveal and solve everything.
It’s time to put emotions and expectations aside and follow where the evidence leads. I think our best hope comes from independent civilians, whether working alone or in collaboration, to keep investigating UFOs and researching with an open mind.
Curt Collins writes on the UFO mystery, as well as its legends and hoaxes, at the websites: The Saucers That Time Forgot and Blue Blurry Lines. He is also an occasional guest co-host at The Paracast.
Copyright 1999-2023 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
