The Paracast Newsletter
August 17, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Long-Time UFO Researcher and Author Nigel Watson Delivers a Reality Check on Roswell and Other Famous Cases This Week on the Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
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 bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (August 17, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present long-time UFO researcher and author Nigel Watson, who has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, he has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917, and he has produced another e-book titled The Flying Saucer Cinema. Watson is also the author of Portraits of Alien Encounters (1990), Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000). In all, he has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including How It Works, All About Space, All About History, Aquila, Fortean Times, Wired, Flipside, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Alien Worlds, Magonia, The Unexplained, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine. Watson has also contributed for the books Alien Artifacts, Mimics: The Others Among us, and Weird Time – Exploring the Mysteries of Time and Space. As of the show date, Nigel’s latest book is: Paranormal Perspectives: Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited — UFOs and Unexplained Phenomena in Northern England.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by August 16: Long-time UFO researcher Nigel Watson returns to speak with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about a large variety of topics in the UFO field. He focuses, in part on one of his books, The Flying Saucer Cinema. The UFO/movie connection has long been a topic of interest, especially how pop culture has been influenced by both. Watson will also offer some reality checks in the “disclosure follies,” and UFO abductions. He has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, Watson has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917. Watson is also the author of Portraits of Alien Encounters (1990), Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000). In all, he has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including How It Works, All About Space, All About History, Aquila, Fortean Times, Wired, Flipside, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Alien Worlds, Magonia, The Unexplained, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine. Watson has also contributed for the books Alien Artifacts, Mimics: The Others Among us, and Weird Time – Exploring the Mysteries of Time and Space.
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. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
A Snapshot of Ufology
By Nigel Watson
The UFO enigma is here to stay. Every now and again there are mutterings that the subject is a dead duck, but it only takes a new sighting, a video or a photograph to revive interest in the topic.
The revelation in 2017 that the U.S. had funded a secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to the tune of 22 million dollars, along with videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots, brought UFOs back into the headlines.
Now re-titled as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the storm of publicity brought about U.S. Congress hearings where the idea that UAPs are of a non-terrestrial origin was strongly endorsed.
Another consequence was that the Pentagon set up an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to collect, record, investigate and evaluate UAP reports and is mandated to provide Congress with an annual report of their findings, whilst NASA has set up an independent UAP study that will concentrate on “aerial” phenomena.
Kevin Knuth, Robert Powell and Peter Reali, members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, in a 2019 paper note that reliable witnesses have seen structured craft that exhibit “impossible” flight characteristics. They state: “Estimated accelerations range from almost 100g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies. In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth.”
Their belief is that: “The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel.”
Other serious supporters of UAPs have agreed with such views and have speculated that these non-terrestrial craft are from other dimensions.
We should wind the clock back to 1947 when Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of flying saucers, initiated fears that they were some kind of Soviet super weapon or extraterrestrial visitors preparing to invade our planet.
At that time the United States Air Force quickly established Project Sign to investigate sightings and in an unreleased “Estimate of the Situation” it was claimed that after filtering out cases that could be identified as misidentifications, the remaining cases might be of interplanetary vehicles.
Civilians like Donald E. Keyhoe and his National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) organization took up the challenge to thoroughly investigate UFO sightings and to get the Government to admit that they were hiding evidence of interplanetary visitations.
Whilst Keyhoe took a scientific approach to the subject, he was concerned about “the crackpots who claim to have ridden saucers and talked with spacemen or women. Unfortunately I have laid the groundwork for these phonies to succeed; I think I have built up a fairly logical case for an interplanetary answer...you have to be stronger than the fakers.”
Keyhoe was frustratingly stuck between the rock of the Air Force’s extreme skepticism and the hardcore contactee “crackpots” who thrived on telling wild stories with no evidence to back up their claims.
The physical sciences do have their place in the study of the UFO phenomenon, but the tendency has been for other aspects of the phenomenon to be ignored or excluded for the sake of what is regarded as scientific objectivity. For example, the late Charles Bowen, who edited Flying Saucer Review, related the story of a well-known UFO investigator who interviewed a UFO witness whose story was so improbable that he listened to the person in an ultra-skeptical vein. Several years later the same investigator was staggered to read a report of a case that was very similar to the old case he had cast aside for fear that it was a romantic fabrication. In the process of UFO investigation, this kind of censoring of evidence is not uncommon.
When Project Blue Book was closed in 1969, it concluded that:
1. No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
2. There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
3. There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles.
That was a pretty damning conclusion, one that the British Ministry of Defence has always concurred with. It does make you wonder if the latest NASA and AARO studies will come to similar findings, or will they find the truth (whatever that is) that Ufologists lust for?
My Portraits of Alien Encounters book was written with the excitement of the release of films such as Star Wars, Close Encounters and the boom in science fiction films in the background. My aim in that book, and the revised update, was to collect, investigate and record the reports that came my way.
I discovered a massive underbelly of reports that even Ufologists were likely to reject as too weird or unbelievable, by people who might be cruelly branded as crackpots. UFO and paranormal scholar Hilary Evans notes that calling people crackpots or labeling their accounts as “figments of the imagination” offers no help to the percipient or to our understanding their experiences. He goes on to say that, “in neglecting the investigation of such reports, science is passing over a wealth of case-material which could tell us more about how the human mind works.”
Portraits of Alien Encounters was a snapshot of Ufology, mainly in northern England, of that period, and finally published in 1990. Now many decades later, the rereleased version is extensively revised with some of the chapters being deleted and replaced with newer and more relevant cases and reports that supplement the older ones.
The cases show the sheer variety of UFO experiences, and I have tried to present them as best as possible in the words of the percipients without trying to force them into any explanatory box.
Nigel Watson has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, he has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. Their comprehensive study of the 1913 airship scare was published by the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) in 1988.
A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917 and he has produced another e-book titled The Flying Saucer Cinema.
He is the author of Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000).
Watson has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including Fortean Times, Wired, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Magonia, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine.
As note above, his new book is: Paranormal Perspectives: Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited - UFOs and Unexplained Phenomena in Northern England.
Copyright 1999-2025 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 17, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Long-Time UFO Researcher and Author Nigel Watson Delivers a Reality Check on Roswell and Other Famous Cases This Week on the Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
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 bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (August 17, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present long-time UFO researcher and author Nigel Watson, who has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, he has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917, and he has produced another e-book titled The Flying Saucer Cinema. Watson is also the author of Portraits of Alien Encounters (1990), Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000). In all, he has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including How It Works, All About Space, All About History, Aquila, Fortean Times, Wired, Flipside, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Alien Worlds, Magonia, The Unexplained, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine. Watson has also contributed for the books Alien Artifacts, Mimics: The Others Among us, and Weird Time – Exploring the Mysteries of Time and Space. As of the show date, Nigel’s latest book is: Paranormal Perspectives: Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited — UFOs and Unexplained Phenomena in Northern England.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by August 16: Long-time UFO researcher Nigel Watson returns to speak with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about a large variety of topics in the UFO field. He focuses, in part on one of his books, The Flying Saucer Cinema. The UFO/movie connection has long been a topic of interest, especially how pop culture has been influenced by both. Watson will also offer some reality checks in the “disclosure follies,” and UFO abductions. He has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, Watson has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917. Watson is also the author of Portraits of Alien Encounters (1990), Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000). In all, he has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including How It Works, All About Space, All About History, Aquila, Fortean Times, Wired, Flipside, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Alien Worlds, Magonia, The Unexplained, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine. Watson has also contributed for the books Alien Artifacts, Mimics: The Others Among us, and Weird Time – Exploring the Mysteries of Time and Space.
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. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
A Snapshot of Ufology
By Nigel Watson
The UFO enigma is here to stay. Every now and again there are mutterings that the subject is a dead duck, but it only takes a new sighting, a video or a photograph to revive interest in the topic.
The revelation in 2017 that the U.S. had funded a secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to the tune of 22 million dollars, along with videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots, brought UFOs back into the headlines.
Now re-titled as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the storm of publicity brought about U.S. Congress hearings where the idea that UAPs are of a non-terrestrial origin was strongly endorsed.
Another consequence was that the Pentagon set up an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to collect, record, investigate and evaluate UAP reports and is mandated to provide Congress with an annual report of their findings, whilst NASA has set up an independent UAP study that will concentrate on “aerial” phenomena.
Kevin Knuth, Robert Powell and Peter Reali, members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, in a 2019 paper note that reliable witnesses have seen structured craft that exhibit “impossible” flight characteristics. They state: “Estimated accelerations range from almost 100g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies. In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth.”
Their belief is that: “The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel.”
Other serious supporters of UAPs have agreed with such views and have speculated that these non-terrestrial craft are from other dimensions.
We should wind the clock back to 1947 when Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of flying saucers, initiated fears that they were some kind of Soviet super weapon or extraterrestrial visitors preparing to invade our planet.
At that time the United States Air Force quickly established Project Sign to investigate sightings and in an unreleased “Estimate of the Situation” it was claimed that after filtering out cases that could be identified as misidentifications, the remaining cases might be of interplanetary vehicles.
Civilians like Donald E. Keyhoe and his National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) organization took up the challenge to thoroughly investigate UFO sightings and to get the Government to admit that they were hiding evidence of interplanetary visitations.
Whilst Keyhoe took a scientific approach to the subject, he was concerned about “the crackpots who claim to have ridden saucers and talked with spacemen or women. Unfortunately I have laid the groundwork for these phonies to succeed; I think I have built up a fairly logical case for an interplanetary answer...you have to be stronger than the fakers.”
Keyhoe was frustratingly stuck between the rock of the Air Force’s extreme skepticism and the hardcore contactee “crackpots” who thrived on telling wild stories with no evidence to back up their claims.
The physical sciences do have their place in the study of the UFO phenomenon, but the tendency has been for other aspects of the phenomenon to be ignored or excluded for the sake of what is regarded as scientific objectivity. For example, the late Charles Bowen, who edited Flying Saucer Review, related the story of a well-known UFO investigator who interviewed a UFO witness whose story was so improbable that he listened to the person in an ultra-skeptical vein. Several years later the same investigator was staggered to read a report of a case that was very similar to the old case he had cast aside for fear that it was a romantic fabrication. In the process of UFO investigation, this kind of censoring of evidence is not uncommon.
When Project Blue Book was closed in 1969, it concluded that:
1. No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
2. There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
3. There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles.
That was a pretty damning conclusion, one that the British Ministry of Defence has always concurred with. It does make you wonder if the latest NASA and AARO studies will come to similar findings, or will they find the truth (whatever that is) that Ufologists lust for?
My Portraits of Alien Encounters book was written with the excitement of the release of films such as Star Wars, Close Encounters and the boom in science fiction films in the background. My aim in that book, and the revised update, was to collect, investigate and record the reports that came my way.
I discovered a massive underbelly of reports that even Ufologists were likely to reject as too weird or unbelievable, by people who might be cruelly branded as crackpots. UFO and paranormal scholar Hilary Evans notes that calling people crackpots or labeling their accounts as “figments of the imagination” offers no help to the percipient or to our understanding their experiences. He goes on to say that, “in neglecting the investigation of such reports, science is passing over a wealth of case-material which could tell us more about how the human mind works.”
Portraits of Alien Encounters was a snapshot of Ufology, mainly in northern England, of that period, and finally published in 1990. Now many decades later, the rereleased version is extensively revised with some of the chapters being deleted and replaced with newer and more relevant cases and reports that supplement the older ones.
The cases show the sheer variety of UFO experiences, and I have tried to present them as best as possible in the words of the percipients without trying to force them into any explanatory box.
• • •
Nigel Watson has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings. In collaboration with Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, he has written several articles about phantom airships seen over Britain in 1909 and 1913. Their comprehensive study of the 1913 airship scare was published by the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) in 1988.
A wider survey of these historical reports is contained in his e-book titled, The Origin of UFOs: Phantom Airships 1807 to 1917 and he has produced another e-book titled The Flying Saucer Cinema.
He is the author of Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909- 1918 (2000).
Watson has written for numerous books, publications and websites, including Fortean Times, Wired, Strange Magazine, Beyond, Paranormal Magazine, History Today, Magonia, Flying Saucer Review, UFO Matrix and UFO Magazine.
As note above, his new book is: Paranormal Perspectives: Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited - UFOs and Unexplained Phenomena in Northern England.
Copyright 1999-2025 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!