THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
March 8, 2020
www.theparacast.com
Discover Ghostly Encounters at Hospitals and Elsewhere with Morgan Knudsen 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.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM 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 sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes. Flash! For a limited time you can save up to 40% on your subscription. So act now! Check out Introducing The Paracast+ — Five Years and Growing! « The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio for more details about The Paracast+.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Randall present an encore appearance from Canadian ghost hunter Morgan Knudsen. She runs Entityseeker Paranormal Research and Teachings as well as the world-renowned Teaching the Living program. Morgan brings classes and presentations on paranormal phenomena to a new level. She is also the resident paranormal specialist featured on Haunted Hospitals and Paranormal 9-1-1, and this interview focuses on the various ghostly encounters she has examined over the years. Morgan is also author of Teaching The Living.
J. Randall Murphy's Ufology Society International: Ufology Society International (USI) - Explore the UFO Phenomenon
Morgan Knudsen's site: EntitySeeker Paranormal / Morgan Knudsen
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on March 8: Gene and Randall introduce Chris Holm, host of the Conspire A Theory Podcast. In addition to podcasting about fortean topics, Chris also uses his artistic talent to recreate accounts of paranormal experiences. With college level traditional art training applied from magazine publishing to comic books. Chris' primary interests in the paranormal are alien abduction phenomenon and cryptids such as Dogman or Chupacabra. During this interview, Chris will focus mostly on the first, and whether we're dealing with visits by ET — or something else entirely!
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. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel
Ufology: The People or the Phenomenon?
By Gene Steinberg
I can’t begin to estimate how many thousands — or millions — of UFO sightings have occurred since the modern era began in 1947. For the sake of this column, earlier sightings don’t really matter, since much of what I’m writing about doesn’t relate to that.
Now we all know that the vast majority of strange things seen in our skies can be explained conventionally as aircraft, drones, test vehicles, planets, stars and lots of other things. The real “unknowns,” the ones that still can’t be identified, may represent a relatively small fraction of the total, perhaps 5% or less.
But even a single sighting with sufficient evidence to prove it’s genuine would be enough to confirm the existence of a mystery that cries for an explanation.
Now it’s true that some UFO publications, digital and print, regularly cover the most compelling sightings. But after you read about what appears to be the same sighting all over again, except for different dates and eyewitnesses, you wonder when enough is enough.
Unless a sighting provides compelling new evidence, or indications of a change in the nature of the phenomenon, I can well understand why some you might become jaded or bored.
Or even fed up with the UFO field, since we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Some of our listeners complain that I dwell on the past just too much. But if we don’t learn from what has gone before, how do we progress?
So the demands for disclosure can be dated back to such UFO authors as Major Donald E. Keyhoe. He believed then that the phenomenon represented visits by extraterrestrials, and that the U.S. government knew the truth. Or enough of the truth to confirm that this was a likely theory.
One of his books, “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy,” published in 1955, said it all. There was a Silence Group within the government managing the secret. The public deserved to know the truth, and at least when he wrote those earlier books, Keyhoe believed the government would relent and tell us what’s really going on.
That was then, this is now.
While I consider him sincere, when disclosure lobbyist Stephen Bassett says something’s going to happen real soon now, it’s hard to believe him. How often must he repeat essentially the same hopes and dreams as voiced by Keyhoe decades earlier, before you wonder if he’s cried wolf too often?
But even as UFO research continues, when is enough — well — enough?
It doesn’t mean some of those sightings don’t represent a compelling mystery. If we’re being visited by ET, it’s potentially world changing.
Yet I wonder if there’s enough work being done to take all this evidence to the next level. It’s fine to collect sightings, especially the ones that don’t merit an easy explanation.
But what happens next?
And is it all about the saucers or the people who find their way into this odd little corner of the world?
Let’s take a journey back through time. In the early days, my old friend Jim Moseley was quite devoted to putting together stories about new sightings. The original Saucer News would cover the most compelling cases.
After a decade or more of this, Jim admitted that sightings bored him. He had heard it all already.
His approach in those days was to poke fun at the foibles of some UFO fans, sometimes create hoaxes, all with the goal of keeping the discussion going when there weren’t many sightings to write about.
Even when he gave up on those fake feuds with his friend, Gray Barker, producing a fake movie of a UFO, and so on and so forth, there was still plenty of personality fodder to go around.
When he finally gave up on Saucer News, and produced the non-scheduled newsletter that later became Saucer Smear, he focused more and more on the sometime wacky personalities of the people who inhabited UFO research.
If there was a dispute about one thing or another that impacted an individual, Jim would take on a role similar to the infamous “Page Six” gossip column of the New York Post.
The more dirt, the merrier.
I was even on the receiving end of this stuff from time to time, but I didn’t take Jim seriously. He was having a good time, and sometimes he published real information about a fraudster, and thus he helped advance the cause of serious research.
These days, we are more obsessed than ever with the personal foibles of individuals. If a politician misspeaks, which is easy to do when you are taking for hours on end, they may never live it down.
So the emphasis on the eccentrics in Ufology is nothing strange. It’s par for the course.
And some very unlikely people may become painted with the broad brush.
Consider former Army counterintelligence agent Luis Elizondo, who reportedly led the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat IdentificationProgram (AATIP), that special access program intended to look into UAPs.
Now Elizondo said he resigned from his last government position, in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI) due to his concerns about the "bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” he encountered in the workplace.
It hardly seems an unusual reason to quit a job. That’s how governments usually work. Other than possible security considerations, working in the civilian world ought to have been a plus for Elizondo.
He has certainly garnered extensive coverage of his work and his ongoing efforts to study UAPs.
Except when another shoe appeared to drop.
So we have those contradictory government statements about the work Elizondo did. At first, his status as head of AATIP was confirmed. At first.
But then someone else from the Pentagon said he didn’t actually lead the program, although he played a role.
Now it may have been a case of the right hand not knowing about the left hand. Or maybe it was meant as disinformation, to cloud the issue and make it all become part of Ufology’s noise level.
Now faking one’s credentials is not terribly unusual in the UFO field. Some of these characters talk about military service that never existed, or invent doctorates that were never granted. You get the picture.
So it’s easy to accept the possibility that Elizondo was one of those people, but don’t forget the original confirmation of his work status with the Pentagon. Leslie Kean, one of the people who brought AATIP to light in a series of articles she coauthored for The New York Times, says she and her colleagues are satisfied that Elizondo is what he claims to be.
She has a reputation for being a solid reporter, so I’ll accept what says as true.
But as this nonsense continues to plague Ufology, sometimes I wonder if I should just get back to reviewing those UAP — er UFO — sightings instead.
Copyright 1999-2020 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!
March 8, 2020
www.theparacast.com
Discover Ghostly Encounters at Hospitals and Elsewhere with Morgan Knudsen 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.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM 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 sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes. Flash! For a limited time you can save up to 40% on your subscription. So act now! Check out Introducing The Paracast+ — Five Years and Growing! « The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio for more details about The Paracast+.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Randall present an encore appearance from Canadian ghost hunter Morgan Knudsen. She runs Entityseeker Paranormal Research and Teachings as well as the world-renowned Teaching the Living program. Morgan brings classes and presentations on paranormal phenomena to a new level. She is also the resident paranormal specialist featured on Haunted Hospitals and Paranormal 9-1-1, and this interview focuses on the various ghostly encounters she has examined over the years. Morgan is also author of Teaching The Living.
J. Randall Murphy's Ufology Society International: Ufology Society International (USI) - Explore the UFO Phenomenon
Morgan Knudsen's site: EntitySeeker Paranormal / Morgan Knudsen
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on March 8: Gene and Randall introduce Chris Holm, host of the Conspire A Theory Podcast. In addition to podcasting about fortean topics, Chris also uses his artistic talent to recreate accounts of paranormal experiences. With college level traditional art training applied from magazine publishing to comic books. Chris' primary interests in the paranormal are alien abduction phenomenon and cryptids such as Dogman or Chupacabra. During this interview, Chris will focus mostly on the first, and whether we're dealing with visits by ET — or something else entirely!
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. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel
Ufology: The People or the Phenomenon?
By Gene Steinberg
I can’t begin to estimate how many thousands — or millions — of UFO sightings have occurred since the modern era began in 1947. For the sake of this column, earlier sightings don’t really matter, since much of what I’m writing about doesn’t relate to that.
Now we all know that the vast majority of strange things seen in our skies can be explained conventionally as aircraft, drones, test vehicles, planets, stars and lots of other things. The real “unknowns,” the ones that still can’t be identified, may represent a relatively small fraction of the total, perhaps 5% or less.
But even a single sighting with sufficient evidence to prove it’s genuine would be enough to confirm the existence of a mystery that cries for an explanation.
Now it’s true that some UFO publications, digital and print, regularly cover the most compelling sightings. But after you read about what appears to be the same sighting all over again, except for different dates and eyewitnesses, you wonder when enough is enough.
Unless a sighting provides compelling new evidence, or indications of a change in the nature of the phenomenon, I can well understand why some you might become jaded or bored.
Or even fed up with the UFO field, since we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Some of our listeners complain that I dwell on the past just too much. But if we don’t learn from what has gone before, how do we progress?
So the demands for disclosure can be dated back to such UFO authors as Major Donald E. Keyhoe. He believed then that the phenomenon represented visits by extraterrestrials, and that the U.S. government knew the truth. Or enough of the truth to confirm that this was a likely theory.
One of his books, “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy,” published in 1955, said it all. There was a Silence Group within the government managing the secret. The public deserved to know the truth, and at least when he wrote those earlier books, Keyhoe believed the government would relent and tell us what’s really going on.
That was then, this is now.
While I consider him sincere, when disclosure lobbyist Stephen Bassett says something’s going to happen real soon now, it’s hard to believe him. How often must he repeat essentially the same hopes and dreams as voiced by Keyhoe decades earlier, before you wonder if he’s cried wolf too often?
But even as UFO research continues, when is enough — well — enough?
It doesn’t mean some of those sightings don’t represent a compelling mystery. If we’re being visited by ET, it’s potentially world changing.
Yet I wonder if there’s enough work being done to take all this evidence to the next level. It’s fine to collect sightings, especially the ones that don’t merit an easy explanation.
But what happens next?
And is it all about the saucers or the people who find their way into this odd little corner of the world?
Let’s take a journey back through time. In the early days, my old friend Jim Moseley was quite devoted to putting together stories about new sightings. The original Saucer News would cover the most compelling cases.
After a decade or more of this, Jim admitted that sightings bored him. He had heard it all already.
His approach in those days was to poke fun at the foibles of some UFO fans, sometimes create hoaxes, all with the goal of keeping the discussion going when there weren’t many sightings to write about.
Even when he gave up on those fake feuds with his friend, Gray Barker, producing a fake movie of a UFO, and so on and so forth, there was still plenty of personality fodder to go around.
When he finally gave up on Saucer News, and produced the non-scheduled newsletter that later became Saucer Smear, he focused more and more on the sometime wacky personalities of the people who inhabited UFO research.
If there was a dispute about one thing or another that impacted an individual, Jim would take on a role similar to the infamous “Page Six” gossip column of the New York Post.
The more dirt, the merrier.
I was even on the receiving end of this stuff from time to time, but I didn’t take Jim seriously. He was having a good time, and sometimes he published real information about a fraudster, and thus he helped advance the cause of serious research.
These days, we are more obsessed than ever with the personal foibles of individuals. If a politician misspeaks, which is easy to do when you are taking for hours on end, they may never live it down.
So the emphasis on the eccentrics in Ufology is nothing strange. It’s par for the course.
And some very unlikely people may become painted with the broad brush.
Consider former Army counterintelligence agent Luis Elizondo, who reportedly led the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat IdentificationProgram (AATIP), that special access program intended to look into UAPs.
Now Elizondo said he resigned from his last government position, in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI) due to his concerns about the "bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” he encountered in the workplace.
It hardly seems an unusual reason to quit a job. That’s how governments usually work. Other than possible security considerations, working in the civilian world ought to have been a plus for Elizondo.
He has certainly garnered extensive coverage of his work and his ongoing efforts to study UAPs.
Except when another shoe appeared to drop.
So we have those contradictory government statements about the work Elizondo did. At first, his status as head of AATIP was confirmed. At first.
But then someone else from the Pentagon said he didn’t actually lead the program, although he played a role.
Now it may have been a case of the right hand not knowing about the left hand. Or maybe it was meant as disinformation, to cloud the issue and make it all become part of Ufology’s noise level.
Now faking one’s credentials is not terribly unusual in the UFO field. Some of these characters talk about military service that never existed, or invent doctorates that were never granted. You get the picture.
So it’s easy to accept the possibility that Elizondo was one of those people, but don’t forget the original confirmation of his work status with the Pentagon. Leslie Kean, one of the people who brought AATIP to light in a series of articles she coauthored for The New York Times, says she and her colleagues are satisfied that Elizondo is what he claims to be.
She has a reputation for being a solid reporter, so I’ll accept what says as true.
But as this nonsense continues to plague Ufology, sometimes I wonder if I should just get back to reviewing those UAP — er UFO — sightings instead.
Copyright 1999-2020 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!