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Your Paracast Newsletter — May 2, 2021


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
The Paracast Newsletter
May 2, 2021
www.theparacast.com


Paranormal Talk Show Host Katina Kyle Talks Shop, the Paranormal and More 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 join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Flash! For a limited time, you can save up to 40% on your subscription. Long-term susbcribers will receive a free coupon code for the James Fox UFO documentary "The Phenomenon," which includes 3 hours of extras, while supplies last. And PayPal now accepts cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in payment, so act now! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: Choose Your Membership Upgrade

This Week's Episode: Gene and Randall present the return of Katina Kyle, a.k.a. K-Town, who will be joining us to talk shop, personal experiences, theories, and what's in store for the paranormal community in 2021. In addition to being the organizer of the Knoxville AlienXPO, she is a military veteran and the host and creator of Mysterious Radio and The X Podcast. Katina has worked in many different fields since leaving the military, but it’s working with children, serving in the military and now podcasting that she’s most proud of. K-Town has had a long interest in all things strange and unusual since witnessing “fire” suddenly start to blaze out of a hill at night when she was 14 years old. Always knowing that there was more going on in the unseen world, she started Mysterious Radio in 2016 and has conducted interviews on everything from ufo and alien phenomena, true crime, strange disappearances, true hauntings and more.

J. Randall Murphy's Ufology Society International: Ufology Society International (USI) - Explore the UFO Phenomenon

K-Town's Mysterious Radio: Mysterious Radio: Paranormal, UFO & Lore Interviews

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on May 2: Paranormal talk show host Katina Kyle, a.k.a. K-Town, returns to talk pop culture and other subjects, including Star Trek, Babylon 5 and even the Canadian “steampunk” crime procedural drama, Murdoch Mysteries, which has some sci-fi elements. Katina also talks about the apparent low participation of blacks in paranormal media. In pursuing her path of podcasting several regular programs, K-Town realizes that she’s just now starting to learn about the true nature of our reality and believes that no matter if it makes us uncomfortable the human race STILL has to face…and deal with it.

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: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheOfficialParacastChannel

Getting From There to Here

By Gene Steinberg

In the 1960s, I wrote a letter that may have changed my life.

As an avid fan of sci-fi and monster movies and TV shows, I was a regular reader of a newsstand magazine with a teen orientation, “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” It was edited by Forrest J Ackerman, a long time sci-fi/horror fan, editor and agent, whose Los Angeles home had become a museum of books and film memorabilia.

Well, in one of the issues, Ackerman said he was planning a cross-country trip, during which he offered to visit the homes of his readers for lunch. You had to write him a letter indicating why you should be on his travel list.

I don’t know if I just lucked out, or my letter was better than most of the others he’d received — I didn’t consider the possibilities. But I did receive a response one day indicating that he would be visiting the Steinberg apartment at 270 Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.

By the way, I’m not surprised to see that the apartment building is still there and in evidently in good repair.

Anyway, I wanted to make a good impression, and make a recording of the event. Over the next few weeks, I visited a couple of the local consumer electronics outlets — Radio Shack and Lafayette Radio — for cables, mics and a cheap mixer. I already had a pair of reel-to-reel tape recorders.

You might say I already had a radio career in the back of my mind.

The luncheon went off as planned. I was joined by several fellow readers Ackerman’s crew invited from around the New York area. I set up my studio on the kitchen table, carefully snaking the wires around the corners of the room so that people wouldn’t trip on them.

In short, I turned that lunch meeting into a sort of radio talk show, of which I was the host. The audio quality was listenable enough, but it wouldn’t pass muster in the 21st century, since the mixer produced a persistent noise floor consisting of a slight hum and hiss that no amount of fiddling with the volume levels would eliminate.

It was a fun beginning, and it influenced me on the course of my future career paths, which also included writing. But as to the recording of that event, well many moves later, I no longer have it. Perhaps it was accidentally thrown away during a spring cleaning attempt.

Over the years, I’ve recorded a number of interviews, mostly for my radio newscasts or sometimes to transcribe for an article. Most of them were on compact cassette, but again, they were casualties of all those moves and just having too much stuff to sort through.

Nowadays I have the tools with which to take the audio, clean it up, and deliver recordings that will pass muster. That is, if I am able to locate the originals.

In addition to that lunch meeting with Ackerman, I recorded interviews about UFOs that featured such notables as Betty Hill, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Major Donald Keyhoe, Ray Palmer, Richard S. Shaver, Brad Steiger and even Muhammad Ali.

Except for the first three, these interviews and others found their way into the pages of my late magazine, Caveat Emptor, and you can find scanned versions of every issue here:


I do wish the recordings had survived, however. We’d be happy to offer them to subscribers of The Paracast+, and that may still be possible. There are boxes and boxes of materials that have survived over the years that have rarely been examined. Barbara and I hope to go over them soon to see what we want to keep. Maybe we’ll luck out.

In the meantime, there are other interviews that I hope to add in the near future, from Coffee Klatch, a radio show that our staff announcer, Bob Zanotti, hosted at a college radio station back in the 1960s. I am still working with Bob over the best of the batch, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, there are nearly 800 episodes of The Paracast available from our site. If you subscribe to The Paracast+, you’ll be able to download over 300 episodes of the ad-free versions of these shows, plus the exclusive After The Paracast podcast.

For quick sign-ups to The Paracast+, please visit: Choose Your Membership Upgrade

And whatever you think about digital audio, it’s nonetheless true that these shows will survive for the simple reason that we have multiple backups of every episode. Well, at least until new formats and new ways of preserving such interviews take over at some future time, and the playback devices are no longer available.

Indeed, I often wonder just what would survive of our civilization in the event of a worldwide catastrophe. If all of the analog and digital methods of storing audio and video content are destroyed, just what would a future civilization, if one arises, or alien visitors, discover of our legacy?

No doubt silicon-based flash media would have the best possibility for longevity, and I would expect that it will be possible for our successors to translate such material into readable form.

Of course, in the comic book world, media is stored on tiny bars constructed of shiny crystal. SSuperman’s Fortress of Solitude, or the tiny spaceship in which he traveled to Earth, are examples. When these crystals are placed into playback devices, they can display the content with realistic 3D or holographic images and audio. Evidently the residents of Krypton couldn’t bother themselves with magnetic tape or vinyl.

But when I think about recording methods, it brings me back to the first recording contraption my parents bought me, when I was 12 or 13 years old. Rather than a reel of tape, it used a flexible magnetic disk. Alas, the thing only lasted a week or two before it failed; the warranty replacement fared no better. But listening to its playback did help me rid myself of an annoying stutter.

So I have to thank the generosity of my mom and dad for the fact that I used that device and its more reliable successors to discover a lifelong career.

And here I am.

But I would really like to recover those old interviews. Maybe they still exist in an alternate reality, or perhaps a Mandela Effect event of some sort might put me in a place where they are still available. But as some might say, dream on.

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