THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
May 31, 2015
www.theparacast.com
The Paracast Continues to Explore Mysterious Phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch
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.
Announcing The Paracast+: We have another radio show, and for a low monthly or annual subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast, without the network ads, and chat rooms. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes, and The Paracast+ video channel is coming soon. For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Researcher Ryan Skinner returns to The Paracast to talk about his two new books: Tales of the Skinwalker: Stories from Skinwalker Ranch and Skinwalker Ranch: The UFO Farm. As many of our listeners know, Ryan has made countless trips to the Uintah Basin where the infamous Skinwalker Ranch, scene of numerous paranormal events, is located. Over the years, he has collected quite a number of interesting accounts that seem to be centered in the area around the ranch. In his new books, he discusses many of the stories that didn't make it into the first two books and expands on his ongoing investigations into the mysteries in Utah.
Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on May 31: Can you keep a good hoax down? Following through on this week’s issue of The Paracast Newsletter, Gene explains how old UFO hoaxes cannot to be killed. We frame that beginning to talk about the latest developments in Slidegate, where some of the promoters/participants are still attempting to spin this sorry episode as evidence that a real extraterrestrial body was recovered. The disclosure that the body was nothing more than the mummy of a small child clearly hasn’t stopped endless speculation about government conspiracies and other nonsense. Chris takes the occasion to apologize for criticizing two of the members of the Roswell Slides Research Group, which exposed the hoax. He also gives an update on a possible forthcoming revelation of the results of Ray Stanford’s longtime investigation into UFOs.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
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.
You Can’t Keep a Good Hoax Down
By Gene Steinberg
After flying saucers became a prominent fixture in our popular culture beginning in the late 1940s, it didn’t take long for people to claim they had actually met the pilots. Claimed contacts with space people often occurred in out-of-the-way places such as a desert. That ensured that few people – or no people – were around when the encounter supposedly took place.
So in one famous case, someone who ran a concession stand at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, claimed to have met space people and, surprisingly, they looked very much like us, or at least one’s conception of what an ideal human being with so-called European features would look like.
George Adamski’s claims of meeting otherworldly beings, however, wasn’t the start of his career as figure in the UFO field. He actually claimed to have seen and taken flying saucer photos as early as 1947, and, by 1949, had begun to lecture on the subject. During those lectures, he claimed that all the planets in our solar system were inhabited, and that the Martian canals were artificial constructions.
In 1952, allegedly witnessed by five people, he met a blond haired being of medium height, wearing a shiny silvery uniform, in an out-of-the-way desert locale. Communicating via telepathy, Adamski learned that the visitor was named Orthon, and that he was an inhabitant of Venus.
So much for Adamski’s seriously flawed concept of astronomy and the surface conditions of our neighboring planets. I suppose he received his education on planetary conditions by watching such child-oriented sci-fi TV shows as “Captain Video,” and movies that conveyed similar misleading or naïve views of reality.
Indeed, when I first read about Orthon in Adamski’s 1952 best-selling book, “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” I wondered how much he was influenced by Klaatu (Michael Rennie), the alien protagonist in the classic sci-fi flick, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” All right, Klaatu had short hair and was quite tall, at 6' 3½". But still!
On the surface, the story was nonsense. The flying saucer photos Adamski produced were laughable. But what about those alleged eyewitnesses? Well, it seems that maybe they were too far off to see anything significant, and there was some recanting of their stories later on, according to the famous “Adamski Expose Issue” of Jim Moseley’s Saucer News magazine.
For most people, Adamski’s contact claims were just some of the fanciful stories that arose in the early days of the UFO field. Indeed, I regarded it as little more than a curiosity until we interviewed UFO researcher Timothy Good on The Paracast on December 22, 2013.
Indeed, despite the very illogic of Adamski’s claim, the questionable evidence, and the lack of adherence to known science about surface conditions of nearby planets, Good believed the case lock stock and barrel, including those silly photos. Indeed, it has been pointed out on more than one occasion that the landing struts depicted in some of those photos were nothing more than common light bulbs. No I did not see a “GE” label on them.
This situation is not unique. While a number of UFO cases over the years have been exposed to be nothing more than mistakes or hoaxes, a good yearn gets repeated anyway, still taken seriously.
So there are those today who insist that the notorious alien autopsy film of the 1990s, from Ray Santilli, must have been genuine even though he admitted, during a TV interview in 2006, that it was just a “reconstruction.” In other words, a fake. All right, Santilli still insisted it was based on genuine footage that had mostly degraded beyond the ability to repair. That means the released film was a fake, but the source was real. The source, however, hasn’t been made available to image experts who are skilled at restoring film.
Excuses, excuses!
Then there’s this year’s notorious Slidegate episode, involving a pair of slides that allegedly depicted the corpse of an extraterrestrial lying on a glass table in what appeared to be a museum display. After more than two years of hype, independent researchers who got ahold of a high resolution scan of the slides were able to quickly interpret the contents of a placard at the right front of the body. Using software that deblurs, in effect sharpens a blurry image, it was clear it was nothing more than the mummy of a two-year-old child.
That should have ended the episode then and there, but not for the original promoters, including one Adam Dew, who makes film documentaries, and Mexico’s controversial UFO promoter, Jaime Maussan. To them, the manipulation of the slide was a fake, and the revelation that it belonged to an actual museum exhibit must be false as well, or a plant?
There were apologies from some of the key participants, including Roswell researchers Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt. Indeed, Schmitt’s apology seemed heartfelt, and you almost felt sorry for him; that is until he apologized for his apology. So the placard was wrong and the body had too many anomalies to represent a human being, even one heavily deformed.
Yet another wacky claim I’ve since read online has it that the efforts to disprove this claim were all part of a government plot that somehow involved Adobe Systems, a civilian corporation that publishes such content creation apps as Photoshop.
The mind boggles!
Now let’s just suppose that the placard was misleadingly labeled for some unknown reason, that it was all a plot to reveal the existence of ET without actually revealing anything. But why? Why would anyone stick the body of an alien corpse in some obscure museum exhibit only to have it discovered by accident by someone checking out a box of slides found in the attic of someone’s home?
Wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense to simply keep the evidence secret, if such evidence even exists?
And what about the potential danger of alien viruses? Why would anyone in government take the risk of allowing alien remains to be exhibited in public without proper safeguards? To what purpose?
To me, the promoters of Slidegate were sloppy. They evidently didn’t consider the real possibility that the whole thing would come crashing down as soon as researchers got ahold of high resolution scans and went about their work. If they truly wanted the placard not to be a factor, it would not have been terribly difficult to edit that portion of the image in Photoshop and remove evidence of its presence. A photo editing professional could handle that chore, with little or no evidence of the manipulation, for a fraction of the money spent to promote this mess.
Regardless, it goes to show that UFO hoaxes, good, bad or just ugly, often never die. There will always be someone who can find a way to make hay of it, even if the claim rides on quicksand.
Copyright 1999-2015 The Paracast LLC. 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!
May 31, 2015
www.theparacast.com
The Paracast Continues to Explore Mysterious Phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch
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.
Announcing The Paracast+: We have another radio show, and for a low monthly or annual subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast, without the network ads, and chat rooms. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes, and The Paracast+ video channel is coming soon. For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Researcher Ryan Skinner returns to The Paracast to talk about his two new books: Tales of the Skinwalker: Stories from Skinwalker Ranch and Skinwalker Ranch: The UFO Farm. As many of our listeners know, Ryan has made countless trips to the Uintah Basin where the infamous Skinwalker Ranch, scene of numerous paranormal events, is located. Over the years, he has collected quite a number of interesting accounts that seem to be centered in the area around the ranch. In his new books, he discusses many of the stories that didn't make it into the first two books and expands on his ongoing investigations into the mysteries in Utah.
Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on May 31: Can you keep a good hoax down? Following through on this week’s issue of The Paracast Newsletter, Gene explains how old UFO hoaxes cannot to be killed. We frame that beginning to talk about the latest developments in Slidegate, where some of the promoters/participants are still attempting to spin this sorry episode as evidence that a real extraterrestrial body was recovered. The disclosure that the body was nothing more than the mummy of a small child clearly hasn’t stopped endless speculation about government conspiracies and other nonsense. Chris takes the occasion to apologize for criticizing two of the members of the Roswell Slides Research Group, which exposed the hoax. He also gives an update on a possible forthcoming revelation of the results of Ray Stanford’s longtime investigation into UFOs.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
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.
You Can’t Keep a Good Hoax Down
By Gene Steinberg
After flying saucers became a prominent fixture in our popular culture beginning in the late 1940s, it didn’t take long for people to claim they had actually met the pilots. Claimed contacts with space people often occurred in out-of-the-way places such as a desert. That ensured that few people – or no people – were around when the encounter supposedly took place.
So in one famous case, someone who ran a concession stand at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, claimed to have met space people and, surprisingly, they looked very much like us, or at least one’s conception of what an ideal human being with so-called European features would look like.
George Adamski’s claims of meeting otherworldly beings, however, wasn’t the start of his career as figure in the UFO field. He actually claimed to have seen and taken flying saucer photos as early as 1947, and, by 1949, had begun to lecture on the subject. During those lectures, he claimed that all the planets in our solar system were inhabited, and that the Martian canals were artificial constructions.
In 1952, allegedly witnessed by five people, he met a blond haired being of medium height, wearing a shiny silvery uniform, in an out-of-the-way desert locale. Communicating via telepathy, Adamski learned that the visitor was named Orthon, and that he was an inhabitant of Venus.
So much for Adamski’s seriously flawed concept of astronomy and the surface conditions of our neighboring planets. I suppose he received his education on planetary conditions by watching such child-oriented sci-fi TV shows as “Captain Video,” and movies that conveyed similar misleading or naïve views of reality.
Indeed, when I first read about Orthon in Adamski’s 1952 best-selling book, “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” I wondered how much he was influenced by Klaatu (Michael Rennie), the alien protagonist in the classic sci-fi flick, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” All right, Klaatu had short hair and was quite tall, at 6' 3½". But still!
On the surface, the story was nonsense. The flying saucer photos Adamski produced were laughable. But what about those alleged eyewitnesses? Well, it seems that maybe they were too far off to see anything significant, and there was some recanting of their stories later on, according to the famous “Adamski Expose Issue” of Jim Moseley’s Saucer News magazine.
For most people, Adamski’s contact claims were just some of the fanciful stories that arose in the early days of the UFO field. Indeed, I regarded it as little more than a curiosity until we interviewed UFO researcher Timothy Good on The Paracast on December 22, 2013.
Indeed, despite the very illogic of Adamski’s claim, the questionable evidence, and the lack of adherence to known science about surface conditions of nearby planets, Good believed the case lock stock and barrel, including those silly photos. Indeed, it has been pointed out on more than one occasion that the landing struts depicted in some of those photos were nothing more than common light bulbs. No I did not see a “GE” label on them.
This situation is not unique. While a number of UFO cases over the years have been exposed to be nothing more than mistakes or hoaxes, a good yearn gets repeated anyway, still taken seriously.
So there are those today who insist that the notorious alien autopsy film of the 1990s, from Ray Santilli, must have been genuine even though he admitted, during a TV interview in 2006, that it was just a “reconstruction.” In other words, a fake. All right, Santilli still insisted it was based on genuine footage that had mostly degraded beyond the ability to repair. That means the released film was a fake, but the source was real. The source, however, hasn’t been made available to image experts who are skilled at restoring film.
Excuses, excuses!
Then there’s this year’s notorious Slidegate episode, involving a pair of slides that allegedly depicted the corpse of an extraterrestrial lying on a glass table in what appeared to be a museum display. After more than two years of hype, independent researchers who got ahold of a high resolution scan of the slides were able to quickly interpret the contents of a placard at the right front of the body. Using software that deblurs, in effect sharpens a blurry image, it was clear it was nothing more than the mummy of a two-year-old child.
That should have ended the episode then and there, but not for the original promoters, including one Adam Dew, who makes film documentaries, and Mexico’s controversial UFO promoter, Jaime Maussan. To them, the manipulation of the slide was a fake, and the revelation that it belonged to an actual museum exhibit must be false as well, or a plant?
There were apologies from some of the key participants, including Roswell researchers Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt. Indeed, Schmitt’s apology seemed heartfelt, and you almost felt sorry for him; that is until he apologized for his apology. So the placard was wrong and the body had too many anomalies to represent a human being, even one heavily deformed.
Yet another wacky claim I’ve since read online has it that the efforts to disprove this claim were all part of a government plot that somehow involved Adobe Systems, a civilian corporation that publishes such content creation apps as Photoshop.
The mind boggles!
Now let’s just suppose that the placard was misleadingly labeled for some unknown reason, that it was all a plot to reveal the existence of ET without actually revealing anything. But why? Why would anyone stick the body of an alien corpse in some obscure museum exhibit only to have it discovered by accident by someone checking out a box of slides found in the attic of someone’s home?
Wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense to simply keep the evidence secret, if such evidence even exists?
And what about the potential danger of alien viruses? Why would anyone in government take the risk of allowing alien remains to be exhibited in public without proper safeguards? To what purpose?
To me, the promoters of Slidegate were sloppy. They evidently didn’t consider the real possibility that the whole thing would come crashing down as soon as researchers got ahold of high resolution scans and went about their work. If they truly wanted the placard not to be a factor, it would not have been terribly difficult to edit that portion of the image in Photoshop and remove evidence of its presence. A photo editing professional could handle that chore, with little or no evidence of the manipulation, for a fraction of the money spent to promote this mess.
Regardless, it goes to show that UFO hoaxes, good, bad or just ugly, often never die. There will always be someone who can find a way to make hay of it, even if the claim rides on quicksand.
Copyright 1999-2015 The Paracast LLC. 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!