THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
September 29, 2013
Our Listeners Talk Shop on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 2:00 AM until 5:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Why It's Important for You to Donate to The Paracast: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough to pay your humble hosts decent wages. Also, we do not receive any revenue from the ads placed on the show by our network or local stations. So we hope you're able to help fill the gap, if you can, to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch and utility bills. No contribution is too small (or too large
. It’s easy to send a donation. We have a Donate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com. And if you’ve had a problem getting to our Donate screen, please try again. We just fixed a serious PayPal access problem, and it should wor k properly now.
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: Gene and Chris present another listener roundtable that features two of our most prolific and knowledgeable posters, which include forum moderator Goggs Mackay and long-time forum member Mike Jones ("mike"). We'll focus heavily on what's wrong with paranormal research, and why a new paradigm of investigation should be considered. We'll also discuss the influences of sci-fi on the UFO field and popular culture.
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
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. We recently completed a major update that makes our community easier to navigate, and social network friendly.
How About Investigating the Places Where UFOs Are Seen?
By Gene Steinberg
Let me credit my friendly co-host, Chris O’Brien, for inspiring this column, although I might take it in different directions that he might expect. You will hear more about his approach on this week’s episode of The Paracast.
But let me get down to basics.
Whenever a UFO sighting occurs that garners any publicity at all, you can bet that lots of people, including UFO researchers, will be trying to find what exactly was seen. If they’re doing a proper job of it, they will first try to determine whether a conventional object or phenomenon might have been involved. This is doubly important, because over 90% of all UFOs are really perfectly normal things, such as aircraft, or perhaps a planet or star seen under unusual circumstances.
Now over the years, there have been literally thousands upon thousands of reports of really weird things, many of which appear to be metallic aircraft, under intelligent control, sometimes making amazing maneuvers way beyond Earth technology.
The assumption of many is that these “genuine” UFOs represent visitors from another planet, no doubt orbiting another star system. The issue of how they came here, and why they are here, is secondary to this essential theory that has governed a large part of UFO research over the years.
One thing that is often overlooked in the field, however, is the fact that UFOs may not be the only thing seen in certain parts of the world. There may be other odd events, including sightings of strange creatures, such as Bigfoot, or even phenomena with the collective title of ghosts or poltergeists.
It’s easy to say all of these things have separate causes. UFOs are extraterrestrial, Bigfoot is just another undiscovered species, and ghosts or poltergeists are restless spirits of the dead. All of that could, I suppose, be true, assuming at least some of those reports are correct.
But it also seems as if certain areas around the world appear to attract a sizable percentage of such occurrences. Maybe it’s the San Luis Valley, which covers south central Colorado and north central New Mexico. Our own Chris O’Brien has written very popular books covering the unusual events that occur in this area, but it’s not the only location where reality appears turned upside down.
There is also the Skinwalker Ranch, known also as the Sherman Ranch, which spans about 480 acres and is located southeast of Ballard, Utah. Now a skinwalker is, according to Native American legends, a being that can assume different animal forms. In the fantasy TV show “Haven,” broadcast on the Sy-Fy network, the skinwalker character was depicted as a creature that will remove someone’s skin and thus assume their form.
Regardless, what appears to link these and other places are supposed to be the greater occurrence of paranormal events.
Now some writers on the subject, such as the late John Keel, may speak of “window” or “portal” areas, which serve as doorways to one or more alternate realities. Under accidental or deliberate circumstances, a person, creature or craft may be able to travel from one place to another.
Certainly we see the concept on occasion in popular culture, such as the BBC TV show, “Primeval,” which was reborn as a short-lived Canadian show, “Primeval: New World.” Of course, both shows used the concept of portal areas, which they referred to as “anomalies,” as excuses for monster-of-the-week plot lines, where whatever transported itself from that other place, assumed to be the distant past, would be a gigantic prehistoric creature.
Indeed, there was a short-lived reimagined version of the classic comic book and movie character, “Flash Gordon” on Sy-Fy, which employed the concept of a dimensional portal to take Earthlings to another world and back.
Regardless, if we accept the possibility that certain locations on our planet somehow attract more offbeat events than other areas, it would appear to make sense to concentrate on those areas in doing research rather than treat each unusual sighting as a separate event. Surely if you want repeatability, which is what scientists expect in order to consider some sort of new phenomenon as genuine, you’d want to go somewhere where such things happen more frequently.
You’d then want to attempt to discover what factors make such places more susceptible to the paranormal. Is there indeed some sort of doorway to another planet or even another universe, or are there measurable characteristics, such as the presence of radiation, electromagnetic effects, or other conditions that somehow attract UFOs, strange creatures, and other odd things?
Now it may well be that whatever causes such things to happen cannot be measured by our existing technology, or maybe we aren’t looking for the right things. If funding were available, it would be nice to have a scientific team on hand 24/7 with all sorts of instrumentation, ready to witness a peculiar event, and having their gear going full tilt to see what, if anything, has changed. But these events aren’t exactly predictable, even if they happen more often in some locales.
You might expect that a large UFO or paranormal research organization, say MUFON, would be devoting considerable resources in order to focus on this potentially productive area of research. But it seems MUFON’s main goal is to tout what they believe to be the ET presence on Earth. That being the case, those “side issues” may not be given much, if any, attention.
Indeed, the biggest impediment to figuring out the cause behind UFOs and other strange occurrences may be putting artificial limits on one’s research. And certainly, if one place has a greater number of weird events than another, it would make perfect sense to focus on that area. It would certainly improve the chance of getting to the bottom of these mysteries.
Right now, unfortunately, we seem to be going nowhere.
Copyright 1999-2013 Making The Impossible, Inc. 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!
September 29, 2013
Our Listeners Talk Shop on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 2:00 AM until 5:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Why It's Important for You to Donate to The Paracast: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough to pay your humble hosts decent wages. Also, we do not receive any revenue from the ads placed on the show by our network or local stations. So we hope you're able to help fill the gap, if you can, to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch and utility bills. No contribution is too small (or too large
. It’s easy to send a donation. We have a Donate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com. And if you’ve had a problem getting to our Donate screen, please try again. We just fixed a serious PayPal access problem, and it should wor k properly now.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: Gene and Chris present another listener roundtable that features two of our most prolific and knowledgeable posters, which include forum moderator Goggs Mackay and long-time forum member Mike Jones ("mike"). We'll focus heavily on what's wrong with paranormal research, and why a new paradigm of investigation should be considered. We'll also discuss the influences of sci-fi on the UFO field and popular culture.
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
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. We recently completed a major update that makes our community easier to navigate, and social network friendly.
How About Investigating the Places Where UFOs Are Seen?
By Gene Steinberg
Let me credit my friendly co-host, Chris O’Brien, for inspiring this column, although I might take it in different directions that he might expect. You will hear more about his approach on this week’s episode of The Paracast.
But let me get down to basics.
Whenever a UFO sighting occurs that garners any publicity at all, you can bet that lots of people, including UFO researchers, will be trying to find what exactly was seen. If they’re doing a proper job of it, they will first try to determine whether a conventional object or phenomenon might have been involved. This is doubly important, because over 90% of all UFOs are really perfectly normal things, such as aircraft, or perhaps a planet or star seen under unusual circumstances.
Now over the years, there have been literally thousands upon thousands of reports of really weird things, many of which appear to be metallic aircraft, under intelligent control, sometimes making amazing maneuvers way beyond Earth technology.
The assumption of many is that these “genuine” UFOs represent visitors from another planet, no doubt orbiting another star system. The issue of how they came here, and why they are here, is secondary to this essential theory that has governed a large part of UFO research over the years.
One thing that is often overlooked in the field, however, is the fact that UFOs may not be the only thing seen in certain parts of the world. There may be other odd events, including sightings of strange creatures, such as Bigfoot, or even phenomena with the collective title of ghosts or poltergeists.
It’s easy to say all of these things have separate causes. UFOs are extraterrestrial, Bigfoot is just another undiscovered species, and ghosts or poltergeists are restless spirits of the dead. All of that could, I suppose, be true, assuming at least some of those reports are correct.
But it also seems as if certain areas around the world appear to attract a sizable percentage of such occurrences. Maybe it’s the San Luis Valley, which covers south central Colorado and north central New Mexico. Our own Chris O’Brien has written very popular books covering the unusual events that occur in this area, but it’s not the only location where reality appears turned upside down.
There is also the Skinwalker Ranch, known also as the Sherman Ranch, which spans about 480 acres and is located southeast of Ballard, Utah. Now a skinwalker is, according to Native American legends, a being that can assume different animal forms. In the fantasy TV show “Haven,” broadcast on the Sy-Fy network, the skinwalker character was depicted as a creature that will remove someone’s skin and thus assume their form.
Regardless, what appears to link these and other places are supposed to be the greater occurrence of paranormal events.
Now some writers on the subject, such as the late John Keel, may speak of “window” or “portal” areas, which serve as doorways to one or more alternate realities. Under accidental or deliberate circumstances, a person, creature or craft may be able to travel from one place to another.
Certainly we see the concept on occasion in popular culture, such as the BBC TV show, “Primeval,” which was reborn as a short-lived Canadian show, “Primeval: New World.” Of course, both shows used the concept of portal areas, which they referred to as “anomalies,” as excuses for monster-of-the-week plot lines, where whatever transported itself from that other place, assumed to be the distant past, would be a gigantic prehistoric creature.
Indeed, there was a short-lived reimagined version of the classic comic book and movie character, “Flash Gordon” on Sy-Fy, which employed the concept of a dimensional portal to take Earthlings to another world and back.
Regardless, if we accept the possibility that certain locations on our planet somehow attract more offbeat events than other areas, it would appear to make sense to concentrate on those areas in doing research rather than treat each unusual sighting as a separate event. Surely if you want repeatability, which is what scientists expect in order to consider some sort of new phenomenon as genuine, you’d want to go somewhere where such things happen more frequently.
You’d then want to attempt to discover what factors make such places more susceptible to the paranormal. Is there indeed some sort of doorway to another planet or even another universe, or are there measurable characteristics, such as the presence of radiation, electromagnetic effects, or other conditions that somehow attract UFOs, strange creatures, and other odd things?
Now it may well be that whatever causes such things to happen cannot be measured by our existing technology, or maybe we aren’t looking for the right things. If funding were available, it would be nice to have a scientific team on hand 24/7 with all sorts of instrumentation, ready to witness a peculiar event, and having their gear going full tilt to see what, if anything, has changed. But these events aren’t exactly predictable, even if they happen more often in some locales.
You might expect that a large UFO or paranormal research organization, say MUFON, would be devoting considerable resources in order to focus on this potentially productive area of research. But it seems MUFON’s main goal is to tout what they believe to be the ET presence on Earth. That being the case, those “side issues” may not be given much, if any, attention.
Indeed, the biggest impediment to figuring out the cause behind UFOs and other strange occurrences may be putting artificial limits on one’s research. And certainly, if one place has a greater number of weird events than another, it would make perfect sense to focus on that area. It would certainly improve the chance of getting to the bottom of these mysteries.
Right now, unfortunately, we seem to be going nowhere.
Copyright 1999-2013 Making The Impossible, Inc. 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!
