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Rob Kristoffersen of Our Strange Skies · Caught on the Mike...

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Listener discretion is advised.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: They can point to everything.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're life-changing events and affecting those in ways you never bothered to ask.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: They are, in essence, a today.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: He hosts the podcast, Our Strange Guide, a show that focuses on the history of UFO phenomenon, and be asked those questions and talk a little bit about that history.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Caught on the Mike.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, I have been wanting to do an episode like this for quite some time.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I am a broken record, and I say that on a lot of my episodes.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I've been seeking out, actively seeking out, a ufologist.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And today I have somebody on the podcast, Mr.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Rob Christofferson.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: How are you, my friend?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: How are you?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Good, good.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: You are phoning in from New York?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I live in the uh Adirondack, so I'm up in northern New York.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So do you get a lot of activity up there?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you will see things because uh in the Adirondack, it's not very light polluted.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: So you have a pretty good view of the sky like all the time.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes you will see strange things there.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for a long time, for uh a number of years, from about 2012 to say 2016, 2017.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you looked up in the sky, you could see a stationary white or red light didn't seem to be at a very high elevation, just like moving through the sky very slowly.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So uh slowly, silently, you never heard anything.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, you you'd be surprised.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you do see things up here, and I I have seen some weird things up here.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I just had a guest on a few weeks ago, and he was talking about the anomaly of Bigfoot sightings up in the Adirondacks that I did not know that that is one of the nation's biggest hotspots.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, down toward the southern Adirondacks when you get into uh White Hall or around that area, that's a pretty well-known uh hotspot for Bigfoot down there.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: There it's a very weird collective of stuff that you have up here because uh UFOs, Bigfoot, uh, there's like a ton of uh haunted locations, especially in my hometown.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm from Saranac Lake, which is what's primarily known in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a place where people would seek refuge uh if they had tuberculosis.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So come up there for the clean air.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of people died.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and a lot of the houses, especially up in the neighborhood that I grew up in, were cure cottages.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: They had uh a lot of them had historic uh registers with with the town, and uh but you were never able to shake that thing.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in an apartment that was a cure cottage at one point, it had an open porch on it, which uh when you look at pictures of people uh coming up here and doing that, they would sit out in the winter months out on these open porches, and like where I live, it gets down to uh you you'll get a day that gets down into the negative 20s at certain points.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it gets really cold up here.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So so yeah, like it's uh it's a you know conglomeration of a lot of different types of activity up here uh in in in the uh Adirondacks and northern New York.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let's back up a little bit and set the table properly.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you introduce yourself and tell my audience who you are and kind of what your background is?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so my name is Rob Kristofferson.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: I am the host of the Our Strange Skies podcast, which is a podcast that dives into uh the UFO phenomenon and in particular historical cases, like the the weirder the better is where I dwell, like talking about like uh very strange encounters with uh aliens and weird humanoids and stuff like that.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I've been researching this topic since 2015.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: I had a close encounter of my own.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh right when I was at work, actually, a friend of mine had uh come down, asked me to go out on a break.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we go outside, we're just kind of talking, and we look up and we see this object.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is it looked like a giant egg in the sky, like the size of a small like VW, uh Volkswagen bug.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just slowly moving, kind of like parallel to where we're standing.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're just standing there watching this thing, kind of pretty docile.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like it it it the feeling at the time was like you were so calm and collected, and like you were just looking at this thing like the it was like something you had seen like a million times, it was no big deal.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: But this object it gets to about where we're standing and it stops, it hovers briefly, it turns 90 degrees, and then it sets off in a different direction.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: So uh my friend and I we have this sighting, and it just I start buying like book after book.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: I start finding every program that I can on UFOs, and I just dive deep into this um topic until I started Our Strange Skies two years later.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: I had a bunch of friends that were doing podcasts, and like uh every now and then I'd be like, Hey, you should cover this case on your on your show.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think it would be interesting, nobody talks about it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh eventually I was like, Yeah, why don't I do it?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh my dad was in radio for 25 years, and uh you know, I I like I never I like growing up, people wanted me to be my dad and uh go off and get a you know, like a communications degree and go into radio, and it was something that I didn't really want to do.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, like in a way, I I kind of feel like this is me carrying on to an extent that legacy of of like you know being a broadcaster of sorts and and you know doing it in my own way.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: But like uh, you know, since then uh we've done like a hundred and forty some odd episodes at this point, and uh just finding the strangest of the strange, you know, the strangest cases I can get my hands on, and that's that's really what I thrive uh on.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the main catalyst of starting the podcast was to learn more about the subject, and you know, I've done that, you know, for the for the last five plus years.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to pick out any one case or one specific episode in history, what is the strangest occurrence that you've ever covered that just has a ton of evidence around it?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: The the evidence stuff is always is always tough, but uh the one case that I always come back to is a case of a police officer named Lonnie Zamora, and uh in 1964, he uh down to the earth kind of police officer.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was 5 45 in the afternoon.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh this is in April, police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, and it's his shift is starting to wind down, and he sees the speeder come through town.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like, Okay, I'm gonna get my one last ticket for the day.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he sets out, and you know, it it turns into kind of like a low speed chase for a bit.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and eventually the car actually ends up winning because he um he see he hears this what he calls this like loud roaring sound, and he sees this kind of blue flame in the sky.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And where he is is where um this like the mayor of this town had an old dynamite shack, and he was kind of scared that it was yeah, he was scared it was gonna blow up.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So he decided to go check this out, and he climbs up this uh um this embankment and he sees down in this arroyo what he first thinks is like an overturned car.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: He gets closer and he realizes it's an egg-shaped object that is uh sitting on the ground on four legs, and there are these two people that are outside of it.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he described them as being like tall children in a way, and they're just doing something.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: They see him, they get startled, he loses sight of them for a second, and um uh eventually, once he catches back up, uh these figures are gone, and this object starts to lift up from the ground, and there is this huge blue flame underneath this thing, so much so that he actually had to take refuge behind his car.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he watches this object like lift into the air, probably about 15 feet or so, and the flame cuts out, hovers there for a second, and then just moves on.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this became a case for um the United States government uh during the Project Blue Book era.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Project Blue Book is uh was one of the government's official UFO studies.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: They come, they investigate it, they find uh a lot of unique marks in the ground, they find burnt vegetation, and they find just uh there's a lot of evidence in this case.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: They also find other eyewitnesses that claim to see this object flying away around the same time that Lani Zamora saw it depart.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's one of those, it's one of the few unknown cases in the Project Blue Book files that deals with strange figures that were seen.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's only two cases, and that and that's probably the the biggest one, but that that has probably all of the boxes ticked when it comes to like really good cases with physical evidence that are left behind.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have any opinions about why so much activity has been uh observed in the southwest portion of the United States?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing, is like uh, you know, depending upon what you think UFOs are are coming around for, a lot of people think that it is for uh they're interested in like natural resources or especially because like a lot of cases, in a lot of cases, UFOs are seen near water.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And um, there are some cases in which UFOs are seen to like draw water.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh when it comes to like the southwest in in particular, uh one thing that's interesting about a lot of sightings, especially back in the day, is that uh a lot of them occurred around um nuclear facilities.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And you have a lot of nuclear activity down in the southwest.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, like White Sands, there were a lot of sightings at White Sands.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there are just like a lot of sightings uh in and around that area, even in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a lot of sightings there.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you you know, nuclear facilities all over the the country, they have a history of UFO sightings and strange objects that appear over them for sure.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of merit to that.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I uh spent a few years as a kid living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I will tell you that state at large has some of the weirdest phenomena I have ever experienced in my entire life.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'll I'll say it, I am one of those straight and narrow.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna believe one thing or another.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just I I want to hear the evidence as it's laid out for me.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But my time in New Mexico, there were some strange occurrences that you know just happened and that I got to observe as a kid.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Talked about white sands, and I really wondered if maybe the original testing of the nuclear bomb wasn't a beacon of some sort, because there are a lot of military installments all over the world where the activity is a lot more heightened than say just over your local small town.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the interesting things, um, when Project Blue Book first started, it was uh in 1951.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the uh the heads of the military had um there was this kind of infamous radar visual sighting in New Jersey, and uh it made it like a big stink in the military to the point where there were um high-ranking officials that were asking for reports on this.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time it was uh classified under this uh program called Project Grudge, which they didn't take UFOs seriously.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the thing's called Grudge, you know.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: So these people don't they're they're trying to downplay all these reports.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: So uh this guy, uh General Um Cabble, he uh he wants all the information that he can get on it.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And once he realizes that the program is severely understaffed, he um he orders a new program, gets uh like all new project heads in there and everything.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the first things that the new project head was a guy named uh Edward Ruppelt.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruppelt was actually on the backup crew of the Enola Gay.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if the pilot wasn't feeling up to it, he would have been the one dropping the atomic bomb.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: So uh he comes in, and one of the first things that he does that nobody had done before is he starts to plot all these sightings, uh, all these military sightings that they had.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh, by and large, uh towards the beginning uh of government studies, they largely just dealt with um military sightings.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: So he starts to plot things on the map, and then he sees patterns that over a lot of military bases there are these sightings that keep happening.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of the most infamous sightings over um uh a base that had nuclear ordinance that people didn't note about was um over in uh Rendelsham Forest, uh RAF Bentwaters.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's this really there's a set of sightings that occur over a couple series uh a couple of nights, and these military guys, uh one of them gets so close that he actually touches this object.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: He describes it as like um a kind of like triangular-shaped object with a um kind of like a small pyramid on top.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: He touches this thing, and the next night there are these strange lights seen in the forest.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: But at one point, these people, these military officials, they see this object start to hover over a uh spot on the base that was known to have nuclear ordnance and it sets down a beam of light and hovers there for a couple seconds and then takes off.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: So nuclear like the nuclear capabilities does seem to be a drawing point for these things.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like there are reports uh that UFOs have disabled like military, like nuclear ordinances stuff too.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's very wild when you like read and comb through all these stories.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: It it's very infamous.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like there isn't a nuclear facility that didn't see UFOs over it at any at any point, at any time.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't remember the exact story, but I know that there was a nuclear facility someplace in the world that was having power surges that were coinciding with sightings around the same time.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I do remember that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't I wish I remembered the details about that one.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's there's a lot of them.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Malmstrom, uh, Air Force Base got had sightings like that.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: They had uh, especially in the late 60s, um really I I there is no other bases that like they're all they all receive visits like that, you know.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: The they all had documented sightings, and it it there is a strong connection there, um, for that.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: As far as society's perception of the UFO UAP phenomenon, um, there's a big chicken or the egg question, specifically um with people that are a little bit more skeptical.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like what came first, the sightings or the science fiction from the sightings?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and a lot of people circle back to chariots of the gods and some of the some of the um uh hieroglyphs and some of the other things around that kind of show evidence of UFOs.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: As a podcaster that specializes in this topic, how do you answer that question if they're if somebody's presenting to you with a skeptical bias?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: What I find interesting is like you can you can go and you can look at kind of these, you know, old drawings, carvings, depictions of strange things, and you can kind of draw whatever you want from them.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the ancient aliens folks definitely have uh Eric von Doneken just kind of made it his thing to go back and look at uh you know, like the Nazca lines and say, oh, well, they had to be, you know, seen from above, and you know, uh uh why are there so many similar structures all over the you know planet?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh people are building kind of the same things, just you know, they look different uh slightly.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: But like there is like a precedent for strange things being seen in the sky, whether they are natural phenomena or not.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to UFOs and really like the first kind of documented sightings, goes back to like uh one of the most compelling goes back to like seven sixteen ninety something, I forget exactly when it was, but this guy, James Everell, who was uh part of the Massachusetts colony, he in the um I think it was the mayor's journal, uh John John Winthrop, he documented how he was uh fishing on a lake with some guys, and he looks up and he sees a strange luminous object that he describes as being like a pig in the sky, a luminous pig.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they watch this thing for quite a while, and they realize that they've been watching it for two hours and that their boat had actually gone against the current and actually gone backward.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So like there are some cases that are interesting that you can say the bare bones of the UFO stuff is there, and that it predates the you know the science fiction, because if you if you look at science fiction and its origins, you look at Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, and then it kind of goes from there.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So like the first real uh uh kind of uh UFO sightings that people point to are the uh what we call the mystery airships of the 18 of 1896, 1897.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it started in California.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: People were reporting these strange looking kind of like blimp objects at a time when you know blimp objects they were starting to be, you know, people were starting to work on them, but they weren't like a feasible thing.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: So people see these blimp like objects, these airships on the on the west coast for yeah, a couple of days, and these sightings kind of die down, and then they pick back up on the east coast uh months later, and people talk about you know um encountering the pilots of these things, and these are like they're like ordinary human beings that they're talking to, and and like but they sound alien in many ways, but like these are the first kind of documented UFO sightings, and they're interesting because again, this is at a time when really you know airships aren't going to be a very big thing for very long, like you have user zeppelins, they don't last very long, they're they Become antiquated pretty quick.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but like the the accounts that these people had were just very strange and like watching people looking like they're pedaling a bike in the air, like moving these things.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: But there are other strange things, uh especially once you get into the early 1900s, there were what they called phantom airplanes, and what they were is uh people would report hearing airplanes or seeing airplanes in really bad weather at a time when airplanes, you know, the the technology is at its infancy.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: There isn't a lot of you know airplanes in the sky.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: But people are reporting that in the middle of storms, they're hearing the sound of airplanes in the sky, or they're seeing, you know, airplanes like uh small single-engine airplanes just you know coming out of the cloud bank and stuff like that.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: This gets reported for a number of years, and like it keeps going through an evolution.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the most interesting parts about the UFO thing is it goes through it keeps going through this evolution.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you have these mystery airships, they show up in 1896 and 1897, they show up again over in England in 1909.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh some sightings in New York in 1909 and stuff, and then you get to these mystery airplanes, and then eventually you get to the foo fighters of World War II, and then these pilots that are reporting these strange lights in the sky that are tailing their planes and and stuff like that, and then it evolves again a couple years later to um what they called the um ghost rockets.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So over in Europe, you have these like long go these long rocket-like objects that are seen like going into water, coming out of water and stuff, and ultimately it evolves again until you get to you know the flying saucer stuff and what Kenneth Arnold was seeing.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Kenneth Arnold is uh considered like the first the first person, uh, the first sighting in the modern age.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: He um he was flying over Mount Rainier, uh, and he was looking for a downed military plane that had um the military had lost like a few days ago.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: There was a big reward out for it.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: So he's kind of circling around Mount Rainier looking to find it.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he catches a glint of silver, and he looks and he sees uh about nine objects that are flying in the sky.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: They're in this um step-like pattern, an echelon formation.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what makes his sighting unique is like while he's in the air, he's doing everything that he can to like measure how big they are to see how fast they're going.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and he realizes they're going about 1700 miles per hour, which is too fast for him.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: So he like bumps that number down.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, No, they're going 1200 miles per hour, you know.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Don't they're not going that fast.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing that goes that fast.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he's uh holding out um um planes back in the day, they had um these fasteners on the um skin of them called Zeus fasteners, and they would keep the skin from falling off the plane.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: He was holding up one, you know, trying to get like an accurate size on these things.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: So from there, it it hasn't really evolved all that much.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like there are added elements, but like you know, we're in that flying saucer age still where you know the same stuff that was being reported in the late 40s is still kind of being reported today.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just um, you know, there's added elements.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people see beings, and sometimes people see different kinds of shaped objects, like triangular objects, um you know, oval-shaped objects, there's a lot of different types, but like the evolutionary process is like the most fascinating thing about this because it it does seem to evolve over a period of time and with like you know, technology as it advances.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: As our own science fiction is becoming science fact and science evolves our own technology, it would feel like that we would have more tools now than ever to disprove this if it wasn't true.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the inverse is what's happening.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: We are learning more and more and more, and the evidence is getting stronger and stronger, and it's credible people.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, in particular, this last five years, um, you know, the tic-tac over the ocean and uh who is it?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh David Fravor.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, David Fraver.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's a very interesting construct where we're learning more, and that suspension of of disbelief is going away and it's just changing to belief.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think what we saw in 2017 after the New York Times article came out is a bit of a more serious approach to UFOs.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because before that, if you look at you know UFO culture, a lot of it was influenced by the X-Files, and the X-Files was influenced by 80s ufology, which is very conspiratorially minded.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's very there's just so many conspiracy theories that pervade it to the point where that's what the image of UFOs becomes.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And like there's still a section of that that clings to like whenever the government comes forth with any kind of information about UFOs, especially recently, like when people don't get the information that they want, or the you know, like it's not presented in the way that they want, they get upset.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's still very pervasive today, but it's taken you know more seriously than it ever has been before.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's just there's a large audience that wants it to be so foreign to us, this technology, that aliens are on the table.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: They've got to be on the table.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is so far advanced that it couldn't be anything else.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so far, I think the um I think the tic-tac sighting uh that Fravor had and um his co-pilot had is probably one of the strangest um on record.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the stuff that the military shot down, um, it's it's it's not very interesting, and I knew it wasn't gonna be interesting to a lot of people.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of hype surrounding it because they shot down a Chinese spy balloon, and then after that, they were on heightened alert, so they shot down a few other things that may very well be um civilian things that got out of hand, which is what it seems to be.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, there are a lot of people that um don't like that answer that that are like, no, they were describing these things, they're not balloons, they're not this, they're not that.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't think we know what they really are.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like um in the 80s, you couldn't trust the government to give you the information that you wanted because they were very much involved in disinformation, um, especially um the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, they were caught.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, basically, um, there was a guy named Paul Benowitz, he was a military contractor, and he um I forget exactly what base he lived across from, but he, you know, designed uh certain things for this for the military, and he started seeing these strange lights over the base, and it was secret secret you know technology that they were working on, and he was like, No, they're aliens.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna tell the government that they're aliens.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of saying, No, Paul, they're not aliens, they decided to feed into the that trope.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So they took the Office of Air Force and Special Investigations, decided to like start pumping them full of like all of this paranoia and stuff like that.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: They even gave him a machine that was you know said to pick up on alien frequencies and stuff.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And later on in the decade, there's a guy named Bill Moore who was part of this.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: He uh he basically helped to circulate disinformation within the UFO community for what he was you know, what he believed was real information that he was getting.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: He ultimately comes out in I think it was 1989 at this movon conference, and he has this huge like presentation that he gives where he basically says, I played a part in this, you know, this the government's lying to you and and all this stuff.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think what's interesting is like we've gone from the age of the you know, the government is capable of introducing disinformation in the UFO community.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the first time that it's happened, you know.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're they were the government was heavily involved in UFO groups going back into the 50s and the 60s.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're to the point where um, you know, people are just like yelling at the government, telling them, you know, tell us what you know.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the government doesn't really know all that much.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh when it comes to like the the UFOs and like the unidentified cases that they're talking about, um, people wanna, you know, jump to that conclusion that it is, you know, alien technology or or something like that.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like to be honest, I don't think most people in the UFO community give a crap about national security in in any way.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: But um yeah, it's just it it's interesting to see like the dichotomy of it's being taken more seriously, but people aren't getting the answers that they want, so you know the government's lying to you.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I like the way that you are analyzing things using the process of history, and I think that's something that's probably makes your show unique because you're not just you're not laying into sensationalism of it, you're going off of historical data and and stories as they've been passed down year over year.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And all the like, you gotta think right before the pandemic happened, uh, Joe Rogan took out his magnifying glass and he put it over the top of Jeremy Corbell and the Bob Lazar situation.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: How has that impacted just the whole premise of that science?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Lazar is one of those people that did help to he influenced uh a lot of people, and it's been interesting to see him come back these last few years and basically, you know, uh affirm everything that he claimed back in the late 80s, and like that's where DX Files got a lot of their stuff from, like with Area 51.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: He put Area 51 on the map, and like we do know what Area 51 was used for.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it was largely used by um uh Lockheed Martin to you know build all of these planes, like you know, the SR71 and stuff.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's where they built them, that's where they flew them out of.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, you got Bob Lazar here talking about, oh yeah, I worked on you know this this UFO.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: We called it the sport model.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's like okay, like uh I I I think what's interesting is like we're seeing a lot of the uh especially in the last few years, a lot of the old stuff that a lot of people had dismissed.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's coming back.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there was talk in one memo that I saw uh a few years ago about the alien autopsy video, and we know who faked the alien autopsy video because they they've come out and they've said, this is how we faked it, this is how we did it.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and the thing is, is like going back and watching that that Fox special, like they had like one of the most premier like um uh experts on you know like anatomy and stuff completely fooled.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, oh man, this is this is complete, this gotta be, you know, real.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And like it's easy to fool stuff people with like you know video footage and stuff like that.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: So like with the advent of people like Bob Lazar, you have a lot of that conspiracy-mindedness in the UFO topic, but you also have alongside it these people that just assume that the government knows something and that they need to give it up.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where it just gets very strange to me.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you can't trust the government, but you want the government to give you all this information, right?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like those two don't don't gel together.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if you bring that up to people like you know, those those heavy enthusiasts, they will, you know, shoot you down.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like I've had people literally tell me, oh no, the government can't lie to us, or you know, the the government, that's what the government did back then.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't do that again.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Are you kidding me?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like the government, the government lies a fair enough, you know, amount.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: So like uh trusting the one source that is going to lie to you is absolutely hilarious to me.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's people straddling both lanes, like one lane it's confirmation bias, and the other lane it's the government's our enemy.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so all that does is sensationalize the topic even more.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it and it sensationalizes every bit of information that the government decides to release.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and every time it releases a report, you know, like it it just dropped a report a few weeks ago, and it is it's nothing.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: It it's just hey, this is our status report on what we did.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like there isn't a lot to to bite on.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's like six pages or something like that.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: But uh when it comes to you know investigating cases like that, it also takes time.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, most of those cases are not gonna be what people want them to be, which is again alien technology.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of enthusiasts, again, they don't care about national security, they don't care about what other technology other countries have.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: They want aliens, and unless you give them aliens, uh, they're not gonna be happy with that.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you've touched on it a few points, uh, a few times, where you've brought up national security, and I think people do dismiss that so frequently and realize that there is a reason we don't know some things, and that there are things masked by our government because we are not meant to know that, you know, because maybe we don't want to know the answer.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a it reminds me of a great quote by Arthur C.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: Clarke where it says, uh, two possibilities exist.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Either we're alone in the universe or we're not.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Both are equally frightening.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, they they absolutely are, and like, you know, uh like the living with that, you know, idea is it is absolutely terrifying, especially when you read a lot of like the reports that I cover on my show, like a lot of them involve very strange figures that people have claimed to interact with and and such.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And like some of them are absolutely terrifying.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: So like like one of my absolute favorite cases um is this case that occurred in November of 1967, uh, in Riri, Idaho, these two um young Navajo men, Guy Tossey and Will Be Gay, they're out, you know, joyriding at night, uh, right outside Reary, Idaho.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're coming around a bend, they see this light uh in the middle of the road, and they realize that it's a small UFO.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's Saturn-shaped, it's got a transparent dome on it, and they can see two figures inside.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: These figures, um, they describe their skin as like um like almost resembling like uh, you know, a mummy in a way.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like the their skin looks like the way a mummy's head is like bandaged and stuff like that, and they have these long pointy ears, and you know, just these short figures wearing these kind of spacesuits.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: The dome opens, and one of these figures starts to float out, and they're trying to you know speed away, but their car won't go.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: This this figure walks over or really floats over to the driver's side door, opens it, pushes the other two guys over, gets behind the wheel, and just goes for a short joy ride into a uh wheat field until he stops.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the guys runs out, runs to this farmhouse nearby to get help.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: The other guy is just like you know, absolutely terrified in the in the cab of the car.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the alien's trying to talk to him, he's trying to say something, can't understand him.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like, you know, really just cowering in the corner, he's talking to him, and then eventually he's like, Oh, this guy doesn't understand me.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the alien gets out, goes back to his ship, and it takes off.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, in what world, you know, aliens going for a brief joy ride, right?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like it doesn't it doesn't make any sense.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what's interesting about a lot of these cases is like when you get into the really weird stuff, they don't make sense.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like, um, and but they're also seem very deliberate in their execution.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're meant to be seen by whoever sees them, and that and that even that that witness might have been meant to see that at the time, because I don't believe that there are so many people that are in a right time, right place scenario that like this would just like automatically you know, people would stumble into this all the time.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: This this seems like a one in a million thing, but like a lot of the encounters that people have with these strange beings, they all look different.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they all they aren't uh, you know, now you in UFO culture, you have the concept of the gray and like this uh you know alien with these huge black eyes.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: That that wasn't always there, that didn't really pop up and become a thing until the 80s.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go back through history, there's a there's a great timeline um called uh Joe Nichols.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think it's Joe Nichols Alien Timeline.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it from the 1940s, uh and I think it goes back even further that than that, to 1987, they all looked different.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like some were tall, some were short, some look like uh short versions of Bigfoot, some of them looked like you know, normal kind of humans wearing spacesuits and stuff like that, but they've varied greatly to whoever saw them.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: So either the universe is so abundant with aliens that you know they're all interested in coming to Earth and and taking a peek, or um, there is some definite weird design behind you know these things appearing to people in the ways that you know maybe they want them to see them and stuff, which if you look at all these cases and you think that these are aliens coming from different planets, it doesn't really make sense because there are so many aliens then you know visiting here where that doesn't seem statistically likely.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to wonder, well, if they don't come from another planet, where do they come from?
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really the you know the the debate uh behind all of this is where do these things come from and why do they appear to people seemingly uh in in in with some intentionality of appearing to these people.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: The uh the figure of the gray and the image of the gray, that more or less became a thing after the book Communion came out, if I'm not mistaken, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: That was what put it on the map.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there were a couple of cases that involved similar-looking beings, but um, yeah, the when um communion became the bestseller that it did, uh the the image on the cover just connected with a lot of people to the point where um you know they came forward saying, Oh, we've had these experiences, we've you know encountered these beings before.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um our family has histories of this.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: So like the uncanny valley of that image just like really hit a lot of people hard to the to the point where you know Whitley Streber was receiving hundreds of letters a week saying I've I've had encounters with these beings going back decades.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, like it's 1987 is the year.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever pondered the possibility that it's something aside from aliens?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm gonna go out there.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say maybe there's a convergence of parallel universes or you know, other things of that nature, you know, another big uh Topic that's picked up a lot of steam, especially since 2012.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: I like talking about it a lot just because it fascinates me, is the uh large hadron collider.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: It begs to question, uh, you know, what else could these things be?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh, you know, that's one prominent theory is like these are extra-dimensional figures that come through and you know do what they do.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um for me, I I I I've thought that way for a long time, and maybe they these things are, they do come from some other place that you know we can't access, but they can somehow come through to us.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the one interesting thing is like how these uh events affect people, which is something that if you you know go back and you read UFO journals going back into the 50s, 60s, and 70s, nobody's nobody's ever really bothered to ask that question.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: How did it affect you?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: You read our UFO account in a UFO journal, it gives you the details and then it just ends.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: And realistically, uh the way that I see UFO encounters and like these like humanoid encounters and stuff like that, it's a very personal thing for the witness to the point where it affects their lives in so many different ways.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the first people that ever actually you know decided to publish a book about how UFOs affected people was Ryan Sprague.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan Sprague, he's the host of uh Somewhere in the Sky, so it's just a great podcast, and he has a book of the same name, and in it he documents all these uh UFO encounters and you know, alien encounters that people have had, and he sees how they've affected people.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: There are some people that went on to become actors, there are some people that uh there's one guy that went on to become a pastor and stuff like that.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, the UFO and and the humanoid is as much a signpost for someone in their life when they need it, as much as they are some random dimensional thing or some alien thing that comes from somewhere.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like to me, these are purposefully done encounters to where the person sees them at a point in their life when they need to see them, when maybe they are at a crossroads or maybe they are at the verge of you know on something big and life-changing and stuff like that.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've just come to see UFOs more as um a signpost for the witness than you know, uh just some random thing that happens somewhere in the world that someone's lucky enough to see, like there's just too much design behind that to make me think that it's random at all.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: I love that, and that's a great lead into my next question is how did your experience impact you?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: And how has doing this podcast and getting to hear all the stories and all the studying you've done over time impacted you as well?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like it's made me uh it's made me connect with a lot of people that I never expected to.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like I've just connected with uh a lot of other podcasters, a lot of other witnesses, a lot of other people that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to if I hadn't had my sighting.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's first and foremost.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, secondly, it's it's influenced my creativity.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I have Our Strange Skies, and uh, if you listen to like the entirety of Our Strange Skies, uh for a long time I didn't know what I wanted that to be.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it sounds very different throughout the years.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of the episodes are me by myself uh going through these cases.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there was a period where I would set it to music, make it as dramatic as I possibly could.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, there are a lot of light-hearted episodes in there too.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: But um, it's led me to uh a lot of creative people, and one of them that it has led me to is uh a friend of mine named Todd Purce.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: And together we we have a um UFO webcomic we release once a month, it's called Welcome UFO People, and in it it's just a five-panel comic that depicts uh you know a UFO incident from history and stuff like that.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had about six.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: We just dropped one this week, and um it is and it it is as much uh uh it affects creativity, it's is an influencer for creativity, these uh incidents, to the point where again you have people going on to become actors.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you have others.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um Dan Pavenmeyer, for instance, the guy behind Phineas and Ferb.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um he had uh a missing time incident uh before he started doing that.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that seemingly affected him in different ways.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: But uh that question of how it affected people has not been asked enough to the point where I we don't know the full effect of how it has affected other people's creativity and stuff.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: So in in many ways, like yeah, the it's just for me, it's led to a lot of good and positive change, it's led me to a lot of fulfilling relationships in my life with people that never would have expected and that I'm extremely grateful for.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, it's led me to different avenues to explore creativity, so it's it's kind of if at the very least, the UFO is an avenue for change.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like at the at the at the base of it, that's that's what it is.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's change.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: So do you think we're gonna ever get any answers in our lifetime realistically?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're gonna get answers, but I don't think they're the answers that people want.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they're the easy answers that are because like we we've had this image for the longest time that, you know, and going back to the 50s and stuff like that, you know, claatu barata dictu, you know, landing on the White House lawn and stuff.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like we we believe that's the ultimate scenario is like these beings coming down and introducing themselves and you know, just making themselves known to people.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, hey, we come in peace.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's that's not the answer.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's not where you're going to, you know, find the UFO is in that kind of stock answer.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: The UFO is as much to me um an internal, you know, finding something internally as it is externally.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I think people will find UFOs, but they just won't be in the ways that they think they will.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they won't be in the conventional ways that a lot of people think UFOs manifest themselves and stuff, because uh I do believe it is more internal than external.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I think people see UFOs when they need to see them, when it's important for them to see them.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the change that it leads to is uh important for everybody that sees them.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, people will see UFOs, they'll figure it out, but it's just not the answer that people are looking for.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love that sensible answer, sir.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think people need to hear a lot more of you.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you let my audience know where they can find you online, where they can find your webcomic and your podcast?
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: So um, if you want to check out the podcast, best place to do it, check out our strange skies.com.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can find links to everything.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: We're on, you know, most podcast apps and everything.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when it comes to the webcomic, welcome UFO people.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: We are on Twitter at welcome ufo peeps and uh Instagram at welcome ufo people.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have high res images that uh I put out on my Patreon.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we're getting to a point right now where we're gonna be releasing some you know prints that people can buy.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and the hope is eventually to put this, put all of these into a book at some point.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, follow along there.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um, if you want to follow along, uh I'm on Twitter at your UFO guy, spelled Y-E-R-U FO guy, uh, if you want to follow me personally.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh yeah, uh I'm around.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for doing the show, especially on short notice.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: Will you come back and do this again?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: I love this, man.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think we have a lot more to talk about in the future.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, Rob.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: The world's a better place with you and it, my friend.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: This has been this has been a blast, man.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it so much.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, I'd like to thank Rob Christofferson for being on the show today.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can check out his podcast, our streams guide, on all of your favorite podcasting platforms.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Give him a follow on Twitter at your UFO guy, irUFO guy.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: And while you're following people and checking out people's social media, make sure you follow and give a like.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Available on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can also visit www.clap on the mic dot.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: As always, I appreciate those five-star reviews in the Apple Podcast app.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I gotta tell you, friends, there are some exciting things on the way.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: This has been on the mic with Michael Clark.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Michael Clark.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.