Tweet

Jeffrey Daugherty spent twenty years of his life as a Christian preacher and over a hundred thousand hours studying the New Testament in its original language. By looking at the native text, he started seeing a stark difference in the books written by the apostle Paul versus the apostle John.

These differences led to a crisis of faith for Daugherty, who was conflicted between his discoveries and the Church that he had given his whole life to. He had a family to provide for and his entire existence revolved around his affiliation with his church, from where he lived to what he ate to who he spent his time with. As he talked to his elders and asked them about the contradictions, his concerns were swept under the carpet with the “God works in mysterious ways” response or being told that his interpretation was mistaken or his faith just wasn’t strong enough.

But that wasn’t enough for Jeffrey Daugherty. He saw an agenda in the writings of Paul, an agenda of control and manipulation that seemed contradictory to the teachings of Jesus. Using the modern standard of the Bible, the King James Version, Daugherty saw changes in the text over time, once by being vetted and translated by the Roman Empire early in Christianity’s history and again by the English king in the Seventeenth Century.

He re-edited the New Testament so that the books are in chronological order and with Paul’s writings removed and this Diamond New Testament is the place he believes you should start if you really want to understand what Jesus (who Daugherty refers to as Yeshua to separate him from the character created in Paul’s testament) was trying to say.

Moving on from there, with his Final Message From The Last Apostle book, The Christian Whistleblower finds an extraterrestrial alien agenda in the original language of the writings of the Apostle John. And then his book, Apostle Paul Anti-Christ, is about the fear and guilt used to control humanity by studying the original text of  Paul’s writings.  His books are absolutely fascinating and to say his writing and research is provocative is a massive understatement.

This is more than your standard “organized religion is a scam to control humanity by unscrupulous bishops and priests”, Daugherty is flat out saying that a dark being is using Christianity itself to set the stage to take over our planet.

And if that is the kind of idea that you find fascinating like we do, then you’re going to want to learn more about The Christian Whistleblower and check out more of his books and videos. His combination of scholarship, earnestness, and dynamic presentation might even make you a believer.

This week’s song is an unreleased Sunspot track that we arranged for acoustic guitar and violin, “Flesh and Blood”.

Why did you let them take control.

of your mind?

Why couldn’t you see the could burst,

in your eye?

And I won’t believe

in a love that deceives

and I won’t waste my faith foolishly

on cosmic rays

and mysterious ways

that never gave a damn for us anyway

And heaven and earth can fade away

and the mountains might fall

and all the power to which we pray

Tweet

Forrest J. Ackerman was the editor of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine that he founded in 1958 to discuss his favorite thing – fantasy, science fiction, and horror movies. The magazine would go behind the scenes with special effects and stories on the people involved with the production.

The modern definition of a geek is someone in a circus sideshow who would run after chickens and bite their heads off. They would eat anything and this is where the modern idea comes from. We geeks love to learn anything and everything about their favorite pop culture. I used to devour books about Doctor Who when I was a kid, reading production diaries and stories about the set in addition to the actual shows and novels. The Internet makes it easy today to keep up on your favorites, but back in the 50s when Famous Monsters of Filmland came out to cash in on the first wave of classic Hollywood monster films finally hitting the TV airwaves, it was the only place to hear more about your favorite films.

As a young Paul Davids grew up in the Washington D.C. area in the 50s, he fell in love with the fantasy and science fiction films of that era. He made home movies and sent stills in to Famous Monsters magazine which would publish them and encourage building a community of aspiring imaginative filmmakers. After he grew up, he joined the Hollywood Circus during the American New Wave of auteurs (a movement that spawned legends like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg.)

Davids became a personal friend of Ackerman (who everyone called ‘Uncle Forry’) and spent a lot of time at the “Ackermansion”, the editor’s Hollywood home with massive amounts of movie memorabilia that he would open to visitors on weekends.

Paul Davids would go on to become production coordinator on the original Transformers cartoon (one of my personal favorites!) A few years later, a personal UFO encounter in Los Angeles (which he describes in the episode) would lead him to produce the Showtime movie, Roswell (which we talked about in-depth with Don Schmitt about in an earlier podcast.) His close friendship with Ackerman would lead to the production of a documentary called The Sci-Fi Boys as well in 2006, detailing the influence that Famous Monsters had on a generation of filmmakers from John Landis to Peter Jackson who would end up taking over the blockbuster film industry.

While both Paul Davids and Forrest Ackerman loved their fantasy and science fiction films, neither of them were religious and Forry himself was an atheist who didn’t have any belief in the afterlife. Which is why when he jokingly told his close friends that if there was some kind of life after death, he would try to communicate with them, they all had a good laugh.

Forrest J. Ackerman passed away in December of 2008 at the ripe old age of 92, but he had the last laugh. Within two weeks of a special tribute to Ackerman at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre (a place we also talk about in our Ghosts of Hollywood Boulevard episode), strange things started occurring to his friends. Davids himself started getting weird messages and synchronicities and after too many of them occurred,

Tweet

Ed and Lorraine Warren were the Jay-Z and Beyonce of the paranormal set for decades. After establishing the New England Society for Psychic Research (notice the titular similarities to the science-minded Society for Psychical Research in the UK and the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City) in Connecticut in 1952, Ed and Lorraine could be found lecturing all over the New England college circuit. More films and books have been based on their exploits than any other real-life paranormal investigation team. They even have an Occult Museum  in their home in Monroe, Connecticut.

 

With ties to most of the famous cases of hauntings and demonic possessions of the Twentieth Century, their controversial claims have given them thousands of hours of airtime on radio and television and have sold millions of books.  Ed carried a business card that just said “Demonologist”, Lorraine has claimed to be clairvoyant and psychically sensitive. They are famously portrayed by Academy Award nominee Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. The books and films based on their exploits all say “Based on a true story” but you know how far that the film industry likes to stretch that.

We decided to take a look at some of their most famous cases and see what the real story was behind Ed and Lorraine Warren’s involvement.

Annabelle

In the movie The Conjuring, Annabelle is about the scariest nastiest doll you can imagine. There’s nothing cute or sweet about this thing. In real life, it’s a Raggedy Ann doll that actually you can see why a little kid would want to play with it. They keep it in their Occult Museum with a sign that says “Warning: Positively Do Not Open”. The Warrens often told the story of how they got the doll from a 28-year old nurse who saw it acting strangely and held a séance where it was said that the spirit of a seven-year old girl was inhabiting the toy. Eventually the Warrens have to take the doll to their museum because they think it is inhabited by an inhuman presence. Ed even claimed that someone mocked the doll and died in a motorcycle crash an hour later. But that claim, like the rest of the claims about Annabelle, you have to take the Warrens on their word, which makes it feel a little more pedestrian than paranormal. Lately, I got a Turnigy 9X for my RC plane, it’s the most useful accessory for my RC that I’ve gotten in years.

The Amityville Horror

This Long Island house had a real-life horror story when Ronald ‘Butch’ DeFeo ended up killing his entire family there in 1974. A year and a half later, George Lutz  bought the house and lived there for 28 days with his family in 1975, they claimed they saw everything from an evil pig with glowing red eyes to blood oozing from the walls. They recorded forty-some hours of audio and author Jay Anson turned that into a book that sold ten million copies and that was turned into a movie franchise.

Eventually the lawyer for Ronald DeFeo claimed that he made the whole thing up with the Lutz family to try some kind of possession defense in a new trial for his client. But when the Hollywood money showed up, they all ended up suing each other.

This interview from the

Tweet

The world of the paranormal and the world of entertainment are intrinsically bound together. From Moses and his Burning Bush to Valerie Bertinelli getting Touched By An Angel, we tell stories to each other about the things that might sound crazy if they would happen in our regular life. But those stories help us believe.

Really, would The Exorcist have been so scary if it wasn’t Roman Catholic priests battling a demon who serves a master that fifty-seven percent of Americans believe exists? That’s not The Creature From The Black Lagoon or even George Romero’s zombies (who I thought might be real after a particularly traumatic Night Of The Living Dead viewing as an easily impressionable six-year old), we’re taking about The Devil, baby.

But we’ll get back to Ol’ Scratch soon enough (we always do). First, let’s talk about this week’s guest. Daniel Rumanos is a Baltimore-based entertainer who performs bizarre magic. Okay, that’s a pretty cool name, but what is bizarre magic all about?

Rumanos describes it as story-based magic, you tell a tale to go along with the tricks. Part of the performance is creating a greater magical “outside” world with which to tell the story and then the tricks serve to spice up the performance. In our Houdini & Doyle episode, we talked about how some magicians in the Houdini era deliberately told their audiences that they had supernatural powers, and that set an atmosphere of wonder during the performances. While most modern mainstream magic shows use comedy to set the mood, Bizarre Magic uses the power of a supernatural or horror story to evoke an air of mystery. But today’s audiences don’t believe that these modern bizarre magicians actually have supernatural powers.

If David Copperfield makes an elephant disappear right before your eyes, you don’t really think that David Copperfield is a sorcerer who is invoking a supernatural power Gandalf-style to make the elephant disappear. It’s still wondrous and amazing, but you know that it’s a carefully constructed man-made illusion. If someone told you that David Copperfield is actually a wizard, it might flash as a possibility before your eyes for a second (how did he make that German goddess Claudia Schiffer fall in love with him after all?) but then you’d have a laugh because we all know that stage magic is an illusion and it’s great, but it’s not supernatural.

So, now let’s go back to the Devil and this is where it intersects with Daniel’s life. While a bizarre magic show might create a Lovecraftian world of sorcery and monsters which the tricks and stories take place in, there are events that take place all the time where someone’s faith has prepared them their entire lives for an atmosphere of wonder and paranormal experience.

When people go to a traveling religious revival event, their Christian faith has already done the groundwork to set the mood. If a majority of Americans believe that there is an actual Satan who is actively trying to deceive, seduce, and tempt humanity to do horrible things to each other, well, then you’ve got a pretty good setup for a traveling stage show where the magician (preacher) does battle versus the Devil and his minions (sinners in the audience.)

Tweet

Before the wreckage of this last week’s crash of EgyptAir Flight 804 ended the mystery surrounding what happened to the Airbus A320, cable news immediately jumped on the story. Missing planes are big business. Traveling in the modern age means flying, and flying means getting in a metal cylinder and hurling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. For myself, it’s the surrender of control that makes it terrifying. Not that I know how to fly, but I’m at the mercy of the pilot, someone I don’t usually even see. My life is in his or her hands, that’s a lot of trust to place in someone that you don’t know, only reassured by the fact that their lives are in their hands as well and whatever happens to me, happens to them. So that helps. And also knowing that your chances of dying in an airline crash are extraordinarily low, you’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning or bitten by a shark than going down in a plane.

Now what happened to EgyptAir 804 was probably terror-related (they were already in Cairo airspace when they just turned around for seemingly no reason), but since aviation has only been with us for a little over a hundred years, we have an excellent record of its history. Missing planes are news now because it happens so infrequently. And when it happens, when all the safeguards humans have created to protect themselves during air travel fail, then it’s a big deal. But what if it’s something more than just human or mechanical error, what if it’s something paranormal in nature?

The most recent flight to disappear was Malaysian Airlines Fight 370. Taking off in Kuala Lampur, the flight was supposed to land in Beijing, but never did and was said to have crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The mystery behind that missing plane lasted for months until a piece of wreckage washed up on an island near Africa in the Indian Ocean.

Conspiracies abounded from Flight 370 from North Korea shooting it down to a CIA coverup to the plane being commandeered to land in Russia. Of course, 5% of people even believed that it had something to do with aliens or supernatural activity.  Those people are my favorite. But reliable aviation experts and different authors have challenged the authenticity of the debris, saying it was planted. A new photo that showed up last week has made the veracity of the wreckage more likely, however, and as the public slowly loses interest in the flight, the final mystery might never be solved.

But the most famous place that planes have disappeared has to be the Bermuda Triangle. The three corners are Miami, Florida, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Popularized by author Charles Berlitz in his 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle.

The most famous case of disappearing planes over the triangle comes from December 5, 1945. Flight 19 was a bombing training mission run by Lieutenant Charles Taylor, a flight veteran. Their compasses ended up not working, the planes got lost over the mid-Atlantic and five planes and 14 men were lost at sea and never found. Later, they sent out another plane (a flying boat) to go search for the missing planes.

Tweet

What a fantastic weekend as Wendy and I attended the Paradigm Symposium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The mission of the event is to bridge the gap between academic thinking and alternative studies  and you could see it in action because the speakers treated each presentation like it was a college lecture.

The guys behind the event were Scotty Roberts and John Ward from Intrepid Magazine, which is a publication after my own heart, dealing with everything from science fiction to alternative history and archaeology. It was a massive undertaking, but completely worth it, because it provided us with a ton of inspiration for new episodes, new friends, and of course, lots of new things to ponder.

In the episode, Wendy Lynn and I cover all of the speakers that we got to see during the convention and tell a little bit about the topics that they covered.

Here are some links to the speakers so that if you hear about something you like during the podcast, you can come back and click on the link to learn more (and of course, we’re going to be asking all of these fascinating people to come on the podcast sometime soon!)

Micah Hanks – Secret societies, Yale’s Skull and Bones and its connection to America’s foreign policy think tanks. This dude can speak! And he’s got one of the best paranormal podcasts out there, The Gralien Report.

Jeffrey Daugherty (The Christian Whistleblower) – Was Jesus an alien? He doesn’t answer that for you, but his literal translation of the books of the New Testament certainly makes you think and it’s delivered in a helluva style!

Laird Scranton – Connecting the ancient abandoned site of Skara Brae on Scotland’s Orkney Islands with Africa’s Dogon Tribe and ancient Egypt. Heavy on the symbolism and linguistics, he’s obviously done his homework.

Dr. Rita Louise – Did aliens mess with our DNA early in our history? Could humanity be a lot older than we suspect? Lots of alternative history here!

Lon Milo Duquette – Revelations about King David and Solomon and their possible connections to the Knights Templar and Freemasonry.

Peter Robbins – The Rendlesham UFO Incident – it’s the United Kingdom’s very own Roswell and he can deliver the case for it as convincingly as they come.

Paranormal Sarah – Sarah Soderlund is a Twin Cities-based parapsychologist and author who also goes by the online name Paranormal Sarah.

Rocci Stucci – Political talk radio host and paranormal investigator, his EVP from an investigation with Scotty and John almost made me lose voluntary bladder control.

Travis Walton – The world’s most famous alien abductee and the man behind the classic Fire In The Sky, which was very influential on me when I was younger, watching the new documentary, 

Tweet

Quick update on some fun things this week, Wendy and I will be at the Paradigm Symposium paranormal convention in Minneapolis this weekend, so look out for us and let’s hang out if you’re there!

Also in more fun haunting news, I just launched St. Paul Ghost Walks which is the first haunted history walking tour of downtown St. Paul, Minnesota (I like to call it the Evil Twin) and that launches this Friday the 13th! 

And there’s still time to vote for our band, Sunspot, in the Madison Area Music Awards – if you voted in the first round, it doesn’t cost anything to vote for us in the FINAL round (ends May 19th). If you haven’t voted, it’s five tax-deductible dollars and every penny goes to helping out music education in Madison area schools. It’s a cause we believe in deeply and are proud to have been supporting this charity since the beginning.

This week, I got to take some time to talk to a creator after my own heart, Christopher Saint Booth. As a musician, film producer, and paranormal investigator with a superb sense of style, he and his brother Philip bring glam chic and a distinct sophistication to the world of the weird.

I met Christopher at the Chicago Ghost Conference (Episode 61 of the podcast has our haunted wrap up) when Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts  grabbed a copy of his book, The Exorcist Diary: The True Story, which is an adaptation of the original journal kept by the priest who was performing an exorcism on a boy named Roland Doe, and that was the real-life story that would eventually inspire William Peter Blatty to write the pea-soup barfing, crucifix-humping movie that we all know and love, The Exorcist.

In our conversation, we start with his career as a musician on the Sunset Strip in the late 70s and early 80s and his move into art director on various films (hey man, he got to work on Dreamscape, the film where people could travel into each other’s dreams and we’ve talked about it on this podcast a bunch of times!)

In addition to some fun Hollywood stories, Christopher shares with us some of his real life paranormal experiences that he’s also documented in an autobiographical book called PARANOIA – The Strange Case of Ghosts, Demons, and Aliens.

While he’s always been into horror movies, what I think is interesting is how the brothers stumbled upon becoming paranormal filmmakers. They were filming a movie called Death Tunnel at Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky, a legendarily haunted hospital that has been closed for decades. In the script, they used the real legends of the sanatarium for inspiration.

But the real show was what was happening behind the scenes. They got so much footage of weird stuff occurring while they were filming that they were able to make a documentary...

Tweet

So, Wendy and I recorded this episode while on a trip to the sunny California Dream Factory and saw the previews for a show we’d talked about all the way back in Episode 36 – Paranormal Lit 101: Victorian Horror with Brian J. Showers. Houdini & Doyle is the show that turns the friendship between escape artist Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into a crime solving duo. We haven’t seen it yet, but we thought we’d talk about the real relationship between the two men, who were on very different sides of the Spiritualism equation in the 1920s.

For a fun little side note, we not only went back to visited with rock photographer Jimmy Steinfeldt, the Rock n’ Roll Lens (get his awesome book of rock photography here!) at his studio in Laurel Canyon . Fun fact, it was formerly the home of Gary Kurtz, a producer on Star Wars, but more importantly for us, producer on Return To Oz (which I’ve referenced in this podcast way too many times!)  So that was a nice little dose of extra nerdery for me.

Caught this breathtaking view of L.A. while visiting my friend @jimmysteinfeldt ‘s amazing photo studio! #losangeles #skyline

A photo posted by @sunspotwendy on Apr 29, 2016 at 11:37am PDT

And here’s the nice tribute to Prince that was on the Rock Walk at Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard.

Lovely tribute to #Prince at the Rock Walk.

A photo posted by sunspotmike (@sunspotmike) on May 4, 2016 at 9:19am PDT

Spiritualism was the movement that grew to massive heights in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. With so many people dying in the American Civil War and the massive loss of life that occurred in the First World War, people were desperate for ways to contact their deceased loved ones. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of these, he was always interested in the supernatural, but became obsessed after losing his first wife in 1906 and his son shortly before the end of World War I.

Spiritualist mediums would hold séances where spirit faces would appear, strange knocks and sounds would respond as answers to questions, ectoplasm would manifest seemingly from nowhere, fingerprints would show up on the table that weren’t from any of the attendees. The mediums said that they could talk to the dead and Conan Doyle ate it right up.

Harry Houdini was the most famous magician in the world and it wasn’t uncommon for performers like himself to claim that they had real supernatural powers. But when his beloved mother passed away, Harry was desperate to talk to her again. He attended séance after séance to try and find some evidence of the paranormal, of a connection to the afterlife. But he knew the stage and he knew sleight of hand, he knew how to trick people and he knew when he was being trick...

Tweet

We took the show on the road this last Saturday night to the Old Baraboo Inn in Baraboo, Wisconsin to do a live podcast and ghost hunt.

Allison from  Milwaukee Ghosts joined Wendy and I to explore what is reputed to be one of Wisconsin’s most haunted buildings. She put on a presentation about Dairy State weirdness at the beginning of the night and it was fantastic because there were a bunch of stories that I never heard before and she gave us a preview of some of the cool stuff she’ll be doing at this year’s Milwaukee Paranormal Conference.

Once Allison finished her presentation, we took some time to interview owner B.C. Farr about the place and its history. Built in 1864, the saloon has had several owners over the decades as it shifted from a boarding house to speakeasy to brothel and then just a nice Wisconsin tavern.

B.C. had been a regular there since the 80s and was on a path to become a professional NASCAR race car driver. But the entrepreneurial spirit got the best of him and after a strange fire gutted the place, he got the opportunity to own it for himself. And it only took a short time before he started seeing his tools disappear randomly and shapes out of the corner of his eye. And that was just the beginning…

Since it was a live interview, it was even more fun because there were people at the bar who had seen things with B.C. over the years and he calls out a friend who had sat with him at the tavern one night and listened as the jukebox turned off and they could hear old honky tonk piano music wafting through the room for 30-45 seconds before the jukebox kicked back on. Another patron talked about the ghost of a cowboy they both saw one night. And according to this Wisconsin State Journal article, there’s plenty more ghosts there, including a few of the ladies of the night that used to work upstairs in the establishment. Whatever specials they’re offering, the ghosts are taking it, because it seems they’re just as popular with the dead as with the living!

Once we finished interviewing B.C. we talked with Melanie Carroll, who was dressed up like a spirit named Cybil, who’s been seen wandering the tavern in a fancy white dress. Melanie has a team called Date With The Paranormal in the area and has been investigating the Old Baraboo Inn since she moved into the area.

Her team uses what’s called an SLS Camera, which stands for Structured Light Sensor. Its use in ghost hunting has been made popular by Zak Bagans and Ghost Adventures. The camera captures an interesting variety of electromagnetic fields and seems to be able to detect movement that we cannot with our naked eye. In addition to doing photos earlier in the evening as “Cybil”, Mel was gracious enough to take us on a mini-ghost hunt up in the apartment upstairs where the old brothel used to be! My internet cut out after a few minutes, but I was able to capture a little bit of it in our See You On The Other Side Facebook live stream…

Okay, now here’s something weird. For this episode we originally recorded a tribute to Prince, who died this week at his estate and recording complex in Minnesota. So, Wendy and I worked up an acoustic version of “Delirious” and we ...

Tweet

So, with Wendy on vacation this week, Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts Tours And Investigations joins me again to discuss the upcoming economic technocalypse, that’s right technological unemployment. Allison was just with me last week for our first Wizard World Comic Con in Madison, Wisconsin where we were on a panel called Wisconsin Paranormal. It was hosted by our friend, Tea Krulos, and also on the panel was J. Nathan Couch, the world’s foremost Goatman expert, and a former guest on See You On The Other Side as well. It was a lot of fun and we can’t wait to get to another one.

Notes for the Madison convention, man, there was a lot of Doctor Who cosplayers, especially Osgoods – (and the character is kind of a Doctor Who cosplayer herself, so that whole thing was particularly meta), but whoever were dressed as the Predator and Ms. Predator (for real, it was like Ms. Pac Man but way more terrifying) were the real winners. Those costumes looked like it walked off a 20th Century Fox backlot and I was looking around to see if Ahnuld was anywhere to be seen.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10207270373255756&set=pcb.979456535436341&type=3&theater

This last week, actor Gareth Thomas passed away and we do a quick tribute to him. Blake’s 7 is still some of my favorite dystopian science fiction. Thomas played the lead character, Roj Blake, in a desperate fight against a tyrannical Galactic Federation. It was the anti-Star Trek, but it certainly was a fun and thoughtful show. And those outfits! I love you 1970s.

Also, I’m currently working on a haunted history tour of St. Paul, Minnesota and if you have any stories that you might have experienced or have friends that might have experienced, please send me an email at mikeATsunspomtusicDOTcom because I’m looking for more stories to complete the tour!

Okay onto this week’s main topic. It’s an election year and so people are talking about the issues that matter to them most. And what’s the most important issue to almost everyone? Well, as that famous cueball James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

And the economy is all about jobs. That’s where we earn money, that’s where we spend our time. When you have a job, you hate it (usually, I know I have in the past) but when you don’t have a job, you hate it even more (once again, I know I have in the past.) The most common cry is that American jobs are being stolen by immigrants who will work for less money or outsourced to Asia where people will work for a lot less money.

On a sci-fi comedy bent, South Park famously has an episode where future humans come back to our time from the future where there are no jobs. They’re willing to work for very low wages and the townspeople rally around the battle cry, “Dey took owr jerbs!”

But whatever side you stand on for free trade and immigration, there is one class of worker who is coming for our jobs.