We go back to the archives for this unreleased episode where we talked with Nick Redfern about his book, “The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy”.

“The object was hovering on legs”

“Something being tested in the area”

“A world of trouble”

“Minds were manipulated”

In the final days of December 1980, strange encounters and bizarre incidents occurred in the heart of Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. Based upon their personal encounters, many of the military personnel who were present at the time believed that something extraterrestrial came down in those dark woods. What if, however, there was another explanation for what happened four decades ago?

What if that explanation, if revealed, proved to be even more controversial than the theory that aliens arrived from a faraway world? The ramifications for the field of Ufology would be immense. In his new, sensational book, Nick Redfern reveals that one of the most famous UFO cases of all time was really a series of top secret experiments using holograms, mind-control programs, deception, disinformation, conspiracies and cover-ups. The shocking truth of a forty-year-old mystery is now revealed.

The song this week was inspired by Nick's 2021 book "Diary of Secrets: UFO Conspiracies and the Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe" and it's a track called "Dear Diary" from Sunspot's 2022 album, "The Strangest Frequency".

BIO

Nick Redfern is the author of more than 60 books. They include Flying Saucers from the Kremlin; The Roswell UFO Conspiracy; Women in Black; Men in Black; Nessie; Chupacabra Road Trip; The Black Diary; and 365 Days of UFOs. Nick has appeared on many TV shows, including the National Geographic Channel’s Paranatural; the SyFy Channel’s Proof Positive; and the Travel Channel’s In Search of Monsters.

"A certain number of people, good honest working folk, had seen something—something unusual. Something scary. Something hairy that relished pavement patty dinners!" 

That was the caption underneath the cartoon of an upright wolf eating roadkill that ran in the December 29th, 1991 article ofThe Week, the local paper of the small Wisconsin city of Elkhorn. It was an article that they thought would be fun but forgotten soon after. Stories were spreading among the kids of the town that people seeing a huge dog or wolf on two legs along a rural road late at night. The original reporter, Linda Godfrey, had to fight to get the article published. 

We've talked with Linda on the podcast many times, but on this special anniversary, Mike and his sister Allison bring Linda back to talk about how things have changed in the three decades since Linda broke the story. 

It all started with a folder labeled "Werewolf"

Once Linda Godfrey went to the Walworth County Animal Control officer, he already had a stack of reported sightings and unusual occurrences and the manila folder was labeled "Werewolf".

The sightings go back to 1936

Once Linda ran the story, people started contacting her about their own sightings. One man detailed his own father's encounter not far from Bray Road with a strange creature decades before. A story he had only shared with family before. The monster that his father had seen had all the hallmarks of the Beast that people were seeing along Bray Road in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It's Not Just Upright Wolves or Canines

Linda has also discovered hundreds of sightings of big cats in Wisconsin, sightings that the Department of Natural Resources says are impossible. Those sightings have political implications so sometimes cryptozoology can bleed over into the world of state politics, land zoning, and animal control. 

A never-before reported sighting

While driving home from Lake Geneva (where we have one of our most popular ghost tours!) a couple saw a puzzling creature in a cornfield in the middle of the day. Only after hearing about the Beast of Bray Road for the first time on TV a year later, did they realize that they had seen the same thing!

Listen to a special podcast episode featuring an interview with the original investigator and hear a firsthand never-before revealed encounter with the Beast of Bray Road...

Hello, dear listener! It’s been a bit since we published a “traditional episode” of this audio podcast, and we want you to know that we’re still here and we’re still at it!

This episode is a quick “hello” and a little retrospective of what has gone on in our world since the last episode was published.

When Hollywood comes looking for a nasty monster from First Nations folklore, there’s one supernatural creature that seems to dominate the landscape. The legend of the Wendigo has inspired cinematic villains from Pet Sematary to Supernatural , Ravenous to Bone Tomahawk. From the legends of the Algonquin-speaking Great Lakes tribes in the Upper Midwest and Canada, the Wendigo is the evil spirit that transforms starving humans into a voracious cannibalistic monster after they finally succumb to their basest instincts and taste human flesh.

These tribes lived in an area with harsh cold winters where food becomes scarce. Right around February when you haven’t had anything decent to eat for months and your body is starving for any kind of protein outside of your shoe leather, well, your neighbor might start looking pretty good. The human instinct to survive at all costs is hard to resist. The Wendigo is our warning to resist that urge, that this evil irreparably taints the soul once you feast upon another human.

Cannibalism is the ultimate human taboo. The whole reason that humans thrived on this planet is because we work together. We don’t have the natural advantages that other creatures do like fur on a bear to survive the winter cold or teeth like a wolf to dig into our prey. Our socialization is what enabled us to conquer the planet in all of its areas and climates. Winter is the cruelest climate of all because not only is terribly cold, there’s no food. Eating your fellow man is the ultimate betrayal of what makes us human, our tribal capacity to take on the world together.

Chad Lewis and Kevin Lee Nelson have been working on this compendium of Wendigo lore and mythology for almost two decades. And in this episode, Chad tells us of the journey he took in writing the book. Some of the things we also talk about in this conversation:

• Why you’re never even supposed to say the name of the Wendigo
• The most famous case of the Wendigo in the modern era, Swift Runner, who ate his family in 1878 Alberta
• The far edges of the world that Chad Lewis and his co- author went to walk on the same ground as the people they talk about in the book
• The radio station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin we used to perform at all the time and Chad had a show had an owner that thought he was a skin walker!

The Wendigo are more than just the winter spirits of desperate hunger, it is a monster that feeds on greed. The human capacity for gluttony and the desire that you will never have enough. The Wendigo, like George Romero’s zombies, is never satisfied, its craving is never satiated. It’s a eerily thin, gaunt beast who grows larger with every human it devours, but it’s still not enough. Once you break the taboo and taste the flesh, you descend into madness and you will never satisfy “The Hunger of The Damned”.

Horror stories, clickbait, panic porn, your amygdala is constantly getting stimulated nowadays because the media understands that if they activate your fight or flight response, you’ll pay attention. The old saying goes “If it bleeds, it leads” and that applies now more than ever. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has kept most of the world inside and glued to TV and social media for two months. We’re constantly surrounded by news stories of how many people are predicted to die, how many deaths are already happening, and how quickly the disease is spreading, and how dangerous it is.

Millions around the world have been impacted by the disease, losing loved ones or getting sick themselves, and millions have also been affected by the reaction to it. The economic shutdown has made millions of people dependent on unemployment insurance for the first time to pay their bills and a system unprepared for such a gigantic influx of new applicants has suffocated under the weight. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses whose doors were shuttered by the shutdown orders across America that had to apply for emergency loans to the Small Business Administration didn’t even get their applications looked at before the money ran out.

The school and daycare centers are closed and parents are stuck between the rock and a hard place of trying to keep money coming in and pay bills while providing their own child care, in essence, trying to juggle working full time from home (or if you work in a hospital or food industry, still having to go in) with parenting full time.

So not only are we worried about getting sick or people we love getting sick, we’re worried that we won’t have enough money to pay the bills and feed the children that we’re now assuming the teaching . Add to that, we’re in the middle of an election year, so the political teams have no co-opted the elements for the crisis and the lines in the sand have been drawn, depending on where your political beliefs fall.

People are desperate. People are scared. A lot of us are not okay. So, what are some ways that we can get back to “okay” when it feels like the world is crashing down on us. Our “fight ot flight” center, the amygdala is constantly being activated lately. So what are some ways that people have stayed cool in a crisis? From just breathing to praying and meditating? That’s what we cover in this episode.

Some of the different methods we discuss in this episode include:

• The scientific process behind how the brain handles anxiety
• Learning breathing techniques from the Dutch Iceman, Wim Hoff , who can control his body temperature so much that he can melt ice around him
• How meditation can calm your mind when you feel a panic coming on
• The history behind the incorrectly called “Chinese proverb”, “May you live in interesting times.”
• How using a mantra (repeated phrase) can help when you can’t calm down
• The sad and unbelievable story of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of anxiety and mental health
• Miracles that have been attributed to the calming prayer cycle known as the Rosary, including one at Hiroshima during the atomic blast.

Millions of people have UFO stories. There is a one-hundred percent chance that you know at least one person that has a story! So, we went to our listeners and in our own archives for this episode’s tales of UFO experiences.

Once again, join me, Wendy Lynn, Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com , and my sister Allison Jornlin from MilwaukeeGhosts.com to talk about our own stories as well as great ones from our listeners. You can watch the unedited livestream of our conversation here if you’d like to see our pretty faces while we talk.

My sister, Allison, has her own UFO story and it happened to be on the day that my daughter was born, September of 2016. Here’s the exact text of the email she sent me and it came out about 15 minutes after the birth, she didn’t know about it yet and I didn’t have much time to think about it at the time!

I’ve got my own UFO story too, not exciting like an abduction or anything, but interesting enough to me that I wrote it down the same day.

I was on a vacation in January of 2008 visiting a place called Cabo Rojo which is an incredible white sand beach on the southwestern shore of the island, opening up to the Carribbean sea with a very famous lighthouse.

Funny enough, as we were getting back on the road and driving towards our next location, just what road do we end up driving on? Yeah, that’s some kind of synchronicity. I see something weird in the sky I can’t explain on the same day we randomly decide to drive Puerto Rico’s Extraterrestrial Highway.

This episode is chock full of weird lights in the sky stories, including:

• Once again, our Patreon Dr. Ned tells us an interesting UFO encounter he had in the 1960s
• We’ve got high strangeness on a military base from our Patreon C.E. Martin’s book ,  Stranger Than Fiction .
• A Chicago UFO sighting from Illinois MUFON state director, Sam Maranto
• A Bermuda Triangle story from near Cabo Rojo where we were in Puerto Rico
• and lots more…

Well, something I said in this episode is that I’m gonna punch the next person that says the phrase “Space Brothers” to me, well guess what, it was me. The most ridiculous UFO hunt I’ve ever been on was at the Michigan Paracon in 2017 where we all stood outside in the parking lot while Andrea Perron sang “Sentimental Journey” and it was as ridiculous as it sounds. The only reason I took it even a little seriously at first is because Dave Schrader from Darkness Radio and The Holzer Files and Amy Bruni from Kindred Spirits both said that Andrea could really make some crazy stuff happen. Well, I don’t know what they were smoking, but here’s our immediate reaction afterwards…

Everyone’s got a ghost story, from your grandma to your high school social studies teacher. In fact, some of the people that you least expect (and some skeptics as well), seem to have stories that they just can’t quite explain. One time, I remember talking to someone about ghost stories and he said, “Nothing’s really ever happened to me… well… except that time that heard my grandmother’s voice tell me to stop immediately when I was driving, and I narrowly avoided getting into a car crash that surely would have killed me.” Nope, nothing at all then.

Kevin Hart Say What GIF

Kevinhart GIFs

So, this week, we decided to talk about our personal ghost stories as well as reach out to See You On The Other Side listeners to get their tales of the unexplained, so we could share them for this special episode. Wendy and I are joined by my sister, Allison from MilwaukeeGhosts.com as well as Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com and we originally recorded it as a livestream on Facebook.

Here’s the video of our livestream

But there was a ghost in the machine that day, so we didn’t end up listening to several of the listener stories, because of technical issues. However, all of those stories have been saved for the audio podcast for your listening pleasure, including:

• The ghost story Allison and my mother told us when we were kids when our parents lived across the street from a cemetery
• Our family’s strange story of our great uncle seeing an “Angel In The Mirror” right before he died
• A comforting ghost seen by our Patreon, Dr. Ned
• Katie’s story, who as a young girl, was out on the road doing merchandise with a country singer calls us to let us know about a hotel she stayed at where the ghost got a little too friendly
• Former Milwaukee ghost tour guide, Mike J., tells us of a childhood haunting in the “little pink house” that his family lived in
• Allison and her husband’s adventures at the Haunted Larium Manor Inn in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
• Ghost hunter Scott Markus’ adventures investigating in Illinois
• Quick stories recounted by Amy, Jimmy, and Tina as well…

We also read our Patreon C.E. Martin’s story, “The Closet of Terror” from his biographical paranormal novel, Stranger Than Fiction .

In the wilds of western Alberta, Canada, Ken Walker lives, hunts, creates, and sings Roy Orbison tracks. He’s a world champion taxidermist who specializes in recreations of extinct animals. He’s brought back stunning versions of the Sabretooth Tiger and the Irish Elk and his work is featured in the Smithsonian Institution. He’s also a Squatcher and in 2015, he began a quest to create a perfect version of the Bigfoot from the infamous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film , a not-so-little lady he calls “Patty”.

Kansas City filmmaker Dan Wayne was taking on taxidermy as a hobby when he encountered Ken on an internet forum. He found Ken’s work fascinating and was amazed by the amount of access that this first-in-class taxidermist was giving him online to help developing his own skills. And when he discovered that Ken was working on a Sasquatch, he thought it would make a great documentary.

And he was right. The ensuing documentary, which played at Slamdance Film Festival in 2020 is 

Big Fur, a compelling story about a man’s quest to recreate a creature that many have claim to have seen but only really has been captured on shaky 1967 filmstock. Ken said that he wanted Bigfoot experiencers to see his mount (what taxidermists call their creations) and say “That’s exactly what I saw.”

Ken Walker with “Patty”

I have been a Bigfoot skeptic for awhile now because I just have too many unanswered questions, but talking to Ken and Dan about their documentary and Ken’s theories on the creature have once again opened me up to the possibility. Skeptics, believers, and people just interested in Bigfoot and taxidermy will find a lot to enjoy in this wide-ranging and entertaining discussion, including:

• Ken’s own Bigfoot experience that led him to believe in Sasquatch
• How he ended up with several bags of what he thinks is Sasquatch feces in his freezer
• How you can tell a Hollywood-style fake Bigfoot costume from a real one (hint: it’s all in the forehead)
• The careful measuring of ratio and dimensions that Ken used to determine the height and size of his creation
• The electromagnetic energy of Bigfoot
• Hunting Bigfoot with special Faraday Cage camo suits
• What kind of weird tree structures that Sasquatch are making out in the Alberta woods

Wendy and I were joined for a podcast we recorded on Facebook Live with Allison Jornlin, Milwaukee’s Paranormal Researcher of the Year and WhatsYourGhostStory.com ‘s Scott Markus to talk about the happiest ghost stories we know.

In this episode, we talk about a ton of happy ghost stories and one not-so-happy one:

• The Gallery Inn in San Juan, Puerto Rico which is haunted by the ghost of the husband of the owner, Manuco Gandia and the stories that the staff told me personally
• Rudolph Valentino’s favorite haunts in Hollywood
• The lovers that haunt the Miller Caves in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• The spirit of North Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus and the ghost story there from my high school social studies teacher!
• How naturalist John Muir saved his professor’s life after a psychic premonition
• Milwaukee’s own Hungarian Baron, adventurer Dr. Stephan Borhegyi who still haunts the Milwaukee Public Museum
• The ghosts of the Eastland Disaster and the ones that haunt Oprah’s Harpo Studios in Chicago (that’s the not so happy one)

Rudolph Valentino’s most famous role and his spirit still haunts his favorite places in Hollywood

Every year on St. Patrick’s Day, we all hear the story of St. Patrick so we know it by heart, right? Even before most of us were old enough to slurp cheap green beer and scour the streets in search of Jameson, we knew the story of Ireland’s most famous Saint. He used the shamrock to explain to the Pagan Celtic heathens the mystery of the Holy Trinity (three leaves in one shamrock equal the Father, Son, Holy Spirit all God) and he banished all the snakes from Ireland, right?

Not quite, bucko. Patrick was way cooler than that.

hSláinte from the Junior Varsity St. Patrick’s Day Parade! (Otherwise known as our Halloween show at an Irish bar)

How about this?

• He was captured by Irish slavers
• An ethereal voice helped him escape captivity
• He had frickin’ magic duels with pagan wizards
• He argued with an angel about letting him judge the Irish souls on Doomsday.

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we set the record straight on one of Ireland’s favorite saints in this episode celebrating his Feast day and some of our favorite Irish creatures.

tThe Lady Wilde, Oscar’s Mother and Author of Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland

If you’re looking to learn about Irish legends, faeries, and cryptids, one of the perfect places to start is Lady Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde and her book Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. She wasn’t only a remarkable researcher, writer, and suffragist, but she raised literary giant Oscar Wilde . Even better since her book is in the public domain, you can read the whole thing right here.

Wendy took a dive in to talk about the legend of the banshee, which is steeped in the Celtic tradition of “keening” where a woman or group of women wail a lament over a dead body as part of the burial and grieving process. The banshee would be a premonition of the “keening woman” and it would signal a death in the family, sometimes in the form of an innocent virginal sister of the family who died early.

tThis banshee image was the scariest I could find, damn.

Banshees could also be a type of fairy and Irish legends are full of those as well, including the Phouka and the Kelpie. The Celtic word for the fae is Sidhe (pronounced “she”). Of course that includes everyone’s favorite, leprechauns, whose legends have even made it off Earth and into (ahem) outer space.

p

Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com once again joins us to talk about the Hellfire Club, an Enlightenment-era Eyes Wide Shut- style party group whose ritualistic orgies that even Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame said were “a brace of monsters, blasphemers and Bacchanalians”. Hellfire Club rumors include a huge black cat that haunts the grounds as well as stories of Satanic Black Masses where unwary passers-by were left scarred for life. In reality did they worship the Devil? Probably no more than the modern Church of Satan does, they were just rich pr!cks who wanted to party with no rules or repercussions.