Radio Misterioso

Tim has been around the UFO scene for close to 50 years. He helped Jim Moseley organize conventions in the late 1960s, hung out with authors/ pranksters Gray Barker and James Moseley, and counted some of the classic contactees as friends.

He has also been publishing UFO and mysteries books for over two decades as president and CEO of Inner Light Publications. Have you heard of “Commander X?” Tim discussed this mysterious character and how he was able to write so many titles such as The Reality of the Serpent Race, Underground Alien Bases, and The Secret Plan of the Evil Shadow Government.

OK, I made that last one up, but Tim and I also talked about the early UFO scene and the colorful and fascinating history of UFO and space-themed publishing, some of which reaches back into the murky genesis of sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1930s.

We also discussed his encounter with a Man In Black in the 1960s and his photo of a mysterious character standing outside a friend’s New Jersey home, published in his 1990 book Mystery of the Men in Black: The UFO Silencers.

 

 Timothy Green Beckley 12/6/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It is amazing that the name S. Miles Lewis does not come up more often in paranormal circles. In the time I have known Miles, he has been a magazine editor, served on the boards of Austin MUFON and the Institute For Neuroscience and Consciousness Studies, founded the Anomaly Archives and created a host of webmedia outlets though his Elfis Network.

On November 15th we talked about how we first met, my UFO hoax on Miles and our friends in the late 1990s, his magazine Elf Infested Spaces, the work of filmmaker David Lynch,  and Lewis’ other influences and inspirations. We also discussed the possibility of a sort of unifying principle for the experience of the anomalous.

The Radio Misterioso page, as well as the Excluded Middle site is hosted and archived by Miles, so I can’t help but give him a big “thanks” for the unwavering support over these many years.

 

 Miles Lewis 11/15/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mac Tonnies, Paul Kimball, and Nick Redfern, 2006.

On Sunday, November 1st, Paul Kimball and Nick Redfern joined me to celebrate the life of our friend Mac Tonnies, who was found dead in his Kansas City apartment on October 22nd, apparently of natural causes.

The sense of great loss was still with us as we discussed Mac’s sharp intellect, great sense of humor and his effect on us and others interested in the fields of UFO study, forteanism, and futurism. He was also a damn good science fiction writer. His ideas on the UFO subject were refreshingly non-dogmatic and evinced a refusal to toe the extraterrestrial party-line.

Mac had so much more to give, but we’ll have to be content with his memory, internet output and published writings and his forthcoming book on his Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis, due out in the spring. We hope this program was a fitting memorial to our late, dear friend.

The program begins and ends with recordings of Mac reading from the draft of his new book. For other Radio Misterioso interviews featuring Mac Tonnies, look here and here.

 

 Mac Tonnies Memorial 11/01/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you read the description over at top left of the page there, this show is supposed to alternate interviews with “weird music and audio.” Here’s a great example.

Straight from his excellent blog Music For Maniacs, “Mr. Fab” joined us for two solid hours of musical strangeness on October 25th. Notable tracks played included a reggae song about Apollo 11, four or five old UFO drop-in songs (think “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman), sounds from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, elephants playing xyolphones and theremins, a mashup of the Muppets and the Stray Cats, Sad Kermit, and music from L. Ron Hubbard.

Enjoy!

 

 Mr. Fab - 10/25/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Peter Robbins and Nick Redfern. Not pictured: Tim Binnall

Three past guests joined us for two hours of conversation about the Mass Mystery Weekend which took place on October 16th and 17th in Boston. Tim Binnall was co-organizer and the MC for the UFO lectures, and discussed the joys and problems of running a conference. At the conference, Nick spoke on UFO crashes and also about his research into the chupacabras and Peter talked about his famous research into the Bentwaters UFO landing case.

We spent the show discussing the conference itself, the guests’ recent work, the divide between those interested in UFOs and those who follow other aspects of the paranormal, and possible directions that research can go in the future. We also debated the pluses and minuses of the Disclosure movement, and Peter spoke about the possible use of Reichian Cloudbusters by the U.S. military.

 

 Binnall, Redfern, Robbins 10/18/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Chris O’Brien’s fourth appearance on Radio Misterioso (since February of 2005) this time to promote and discuss his new book Stalking The Tricksters. The book is a thorough examination of the trickster archetype and its connection to the sort of paranormal events that O’Brien investigated for over a decade in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Chris’ theory is that most, if not all sightings of UFOs, abductions, cryptozoological creatures, ghosts, and other strange events that challenge our collective ideas of reality are the result of a control system that operates on a symbolic level to shock us out of our emotional and intellectual complacency.

We talked about the trickster archetype, more as a force of the collective psyche than a clownish imp prancing about the countryside. Appropriately, the importance of humor and the court jester figure came up–the comedian whose job it is to tell the truth, couched in jokes–so that we can recognize and deal with serious problems.

Chris also discussed his recent work with officials of the Zuni tribe of western New Mexico, and a strange sandstone tablet recently unearthed on the Zuni reservation which appears to have Tibetan or Sanskrit letters carved into it.

We concluded with a discussion of why the paranormal is so compelling and why people would spend their lives in pursuit of something that may never have any conclusion.

 

 Chris O'Brien 10/04/2009: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sesh Heri is the author of three intriguing books. Two are fictional adventure stories based on (but extrapolating from) historical facts. The first title, Wonder of the Worlds, follows inventor Nikola Tesla, illusionist Harry Houdini, and author Mark Twain as they  wage interplanetary war against a shadowy Martian race. The next novel in the trilogy, Metamorphosis, looks at Houdini and writer Jack London as they try and trace the origins of a sinister extraterrestrial organization, and how this group controls Earthly events. The third novel in the trilogy is due this fall.

In this program we talked about the historical events that Heri used to construct his storylines, and the inner personalities of the characters. What forces control the introduction of new inventions and how these forces used? Heri has a radical view of how these events transpire, and presents us with the idea that new ideas are not always due to endless trial and error, and may come into existence through simple inspiration or in a more sinister way by intellectual theft from others who cannot play the political games involved to claim due credit.

 

 Sesh Heri 9/6/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Micah Hanks is the man behind the Gralien Report, co-host of the pocast Speaking of Strange, and all-around interdisciplinary pararnormalist.

Micah has sent along a list of topics which we went through, which included stories of the strange “bloop” sound which was picked up by pacific ocean hydrophones in the 1990s (and which some attribute to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu!) and whose acoutic signature has been theorized as coming from “a mammal large enough to swallow a blue whale.” We also talked about other strange undersea cryptids, the “old days” of the Art Bell show, Micah and Josh Warren’s paranormal research group, “mothman” reports from around the world, the work of Nikola Tesla and the possibility that some fiction writers (like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) may have been “remote viewers” because of their prophetic stories.

Damn good show.

 

 Micah Hanks - 8/16/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mac Tonnies appeared once before on Radio Misterioso on May 21st of 2006 when he and Paul Kimball were in Los Angeles to shoot segments for Kimball’s documentary Best Evidence: The Top 10 UFO Cases. Mac came on for a solo appearance on July 26th to update us on his recent projects.

His eagerly awaited book on the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis (due to be completed in November) will turn the UFO world on its ear by suggesting that the source of the phenomenon may be a non- or quasi-homo sapiens race that has been inhabiting the planet alongside us for millenia. Mac discussed his work on the book and read extended excerpts in an exclusive for the show.

We also discussed other alternatives to the extraterrestrial hypothesis and our human ideas about how another intellegence would appear to us and perhaps try to communicate. This led to a discussion about “asemic” writing and its relationship to so-called “alien writing,” which brought up the controversial CARET documents and the claim that the strange symbols on supposed UFO components were an integral component of their operating system. In other words, the symbols “booted up” the devices that they were printed on.

Mac suggested that UFO sightings are the visible incursion into our universe of intelligences that inhabit an existence of pure information–what I call the “symbolic realm”–a non-space and time bound dimension. This would explain the strange nature of many encounters and our seemingly futile efforts to comprehend them.

We also talked about influences on Mac’s theories, which include the works of John Keel, Jacques Vallee and William Burroughs.

In the last half hour, we took questions from the audience sent in by email, facebook and twitter.

 

 Mac Tonnies - 7/26/09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Meeting Keel in New York 10/28/02

Kenn Thomas recently sent along a recording of an interview he conducted with the late John Keel from 1992. I played the recording on the July 19th show. Due to many requests for a downloadable version, I have obtained permission from Kenn to post the file for free and perpetual public access.

The interview features Keel at his cranky best, skewering UFO fans in particular and paranormal dilettantes in general. He also mentions a few things that I found surprising, such as his contention that Kenneth Arnold originally witnessed only bright lights from at least 50 miles away when Arnold officially opened the modern age of flying saucers with his sighting on June 24th, 1947. Keel says that publisher Ray Palmer had Arnold add details that were not originally reported, and that UFO fans have been extrapolating the facts ever since. I believe that there are interviews with Arnold that include more details than just “bright lights” (or reflections) before he wrote about the experience for the first issue of Fate magazine ion 1948 and four years later in The Coming Of The Saucers, which were both published by Palmer.

Keel also argues for his fugo balloon theory of the Roswell crash, which should still piss off a lot of people, which is just how old John would have wanted it. Keel was in an adversarial position with the ufological rank-and-file from the beginning, which made him a bit impatient with those he thought were stuck in a hopelessly bankrupt belief system, but his theories are still valid with respect to things that have not been explained to everyone’s satisfaction. If you can find a copy of his landmark book Operation Trojan Horse, I would highly recommend that you read it.

The interview was conducted on July  12, 1992.

 

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