Shadow People and Poltergeist Activity: A Connection?

Just recently we were fortunate enough to interview Jason Offutt concerning all of the reports he has collected on the subject of shadow people. The idea of shadow people is one that tends to divide the paranormal community over those who feel that pre-internet reports of shadow people were labeled under different monickers and that the phenomena itself has been around far longer than the advent of the web, and those that feel that the phenomena itself is a web generated, or more aptly put, web propagated experience. Regardless of it's origins, reports never cease to make their way across his desk, or as in this story, into our inbox.

Considering that my own humble beginnings started in the midwest I will occasionally ask for , and receive, stories from that region. Below is a recent email received shortly after the Jason Offutt broadcast:

"I live in a Large Two Story house in Illinois with my husband and three children. There has been a lot of personal turmoil in the last few years and we have all been through some troubled times. About a year ago I kept feeling that I was being watched especially when I was alone and the kids were in school. I would see something out of the corner of my eye but, being someone that does not follow any super natural experiences or who even watches those kind of shows, I decided that I was just imagining that I saw something. This was happening quite often and then we had Thanksgiving last year and after we sat down my mother's eyes got big and by her expression I just knew that she had seen something. I looked at her and said, "Mom what is wrong?", and before she spoke I said "let's talk about it after dinner". When we were alone in the kitchen she said that she saw two dark figures walk from the foyer and move towards the stairs. My mom is very interested in the Paranormal and told me that she thought that what we saw were shadow people. Things had been fairly quiet this past summer but now I have a teenage son that is having problems in school and he has started to see these beings as well. At first he would just act funny and say that nothing was wrong but now he has confided in me about what he sees. He is another non believer and for him to be upset I believe he is truly seeing them. I also have two dogs and several times I see them cock their heads and bark and absolutely nothing. I have heard that animals are very sensitive to this so maybe they see something also."

The idea that emotional turmoil has an impact on supernatural phenomena is not a new one. In many poltergeist cases, there is usually a child entering puberty or working through a broken marriage or move that becomes a central figure in the phenomena. This is also the case in instances of demonic possession.

I was able to contact the family and soon realized I had stumbled onto something that exceeded their original story. When asked if the family had experienced anything preceding these events the mother said no, then followed with, "Well, my youngest used to have imaginary friends,but I don't see where that has anything to do with this." I pressed a little further and she revealed that immediately following her divorce with her previous husband her youngest son began to tell stories of two children who would play with him late at night when everyone would go to sleep. Her son also remarked on the appearance of the children. Both children were apparently wearing what he called "short pants". His mother had, at first believed this to just be his own jargon for shorts or even boxers. Upon seeing an antique picture, however, the boy pointed to the style of dress and exclaimed, "Short pants!".

Of particular interest to me is the fact that both phenomena started after a traumatic event in the "children's lives". Being that much poltergeist activity deals with a physical interaction of the entity and its immediate surroundings, my line of inquiry migrated to the child's toys and was met with a short story revolving around the placement toys in the room always being disturbed after the child's late night play sessions. Many toys were also displaced never to be found again.

My question now has to be whether we are seeing a troubled adolescence as a gateway phenomena or simply as fuel allowing entities to manifest themselves after leaching off of the child's distress. Hopefully with the growing number of shadow people cases that bloggers like Offutt are collecting we will see the correlation between these two phenomena and gain greater awareness of its origins.

If You Were Abducted By Aliens...

I know everybody thinks "oh, it would be so cool if I were to get abducted", but how would you really feel? Something comes to your house and takes you against your will and begins doing strange tests on you. I guess what it would mostly boil down to would be the temperament of the aliens that were abducting you, but what about the time before you would even get to that?

First would be the feeling of confusion, what is going on? Where am I and how did I get here? Then there would be almost immediate fear once you realize that you don't recognize your surroundings, fear for your life because you do not know if you are in danger, you do not know who has kidnapped you. You will not even think that you are on an alien vessel. The first thought at this point would most likely be "Who has done this to me and what do they want?" and think that you were in a Silence of the Lambs type situation of a crazy person that wants to torture you.

Once the initial panic has passed you would probably begin looking around trying to find clues as to your whereabouts. You may be loose in a large room or you may be strapped down to what appears to be a hospital bed. You would start to look around and maybe see a language that you do not recognize. In your mind you would see this and possibly rationalize it as an East Asian language because you are not thinking of the possibility of it being alien.

About the time that you calm down and come to terms with the fact that you are in a situation that you have no control over, the first one enters the room. You recognize the familiar shape from movies, stories, and cases that you were never sure if they were real or not and now you get a slap of reality right in the face. At this point I ask, how would you react to it?


Mark

The creature rings twice – A bizarre cryptid sighting from Illinois

Illinois, aside from its metropolitan anchor city of Chicago, reflects a lot of the Midwest in its vast expanses of farmland bordered with forestry relatively untouched by any encroaching development. It is often that places like this yield some of the more fascinating, yet puzzling stories of strange creatures. This story, told to me by my mother years ago and later reiterated during one of our past broadcasts, is no exception.

In the fall of 1966 my mother’s cousin was living in the town of Georgetown, IL. Georgetown’s population at that time was under just a couple of thousand souls and many residents still lived on the old lanes that dotted the perimeter of the town. Many of the houses that edged the city’s limits were set off the main roads, often as much as a quarter of a mile back or further, with long driveways that looked more like service lanes. My mother’s cousin, who we will nickname Barb lived in such a house. Below is a brief retelling of the story from my mother herself in a recent email

“In a small rural town in central Illinois my cousin when she was about 16 was baby sitting late one night around One in the morning when she was walking up to her house after being dropped off. It was very common for houses to have a mile or so long driveway. She had a strange feeling that someone or something was watching her. She picked up her pace and could feel the hairs on her neck prickled up. When she turned around she saw something white and hairy running towards her and she panicked of course and slammed in to the front door, which was left unlocked for her late arrival. She ran upstairs to her parents and was screaming that there was a monster after her. They ran outside and looked to find nothing. Her bedroom was downstairs and she decided to go to bed. She heard a noise outside of her window and when she pulled back the curtains there was a creature with long white hair covering the body except for the facial features staring back at her. When she screamed for her parents it disappeared. It took her a long time to get over this. But the strangest and most disturbing fact is that this story does not end here. Years later after she was married and had two little girls she moved to the edge of Kentucky. Her husband was a avid hunter and gone a lot. They lived in the country and one weekend when her husband was gone on a hunting trip she and her two daughters were alone and heard something outside. They looked and thought they saw something run across the yard but thought that it must have been a deer or whatever. A little while later they heard something again and this time it was on the front porch and when she pulled back the curtains a creature with long white hair and skin type features was pressed against the window pane. She screamed and ran to call the authorities but by the time they arrived it was gone. When she had told me this story we were at her house in Kentucky and I could see that it still was terrifying for her to talk about. She also said that the stare from this creature was not one of curiosity but a devious stare.”

The implications of a multiple sighting spanning decades is interesting to me because of the change in location in this instance. Does this lend itself fmore to the paranormal? We often here of animals being able to cross thousands of miles to return home or find owners who had moved while the animal was out hunting or off the property, but years later? Or was my mother’s cousin, in fact, part of the hunt for this creature? Had it tagged or marked her, returning years later to terrorize her again?

Ash

Greg's Thoughts on Paranormal Activity

The hype surrounding Paranormal Activity has been crazy. The funny thing, about hype is that the reality never quite lives up. Now at this point, two sentences in, you must thinking, “Fuck him, he doesn’t know shit. That movie was great.” Well, you’re right it is a great movie, but did it live up to the “I had to walk out I was so scared” hype? Certainly not. It’s a movie. You know it, and I know it. The demons aren’t going to follow you home from the theater. Did the script and situations, sufficiently immerse you into the characters and settings? In my opinion, they did, but the scares just weren’t THAT scary. Perhaps the cynic in me is just too powerful to let me fall in far enough…..

If you want to scare me you will need two things: A zombie creating agent and some bears to turn into zombies. Now that would be scary. Imagine, your walking through the woods, and you see this nice cuddly baby bear, but somethings not quite right. As you back away behind you a branch falls, when you turn, IT’S MOMMA ZOMBIE BEAR!!!!!

Run.

Run for your life, because if there is anything that will live up to the hype, it’s a zombie bear.

Changing it up a bit, do you know what I find fun? Chainsaws. These tools of destruction are immensely fun to turn on unsuspecting trees and hookers. The big problem is the person tells you “Cut here and here” has been the victim of a massive stroke. Do not trust this person’s cuts, otherwise that tree, will fall on your pool. It happened to me.

Greg

Just a moment on life and its fleeting spark...

My mother and father are both alive and for that I can barely express how grateful I am. I am lucky. I am also one of those people who tend to take for granted the people that surround them and I doubt that this blog entry will change that, but I hope it might at least make a difference. We often see our own mortality in the strangest of places. I think this year it has been recognized by the passing of entertainers that not only marked our own passage of time, but the passing of an era.

I used to be a crazy Michael Jackson fan when I was a kid. I had the pleather jacket that I wore to school and the Making of Thriller was one of the first things that I watched on our Zenith VCR. Michael's untimely passing has had a way of making people forget the persistent allegations and rumors that supplanted his fame in "later" years. Those same allegations and the plethora of bizarre tendencies made him a less than endearing figure for me and the idea of relating to someone like him is pretty much flat-out, out of the question. I don't think any one of us can imagine a world where a seventy something Jackson still attends the Oscars and tours in support of the next best "Hollywood friendly" presidential candidate. Michael left in much the same bizarre fashion that lived. Untimely death, but not all together surprising. That being said, I doubt we'll ever hear tell of the "everyman" Michael Jackson that would have a beer with a fan or chat up newlyweds at a city hotel. He was a music video, and the rumors, for me, make him hard to mourn.

Easy to mourn for me is "the fighter". Maybe not the classical archetype and not as wise as the "old man" personna, but the fighter has always been that perfect mash-up of Jung's hero and Freud's super-ego for me. We've seen them as well on stage and screen, and we want to be them. As a man who spends more of his life in front of a computer than anything else, it sometimes seems like a biological imperative to throw away the trappings of my monitor and keyboard and brandish a sword or become the drifter martial artist of Swayze's Dalton or Elliots' Garret in Roadhouse. There is a kickassery to that movie that transcends the heartthrob idol that Swayze personified in Dirty Dancing. Thank God for TNT and USA to play Roadhouse ad nauseum. Enough for me for relish in a silly earnestness that makes that little film more than just a b-rate action flick. It was a movie that seemed custom made for my generation and one that left an impression far beyond the one that Kelly Preston left on the wall of that loft. My sister even named fer oldest after the titular character.

It's both easy and difficult to mourn an actor like Swayze. Easy because he seemed like that everyday guy who sorta "fell" into acting. He could have been a parent on my block or just a good looking guy that was at the right place at the right time. He was an easy actor to like, and presumably a kind person that carried his own warmth onto the screen. I didn't know him, but unlike Jackson or Fawcett, I don;t think it would have seemed unrealistic to have known him. Either way, the public came to see him as a fighter of another sort. Tabloids or never kind and they have a way of shoving their own dead pool in your face everytime you have to checkout in your local grocery store. This wasn't a man addicted to plastic surgery or strung out on booze to the point of being unintelligible...this was just a man trying to survive.

Another one of Swayze's movies, Ghost, is probably responsible for more of the public's opinion on the afterlife than our generation would care to admit. It's hard not to transpose the mythology of Zucker's film onto our own imaginings and speculations of what the afterlife might be like. I'm guessing it's visuals have probably been inserted into more paranormal researcher's personal belief system than they would care to admit. Another one of Swayze's films that proved to be a defining pop-cultural hallmark for a generation. My generation. My generation is now among those that spearhead the new paranormal or even "spiritual" movement if we want to call it that. It is, what most people would consider a rather morbid little past-time. One thing that I have recognized is this community's heart and how it is rarely morbidity, and instead a sincere commemoration for those who've passed and longing to understand when and where they might be waiting for us on the other-side. Wherever it is and however we get there, there is I'm sure a warm reception for those we remember, and those we mourn. Rest easy, Johnny Castle. Rest easy, Sam Wheat. Rest easy, Bohdi.

Are We Truly Prepared for Contact: What District 9 Represents

This summer's alien offering, District 9, might have a little more gore and gristle than the typical Independence Day "time to meet the aliens" contact outing, but it also has a message that resonates on a deeper level: if contact is imminent and we are faced with the interstellar pot-luck that contact could imply, are we ready?

The film, which carries a very strong socio-political message about mankind's inability to tolerate and co-exist with the different factions and races within itself, raises a few strong questions that seem to go largely unasked in UFOlogical circles. One of these questions is very simple. Have we celebrated and glamorized the idea of contact to fantastic heights that will undermine the very event itself? What if we aren't looking at Adamski's and Meijer's visitor's. What if we aren't face with the Nordic visages of the Plaeidians? What if, in fact, OUR visitors appear grotesque and not humanoid at all? We as humans seem to have a hard enough time dealing with different colors, even deformities, but what about an extending pair of mandibles or a prehensile tail that can decapitate with the same lethal force as a grizzly bear? What if on top of their appearance they were more agile, stronger, faster, and prone to the same aggressive outbursts that we ourselves are privy too? Some race is bound to circumvent their own extinction sooner or later none the wiser?

Let's suppose that for one moment there is the possibility that they don't come bearing gifts. What if instead of handing out a Sear's Roebuck catalog of new technology and extending the olive branch, solving our problems, they need OUR help. Then we are faced with a slightly new Malthusian argument. What if they are seeking refuge or even sanctuary? What if we are looking at a planet-wide exodus where their surviving numbers increase our own by 20%? 40%? Our scientific pursuits aren't always altruistic. What if we had to divert our research to sustaining a population that explodes instantaneously?

I think a film like District 9 is meant to entertain the audience with sometimes a heavy handed undercurrent of introspection. It uses aliens, explosions and the fantastic, allowing us to look at our own prejudices through the shimmery veil of Hollywood. My final question, and one that might seem as heavy handed as the politic laden District 9, is this: Has the UFO community spun a veil of it's own, leaving us as unprepared and as prone to mistakes as the very real kind of antagonists that make District's conflict not only a plausible one, but perhaps a disappointingly prophetic one?

What Is Wrong With The Mainstream Media?

I just finished watching ABC's Primetime Outsiders special and I am livid. They are not the only ones guilty of this, but that is where I am focusing my anger right now.

First, a major network decides to do a special on abductees and experiencers. Good idea, right? Not if you are the mainstream media. It seems that the entire pupose of the show was to debunk the people that were kind enough to be on and make them look like they are crazy, liars, or as they put it, "charlitans". The only person they interviewed on the show outside of the people that have had the experiences are either very stout non-believers, and one clinical hypnotist that they made look like he was crazy for believing in extraterrestrial life.

Why don't they have proper UFOlogists on? Because that might make these people look legitimate. If these people look legit, then they won't be able to try to turn their special into an episode of the muary povich show. Would it have been that difficult to get people like Timothy Good, Stanton Friedman, or Bill Birnes? Of course not, I have been able to reach out to each of those people at one point or another to get them on our show and we're just an internet radio show, I'm sure they would jump at the chance to be able to express their views on national television, but it will never happen. It won't happen because each of these people are too intelligent for these programs to have on, there is no way that they would be able to make them look silly in front of their viewing audience.

Don't even get me started on that terrible host Juju Chang. You could tell her questions were so passive agressive to make these people look bad it wasn't even funny. She went into it without even trying to believe or even be slightly open-minded about it. I've never seen anyone be so outright condescending in an interview in my life. She should be ashamed at her piss-poor excuse for journalism and throw herself off of a tall building. If I were any of those people and she asked me some of those questions I would have tried to turn it around on her and slam her lack of journalism skills. Of course, that part would have wound up on the cutting room floor, but I would have my own hidden camera going and put it up on youtube. The show should not have been about her or her worthless views. It's about the guests, that is why we have guests that return to our show regularly. We aren't here to debate them, make them look bad, or confront them. We are here to let them talk about their experiences, talk about their subject matter, and tell us their feelings on these extraordanry situations that live has given them, and I promise all guests that we ever have on this show, we will NEVER treat you like that.

Mark