The planets buffet masters
almost surely have a plan.
There's clearly maybe something
there beyond the realm of man.
And until we've thoroughly tested
every last close chested view,
I find the more we think we know,
the less we really do.
Where would we be
without THC?
Because we know they're lying to us. Just
don't know
to what degree
where would we be
without THC.
The higher side chat show
Greg Carlwood and company.
Like a cheeseburger in paradise from the sunshine
state. I'm Greg Carlwood. And while we seem
to be deep in psyops season and the
political changing of the guard has all sorts
of strange shenanigans going on, there is something
more timeless and no better understood that seems
to invade the lives of everyday people regardless
of their age, location, or feelings about it.
A thing that sometimes presents itself as strange
creatures with magical powers or frail beings coming
from foreign machines and it sometimes latches onto
the psyche of those who have cracked open
the door and is often hard to shake
off.
And the strangest aspect of these things we
lump under the paranormal umbrella is the large
overlap they seem to have with individuals and
states of trauma, tragedy, hopelessness and even death.
Sometimes these strange beings deliver messages from the
dead or are even seen as companions for
the dearly departed.
And then we have ghost stories and legends
that seem to spring up from nearly every
city in town across this island Earth,
where tragic and sudden violent death seem to
disrupt whatever the life death transition normally is.
And sometimes it seems like a person's energy
is stuck or imprinted in the landscape.
It's hard to know what causes what in
these circumstances
or know why some get this haunting treatment
and others transition more smoothly,
but those seemingly unable to transition don't usually
have a story that starts with dying peacefully
in one sleep.
Well, we know damn well that one of
the living legends of paranormal research is the
prolific and powerful Joshua Joshua Cutchen. He's been
here 5 times before talking about his books,
A Trojan Feast, The Food and Drink Offerings
of Aliens, Fairies and Sasquatch.
The Brimstone Deceit, an in-depth examination of supernatural
scents, otherworldly odors and monstrous miasmas.
Where the Footprints End, High Strangeness in the
Bigfoot Phenomenon volumes 1 and 2, as well
as Ecology of Souls, a new mythology of
death and the paranormal volumes 1 and 2.
And today, he is joined by filmmaker Ryan
Grolick of Creepy Kingdom to talk about a
recently released true crime paranormal documentary they collaborated
on titled Lady of the Lake about a
murder victim, some odd things about her death,
and the ghostly woman seen around the lake
years after.
I've watched it, I got questions, and I'm
psyched to get into it with them. The
murder mystery movie makers, Lake Crescent lost investigators,
and tellers of forgotten tales, Josh and Ryan.
Ryan and Josh, happy to have you here.
How the hell are you?
It's great to be here. The best intros
in the business. I know you're probably tired
of hearing that by now, but it's true.
It's all part of the 9 to 5.
Thanks for having us.
Of course. So there is quite a bit
I hope we can talk about, but, of
course, we start with why we do the
dance and that is this film, Lady of
the Lake. I understand it all started with
an email from Ryan as just a fan
of Josh's work
and really who isn't,
but then it turned into this documentary
project. And I'm curious with all the
strange unsolved murders and paranormal stories out there,
why this story of a murder victim from
1937
tossed in
Lake Crescent in Washington state?
Great question. So as I sit here today
in sunny Orlando, Florida,
I am
remembering
the not too distant past where I was
a resident of the Pacific Northwest.
This story
sits colloquially in just sort of the whole
area
as one of those just anomalous cases.
The condition of the body is really what
was sort of almost fetishized in discussion.
And so I was aware of the story
and just kind of as I started to
dig deeper,
there was a compulsion to follow it largely
because of COVID.
And we were trying to make a feature
film, a narrative horror film, and we couldn't
get a crew that big together. And so
we started to pick a dock. This one
emerged, and it literally took 4 years out
of my life to get done, but we
had a great time doing it. I wanna
compound that with the fact that I'm a
Disney nerd. And on December 21, 1937,
this victim was murdered. However, also on December
21, 1937, in a great synchronistic adventure, Walt
Disney himself released Snow White and the Seven
Doors at the Carthage Circle in San Francisco.
And so when I saw that those two
things collided, it was just more rocket fuel
and I kept going.
And it was the winter solstice, I understand.
You understand correctly.
Man, so, Josh, how did you get involved
in this? Because when I heard about this,
when you told me this was happening, I
was like, oh, great. I'm gonna watch a
documentary about Josh investigating
this mystery, and that is not what I
got.
How are you involved?
No. It's that face for radio thing again.
Right?
No. I started up a correspondence with Ryan
sometime probably around pandemic, around that sort of
time.
You know, I always try to be really
diligent about answering emails and things like that.
So I responded, and then it turned into
phone correspondence, and then it evolved into what
became a friendship. So Ryan and I would
catch up. I think it was weekly for
a while.
And then,
thankfully,
I well, I was going through a little
bit in 2020 as we all were.
I'm not shy about it. I I was
heading towards my August check-in to rehab for
alcoholism.
Coming up on 5 years now, we're all
good. Heck yeah. Golf clap. But, you know,
alcoholics aren't not necessarily the best people about
getting back to correspondence. So between the, the
collapse of my worldview and the collapse of
my world, I sort of ended up ghosting
you, Ryan, a couple of times, I'm afraid
to say. No pun intended. Yeah. Right? But
he was very tenacious, and we reconnected a
couple of months
later, and we continued to sort of bounce
ideas off of each other. And it has
emerged as this wonderful sort of collaborative friendship,
and I'm really
excited to see what has come of that,
not only with Lady of the Lake, but
with some of the things we have planned
in the future. And just what I think
is going to be a trend, hopefully,
for paranormal media as we move forward,
which is the continuous
blending and blurring of distinctions between separate domains.
And I think that's really what we need
a lot more of is looking at the
similarities between these
parts of the phenomenon that we've often assumed
have been discrete and separate and really showing
how they all seem to have some sort
of underlying connective tissue. Yeah, man. Yes. That's
why I've always gravitated to you because I
do like that comparative stuff. I like the
blurring of the lines. I'm kind of over
doing interviews with boomers who talk about the
chain of custody of the meta materials from
Wright Patterson to here to there. It's like,
okay. Let's talk about something, like, weirder.
And when you open the door to this
kind of stuff as a filmmaker,
I'm looking at it. And the reason that
I was so persistent
in touching this with Josh, I don't know
if I've really said this to you, but
is that
his work sits in that space where Ville
sits, where Kiel sits, where
these concepts,
your head has to make it through the
door at the end of this interview. But
I think it's in that space, right, where
we're not naming it, we're just exploring it.
And so as I was going through this
with our subject, Amanda Paulson,
alongside me and really digging deep into this,
we were heading into territory where there were
not easy definitions. This was a Fortean affair.
And in terms of modern Fortiana
in America,
Josh is an easy person to go to
and say, Hey, I have a nerdy question.
As a professional,
until I moved to Florida, I was the
CEO of a company. I rarely spoke about
this kind of stuff ever.
And so I was fluent with a lot
of the different researchers, and it was an
obvious
choice for me to go to him and
engage him. And so over time, he's being
a little bit humble, but over time, he's
been a real cornerstone in my thinking about
how to approach some of this stuff and
how to look at this domain of the
larger phenomenon, like a meta phenomenon.
And I think that for Lady of the
Lake, in particular, as we'll get into it,
you can see that we were talking about
things like brownies that live out on the
Olympic Peninsula and their relationship to potential satanic
murders,
and they're being seen at the Lady of
the Lake. And it got strange real fast,
so he was an ally there for sure.
Love it. Love it. So, yeah, let's give
people
the structure,
the bullet points of what this story is
because it is a specific story. Like I
mentioned, this woman died in 1937
on the winter solstice on the release of
Snow White and the 7 dwarves.
Not exactly relevant or maybe it's all connected.
Who knows? But tell us the basic story
of Haley so that people have a sense
of what we're talking about.
Yeah. So Haley Illingworth was born in Kentucky
and migrated all the way across this great
big country. Back in that day, it was
not an insignificant feat to pretty much the
edge of the world. Port Angeles is the
northwestern
most point of the United States. You can
stand in the town and look across and
Canada is visible.
And so she was out kind of in
the middle of nowhere
and ended up in a position where she
just took this really long journey, and it
ended there for her. But the reason we
know about her
is because
in July of 1940, 2 fishermen row up
onto what they thought was, you know, some
sort of detritus.
In actuality, it was a hand sticking up
out of the water vertically, which in and
of itself is a tremendous anomaly and also
harkens us back to the Arthurian legend of
the lady of the lake where the hand
is actually sticking up out of the water.
Okay, that's actually how she was discovered.
And there were pieces of the, flesh around
her fingertip that were exposed. So her body
was found this way, but we didn't know
who this person was. When we pulled her
out of the water, her body had saponified,
and this is a chemical reaction that is
also known as adiposere,
corpse wax.
What happens is under certain conditions, the body
basically turns into a soap like substance. In
a lot of places like down south in
the US and France and some other humid
places in the in the southern world, you'll
see that graves are above the ground and
that the reason for that is the water
table. And so while in some places this
is an anomalous, in Seattle area in the
northwest, it was exceptionally anomalous.
So when they discovered this body
in Lake Crescent, which is a lake that
is famous for literally never giving up its
dead, and we can talk about the lake
in more detail later, when they found this
body, it was an instant mystery.
The mystery was very well publicized. They ended
up finding out who the victim was through
some circumstance,
but we know about her because of the
conditions of her body. That's where this all
started was in the strange anomaly of that
and I think amplified by the colloquial sort
of the lake never gives up its dead.
It's a bottomless lake. And so from a
mythology standpoint, she kinda springs out into the
public.
Mhmm.
I read it as the second
deepest lake in Washington state. I'm sure there
are parts of it where it goes deeper
than even is measured.
I read that
83 people, I think, have been reported missing
around the lake, thought to have died in
the lake most likely, but Haley is one
of 3 that have ever been recovered or
known to be recovered. So if they're unrecovered,
I mean, you don't really know if they
died in the lake or not. But we
assume a lot of people have and very
few are recovered.
And,
yeah, there's obviously a striking visual
of a deep, deep lake,
a body that's been underwater
for 3 years, and then a hand is
sticking out above the surface of the water,
and that is what people see. And then
the body is turned to a soap like
substance.
These qualities,
how much of this do you think is
related? Because Lady of the Lake, we're talking
about basically a ghost story. There's stories in
the area where people see a woman in
white crying, walking around, and so there's a
mythology that builds up. I mentioned in the
intro, all across the country, there's little towns
where it's like, go to these railroad tracks,
say this name, and then you'll see the
thing.
This comes up all the time. So this
is one of those kind of legends. There's
this
ghostly figure people see in the area.
The assumption is it's pegged to
Haley who went missing.
Of these qualities, the arm sticking out, the
soapification
of the body,
how related do you think some of these
physical things are to the nonphysical
weirdness of the story itself?
Well, this is something that I've taken a
greater and deeper interest in lately is the
fact that we should be looking more closely
at the story part of ghost story than
we do at the ghost part.
As Ryan sort of alluded to, there are
a lot of archetypal fingerprints all over this
whole narrative.
Not only do you have the sort of
woman in white thrusting her hand above the
waves and an echo of the Arthurian lady
of the lake, but
some of the things that the story touches
on are a little bit less publicized. The
fact that the lake in question is
supposedly bottomless and that it has a reputation
for never giving up its dead, these are
things that we see in a lot of
lakes that are associated
with certain mythological
characters and creatures throughout the world.
Specifically, the bottomlessness
nature and the tendency to not yield its
dead
speaks directly to something that was
mentioned as some of the criteria for lake
monsters in one of my favorite lake monster
books, Michel Mercier's Lake Monster Traditions. It's like
Passport to Nagonia for lake monsters. It's an
excellent book. But
just the fact that you have these sort
of archetypal themes popping up time and time
again, I think doesn't really suggest
a chicken or egg scenario or one or
the other scenario, but really a both and
sort of scenario. And that where the story
of Halle's death and the lady of the
lake
belief that really has saturated the community, we
can talk about that in a little bit
too.
Where those things meet is really what's at
question here. And what I think is what
really sets aside this documentary from a lot
of other paranormal media out there, it truly
becomes something that is less than just, you
know, oh, it's a paranormal mystery with true
crime elements. Like, yeah, that's in there, but
it really does end up being a Fortean
story because you do end up with these
intersections of larger than life themes that aren't
necessarily based on just the facts. Yes. The
facts play into it, but there's also the
bigger story that we ourselves weave and have
woven
over
our lifetimes,
over decades, centuries, and millennia.
Mhmm. Well, I like that you said we
should emphasize the story part because that is
what I came away with and, you know,
thinking about preparing to talk about this, like,
how can I make this a little different?
I mean, that is kinda what I thought
about. The Lady of the Lake is an
archetype,
and so you start to think, man.
So what causes
the ghost phenomenon? It doesn't seem like it's
the physical body because that was found in
1940,
yet the imprint in the area, the stories
of some kind of ghost
are
still
there. It would be interesting to know if
those stories go away
when more people see the documentary
because the story is now told.
Like, that would be maybe a mechanism because
we've talked many times about trauma being associated
with Fortian Paranormal Stuff. Well, maybe trauma isn't
exactly the right word. Maybe it's like
unresolved
trauma would be maybe a more specific term
that once something is resolved, maybe the energy
is released. What do you think about something
like that?
Or the question that, you know, really comes
to mind for me is that if Halley
is deposited
and later recovered from
an area that's less strange or from
a body of water that has less folklore
attached to it in general,
does this story take on the life of
its own like it has in Port Angeles?
Like, I think that's part of the question
too. It's almost like a catalyst
for the mythopoetic side to emerge into life.
And to that extent, I think trauma itself
can serve that similar role.
And
that's what I think that Ryan as director
did an excellent job of showing, and I'll
I'll let him speak to that here in
a moment. But the fact that Halle was
a person
and had
dreams and aspirations.
And
it's so easy to sort of slip into
this trap
of using
victims as plot points or, you know, sort
of deifying the killers when you're dealing with
true crime. And I think Ryan's handling of
the subject matter really sidestep both those issues
in a good way. And to the contrary,
it was actually a remedy for a lot
of what we see. I don't know if,
Ryan, you wanna speak to the role that
trauma plays in this particular narrative.
Sure. Everything you guys are saying is in
line with what I found, and it's more
of a yes and situation because
what I found was that
the community
was struggling with the trauma. This is a
place where, at this point in time,
the population was really small, they were isolated,
they weren't and still are not a big
city, they did not have big city infrastructure.
This murder really shook the town. And
because of the implications of the trial
once it started to happen and, like, all
of the dynamics that were involved with it,
it was very close to home. And so
prior to the Internet, prior to the collapse
of peer to peer communication in real space,
we would actually engage in these sort of
dialogues meaningfully as small communities. And I think
one of the ways that we end up
doing that is through story.
And so at the end of the cycle,
here where we are,
story is now what Allie has become. Okay?
She is a real person. She was alive.
She was no longer with us. And I
think you have to treat that with the
respect that it deserves. I don't see it
as a feat to humanize a person in
these stories. I think it's a shame that
they're not. Generally,
I would assume it should be par for
the course, not to go too golf on
it, but that should be where it's at.
So now she is a story to most
people.
And I think that the story that we're
telling about Hallie and about a lot of
these ladies of the lake or these different
haunted
locations
is very similar to what you would get
out of a thrill ride when you go
to a theme park. You get on, you
hop in, you say, Do a trick, ghost.
And the phenomenon responds. And then you go
home. And in the haunted Words of the
Haunted Mansion, a ghost may follow you home
and you don't even know it. You're just
on this place where you're completely unaware of
what you've escalated into. And I think that
my intention with this was to, yes, humanize
Halle Illingworth, but to also,
hopefully,
provide her with a vehicle to transcend victimhood.
And by taking this story and shaping it
the way we did, I hope that the
sightings don't stop. I hope that this egregore
gets bigger and bigger and that Halle is
remembered as the lady of the lake and
has a power that was taken away from
her in life, restored to her in death.
Well, that's an interesting take. Ambitious hopes. I
know that you have talked to Mark Stavish
in
some bonus footage,
and I'm assuming that's kind of where the
egregore
comment comes from.
But what do you think about this relationship
between
an egregore
and an archetype?
Just this idea that
a seemingly random
situation,
a murder, it kind of falls into
being archetypal.
You know, the killer didn't try to fulfill
some archetype,
so there's, like, a weirdness there. But, like,
sometimes a murder does fall into
that role. And, like, what is the difference
between an egregore and an archetype? And what
is it that people are seeing? Are they
seeing an egregore? Are they seeing an archetype?
Is there even much of a difference?
I have to jump in. John Tenney says
it very well.
The aliens land on the White House lawn,
and they get out. And the Secret Service
is standing there with their guns pointed. And
the aliens say,
what do you guys know about these ghosts?
The question, I think, is more so,
what are we dealing with
within ourselves
when we experience these phenomena?
And so in order to classify this and
to try to give it a quantified reality
of, like, being an archetype or being an
egregore and what's the difference,
I think you could get into semantics pretty
quick, like you were suggesting. But the reality
is that when you look at the work
on Stavish and guys like that that are
talking about this stuff, I think it's really
great because it helps us to shape our
minds around the fact that reality has a
co creative nature, and that for me, the
egregore itself is a clinical definition
of feeding the archetype.
Right? It becomes this group thought form where
we're feeding an archetype.
And that's really sort of what is happening,
in my opinion, with a lot of these
stories.
Yeah. It's a bit like that definition of
pornography. Right? You know it when you see
it? Don't I ever?
I think there's a quote that Jung has
that is about
how archetypes are like deep long ago cut
riverbeds.
And they may sit dry for a while,
but when certain conditions are met, that's the
course which the water chooses. And, you know,
to that extent,
I think that there are naturally forming riverbeds
and there are some man made riverbeds too.
And I think that with enough time and
erosion,
we can sort of form our own riverbeds.
Although, I would suggest that they take quite
a bit more time than these ones that
were cut long ago.
So I think that that might be sort
of an open handed way to address that
distinction.
And
I think that there are certain things, certain
events, certain personalities
that choose the path of least resistance
from
a underlying source code of the universe kind
of perspective and fall into these pathways and
these well worn waterways.
And I think that when you see that
happening, that is really sort of the activation
of an archetype.
And then when you see something that seems
to be the product of collective belief, given
enough time, that would fall a little bit
more into the egregore category. Although the question
is,
are egregore's vehicles for forces beyond ourselves or
are they purely the force of human will
and the force of human belief?
I'll have to remain ambivalent on that because
that's a question with the sort of durable,
long lasting
implications that you have to sit with.
It's the same kind of question that is,
you know, are the spirits real, or are
they all in your head? You know, it's
the same kind of question. Yeah. I guess
my thought is, like, if there is a
life cycle to these things,
an egregore
seems like a young archetype or an archetype
seems like an older egregore. But I like
the whole thing about man made riverbeds because
I I tend to use the term gravity.
There's, like, a gravity that kinda pulls things
in to an archetype. If it's close enough,
like, maybe it comes 80% of the way,
and then something else pulls it all the
way into being a fulfillment of the archetype.
And,
yeah, it probably takes more time to try
to
game that or try to create
an artificial riverbed, to use the same analogy.
But, man, that's kind of what I think
the little green men, sci fi, alien thing
has been. I never heard it put in
those terms really, but
we always talk about, well, the presentation is
what you expect to see. Things like that,
obviously, are talked about all the time. But
it seems like maybe
the military
set out on an operation
to be like, I wonder if we can
use Hollywood and use our own whistleblowers
to infiltrate the conference scene and describe things
in a certain way, and then just as
an experiment,
see what happens and see if people start
seeing this. It seems like that is a
great way to contextualize
what I think a lot of that eighties
nineties UFO stuff was is the attempt to
create
Edgar Gore archetype riverbed.
I think that that's extremely prescient. I mean,
I was asked recently at a conference about,
you know, do you think the flying saucer
is an archetype? And I'm like, well, it's
on its way to becoming an archetype. I
don't know if something with sort of that
relatively short
attention and focus as we know the modern
UFO to be can really carve that riverbed,
but
transportation to the other world, the mandala, like,
these things are archetypes. So it's almost as
if if we're going to continue using this
riverbed analogy,
you know, a tributary is starting to wear
away in the direction of the flying saucer
and it'll be sort of an offshoot of
that main waterway. And this is exactly what
you're talking about, sort of the manipulation of
the narrative or the mediation, as my friend,
David Metcalfe would say, something that I've been
giving a lot more attention to lately. Not
to pivot us off of Lady of the
Lake because I wanna bring us back around,
but I'm working on a book that should
be coming out this year called 4th Wall
Phantoms. And among the many things that it
deals with, in addition to fictions that become
true
are the possibility that we are the last
people to really realize this, that you can
sort of reinforce
beliefs long enough that they sort of end
up reflecting what your beliefs are. There's a
passage that can't recall which book it was
from. I believe it was transformation, but I
might be mistaken.
1 of Whitley Strieber's books, he mentions a
memo from Wright Patterson that says that
basically the alien invasion can be held at
bay through orchestrated belief.
And the idea that simply by denying them
the power to enter our reality, we can
keep them from our reality, which is an
idea that I really do sympathize with quite
a bit.
Might speak to our current point in the
timeline. You know, who knows?
But, yeah, that's something that I I really
do resonate with.
It also speaks to the lady of the
late, just to be clear.
There is the suggestion or implication in the
film that we're dealing with nonhuman intelligence.
If you watch it, we're using the Estes
method to try to engage what we perceive
to be a nonhuman intelligence.
And I don't ghost hunt. I've never seen
a ghost hunting TV show to this day.
I am very
not fluent with the entire space post the
spiritualism
and Houdini trying to debunk it. And so
I'm looking at that
in exchange with nonhuman intelligence
in a very different way. And what I
see happening
is exactly that question.
Are we able to
limit the
transmission
of whatever we're encountering
by simply denying its existence?
Do you have to buy the ticket to
take the ride?
How does this work?
And I think that what I
keep coming back to
is
how do people feel
about what they're experiencing
and how do people feel about the phenomenon
in general has become ultimately more interesting to
me than the mechanics of how it works
because what we tried to do with this
film was see how do people feel
when they talk to us about Hallie and
her life? How did Amanda feel about this
whole entire process?
And what are the similarities between her and
Hallie Illingworth? And how do they align and
collide as she goes and hunts for her?
And so for me, that emotional component of
story and of this story and kind of
all of our stories
is becoming, like I say, more fascinating than
how the sausage gets made. But the point
to me is there's definitely sausage.
Right? There's definitely something that we're dealing with.
Definitely.
3 of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right here.
Where's Amanda?
Oh, I can't speak for her, but I
watched someone sort of engage with that as
a documentarian,
and I really did come away feeling like
the feelings
are the things
that probably matter the most.
Right on. Well,
on the subject of the feelings, like, this
is something I copied down from Josh's last
book, Ecology of Souls, and I was gonna
try to shoehorn it in somewhere, and it
fits right here. But this is a quote
that is about the Tibetan book of the
dead. And you write,
the book explicitly guides readers through the afterlife,
encouraging the dying to remain as lucid as
possible when entering the Bardo between death and
rebirth.
Within this realm, the dead realize their fate
over several days before experiencing the primary clear
light at the death moment.
Those who are enlightened see it and ascend.
Others drop to a lower level,
experiencing visions created by their karma, the good
and bad deeds of life. They must confront
both peaceful and wrathful beings,
human emotions
incarnate,
if they wish to move towards Nirvana, liberation
from reincarnation.
According to Gregory Shushan, who I've interviewed since
the last time we talked, the book so
closely corresponds to the near death experience that
it can effectively be seen as verification that
the book genuinely is what it purports to
be, a preparation for what happens at death.
And I just thought the concept of confronting
beings that are human emotions incarnate
is definitely in the wheelhouse here. I recently
interviewed someone
who thinks that when a person has experiences
like a Whitley Strieber archetype,
that if you go back, it's probably
unresolved trauma.
Not that these
beings are related or are attracted to the
trauma, but that it's something manifesting from inside.
Because you're not dealing with what's inside,
you're projecting
it out and it's coming at you from
a third party perspective. But, I mean, that
right there, human emotions incarnate, now that's after
your dead, but if this mechanism is there
in any way, shape, or form, maybe the
lines between life and death and these things
spilling over into life are there. Maybe that's
a pretty good clue to what the answer
to these things are.
Yeah. I mean, I find myself sympathizing with
ideas and concepts like idealism
more and more lately, the idea that
everything is based in consciousness. And I think
that
perhaps emotions are the very thing that reality
runs on. Right? And it's part of the
reason that I've become sort of frustrated with
people needing any sort of proof
for these things to exist. And I don't
just stop at, you know, photographic evidence or
audio evidence.
I'm talking about, you know, your eyes and
ears, you know, like I it frustrates me
and maybe I've just been doing this for
a little bit too long, but it frustrates
me that we seed
supremacy
of those senses.
We see the supremacy of our other senses
to those senses. Right?
We have to see it. We have to
hear it. We have to smell it as
I've talked about. And I'm starting to see.
Even if you don't have any of those
things going on, there is such a thing
as feeling something in your gut. There is
a world between your ears, which is probably
no different from the world
around your ears and outside.
And I think that so much about our
lives would make a good deal more sense
if we could really grasp the false dichotomy
between interior worlds and exterior worlds. And to
start to realize that these things are both
reflections of one another and that we don't
necessarily have to see something or hear something
to know it's there.
And that might really be all that psychics
are tapping into, right? They're sort of abandoning
the pretense that we need to see or
hear things audibly with our organs
and we can just sort of reflect and
pay more attention to those inner ways of
being. I think that might be what's going
on with psychics in general. Could be. And
there's this world of felt experience. Right? So
anybody who has had any sort of experiences
with the paranormal
or strange, which I have throughout my life.
And if you have had those moments, then
you have your own language for them, and
you have your own approach to what they
could be, and you wrestle with that probably
for your entire life. And so it's gonna
be unique to everybody because everybody does have
a different opinion. Everybody does have a different
culture and background. But what's really
sad is that we are obligated
to apply ourselves
to a post industrial
sort of mentality
when looking at something that is literally a
primeval part of the human experience,
and possibly the larger cosmic experience. Right? And
so when I think about
whether
a particular
experience may be valid or not, again, I
go back
to how does that person feel about it.
Right? And so for whatever reason,
we have shied away from listening to each
other. And I think that that unresolved trauma,
Greg, to your point, is a byproduct of
us not listening to each other and not
talking to each other and not resolving issues
at scale, which is part of this meta
crisis that we exist in today. And I
go back to reality and the nature of
it. When our friend Harry Potter dies and
goes to King's Cross Station and he meets
up with the great wizard, Albus Dumbledore. Never
insult Albus Dumbledore in front of me. But
he goes to him and he says, is
this real? Is this all in my head?
And Albus says, of course, it's all in
your head. But why shouldn't that make it
real? And so, like, this idea that consciousness
is the thing, this idea that we're exploring
this stuff through our mind, through our feelings,
it's really an old idea. And we just
now got perverted to where
science becomes religion in a lab coat, and
you're supposed to be convinced that there's nothing,
there's no there there unless you can view
it under a microscope. And I think that
that's kind of unraveling in the face of
a lot of the change that's going on
in the world.
Yeah. Well said.
So this is getting a bit heady. Let's
bring it back
to brownies and ritual murder. I mean, I
took a note. I'm definitely gonna come back
to that, but just, really, Crescent
Lake itself. This is kind of an area
that is a hotbed for more strange activity
than just this instance.
And
it's funny because I've been in that area.
A lot of people don't even know the
continental United States has a rainforest, and I've
been up to the Ho Rainforest. Really fun,
cool area to see. Crater Lake, not exactly
close, but also a serene
crazy place. And I just love the whole
area from Crater Lake to the Ho Rainforest,
and this sits in that area more towards
the top.
But, I mean, I've heard that this is
a Bigfoot hotspot.
I've heard that, Ryan, you got involved in
a Facebook group about the paranormal, and the
stories just kept coming. Talk to us about
some of the more bizarre things that this
region seems to be known for. Sure. Everything
I talk to you about here in this
next diatribe is gonna be what literally catalyzed
the friendship between Kutchin and I because I
was struggling, right? I knew Kiel, I knew
the window area concept,
And I knew then through my research
in the region that the whole rainforest, as
you mentioned,
is actually the single highest spot per capita
of big flood reportings on the planet. Oh,
shit. And that that, as the crow flies,
is a good 20 miles from Lake Crescent.
I knew that we had a paranormal
thread going on in the Facebook group for
Port Angeles citizens that I had to sneak
my way into, thanks to my unknown researcher,
who I won't put on blast in public.
But they're very private, and and the they
were verifying. And so I got in, and
they were willing to talk about Lake Crescent.
And there was everything from, you know, folks
who are of the tribes out there
sharing, you know, some of their stories about
what's going on in the lake.
There are people that are experiencing
wars,
the woman in white,
more traditional ghosts,
aliens,
and UFOs, and all
alien like creatures,
little people, right? So we get into the
brownies and stuff. And so all of this
stuff kind of came flooding at us.
And
I guess I was sort of trying to
say, okay,
now my brain's broken. So that's where I
went to the Obi Wan Kenobi with Josh
and sort of said,
help me, Obi Wan. You're my only hope.
I'm not Obi Wan.
You did a Terrence begin an impersonation
and explained some things to me. So I
think I always wanna make you do that.
But let's go ahead and tell us in
Terrence's voice where you took that conversation.
Oh my goodness.
I don't know if I have an applicable
Terrence quote for that specifically.
While you think about it,
the ritual
murder component,
in the satanic panic, there was a retired
FBI guy named Ted Gunderson who kinda got
popular for a hot second.
He's on Geraldo Rivera, you can find the
episode out there. He makes the claim
that there will be a
body pile, a ritual burial ground
discovered
in the woods that are again adjacent as
the crow flies sub 50 miles from Lake
Crescent,
and it makes it into the press. There
was a collection of this stuff. And again,
I went from brownies and what do we
do with that? To this satanic panic influenced
egregore of potential ritual murders that probably didn't
happen. God forbid, let's hope they didn't. But
there was all of this stuff that was
just ripe in this little area. And the
whole Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for strange
stuff. But for whatever reason, this little area,
all the way back to Kenneth Arnold,
is attracted
to this stuff. Maybe it is an archetype
in and of itself. Maybe it is an
inevitable
slide into a region having all of this
lore. But for whatever reason, I can't tell
you I was smart enough to be able
to differentiate it and to know what to
do with it. But it all kind of
came at me and I had to look
at different resources to try to contextualize it.
And there's a lot of things in the
film that you didn't see. But what you
did see
was a great example of how story is
gonna interface
in Israel Keyes. So Israel Keyes was a
serial killer that killed himself in jail after
being caught. He's known
from a body count standpoint to I think
he's somewhere around 7 or 8 bodies that
are confirmed, but it's rumored that he killed
just a ton of people. And if you
look him up, he's a very disturbing guy.
And I found his interview tapes because he
had lived out in the area by Lake
Crescent and apparently at some point admitted to
putting a body in Lake Crescent. So then
I went in and looked up his interviews,
looked up all the transcriptions from the FBI,
and I found this segment where he was
talking about Lake Crescent
and says basically, I'm not quoting him, but
basically he says that you should have known,
I thought you would have known that this
is one of the places I would put
a body because it's got a history, essentially.
And as soon as he said it, I'm
like, he's talking about this story
because people know this story out there. And
so then a serial killer goes and he
admits to putting a body down there, and
he assumed
that the body would be in the exact
same condition as when he put it in,
which goes back to Hallie,
and to her being saponified and basically being
a statue that emerged out of there. So
he knew the story, I think, and there's
just all of these different variations on it.
Some are very disturbing
and very dark, and then others are a
bit more whimsical and fun. But there was
no really great way to parse the data.
You just had to sit back and take
it all in and go,
what context does an audience need to have?
And, again, that was where I sort of,
you know, had a lot of outside help.
Yeah. And I think
one of the things that
emerges out of Lady of the Lake, and
it's part of what I love about watching
it, you know, rewatching it,
is that you get about 2 thirds of
the way through, and you're like, what the
hell am I watching? Because, you know, it
does take a turn into this other territory
that we are not used to seeing in
ghost media or true crime media, and I
think that's the discussion that we need to
be having.
The fact that some of these manifestations of
Halley around the lake have
all the earmarks of what you might call
urban legends.
There's a story of how she is signaling
to drivers to, you know, slow down or
be aware of an abrupt curve so that
they don't go off the road. I mean,
that's classic urban legend stuff. Where I am,
there's a story of a trucker who went
off the road on in Monteagle,
Tennessee and does the exact same thing. Like,
you'll find this story everywhere.
But, you know, people still
report these stories
outside of that sort of
matrix of folklorists that talk about these things
as being recurring themes and motifs. So what
do you do with the fact that some
of these sort of broader
stories seem to use the events of her
death as sort of a vehicle, a sort
of a launching point to sort of enter
our reality. Similar to that,
you've got these stories of Halle crying alongside
the lake, which is very evocative of the
stories from Latin America of La Llorona, who's,
you know, seen in white weeping alongside the
lake. As Ryan alluded to, you've got all
the sort of window area strangeness there from
Bigfoot to UFOs
to these stories of little people.
And
Claude Lecouteau,
former Sorbonne medievalist, said that fairies were so
closely associated with bodies of water that they
might be considered
primarily of an aquatic element. And you've got
stories of sirens luring people out to their
death Oh, I know that. In bodies of
water. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Paging doctor
Knowles.
You start to view this as
variations on a theme or as
attributes of lived experience being plugged into a
broader story.
It does paint a picture that we are
dealing with something that really transcends
the narratives that we've all grown up with
and the narratives that we've all sort of
come to expect to the extent that, you
know, it's not a household term.
People talk about the ETH,
the extraterrestrial hypothesis in regards to UFOs.
There is a similar stranglehold
in parapsychology
regarding ghosts that you could call the DPH,
you know, the dead people hypothesis.
And look, I'm very sympathetic to ghosts being
the dead that obviously plays some sort of
role in whatever that contact is, but it
still remains a hypothesis. And before even getting
into stuff like,
you know, emotional imprints on the land or
the stone tape theory, I think we also
should pay some attention to how these stories
and myth themes seem to repeat themselves
and often repeat themselves alongside other things that
are considered just anomalies. Yeah. I'm with you
there. And I'm glad you mentioned UFOs because
I did want to
kinda jump over to the UFO topic while
we're still in this first hour so we
can kinda slide in some current events because
people are gonna wonder why the hell I'm
not talking about it. It's because I booked
my show way in advance, and I wasn't
expecting weird shit to happen, but I guess
I should have.
But there really is a lot of UFO
stuff going on right now. Obviously,
some people think the drones over New Jersey
were more than just drones. And now people
are saying that they're not just over New
Jersey, they're over Denmark. They're all over the
place. People are suddenly
recording weird stuff in the sky.
And then the Cybertruck bomber apparently had some
manifesto
about the drones using anti gravity propulsion.
Lou Elizondo released a book not too long
ago that talks about ATIP and surgeries to
remove implants where the implants move deeper into
the body to get away from the surgical
tools.
It is hard to keep up with these
things, the congressional hearings, the new whistle blowers.
I don't follow it as closely as I
should even though it is my job to
be somewhat aware
because it's not the context in which I'd
like to think about 40 and UFOs
paranormal y stuff. It's all just very
military heavy. But if you look at the
UFO forums today or the UFO subreddits,
it's flooded with drone stuff. It's funny because
the conspiracy
subreddits are talking about UFOs and the UFO
subreddits are talking about
military
psyop conspiracies.
And that's a little unusual.
But
in the context of all the geopolitical
tensions, it's just weird that this dead guy
has this manifesto
and says, well, these are China's things, and
we gotta be scared.
And then he goes on the Sean Ryan
podcast. I don't have anything bad to say
about Sean Ryan, but
the FBI comes out and verifies the manifesto
as authentic
before the podcast comes out. It's like when
does the FBI or the Pentagon ever verify
anything? They either say nothing or they deny,
deny, deny. So it stinks to me, but
it is interesting that we're talking
to the king himself,
King Kutchin,
and
you gotta have some thoughts about these recent
events and these stories.
I'm gonna try to address as many as
I can. The first thing is that none
of these stories are new. The moving
implant under the skin, you can find examples
of monks writing in their diaries about the
devil putting a pea sized object in their
skin that always flees from the touch.
So these are always old stories that get
co opted and reused by
authority figures. Right? So that's point 1.
On the drones
writ large,
it's an amazing time to be interested in
UFOs and to see this happening. Right? Because
the phenomenon has always adjusted to expectations. You
have the steampunk airships around the turn of
20th century moving into these art nouveau flying
saucers
in the mid century into the black triangles
of the eighties. And then
come 2017,
we're all talking about this tic tac, tic
tac, tic tac, drones. We've been primed to
view the UFO phenomenon as a drone. And
I've had some friends who said, Yeah, but
people aren't really seeing those. And I said,
Just wait.
And now in the course of, you know,
3 short months, that's the way that the
American public has been conditioned to think of
UFOs and UAPs as drones to the extent
that, like, they might as well be synonymous
in coverage right now. So I think that
this is one of those watershed moments where
the UFO, regardless of what the drones actually
represent, right,
regardless of what they are, the public, how
it's changing the minds of people, is to
think of UFOs as drones. So I think
it's another example of the phenomenon
really plucking
a commonly reported shape out of the zeitgeist
and applying it to its form and function.
2nd part of
that, regardless of what the drones were, I
do think some people are seeing some genuinely
anomalous stuff, some stuff that might not even
be terrestrial.
Maybe the phenomenon is being attracted by all
the extra attention in the skies or
this is how strange our skies always are.
And it's just now that people are paying
attention and looking up, you know, looking up
and seeing things until they're finally realizing how
strange things can get. They saw the Superman
trailer.
Right?
Yeah. It's a bird, it's a plane, no,
it's a drone.
And
we got a constellation of things going on
here. We've got some shady terrestrial drones. We've
got some abject misidentifications
of very mundane things, and we probably have
some strangeness up there too.
I do not know what to make of
it or the manifesto as it came out.
I have to admit being attracted to the
parsimony of 2
conspiratorial
flash points coming together,
as you alluded to with the different subreddits
sort of cross pollinating in that way.
I'm trying to remain aware of the fact
that that flatters my sensibilities and that I
love seeing how these things are connected. That
does feel a little bit too parsimonious
to me. And if it flatters my sensibilities,
I usually become quite skeptical of it right
away. So
Amen. Amen.
Here's been my biggest problem throughout this whole
drone flap and I do appreciate
the coverage of the manifesto because it does
resituate this.
Ufologists
are so obsessed with exo politics that they
forget about geopolitics,
which still exist and are still a thing
and present a more ominous
threat and concern than any of the exo
politics stuff. Right?
So I do appreciate
the fact that people are talking more about
geopolitics in the past 24 hours since all
this came out.
But at the same time,
that could be a cover for something as
well. So I think that the best sort
of remedy for all this, for me at
least, and people can take this or leave
it, is to proceed with open minded interest
and to, you know, constantly perform a gut
check and see what they think about it.
I do think that something about the Las
Vegas incidents
don't pass the smell test, but I could
have told you that on day 2.
So who knows?
It's just
here's your Terrence McKenna quote, Brian. You wanted
a you wanted a Terence McKenna quote, you
know, okay.
It is this idea that, you
know, we're cascading towards an ever increasing advent
of novelty that will become so suffocating and
frequent that the only thing by which we
recognize our entire
reality is the ever increasing novelty.
And he was right. I mean, like, let's
take a step back and say that, you
know,
time wave 0 might not have been spot
on and the timing might have been funny,
although a strong case can be made that
2012 is when things started to sort of
get strange.
Yeah. I interviewed a guy whose whole claim
was that we all died in 2012.
Yeah. I heard that as well. Yeah.
But
the point is, is that the broader point
that Terrence was trying to make is that
yes, we are on an asymptotic
curve towards ever increasing novelty. That seems
to be apparent to anyone paying attention.
Yeah. And I just wanna say 2 things.
Number 1, to Rifan McKenna. In the last
interview that he gave where he's out in
Hawaii and going into some of that stuff,
he talks about how he fully expects us
to
be able to transfer consciousness
from one body to another,
to travel
faster than light speed, have all this amazing
technology while at the same time we're displaying
unlimited barbarism
and killing each other and
doing all of these terrible things, and that
both of them will be happening at scale.
And I think that that sort
of novelty is absolutely the state that we
live in. I think that there's also
and I'm not a parapolitical
person, but
I do believe that we are sort of
existing
in an MK Ultra
sort of state. Oh, now we're in now
we're cooking with gas, Ryan. And have been
for quite some time.
And so now that that's become the norm,
I can basically
talk about the drones this way, just to
say this is my thought.
The disclosure,
which is what's happening, the disclosure
is a cover up.
But the cover up
is
the disclosure.
So the fact that they're even engaging with
the cover up, to me, implies that, you
know, we're we're getting to the point where
it's like we're getting softened, you know, to
be able to, like, experience more
things
based on the Brookings Institute. And I I'm
sure there's a trajectory that makes sense for
a larger apparatus like the government in that
way, plus all of the political implications and
commercial implications that come along with maybe hiding
some of that technology or whatever has been
going on.
But at the end of the day, I
go back to,
isn't it amazing to see people
feel
enchanted
by this whole process?
And if they can avoid the razor wire
of World War 3 or impending reptilian domination,
if they can avoid those two things and
just for a moment suspend disbelief and find
themselves engaged with this experience of life, right,
Whatever's piloting these things. I love seeing people
talking about this and not talking so much
in the pejorative
about life for a minute.
That was really inspiring to me. That's what
all
good eschatology
does. Right? Is it has a re enchanting
sort of quality to it. It's that old
question of, like, if you knew today was
the last day on earth, what would you
do? And everyone's answer is hugging loved ones,
having the best meal that they could have,
going outside and hugging a tree and putting
their toes in the grass. Like, it's all
about stuff that we do day to day
and take for granted. So that's what
really confronting
mortality, be it of yourself or of the
world,
does. And so, yeah, that is a positive
side to this.
Seeing a UFO
as a beautiful thing,
that's the component that I think is missing.
And, you know, we go through cycles like
this too. Anybody who's into film history can
easily riff on Star Wars emerging out of
Dirty Harry. Right? And
all of the
fantasy movies coming out of these darker times
and as a response to them. So I
really hope personally that we're walking the razor
edge towards
the next Harry Potter or something as opposed
to World War III. But there's definitely a
really dark sensibility
to this time period as well. So I
can see how people are responding to it
in a negative way.
But I would also venture out on a
limb and just say, Stop looking to the
government to qualify your existence. Stop looking to
the government
to justify
your lived experience
and stop looking to the government for your
source of truth, right? We go back to
how are you feeling, right? In your stomach,
how does it feel when you saw that
thing that you saw? In your stomach, how
does it feel when you hear these people
talk who are talking? Use that.
You've had that beaten out of you. So
go ahead and try to use it now
and see how that works out because in
the end, that's gonna be the best barometer
for truth you have because we are moving
into that wacky MK Ultra novelty period, and
you kinda have to assume that you are
your own best advocate. It's like when you
go into the hospital, you really are your
own best advocate. You're kind of in that
liminal space right now.
Amen. And not to take us too far
into conspiracy land, but you said MKL is
your first, Ryan, so I can say it
now. But, you know,
both of the New Year's Day attackers,
the New Orleans guy and the Cybertruck guy,
they both spent time at Fort Bragg. And
Fort Bragg is known for having a psychological
warfare division.
It's basically
the MK Ultra hub. So you have 2
ex military guys
who did time in the exact place. I
mean, if you know the Michael Aquino stuff,
that all comes out of Fort Bragg too.
It's like something dark's going on there that
is a real hub for
this activity and how it's crossing over into
UFO
space. Well and, you know, it occurs to
me that
someone doesn't necessarily
need to go through MK Ultra experiments
experimentation on you to be in that milieu.
And, you know, if we do believe, as
people like Chris Knowles have talked about MK
Ultra being more about calling down demons than
anything else,
you know, it stands to reason that
something like that could be called down and
sort of set up shop in a location
and then have
an entire array of people to pick from
regardless of whether or not they were actually
approached or not. Just the fact that something
dark might hover around a location seems entirely
plausible to me. And if you ever read
like Program to Kill, there is actually
a paper trail for these sorts of things
happening.
To what extent is obviously kind of spurious,
but there is definitely a paper trail for
some of these things type of like, you
know, people becoming
having tendencies towards these sorts of violent outbursts
after participating in certain types of programs or
being in certain places, there's definitely correlations that
you can draw. Like, that's common sense. Everybody
knows it. Can you attribute
some sort of government program to these things?
That's spurious. It's total conjecture. But how do
you feel
when you see it? Where is your gut
when you see this stuff, right? And, like,
for me,
what I think
with these activities is that we are just
headed into the cuckoo land. And
if you've ever taken psychedelic medicine and had
to get through it, and if you feel
like you're going to die and you just
have to lean into the death, like, here's
where you are.
You're in that space where this is going
to get weird. I personally think it's gonna
intensify.
To the point of these demons and the
idea of this demon haunted world, not to
make too Sagan was against it, right? But,
like, this idea of the demons,
I kind of have had this wonder in
me about the UFO phenomenon as it sits
because Josh, you made a comment, we were
on a show the other day, about
the potential for the Tic Tac or the
drone even becoming the next physical
visual manifestation
of the UFO phenomenon in a long series
of them, right, from airships to drones.
So you're talking about that and I was
thinking about if I were a hungry non
human intelligence sitting on the other side of
the veil that actually needed
belief to exist, right?
I would be looking at the world and
going, It's so secular.
How do I get people to believe in
anything again? And I think that shaking the
tree proverbially here could be almost a ploy
from a hungry
psychic entity that does want us to speak
to your point on that. Is there like
a precedent
for
alignment between
the changing modes of how we experience, let's
say, the UFO
and also
folklore or traditional
religion around entities that are looking for belief
to manifest?
I'm sure you could draw some rough correlations
between
the eighties
ascension of the new age and sort of
how that was an inflection point when things
changed. And
obviously,
world wars tend to have an outsized impact
upon spirituality too. So that might be tied
up in the whole Kenneth Arnold era, the
flying saucer era.
I think that
if not
orchestrated
by some sort of outsized meta intelligence that
this time period is just scheduled.
I find it really fascinating to me that
we're going through all this and that, look,
I've been historically very critical of disclosure, but
I think we can all say that it
seems as if some sort of gains have
been made if in no other way than
getting people on the street to say, yeah.
There is something funny about this stuff. That's
a sea change. Right?
Yeah. It's sad how little How little it
takes. We get. Yeah. I mean, the crumbs,
you know, we're
really just eating crumbs here, but That that
is a sea change. And I think that
the success of that movement for whatever you
wanna call it, and I think it still
falls short of what it could accomplish or
what they seek to accomplish, but still the
relative success of that movement,
coupled with the lack of
faith and authority structures, coupled with
bizarre geopolitical tensions,
I think it all speaks to the time
that this is trickster time. Like I think
that these things are not unrelated at all.
That's going in the title. Well, I I
just think that it's this ties back onto
some stuff that I first learned about in
some of your conversations with Gordon about Fort's
dominance.
It does seem like as if there is
a prescribed time where it is trickster time
now. And
the level of not only acceptance, but fluency
with which I see people discussing
the UFO topic in particular is quite shocking.
I can't tell you how many conversations I've
had with average people on the street
where, you know, they ask me what I'm
into and I mentioned the UFO thing. And
I'm preparing my spiel to say that I
don't think it's ET. Right? And before I
can even say that, the person will say,
I think they're interdimensional. And I'm like, what
in the John Keel did you just say?
Like like, how has this discussion moved such
that people will sort of offer that? Regardless
whether or not it's accurate or not. Like,
that's a bizarre thing.
You know, another example that I've been using
lately is I have you know, I used
to not talk to people at my church
about what I I'm into because, you know,
it opened up a whole can of worms
and the obvious conversations that have to come
out of that. And now I'm at church
functions and people are coming up to me
asking me about Skinwalker Ranch and Chris Bledsoe.
And it's like,
what happened?
And I think it's
tied into that ever increasing novelty, probably tied
into the 2012 shift, probably tied into
this trickster era. And I think these things
whatever gains disclosure has made, I don't know
if any of them would have been made
in any other time period. I think that
this is a top down sort of permission
to do this from forces we can't comprehend.
The coyote is on the prowl.
Being aware, right? Like being situationally aware is
so important.
Amen. Amen. Well said.
Okay. Well, I think this was really great.
We gotta find some place to land.
I will be honest. When I put my
producer hat on and I was, like, getting
ready for this, as you know, we rescheduled
because I was like, I need more time
to figure this thing out because I was
worried how are we gonna talk about this
film
that is as long as the interview that
I need to do
and not give away the whole goddamn thing.
And, you know, now this is one of
my favorite ones in a while, so it
all worked out. And
let's do the promo thing one more time.
Tell them where they can see
Lady of the lake, tell them about the
upcoming projects mentioned. Anything else you got going
on? I know, Josh, you wrote a novel
too. If you haven't done enough to make
me look lazy,
hit them with all the good stuff. Ryan,
I'll let you start with the lady of
the lake details and VOD and all that.
Yeah. So the Lady of the Lake is
streaming on all of the platforms, but we
prefer you go to Amazon or Itunes if
you can because they give us the most
coin. And movies ain't cheap. And like I
said, we're self financed. So if you like
it weird and you like it true to
your individual
self, then keep sponsoring weird people You're doing
that.
And then online,
you can follow Creepy Kingdom to see the
menagerie of stuff that company does.
That's the best way. I'm not that interesting
on social media. You are the co creator
of that company, right, Ryan? Co owner, yeah.
Co owner. Yeah. Cool. I,
am Joshua Cutchen. And
still Joshua Cutchen, I think.
And since we've spoken last, I have a
novel that's out called Them Old Ways Never
Died.
And I have another nonfiction
book pending in the spring, hopefully, if everything
goes well, called 4th Wall Phantoms. It's
all about fictional incursions entering our reality and
what that possibly says about the UFO question
and the spirit question and the cryptozoological
question.
I am currently
available for your viewing pleasure
in the, documentary, Kosmosis
that can be found through YouTube, Apple Plus,
and Amazon Prime.
We are still in preproduction on a documentary
together, Ryan and I, on the UFO topic.
So look for some news to continue to
come out for that in 2025.
Probably some other TV stuff coming up later
this year that I'll be making an announcement
on. But to find out when and if
that is happening, you can head on over
to joshuacutchen.com,
joshuacutchin.com,
and you can track me down on Facebook
and Instagram if you are so inclined.
Love it. It's like you've done that before,
but you still miss something. So I'll swoop
in with an assist
and say that you even have an NDE
course that people can take. I do have
an NDE course, so thank you. You're welcome.
Part of the reason that it slipped my
mind is because I actually offered it this
past spring, but it's available through the Cosmos
Institute.
They were so pleased with the result that
they have actually made it an evergreen course
and all the classes were recorded. So if
you're interested in that, you can go over
to cosmosinstitute.org.
That's cosmos with a k.
And, yeah, you can see what you missed
out on the spring, seeing all of my
pontificating
on the NDE. Thank you for reminding me
of that. Of course. It's what I do.
I I got too many things going on.
What can I say? I know. I know.
Man, makes me feel like I should be
doing so much more. But anyway, this was
really great. I super enjoyed talking to you
guys. We were all over the map, and
I think that we covered, really important ground.
So I appreciate it, and I look forward
to seeing the other projects you do. Take
care. Thank you.
Alright. And boom goes the dynamite. Joshua Cutchen,
always a treat. Ryan Grolick, a nice addition
to the conversation.
Lady of the Lake, an intriguing decades old
true crime mystery that was only unraveled because
of the sightings in the years since.
I enjoyed the film, but I really enjoyed
the parts of the conversation that got deeper
into their thoughts on broader topics, like the
big picture ideas regarding 40 and High Strangeness
and also
their thoughts about government disclosure
and the Cybertruck
bomber manifesto
situation.
Somebody on the higher side chat subreddit actually
started a thread about the Sean Ryan show
and their thoughts on that being a genuine
situation.
And it made me feel a little bit
better because I said I kinda doubted it
in this episode and I just thought, man,
I'm probably bringing on a lot of unneeded
heat because that audience is so much bigger
than my own.
Apparently, I'm not alone in thinking something was
fishy with that, and that's good to know.
So I thought that's when it got extra
fun, and I try to keep from tainting
Josh with my conspiracy
lunacy, but the streams are crossing more and
more these days. And I'm glad he was
just willing to indulge me a bit on
it.
As is usually the case, the second hour
really shouldn't be missed especially if you liked
where we were at the halfway point because
we got into even crazier stuff from there.
The nature of true disclosure,
rituals,
intention, and collective
consciousness,
retrocausality,
and the future of humanity,
collapsing world views, new understandings,
the human experience in the UFO narrative, shamanism
and stewardship,
the role of trauma in all this,
Gertrudeff and the importance of death awareness, and
living with purpose and active engagement.
No shortage of good points and little insights.
Sign up right in the show notes or
at thehiresidechats.com.
And THC can keep on being one of
the last remaining independent and listener supported shows
out there
in a very ad heavy world.
But there is a lot going on out
there. Lots of recent events and shenanigans
that need deconstruction,
and I should've known January would be jam
packed with all kinds of chaos leading into
Trump's inauguration.
But I booked a few guests on very
specific
topics
and I'm super happy with most of them.
I mean, ancient mysteries and plasma are great,
but they aren't really the kind of guests
who are gonna comment on current events. And
the shit that happened on New Year's Day
and these fires.
There is so much to talk about and
I'm gonna get us
a few good guests to break down a
lot of it because there's no shortage of
things already
just 12 days into a new year
to talk about.
But I'm probably,
like usual, not gonna be the fastest
to
break all the news.
But we will be thorough. I can promise
you that.
But I'll try to be more conscious of
that and make sure that I always have
some
current events, guests
peppered in
so that we can be more up to
date on the news, but it just didn't
happen
in this first
couple of weeks of the new year.
But these fires in LA, man,
there are fires every year but not usually
in January.
January was usually the wet season.
People know it doesn't snow there, but we
would get lots of misty rainy days throughout
the winters.
And I don't know where that went. Now
it's apocalyptic
fire covering over a 100 acres.
And, obviously, there's gonna be many
micro stories in all of that, but I
did hear 2 that were particularly
sad.
1st, the Theosophical
Society in LA burned down. This was part
of their statement.
This was the world's largest archive of Theosophical
materials, including a library with 40,000
titles, the entire archive of the history of
the Theosophical
Society,
as well as about 10,000
unpublished
letters pertaining to Blavatsky, the Mahatmas,
W. Q. Judge, and several other people I'm
unfamiliar with,
as well as membership records since 18/75,
art objects, and countless other irreplaceable
materials.
The archives also contain works of Baum,
Gichol,
donations from the King of Siam, including rare
Buddhist scriptures, and so on.
Really sad to hear that. Lots of history
lost. We don't like that.
And it's a shame they didn't have a
digital archive of this stuff.
Not really a new idea, but hindsight is
2020.
Obviously, I greatly prefer a library of
original materials, but a digitized archive is a
nice
plan b for situations like this.
And then the second sad story I heard
is that Maja, our last guest, has lost
her home and everything in it.
There's a GoFundMe you can find on my
Twitter, but just another sad story out of
what is 1,000.
Again,
we will make time to cover all that
in detail soon with a great return guest,
but the hits just keep on coming in
2025.
Either way, I got a lot out of
this interview.
It is hard to make
40 and high strangeness
shows fresh,
but there is a good way to do
it and a deeper way to do it.
And I think with Josh Cutchen,
you're always gonna get there.
I know I said that I didn't find
the whole feelings connection aspect to be the
most exciting conclusion.
I'm just being honest about that, but I
do want the true conclusion.
I wanna understand the phenomenon as it is,
not as I wish it were because it's
more exciting to think it's disembodied
separate beings.
The more I learn, the more it does
seem that these things are deeply personal and
maybe even emerge from within an individual.
There might even be a set of circumstances
that all have to line up, and only
one of them is the emotional state of
the individual. It's hard to say.
But I like to think that we had
this conversation at a high level, especially as
it went on.
With the lady of the lake situation in
this instance in particular,
it's got a very 6th sense vibe. Right?
She won't move on until the story is
told. The unfinished business is complete.
But her body was recovered and the sightings
remain.
I can't remember the exact number now, but
there was what? Dozens of more people that
were thought to have died in the lake?
Maybe there's more than one lady.
Certainly an interesting story, and I know true
crime isn't our thing usually, but I'll take
any reason I can to talk to the
Kutchmeister.
And I considered
the story to be a bit more interesting
because of the archetypal
overlap.
Even in previous episodes, I know Josh has
told a couple of Lady of the Lake
stories.
I guess it's just one of those grooves,
you know.
But as for the last show, yes, with
Maja, it was a pretty mixed bag according
to Plus members.
She was kind enough to jump into the
comments herself and navigate the good, bad, and
the ugly there. But the rating came in
at a 4.2.
Not the greatest. I don't worry if we're
still above 4,
but it's clear people had strong feelings. Those
who liked it really liked it and those
who didn't were not shy about saying so.
Maybe it was a little bit broad, but
she's someone who has had this connection to
the field from a young age, going out
of body because of fevers, knowing that the
material world was only half the story.
That set her up for a really interesting
life and a deeper connection
to the field, and we explored
different aspects of that.
And sensing that entanglement with spirits,
I mean, you know, you heard it, but
I was kinda surprised
that it was a 4.2.
Regardless of how you feel about our conversation,
to have such a devastating thing happen so
soon after,
Man, thoughts and prayers. Right, guys?
I guess there's not a lot more to
say. I realize it is a bit of
a slow start for us in this new
year,
but my editor has 2 shows in the
pipeline right now. He's moving as quickly as
he can. I'm recording again tomorrow.
I mentioned this, but
I was sick. My 2 kids were sick.
My wife was sick. And none of it
overlapped
exactly perfectly. So
the last half of December wasn't great. So
we're still just trying to get back up
on our feet in the Carlwood household.
And with the production chain of this show,
when I'm doing a really work heavy couple
of weeks, it takes a while for you
to notice as it does take a couple
of weeks for you to notice that I
lightened my load.
But wheels are in motion, and it's gonna
be a more action packed second half of
the month, it looks like. But let's do
the meetup calendar thing, as we tend to
do.
I'm recording this on January 12th. January 11th
was our big day with, like, 5 or
6 events. I hope they went well.
January 13th, we got one in Miami at
Lincoln's Beard Brewery.
January 25th, Allentown, Pennsylvania, McCall Collective Brewery.
February 1st, Conway, Washington, Conway's Pub.
The locals might've liked this episode.
February 3rd, Auckland, New Zealand, Gale Brath's Ale
House. February 8th,
Baringsville, Pennsylvania.
McCall Collective Taphouse.
Two places
called McCall's in Pennsylvania,
but in 2 different cities. I don't know
about that.
Locals can probably sort it out. But go
to the meetup calendar, higher side meetups.com,
for more information on any of these events
or to make your own.
And Gordon and I will be having our
event here in Tampa
on March 8th.
We are still narrowing down the venue, but
that is the date.
I think we're gonna do what we did
in Austin, which is
not charge for the event at all. No
ticket price.
But we keep it to the inner circle
of paid members as a thank you.
I feel like if you keep me and
Gordon going with a subscription to what we
do,
then this can be considered an added bonus
because you really do keep our lives running.
So we're gonna be doing a lot of
hanging out and mingling as we do, but
then we will also do a live interview
kind of thing.
Recorded, of course, 4 plus members who can't
make it.
And we got a pretty good topic lined
up. I'm pretty excited about it. It will
be good to see him again. It's been
a while.
In fact, maybe I haven't seen him since
the Austin event. I know I certainly haven't
gone anywhere.
But that is, the show. That's about all
she wrote. Thanks for listening. Check out the
film if you think it's your thang.
You will find more from Ryan at Creepy
Kingdom, and of course, Josh is as active
as ever, and his books are
top shelf.
Big thanks to both of them for taking
the time.
Thanks to you for listening. Try to keep
your head on straight out there.
That's it for me. I've done my part.
Your move, trickster beans, disclosure, disseminators,
and lake ladies.
Your fucking
move.
Roads wind around the redwoods,
circling the water's edge.
Many
mysteries to see,
at least the visitors
allege.
Elemental
sprites
and hairy
beasts might manifest,
But one legend's most persistent
standing
out above the rest,
the lady of the lake.
She sometimes
appears
a ghostly woman
in white
orphaned and tears.
An unexpected
death,
a secret still unknown.
Alone. Break the case back open. Send
her home.
What's the connection
between
violent
tragedy
and the strange reported
sightings of imprinted
energy?
Maybe it's
tied up in how you
feel.
The more you ask,
the more you wonder
what is even real.
The lady of the lake,
she sometimes
appears
a ghostly
woman
in white, often in tears.
Her
home.