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Ep 155 - Investigating UAPs with Dave Hodrien, Birmingham UFO Group Chairman
198 Plays13 days ago
Dave Hodrien returns to the show to talk to us all about his own journey into investigating UFO's and the Paranormal, as well as giving us an insight into how he conducts the 100's of UFO investigations he has personally undertaken as an investigator, and chairman, of the Birmingham UFO Group
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
our mostator money i don't know how to white those on or it was it wasn't an airplane it was not in your play it was so awful You're listening to Pursuit of the Paranormal Podcast with your hosts, Ash Ellis and Greg Tomlinson.
Recent UFO Meetup and Topics
00:00:24
Speaker
Hello, hello Ash, how are you doing? Very well, great Greg, good to see you. It's been a long time since we last spoke. 24 hours? Yeah, pretty much. yeah In the pub for the first time in a long time. In the pub for the UFO identified North West Division Meetup.
00:00:46
Speaker
It was a good night. In sale, yeah, it was a very good one. We covered off subjects like simulation theory, off-world missions, and what we're looking to do topic-wise and get people's thoughts on for
Celebrating UFO Month with Dave Holdren
00:01:01
Speaker
next year. So that was it was great to see.
00:01:04
Speaker
a load of people that I haven't even met in person really so yeah quite a few guests of the show um all meeting up together that have been on the podcast so it's good to see everyone it was a great night and looking even more forward to tonight's chat as we continue UFO month on pursuit of the power node to celebrate our fourth anniversary of the podcast which is this week And we're welcoming back to the show.
Dave Holdren's Background and Role
00:01:33
Speaker
I've been on a couple of times before, always popular episodes and always a good chat with a Dave. So we're welcoming back Dave Holdren, the chairman of the Birmingham yeah UFO group. I'm sure a lot of you will know about Dave, a very prominent UFO researcher, investigator, and host his own monthly meetups in the Birmingham Oldbury area. So welcome back to the show, Dave. How are you doing? Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
00:02:00
Speaker
Great to have you back. Awesome. So today, because in the last couple of times you've been on, we sort of talked about specific subjects. We talked about screen memories. We talked about kind of UFO representation in video games and stuff like that, which have been really interesting ah kind of episodes. But this time, I'm gonna go a bit more personal to you, talk about your own experiences. Something that I don't think I've even heard myself before from you. ah Having seen you talk quite a few times, obviously met you quite a few times in person. So I'm looking forward to hearing about your experiences and then some of the more interesting cases that you've investigated over your years as a researcher. So I just wanted to give,
00:02:36
Speaker
everyone I guess a bit of a background initially just into the work that you do and the bit when you evolve you can then we'll move on to your experiences. Yeah, so I've had an interest in the world of the UFO and why the world of the paranormal since childhood. And in 2007, the creation of Birmingham UFO Group became my driving force to start actively investigating the subject. I got taken on quite early on as the investigator, an official investigator for Birmingham UFO Group. And from that point, I was investigating cases, speaking with witnesses directly.
00:03:10
Speaker
A couple of years after that, I also got taken on as the chairman of Birmingham UFO Group Takeover, the running of the group, and I continued to be the lead investigator for the group.
Birmingham UFO Group Meetings
00:03:20
Speaker
In that time, in the last 16 years, I've investigated over over a thousand uh experiences and cases from around the world uh that number continues to grow all the time it's uh it's a ah regular active part of my life and i absolutely love it and it's certainly been absolutely fascinating i've heard some incredible stories and experiences of people over the years ah very very compelling really interesting stuff
00:03:47
Speaker
and Alongside that, I'm the United Kingdom Deputy Representative for ISA. That's the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research. What ISA is, is a it's got representatives and deputies from 30 countries around the globe, and it's an international effort to help put out the reality of the subject to the wider public in whatever ways that we can, ah whether that be through some educational courses, ah booklets and websites and articles that we release, etc. conferences organized, that sort of thing. So yeah I've been there part of ISA for the last few years. um ah Aside from that, yeah the the running of the group, yeah as Ash mentioned, we've got we've got our regular monthly meetings on the first Thursday day of every month. That side of Birmingham UFO group I'm particularly proud of, because there's not that many groups obviously in the UK. UFO identified is of course another one where you have ah your actual meeting, ah your actual meetups. And there's very few groups actually doing that these days.
Dave's Journey into UFO Investigation
00:04:45
Speaker
And there should be
00:04:47
Speaker
It's it's a a real pity. like a lot There's a lot of groups out there who just investigate and put things online, but the the live community and getting together with people once a month, having a good old catch-up, and I invite various speakers to come and talk. and We've had many, many speakers of great quality yeah over the years, and we've actually got another meeting coming up in a few days' time, there Alan Foster.
00:05:09
Speaker
whilst you're a phone investigator coming to give the last lecture for the year at Bufog. Anybody's welcome to come on down join in with those meetings if you live in the Birmingham area or you want to travel you're more than welcome. It was almost a year ago when I came down to give my talk. Yes. like In January so yeah nearly travel was gone that was ah fun. and Excellent it was Ash and youre you're mo you're you're welcome back anytime
Challenges in Paranormal Research
00:05:33
Speaker
of course.
00:05:34
Speaker
Cheers. So going back to, like you said, you've always had an interest in the paranormal and that side of things. How did that interest initially kind of kick off for you? Maybe, I don't know, Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious world. but has yeah So many people from their childhood would remember that book. this kind of is It's one of those, I don't know, it was just such a great kind of collection of different fascinating tales of the paranormal and I remember that being one of the earliest books that I read in depth and I'd just sit there late night with a torch just reading away and getting really spooked out while these stories spontaneous human combustion and raining frogs from the sky and all sorts of strangeness and they and it just I've always been fascinated by just mysteries of the world that we live in and I think that
00:06:25
Speaker
the The more I've looked into that, the more I've realized that mainstream science always hits sort of roadblocks because they need this repeated testing and it's all governed by sort of academia and funding and that sort of
Common Misidentifications of UFOs
00:06:39
Speaker
thing. And the world of the paranormal really doesn't fit into that. A lot of the time, the experiences are kind of one-off weird things that just happen. But the amount of cases on record, ah not just for UFOs, but for other things like, let's say, ghost, for example, as well,
00:06:53
Speaker
incredible numbers of experiences on record. um I've had my own experiences, which I didn't go into, but also I know numerous people. Most people, even if they haven't had their own experiences directly, will know multiple people and friends and family that have had. It's really, really common. There's so many cases out there. That's going to be a lot of misidentification. You have to remain grounded with this. And one of the things that I'll do as a UFO researcher is try to remain very very grounded and very sceptically minded with it because there's a lot of mundane things that that can be misidentified and there's all sorts of weird things flying around our skies yeah they get misidentified as ah as something more unusual and if you're not familiar with how what those things look like or how they act or how they look in certain lighting conditions
00:07:44
Speaker
then you you might interpret it as something a lot more fascinating.
Integrity in UFO Reporting
00:07:48
Speaker
And it's widely known that the majority of UFO sightings are of of mundane objects. But we don't need to worry about those. Those aren't the interesting ones. The interesting ones are the ones that can't be explained by by mundanus.
00:08:00
Speaker
Now obviously a lot of the evidence is testimonial based, you've always got that, you've got that in the water ghost as well. A lot of the time you're hearing tales of something that's happened to somebody, it's hard to go back and prove it. But I've ah've spoken with so many witnesses over the years who've given up so much of their time to to discuss with me in depth. And when you talk with somebody for an extensive period of time,
00:08:24
Speaker
the reality of what they've go through, it it hits home. There's very few times I've felt alarm bells that that the person's trying to kind of make money off it, or fame and fortune and that sort of thing. And I'll actually actively back off from cases, there's been a number of times where I've even gone as far as to write the actual case reports out. We're talking about many, many pages sometimes, very big case report. And I've write it all out, it's taken me ages to document it all. And then I'll have this sal alarm bell with it and I'll be and i'll and I'm not willing to put it out and I'll back off from it and the the case is never
From Interest to Investigator
00:08:56
Speaker
released. And that's because I've not only got my own integrity as an investigator, but also the integrity of my group to uphold. ah want I want Birmingham UFO Group to be seen as a realistic, yet you know positive to the reality of this subject.
00:09:10
Speaker
and the group that's seen in that in that light. So um that that's why I actively go down. I mean, there's so many unanswered questions with it with this stuff, it's and it's ah and every and there's so many viewpoints out there, and you're never gonna get two people on the planet who've got exactly the same viewpoints across all the cases. You're gonna get certain general viewpoints on certain things that it may or may not be, and there's quite a lot of synergy on that sort of level, but as soon as you get down into individual cases,
00:09:39
Speaker
ah you're going to get certain people who, you know, don't distrust a particular case or particular person or whatever for any number of different reasons. But yeah, back to my childhood. So yeah, just a general fascination with ah with unsolved mysteries. And like like many people, I got into UFOs by reading UFO magazine. I started to go to conferences at the age of 16. That was brilliant. the Where I live in Sully Hill, UFO magazine ended up having a number of their earlier conferences in Sully Hill, which was amazing because I could just go straight in on a bus.
00:10:13
Speaker
obviously back then I wasn't driving or anything and I and i remember going down there to those early conferences and seeing people talk about being on the front lines of this subject and speak with witnesses sometimes you'd have actual witnesses talking about a lot of the time it was researchers talking about cases they'd gone over and I remember about then just thinking how cool that would be how fascinating it would be to be one of those people to be actively looking into things. So it was always there kind of from then, it was always there at the back of my mind, but never it never developed into me becoming an active investigator.
Contributions to UFO Truth Magazine
00:10:46
Speaker
I quite like the idea of actively investigating for a group.
00:10:51
Speaker
rather than just being Dave Hodre, a UFO investigator, right? So when Craig and Mark, the original chairman of Birmingham UFO Group offered me the chance to become the official investigator for Birmingham UFO Group, I took ah took that on and I've never looked back.
00:11:07
Speaker
But before up until that point it was just same as many other people just watching lots of documentaries Yeah, we still remember the X-Files coming on TV back in the 90s and be blown away with all that and yeah, just reading your phone magazine and ah and In some cases writing certain articles back then these days I write regularly for UFO truth magazine, which is a bi-monthly easing that all the All the researchers who submit articles for UFO Truth magazine believe in the reality of the subject, as in non-human intelligence is involved. They're not necessarily saying they're definitely extraterrestrial, but they're certainly coming ah from a
Importance of Skepticism in UFO Cases
00:11:45
Speaker
positive standpoint. And that's said that's that's something that's just an agreement with you know with the people that write for that particular magazine. So I write for that regularly along summer work for Birmingham UFO Group.
00:11:57
Speaker
So you mentioned, just going back slightly, about remaining grounded when doing the investigations. How do you do that? Because I know Ash is the same, but me, I'll send Ash stuff, loads of stuff going, have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this? So I'm like the normal person in a street. How do you remain grounded when people come to you with these um yeah Some of them are ah completely fantastical kind of um experiences. how do you How do you deal with that and and not get excited?
Natural Phenomena Mistaken for UFOs
00:12:37
Speaker
yeah yeah so such Obviously there's always a bit of excitement there. you know and And I'm always thinking, is the next case going to be the one that has some absolutely groundbreaking you know smoking gun evidence, if it will, as part of it. But most of the time that doesn't happen and that's absolutely fine. That's just the nature of the subject. yeah
00:12:53
Speaker
um but and investigating so many cases over the years and just examining all the different things that can be seen and different times of day and how that can affect these different weather conditions etc. I feel I've got a very very good knowledge of of of how certain things can be interpreted in in certain scenarios as as something unusual. So I mean at first I will make sure that I get as many details about what's been experienced as possible off the individual without prompting them, so without kind of trying to lead them, I never try to lead people.
00:13:26
Speaker
And when we get more into in-depth discussions later on after I've captured those initial details, I might express certain viewpoints with them, but I'll always be like, these viewpoints are not set in stone.
Credibility and Evidence in UFO Cases
00:13:38
Speaker
And if you don't believe what I'm telling you, or you think something different entirely, that's absolutely fine. I mean, yeah, a great case important to be solar airships. So do you know what a solar airship is for a start?
00:13:50
Speaker
Yes, I've seen those. yeah yeah So you are probably about in the 5% of the population that knows what a solar airship is. Most people don't even realise they exist. Only because of all ah all of this podcast stuff. Yeah, well i yeah exactly. yeah that's it That's it, really. I've seen countless photographs of solar airships put out on the internet, yeah masquerading as giant cylindrical or cigar-shaped craft. Is that the bla that big blast? That's right, yeah. yeah yeah so like yeah the The thing about them is this they're massive, yeah they're like huge, they're the length of a room of a house. yeah So if you know if you don't know what you're looking at, it drips up into the air, it's tethered usually on the kite, which like a kite, that means it can ah appear to hover. So if you're far away from it, you're not going to see the tether. So it looks like some sort of cylindrical object that's disobeying the laws of the the wind currents around it or whatever.
00:14:45
Speaker
Even more interestingly, I've had cases where the tethers actually snapped and the things started floating across the sky. Now, in those cases, it often starts to tumble. So I've had i've had cases where they'll be like, oh, you're not going to believe this day. There was this really weird cigar
Integrity in UFO Research Community
00:15:00
Speaker
shape UFO and it was spinning, it was spinning and it was going across the whole skyline. And then they're like, oh, I got it on video. I was like, I did. Yeah, amazing. Fantastic. You send that to me and then and they send it to me and absolutely yeah without doubt it was a solar airship drifting on a wind current and rolling over and over now even more interestingly than that if it's a bright sunny day which most of the time solar airships are are launched in sunny conditions yeah sunlight will capture off it and reflect off it
00:15:27
Speaker
people can report it having rainbow colored flashing lights, like like a Christmas tree right here, yeah, along it. That's just the reflection of the sun in it, but it's interpretation, right? So I've had people report, oh, it's a cigar-shaped craft with flashing lights along it.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, which to all intents and purposes with those base details, you're like, wow, and then it oh it was quite large in size as well. So you're thinking, wow, this could be a genuine case. And then, you know, and then when you start delving into it, or if they've got a photo or video of it, you can, you know, you can put that to bed. And we've had a number of cases where that's been the exact scenario. um There's also many, obviously, in the early days of investigation, we had the good old Chinese lanterns or sky lanterns, as they're known,
00:16:10
Speaker
Now you don't get those so much anymore because of the fire risks, so they'll stop selling them commercially, but they're not illegal yet. You can still get them online and people can still keep them in their garages for years and years and then finally decide to light them up. And every year we'll probably expect to see some in the coming weeks, and maybe over New Year. Now because they're getting rarer again in the sky,
00:16:31
Speaker
um that actually increases the chances that somebody will be impressed by it. yeah So in the early days of my investigation back in 2007,
Investigating Misidentifications
00:16:40
Speaker
2008, etc. yeah I was inundated with cases and you could actually see the spike around around celebration times or in the run-up to New Year, the run-up to Christmas, fireworks night, etc. And you can actually see that and you better plot that on a chart, um which I'll i'll ah go over in a bit what I'm doing at the moment. I've got a certain project on the go at the moment.
00:16:58
Speaker
but essentially you can see that but in the early days when that was all the rage and they were everywhere a lot of people didn't know what they were looking at and they were reporting seeing squadrons of these orange glowing orbs and sometimes they would appear to kind of hover or follow along after each other so of course they're all on the same track yeah that means they're intelligent doesn't it yeah because they're all following the same course yeah and ah then sometimes oh my god look at that they've arranged themselves in the perfect equilateral triangle ah you know so Interpretation, again, depends on what position on the ground you're looking at them as to how they look and in relation to one another. yeah So yeah it might just sometimes it might just be coincidence, air currents, et cetera. The trouble with air currents is you can have conjoined air currents. You can have it going that way. And then all of a sudden, it will appear to perform almost a right-angle turn. Now, right-angle turns is one of the aspects of the UFO subject that we look for with maneuvering capabilities of these things. But the trouble is, is the balloons can sometimes perform
00:17:56
Speaker
or seem to perform very sharp turns and really they're just entering a different air current and and it's across across winds and they'll go off a different way all of a sudden so you have to be very very careful then you've got the whole distance thing of course the further away it is it's very very hard to tell exactly how far away something is therefore how big it is how fast it's moving So um I'm always very, very cautious with the with the details.
Continuous Learning in UFO Research
00:18:21
Speaker
It's all all matters, all of it. i'll I'll then usually check on flight radar 24 to see if there's any aircraft in the vicinity, but trouble is, not okay not all aircraft cover transponders, right? Especially not military aircraft. However, depending on the location, so if it's near to nearby to a large airport, not nearby to Birmingham Airport,
00:18:41
Speaker
um then it's more likely that we'll have the transponder on because they've been told by the airport you must have your transponder on so we can pick you up in air traffic control. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're legally obliged to have it have the transponder on.
00:18:56
Speaker
I'm always learning there all the time with this, you know, there's there's always things to learn. Like, in if you go back to my earlier reports, yeah, I will have said comments along the line of, it it was after dark, so the object could not have been a hot air balloon, yeah, because hot air balloons are not allowed to fly after dark, are they? Except that they are. They actually are.
00:19:16
Speaker
but but they are then obliged to have a flashing light that hangs 50 feet below the basket in a continuously flashing white light so they are allowed to do night flights but they're legally obliged to have this light on so if the object's large but it doesn't have that flashing white light under it very unlikely to be a hot air balloon after to dark yeah But I didn't know that until about a year ago. And then so I'm always learning new things about certain things and and taking that into my worldview and how I investigate cases. There's always more to learn within the world of investigation and more sort of clever ways of of working out whether something is or isn't a ah certain thing in certain conditions.
Impact of Conspiracy Theories
00:20:00
Speaker
But it's absolutely fascinating. Yeah, definitely. And there's some good things you said there straight away where to help people kind of
00:20:08
Speaker
reent identifying things in the sky there's like lots of things that you see if things like like sunlight reflecting of a flock of birds and stuff like that well birds don't be flat so well actually they do so I get another a fleet of ships know of orbs here flying around one another darting around just a lot of geese actually going over the things Yeah, there yeah yeah there's a there's actually an IFO's page on the Birmingham UFO Group website that I've put together which has countless numbers of different um identified flying objects and also there's a section on the bottom with the photographic anomalies too where
00:20:48
Speaker
looking into lens flare insects close to the lens birds etc um so like like i say to be an invest a good investigator and somebody who's respected as an investigator you need to be grounded you need to be because ah otherwise you just end up going down this absolute rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and there's so many conspiracy theories and things online regarding this subject and a lot of it It gives the subject a bad name here because people are you know normal members of the public who aren't invested in any depth in this subject you can look at that stuff and they can be like, this is madness, absolute barmy, look at this nonsense, look at this hippie stuff. you know and ah you know And there's a big difference between that and the actual core reality of what's going on with these cases around the world. But in the last 16 years, I went in with a view that there was something real to this subject.
00:21:38
Speaker
and now that
Evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
00:21:40
Speaker
view is massively strengthened it's not the other way around it's not like i've looked into all these cases and i know like oh there's nothing to it it's all mundane it's all top secret black budget military projects there's no other intelligences involved in this i can absolutely categorically tell you without doubt in my mind that there are other intelligence involved. ah won't I won't say where they're from, I won't tell you they're definitely alien or definitely from off world, right? They might be from another dimension or from Earth, future or whatever. You've always got these continuous arguments. And there's actually interesting evidence that points to each of those arguments. So maybe it's like multiple things going on at once and maybe certain types of from our future and other types that from actually from elsewhere in our universe
00:22:20
Speaker
we don't whatever whatever's going on with this is extremely complex and extremely detailed and it involves numerous different species or types that are regularly reported by people not just in contact so become I'm a particular specialist in the contact field. I've dealt with hundreds of cases from around the world and on contact and and spoken with experiences who've had contact experiences throughout their whole life, right back to childhood. It's particularly fascinating to me because I believe that the contact phenomena gives us a window into what's going on with this subject, why they're flying around our skies.
00:22:58
Speaker
Because they've got to be doing something, right? Yeah, let's say they've been here for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. That's if you go with the agreement that there's other intelligences involved. Let's say they're, ah, yeah. They've got to be up to something, right? They've got to be doing something for an extended period of time. And and what I believe comes out to the contact experiences is a view of of what that is. And you get repeated agendas. um And we're not just
Worldwide Contact Cases
00:23:20
Speaker
talking about sort of in one particular geographical location. We're talking about worldwide here. You can get cases from us. have double cases from Australia, Germany, France, you name it, Iran, everywhere, right? And the details that come out in those cases about the types of things that are seen, both the craft, if you will, objects, you want to call them that, and their their occupants.
00:23:44
Speaker
the the the procedures that that they they deal with, and and I've heard some of this off off people who, even children, who haven't haven't had their minds polluted by watching too much X-Files or closing canners or anything. ah and a lot It's interesting that analogy because a lot of people use that and they're like, oh, they watch closing canners of the third kind. and Not realizing that Steven Spielberg based that film on real cases. So it's the other way around. It's not that the film in made these cases appear. The cases made the film appear. yeah he He went researching into the subject to put together that movie. That's why many of the aspects in it relate to real aspects seen seen in the subject. And there's been many films, obviously, since. He's actually working on a new one. He's probably aware he's working on a new alien-related, UFO-related project.
00:24:32
Speaker
I think we're going to see yeah more on it next year but he's he's working on that at the moment. ah Details are pretty secretive at the moment but I've heard it is UFO related. So it's really it's really nice to see him going back to that topic again because he's got a big interest in the subject.
00:24:49
Speaker
Nice one. Yeah, definitely looking forward to that one. So tell me, Dave, about that's going to your experiences. Sure. Do you want to just, I know, is the one
Personal Paranormal Experiences
00:25:00
Speaker
in warm and stuff, the one that you've had? Yeah, the warm and stuff was my, um my UFO sighting, but I'll go through things in the order that happened in my life because it's not just UFOs that have happened. I've had an antibody experience when I was 14 years old.
00:25:18
Speaker
and like many people I had it when I was ah knocked out when I was out of consciousness and I was knocked out because I was out the dentist getting a tooth, either a heavy-duty filling, this was back before they did the injections and they don't like talking about this stuff seriously meant to be went right.
00:25:37
Speaker
But yeah, the back then they used to have the gas, yeah and the put the thing you know obviously due to a safety or worries that people weren't going to wake back up again, which maybe has happened in certain cases, I don't know. and They stopped doing that and now they go with the injection instead. yeah But back then they have the good old gas. and yeah gone in I don't think I was getting the tooth extracted, I think it was just a heavy filling that he was doing.
00:26:01
Speaker
and um So I was in the chair and he puts the gas on me and next thing I know I'm in a standing up position um looking over the dentist and ah me in the chair. Now I couldn't see much of myself because of the angle I was, I was kind of like back, imagine I was like back behind the dentist's right shoulder. yeah so i could see him leaning over and i could see his back leaning over the chair and i'm sitting there watching this now i couldn't i couldn't move or anything i didn't think i'm out of my body i'm going to fly around or see what's going on in the corridor outside or anything anything like that it wasn't like that it was like i just remembered having this view of it take place so it wasn't like a full blown i've got all my senses oh my god i'm out outside my body let's go and fly around the town and anything like that
00:26:47
Speaker
it was it was a lot more mundane and that was a lot more straightforward you know i was just in this viewpoint in the standing up position yeah now uh then next thing i know i'm coming round from it yeah so i'm back in my body i don't remember kind of re-entering my body or anything like that i didn't see this cord that some people talk about or anything like that uh so i'm coming out and i'm very very groggy and the first thing i say to the dentist is uh i watched that happen right And back when it happened, I didn't know anything about ad about body experiences. I didn't know what I was experiencing right.
00:27:18
Speaker
But I said to him, I watched that happen. And I remember his response to me was, ah you couldn't have. You were knocked out, as in he thought that I hadn't been fully put under or whatever. That's what he thought I meant. Of course, what I meant is I was watching it from this other position. um But I didn't, you know, I was very, very groggy. So I said that to him. He said that response. We didn't continue the conversation. I still remember being taken back to my grandparents' house and they got the afternoon off school or whatever, which was pretty cool. But I was i was in a bit of a state And it was only years later when I looked
Unexplained Events in University Home
00:27:50
Speaker
into it that I realized that what I'd had there was an out-of-body experience. And it's the only one I've ever had. I've never had any other out-of-body experiences or astral projection or anything like that. um It's just just that one incident. But in reading into that, obviously I've looked into OBEs quite a lot because you sometimes get a lot of crossover with OBEs and sort of sleep paralysis, sleep hypnagogia with the contact phenomenon, mundane explanations for certain contact experiences.
00:28:17
Speaker
um like anybody else's research into context in any depth there's definite differences between those things and they don't explain the content phenomena at all but there are certain cases where you could say okay that's what the person's experienced you know so they've they believe they've gone flying right they've gone flying up into landing craft you know or whatever or they've gone flying towards the window and it's not that they've had a contact experience as in they've been ah taken by aliens or anything like that but they've had an out-of-body experience and they were interpreting it as a contact experience. But, incredibly, i've I've actually dealt with more than one case. It's quite rare, but I've dealt with more than one case where the person's actually had an OB and a contact experience at the same time, as in they are floating up by their ceiling, looking down as a number of greys or whatever are in their bedroom, like a visitation experience, and they're watching it from outside of their own physical body. Really interesting.
00:29:14
Speaker
wow it's pretty wild some of the stuff that goes on that must be scary yeah yeah it's really interesting but it has links with the sort of metaphysical nature of certain content experiences so uh there's there's plenty of content to cases where it looks like people have been taken physically yeah as in they've gone from their bed and then they return later on or whatever or they disappear from their kitchen for an hour and a half and then all of a sudden they're back there and this sort of thing But there's also quite a lot of cases which appear to be sort of more metaphysical in nature, like they haven't actually gone anywhere, their physical body's still there, and yet they've had an abduction experience or whatever. Does that mean that it's not real and it's all in their head? Absolutely not, yeah. That would be very, very narrow-minded to say that they haven't had a real experience with that.
00:29:56
Speaker
um and some of the cases that the Harvard professor John Mac looked into when he delved into the world of contact were metaphysical type experiences and he was sure that there was a ah still a kind of reality to it but it was a pseudo reality it wasn't a physical reality but there was something going on with it, you know, and it was linking into the dreams and this sort of thing. And so they were getting some of the experiences back in sort of dream form, you know, so they weren't real as in physical, but there was, but there was still, it wasn't just in their head, you know, there was a, there was a common, some sort of reality to it. Really interesting.
00:30:30
Speaker
Um, so yeah, that was my OBE experience. Yeah. And that's the first unusual thing that happened in my life. I don't remember anything out of the ordinary or paranormal happening before that. And it was only like in late my twenties or whatever, when I started delving into out of body experiences more that I realized that that's what that was. Uh, but it's really cool. Uh, it's really interesting to have that experience and look back on it. So now I'm going to move forward to my ghost experiences.
00:30:56
Speaker
um unusual Unusual poltergeist type activity in one of the houses that I moved into. I went down to Plymouth for university. um I wanted to kind of, I suppose I wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible. It wasn't that.
00:31:14
Speaker
um I wanted to go to the coast because I was very interested in marine biology and I wanted a university that would do a lot of marine biology and I'd be able to do scuba diving and things so I've done many many scuba dives in Plymouth sand etc down there for the years I was at university it was really good
Skepticism of Paranormal Events
00:31:30
Speaker
fun.
00:31:30
Speaker
So i during that time, I stayed in a number of share houses and moved around different years. I was in different houses. But one of the, I think it was the third house I moved into, um the second house, sorry. Yeah, second year, moved into this new house. It was a proper big old Victorian house. A lot of the houses down there are pretty old and they're absolutely massive compared to the houses around here in Birmingham anyway. There's multiple floors to it and there was there was four other the people in the house there was a three of the blokes and then a girl.
00:32:04
Speaker
So it was quite a busy show. I asked really nice people, it was really good to move in. But when I moved in, they decided it would be a shortlesome to make out that somebody had topped themselves in my room. I know it's kind of a pretty bad taste, right? They were just trying to spook me out. They were like, oh, the room's become available because the previous owner, you know, and there's something. And it was nonsense, yeah. They were just trying to spook me out. And I didn't believe a word of it.
00:32:32
Speaker
But strangely enough, in the in the initial weeks after moving in, there was a number of experiences that went on. And I don't think it was them. I'm pretty certain it was it wasn't an ongoing prank by by them. And you'll see why as it goes through what happened, yeah.
00:32:47
Speaker
um so the first thing that happened was quite it was quite mundane really I mean I mean there was never any full-blown like loads of you know like you hear in some of these cases with objects flying across the room in front of people's faces or anything like that yeah it'd be pretty wild if it got to that sort of level I was hoping it would but it never did yet but the the first thing that happened we had a big living room and then it joined the kitchen just straight off it and it was uh it's doing the washing up and above the sink we had a uh just a shelf we restore a line of glasses along most of the pint glasses put them back on the shelf
Personal UFO Sighting
00:33:20
Speaker
and I'd go back into the living room, this is just broad daylight middle of the day yeah and all of a sudden there's this thud right, it's only a few seconds later and I'm like so I go back in the kitchen have a look and one of the pint glasses is no longer on the shelf it's like in the middle of the kitchen floor rolling around yeah
00:33:35
Speaker
and I'm like okay. Now I'm thinking okay maybe it like slid off on suds or whatever but even if it had it would have landed in the sink right this thing was on the floor so it would have had to have bounced or something and it was completely dry and there was no suds on the on the shelf at least to my recollection. So it was a bit weird though but I didn't think much of it I didn't think oh I've got a ghost obviously you don't something as mundane as that do you?
00:33:58
Speaker
So I just picked it up and just put it back on the shelf and just forgot all the about it. Now within about a week of this or so, it will you all those things happened in quite quick succession and the next thing that happened was definitely a lot more um yeah a lot more prevalent. So on this particular night,
00:34:15
Speaker
um three of the housemates had gone out, there was just me and one of my housemates, Steve, and was sitting in the living room, and it's really quiet, and we were just sitting there watching telly, and the other three had definitely gone out, yeah, they were out for the evening, so they weren't hiding in the corner of their room to play a prank or anything like that, yeah. It was definitely just me and him in the house. We were sitting there watching TV, and all of a sudden,
00:34:38
Speaker
the thud thud thud thud thud and it was the noise of running footsteps going right across the living room ceiling yeah along the landing yeah right over our heads yeah God, it just makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand. That's weird. I didn't expect to be kind of have some sort of effect even there. Anyway, it's ah yeah it was just we we're just frozen. We're just ah and it's just dead silent and we pause the you know pauls are telling and it's just silence. And Steve doesn't want to go up there. He's not going to go upstairs at all. And he's just frozen. His arm chair is not going up there.
00:35:11
Speaker
So I just remember I would sit there a few minutes and there's nothing, there's no sound at all here. So I'm just peeping round the living room door light and the hall lights on and the stairs and everything and there's nothing. And eventually I'd, you know, pluck up a bit of courage and I'd go upstairs thinking maybe it's a burger or something like that. Nothing. No, nobody up there. No windows open. No smashed glass or anything like that.
00:35:34
Speaker
Now, obviously, logical brain. OK, it's an echo from next door, right? Because it was semi-detached. Yeah. So there was a right. Here's the thing. I was in that house for a good year, nine, 10 months or something.
00:35:49
Speaker
never again, only that one time. I mean you think if it was kind of echoes from next door you'd hear similar type things again with people knocking or you know running around or whatever, nothing. It was only over that once and it was so prevalent. I mean you could pretty much feel the the living room ceiling like vibrate as it went over the steps to to did it right along and it was really interesting and I was like waz.
00:36:09
Speaker
something going on here. Then I thought back to the pint glass thing and I was like we got some sort of poltergeist activity going on here. This is really interesting and and it didn't end there. The year the the next thing that happened and I don't know what maybe it was me entering the house. I mean they say that sometimes these things are linked to change in ah in a property depending on your viewpoints.
00:36:30
Speaker
on the subject of poll guys, et cetera. And that was the change. The change was me entering the house. um But anyway, it was within, um you know, within a week or so of that,
Challenges in Documenting UFOs
00:36:40
Speaker
something else happened, which I suppose some ways is even more interesting. So on top of our television, we had this it was a fake vase of flowers. Yeah, because I don't trust students to water pumps regularly.
00:36:54
Speaker
So it was plastic ones, yeah. but And it was just these yellow flowers on top of the telly. And on this particular night, again, three of them had gone out. It was just me and another housemate, also called Dave. And we're sitting there watching telly again. We go through to the kitchen, kind of been longer than 10 seconds or something. We just nipped through there to grab something. We come back into the living room.
00:37:18
Speaker
and the vase of flowers is now sitting in front of the television screen like as in its move from the top of the tv to in front of the tv screen still standing upright yeah and i was like what So I turned to Dave and I'm like, you did that, yeah. And he didn't, because he was in the room next to me, yeah, but I'm trying to kind of logically piece together what's going on here. And he's like, no. and and And there was definitely nobody else in the house. It wasn't like one of the others had come out of the room and had gone and moved it and then ran back into the room, whatever. They were definitely out.
00:37:51
Speaker
And it was just so weird. And our and he just seemed so blasé about it as well. if was like you He didn't care. And you get i've I've dealt with people who've had full-blown close encounters with beings, and they're still really skeptical of the subject. like So they'll have an incredible experience. And they'll still be like, yeah, it was probably explainable.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yeah, even if they've seen something up close, you know, like a landed craft or whatever, you know, it's like, how is that explainable? and but But anyway, that and it's that that same sort of logic
UFOs or Military Projects?
00:38:20
Speaker
is kind of like he didn't want to go there. He didn't want to ah entertain the notion that there was something on about it. So I don't know what he thought was going on in his head regarding it. I've no idea. Maybe he thought I'd planned it and I was doing a prank on him or something. But either way, it was just there. And I just went and picked it back up, put it back on top of the telling.
00:38:36
Speaker
And we carried on watching TV. And it never did it again. It only ever did it the once. It was like this. But a lot of people who have these podcast type experiences, they say that's kind of almost like a trickster, like it's trying to prank you in a way. And it felt like that. It felt like it was mucking with us and doing little things like that. But after that, it kind of stopped. I was disappointed in a way because I was quite fascinated and I was like, what's going to happen next? And so I wrote down those experiences. And then I was hoping to kind of continue to write some sort of diary of strange goings on.
00:39:06
Speaker
in the property but nothing else apart from that was it yeah after that it was usual student hijinks you know traffic cone etc parties smoke machines yeah other other things that went on back then yeah but non-paranormal related right um but yeah that was that that was interesting and that's the only time in my life that i've had uh what i believe to be paranormal type experiences with what you could call a ghost of some kind I mean, it was certainly unexplainable. I mean, you could explain the pint glass, right? And I suppose you could entertain the notion that the footsteps were some sort of weird echo from outside or something. But I had to explain the vase thing. It was kind of like it was building up. And that's why I thought maybe we were going to get something else happening, more crazy after that. But I've known lots of other people over the years about experiences. My partner, Tasha, has had numerous experiences
Importance of Multiple Witnesses
00:40:00
Speaker
where she's seen full-blown apparitions and things.
00:40:02
Speaker
so they ah There's certainly a ah reality to the to the subject that cannot be explained by mainstream science, you know, however, however you want to look at it, you know, because there's so many cases on record and even with false stories and people jumping on the bandwagon and that sort of thing you know you're gonna get that you always get that right but there's no need to dismiss the whole subject just because that happens that's always going to happen especially with some kind of fringe subject like this so yeah let's let's move on to my my UFO encounter which ironically happened within two months of becoming the chairman for Birmingham UFO group coincidence or not you decided you manifested it dave hey
00:40:46
Speaker
It's just strange. I mean, you couldn't make it up, couldn't you? I've been hoping to see something. And then when I become the chairman for Birmingham Uofo Group, within two months of that, I'll have a sighting and it's unexplained to this day. Let me go over what to play. Is this very much like when you see a competition on TV that you're not allowed to enter if you're a member of the half or family member? You essentially have to go. But it's fun to me because yeah people won't believe it. That's it, yeah.
00:41:16
Speaker
That's it. And I do wonder if I ever have some full blown, like, closing can of whether people would genuinely believe that. I tell people, they'd be like, oh, really? How convenient. So you're the prime person now for them, whoever they are, to come in and take you aboard a ship. Because they go, no one's going to believe you, Dave. I know that, absolutely. Because you know too much about all this thing. You could fabricate
Investigation Process
00:41:40
Speaker
the perfect story. Indeed, yeah. And I don't know what would happen in that situation just to sidetrack a minute.
00:41:46
Speaker
I like to pretend that I'll be totally okay with it and I'll be like okay this is happening and id I'll be all like have loads of questions I wanted to ask and that sort of thing but knowing what I know about the subject I know it wouldn't go down that way first of all I can guarantee that the majority of people even people who genuinely believe in the reality of this if it happened to them directly you would act in very strange and unusual ways that you didn't think you were going to act. You might be terrified or yeah or something else entirely. um And then on top of that with contact, people a lot of the time are in an altered set of consciousness when they have these experiences anyway, which is the reason, any skeptics listening, the reason why there's very, very few photographs and videos of contacts taking place. Because everybody's like, okay, if this is happening all around the globe,
00:42:32
Speaker
These contacts and these visitations are real, yeah? Surely somebody by now would have grabbed their mobile phone and videoed these beings in their room up close and and you could you know prove that it wasn't CGI or whatever and that sort of thing. And there's very few videos of that nature out there. And the reason for that is most of the time when people undergo contacts, they don't act in a rational, normal manner and they have to completely complacent and like it's... And then afterwards they ask themselves, why on earth didn't I ask questions or why didn't I take a photograph or something? Again and again and again.
00:43:01
Speaker
So you know there's a there's a rational explanation for all of these skeptical viewpoints that are put out towards the the UFO subject as a whole and the the content phenomena. Anyway I digress let's get back to my UFO sighting before we get sidetracked and I forget to tell you all about it. So I had a UFO sighting in a
Phoenix Lights Incident
00:43:20
Speaker
known UK UFO hotspot on a UFO skywatch
00:43:27
Speaker
and ah but Well, that's why we do it. The thing is, it it happened and I can't and alter the fact of what happened, right? But that's what happened. Yeah. I mean, well, the odds, right? Anyway, I've gone down to a warm and stone Wiltshire to cause where they get a lot of the crop formations, which incidentally are still going on to this day. It's just that news has stopped being interested in and they're still getting crop formations. We could get sidetracked again and I could get started diving into my viewpoints on crop formations, but I'm not going to do that, right?
00:43:57
Speaker
So I've gone down warm and stuff for a yeah UFO and paranormal conference. It's called the weird 2009 paranormal conference. Yeah. And it was a mix of speakers, not just UFOs or psychic and type stuff. and ghosts and that and It was really good. and it was ah It was a two-day conference. I'd never been down to that one before, but halfway through the conference, because it was two days, I decided to organise a Skywatch. There's a number of hills in the outskirts of Warminster that are very, very good for skywatching with lovely, clear views of the sky. ah One of the hills is Cradle Hill, which is ah just north of the town, and it's um it's widely known for skywatching. Many people go up there and
00:44:36
Speaker
On that particular night, there was quite a lot of people turned out for it because they'd advertised it and a lot of people from the conference had gone along. There was some TV crews with cameras and all sorts, about 50 or so people up there. So it was pretty busy initially.
00:44:51
Speaker
and It was a lovely clear night, the yeah clouds parted and we got a full view of the stars. Craterhills right alongside some M.O.D. owned land here, so we expected to see some military craft in here at some point in the night, some jets or whatever. But it was actually pretty quiet in terms of actual things up in the sky initially.
00:45:10
Speaker
we um we We would hear some passenger planes on the horizon. Obviously, sound travels really well after dark, doesn't it? So you could hear them like miles a month. You couldn't see them, but you could suddenly hear them rumbling in the in the sky, the engines. It gets to about 11 o'clock at night, right?
00:45:24
Speaker
and and there was about 20 people left up on the hill by that point. A lot of people who can't buy that time out of their fill and they've gone back to their hotels or whatever. About 20 people remained. There was myself, there was a few other people from Birmingham UFO group who'd come along. There was the yeah the UFO themed rock band CE4. I don't know if you're either yet aware of them. I don't think they exist as a band anymore but CE4 is Close Encounters of the fourth kind. In other words the contact phenomena.
00:45:52
Speaker
a lovely couple of chaps from from Scotland they released a number of albums every single song themed on on the UFO subject and and and they were up there um and then just another bunch of people at the conference yeah so it got to about 11 o'clock at night and to to our To our northeast, there was a kind of low valley area. And all of a sudden, there was this weird intermittent flashes started off. Almost looked like sheet lightning, but like down near the ground here, like out of sight. And it was very, very bright. It was almost like a welding torture, like a kind of a bluey sort of light blue glowy light going off. And it was just on, off, on, on, on, off. And there was no pattern to it. And it lasted a good like five or six minutes.
00:46:39
Speaker
And everybody was looking
Personal Impact of UFO Experiences
00:46:40
Speaker
over there and we were like, what is that? And nobody could really, you know, nobody kind of related what it what what it was. It was just odd, right? I don't think it had anything to do with what happened next year, but it was just the first interesting thing that happened that night.
00:46:55
Speaker
and it hasn't been explained. it could I mean, it could have been somebody mucking around with us, right? It could have been somebody who knew the Skywatch was on and had some sort of very bright lights or something and went out there and decided to randomly, at 11 o'clock at night, go out the sides of the hill and randomly flicker them for five minutes. like I don't know why, it'd be a bit of an odd thing to do, right? That it's entirely possible, yeah? ah I mean, we've had people launch flares on some of our Skywatches and then say, dave Dave, look at the UFO and watch the flare.
00:47:23
Speaker
Anyways, this happened. About half an hour later and somebody all of a sudden says ah there's a jet coming in because as I said we're expected to see military aircraft here. We look to the south and sure enough there's a dark object coming towards the hill from the far side of Warminster to the south.
00:47:42
Speaker
and um it looks about the size of a a light aircraft it's definitely not a small thing it was you know maybe helicopter size that sort of thing not ginormous either obviously i'm trying to gauge as much as i can not initially because i thought it was a plane right so i had this ah all you could see on it was just a single white light i thought that's just the angle it's normal to have lights it's just the angle it's coming out as we can only see a white light on it yeah all of a sudden this white light just flares up really really bright so boom it comes up like this yeah and everybody's like that's a bit weird just going on with that yeah and it doesn't so it doesn't go on off like a strobe does on a plane it like stays lit really
Ongoing Projects and Resources
00:48:20
Speaker
bright yeah for a good several or so seconds yeah and then it dies down again and then i could see this other weird light on it and it was a small dark turquoise colored light the closest thing i can describe it to
00:48:35
Speaker
Yeah a mix between blue and green like a dark turquoise not like the lime green that you got an aircraft at all like completely different to that Yeah, so I have this smaller lights on it It's getting nearer. It's not changing course or anything. It's just getting nearer to us White light flares up a again. Yeah Still no the nav lights dies back down again. It's getting closer. No sound I'm like, why is it silent? So I'm thinking, that's got to be a jet. So I tried to film it. I had a video camera with me. So I tried to film it. And the only thing that came out, because it was a normal video camera, it wasn't a proper night vision camera or anything. And all we got was the audio of me saying, somebody tell me that's a jet.
00:49:19
Speaker
and just It didn't even pick up the white flaming lights on it. It picked up literally nothing like pitch black. I did see some footage later on that CE4 had taken on one of their cameras that showed it, but it didn't look particularly impressive. It just looked like a white dot that was appearing and then disappearing. It's not going to convince anybody, right?
00:49:37
Speaker
But this thing came in over the hill and it wasn't that high up. like um you know Obviously, I'm trying to take in as much as I can. I wish I had a decent night vision of scope on me so we could get a proper look at the the shape of it. But I still don't have one of those today because they cost over a thousand pound. I've got a i've got and ah night vision thing that is utilized for hunters to spot deer after dark year.
00:50:02
Speaker
really good at the ground. yeah If you fight the ground after dark, it looks really clear, you can see trees in the distance, maybe at the sky, useless. yeah The only thing that works after dark properly is military grade tech, and unless you're really, really rich or whatever. I like don and i can't ah don't make anything like that enough money for the group to fund that, getting one of those, so it hasn't happened yet. But a few people have bought such a thing on some of our scar watches before and they're incredible. But even then, they can't record yet. So you can see you you buy this thing for over a thousand pound. And yes, you can see the shape of a thing in the sky or consider light or whatever. You can't record it. yeah So some of you know, let's say you see something really incredible. And later on, somebody's like, well, show me it then. And even like I can't I didn't I didn't get any footage.
00:50:45
Speaker
Yeah, this is the problem here. You need kind of a laptop setup with it all rigged up, linking to a laptop to record the footage while you're looking at it and that's very, very inconvenient to take that out into a field in the middle of the night when you're trying to hulk out there with with chairs and all that jazz. So anyway, I digress. Back to the sighting. yeah So it comes in over the hill.
00:51:07
Speaker
It's on a straight path. All of a sudden people were like, slowing down, here wasn't slowing down. It was actually turning. It turned on a gradual arc. So it gave the appearance appearance of some directions that it was slowing, but it wasn't. It turned and then it went off into the distance. Didn't perform any crazy maneuvers. Didn't shoot straight upwards. Didn't land or anything like that.
00:51:24
Speaker
What it was though, it was sizable it had lights on it that didn't match any known civilian or military aircraft or drone or anything else. And and it was quite big and silent. So, and it's in the morning, once a gun, you can still see the white lights on the horizon you can see it like a minute later you can still see it flaring up.
00:51:44
Speaker
And the in the morning I interviewed about five or six people who' who'd been up down the hill, wrote down the account. It was quite interesting writing a cash report on something I'd seen directly. That was pretty cool. um And yes, it's to be explained to this day. ah So it's therefore an unidentified flying object.
00:52:03
Speaker
Um, not particularly impressive. It didn't, I didn't see any alien beings or anything like that. It would have been cool if it had done something incredible, like just shot straight upwards all of a sudden or something like that, but it didn't. And even if it did, we wouldn't have captured it. All that would have proved to me is that there was something very, very exotic.
00:52:19
Speaker
I don't have that, but as I said, it didn't even though we were an next to military-owned land, I obviously did a ah very detailed check of of different military aircraft and that after it. I know various people in the aviation community, people who've served in the military and that sort of thing, and they all confirmed to me that it was not anything military that they were aware of.
00:52:41
Speaker
So unless you unless you say it's some sort of weird black budget plane that was randomly flying across Cradle Hill in full sight of people on the Skywatch, then it could have been. I suppose it can't be ruled out. But then, yeah, I mean, really, in reality, you can't rule out that from 95% of UFO sightings, really.
00:53:00
Speaker
is always that angle that it could be a a top secret project. But you see, this is one of the this is one of the angles that will often be kind of put out there as alternative explanations for the UFO phenomena. ah Well, ignoring the fact that that that explanation yeah completely ignores all cases where non-human beings are seen, at which there were thousands on record, yeah ignoring that. yeah um Why on earth would they be flying some sort of top secret black budget project? over over cities Over over populated cities in full sight of the population makes sense for them to be flying it in the middle of nowhere like area 51 out in the Nevada desert was hardly anybody around to witness it especially not with your with the clearance ah of numerous miles so you can't even get close to the base yeah brilliant perfect yeah perfect place to test stuff yeah
00:53:47
Speaker
right But not over the middle of Birmingham, or any other city for that matter. I've dealt with cases from all over the place, including landing cases and up close encounters with craft in and in close proximity of ah of objects that are definitely not anything mundane.
00:54:04
Speaker
so ah the the the the military the black budget military angle even though it probably works in some cases there probably are UFO cases where people have seen things that probably are black budget projects yeah but it doesn't explain the entire phenomena it can't no definitely i think we've got to think about that case in particular i obviously got the multiple witnesses um always, obviously, out to a case where you've got multiple independent witnesses just to build that kind of strong of a case where it's like when you've got one person who's seen it, it's a lot harder to kind of Yeah, because you always got the interpretation, you know, that it was really big. It's like, but was it, you know, or was it did it just look really big for your position? You're looking at a dark sky with no point of reference.
00:54:51
Speaker
Maybe it was a lot closer and it was actually small. Maybe it was even ah a drone or or something like that. But then obviously, then you' then you've got the sound. here Then you've got the sound aspect. too So if it's a drone and it's close, yeah you'd be able to hear the whirring of the drone, wouldn't you? So if you're seeing a drone up close and it's performing maneuvers like that, you would expect to hear it. So you always have to look at all aspects of the case. you'll ah you out You have to take it everything into account, including weather conditions, time of day, et cetera.
00:55:17
Speaker
um So I usually do sort of checks on wind direction, that sort of thing as well. Anything I can, anything I can get hold of. And there's certain things you can get at the time. A lot of the cases I don't know whether they're historic, I don't care whether the cases I investigate are new cases or historic cases, it's all information, it's all things that have happened at some point. um And even then you can go back in time and you can usually get certain things like the ISS tracker, obviously you can find out the point around the planet where the ISS tracker was at the exact minute that they had their sighting and you can discount that if if there's a possibility that it was the ISS. And talking about the ISS, we actually did see the ISS on one of our Skywatches in Canachase here, and it looked amazing. And if you didn't know what you were looking at, it looked like it was in the atmosphere. We were up on the top of this hill, and it looked like this blazing white fireball, and it came towards us, and we had the ISS tracker on our phones here, so we trapped it, and it's the Etsy ISS. Two hours later, it goes right around the Earth, comes back.
00:56:17
Speaker
exactly two hours still on the skywatch, it was regular spot work yeah but to look at it if you didn't know that it was the ISS you could easily misinterpret that as some sort of glowing bright white orb within the atmosphere because it looked like it was in the atmosphere was impressive that wasn't ah that wasn't down in Walnut so it was a different different skywatch yeah Cool, so I'll talk about investigating cases. Do you want to talk to us about some of the more, maybe some of the more interesting kind of cases that you've investigated? Yeah, sure thing. Does anyone particularly want to talk about? Yeah, I mean, I'll go over a couple of recent sightings if you want. and I mean, they're not like some of the most incredible cases ever, but they're brand new cases. yeah They're both of these two have come in within them the last week. um the The first of which happened, actually, all right, slightly over a week, happened last Saturday.
00:57:07
Speaker
not the one just gone but the one before. I've now written up the case report on this case happening in Castle Vale which is an area north of Birmingham and it was a daylight sighting of two unusual objects ah the It was reported to me minutes after the sighting had occurred. It was a builder who was working on a house out in Cannock Chase. He was just down in a kind of a side road working on around the garage's area of this property and he happens to to look up a large flock of ah of seagulls a couple of roads away from him.
00:57:44
Speaker
and then all of a sudden he realizes there's some sort of very large thing object in the middle of the seagulls and at first he thought it was like a really weird large bird like a large vulture or something ah ah but then he realized immediately it it couldn't have been it was and it was it wasn't acting like the birds so the birds are flying around and this thing was pretty much stationary.
00:58:04
Speaker
um But then he realised there were two of them, so the more he looked at it, he kind of got that there were two kind of quite close together alongside one another, identical looking things. What he described was a weird arrowhead shape, things that were like rounded arrowheads, yeah. So imagine if you took an arrowhead, yeah, and you inflated it so that it was all kind of curved and more like an elongated heart sort of shape, I suppose.
00:58:31
Speaker
um completely black, sort of jet black. He said that they the outside looked kind of shiny and black um and no markings or lights or anything like that on the thing.
00:58:45
Speaker
yeah were moving very slowly away from him on a straight course and what he said they were doing is occasionally they would kind of start to tip like this backwards and forwards like rock not not go all the way over but sort of like this and then they would sort of right themselves and then they would carry on straight and then it would start again and start to do the rocking thing at the same time and then they would write themselves and go away and he watched that for a number of minutes as they moved off and he he lost sight of these two things. Now looking at it and looking at the aspects of what that could have been, yeah. I checked the wind, could I was saying a check wind direction and the wind direction was the direction that you saw the objects going off in, yeah. So it's my personal belief after delving into that that it was probably two novelty balloons of some kind. Now he he interpreted them as pretty darn big, yeah. He said that they were the size of a bus, um a single decker bus, yeah.
00:59:42
Speaker
I don't know how, like, you could interpret a novelty balloon as in a standard sort of sized balloon, yeah, as something the size of a bus, yeah. and That's quite a big difference in size, right? So there there is that aspect that doesn't fit. There's the odd kind of rocking thing they were doing in the writing. A lot of the time balloons, if they're drifting, they might sort of rotate continuously or they'll just jumble around and just be buffeted about all over the place back and forth.
01:00:09
Speaker
These things were more, he said that they looked like they were kind of copying each other and trying to write the path and then they'd start again. Very weird. um So there was that aspect to it. Obviously I looked on flight radar, there wasn't any planes in the vicinity with transponders, not that I thought that these objects were planes at all. So yeah, probably two large novelty balloons of some kind. A weird shape though, couldn't find anything online that matched them.
01:00:35
Speaker
the closest thing was a kind of black heart balloon and there was another one that was a kind of ah a crescent moon but both of these novelty balloons that I found that were jet black here were small normal sized balloons yeah so these things unless you it it seems unlikely to me that you could misinterpret a normal balloon for something the size of a bus.
01:00:55
Speaker
but he didn't have any video yet so he didn't he said he had a phone on him but he said it was an old an old Motorola that doesn't you know the video footage wasn't very high quality on it again and again and again I've dealt with hundreds of cases and there's very few cases have actual video evidence with them you probably experienced exactly the same ash this is this is standard yeah and this is not this is not in any way an excuse and oh you didn't get video footage I mean it didn't happen yet again and again and again, people will be like, I was too transfixed, I was too busy watching the objects, didn't even think about it yet, or something else like this, I have my phones out of batteries, I didn't have it on me at the time, like if there were military cases, they're not allowed to carry the phones on them at the time, so they don't have a way of recording it, that sort of thing. there's most In most cases,
01:01:41
Speaker
There's a real, very real straight up explanation for why they didn't get any video footage. And even though everybody's got smartphones on them, not everybody has a really good smartphone with really clear video on it. And even if even though there's a large proportion of the population do now, and we've got good good cameras on our phones. Yeah. And it's usually in our pocket. Yeah. a lot of the time when these incidents occur, they're either too fast, they only see the thing for a couple of seconds, or they're just too busy looking at it. They don't care. They don't think I must record this to should give it to an investigator later on or whatever. They're just they're just in the moment, they're experiencing and that's absolutely fine. You know, and there's nothing there's nothing
01:02:20
Speaker
in any way sort of skeptical or worrying about that and I've i've i've dealt with people who've got fascination in the UFO subject, even some of my friends have had a UFO sighting and they they come down the group, they love the subject, yeah they're really interested in it and they don't even get the phone out and then afterwards they're like why didn't I record it and then yeah they they're kicking themselves for not getting the phone out and that's for somebody who's got an interest in the subject.
01:02:43
Speaker
as somebody who hasn't got an interest in the UFO subject or isn't particularly trying to get the world's best evidence to prove it's real, to them it's real in that moment so they're not thinking I must record it. There's also those cases where people say like as I've looked down to get the phone, when I look back up it's gone. Oh yeah, yeah. Like the other side of it's that they have gone to get the phone then look back up. Actually interestingly enough that leads on perfectly to the next case that I've had in. Nice one.
01:03:13
Speaker
Now this is a case from November or December in 2021. It doesn't remember the ex exact month, but obviously around this sort of time of year. um And it's in Moundsborough.
01:03:24
Speaker
um I don't know if you know that. I don't think I've dealt with any other cases from there before. ah But it's quite an impressive close encounter. Now, we only have testimonial evidence for this. There's no there's no other other proof at all. I suppose you could say that about the last case. But this is a historic case that he wanted to get on the record, essentially. The witness seemed very, very believable when I was speaking with him. He didn't come across at all like he was telling me some sort of tall story or whatever. There'd be no real reason for it.
01:03:52
Speaker
um He was out walking his dog. Incidentally, he doesn't want his name in the report. So a lot of the time when the speak with witnesses, they don't want the real name in the report. but So think about that a minute. yeah If they don't want the real name in the report, then they can't be after any personal fame or fortune from it coming because nobody knows who they are. So it's completely anonymous. So they're never going to get anything from it. They're never going to get any from it. So you've always got to take that on board. yeah So he didn't want his name going out in the report because he's scared of any kind of ridicule that might come about from it.
01:04:21
Speaker
He was out walking his dog and he came across this large rectangular shaped object, craft if you will. and It was hovering over this chestnut tree. It thinks it was about 60 feet in the air. So we're talking about low altitude. Said it was about 30 to 35 foot long. So big, not like a small thing. This was obviously a low enough altitude with the tree and that sort of thing. You can you can gauge the size of it. You said it was larger than this big tree. It was off both ends. It was hovering motionless and silent in the air.
01:04:57
Speaker
At one end of it, you said it had a a line of white lights like right across it. And above these white lights were was a row of square-shaped windows or portals or something. They were square. They would just look dark inside. There was no light coming out from inside it. Couldn't see anything inside. It was just dark. But they looked like windows, essentially. On the other end of it, so you got the chance to walk around this thing. yeah He literally literally walked along and viewed it from different angles. yeah right On the other end of it, you said it had a like a line of red lights. You're thinking, okay, like what, like a car? ah White lights on the front, red lights on the back, brake lights? Who knows, yeah. that's just one That's just what the thing looked like, yeah. um So some kind of large vehicle or some kind. It was hovering there motionless, yeah. It look as that looks at it for a number of minutes. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, you said it started to move off, yeah. But it moved off in a very weird, peculiar way, yeah. It started to move off in a zigzag pattern. So it went that way and then it stopped.
01:05:54
Speaker
stops a couple of seconds and then it moves off the other way further away but the other direction stops again so it's going left right left right yeah after it does this about four times and it's done the vicinity he glances down at his dog for he said for like a second and when he looks back it's gone that's it disappeared. This was a large object, yeah, there was no way that it would go and vanish behind a cloud or a house or something in that short period of time. It's talking about a quick glance like that and it's gone. So again, just as you said, happens all the time.
01:06:27
Speaker
Not actually, no, that's a lie. Okay, that's bad for me to say. It doesn't happen all the time. Nobody nobody doesn't. Okay, it doesn't. Right. There's a lot of time it doesn't, right. But I've dealt with a lot of cases where that has happened, like far too many for it to be coincidental. Like they're looking at it for 10 minutes and then inside, they want to get a photo or video of it. And they reach down and grab the camera. And when they look back 10 seconds later, it's not there anymore. Or they lose sight of it, they go underneath the bridge. And when they come out from the other side of the bridge, it's not there. Yeah.
01:06:54
Speaker
So like in in the in the time that it's not in their viewpoint, it decides to leave the area. Now, it's my belief with this with these cases, I think that in these cases, at least some of them, some of them, it could be coincidence, right? You've always got to take that on board, yeah? But some of them, I think it's probable that the object knows it's being observed. It's the occupant on the object, not the object itself, because the object itself is a craftiness. You want to say it's alive or something.
01:07:22
Speaker
Right, but the occupants on there know that they're being watched by somebody on the ground, and they utilize the ah the opportunity when the person's looking away to leave the area. It just happens far too commonly for that not to be a possibility or I would say in some cases a probability really interesting because that I mean that that that not only I mean if you take that on board you take that reality on board yeah we think about what that means it means that these objects flying around they know they're being observed they know where people are on the ground they're monitoring us they know when they're being looked at and and maybe know when they're about to be filmed it shows a level of
01:08:02
Speaker
of intelligence there and also advanced tech because we can't do that with them right but they're doing that with us so yeah yeah again it's an aspect of the subject which points towards advanced levels of capabilities and for all we know they're doing it using their mind they're not even it might be some sort of telepathic thing going on with it but they're no telepath they're just no they're not using any kind of advanced tech but they are aware in their minds that they're being viewed viewed by a person from particular point Now a lot of the cases on record occur in the middle of nowhere. They occur really rural or in the dead of night. yeah And that again is far too regular a thing for it to not be a factor yet. I think that a lot of the time these things do not want to be observed. They are acting in a kind of covert manner and if somebody just happens to be in the vicinity of them
01:08:54
Speaker
too bad they get spotted or whatever but they're doing their best to kind of stay out of the way. But then again you get the exact opposite of that and you get cases like the Phoenix Lights incident where it's very very public and lots and lots of people have seen it and it almost seems like some kind of a display.
01:09:11
Speaker
see I knew that of that as a very prominent case which had hundreds of witnesses to it and I really hoped that in the end I would get to speak with one or more witnesses. Somebody knew about that case and eventually I got my chance. so It was a case I was dealing with in Vancouver. It had contact experiences throughout his life um and many of you are pho sightings and this sort of thing but um at the time in the Phoenix Lights and he was actually an aircraft mechanic stationed at a yeah the base just on the outskirts of Phoenix. and Now on this particular day he'd actually taken a day off, so he wasn't on the base, he was actually out in Phoenix shopping with his partner and at the end of the day they were travelling back down at Tuscan where they yeah where they resided at the time.
01:09:58
Speaker
ah down Highway 70 was the main road between Phoenix and and and Tuscan. Now that's the direction which the object the Phoenix lights object moved in yeah throughout the sighting. It came down and it headed down a kind of southeast direction. When he saw it, he he saw it because of hearing accounts on the radio. So they were going out, local radio stations were saying people are reporting seeing these ah boomerang shaped craft or a line of white lights or orange lights or whatever.
01:10:25
Speaker
ah You know the ferry accounts coming in and there was something going on. He heard that on the live radio So he thought I wonder if I can see it Yeah, so he stops the car by the side of the highway. Yeah now out there. There's no street lights at all. Yeah, it's like middle and it's middle of the night Yeah, it's quite quite late evening by that point um Actually, that wasn't over the yeah the time of night meant it was after dark. yeah It wasn't particularly late because the the actual Phoenix Lights incident happened between half six to about seven. um that' see That's the timings of it. So it would have been about i suppose about seven o'clock or something. ah The last sightings were reported around Tuscan
01:11:00
Speaker
um which was past where he saw it anyway stop by the side of the road and he gets out and he's looking around you and he looks in the direction of phoenix and he can't see anything at first it's just really just remote out there it's just flat desert either side of the highway his partner's in the car she can't see, he just got out to take a look here. All of a sudden he realizes that there's a very very large object of some kind that's blocking out these stars and he can see it moving and he can see the stars disappearing. So he saw the he saw the object but he saw it from a sideways perspective yeah so he didn't get the line of light so he got them all kind of crushed up because he was looking at it almost sideways on here.
01:11:39
Speaker
and he could see a few of the white lights just the ones on on the near edge to him and he moved across the sky past him like that on a straight course completely silent he said the thing was absolutely huge and he could see it now when he saw it he thought that's a military craft he thought that's some sort of top secret project that i haven't been told about yeah and because he thought it was military he thought that's gotta be um clandestine that's even though it had gone across the city right so he didn't want to tell his partner he didn't actually tell his partner what he'd seen when he got back in the car he pretended he hadn't seen anything because his military kind of mind kicked in and he was like oh this is going to be classified i wasn't he very much felt like it was something he wasn't supposed to be observing yeah
01:12:20
Speaker
a couple of days later he goes back to the base yeah and starts asking around the other other people on the base and obviously there's a lot of reports of what had taken place and at that point he realizes that it wasn't military that it wasn't one of theirs and straight away he knew that whatever he'd seen was something very very unusual. i mean I mean he by that point in his life he'd come to the realization of the reality of the subject as I said he'd had contact experience, abduction type experiences as a child and then numerous interesting UFO sightings before that point. So yeah, really, really good. Very, very detailed. One of the most detailed cases I've ever i've ever looked into has had all sorts of things go on. Another incredible incident. There was a base in Michigan where this blue glowing humanoid type entity appeared ah in the barracks on the military base while he was on active service.
01:13:09
Speaker
and is and his girlfriend at the time was actually stopping over sleeping over and she saw it as well and she was terrified of it and she thought that he he'd made it appear and she was like suspicious that he was I don't know getting interested in black magic or something like that and that he'd created it with voodoo or whatever and that she actually broke and she actually broke up with him as a result of the experience.
01:13:31
Speaker
you know, which brings home the reality of these incidents, you know, has knock-on effects. It actually damages people's lives and relationships. So that was, it was incredible. And then there was lots of other things that happened throughout his life, but it was fascinating, while especially as there was another witness, independent, obviously, I never got to speak to his girlfriend, because that was many years before I need broken up from her, you know, as a result of that encounter.
01:13:53
Speaker
yeah very interesting so yeah certainly with the phoenix lights i certainly believe it's a a very compelling and and very real incident and i do not believe for one second that it's flares i believe that they dropped flares i believe that the flares were a were a cover for the object i think they dropped the flares on purpose so they could then later on say oh what you saw was just flares right and a lot of those famous videos that have gone ads are absolutely the flares and they've done some examination and prove that they vanish at the same time when they drop down behind the top of the mountain and they look like they only look like they're hovering still because they're so far away from the camera so they look like lights appearing and disappearing but really they're they're slowly slowly descending.
01:14:34
Speaker
But that that happened about half ten at night. So the actual incident happened several hours before. I've actually seen skeptical um lectures talking about the Phoenix lights and just basically dismissing it as the flares, which is ridiculous because the incident actually happened several hours before the flares were dropped. So how could it have been? So, yeah, it's an incredible case. Awesome. Well, do you mind our listeners where you can find more information about the group and about your case reports, stuff like that. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so all the cases I've gone over tonight and hundreds more are all on the Birmingham UFO Group website. It's www.boofhogg.com. It's b-u-f-o-g.com. There's a case investigations section on the site. You can just go
Exploring UFO Cases and Music Videos
01:15:21
Speaker
there. There's a search bar. You can look for particular towns. You can look for particular craft types. You can type in Flying Triangle and it'll come up with triangular cases.
01:15:30
Speaker
ah You can put in a particular date, so you can search for on December 2024, whatever, and it'll come up with all ones from this month and that sort of thing. So utilize that as you wish. ah You can just bring up all the cases and just start scrolling back through them. There's literally over 500 reports on there written up by myself and other investigators of boot fog over many, many years.
01:15:51
Speaker
and Also on the website, lots of other information about UFOs. We talked about the IFO's page on there as well, so you can see mundane things that can be interpreted as something unusual. ah There's also, I'm pretty proud of this, there's the biggest collection, I believe, the world's biggest collection of UFO and alien themed music videos on the website for you to check out. They're all split up into different musical genres, so something for everybody in that section and lots of other media and stuff.
Join Bufog Truthseekers Group
01:16:19
Speaker
ah We've got, on Facebook, um we've got our community page is Bufog Truthseekers. I'm the admin of that page. It's a private group. You're more than welcome to join it, just ah and and then you can speak with me directly or post links and chat about the subject. Not just about UFOs, either. We talk about paranormal and other things in there as well. Because it's a private group, it's a safe space, and I don't ah don't stand for any nonsense. So consider it somewhere safe and open where you can talk openly about things.
Monthly Meetings in North Birmingham
01:16:47
Speaker
And then we've also got our organisation page, just Birmingham UFO Group, on there. I'll post new case reports and details of upcoming monthly meetings. I mentioned the meetings earlier on, though, on the first Thursday of every month from half seven in the evening in Oldbury, North Birmingham. Again, you're welcome to come along. ah Most of the meetings have an entrance fee because we have to pay for speakers and events that we do. And it's all non-profit and self-funded, has been for the last 16 years.
01:17:13
Speaker
ah You're more than welcome to attend those. if you need to If you need to stay overnight, there's some hotels in the vicinity of the venue and all sorts.
Explore ISA Network and UFO Truth Magazine
01:17:21
Speaker
Lots of info and you can always reach out to me for any particular questions you've got. I already mentioned isr um that's ISA. dot Network is the is the website for that so you can see what's going on with with ISA um and also UFO Truth Magazine. Check it out if you like reading about fascinating UFO information.
01:17:42
Speaker
Amazing. Well, another fascinating chat as always, like like Greg said, we could talk.
Closing and Credits
01:17:48
Speaker
And we have talked for literally hours, so it's ah it's good. It's good. So yeah, thanks again, Dave. And I'm from Matilda. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you for your time, as always.
01:18:02
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Pursuit of the Paranormal, title music created by Steve Yarwood and Ambienfinity. If you like the show, please follow us on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, and Instagram. And if you really like the show, please rate and review the show wherever you are listening. It really does help. See you next time, and until then, stay weird.