Skeptiko covers UFOs and consciousness

Skeptiko is a podcast series focused on human consciousness, it's run by a really smart and perceptive host, Alex Tsakiris. Recently he has been turning to the UFO phenomenon as a topic, and with his focus on consciousness the results have been really impressive. Nobody out there is digging into these mysteries with his insights.

I'm linking seven excellent Skeptiko shows on the topic of UFOs. It sorta blows my mind that I'm a guest on one of these episodes.

• Dr. David Jacobs (part one)
• Dr. David Jacobs (part two)
• Mary Rodwell
• Dr. Janet Colli
• Mike Clelland
• Grant Cameron (on consciousness)
• Stanton Friedman (on consciousness)

There have been some questions that arose out of the David Jacobs episodes. I have to say that he comes across sounding quite intolerant of the larger pool of data that has been amassed by people other than himself. This two-part interview is worth listen to just to hear his point of view.

He also made some statements about the late Dr. John Mack that don't seem to ring true. I've included a particular quote from Jacobs (transcribed from part one) and a response from Will Bueche, this text was lifted from the Skeptiko forums. Will worked with Dr. Mack and continues to this day as part of the John E. Mack Institute.

 read more below 

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interview with experiencer Peter Maxwell Slattery

Peter Maxwell Slattery is a young outspoken contactee from Australia. One question that any researcher will ask someone with a history of contact events is, “Do you feel a sense of mission.” Just looking at Peter’s site and recent history, it’s obvious that he’s on fire with this sense of mission. In just a little over a year he has written four books about his experiences, been the subject of more than one documentary, started website, produced an audio podcast interview series and he’s video taped hundreds of unusual lights in the sky.

Last night, I was his guest on his interview series. We had spoken a few days earlier, I had sought him out for my research because I heard bout some of his owl experiences. We hit it off great when we first talked, and he asked me onto his show.

  one-click audio download linked HERE  

[ the same interview in video format below ]

video interview between the Rocky Mountains and Australia

I've written up his experiences for my ongoing book project on owls. I am posting this excerpt here so you as the listener can get an insight to his very odd owl experiences.

  book excerpt linked HERE  

Peter has an infectious energy, it's great to see someone younger within the UFO research community pushing forward with such a positive vibe. Here's a link to Peter's website, and to his interview series.

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Peter Maxwell Slattery and seeing big owls

This is an excerpt from a book project with the working title; Owls, Sychronicity and the UFO Abductee. I plan on posting a few samples from time to time. 

—Mike C

Peter Maxwell Slattery is a young outspoken contactee from Australia. One question that any researcher will ask someone with a history of contact events is, “Do you feel a sense of mission.” Just looking at Peter’s site and recent history, it’s obvious that he’s on fire with this sense of mission. In just a little over a year he has written four books about his experiences, been the subject of more than one documentary, started website, produced an audio podcast interview series and he’s video taped hundreds of unusual lights in the sky.

Peter saw his first UFO in the summer of 1995 when he was just twelve years old. It was a hot sunny day and he saw a huge gray disc, about three times the size of a football field above him in the sky. The object hovered silently and then started moving, he watched it for 30 to 40 seconds until it glided out of view.

In the follow up years he’s had a powerful set of ongoing experiences, including UFO sightings, psychic awareness, telepathic downloads, ghost sightings, poltergeist happenings and profound synchronicities. Many of these events were seen by multiple witnesses. Add to this a bunch of really odd owl sightings.

The first happened when Peter was working as a security guard, his job meant driving a route at night with a partner, checking on a set of businesses. This was at a time before his more intense experiences had started. They were driving slowly through a dark industrial area, Peter was new to the job and he was learning the route.

Then a big white owl appeared out of nowhere, it was moving toward the windshield in a weird static pose. He hit the brakes and came to a complete stop.

Just as suddenly it was gone and they both exclaimed, “What the hell just happened?”

The whole thing was much stranger than just seeing an over sized bird at night. Even though the owl had rushed at them, he was very clear that it wasn’t flying. In the aftermath, they were both reacting as if something wasn’t right. Peter said, “Something was off. We just weren’t normal. The whole rest night we both kept talking about that bloody owl.”


It was just a few months later he was flooded with an onslaught of intense UFO sightings, some were seen by others and even posted on the local news. These sightings started on October 10th 2010, that plays out as 10-10-10.

 read more below 

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other people seeing owls

This is becoming a pattern. I will talk to folks, often friends I haven't seen in a while, and I'll fill them in on my book project. The topic will turn to owls and I'll ask them, "Have you seen any owls recently?" They'll reply, "Yes, just yesterday." Then they'll then describe a curiously close up sighting of an owl less than 24 hours earlier.

I'll think for a moment and then tell them, "I think maybe that was because of me."

from the stat counter on this blog

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Bert Janssen and Heather Clewett-Jachowski in conversation

Bert Janssen and Heather Clewett-Jachowski

Bert and Heather are a husband and wife team doing crop circle and ancient sacred site research in the southern UK. They also have a very powerful story to tell that features a white owl. We spend most of our time digging into that event, which took place in May of 2011.

  one-click download HERE  

The way this interview is framed, the white owl event is in the center of the web, and we try to follow some of the threads outward to see where they lead. I think stories are more interesting than speculation, and this interview features a wealth of really interesting stories.

Here's a link to Heather's White Owl story.

Bert's web-site HERE, and Heather's web-site HERE.

Bert speaking about the hidden geometry within crop circles

a stack of DVDs

I'm holding a stack of 31 DVDs from a 2007 documentary

I have a set of raw, unedited DVDs with footage from a documentary that was in production between 2007 and '08. There is a stack of 31 discs, each about an hour long. These include long interviews with Budd Hopkins, Dr. Leo Sprinkle and Dr. David Jacobs. At some point (hopefully soon) I plan on posting those interviews.

For more about this documentary, click HERE.

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Skeptiko interviews Mary Rodwell

Alex from the Skeptiko podcast series interviews UFO abduction researcher Mary Rodwell. As always, I am impressed with the depth of his questions and the way he challenges his guests to dig deep. Highly recommended. 47 minutes long.

  Click HERE for a link to the Skeptiko interview  

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Archetypes and screen memories

Chapter in progress: This is an excerpt from a book project with the working title; Owls, Sychronicity and the UFO Abductee. I plan on posting a few samples from time to time. 

—Mike C

Most of the research for this book has been me reaching out to folks with curious stories, and just asking the question, “Do you have any odd owl experiences?” Most of the time the reply would be no. I got a lot of replies that played out as screen memories, the smallest percentage were the extremely unusual experiences that involved, as far as I can tell, real owls. I would ask this of folks through email, phone calls and in face to face meetings. A lot of the time I would ask this question to complete strangers, or to people I barely knew.

Peter was one of the experiencers featured in Dr. John Mack’s 1994 book Abduction, and the events in his life have been extremely intense. I’ve talked on the phone with him only once, and we've shared a few emails over the years. He’s been supportive and insightful in all of my correspondence.

As part of this book project, I sent Peter one of these emails, asking him that same question, had he ever had any odd owl experiences. He replied:

That is what got me in the door, so to say, to begin looking at this in my life. When I lived in Hawaii, there was a big old owl (that’s what I thought at the time) that would come to the sliding glass door off my bedroom at night. Of course under regression when I looked at the owl it was a whole other creature. So yeah, me and owls and ET's have a connection.

This owl fits cleanly into the screen memory category, it seems to play out as deceptive owl imagery projected into Peter’s mind, presumably so he wouldn’t be terrified of seeing a creepy gray alien. How this is done is a mystery, why is another question. One easy way to frame this is that the owl is nothing more that a convenient disguise, it’s a common enough animal, and those big penetrating eyes seem to match the likeness of the iconic alien. This might be exactly the reason for the owl deception, but it just feels too simple.

I suspect that this contact experience has been ongoing throughout the entirety of human history, and the reverence for the owl in folklore and mythology can be traced back to experiences just like what Peter described. The shamans and sages throughout time might have confronted similar owls, staring at them from their own doorways.

 read more below 

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owls = UFOs = synchronicity

Animal symbols will show up at certain times, almost like reality is a dream and animals can be placed into the dream when needed.

This statement came to me in an email, it was part of the ongoing owl research I've been all swallowed up in. The email was from a man describing an owl sighting on the farm of his father-in-law who had just died. He felt strongly that is was the spirit symbol of his father-in-law, looking at the farm one last time before he left.

This short little statement rang true to me. I sense that the script writers of reality can easily pencil in symbolic imagery right into the storyline of our lives. If they need to punctuate something within the narrative, they’ll just add what’s required for the desired effect.

The animal looking at the farm was an owl, and this is a powerful symbol, at least to me. What I also see in that statement is simply changing the word animal to either UFO or synchronicity, and the message would ring just as true.

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audio conversation with Colin Andrews

Author, researcher and experiencer

Colin Andrews brought us the term crop circle. He was one of the initial team of investigators that were looking into the unusual formations that were emerging each year around the world, but with a particularly flurry in southern England.

Along with is wife and co-author, Synthia Andrews, they've just published On the Edge of Reality. This book has the lengthy sub-title: Hidden technology, Powers of the Mind, Quantum Physics, Paranormal Phenomenon, Orbs, UFOs, Harmonic Transmissions and Crop Circles. They could have added this: A bunch of really weird personal experiences too!

  one-click audio download HERE  

We dig into a lot of extremely interesting stuff. I tried to keep the focus on personal stories, either his or my own. We cover the list below (and lots more) but these are linked for more follow-up info.

* Colin's recent interview with Mel Fabregas on Veritas

* Stace's Doug story

* Dr. Steven Greer and the mosquito

* Teton Crop Circle report

* Stace's weird experience in the Teton circle

* The initial crop circle event from 2002

* All the posts revolving around the two Byrons and the giant triangle

* Stace's line on a map across Kansas

* And, Colin's own web-site.

Presentation from the 2009 X-Conference

job interview at the CIA conducted by an alien

During the audio conversation with Eliane Douglass, we spoke at length about one very interesting case. It told the story of a young man going to the CIA for a job interview, he claims he was given a lie detector test by an alien. The article written by Elaine and published in two parts in Journal of Abduction Research (JAR) magazine.

A lot of listeners were eager to read this two-part article, they said as much in the comments below the interview posting.

  Both issues are linked here, Part ONE and Part TWO  

The title of the article is: Don’t apply for a job at the CIA—you might be interviewed by an alien

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the number 123 shows up

from my blogs "hit" counter

The numbers 123 and 321 show up on the overview of stats on this blog. Yes, I realize this is something minor, but I fee a responsibility to post any and all synchronicities.

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Off-Planet Radio interview

Randy Maugins from Off-Planet Radio asked me on is show to spend two-hours in conversation. His co-host Chris Holly couldn't make it, and that was too bad because she has had some odd experiences with owls that exactly fits what I have been digging into, hopefully someday we can all talk together. Also, there is a bonus segment featuring Richard Dolan interviewed by Randy at about the half way point.

  one-click audio download HERE  

This was a live show recorded on Friday Oct 18th.

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audio conversation with Elaine Douglass

There is a dark side to the UFO abduction phenomenon that seems to get lost in the online podcasting scene. Elaine has been digging deep into this research, and her conclusions are at odds with many in the community. What she sees is a cautionary tale, one that challenges my own outlook on these complex issues.

Elaine Douglass has been a UFO investigator for over 25 years. She holds a masters degree from MIT in military policy. She was with MUFON for 25 years as state director of Washington DC and then Utah. In the 1990s she was an organizer for ORTK, Operation Right to Know which held street demonstrations in several cities protesting UFO secrecy.

Elaine has investigated a huge number of sighting reports, but early on she turned her attention to the abduction cases. In 2008 she founded JAR, The Journal of Abduction-Encounter Research, an email magazine which published 9 issues. In 2012 she was a guest on the Jesse Ventura show where he interviewed on her contention that Robert Bigelow is an intelligence asset operating in the UFO community.

  one click audio download HERE  

2 hours / 18 minutes

For more information Elaine's experiences with MUFON, and also what others have been through, I’m going to suggest a series of informative interviews from Jerry Pippin under the title MUFON UNDER SIEGE. You’ll hear her tell about some demoralizing experiences within that organization. Elaine also started an organization, The Committee to Reform MUFON in the hopes of lobbying for more openness within that organization.

Here's another very good interview with Elaine, from March of this year. Elaine can be reached at her email address: edouglass [the 'at' symbol] frontier.com.

Here is a link to the article by Elaine where she tells the story of a young man who was at a job interview with the CIA, and he was given a lie detector test by an alien. Linked HERE.

the elusive search for truth

Robbie Graham from  the website Silver Screen Saucers

posts an insightful and highly recommended essay:

 Letting go of UFOs

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Jerome Clark talks about the stranageness in UFO reporting

Jerome Clark

  one-click audio download HERE  

Extremely interesting talk given by UFO researcher Jerome Clark. He spoke after being presented the Tim Dinsdale Award in 2009. He addresses some of the stranger aspects of UFO reports and how these correlate to mystical events in history. I lifted this audio from a 4-part youtube presentation.

owls and a mournful call

great horned owl

I saw an owl tonight, actually two of them.

It started on a bike ride heading north from my house to town, I had been writing about owls all day and my head was swimming with owl imagery and thoughts, the tape loop still grinding away as I rode the bike trail. It was a gray afternoon and for the first time this fall, it was starting to feel cold. The area along the bike path is mostly open flat horse pasture. At one point as I rode along I heard a mournful harsh squawking. I looked up to the telephone poles to see what it might be. I am an okay birder, and it sounded like it might be a hawk, but my mind thought owl. The squawk was ringing out at very defined intervals, perhaps once every 20 seconds or so. It was coming from a cluster of cottonwoods, all rusty gold with the season.

I got off my bike, walked through the dry grass to the barbed wire fence and stayed still looking and listening. The squawking seemed so sad, and it continued at steady intervals, but I didn’t see anything. It was definitely coming from that set of trees, but whatever bird was making the noise was hidden from my view. I got back on the bike and continued to town.

On the way back from, now riding south, I heard the same sound again, and this time I saw a bird on the back side of this stand of trees. No way to tell what it might be from that distance so I set my bike down again and walked up to the same barbed wire fence but a few hundred yards north from where I stood earlier.

The squawking continued and I could see the outline of the body and it sure looked like an owl. I shimmied under the fence and walked towards it to get a better look.

I had spent the day writing about the owls heightened ability to see and hear, so I was hyper aware that there was no way I could sneak up on it. I got fairly close and in the steely twilight I realized I was looking at a great horned owl.

All this time it continued that melancholy squawking at a steady interval. As i stood below it, I heard a faint response off to the west. The owl in the tree near me would squawk loudly, and just a second later I would hear the exact same call but way off in the distance. At first I wondered if it was an echo, but that would be unlikely in this big open terrain.

I turned my head for a few seconds to see where the faint noise might be coming from, and in that moment the owl dropped off the tree. When I looked back the owl was in flight, coasting slowly with what seemed to be impossibly large wings given that she only looked to be about a foot tall in the tree.

I watched her drop down to the hug the ground level and I lost sight of her as dipped low. Eventually I saw her reappear and alight on a big hay barn about a quarter of a mile from where I stood. Seconds later I saw another owl land on that same barn and one or the other of them took off. When I walked back to my bike there was only one owl on that barn.

Curiously, that was the very same barn where I had my picture taken with a great horned owl. This happened last summer, and I wrote about it, and the follow up synchronicity here. And equally curious the owl was doing some of the things I had just been writing about. Dropping from tree branches, flying oddly slow and hugging the ground as it flew.

I got home and search out that mournful screech, you can hear it on this page, about half way down a set of audio players. The audio is titled: Female squawk. This is an exact match, including the length of the interval between calls. It’s because of this that I am referring to this owl as a she.

This post comes the day after a posting a series of extremely bizarre owl sychronicities, involving driveways and laundry, linked here.

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Text added Oct. 13th, the following day from the post above

I feel pretty sure I saw two owls today, both of them were quite far away.  I am saying they were probably owls by the chubby barrel shape of their bodies. One was on the same hay barn as I wrote about yesterday. The other was in a tree. I saw them while driving. Not much to say, I feel like the ones way off in the distance don't have much synchro-resonance. That said, four in two days is a lot.

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Owls, driveways and laundry

A string of owl sychronicities emerged last week, and I’m trying to make sense of the overlapping weirdness. Like any synch, these things get so intertwined and personal that it ends up being almost impossible to convey their power, let alone their meaning. I’ve gotten to the point where I trust that the more entangled this stuff gets, the more I trust it. That said, I trust this flurry of synchro-weirdness.

What follows is my (excessively hyper-linked) attempt to unravel this knotted cluster of owl stuff.

I'm visual, so charts help me focus

On Monday (Sept. 30th) I had a Reiki session with a woman I know here in my little town. You can read a long post about what happened HERE. At the end of our meeting I asked if she had ever had any odd owl experiences.

I asked her: “Have you seen any owls recently?”

She said, “Well, me and my boyfriend saw a great big owl last night, it was really incredible.”

She explained about seeing a great horned owl that flew along side her, from fence post to branch, as she walked along a path. It would swoop down low and then landed further down the path, staying ahead of them as they walked. It was huge and it would glide low and incredibly close to the ground as it stayed in front of her and her friend.

I calmly told her, “That was me. That owl was all about this, us here right now.”


She agreed.

That same night I got an email where she told me she had see another owl after our session. She wrote that is was a huge gray owl (I am assuming it was a great gray) in the same spot, and it “appeared” right in the moment when she thought to herself that she wanted to manifest an elephant.

I wanted to talk with her but didn’t call until the next day Tuesday (Oct. 1st), right before calling her I switched on the live broadcast of Micah Hanks’ The Grailien Report. The show was only on for a little bit, just enough for me to hear that Micah had two guests, Cam and Kyle from the Expanded Perspectives Podcast.

I turned off the audio, walked next door to do a load of laundry (I use my neighbors washing machine) and when I got back to the house I made the call to the Reiki therapist. I left a message on her machine and then switched the audio back on.

The first thing I heard was Micah’s voice excitedly declaring, “The gentleman you guys are talking about is… Mike Clelland of the Hidden Experience blog. So, someone needs to get him in the chatroom, we’re talkin’ about owls!”

I was sitting right at my desk, I clicked on skype, send a little note, “Micah - I JUST started listening - and guess what I heard…” Within seconds I was on the air with him and his guests.

You can hear the excitement in amazement in their voices as they reveled in the fact that I heard my name and got on the air so quickly. I felt a little bit like I’d hijacked the conversation for the remaining half hour of the show. One thing I talked about was a weird synchronicty surrounding a woman from Asheville North Carolina, right where Micah lives, and her mystical experiences with owls and a very strange UFO sighting.

Now, what I hadn’t heard was just how my name came up. This morning I listened to the archived edition of the show from that night, and a a highly charged number comes up.

There it is again, 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 !

At the 1:23:45 time count, Cam begins a very interesting owl story by saying, “Now a little stranger than that, here’s another story that my mother actually shared with me…” What follows is an extremely eerie sighting of a giant 4 and 1/2 foot tall owl seen in a driveway.

As the guy tells this story, he says he pressed his mother for details because there is a guy who has a blog where he talks about owls and UFO abduction. He was obviously talking about me, but I hadn’t hear this part live.

Fast forward to yesterday, Thursday (Oct. 10th). I was at my desk all day obsessively working on this owl book project. As it got to be evening I received an email from Alan Abbadessa-Green, he was replying to a note I had sent him on Monday (Oct. 7th) where I said, “Are you up for a call?”

I don’t know if I’ve ever just asked him to chat like this, but I really enjoy talking with him. So it was a little bit unusual that I would just ask to talk like this. He said lets talk and later that night he rang me up on skype.

He excitedly asked, “What did you think of that picture I sent you!”

I hadn’t received anything, and he resized he had tried to tag me on someone else's photo on facebook, so I never go it.

a small owl in Alan's driveway

He sent it as we talked. He explained that last week, on Wednesday (Oct. 2nd) he was coming home from doing the laundry, and as he was nearing his driveway he had a strong thought in his mind, “Mike Clelland - owls - owls owls - Mike Clelland.” When he pulled into his home, there on the driveway was a small little owl. He was with a friend and he took a picture of it. He said he was close enough that he could see it’s big eyes dilate from the flash.

Caption from the site: 
Ran into this cute little guy on my walk to work.
He didn't move, just starred at me.
I even gave him a boop on the head.

Now that morning Thursday (Oct. 10th) the first email in my in-box was a link to this image. It was from someone who I didn’t know, but had heard me on Greg Bishop’s Radio Mysterioso. It was just a cute owl image found online, but it weirdly matched Alan’s experience. It was an owl in a driveway!

Alan and Micah both live in the same town, along with the woman who had the owl and UFO experience, that being Asheville North Carolina. Both Alan and Micah are podcasters, bloggers, authors and publish books. I've interviewed both Alan and Micah, in both of these there was huge focus on synchronicities.

Now, there is no better person on earth than Alan to try to unravel this kind of synchro-weirdness. The laundry connection seemed odd, and Alan pointed out that I had my own powerful laundry sync (linked HERE). But weirder to me was the striking similarity of the two owl in the driveway pictures.

We both tried to untangle this weird knot of owl stuff, but all we ended up doing was seeing more and more little threads that seemed to lead everywhere. No answers, just a recognition that this stuff really happens.

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2014 International UFO Congress

I'll be one of the presenters at the upcoming IUFOC (International UFO Congress) just outside of Phoenix. This is a 5-day conference run by Open Minds Magazine. The event runs through the 12th through 16th of February 2014.

A while back I sent in a written proposal to the conference organizers; writing this letter involved some coaching from Micah Hanks. They got back to me recently with a yes, explaining that they've been receiving some feedback that attendees wanted to have more abductees as presenters. I'll be one of 20 speakers in the line-up.

This is an event I've been attending annually since 2008. The reason I make the pilgrimage each year is because it's a long format conference. This allows for much more time to sit and connect with the other attendees, many of whom have their own experiences.

Here's the synopsis of my presentation:

Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee:

Mike Clelland began his study of the UFO abduction phenomenon in 2006 as a way to better understand his own personal experiences. This act of looking unleashed a flood of synchronicities as well as intense owl sightings. These events have been the focus of his ongoing research. Both owls and profound synchronicities seem to play a guiding role in the direct experience of some abductees, this connection points to a deeper reality at play in these mysteries. By looking at these elusive and often ignored aspects of the abduction lore, something truly mystical seems to be revealing itself.

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the Oz factor

I've attached a short essay describing the unusual effects reported by close up UFO witnesses. There seems to be something directly influencing the consciousness of anyone in close proximity to a UFO.

An the eerie silence is consistently reported by close encounter experiencers, but what also gets described is a bizarre warping of reality, as if their consciousness was being altered or distorted.

The term Oz Factor was coined in 1983 by British UFO researcher Jenny Randles to describe this strange, but commonly reported, effect of the proximity to an unknown craft. This recommended essay is posted below in a one-click PDF reader.

The Oz Factor by Jenny Randles