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Throughout this summer and assumedly ongoing, the United States government began releasing some of its UFO and/or UAP files to the public by Presidential decree. While the first release gained some positive press, even New York Times journalist Helene Cooper noted that the drop’s “initial files are murky images that show what could be anything.”1 Cooper, it should be noted, along with journalists Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, was one of the cowriters on the NYT article that brought UFOs screaming back into mainstream public consciousness in 2017, titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money.’”2 Almost a decade after that embattled article, it seems that people have UFO fatigue. The attention that the piece received caused a brief flurry of nationwide discussion before settling back down a bit. Ever since its release, however, fervent followers have kept the flame burning throughout the ensuing decade. From the efforts of enthusiasts and lobbyists, the subject now occasionally broaches national news but rarely with any lasting impact beyond a bureaucratic paper trail.

The resurgence in UFO interest has nevertheless led to the first congressional hearings on the subject in more than 50 years, as if it is a Cold War ghost that will not move on. Despite the somewhat sensational claims from members of the military and intelligence community, the oft-advertised direct evidence is considered too sensitive to release publicly. The same could be said of important corroborators—even secondhand witnesses must be kept under wraps, in fear for their lives.3 Videos leaked to the public, while looking somewhat remarkable, offer little to no clue as to what the audience is viewing. Fast moving blobs and indecipherable lights, while making for intriguing viewing on Paranormal Caught on Camera, do not pose national security issues on their face, except when they may be depicting earthly drone swarms—hardly the extraterrestrial or interdimensional sensation the public is looking for. The unexplained, amorphous sky objects are evidence, albeit evidence of something unidentified and little more.

By the time the second release rolled around, the feeling of overkill had set in. Researchers noted little truly new or remarkable in the first drop, simply re-released documents, firsthand accounts with little explanatory power, and videos that are less compelling than those released in previous years.4 The second drop was more of the same, again with little in the way of explanation or even indications of significance. Videos and documents displaced from history and time, with a statement from the Department of Defense encouraging the audience to “make up their own minds about the information contained in these files.”5 That method has famously never gone awry.

A third tranche of documents, released the day before this talk is being given, again contained rehashes of previously released documents that were touted by tabloid journalists and sensationalist scientists, such as Avi Loeb, as new.6 [Note: Concurrent to this talk, despite clear sensationalizing and not much in the way of historical literacy in ufology, astrophysicist Loeb was apparently appointed to lead a new multi-agency UAP Advisory Council.7 This posting was seemingly confirmed Office of the Director of National Intelligence, though, at time of writing, few mainstream publications have remarked on its veracity. ODNI told Christopher Sharp at The Liberation Times that the establishment of a UAP Governance Board—of which the Advisory Council belongs to—is part of the ongoing (and surely wildly successful) transparency effort.8] More intriguing, albeit indeterminate, footage of bright orbs crossing the sky was included as well. Although, given that thousands of people have witnessed phenomena of this type, the presence of “few hard facts” makes it yet another unexplained encounter to add to the pile that stretches back to the earliest days of recorded history—hardly the Disclosure that the public has been promised.9

That concept, “Disclosure,” has been a stated goal of the UFO community since the early days of Donald Keyhoe and his time leading the major UFO research organization, National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP). Keyhoe, a former naval aviator and publicity specialist who successfully managed a world tour for pilot Charles Lindbergh, brought his toolkit to fight for UFO transparency in the thick of flying saucer mania. Like some before him and many after him, he led with the assumption that the Pentagon knew more on the subject than it professed, chiefly that craft from other worlds had been patrolling American skies and the military was avoiding an outright panic. UFO secrecy has continued to be impenetrable to any admissions of off-world vehicles or non-human intelligences, though allegations have simmered in the fringe and recently reached the congressional record. This development has been a long time coming: Researcher Jack Brewer writes that “many have been personally ringing an alarm of imminent Disclosure for decades.”10 Because of this lengthy battle between the UFO community and the U.S. government, the past ten years have been more unprecedented. Rarely does the President of the United States call for the immediate release of UFO documents and hint at the existence of extratorrential, er, extraterrestrial lifeforms.

Of course, these apparent declarations of UFO and ET disclosure were immediately undercut after it was revealed that the recently-purchased aliens(dot)gov website was “a piece of political theater aimed at dehumanizing immigrants and casting those the Trump administration has arrested as the secret extraterrestrial visitors of UFO conspiracy lore.”11 This development is not necessarily out of character, as the prominence of the UFO issue in the political repertoire of Trump, the Republicans, and even some Democrats has always been theater of some sort. Whether it’s being utilized as a clumsy distraction from the Epstein files, the quickly degrading quality of American life, or the unpopular wars abroad, UFOs have become a cynical bread-and-circuses-like tool for politicians and talking heads. Several news sites and independent observers have noticed as much,12 even commentators previously friendly with the Trump Administration.13

Disclosure does not seem to be going all that well. The file dumps were disappointing enough to lead Rep. Tim Burchett—one of the staunchest supporters of government transparency regarding UFOs—to preemptively warn that “the intelligence community could be” planting fake stories into releases “in order to ‘murky the waters’ around the entire UFO debate.”14 Fascinatingly, Burchett does not consider that the very stories (sometimes involving hybrids or underwater UFO bases) that transformed him into a Disclosure crusader were part of the same IC action—activity that has been documented for decades. Instead, the military and IC personnel that serve among the dozens of “whistleblowers” in this journey towards UFO truth are seen as beyond reproach, not receiving any suspicion about possibly being plants or deliberately mislead. It is, in fact, likely that there is something the U.S. government is not forthright with regarding UFOs, but this very notion has led to several assumptions that are often turned into scarcely evidenced calls to action. There’s the rub with so-called Disclosure: How can you trust anyone in a society and culture that has so often abused or punished trust in the government, the media, or other institutions?

Religious scholar D.W. Pasulka, writing for The Washington Post, noted that, while UFO belief spans a diverse cross-section of the population, most participants are “profoundly anti-institutional,” and “often distrust governments, legacy media, academia and organized religion.” Because of this tendency, the UFO file releases “encourage a form of belief that thrives on uncertainty.”15 While taking an impartial stance on these developments,16 it is Pasulka’s contention that “mistrust of institutions has powered the rise of anti-institutional forms of belief” that have enabled “religious impulses” to be reoriented “into new technological and media environments that bypass gatekeepers.”17

However, UFO belief and the very notion of Disclosure is still completely reliant on gatekeepers, now more than ever. Those same gatekeepers, far from being anti-institutional, make up some of the most prominent institutions in the country—their credibility is directly tied to that institutional authority. Every religion needs a figurehead, and since the 2017 revelations, that role has been filled by various individuals within the military, intelligence community, or defense contracting space. Pasulka, whose 2019 book American Cosmic facilitated the continuation of UFO rumors bubbling below the surface, even depicts her ostensible “initiation” into the faith via a gatekeeper, through the anonymous Tyler D. who took her and Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan to a UFO “gifting site.” Tyler turned out to be former NASA contractor Timothy Taylor, whose motivations and background are murky at best. Despite contradictions and odd behavior from their main source, Pasulka and Nolan have been recurring figures folded within the recent fight for Disclosure.

[Note: Like Loeb, Nolan and fellow Sol Foundation co-founder Peter Skafish were also included in the roster for the proposed new UAP Advisory Council. Unsurprisingly, this endeavor is couched in national security terms. Loeb writes:

The most down-to-earth interpretation of technological UAPs is that they are human-made. The inability of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon to figure out their nature is a serious concern for national security. (…) President Trump’s directive to declassify UAP files is a blessing because it provides a reality check on whether there are holes in protecting strategic sites in the U.S. against espionage by drones, balloons and other gadgets developed by adversarial nations. Scientists and engineers need to develop better sensors and AI analysis tools to help the Pentagon in its mission.18

Loeb writes as though the public has already witnessed “an actual UAP disclosure by the U.S. government” courtesy of Trump, though real answers can only be achieved through a larger matrix of militaristic global surveillance equipment. This is another quality of Disclosure—it’s always just around the bend. Its utility as a lure for defense spending is self-evident. Looking for UFOs is easier for mass media to stomach, superficially distant from programs such as the DoD’s Total Information Awareness which was partially shuttered (though still utilized) after its overreach became clear.19]

Gatekeeping is not only integral to the updated flying saucer lore, but it is also fundamental to Disclosure—an event heavily reliant on “white hats” within the government or trust that the powers that be are responsive to their constituents and would not lie to the American public. Three quarters of a century spent lying about UFOs (at least, according to the lore) would not, and should not, be magically forgiven if the military-industrial complex would just come clean on the subject matter. The American populace is way beyond a “fool me twice” scenario. In this way, Disclosure is an inherently impractical goal for any individuals or organizations to dedicate themselves to, and not because there are no deeper truths to be gleaned from UFOs. It is impractical, rather, because a wondrous, at times spiritual, symbol like the UFO should not be dependent on the forces of empire to assert its existence. The UFO should exist outside of the grim, bleak, and increasingly hostile defense industry or political sphere.

Truth be told, the mainstream attention has sucked all the fun from the UFO topic, instead situating it in the environment of foreign policy analysts and political paper pushers. While flying saucers have always been tied to possible Cold War projections, the same cannot be said of the UFO more generally, or, indeed, the unexplained. When Charles Fort wrote on the allure of the mysterious in the 1920s, it was an anti-establishment statement. While he did not limit himself to unknown objects in the sky, instead pulling on threads in all manner of paranormal phenomena, UFOs did play into his conception of the world. Unlike the present movement, Fort was not necessarily angling for establishment institutions to accept the beliefs of the anti-establishment. Rather, he encouraged his readership to not take the truth for granted, to always be curious, and advocated for the idea that there’s something more at play in our lives than scientists, politicians, or religious doctrine could ever conceive. Now, ufology is only considered relevant if those establishment foundations legitimize it. The same scientists, theologians, and political entities that Fort would thumb his nose at are actively sought as legitimizing forces.

When I think of ufology, I do not think of the “Tic Tac” object caught on a FLIR camera placed upon a Navy aircraft carrier, footage that now too closely resembles extrajudicial strikes on civilians in Caribbean.20 I don’t think of walking military man cliché Lue Elizondo and his “five observables”—phraseology that could come straight from the National Reconnaissance Office. I do not think of any of the military personnel that are granted the most suspension of disbelief by virtue of their service. I have often repeated that there is no such thing as a “trained observer” of supernatural phenomena—it is much too elusive and too pure to be part of the military school curriculum.

No, instead, I think of individuals like Lonnie Zamora, the Socorro, New Mexico policeman who was truly rattled by his sighting of an egg-shaped flying craft in the desert, devoid of windows and making a tremendous roaring noise. He briefly spotted two small-statured humanoids nearby. Zamora was a well-regarded, serious individual—a credible witness, though not because of any vague authority. He was also a devout man, “not want(ing) to be interviewed before talking to a priest, because he thought he might have seen something diabolical.”21 Zamora’s case, like others, was included in the new UFO releases, though most of the files were available previously. Lonnie Zamora does not need officialdom to validate his sighting, nor does the public need this validation to believe it. Whether a sighting of aliens, angels, demons, a college student prank, or military test, I believe that Lonnie Zamora saw something strange.

I think also of Woodrow Derenberger, who witnessed an oddly shaped grey craft on a West Virginia interstate and met its kindly occupant: A human-looking figure named Indrid Cold who hailed from the planet Lanulos. A short two weeks later, sightings of a strange, grey, red-eyed entity rattled a sleepy West Virginia town. Famed UFO and paranormal investigator John Keel provided the foreword to Derenberger’s book on his experiences, writing: “Derenberger will be called a liar, a psychopath and many other unpleasant things. He has already suffered considerable ridicule and condemnation, even from those who believe in ‘flying saucers’ but do not wish to believe that someone is actually riding around in them.”22 Despite it all, he cheerfully recounted his trips on a spaceship to Cold’s native planet, where everyone was nude and they had abolished war.

I think of Leah Haley, a Southern abductee who lost everything—“her job, her house and her husband”—because she came to believe she had not only been abducted by alien beings, but also by members of the U.S. military.23 She came to call these military abductors “OMAGS,” short for “obnoxious military and government scoundrels.”24 Along with numerous other abductees, files regarding her case and transcripts of her hypnotic recollections were sold to real estate mogul Robert Bigelow for $14,000—all without their consent.25

I think of individuals closer to my own hometown, like young Ronald Johnson in Delphos, Kansas who witnessed a mushroom shaped craft one evening that burned his eyes. He was plagued by eye irritation and nightmares involving canine figures for the days and weeks following.26 I think of Clarence Williams and Lerone and Buddy Pryor—Kansas City natives who witnessed a large object, sputtering “green orbs of light” and “changing shape (…) as it seemed to scan a vacant lot and mining area.”27 Williams was subsequently the apparent victim of abductions, trance states, and even implants. Despite the at times frightening nature of these events, Williams went from “angry and depressed” to being “a calm, caring person.”28 The changes in his outlook were extreme: “Just before this incident (Williams) was shot by a man, and he fully intended to retaliate, but after the sighting(, Williams) went to the man and forgave him, saying that he wanted to stop the violence.”29

The mainstream current of ufology has forgotten the strange and numinous that made it worthwhile, the purported abductions, encounters with odd humanoids, and spectacular visions in the sky more reminiscent of intense spiritual apparitions than enemy combatants. The current UFO culture has also increasingly forgotten about useful suspicion. Far removed from the battlefield or nuclear missile silos, UFOs affect the lives of everyday people. These are individuals who are mocked, disbelieved, often traumatized, and nearly always profoundly changed. This trauma is not a national security threat, nor are the personal transformations. It is the human element of the UFO—these strange objects that glimmer, glide, and dart through the Earth’s skies—that make the subject worth studying at all. While accounts from the military can have their own implications on the human element, there is a reason these allegations have been prioritized over civilian anomalous experiences. Those reasons are multifaceted, but almost always involve some manner of military propaganda or policy maneuvering. Worst of all, the U.S. government and its defense apparatus asks for trust, a trust that has not been earned in areas within and without ufology.

While it is tempting to take on the X-Files mantra of “trust no one,” this method is at times counterproductive. A more clear-headed technique is to distrust those who lie and to always be ready to accept that people, organizations, and institutions lie. And they lie a lot, even when they promise to tell the truth—a seductive, tempting, but rarely satisfying notion. As Bob Dylan said: “Trust yourself / And look not for answers where no answers can be found.”30 To be clear, that doesn’t mean to call off the search for answers. If anything, individuals interested in the subject matter should become more proactive in the search for UFO truth—learning, growing, and gaining the ability to trust one’s instincts. UFOs are the spark of creativity, the raw emotion of gazing into the night sky. Any attempt to recreate this uniquely human experience, especially by the institutions that have consistently failed to be honest with the American public, is a cruel mockery, far removed from the eyewitness on the ground. Most importantly, be wary of accepting the gift of Disclosure when the sender has neglected to feed, house, and respect its recipients. Suspicion is always warranted, but so is wonder.

The thumbnail image is from René Magritte’s La reconnaissance infinie, 1933.

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Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

The schedule was released over on the @pgh_ufo Instagram page, which you should follow for updates:

12 pm: doors, UFO book sale, chat with other PGH UFO heads

1 pm: Dani LaMorte (@zygo.phyll.aceae) on their work in the Budd Hopkins archives

2 pm: Tanner Boyle (@gettingspooked) on UFOs and American politics

3 pm: a reading from UFO poets Ed Steck and Courtney Bush (“Intelligent Process” chapbook release!!)

For quick reference, hold onto the posters and schedules below:

If you’re a fan of Getting Spooked, drop by and help me get through my stage fright and present a brand new piece of writing. Even if you cannot attend, I highly recommend you start keeping tabs on the speakers and organizers as they are all doing top-of-the-line work in UFO writing, research, and art. These include Timothy Grieve-Carlson (also on Substack at Never More Real) and the aforementioned Dani Lamorte (also on Substack at Groundcherry), Ed Steck, and Courtney Bush. I also hope to publish a version of the talk over here on Getting Spooked, my home base, as well, so stay tuned.

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Thumbnail from “Search for Meteor is Unsuccessful; Hunt in District is Ended.” The Evening Standard (Uniontown). 10 December 1965. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-evening-standard/198881238/.

Also, going to keep reminding folks, the Kickstarter from Strange Attractor Press for Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan is still ongoing but getting closer to the deadline. Support good UFO art and receive prints, totes, and a beautifully printed book of some of the most visually stunning UFO art out there. Plus, you’re supporting a press that I’m cooking up something intriguing and spooky for. Click the image below for more:

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Read more

Tanner has a bit of an echo at points, sorry about that.

Episode art is La salle d’armes by René Magritte.

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Bluesky

Toiling in the heat of a boiler room, Cystic Detective gently coughs. His mouth tastes like pennies. He can no longer hear Moira, imagination or not, but can detect faint trumpet sounds, as though the seven trumpets were blaring but he was much too far away for it to matter.

“God in heaven,” he thinks to himself. “And me down here.”

Moira meanwhile continues tracking the trail of slime down a spiral staircase. “I’ve only met one man who discharges this muck,” she mutters to herself. Coming upon a metal door at the foot of the stairs, she wrenches it open expectantly. Cystic Detective is startled to see her again in such strange circumstances.

“I thought you were going up,” Cystic Detective quietly remarks.

Moira, annoyed at the false lead, is befuddled by this claim. “Who are you?” she asks.

Cystic Detective Updates are usually special reports for paid subscribers, documenting research efforts, personal thoughts on recent news, or other, loose tidbits and recommendations. It is a small offering for those who support the longer, denser, free articles and the ongoing book project. For access to past and future updates, (as well other archived articles and special podcast episodes,) you can take advantage of a running offer: 25% off for life with the iconic “Reads to the End” discount. My thanks to those who help Getting Spooked live to fight another day.

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What’s coming up?

Fresh off an exciting event in the UK—where Mark Pilkington and I discussed contactee groups and the ufological playing field after a screening of Ruth Norman’s 1981 sci-fi epic The Arrival—I will be doing another talk closer to home: On Saturday, June 13th, 2026, join me in the backyard at Fungus Books & Records, 700 ½ South Trenton Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA for a UFO talk. It’s the inaugural meetup of the Pittsburgh UFO Club, started by the stellar religious scholar Timothy Grieve-Carlson (read Never More Real) and featuring yours truly along with writer and artist Dani Lamorte, author of the recent Nobody’s Psychic, a collection of essays on Appalachian weirdness and identity. Ed Steck, poet, writer, and one of the proprietors of the lovely bookstore, promises hundreds of UFO books in stock—a perfect opportunity for hungry collectors. More announcements to come as the event draws nearer, but hold onto this poster announcing it and check Fungus Books on Instagram for future updates:

What’s new?

I suppose it’s as good a time as any to let readers know the book plans I keep bandying on about: A research project covering numerous previous Getting Spooked stories and personalities, all angling towards a thesis of UFOs and the paranormal as a battleground in the perpetual cultural Cold War—alternatively a direct or figurative assault on the psychologies of civilians both in America and abroad. This work is being done in close collaboration with graphic designer Robert Voyvodic (his peerless art is adorning this humble newsletter) to develop images, maps, and layouts to aid the reader in the long, strange trip. We are working with Mark Pilkington (author of the seminal UFO text Mirage Men) to eventually publish through his Strange Attractor Press, a literal dream come true in several regards. Once the time comes, I am aiming to reward readers and listeners who have supported Getting Spooked with some writing that you can hold in your hands and won’t burn your retinas.

In the meantime, I would urge those interested in high strangeness and outsider UFO art (flashes of personal favorites David Huggins or Kim Bond) to take a look at Strange Attractor’s Kickstarter campaign for Daniel Wojcik’s book Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan. SAP is looking to fund the production of the book as well as prints and other goodies that showcase the phenomenal work of Ionel Talpazan, a UFO experiencer who diligently painted his mystical visions on canvases that he sold as a New York street vendor for decades. From the Kickstarter description:

Drawing upon more than a decade of interviews and research, scholar Daniel Wojcik and Strange Attractor Press present an out-of-this-world monograph on the life and artistic achievements of Ionel Talpazan, a Romanian-American visionary artist, gathered together in one volume for the first time.

Artist as Astronaut will contain nearly 200 full colour images of Talpazan’s work, many never seen before, alongside personal archival photographs and ephemera, and essays by artists and art historians, including David Byrne, Tony Oursler, Valérie Rousseau, David Tibet, and Terry Winters.

I’ve long been a fan of the Strange Attractor and their painstaking work at supporting strange creative endeavors, giving their books the sleek and beautiful physical forms that all good texts deserve. Now that I am slated to release a book with them, I would encourage everyone to support the continuation of a press that will publish oddball writers like me and others. Check out the reward tiers here.

I had the opportunity to visit Mark at the Strange Attractor offices towards the end of April and am heartened that such a publisher still exists in our current cultural climate which (for some reason) seems somewhat hostile to smaller presses. Two recent releases of interest (generously gifted) that give a good idea of the beautiful editions that SAP puts out are Tom Bolton’s Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations and the collection The Megalithic Imperative: A 3rd Stone Anthology. Both of these books are gloriously illustrated and chockful of distinctly English uncanny weirdness. I hold little doubt that the same amount of care will be given to the Ionel Talpazan art book and its accoutrements.

What’s in the news?

Disclosure is finally here. Again. And certainly for the last time. I’ll keep it real with you, this recent news has committed the worst sin of ufology: It’s boring. Boring enough that, unlike previous occasions where the subject has reached national attention, I feel no urge to write a Manifest(uf)o or State of the U(fo)nion. Prior editions of that series of diatribes already cover the significance of this current flurry of interest. There is nothing new or groundbreaking and it arrives at a time when multiple other issues are (rightfully) at the forefront of the American consciousness.

Indeed, even mainstream outlets, which tend to uncritically regurgitate the claims and insinuations of the military and intelligence officials pressing the issue, have seemed unimpressed. “Many” sources that spoke to DefenseScoop’s Brandi Vincent “hinted that the majority of the files included media that’s already been widely disseminated,” with several repeating the old notion that this is a “step towards government transparency.”1 Given the number of steps taken towards this goal and the steps that theoretically remain, one wonders if UFO disclosure is more like a stair climber exercise machine than a trip down to the basement.

Guardian writer Daniel Lavelle opined that: “If there’s no proof of aliens, the president can blame the deep state. If there’s proof, he’s a hero. Either way, it helps his popularity.”2 While I would buy that that’s the administration’s posturing, I’m not sure if the results were what they expected. The releases were so underwhelming that UAP enthusiasts can’t help belying their disappointment and the wider public largely mocked the announcments online as a distraction from a struggling economy, a worsening American quality of life, and broadly unpopular wars of aggression around the globe. To add salt to the wound, President Trump then proceeded to post AI slop portraying himself as the commander of a spaceship, another depicting him meeting an ET at a military base, neither of which added much in the way of credibility to the subject.3

This credibility has been promised since day one by believers and lobbyists and, indeed, legitimization seems like the main overarching goal. General public perception seems lukewarm and, far from being clean and bureaucratic, it’s become increasingly wacky in the hands of Congresspeople Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett. This wackiness is good for people like me who relish in the weirdness and absurdity of the subject, but cannot be good for folks trying to change the bounds of military science and conventional reality. Though maybe future releases will have more to chew on or, at least, provide a hefty distraction that makes the country forget all its ills.

Continually ignored, too, is the deeper complicity of people within the defense establishment, intelligence community, and private contractor space that have willfully given the topic an adrenaline shot 2017 and onward. Was what we saw with the release of these UFO files what they were seeking to accomplish? I imagine that this is not the case, though others will argue that they were tilting at windmills all along anyway.

More interesting, to me, in the paranoiac subset of congressional action is Rep. Luna’s attempt at an MKUltra dog and pony show on Capitol Hill. These scheduled hearings were cancelled amidst a very public dispute over document access wherein Luna accused the CIA of taking boxes of MKUltra and JFK files from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ODNI and the CIA both denied that a raid ever took place, indicative of the fact that a little political kayfabe is in action with this topic.4 Now, MKUltra is a relatively well-documented atrocity that has been public knowledge since the 1970s. Famously, thousands upon thousands of documents were destroyed at the behest of CIA Director Richard Helms prior to the Church Committee. While we only know the tip of the iceberg, that tip is some of the most direct confirmation that the United States intelligence community regularly involved itself in unethical human experimentation and general domestic subversion.

In the picture painted by Luna and others throughout social media, MKUltra is treated as an intangible deep state boogeyman in the vein of the UFO mystery. While the two topics do indeed have somewhat astounding overlaps, MKUltra is simple (and heinous) fact, not ambiguous lights in the sky or anomalous paranormal encounters. It is the deep state, the problem lies in the fact that it’s not the illusory deep state of nationalist imaginations—it’s the real one, the one that aligns itself with the goals of US nationalism. I think the deliberate entanglement of the two subjects, along with other very real instances of domestic covert action, is geared towards turning MKUltra into conspiraslop. This trend has been gradually taking place over the last decade, chiefly as it is covered in podcasts that treat it as equivalent in relevance to Bob Lazar or ancient aliens. My entreaty to readers, although it’s definitely too late: Don’t let that happen.

What have I been reading?

Before I traveled abroad with the books recounted in Reading List #7 in tow, I read a very compelling, short, fictionalized memoir that had slipped my mind. I first heard about this strange text from the YouTube channel Interesting Books Reviewed, which, despite ideological oppositions and their positive coverage of several personalities that Getting Spooked has shat upon, I can’t help but love the videos. Simply put, they have the best book collection on YouTube and even some novel things to say about UFOs, the paranormal, and mind control. Plus, according to their book shopping tutorial, we have roughly the same method of scavenging for gems:

The book in question is Gloria Naylor’s 1996, a fictional work that is heavily influenced by the author’s strange experiences in the titular year. Naylor is most famous for her debut work The Women of Brewster Place, which won the National Book Award in 1983 and was later turned into a TV miniseries for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. After a string of successful novels, she wrote a fictionalized memoir of the nightmare that accosted her in the year 1996, when she found herself the victim of a gangstalking campaign. Incredibly, Naylor reports being targeted by agents of the NSA, DEA, and ADL, all for complaining to a neighbor about a cat defecating in her garden.

That last organization may seem a bit too on the nose, and indeed, Naylor appears aware that her accusations might sound antisemitic. The fictionalized protagonist Gloria at one point writes to her therapist about her targeting by an unruly gang of individuals, noting that “if I were to state my observations that the private vehicles were almost always driven by Jewish Americans, they would label me and anti-Semite to boot.”5 1996 is told under the veil of fiction for this very reason, Naylor is tortured by thoughts, feelings, and impressions that don’t seem to come from her own head—hateful, prejudiced notions beamed in her own interior voice, which picked up a habit inciting her to self-harm. She deals with persistent break-ins, car alarms, and even betrayal by close friends. Suspecting microwave or voice-to-skull technology, sinister agents continue to fill her head with worsening thoughts. She eventually intuits that they have also developed the technology to read her thoughts as well, causing a subconscious war in silence. Portions of the novel are written from the gangstalkers’ perspective, indicating who Naylor pictures when subjected to these cruelties—sometimes these envisioned foes are ludicrous, paranoid stereotypes.

It is in these explicit details, implicating rabbis, antique shop owners, and average car drivers, that the reader begins to worry that schizophrenia is the likely explanation for Naylor’s plight. Through her research into government overreach and domestic surveillance, these paranoid feelings are only further reinforced, a somewhat scathing indictment of the negative mental effects of the surveillance state. (Sidenote: the book begins with a quote from Armen Victorian, to give a sense of the paranoia at play.) Naylor battles these feelings and torments head-on, eventually concluding that the only way to fight the amorphous gang of combatants torturing her is by writing a book about her experiences, under the guise of fiction. In that quest, she appears to have been successful.

Reservations aside, Naylor’s book is fascinating in the fact that she did not lose her narrative voice. Unlike other victims of gangstalking, some of whom have written books on their experiences, Naylor writes a cogent, absorbing, even at times resonant story about suffering this fate.6 As Katie Frank noted at Hobart Pulp:

The thing about this book is that whether you believe her or not, it’s still remarkable. Either she survived harassment by the government using advanced classified technology and emerged with her sanity intact, to create a work of great literature, full of empathy, fearlessness and insight, or she survived an extreme bout of schizophrenia, and then, basically cured herself of it, through writing.7

Indeed, I have never read another book like 1996. The only comparisons that come to mind are Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things, about the authors altered perception amid a battle with schizophrenia before going into spontaneous remission. It is also akin to Whitley Strieber’s Communion in that a talented fiction writer is lending a voice to the gangstalked community much as Strieber had done for alien abductees. Strieber, like Naylor, is a rare literary voice that’s able to relay remarkable and unbelievable events in their life. Belief or disbelief aside, it’s a fascinating portrait into what claimed victims of targeted mind control experience daily.

A final tangent: Naylor is not the only Oprah-promoted author that this paranoid fate befell. Alice Walker, of The Color Purple fame, got in some hot water for, not once, but twice recommending the work of conspiracy writer David Icke. “In posts on her website, she compared the former footballer to Malcolm X and described Human Race Get Off Your Knees as ‘the ultimate reading adventure,’” The Independent reported in 2013.8 Five years later, Walker recommended Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free in a New York Times interview which was met with more criticism.9 I don’t know what it all means, I’m just impressed she was able to actually read an entire David Icke book, let alone two.

What have I been thinking about?

I’m not going to bore readers with a slideshow of my vacation like your weird uncle used to do, but I would like to note some of the weird highlights of my short stint in the UK. In no particular order with (of course) the nearest bookshops pointed out:

• Glastonbury Tor, the impressive hill of Arthurian legend with the oft-renovated remnants of a church tower at its peak is everything the mythology stresses it to be, bursting with aetheric energy. We visited Glastonbury unknowingly during a large renaissance fair which only amplified the weirdness of the already deliberately strange town. Nearby, you can find Courtyard Books, a shop specializing in all things occult that readers of this newsletter could spend hours in. I found a neat first edition of Andrija Puharich’s The Sacred Mushroom (see: The Children’s Crusade). Near the Tor itself, the gorgeous, candle-lit White Spring is another location not to be missed, featuring two different healing springs that offer the closest connection to the subtle energies of the ancients sites.

• The Charles Fort historical marker, located along Marchmont Street in London, gives Fortean nerds like me an opportunity to see the flat where the Prophet of the Unexplained worked and lived throughout the 1920s. Across the street, one can wander over to Skoob Books, a location I didn’t get to spend much time in, but which has a wide array of used texts in a delightfully cramped space.

• The Avebury stone circles—more impressive and quieter than the more popular Stonehenge monument—are a treat to see in person. A calming walk through a countryside dotted with mysterious stone monuments and grazing sheep is worth your while, only occasionally interrupted by activity from one of the many nearby RAF bases. The Henge Shop is in the center of town, offering mystical artifacts and books about the strange phenomena surrounding these ancient sites. I snagged a copy of Tompkins and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants which I had been scouring used book shops for—it’s kismet. Plus, if you’re in the neighborhood, the prehistoric mound Silbury Hill is right nearby, an awe-inducing sight jutting out of the Wiltshire countryside.

• London also has several specialty bookstores, interested in the occult, magick, and the fringe. Emily and I had the most luck at Watkins Books and The Atlantis Bookshop, both longstanding institutions with stock that will baffle. I found a copy of Eileen Buckle’s The Scoriton Mystery with its beautiful cover art intact at Watkins. At Atlantis, I gave in to temptation and splurged on a four-volume set of Eric Dingwall’s Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena, a historical survey of 19th century hypnotic techniques around the world. I intend to use these volumes as preparation while I await Christopher Josiffe’s upcoming exploration into Dingwall’s strange career in psychical research.

• Lightning round: Great to meet friend of the publication Smith, whose Infraterran page I am told will eventually have writing of interest to GS readers. The Long Man of Wilmington is another mysterious hillside glyph whose history is contested, but it’s another impressive site to behold. The entire east coast of Kent is a beautiful area that I’ve never seen anything like: Best seen through birdwatching at Rye Harbor or making the trek to the remains of experimental WWI sound mirrors near Dungeness.

As always, thank you for reading Getting Spooked. I am a reader-supported publication, so if you enjoy this research and commentary on the paranormal and parapolitical, consider subscribing, sharing articles with others, or upgrading to a paid subscription. This is not without its benefits: Paid members gain access to other Cystic Detective Updates like this one, archived articles, special podcast episodes, and the ability to ask questions for Q&As. It is the best way to directly support the continuation of this publication and my thanks goes out to anyone who has done so.

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Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

Works referenced (roughly in order of mention or relevance):

Communion, 1989, dir. Philippe Mora

Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Avon Books, 1987. https://archive.org/details/communion-a-true-story-whitley-strieber-z-library/.

Programmed to Chill archive

Horsley, Jasun. Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation. London: Aeon Books, 2018. https://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Infinity-Engineering-Psychology-Fragmentation/dp/1911597051.

Dumsday, Travis. “Alien Abduction as Enlightenment: Whitley Strieber’s Trauma-Fueled Spirituality.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 38, no. 1. 2026. https://online.ucpress.edu/jrpc/article/38/1/50/214306/Alien-Abduction-as-EnlightenmentWhitley-Strieber-s.

Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf aka Howling II: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch, 1985, dir. Philippe Mora

The Beast Within, 1982, dir. Philippe Mora

Swastika, 1973, dir. Philippe Mora

“The Wolfen, The Hunger, The Night Church, Black Magic.” Beyond Communion. http://www.beyondcommunion.com/wolfenhunger.html. (Original “about the author” section for Wolfen reprinted.)

Sunshine, Spencer. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. London and New York: Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Neo-Nazi-Terrorism-and-Countercultural-Fascism-The-Origins-and-Afterlife-of-James-Masons-Siege/Sunshine/p/book/9780367190606.

SMiles Lewis at the Anomaly Archives

Strieber, Whitley. “The Boy in the Box.” Unknown Country. 14 March 2003. https://unknowncountry.com/whitleys-journal/the-boy-in-the-box/.

Martin Cannon’s Strange Tales

Conroy, Ed. Report on Communion: The Facts Behind the Most Controversial True Story of Our Time. New York: Avon Books, 1989. https://archive.org/details/reportoncommunio00conr_0.

Strieber, Whitley. Black Magic: An Occult Thriller. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1982. https://www.amazon.com/Black-Magic-Whitley-Strieber/dp/0688010210.

“Remote Viewing as Intelligence Laundering: In Forbidden Science Dispatches #11, we examine the befuddling history of remote viewing, its ties to Scientology and MKUltra, and how its true intel value may remain occulted or obscured.” (Getting Spooked)

“Christopher Bledsoe and the UFO Cult of Intelligence, Pt. 7: Überspook Col. John B. Alexander, the Pope Incident, the Cult of Intelligence, the MILAB Melee, Information Warfare, and Non-Lethal Weapons.” (Getting Spooked)

UPI. “Paper in Moscow Links 3 U.S. Correspondents to the C.I.A.” The New York Times. 26 May 1976. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/26/archives/paper-in-moscow-links-3-us-correspondent-to-the-cia.html.

Strieber, Whitley and Jeffrey J. Kripal. The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained. New York: TarcherPerigree, 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Super-Natural-New-Vision-Unexplained/dp/1101982322.

“Programmed to Chill - Premium Episode 26: ‘Why is everything just two steps removed from Jonestown?’ An Exploration into Mothman, the Hill Abductions, the Hopkinsville Goblins, Hypnosis, and Related Psychological Operations, feat. Tanner Boyle.” (Getting Spooked)

The MKUltra Subproject that mentioned both highway hypnosis and sleep paralysis as possible vectors for induction of hypnotic states was Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West’s Subproject 43: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/MKULTRA%20SUBPROJECT%2043%20%20%281%5B8145466%5D.pdf.

“The strange tale of Dr Narut.” Sunday Times, 6 July 1975, pp. 1+. The Sunday Times Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/FP1801054514/STHA?u=bcptstothepast&sid=bookmark-STHA&pg=1&xid=253725ee.

Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812213058/the-terror-that-comes-in-the-night/.

Horsley, Jasun. The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. London: Aeon Books, 2019. https://www.amazon.com/Vice-Kings-Socialism-Revolution-Engineered/dp/1911597043.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1928. https://archive.org/details/comingofageinsam00mead.

Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. https://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=95.

Changing Images of Man: Prepared by the Center for the Study of Social Policy/SRI International. ed. O.W. Markley & Willis W. Harman. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982. https://archive.org/details/changingimagesof00camprich.

Strieber, Whitley. “Pain.” Cutting Edge, ed. Dennis Etchison. New York: Doubleday, 1986. https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Edge-Dennis-Etchison/dp/0385234309.

Press-Reynolds, Kieran. “TikTok Brainrot Is Normalizing Alt-Right Ideologies.” Pitchfork. 30 April 2025. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/tiktok-brainrot-is-normalizing-alt-right-ideologies/.

“Nightcore in Hyperborea: An Empirical Study of Audiovisual Stimuli in Esoteric White Supremacist Content on Social Media.” Master’s thesis, University of Glasgow, July 2025. https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/207394/120518908.pdf.

Tran, Emi Tuyetnhi. “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” 30 July 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/race-change-to-another-trend-online-rcna93759.

Purtill, Corinne. “RFK Jr. clears path for minors’ use of tanning beds, much to the dismay of dermatologists.” Los Angeles Times. 6 May 2026. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-05-06/rfk-hands-major-win-to-indoor-tanning-industry-to-dermatologists-dismay.

Strieber, Whitley. The Fourth Mind. New York: Walker & Collier Publishers, 2025. https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Mind-Whitley-Strieber/dp/B0DS9R3FQT.

“#89. The Skull Boys s02e04 ‘Atlantis of the Goths.’” The Return of the Repressed. 4 March 2026. https://www.patreon.com/posts/89-skull-boys-of-152265902.

Terry, Maury. The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into a Dangerous Satanic Cult. London: Diamond Books, 1987. https://archive.org/details/ultimateevil0000terr.

Sanders, Ed. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1971. https://archive.org/details/familystoryofcha00sandrich.

Downard, James Shelby. “King-Kill/33°” in Apocalypse Culture, ed. Adam Parfrey. New York: Amok Press, 1987. https://archive.org/details/apocalypsecultur00parf.

“An Introduction to James Shelby Downard.” YouTube, uploaded by Strange As It Seems, 6 January 2025. Link.

Downard, James Shelby, Adam Gorightly, Richard B. Spence. Stalking The Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard. Self-published, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Great-Whore-Writings-Downard/dp/B0BTRQ3GNZ.

Coleman, Loren. “Sirius Rising In the Days of Synchromysticism.” Twilight Language. 30 March 2018. https://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2018/03/Sirius-Rising.html.

J Wilderness (@JWilderness). “Adam Parfrey - founder of Feral House (and Abraxas suslord) - in full Process Church of the Final Judgement regalia. These shots appear to be from a 2009 Sabbath Assembly ritual in Seattle.” Twitter, 5 May 2026. Link. (On Substack at J Wilderness.)

Downard, James Shelby. The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth: 1913-1935, ed. Elana Freeland. Port Townsend: Feral House, 2006. https://www.amazon.com/Carnivals-Life-Death-Profane-1913-1935/dp/1932595155.

Freeland, Elana. Under an Ionized Sky: From Chemtrails to Space Fence Lockdown. Port Townsend: Feral House, 2018. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Ionized-Sky-Chemtrails-Lockdown/dp/1627310533.

Parfrey, Adam. “Latter-Day Lycanthropy” in Apocalypse Culture, ed. Adam Parfrey. New York: Amok Press, 1987. https://archive.org/details/apocalypsecultur00parf.

Melore, Chris. “Religious leaders told ‘prepare now’ for UFO disclosure to unleash Bible-changing revelations.” The Daily Mail. 5 May 2026. https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15792747/religious-leaders-ufo-disclosure-bible.html.

Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex). “When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment…” Twitter, 17 April 2026. Link.

Arthur. “Communion or Concoction?” Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy. 5 May 2019. https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/communion-or-concoction/.

Music:

The Out of Limits - “The Reptoid Connection”

Walter Wanderley - “Summer Samba (So Nice)”

Steve Hillman - “Citadel Parts 1 & 2”

Emerald Web - “Diamond Passage”

Contact:

gettingspooked@protonmail.com

Twitter

Instagram

Bluesky

It’s true, I will be visiting the grand ol’ UK so there will be a short pause in Getting Spooked posts, both written and audio. But don’t feel abandoned—I’m not going out for milk and cigarettes never to return. The Cystic Detective is incorrigible and pathologically unable to quit. Besides, when I’m back in the States, the follow-up to “The Communionist Manifesto: Preamble” will finally come to fruition. Norm E. Guy, Reid, and yours truly are intending to cook up something fierce.

In the meantime, I engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with friends of the newsletter, Subliminal Jihad, where we talked about all manner of topics ufological, Fortean, and parapolitical. It’s nearly four hours of rabbit holes sure to whet your appetite for at least a bit:

I’ve also been dropping in on various meetings of the Wayward Sons book group with Expanding Frontiers Research, one of the most important collectives in modern ufology led by Erica Lukes and Jack Brewer. The group reads and discusses Brewer’s highly relevant book, Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC, which every interested party should check out. Brewer & company ponder the inordinate number of intelligence personnel within the early flying saucer group, the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and have quite interesting insights. I provide some occasionally insightful input and a bushel of poorly timed jokes. Nevertheless, viewers looking for a Getting Spooked fix will find the book and accompanying discussion worth consideration:

Lastly, if you’re a UK local, it’s a good opportunity to catch the 1980 Unarius film The Arrival at The Horse Hospital in London, Thursday, April 23^rd at 7pm GMT. Following the screening, Mark Pilkington (a great ufological thinker and a key influence on my own work) and yours truly will then have a chat about the Unarius group, the contactee movement, and modern ufology. It’s sure to be barnstormer of a screening and a lively conversation. Buy tickets here, the time is coming soon.

As the time of my departure nears, I wanted to provide a quick reading list of what I’m packing in my bags. Lately, I’ve been coming and going from various tendrils that connect to ufology and the paranormal. Whether that be the JFK assassination, Danny Casolaro’s Octopus conspiracy, or the many psychological operations conducted by the intelligence community, there are untold stories of fringe networks and games of shadows that say more about the subject matter than any ghosts, ghouls, or extraterrestrials. These are the real phantasms the lurk at the edges of the fringe, keeping one foot assuredly placed within the solid state worlds of intelligence activity and the halls of power. Mind you, ghosts, ghouls, and extraterrestrials can exist separately if they so desire, but we’re dealing with flesh and blood actors that nevertheless seem to be, in many respects, strangely intangible.

Hougan, Jim. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 1984.

Friend of the publication and Gnomechat participant, Bradley, has recently been reading Jim Hougan’s Spooks, an excellent 1978 book on the intersection between big business and the American intelligence community. I’ve used it as a key resource in the past, but fresh off some of my JFK-induced fervor, I watched the spiritual sequel, Oliver Stone’s 1995 film Nixon. It’s not nearly as good as its predecessor but is still an interesting film and inspired me to start reading Hougan’s Spooks follow-up, Secret Agenda. This book covers the intelligence operatives surrounding Watergate and the Nixon camp and posits alternative readings of the landmark American historical event. Particularly, after reading Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins and considering purported electronics expert Gordon Novel’s claims of working at CIA operative E. Howard Hunt’s cut-out corporation Double Chek in Miami, I’m curious to learn more about Hunt’s life and involvement in covert activities.1 Luckily for me, Hougan is an engaging writer, hopefully engaging enough for a long flight.

This read continues research threads begun here:

Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. Walterville: TrineDay, 2010.

I’ve referenced Cheri Seymour’s research often in Getting Spooked articles because there’s probably not a better overview of the many people, places, and events that comprise the Octopus conspiracy. Of course, you never really know who to believe at any given time, but no one save for Seymour has documented so thoroughly the words and supposed deeds of the shadowy operatives who entered the life of writer Danny Casolaro before his untimely death. Michael Riconoscuito, Robert Booth Nichols, John Philip Nichols, and others are all examined within the book, which contains loose drippings of info on these slippery personalities. I’ve read portions of the book in chunks, probably reading the whole thing piecemeal, but in this front-to-back read-through, I intend to use a magnifying glass to look into the military technologies the group claimed to be involved with. More than that, I’m hoping to set up some background research on individuals appearing in memos from the Cabazon Arms operation, one of the main nexuses that connected Octopus conspirators together. Unfortunately, once the cast of characters started to associating with ufology, the Bob Lazar story, and the underground base craze, the “nexus (…) to a lesser extent (…) also included Gordon Novel,” according to Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith.2 Novel seems to lurk not too far away from whatever spooky action one looks into, and it bears considering how much myth-making he was doing versus how involved in these operations he may have been.

This read continues research threads begun here:

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 2013.

Like The Last Circle, I’ve probably cumulatively read Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War completely but never cover to cover. The more I examine the UFO topic, even other paranormal subjects tangentially related, I find myself wondering how often they were used as cultural touchstones throughout the Cold War: Reorienting externalities into internal phenomena, concealing classified tech and intelligence activity, and perhaps even serving as a springboard to espionage. Countless art collectives and writing groups had moles, informants, and wreckers, and with a topic as uniquely “Cold War” as ufology, I doubt the community was spared this fate. (See the aforementioned Jack Brewer’s Wayward Sons for hints of this activity within the UFO research community.) Hence, why I am revisiting Saunders’ impressive work, which documents the activities of the CIA, backers in American business, and the various cut-out organizations who sought to establish American cultural excellence and root out any lingering semblance of the pinko threat from the US creative landscape. I’ve been obsessed with Budd Hopkins’ appearance in this text, his associations with abstract expressionist artists and social scenes, and his later attempts at receiving funding from the Rockefellers for abduction research—just a few decades removed from the Rockefellers assisting with the CIA’s propaganda and psychological warfare effort before, during, and after WWII. There is something profound in these details and I hope to work out what that is more succinctly.

This read continues research threads begun here:

Thumbnail art is René Magritte’s The comic spirit, 1927.

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Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

From the Strange Attractor announcement:

Shot on a shoestring budget by the San Diego-based Unarius Academy of Science in the late 1970s, The Arrival is a science fiction religious epic in miniature. With a mind and time-bending plot, dazzling special effects a soundtrack performed on home-made synthesisers, it’s a true one off in the history of cult cinema. If ABBA and Ed Wood had joined forces with Douglas Trumbull, it might look something like this.

That it also happens to be a recruiting film for one of the most colourful spiritual movements to emerge from post WWII America, and its fascination with flying saucers, makes it all the more remarkable.

As an expression of America’s UFO culture, it stands in luminous contrast to the darker, paranoiac, conspiratorial turn that the field would take in the 1980s, which also manifests in the current wave of interest in the phenomenon.

With the blessing of the Unarius Academy, and film maker Jodie Wille, whose documentary about Unarius, Welcome Space Brothers, is produced by Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision, we’re thrilled to be screening a newly remastered edition of this joyful expression of cosmic optimism.

Following the screening, SAP’s Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men, will be in conversation with Tanner F. Boyle, author of the brilliant para-fortean blog – and forthcoming SAP title – Getting Spooked, visiting the UK from his native Pittsburgh, USA.

You can find further details and purchase tickets on The Horse Hospital’s website.

As the extraterrestrials are sometimes bound to say…

And for those curious enough for some preparatory viewing:

Read more

Bradley W Pl…

Read more

Norm’s notes:

Edwards, Joe. “Bigfoot Expert Details Excitement After Wave of Ohio Sightings.” Newsweek. 12 March 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/bigfoot-expert-details-excitement-after-wave-of-ohio-sightings-11665589.

Hurley, Graham. “Monkey mayhem in South Carolina after 43 primates escape research facility.” CNN. 9 November 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/07/us/south-carolina-monkeys-escape.

Ensign-Lewis, Kate. “Is Cain Bigfoot? The truth behind 5 Latter-day Saint folklore stories.” LDS Daily. https://www.ldsliving.com/is-cain-bigfoot-the-truth-behind-5-mormon-folklore-stories/s/64534.

Schultz, Isaac. “The World’s Most Famous Ghost Ship Is an Enduring Symbol of Empire.” Atlas Obscura. 24 October 2019. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-flying-dutchman-explained.

Owens, Lance S. “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27, no 3. Fall 1994. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V27N03_131.pdf.

Subliminal Jihad. “[#239] GREAT EGGSPECTATIONS, Part One: UAP Disclosure, AI Gods, & the Return of The Lady.” 14 March 2025. https://www.patreon.com/posts/239-great-part-124356921.

Karriker, Wanda, Thorsten Becker, Carol Rut, and Bettina Overcamp. “Findings from the 2007 Extreme Abuse Survey (EAS) Series.” End Ritual Abuse. 2015. https://endritualabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Findings-from-the-2007-EAS-Series-June-25-2016.pdf.

Sandulescu, Jacques. Donbas. New York: Van Rees Press, 1968. https://archive.org/details/donbas00sand/.

’s notes:

“Was the Myakka Skunk Ape Real or a Hoax?” YouTube, uploaded by Beige Frequency, 28 June 2023. Link.

Williams, Angela and Erin Lowrey. “Mississippi officials hunt for loose monkeys after crash.” 29 October 2025. https://www.wapt.com/article/tulane-university-monkeys-escape-from-jasper-county-crash/69194319.

Limehouse, Jonathan. “Multiple monkeys on the loose in St. Louis, health officials say.” USA Today. 10 January 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/pets-animals/2026/01/10/monkeys-loose-st-louis/88118088007/.

Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Avon Books, 1987. https://archive.org/details/communion-a-true-story-whitley-strieber-z-library/.

Communion, 1989, dir. Philippe Mora

Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf aka Howling II: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch, 1985, dir. Philippe Mora

Howling III: The Marsupials, 1987, dir. Philippe Mora

Denton, Sally. The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land. New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2022. https://www.amazon.com/Colony-Faith-Blood-Promised-Land/dp/163149807X.

“The Cultural Cold War and Alien Abduction: Budd Hopkins, Abstract Expressionism, Hypnotic Regression, Screen Memories, American Exceptionalism, and Recurrent Problematic Patronage in the Arts and Sciences.” (Getting Spooked)

Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2001. https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Whitley%20Strieber%20-%20The%20Key.pdf.

“Christopher Bledsoe and the UFO Cult of Intelligence.” (Getting Spooked)

“Reader Requests #1: Wendelle C. Stevens: Bringing Meier to America & the Uncomfortable Truth of Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens.” (Getting Spooked)

“Reader Requests #2: Return to Wendelle C. Stevens: The Huckster, the Pedophile, and the Fascist.” (Getting Spooked)

Strieber, Whitley. “Pain.” Cutting Edge, ed. Dennis Etchison. New York: Doubleday, 1986. https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Edge-Dennis-Etchison/dp/0385234309.

Horsley, Jasun. Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation. London: Aeon Books, 2018. https://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Infinity-Engineering-Psychology-Fragmentation/dp/1911597051.

Day, James. The Mad Bishops: The Hunt for Earl Anglin James and His Assassin Brethren. Walterville: Trine Day, 2023. https://trineday.myshopify.com/products/mad-bishops-the-hunt-for-earl-anglin-james-and-his-assassin-brethren.

“Wake up in Chinese #chinese #shorts.” YouTube, uploaded by Cynthia teach Chinese, 20 March 2022. Link.

Music:

The Out of Limits - “The Reptoid Connection”

Walter Wanderley - “Summer Samba (So Nice)”

Alien Planetscapes - “Soft Martian”

Contact:

gettingspooked@protonmail.com

Twitter

Instagram

Bluesky

i. Introduction: A Salty Salute

Guided By Voices, a lo-fi indie rock project led by frontman Robert Pollard, were far from the mainstream cultural consciousness until 1994 with their cult hit album, Bee Thousand. Pollard was a Dayton elementary school teacher and former star athlete. He was 36 years old when the album released, a highly unusual age for a rock star to have their breakout. In the decade earlier, he tried and failed to get the band some notoriety, securing small loans from banks to finance the first five albums of GBV’s existence. Now, blessed with a record deal from Scat, a subsidiary of Matador Records, the pieces seemed to be falling into place. However, as Woodworth notes, “there’s nothing formulaic about Guided By Voices’ music or their move from invisibility to relevance.”1 It is an understatement to say that GBV did not fit the mold of the typical 1990s indie rock group, they were a different breed of creative workers altogether. This love letter of sorts examines GBV as an oddity within the indie rock scene and the musical economy altogether, balancing between the band’s mythos as a rags-to-rock-riches parable and a tale of immense luck in an uninviting creative landscape.

Through Matt Stahl’s work on 1990s indie rockumentaries, GBV’s unconventional rise and fall from popularity will be better contextualized. Stahl sees the rockumentary as a medium that “engages and produces narratives that interweave discourses of popular music and political and economic autonomy with themes of musical professionalization, self-actualization, and the achievement of social mobility.”2 Further, GBV actually had a rockumentary made about them, Banks Tarver’s Guided By Voices: Watch Me Jumpstart, which does not quite fit the mold that Stahl outlines while still giving a window into GBV’s journey to recognition. The band could certainly be considered a group representative of the upward mobility rock ‘n’ roll story but I hope to complicate this matter by exploring GBV’s career, lyrics, and rockumentary as a departure from the bands that Stahl writes of.

To these ends, affect theory, particularly Lauren Berlant’s writings on “cruel optimism,” will provide further methods for analyzing GBV’s personal history and songwriting. Affect theory is not a totally novel way to examine GBV; Woodworth noted the affective power of Bee Thousand in particular, describing it as a record that encompassed “so many human states and emotional realities that no single story could define it or give it a calming, false name.”3 The affect among the many I wish to elucidate from GBV’s history and work is that of desperation, disillusionment and working-class depression—particularly in relation to Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” English academic Hua Hsu gives helpful insight on Berlant’s notion of this term:

We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author. But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness—a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending. For all that, we keep on hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living.4

In the case of Guided By Voices, cruel optimism pervaded their early days: Time, money, and intense creative work did not blossom into a success story. When the band reached moderate success, it was largely through luck. Even later, when the band was able to achieve a major record deal, Pollard’s disillusionment of an industry that took away creative control was equally dissatisfactory. Cruel optimism and disillusionment are illustrated through their songs and business decisions, as Pollard attempted to salvage his artistic vision in an unwelcoming local and national music industry.

ii. Dayton, Ohio circa 19 Something and 5: The Early Days

Guided By Voices was always an artistic project of cruel optimism. As Cullen writes: “Making is affected by the artists relationship to material. The material the artist can afford or that they can find, material they know how to process or the kind of scale they are able to work on due to space and resources.”5 The scale of resources is severely skewed in creative industries, unable to meet the standards needed of the “good life fantasy,” though the optimism still remains. GBV’s materials of creative production were simple: After borrowing money for an early EP (Forever Since Breakfast) that sounds like R.E.M., Pollard ditched the polished college rock aesthetic in favor of a gritty, lo-fi sound. All the band needed was a four-track recorder and a basement or garage. Even after the vinyl was pressed for the band’s fifth album, Propeller, Pollard and the band made album covers out of whatever they could find around—hand decorated with stencils, bargain bin album covers, even beer cases.

The aesthetic qualities that may have arisen out of budget limitations eventually became the easiest way for Pollard to record music—the patchwork, lo-fi sound was the perfect canvas for the terse, powerful pop songs that were in his head. Yet music theorist Marianne Tatom notes that “Pollard suggests that the lo-fi traits prized by early fans had little to do with his own vision of the band’s sound,” further illustrating the connection of GBV’s music to available materials.6 Despite this limitation, the lo-fi aesthetic was a huge draw during the burgeoning lo-fi scene of the 1990s. Novara and Henry note that the band was “known for intelligent songs that pushed the limits of the lo-fi subgenre.” They found this especially true in the case of Bee Thousand: “With abundant tape hiss, amplifier buzz, feedback, and underproduced instruments, the recording process creates a sonic design equal in importance to the actual songwriting.”7 What was initially a product of convenience and necessity became a desired aesthetic. The subject matter of their lyrics, combined with this undoubtedly down-to-earth aesthetic, transformed their music into a workingman’s rock ‘n’ roll. “This is the sound of transforming everyday realities,” Woodworth writes of Bee Thousand. “Sticking gold stars on fourth-graders’ papers, shuttling the kids to practice, paying the interminable mortgage, friction with the folks—while always keeping those realities before us, however transformed they become in the process.”8

GBV is also often associated with their hometown of Dayton, Ohio—a location that Pollard has a love-hate relationship with. Biographer Matthew Cutter notes that it took decades for Pollard’s band to gain any traction or positive publicity in Dayton. Yet Pollard has always lived in his hometown, a location that could be an impediment, as important as it eventually became GBV’s reputation. Harper writes that “their geographical isolation (…) was seen as a major cause of their authenticity. One writer compared them to a ‘tribe that had no previous contact with civilization.’”9 Even Pollard hides his “hick” Dayton accent in a false British vocal intonation because he learned to sing from Beatles records.10 The gritty bleakness of the industrial Midwest was equally affecting for Pollard—GBV’s fourth album, Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, was a loose concept album about an alcoholic, presumably from Dayton, whose crutch eventually lands him in jail. The album is perhaps the best representative in GBV’s oeuvre of Midwest depression and desperation. From the track “Drinker’s Peace,” a love ballad to alcohol:

My life was dirt, but you seemed to make it cleaner / Reduced my felony to a misdemeanor / When I feel sick, you’re an antibiotic / Organized my world when it was pointless and chaotic / I get a contact buzz / Can’t remember what the problem was / I find it hard to even care / Life was too real until you got there.11

Just like Dayton, the band has a love-hate relationship with alcohol. GBV’s live shows have historically been the site of amazing feats of drinking on the band’s part, but Same Place the Fly Got Smashed reveals alcohol as a complex topic within the band’s mythology. It clouds out the miserable world around them and seems to spark creativity, but “Drinker’s Peace” reveals the tonic to be more of salve for the situation the band finds themselves in, unable to escape the place that is both home and prison. Berlant writes:

What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.12

Such a description of the cruel attachment concept represents GBV’s relationship to alcohol and to Dayton well. On Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, the affect toward alcohol ranges from a needed release from monotony (and welcome addition to the music-making process) to a powerful force of self-destruction.

Dayton itself would serve as inspiration on future releases. The song “Dayton, Ohio—19 Something and 5” appeared on the 1996 fanclub-only release, Tonics and Twisted Chasers. The song is a reference to the 1972 Randy Newman piano ballad, “Dayton, Ohio 1903,” which reminisces upon an idyllic Dayton of the early 1900s. Pollard and Sprout’s version evokes a contemporary Dayton in a manner equally idyllic, but somberly tongue-in-cheek:

Isn’t it great to exist at this point in time? / Where the produce is rotten but no one’s forgotten / On strawberry Philadelphia Drive / Children in the sprinkler, junkies on the corner, / The smell of fried foods and pure hot tar / Man, you needn’t travel far to feel completely alive.13

Pollard ended a 2000 live recording of the song by exclaiming, “that’s kind of a sad song (…), huh?” The listener is cued in on how desperate the band is to escape the bleak everyday life of Dayton, while still appreciating it as their home. This topic is regular fodder for GBV, especially in Pollard’s minimalist power ballads. From “If We Wait”:

There’s some food upon the table boys / and if you have ever seen me flying / then you know that I am weak / and you are free to take me downstairs / away from cares. / I’ll be with you in the morning, boys / ‘cause you know that if we wait / for our time / we’ll all be dead.14

Pollard wails out the final lines, croaking them out as if in pain, and the listener gets a clear sense of desperation from Pollard with regard to his desire for success in the musical economy. Further tracks like “He’s the Uncle” see Pollard further worrying about running out of time before making the creative mark he wanted to (“and I am getting old aren’t I?”).15 Even immediately after the band’s signing with the semipro Scat Records, other songs seem to display a cynicism at the prospect of the record deal’s longevity. On “Wandering Boy Poet” from Vampire on Titus:

Dream on child of change / throw your javelin through the sun / pierce the heart of everyone / though we push to slave the days / this is not reality / this is just formality / the cup is only being filled / for the chance to have it spilled / flowing just like the day / sailing just like the days.16

“Wandering Boy Poet” presents several affective facets of GBV’s music in less than a minute of runtime. There is a sense of the aforementioned Midwestern desperation in the vocalist’s plea to keep dreaming despite the “child of change” slaving the days away. Yet this desperation is matched by dread, anxiety, and a wariness of good fortune lasting. As often as GBV puts on a bombastic swagger, their music is not without its tender moments. Pollard is emotionally in tune with everyday life in his hometown, pummeled with criticisms that the band could never “make it,” because they were too old and too weird for the 90s indie rock audiences. While responding to these criticisms with stubborn defiance on albums like Propeller (“And hey, let’s throw the great party / Today for the rest of our lives”), Pollard also seems aware that the band could never make it (“You see it falling and now it’s crumbling / To the cold, unforgivable ground / You had a hand in it”).17 At the same time, tracks on Propeller imply that there is the ability to live out the rock star dream, even if it is in music recorded on a 4-track in a friend’s basement. From “Metal Mothers”:

Tune in rock star, / there’s no dark spot / running around your face / You find time to get laid, / you find ways to get paid. / You don’t see no / busted rain clouds / watering up your days / And so set in your ways / and so fixed in your gaze.18

Propeller was the metaphorical American dream of indie rock records. Pollard intended it to be a final record, a farewell party with his music buddies, with no expectations of higher reward. These intentions were exceeded beyond belief when Pete Jamison, a friend of the band, marketed the album for him, eventually getting the attention of Robert Griffin, an executive at a Matador Records subsidiary. With this shift to minor industry recognition, GBV’s toe was dipped into the larger American music economy.

iii. Interlude: “I Write Music for Soundtracks Now”

Banks Tarver’s Guided By Voices: Watch Me Jumpstart was filmed from 1994 to 1995—the period immediately after the band’s success with Bee Thousand, then in the period prior to and after the release of the follow-up Alien Lanes. The film, as in GBV’s constant style, is unconventional, bursting with creativity, and short. It does not “construct (…) a life in which work is the authentic expression of a self autonomously aligned with global entertainment capital,” as Matt Stahl writes, because GBV were barely beginning their brush with stardom.19 This was a stage in the band’s career when the musical economy was absent from their minds. Tarver’s film instead views its subject more like outsider artists—normal middle-aged Midwesterners who have an eccentric hobby. While most of the footage is done in a black-and-white cinema verité style, it is cut and interspliced with homemade music videos, interviews in color, and experimental footage combined with sound bites of Pollard’s lyrics—editing not dissimilar from early GBV albums. Concert footage is not at the forefront, no record executives make an appearance, and the majority of the film is dedicated to observing Pollard and GBV’s creative process as they write lyrics, creates album covers, and record tracks in various basements and garages across Dayton. The documentary has an intense focus on the Ohioan city, with countless shots focused on the snow-covered industrial Midwest landscape. Drummer Kevin Fennell remarks that it was easier to be creative in Dayton “because anything you do is new.”20 Tarver also makes a point of highlighting a drive-thru beer vendor, further associating GBV’s legend with Dayton and alcohol.

Watch Me Jumpstart makes a concentrated effort to illustrate GBV as separate from the overall music industry. This separation is highlighted by a brief scene in which GBV fight with the band Picasso Trigger after a dispute regarding top billing. After GBV gets kicked out for booing Picasso Trigger, a manager of the venue remarks that “shitty people like that give industry people a bad name,” to which Pollard’s brother Jim responds “see ya later sideburns!” before the van drives off. This moment is played for humor, with GBV packed in one small van like a high school garage band who got booted from an appearance at prom. Combined with Tarver’s other footage, showing recording and production done by the band themselves, Tarver represents GBV as a non-industry entity, willfully independent and anti-establishment. The documentary ends with Pollard asserting that it has never been about the money, he is just making what he thinks sounds good. These motivations seemed to shift somewhat in the years that followed, but Pollard fought to regain control of his creative work wholeheartedly. As Stahl writes, “most working people—no matter how innovative, no matter how autonomous—still have nothing to sell but their skins.”21

iii. I Am Produced / An Unmarketed Product: The TVT Deal

Berlant writes that optimism is a multifaceted and varied concept: “Because optimism is ambitious, at any moment it might feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity, the whole gamut from the sly neutrality of browsing the aisles to excitement at the prospect of ‘the change that’s gonna come.’”22 Pollard and GBV were always in a perpetual state of cruel optimism, as Berlant envisions it, even when they had resorted to making music only for themselves. These moments of cruel optimism stem from a mixture of desperation in their conventional working-class lives in Dayton and confidence in their own creative output. On their initial “last hurrah,” Propeller, Pollard fuses the “sly neutrality” of driving a car with bombastic, if unwarranted, optimism in “Quality of Armor”: “Oh, yeah, I’m going to drive my car / Oh, yeah, I’m going to go real far / Beyond the shadow of a doubt / Beyond the power of your clout / Beyond the secret bogus world.”23 The swagger in “Quality of Armor” appears almost tongue-in-cheek for a musical project that was coming to an end. An optimism against all odds is also reflected in the opening moment of Propeller where participants in an imitation crowd chant “GBV! GBV!” as if the band were a fixture of rock ‘n’ roll. Early GBV is an almost perfect representation of Berlant’s concept, mixing the dread, anxiety, and monotony of everyday life in a nameless Midwestern city with the whimsical curiosity of a creative mind wanting more.

Even after GBV’s record deal with Scat/Matador, Pollard’s lyrics express this combination of affects. The opening lines of “Bright Paper Werewolves” are a sonic word scramble, a perhaps meaningless poetry: “Come on, polluted eyeballs / Stop scouting out the field / Jump up, bright paper werewolves / And everybody everywhere.” After a tonal shift, the closing lines are pervaded with a sense of anxiety, rejecting traditional optimism for an apprehension about the band’s security in the musical economy: “They want to get out of here / but they can’t find the exits / They cling to the cinema / and they can’t find security / Then they finally got recognized / So they left in obscurity and misery.”24 Berlant warns that optimism can equally be put forth toward “the change that is not going to come.”25 Pollard seems knowledgeable of this possibility in “Bright Paper Werewolves,” but nevertheless pushed forward with his ambitions in the musical economy.

After Alien Lanes, GBV’s first record with Scat’s parent company, Matador, the band’s fortunes seemed to only go up. Despite a milder response to their records after Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, GBV was eventually signed to a major label, TVT (a subsidiary of Sony Records), and released their most divisive album in 1999’s Do the Collapse. Pollard, while also wanting to find success in the music industry, illustrated anxieties about the prospect in earlier releases. On Mag Earwhig!, the Matador album that preceded Do the Collapse, Pollard included the trudging art rock piece, “I Am Produced”—a song more reminiscent of Genesis’ “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging” than other indie rock. The lyrics of both songs describe human beings packaged like vulgar commodities on a production line: “I am pressed, printed, stomped, and strategically removed / I am everybody / Insane without innocence, I am trapped, tricked, packaged / And shipped out / I am produced.”26 An economic view of musicmaking was expressly anathema to Pollard.

Even on Do the Collapse, Pollard’s songs seem to indicate a dissatisfaction or wariness of the music industry he had become a part of—as if he was already regretting the deal while writing the album. From the closing track, “An Unmarketed Product”: “Well, I can give you credit / Suitable and custom-tailored / And if you have any luck / You’ll get ahead, before you’re dead.”27 Pollard’s reservation while within the music industry echo his anxieties outside of it. The line “you’ll get ahead, before you’re dead,” (which seems to mimic the promises of music executives) is eerily reminiscent of Pollard’s earlier exclamation that if the band waited for their “time,” they would “all be dead.”

Furthermore, Pollard never truly exiled himself from the indie rock scene, illustrating a reservation to make a full dive into stardom with TVT. The same year that Do the Collapse was released, GBV fans saw the beginning of Pollard’s Fading Captain Series, a record label of self-released albums and EPs that Pollard had complete creative control over. Among the releases were his third solo album Kid Marine, a collection of experimental early tracks by a fictional called Nightwalker, and a 100-song boxset of outtakes and demos titled Suitcase: Failed Experiments & Trashed Aircraft. The latter was the first of 4 boxsets in a series and included fictional band names for each track. Releases in The Fading Captain Series were the first stirrings of the push for creative autonomy to come: The label was started by Pollard and a friend, there were no music executives who could tell him what to do. Pollard was releasing copious amounts of music away from the TVT deal, indicative of an unwillingness to put total trust in the national music industry and a desire to continue his active creative output on his own terms. Indeed, Pollard soon regretted jumping on the TVT roster: “I love Matador. I should have stayed there. I fucked up.”28

Do the Collapse was produced by former frontman of The Cars, Ric Ocasek, and had the glossy production of indie rock he was famous for (evident in albums such as Weezer’s debut, Nada Surf’s High/Low, and No Doubt’s Rock Steady). Of the singles released, Pollard holds the most animosity for the pseudo-country ballad “Hold on Hope”: “Pollard likened the song to R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ or The Cars’ ‘Drive’—a syrupy sentimental ditty that just happened to have hit potential. He wanted no part of that action.”29 After a feud regarding a remix of the song meant for single release that Pollard saw as “something you hear in a skating rink,” he began to see the money-hungry side of the music industry—the side that threw artistic integrity out the metaphorical window. “When the record company took his song and altered it so fundamentally,” Cutter writes, “Bob realized things were spiraling further from his control than he’d prefer.”30 Again, Pollard’s stumbling journey through the music industry smacks of cruel optimism: “When something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.”31 Pollard wanted a record out that he was proud of, which generally meant one that he had complete creative control over, but his desire for creative control would continually be an obstacle for further financial success. Pollard did not care. GBV re-signed with their old label, Matador, and Pollard’s creative autonomy was regained, albeit revealed incompatible within the mechanism of the larger music industry. As Cutter writes: “He could jump for the record label, and maybe even score some radio hits, but he’d always be a slave to commerce.”32 Moved safely back to an independent label, while still releasing his own side-projects at an astonishing pace, Pollard became increasingly more isolated from the larger musical economy, but this move was the only option in gaining a fuller musical autonomy.

iv. The Littlest League Possible: Regaining Autonomy

After disbanding GBV in 2004 with the farewell album Half Smiles of the Decomposed, Pollard continued his prolific solo career and started several side projects like Boston Spaceships, The Takeovers, and holdovers from the Fading Captain Series such as Circus Devils. While early solo records were released through semi-major label Merge Records, by 2008 almost all of Pollard’s music projects were released through self-started record labels like Happy Jack Rock Records and Guided By Voices, Inc. Pollard had separated himself from the larger music industry entirely, enabling him to release any and all of the vast quantities of music he has created throughout the decades.

The Bee Thousand lineup of Guided By Voices reformed in 2012, but the records were released much like the early days: Through Pollard’s own funds and label. This time, however, he had the dedicated fanbase to support it. The new, sustainable business model is echoed in the lyrics to the 2014 GBV song “The Littlest League Possible”: “The most rudimentary division / of competition / where no worlds collide / to be the biggest fish / in the smallest pond / on the littlest island / where I shall reside / or keep banging it out / in the Texas league.”33 As a triumphant piece of lo-fi arena rock, “The Littlest League Possible” illustrates in some ways the Pollard success story—but also its drawbacks.

After getting Guided By Voices a mainstream audience against all odds, the music industry was not the happy place that its glimmering reputation might imply it to be. It was a cruelly optimistic vision, a reality not met by the dream. It was through this minor brush with fame, however, that Pollard found a small but dedicated cult following that allowed him to release records that sold well in “the littlest league possible,” as opposed to the multimillion dollar music industry. Pollard now has mostly complete creative freedom and can rest assured that his records will at least break even. GBV’s 2016 release, Please Be Honest, was a return to the earliest days in Pollard’s musical career. The album features Pollard on all instruments and vocals and includes some of his most surreal lyrics, a factor that Woodworth notes as a high point on Bee Thousand—“tangled skeins of words.”34 With a new lineup, Pollard returned to the band format that same year—further insisting that GBV was any formation that Pollard deemed as such. The fake collage album covers that he patched together since high school has evolved into artwork and art zines that he sells on an online store. While GBV and Pollard’s music appears on streaming services, Pollard has achieved the bulk of his economic freedom from selling physical merchandise through GBV’s online store and on tour. Limited edition vinyl records—like the comic country 7” She Laughed I Left by Pollard’s alternate persona Cash Rivers—regularly sell out. Pollard has, in some ways, achieved a separate musical economy through his own singular vision.

Woodworth writes that “it’s tempting to make a myth out of the Guided By Voices story, to turn the reality (…) into a by-the-numbers rise-to-glory narrative.”35 My aim in this love letter has been, in fact, to do the opposite. Pollard and GBV were lucky to succeed in the environment that they succeeded in. The record that got a contract with a label, Propeller, was a last ditch effort for the band—Pollard was giving up on his dream job, resigned to becoming a good working-class citizen. The DIY lo-fi aesthetic was adopted and well-utilized by Pollard, but what alternative did the band have? They were pursuing this goal through small loans from a local bank—eventually the credit would run out. Parents, wives, and friends implored them to quit. Even their songs, as catchy and innovative as they may be, were “too weird” for Dayton and would have been too weird for nearly any other era of the music industry. They pushed a lo-fi aesthetic before the genre was widely accepted by the majority of the indie rock crowd.

This is all to say that GBV is an oddity, a band that could easily be mythologized as “the American dream of rock ‘n’ roll.” Alternatively, GBV represents the fractured American dream of the music industry; a band that is exemplar of the cruel optimism that pervades the musical economy. Creative autonomy will only get a musician so far. The same is true of any unconventional upbringing in the musical economy, i.e. it will only initially serve as a mark of authenticity or spectacle. Even genuine talent will be compressed and polished into consumable products. Guided By Voices should not be mythologized as a success story, regardless of how successful Pollard wound up being. It is also largely by chance that they were exposed to the larger music community long enough to gain a cult following that could support small-scale endeavors.

Rather, GBV serves as a representative of the fact that rock ‘n’ roll dreams becoming reality are an oddity. The musical “good life” is mostly unattainable—the creativity that is said to be the driving force behind musical careers becomes an impediment at a certain level. GBV’s best records came from the era when cash was low but motivation to make art for its own sake was high. Their plight suggests that total creative autonomy cannot truly exist in a broader musical economy, it is predominantly unwelcome. Although creative autonomy is implied to be the force that stimulates a musician’s mobility within the music industry, “this is not reality, this is just formality,” as Pollard says. Yet the frontman’s disillusionment during his abandoned climb to the top illustrates the cruel optimism of the music industry: The musical “good life” cannot exist without surrendering at least part of the fantasy of the that very “good life.” The musical economy cannot sustain or will not allow the musical “good life” to exist.

But sometimes, in exceedingly rare instances, small blips can get through the static and shock us all. As fellow unsung indie rockers Big Dipper wrote in their tribute song to Pollard: “The minor stars are growing dim / And they fall around him / They’ve sputtered and they’ve faltered / None burn like Robert Pollard.”36 Indeed, Pollard was one of the few to make it out of the industry with enough cred to stay in perpetual motion. The band that penned this homage track, Big Dipper, was a different case altogether—a band that got lost after the 90s came and went. Maybe one day they’ll get a love letter of their own.

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Moira stood mystified at the Cystic Detective. Still, she sought to enlist his services to locate a missing acquaintance—one of the many. But before her slouched a being of pure melanomic misery, pustules of unidentifiable substances seeping from apparent sores. Some pools collecting upon the poor, metastasized soul seemed to glimmer in the incandescent light.

“I just,” she stammered. “I hoped you could help find her. At least put me a step in the right direction.”

Cystic Detective attempted to meet Moira’s insistent stare, but blisters of the vertical continued to pop and crackle in his peripheral vision. “I do want to,” he said. “But I worry the next faucet I touch will eat the last of my lunch.”

His attention darted to a soft-soled shoe trampling wet concrete. Water, water everywhere—every drop a solid gold ingot in his eye sockets.

“I can hear my mother call, late at night I hear her call.” Cystic Detective assumes Moira spoke those words, though he may have imagined it.

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And tune in to Weird Reads with Emily Louise on February 28th when she livestreams with friend of the show Dr. Jerrold Coe to talk about The Telepathy Tapes and Epstein associates in further depth.

Bradley W Plaisier’s notes:

Bradley’s proprietary Getting Spooked sweatshirt:

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Elkes, Joel. The Dark and the Light II. Kalamazoo: The Fetzer Institute, 2002.

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The Phoenix Lights, dir. Lynne Kitei, 2005.

Ruelas, Richard. “Kurt Russell claims he saw — and reported — the ‘Phoenix Lights.’” The Arizona Republic. 14 June 2017. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/06/14/kurt-russell-claims-reported-phoenix-lights-ufos/394749001/.

Davis, Erik. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London/Cambridge: Strange Attractor Press/The MIT Press, 2019.

Sheffield, Suzanne. “The 23 Enigma, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Synchronicity & Me.” HubPages. 2 March 2021. https://discover.hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/Carl-Jung-Aldus-Huxley-Synchronicity-Connection.

Keel, John A. Our Haunted Planet. London: Neville Spearman Limited, 1971.

Tyson, Neil Degrasse and Avis Lang. Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Owen, Iris M. and Margaret Sparrow. Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1976.

Deleted analysis from the Teletubbies Wikipedia page: https://theteletubbysisterfans.fandom.com/wiki/Teletubbies_(TV_Series)

Reid’s notes:

Black, Conrad. “The Charter is dead — Jordan Peterson’s forced re-education proves it.” National Post. 17 August 2024. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-charter-is-dead-jordan-petersons-forced-re-education-proves-it. (Wherein Peterson is called “Canada’s leading public intellectual and probably the most famous and esteemed Canadian in the world.”)

“Epstein Tells Ex-Israeli PM Ehud Barak About Palantir In Leak Audio.”

Haskins, Caroline. “Epstein Files Reveal Peter Thiel’s Elaborate Dietary Restrictions.” Wired. 2 February 2026. https://archive.is/20260204180605/https://www.wired.com/story/epstein-jeffrey-files-peter-thiel-diet-sushi/.

“The Cult of Aristasia (Part 1) with Reid @seriations.” YouTube, uploaded by Weird Reads with Emily Louise, 23 March 2024. Link.

Reid’s series on Belita Adair and Andrija Puharich, “The Children’s Crusade.”

“Andrija Puharich and His Space Kids with Heidi Jurka.” YouTube, uploaded by New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove, 25 February 2024. Link.

Spector, David. “DOJ emails reveal Jeffrey Epstein was asked to fund telepathy experiments — and met with ‘spoon bender.’” New York Post. 7 February 2026. https://nypost.com/2026/02/07/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-asked-to-fund-telepathy-experiments-and-had-meeting-with-spoon-bender/. (More on Gino Yu and others in this article.)

Relevant Cryto Cuttlefish thread.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. London: Headline Book Publishing, 1996.

Garisto, Dan. “Epstein files reveal deeper ties to scientists than previously known.” Nature. 6 February 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00388-0.

Ghorayshi, Azeen. “Nobody Believed Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s First Accuser. Now There Are Three More.” Buzzfeed. 6 December 2018. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/neil-degrasse-tyson-sexual-allegations-four-women.

Eshleman, Tina. “Steven Pruitt ’06: Wikipedia’s most prolific editor.” William & Mary Alumni Magazine. 29 October 2018. https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2018/the-wikiman.php.

Tanner F. Boyle’s notes:

About Richard Sharpe Shaver’s “Rokfogo” technique: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/03/20/a-threat-to-mental-health-how-to-read-rocks/.

“The Bosco in Brazil” on the life and claims of Bosco Nedelcovic.

Special thanks to Rich Reynolds, blogger at various venues.

Phoenix Lights press conference with Fife Symington.

Tanner was thinking of the coverage of the Phoenix Lights done by the 2021 Showtime documentary series UFO, dir. Mark Monroe & Paul Crowder.

“File: Pascagoula Alien Abduction.” Files of the Unexplained, season 1, episode 1, 3 April 2024.

Gorightly, Adam. “When Downard Met Discordia.” Historia Discordia. 21 December 2016. http://historiadiscordia.com/when-downard-met-discordia/. Now on Substack at Saucers, Spooks, & Kooks.

More on the Sirius Rising tapes: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/category/books-and-periodicals/authors-editors-and-wordsmiths/james-shelby-downard/

More on noxious freak Jim Brandon (aka William Grimstad) from Spencer Sunshine’s Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege:

(Adam) Parfrey also asked if Mason would share his mailing list to promote both EXIT and his forthcoming titles from Amok Press. He then name-dropped two of his ‘movement correspondents.’ The first was William Grimstad, who had edited the NSWPP (National Socialist White People’s Party) newspaper White Power as well as David Duke’s Crusader but was most famous for writing The Six Million Reconsidered: Is the ‘Nazi Holocaust’ Story a Zionist Propaganda Ploy? (…)

Grimstad would be involved in the Abraxas Clique. In September 1987, he put another Holocaust denier, Keith Stimely, in touch with Parfrey, and the two met in 1988. With a view to the situation quite like Mason’s, Grimstad described Parfrey’s circle to Stimely as “an apparently vital and by no means traditional ‘right wing’ reactionary group, of the type that we absolutely have to have if we are to get anywhere.” (…) In October 1988, Parfrey suggested that Grimstad write the introduction to a George Lincoln Rockwell book Mason was planning.

Dr. Jerrold Coe on Twitter (sample thread)

Tell Them You Love Me, dir. Nick August-Perna, 2023.

Esoterichoe. “How I Saw the Grift Behind The Telepathy Tapes: A Story On Media Literacy and High-Control Systems.” Esoteric Hoe Substack. 3 January 2026. Link.

Barr, William P. “Why Pam Bondi Didn’t Publish All the Epstein Files in 30 Days.” The Wall Street Journal. https://archive.is/20260124145254/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-pam-bondi-didnt-publish-all-the-epstein-files-in-30-days-6c6689fd#selection-547.0-547.61.

Levine, Sam. “Noam Chomsky’s wife apologizes for their ‘grave mistake’ in Epstein ties.” The Guardian. 8 February 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/08/noam-chomsky-epstein-ties-wife-apology.

McLaughlin, Aidan. “Inside Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein’s Disturbingly Close Friendship.” Vanity Fair. 13 February 2026. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/steve-bannon-jeffrey-epstein-files-trump-maga.

Relevant thread on Rupert Sheldrake’s correspondence with Epstein.

Nemo C. Mörck at the Society for Psychical Research

Brewster, Thomas. “How Jeffrey Epstein Manipulated Google Search To Bury His Past.” Forbes. 10 February 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2026/02/10/jeffrey-epstein-manipulated-google-search/.

Anono, Bea. “Demand Wikipedia to Dismiss Editors Suppressing UAP Phenomenon Information.” Change.org. https://www.change.org/p/demand-wikipedia-to-dismiss-editors-suppressing-uap-phenomenon-information.

Matsakis, Louise. “The ‘Guerrilla’ Wikipedia Editors Who Combat Conspiracy Theories.” Wired. 25 July 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-combat-conspiracy-theories/.

Music:

“No More Hot Dogs” by Hasil Adkins

“Girl from Ipanema” by Walter Wanderley

“Themes from Venus” by Love Tractor

Contact:

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“A cornucopia of carcinogenic ether,” Ruby Tuesday alerted Cystic Detective. He could not remember slipping into the vertical which was strange. Usually, he was plagued by a phantom limb sensation that made him feel as though he was grasping the handles of a nonexistent bathroom sink. It offered a sense of security even if immaterial—a tether to the real.

He is tripped up by vague flashes of past exploits, sometimes blinding: His attempt to exorcise a beady-eyed demon from the soul of a line cook as his twelve-year-old son watched on. The line cook was not possessed. The entire affair began with misreadings from friends and acquaintances who saw the malevolent in small gestures and statements. The line cook was merely melancholic. Cystic Detective doused him with holy water and recited verses. By the end, the line cook was catatonic.

Now he lived with Ruby Tuesday, one of hundreds of faces that floated around the vertical. When he unfocused his eyes, Cystic Detective saw a sky of bone white discs darting across the horizon.

Cystic Detective Updates are special reports for paid subscribers, documenting research efforts, personal thoughts on recent news, or other, loose tidbits and recommendations. It is typically reserved as a small offering for those who support the longer, denser, free articles and my current long-form project. As I’ve been gone too long, this Cystic Detective is on the house. For access to prior updates, as well as other archived articles and special podcast episodes, you can take advantage of a running offer: 25% off for life with the iconic “Reads to the End” discount. My thanks to those who help Getting Spooked live to fight another day.

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Bradley W Plaisier’s notes:

Robinson, Ben. The Magician: John Mulholland’s Secret Life. Lybrary.com, 2008. https://www.lybrary.com/the-magician-john-mulhollands-secret-cia-life-p-2132.html.

Williams, Margaret and Lee Gladden. Hands: A True Case Study of a Phenomenal Hypnotic Subject. Warner Springs: Galaxy Press, 1976. https://archive.org/details/handstruecasestu0000will/.

Bradley’s dad on Trauma: Life in the ER

UFO Sunset

Merrill, Jame. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Atheneum, 1982. https://archive.org/details/changinglightats0000merr/.

Chambers, John. Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life. Rochester: Destiny Books, 2008. https://www.amazon.com/Victor-Hugos-Conversations-Spirit-World/dp/1594771820.

Portis, Charles. Gringos: A Novel. New York: The Overlook Press, 2000. https://www.amazon.com/Gringos-Charles-Portis/dp/1585670936.

Calling Earth, dir. Daniel Drasin, 2018

Estep, Sarah. Voices of Eternity. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988. https://atransc.org/voices_of_eternity_web.pdf.

Cinco Boy | Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! | Adult Swim

Tom Cruise, Jr. Returns | On Cinema 4th Annual LIVE Oscar Special | Adult Swim

Mark Pilkington - Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs (Constable, 2010)

Emily’s notes:

Weird Reads with Emily Louise

“The Montauk Project : The REAL Story Behind Netflix’s Stranger Things”

“GOT ALIENS ? LETS TALK , ALIEN IMPLANT REMOVAL - w/ STEVEN COLBERN.” Spaced Out Radio. 1 May 2024. Link.

Aduna, Dayne. “2026: The Year We Go Analog.” VMAN Southeast Asia. 15 December 2025. https://vman-sea.com/arts-culture/2026-the-year-we-go-analog/.

Project Mohammed: https://chuffed.org/project/158290-help-people-in-need-in-gaza

Reid’s notes:

Trinh, Judy. “ How organizers with police and military expertise may be helping Ottawa convoy protest dig in.” CBC. 9 February 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/convoy-protesters-police-tactical-knowledge-1.6345854.

“eShop (qCode Gold).” Quantum Paranormal: A 21st Century Analysis of the Paranormal Phenomena. https://quantum-paranormal.co.uk/eshop.html.

Jackson, Patrick. Quantum Paranormal: A 21st Century Analysis of the Paranormal Phenomena. Self-published, 2020. https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Paranormal-Century-Analysis-Phenomena/dp/B08N96V8QG.

“Ashton Forbes is a Grifting Fraud.” Professor Dave Explains. 12 June 2025. Link.

Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982. https://archive.org/details/disappearanceofc0000post_a8p8/.

Illing, Sean. “Will AI become God? That’s the wrong question.” Vox. 7 April 2025. https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/407154/jaron-lanier-ai-religion-progress-criticism.

Tanner F. Boyle’s notes:

“The Rise of Romana Didulo (Documentary)” Anomaly Documentaries

Higdon, Margery A. Alien Abduction of The Wyoming Hunter: First Person Story of Carl Higdon, October 25, 1974. Self-published, 2017. https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Abduction-Wyoming-Hunter-October/dp/198181289X.

The Asphyx, dir. Peter Newbrook, 1972

Patient Seventeen, dir. Jeremy Kenyon Lockyear Corbell, 2017 (too many names, brother)

UFOs, Drones, Glitter, and Radar Chaff: What Leon Davidson and the Solution to the Glitter Mystery Can Tell Us About the Current Unidentified Flying Drone Flap

Knapp, George. “I-Team: Skinwalker Ranch and the ‘hitchhiker effect.’” 8 News Now. 24 June 2022. https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/i-team-skinwalker-ranch-and-the-hitchhiker-effect/.

It’s Always Sunny in Gulf Breeze, Pt. 1: The Gang Goes AWOL (A Gulf Breeze Six Primer)

Rosales, Albert. “1970: Aliens vacation at a Motel in Saint Louis.” Think About It Docs. 3 August 2013. https://www.thinkaboutitdocs.com/1970-aliens-vacation-at-a-motel-in-saint-louis/.

Wendy’s notes:

Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

Wendy’s Ko-fi

MISSING 411 ALASKA CRUISE

American Sasquatch: Man, Myth or Monster, dir. Gabe Torres, 2025

Missing 411: The UFO Connection, dir. David Paulides, 2022

Ostrow, Ronald J. and Tom Gorman. “Biochemist Arrested in Blast Probe.” Los Angeles Times. 13 May 1995. https://archive.is/20240615165008/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-13-me-249-story.html#selection-2091.0-2091.34.

“Steve Colbern Bio.” Quantum Paranormal: A 21st Century Analysis of the Paranormal Phenomena. https://quantum-paranormal.co.uk/steve-colbern-biography.html.

“Crackpotoberfest 2: An Alternate Reading of Ghostbusters.” Programmed to Chill, bonus episodes 63-66. Link to archive.

Delillo, Don. Libra. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. https://archive.org/details/libradeli00deli.

Mister Tarot. “Arthur Edward Waite — The Man Behind the Modern Tarot.” Mister Tarot. https://www.mistertarot.com/arthur-edward-waite%E2%80%94designer-of-the-modern-tarot/.

Music:

“Searching for Clues” composed by Ted Nichols

“Wake Up” by Jordan Peterson to Justin Trudeau

“Lemurian Timewarp” by Magenta Mirror

“What Is Love” by Haddaway

“Don’t Smoke the Government Weed” by Vegan Vampires

Contact:

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Also UPDATE on the Oli…

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In August 1975, Belita Adair, her mother Stephanie, and older sister Tatiana stayed for a long weekend at Stanford University. This was no campus tour; rather, Belita was there to be studied herself, an idea that the theatre producer who’d discovered her had for publicity and validation of her psychic and musical gifts. These informal psychic experiments were led by Hugh Macdonald, then a Stanford graduate student getting his MA in psychology. Until now the only source available on what happened during these experiments was Belita’s own blogpost and scattered comments online and in interviews. Although I have been able to corroborate much of Belita’s story, the amount of trauma, frequent altered states, hypnosis, and drugging she was subjected to during her time as one of Puharich’s test subjects throws some of her recollections into uncertainty.

Luckily, earlier this year I was able to get in contact with Hugh and he generously agreed to an interview to discuss Belita’s case. His memories shine some light on this murky chapter in the history of psychology and parapsychology, clarifying what exactly happened during those three days in August while raising even more questions.

Prior to his graduate work Hugh had obtained a BA in electrical engineering. In the mid 1970s, during his MA, he was working as an instrumentation specialist under psychologist Ernest Hilgard’s Hypnosis Laboratory at Stanford, initially studying biofeedback on meditating subjects. Hilgard was a highly influential psychologist who pioneered formal experimental research into hypnotic pain management. Curiously, Hilgard also served on a US National Academy of Science panel that reviewed the Air Force’s 1968 Condon Report on UFOs, which studied the results of Project Blue Book among other sources. More worryingly, he also served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the infamous False Memory Syndrome Foundation.12

During and after obtaining his MA, Hugh published a series of papers with Hilgard and other researchers at the Hypnosis Lab, with such titles as “The reality of hypnotic analgesia: A comparison of highly hypnotizables with simulators” and “Pain and dissociation in the cold pressor test”, but stopped after 1979 to pursue a career as a computer technician and professional stage magician, which he continues to practice today.34 A number of the hypnotic pain management studies specifically were funded by contracts Hilgard’s laboratory had with the United States Air Force, a connection we’ll explore in future articles. In the sections below any statements in quotations are verbatim quotes from my interview with Hugh, while paraphrased quotes have been condensed for readability.

Speaking with Hugh over the phone, he explained how he came to meet Belita: “I studied [Belita] gratis. Well not gratis, [I did it] for avocados. Nobody at the department would take a look at her, but I agreed to.” Rather than being part of a funded project, the experiments were done at the producer’s request, possibly as part of a pitch to establish he psychic bona fides in preparation for a film career. Belita herself recounted that Sam Peckinpah had wanted to make a film staring her, with Belita playing both “a devil and an angel” when she met him at his offices at MGM studios earlier that year. However, as discussed in Part One, these offers could have been an inducement to rope Belita into psychic research in the first place. On the other hand, Hugh characterized Belita’s mother being “like Judy Garland’s mother”—a high pressure stage mother with equally high expectations, so the push for stardom was certainly a factor regardless. In this respect some of Hugh’s statements to me about the image Belita’s mother and the producer tried to create for her are notable. He mentioned that Belita was in fact around 13 when she visited his lab, not 10 as her mother stated. The theatre producer intimated to him that this was a ruse to make her talents and demeanour seem more impressive, “like a real child star”. He noted her behaviour had a tendency to split: “she would be evanescent, not typical of a kid her age, answering questions in a floaty ‘ohh yes I can do that’ voice [...] then she would snap and be an ornery creature like a normal ten year old.”5

That isn’t exceptional for an early adolescent, least of all one under the high stresses of show business, a domineering stage mother, and being a psychic lab rat. But it does foreshadow the fractured personality Belita demonstrated later in life, careening between psychic pop starlet, pagan-curious self-identified Jew, and finally neo-Nazi high priestess of Satan. Hugh couldn’t recall much about the theatre producer himself, only that “he had avocados from his trees in Ojai and he wanted to get rich off of this psychic he’d found. And he said he was Jewish, and that he knew Hebrew, and [Belita] spoke Hebrew just like he did at his bar mitzvah.”

The strangest part of Belita’s recounting of her experience at Stanford was being taken to a dark room by strangers in lab coats, who didn’t permit Hugh or her mother to observe or intervene as she was “mentally bombarded” with insults while a strange machine pummeled her with high-pitched sounds. When I asked Hugh about this terrifying incident he said he had no knowledge of it, and probably would have known if anything of the sort was going on that weekend. But in explaining the experimental procedures and facilities they used he revealed an ominous detail: “I don’t remember this event [...] I don’t think we ever tried hypnosis on her, or brainwaves, but we did the music and language tests [...] we used [another researcher’s] interview room, it had a nice soundproof room. He was a social psychologist, Zimbardo if you know him, he did the prison study?” This was completely new information to me: most of the experiments on Belita were conducted in interview rooms and other social psychology laboratory facilities run by the infamous Philip Zimbardo.67

Zimbardo is best known for being the lead researcher on what’s popularly known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, a social psychology experiment sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. This particular experiment is what brought Zimbardo infamy for the abuse subjects were subjected to in a prison role-play simulation that lasted six days, as well as the “flawed” experimental design that pushed subjects in the role of guards to become abusive.8 However, considering other extreme forms of behaviour modification the US Navy was experimenting with at this time, Zimbardo may have delivered precisely what his sponsors wanted. The most disturbing example was revealed, unusually, in July 1975 by British newspaper The Sunday Times. Quoting at length from remarks made at a NATO conference in Oslo by Dr. Thomas Narut, a PhD psychologist working for the Navy, the paper reported on a secret “combat readiness” program training assassins to “heighten their dissociative powers with regards to killing”. This was done by bolting recruits’ heads into a clamp and forcing their eyelids open while playing a series of graphic films, then asking them questions about details from each film to guide their focus. These included scenes of a circumcision performed with a blunt knife and a saw mill worker cutting off his finger. Narut claimed the successful trainees were stationed at US embassies around the world to be on-call hitmen. Curiously, he stated the busiest time for the program had been during the end of 1973 at the outset of the fourth Arab-Israeli war. The Navy, of course, denied everything in The Times report and attributed the story to Narut having “personal problems.”91011

In this context, the fact that Zimbardo and his personnel controlled the lab infrastructure Hugh was using raises the plausibility that Belita really was subjected to sonic and emotional torture while confined to some sort of sensory deprivation room. Zimbardo’s Navy funding and the Hilgard laboratory’s support from the Air Force further suggests someone from the military may have been keeping tabs on their work much more closely than simple contract management required, given how intensely scientists were surveilled during the Cold War by multiple domestic counterintelligence agencies.

While Hugh didn’t recall any incident like what Belita describes and thinks it implausible that she could’ve been separated from him and her mother in such a way during the three days she was at Stanford, Zimbardo’s control of the lab should raise alarm bells for a few reasons. First, Zimbardo himself was willing to put his test subjects in dangerous and deeply unethical situations. The Stanford Prison Experiment alone is evidence enough of that. Second, his connections to Navy behaviour modification give him further motive to use parapsychology research (like that Hugh was conducting) as cover for further otherwise illegal or sensitive projects. Third, since Hugh’s work with Belita was informal, not subject to the usual funding strings, Zimbardo and his people may have had opportunity to take advantage of her presence in their lab. Fourth, Hugh specifically told me that the room next to the social psychology interview room in Zimbardo’s lab was a soundproofed chamber complete with the EEG equipment necessary for doing brainwave analysis on subjects. Taken together this establishes means and motive for Zimbardo or his people to have done precisely what Belita claims happened: confined her to a small soundproof room, subjected her to alternating sensory deprivation and overload, and monitored her with a strange machine. It’s important to note how at the time, as a child, Belita would have no knowledge of Zimbardo’s modus operandi or what to expect from a brainwave monitoring setup, so the details she mentions in her blog are strong indication that the events truly happened.

Unfortunately, Hugh does not have his notes or data obtained from any of the experiments Belita participated in that summer. He noted that since the tests didn’t lead to the publication of a research paper it’s unlikely any records still survive, but he did recall giving a short write-up report to the theatre agent who arranged everything. The biggest takeaways Hugh had about Belita were that when it came to psychic tests “she was pretty average at everything”, but she had a striking ability to confidently improvise in response to prompting. When asked if she could channel music in a particular language for instance she would simply reply “yes” and launch directly into a performance. Hugh identified this as a highly unusual capacity, especially for an early adolescent. But this does track with the high suggestibility Belita demonstrated throughout her life and along with her musical gifts is probably part of what made her such a prized test subject for the likes of Andrija Puharich.12

Overall, Hugh’s impression of Belita was certainly of a precocious musical talent, but hardly a genuine up-and-coming psychic. Although Hugh himself does believe psi phenomena are real he showed no indication of believing Belita had any genuine ability in this domain. Rather, she seemed to be getting manoeuvred into a show business career by both her mother and the theatre producer who arranged the experiments. The psychic act then would have been a combination of true belief on her mother’s part—the family certainly had a longstanding interest in the occult, shown by their life in Ojai & dabbling in the Liberal Catholic Church—and the producer’s show business savvy. Adding the spectre of opportunistic military behaviour modification experiments to this mix may explain how Andrija Puharich, a captain in the US Army Medical Corps’ psychological warfare section, knew to contact the Adairs immediately after Belita’s health declined following the events at Stanford.

Tanner here. As always, thank you for reading Getting Spooked and my sincere thanks to Reid for contributing the second installment of this series. This is a reader-supported publication, so if you enjoy this research and commentary on the paranormal and parapolitical, consider subscribing, sharing articles with others, or upgrading to a paid subscription. This is not without its benefits: Paid members gain access to archived articles, special podcast episodes, Cystic Detective Updates, and the ability to ask questions for Q&As. It is the best way to directly support the continuation of this publication and my thanks goes out to anyone who has done so.

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My thanks to The Anomalist for linking to several recent articles that can still be found on the Getting Spooked homepage. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.