Darren Bousman recounts filming 11:11 in Barcelona, where his crew suffered hallucinations and injuries at a UMO cult house linked to planet 14.6 million light-years away. He details his shift from Hollywood fiction to real esoteric doctrines, citing Jack Parsons and theories that Spielberg embedded UFO imagery in classics like Close Encounters. The discussion speculates on a 2026 Spielberg disclosure movie serving as an "ontological shock," suggesting mainstream cinema has primed the public for official alien admission while blurring reality through immersive theater techniques. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The House With A Sordid History00:03:29
Something caught my eye is you had a book that said Umo.
By the way, the movie you were shooting, 11 11 11, was the one time in my filmmaking career that I went down a rabbit hole I couldn't pull myself out of.
I wanted a really unique looking house.
And then I was going through the location library and I found this house and I said, that house.
And they said, no, not that house.
And I said, no, that house.
You go on what's called location scouts.
There's about 20 or 30 people.
You're in a bus and they're all kind of whispering to each other.
And eventually the caretaker undoes the gate.
And opens it up, but he won't go inside.
You walked in this house, and all I can say is there was a heaviness.
There were mattresses all over the floor, and there was like residual of wax.
And then I started noticing there were masks on the ground.
On all the doorways and all the windows, there was this symbol, and it was an H symbol, but it wasn't an H.
It was a weird looking H.
We found out it was something that meant UMO.
And I was like, what is UMO?
And then he said, Ramoncin, por favor, has he seen an ovni in the 1960s?
Started popping up around Europe, but especially France and Spain.
Umo was apparently an extraterrestrial planet that exists, you know, 14.6 million light years away.
And these people basically disseminated information from their culture throughout these letters.
It wasn't like one payload, it was multiple payloads to multiple people over multiple places.
Now the debate comes can one person write all of this?
French computer scientist Jean Pierre Petit, he studied Umo, so he had models on magnetohydrodynamics that were based on some of these.
Papers.
So they were legitimate theories.
So now you have this guy saying, Oh, it was me all along.
Sorry about that.
It was just a big joke.
Well, his son went on a rampage.
There was a protest in the middle of the theater.
He stopped the screening, as I remember.
That started what I would consider to be the most horrific 10 days of my adult life.
There's a shot where they're standing on the beach, and behind them, you can see the house.
And in the house, there are these three large picturesque windows, but the curtains.
We're on the outside, not the inside, and they're wooden.
And so, to open one of these things, you have to be inside the house and on a pulley system, and you have to use both hands to pull it because they're heavy.
Well, we shot in that room, and the curtains were broken.
You could not open them.
And so, they had to remain shut.
In this shot in the beach, all of a sudden, you see every window open, open, open behind them.
Yeah.
And it almost looked like a visual effect.
There was a small window, is all I can say, with an H over it.
Asked my assistant, I want to know what's on the other side of that.
In the wall.
It was a room, and inside this room, there's an altar.
The previous owner of the house was in the middle of a divorce.
They were sharing custody and he buried her body in the house.
Hey, just calling to report a sighting.
About two years ago in October in Tennessee, Crossville, I was riding my motorcycle and came over a hill and I looked up over the tree line right in front of me, a mile away or so.
It was a football shaped craft just kind of just above the tree line there.
I'm a follower of David Pelias and he said.
You can't take your eyes off this thing, otherwise, it'll disappear.
Buried Secrets In Tennessee00:03:01
And looked up to the left, looked back, and it was gone.
That pretty much confirmed it for me.
Today, we are joined by a good friend of mine who's become a good friend of mine in the last several years.
How long have we known each other?
2018, I think I reached out to you.
Whoa, so seven years already.
Yeah.
This is Hollywood director and director of Saw 2, 3, 4, and Spiral, among so many other horrific projects.
And by horrific, I mean that in the literal sense.
Thank you.
Darren Bowsman, welcome and thank you for joining me.
This is so surreal to be sitting in The SCIF.
You're a fan of the show?
Oh, dude, I've watched every episode and I get jealous.
You've actually become a bigger director than I have.
You're just insanity.
It's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a labor of love, as you know.
And you're, this is really exciting.
And we're going to mention this off the top because you are getting into the podcast space as well.
Yeah.
This last couple of weeks, we've just dropped our first few episodes called Darren and Josh Make a Movie.
It was Josh Stolman.
Josh Stolberg, who wrote Spiral, who wrote your scene in Spiral.
And basically, we're going to take audience kind of like a Project Greenlight through the inception of an idea all the way through the distribution of actually getting the movie out and made into theaters.
And they can follow along week to week as we go through that process through the hurdles and victories and tragedies.
That's amazing.
It's such an exciting venture as well to be able to take the audience through that.
And I think it's really what people want more and more, right?
They want to know.
It's why a lot of these people sign up for like the behind the scenes membership stuff.
They want to see what's going on and how this stuff works.
I didn't realize how complicated and arduous creating a podcast was, specifically with video.
You know, I've directed 18 movies and I think I've had more breakdowns in the last couple of months with this filming the podcast than I have any film.
So kudos to you for being able to put out really cool content.
And for those who don't believe me at home, how many people do I have in the studio helping me with this right now?
There would be zero.
I was kind of shocked.
You walk into this, and it's a huge warehouse, and it's just you and some cameras.
So it's more impressed now than I was walking in.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
It means a lot coming from you, Mr. Hollywood director.
Darren, we're going to be talking about some really interesting stuff.
And I've been so excited to get you on the podcast because a lot of people who listen, they understand that we talk to whistleblowers, witnesses, experiencers, all sorts of people from the military.
Three letter agencies.
But I also find it really fascinating to have people who help further the conversation in the entertainment field as well.
Because, you know, for me, entertainment is a valuable means to absorb information.
You know, you look at, I always say the three Georges, George Orwell, George Carlin, and George Lucas.
Inside The Empty Warehouse Studio00:03:44
You know, you look at, they taught me a lot.
Yeah, that's great.
You know, so, and it was all through entertainment.
I mean, I think that's why I learned my real education came through film and through TV.
I never was really great at reading book smarts, you know, going to school, but I would pick up ideas and concepts watching movies in such a great way, I think, too.
Disseminate information through film.
Yeah, there's, and we're going to be talking about that.
I'm really excited.
That's actually one of the things I'm most excited about talking about movies, UFO, alien movies, and that type of thing.
But before we get into that, something interesting happened a few weeks ago.
You were watching one of these episodes, and I was shooting some B roll.
I put some B roll in, and there was a book that caught your eye.
You want to take it from there?
Yeah.
So I've watched every episode.
And, you know, it's even if I didn't know you and we weren't friends, I seek out UFO, paranormal, occult podcasts.
So, you know, on yours, like I was watching it, irregardless of our relationship, and I loved the little details.
I loved your cutaways.
I love, you know, all of those things.
And something caught my eye you had a book that said UMO on it.
And I would consider myself pretty versed in the UFO world, but it's a very, Not a lot of people know about UMO.
It's not one of those things that you talk about a lot.
And I had a very impactful, traumatic experience with the name UMO and the UMO UFO thing.
And I reached out to you and I was like, dude, is that what I think?
Did I just see an UMO book?
It was pretty crazy.
Yeah.
And just to catch people up a little bit, because this is something that I've been looking into, especially since Darren had mentioned it and we had agreed on this podcast, I was like, I got to go down this rabbit hole.
And, you know, I read the first, almost the first volume of that book, went online.
And so, to give you a brief little history for those of you at home listening, in the 1960s, these mysterious letters and the 70s started popping up around Europe, but especially France and Spain.
Now, these letters were typed like with a typewriter, and they all had this little symbol on it known as the UMO symbol.
Well, UMO was apparently an extraterrestrial planet that exists, you know, 14.6 million light years away.
And these people basically disseminated information from their culture.
And their sciences and their astronomy throughout these letters and sent them across Europe.
Laughable at first.
Yeah, I mean, they hundreds of letters.
Yeah.
And I think what's really interesting, it did not go to one, it wasn't like one payload.
It was multiple payloads to multiple people over multiple places.
Over multiple years in multiple languages.
In decades.
Yeah.
And people started to get together and they would share the letters and they would go through the letters.
What was fascinating is these letters were not only scientific in nature, but they dealt with things that at that time, I mean, you didn't have Google, you couldn't just pull this information down.
They were dense, and it really started to make an impact this idea of UMA, which I think it started originally with UFO sightings.
It started with a few sightings and pictures of someone witnessing a saucer.
It's the classic saucer shape in the sky with this really unique H symbol.
Kind of in the bottom of it.
And then more people started seeing it.
And then the letters started appearing.
So, yeah.
So, I never heard of this until 2010.
Strange Symbols Over Spain00:07:03
I got lucky to go to Spain, to Barcelona, to shoot a film.
And I hear myself telling this story and I feel like an insane person.
And I know that if my mother tunes into this, she'll say, stop talking about it.
You seem insane.
You're in the right place.
I know.
So, my wife, who is, you know, she's Avid and speak Spanish, and she can do Catalan and all of that.
And in Barcelona, that's what it is.
In this movie, we needed a location that I wanted to be the kind of backdrop.
And I wanted a really unique looking house.
And I kept getting the location people would send me house after house, and nothing worked.
And then I was going through the location library and I found this house.
And I said, That house.
And they said, No, not that house.
And I said, No, that house.
And they said, No, we're not going to go to that house.
And after weeks of me turning down the houses, I went back and I said, This is the house I want.
And they Finally, said, Listen, we don't recommend, but we'll take you there and show it to you.
And immediately when we arrived, there was this energy on the bus and everyone was rapidly speaking around me.
And I didn't understand what they were saying.
And we get out, and some of the people stayed in the bus.
And that was my first clue that something was weird.
And I was like, okay.
And I get out, and this feels fake, me telling the story now.
I hear it and I'm like, this is bullshit, but it's not.
We get out, and there's a man who is a caretaker of the house.
And he's kind of pacing back and forth, and it's beautiful.
It's on the Mediterranean Sea and it's surrounded by these mansions.
It's beautiful.
And we get out, and he talks to the producer, and they're kind of rapidly talking back and forth, and it's getting heated.
And I'm seeing the crew, you go on what's called location scouts, there's about 20 or 30 people, you're in a bus, and they're all kind of whispering to each other.
And eventually, the caretaker undoes the gate and opens it up, but he won't go inside.
And we see him standing out there, and he's smoking, he's like chain smoking.
And now I'm seeing more of the crew that are not coming through the gate.
Maybe, I don't know, 18 of us went, and there was about six or seven of us that stayed behind.
And we get in, and I didn't notice it at first.
They opened the door up, and there was like a weight.
And by the way, at this point in my life, I've never experienced anything supernatural.
I've always wanted to, but I can say I've never seen anything, never felt anything.
You walked in this house, and all I can say is there was a heaviness that hit you.
And the first thing that was kind of weird is the house was empty, but there were mattresses.
All over the floor, mattresses in every room.
And there was like residual of wax.
And then I started noticing there were masks on the ground and it very much looked like an eyes wide shut party.
And I was like, all right, whatever.
Like people do that.
Is that why people are not coming in?
But then I started noticing on all the doorways and all the windows, there was this symbol and it was an H symbol, but it wasn't an H.
It was a weird looking H.
And we walked through the house and I noticed the H's, but it didn't really click with me.
And I leave and I say, that's the house I want.
And they try to talk me out of it again.
And now I'm starting to get upset because why is this production company trying to talk me out of shooting here?
I had my wife come back the next day.
They were doing another walkthrough.
This time it was with what's called GE or Grip and Electric, where they had to figure out where they were going to put the trucks and pull electricity.
And I wanted my wife to go because I wanted to know what they weren't telling me.
And in the bus, Laura is like leaning over to me and she says, they're talking about this cult and everyone doesn't want to be disrespectful.
They don't want to do these things because of this cult.
And I said, what cult?
So we get there, and there is a prominent H over the front door, and no one wants to go past it.
No one wants to open the door, no one wants to touch the H.
And we found out it was something that meant UMO.
And I was like, What is UMO?
And they said, Oh, it was a Spanish thing.
It was, you know, some people still revere it and they believe in it.
And it's not considered polite to move it.
And my wife walks up to it and pulls it down.
And I think she called them something.
She said, You guys are a bunch of wussies and takes it down and throws it kind of on the ground.
Let's cut to 24 hours later.
My wife is in a hospital.
She's hallucinating tremendously.
She ended up being bedridden for about five days.
Whoa.
That started what I would consider to be the most horrific 10 days of my adult life of just insanity occurring in and around us, where we removed all the H's in the house and we started finding things in the house that didn't make sense.
Did you keep any of this?
No.
There are videos online.
It's downstairs.
It's downstairs.
Yeah, so here's what I want you guys to do, and I'm serious about this.
I am very superstitious.
I don't want any cold stuff here.
Get the cold, get that humo stuff and get it out of here.
Now, while this is all happening, I'm sending footage back to the distributor, and they think we're setting it up.
And they literally said, Is this a publicity thing?
And I'm like, No, this is all right now what you're seeing is real.
Now, over the course of the three weeks we were in the house, we probably lost a third of the crew members that quit.
No way.
We had one that was pushed down the stairs.
It was the second AD who broke his ankle.
Sam, have you had any crazy experiences here yet?
I have not been harmed, I'll say that.
But that's miraculous seeing as even our camera woman right now went through her own bit of violent illness when she walked in the house.
Then we had a broken foot.
We had severe head trauma.
Twice.
Two severe head traumas.
And a bit of loco-ness.
One of the associate producers quit.
The continuity person who is my right hand on a movie, a continuity person sits with the script and they make sure that I am not forgetting lines in the script.
And if someone's holding a drink in the right hand, the next take, it's not in their left hand.
She began to have hallucinations and get physically ill.
So this is about maybe the eighth or ninth day that we're there.
And I start thinking, you know, I still am not going supernatural yet.
There's got to be a logical explanation for this.
So I asked my assistant to find out if we can have some mold remediation.
I wanted to have the air tested.
I was like, if we're in a place, this house is very old.
Yeah.
So we do, and it comes back completely clean.
And then one of the producers finally comes up to me and tells me what was going on with the guy, the caretaker.
And it gets revealed to me that this house was a meeting place for this cult called Umo.
And at that point, I still don't know what Umo is.
And I was spelling it like it was an H.
So I'm spelling it H O M M O H Umo.
And that's not how it's spelled.
And so now I'm able to actually go on and research what Umo is, which leads me down this rabbit hole of this fascinating UFO thing that took place.
And still, I don't want to say it's prevalent, but it's still very much around.
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Data Brokers And Lizard Neighbors00:15:45
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It's, yeah, it's still around.
They're still, they call them the Umites, the people who follow the word of Umo.
And for those of you wondering at home, being like, well, how, I mean, obviously this is just a hoax, right?
You're thinking at home, this is obviously just a hoax.
But to give you a little bit of context here, I'll just read a few things that have come to light with these documents.
And so the letters included diagrams also of these spacecraft, advanced theories of physics, and even philosophical commentary.
They run through the language, sociological things, cosmology.
Every, absolutely every aspect of their civilization.
Um, and what made them different was the consistency and complexity of these letters.
So these letters across the board didn't cancel each other out.
So if this was a team of people, which a lot of people suspected it was because of the vast reaching sort of knowledge that was, you know, put into these documents, you would have to expect it's a lot of people, but they had concepts in there that weren't even theoretically out there yet in terms of physics.
So, um, Concepts like communication via neutrinos and early mention of dark matter, which was way ahead of its time at that point.
And, you know, some of the stuff mimicked cutting edge theories years before they were widely accepted, loosely resembling string theory, neural networks, and multiverse structures.
So, if you're a lay person reading this stuff, I tried to.
It is.
It hurts.
Dude.
Well, it hurts your head.
And I think that.
So, now we're a couple of weeks in the shooting of this place, and I find out that it's a UFO cult.
And I've always been fascinated with UFOs.
I mean, I think the first adult book that I read growing up, and this is 100% accurate, was Communion, because like VHSs, when you would, you know, when you grew up in the 80s, you would choose movies based on the box art.
I chose books by the box art, too.
And so, when you go see that.
You know, that face, that was one of the first I remember adult books that I read.
So I've been fascinated with UFOs since a kid, but it's something that I felt that I didn't know about.
So I became obsessed with figuring out what this house was.
It was, it had staircases that went nowhere.
One of the things, and I think it's in the documentary, if you go on YouTube, there is by the way, the movie you were shooting, 11 11 11, which we're going to get because I want to talk to you about the 11 11 phenomenon.
And by the way, for those listening or watching, the movie's terrible.
The story that takes, and partially, we were talking about this before we began, is I feel like I lost my mind a little bit.
It was the one time in my filmmaking career that I went down a rabbit hole I couldn't pull myself out of.
And I became obsessed with everything that was happening and me trying to find a rational explanation for it.
At this point, you know, I was very much ingrained in the horror world.
I loved macabre, but to have it happening all around me, people getting sick, people falling down staircases, one of the things that I think was the most shocking thing to me that had happened.
Our DP, a guy named Joseph White, I fly him in from Los Angeles and he hears these stories.
I'm telling, dude, there's a cult here.
It's called Umo and it was a UFO thing.
And he's laughing.
He was like, dude, you hear how insane you sound?
And I was like, dude, you don't understand.
So he arrives two days before filming and I hear him.
I'm upstairs and I hear him come in the door and he's like, where's Bowsman?
I want to see this haunted place.
And this is, again, it sounds fake me telling the story.
I'm looking down from this kind of, I can see down to this very grand entryway.
And I was like, yo, Joe.
And he looks up and he's like, I still don't believe in this bullshit.
And I'll never forget this.
I hear a noise and I hear one of the guys that's on the GE department tell Joe to move.
And almost instantly, the chandelier that was just hung collapses and falls directly where he was just standing.
Oh, my God.
So I'm like, and again, I'm still wrestling with what does supernatural ghost stuff have to do with a UFO cult, which led us to pull the information on the house and the sordid history of this house, which was insane.
So during the process of filming, I'm not focused on the movie.
I'm focused on the mythology of this house, this Umo cult.
And what I think I found fascinating is, and I was talking to you about this, was not only is there a fascinating story about the origins of Umo, but it spawned other things, cults, something called Daughters of Umo, something called, I think, with the Edelweiss Foundation, which was a cult in the true sense of the word, where they were branding kids.
It was basically like a Boy Scout thing.
Started and they were branding kids with the Umo sigil on their skin.
It got dark and people went way overboard, basically living by these documents that were mysteriously produced.
And so I just became fascinated.
And I think it was one of my first real itches into this world of trying to uncover the mysterious.
And so while I should be making a movie, I am staying up all night and drinking too much scotch, being like, oh my God, listen to what happened here with the Umos and this and this and this.
And you can tell when you watch the movie because the movie's pretty bad.
But it was crazy.
And it was such a little known story, I think.
We've all heard a lot of the same UFO stories, you know, the Betty and Barney Hill story and all of these, but I never heard about Umo.
Yeah.
Umo is one of those, it's one of the ones that Wendell Stevens, you know, he put out a whole bunch of contact books that I'm obsessed with because, again, these are the lesser known stories, but that are quite extensive in terms of documentation, in terms of sightings.
There's even a sighting, I think, in 1989 in Russia.
And the name eludes me right now, but in Russia, it was witnessed by children and a police officer.
So, a police officer and a bunch of children witnessed this craft come down, the doors open up, and the toaster man.
Yeah, there was like this robotic sort of toaster.
And that sort of toaster man, you know what that was?
That was because apparently the person dressed up as a human would use that to destroy the clothes.
So, it was like a shredder that followed him around.
And then there was this giant sort of thing.
Three eyed being with the symbol of Umo on its torso.
This being here.
Well, check that out.
Oh, you're a fan of ephemera.
I am.
That is, and this is what I think I find so fascinating about this case I'm fascinated with religion.
I'm fascinated with the occult and the esoteric.
And I think a lot of it has to, you can start it right here with the research of Umo.
There's a large section of the population that are convinced 100% it was a hoax because the man.
Jose Pina.
Pina, on his deathbed, basically admitted to it.
And he said, I did this.
I wanted to do an experiment to see that our belief could we convince a population to believe in something just based on faith?
We're going to put these documents out.
And by the time that he was done, it had taken on life of its own.
It had grown, it had expanded, it had gone across continents, and it was unable to be stopped at that point.
But then later, after his death, it was revealed that no, maybe he didn't start it.
Maybe he was told.
To say he started it to basically help keep it mysterious.
I mean, you know a lot about that too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, 1993, he came forward to say basically that he was responsible for concocting this thing as a social experiment.
Now, Jose Pena is an interesting character because he was a trained psychologist and sociologist with like a deep interest in parapsychology, in fringe physics.
Now, the debate comes can one person write all of this?
And if you're at home and just You want to look into it, just Google some of the UMO documents and try to have a read through.
It is mind bendingly difficult to read.
And when scientists were given this, there's all sorts of scientists, by the way.
There's even a computer scientist, a French computer scientist, Jean Pierre Petit.
He studied UMO and he published his own models basically based off of UMO.
So he had models on magnetohydrodynamics that were based on some of these papers.
So, they were legitimate theories.
They weren't just half brain concocted ideas.
So, now you have this guy saying, Oh, it was me all along.
Sorry about that.
It was just a big joke.
Well, his son went on a rampage.
I heard it just screening.
I don't know if it was Sieges, but there was a film festival in 2022.
There was a documentary that they basically made on Umo and Umites, which kind of really leaned into the fact it was hoaxed and that it was created by him and two of his friends.
And there are some connections that are hard to overlook.
Like the second sighting of it was from his roommate.
That's right.
So you go down this rabbit hole, and there's a lot of connections, but this documentary goes into that.
And there was a protest in the middle of a theater.
He stopped the screening, as I remember, and was furious.
Because I guess the son knows it to be real, and the father's dying confession was, I guess, coerced out of him.
That's right.
That it was something that he was.
And then there's a lot, if you go really down the rabbit hole, that maybe the CIA was involved, maybe the KGB was involved.
It's fascinating because the minute you think you've reached the bottom of this maybe hoax, maybe conspiracy, it goes far, far deeper and darker.
Mentioning these kind of side cults that stem from some of the kind of mythology that these papers purported.
Yeah, and these papers had enough in them to where if you fully read through all of them, you too could be convinced that they're real.
Like, I mean, really smart people read through these papers and they got together.
So there are these houses that existed back then where people would get together to try and decipher collectively as this sort of group session these papers.
And, but then you run into a house like this that you're describing.
And you said something interesting to me about the beds in the direction they were facing.
Well, when we first took it over, so we, one of the first things that when I started to get really kind of, I felt I was being punked.
I felt that I was being screwed with because here I am as a Western director that's coming over to this country making a movie there.
I felt that maybe they were screwing with me.
So I had a lot of documents pulled around the area and to try to find out the ownership of the house.
It sat empty for a long time before we went in there and it was rented out.
There was a lot of things that people would rent it out for events.
But they, it looked like Eyes Wide Shut Party, but all the beds in the place were facing east.
The candles were put up in a very ritualistic way.
Why is that important, facing east?
Well, I mean, getting into esoteric traditions, I mean, a lot of things have to do with direction things.
I mean, if you look into Freemasonry, where they're built, which way they're facing.
So inside the house, though, which is kind of, Of incomprehensible to explain.
I think the Winchester Mystery House might be the best comparison.
There were staircases that went nowhere, but not like they were built like that.
They were bricked over.
And I think this was the most concerning thing for me is so we shot in the basement of the house, and in the basement of the house, there is a staircase that goes up, and then you can see kind of a modern brickwork that's literally bricked up a quarter of the house.
You can't get into it.
And they've gone through a lot of effort to brick that part of it up.
In one of the scenes that I wanted to shoot in, which we ended up not being able to shoot in because everyone that went into it got ill.
And that's where I started to get convinced maybe this was some sort of mold or gas or something like that.
There was a small window, is all I can say, with an H over it.
And I asked my assistant, I want to know what's on the other side of that.
And he broke in the wall, and you can see it online.
It was pretty ridiculous.
It was a room, and inside this room, there's an altar.
And inside the altar, there's candles and there's, you know, other things like that, but they were all closed off.
We tried to ask the caretaker of the house, like, why?
What is this thing?
And he refused to talk about it.
He was just evasive.
He was just, he wouldn't give us any information about it.
It was an interesting thing.
And still to this day, I mean, it's 10 years later.
I still look back at some of that and I was like, it was the most uncomfortable I've ever been.
I have a funny kind of side story.
So we leave Spain and I go back and I'm editing in Los Angeles and I had the coolest editor.
The editor edited Full Metal Jacket.
Oh, cool.
He was the editor, the assistant editor on The Shining.
So he worked with Stanley Kubrick and this guy is like an old school dude.
And one day he calls me in and he goes, hey, can you, what is this?
And he shows me footage and it's a guy sitting on the edge of the bed.
And he is doing a monologue and he's very kind of quiet and he's whispering.
But in the corner of this spatially, he's sitting there.
You hear somebody yelling in a language that I don't know what the hell it was into it, but no one references it.
You don't hear me yell cut and the guy continues on with his monologue.
So, my first thing is that doesn't make sense.
That's impossible because it was so loud that we would have called cut, but no one heard it there.
So, I write that off as a corrupted audio file.
I'm like, okay, there's something weird here.
This is a corrupted audio file.
But then there were other anomalies in the footage.
The one that was so subtle, and if you see it, you might just kind of blow it off and be like, that's nothing.
But to me, it was really upsetting.
There's a shot, and you can pull this and put it on the screen now for YouTube.
There's a shot where they're standing on the beach, and behind them, you can see the house.
And in the house, there are these three large picturesque windows, but the curtains were on the outside, not the inside, and they're wooden.
And so to open one of these things, you have to be inside the house and on a pulley system, and you have to use both hands to pull it because they're heavy.
Well, we shot in that room and the curtains were broken.
You could not open them.
And so they had to remain shut.
In this shot in the beach, they're in the foreground and they're talking.
All of a sudden, you see every window open, open, open.
Heavy Wooden Curtains On Pulleys00:07:14
Wow.
Yeah.
And it almost looked like a visual effect.
Whoa.
It did not open like that.
We could not open them.
And to make that happen, it would take six people because it took two people to do each one of the curtains.
It would have had to have been coordinated to say, no, again, I'm not saying that the crew wasn't screwing with me and saying, let's screw with this guy, but to what Point.
It took me five months after we did it to me to even see it.
So if I was being screwed with or, you know, punked, you thought they would have laughed and done whatever.
Yeah.
But it was these subtle things throughout the footage.
Do you have any of that?
Yeah, that, that, that you can find that on YouTube.
If you do 11111 shutters, you can see it.
Okay, great.
It was funny when the DVD came out, the foreign sales company would not put it on there because they thought it was all staged.
They said, there is no way we're going to pass this off as real.
And it made me so angry because I'm like, it's not.
It's all, we did not do that.
Yeah, that's like a boy who cried wolf situation because.
You're also known for immersive horror.
Yeah.
You're someone who creates experiences using horror and to sort of blur the lines between what's real and what's fiction.
So that would seem like something you would do.
I'll tell you, my wife, who was there with me during the time, she became worried because you talk about this idea you heard a lot in UFOs this cognitive dissonance, this coming to grips with something that just doesn't fit with your worldview.
I didn't have time to process what was happening and what was going on with the crew quitting, getting sick, these weird.
Injuries that were occurring on set and what we were feeling and seeing.
I was just, um, such in a fog during that entire movie.
Uh, it just because it challenged everything.
Like, I was like, there's just this presence in the house.
So, not only were we dealing with the UFO Umo thing, we're dealing with this presence in this.
And then there is a story that goes with the original owners of the house that was eventually uncovered, which the previous owner of the house was in the middle of a divorce.
They were sharing custody, and the daughter kind of stopped talking to the mother, just kind of disappeared.
And every time the mother would reach back out to the owner of this house, the father, he would say she was gone.
She's at school.
She's on vacation.
She's this, she's this.
Eventually, the mother was done with the shenanigans.
She wanted to see a daughter and sent the police.
And the I'm going to mess up some of these details now, but the daughter had died and the husband was a political figure, fearing that he was going to be blamed for it and thrown out of this political thing.
He buried her body in the house.
And I didn't, again, it was one of these things.
I was like, that's not true.
I do not believe that.
That sounds like an urban legend.
It sounds like a horror movie, right?
It sounds like something I would make.
The details are far less dramatic than maybe you're putting it, the death and all that.
But again, this house has a very sordid history.
But it was kind of like my first.
Really, kind of awakening into my fascination with what goes on that we don't know about.
So, this house ended up having potentially a murder or some type of death and some type of cover up with this child in the basement, we would assume?
It was the basement.
And that's where you filmed?
We did film in the basement.
Now, that's not what the door was.
I told you there was a staircase that went to a door.
And that has nothing to do with where the body was found.
It has nothing to do with where the body was found.
You know, it's been, like I said, it's been almost 14 years now.
I want to go back.
And I recently looked up the address.
I found a call sheet and I found the address and I looked it up and it's still available to rent.
And I've been in a lot of places.
I was going to do a movie in the Lilori Mansion in New Orleans, which is a lot of people consider to be one of the most haunted.
I'm telling you, it had nothing on this place in Barcelona.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
I mean, since going down this rabbit hole, I've been just completely consumed with all of this because.
It's like you said, so fascinating.
It covers so many facets.
It goes from being, okay, potentially real UFO sightings to, okay, an elaborate hoax to now some type of almost meta religion that started.
Multiple cults started off there.
Cults, religions.
A lot of, and by the way, a lot of non violent, non sort of.
Most are non violent.
Yeah, when we say cults, we don't say they're drinking Kool Aid and they're all having sex parties.
That's some of it, maybe, but there's the Edelweiss.
Yes, they did.
The branding and the sex stuff.
Yeah.
But for the most part, these were just gatherings of people who believed in the word of Umo because it made a lot of sense.
And ironically enough, after reading some of it, this is exactly what they wanted to avoid the Umites.
They wrote in their papers specifically do not take this as the word because we don't want to shift your culture into ours.
We're just here to observe.
If I remember correctly, in the documentation, it was very much against a cult mentality, it was the opposite of that.
And I think that's what I find so fascinating about belief in religion is that, you know, if you are to believe that it's a hoax, you know, it had gone past his ability to stop it, that it had people had found a way to live with it and really believe in it and make it a way of life.
That even when it came out publicly that, hey, this guy made it up, it was an experiment, people didn't want to hear that.
They wanted to believe.
And the fact that after he admitted to doing it, letters were still surfacing.
They were still being sent for quite a while.
For quite a while.
But the tone had shifted a little bit.
It had gotten a little bit more serious from the UMO.
I mean, there's all sorts of really interesting stuff.
I mean, I was telling you earlier, they had this whole cipher, which gave you directions to basically an end of the world bomb shelter because in the 70s there was some tension with, Iran and Israel.
And during those tensions, apparently the UMO got signaled that they were at a 26% chance of nuclear war, and that was enough for them to leave.
But they'd given instructions on where to go in case this happens.
Now, these encoded instructions were never really fully deciphered.
I ran them into AI and I got the answers back, which is super interesting.
I got to say, though, as spooky as the story is, if you want to have a good laugh on UMO, If you ever go down the rabbit hole of the Umo language, it is quite possibly the most hilarious, funny, ridiculous.
And it's all about tone and inflection, but the words are all the same.
So it's like Umo, Umo, Umo, Umo, Uya, Uya, Umo, Umo.
And I thought that was really funny.
I actually stumbled onto a Umo music channel because there are people that still very much believe in this.
And it's who they are now.
And there's Umo music.
Yeah, it's a whole culture and I kind of like it.
I kind of think it's sick that you're here for it.
Believing In Umo Music Culture00:14:54
Yeah, why not, dude?
Like, I mean, you know, if you're not hurting anybody, but obviously if you're doing some weird, you know, weird deviant, uh, deviantly natured things, then yeah, I'm not necessarily for it.
Um, but I think it's just so interesting.
Plus, you know, you're someone who has this fascination with not only horror, but the occult.
You've been just absolutely consumed by the occult.
I guess it's one of your driving factors into what it is you do for a living.
Can you maybe tell me, as someone who's not super versed now, I have a book here actually Sex and Rockets, the Jack Parsons story.
Jack Parsons.
I've been looking into him, fascinating character.
But before we touch on that, I would love to get your sort of origin story and what brought you towards the occult.
I'll start off by saying I'm very much an armchair occultist.
And it's a funny story, I guess, because you are a part of my occult journey.
I've used my Quasi C rate celebrity fame to meet people that I like or admire.
And that goes from musicians to actors to magicians, sleight of hand.
And it started with sleight of hand.
I became friends with yourself and Penn Teller and Danny Garcia.
And you guys all have the ability to take a deck of cards, 52 pieces of paper and plastic, and do incredible things.
And you can create a moment out of those 52 things.
Now, if you hand those cards to anyone else that doesn't have that knowledge, they can't.
They can stumble around, but you have the ability to control an entire room because you have knowledge that not everyone else has.
You have methods that not everyone else knows.
Hey guys, hope you're enjoying the podcast.
I just wanted to remind you that our MJ12 collection is still available at area52.shop.
This is some of the highest quality merch that you can get.
We worked on this in house for the past six months.
This is not a drop shipment, everything ships out of my warehouse.
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And I became fascinated to learn how you were doing it.
I became fascinated when I see Danny Garcia do something that to me breaks my brain.
To be fair, Danny Garcia breaks my brain as well.
Yeah, well, I wanted, I just had this thing that I couldn't sleep at night because it didn't feel real to me.
I knew it was a trick, but it didn't feel real.
So I started collecting magic books and I wanted to uncover the secret.
And the best example that I can give is that my kind of quest of esoteric knowledge or occult knowledge, that's all it is.
I mean, occult is just that which is hidden.
That's what it is.
It is uncovering things that aren't widely known and understanding the mechanics behind them.
In the same way that once I read a book on magic, I have, when I say magic, sleight of hand, I can start to understand what you're doing.
Not that I can do it, but I understand it.
I understand the mechanics behind it.
But you create magic with cards, real magic.
I'm talking magic like Jack Parsons magic, because you can.
You can get a group of people together that are strangers, and you can do a trick and you can create laughter and emotion and amazement.
Alchemy.
Exactly.
You have changed something.
Who cares that you're using sleight of hand?
It is still magic.
That is magic.
And I became fascinated with that.
So part of it started there.
The other part of it, I'm a poser.
I always feel like I have imposter syndrome.
So I am a horror director, I've made my career in making horror movies.
And I wanted my office to feel like that.
So when I first started out after Saw 2, I had a spooky looking office and I had spooky skulls and I had spooky, scary looking books and spooky candles, but they were all fake.
It was all stuff you would buy at like Spirit Halloween.
And as I started to get more money, I started to replace those spooky things with real things.
So I remember the first thing I did was I had all of these spooky books that, and they're plastic, you know, they're things you would buy at a Halloween store.
And I was like, this is cheap.
When you come in my office and you turn the lights on, it's cheap.
I want the real book.
So it started with Magic's Flight of Handbooks.
So I started buying Professor Hoffman.
Which are like if you're a magician or a sleight of hand person, Professor Hoffman is like everyone knows who he is.
Tricks with cards.
Exactly.
So I started replacing all of my spooky looking books with magic books and books on parlor magic and all that.
So now when you go into my office, it's this old Victorian looking bookcase with all these books in it.
Then I started replacing my scary books like Frankenstein and Dracula with real books of that.
Then that led me into realizing how fake I'd been my entire career because I'd made a bunch of movies on religion and the occult.
And it was all bastardized Hollywood ideas of the devil and things like that.
And that's not what it is.
So it started with after I had my magic books and I had my original Frankenstein books, I started getting esoteric knowledge books.
And Manley P. Hall is an example.
He's one of my favorite, I guess, esoteric thinkers.
I started getting his books because I liked the way they looked.
So I say I'm a poser.
I like the covers, I like the images on them.
And then I started reading them.
And it just made sense to me.
Things in it made sense.
It was philosophy, it was ways to look at life.
And then it became a conversation piece.
I realized when people came in my office, they're like, um, I remember one of the books I had is called, it's a Manly P. Hall book called Anatomy of a Man.
And there's a, there's a new, there's a naked picture on it and it's old and it's, it's, you know, when you come in, you're like, what is this?
And then I found myself talking about it and getting excited when I talked about it because it challenges beliefs.
And that's, I think, my grandfather was a Baptist minister.
My mother was very religious.
And for so much of my life, I didn't understand religion.
I knew it was something I had to go to every Sunday growing up, but I didn't really have faith.
And I got to be honest with you, it was through all of these weird books and these esoteric documents that I think I found faith.
And I found Hermeticism, like Rosicrucianism, like that type of stuff.
Yeah.
You know, I think that I just found things that I believed in.
In that, things that were said.
And I'll tell you, you mentioned I do immersive theater.
For those that don't know, there's a movie, a Michael Douglas film starring David Fincher directed it called The Game.
And basically, it is a real narrative that takes place in the real world for one or two people.
I started doing those.
And the first one I did was based on a cult, like a Jonestown like cult.
Up until that point, every time I tried to touch religion or cult, it was all, like I said, very surface Hollywood.
Versions of it.
I wanted to base it in something real.
So I went down the rabbit hole of reading documents on secret societies and I would change it like 8 to 10%.
And I started doing it.
And I started to base the mythology on real doctrine.
And it sparked something.
It just felt real to me and it felt real to the people doing it.
And I took, I kind of cherry picked the stuff that I believed in and the stuff that made sense to me.
Can you give me an example of something that you might have done immersively just to give people a bit of a context?
Because they might not be familiar with what.
Immersive theater is.
So, yeah, immersive theater is if you go see a movie in the theaters right now, it's two dimensional.
You're staring at a screen and it's passive.
It'll never change.
You can watch it 100 times, it's going to stay the same.
Immersive theater interacts with you.
Your interaction with the actors changes what we do.
Instead of watching someone on a screen, you're sitting next to them.
You're sharing a drink with them.
You can smell the cigarette that they're smoking.
You can smell the perfume.
And so, things that we would do is like we would Uh, put documents in the downtown public library, uh, in the esoteric section.
And it, we would, we'd reprint entire books and it would be 85% real.
But then inside the book, there would be 20% fiction that we would create for our storyline.
And so if they were to Google it, they would say it's a real book.
And so we were able to base a mythology.
They would believe on something very real, but it wasn't.
Um, but we would take ideas that, um, ritualistic ideas or initiation rites.
Initiation is very much alchemy.
It's, it's that you are going through a process of transformation.
You start in dark and you find light.
You know, that's so much on these things is stepping into light that we are neophytes right now.
But once you go down this certain path, you are awakened, enlightened, enlightened.
And I think that so we use that as a foundation very much.
So you start this ARG, which is an alternate reality game, as a neophyte.
You're in the dark and it's all about illumination.
You will find the answer through these tasks.
And so we, you know, I use my screenwriting.
Partners and we took traditional narratives, but we based the mythology for the first time in real documentation as opposed to bastardized doc.
And so many movies that I see in Hollywood, whether it's UFOs or on the occult, are just, they're fake.
They're not based in anything.
They're not based in anything.
They're based on what me in a Midwest, growing up in the Midwest, thought the occult was, thought UFOs were.
And I think what, by making it a little bit more real, it just ingrained itself and imprinted itself so much more.
And that just formed a fascination.
And now I collect these documents.
I seek them out.
I, you know, and it's fascinating to me.
Which is the same thing for magic, sleight of hand.
I want to understand how things work.
I want to understand the thought process behind why someone would, like Jack Parsons, what made him a Thelemite?
Why did he go down this road as someone who created the modern rocket propulsion system?
What would make him go into sex magic?
And so I want to understand that.
And so I think that it's made me a better storyteller.
And I think it's helped define my own faith and my own belief system.
Sure.
Yeah.
I think that's really profound.
And that's kind of the, The path I think that a lot of people in this space end up going down in one way or another, maybe not so directly, but in the sense that we're looking to merge science and religion or science and spirituality.
You know, if you look at the UFO space, for example, there's a lot of this talk of, oh, these are angelic beings and this is, you know, whatever it is.
And then on the other side, it's like, no, it's just purely like nuts and bolts.
But then there's this school of, okay, maybe we're talking about the same thing.
Maybe what's spiritual to you is quantum physics to me.
And that's something that Jack Parsons actually tried to merge, although, you know, in a more deviant manner.
Yeah.
And he had a very horrific ending.
Yeah.
Jack Parsons is, I mean, he's fascinating because you look at a guy who, a genius, a genius, but doing things that I think would be labeled insane or crazy.
Yeah.
And trying to find that balance between the two where, you know, by day, he's this engine, this rocket propulsion person, and by night, he is.
Participating in ritualistic magic.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's a fascinating, if I recommend, if you've not seen it, Strange Angel.
Yeah, just got done watching season one.
It's great.
I love that because it's, first off, by the time you get to season two, you're just going to ask yourself, how did this ever get greenlit?
How did anyone put this on TV?
Yeah.
And I love it.
Was it 2016?
I think it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it bums me out that it didn't continue.
You'll understand why it didn't because it goes places.
I mean, it definitely goes.
And they did not shy away.
From the occult in that.
I love that though.
I think even in the first episode, there's already this guy bringing a goat into his house and then coming out with a vial of blood later.
You're like, what happened there?
For people who don't know about Jack Parsons, he was one of the founding figures in American rocketry, co founding JPL, so Jet Propulsion Labs, and Aerojet Engineering Corp.
His work laid the foundation for NASA, what we now know as NASA.
And the most interesting part of all this, this guy.
Was basically just like a chemist.
He didn't go to some massive.
He didn't go to school for this.
And so, for him to be accepted in modern rocketry, first of all, going down this whole sort of occultist, Aleister Crowley sex magic route, actually, they withdrew his name from a lot of this early American rocketry stuff.
Yeah, he was shunned, his belief system, because when you're dealing with what he was dealing with, with clearances, with all of that, I mean, he went through a very intense process.
The process of being vetted.
And then here he is.
And at that time, I think he had the compound.
He had that in Pasadena.
I forget the name of it now.
The Parsonage.
Yeah.
Which was like this place for rituals, this place where people from all over would come, these illuminaries or these, you know, whatever you were, these vagabonds.
Well, and I think it was a hard time because anytime you mention a cult, you're either met with a dead stare.
I was at dinner, I won't say the name, but I was at dinner last night with the magician we both know.
And the first question was, are you into Satanism?
And I was like, no, no.
And they're like, but isn't that a cult?
And I'm like, no, it's not.
So much of a cult comes from Christian teachings.
It comes from.
You know, things that are the opposite of that.
But I think that there is a belief that so much of this is, you know, evil, bad, satanic, whatever.
And I think that what he was met now, I'm not saying what he was doing was not because he was on a much darker path.
But yeah, I think that, you know, trying to juggle both of those things, being somebody in that high in the government and going and doing ritualistic sex magic at night.
Yeah, especially in the time where it was like super taboo.
This is like late 40s.
Uh, well, well, actually early to late forties and then, um, you know, associating himself eventually with people like Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.
L. Ron Hubbard, that's right.
Uh, getting mixed up with these folks and doing some really sort of like nefariously oriented things.
He went down a very dark path.
Um, and then, uh, you know, I, I read the book years ago, uh, the book in which the show was based on, but he was trying to bring about Babylon, uh, the, the girl.
Yeah, the elemental.
Yeah.
Yeah, female elemental, the goddess Babylon was him and L. Ron Hubbard were trying to summon this lady, essentially.
Dark Paths Of Ritual Magic00:14:44
I had such a worldview shift.
And then he did, by the way.
Yeah, and then he blew up.
Yeah, but he did end up summoning.
He supposedly summoned the devil.
Well, his girlfriend showed up, this beautiful redheaded lady who showed up.
What was her name?
Marjorie Cameron, sorry.
His very early on in his life, I think early teens, he felt he summoned the devil.
Lucifer in his room.
And that's what got his fascination into the occult.
But, you know, for me, he was practicing, he was going through and doing these rituals and doing whatever.
I am so just fascinated with learning in the same way that I wanted to understand in cardistry how to do a double lift or to do whatever.
I wanted to understand it because it gave me a new way of thinking.
When I learned magic or went down that rabbit hole of, and I say magic, the sleight of hand, it changed the way that I approach problems.
It was a problem.
So I think as a magician now, when I'm doing a movie, when I'm doing a saw trap example, here's one I can explain it.
We wanted all the saw traps to be practical.
I didn't want to use visual effects.
So we would design them.
In forced perspective with mirrors.
I learned that through magic thinking.
I wanted to understand this whole kind of idea about esoteric thought because I wanted just to think differently.
And I think that so many people are so closed minded to whatever they grew up believing.
I grew up in the Midwest, I grew up in a Lutheran household.
My grandfather was a Baptist minister.
So I had this kind of sheltered view of the world.
I've been lucky enough to travel the world with these movies, and I just recently went to Saudi Arabia and I had a very sheltered view of Islam.
And then I go there and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's this, it's this, it's this.
And my whole, I guess, mentality of that culture shifted.
And that's why I think I'm so fascinated with all of this esoteric thought, it completely shatters all of these preconceived notions and opens my mind up to believe and accept a lot more that I maybe wouldn't have believed or accepted if I did not read that book.
Yeah.
And a lot of these ritualistic things that we bear witness to at a young age.
I was raised Catholic as well.
You know, eating the body of Christ, drinking the blood.
Like these are things that seem fairly normal as a child.
And as you grow up and kind of have a removed sort of sense of what this is, a bird's eye view, if you will, of what's going on.
And I had that happen to me actually when I was in my early 20s.
And at that point, I was still kind of practicing religion a little bit.
And I would go to church with like friends and stuff.
And at one point, I was at a baptism.
And, and, You know, in it was a Catholic battle.
In walks this priest, but like dressed in like these golden robes.
He had a scepter, and like following him were these people with like this smoke, and everything was gold.
Somebody was holding a big golden book.
That is a ritual.
You were going to a ritual.
That's right.
And I'm watching this stuff, and it's kind of like hitting me now because I'd gone every Wednesday night.
We'd have like prayer night, and there was music.
It was beautiful.
Like people would congregate, and they were all lovely, and everyone was really nice to each other.
It was all normal.
But then I started to look at it like, whoa, what's going on here?
And when they baptize the child in this giant, like a stone basin, an altar.
Yeah.
And they put water.
And I remember there's a lady, this is always stuck out to me.
They go to put water on the child's head, and it kind of only grazed the child's hair.
And then he went on with his thing.
And a lady in the back goes, You didn't get him.
Right.
And I'm thinking, Surely this is only symbolic.
And then he's like, Oh, and then he puts more.
And now it's in the baby's eyes.
The baby's crying and everything.
And at that point, I was like, Wait a second.
Is this symbolic or is this literal?
And that really shifted how I see all of this.
And I'm like, this must be symbolic.
And if it's symbolic, you know, surely we don't need all of this.
We don't need all of these, you know, bells and whistles if it's just a mind state, right?
But for me, yeah, that really showed me that even the things that I was, like you're saying, really accustomed to and never really questioned, all of a sudden from a different perspective seemed occult, seemed a little foreign to me.
So much, I think that I'm in a unique position being in Hollywood.
Um, and getting to work in movies, um, seeing how much the esoteric thought is ingrained in certain things.
Um, you know, some of my favorite, uh, I love graphic novels.
Some of my favorite graphic novels are written by some of the biggest occultists, Alan Moore, who most people would know from Watchmen, from Hell.
Um, you know, this guy is, this guy is a true magician, um, magician, uh, esoteric thinker.
Um, I remember I listened to one of my favorite books is something called The Invisibles, which is very much based in like esoteric thought, but it's, it's, It's a graphic novel.
He had a YouTube video off a lecture he wrote for a book called Disinformation Guide of the Occult, I think is what it's called, where he talks about chaos magic.
And things just clicked for me in those, like the words they were saying, ideas that they had.
And I realized how much of our life is a ritual or magic.
The idea of saying, I love you to me is magic because you can say, I love you to someone, and those words change that relationship with that person.
So you've put an intention out there, you said, I love you.
And now, all of a sudden, your relationship has changed with that person.
These little things I never thought of before.
So things just started connecting for me that never did before.
How much of what we do is ritualistic?
I mean, you just went through, imagine that same thing of a Catholic church, but put it in a dark underground cave.
And that same thing, all of a sudden, that becomes satanic, that becomes whatever.
So much of it of society.
And that's a good point.
I mean, even, you know, we would, there's this, I don't know, you know, I don't know if there's any truth to this, but it sounds, True.
But when we spell things, right?
Yeah, that's not true.
Like it's an actual spell you're casting, you're saying, hey, go outside.
And I send this letter across the world.
And the person who reads it then goes outside.
You have said something and they've done something.
You've created something.
You haven't even said it.
You've just.
But that is an action.
And I think that's something else that I found fascinating was this idea that magic is just something that you don't yet understand.
So if you go to a caveman and animal lighter, that's magic.
But when you actually understand the mechanics of it, it's not.
I always find that fascinating because I've looked at things as a kid and I was like, oh my God, that's magical.
And then I learned them and I'm like, it's not magic, it's this.
So, how much of these things that we hear about or read about is just, I forgot who said it, but it's just magic is science not yet defined.
Yeah, Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Exactly.
And I just wonder how many things like that that we see that soon will no longer be magic, it'll be science.
There was a book I just got, and it's amazing.
It's huge.
I mean, you can't hold it.
It's a Manly P. Hall.
It's like the Secret Teachings of all ages.
Tashin just put it out.
Oh, wow.
And it is, I mean, it's this big.
And basically, it's like his grand opus where he went through every major secret society and esoteric and basically wrote these chapters on it.
It breaks your brain to have to read it.
I've read through some of it.
It's very dense.
It's like the Umo papers.
That's right.
You just cry when you get through like a page.
Yeah, but it's fun to open up.
Oh, it's beautiful.
I just open it up sometimes and I'm like, I'll start here.
And it's just like a whole chapter on the pineal gland.
And I'm like, oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So for me, I think that the exploration, though, started from sleight of hand.
It came from cards, it came from watching people like yourself do card tricks that I didn't understand.
And I knew that if I understood them, maybe they would stop being magical.
And I wanted to understand the mechanics.
And that's where I started kind of my fascination with these books and collecting these documents.
That's so interesting.
And Man, I mean, you know, it's funny because I talk to you as a magician because you're, you know, quite familiar with a lot of the techniques.
We've hung out a lot and talked a lot about it.
And I don't get to share that with very many people.
You know, I can sort of abbreviate it or dumb it down a little bit for like, not dumb it down, but just put it in layman's terms for people to understand.
But it's fun to be able to talk shop with you in terms of illusion, you know, and magic thinking.
Because magic thinking is something that once you notice it, You see it everywhere.
I see it within intelligence agencies.
Well, 100%.
And that's why I think that my education, I've had two educations.
I had the one where I went to school when I was in my 20s, and I consider my midlife education.
And the midlife education was sleight of hand into what I'm doing now with these books.
It's completely reframing how I approach any situation or how I think about them, including how I make movies now.
You know, part of, we talked about this at lunch, but part of magic is it's an intention.
When you are going to cast a spell, when you're going to do something, it is an intention you're trying to put out.
As a director, I want to affect an audience.
Through a series of images and sound.
How do I do that?
And I have the ability to move them, to scare them, to discuss them, to upset them by moving pictures and images.
Now I'm using tricks, not only for magic, a sleight of hand, but tricks psychologically that I'm reading about in some of these other books.
And I think that it's fascinating.
It feels like, again, I'm back in college with all this stuff, learning new things.
That's amazing.
I'd love to hear it.
Yeah.
I mean, you, once, once you're, once your mind is attuned to how magic kind of works, you'd think you'd get disillusioned, but you actually become inspired to create more, uh, once you're aware of these things.
And, uh, but it is, it is interesting too.
I have a talk coming up at, uh, Psy games, uh, which is like the Olympics of, you know, really cool what they're doing.
Um, Hakeem Isler, he's putting together this thing where all these people will compete in different, um, psychic events.
And I'm overseeing to make sure that they are, You know, rigorous and you can't cheat them.
And we're going to see if anything can be done.
But during that time, I have a talk and I'm writing it now.
And the talk is about real magic and not magic with a K, but kind of the fact that during magic performances, psychic events tend to happen.
And magicians know this.
If there's any magicians watching, comment below.
Let me know about a miracle that you've performed and let me know how often these things happen because they happen more often than they should.
And there is a relationship there with, you know, Russell Targ as well got into Psy stuff.
He was the founder of one of the guys at SRI, but he got into it through doing stage magic.
And I just find it so interesting that my personal life has gotten me from magic with a C to magic with a K to magic with a K to magic with a J now.
Oh, majestic.
That's right.
Yeah.
The whole majestic thing.
It all comes full circle.
And so magic has been kind of exactly, magic has been kind of following me everywhere.
You know, it is crazy.
I'm watching the David Blaine special now Do Not Attempt or Do Not Try.
Yeah.
And what's I love that special, by the way.
I do too.
And I think what's crazy about it is.
I think we are capable of great things, all of us.
If you don't believe you are, then you won't be.
And I think that you look at David Blaine, who's, you know, doing these feats that seem completely unreal, but he's trained his body, he's trained his mind, and can do insane things.
And I think that we all have that ability.
And again, if you show that 50 years ago, that is magic with a K, what he's doing.
And I think that, again, it's science that we just didn't have a name for then.
But if you know how to do it, if you know.
And I think that's why they.
You know, I used to always watch ghost hunting shows.
Like I said, never seen one, but I would always really love it.
Why do certain people see things and other people's don't?
And I think a lot of it has to do with what you allow yourself to believe.
If you're closed off to it, if you're like, I can't hold my breath for six minutes and you're never going to get to that point in your life, I can't see a ghost, you're never going to have that.
I can't see a UFO, I won't.
Versus those that are open to the idea, I can hold my breath for six minutes, I'm going to train my body, I'm going to do whatever.
Now this impossible feat becomes possible.
I can see something that's, you know, just outside of our perception.
And you've just described abracadabra.
Yeah, I mean, I speak what I create, what I speak.
Exactly.
It goes back to the idea of spells, too.
But I feel that there's such a cross section of magic with a C and magic with a K or a J.
It is this belief, it is this training.
It is, and so I was really fascinated by what David Blaine has done and what he continues to do.
I think I'm always fascinated, like watching your show, all of these things that 20 years ago you would have been laughed out of a room, these ideas, these concepts of things that exist in the sky.
Now it's mainstream.
It is mainstream.
It's on mainstream news sites on a daily basis.
That to me, I think that soon we're going to realize how interconnected this all is.
You mentioned it earlier, what, you know, a thousand years ago they called angels or demons.
Now we call UFOs or NHI.
I just feel that there's more of a connection here between the occult, the UFOs, religion.
Oh, yeah.
And you can even look at places like NASA who continue to this day, allegedly, to do sort of these ritualistic, albeit less, you know, Dark, but like still ritualistic nonetheless, things during their or before their launches.
You know, you just read American Cosmic by Dana Pasolka.
She mentions it on a few interviews as well.
That, yeah, sometimes they're like, hey, you got to wear your launch t shirt and everybody has to wear, or everybody has to eat the same food or stand in a certain.
Those are all little rituals that they continue to do to this day because it's such a precise science, rocket science, that if the slightest miscalculation happens, That thing's going to blow up.
People's lives are jeopardy, billions of dollars.
So they want everything on their side, including perhaps whatever's up there.
Psychic Experiments With Mind Control00:07:12
Absolutely.
I mean, you've got to look at, and again, it's less now.
And I live in Los Angeles, which is a completely different environment and world than a lot of other places.
But you drive down the street and you see churches.
I mean, we were driving down the street and you have this beautiful church.
And you realize that how much of the population does have a belief, they have a faith in a supernatural presence and a being and something like that.
I think that it's ingrained in us.
It's indoctrinated from the very beginning of us being children.
Ritual, belief in something that we cannot see.
It's fascinating to me.
Well, let's stop talking about the stuff we cannot see and a great segue into something that you saw.
Now, you started telling me about this prior to the podcast, and I said, save it for the pod.
I want to hear it.
I want to hear it live.
So, I really do want to see something, and that's been my thing.
I want to see some apparition.
I want to see, I just want the proof, even though I can read these things and I can conceptualize them, I want that moment.
I want that.
I say that now until something appears and I have an apparition.
I'm like, crap my pants.
I crap your pants.
I crap my pants.
I had one moment, and I'm hearing all your stories on your thing, and I was like, what have I had?
There is one.
It's pretty.
It was the 4th of July weekend.
I went to Kansas, where my family is from, and I brought my son.
I think he's four or five at this time.
And we are out letting fireworks off, which are legal in Kansas, in the driveway of my parents' house.
And above us, way above where the fireworks are going off, there are lights.
I can't say they were in a triangle fashion, but they were definitely in a formation.
And it's 4th of July.
So, of course, I go to it's, it's, you know, it's fireworks, it's something.
And then I didn't say anything.
And then I see my dad say, Do you see that?
My dad's military, he was army.
And he goes, Do you see that?
I was like, Yeah, I see it.
And I pull my phone out and I aim my phone up at it.
And it's not moving.
And so, my first thought was, it could be like a military performance, it could be skydivers, it could be flares.
It's not moving.
What color were they?
White.
They were orb like, but they were way above where the fireworks were.
So again, I went to, is it a planetary thing?
Is it a star cluster?
And I have an app on my phone that you can like aim it up at the sky and see what it is.
Nothing like that.
But I'm still convinced it's 4th of July.
It didn't cross my mind at this point that it could be something else.
So we keep letting the fireworks off, and this thing isn't moving, it's there.
And then I see, which I perceive it, that it goes from left to right.
And I pull my phone out again and I start filming.
Now I'm trying to zoom in.
So I'm using the optical zoom on my phone.
And It moves.
It moves very fast and it moves in a way that it should not have moved.
My dad runs inside to get my mom and I run, Nancy, get out here, get out here.
And now my son's looking up and he's pointing and I'm filming it and it's gone.
In my view of the phone, it just flies off.
I take it down and I'm showing my mom and it's on my phone.
I'm showing it to her and I'm like, look at this.
And I'm zooming in on the phone.
So I'd already zoomed in on the phone.
Now I'm trying to zoom in again.
And now you're getting a little more clarity of it.
The neighbors come over.
And we try to show it to them again.
As I pull my phone out, it deletes right then and there.
No way.
Gone.
Gone.
And it to me seemed so weird because it wasn't like I didn't hit the delete button on the phone.
And also, there's recently deleted.
So if something deletes, it should be in the recently deleted folder.
Sure.
Recently deleted folder is gone.
So all the photos that I deleted throughout the last couple of days, you know, just pictures of whatever, they're gone.
So it was like the video did not even exist.
And it happened so rapidly, too.
It was just the one thing that I was like, that was one that I can't explain.
It was so Um And it happened right then and there.
And it wasn't like my finger went over and hit the delete, but I would have to go into recently deleted to delete that as well.
And then, you know, when I told that story again, someone was like, oh, you're stupid.
Like, how could that happen?
And then I started realizing today, my son got in trouble at school.
He's in summer school and he got in trouble.
I disabled his iPad from my phone and been here.
That's right.
Yeah.
I disabled his iPad.
And that, think about it.
If there are NHI and there are things in our sky, how easy would it be for them to just hit a button?
The same way that I turned my kid's iPad off and disabled it, he can't even turn it on.
I have it so I can.
Turn his iPad off.
So I just started thinking now, like, how crazy really is it to believe that they could delete photos or make them blurry or whatever it is that they're doing?
In the moments, I tried to rationalize it.
I was like, well, maybe my phone ran out of storage, maybe whatever.
But now, hearing and reading a lot of these other books, I mean, I'm sure they have the technology.
It's not that surprising.
It's not that surprising.
Now, do they give a flying fuck?
I apologize.
You can beat that out.
I can't imagine them actually going into my.
Verizon settings in my 5G and going in there and turning it off.
But it's again, it's that idea, that thinking, how my thinking has changed about advancements.
Like 20 years ago, 10 years ago, I couldn't have turned my son's iPad off.
I can now.
Yeah.
So what are they capable of?
And who's to say that that's they at all?
It could be the military.
That's right.
Exactly.
That's where my head goes.
I know.
You know, that was close to a military base as well.
Well, there's a lot in Kansas.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's what I always think as well is that so many times, I mean, how much was a stealth, Sure.
Misthought of as a UFO.
Oh, not even just a stealth bomber.
We had John Ramirez on here and he was talking about some of the early flights they did with the U 2 and all sorts of things, but they were all painted silver because back then you didn't have a night vision camera or anything like that.
So you didn't have infrared.
So they would have to be visible.
So they made them, they're weird shapes, they're silver.
I mean, people would call these things all the time.
They would call them in and be like, hey, Air Force, we got UFOs here.
And then the CIA sent people to their houses, not to tell them.
They saw something they didn't.
Just an intel collection.
What do you think it was?
Yeah, what is it?
Exactly.
Well, you know, I have an interesting story.
So I was shooting in a place called Awula in Saudi Arabia, and it's the most remote place I've ever been.
And there was a really cool moment where it's this desert, and as far as you can see, it's just sand and rock.
And the guy that was taking us around says, he stops me and he goes, What do you see?
And I said, Sand.
And he goes, What don't you see?
And I looked around and he goes, Look at the ground.
What don't you see?
And then I realized, he goes, Look behind you.
And there were footprints.
And I looked in front.
I guess I don't see footprints.
And he says, in this desert, when you step on the sand here, it'll stay here for decades because of the no rain, the no wind.
So your footprints will stay there.
So if we were to go back now, you would see our footprints from where we walked.
And so I'm looking at this beautiful, vast desert that had not been walked in for so long.
And in this shoot, we had drones and we sent the drones up and we were going to get this huge, picturesque shot.
And as they go up there, they fall out of the sky.
One falls, the next one falls.
And we found out later that one of the royal family was flying in and they have something to knock drones out of the sky.
Footprints That Stay For Decades00:13:59
Whoa.
And you know, you think about that like 10 years ago, that would have been an alien to me.
I would have been like, no, it wasn't.
It was they knocked him out of the sky.
Whoa.
So I think that so much of what we do see could be that.
But that thing on 4th of July, which was just more than anything, I thought, I'm an ant.
Why would they care about what was on my phone?
But it did happen.
And it was one of those things that I, I was going to ask you.
I know, I know.
It's, it was, but it happened right then and there too.
Like we're standing around the phone.
So it was, it was a crazy situation.
That's a cool moment.
Well, that's a cool micro confirmation, you know, of, hey, I really want to see something.
They're like, okay, but here's the caveat you don't get to keep what you see.
You can see it without your phone.
Well, I mean, I, like everyone else, I would get frustrated.
I told you the first book that I read is like a, my first adult book was Communion.
I agree.
Like I'm on Reddit all the time.
And why are they blurry?
Why are they out of focus?
Why this, you know, as a filmmaker, We have HD cameras on us all the time, but then you realize if they are as advanced as I am with my son, then I could stop anything.
Yeah, not to mention gravitational distortion potentially, and not to mention if there is some type of, you know, adjustment bureau type deal happening in this sphere that like anything of consequence will get snuffed out anyways.
Now that's fringe theory, but I mean, it's still, you know, it's not off the table.
Well, as a filmmaker, I have to ask you, what are the.
Movies that you watch, whether UFO, alien, that have affected you the most?
That have affected me the most.
Interesting.
I mean, initially, Fire in the Sky.
Yeah, that the abduction scene in that gave me nightmares as a kid.
I mean, that is one of the most horrific 15 minutes of filmmaking.
I mean, that it's even now it's hard to watch.
Yeah, it was tough because, unlike any other horror movie that I had seen, and I'd seen quite a few, I was nine years old, but I had an older brother, right?
So I remember watching Leprechaun.
Which I know you're a fan of.
Sore spot.
Let's not talk about that.
Yeah.
I wanted to remake Leprechaun for years and I know it's kicked off that movie.
So I remember watching Leprechaun.
I remember watching Event Horizon like out of year.
Oh, dude.
Yeah.
It's a wild one.
Talk about interdimensional hell, you know.
But Fire in the Sky, what was so interesting and unique about it was that there was never an explanation given for any of it, right?
And that didn't sit well with me as a child.
I watched this based on a true story, first of all, an adult telling me that aliens are real.
Okay.
And I'm seeing this, and all the while, I'm waiting for someone to tell me why.
Yeah.
Right?
I'm waiting for someone to say, oh, that was just, or they wanted this, or for the aliens.
To have a conversation among themselves that we could listen in on, nothing.
We were given nothing.
They were just shoving stuff in his mouth and like opening his eyes and doing all these weird things to him and then dropping him off and leaving.
And we, and guess what?
We never see him again.
I'm like, what do you mean we never see him again?
They don't come back, they don't tell us what, no, we never see him again.
Well, I think that probably is life.
There's no resolution or explanation that we're ever going to get that's going to satisfy us.
But that's what sent me on the quest.
And I, I had the, uh, the same feeling that movie, um, Unnerved me and literally so did communion.
Maybe it was Christopher Walken's face that just scared me, but I mean, that guy's NHI for sure.
I know.
You know, as a kid growing up and trying to wrap my head around this thing that there is something that could come in your house in the middle of the night and paralyze you and you can't do anything about it terrifies me.
I heard Poltergeist too was another one when I was a kid.
But let's be honest though, Killer Clowns from Outer Space might be the best of them all.
Yeah, I, you know, I have a fun, the same, this ties back into 11 11.
The editor, His name is Martin, who was the assistant editor on The Shining, told me the greatest Stanley Kubrick story.
Is it that he faked the moon landing?
Okay.
No, stop.
No, here's the story.
No, stop.
Okay, listen.
It's not that.
So I said, You got to tell me a Stanley Kubrick story.
And he goes, Okay, I got one.
He was also an assistant on Dr. Strangelove.
And he said that one day, this is in the day where, you know, you didn't have cell phones, it was a landline phone and it would ring.
And he said that the phone would ring and he was never supposed to answer the phone.
And he said the phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing.
And he finally picked up and they asked for Mr. Kubrick and it was someone at the Pentagon.
And, uh, he, they put him on hold and said, uh, Mr. Kubrick, it's, it's so and so at the Pentagon.
Stanley gets really frustrated.
He takes a breath.
He picks up the phone.
He waits for them to say something and he hangs up the phone and takes it off the hook.
And I'm like, what did that mean?
And he's, and I said, I go to the moon landing.
He goes, he would not talk about it.
He wouldn't address it.
He believes what it was was Dr. Strangelove dealt with, you know, the war room and dropping bombs.
That there was a, I don't know if it was an agency or what, when you had movies that dealt with that, you had to show them.
There was basically a protocol that they had to watch it to make sure that.
It's like a dobser.
Yeah.
But I would like to believe it was about the moon landing.
I would too.
But he didn't confirm that.
He just said, no, he.
He hung up the phone on them and took it off the hook.
Well, I mean, there was that scene in the ET where they replaced all of the guns with walkie talkies with walkie talkies.
And there's also Flight of the Navigator.
Love that, which is great, by the way.
And what a prophetic movie in terms of technology.
I had to show that to my kid.
Yeah.
And that was filmed at the Kennedy Launch Center there.
That was real NASA stuff that was being shown.
So that hangar where they had it in was an actual NASA hangar, right?
And so when they filmed it there and they got the okay to film it there, It had to go through a bunch of screening where they were like, wait, is this too close to home?
I always wonder this.
I'm fascinated with conspiracy theories, but so much of it is a conspiracy.
There's nothing behind it.
I've read a lot of websites and gone down rabbit holes about Hollywood being infiltrated by the CIA or people that are putting imagery.
I put tons of occult imagery in my movies, tons.
They're hidden in the background.
I go out of my way to do things that I want people to find that most people don't find.
No one's telling me to do it.
It's just something because I'm fascinated by it.
There's no one whispering in my ear.
I do wonder on some of these movies, like you always hear about, like, Steven Spielberg on ET.
Was Jacques Valet or in Close Encounters of a Third Kind whispering in his ear, you need to do this, you need to do this?
I often wonder that.
He had, like, skunk work boxes, like, during the taping of that.
He had that hand scanner, which.
The hand scanner, which Bob Lazar, right?
You know, like, so many, so many little things that are, like, you said.
I believe that as well.
I believe, well, I have my own belief about Spielberg, but I do believe that he is a fan.
Of the UFO stuff.
Yeah.
And if you're a fan, like you are of the occult, that's just it.
I go out of my way to put it in there and give production designers things to do.
That's right.
So I think so much of it is that, like, if you have an interest, you will put Easter eggs in your thing.
And then 20 years from now, I'll be a CIA shill because, look, he's got this, this, and this.
In reality, I'm geeky and I love that stuff.
That makes sense to me, too.
But I do wonder how much of it is there that other side?
Like, what was that call from Stanley Kubrick?
Was, you know, I don't know.
I have this theory about Steven Spielberg.
I want to hear it.
That I hold dear and I really want it to be true.
You know, okay, we got this guy who's the most, you know, prevalent movie director of our time.
Beside Darren Bowsman in 11 11 11.
Yeah.
We have Spielberg, who's made like the most iconic movies in regards to especially extraterrestrials.
He even put out that encounter show that I guess he produced or something.
War of the Worlds.
Yeah, War of the Worlds, ET, Close Encounters.
Got a new one coming out?
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Disclosure.
So that's where I'm getting to.
What if Steven Spielberg was tasked with disclosure?
So get this from early on, Steven Spielberg doesn't give a lot of interviews, by the way, about this stuff.
And when he does, he's pretty standoffish and he's like, Yeah, I'd love to see one one day.
Never saw one.
And he's kind of, but he doesn't really lean into it at all.
And he's hard to like pin down.
Yeah.
What if he was told early on, like, Hey, man, you're going to be the soft drip.
All right.
We're going to give you all these amazing million dollar contracts and you're going to slowly start putting together these narratives, these narratives of these beings being benevolent, like ET, these narratives like this, like that's the exchange program, like Serpo.
Like all of these little narratives over time, the payoff we're going to let you use an actual UFO in a movie eventually.
But you got to shut up about it.
All right.
So, come 2025, we hear about this movie that he's directing called The Dish, right?
Which is like a flying saucer thing.
We're like, oh, cool.
The Dish, right?
Then it gets changed into disclosure.
It is the actual disclosure, is what you're thinking.
What if?
You're in theaters watching this, and you get one of those just like I saw when I watched Fire in the Sky.
This movie is based on a true story.
What if you get this movie features an actual UFO?
And even the actors don't know that they're inside one.
They think it's a prop or it's just footage, whatever.
But Americans get disclosure while eating popcorn while simultaneously the biggest box office hit of all time.
I do believe that if this is all real, which I believe it is, that there is an HI and there's all of this, you know, it has been ingrained in it since childhood, since birth.
You know, E.T. was probably the first one of those movies that I can remember.
It was an event movie for me.
And then I remember seeing, you know, all of these other alien films where they are portrayed every number of ways good, bad, nefarious, helpful.
And then I'm, you know, like I watch now, I'm watching the Skinwalker Ranch show every week.
And it's just like more and more things are connecting.
And, uh, It's going to make that ontological shock, I think, easier for everyone to take because it's been there since birth.
It's been there since, you know, if you ask my five year old daughter what this image is, she would say, that's a gray alien.
How does my five year old daughter, I don't put that around her.
I'm not showing her alien pictures, but it is ingrained in the cartoons she watches.
And I think that, you know, it's, it is, I buy that theory 100%.
Cause I don't think, thing is, I think about my reaction, I wouldn't be mad.
No.
I'd be like, Great move, America.
That's sick.
And just to corroborate this little thing a little bit with some anecdotal evidence, when he changed it to disclosure, Anna Paulina Luna, the congresswoman, and I think Burleson both retweeted him saying things are about to get interesting.
They both retweeted that.
Dude.
I mean, he would be.
I think what's great about him doing it.
So, we're just going to go on this for a minute.
It's him.
Okay.
He is revered.
He is iconic and he is beloved.
And I think that it's not like you have, you know, some hack guy that made 11111 doing it or, you know, some subversive filmmakers.
He's beloved.
And I think that would make a lot of sense.
The other side of this coin, which is probably the reality that we're living in.
Good luck Googling Disclosure 2026.
Yeah, it's just going to get Spielberg.
You're not going to get the.
It's the same thing that happened to Men in Black.
The movie.
Yeah.
Good luck Googling Men in Black and not seeing Will Smith's face.
I do have to think, though.
I mean, do you watch the Skinwalker documentary or the TV series?
I stopped, but I was pretty caught up with it.
I mean, like, I do look at things like that, which, again, is entertainment.
I get it.
It's completely entertainment.
But there's so much that they are now doing.
It's ramping up that if I would wonder if it was real, why isn't it being shut down?
If it's not real, why?
You have to be caught up on it, but it's crazy how quickly it's mirroring what you're hearing in the congressional oversight committees, how quickly it is.
And so, what if it is this multifaceted thing where all of these people are doing it from music to TV to movies?
I would completely buy that.
That would be the way to, I think, walk people through this, handhold them through it.
And what if it isn't humans that are controlling that?
What if it's actually the NHI?
You know, there's this story.
We talked about L. Ron Hubbard before.
You watched that episode with Danny Sheehan?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So with Danny, he says that he was offered a job representing L. Ron Hubbard.
And he said, I want to see the three most classified files that you guys have.
And two of them revolved around remote viewing.
One of them, namely, was Pat Price, where he put on this helmet in Southern Ontario and controlled an entire town to file their taxes.
All simultaneously into this little male spot, like in the town or whatever.
Like 70% of the people did that.
So it was an experiment to show, kind of like, oh, you can use this psychic ability to control minds, right?
I don't know whether that's true or not, but that was the file apparently that Danny Sheehan was shown.
Now, if we can do that, what can they do?
Subtle Fears Beyond Classic Hauntings00:15:05
Right.
And you hear about stories where people just, oh, I was flushed with, I felt so good.
And it's, Presence and I wanted to go along, and my memory was gone.
Barber said that when his thing with the egg, right?
That he just felt this overwhelming sense of peace and blah, blah, blah.
That was with the actually the eight gone thing that he got.
But you know who else said that?
Dan Burrish.
He said, when you looked into the eyes of the J Rod, the alien that he was tasked at taking these biological samples from, when you looked into its eyes, he said you would fall into its eyes.
And when that happened, they were trained not to fall into its eyes, by the way.
He had briefing prior explaining, careful, because what happens after that is they start flooding you with endorphins to make you feel good.
And so you have to fight that.
So he said, when the J Rod started realizing that he was resisting to this flooding of endorphins, The J rod would let go.
But he said the consequence of that was being terrified in the presence of this thing.
And he said, That's what they do.
He said, The rogue ones, that's what they do when they abduct you in your bedroom at night.
They flood you with endorphins so that you feel like it's this benevolent angel and you forget that it's, you know, so man, I was like, Whoa, it's so dark and twisted and wild.
But if you can do that, you can do a lot more.
It's fascinating.
And I keep finding connections that, that, You know, it's just like you see that classic meme of like someone has a bulletin board with a million strings everywhere.
That's me in my head right now with everything because, like, I recently got a movie, a script about the book of Enoch.
And, you know, reconceptualizing that book, which is literally about the angels that fell to earth, the watchers as aliens, reconceptualizing all that, there are so many connections.
And when you look at mistranslations of words that we thought meant one thing actually meant something else, All of these dots just to be in to connect, and it feels like it's this endless black hole that we're never going to get an answer.
I hope it is Spielberg in 2026 with this movie.
You're on board with my conspiracy theory.
I want that, I want that to happen.
Same here.
I'm going to use all of the magic and occult uh intention to make that happen because that would be that would be awesome.
I have the same feeling.
I'm like, this is the one I hold dear.
I'm like, please just let this one be true.
Uh, it's building to something.
I mean, like I said, you cannot open the news now without seeing something in there that's NHI or.
On, you know, UAP, it's building.
Yeah.
If you were to rate your top five UFOslash alien movies in no particular order, what would those be?
Who would make the top five?
Oh, it's so hard.
I mean, I definitely, Communion has such a huge part for me because of the book, then going straight into the movie, Fire in the Sky, obviously.
Close encounters because I liked how it didn't take a fear based approach.
It was more mental in this guy's family dynamic.
ET?
Yeah, but.
Not so much.
I'm trying to ones that actually stay.
ET in a different way because ET was something that I share with my kids.
And so I'm trying to think.
I mean, I would absolutely call Event Horizon one because.
I mean, you're dealing with insanity and hell on a ship.
So to me, it's there.
Interdimensional.
Yeah.
I'm trying to think of some more obscure ones that maybe people haven't seen.
Arrival for me is up there.
Arrival is great.
What I liked about Arrival was, you know, I think we're so used to what aliens look like that they're these either Nordics or they are the grays.
And you have these squid like creatures in that thing, which I thought was fantastic.
And also, he did such a unique approach.
Approach because again, it wasn't the classic someone being hunted or haunted by an alien.
So, you know what?
I'm going to add that.
Thank you.
Not only the score and the sound, but just the way that the aliens were unlike anything that I've ever seen.
It was ominous, too.
You know, another one that I really liked was the one with Natalie Portman.
I'll think of the name in a second.
It's based on a book.
I'm blanking out right now.
I'll think of the name in a second of it.
But it's like she goes to.
It's like an alien planet, basically, that's just like ours.
I'll think of it in a second, but it was, yeah, I remember seeing it in a theater and it just unnerved me and made me uncomfortable.
I'll come back to that.
I don't know.
And I think that I've also become desensitized now a little bit because, you know, I look around and I see all your books.
And in the same way that I feel if I could take back my first eight films on anything occult based, I would because it was just me pretending to act like I knew what I was talking about.
I didn't.
Now that I've read some of these alien stories, They are so much more horrific and scary and beautiful than any of the movies.
I think so much, it's a fear based thing.
And there's so much more to them than that now.
So I'm trying to think of some of the obscure ones that I've seen.
So I'm going to come back.
I'll answer that maybe off air and you can put it on screen.
Darren thought about it and he said this.
Yeah, I'm Flight of Navigators made that list for me because that was like a big event for me as a kid.
I actually, you know what?
I wrote down on here, I'm going to go see where my movies were because I actually put down.
Well, to see if you'd seen some of these.
So the ones that I wrote down were Close Encounters, The Phenomenon, which is a documentary.
The Fourth Kind.
And it's not that it's great, it's a mockumentary, but I saw it really late at night and I didn't know until like 10 or 15 minutes in it was not real.
And I just, those always unnerved me.
Yeah, found footage type stuff.
I mean, The Arrival, which I do have on here.
Yeah, I have more occult movies than I have UFO movies, but those are, what is, What's your all time favorite?
Would it be Flight of the Navigator?
No, all time favorite.
I would say it might be Arrival.
I've seen it a bunch of times, and every time I watch it, I get something new from it.
It borrows from certain themes as well.
If you, Childhood's End, right?
By blanking out on his name right now.
I'm talking about, um, why am I liking I'm the same.
You'll put it up on your pop up, like I'm going to put my Natalie Portman movie up on the pop up.
Yeah, exactly.
But Childhood's End in there has a similar plot where the aliens just show up and they wait.
And then everybody gets all hectic and like, whoa, are they going to attack?
And then the guns put down.
And then there's this whole waiting period.
I think that's how it would happen.
I think if they were to show up, right, it wouldn't be show up, open the door, what's up?
It would be show up.
Let's let them take this in for a second.
Well, this is the famous, I think it's called The Monsters Are Do at Maple Street, which is the famous, and again, it's either Twilight Zone or I think it's Twilight Zone, where the whole it's a great premise.
These two aliens are overlooking.
Arthur C. Clarke, sorry.
What was that?
What the aliens are doing at Maple Street?
Childhood Zen.
Well, this one is these two aliens overlooking a neighborhood and they let this suburban thing destroy themselves.
Like, we don't have to do anything.
Just wait, watch.
They do everything.
And I think that was that it is right.
Sometimes to me, the scariest movies are the ones that are most subtle that are not in your face.
And maybe that's why Fire in the Sky is so upsetting, is because it's a small community and it's almost as much about the community turning on him and not believing him than it is the aliens and what they did.
And I think that to me, that's scarier.
There's that great scene in that Ibn Night Shyamalan film that everyone loves where the alien comes by the window.
You're in the background and they're looking.
And that little thing terrified me because it was subtle.
It wasn't in your face.
It wasn't.
On video, it was on video, it was on video, but they were looking through a window, yeah, filming it.
And it was to me, I think that's scarier because it is so subtle.
And I think that they will come like a thief in the night, it's not going to be this big spectacle thing that we're expecting.
Um, and I think that to me is terrifying.
Do you ever see The Vast of Night?
You got there?
Uh, well, I want to go back here to my UFO thing just so you know, I'm not a look at number fourth one down.
Oh, yeah, Vast of Night.
Yeah, I love that one.
That was a directorial debut by the director, forget his name, but.
That was his first movie.
He did some really interesting cinematic things in there.
You know, a lot of one shot.
Those were shot on gas powered go karts.
That's so crazy.
Because they were like going super fast.
And I loved the whole movie because it was based in this sort of mid century time where like TVs weren't really a thing yet, but radio shows were still really prevalent.
And the audio of that creating that tone of these aliens arriving through phone calls, through these weird anomalous sounds, through the power going out.
And then at one point, there's this scene in the car where they're driving and they're playing a recording of this lady who had a run in with these extraterrestrials.
And she starts speaking in tongues almost or something.
And the driver and the passenger just start going like this.
Yeah.
And their heads go back, and you're like, whoa, what is this?
Well, I think that we can't comprehend the idea of aliens themselves.
You're left with things like Mars attacks or something that's bigger than life, but we understand human and how humans will react.
And I think that the ones that I gravitate to.
are the more human stories.
I mean, even communion, uh, I'm not talking about the book right now, but the movie, it's through the eyes of, of, you know, in this case, Christopher Walken and, and the, and the fire in the sky, it's through his eyes.
And I think that it's more terrifying because you understand that you can comprehend it.
The same thing with vast of knife.
It's what you don't see.
It's why Spielberg, I think, is a, is a, is a amazing, like go back to Jaws.
How often do you really see the shark?
Don't, but you see how it affects everyone in the town and the community.
Um, I'm more scared about how we react when aliens come than I am what the aliens are actually going to do.
Yeah, I mean, the chaos, the riots, the looting, the utter fear is, I think, more worrisome than whatever the ships bring in.
Well, that might be the reason it hasn't happened yet.
I mean, it could be.
Uh, that is, uh, I'm trying to think because there's so many obscure alien films that I know I'm leaving off this list.
And there's a bunch of older ones too.
Well, I mean, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, I remember it was something they showed in film school, which again, I mean, now it's kind of ridiculous with how far we've come, but just that idea terrifies me.
But I also love documentaries.
I mean, all of James Fox's stuff I find fascinating.
And I'm excited to see.
I know you saw the documentary at South by Age of Disclosure.
Yeah.
I get really now, the older I get, more wrapped up in documentaries.
It's, I liked it for people who, for the uninitiated, I would say it is a great sort of initiation by credible.
I think 34 people were interviewed, right, that had firsthand knowledge of some type of program or some type of experience within like military, you know, surroundings.
For me, however, like that's going to hit home with a lot of people who are on a fence.
I know that.
Right.
For me, I'd much more gravitate towards something like Moment of Contact, where it's about people in a town who these people have no real agenda.
Coming on camera to them makes their life worse, not better.
I just read a huge kind of book on Heaven's Gate or the Hale Bop Comet.
It goes back to the idea of going full circle of cult and the believability.
So many cults have this tie in to something celestial.
And what they will do for that belief system.
In that case, these people all killed themselves for this belief of a UFO trailing a comment that they could do this and end up there.
What year was that, 98?
Yeah, I don't remember when it was, but if you go back and watch the videos of a D, and I forgot what his name was on it, what he called himself, it's terrifying.
And again, it goes back to belief, it goes back to faith, what they believed in, what they allowed themselves to believe in, and what they would do for their belief and their faith.
It's like a royale.
Yeah.
It's, it's, uh, It's to me, it's terrifying.
And I, the more I experiment in my own faith, it's crazy when you go down that rabbit hole.
But if you, for those that don't know, I mean, the Hale Bop thing or the Heaven's Gate cult thing is pretty, pretty horrific.
Yeah.
I mean, it's akin to like the Jonestown stuff.
You know, people drinking Kool Aid pretty much.
Pretty, pretty insane stuff.
But yeah, that idea of ascending.
To something higher, some higher purpose.
You know, I mean, I can't even imagine.
Unless they're all the correct ones and we're not.
Like maybe they are on the back of that comment somewhere and they're laughing at us right now.
I think if that's the case, we'll all end up on the comment eventually.
I just want, now I'm fascinated with your Spielberg thing.
I want that to happen.
That's Willie's fourth movie, I guess, right?
E.T., Close Encounters of a Third Kind, War of the Worlds.
This will be his fourth.
Yeah, and he did the encounters there.
He did the show.
Yeah, the show.
Yeah.
And this, I mean, you have to expect this.
He's getting up there as well.
You'd have to expect this to like, is this the magnum opus?
Is this.
I was hoping that when Jimmy Carter, before he passed, he was going to drop some deathbed confession about what he knew and what he heard.
You've heard the story about him, like hearing all that information.
I keep waiting.
I keep waiting for that person to do the deathbed confession.
Deathbed stuff is the most compelling stuff.
I agree.
Yeah.
I. There's an Oscar Wolf guy who.
You know, talked about S4 and meeting that alien at S4.
Yeah, was that the one that was just on?
I just listened to the American Alchemist one with the guy who was about to die.
Danny Sheehan talked about it, but originally he was interviewed, I think, by Richard Dolan, and Jeremy Corbell actually was filming that interview where you see that guy in the video of the guy talking about it.
Yeah, I, that, it's going to happen soon.
I mean, everyone's saying that date 2027.
I don't know about that, but maybe Spielberg has himself two years to get this movie out before.
Yeah.
Well, that's, I, is he, is it 2026 he's putting it out?
I think so.
But that, that gets us ready for 2027 when the actual thing arrives.
History Repeating Itself Rapidly00:02:06
That's what I'm saying.
It's way too suspicious to change it from the dish or whatever to disclosure.
Yeah.
What a terrible name for a movie.
I'm sorry.
Not a great name.
I just don't know any other time that it has been this prevalent and this accepted.
Where I remember talking about UFOs at Christmas dinner 10 years ago, and my mom would be like, Stop, stop, stop.
Don't talk about it.
Now, you know, it's on C SPAN.
You know, that you're watching, I don't know when else is entertainment that I've sat down and watched a joint oversight committee, you know, talking and whatever.
I mean, I sat there and watched it if it was the Super Bowl.
Yeah.
The world has changed rapidly and is changing quicker.
And I think AI is just going to push it further.
It gets harder and harder to hide things.
But you had briefings like that happen post, you know, 1952 and the flap that happened over Washington as well.
You had a general or whatever on TV talking about.
You know, we don't know what these things are.
They're not ours.
You know what I mean?
So it feels like history, a little bit to a certain extent, is repeating itself over and over again.
It does seem like we're getting closer.
But the one thing that is coming more and more clear for me is that disclosure is not going to come in the form of like some redacted document.
And it's not going to come from any figurehead telling you, whether a president or whether anyone else.
It'll come from a personal belief system.
You know, if I told you, oh, I have irrefutable proof of Jesus Christ, will that make you believe in Jesus?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
And I think that you just hit it is that it took me, Wanting to know sleight of hand to go down the rabbit hole to accept books that I never thought I would read and go down rabbit holes I never thought I'd go down because I found it was a way that I understood it and it was a way that worked for me.
And I think that I still sound like a crazy person when I talk to my wife about it or anything like that because you're trying to conceptualize volumes of books in a two minute conversation before their eyes glaze over and you're trying to get those bullet points out.
Personal Beliefs And Secret Grammars00:03:36
It made sense to me.
I think that every person is going to come to it on their own accord of what makes sense to them.
Yeah.
But, you know, it challenged my belief system.
It all started with double lifts and cards.
And I was like, how do they do that?
And now here we are years later.
And I am, you know, probably spent my kids' college fun on esoteric texts and, you know, ritualistic documentation, all for the same reason.
I want to understand why people believe this, why they think it, and how it works.
But it will be unique and individual for everyone.
At least right now it will be until the.
Until Spielberg puts out his movie.
Until there's a UFO on the lawn.
Yeah.
On the lawn of the White House.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I'm going to go start.
We got some questions here coming in from the members.
So, if you're a member for five bucks a month, you can become a member of the Area 52 team, basically become an intern, and you have access to so many different things.
I'll put my A3 on.
Oh, look at this guy.
He's a real member.
Yeah.
So, you guys can check that out.
And with the membership, you get all sorts of cool stuff, but namely, you get to ask our guest or you get the opportunity to ask your guest a question.
If you give me a second, I'm going to go turn that on.
My mom told me a cool story.
My mom was a.
I found out recently my mom had a secret.
She had a top secret clearance.
She never told me until she was in her mid 70s.
She worked at a.
I'm telling you this, I don't think this is a.
You shouldn't put this on.
Okay, got it.
She was a secretary and she had to get clearance.
And it took six months of interviews with her neighbors, her parents.
She said that every time that she would leave work, she would have to take the typewriter ribbon out of the typewriter and send it into a bank tube that went up.
And she said one day after three months of working there, she got called into an office and she said there was like six men there and she's never seen them before.
They had their arms crossed and they had like six typewriter ribbons out and they made her sit down and they said, What were you tasked to do here?
And her job was to take dictations, type the dictations out or handwritten letters and type them out and then send them to the person.
She was correcting the grammar and the shit.
And so she was correcting the misspellings and grammar that was code.
And so by correcting the grammar, They thought that she was fucking Bubba Lot, but they were looking at the typewriter ribbon thing.
And I just found this out about my mom recently.
I had no idea.
It was a military weapons thing.
Cool.
But it's so crazy.
My mom had clearance.
No idea.
That's good.
You don't want to leave that in?
Ah, fuck it.
You can say it.
Mom, sorry.
I think you're fine now.
I couldn't resist.
No, I don't want to play a game.
I would be the first one to die in a Saw movie.
I am terrified of blood and violence.
I had to.
All right.
There will be no blood sacrifices for me.
All right, first question here from the members.
What is your most prized occult piece in your collection by Hex?
My most prized piece in my collection.
I have a, I don't know, I guess you would call it like lecture notes of a secret society and their meeting notes from 1928 that is the basis of the world that I built called The Tension Experience.
The Tension Experience is the immersive theater show.
Breaking The Fourth Wall Of Horror00:06:56
And take a cold out for a second.
It's a very simple premise.
The show is about a family trying to pull their daughter out of a cult, and you, as an audience member, are going into a compound to get her out.
But I wanted to populate it with real belief and real thought and what this organization believed in.
And I was at a flea market, and I found a folder.
And in this folder, there was this it's not that it's so old that it should be doing this, but it crumbles when you touch it.
So it's the paper is very cheap and it crumbles.
I used the art, I used the diagrams, and I used about 80% of the text to base all of the tension experience and the sequels that I made on that.
What was it called?
Brotherhood of, I'm trying to remember the last name, because now it's framed on a wall, so I should know the name of it.
I don't because I'm scared of breaking it.
But it was Diane Fortune, who is a famous occultist.
It was one of her lecture series, and they formed like a.
It formed its own like offshoot.
Uh, she wrote, uh, there's a bunch of books.
One of them is a practical occultism, uh, sane occultism.
But, uh, that and it almost looks like something from a Freemasonry Lodge, um, or a magician's lecture notes.
You know, when like olden days when magicians do lecture notes, so it was individual pamphlets.
Um, I think that to me, just because it has, it was such an important thing for me and my narrative to be able to try for my first time to say, I'm not going to do the Hollywood bastardization of what I had been about, oh, it's the devil and it's black magic.
And it wasn't like that.
It was more, um, Philosophical and internal than it was outward and like ridiculous.
So I would say that by far is probably the coolest thing that I have.
That's awesome.
Great question, Hex.
All right.
Uh oh.
Phenomenal question by Gina here coming up.
Gina.heater questions.
Love this question.
Do you think disclosure would kill horror or feed it?
There was a, it's a great question, Gina.
There was a thing done recently about the pandemic, and it was conducted, I want to say, it was the University of Chicago.
They realized that people that were fans of horror, Had a much easier time dealing with the pandemic than people that were not.
And the reason why is because as a horror fan, you immerse yourself in the macabre and the horrible zombies attacking a cabin, aliens coming down, and you live through that horror.
And I think that to me, the horror audience is probably the most grounded, rational group of people because they live out their fantasies on screen and then they're done with them.
But if you look at trends of horror, I think every Time that there is a world war, every time that there is a great tragedy, there is an influx of horror because it allows us to work out our anxiety, our fears, our paranoias on the screen.
So, no, I don't think it would kill horror.
I think that it would feed it and it would fuel it.
But I would think if there was, at least for me, if disclosure happened, I would probably, I don't know if I'd make it in the horror film.
I'd be so fascinated with, I'd go down that rabbit hole like I did in 11 11 and lose my mind again.
And I think that.
But no, I don't think anything's ever going to kill horror.
It's a great question.
That's a really good question.
Yeah.
I love that, too, that the idea that it would feed it more in order for us to cope with it, to understand it, to work through our own trauma.
I guess horror is so great at.
Love that.
All right, Tess.
We got a question from Tess here.
Great question again, Tess.
This is awesome.
You guys came in with clutch questions this week.
What are the most efficient psychological tactics you've utilized to manufacture fear?
That's a, these are all great questions.
Tess, to answer your question, I want to go back to my immersive stuff because I think for me, as I've gotten older, it's much harder for me to scare someone in a movie screen because you know you're sitting in an AMC theater, right?
So to me, it's harder for me to suspend disbelief.
So for me, it is breaking the fourth wall and becoming meta.
And what that means is, you know, we were talking about War of the Worlds earlier.
You know, when you can get with someone and have them question, is this real?
Is this a hoax?
Is this an Umo hoax or is it real?
Inserting the idea that maybe I'm an unreliable narrator and some of this could be real is to me the way that I found to affect people the most.
And how I use it with theater is imagine you're going to go to a haunted house and you know that in this haunted house there's a demented nurse.
And you get in the haunted house and you're chased around with the demented nurse and she's got a syringe in her hand.
And You might get scared because she's chasing you, but imagine if she hits you with the syringe and then she stopped and she called the safe word and all the lights in the haunted house came on.
And all of a sudden, the stage manager comes out with a microphone and he says, can I see your arm, please?
You need to come with me.
And you're taken backstage and they're looking at your arm.
And next thing, an ambulance shows up.
And next thing, uh, they're giving you a sailing bag.
That is the stuff we do.
We take your idea of what you're going into.
I'm going into a haunted house with a nurse and we break the fourth wall and say that was not supposed to happen.
You've just been Hit with something you should not have been hit with.
So, we do things of breaking the fourth wall and becoming meta.
And when you do that, you begin to make people question is this part of it?
Is this, is this?
And there's a great Clive Barker book.
Clive Barker wrote Hellbound Heart.
A lot of people know it as Hellraiser.
But he wrote a book called Mr. Be Gone.
And it's really good.
It's taken from the standpoint of a demon.
And that book is written to you almost like there's a monster at the end of this book.
The demon starts talking to you, the reader.
So, on chapter one, it might say, you think you're so clever reading this book.
I will come to you later.
And on chapter three, it says, last night, did you hear me?
I was the one in your wall, the one that you misrepresented as a mouse moving around.
It was me.
And so you're reading the book and it's talking to you.
And I think to me, that is so terrifying to me when I can't tell the difference between was that supposed to happen or not?
So, I use that a lot now is becoming meta and breaking the fourth wall.
That's so great and terrifying.
I'm just trying to imagine as you were talking about the nurse chasing and the lights going on, I was like, yeah, no, dude, I'd say, you go, wait, is this part of it?
No, it couldn't be.
They wouldn't go this far.
And then all these other psychological filters.
Can I share one that I did?
Yeah.
That nurse one wasn't real, but I'll tell you what I did do.
In the tension experience, I told you it's kind of this, and you are indoctrinated into a cult.
And one of the things you have to do is your final act is you have to take this pill, blindly take a pill.
Manipulating Reality Like A Magic Trick00:08:14
And they're gel caps.
There's nothing in them, but you're put into a room and we break you apart from your group, and there's only two or three of you in there.
And they put a pill in front of you, and you're told you have to take it if you want to continue.
And everyone takes it 100% of the time.
Every fifth group that would come through, every fifth group, you would hear so they would take the pill, and then you would hear something outside the door, and there'd be screaming, and you would hear LAPD, LAPD, and all the lights would come on in the building.
And then you would see flashlights going around, and the door would kick in, and it'd be LATE officers.
They would take the actor who just did that and put him on the ground.
They would make you stand up and they would try to flashlight.
Have you eaten or consumed anything?
Did they give you anything to eat or drink?
Yes.
What did you, you took a pill?
Listen, we have three people in here.
They've been given the pill and you would be taken outside where there were paramedics.
Now we did that.
And in that moment, you saw there were actors.
You saw call sheets up.
You saw all of that, but you saw LAPD officers.
That to me was one of the most impactful things because it didn't happen to everyone.
It happened every fifth time.
Um, so that to me was, was something pretty, uh, Pretty exciting.
Dude, you're in the business of messing people up for life.
Exactly.
Well, this thing is that I'm a filmmaker and I want to create emotions, and it's harder for me to create emotions when you know that you're watching a movie that is designed to scare you.
I can gross you out very easy, but to really scare you, I got to get inside your head.
And that brings you back to magic a little bit, too.
It's all magic, it's tricks.
Yes.
It is knowing the psychology of your audience.
That's right.
Because if in a magic trick or even in an entertainment hypnotic sort of demonstration, if you didn't believe that I was able to hypnotize you, but then I hypnotized the person beside you who you knew, that would make you be hypnotizable, so to speak.
So you're also creating this idea like, oh my God, I just talked to that person, something's happening to them, and they're actually convulsing or whatever that is, you know, like, That's another layer of reality.
I have become a better filmmaker and storyteller since learning books on sleight of hand and understanding how tricks are conceived and done.
I mean, I remember even going back into Thurston and old, like the old magicians, like realizing the psychology they would use to create that astonishment of an audience.
I've just transferred into the filmmaking and theater that I do now.
And what lengths they would go through.
There's what the old proverb says a magician is just somebody who spends an unreasonable amount of time doing.
Yeah, doing something.
That's it.
Yeah, that it, you know, I often think of, you know, to explain what magic is to people sometimes.
Magic isn't only because we talk about angles, right?
Angles are a big part of magic and knowing your angle.
So if you're being surrounded, well, you're not flashing or, yeah.
But if you're a magician with enough under your belt, you can flash.
Thing is, you might be, you might have to manufacture what it is you're flashing.
By flashing, we mean like showing the method behind something, right?
So, If I'm aware that someone's behind me, I might do something where purposely they get to see something.
But I'm now manipulating what it is they're seeing.
So their explanation of what happened can be canceled out with the next performance.
You just hit on exactly, you brought this full circle again.
There's a magician named Mike Pashoda.
He performs the Magic Castle.
The Magic Castle, yeah.
He has one of the greatest things where I gave you a horror version of what I did.
I'm going to give you a non horror version of the same idea and it came from magic.
He does a trick where he.
I don't think I'm.
If I'm revealing a magician's code, beat me out here.
I don't think I am.
He asks three people to come up with a card and you do it together.
So it's not like a magician's choice.
He's actually saying, you give me a number, you give me a color, you give me a suit.
And then he goes, I knew you were going to say that.
And he pulls out a card from his pocket.
And when he does it, he flashes and he's got what's called a pocket index.
And in that pocket index, it's every card.
And he puts it down and he's like, oh, should I flash that?
He flashes the back of a bunch of cards.
Yes.
And he goes, I flashed, didn't I?
And you're like, yeah.
And he's like, that's all right.
And then he Pulls out all the cards and they're all the same card.
So you thought he flashed, but he didn't.
That was part of the thing.
But your mind breaks at that point because you thought you saw something you shouldn't have seen.
That's right.
It's the same idea.
He broke the fourth wall.
He became meta with it by breaking the trick to say, Did I just flash?
And then he goes one step further and your mind just breaks further.
And he was in control all the time.
And that to me is the magic that I take now into the storytelling that I do and how I use psychology to fuck with an audience member.
That's right.
And that's the best magicians, is what they do.
Max Mullini, you know, off to he would do the length that this guy went through.
This is like 100 years ago, but he would invite people over.
He would have like 20 people over for this feast, this beautiful feast, right?
Like this big turkey dinner.
And the turkey would be sitting on the table and everything's like, oh, everybody's hungry.
And the discussion, he would psychologically manipulate the discussion to the occult a little bit to where we'd start talking about bringing people back from the dead.
But he wouldn't bring it up.
They would bring it up through conversational psychology and social sort of tricks.
And he would go, I could do that.
I'm a magician.
I could bring somebody back from the bed.
They go, You never know.
There's no way, Max, that you could do that.
And everybody would start arguing.
All right.
Well, the turkey's on the table.
So he would say, Yeah, watch this.
And all of a sudden, he grabbed the turkey and the turkey would just start, no feathers, running across the table.
I love it.
Everybody's freaking out.
They're screaming.
There's pandemonium.
And guess what?
There's no turkey dinner now because he turned the turkey live.
And the thing was, he hypnotized the turkey.
He plucked the turkey's feather.
He made it look like it was a cooked turkey.
Oh, that's not where I thought you were going with the story.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
And so it was all for a trick.
Well, so he would manipulate the conversation into that.
Then the turkey would get up and start.
And so everybody thinks he just brought back a turkey to life.
And now guess what?
There's no real turkey that's going to be served.
That was the supper.
So no one gets dinner.
Uh, and this goes where I think all these things connect now.
Um, my office, I guess I mentioned it's got these weird esoteric books and it's got magic books.
One of the things that I've done, I figured out I could never be a sleight of hand artist like yourself and I can stare at your hands and I know what you're doing and I still can't figure it out.
I understand the methods.
Um, but I'm a storyteller, right?
I'm a storyteller and my hope as a storyteller is I can elicit a reaction.
I can get an emotion out of you.
So in my office, I have designed numerous arcane looking Occult paraphernalia that's magic tricks that I have made specifically.
I'm going to give the guy a plug.
This guy, Lebanon Circle is his thing, and he makes these amazing tricks.
And you'll see like a Victorian ashes box or you'll see this old, arcane looking hourglass.
And so, what happens is when people are over at my house, inevitably something will come up about the occult because they'll see my books.
And then I'll say, you know, I dabble in magic.
And then I will use real magic things from real occult that I have read and used.
And I will turn it into something in my room that is already ready to go because I 20 things in my room ready to go.
And depending on where you're looking, what you're doing.
And what I'll do is I will create horror in that moment because it doesn't look set up in the same way that he would hypnotize a turkey.
That's right.
And go in.
And you hear those stories about, oh my God, the actor, he did a 52.
Ricky J. Ricky J. You know, I've read these amazing stories about him where he did the equivalent of the fishbowl trick with ice, where he would show up to a diner and have this huge giant slab of ice and he would do this insane setup for this just one person trick.
I thought I love that to me because it allows me to be a horror storyteller in my office and get under somebody's skin in a way they were not expecting.
If I pulled out a deck of cards and said, let me show you a trick.
No, in this case, it is what is that weird Egyptian thing over there?
Oh, I got that in Egypt and it's supposedly this cursed object.
Leave it alone for two hours.
And then two hours later, they're looking at it after a little wine and like, what do you mean it's cursed?
Boom, there's the magic trick.
Turning Fringe Stories Mainstream00:06:08
And I think to me, that is the sweet spot.
And again, it combines my love of storytelling, the occult, magic, sleight of hand, psychology.
Yeah, and that's why we see, you know, and I reference it a lot, but we see it a lot with intelligence agencies.
Absolutely.
They do the same.
They do PSYOP, which is a magic trick.
We, in the tension experience, we hired a few people in the military about how to do psychological torture.
And it's not what I thought.
It's not waterboarding.
It's none of that.
It is how to get under someone's skin very quickly and make them uncomfortable through it could be a fluctuation of temperature.
It could be a specific frequency that's playing that just unnerves you just a little bit.
And when you compound these things, One after another after another, it will create a feeling in you.
And I think that that is absolutely, I mean, that's, it's fascinating.
All right.
We got one last one here.
Great questions, by the way, guys.
And this might be something we've already kind of answered, but maybe we can touch on it one last time.
From UFO in the Know asks How has Hollywood shaped the public's perception on the UFO phenomenon?
I think it's taken something that was at one point considered fringe and made it mainstream.
And it's done it not overnight, it's done it over the course of decades.
Whether it's introducing a little alien that lives in a CIA officer's house in a cartoon fashion, like American Dad, the Seth thing, whether it is ET, who's a friendly extraterrestrial, or whether it's Skinwalker Ranch, that you are inundated.
And I think what was it, the Super Bowl, there were like three separate ads about Martin Scorsese.
It's like there are all of these things that it has become mainstream now.
And so, if anything, it's, it's, it's, uh, It's gotten us ready.
It's made it a conversation that happens that you're not, like I said, the eyes don't glaze over as much anymore.
You know, reputable people at reputable schools, Gary Nolan, whoever that is, you can now have a prestigious career and be focused on anomalies like that.
That wasn't like that all the time.
So I think a lot of that has to do with Hollywood arts, entertainment, books, making it okay to have this conversation now because it is so mainstream.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's been part of the goal of this channel, too, is just to help have the conversation.
You know, a lot of people, they watch the videos here and they're like, well, Chris, you know, you're not conducting an actual investigation.
I was like, no, this isn't an actual, I'm not an actual detective that lives in the 50s.
You know, I do this for a part.
Part of it is entertainment, but I also understand the value that entertainment provides because so many people can regurgitate information at you.
But if you're not creating it in a way that they want to absorb it, then that is for naught.
I think that you have to create.
A world, and that's what I love doing, that's what you love doing, in a world where people want to willingly be a part and learn.
You've opened the door to conversation, and I think that that is, I'm nowhere near any.
I said to you jokingly that this is the episode that jumps the shark because you've had the top of the top of the top people in this field.
But UFOs extend far past scientists, it goes to filmmakers and it goes to moms, soccer moms at home, and I think they all have stories about why.
What is it about them?
And I think my avenue into it is different than, you know, the person you had last week or the person you're going to have next week.
And I think that's fascinating because those that are listening and watching have their own story.
And I think that conversation is important to hopefully get to Spielberg releasing 2026's actual disclosure and shows everyone that we're ready for it and we can handle it.
Absolutely.
Speaking of which, are you ever going to make an alien UFO related movie?
I, this is really funny that you mentioned this.
Every movie that I make, there are 20 that don't end up happening that I'm attached to.
Either I'm fired, it goes over budget, or the thing just falls apart.
There is one right now that I can tell.
I'll tell you the premise off the air.
I'm sorry I can't talk about it, but it is a movie that you referenced tonight.
It's the cousin of that movie.
But it's, yes.
And I think it combines all of my fascinations.
Very much a nod in the way of coast to coast.
It's a human story.
It's a human way into it, but it absolutely is an alien thing.
That's awesome.
We'll see if it happens, though.
Give it a couple years.
Well, we're all sending you our positive vibes out there on this happening.
We'd love to have you back here.
Let's make an Umo movie together.
We'll go do that.
We'll go figure out the Umo thing.
As long as we don't get it, as long as we can't film in that building.
I'm going to give you the address.
So you go look at the house and tell me if there's anything that happens to you there.
Well, I'm actually going to Barcelona, I think in September.
I will get you in that house.
I want you just to go.
Dude.
All right.
I might have to do a pit stop.
You know, I might be actually going with a UFO friend.
So that might be interesting.
Darren, are you down to stick around for some overtime chats?
Let's do it.
All right.
Folks, if you want to, Become a member and come check out the rest of our conversation.
Feel free to do so.
Link below, click the join button.
Darren, thank you so much for joining us today.
It was an absolute pleasure, folks.
If you want to go check out Darren's latest project, which I highly recommend, is it Darren and Josh make a movie or Josh and Darren make a movie?
Darren and Josh.
He got the short straw.
He did.
It's at DJ make a movie on all social medias and the website.