Edition 259 - William Konkolesky
US alien "Experiencer" Bill Konkolesky's story might make you think twice...
US alien "Experiencer" Bill Konkolesky's story might make you think twice...
Time | Text |
---|---|
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Nice to have you back there. | |
Thank you very much for all of your communications and as promised, I'm going to do a bunch of shout-outs on this edition going through your correspondence. | |
If I can't get round to yours, please know that I have seen your email and I always act upon whatever you say. | |
So if you want to contact me, go to the website designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot. | |
It's theunexplained.tv. | |
Follow the link and send me a message. | |
And if you can possibly send me a donation to the show to help it continue to grow and develop, that would be fantastic. | |
And thank you very much for all of your support. | |
Bill Konkoleski is the guest on this show. | |
He is an alien experiencer, but with a big difference. | |
He'll be talking about some of the experiences that he says that he had when he was very, very young. | |
And he can recall them. | |
He's put them in a new book. | |
This man recommended to me by Peter Robbins. | |
So Bill Konkoleski, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, coming very soon. | |
Shout outs. | |
Let's get to them. | |
Courtney von Wolf in the U.S. says, hello, Howard. | |
I've recently discovered The Unexplained and have been binge listening to as many episodes as I can. | |
I work as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, and your podcast has been getting me through my work days. | |
Sending you sunshine from summertime in Rockland, Maine. | |
Courtney, good to hear from you. | |
And you need to know that you're a transatlantic connectee to post people over here because my postman was actually listening to one of my shows when he knocked on my door with a parcel one day. | |
And he didn't know that it was me who did the podcast that he was actually listening to at that moment. | |
Both of us nearly fell over. | |
It was quite remarkable. | |
But I seem to be sustaining postal workers around the world. | |
And that's good news. | |
You do vital work. | |
Casey Sweet, thank you very much for your email. | |
Writing from New York City. | |
Stumbled upon the show through my pod app called PodAddict. | |
Can you do shows about past lives that kids say they remember? | |
Yep, that's a great topic. | |
We need to do that. | |
Casey, thank you. | |
Jeff Ellington from Huntington, now working in Liverpool, a listener to the show and enjoying it, and says Liverpool is well worth a weekend visit to see the city. | |
I should say so. | |
You know that I was born there and I haven't been back there for a couple of years now. | |
I haven't been back there since my dad died, but I've got to return to Liverpool. | |
You know, they say you can take the boy out of Liverpool, but you can't take the Liverpool out of the boy. | |
Scott in Perth, Scotland says I've been a big fan of the show for a few years. | |
Listen regularly on my headphones at work. | |
I attended the Glasgow Paranormal and UFO conference recently. | |
A great day with a wide range of speakers. | |
And you thought that Peter Robbins talking about Rendlesham Forest was very interesting. | |
He is, isn't he? | |
Thanks very much, Scott, in Perth, Scotland. | |
Kevin, Norfolk, UK, in a recent podcast, I heard you say that you wanted to get a good time travel guest on How About Andrew Basiago. | |
I've been trying to get him on. | |
Also, Thomas in Norway. | |
Hello, Thomas. | |
You suggested the same guest. | |
I will keep trying. | |
Mark Boynton says, hello, sir. | |
Says, I like to listen to many podcasts. | |
Yours is one of those that I can hear from your voice. | |
You're an empathetic human being, and I believe that you have a fair understanding of how the world works. | |
The only thing that concerns me, says Mark, is when you speak about being impartial. | |
When you speak to family, are you impartial? | |
Are you impartial with friends? | |
Where do you draw the line? | |
Podcasting should be free from the restraints that mainstream media have. | |
Are you unable to help the public because of your ties? | |
Well, in terms of impartiality, it's a funny thing, really. | |
I'm one of these people, and I think maybe it comes from being the kind of person that I am and having done the work that I've done, I tend to see all sides of an argument, unless, of course, it's completely beyond the pale. | |
So I do kind of have a balance in things. | |
Yes, of course, I do have views. | |
But look, I wanted this show to be different from other shows where you don't have somebody opinionated shouting at you all the time. | |
One of these days, I will share my views about life, the world, and everything. | |
But when, you know, when the time is right and when it's necessary and important, I think. | |
But for the moment, I like this program, Mark, to walk the line and be impartial and let the people who make the judgments about things that we have on the show be you rather than me. | |
It's not for me to make the judgments, I don't think. | |
Randall in North America, Randy Deputy, says, what are your thoughts on the Brexit vote? | |
Now, the same sort of thing here. | |
What issues drive this vote? | |
What issues are important to the British people? | |
Well, the Brexit vote, by the time you hear this, this was recorded in advance, so I guess the news about all of this would have changed. | |
Of course, it was a big shock to the money markets and others. | |
What I can say, and I think this is still being impartial, but what I can say is it says something about British people's disgruntlement and disconnection from politicians, whichever side they're on, whether they were pro-leave or pro-stay in the European Union. | |
People, wherever they are, and I think that goes for the US as well, are starting not to trust the politicians. | |
And the politicians need to take a great big look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves, why is that? | |
Why are they less credible than maybe they used to be? | |
That's a big question, and it's a question for another time, but it's well worth asking. | |
Ives in the UK says, and this email, Ives, means a lot to me. | |
Now that I've managed to secure a job as a lifeguard, I listen to your show on my journey from speak in Liverpool, I know it well, to my job in Southport, near where my mum and dad used to live. | |
I've always pledged to myself that when I get my first pay packet, I donate to your show. | |
And I've just done that. | |
Ives, thank you so much, and I hope the job goes really well. | |
Southport's a wonderful place. | |
It was very good to me, as was Liverpool. | |
So, you know, you're in the best place. | |
Greg says, I've just discovered your podcast, and I must quickly say I've added it to the list of must-have downloads. | |
That's nice. | |
Natalie in Inverness, thank you for your good email, Natalie. | |
Good to hear from you. | |
Jeff McDonald in British Columbia, Canada. | |
Thank you for your email. | |
William Smithhurst in the US, thank you for your guest suggestion, William. | |
Gareth James, great email. | |
Thank you for that. | |
Heidi says, I've been following Penny Sartori's work for several years. | |
This is Penny Sartori, who talks about near-death experiences and has researched them. | |
She was a wonderful guest and very believable. | |
The interview, exceptionally good. | |
Thank you, Heidi. | |
John Embry from the University of Eindhoven in Holland. | |
Thank you for your email. | |
And Heather in the Bahamas, old friend of the show. | |
Nice to hear from you, Heather. | |
Says Jason Offert on the last show was a great guest. | |
Wowee, says Heather. | |
That really checked all the boxes for my own experiences. | |
Good to hear from you, Heather. | |
And if you have emailed, thank you very much for getting in touch. | |
Please keep in touch with me. | |
And when you do email, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show. | |
Right, let's cross to Alien Experiencer Bill Konkoleski in the U.S. Bill, thank you very much indeed for coming on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
Thank you, Howard. | |
Great pleasure to have you on. | |
Peter Robbins recommended you very highly, Bill. | |
He thinks very highly of you and the story that you have to tell. | |
So I'm really looking forward to this. | |
Cool. | |
I'm glad to be able to share it. | |
Okay. | |
Tell me about you then. | |
You know, the kind of life and upbringing. | |
And of course, you talk a lot about your childhood in this book. | |
It's about that period. | |
So talk to me about you, where you lived, and how you lived. | |
King, I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan here in the United States, and lived a fairly normal childhood and just went up through the normal school system, college, etc., the whole thing. | |
And the other part of my childhood was something that I sort of kept close at hand, didn't share with a lot of people, but it's every bit about my life as the rest of anything else I've ever done, which is at age two, my very first memory is of a little gray guy coming up to my crib, staring down at me. | |
And this wasn't something that I remembered years later, that I wondered if it was real or not, or that I dreamed or anything. | |
It was quite literally there right at the foot of my crib. | |
And then as it left, you know, I was left in bewilderment. | |
And at age four, they came back and visited me again. | |
All right, let's talk about that first experience when you were two years of age, because a lot of us, I have to say that I can't remember anything from being two. | |
But in the book, you describe, and I've just actually gone through reading the book, you describe an odd visitor, a strange skull looked into your crib. | |
You were two years of age, and you can even remember screaming for help. | |
Yes, and, you know, I have actually a handful of memories from early in my life. | |
You know, one being at a museum, also when I was age two, a little bit later in the year. | |
Age three, I have memories of Niagara Falls. | |
So this isn't unique in being an early memory of mine. | |
It just happens to be the very earliest and one of the scariest memories, certainly. | |
As I was laying there in the crib and this little gray guy was staring down at me, I was screaming and yelling for my parents and my mother was just telling me to go back to sleep, go back to sleep. | |
And so she didn't come to my room or anything like that. | |
And after a moment, the thing left my room. | |
And, you know, many years later, I actually went under hypnotic regression. | |
And a lot of people say, oh, you know, is hypnotic regression valuable? | |
You know, doesn't it implant false memories? | |
Well, the thing about my memory at age two was that I remembered things better under hypnosis, details of my room that were accurate that without hypnosis, I wouldn't have remembered the room nearly as accurately. | |
So that lent credence to me about the power of hypnosis, including the exact appearance of my crib at that time. | |
I sort of remembered my crib looking a particular way, but under hypnosis, I couldn't remember it the way I thought I had remembered it. | |
I was remembering it the way that hypnosis was telling me that this crib looked. | |
And when I told my mother about it, it turned out we still had the crib up in the attic, and I looked at it, and yeah, it was how I recalled it under hypnosis. | |
So that being was still as creepy as ever, and I had other details of the room to sort of back up the fact that hypnosis did, in fact, aid my recall. | |
So Bill, you had a bit of corroboration there because you actually had the crib and you could see that it really did look like that. | |
Now, here comes another interesting point, though. | |
As you know, and as you've said, hypnotic regression for these things is a little controversial. | |
You know, some people don't believe in it. | |
When you're two years of age, you can sometimes misinterpret the things that you're seeing. | |
That's why kids get scared. | |
Are you sure and certain, and those who are helping you go through this process of decoding those memories, are you sure and certain that you weren't seeing this with the eyes of a child and misinterpreting what you'd seen? | |
Well, I guess I could put it this way. | |
At age two, a little man that was not a family member came into my room and then left the room. | |
I mean, the details beyond that are the descriptive details I remember of a little gray man. | |
But say I misinterpreted the appearance of this being, you know, would it have been a household intruder, you know, a burglar? | |
You know, would it have been, you know, what, a monkey or something? | |
Some people say, you know, that people, you know, children misinterpret these things in animals and whatever. | |
Somebody was clearly there in my room. | |
That much, you know, is certain. | |
And, you know, the details of it I have are, again, of a little gray guy that the details never shifted throughout my life. | |
They never really changed or altered. | |
It wasn't like in high school I saw Whitley Streever's Communion and morphed what I saw into that. | |
I saw Whitley Streever's cover of Communion and I said, oh my gosh, it's that little guy that came to my room. | |
You said that's what happened to me. | |
When you're two years of age, you don't have the power of language that you have when you're older. | |
So in many ways, it's more scary because you can't vocalize, You can't verbalize what you're going through. | |
Yes, call is what I remember. | |
The closest thing I could equate the face of the thing to at that age. | |
Okay, and then you, a little further on in the book, you tell a tale of being touched by a mysterious hand. | |
This was in broad daylight, and I think this was in 1975 when you would have been, I think, what, four, as you said. | |
Yeah, I was four at the time, and I have older brothers. | |
They were all off to school, and my dad was at work, so it was just my mother and myself at home. | |
My mother was out in the front yard pulling weeds, and so I was inside, and I decided to take a nap. | |
And as I laid down, before I was even able to fall asleep, I felt this touch upon me, and it felt like somebody was pulling me up almost like you pull a handkerchief out of a pocket quickly. | |
And I found myself outside of my body in my bedroom, again, broad daylight, middle of the day, with three little gray guys around me. | |
And at that age, they were sort of playful with me. | |
They had this sort of happy energy, very welcoming, very warming, very good. | |
Which visa the greys, very contrary to the popular vision of grays as being the bad guys, the chilling ones, the ones who don't have much in the way of emotion, you had happy experiences. | |
Yeah, as a small child, yes. | |
And then as I got a little bit older, things certainly got scarier. | |
They dropped all pretenses of friendliness, and they were all business. | |
And so my teen years, yeah, were terrifying, just absolutely terrifying. | |
But still, as a small child, somehow they were able to evoke happy, happiness. | |
And did they give you any idea, any conception as far as you can have when you're four? | |
And look, I have memories from four. | |
Kids of four can know a lot. | |
Did they give you any idea of what it is they wanted with you? | |
In this particular case, it was just a simple test. | |
I mean, I didn't get any sort of long game from them like, you know, this is what you're going to be doing in your life or this is why we're here in a broader sense. | |
But what they wanted simply was to see how I operated, how well I could operate outside my body. | |
So they took me out in the hallway and my bedroom was on the second floor of the house and they had me lay down on my stomach in a sense because out of body you don't really have your parts. | |
So they then wanted me to float down the stairs as a test. | |
Can you fly down the stairs into the room down there? | |
Which I was able to do fairly easily. | |
And they were, you know, they gave this sort of feeling of delight. | |
They were very excited that I was able to do that. | |
And I was like, oh my gosh, I got to tell my mom. | |
I got to tell everybody. | |
And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no. | |
This is just between us. | |
Don't tell anybody. | |
Don't you ever tell anybody. | |
And they escorted me back to my body. | |
I felt the tingling. | |
And then I was back in the body. | |
And I got out and I scoured the house for them. | |
I didn't see them anywhere. | |
And so what I did, being a little kid, is thinking, wow, maybe I can try this on my own. | |
So I went up to the top of the stairs, laid on my stomach, and tried to float down the stairs, and I couldn't do it. | |
So I ended up crawling down the stairs face first. | |
And yeah, it wasn't quite the same. | |
And are you sure when this thing happened? | |
And there is a distinct difference between an out-of-the-body experience, which you talk about a lot in the book. | |
There's a distinct difference between that and being asleep. | |
Are you sure that you were not asleep? | |
And dreaming? | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah, I've had a number of out-of-body experiences through my life. | |
And, you know, there's this sort of awareness and continuity. | |
It isn't this sort of jumbled mess. | |
When you're in a near physical state and out-of-body, you can't change things. | |
The environment is still pretty much effectively the same and immutable. | |
The feeling that you're in it, it's sort of this sort of swimmy feeling, like you're underwater in some sense, but obviously you're sort of floating in the air. | |
But I would say the feeling of being consciously aware and a continuity and the inability to change the environment so much. | |
You can pass through things, but you can't really turn a house into a castle or make things disappear or whatever like that. | |
If somebody hasn't been in that state, maybe it's a little tricky to define. | |
But I wasn't going through this complete and utter fantasy zone. | |
And what about your mom, your dad, at that time? | |
As far as you could have been aware when you were four, did they have any inkling of this? | |
And if they did, were they concerned about you? | |
Yeah, I have four older brothers, and my two oldest brothers have had probably about as many highly unusual experiences as I have. | |
The next two brothers, zero. | |
Zilch. | |
Absolutely not a single encounter between the two of them. | |
Very strange. | |
But my youngest brother is still six years older than me, and they're all about a year apart or whatever. | |
So when I was young, I was pretty open about talking about a lot of what was going on with me. | |
Not everything, but I was pretty open with sharing stuff, and my parents and my older brothers would be listening and they would nod, and they seemed to be accepting of it. | |
They weren't missive of anything I was saying necessarily. | |
Right, so the Grays told you not to say anything about it, and you didn't tell your mom and dad, but you did tell your siblings? | |
To be specific, I didn't tell anybody about that flying thing for many years, but other things I did just tell them right away. | |
You know, I remember that episode I had at two, I was, you know, I had a sense, you know, the very distinct memory is of that particular event. | |
But the way that the memory clung with me, that was probably the first time I went around, you know, sharing something unusual that had happened to me. | |
But I remember my, you know, things happening, like what had happened to me at age seven. | |
I was very vocal about that. | |
I had an experience at that age. | |
Now, I told my brothers, I told my parents, but they didn't reciprocate and tell me about the stories about my older brothers because they didn't want to scare me. | |
They didn't want to influence me. | |
They listened, but they didn't share the stories that my older siblings were having with me at the time until I was in my teens and then they opened up. | |
And I felt like I'm like, oh my gosh, and all this time I thought it was just me. | |
And now I know that other people are. | |
Bit of comfort in that. | |
What happened to you at seven? | |
I was in bed, and then a black void opened up over the bed. | |
Just sort of this dark nothingness just kind of opened up, kind of like a little aperture opening. | |
And this little metal sort of hose came down, a little metal cable, started whipping around over my head. | |
And I felt the air very electrically charged by this thing, whipping around at a very rapid rate. | |
And it was, you know, just a couple feet over my head. | |
And then it pulled me into this, I felt my whole body tingling, and I was pulled into what I call on board, but the truth is I didn't see any windows, so I just assume it was some sort of flying craft. | |
And I assume it in retrospect there, it just felt like I was in some sort of doctor's office. | |
But I found myself in a lobby that had sort of a blacklight effect, and I was escorted into the broader doctor's office, craft, whatever it was, by the little grays. | |
And at this time, again, they were still very friendly, very nice to me. | |
And they're about three feet tall, the ones that would escort me around. | |
And I was brought into this room that looked like sort of an examining room, and they left me alone in the room. | |
They went out one door, and I'm like, well, this is strange. | |
They just left me alone in this room. | |
You know, I'm not going to stay in this room. | |
I'm going to get out of here. | |
I'm going to explore. | |
I'm at least not going to be in this place that's kind of creeping me out. | |
So they went through, they exited the room we were in through one door, a very brightly lit white room at this point. | |
And I went out through the other door, and I found myself walking down a curving hallway. | |
There were some doors to the left and right, but I got to the sort of a dead end. | |
It felt like a closet almost with a sort of a furnace thing inside. | |
And I'm like, oh, geez, you know, there's nowhere else for me to go but back. | |
And by this time, they had realized that I had left and they were following me, but just at a distance. | |
They were not curious and interfering with anything I was doing. | |
They were just sort of back watching me do whatever I was, you know, doing. | |
And then when I realized there was nowhere I could go, I started to come back to them. | |
And they ushered me into this little side room. | |
And inside was this metal chair. | |
It was much like I had the essence of a dentist's chair. | |
And they wanted me to sit in the chair. | |
And I did. | |
And then I felt myself pulled and locked into the chair. | |
The best way I can describe it is it felt I was magnetized into the chair and stuck there. | |
And there was a taller gray in the room. | |
He was about five feet tall, a little lighter complexion than the shorter ones. | |
And it had sort of a vibe of being a doctor. | |
And it came up to me and told me, oh, be really good, and you'll get to see the color blue. | |
And as a little kid, you get stickers, you get suckers from going to the dentist or doctor. | |
What's this about getting to see the color blue? | |
So as I was sitting there in a chair, I felt a real sharp pain in my right arm. | |
And I looked down and I saw that there was a cut, a horizontal cut across the bicep area of my right arm. | |
And as I looked, it was healing before my eyes. | |
I just watched it seal up. | |
And I have no idea what caused the incision, just that it was caused and then it was healing as I was looking at it. | |
And then I looked back up at the doctor, the five-foot-tall gray, and he was face-to-face, pretty much nose to nose with me. | |
And while his eyes were a deep black up until that point, they lit up this bright, really bright, colorful cerulean blue, almost like police siren blue. | |
And I just felt pounded by this mesmerizing, tranquilizing force that seemed to be pouring out of his eyes. | |
It was deeply relaxing, and it was very blissful, and I passed out to that. | |
Now, while you were having these experiences, Bill, how close to being, Did you feel that you really were conscious during those experiences? | |
Sure. | |
And that's a big topic in and of itself. | |
There's a sequel, What Happened the Next Day, I think, is of interest in responding to that. | |
And I'd rather touch on that and then sort of flesh out that sort of feeling of when you're asleep or when you're awake. | |
This is just the Short tail end of that. | |
It was the next day, me and a little boy across the street were playing in my backyard, just climbing the trees. | |
We had a little maple, a little apple tree back there we were climbing, and while we were back there, this white mist, again, this is the next afternoon, this white mist came around the house and floated into the backyard. | |
When I saw it at first, I thought it was smoke, but it was cool, and it was very much sort of like a dry ice effect of a mist. | |
And within that mist was a little gray guy who came up to me and asked me if I was all right. | |
And this was, I mean, I wasn't taking a nap. | |
This wasn't being pulled from sleep. | |
This was playing in the backyard. | |
And this little gray guy comes walking back there. | |
And he, you know, asked, you know, am I all right? | |
And I said, oh, yes. | |
And I knew what he was referring to. | |
And he just sort of, and it was all telepathic. | |
And he's like, oh, good. | |
And then as the mist left our backyard very directionally, went into the neighbor's yard and kept going, the little gray guy walked inside of it, almost like that was some sort of camouflage, you know, some sort of screen so that no one else would be able to see him. | |
Then the little neighbor boy I was playing with, he was six at the time. | |
You know, he saw the mist, but he didn't see the little gray being. | |
And he still remembers the event with me. | |
It was nothing he had forgotten either. | |
He was very much there when this cloud just kind of floated through the backyard and just kept going. | |
Didn't dissipate or anything. | |
It was very solidly there. | |
And so there's an element to that that is unfettered by being in the bed, you know, near sleep at least in any case. | |
So that, you know, that was very much clearly in undeniable wakefulness. | |
The thing about these things is that, yes, I do have bad dreams about these little guys, and I understand, and I know when they're dreams. | |
And it's very different from being awake. | |
It's like, you know, I have bad dreams sometimes about my mother-in-law coming over unannounced, which she often does. | |
You know, and I know the difference between her actually showing up and it being a dream. | |
Got it. | |
Okay, now look. | |
The 70s, as I remember, was a very different era from the era that we're in. | |
If these kind of things were happening to a child now or in more recent years, then, you know, child protection services, child psychologists, all sorts of people would be called in, and there would be people very seriously on your case. | |
But because this was the 70s, I'm guessing none of this happened with you. | |
No. | |
No, not a thing. | |
Okay. | |
And what about the reaction then? | |
I mean, look, by the time you're seven, you know, you have friends, you're going to school, you're communicating with your parents because you're of an age where you can tell them how you're feeling and what you're experiencing. | |
So what is going on with you? | |
What's going on with you at school? | |
What's going on with you at home? | |
Well, during that phase, I was fascinated by things that were happening to me that were tricky to articulate to friends. | |
And you sort of get a feel for who will listen and to what degree. | |
My closest friends that lived right physically around me were often easy to tell these things to and remember them to this day that I told them back at that time that it happened. | |
At school, I really had to pick and choose who I would say stuff to. | |
I often got a feeling that this sort of thing happened to a lot more people than were open about it. | |
But it's tough to really open that can of worms because during certain phases of growing up, you could just be, I mean, kids are just looking for any reason to pick on another kid. | |
And something like that would seem to definitely stick with somebody for several years. | |
And so it was a very good. | |
And now that you're older, Bill, and now that you've been able to talk and write about this, have you had people getting in touch with you saying, guess what, Bill? | |
I went through exactly the same thing. | |
Oh, yeah. | |
Yeah, all the time. | |
I mean, I'm in a position through my participation in the Mutual UFO network and, you know, being open about my phenomena just sort of publicly by going out and speaking about it. | |
That, yeah, I am fairly regularly contacted by people. | |
And sometimes what I will hear from people are stories that I haven't shared publicly. | |
And when somebody describes a room that is a very unique room on board, as I guess I'll call it, and you've never shared those details with anybody, but this is, you know, they've got it down to a T, there's that sort of double-edged sword. | |
On one side, you're like, oh my gosh, you know, good, you know, I thought I was going crazy, but here's somebody else who remembered it exactly the same way I did. | |
But then on the other side of that, you're like, oh my gosh, that was real. | |
And the terror sets in. | |
It makes it harder to deny the details of you remember it when somebody else remembers it exactly as you remembered it. | |
Right, so it's more comfortable in a way to always have the possibility that it may not really have happened. | |
But once you realize that other people are having the same experience, and God, it may be real, that probably hits you like a freight train. | |
And even if I were to say, you know, I'm beyond the luxury of disbelief. | |
Even if I were to say, no, none of that really happened, well, there's about a half dozen experiences that I've had with other people. | |
And, you know, even if I deny that it really happened, it's still in their memories. | |
So, you know, I can't just pretend it didn't happen. | |
I can't shut it out. | |
You know, some things that were simply nightmares, obviously, those things fade. | |
The other things that actually happen and affected my life in a number of ways, it's one of those things where you deal with the hand you were dealt. | |
And, you know, I understand that a lot of people, if you tell them, this is what happened to me. | |
I was taken. | |
These gray beings are real. | |
They're probably from another planet, though I'm not absolutely sure where they're from, et cetera, et cetera. | |
It's not as simple for them to just acknowledge that because they have to re-evaluate everything is, I guess, what I was going to say. | |
You said, I don't want this point to get away. | |
You said that there were six occasions on which you've experienced things with other people. | |
Were all of those occasions, events like happened when you were seven and your friend was six where a mist appeared? | |
You saw the gray, but your friend didn't? | |
No, a couple of them highlighted, and I would say the two that are possibly best shared out of the handful of these things. | |
When I was in high school, jumping ahead just a little bit, me and two friends saw a pretty interesting UFO display one night. | |
It was February of 89, and we were, the three of us, in a friend's car. | |
We were parked outside another friend's house waiting for her to get home at 9 p.m. | |
It was dark out, when a blue ball of light at the height of about two telephone poles arced over the car. | |
It was sort of football shaped, and it had a football as in, you know, American football, you know, and it had this bright blue hue to it, and it arced over the car, and then a white ball of light came and zigzagged all over the entire sky. | |
Then a red ball of light appeared in the center of the sky and then disappeared. | |
And, you know, the two friends that I was with, you know, they witnessed every bit of it. | |
And, you know, it would take a while. | |
And I explain it certainly in the book how meaningful it was to have an unusual UFO event that day. | |
But we had all seen that particular UFO display. | |
And one that had happened to me in 95 when I was 24, me and this girl, who had just started dating, we were out in an isolated part of a park. | |
And we had a blanket laid down and we watched the sunset. | |
We'd only been dating about two months if I hadn't mentioned then. | |
And I hadn't yet told her anything about my experiences. | |
It's something certainly you always have to share with somebody at some point. | |
You've got to find the moment, haven't you? | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah, it's, you know, a lot of times you just hope that there's some UFO show on TV and you try to gauge their interest or something like that rather than approach the subject directly. | |
But obviously, of course, at some point you have to approach it directly. | |
And I wasn't just there yet with her. | |
And so we were out, it got dark, we were up on this hill, and we had to blanket out and we were stargazing, meaning we were watching the stars intermittently while we were smooching. | |
And while we were laying there, I heard, we both heard everything in the woods suddenly become quiet. | |
And now this was in May, so it wasn't like that cacophony you get out in the woods in the later part of summer, but there were still some sounds out in the woods, and everything became quiet. | |
And she and I both noticed how still it was, and then we heard the very distinct sound of footsteps coming up the hill. | |
So we ran to the center of the hill, and she and I started making small talk. | |
And this is a highly unusual story to tell because it steps beyond just your average sort of abduction story, and it gets into some very high strangeness stuff. | |
She had pointed out what she had thought was the big dipper, and I had corrected her, and I said it was the little dipper because I had an astronomy class in college that semester, and we started talking about the high cost of textbooks. | |
Then we felt comfortable enough to lay back down on the blanket, and then a few moments later, everything got quiet again. | |
We heard footsteps coming up the hill again and went to the center of the hill. | |
And she points out what she thinks is the big dipper. | |
And I correct her, and I said, that's the little dipper. | |
And at that point, I didn't remember what had happened the moment before. | |
I just had a slight feeling of deja vu. | |
And then we started talking about textbooks, went back onto the blanket, same thing again, everything went quiet. | |
And we heard footsteps coming up the hill, went back up to the center of the hill. | |
Again, little dipper, big dipper, price of textbooks. | |
And at that point, I realized, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is at least the third time that we've had this conversation. | |
And right at that moment, we were both frozen in place, pretty much facing face to face. | |
And three little gray guys came up the hill and didn't seem to pay any direct attention to me, but they all started inspecting her, just watching her, you know, not touching her or anything, just looking her up and down. | |
And I could hear their telepathic banter saying, no, not her. | |
No, she's not good. | |
She's not the one. | |
No, no, not this one. | |
And then they went back down the hill, and we suddenly could move again. | |
We grabbed all of our stuff, ran for the car, drove back towards our home, and she didn't want to be dropped off at home, and I didn't blame her. | |
So what we did is we went into an all-night sort of department store, and this place that's open 24 hours, you can get groceries or anything there 24 hours. | |
And we went up and down the aisles of the store just looking at things like mops and breakfast cereal and just anything to sort of ground ourselves in, you know, just modern life consumerism, what have you. | |
So let's get this clear. | |
She went through precisely the same experience as you. | |
And she, to this day, if I was to get her number and call her, if I could, she would recount the story. | |
This is what happened. | |
She broke up with me immediately after. | |
Was she scared? | |
Was she scared of what was going on around you? | |
Is that what it was? | |
Yeah, well, I don't think, you know, while I didn't tell her it had anything to do with me, I suspected she knew it had everything to do with me. | |
And, you know, our conversation after that point has been sort of accidental. | |
We had shared at least for a while a same group of friends, but there was a tension of us even communicating at all. | |
Are you still in touch with her now? | |
Do you know where she is? | |
I know she's still in Michigan, where I live. | |
Because it would strike me, and some people listening to this might also think this, that the one person who could absolutely corroborate everything for you is this person, isn't it? | |
Because she went through the same experience, saw what you saw. | |
You both made your exit from the place where it happened. | |
And it changed fundamentally the nature of your relationship. | |
It ended because of this. | |
So if anybody could verify everything that you say, it's her, isn't it? | |
She could be one person, certainly. | |
The awkwardness is certainly the fact that, I mean, she's an ex-girlfriend, and being married and having a family, it's sort of an awkward thing. | |
And for myself, it's not that I had any doubt what had happened and that she was there for the whole thing. | |
It would be for the benefit of others that I would reach out to her, not necessarily for myself. | |
And to be honest, others haven't pressed as much of what is really ostensibly a good idea as yourself. | |
But she's still around and under the right conditions, certainly I would make that step to reach out to her and have her try to put out her recollection of what happened. | |
But for myself, it's more awkward. | |
So, Bill, there is somebody in this world who you know could corroborate this stuff, but an awful lot of other things have happened to you. | |
And I want to wind you back for just a second now, because as you were a child and growing older, there was a bit of a watershed point, if I read the book right. | |
When you were 12, the Greys who'd been playing with you up to that point, one of them played a trick on you. | |
And I wonder if you can tell that story. | |
It involved a girl. | |
It involved a girl you had a crush on at the time when you were 12. | |
And this alien did something that wasn't a nice thing to do. | |
It played a trick on you involving her. | |
The beings, when they had taught me to exert a bit of control outside of body when I was age four, whether they had done this intentionally or not, but through the years, I accidentally found myself out of body on some occasions. | |
You know, not intentionally. | |
I tried to leave my body intentionally on a handful of occasions, and that never quite worked. | |
But I would find myself unintentionally out of body on occasion and then, you know, have to scuttle myself back inside my body. | |
The beings always took a tremendous interest whenever I was out and were quite alarmed by it. | |
And there is nothing that seemed to get them to come more than I was, you know, when I found myself out of body. | |
They were on me pretty much right away. | |
One situation, I was in my room. | |
I don't remember the beginning of the experience, just simply the end, that I found myself in my room at the foot of my bed, and there was one of the taller grays by me and said, like, oh, you have to go back to bed now. | |
And I was confused. | |
I'm like, no, no, I really don't. | |
I just, I don't want to go back to bed. | |
And they're like, yeah, go back to bed. | |
And then he said, oh, look, it's this girl that I had a crush on at that point. | |
And I was a little younger than 12. | |
I think I might have been more like 10. | |
But the being said, look, there she is in the bed. | |
You know, don't you want to go inside your bed and like cuddle with her? | |
You know, this was, you know, I didn't really have any sexual thoughts at that young age. | |
And so I said, oh, yeah, I'll do that. | |
So I climbed into bed, and right when I touched what I thought was her, I got pulled into my body. | |
I got pulled into the body, which turned out to be mine, I should say. | |
It was actually my body under the sheets, and the thing tricked me to get back in bed and back into body by making me think that it was somebody that I wanted to cuddle with in my bed. | |
And as far as you're aware, Bill, what was it doing that for? | |
Why did it do that to you? | |
It wanted me back in bed. | |
My assumption is that either it was one of the times where I accidentally found myself out of body, I accidentally exited my body, or that itself, that the being itself had some business with me and had taken me out of body, but just was having a difficult time put me back in. | |
The beginning of the Experience: I don't have any recollection. | |
Now, they do try to mask as much as they can a lot of the things that have happened. | |
So, you know, it's possible that they were blocking whatever it was, you know, that had preceded that. | |
Or sometimes one of the best ways to exit one's body is actually through the dream state. | |
You pop back into consciousness, like you sort of wake up, but you don't wake up in bed in your body. | |
You wake up outside of your body somewhere else. | |
And so that would explain that, too. | |
I have no idea what had happened in those preceding moments, just how the tail end of it went. | |
Okay, this is a very good point, I think, to insert a question that I've been meaning to ask and should have asked maybe before now, but we can do that now. | |
Did they, at any point up to this point, give you an idea of what it was they wanted with you? | |
No, no, no, not in a broader sense, no. | |
And what I would try to ask them, and most of the time it would be the little grays I would experience, they would always answer in sort of a very immediate sense. | |
Like I would say, where are we going? | |
And they would be like, yes, we're going. | |
What are we doing? | |
And they said, we're going somewhere. | |
You know, it was very much in the immediate. | |
They wouldn't answer questions about the near past or near future, let alone the far past or far future. | |
It was just very much, you know, in that very exact moment. | |
Now, when I was in my teens, of course, and they stopped being friendly, they dropped all pretenses and they were just grabbing me left and right. | |
I had a streak of teenage resistance to them as much as I would anything else I was experiencing in life. | |
And you talked about this in the book. | |
They became conscious of the fact that you were starting in a way to resist them, which is very something that a teenager would do. | |
And they didn't like it. | |
No, and yeah, so they brought out the big guns, so to speak. | |
They, one night, brought me before a being that I referred to as the mantis, well before I had heard other people refer to this being at all, let alone call it the same thing that I had termed it. | |
It was menacing. | |
It was about seven feet tall. | |
It looked very much like a giant praying mantis. | |
And it had this sort of slightly outrageous sort of wizard garb on it. | |
You know, it was just, it's a strange thing to look so horrible and have some kind of absurd costume on it, but it is what it is. | |
So it was very intense. | |
The gray beings brought me in front of this thing, and it had a very ominous, overpowering sense to it. | |
And I could tell that this was the guy in charge, so to speak. | |
I don't know how high up the food chain he was, but he was definitely higher up than any of the grades that I had experienced at that point. | |
And he told me to stop resisting what they were doing to me, saying that just go along with the program and that once everything was done and, you know, said and done, that once it was all over, then I would understand and that would be okay. | |
But of course, at that stage, if I was a teenager and I was going through all of this, I would be saying, well, what is the program? | |
What are you doing with me? | |
Now, this, again, I had very little success with the grays, at least the three-foot grays, because they didn't seem to be able to answer even the most basic questions. | |
And this thing on the other end of the scale, I'm sure it knew, but it was so terrifying. | |
It was like being brought before the principal of school, the headmaster or whatever, at just some sort of ultimate level. | |
This thing was so horrible that I was afraid that the thing felt like it could bite my head off in just about a very literal sense. | |
And its energy was very, very overpowering. | |
I did not want to challenge this thing in the slightest. | |
I didn't want to ask any questions of it. | |
Whether it was possible that at other times I had meaningful conversations with the five-foot grays that seemed to be a bit more interactive, that's certainly possible, but I feel that any sort of conversations in those respects have been blocked from me. | |
And from what I know of other people and their experiences, that they're not always necessarily honest with people. | |
They just seem to be just want you to go along with whatever they're doing, and they'll agree to just about anything or feed you sort of any line just to get you to cooperate. | |
Was this, it would with me, I think, especially at that age. | |
You know what being a teenager is like. | |
Was it depressing you in any way? | |
Was it getting you down? | |
Was it making you feel like you were going mad? | |
It was very depressing and very terrifying. | |
And anytime that I had an experience or I could feel their presence, I was taking some caffeine pills to keep me awake. | |
And so many nights I would stay awake all night and then I would tell my mother I was sick and that I couldn't go to school the next day. | |
And so I would sleep during the daytime. | |
And during the summer, where I was able to stay up as late as possible, I sure as heck did. | |
And then I slept in till noon or later the next day during the daylight hours, again when it was safer until my mom discovered the caffeine pills. | |
And she was really upset about that. | |
And I told her that the reason I take these things is because of these experiences. | |
And I could tell it weighed on her heavily. | |
And the sensation I got from her was that she was well aware that what was happening to me wasn't imaginary, just something that she really couldn't do anything about. | |
The phenomena runs on her side of the family, not my dad's side. | |
Okay, had your mom been through what you'd been through? | |
I don't think I know everything, but I know that there have been some things that have happened to her that were of a similar nature to some of what happened to me. | |
I don't like to speak about other family members because they're, for the most part, pretty private about it. | |
I'm an exception in going out and talking about it. | |
Now, if I read the book right, Bill, there was also a psychic, there has also been a psychic sort of element to this, a kind of predictive element to it. | |
I think at one stage you visualized you saw an explosion in the sky, which I think you thought represented some kind of natural disaster or event. | |
Talk to me about the psychic side of this. | |
Well, in terms of meaningful premonition, there hasn't been anything that I've experienced that I feel that has been indicative of any sort of major disaster that's actually come to pass. | |
Well, gosh, not at least what was mentioned in the book. | |
This kind of opens a can of worms here. | |
Let me give this example. | |
It was one night in the latter part of 2001, I had a dream that I fell basically, I was in the Empire State Building at the very top, and it was hollow for some reason. | |
And I fell all the way down to the bottom in the interior of the Empire State Building. | |
Then when I hit the bottom, I flew all the way back up to the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, and then I woke up. | |
And that was the morning of 9-11. | |
And, you know, different, you know, tall building in New York, set up tall buildings. | |
And, you know, was that a coincidence? | |
Well, you know, I guess I can't say that it was any more of a coincidence. | |
But to me, I thought that was very unusual because, you know, I hadn't been to New York yet at that point. | |
And, you know, why would I dream of the Empire State Building? | |
But when I was a kid, I would have dreams of what my friend Ted was going to have for lunch the next day at school. | |
And it would often come true. | |
Or, I mean, anytime I dreamt it, it did come true. | |
And, you know, it was sort of a meaningless form of a premonition. | |
When I got older in my 20s, there were things that happened to me in a very personal way, not in sort of any big world-changing way where I had premonitions of things that would happen later in my life, which did come true. | |
And I thought was helpful for me to have had some sort of foresight into what the future would bring because of the shock value of some of the things that happened in my life. | |
I guess that's kind of vaguely stated, but yeah. | |
Okay, the one thing we haven't talked about is as you've got older, you've been trying to establish yourself in the world, get an education, go out into the world, get a job, do all the things that ordinary people do. | |
How have these experiences impacted on you living a normal life? | |
Well, I've been fairly open about it, and my family, especially with their background and experiences, has been very welcome. | |
My wife, it actually, the phenomena runs on her dad's side of the family, so she's been very open about it. | |
In terms of the workplace, they all know about what I'm into, some of them more than others, I suppose, but I'm completely open about it. | |
And so all the time at work, coworkers are coming up to me and asking me what I think of different UFO reports or different UFO television programs they've seen or whatever. | |
And I've been blessed to be open about it. | |
I really haven't experienced in my adult life any backlash that's held me back and not allowed me to network with other people who've had experiences, not allowed me to, you know, I've been able to function a very normal life without having to worry about it. | |
You know, one day my next door neighbor at the house that I lived in recently, you know, said, you know, I heard you on the radio, and he's like, that is so cool, you know. | |
And that's the type of response that I've tended to get. | |
I think we live in a different culture than, you know, I think each successive generation is more open to the phenomena. | |
And so I think, you know, at some point, you know, some sort of tipping point, people will be completely open and accepting of it. | |
It's just the hard work that they have to do if they're not actually having the experiences themselves, you know, to tell them, okay, I know this didn't happen to you, but this happened to me. | |
And I understand that if you believe everything that I'm telling you, you're going to have to reevaluate everything in your life. | |
You're going to have to rethink your religion, you know, the whole place in the universe, you know, this and that. | |
And, you know, I have to say, if you believe me, you have to accept this big, giant paradigm shift in your life. | |
And for a lot of people, they're like, well, I'm not having the experiences you're having. | |
I haven't seen a UFO or anything like that. | |
So for me, it's a lot harder work to go along with what they're hearing than just to sort of ignore it and go on with their life without any issues. | |
I totally understand. | |
You told me that the Mantis creature, The head teacher creature who basically you were brought up before because you were being rebellious in your teens, and he essentially said to you, Get with the program and it'll be okay for you. | |
As far as you're aware now, has the program come to an end? | |
Have they stopped being a part of your life? | |
A lot of the experiencers who seem to have been having the types of experiences I was having during this same timeframe, we have sort of collectively gone into a lull. | |
And I believe that I am in a lull rather than at the end of whatever they have in store. | |
I see other people going through these types of experiences now. | |
Certainly, I don't think they've stopped with folks in general, and I don't think that they're ultimately done with me, but I haven't had that type of experience in several years. | |
I've had a lot of other unusual things, you know, as anyone knows, that if you have this type of experience through your life, you know, you have poltergeist activity, you know, just wild off-the-wall synchronicities, and just a lot of other little sort of psychic residue around the phenomena. | |
But, you know, I haven't had any straight-up abduction activity in years. | |
You sound like a very calm and balanced individual, if I may say so, Bill. | |
I've got to ask you this as we come to the end. | |
At any stage in all of this, have you ever thought for yourself, or has anybody ever suggested to you, that just for your own peace of mind's sake, you get yourself psychologically checked out, just to make sure that there's nothing else going on here, and then you can move forward? | |
Sure. | |
I can respond to that. | |
I've taken the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, which indicated that I'm not fantasy prone. | |
I participated in a program that a local college put on, Wayne State, through a local hospital, where they had several people stay three nights in the hospital, a group of people that said that they were abductees, and another control group. | |
I never met anybody in either group personally. | |
But after, because what they wanted to do was to investigate all of our sleep patterns to see if there was anything telling in a sleep pattern and might lead to some sort of weird hypnagogic or hypnopic type fantasies or whatever. | |
And at the end of the study, they told me that I had a better sleep than not only all the other abductees, but all the people in the control group as well. | |
I slept better than anybody in either group. | |
And then additionally, as you probably know, that when you are embedded in this phenomena, not only seeking others in it, but investigating the phenomena actively, there are a lot of psychologists that are interested in the phenomena, at least for short periods of time. | |
So I've met any number of them. | |
Three of them have become fairly close friends over the years. | |
And they tell me that from their perspective that there doesn't seem to be anything with me that doesn't check out or seems to confabulate things or to have any sort of psychological issues. | |
So I guess I can't call that a clinical stamp of approval. | |
But from my experience with people that are professionals, they've indicated to me that they've seen nothing wrong with me. | |
And they could have, if they had anything, I didn't ask them. | |
So, hey, Doc, do you think I'm okay? | |
These are that they've confided to me just from their observations. | |
Okay, well, thank you for explaining that so fully. | |
As you get to this stage in your life, do you fear somewhere deep down maybe that it all may start up again? | |
Do you think, oh my God, maybe I'm only out on parole here. | |
Maybe they're going to come back and get me again. | |
Do you have that fear? | |
I have that suspicion. | |
Whether it's a fear, I don't know. | |
I don't know if it quite grips me the way that it used to. | |
I had, you know, one of my experiences that I had in my 20s was of, and it's a very strange one itself, but the beings basically told me that I would be fine and that there would be no reason for me to fear them. | |
And it seems to have worked my fear dissipated of their contact in my 20s. | |
And at this point, I've been so open about it. | |
It's such an integrated part of my life. | |
Somebody asked me once, you know, would I prefer that none of this had ever happened to me? | |
And I had to respond. | |
I said, I wouldn't recognize myself. | |
I have no idea. | |
I mean, my very earliest memory on is of these types of experiences. | |
And so it's just part of my life. | |
I have to deal with it. | |
But yeah, I think that at some point I'll be seeing them again. | |
And I don't have a concern that they're going to take me away forever or kill me or anything like that. | |
So I'm just waiting. | |
They play the game on their terms. | |
And so I guess I'll have to see if they come back. | |
Understood. | |
So what you know is that these things happened to you. | |
What you know is that psychologists who've checked you out think that you're absolutely okay. | |
But what you also know is that this happened to you and you don't know why. | |
Now, for most of us, that void in our lives would be something that would gnaw away at us like a woodworm or, you know, like some kind of bug within. | |
Does that bother you? | |
Do you lose sleep about? | |
I mean, you've told me you sleep well, so maybe you don't, but do you lose sleep? | |
you concerned about that um i i just i i think if there are things that you you know you absolutely come to the realization you are just not going to know then that in itself is an answer it | |
I suppose that could bother a lot of people on a day-to-day basis, but when you come to this realization like, geez, that's just not one of those things I'm ever going to get an answer to, and you have to sort of resolve yourself to that lingering mystery. | |
And within that mindset lies peace, I would think. | |
Yeah, just some sort of, I guess, being resolved to understanding that it's one of those few mysteries that's just going to sort of hang there. | |
Peter Robbins told me that you would be a fascinating person to speak with, and I completely now concur with that view. | |
Thank you for giving me an hour of your time, Bill. | |
If people want to know more about you and the work that you've done and the communications that you're now making to the world about what you've been through, is there a website somewhere they can go to check you out? | |
Yeah, the best website for me that I'm affiliated with is my own website, Experiencer.me, which is.me. | |
So experiencer.me. | |
And then, you know, there's a little bit more about me, some videos, how to get my book. | |
I haven't updated it in a while. | |
Probably should do that again. | |
But yeah, it's got contact information for me too. | |
All of that's there. | |
Just very finally, somebody I recently interviewed who'd had similar experiences, but not the same to the ones that you've had, was very, very, as you are, adamant that the word that must be used in relation to people like you is not contactee, it is experiencer. | |
Tell me briefly, now that we're at the end of the conversation, why that is for me, you know, I mean, certainly contact E has had its baggage attached to it from, you know, the, you know, the 1950s and the people that were clearly confabulating about a lot of what was going on with them. | |
I think it became sort of a loaded word in that respect. | |
But also for me, thinking that, you know, possibly history is forgotten about that era, I think experiencer is more of an accurate term because these experiences don't always involve even contact. | |
You could have strange, transcendent experiences as part of the sort of paranormal milieu that goes on in your life without necessarily just it all being about you contacting some other being from some other place. | |
Like, for example, premonitions. | |
You know, that's not really contact per se, but you are experiencing something of high strangeness. | |
Bill Konkoleski, you've given me a lot to think about, and I thank you very much for giving me your time and speaking with me, and I hope we speak again. | |
Thanks, Bill. | |
Thank you, Howard. | |
Bill Konkoleski, and I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
The website designed, created, maintained, and honed like a Swiss watch by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
I hope you're enjoying the summer. | |
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope that you're getting through the winter if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. | |
Wherever you are, please stay in touch because I love to hear from you. | |
And I promise you that we'll continue to develop this online show. | |
I'm very, very grateful for your support. | |
And if you're one of the people who also listens to my national radio show in the UK, thank you for that too. | |
And please keep supporting that. | |
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained. | |
My name is Howard Hughes. | |
And please stay safe. | |
Please stay calm. | |
And above all, please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |