---

Raw unedited transcript from Streamyard.com

Thank you. EWA- Five-Seventeen, do you want to report a UFO? Over. Negative. We don’t want to report. Look, it wasn’t my worst Wednesday night. Hello, and welcome to another edition of Anomaly Now. I’m your host, Miles Lewis. This is the weekly… Rarely alive these days News and media roundup for the nonprofit by the one C three scientific anomaly Institute aka the anomaly archives Located here in the heart of Texas Austin Thank you for joining us. We’re gonna dive right in they’re gonna Burn through these news headlines. I’m not gonna cover that much tonight today this episode but Wow course you can go to our website anomalyarchives.org and learn all about our organization we were founded in two thousand three as a five one c three non-profit we have over seven thousand books and thousands of periodicals dealing with all things anomalous ufos parapsychology ancient civilizations all the mysteries that science tends to poopoo or relegate to uh The back of the bus, so to speak. Not to make light of that. But we have some big news, a periodical. From back in the nineteen nineties, thirty years ago, there was this really well done zine, a newsletter called Houston Sky, and this was produced by Gail Neeson. And it is one of those rare examples of a really interesting and balanced ufo newsletter from back thirty years ago in the nineteen nineties um all eleven of its brief run from october nineteen ninety four to june october nineteen ninety six all eleven issues have been digitized and are available online uh thanks to the archives for the unexplained afu over in sweden uh we’ve got the link at our website anomalyarchives.org collection slash periodical slash houston dash sky or just search houston sky uh digitize online you’ll find it but um yeah it this has uh been a a long sought after um series of back issues um and it’s been used in a lot of more recent reportage reflecting back on famous cases uh in this case you can see here we’ve got a uh picture from gail neeson’s article a conversation with philip j class that’s right folks even people who are interested in quote unquote believers and there being something important to the ufo phenomena have engaged with these arch skeptic nemesis of the ufo scene uh this excerpt was from um our friend Kirk Collins’ blueblurrylines.com Philip class on the Cash Landrum UFO case circa twenty nineteen. But this what he was excerpting was Gail Neeson’s nineteen ninety five interview. But yeah, you can go and you can click through and you can see examples of these great back issues there over AFU. Of course, we have all these locally as well. here’s an example of houston sky for uh october november the seventh issue a bi-monthly ufo newsletter for houston area mufon members and others uh the cover article in this case was the alien autopsy circus but so guess what um gail is resurrecting for one final finale issue the the houston sky magazine she had a lot of material that was supposed to go into the the twelfth and final issue way back in the day and she uh… because of her interest in continued interest in the phenomenon and where we’re at nowadays She wanted to put that information out there. And so she recreated the zine and there is now the twelfth and final finale issue that is, according to emails I read this morning, is making its way across the country to a group of lucky recipients as of the last twenty four hours or so. I can’t wait to see the final issue. Of course, we’ll have more to say about this in the future. But yeah, you can find out more about that. over at anomaly archives.org our page for the houston sky magazine and periodical and yeah check it out So in consciousness news, ESP news over at discoverwildscience.com is this amazing article from November eighth by Jan Ott. That’s O-T-T-E, last name O-T-T-E, Jan Ott, Jan Ott. The shared dream reports that are stumping neurologists. Now, I think I have commented on this a couple of times recently because, well, you know, i’ve had experience with this sort of um in high school i had a dream swapping switching experience with my best friend and um that among other weird dream experiences is likely uh part of why i became so interested in the paranormal and ufos as a youth as a child This article begins by saying, picture yourself waking up from a vivid dream only to discover that someone else experienced the exact same narrative down to the smallest details. This isn’t the plot of a science fiction movie. Various reported mutual dream narratives have been analyzed, suggesting that shared dreaming might be more than just an urban legend. Throughout history, humans have reported experiencing identical dreams with others, creating a mystery that continues to challenge our understanding of consciousness and the sleeping brain. The phenomenon has captured the attention of researchers worldwide who are now documenting cases with scientific rigor. The best documented cases involve therapist-client shared dreams. In these, there is a professionally trained therapist who verifies the claim that the dream happened to both the therapist and the client around the same time. Yet, despite the mounting anecdotal evidence and preliminary studies, the scientific community remains divided on whether genuine dream sharing is possible or merely an elaborate coincidence. And so this decently lengthy article goes on to several sections, including the science behind documented mutual dreams, It says, studies suggest that most reported mutual dreams occur between two people, commonly involving friends, relatives, or significant others. This statistical breakdown reveals fascinating patterns that suggest shared dreaming isn’t random, but follows specific relationship dynamics. What makes these cases particularly intriguing is their consistency across different studies. Mean similarities ratings… for dream settings, themes, characters, events, and objects were all above four point oh, where five point oh indicated identical content. These remarkably high similarity scores indicate that people aren’t just sharing vague dream themes, but detailed specific experiences that align with extraordinary precision. Next section, neurological mechanisms that could enable shared dreams. Many findings pointed out that mental activity during sleep and wakefulness shared similar neural bases. On the other side, recent studies have highlighted that dream experience is promoted by significant brain activation characterized by reduced low frequencies and increased rapid frequencies. This neurological foundation provides a potential framework for understanding how shared experiences might occur during deep, excuse me, during sleep states. One hypothesis for parallel dreaming involves neural synchrony, the phenomenon where brainwaves of different individuals synchronize. Research has shown that people can achieve brainwave synchronization through activities like meditation and music. If two emotionally connected individuals can synchronize their neural activity while awake, the possibility extends to synchronize dreaming during sleep. The concept of brainwave entrainment offers another compelling explanation. High frequency neural oscillations are associated with various aspects of dream consciousness, suggesting that specific neural frequencies are associated with dream consciousness. When individuals share close proximity or strong emotional bonds, their brain patterns might actually align during REM sleep phases. The role of emotional connections in shared dreaming. And this is where I would point out this was my best friend that I had the dream switching experience where he seemingly had my dream that I was anticipating going to sleep, but also with the intent and thought, I can’t wait to share what I was hoping to dream about a particular person that I’d met earlier that night that I was hoping to share that information with this best friend. Meanwhile, he was back here in Austin, I was in Houston, and he was worried about his homework. And instead of having the dream I was expecting about this person I’d met, I had this dream about uh homework and being literally paperwork falling on me uh something i never had in high school i was never worried i never had nightmares or bad dreams about school work it was that was way beneath me but uh the article goes on to say mutual dreams tend to occur in close dyadic relationships be very similar in content and occur when related dreamers are separated and not feeling very intimate Noticing or constructing mutual dreams may therefore be related to a need for emotional closeness or attachment in relationships. This finding suggests that shared dreams might serve an important psychological function rather than being merely coincidental. A two thousand seventeen study explored the idea that shared dreams come from a desire to enhance emotional attachments in relationships. The main focus was on the relationship between two dreamers, and the study found these dreams tended to occur when the subject were feeling a sense of separation and lack of intimacy in their daily lives. This research indicates that mutual dreams might be the mind’s way of maintaining connections during physical or emotional distance. The timing of these experiences adds another layer of complexity. Dreamers did not typically speak together during the dream, and forty eight percent had the dream in different locations. This geographical separation rules out external environmental factors, suggesting the phenomenon operates through purely internal mechanisms. Next sections, historical documentation and cultural perspectives, and they just reflect on the fact that, yes, ancient civilizations had lots of ideas about the idea of the import of dreams, their prophetic abilities and the possibility of people having the same dreams. I think I recently mentioned all this in the context of an episode from the nineteen nineties sitcom, drama, whatever you want to call it, Northern Exposure, in which there’s a exacerbated, a wild display of the Northern Lights. Of course, this is all set in Sicily, Alaska. And people in the town started having each other’s dreams. They literally all started having dream switching experiences, though it wasn’t always a one for one, I had your dream, you had mine. It just kind of like they were hopscotching around. Another section in this article, modern research challenges and methodological issues. Well, obviously, most science is wanting instrumented, verifiable information. And so studies that are trying to focus on dreams can largely only work when they deal with the comparing the descriptions. But then that becomes this kind of anecdotal self-reporting that happens. carries less weight amongst most scientists. But it is possible that with more and more advanced neurological imaging technology, there’s this new technology where AI software can extract some signals from the brainwaves and reconstruct them and approximate what the person is seeing in real time. Imagine if they applied that to dreaming. This has been, of course, the subject of many a science fiction movie. But let’s see. Then, yes, the quantum consciousness connection, this section. begins a more speculative and controversial theory involves quantum entanglement, a phenomenon where particles become interconnected and instantly influence each other regardless of distance. Some researchers have posited that human consciousness might exhibit properties of quantum entanglement, allowing for shared experiences across space and time. While this idea is far from mainstream acceptance, it adds an intriguing layer to the discussion. This quantum approach to consciousness suggests that individual minds might not be as separate as traditionally believed. If consciousness operates partially through quantum mechanisms, then the boundaries between different people’s dream experiences could theoretically become permeable under certain conditions. The concept gains additional credibility when considering that quantum effects have been observed in biological systems, including potentially in neural microtubules. Though highly controversial, some researchers propose that consciousness itself might emerge from quantum processes within the brain, opening possibilities for non-local connections between minds. I think that there’s quite a bit of possibility in that direction. The article goes on. There’s a lot more here. Neurologists’ current perspectives in future research. They talk about a famous lucid dreamer, Steven LaBerge, began conducting research into shared lucid dreaming in twenty nineteen with results still pending. This ongoing research represents one of the most promising avenues for scientifically investigating shared dream phenomena using controlled experimental conditions. While brainwave alignment is measurable, proving that two people are experiencing the exact same dream remains a challenge due to the inherently subjective nature of dreams and the absence of technology capable of directly capturing dream content again. There is some new technology that might be able to do this, and we can finally have a dream recorder like I and so many others have always dreamed of. However, emerging neurotechnology may eventually provide the tools necessary to decode and compare dream experiences objectively. What this means for our understanding of consciousness. And yes, I’ll just encourage you to go and read the rest of this article and its conclusions. I do think it’s nice to see this kind of thing being talked about more And again, this is over at discoverwildscience.com with the headline, the shared dream reports that are stumping neurologists. And I would just note that, you know, the Anomaly Archives has a number of books on the subject or related subjects. We’ve got books like Time Loops, Precognition, Retrocausation and the Unconscious published in twenty eighteen by Eric Wargo. precognitive dream work and the long self interpreting messages from your future by eric wargo eric wargo that’s w-a-r-g-o circa um and one of the few books literally on this subject that i would highly recommend uh is called mutual dreaming by linda lane magalon that’s m-a-g-a-l-l-o-n published almost thirty years ago twenty eight years ago in nineteen ninety seven uh… there’s also a more recent book group dreaming by gene campbell that’s campbell uh… group dreaming by gene campbell circa two thousand six of course there’s other books that have dealt with altered states of consciousness uh… precognitive visions dreams and so forth such as second sight by judith orloff circa nineteen ninety six um captain of my ship master of my soul living with guidance by f holmes atwater circa as well as psi scientific studies of the psychic realm a dutton paperback original by charles tart circa god i love that that book uh the ultimate time of shooting a remote viewer’s perception of time and predictions for the new millennium by joseph mcmoneagle um self experiments with consciousness and hypnagogia by shirley marks bonham circa that’s a a local uh writer researcher who uh is a friend and a long time supporter of organizations associated with the anomaly archives uh the classic dream telepathy experiments in nocturnal esp by montague ullman circa and others including limitless mind by russell targ circa Yeah, there’s just so much great information out there. But, yeah, it can be hard to come by. There’s also a whole host of other weird seeming shared consciousness experiences that I’ve reported on over the years. Back in nineteen ninety six in my elf elf zine ELF and best spaces journal of possible paradigms. I published a account by the mother of a close friend of mine called A Shared Near Death Experience. very tragic circumstances, but an amazing, amazing tale of a woman who seemingly co-experienced the near death experience, the actual death experience of her husband, who was murdered that night. tragic but beautiful and amazing story. Also, back then, we republished something from the local Austin MUFON, Mutual UFO Network newsletter called Coincidence, Synchronicity, or Is It a Shared Event? And this is an example of something very strange that is kind of exemplary of the weirdness associated with alien abduction, contact experiences, and dreams. I don’t know if I need to read the whole thing here, but it starts by saying, as the dream quote unquote began, I found myself just inside the gate of some kind of compound enclosed in a high cyclone fence with tilted end barbed wire at the top. It was the type of fence you would see in closing a prison or military installation. I was milling around with about a hundred other people, all of us naked and confused, and felt a surge of anger and frustration as the guards roughly hurried us forward with as little concern as one would have with cattle. I strained to focus on these guards, but their faces were fuzzed out with a shimmer similar to the one used to blank out faces on TV when someone’s identity is being protected.” Another part a little later. As we were heard into the enormous interior, I saw many, many curtained off areas such as you see in emergency rooms. I was in a kind of daze at this point and did not protest as I was led into one of the cubicles and placed on a gray metal table. So very much kind of an alien abduction experience, but also like an internment camp experience. Like, unfortunately, we seem to be going through again now after having done that horrible activity ourselves in World War II. I seem to recall hearing someone crying, but I can’t get a clear picture of the activity which accompanied this image. After that, I was back outside walking towards the gate. I don’t know if I was unclothed at this point, for the dream faded. I came to with a start, sat straight up in bed, and looked at my bedside table clock, which I could see by the streetlights streaming in the window. It was exactly two a.m. I felt wide awake and terrified and jumped out of bed and began pacing the floor, suddenly aware that my body ached from head to foot. After swallowing a potassium tablet and an aspirin, I went back to bed, determined to get some sleep for the next day. It was a work day and I needed to be alert. I related this dream to a friend at work during my coffee break the next day. This friend is aware of my UFO experiences, is possibly an experiencer as well, and could be trusted to keep confidences. As I finished telling the last part, in which I woke up at two a.m., another co-worker came in the break room and asked why we had the serious faces. We laughed and answered only that I’d had a really spooky dream which had upset my night. The person said, that’s funny. I had a really weird dream too, he remarked. I was out driving around and I didn’t have any clothes on. I came up to this big gate, got out and went inside and there were all these other people there, naked as jaybirds. didn’t seem to notice that my friend and i were starting staring at him open mouth as he continued recalling basically the same dream that i had experienced he finished by adding it was really strange i woke up at two o’clock wide awake and my body was hurting all over i got up and walked around for a while and rubbed my arms and legs and got a glass of water but it took a long time to go back to sleep i really i feel real hung over this morning and i can’t figure out why i went to bed early and didn’t even have one beer coincidence telepathically tapping into each other’s minds? Or did we both experience the same event? I doubt if we will ever know, or I cannot discuss this mystery with my coworker. He is a member of a fundamentalist religious congregation and refuses to acknowledge that there are any other worlds except for our world, or that God ever created any other beings except for humans on planet Earth. He has had dreams of being kidnapped by demons who took him for fantastic rides to places where he saw quote-unquote vampires, but these will remain dreams for him. I cannot topple his worldview by suggesting other realities. He wouldn’t believe it if I did. He wouldn’t believe a single word. All right. We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back. thank you for joining us thank you for sticking with us this is smiles lewis and this is the wednesday november nineteenth two thousand twenty five episode of anomaly now the weekly news and media roundup for the five oh one c three non-profit scientific anomaly institute aka anomaly archives so we were just talking about the possible phenomena of dream sharing, shared dreaming, group dreaming, dream switching, other types of weird altered states of consciousness sharing, like near-death experiences or a death experience sharing, and the connection to perceived alien contact, alien abduction, UFO space weather contact through telepathy and dreams, that sort of thing, which brings us to something I was going to share So in the last few days, I heard this reference to Joe Rogan having described an intense dream on one of his recent episodes of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast show. He was describing to his guest a dream that he’d had either that morning or within the last forty eight seventy two hours or something like that um and of course so this is provided this clip was provided over at Red Panda koalas UFO history Archive YouTube channel it’s a four and a half minute clip but I kind of shrunk it down to even even shorter and wanted to share uh this with you I think you might all find it interesting I was telling you before we get started that I had the most bizarre dream I’ve ever had in my life last night. The most realistic and most bizarre dream. And… It’s so hard to try to explain how strange this was. But I was in some weird corridor that looked like a building but was odd. Very strange. And I was encountering these beings that look like people but very different. They were very thin and they were slightly on the tall side. And they had big heads like larger than normal with larger than normal eyes But they looked like people and they were playful and they were scaring me They’re like they scared me and then they joked around like we’re just joking around it was the most realistic dream I’ve ever had in my life and I woke up and I could not go back to I had to stay up I got up at three thirty in the morning and And I just went to the gym, and I worked out for a couple hours. And I was like, what the fuck was that? But it was very bizarre in that there was communication going on. It was like… God, I want to read into this, because I know it’s just a dream. But it was like… Get comfortable with this. Very organic. Whatever this was, it felt like living organic beings that were like us. There was also a water element. It was hard to understand what the water element of it was. But there was some sort of an indication that there was water and that there was a protection from you going out into the water. But if you did go out of the water, there’s a bunch of predators in the water. But they weren’t like it wasn’t like sharks. It was. reptile like crocodile type things that were in the water and that they were they had been like feeding them and keeping them calm and like keeping them away, but whatever these beings were in my dream they were like like what humans could eventually be. That’s what it felt like. It didn’t feel like a person, but I don’t feel like a monkey, you know what I mean? But it was like that. It was very, very realistic. Like there was communication going on and I was really freaked out and they were fucking with me to lighten me up because I was freaked out. They’re like . And then they were like this, like calm down, like relax. It was so realistic that when it was over, I wasn’t sure what happened. It wasn’t like, whoa, what a fucked up dream. It was like, that was different. That was different. Yes. It really sounds like very similar to a DMT experience. Of course, this is a chemical that’s endogenous to the human brain and body, and it’s in a lot of different plants. It’s the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the spirit vine. Of course, there’s been government-funded research by Rick Strassman, as reported on in his book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. It really sounds like that. But it’s interesting because, of course, Rogan, I believe, has done DMT, maybe even ayahuasca variation of it. But these entities that he’s describing sound remarkably like DMT elves or… what Terence McKenna described as the dribbling basketballs, the elves of hyperspace that he and others have consistently reported as a common inhabitant of this other realm. And that seems more real than a hallucination. And the exact behavior that he’s describing, I know people who’ve had that experience of hordes of these creatures messing with them trying to scare them showing them lots of scary things but always with the sense of no no see it’s this is all imaginary you don’t have to worry you’re safe um you know learn learn to not react to the alarmingly anomalous things that you are experiencing and about to see and then the thing about the the water element and uh these beings keeping fed or at bay these reptilian alligator crocodile type creatures. Again, this all kind of fits a lot of the lore, both of shamanism, various indigenous peoples’ accounts, as well as the UFO literatures. And obviously Joe Rogan’s somebody who’s dive deep into the ufo literature and so it’s not unlikely that he would have come across these things and it could just be his unconscious uh um helping him process this but it is very interesting because this does ring true which it sounds like so many alien abductee contactee dream experiences where it seems like there’s something more significant going on here and I’ve long maintained that a parapsychological understanding of UFOs is the only way to get to the heart of it. I do believe that basically the UFO contact experience is just a psychic interface for us and our own collective unconscious, our own personal unconscious, and possibly probably the collective consciousness and individual consciousnesses of every life form on this planet every life form in the universe the universe itself as living information and consciousness wacky ideas i know so your mileage may vary anyway i thought that was pretty interesting Along a similar line, over at Psyche.co, that’s P-S-Y-C-H-E.co website, Psychedelic in the Sky. What can we learn by taking transcendent UFO stories seriously? In Psychedelic in the Sky, the U.S. filmmaker Matthew Salton takes a leap of faith, embarking on a project to take the UFO phenomenon seriously. Through interviews with a true believer who claims to have had a world-shattering encounter with a mysterious flying object, and by invoking the work of the French astronomer and ufologist Jacques Vallée, one of the few scientists to research UFOs decades ago, the animation takes viewers on a thought-provoking journey into social psychology and spirituality. Pairing these voices with his own reflections and a stylish vaporwave aesthetic, Salton’s short makes for a fascinating exploration of what these stories of strange objects in the sky, and even encounters with creatures inside them, reveal about the shared human experience right here on Earth. Excellent synopsis of this eleven minute video that you can watch at this link or at the Matthew Salton’s VO channel. I do have a couple of clips. It’s like it’s an eleven minute video, but here’s a couple of clips. And again, it rehashes some existing Jeffrey Mishlove interview with Jacques Vallee, where he outlines the three-fold, the three levels that UFO contact affects humanity through. But I’ll comment a little bit more in a second. Here’s the first clip. A very large orange sphere with flames coming off the front of it and the side of it. with a little white star orb following in its trail. Its very being, its very fact that it’s there was screaming, we’re from somewhere else. This is not a normal Earth experience. More than thirty residents from nearby towns and villages reported sightings that night. Like I said, I consume a lot of UFO content. So when I encounter stories like this, I inevitably think of the work of Jacques Vallée. What we know today about the UFO phenomenon is considerably more than we knew twenty years ago or ten years ago. And he’s one of the few scientists who believes there’s much more we can learn from these sightings, other than just stories of strange lights in the sky. And we have to understand it at three different levels. The first level is the physical level. That thing came right over, right as close as can be over our head. Almost all described it like Len did. Seeing the little white orb following in the trail, the articles appeared and they quickly faded away. I don’t think I told very many people that it might have been somehow personal. It was like a beacon in the night. It was like a torch, if you will. This feeling came over me, this thought. They were giving me a hello. psychedelic in the sky matthew salton uh highly recommend you go check it out um and you know the thing i immediately realized about that account and seeing the news clippings was this was the brockport ufo incident that i had only become aware of thanks to diana pasolka’s second book encounters and in fact while looking that up i’ve found this this bit here um remembering brockport new york this is uh lynn philip i’m sorry if i’m mispronouncing your last name f-i-l-p-p-u lynn i think he’s the len in this he must be the lynn because he’s talking about this experience and he posted back in november of following up on the brockport ufo Encounters, the new book that covers my eyewitness account of the nineteen sixty seven UFO over Brockport and other nearby towns is now available. And I had the pleasure of sharing a few moments with its author, Diana Walsh-Basilka, last weekend at the inaugural Seoul Foundation Symposium at Stanford University. And yeah, there’s some images here of he and she and others reading his book, or her book rather, and then screenshots of the photos of the book proper related to his experience. And yeah, very, very interesting. And again, highly recommend this. There’s another clip I’m going to play real quick here. When is a UFO story no longer just a UFO story? I have no idea what I saw, but it scared me to death. It was bigger than my house. It was just an enormous glowing object. Not everyone reports a craft, but luminous lights and orbs that appear and disappear. It was doing figures of eight. It was doing loops. All the while, it was changing color. Sometimes there are strange creatures. He was about seven feet tall, the silver suited man. He was there for about two hours. People encountered psychic phenomena. I got seemingly a telepathic message while I was meditating. That voice switched over to Latin. Dreams and visions would follow. oftentimes they would say, we are you and you are us. There were even cases of people being healed from physical ailments. A lot of experiencers even interpreted their encounter as religiously significant. Whether they are a cop driving on a lonely road or a PhD or a bank president, whether they are religious or not religious, their view of themselves, their view of the world around them, their view of the universe has been shattered. You see a UFO, and that is consciousness expanding. It’s like a psychedelic flying in the sky. I love videos like that. I love that kind of animation that’s not this… dang AI animation that is becoming so prevalent. I was just watching a video that was purporting to be all about Tim Taylor talking about Diana Walsh Basulka’s encounters with them. And all it did was harvest a bunch of audio and video interviews where people have talked about Tim Taylor, this mysterious figure that relayed in her book, American Cosmic. and who is a very interesting person. And yes, it’s nice to see and hear all the interview footage compiled together, but the entire video, all AI generated. And then some of it’s really beautiful and amazing, but it’s all so obviously AI generated. And it’s just capitalizing off other people’s material. Go watch that video for yourself. And I’m going to hopefully try to support that artist’s work, Matthew Salton. yeah in that video I was that referring to though the Tim the Tim Taylor video it I also suspect that the the only quote-unquote new material added the the narration for the video not not what I was just playing but this other thing I’m referring to this ripoff video I swear it’s probably a I generated to the narration it’s probably just got some voice speaking based on the input of those those interviews and talks about anyway Moving right along, over at oakparkandbeyond.org is this article that’s one of two I want to highlight at the end of the show here called The Seekers Cult Oak Park, The Spaceship That Never Came. This is a nice local flavor article about an event that you’ll realize you’ve probably heard about inevitably, even if you’re not real familiar with the case details. As it says here, the story unfolded on an ordinary Oak Park block, and thanks to the Oak Park River Forest Museum, we’ve got the details. Oak Park, Christmas week, On the seven hundred block of South Keuler Avenue on a wintry evening, a small circle of people sing carols and watch the sky, waiting for a ship to take them up to planet Clarion. This is the night they expected, the night they’ve been waiting for. It’s the public rendezvous after an earlier predawn vigil that passed without a pickup. Outside, neighbors edge closer to a peek into what’s going on, and the officers stay close at the curb. Inside, the circle of fresh messages promise that departure could still come at any moment. To the seekers, it’s a quiet street holding an enormous hope. But to see how an ordinary block became the location of this midnight watch, we have to meet the people at its center. Who were the seekers, and how did their promise take hold? At the center of the seekers was Dorothy Martin, a fifty-four-year-old Oak Parker who said she received communications by automatic writing, a spiritualist practice of writing messages without conscious control. She received this automatic writing from higher beings called the Guardians. Using the pen name Marion Keech, she spoke of approaching disaster and flying saucers ready to ferry the faithful to safety. Once her word started spreading, a small network of cult members formed, one of the most zealous being Dr. Charles Lawford, a physician from Michigan who began traveling to Oak Park. The press and onlookers would later call them a UFO cult or Doomsday cult, though on the ground they looked more like a mid-century religious group meeting in homes to parse quote-unquote messages. Their belief system drew on esoteric sources including OASPI, an eighteen eighty-two spiritualist scripture produced by automatic writing, and quote-unquote contactee lore, mid-century UFO accounts from people who said benevolent space beings gave them messages, along with familiar religious language built on the idea that God could stay a catastrophe if enough light was spread. Oak Park played a quiet but crucial role. Meetings happened in homes here, visitors came from throughout the region, and the story attracted reporters who amplified the drama beyond the block. Later tellings would use pseudonyms for people and places, but the local footprint remained unmistakable. What the Prophecy Said and How the Nights Unfolded The date that mattered was December twenty-first. Before dawn, according to the prediction, a catastrophic earthquake and flood would devastate the central United States. Extraterrestrial rescue would arrive just before then, a visitor at midnight, and then a spacecraft. Following instructions that metal would interfere with the pickup, believers removed metal items, jewelry, zippers, fasteners, before waiting in the house. Unfortunately for them, midnight passed, so another clock was consulted. Still nothing. By four forty five a.m., a fresh communication reported that the group’s vigil had spread so much light that God had spared the world. The catastrophe, they said, was averted. By afternoon, the group had died. The group that had shunned reporters now sought them out, pivoting to share the good news. Three nights later, on Christmas Eve, there was a public rendezvous outside Dorothy Martin’s Oak Park home. A small circle of seekers sang carols and scanned the sky, while a much larger crowd of neighbors and press looked on. Several accounts put the onlookers in the hundreds. No ship appeared. Police kept order and weighed whether any charges were appropriate. As for the group itself, sources vary, but the Oak Park core that winter was small. Roughly a dozen committed participants, with others drifting in and out. After that second non-event, the seekers redoubled their insistence that the vigil itself had worked. The cult presented the outcome as a success story. Disaster predicted and, in their view, disaster avoided. In their telling, the prophecy didn’t fail, but was instead fulfilled differently. Many group members remained firm believers. Why the small Oak Park story got big. Enter social psychology. Researcher Leon Festinger and colleagues embedded with the group before and after the failed dates. Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Henry Reichen then published When Prophecy Fails in Rather than presenting a finished theory, the book documented the group’s reactions. The case soon helped shape Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance, which he formalized in . In plain terms, when reality collides with conviction, some people don’t let go. They explain, reframe, and sometimes proselytize harder. Decades later, the story still bounces around broadcasts and social media, especially each December as writers revisit, quote-unquote, the Christmas the aliens didn’t come, and ask what the case says about modern movements and the pull of certainty. It’s become a cultural shorthand for how a prediction can fail and a movement can carry on. now i did like this part here uh you can read the rest over at oakparkandbeyond.org oak park today how to engage with the story responsibly when it comes to the seekers there’s no official tour and there shouldn’t be private homes and the people who live in them deserve privacy If you’re intrigued, treat this as a chapter in local history rather than a scavenger hunt. For deeper context, look to reputable local resources and museum programs that discuss Oak Park in the news coverage of the vigils and how the study found its way from a block on South Keeler Avenue to the center of a social science debate. Curiosity is welcome. Respect is required. I like that. Well, I bring this up in the context of this other article written by Ryan Whalen over at TheDebrief.org. This is pretty interesting. I was not aware of this until I saw this article and very much appreciate Ryan Whalen and The Debrief publishing this. The title is Alarm Bells Went Off. New Research Takes a Critical Look at the Landmark UFO Cult Study When Prophecy Fails. Since its nineteen fifty six publication, When Prophecy Fails, the classical psychological study of an American UFO cult has remained a prominent psychology text underpinning the idea of cognitive dissonance written by Leon Festinger, Henry Reichen and Stanley Schachter. When Prophecy Fails recounts the experiences of members of a UFO cult after their leaders predictions failed to come true, which only increased the members fervor. However, decades later, a fresh academic review of the seminal work raises significant questions about many of its claims. In a new paper published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, independent researcher Thomas Kelly examines contemporary periodicals, one of the author’s original notes about the study, and further investigation of the subject’s later lives, now arguing that the work’s conclusions were inaccurate and derived from the original researcher’s unethical behavior. Now, I’m not gonna repeat the part where it gives you this description of what we just read about the nature of these experiences. But yes, there was this person who started doing automatic writing and was issuing these prophecies that then seemingly did not come to pass, but were reinterpreted. And the implication being that people double down on their beliefs, even in the face of perceived failure. Reconsidering When Prophecy Fails. Researcher Thomas Kelly is a political scientist by training with a PhD from the UC Berkeley and has previously published on health policy. He explained to The Debrief how after reading When Prophecy Fails for personal interest, he became… He became concerned with the influential work’s accuracy. Quote, when I read the book, alarm bells went off in my head because the authors made sweeping claims while offering anecdotes that often seemed to undermine their main thesis, Kelly explained. For example, they would discuss how the cult rarely proselytized in one chapter and then the next introduce a book publisher that they were hoping would print a book of their teachings. Quote, as I read more about the case, each document made when prophecy fails look worse, Kelly continued. For instance, Festinger’s book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, offered an account of the events of when prophecy fails, but he altered the account in several ways, even though they were only published a year apart. Kelly noted his greatest surprise was at how often the researchers documented their active encouragement of the cult’s beliefs during moments of doubt, which he discovered in Festinger’s newly released papers. Let me reread that. Kelly. What is happening with this webpage? I don’t know if it’s showing up there. Is it? Kelly noted his greatest surprise was at how often the researchers documented their active encouragement of the cult’s beliefs during moments of doubt, which he discovered in Festinger’s newly released papers. Quote, I was surprised by how actively the authors manipulated the cultists. Henry pretending to be an alien emissary, Liz pretending to get psychic messages, Liz and Frank getting involved in the child welfare investigation, Kelly expressed. Had the authors just massaged or exaggerated their findings? I would have been much less surprised. Belief persists. Quote, by the standards of the authors, mere belief in UFOs or psychics or occultism is not an example of belief persisting past disconfirmation, Kelly writes in the recent study, adding that, quote, only belief in Martin’s specific prophecy and reinterpretation would qualify. Kelly traces this. Kelly traces Martin’s later career as Sister Thedra, a period marked by claims that she channeled both Jesus and extraterrestrial beings. At the same time, the Loth-Heads continued to promote their beliefs in prophecy and alien contact. When Kelly notes that Martin eventually recanted, the reality appears more nuanced than a simple admission of error. Martin suggested that her belief that the followers would be taken up in a spaceship might have referred not to a literal ascent but to a spiritual uplifting. though she later conceded that no one can make precise date-specific predictions. Interestingly, some of Sister Thedra’s subsequent followers seem to have been unaware of the original Nineteen Fifty-Four events that gave rise to her earlier notoriety. Anyway, this is a good synopsis of this case. Very interesting. Also interesting that Ryan, the author, interviewed Aaron Gullias, the host of the long-running Saucer Life podcast, which unfortunately, sadly, has come to an end. But there’s still all those wonderful episodes of the Saucer Life podcast available for you to listen to. Gullias is interviewed here and says, quote, I think it’s an interesting take, which could have been fleshed out a bit more with additional examples and evidence, commented Aaron Gullias, a historian specializing in UFO and conspiratorial beliefs regarding Kelly’s new perspectives on the work, though arguing that it may not entirely refute the primary argument of when prophecy fails, quote. The focus on the proselytization angle seems a bit narrow to me, Gullius told the debrief. I thought that Kelly might have paid more attention to the way that Martin’s and the Lawfid’s commitment to UFO belief deepened despite the failure of the prophecy. Quote, I’ve always had serious concerns about the infiltration angle of the study, and Kelly’s article indicates that there were certainly ethical issues at play here, Golias concedes. At the same time, I don’t think flaws in the study undermine the concept of cognitive dissonance as much as Kelly seems to. Yeah. But you can read the rest of that over at the debrief.org website. I think this is a great reexamination of something that’s long been and continues to be cited in terms of believers in UFO phenomena, cult-like belief by believers, and discussions of UFO belief engendering a new age religion, a new religion of sorts, a new religious movement. This is a recurring theme, obviously, promulgated by the fact that some of the biggest names in the academic world who have written about this, Diana Walsh-Basilka, Jeff Kripal, et cetera, come from the field of religious studies. Well, folks, that’s going to be it for this episode of Anomaly Now for November, nineteen, two thousand twenty five. Thank you for joining us. Please go to Anomaly Archives dot org and sign up there for updates or more more helpfully. go to our patreon at patreon.com anomaly archives where you can sign up for free and get updates uh or if you have if you if you can please consider donating a dollar two dollars five dollars ten dollars a month or more uh to help us in our efforts for uh preserving ufo and anomalous related information and educating the public we could really use your help of course like and subscribe hit the notification bell all those silly goofy things that youtube wants you to do Thank you so much, everybody. Good night.