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Putting Paranormal Research into Perspective: Ask Micah Hanks!

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Gene Steinberg

Gene Steinberg

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If it's paranormal, Micah Hanks is covering it on his various blogs and his radio show, The Gralien Report. So you'll hear about his fundamental philosophy not just on UFOs, but about all facts of research into the world of the unknown.

With all the troubling reports about the state of UFO research in recent months, we felt we needed a reality check, and Micah will provide it.

According to his bio:

Micah Hanks is a writer, researcher, podcaster, lecturer and radio personality whose work addresses a variety of areas, including history, politics, scientific theories and unexplained phenomena. Open minded, but skeptical in his approach, his research has examined a broad variety of subjects over the years, incorporating interest in scientific anomalies, cultural studies, psychology, sci-fi and pop culture, government secrecy, and the prospects of our technological future as a species as influenced by science. He has also written several books.
 
Micah
What can you tell us about GHOST ROCKETS, that might be new information?
What did you discover when you investigated this subject?
 
Probably my favorite Grealien Report to date was the one from last june with Joshua Cutchin and his book A Trojan Feast ( maybe try to get him on the paracast as well)

i found it to be an interesting premise but at the same time maybe a little paradoxical that that there is any commonality in the practices of providing food and drink within the various facets of paranormal folklore outside the act of offering food and drink.

What i mean is if you go along with the folklore , when it came to fairy lore the people in question were usually abducted into the fae culture and usually held slave for a period so the consideration of accepting an offering from the gentry would almost be a non-issue would it not ? where did the idea of accepting food and drink doom one to be forever held in their world when the folklore suggested that they were held for some time regardlesss of whether anything was accepted?

was there not a legend that Henry Hudson and his men allegedly came across some of the gentry folk and spent an evening with them consuming a good quanity of beer and almost turning into them but in the end went back to their ship and slept it off ?

Also on a related note do you personally make anything of how the alien contact story has changed over the decades ?
Older stories in their telling talk of humans being invited or asked to come aboard and encouraged and maybe even a little forcefully to consume something yet ...providing the account is true...the contactees were let go. Most of these cases were genteel in nature, now it's all about kidnapping and forced abductions against their will and still being plied with liquids and still being released..

In some stories regarding the fae shoes are a common theme and this issue rises again in many of the stories regarding the reports in David Paulides stories but it's in a different context context, so a common denominator would be tough to discern.

i guess my point is one does have to take these various stories with a grain of salt..or buckwheat pancakes...but there seems to be a lot of wiggle room here regarding the possible outcomes of any of these stories, so what are your feelings about the practice and it's posssible consequences ? To me it just seems to be a very human act, when one enters the domain of another being, that person is usually offered something as any host would...this is even done between otherwise would-be enemies.. I have to wonder whatever is happening to these people they tend to report this act of being given food and drink because culturally they expect it to happen, and it's akin to a lucid dream in which we dictate the outcome of the scenario. Hats off to Joshua for tackling this angle though.
 
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Good to get Micah's take on a couple of the issues being discussed in the forums.

1) Is Bob Lazar a liar and does it matter if he is?

2) Should we be excitedly anticipating or just rolling our eyes after the latest news from Ray Stanford?
 
1) Are you a believer in Ray Kurzweil and his ideas? If yes, in what ways? If no, then why? If yes and no, then explain what you agree and disagree with.

2) You have expressed ideas about rethinking the UFO. Since UFO's are definitely real in the mind's eye ALWAYS when a sighting is experienced, whether or not the UFO is really "out there" or not, what do you think is lacking about our understanding of the Human mind that might help explain this phenomenon? Quite often even with multiple witnesses the same object is not seen identically or sometimes not even seen by someone there too. What are your theories about what is likely happening, and what new directions should Ufology be taking to get at the root causes?
 
Hi folks,

Micah here... some excellent questions we're seeing in this thread. Also, I've alerted Gene to a few other subjects we might touch on today, just to keep things interesting, and which may inspire some new questions from you guys. These subjects are as follows:

1) The Mystery Booms: I’ve dug into this one deeply, and have devoted a site to the scientific study of the phenomenon since the last time I joined Gene and Chris on the show. My research can be viewed at www.mysterybooms.com for those interested.

2) Whale beachings: This isn’t the kind of thing we’d normally discuss, per se, but I find some intriguing correlations that appear to exit between whale beachings and deep sea earthquakes off the Pacific Coast. This remains a fairly contentious subject in the scientific community, although in parts of the Eastern world we often see great concern following mass whale beachings, since they have appeared to precede tsunamis in some instances. Whether that correlation is causal in nature has yet to be determined.

3) The Enduring Airships: Another contentious debate has been the question over whether "mystery airships" were in operation in California and other parts of the United States in the 1890s. What I have learned is that there were, in fact, several inventors that were operating crude airships around that time, and that there is at least a possibility that others may have been as well, whose activities have not been so well-documented. Whether or not these kinds of clumsy aircraft experiments would match the reports appearing in various newspapers of that era, of course, is a very different story; however, some evidence may suggest that a more advanced operation had indeed been underway in the Bay Area, which might lend us clues to the mystery. And of course, no discussion of airships would be complete without mention of the odd stories about the “Sonora Aero Club” and the supposed group called “NYMZA” behind their operations. This is largely considered to have been fiction depicted in the 'Aeronautical Notebooks' of Charles A. Dellschau, as documented during the period spanning 1830-1923. However, some think these bizarre notebooks weren't merely art, and could offer evidence of a German-funded aeronautics research outfit... a notion which presents its very own rabbit hole for us to have to crawl down.

Then again, that's just what we do here on The Paracast, isn't it? Looking forward to the program folks, and thanks for your questions.

Micah Hanks
www.micahhanks.com
info@micahhanks.com
 
Q. Hey Micah, did you catch the show myself, Curt and Don were on the other week? - What do you think of my suggestion that some mystery booms might be sonic booms from a black-project aircraft of some kind?
 
Goggs Mackay said:
Q. Hey Micah, did you catch the show myself, Curt and Don were on the other week? - What do you think of my suggestion that some mystery booms might be sonic booms from a black-project aircraft of some kind?
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Hey Goggs!

I definitely think that is a possibility. In fact, I think I've found some evidence of this in a CalTech paper that details an investigation into booms reported in Southern California in the 1990s. Hopefully we can discuss that a bit on the show today... great point that you bring up!
 
Mr. Fibuli said:
Micah, do you agree with Michael Moorcock's statement that Tolkien wss a crypto-fascist?
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How funny, Mr. Fibuli... did you see where I tweeted Moorcock's quote on that? If not, it's serendipitous that you'd mention it here (and love that avatar of yours, by the way... fellow classic Whovian here).

That said, I don't agree with the notion in the least; it's pretty widely accepted that Tolkien's LOTR series were inspired, at least in part, by the horrors of War. Having put the writing aside only to resume in 1944, in likelihood he had been influenced somewhat by the events having transpired with WWII, as well as Tolkien's own service in WWI. This seems almost impossible to ignore.

I feel that to presume that Tolkien had been a "crypto-fascist" just seems absurd, as it runs counter to themes present in his literary offerings. I realize this concept of "crypto-this-or-that" can be attributed or traced back to Gore Vidal, and his use of similar terms (he similarly called William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi" on live television back in the '60s, to which Buckley famously - and very angrily - responded with threat of knocking him out there on the spot). Thus, it is my personal view that this is an assertion that many make today (obviously political in nature) toward those with whom they have extreme ideological disagreements, as Vidal and Buckley maintained throughout their lives (and many subsequent lawsuits).

To assume Tolkien was secretly a supported of totalitarianism or right wing extremism seems to run quite counter to the undertones and commentary on wartime that LOTR presents... those are my feelings on the matter.
 
Yeah I like to research the guest so that I can pose a salient question (for two weeks at least).
I am a HUGE fan of both Moorcock and Tolkien as authors. The Hobbity books I read over and over when I was a child in the '80s and the DarkPsychedelic stuff as a teenager in the '90s. I like how salty Moorcock gets about stuff in that interview; he's a real radical.:p
 
Micah Hanks said:
Hey Goggs!

I definitely think that is a possibility. In fact, I think I've found some evidence of this in a CalTech paper that details an investigation into booms reported in Southern California in the 1990s. Hopefully we can discuss that a bit on the show today... great point that you bring up!
Click to expand...


Don't know if it's the same thing but I read something about it possibly being planned demolitions of unexploded ordinance in California desert (Naval weapons yard I think) and sound being what it is one could be 2-3 miles away and not hear it yet one could hear it from over 20 miles away or maybe furthur.

This may have been Micah's post, if so i apologize for spoiling anything.
 
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Goggs, that's absolutely right. This was part of the determination made recently in relation to a series of booms reported near Mother Lode, which actually result from controlled explosions at a military installation, which are heard great distances away. I wrote about this in the following post at the Mystery Booms site:

Source of Mystery Booms in Mother Lode Identified

I also should link to this paper on refraction of sounds off the atmosphere, which describes the physics underlying how a sound could travel more than 100 miles away, and yet not be heard within a 20 mile radius of the blast site:

http://flyquietoak.com/_source/pdf/...efraction of Sound in the Atmosphere_2006.pdf

That study is well worth the read for those interested in understanding the science of how sound travels, and the way that cumulative studies over the years helped us come to the understanding of this which we possess today (which, funny enough, is very seldom cited in relation to the seemingly mysterious way that booms occur with no source nearby, while rather obviously, the origin point in many such cases is likely to have been a great distance away).
 
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