How did we do it?

Hey guys!

So, I’m back from my big, horrible, awful break from posting on the blog with a good bit to say! If you want to skip my housekeeping section, just scroll down to the asterisks.

First off, I hope you liked the first episode of Signal & Noise! As anyone who’s been here for a while knows, this project has taken well over a year to get to this point. When we first set out, my goal was just to document our adventures for a while. The two investigations prior to that first filmed outing ended in what was, after the fact, really funny ways. At the very least, if the trend continued, I wanted to have something to share with my friends and laugh about. Of course there was no way we ever could have known how that first outing was going to go, let alone that we’d still be chasing that particular “entity” to this day or that the whole thing would send us down this weird, revelatory path, but that’s a topic for the episodes still to come!

I’ve mentioned a few times that a podcast is coming, too. It still is, we’re just having some trouble finding a day where we can all be there to film it. It’s a particularly busy season for the career of one our members, so it might be a little later than I’d hoped, but it’ll be worth it! There’s a good possibility I’ll record an “Episode 0” if it takes too long. Whatever I decide, it’ll be linked here when it’s ready.

Post-production on Episode 2 is well underway! Part of why Episode 1 took so long was I had to change my editing software in the middle of it. It should be out relatively soon, but I’m not going to put a date on it just yet. Again, you’ll know when you know and it’ll be shared here first.

The website is changing a little bit! Hopefully you’ve noticed some slight changes here and there (there’s been a lot of little changes I’ve wanted to make for a while) but some bigger ones are in the works! I’ve spoken about a video archive I wanted to set up — that page is almost complete, it’s just not linked anywhere on the website just yet. Also, I’m phasing out the monthly subscriber emails for something cooler and a little more extensive. This is the main reason why blog posts are going to be a biweekly thing from here on (if I haven’t said before, I have now). I’ve still got an announcement to make for an upcoming in-person event, so keep an eye out for that, too.

When it comes to the paranormal, as always, there’s a lot happening! More about recent news and ongoings will be posted, as always, as their own individual blog posts. I’ll be back with one two weeks from this one!

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As we were prepping to film Signal & Noise (at the time, called Into the DeeP), I was thinking a lot about the kind of stuff I wanted the show to be about.

First and foremost, I was equating it to something like a reality TV show. I wanted it to be this raw, unfiltered look into our lives as we went from goofing off at work to having life-changing experiences trying to speak to the dead. The edges of this idea still linger in Signal & Noise, though not quite as prominently.

I’d planned out a few episodes. We were going to film three classic ghost hunts, a bigfoot expedition, an exploration of the Alabama White Thang and how it’s changed over the years, a piece about religious beliefs and the idea of God (1), a live episode that was to take place during a seminar I held last fall, and then the UFO episode where we were going to try to summon a craft and get abducted.

When I was shopping these ideas around, the UFO one always got the most attention, we were super excited about it too, so that one ended up being the first one to be filmed.

Photos above all taken while location scouting for the UFO Episode

If you’ve watched the episode (if you haven’t, watch it now and come back; it’s linked all over the place on the site so I’m sure you can find it), I go in to some of the scientific and supposedly magickal ideas behind the experiment performed, so I don’t really see too much of a reason to repeat all that right now. In short, just know that the ideas behind manifestation, the affects of belief on reality, and psychic phenomenon do have a basis in reality. The experiment performed is one derived from experimentation that’s been successfully undertaken for decades.

The original form of this particular video was going to be a lot more grounded than I think it ended up being (and that’s saying a lot, because it’s a lot more grounded than it could have been). I’d been in contact for a while with the Von Braun Astronomical Society (their building, and a segment of their observation field, is visible in the slideshow above) in a desire to use their campus as our base of operations. When I was in college, I was originally an astronomy major and have been a member of the society for a good portion of my adult life. In the original format of the episode, we were going to perform our visualization experiment (which I’ll explain further below) and then meet up with some actual astronomers, discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and then spend the night with them, their telescopes, and whatever UFO we might have been lucky to entice to approach us. At the very least, we’d have the clearest view you can find in town as the VBAS sits atop a local mountain and is situated well-above the summer smog and haze.

Of course, it didn’t work out. The astronomers there honestly seemed interested in the whole thing, they never forbade us from coming, it was just ultimately decided that we’d have to pay a fee to film there that was outside of our reach at the time. Such is the way it often goes, when filming on private property.

After shopping around a bit, I settled on some property that my dad owned in a small, unincorporated town around half an hour south of us. I was embarrassed by this, it didn’t seem as “professional”, but I think that helped in the end. It really helps to hammer home that anybody can do this, anywhere, as long as you approach it the right way.

At the time, we were mostly communicating via discord. I was driving around in my free time, looking for fields to film in and sending pics of the area for the most part, and then, after I ended up with permission to film on my dad’s property, we switched gears. Thus began the development of our “technique”. Saying it like that makes it sound like it’s something incredible, bigger than it is, but there’s really not much to it.

I remember I’d been speaking about doing more than just what we ended up using (I was going to make it more complex) but I ended up cutting out a lot and trimming it down to something really approachable. To be honest, I don’t remember what the other stuff I was going to include actually was (lol). Below is the full set of messages sent via that discord channel.

For the week or two prior to the encounter, we were all meditating whenever and wherever we could. Once we reached that mindset that comes with meditation, we were going to focus on the address, an image of a UFO, the date, and the location. Then, as I mention above, we were going to envision orange leather (2) as realistically as we could, then return to the image of the UFO and what we imagined our encounter might be like. Myself and another member were performing this visualization in a ritualistic type setting.

I’d also made a point to create a sigil (I’ve gone into the creation of sigils from similar uses on different posts in this very blog if you want more about the hows and whys of that) that was intended to attract highly strange goings-on.

What was key to all of this was our state of mind. I wanted everyone who was supposed to be there to approach this with the belief that it was so sure to happen that it might as well have already taken place. Don’t want it, don’t be desperate, don’t plead — any bit of that and your suggesting that it might not happen. On top of that, we were to approach it with a sense of fun. We’re there to hang out, to enjoy the night, to look at the stars, not to capture this on film. Bigfoot hunters will tell you that that affects the paranormal. They all have a tendency to believe that bigfoot, somehow or another, can tell if you want it too much or if you’re there specifically to film the creature. It’s when you’re camping (with a purpose, as squatchers call it), and just enjoying the campfire and joking with your friends that you have your encounter.

Beyond that, we were going to try and make contact with anything that might be there by use of the Estes Method of Spirit Box based instrumental trans-communication. So here we have blended, with an attempted UFO encounter, supposed contactee methods, ritual magick (through the visualization, manifestation, and creation of a sigil), classic paranormal ITC methods (using the spirit box, a modern medium/channeler’s tool), and ideas pulled from bigfoot hunting (to be fair, though, this mindset works in all aspects of the paranormal you just hear about it more with bigfoot). I say it all the time that one of the big ideas behind Signal & Noise is that most paranormal encounters, I believe, are derived from some singular source phenomena that changes how it presents itself based on how you’re prepared, in that moment, to experience it. We used three separate methods, from three fields of paranormal-related fields, followed the rules of each, and what do you know? We saw an orange glowing UFO.

In fact, and we didn’t know this at the time, but Robbie (our occultist) and I were both visualizing an orange orb for our UFO. I burned orange candles as I meditated, as did he, completely unbeknownst to each other. As you know from the episode, we saw orange orbs for a while after that. I know it’s a reach, but I even ended up buying an orange car a day or two prior to the encounter.

Some extra pics from that day

Anyways, the point of all this is that I want you guys to do it too! Follow the prompt above (the one in the discord screenshots that I posted in the gallery), alter it for your own location, your own date, and see what happens! If you see something, share it in the comments!

Stay weird!

-Scott w/GHPR

(1) This is a topic that is of immense interest to me and is something I’m hoping to develop into an episode at some point in the future. It’s how viewers will receive it that concerns me. Since belief, ritual, and daily practices play heavily into some of the themes of the show, we wanted to explore Catholic practices and attempt to apply it in what was, upon speaking to others outside of the team about it, a very polarizing idea. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to approach this at some future date.

(2) I’ve said before that I think this, albeit, weird bit of imagery came from Woodrow Derenberger, an alien contactee from the ‘60s, but I’m wrong on that one. I pulled it from a book called The Silver Bridge. This one’s a book, if you couldn’t guess by the title, about the silver bridge collapse and the mothman sightings, hence, I think, why I conflated the source with Derenberger as he’s a prominent name from that particular case (he’s the guy who met Indrid Cold and the other so-called “visitors from lanulos" while the mothman was being encountered). The Silver Bridge is the poetry to The Mothman Prophecies’ (by John Keel) prose. Definitely worth the read, but Barker being Barker, he inserts some fictional scenes to help ensure that the ideas he’s presenting are taken as they should. You can spot these scenes a mile away, but it still leaves some doubt in my mind as to the validity of the whole of stories he recounts. In one portion of the book he mentions a contactee telling someone else that his aliens told him to picture orange leather in the way I mentioned above if he wanted to speak with them. I don’t know whether the orange leather imagery acts as some psychic beacon to those aliens or it just helps to ensure that you’re in a state of meditation and visualization where you’re deep enough in, so to speak, to “manifest” something, but it worked for us. Whether or not Barker actually pulled it from a real contactee or made it up doesn’t actually matter — it’s your state of mind and belief in the technique that does.