In the depths of winter last year, I was running through a cold and unlit field near my house when I saw a trail of lights moving through the sky. I stopped. The air caught in my throat. “Bloody hell,” I thought, “were the UFO people right all along?”
In the last five years, the number of podcasts investigating aliens, UFOs, the esoteric and the inexplicable has exploded on to the internet like a meteor shower. High Strange, That UFO Podcast, Johnny Vaughan’s Alien Kidnap Club, Chinwag With Paul Giamatti, the BBC’s Uncanny; the list goes on. There are certain themes and similarities, of course. A lot of men. A lot of men talking about military hardware, philosophical theories, government conspiracy and maligned intelligence. A lot of people selling DVDs, hosting conferences and self-publishing. But there is also a richness to these podcasts that mirrors, in their own way, previous podcast trends in true crime podcasts, songwriting podcasts, two comedians chatting podcasts and wellness podcasts. They have an audience, they have experts and, boy, do they have stories.
One of the early guests on Vaughan’s Alien Kidnap Club is the shaman, drummer and author Devara ThunderBeat. Listening to her describing spaceships, messages from angels and spotting ancient Egyptian forms in the rocks around her home in Sedona, Arizona, it would be easy to mock. And yet, when I speak to ThunderBeat via Zoom about her experiences of meeting aliens and travelling on UFOs, she is utterly compelling and not afraid to laugh at herself.
“What’s very interesting,” she begins, with a voice that speaks of late nights and rock bands, “is that there are so many similarities between what happened to me and how people describe near-death experiences. After they brought me up into the ship through a portal, they took me to Sirius A.” I nod, Googling Sirius A – apparently the sky’s brightest star. “Things were a lot thinner, almost translucent. You can still feel, you can still hear. I’m not sure about smell.” She laughs. “So I put the two together and said: ‘When you die you go up into the sixth dimension. There’s no death.’” That’s a comforting thought for a rainy Tuesday morning, I joke, and she nods, smiling.
ThunderBeat also believes that she has travelled to the centre of the sun. Which is, surprisingly, not very hot. “They opened up another portal and brought me into another ship to take me into the sun,” she explains. ‘“They had a purple triangle-headed being, he was 5ft tall, he had three fingers and three toes on each side, and he started floating around me. I said: ‘What is he doing?’ and they said: ‘He’s looking for implants because they’re not allowed inside the sun, where we live.’” Does she lead a very clean life here on Earth, I wonder, thinking of my childhood friends and their macrobiotic diets, angel cards and meditation retreats? “Oh yeah, I’m fully organic,” she replies. “During the 20 years of being in rock bands I hardly ever drank. I took my music very seriously.” So much so, she says, that when she met Led Zeppelin in 1977 and was offered cocaine, she ended up spending four hours in a backroom bar playing backgammon instead.
The strange object resembling a flying saucer carried by a truck accompanied by a convoy of police vehicles is actually an aircraft being tested by the US Air Force. A…
A Canadian resident recorded the brilliant scene created by multi-colored light columns, easily evoking the moment aliens landed on Earth. Timmy Joe Elzinga, a resident of Ontario, Canada, recorded images…
People in a village in Shaanxi province, China, were confused when they encountered a mysterious object falling from the sky into the mountain, creating a large burning crater on the…
An American artist claims he has dozens of children with half alien blood. David Huggins, a 74-year-old artist in New York, USA, claimed to be the father of 60 children…
The triangular flying object slowly flew through the night sky in Russia, making many people believe that this was evidence of aliens. Video recording of flying objects in Russia was…
With the world’s largest radio telescope, China could be the first country to detect aliens. China is focusing on developing space science, including building and putting the world’s largest radio…