The rain is coming down here at Driftless Times Media HQ as I write, a fitting end to an up-and-down week. Apologies for missing our usual Wednesday release. I started work last weekend in anticipation of an interview on Monday evening with a local UFO researcher. However, they requested that our conversation remain private, which was disappointing as parts of it were quite interesting.

I walked away from the conversation Monday with somewhat of a bad taste in my mouth. I’d fallen into the journalist’s trap of building the interview up too much – imagining it being the lynchpin to the piece I’m working on, an absolute slam dunk that couldn’t go wrong. Yet, like a beachball owned by a hedgehog, I quickly found myself deflated. If this were part of my career work, it would be an opportunity to pivot; I usually relish when an interview changes the direction of a story. Given the nature of the piece and the request for confidentiality, that option wasn’t available this time. Such is life.

Now that I’ve had time to separate myself from the interview, I view it more favorably. The piece will still come out in the same format I’d planned all along, as I’d never thought I’d secure the interview. That’s probably what frustrated me most – I could have put this out weeks ago, but I was waiting and hoping to hear back. I’ve been ready to move on to some of the more fun ideas I’ve been cooking up for some time. Damn my propensity toward due diligence!

On the upside, they told me my signature indicated I was a free spirit. So, I’ve got that going for me.

Ultimately, I think I was most let down by how far apart our thinking on the subject was, which I hadn’t anticipated given their other work on the intersection of religion and science.

I’m very much of the “woo” camp when it comes to all this stuff. I’ve lost interest in extraterrestrial visitors, undiscovered apes and so on. Growing up in the ‘90s in the heat of shows like The X-Files and being six years old when the 50th anniversary of Roswell punctured the cultural zeitgeist, I’m all too familiar with the flesh-and-blood, nuts-and-bolts explanation of the unexplainable.

Today, I find those ideas terribly boring. For a long time, my interest in these subjects faded entirely because of them. I was sick of hearing about hybrid aliens, crashed UFOs and Roswell. I couldn’t care less about undiscovered apes or electronic voice phenomena at a certain point. Nothing tangible ever came from any of it – just the same people rehashing the same cases over and over since I was five. It killed my interest for years and years. Even when I felt the spark again after discovering Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, within a year the New York Times’ UAP stories came out and killed my passion again.

Speculating about UFO propulsion systems is boring. Hunting for animals that make little logical sense is boring. Dude bros with slicked-back hair and thermal cameras antagonizing ghosts is boring.

None of it is fun to think about, and I despise contemporary paranormal media so much that I can barely even stand to hate-watch it. My tongue’s still bleeding from how hard I had to bite it Monday when the conversation somehow veered toward History Channel’s The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and how interesting the “research” being done there is.

Honestly, it wasn’t until the onset of the pandemic that my interest in these topics returned and flourished. A week or two into the shelter-in-place orders, a post from the UFO subreddit crossed my feed, and I asked myself, “I wonder if there’s anything new going on now.”

Lo and behold, no. The UFOs and their enthusiasts were just as I had left them all those years prior. However, someone suggested the podcast Where Did the Road Go, hosted by Seriah Azkath. The name struck me, and I had a lot of time on my hands, so I tuned in.

Thanks to Where Did the Road Go and the slew of other podcasts, writers and researchers I discovered through it, my interest in the paranormal was rekindled. To discover there were people out there talking and thinking about these subjects in nuanced, interdisciplinary ways was simply splendid. In many ways, rediscovering my love for the esoteric kept me sane throughout the pandemic while cooped up in my tiny apartment.

So, one can imagine how disheartening – if not profoundly frustrating – it is to be drawn into conversation rehashing the same old stories and theories I’ve been reading and hearing since I was knee-high. I do not want to hear about how Eisenhower might have made a deal with the aliens for the 3,000th time. It’s a dumb, boring idea for many reasons.

Anyhow, enough bellyaching. The sun’s come back out here at Driftless Times Media HQ, and it’s the start of the weekend. The past is the past, and the future is nothing but bright.

Keep curious,

Walker

P.S. Let us know if you prefer the newsletter coming out on Saturday morning rather than Wednesday. We’re always looking to evolve.