Category: Uncategorized
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They Kept the Story. They Lost the Point
Folklore didn’t survive because it was true. It survived because it was useful It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are in life. You already know what it feels like to have a story told about you that was never true. Maybe it followed you anyway. Maybe people believed it because it was…
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The Machinery Behind History’s Deadliest Moral Panic
How Witch-Hunters Turned Ordinary People into the Devil’s Scapegoats The version most of us inherited is compact. Salem, 1692. A few frightened accusers, a brief collective madness, then sanity returned. What that version omits is the machinery underneath. These trials ran for centuries across two continents and were not accidents. They had procedure, specialists, and…
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We Dismissed the Folklore. Then People Disappeared.
Was The Folklore Right? I’ve been around long enough and seen enough to know that when the folklore arrives before the body does, it deserves a second look. That’s not a comfortable position to hold. It doesn’t fit neatly into how investigations work, how evidence gets classified, or how we’ve decided to separate what counts…
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Podcast Episode: In 1966, the Beatles Made Headlines. The List Didn’t.
Pip: Welcome to WJ Brendle, where the past has a habit of showing up in the present without knocking first. Mara: Today we're following a thread that 4everparanormal pulls across four centuries — from a papal list of forbidden books to the question of what institutions decide you're allowed to know, and when. Pip: Let's…
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They Said He Had a Cyst
Then Died from a Bug? Marco Chereze was twenty-three years old and doing his job. A Military police officer, on a January night, a road just outside Varginha in southeastern Brazil. A creature ran in front of his patrol car. He got out and grabbed it with his bare hands. Within weeks he was dead.…
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Now We Know Why They Registered Alien.gov
It Was Never About Extraterrestrials I can handle being told the truth. I can handle being told something I don’t want to hear. What I have trouble tolerating is being treated like I’m too stupid to recognize what’s happening. A few months back I wrote the article The Government Registered Alien.gov. That’s Not Disclosure. I…
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In 1966, the Beatles Made Headlines. The List Didn’t.
Everyone Was Watching the Beatles. Nobody Was Watching the Vatican. In 1966, the Beatles released Revolver. Medicare enrolled its first patients. The United States was at a boiling point over Vietnam, civil rights, and what kind of country it actually wanted to be. The world was loud and cracking open. And somewhere in that same…
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I Don’t Know, So What!
How to Sit With an Unanswered Question and Still Feel Grounded Most people would rather pretend they know something than admit they don’t. They think not knowing says something about their abilities. It doesn’t. What it says is that you are human, and people operate daily inside an ocean of things they have never learned,…
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What Writing Two True Crime Books Taught Me About the Truth
The gap between what happened and what got written down Having just finished writing my second book about true crime there are a few things I wanted to share about the experience. I’ve known for a long time that court cases are never as cut and dried as the news makes them out to be.…
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What If Time Is Not a Straight Line?
What If Ghosts, Déjà Vu, and Near-Death Experiences Are All the Same Thing We’re constantly told that everyone has the same twenty-four hours in a day. But is that really true? Time seems to shift depending on how we experience it. Sixty seconds does not sound very long until someone cannot breathe. Five minutes waiting…