Talking Weird #97 Summer of the Saucers with Steve Ward

Steve Ward has been fascinated by the unexplained for over half a century. There were two major events that inspired his interest in the unexplained.Growing up in Michigan, the March 1966 UFO flap occurred virtually in his backyard. The following November a winged humanoid chased two couples down a lonely country road near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The legend of the Mothman was born.Steve would be chasing the Mothman the rest of his life. Influenced primarily by John Keel and Jacques Vallee, his views on UFOs became unconventional and moved more toward a more paranormal explanation.Steve's main area of research is, what some call "high strangeness" or "window areas" (as Keel dubbed them) where disparate types of paranormal phenomena all seem to occur in the same location, and he believes that studying these paranormally active locations may be the key to understanding what the origin behind these manifestations may be.He has his own podcast called The High Strangeness Factor on the Paranormal UK Radio Network, and is a correspondent on Mack Maloney's Military X-Files, which can be found on that same network. Website: http://www.paukradio.com/Steve currently lives in Point Pleasant, West Virginia & works at The Mothman Museum. He is also writing a book as yet untitled that deals with the underlying patterns that connect different types of Paranormal Phenomena throughout history.Steve returns to Talking Weird to chat with Dean about the "Summer of the Saucers", that season of the first modern UFO wave. Kicked off (at least in the press) by Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine strange craft flying in formation near Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947. This famous sighting was then compounded with saucer report after saucer report, including multiple influential UFO incidents from Maury Island to Roswell.Dean will also be chatting about his recent visit to Maury Island for the 77th anniversary of its UFO incident. Like Kenneth Arnold's sighting, the event at Maury Island was heavily publicized by Raymond A. Palmer. And via Palmer's publications, it spawned multiple facets of modern UFO lore: From UFO crashes, through government coverups, to the mysterious Men in Black!Do not miss this insightful and fascinating conversation about history's most significant UFO wave.