S1 Ep8: Uninvited Guests

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The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests. When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends, and now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them too. Join us weekly in the vault beneath Blanket Fortiana, which we call The Astonishing Dead Letter Office. Tonight's episode, Uninvited Guests. Ooh, one of your favorite subjects. Yes, orbs. Look, I know in the early days of the show, I used to joke about orbs all being BS. Until you saw one. I know I did that. Yeah, and while I still think the majority, I really do still believe this, of orb sightings are misunderstood, mundane things. Okay, gotta put that in there. Right. I still think that's the majority, but I am now a strong believer that there are some that seem sentient and influential in our reality. Okay, so what's changed your mind? What evidence have you come across to base that on? Honestly, it goes back to that video that Professor Sean M. Daly let us post from the nursery at the Sally House, take a drink, when we did that series on Astonishing Legends on the main show. Oh, I see. It was that clip, specifically. I mean, there were a couple clips. There's one really cool clip where all his students, because he brought a bunch of students into the Sally House, folks. Downstairs, there's a clip where they were all in a room talking, and one of the blinds, the blinds, they had sort of those cheap, old-school Levalor mini-blinds, and they went from being open to closed instantaneously, and you have to twist that long plastic wand for that, right? Which, of course, folks were like, oh, it's a lock-off shot. You know, because, you know, as a special effects person, yeah, when your camera's on a tripod, it's pretty easy to do effects, but, like, the way the people reacted seemed very real. Students are not great actors in these scenarios, so that was pretty freaky. Well, listen, you know, we had a couple of people, I believe, solve the case of that in the YouTube comments, you know, Scott, because they were saying that a servo was placed by Professor Daly before they got there with a remote control and a several hundred-dollar apparatus to get the blinds to all close, and not like you do when you turn the, you know how those operate, right? You turn the plastic rod, and then the slats themselves close as there's tension being applied or that twisting motion down the cord. Except in this case, they all go at once. And so that's not even like twisting the plastic rod there to get them to close. So that was a little different. I've hung a ton of those blinds in cheap apartments I've lived in over the years. The bracket housing up at the top is maybe an inch across. You would have to find a very powerful, very tiny servo, pre-wire it, know something about special effects, get a power source to it. And on top of that, it would make a noise. And that's the other thing about this. The students didn't hear it. They noticed it after the fact. Yeah. Someone else pointed it out. And the servo would go, servos make noise, just for the record. Well, it's in the video. Then they all turn around. Then they notice it. So, but it's being captured. Yeah, someone points it out, though. Right. It switches. But anyway, that's not the orb thing. The orb thing was upstairs in the nursery. They're all sitting around in a circle. There's a bunch of toys in there that people have brought over the years, and they leave in there to see if anything will happen. They're on the floor, and there's a football that sort of rolls by itself. And when you first watch it, and by the way, this is on our YouTube page. If you go to the Astonishing Legends YouTube channel and look for it, you can find it. When you see the football move, if you go back and watch, you do see an orb that seems very deliberately to move in a way that would be influencing the activity in the room. Right. Well, you know, that's also been solved by a YouTube commenter who claimed it. They figure everything out. Just before or right at the time that the football moves, one of the students moves their foot. So obviously there's some monofilament there. There's an opposing magnet. They put a monofilament. They tied a string to their shoe, and then they moved to the football. Yes, there's some anti-gravity matter being manipulated. There's some kind of something's happening to move that football a couple of inches after it was prompt to send us a signal. So there you go. But that still doesn't explain the orb. It explains the ball, but the way that the orb moves in that is inconsistent with like a slow floating piece of dust. It's very interesting. Anyway, that's the one that first brought me around on that idea. I trust Professor Daly's footage. It just changed my perspective. One of the video clips that I found really compelling comes from somebody that we've gotten to know way back from those days in Kansas, who's analyzed some of our EVP clips from the DR-60. He also has one that he uses and has video of himself, and he's become quite a fairly well-known paranormal investigator, not just regionally, but all over YouTube. And that's Josh Lewis. And there's a session that he has, I think, in a graveyard with the DR-60 in his car, and he asks a response. And you see, again, people will say like, well, it's just a piece of dust. It's an insect. And a lot of times that can happen if it's a nighttime camera, a setup outside, some kind of security cam. A lot of those are bugs. But this one, you see a little kind of a pinpoint of light, and the orb seems to go into his head, and then he reacts. And after he asks a question, this thing goes, seemingly disappears into the side of his head, and then he has a reaction on video. Yeah, that's right. So either a very complicated or sophisticated piece of video trickery, but I don't tend to believe that. I think there's something to that which is more than just a piece of dust or a bug going into your ear. This one seemed to have disappeared into his noggin. Well, tonight's dead letter comes to us from Holly. She sent it back in 2023 in reference to our episode of Astonishing Legends on Shades of Death Road. All right. Who's doing the honors tonight? I think it's my turn. I'll read this one. I can't remember if I sent in this story before, but I'm listening to your episode on Shades of Death Road, and you mentioned the ominous messages left by red orbs. It reminded me of a really strange experience I had. At the time, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood that was built sometime in the 60s or 70s. My roommate was out of town for a job for a few weeks, leaving me alone in the space. I was between jobs myself. I'm an artist and was struggling to create new work. Needless to say, I was in a bit of a slump. The day where strange things started to happen, I was home trying to come up with new ideas for a story. But my concentration was broken by the fire alarm in my bedroom randomly going off. There was no smoke, no excessive L.A. heat, no reason for the alarm to be going off. In fact, the batteries had been replaced by the landlord recently, too. Even after removing the battery, it kept going off. I had the landlord check it while I continued to work at a cafe, and even she was perplexed. Nothing was wrong with the machine. After another day of no creative breakthroughs, I decided to call it a night early. Maybe sleep would help get the creative juices flowing. But sleep would be hard to come by tonight. At some point, late in the night, I woke up feeling watched. I turned over from my side to my back and opened my eyes. I only point this out because I was moving. It definitely wasn't sleep paralysis. I found a strange glowing yellow orb the size of a bowling ball floating at the edge of my bed. I was frozen in shock as it crawled from the edge of my bed all the way behind the pillow beside mine. Needless to say, I was wigged out, but it's far from the scariest thing I've ever seen. And I went back to sleep. But again, I wake up feeling watched. I open my eyes, and this time I find a smaller, maybe softball-sized glowing orb at the edge of my bed. Like the first one, it crawled up the length of the bed and disappeared behind the pillow. This time, I'm a little more unnerved. I turn my light on and go back to sleep. Again, I wake up feeling watched. At the edge of my bed is a small, glowing red orb. It repeats the same strange migration to the pillow. And by now, I've had enough. I grab my blankets and my laptop and go to try and rest on the couch downstairs. It's 3 a.m. or so now, and I resolve myself to stay up watching Doctor Who until the sun is up. But inevitably, I start to drift off again. This time, as I drift off, I hear an angry thought in my head. Why is she leaving that broken TV under her desk? For a moment, I'm struck with confusion. I don't have a TV, much less a broken one. And why would I even think that? I'm suddenly gripped by an unnatural terror. That wasn't my thought. And I shouldn't be acknowledging that at all. And just as that thought grips me, I get the awful sensation of something grabbing me and pressing me into the couch. Just like an awful sleep paralysis experience. I managed to fight it off and stayed awake for the rest of the night. It wasn't until the light of day finally eased my mind that I started googling about these strange orbs I'd been seeing. I'd never heard of anything like it before. My bedroom was on the third story of the complex, and the only light source was my closed window directly beside my bed. There's no way light could have gotten in, much less create the illusion of a perfectly spherical, glowing, transparent ball of light that moved up my bed and behind my pillow. But from my cursory research, it seems yellow and orange lights are signs of protection or warning. Red seemed to be the same, though more ominous. I think it's interesting that between the fire alarm in my bedroom going off and the lights, something seemed to be warning me of a darker presence in the space. It wasn't until I left the room that something bad happened. And to top it all off, it struck me that morning that while I don't own a broken TV, I did at the time happen to have a big, broken, scintic computer monitor under the desk in my bedroom. So, Scott, what do you think about orbs now? Well, these ones are pretty freaky. Also, that thing where you wake up because you can feel something watching you, I'm not a fan of that. Not a fan of that. Right. That is that inexpressible feeling that people get out in the woods. How does that work, by the way? Well, the people that experience it in waking hours, you know, just walking out in the woods, and again, that's a very specific feeling. A lot of times people, I think, you can be walking in a spooky area or out in the woods by yourself, and it seems nice at first, and then you get the feeling you're being watched. But that's your imagination, I think, in some degree, but also there's a red line, there's a crossing line of where you are not imagining it, you're feeling being watched. You know what I'm saying? There's a difference. It's hard to explain here, but what I'm saying is like, oh, you know what? Somebody could be behind those trees over there, or that's a very, it's a thick, dark copse of trees, or I thought I heard a noise behind that rock over there, and it's probably a squirrel. And you start thinking maybe somebody's watching you, but I'm talking about people who have no, didn't hear anything, have no reason to think that anybody's watching them, and they suddenly get that feeling. And it's a deep down inside your soul kind of feeling, not just your imagination, like, well, somebody could be watching me, sure, there's a lot of places to hide. It's that feeling you can't shake, and then, again, it happens in your sleep, and on that twilight, hypnagogic, hypnopompic twilight sleep coming in or out of it, where you're really in tune with your subconscious. And your primal self, I think. Yeah. And you start to feel that. But, you know, what got me is that, this is no speck of dust orb, this is the size of a basketball or bowling ball. Yeah, well, there's a softball, a bowling ball, and then, like, I think the red one was even smaller. And I've only recently started hearing people talk about how colors mean different things with them, or, you know. One of the first times, I think, oh, this is years ago, I might have, well, when he first came out with this book, I think his name is Andrew Scanlon. And so he wrote a series of books, a little bit controversial, because, of course, he was predicting some major earth changes back in 2012, like a lot of folks were, with the ending of the Mayan calendar and all that. Yeah. But he had a real sickness, devastating sickness, illness that put him in the hospital for a long time, or was an accident or something. And when he came out of it, I think it would, he may have even been in a coma, but he came out of it, and he claimed that there was a large, I would say, bowling ball-sized orb that was swirling in colors and changing colors. And it told him of all these predictions that were going to happen, and he really connected on it. And then he, you know, he sold a few books, I think, or at least one major one, the title of which escapes my mind at the moment. But he also came up with a map of California called the Islands of California. This is not a new thing, but basically it's not California sinking into the sea, Steely Dan, well, Steely Dan, I'm thinking of the song. But basically the waters rise so much and the land is low enough that you will get islands and a lot of flooding around the coastal areas of the United States. And so that was one of the predictions or what this orb showed him. And it's fun and scary to imagine. I thoroughly enjoyed his book. And then after 2012 passes and nothing major really happens, you and I both know it's like you can genuinely get, I think, information from the other side or a higher consciousness or some other source of intelligence that is non-human. And they could be wrong, and not that they're playing a trick, but maybe they have information for another timeline or another parallel universe or something, or maybe they are playing a trick. But it's just interesting, the interactions, though, and what you're talking about here, the colors meaning different things. Yeah. So I found that to be fascinating. The other thing that's interesting to me is about the broken TV under the desk. Like, that for me, that's a huge moment in the story because it implies sentience, but not a modern understanding of reality. Like, it's out-of-touch information, which reminds me a little bit of the vertical plane and the, you know. Right. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Yeah. The computer, not understanding the computer, but seeing that I have one in front of me, that sort of thing. What is that about? It's interesting to me. Like, these things are interacting, and they're sending messages, and they can see our reality and perceive things in it, but they're getting them wrong. Like, it's—why are they getting that thing wrong? Well, I think because there's a slip or an offset of time and reality. So, like I said, if somebody was from the 40s or 50s, you know, late 40s or 50s, and they would know what a television is. Like, that box, it makes light. You look at it. It's—there's images on it. I can see those. But they might not understand what a computer screen is yet. Yeah. Also reminds me of the black-eyed kids, like, could I come in to you as your telegraph? Yeah. It is time for the food. It is food time. Let us in for the food eating. Yeah. And so they get some of it because they can observe it, but they don't really understand fully. But, you know, or ask an older person who's in their 90s now. They would certainly probably know what a computer screen is. Certainly it's been around. But ask them in the 70s or 60s, they may not know what that is because that was not a common appliance. And even for computers, what they would know is a very large machine that ran a stack of punch cards. Yeah, right. Exactly. So if you watch old TV shows, that's what a computer was. Like, they would say that, like, they wouldn't say, like, why do you have that broken mail sorting machine under your bed? Like, they might say, why do you have that broken computer that's the size of a small aux card? So, you know, in this case, they're a little bit off and maybe they're not familiar with it. But I give them points for knowing what a TV was and knowing that it was broken. Yeah, that's right. So how is it that they know it's broken but they don't know what it is? Yeah, you may have seen the operation of it. Like, if you were able to peek into another world and you saw people that were on a slightly different timeline than us. Well, I always think about the end of Interstellar, right? You know, not to spoil it. But, like, there's a – he's peeking in – he's peeking in – or the character is peeking into all different possibilities and timelines and points in time as well, which is – It's all hypotheses based on science. And he consulted with a lot of physicists or at least one there was in a – if you ever watched the behind the scenes from the DVD, I recommend it highly. Yeah. Because he tried to get it very accurately depicted. But in that case where you have a tesseract or you have a mode of looking into the past, much easier, I think, than the future. Right. I've come to believe. But if you can see the past and it was slightly off, there might be a device that you would kind of give an idea how it worked but not really understand what it was. Right. And so, here, they could see this person, obviously, observe them, and they're using something. And if you were from the 1600s, you might call that a magic candle box or the witchcraft light box, whatever it was. Right. They certainly know box. They know light. They might know – they should know what glass is. They could put that together. But what are you doing on it and how do you interact with it? Well, they were able to interact with it in some way but maybe not know how it all kind of comes together and how it works. And so, in this case, I just like the fact that they were annoyed with it. Like, hey, either fix that thing or donate it, get it out of there. Throw it out. Yeah. Get to Goodwill. What's going on here? Recycle it. Recycle it. Right. Yeah. So, just the annoyances of, again, even a higher entity or a higher life form or lower life form. Something is annoyed with your practices, much like a roommate. Or it pulls up to your face and a map appears from your house to the dump. Well, that was – yeah. And again, getting back to Mr. Scanlon, the author there, an experiencer, is you have this swirling orb of color. Yeah. And I think pulsating colors telling you stuff. And it's things about the future that are pretty drastic and dramatic and scary. And what do you do with that information? Well, you either keep it to yourself and think, if I tell anybody they're going to be crazy, or your mandate is to share it with everyone. So, we're glad this story was shared with us. Last thing I'll say is that the possible man in black who orders a steak and doesn't know really how to cut it up with a knife and fork. Yeah. It's food I should eat. Eat food. Please cut my steak. Meat suit. Need food. Yeah. Like a five-year-old. Yeah. Well, anyway, Holly, thanks for sending the story in. We love the details. And now we know that if you see an orb and it's red, well, you've got to be on your toes. And we also know that whatever is driving orbs doesn't know the difference between a TV and a computer. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. The theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music, arranged by Alan Carissia, who composes all the other music in the show. Tommy Beaver Design created the logo. The announcer is John Bolton. That's me. Stories are lightly edited for length, content, and readability, but otherwise presented as they're sent to us. We're always looking for more Dead Letters, so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share, email it to deadletterofficeatastonishinglegends.com. Please include how you would like to be credited. First name only? First name last initial? Anonymous? A pseudonym? Let us know. Due to the number of emails coming in, we often cannot respond, but we do read them all. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright, Astonishing Legends Productions. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. 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I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time and the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. 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Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care's always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC247.org. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. This message is brought to you by Cologuard. 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