Sightings – S2E01 – Mexican UFO Wave – September 11th, 1992

“Now, for the first time on American television, an in-depth look at the largest documented UFO sighting in history. Every week since 1991, thousands of unidentified flying objects have been sighted over Mexico City, and there are people who believe this is just the beginning of an alien invasion predicted over three thousand years ago…”

“Christ speaks of his Kingdom as not being from this world, that his angels would help him. These writings are very dangerous and I don’t like to use them, but I believe that there is a possibility, that there are a lot of possibilities...”

Segment on the Mexico City UFO wave, which began with a solar eclipse in July 1991, and gained quite a bit of fame at the time. But it centers on people's interpretations on it; could it be the fulfillment of a Maya prophecy of the Sixth Sun and the start of a new enlightenment, or is it a sign from the Christian God? Also looks at the media frenzy surrounding it.

Sightings – S2E01 – Alcatraz Ghosts – September 11th, 1992

“There’s a strange pull you feel viewing this imposing outpost from shore. It was once the toughest prison in America, home to Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the Birdman of Alcatraz…”

“Are there ghosts on Alcatraz? We asked nationally renowned psychic investigator Peter James to spend the night on the rock...as we walked through the cell blocks, Peter began to hear what he felt were the voices of tortured spirits.”

“There are at least a hundred ghosts here, a hundred entities that walk these corridors looking for a way out, looking for that life force that they seem to have lost somewhere. Tragically.”

Lots of moody shots of Alcatraz belie that this segment is light on actual ghosts, with few witness reports and the bulk of the runtime being devoted to a psychic wandering around with Tim White (out in the field). The filler extends to doing man-on-the-street interviews.

I've reached the episodes where they start pretending it's a news show

Sightings – S1E11 – Reincarnated Town – August 21st, 1992

“When Sigmund Freud first introduced his theories about the importance of hypnosis, he was laughed at and ridiculed...since then, hypnotherapy has gained widespread acceptance. But now a controversial new type of hypnotherapy is once again asking us to look at our lives in an astounding new way.”

“It all started in the town of Lake Elsinore, California. Here, under hypnosis, more than thirty people all recalled that they had lived and died together more than one hundred years ago.”

Dozens of people in Southern California have similar memories of lives lived in Millboro, Virginia during the Civil War, and all come to local therapist Marge Rieder with their shared memories of their past lives. Eventually, they embark on a trip to Millboro and discover places from their memories, including a hidden chamber underground that no one but them knew about; they also discover proof that one of their past lives really existed and went to West Point.

By all accounts Mission to Millboro was big at the time: Rieder and Maureen Williamson, one of her patients, appeared on Larry King Live. In October 1991, they appeared on Phil Donahue, and in December 1991 Millboro was profiled on Oprah, though sadly I can't find video of either appearance. That last article profiles the reactions of Millboro residents - bemused and indignant in equal measure - and speaks with a local county historian who can't prove the people in their memories exist, but can't not prove it either, due to sketchy records. Rieder wrote followup books in 1996 and 2003; near as I can tell, it's not been definitively disproven, though there are many ways such a hoax could be conducted (by the therapist feeding them info, for instance), and the fact that she started conducting group sessions early on makes it hard to parse what's influence or not. A Margaret Rieder passed away on April 23rd, 2018 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, but I can find relatively little information on her past 2012, so I don't know if this is her. I can't find anything on Maureen Williamson past the initial media coverage. Brian Weiss, another psychologist in the piece specializing in past life regression, is still alive and active, appearing on Oprah's channel OWN in 2013 - in fact, he's hosting workshops next month.

Our post-show tease are Cops, Code Three, and on Sunday a In Loving Color blooper special, followed by a live episode of Roc; after this was Rachel Gunn. This would be the next-to-last episode aired of that show, a sitcom about nurses; it would be cancelled the following week.

Well, that concludes season 1! Next up is season 2, which is longer and shifts to a faux news show format.

Sightings – S1E11 – Dallas haunting – August 21st, 1992

“Ghosts. Many parapsychologists believe they’re collections of electrical energy, and conventional scientists agree electromagnetism is all around us. But paranormal researchers take it one extraordinary step further – they believe electromagnetism has a personality, that it can be the outward manifestation of a tortured soul in limbo.”

“Larry...there’s no reason for you to be in this house any longer. It’s time for you to move to the other dimensions of light.”

“To see if a spirit could be inhabiting the home, a Sightings camera operator stays at the house alone.”

Ghost segment pivoting around the idea of ghosts and electromagnetism, through the haunting of Larry Richard Roach, a Dallas electrician who died by suicide in 1974. Claims are made about strange electrical activity, and a seance is conducted, which the home owner bluntly says didn't fix anything, even though she "could feel" the spirit.

Also contains a nighttime investigation, which turns up a light flickering on and off and the camera's batteries draining faster than normal.

Sightings – S1E11 – Cryonics and Mummification – August 21st, 1992

“Is it possible to cheat death? Can we be brought back to life months, even years after dying? There are scientists betting on the fact that one day, death won’t be permanent – and some people are taking the biggest gamble of their lives: they’re being frozen and mummified in a quest for immortality.”

“Cryonics is an experimental process – and it’s experimental because we don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We have a different opinion on where you draw a line between life and death…”

“I think it’s misleading to people. I think it’s giving some false hopes, at least at this point…”

“Bring me back, I don’t care how. Bring me back into the future. I want to be there, I want to witness this, I want to be able to get out of this freezing suspension or whatever they put me into to get me back, I want to be able to stand there and say ‘Bill, you made it, you’re really there in the future’. If it really can be done, I’m looking at immortality.”

This segment details cryonics, the pseudoscience that was faddishly popular in the 80s-90s (enough to make it into a episode of Star Trek TNG, "The Neutral Zone"). Cryonics is a interesting pseudoscience because its unverifiability is baked right in: cryonics companies never promise it will happen, just that they might be able to preserve your body to a time where science can revive you. They spin it as, explicitly, a gamble and not a promise. It should be noted that while Alcor, the company profiled herein, still exists, many cryonics companies have closed over their years, with their bodies being thawed and "disposed of". You also don't see cryonics brought up often by death-averse rich people these days, since they've moved onto *checks notes* wondering if stealing blood from the young can keep them immortal? Yeah let's go back to freezing them

This story takes a sudden swerve into discussing mummification as a "proven" means of preserving a body. They talk to John A. Chew, a mortuary sciences professor who was director of the Institute for Funeral Service Education and Anatomy at Lynn University before his death in 2016, so a valid expert witness on mummification there. They also talk to...the head of a new religion movement called Summum that practiced modern mummification? A movement led by someone called "Amon Ra" here, but who apparently went by "Corky Ra"??? Corky Ra died in 2008 and was mummified. It doesn't seem like Summum is a cult or anything, and they're still around, mummifying people and pets.

Carlos Mondragon is said by one site to have left his post as CEO in 1993, but he's quoted as its director in a 2003 story on allegations that they're treating the remains of Ted Williams poorly, and he's listed as President in a story from 2017, so it's unclear when he left, exactly. Alcor's website lists such celebrity "members" as a "Bitcoin pioneer" and a "inventor and futurist" and no longer lists Mondragon, though it does list half of its celebrity endorsers as board members, which. It is clear though that death-afraid rich people have moved on to scams promising to help them live forever in this life instead of in a distant future.

Mysteries of the Unknown Presents: the best witness titles of season one

Sightings - S1E10 – Soul Exchange - 1992

“People who have been near death report many kinds of paranormal experience. After a miraculous recovery, a very special few claim to have new, unexplainable psychic powers – powers they believe were bestowed upon them through a controversial phenomenon called soul exchange...”

“The purpose of a soul exchange is always to have a being come into a body that is more highly evolved, and who is coming in for the purpose of helping the Earth evolve…”

Very new age-y segment detailing "soul exchange", aka walk-ins, the idea that people in a crisis may have their soul replaced with another, more advanced soul, for a purpose.

Features Ruth Montgomery, who was once a Washington D.C. press reporter who was invited to cover, among other events, FDR's funeral and Richard Nixon's tour of Russia; in 1969 she retired from journalism after a medium convinced her to try automatic writing and she started to believe she was psychic. A new age celebrity, she died in 2001.

This segment focused on Charlotte King, a woman who claims that after an overdose in the 70s she gained the ability to predict earthquakes with 70% accuracy. Strangely, people took her seriously enough for a scientist at the Library of Congress (???) to start "Project Migraine", tracking the accuracy of her predictions (Dr. Dodge claims that he makes her call them all in the second she makes them).

Charlotte King is still at it, but oddly enough if you look at her website now you won't find any mention of "soul exchange"; she's pivoted to the idea that she can hear the frequencies of faults and uses "biological earthquake detection" like watching the patterns of insects to make her predictions.

She ends the segment by noting, in April 1992, that she thinks "the Big One" will hit Southern California soon, which it obviously didn't...but a couple months after that the extremely powerful Landers earthquake hit, and massive damage was only avoided by dint of the quake hitting in a sparse region of the Mojave. What does it all mean?

Well, no one went broke predicting earthquakes in California, huh?

The end credits tease is for "television history" being made, and it really was: the second season of the Charles S. Dutton sitcom Roc was performed live, all twenty-five episodes, the first show to do that since the early days of television. This was because of a popular live episode in season 1; it's hyped up here as a "haha if it's live ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN!" thing, but another reason was that the core cast of Roc were all Broadway actors. I haven't seen it but by all accounts they were so good at acting live they never made mistakes, and the third and final season reverted to pre-taped episodes.

Sightings - S1E10 - Great Lakes Triangle - 1992

“The Bermuda Triangle may be the most famous vortex of mystery and death in the world, but it’s not the only one. The Great Lakes Triangle, right here in the United States, has been almost as deadly. Hundreds of people have vanished in an area many believe is a gateway to oblivion.”

“We found using three separate compasses...that when we plotted that on a chart, we were nowhere near...”

Little segment focusing on the supposed Bermuda Triangle of the Midwest, especially the Edmund Fitzgerald and the 1965 crash of United 389.

Sightings - S1E10 - Psychic Evidence - 1992

“In 1990, psychic Scott Rogo had a horrifying premonition. He saw a man being murdered. The terrifying vision of death haunted his dreams, and most frightening of all was that the murder victim Scott saw was himself. Tragically, it was a premonition that came true.”

“Psychics felt the police needed an expert witness – testimony from the dead man himself.”

Parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo was murdered on August 18th, 1990. This piece details (with some nice intercutting in the seance sequence) the efforts of psychics to get an answer to his murder from the man himself, which Sightings says lead to a clue: a glass with a fingerprint on it. A suspect was caught and convicted based on the fingerprint match.

Sadly, while that was the state of the case in 1992, in 1996 the conviction was overturned due to "prosecutorial misconduct". The fingerprint and other evidence on the scene did not match the man they found. It's actually extremely hard to find any more information on the case, since most references to it go off dated sources from pre-1996 claiming the case was solved by the ghost of the murder victim; sources I found differed on if the man acquitted wasn't involved at all, or if the man was present for it but not the murderer himself. Ah, well. Sightings promises "updates" on this case, but given the update came during the show's final season, I somehow doubt it ever happened.

(From Tabloid Terrors on Twitter)

Local news report about the Beast of Bray Road - May 18th, 2023

"When we first moved in…a older lady right next door said 'you know the werewolf lives on the back of your property?' And he knew nothing about it."

There's a behind the scenes special where Sightings producer Henry Winkler discusses how he, Henry Winkler, somehow created paranormal news show Sightings and it's lost media. A mystery forevermore

Sightings – S1E09 – Hawaiian Curse – 1992

“Hawaiians believe that ground that is sacred to the gods must be respected. For that reason, according to local beliefs, the Seven Seas Hotel should never have been built.”

“Native Hawaiian people have a great deal of respect for what Westerners might consider superstitions.”

A quick segment about a hotel built on unblessed land in Hawai'i that was destroyed in Hurricane Iwa. I had trouble finding sources on it at first, but that's because the hotel had many names, and I could find a complete article on the event.

...this segment is basically the same as the Native American highway one from the previous episode. Huh. In this case the hotel was destroyed in 1982, a decade before the show, so it's low on relevant footage. Oddly they do cut in some scare shots of the condo built where the hotel was, which they say was blessed by a kahuna and is thus uncursed.

Really, the stars this time are the interviewees. Patricia DiBartolomeo saying "they were asking for trouble" with a bless-their-hearts grin, Julie Coe saying when she was a little girl she fended off the ghosts by screaming every swear word she knew, Miyoko Horita enthusiastically describing how she stabbed a ghost and how they "didn't expect spooks at night!"

Our post-Sightings tease is for Cops, Code Three, and a new Married with Children where Al Bundy has two women.

Sightings – S1E09 – Cash-Landrum Case – 1992

“In recent years there’s been a marked increase in the number of people who claim to have had contact with alien beings. Some of them tell terrifying stories of abuse, and claim to have real physical scars from close encounters they found terrifying…”

“But the movies we love to laugh at have nothing to do with reality. Reality is a woman named Vickie Landrum.”

“The Cash-Landrum case is a very significant case, because we have a situation where we had a very large flying machine that actually left marks on the road...that left burns on the trees, that left burns on the people, that changed their physiology...it’s a composite of many UFO cases rolled into one, with very horrifying results…”

“The government wanted to experiment on something, and they’ve taken the lives of people to do it.”

“Our system is not set up to explain the unexplainable. People all over this country are mysteriously injured...Vickie Landrum believes some of them have met with deadly alien forces...”

Sightings hits another famous UFO case, and another segment with a very grim tone. The Cash-Landrum case is famous for being a UFO case that left behind physical traces - namely, by causing Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum life-long health problems. Skeptics dispute this: while the problems they suffered were no doubt real, there's a major issue - namely, there's no proof that they were healthy before the supposed incident. Were they the victims of a UFO/government experiment, or were their problems pre-existing and unrelated? Betty Cash died in 1998 and Vickie Landrum died in 2007, without the truth ever becoming clear.

This segment also has a very bizarre intro where he talks about how aliens are primarily portrayed as figures of comedy while the names of alien movies pop up on screen.

Sightings – S1E09 – King family haunting – 1992

“It’s an unlikely setting for this real-life horror story: America’s heartland, where the promise of the American dream can still be realized. Clean air and water, safe neighborhoods, a place where you can still buy a house and start your own business. All the reasons why the King family came here to raise their children, and why they want to stay – but staying means confronting an evil force that seems to have possessed the family…”

“This particular home is located in a triangle of high-tension wires...a home like this is a kind of hatchery for ghosts...because of the electromagnetic fields…”

“There seems to be something called place memories. It’s not only brains and minds that hold memories, but places also.”

“We raised the children that monsters aren’t real, and there wasn’t ghosts and boogeymen. And we raised them to be really secure in that...suddenly our belief system, what we taught our children, was turned upside down and shook, and they looked at us...that look of ‘we trusted you’.”

Fairly grim haunted house segment about a family where the mother and daughter are plagued with visions of a murder-suicide. They call in a parapsychologist but get no answers. Driven out of their home, they're sadly forced to return due to it being the only house they can afford.

Dig that description of how it's "a place where you can still buy a house". Buddy, if only you knew

I can't find anything else about this case. Peter Moscow appeared on a few more episodes of Sightings and passed away in 2011. William Roll, an expert in poltergeists, passed away in 2012. Patricia Hayes started a school of "spiritual studies" called Delphi University, whose page informs us her husband has passed on, but is still collabing with her on a new book.

Sightings – S1E08 – Ghosts – Moss Beach Distillery – 1992

“...a deluge of eyewitness accounts warranted more sophisticated diagnostic tools…”

“...we’re installing a infrared detector, a microwave detector, a ultrasonic detector…”

“The Blue Lady is quite comfortable with us, and we’re comfortable with her. We’ll protect her, as much as we can.”

“Despite their battery of detection devices and psychic input, the Blue Lady of Moss Beach did not appear…”

“Since most people have a sense of humor, I think most ghosts do too.”

A relatively routine haunting where nothing shows up. A distillery on the beach in California is haunted by the ghost of a woman killed over an affair, but the ghost is lighthearted and liked by the staff.

Moss Beach Distillery is also still open and also still a haven for ghost hunters. But not the ghost hunters of Ghost Hunters, who in 2009 investigated Moss Beach Distillery and found...an elaborate system of effects set up to stage ghostly activity. Loyd Auerbach claims the staged effects were set up in the late 1990s, with his knowledge, but that they don't detract from the "real" haunting since they're only set up in places where the Blue Lady is not reported to show up, and they keep a log so they can tell apart "real" and "fake" apparitions, and they don't have to mention it's fake because everyone knows already. Sounds believable!

Despite his claims that activity dates back to the 1930s, according to a 2021 story there's little evidence that the Blue Lady's story happened - and some evidence it was ripped off from a story by Dashiell Hammett - and no known references to the Blue Lady before new owners gave a interview in 1981.

...I thought this would be a mundane case, but this may be my longest post yet, and the first where the story in question is conclusively debunked since the Gainesville one. Imagine getting exposed by the incisive skepticism of the Ghost Hunters (TM).

Shout out to June Morrall, the descriptionless one, and Keith Buerke for the greatest job description yet:

The end-of-episode promo isn't Cops this time, but a special called Diana: Prisoner in the Palace, asking “is Princess Di the victim of a uncaring and unfaithful husband?” Which...yes, and also he's King of England now. Fun times.