Paul Davids | A Case Study Of After Death Contact w/ Forrest J. Ackerman

00:04 This puppet master's almost surely have a fit There clearly may be something there And until you've thoroughly tested every last post Just didn't think you'd know the less you really do That's true, Dr. Seuss! Where would we without TNT? Cause' we know they're lying to us just don't know it Where would we be without TNT The Higher Side Chat Show Our one company

00:43 Alright folks, we cast a wide net on THC covering everything from various entities cryptids and UFOs to secret societies mind control schemes in the playbook of the power pyramid. And among all the various threads we like to pull it can be hard to please all other people all over time but it's safe to say that every listener should have a personal interest in today's topic because as fun as the weird world is to explore, in the end much of it just serves to distract our feeble minds from the crushing realization that we will die. And not one of us can be fully confident at what happens at that mysterious and inevitable junction but today's guest Paul Davids

01:18 might have a little insight for us, because in 2008 his friend the great luminary of early science fiction and committed lifelong atheist Forrest J. Ackerman did pass away but not before promising to reach out in the afterlife if such a thing were possible well in the years since Paul has documented nearly 150 instances of synchronicity apparitions self-moving objects and messages from beyond that have reached him and others close to Forrest all of which are chronicled in his book An Atheist in Heaven, The Ultimate Evidence for Life After Death following his sworn affidavit that it's all true and accompanied by chapters written by Dr. Gary Schwartz a Harvard PhD and Yale professor who has been looking at the life after death question for 15 years as director of Arizona University's Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness & Health

02:07 It's a persuasive powerhouse of paranormal contact and some solid confirmation that there is something strange in our neighborhood. Paul Davids, my man welcome to the Higher Side! Thank you Greg! Of course man thanks for being here I was looking at your logo here on the screen where it says smoke a little smoke and it says THC. I don't know if you know that the movie Timothy Leary's Dead is among the films that i've made. Wow, no man! I didn't know that but I did plan to start this off by asking you about your work because both you and Forrest J Ackerman have been involved in some great work

02:43 that I'm sure people would know, but tell us a little bit about your career and maybe about your friendship with Forry as well. Well it's two different questions my career and then the friendship with Forry...I'll say a little bit about my career. I did start my interest in filmmaking really young you know i'm baby boomer I mean my sixties now so when I was around 13 or so Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine had been out for short period of time, maybe 25 issues. And I met Fari in Washington DC at the World Science Fiction Convention and he became familiar with things I was doing related to monsters, monster movies as a child. He printed some things in Famous Monsters about that and that provided a lot of inspiration for me having a career in this field because I got attention as a kid for these amateur movies I was making

03:41 So, I focused in writing at Princeton University. I won the three top writing awards. This was the school of F Scott Fitzgerald and you know the great Gatsby? One of my awards was the F Scott Fitzgerald Award and I had also continued my filmmaking in college though Princeton did not have any film program at that time. I don't think they do now, I don't know but at that time no there was just a filmmaking club And I made an animation stand and was making cartoons in my dorm room, and continuing stop motion animation films.

04:21 And so, I guess it was sort of under the influence of The Yellow Submarine movie when I made my final decision that I was going to try and have a career in film. Yeah. I started – I went from Princeton to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute. At that time it was in Beverly Hills and I was very lucky. It was exceptional situation. They only accepted 15 students for the first year. And this was a fellowship to study film, I focused in directing and writing and I picked up producing along the way but while at the AFI I was able to meet many of my heroes in the film world

05:04 And gradually I worked my way into the film business. I started, well, I was asked by George Powell, the great director of The Time Machine and War Of The Worlds to write a treatment for the Hobbit and that was something that he hoped to do but although I did write the treatment with my wife Hollis We never got a deal there. It had to wait until Peter Jackson could do it, decades later. So as far as my career and the development I think my first foothold into the business was getting hired as script analyst at the Paul Koner Agency. This is a boutique film agency that focused mainly on European talents

05:52 Paul Kohner represented the greatest of all the European talents, whether composers actors singers many directors you know people like Ingmar Bergman and John Huston and William Wyler. Actors like Charles Bronson may not be as well remembered now but in his day between The Great Escape movies like Hard Times and Death Wish. He was the big tough guy before the days of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so that was my entree into the business I wrote a film called She Dances Alone which was about the ballet great Vasilyev Nijinsky and his relationship with Diaghilev and about his daughter then from there after the Paul Koner agency

06:42 I was one of the creators of a television show called Anything for Money. It was a game show, and I worked for F. Lee Bailey, the famous attorney. He had a show called Lie Detector and we got into some very interesting paranormal UFO related segments in that in early 1980's. And then what I think my biggest break around that time mid-1980's I was hired to be the production coordinator for the original Transformers show. Boom! That's a credit? That's a major credit and if you go to imdb.com and look up Paul Davids, you'll see that my credit as production coordinator is on 79 episodes of The Transformers. That's how many I worked on. And I worked with the voice actors

07:34 I wrote some of the scripts, storyboard artists every phase of the production and it was really exciting. Stan Lee was there at Marvel then and Nelson Shin, the executive producer of the show he had created the original lightsabers for the first Star Wars. It was a very exciting time, and then from there I was doing independent writing. I had a UFO sighting in 1987 after The Transformer show was done that was very clear with daylight, with my children. And it propelled me as I researched everything I could about UFOs, I discovered the Roswell UFO case and I was very motivated to get Roswell made as a film

08:23 And it took several years and finally Showtime proved the movie, and paid for the movie. It was a tentpole original primetime television movie for cable from Showtime. That UFO experience you had did you see a ball of light or actual metal craft? What was it like? It was an actual metal craft Wow! It was what you would call a flying saucer typical shape dome on top shallow dome on the bottom silent, hovered for a while. It descended from high in the sky came right near where we were because we walked out on the roof to watch it and it hovered over the road in front of our house and then swooped down over the valley. It was a pivotal moment in my life because after that all the research I did on UFOs discovering the Roswell case, the motivation to get that movie made fighting for four years to get a yes

09:19 and then succeeding, that was a huge breakthrough. It became a $6 million television film and I was executive producer and co-writer so that was substantial credit. From there, I started making my own smaller budget independent films entirely independent but most of them were were picked up for distribution after I finished them by NBCUniversal for television and sometimes for DVD. So I'll tell you about the names, what they were a few of them. I did film called Starry Night was about it was a fantasy about the artist Vincent van Gogh if he could come back today and discover that he was a success after all because he was a failure in his day as far as he sold one painting and his paintings today are worth billions.

10:15 So I created a fantasy about that and I used Don McLean's famous song called Vincent, and Universal released it. It was on television many times and the DVD is still available, Starry Night. I did The Artist And The Shaman about Sedona Arizona, a shaman, Native American shaman I met and worked with there I was the artist, I'm a painter. By the way PaulDavids-artist.com is the main website and my paintings are there you know that hundreds of them now they're in galleries and I've had exhibits so The Artist and The Shaman with the focus was on art like it was with Vincent van Gogh and then came

11:04 pivotal movie called The Sci-Fi Boys. Now, this one got into Forrest J. Ackerman and his tremendous influence in the world of science fiction and how all of the major players who became big directors in science fiction movies later on started under the influence of Farry Ackerman and his famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Right! Yeah so many names there... It started The magazine started an incredible trend and some of the names who were influenced by him, you have to include Lucas and Spielberg and writer Stephen King. And director Joe Dante, John Landis, Dennis Murin who has 10 Academy Awards. He was top guy in effects at Industrial Light & Magic. Rick Baker who has about ten Academy Awards for special makeup effects

11:59 Farry Ackerman, when Rick was a kid, Farry called him Rick Baker Monster Maker and he had pages about Rick Baker in Famous Monsters Magazine as a teenager. These are the kind of things that influenced so many people and then of course Peter Jackson became the host of The Sci-Fi Boys as we dealt with the whole history of special effects in movies Wow. So career-wise, there are a few more films after that. Jesus in India major documentary film had a major release from NBCUniversal on television Sundance Channel for several years it was the main Christmas and Easter movie and I filmed it mainly in India but it dealt with the legend of the missing years

12:48 18 years, not covered in the Bible from age 13 to 30. In India they think he was in India that he took the Silk Road and was among Hindus and Buddhists during those years then went back to Judea and began his ministry at age 30 so I explored that whole theory it's absolutely fascinating From there, I made a Latino film. It's about an Hispanic American family called Before We Say Goodbye and it's based on a stage play and it deals with the Catholic miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe that is so important to Hispanic Americans. So there was that one.

13:33 And then there was the Life After Death Project, which we're gonna be talking a lot about today. This was what happened after Fari passed away. I did a sequel of that too. The first one was on SyFy. Life After Death Project...I think pretty much all my movies are out there available either on DVD with bonus features and all that or streaming please don't go to the pirated sites. They really abuse us independent filmmakers, they take advantage of us and causing a big dent in our profession but after before we say goodbye and the Life After Death Project

14:13 This year completed a film about Marilyn Monroe. It's called, Marilyn Monroe Declassified and it's a documentary that will be out later this year and then of course finished this year with Gary Schwartz the book An Atheist in Heaven which we'll talk a lot about today. And An Atheist in Heaven came out in April and that you can find at Amazon either as e-book or hardback So, that's my career in movies and television. I've done some music as a character called Professor

14:51 Hack hard drive, professor hack hard drive has a lot of music videos songs i wrote that are sort of satirical rap. I've done books of poetry some comedy poetry the first book is called poems to read while driving on freeways and other ways to die laughing Man and then speaking of your logo my third book of poetry was called poems to read when you run out of weed Love it. Love it You could find those all on online there was also right brained poems for left-brained people Interesting, and then I did have done now five coffee table books that are at blurb dot com

15:35 of my art, all my art of many different places on this earth. It's all under the art of Paul Jeffrey Davids. You've got Paris and New York and Mexico and the California coast and on and on and on. Yeah you had an interesting life definitely worked on the transformers cartoon even written star wars books that have sold millions of copies so i left those out of the how did i forget to get the glove of darth vader and profits in the dark side, the star wars books happen right after transformers yeah. I got a received a contract from lucasfilm to write six books with my wife of continuing star wars adventures

16:16 during a period of time that there hadn't been a new Star Wars film out for a long time. And they were working on what was then gonna be the new one, the one that had Jar Jar Binks in it you know? People weren't crazy about that movie but at the time I wrote the books people were waiting for the next Star Wars movie and yeah so let me tell ya' the titles there was The Glove Of Darth Vader Lost City Of The Jedi Zorba The Hutt's Revenge We created Zorba the Hutt as the father of Jabba the Hutt. And then we had a mission from Mount Yoda, Queen of The Empire and Prophets Of The Dark Side. So Greg you can see I rarely sleep.

17:00 I always find another project. Yeah, you've been busy for sure those are some impressive bullet points on the life resume so where does eight years of verifiable sustained contact with a deceased friend providing personal validation of the afterlife rank? Well right now it's topic number one for me Yeah, I think so. It's the most important and you know this is the only subject that i've done three projects on The documentary films came first And that was the life after death project and then the life after death project two personal encounters That was in 2013

17:42 and sci-fi showed the first one. And then three more years of writing, and along comes An Atheist in Heaven which is what I hope everyone who hears this will be motivated to explore this. We've made it available both as an ebook pretty inexpensively, and then The Hardback Is Beautiful With a Dust Jacket, and it's a big work Don't be scared by the fact that it's 500 pages, those who are listening because a lot of it is photos. I call them evidentiary photos because they relate to this complex story of why I'm so convinced that Fari is still here, though he died in 2008. He's still here now. Now I never ever Greg would have said something like that when I was younger you know in my 30s 40s skeptic you know not religious you know My attitude would have been who knows how can we know about that?

18:42 Why do people believe in some of these things so intensely? Heaven, who knows. If you want to take the Bible literally then fine that's your reality." But a lot of people don't and they just don't know. Hell, you know very hard to believe in that divine creator would do something like that so no that never meant anything to me and you do think about these things more as you get older and you lose your parents and you start losing friends and your generation starts thinning down. But the first time it became a topic of interest for me about do we survive as a spirit after the body is gone? Can there be contact between the deceased and the living. That was the big question, and the first time it became a real question for me when I was working on Lie Detector as a segment coordinator for F. Lee Bailey in that TV show

19:41 we would choose all sorts of different cases, great variety of cases. I mean sometimes we'd deal with people who were claiming they didn't commit a crime and sometimes the lie detector would say you're right, you are innocent, you shouldn't have been charged with that and sometimes it would amplify guilt and we would expose liars so I heard about Dorothy Allison, a psychic detective who lived in New Jersey she's deceased now At that time, she was around 1983. So I say maybe middle-aged and she had one extraordinary case that I had read about there was a very distraught father and mother whose teenage daughter had disappeared one day after a certain period of time foul play was assumed the police thought she was dead but they had no clues

20:38 and the body hadn't been found. And so, the parents out of desperation heard about Dorothy Allison and they had her come over and Dorothy Allison wanted to touch some articles of the daughter's clothing And very, very quickly after she touched the clothing she started spouting out a whole stream of clues and they were really strange but bizarre and interesting. She said she's seeing a place that had two church steeples that you could see two church steeples from there. You could see two smokestacks. There were two bridges within range if they're one bridge that was only used for pedestrians walking

21:20 She said she smelled the smell of oil and she saw the letters M-A-R, but she didn't know what they meant. She didn't know whether those were the initials of the murderer or what it was. The parents, the father in particular I think he spent more than a year going all around Long Island where they lived looking for some place that might fit this description and he finally found one that matched it in every respect. And even the letters M-A-R, it was large graffiti in red spray paint on a boulder or rock. So here's Dorothy Allison she's pulled all of these clues out of the atmosphere let's say after she touched the victim's clothing

22:10 And they did find the girl's body there. Not at first, at first they were near it and they missed it. It was in an oil drum down in a ravine with other oil drums. So it was even I think a year after he found the spot before the body was actually found and it was all confirmed. But Dorothy had letters of commendation from many police departments. And so I had to say to myself, this has gotta be real. You know? I know the skeptics don't like it and the scientists have a hard time believing it but this is evidence when she wasn't involved in the crime herself that was not a possibility

22:53 And she helped solve so many crimes according to these letters of commendation. So... Yeah, that's very compelling for sure! You know so by 1983 I'm saying it does appear that there is another realm a spirit realm let's call it that can communicate and can bring information that can communicate with us. That was 1983 but I didn't have a direct experience Until so many years later, it was 2009. So that's 17, you know 17, 26 years later a quarter of a century later it starts happening for me and becomes real because of Forrest J Ackerman

23:36 Yeah, and this stuff is so fascinating. This Forrest Ackerman situation... Let's dive into this and maybe we can get a better sense of Forrey's personality. He seemed like a pretty fun an impressive guy some of this does play into the afterlife contact but he you know mentioned to you He tried to get in contact if it was possible from the other side, even though he was a committed atheist. Probably a little tongue-in-cheek and saying that but tell us how this all started? Well as you've pointed out Fari was an atheist and I mean he never prayed didn't believe in God Didn't believe in the paranormal didn't believe in ghosts

24:19 or flying saucers. I mean, he wrote about ghosts and flying saucers and the undead and zombies you know in famous monsters magazine taking pictures for movies but it was always literature or stories are just fun for him. Yeah entertainment It was entertaining enjoyed it and most of the pictures that he published these things He would have a funny caption He would use a pun or wordplay, twist on words. Sometimes he'd find the word within the word to make certain point. He loved those word games which becomes very important in evidence of this case later on so his influence before we talk about specifically what happened I just want drive home the point. He was born in 1916 and grew up with silent movies

25:12 He fell in love with the early science fiction movies like Metropolis, a silent movie or the first King Kong at 1933. And he became a massive collector of all the props and memorabilia you could possibly find related to his favorite films that's science fiction horror and fantasy. He collected thousands of books He had probably thousands of movie posters, lobby cards, photos from the movies. Props from the movies, the monster props themselves masks life masks that were made everything that you can imagine from the genre he eventually filled an 18 room house with all these things he called it the Acker mansion writer Ray Bradbury

26:06 I called it the Fort Knox of science fiction, very appropriate. And he was very generous in terms of letting people come over having open houses so people could see this on Saturdays and he endeared himself to many people through his generosity and sharing these things. He was also a science fiction agent or writer you know a writer's agent and sold the books that numerous science fiction movies were based on. As I said, my connection with him began when I was a teenager. I read the magazine, I met him he looked at my little amateur monster movies He gave me publicity in the magazine and his publisher James Warren both decided to do that And it furthered things along for me and then I won a movie contest in their magazine It was an honorable mention So when I came to Los Angeles

27:02 and was at the American Film Institute. I solidified my relationship with Fari, I visited his house many times, I brought him in to have a seminar at the American Film Institute along with the great producer George Powell who I met around that time and then through the years I always kept in touch with Fari. I went all of his birthday parties he came to a couple of mine He wrote a foreword for my first book. He called it a forey word, by the way. Of course! Yeah he's always with the puns and we called him Forey So it was a long relationship that spanned decades And I did become familiar with his atheism You know...I was not an atheist My attitude has always been that there is intelligence behind all of this creation It didn't happen by accident I never believed that

27:56 I think the evolution, yes but it had help. You know? I see grand design and intelligence in everything that's here. Agreed! So...I sort of challenged him on his attitude in the atheism and I said you know Fari what if you're wrong? What if you're wrong? Your 90s now And he said well I sincerely doubt that I'm wrong My atheism is a well-known fact. I'll be an atheist until the day that I die." He said, when the brain goes it's like a light bulb going out and there's nothing more. It did turn out that I was wrong and I died and woke up to some great science fiction convention in

28:47 He said, well after I had my reunions with all my favorite deceased actors and my dear wife one day maybe I would drop you a line. And he said it tongue in cheek but then he became very serious and he said don't count on it not going to happen so that was the That was the setup for it and he didn't want a funeral, he didn't want a memorial. He had a caretaker assistant best pal who lived with him about the last 10 years, fellow named Joe Moe

29:29 Joe Moe said, well okay no memorial no funeral but what about a tribute? What do you think of us having a tribute for you and he said that would be okay. So the tribute followed his death by a couple months it was at the Egyptian Theater great restored theater in Hollywood. beautiful, beautiful place and they filled every seat that day in early March of 2009. And that was the weekend that the weird stuff started to happen Greg and it's been happening ever since I didn't ask for it, I mean I didn't seek it, I never knew when something would happen but

30:14 Yes, he did drop me a line. Literally as an editor he changed the line of text in the document I had and I say that now after years of studying and years of science and work with chemists on the actual ink in question this wasn't something I jumped to lightly it wasn't a conclusion I jumped right away. Things happened and it gradually became clear. You start to say, wait a minute what's going on here? There are just too many things related to him that are happening either in a really weird coincidental way or in a physically impossible way because something related to him has moved on its own in a room that nobody was in. Or something I had that related to a film

31:07 disappeared from a house and the whole house is searched. It can't be found anywhere, and then it's found one morning right next to a computer right in plain sight and there's no one physically who could have put it there. And then computers become involved. So many things have happened with the computers for example I do have a lot of folders that have foreign material in my hard drives of various computers find But if I haven't opened a folder, there's no explanation for why when I wake up in the morning and I come down and I jiggle the mouse then the computer becomes awake. Why would there be a large photo filling the screen of Fari Ackerman with director Joe Dante? And sometimes these things would happen on his birthday or the anniversary of the year that he died

32:00 And other times they would happen in response to my having a particular focus on him for some reason. So the long and short of it is when these things started to happen, I took out the video camera, I began documenting everything that I could and went to scientists to begin studying the evidence at various universities I brought my camera to their labs and as they showed confusion, as they showed they could not solve this easily and eventually they couldn't solve it at all. And when ghostly things started happening to the very scientists who were researching this that they found disturbing and defying the laws of physics and it's happening to them

32:45 I said, well, I gotta make a movie. I've got enough material here let's make a documentary so that became the Life After Death Project and then I had so much material I had a sequel The Life After Death Project too That was 2013 when that came out Nice. So let's dive into a little of this, let's talk about that literal line that he dropped you I believe you call it the inkblot obliteration? I think that's probably the most compelling piece of evidence in this and i think It was one of the first thing that happened right? Yeah for me it was the first thing That happened. I also think

33:24 perhaps the most compelling because scientists have really been able to put their hands on the evidence and get involved in it and took it seriously. And you can easily interpret how it related to Fari at that time, that had happened But there have been other, many other things physical things that have happened sometimes in front of witnesses that are very compelling too. It's just that you can't take those things into a laboratory like the ink obliteration so if you get... The book that resulted from all this as we've said is An Atheist In Heaven came out in April this year 2016

34:05 If you get the book, you'll see all the pictures relating to not only this first incident we call the inkblot obliteration but laboratory work on it. There's a chapter by a chemist who spent three years studying it and determined that was a mystery to science and you have his tables and charts and graphs in many pictures of the ink obliteration it leached through to the second page of the document and you see that so it's all to be found in an atheist in heaven in a way that if their chemistry professors listening scientists

34:42 in a way that will speak to their language, particularly through the chapter of Dr. John Allison, chemist from College New Jersey. Now you want to know what like me to tell what it was and how it came about? Sure please! It was March 17th or 18th I think was the 8 evening of the March 18 in 2009 and after Fari's tribute in Los Angeles, I had flown to Albuquerque and gone up to a vacation house we have in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My wife was not able to accompany me on that trip and I often do take trips there alone and I paint it's where I create a lot of paintings and I've even used the house as a production office for two of the films but so I took this trip alone

35:31 and that's getting to be around tax season in early mid-March. So I printed out, I gave the print command to print out a document with 24 pages it was a log sort of like a diary with little shorthand notes of my business meetings of the previous years and any important business phone calls And I wanted to print this out and go over it so I could see if they were business meals or had I had business travel, things for deductions. So you can sort of put the year together in your mind but it was 24 pages and I didn't want to wait around while I printed the whole 24 pages. So I pressed the print command and I went out. I sometimes go to the Indian casinos near Santa Fe or in Santa Fe and I like to play blackjack

36:22 So, I'm not bad at that game by the way. I more often come out a winner than loser with very small stakes, five dollar chips. So, I came back to the house after I played in the casino and I had dinner in the casino and the dinner didn't agree with me so I was feeling, you know, had stomach upset when I got back to the house The first thing I did was, well lock all the doors. We have a security system and I'm the only one there and I go into my office and collect the 24 page document which is printed out and of course ink is dry and look it over and it's completely normal. There's nothing out of line about that document. I staple it and take it upstairs and I was really feeling nauseous so I put the document down on the bed

37:12 Went into the bathroom and was stomach sick, and then I came out about five minutes later. And as soon as I looked at the document, I could see that it had been changed. I was in shock when I saw this. I was just in shock because as I looked at it what we call the ink obliteration, four words blacked out neatly, precisely clearly targeted. It couldn't have been some accident you know this wasn't water dripping from the ceiling or a leaky pan in the bed impossible because it was done so neatly you could tell those words were chosen to be blacked out and they ink or whatever that was used to black it out with still moist

38:01 And the first two words, you could still see through them. You could read the first two words but the second two words were completely blacked out and I didn't know whether this, when I say second two words, I didn't know whether it was two or three. Couldn't read it at all. I was gonna have to go back to the original file to see what it was so that was a key moment in my life because I felt fear. I was gripped with a very, very strange sensation. It's terrifying and why? Because I'm alone in the house no one physically is present who could have done this but someone had to do it so what does that leave that leaves a ghost right if if it was done by something unseen there's nobody hiding in the house that did it and I regarded it as evidence

38:59 So, I didn't touch it. Didn't touch the ink and I kept it very carefully. I photographed it and within a number of weeks, I was taking that to our top chemistry laboratory at University of Indiana to begin the studies. It took quite a number of days for me to figure out what that ink obliteration, the words chosen what it meant. Because at first I'm just reacting with you see something like that and you know you've seen in movies maybe a pirate movie The Black Spot right? What does The Black Spot mean? It means your gonna die right and I had this fear ya know this paranormal thing happened is ya know is telling me that I am soon going to die? Its very very scary when you can't find something

39:49 It turns out it had nothing to do with that you don't still alive after all these years and well, end the incompletion had very good intentions behind it wasn't intended to scare me. It was intended to send me a message, but I couldn't figure it out at first. So should I talk about how I figured it out? Is that what... Yeah yeah let's satisfy that curiosity people are probably feeling and talk to us about what those words were and what the message was Okay, and I do hope you know. I may be telling a lot of the story here But I do hope people will get an atheist in heaven oh yeah There's tons more stuff in there read it all and see it all yeah because this this was the first incident but we have a glossary in the book of 140 incidents

40:38 Probably about a hundred of which related to Fari Akerman and happened in the years after he passed away. So this was just the opening chapter, step number one of a continuing friendship, a continuing relationship after he passed away So the words themselves, alright. The words were spoke to Joe Amodei and Joe Amodei was completely blacked out. Those are the words that you couldn't read and when I saw my computer file that it was spoke to Joe Amodei it just didn't make any sense to me because this isn't somebody that even really knew

41:19 He had been referred to me to talk about film distribution. The question was, was he interested in distributing my recent film Jesus in India? I had one conversation with him and he wasn't interested or at least it wasn't going to work for us So, why would anyone living or dead black out his name on my document? And then I noticed a couple of lines higher on the document. It said in a previous day that I had left message for Joe Amadei. Well left message wasn't what was blacked out

42:00 spoke to was what was blocked out. So why would the ghost, if you will choose spoke to rather than left message? What was he trying to say? What was the difference? Right so I remembered that filmmakers who came to The Tribute from Canada had told me about something paranormal that happened to them the day of The Tribute that they thought was Fari contacting them And so I'd heard that story for them, so it was in my mind could this be a continuation of that? Was this from Fari?

42:37 So I wanted to get some old manuscripts or see manuscripts that had his editing style because I wanted to know how does he black out words when he's editing? Does he just put one simple little line through it, or does he completely black out the words so you can't even read them. And I needed to find something that I knew was by him to answer that question and I figured that the guy who would know the answer was Joe Moe who'd lived with him for the last 10 years And when I called Joe Moe to ask him, he didn't even let me get the question out. Here's the guy who had organized the tribute for Fari a week earlier and he excitedly told me on the phone, He said you know i'm a skeptic like Fari was. I don't believe in this stuff but it did happen to me. I don't know whether it was an apparition of Fari

43:28 a lucid dream. He said, this did happen just moments before I woke up it was more real than anything in real life. Fari walked into my room with a smile on his face In his own way, a funny way also filled with movie references thanked Joe for the tribute. I had been speaker at the tribute too so I had been part of it and there were many other speakers including Ray Bradbury and John Landis and Peter Jackson checked in by video from New

44:05 New Zealand. So he said, Joe Moe said it was like Fari came and spoke to me. There it is! Yeah there it is because what was blacked out was spoke to Joe Amodei or Amo-day and Moe is right in the middle of Amodei so clearly in Farispeak with his wordplay that he always did I I find a long history of his puns, his wordplay words within words. Word games there it is spoke to Joe Moe is the message and in a way I felt like he's reinforcing for me that he really did appear to Joe and speak to Joe It wasn't some dream. It wasn't hallucination

44:56 But it was real and he was confirming it for me, you see. This is the only thing I could think of that made sense to explain what had happened to me and once I had that thought in my mind and I did make arrangements to go first to the top chemist at University of Indiana, I wanted to know can science explain this? Is there something I don't know that happened chemically? Because my attitude was, look if the scientists can tell me why and how it happened and give me an ordinary explanation for it then forget about your ghost Paul. No ghosts you know, you don't need to believe in that or anything paranormal because here we can map it right out for you, we could tell ya just what happened. You've given us the ink, we could study with the best tools of modern science

45:48 And the result, Greg was... One scientist starts it, that's Dr. Jay Siegel who was then chairman of the chemistry department Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis I may have said University of Indiana before but it's properly said its I think Indiana University and here is a man who is absolutely world class experts on inks paints dyes solvents and forensic chemistry Here's a man who has testified in many, many court cases where chemistry could be the thing that would determine guilt or innocence and he's written textbooks on forensic chemistry. So it's no exaggeration to say Dr. Jay Segal

46:33 one of the most important chemists in the United States. And he began the experimentation, he used like a pinhole prick thing to take little samples out of the ink and then The original analysis I think was spectrographic and he was trying to see if he could identify a solvent. He had a long, long list of solvents and inks that he had studied and he was trying to categorize it It wasn't matching up with anything he had. Well, there's a reason it wasn't matching up. There were chemicals in the ink that has determined later by the scientist in New Jersey that the chemicals of the original ink from the printer were there but mixed in with other chemicals like silver and

47:26 calcium chromate. So the spectrographic didn't give it a perfect match to anything. And those were things that were used in inks like hundreds of years ago, right? Yes yes that's right particularly the calcium chromate was related to yellow and paints I think it was and silver showed up in the ferrule of early paintbrushes. Yeah, so I really love that chemical analysis and that just kind of sends a chill down your spine when you find out about that odd composition but now that you've had eight years worth of paranormal events following this game of interdimensional tag you've been playing with Forrest

48:09 How has this shaped your views on the afterlife and what it might be like? What have you learned about the, say the rules of engagement or the limitations of it. That's a really tough question and a good one I think the first thing would be to say the basics, the basics of it is that there's evidence of the survival of Fari's intelligence and his personality, and a sense of humor. So why personality? Well he was an editor, word games, and that was the way he first communicated with me. And many of the contacts that followed

48:49 Had reflected you know the humor that was natural to his personality so it's a way of his saying I'm still here letting me know that he was wrong and if you're continuing to interact and showing he continues to be aware. And particularly things that relate to him now the rules of engagement that's a tough question because Most of the things that have happened, have happened when I didn't expect them at all. It took me completely by surprise and sometimes they were things that almost seemed like jokes or pranks you wouldn't under... You think what's the meaning behind that? Just trying to give me a little nudge on the shoulder and tell me he is still here but a lot of them were things related directly to him

49:38 You know, like when a mask of his face moves by itself across the room 10 feet with no explanation for how it has moved or when this was a good one. And the fact that he makes a silence gesture that we use on the cover. So silence, you know the silence of the night this is one of things sort of his zombie horror culture right? Yeah yeah of course His love of Bela Lugosi and Dracula And the fact that when I tried to do the final output of the film That was gonna go to broadcast for the Syfy channel

50:15 the sound completely cut out of the movie exactly when a friend of Fari's who was present when Fari died, was talking about Fari's silence gesture. So he is talking about the silence gesture that indicates the silence of death and at that moment there is no more soundtrack in the movie until the very end of the movie? it makes no sense unless it's intentional. The odds of it happening are absolutely minuscule and there was nothing wrong with the hard drives or the data that went into creating this, so when listeners read An Atheist in Heaven you'll see the vast array of things that happen and then the things that happened to the scientists for example I talked about Jay Segal

51:02 I didn't talk about Dr. John Allison who's contributed two chapters to An Atheist in Heaven, when he began to study this at Jay Siegel's request using laser desorption to dissect the chemistry from the very first day of the studies when I brought the document to him unexplained phenomena began to happen to him and some of it was caught on film. I say film, I mean videotape on camera. A number of these things that have happened through the years have been caught on camera while the camera was rolling which I think is wonderful we got that kind of evidence so the rules of engagement seem to include allowing us here in corporeal form on the earth to have tangible evidence to know

51:49 that we're interacting with intelligence from another realm that we can't see. And a lot of it does seem subtle, I mean not only in this case but other cases or it seems maybe personal these little brief slivers of strangeness but I do love synchronicities and one thing that I've learned about synchronicity is usually works in these weird groupings of connections where oftentimes you can close a loop around three or four different points of coincidence and you mentioned the blue 4e painting, or the gesture-the hush gesture. And that touches on another thing that's really compelling and it has to do with that blue 4e painting. It's another great example of one of these loops. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

52:33 Yes, well the original painting by LJ Dopp which became the cover of The Life After Death Project. It has a clock in the background with hands on the clock at two minutes to midnight and it was painted four years before Fari passed away. Well Earl Roselle who was present when Fari died reports that Fari died at 2 minutes to midnight And that's exactly what the hands of the clock showed in the painting that was made four years before he died. So, as a major skeptic would say well coincidence, how are you going to explain it? Time travel? You know that a fiery spirit from the future goes back in time and influences the artist and knows when he is going to...you can't explain it in logical terms at all

53:27 But the mystery was compounded, the mystery of the painting when I was asked to write an article about this for Fate magazine. It was called The Strange Case Of Forrest J. Ackerman and while I was writing a paragraph on the first page of the article about lj dot painting right in the middle of lj dot name after because after the lg there's a huge miss print in the article that suddenly says, the blackout into levels of opacity.

54:05 of four words in my document or in the document. I don't know the words exactly, but it said and then it says spoke to Joe Amadei and it repeated itself the blackout two levels opacity spoke to Joe Amadei and then it went on with what I had written for the magazine yeah weird mid-sentence mid sentence right while talking about the artist who painted the painting that related his death And the article had been proofread by four people, including the publisher and managing editor before it went to press. They said it had no problems with it so again the logical mind can't explain it. These things reference each other? Yeah self-referential and sometimes these things have happened either while I've been doing a radio or podcast things have happened very definitely

55:00 Like just the other day, I was doing an interview. And they had a break for commercial after 20 minutes. That's a misplay! Now, they hadn't purposely selected commercials as a matter of fact the producer told me afterwards he said no I had no idea what commercial was gonna come up and so i looked and saw the first one supposed to come up and I knew it was when we all found obnoxious we didn't like and so I killed it from the list and so it just went to the next one And the ad, it begins with a song saying come to the forest. Come to the forest. It's closer than you know in the forest. You will find the real you, the new you that you didn't know brought to you by the national forest service and far is short for Forest. He's Forrest J Ackerman so that's quite a secret city for you when no one intended it

56:01 And one of the ones I really like, Greg. I heard about from a writer named Robert Egbe who saw an early version of The Life After Death Project before it was finished and then he saw the final one with his girlfriend they both watch it together and fascinated and when its done she takes out her cell phone and intends to check her emails but accidentally presses navigation instead of email And what comes up is a map, not of where they are then but of a location 10 miles away with Ackerman Road filling the screen in the middle. His name again. It keeps happening so when you say rules of engagement maybe there are no rules of engagement or it's mainly initiated from his side he keeps poking at us

56:59 Add to sort of wake us up at moments that we may be least expected and add another log to the fire. In terms of one of my favorite additions of synchronicity in this whole thing, There is another reference to the inkblot obliteration event when you find a magazine that Fori had signed for you and his inscription is right above the phrase, The Invisible Ink Men Strike Again. And that one people might say oh that's a little loose but when you stack these things up I mean this is how synchronicity works I know, it works more like a dream than physical reality. Yes he had autographed that and even the autograph above those words The Invisible Ink Men Strike Again, the autograph acknowledged Ray Harryhausen the great special effects director who was signing us because there was a big article about Harryhausen in there

57:54 and he wrote hooray for harry housing and paul david's but he didn't write just the word who ray he wrote. H o and then a hyphen and then are you so it shows his propensity to find a name within a word like he did with joe moody or amadou where moses right there in the middle of it, So he signed that autograph and as you say, this was on the table of contents page for Famous Monsters Magazine. And it said Fang Mail and it said The Invisible Ink Men Strike Again! Now when you think about that the incident that happened to me wasn't invisible ink, it wasn't ink turning invisible although Jack Kelleher who wrote a chapter for An Atheist in Heaven

58:42 an incident of Fari-related ink turning invisible. But if you take it as the invisible ink man, He's invisible. He's the ink man, he's come to put the ink on it in a document. Yeah, he struck some words out. And he struck some words out! He is striking again! How many times is he going to strike? I've got a copy of An Atheist In Heaven here at my desk in case I needed to refer to a chapter or remember something while talking to you and this particular copy on the side of the pages when the book is closed it has a black ink line right in the middle of all those pages about three quarters of an inch long and i don't know how we got there. I don't you know or maybe you do

59:33 I could say, ìDid I have a felt tip marker pen sitting on my desk? Did I just push the book against it and is that how it happened?î I have no recollection of that. But on the other hand this doesnít look like what would happen if you accidentally pushed something against the pen because itís not scribbled in any way. Itís just a straight line again. I'm noticing something, I'm noticing something that didn't notice before. Remember how I said that the original ink obliteration was in two levels of opacity? Well this line is too! The first half of it the ink is kind of light and then it gets very very dark. This on the side of the pages copy of the book. I don't know you know that's something

1:00:27 I've got enough better examples that we don't need to dwell on this. It's just that when it happens to you, you become more aware to look for all of these kinds of things and I know we don't have much time left Greg and I would like to hear toward the ending help the listeners if they'd like to find these things that I've done again to remind them that An Atheist in Heaven, which was published in April of 2016. If you look for that title at Amazon.com you'll find it available. You can get is as a hardback with dust jacket and they have it at discount there I think for right now they're selling it around 21 bucks I think

1:01:13 The list price is 30. And they have it as an e-book for I think $9, which you can use for your iPad or Kindle and then for the documentary film, The Life After Death Project, you can rent it online, I think you can probably download it online that you could stream it at Amazon Prime or I recommend getting the two DVD set because you've got two DVDs. You've got the first movie that was on Syfy channel, then you have the sequel of Equal Length that I made and 40 minutes of bonus features on top of that. That includes much of the tribute to Forrest J. Ackerman

1:01:53 and a wonderfully comprehensive statement by the chemist who spent the most time studying our ink obliteration. So those are the opportunities, and then my other films... Oh! If you go to Internet Movie Database that's imdb.com and look for me, I'm Paul Davids. That's David with an S. They might show a couple of people with similar names and I'm the one that did The Transformers Show so you click on that. You'll see a listing of all my different films and TV shows and most of them are still available. And you know, you'll want to see Roswell

1:02:33 which was the movie for Showtime about the 1947 UFO crash, Starry Night. Before We Say Goodbye, wonderful story in my opinion based on a stage play that gets into the mystery of Our Lady Of Guadalupe and there's The Artist And The Shaman or certainly The Sci-Fi Boys and Jesus in India, all of these different projects I have spent the last 15 to 20 years putting together to help open minds and take topics that some may consider slightly fringe topics. Oh including Timothy Leary's Dead Too which will be... That soon will be up for streaming they're working on that now too but all of these topics to help broaden minds

1:03:18 answer questions, and take you places that you on your own initiative might otherwise not go. Nice! Yeah I love that approach. You've definitely covered some kind of out there subject matter done in an entertaining way made a good life for yourself doing it seems like a win-win-win for everybody i mean i think that's uh... a great approach to life and playing the game of capitalism that we really can't help but play But great stuff, man. I really did enjoy the book very convincing body of evidence You also are going to be at an upcoming conference if i'm not mistaken right? You mean the one in November? It says, Art Music and UFOs The Evolution of Human Consciousness. Yes that's in Laughlin Nevada and I've been there the last two years it's a conference organized by my good friend Paola Harris she is Italian she's a ufologist and writer and knows a lot of really interesting people she brings to those conferences

1:04:17 I think that's a great opportunity to go there. I was just a speaker this year at the International UFO Congress put on by Open Minds and I did speak about the Marilyn Monroe film, and that of course is the other one. I don't know how many more I'm going to be making. They take a couple years each and they take a lot out of me, but Marilyn Monroe Declassified will be released this year on DVD or Blu-ray. It'll show up for streaming, I'm sure. But do avoid the piracy sites because They're really putting us in a position that makes it very difficult for people who do what I do to continue. It's true, it's a complete disrespect of copyright and we work hard to do these things

1:05:06 So we appreciate it when you access them through the proper channels, right? You really have to support the artists that you want to be able to continue to make work Otherwise they can't do it same thing. We face here but is a weird world no doubt I really enjoyed talking to you Thanks so much for being here take care of yourself out there and tell Fori we said what's up Thank you There we go people, Paul Davids closing out the month of May for THC and this isn't typically the type of show I like to do but i did think it was a good case study of life after death contact. It's a weird thing...it always seems to be so indirect and subtle or maybe subtle isn't the best word for it when masks are flying off your walls but instead

1:05:53 crossing out a couple lines of paper, why not say hey what do you know there is an afterlife and it ain't so bad. You know? But it's still pretty wild And I do like looking at those things especially in the context of last week show with Gordon where we're talking about contacting spirits and ancestors thought might be a good follow-up who doesn't want to talk to someone largely responsible for the Transformers cartoon huh but I do wonder how this life after death cycle works I think we all do And when you have a breakthrough experience where you realize there is another plane of existence, that's great to have but it's kind of like the ending of Lost. Way more questions come up than answers. What is it like to just be a spirit existing in a dimension of timelessness devoid of matter? How long do you stay there before getting another body? Do you have to get another body? Does everyone get another body?

1:06:46 I mean kids come through with verifiable evidence and memories of their past lives so something is up there. Why don't more dead relatives make contact? Do they just stand around and wait to greet us on the other side? What do they do with their time, just watch and wait? I dunno it's an odd situation this life-and-death thing we do…I wish we could get more definitive answers but For now, I guess all we got are these little slivers of clues. The synchronicities in stories like these are always a bit interesting to me so big thanks again to him and all the great guests this month! I really enjoyed the Agenda 31 show with Cory and Todd and Success Magic with Gordon those were my other personal favorites i thought those shows had the most useful info

1:07:34 And I guess i'll have a bit more to say in the THC newsletter coming out the first of the month. Sign up for free at TheHigherSideChats.com on the sidebar or right from the Facebook page for THC and I'll let you know who is on deck for next month but thanks for listening, signup for plus if you want to hear more and by all means forge your path to happiness as best you can in this backwards world we're in That's it for me this week. Your move, ancestors of the afterlife and spirits of the great beyond... You're fuckin' blue. Oh no you see The world isn't random It's attached to puppet strings Control over everything The nine-to-five is trying to steal ya Now don't that job seem silly?

1:08:32 Hello, can you hear me? Or should I play back recordings from some spying agency Wish we were younger and free I'll be thankful when it's all exposed The vast conspiracy There is such a difference between us And the Denver Shire Hollow from a higher side They're calling out a thousand crimes They'll tell you the story Of everything that's been done Then they'll call out deception Of the web that's been spawned

1:09:33 Hollow from the higher side The earth is hollow inside They'll tell you about something that no one else will Have you heard about Saturn? Have you heard about the real since so long ago? They're cartoons It's so typical of me to talk about the stuff I'm sorry that's good and well Did you ever hear the argument That nothing really happens? It's no secret And that the best is plus

1:10:33 It's doubling your time Hello from the higher side They're calling out a thousand cries Now tell me something the elite have done And they'll call out deception from a web that's been spawned Hello from the higher side Challenging your paradigm

1:11:13 And I'll tell you someday That the battle's begun But we can't fight it with violence The mind's where it's won At the war At the war At the war Hello from a higher side

1:11:55 They're calling out a thousand crimes. They'll tell you something the elite have done, and they'll call out deception of the web that's been spun. Hello from the higher side! I'm challenging your paradigm And i'll tell you someday that the battle's begun But we can't fight it with violence The mind's where it's won, that's the problem