Rob and Trish McGregor On Synchronicity and ET |432|

Rob and Trish McGregor have explored the sciency side of the paranormal for 30 years and authored more than 100 books.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:06] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris, and you know, I’ve taken to letting Skeptiko listeners guide me on who I should talk to, and today’s show is a great example of how wonderful that can be, when you let other people take the reins.

I am almost embarrassed to tell you that I wasn’t aware of the tremendous body of work, you can see some of the books on the screen, that have been generated by the husband and wife writing team of Rob and Trish MacGregor. Both separately have each become award-winning authors, as well as together, have done some amazing work, and so many of the topics that we love to talk about here on Skeptiko and we like to dive into deeply as they have. So synchronicities, remote viewing, UFOs, ETs, spirit communication, astrology, a lot of other stuff that we haven’t talked as much about.

These folks are just a tremendous well of information, and as I just alluded to, it’s quality stuff. They crank out a lot of books, but there’s a lot of great stuff in these books. So I’m blown away, I’m super excited to have them on and to meet them and have a chance to talk to them.

Rob, Trish, thank you both so much for joining me on Skeptiko.

Trish MacGregor: [00:01:42] Well, thank you Alex. Now if our dog suddenly shows up in this picture, it’s because he’s right under the table here.

Rob MacGregor: [00:01:49] Thanks for inviting us.

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Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:50] You guys, as I just mentioned, we’re going to be talking a lot about these many, many books you’ve written and we’re going to play a little game that I like to play called Skeptiko Jeopardy, where you pick the topics and we go where you drive us. But as as I’m often guilty of, I sometimes kind of jump in there and pick the first one and here I guess we have to talk about the books.

Rob MacGregor: [00:02:17] Yeah, it started basically, when I met Trish, I was working as a newspaper reporter, a daily paper in Hollywood, Florida and I was assigned to do an article on how the Cuban refugees who come to Florida and the United States after the Cuban boatlift in 1980, and this is, like a couple years later, how they were integrating into our society.

Trish was teaching English as a second language at Florida International University, so I interviewed her and we started talking after the interview, and it just turned out that we both had read all of these Seth books and we knew no one else who had, not only had they not ever read the books or heard of them, but had no interest in the subject matter. So it was nice to meet somebody who had similar interests and things went from there.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:03:19] Well, that’s fantastic, and as I mentioned earlier, you’ve written on a lot of different topics and we’re going to talk a lot about many of the different ones. We’re going to talk about synchronicities especially, because a lot of people are interested in that, and you guys have an interesting theory about how synchronicities are maybe at the core of a lot of these different phenomena and how they all might be linked.

But I’d like to know more about your personal journey through these different topics, and in particular, because this is a show that really likes to focus on science. And on one hand you all don’t claim to be doing science, you’re authors, but I did gain an appreciation for, maybe a little bit of that newspaper reporter vibe that you have. In that the accounts that you tell, I get the feeling that you’ve tried to vet them in some pretty serious ways and in some of the work that you present to back up some of these ideas, especially when you were starting out, we’re really unacceptable to people and have become much more mainstream, but I felt like you did go to great lengths to show the seriousness and the serious people that were involved in that. Do you want to speak to that at all?

Trish MacGregor: [00:04:40] One thing. I first read about synchronicity when I was 18 and I had picked up an I Ching book, the Chinese book of divination, and Jung wrote the introduction in 1949. That’s the place where he first publicly talked about synchronicity and I thought, “Wow, this explains a lot.” Because at that time I was also learning astrology, which Jung studied. And when I met Rob, one of the first questions I asked him, I said, “Hey, do you know what synchronicity is?” It was just like my test question, and he goes, “Yeah, I think I do,” and we started talking about it. Actually, our first book we tried together was on synchronicity but it didn’t work.

Rob MacGregor: [00:05:22] Yeah, and that was right at the beginning and that was our first attempt at a nonfiction book and it didn’t go anywhere. We just weren’t prepared at that point to write a book on synchronicity. So we had other things going, Trish’s first novel came out and I got a nonfiction project ghost writing project with the Corporate Executive from Washington DC and we both quit our jobs at that point.

Trish MacGregor: [00:05:50] And then we ran out of money five months later and had to take part-time jobs.

Rob MacGregor: [00:05:55] I took, actually it was a full-time job for most people but I was able to do it part-time and Trish was teaching English as a second language as an after-school program at a high school.

Trish MacGregor: [00:06:06] It was Adult Ed.

Rob MacGregor: [00:06:07] In Adult Ed and we did that for a year and then that’s when Trish’s novel sold and then I got the other project for…

Trish MacGregor: [00:06:17] We actually started out as freelance magazine writers.

Rob MacGregor: [00:06:19] Yeah, first we were doing magazine, I was selling magazine articles and we were doing pretty well selling them, but the problem was getting paid. It was very slow and very low paid, until we got hooked up with Omni magazine, where, I think they paid us 75 cents a word.

Trish MacGregor: [00:06:36] They paid a buck a word.

Rob MacGregor: [00:06:37] Was that what it was? It was good, and we got a lot of assignments from Pamela Weintraub, the editor.

Trish MacGregor: [00:06:43] And that’s how we met Betty Hill and Budd Hopkins who introduced us to all the UFO stuff.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:50] You know, one of the things we’re going to have to do during this show is deal with a lot of name dropping. And it’s not name-dropping, I shouldn’t say that because that is a negative connotation. But one of the things people are going to have an appreciation for is, seen it all, done it all, been there, all of these people that you’ve encountered, which are just tremendously important people in a number of these different fields. And I’ve jumped over to the UFO topic, even though I have upon the screen ‘Synchros’.

So, let me pull back to the synchros thing, synchronicities, because I think, we’ve talked about these a number of times on this show, and I want to kind of approach it from a couple of different angles. One, you’ve written several different books on synchronicities and you’ve chronicled some amazing synchronicities, these kinds of coincidences that go way, way beyond coincidences in our life. But I also wanted to connect it to the fact that, on this show, we’ve also looked at the undeniable science that seems to suggest that there’s something real going on here.

So, if you look at Dr. Dean Radin and his work on presentiment, it’s kind of point in that direction. Dr. Julia Mossbridge at Northwestern as well. And a friend of our show, Dr. Andy Paquette, who’s looked at dreams and synchronicity and an unbelievable connection statistically.

But let’s start maybe from the beginning and talk about synchronicities, because if people pick up this book that I have up on the screen, The Seven Secrets of Synchronicity, they’ll find some really good, kind of factual stuff about what synchronicities are, some common understandings, you know, this thing of the number thing is always interesting to people, people ask me, a lot of them love it.

I have to say, yesterday I was preparing, I was getting ready to prepare for this interview. I wake up, I look at the clock, 4 4 4, it just so happens, on the day that I’m doing the prep work for the synchronicity people.

But I’m sorry, please, let’s talk about synchros, wherever you want to start.

Trish MacGregor: [00:08:59] Okay, one of the things that was surprising to me, I kept rereading Jung’s, his biography, and throughout his life, or out of numerical synchronicities it happened to him, and his theory was that every number is an architype of energy and you keep seeing you particular number until you figure out, sometimes you never figure it out, but until you figure out what the message is. That’s how Jung approached it.

And another man, Bernard Beitman, you need to have him on your show. He’s a psychiatrist, a visiting psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and he’s really the first psychiatrist to take on a serious study of synchronicity.

Rob MacGregor: [00:09:43] Since Jung.

Trish MacGregor: [00:09:44] Yes, since Jung.

Rob MacGregor: [00:09:47] I’d like to just mention a couple of our best stories that are personal synchronicities if I might, that we consider pretty astonishing. Sometimes people have their own personal synchronicities they tell you, and they’re very meaningful to that person, but then they tell somebody else and the other person, they don’t quite get it. But these, I think, are pretty dramatic.

This one took place in Venezuela at the airport as we were leaving. It was at a time when the Colombian drug lords were moving cocaine to Miami, but they weren’t moving it out of Bogota anymore, they shifted to Venezuela. So there was a large army presence at the border there at the airport.

So we come up with her luggage to go through, but just in front of us there’s a man who doesn’t have any luggage, he just has a briefcase.

Trish MacGregor: [00:10:56] He’s dressed in a suit.

Rob MacGregor: [00:10:57] He’s very tall and he’s wearing a three-piece suit and looked out of place in a way. And he puts down the briefcase, unlocks, it, opens it up, and we’re standing right behind him. And there are these kids, like 16, 17 years old with machine guns kind of leaning over who were wondering, “What’s this going to be?” There was only one thing in that briefcase and it’s a book called Fevered written by Trish.

Trish MacGregor: [00:11:24] But I couldn’t even prove it because it was written under a pseudonym.

Rob MacGregor: [00:11:29] We didn’t even talk about that, but that blew us away. We just looked and ducked, “What?” That was a good one.

One other one I might mention is, I used to be a windsurfer and I would windsurf sometimes on a neighborhood lake. One day I went out and I so excited, the wind was blowing and I was so excited and I jumped on my board a little too soon, I didn’t take my billfold out, and at some point, I went down and lost the billfold. But I really wasn’t aware for certain that that’s where I lost it, but I just knew after I got home from windsurfing I didn’t have a billfold anymore.

So, the thing is, I talked to Trish and she said, “Yeah, it’s probably in the bottom of the lake, but I had the feeling that it was going to come back to me. It’s just an odd thing, I didn’t contact any of the credit cards, I didn’t try to get a new driver’s license.

So three or four days go by and I get a telephone call and a man say, “Rob MacGregor?” “Yeah.” He said, “Oh, I’m glad you’re alive. I was fishing in this lake with a net and came up with your billfold and I thought your body might be down there as well.”

So he finds it and then we decided to meet at his house, it’s a man from India, and it turned out he was having a big party as his house that Sunday. I went there, it was like moving into a foreign country, about 40 different people in the house, hanging out in the garage and all over, Indian food. So I went looking for this guy and there were three guys there with the same name and I finally get to the one who owns the house, he gives me the billfold.

house hanging out in the garage and I’ll go over Indian food. And so I’m looking for the sky. There are three guys there with the same name and I finally get to the one who owns the house. He gives me the billfold, all of my cards, all of my money is in there and I looked at him, “Hey, I just met you last week.” He has a lawn service and he came and knocked on my door advertising his services. I talked to him for about five minutes, and here I met him again.

Trish MacGregor: [00:13:42] That’s a really unusual one.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:45] You know, there are a couple things about that story that I think are really worth talking about a little bit further. One is that, you know, as we’ve shown on this show, there are these different levels to these different paranormal phenomena, and one is, we feel a need to prove it. So we want to talk about it, we want to pull Jung in and we want to pull in some sort of authority, or like I was doing. We want to talk about the science that’s been done on it.

But then on another, we quickly get past that and we get to the personal, and that’s something I’ve experienced and I’ve experienced both myself directly. And a lot of times people have medium readings and it will be exactly like you were saying Rob, they’ll say, “This little thing came through that when I tell it to anyone else it seems insignificant, but to me, it was the most meaningful little bit of information that would come through.”

That brings us to the point of starting to ask some really, really deep questions of, who is orchestrating this? For what purpose and meaning might it be orchestrated? Is it good, is it bad, is our spirit guides? Are we potentially being deceived? Is there a grand order to everything and is it working out in a clockwork like fashion?

I think your work, particularly with synchros, brings us to the point where we can start asking those deeper questions. So let’s do it. What do you think about that?

Trish MacGregor: [00:15:13] After I had initially read Jung’s introductions to the I Ching, I actually started experiencing what I thought at the time was coincidences, but they were synchronicities. And once Rob and I years later got around to writing The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we realized that there were really seven categories. There could actually be  more because we had other categories too but the editor we were working with said, “Oh, let’s keep 7 secrets, we like that alliteration of the S’s.” So we did a part two on it.

When you’re at an intersection in your life, you’re going to move or you’re going to get married, you’re going to have a baby, big life events, that’s when synchronicities seem to happen most frequently. Right?

Rob MacGregor: [00:16:08] That’s one thing, yeah.

Trish MacGregor: [00:16:09] Yeah, that’s one thing. Also, when you travel and you’re outside of your comfort zone, then you also seem to experience synchronicities. Sometimes they are warnings, sometimes they are confirmations and sometimes they’re tricksters. So when you were talking about are they good or bad, I mean, I had a trickster synchronicity kind of tick me off.

I was writing a trilogy for a tour and I wanted the second book to be about time travel. So Rob and I were in Orlando at a Scottish Festival and I was looking at clothing that they had there and I looked at the label in one shirt and it said, “Time Travel.” I thought, “Wow. Okay, here’s my confirmation. This is what my second book… that’s a good idea.” When I passed it by my editor, she said, “I don’t want a time travel.” So I thought, “Alright, that’s a trickster.” It was a manifestation of what I wanted but not what was going to be.

Rob MacGregor: [00:17:11] So you were asking the question about, what’s the source of these synchronicities, these meaningful coincidences? We feel that there’s, like a deeper level of reality that exists where everything is interconnected. The implicate, as David Bowman, a quantum physicist described it, and then there’s the explicate which is the physical world, where things do not seem to be all interrelated, it seems to be just the opposite, often times. But what synchronicity is, is right at the border between the implicate and the explicate, because it’s something that’s peeking through from the implicit order, where everything is interconnected. So it’s it’s like a clue, like people are more religious. Like there’s a book called When God Winks, they see it as religious.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:18:17] Yeah, I get that part of it, but I don’t think that really gets to the question, which can be asked in a number of different ways, but it’s like, who’s orchestrating it and for what purpose? And I’m not fixed that we have to come down with a solid answer one way or another, and I wouldn’t trust it if we did. Because I think the data, as you’ve encountered it in your other work, like when we talk about ETs and abduction/contact experience, good ET, bad ET, when we talk about demons and when we talk about hungry ghosts or we talked about angels, you know, we have a lot of different stuff going on in these extended realms.

So, I’m all for this idea that you’re putting forward, which is really fascinating, which is synchros are this particular means of communication in that, kind of in-between zone, that that might have a particular purpose, might serve a particular function as a way of communication, but it does drive me towards those questions of, who is orchestrating it for what purpose?

Trish MacGregor: [00:19:29] I honestly believe that it’s all internal. You know, if somebody doesn’t believe that a coincidence is meaningful, they’re not going to experience anything, you know, generally.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:19:40] Generally, generally, like to say, because sometimes, I mean,  you can see this in your own work, right? Sometimes it’ll come and just beat you over the head, and sometimes it’ll be really subtle and you have to pay attention to it to get the meaning. Other times it’s like, “No, I’m telling you this is it.”

Rob MacGregor: [00:19:57] Sometimes they even pass right over by us. We have a synchronicity, something small, and we don’t even think about it at the time and then later we think, “Hey, we missed that one completely,” and we think about this all of the time, we’ve written so many books about it but other people who aren’t really paying attention, aware of synchronicity, I think they have these coincidences and they think about it for a second or two and then move on.

Trish MacGregor: [00:20:30] What’s really interesting, we have neighbors who have two children and when our first book came out I gave my neighbor the book and she read it and then she said to me, “Trish, I think I’ve had a lot of synchronicities in my life.” And then her kids started coming over and saying, “Miss Trish, Miss Trish, we’ve had some synchronicities.” So part of it is that awareness, you go, “Wow, okay, I get this.”

Rob MacGregor: [00:20:54] And as you’re more aware they happen more often.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:20:58] Okay, but guys, what does that mean? Again, we’re describing it, which is awesome. I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, because hots off to you for doing this work and for amassing it. And again, folks, if you have any doubts that they’re kind of being fluffy with this, go and read these accounts, they’re amazing. And we can go back to the fact that these people are careful about collecting accounts. They don’t just go, take stories that they pick up in the street, they try and verify them, in many cases, to a certain extent, and people will come on their website and share synchronicities. But they won’t just stop and take them verbatim, they’ll go and email the person and follow up and really try and verify it.

But again, we’re describing it, we have contradictions all over the place that that must trouble you too.

Trish MacGregor: [00:21:54] Yeah, it does, because, for instance, if you look at the number 11, or 11:11, when we started looking into that I was kind of blown away, I thought, “Okay, how can there be so many 11:11s?” We were in Columbia last year and I found out that Cartagena found its independence from Spain on November 11^th, 11:11. I thought, “How can this be?” So I don’t know who’s orchestrating it. I do think it’s that underlying, the implicate order of things.  

Rob MacGregor: [00:22:32] And that we exist in that order as well as we exist.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:36] Fair enough. I mean, if that’s your answer, I’m going to just try and pin you down. If that’s your answer, fair enough, is that we are orchestrating it, it’s the tulpa thing, it’s the, we are co-creators of our reality, so of course. I buy that, I buy that, but then I jump over to some of the other work. ET is real. Okay, a lot of people don’t want to accept that. It always amazes me when people go, “Yeah, I believe in UFOs but I don’t believe in ET.” So ET is real, no matter how we look at it and we’ll dive into that in a minute. But there is a being, a species, a manifestation of consciousness that is playing in this in between realm in a way that we don’t understand. Near-death experience, or the mediums, they’re not talking to spirits who are in this extended realm in a way that we don’t totally understand but seems to have some ability to access synchronicities or affect synchronicities in our life.

So that, in a way, I’m not saying it completely does, but it kind of stands a little bit in contrast with this, we are creating our reality. Well, we’re creating our reality but these other beings are there too and they seem to have a say in it.

Trish MacGregor: [00:24:02] With spirit contact in particular, there is interaction. I don’t know if they’re creating the synchronicity, but something is creating the synchronicity.

Rob MacGregor: [00:24:14] And I think these higher beings can move between the physical realm, between dimensions and non-physical. It can appear to us, not necessarily coming out of a UFO but just manifesting to us.

We’re writing a book right now with the woman who is a retired veterinarian, who, since the early to mid-90s she’s been having these experiences and is continuing to have these experiences with… She doesn’t want to call them aliens, she calls them beings. She describes them and she is one of these people who actually likes this experience and she doesn’t consider that she’s being conducted. They come to her every afternoon, she spends two to three hours in her bed with them. They’re not in the bed, they’re around the bed, and one of them is this creature that’s about seven feet tall and looks like a praying mantis, and I’d go through the ceiling if I saw that beside my bed. It stands at the bottom of the bed and it’s got these long arms and there’s this manipulation.

Trish MacGregor: [00:25:26] But as she says, who’s better equipped to investigate an alien species than a veterinarian?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:25:33] Interesting. That’s an interesting angle, that I hadn’t heard before.

Trish MacGregor: [00:25:36] She sent Rob some recordings that she had made and they freaked me out, they sound insectile. Like, if you were standing in an orchard or something and every cricket and insect in the world was singing.

Rob MacGregor: [00:25:51] We’ve checked her out, we’ve known her for a number of years and she’s a legitimate contactee and has an incredible story and I think this story could be the modern-day equivalent of Communion, because it’s interdimensional, it’s physical and non-physical connections and it’s a fascinating story. There’s a lot of out-of-body travel, that they have pulled her out of her body and travelled with her in different dimensions. She has lots of those stories that are really fascinating stories.

Trish MacGregor: [00:26:28] And she feels that what they’re doing is, they’re helping her to evolve vibrationally.

Rob MacGregor: [00:26:36] Yeah and she feels that she’s living the future. This is what humans are evolving to, to become both physical and non-physical beings that move between the two realities. In other words, we get away from the nuts and bolts idea of space travel, we can travel through our minds, through consciousness, and can manifest physically elsewhere.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:27:01] Well, that’s a topic you guys have discussed and covered extensively in some of your prior books. I just pulled up, Aliens in the Backyard and Beyond Strange. I mean, you have amazing cases of contacts/abduction. I think that’s a really interesting topic that I’d like to dive into.

One of the guests that I’ve had on recently and there are several guests who are doing this research with the FREE Foundation, I don’t know if you’ve heard them, but Rey Hernandez and Rudy Shields. They’re down there in Florida. The things they’ve done, and Rey’s been on the show multiple times, is they’ve looked at experiencers and they’ve tried to look at that experience scientifically through a very academic survey. You know the drill, if you do surveys the right way, you can get good data. I mean, that’s how they get data on pain or depression, you have to go and ask people but you ask them with enough questions and you do it in a way that kind of asks it multiple ways, and if you do it carefully, you can get good data.

Well, their data surprisingly comes back and it is very much in favor of, I guess, that last contactee that you were mentioning. They find that overwhelmingly people have a positive contact experience and that the more experiences they have, the more they understand their experiences to be positive. They see spiritually transformative experiences throughout these. They see healing experiences that are kind of pretty undeniable.

Trish MacGregor: [00:28:36] They also develop psychic abilities too, don’t they?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:38] Psychic abilities, which is again, maybe similar to the near-death experience, where people do that. But at the same time, that stands in contrast with some of the cases that you’ve reported, that I think we have to take very serious and we have to respect where people are coming from. Some people are having traumatic abduction experiences that we can’t really put in any other way. No one wants to be taken against their will and have these kinds of weird medical experiments done on them, and people are reporting that, and there’s good documentation for that, where people come back and their clothes are switched with someone’s clothes or their clothes are on backwards. All of this kind of strange stuff that is really terrifying. And then to see your children, which in a lot of cases people see their children being abducted or having this contact experience.

So, this idea of the good alien versus the bad alien, is something that I think really needs to be wrestled to the ground a little bit more, and who better to do it than you two.

Trish MacGregor: [00:29:43] Well, I don’t think there’s just one species here, just like we have blacks and mulattoes and whites. We’re as varied, I think, as these aliens are.

Rob MacGregor: [00:29:54] And different cultures, different belief systems.

Trish MacGregor: [00:29:57] And different intentions.

Rob MacGregor: [00:30:00] So, I think some of them are here maybe for not the best modems for the future of the human race, others may be very neutral and just coming for harvesting our resources that they can make use of, and others may be benevolent and here to help us, but not in a way that we might want them to, to land on the White House Lawn and make an agreement. They’re maybe helping behind the scene but not in a concrete way that we see on a daily basis.

Trish MacGregor: [00:30:44] In one of the cases we talk about, in Aliens in the Backyard, about this French Canadian who had this experience in his backyard. He was carrying around a vial of holy water. So Rob said, “Send it to us, we’d like to take it up to the  over a period of time. We asked him he was carrying around. A vial of fully aware of holy water. And so Rob said send it to us. We’d like to take it up to Cassadaga, the spiritualist community in Central Florida, and have a friend of ours who’s a psychometrist read it.

Rob MacGregor: [00:31:12] A psychometrist is somebody who takes and object and reads the object.

Trish MacGregor: [00:31:19] But she also is a mediumistic. So I went in there and I had the vial and she used to be an RN. So Kathy thought it was a vial of urine that I was bringing in. I didn’t tell her what it was but I just started laughing. So she reads it and she goes, “Oh, they did it for fun.”

Rob MacGregor: [00:31:40] Entertainment, she said entertainment.

Trish MacGregor: [00:31:43] Entertainment, that was the whole…

Rob MacGregor: [00:31:44] That kind of freaked us out, that this can be entertainment for them, that was something unacceptable.

Trish MacGregor: [00:31:51] Yeah, that really was.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:31:53] Yeah, I heard a similar story from a guy who I interviewed, just a terrific guy. We have a connection Rob, he’s a long-time yogi, a long-time meditator for 20 years, was under the the TM guy. Anyways, he had gone to India and had an incredible series of encounters with a number of mystics, gurus and stuff like that. And one guy took him, kind of under his wing, and said, “Okay. I’m going to tell you the truth,. I can see by your aura your consciousness has evolved so far. Here’s what you need to take it the next way, and there are these visitors out there that you’re going to connect with.” And lo and behold he has these amazing experiences, so he claims, with people from the star system of Sirius and he travels out-of-body experience.

But the point of the story, without just being another alien story. He said, “Why do you show up in these spaceships because obviously you can communicate telepathically, you can travel telepathically?” and he goes, “Oh, it’s fun, it’s an interesting thing to do.”

You know, the part of that that really resonates with me, it’s the, as below, so above. We often say, as above, so below. But I think of it as, as below, so above. We have people doing things for a bunch of different reasons and we have some people whose actions we just totally can’t understand, either because they’re doing something really horrible and they’re hurting people and being evil and we see that and we go, “Why would they do that?” And we see other people that are incredibly altruistic and just want to love and help other people. And we see everything in between. The people who are obsessed with kind of gaining things and all of this, and why wouldn’t there be that same kind of diversity of consciousness in these extended. And moreover, that’s not only logical, that to me seems to be what your data is speaking to.

Trish MacGregor: [00:34:02] This thought just came into my head. About a year ago we got an email from Whitley Strieber and he said, “Do you guys know where Cassadaga is?” and synchronistically we were just leaving Cassadaga because I had had an astrology workshop there. I said, “Sure, we know where it is, we go up there a lot.” He goes, “Well, can you meet me up there in a couple of weeks?” We set and date and one of the interesting things that came out of that meeting was he feels that abductions are not happening as frequently anymore because whatever species or race was doing them, they have everything they need, so the abductions aren’t as important anymore. The way Whitley talks, it’s like the ETs maybe exist in the same sphere, the same dimension as the dead and that’s why, sometimes when people abducted or having encounters, they would see a loved one who had passed on.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:04] I’ve got to jump in there with the inquiry to perpetuate doubt, a Skeptiko thing. I’d like to see the data on abductions aren’t as frequent. Because I’ll tell you, one place I hear like people say, “UFO sightings aren’t as frequent as they were before.” Simply not true, they’re just more common. If you go and count the numbers on YouTube, I don’t know if there are more, but I want to do the same thing with abduction. Based on what we’ve just said, there are all of these different visitors, throughout time, right? I mean forever. So that we live in some special time when the aliens are ready to wrap it all up? I mean, maybe, just show me the data.

Trish MacGregor: [00:35:48] Maybe that it was the so-called bad race that was doing these abductions and these medical experiments. Maybe they’re the ones who have kind of backed off. But if so, then let’s bring in the good guys.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:01] I agree. I kind of said I’m going to do this Skeptiko Jeopardy thing and then I’ve kind of hogged the board. So where do we want to go? What what topic do you feel like we want to share with people?

Trish MacGregor: [00:36:17] to share with people Spirit contact.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:22] Let’s talk about Spirit contact and we already did a little bit but one of the main questions I have regarding Spirit contact is in which way do we understand Spirit contact and spirit communication to be different from?

What we’ve already been talking about synchros or ET communication the extended realm and also I have to ask you maybe if you want to share with folks The Rock in the graveyard story because that was a weird one great one in and it also you don’t want one thing people will find it when in your books is you guys are so.

Raven open and you share about your your life together as a couple and you share about with your your daughter and this is a story that encompasses that a kind of family story.

Rob MacGregor: [00:37:13] Yeah

Trish MacGregor: [00:37:13] people kind of think we’re

weird

to

go

out. We got this hotel. We looked up online and seem really nice right on the water and it was kind of u-shaped with. Parts on either side in the back and look like a nice Garden in the middle and then the ocean the other side the garden actually was a graveyard and and we were right in the back on the first level.

So our porch overlooked the graveyard

and Megan did not like

Rob MacGregor: [00:37:56] that. And she didn’t like having the crater right there. But so one day we saw that the gate was open. So let’s go in and see what’s going on. And so we walked in there and the first thing we see. It’s like half of a Windsurfer sticking up as a grave marker and we had thought this was some ancient graveyard that had been there in a historical one, but this guy had just died four months ago.

And that was half of his

Trish MacGregor: [00:38:26] young

Rob MacGregor: [00:38:27] Surfer was his wherever the wind blows I will be that was when it said on and his name which is cool. And then we see the grave.

Trish MacGregor: [00:38:38] Jigger pretty big digger.

Rob MacGregor: [00:38:40] Yeah, he comes up to us and he says come on us. I’m going to show you this there the sand here goes up all the time.

And so there’s graveyards layers layers of Graves and so he was digging a grave to bury somebody and he came upon another grave from. An earlier great earlier graveyard and you wanted to show it to us and we said oh, that’s

Trish MacGregor: [00:39:09] okay. We

Rob MacGregor: [00:39:13] don’t have to just have to see what’s over there. So on the way out Rob, yeah.

And so we now the porch look right out there in the ocean. However, the door to the apartment was actually closer to the graveyard than we had been before but so that night we go to bed fairly early about eleven ten or eleven o’clock. I get a sleeping.

Trish MacGregor: [00:39:48] She’s a separate

Rob MacGregor: [00:39:50] room and we both fall asleep and suddenly.

we hear this sound. Boom

Trish MacGregor: [00:39:59] sound like a wrecking ball

Rob MacGregor: [00:40:00] like a wrecking ball hitting the side of the building and had a very resonant sound and at first I now am I dreaming this or is this happening and it’s just my personal dream. And so this happened three times three three bangs like that three times and after the ninth 1/9 bank, I sat up and Trish

simultaneously

set up.

She had heard the same thing. And it was this sense. They were something very I don’t know and lightning about it. I just felt really filled with a very positive sense of this we weren’t afraid it

Trish MacGregor: [00:40:39] wasn’t

right

Rob MacGregor: [00:40:39] nothing

Trish MacGregor: [00:40:40] frightening strange,

Rob MacGregor: [00:40:41] but another television came on and. So it was like Spirit contact, but it wasn’t the Spirit contact where you’re connecting with the family deceased family members because of the rock.

Trish MacGregor: [00:40:54] So the next day he put that rock

Rob MacGregor: [00:40:56] back into the grave

interesting experience because it was such a resonant. Sound that felt both inner and outer and and

Trish MacGregor: [00:41:10] Megan never heard anything yet. She never heard of which is probably good.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:15] Well, that’s it credible story in you know, we could like we were talking about before we could really drill into how you knew it was the Rock and you know, did that really

Trish MacGregor: [00:41:25] happen my sense?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:27] I mean but isn’t that the way it is? I mean that’s like we’re told it is for it’s like that’s what is Meaningful and that’s the connection again to your synchronicities if it’s like meaningful to you than it probably didn’t cry, 

Rob MacGregor: [00:41:39] Yeah, we actually thought there might have been an earthquake so we went to the management and asked him if anything there had been any reports of earthquake or anything like that and then we told them what happened they said oh that’s that’s the spirit so but they’re friendly they’re good and

Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:54] let’s talk about all that and let’s talk about a couple of these books the secrets of spirit communication and synchronicity and the other side. So this topic of spirit communication is something you guys have written about and. From that story and as well as your work in mediums and spiritualists communities you kind of know a lot about what will people find in these books.

And what else do you want to share about spirit communication that you think is most misunderstood. Let

Trish MacGregor: [00:42:28] me tell you let me give you one really personal example in 2000. My mother died of complications from Alzheimer’s and five years later. My dad complications of core concerns and over the years.

I tried to keep track of them in the afterlife through grains. Like I would dream of my mother still using her walker and calling for my dad or I’d see my dad, you know using his wheelchair. So one night Rob taught him. Meditation course and I think he did a eyes partially open meditation. Well anyway, so my eyes are partially open that’s a really relaxed State and in a corner of the room.

I suddenly saw my mother and she was standing outside a theater laughing and motion people to come on into the theater and she looks really young like in her 30s maybe and then she waves at somebody and so I looked at where she was waving. And I see my dad who also is younger

trotting

up to her and they looked really happy and then they realized I think they both kind of turned and there was some recognition that I could see them and they just faded away.

Rob MacGregor: [00:43:38] I think that was also the meditation Workshop where I was teaching a six sessions and that was the sixth one and the last one so just as we completed the final moment of the. Meditation the lights go out. And so I think or maybe there was a power cord or something Rock back flip on the switch and somehow had flipped off and there’s nobody nobody was standing back there and that but it just came right at the perfect moment lights out as the

Trish MacGregor: [00:44:15] yeah like that.

Rob MacGregor: [00:44:19] My personal contact with the other side is often through deceased loved ones contacts with friends or relatives who have died like a cousin of mine. I wasn’t real close to him. And I knew he had brain cancer and was was very ill and I didn’t know how much longer he had left. But I had this dream it was a very Vivid dream that there he was and you look very healthy which was surprising and looking around and saying what’s happening, you know, and then he vanishes and the next morning.

My sister called me and said he had Jonathan just died

Trish MacGregor: [00:45:05] the dreams are from what we’ve been able to find out from our research seem to be the most common way that people initially have. Spirit

Rob MacGregor: [00:45:13] contact

Trish MacGregor: [00:45:14] maybe because it’s so non-threatening, you know, you dream about somebody but it’s very good.

Rob MacGregor: [00:45:21] My mother had some interesting contacts with my father after he died.

He used to sit in this chair in the den and read a lot and after he passed my mother was sitting there and they live in Minneapolis as renter and the window had frost it over. And his nickname was Mac and she looked and there were the initials Mac in the frost right next to where he had hid

Trish MacGregor: [00:45:50] said last time she saw him.

Rob MacGregor: [00:45:52] Yeah, that is a weird. This is when she was in that same chair. She’s kind of half asleep half awake and coming away and look there he was standing in the doorway. Of the den and here’s wearing this orange striped shirt. And then she says to where did you get that shirt from and he just laughs and vanishes

Alex Tsakiris: [00:46:17] kill some of the questions.

I’ve always had about medium communication and spirit communication my love to get your opinion on it and just done a number of shows as it turns out with some different mediums one. I always have a hard time. Sorting through the discrepancies. Like I had of this made amount outstanding medium. No doubt.

She’s terrific and she’s doing great work. She’s doing she’s a death Doula, you know, she goes around the hospice centers and helps people are making the transition helps families for making this transition and she uses her mediumistic abilities, but she also just uses good death Doula kind of things, but we get to talking about reincarnation.

And it turns out she’s from the spiritualist tradition, you know the spiritualist church and they don’t really don’t believe in that which is strange the whole bleep thing. The belief thing is strange, you know, you have leaves your geraniums are close to know all this stuff and I spoke with another just delightful person a medium from the UK and she says, yeah.

I was kind of brought up in that tradition and that belief and then I had this experience with this woman who kind of helped me see my past lives. And help me understand reincarnation what’s going on that I don’t suppose we understand to be communicating with these other Realms can’t resolve like a basic question about like reincarnation.

And what does that say in general for the information? We’re getting through.

Rob MacGregor: [00:47:47] I know. We tend to think about reincarnation in linear time that this life before this life after where if you think outside of linear time all of these lights coexisting simultaneously, so you are your own personality that person was on personality, but your higher self is related to all of those personality.

So maybe you look at that definition, that could be one that. Could you could say Okay reincarnation doesn’t exist or you could say yes, it does exist, you

Trish MacGregor: [00:48:25] know, but that he’s found out that the actual spiritualist

belief

rise green carnation. Is that real that doesn’t exist,

how could they get that?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:34] How can they get that wrong? You know if we’re going to bring it down to really kind of concrete terms, you know, which I hate because of right and wrong is kind of iffy. But but that’s how it comes across right because people read your books and your books are well organized and well thought out to kind of make a case or to say how to make for example how to improve your chances of having spirit communication which is totally valid and that’s what people want to know.

You know, how can I. Communicate directly with people who’ve passed because in meetings will tell you that to you know, a lot of mediums best meanings will say hey do it yourself. That’s the best way because they realize they are an intermediary and they’re somewhat getting in the way but I’m again kind of interested in the phenomenon itself, you know, like why is there how could there be that?

We don’t why is there that dog? You know, why does it get I don’t

Trish MacGregor: [00:49:26] know. It’s very mysterious. I remember the first time there’s a medium of custody or we know really well. We’ve known her for years and one time in a reading I said to our simple, can you tell me about my you know past lives because oh there’s we don’t we don’t believe in reincarnation and set there and I was just like

so shocked,

you know, just it.

Okay. Well is that mean you’re just stuck in the afterlife for all this time you what

happens?

You know, and she said no. No, you don’t you explain to me what whatever the belief system was about. What happens is you there

Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:00] and then you know, this is kind of related question, but something I want to ask you guys.

That the other problem with the reincarnation thing and I pointed it out. Is that the data that we get back so we can get all attached to the data and Science and all that stuff and there’s so many problems with it. But at the same time we have a need we all have a desire to kind of understand things in a rational and a logical way.

So if you look at the data that comes back about reincarnation. It’s pretty convincing. You know, you look those folks the University of Virginia. Even Senator Jim Tucker now, you know not like bam. Let’s see what these case after case where the data comes through clearly and you know, they’ve done it in a controlled way and they have the birthmarks and all this stuff day-to-day to data and then.

That what do you do with that? What why how do how much do we rely on that data or to what extent is that? Not even a valid path to pursue is it just another way that were deceiving ourselves to think we can nail these things down with data you guys have dealt with a lot of. Scientifically minded people we can talk about remote viewing and Jill mechanical and you know Stargate or you know, any number of ways where you guys are familiar with science and the data that support they’d at least read all that.

But

Trish MacGregor: [00:51:24] Carol Bowman wrote two books. Children’s past lives and she actually studied within Stevenson and one of the areas for they differed from my understanding is that Carol felt that these regressions rather than just, you know, finding out who you were that they’re really about healing certain trauma in this life that may be related to previous lives.

And she you know, are you familiar with the lining or case but the kid who

Alex Tsakiris: [00:51:55] does the world? They

Trish MacGregor: [00:51:57] first contacted Carol and she flew down to where they lived and talk to the boy and she felt there was a genuine case that she wrote the introduction to their book. But what’s interesting I said, well Carol, give me the chart data.

I want to look at this kid’s chart. He’s astrology trip. So she I mean the data and they had only a time of birth. And place of birth for his previous Life as a World War II pilot, but what I noticed. in astrology, you have the North Node of the moon and the South node of the Moon. The North Node is the direction you’re supposed to move in this lifetime to achieve all of your potential.

The South node is your comfort zone things. You’ve you’ve mastered in previous lives. For this kid the nodes were reversed. And I thought I don’t know what this means but it’s really interesting. So, you know

in answer to your question. I mean, you can collect all

kinds of data whether it’s to astrology or science

or whatever and you may never have the answer,

you know, the answer may still elude

you.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:53:02] Fair enough I cannot I can personally attest to that where else might we go. Can we should we tell people about should we share with you about all this work? You’ve done?

Trish MacGregor: [00:53:14] Do Wesley this is do Wesley

Rob MacGregor: [00:53:16] Wesley Meeks

Alex Tsakiris: [00:53:18] fascinating this story the first question. I have to ask and once they hear the story everyone will ask the same question is tell me this is for real.

Tell me if I’d this because this story folks is just crazy crazy start. Do we do we know this guy’s for real? Yes,

Rob MacGregor: [00:53:42] it is.

Trish MacGregor: [00:53:43] Let’s talk to

Rob MacGregor: [00:53:44] him. Yeah over several years of communicated with him and he said he was a police officer for 15 years you worked in child protective services. Will your is became a private?

Investigator I think for several years and then he now is does security and surveillance at a Texas. He’s from Texas and at a Texas hospital which is current job and his experiences started when he was 10 years old when he was. In coming from I think it was the Fourth of July family event. They were driving home and Central, Texas and they’re the only car in the road dark and suddenly there was this green light about 500 feet in front of the car and change colors green blue red, and it was there for about five minutes is they they didn’t know what it was.

And then it vanished unlike he was very interested. But nobody in family seemed to be curious and wanting to talk about it anymore after

Alex Tsakiris: [00:54:54] that to deceive the sadly tail. So he has like two brothers or some in the car

Rob MacGregor: [00:54:59] and it’s a couple Brothers right parents and. After that, he started having out-of-body experiences, which he had no idea whether or not about it experience those his first one he lifted up and out of his body and he saw floating near the ceiling.

He saw his brother getting up to go to the bathroom and then brother came back and was shaking shaking him for him to go to the bathroom. And that’s when he came back down into his body. That was his first experience. So he told his brother. Parents and brother laughed at him and his parents got mad at him for telling stories and are just I think the father was upset in the mother said it was just a dream, you know, nothing to it and but he kept having these experiences and then he didn’t he stop talking about him to anybody for

Trish MacGregor: [00:55:53] that is the problem, you know

Rob MacGregor: [00:55:56] for years.

You have these and then the you I think you’re still pretty young. When yeah when the when the aliens got involved they would. He describes one experience where there were seven or eight of these small beings for the 5 feet tall throughout you accepting the surrounding his bed and they lift him up.

Now. I’m not sure whether he is out of body or in his body

Alex Tsakiris: [00:56:23] pulled from the account from the account the way I read it. It’s one of the things I want to ask you about because later when he’s married, his wife feels him physically moving. From the bed so he has some evidence that some of his out-of-body experiences aren’t even out of bodies earring in looking through the which is also some of the data we get back from encounters alien contact stories.

It’s both so sometimes it’s as Consciousness moving outside of the bank astral travel thing.

Rob MacGregor: [00:56:57] It’s.

Two of them lifted him and took his arms and their hovered above the bed and spinning him around and around and around and then they they all surround him and they he’s in the center and they spin around him like sufis are dancing sufis, and I don’t know what they’re doing and but maybe just.

Working with them, you know just like this Susan women that were that guy in the veterinarian has similar unusual experiences with these beings. And so then he starts doing these Explorations on his own. It doesn’t always involve ETS. And one thing that the bar, oh, yeah. We love the story.

This

is you know, this is an unusual he feels that he has developed the ability to manipulate matter while out-of-body.

So he goes to a topless bar and he sees another guy who’s our body at the bar. Yeah, sounds funny joke, so the waitress walks by. And he reaches out and grabs her she’s wearing these shorts shortage grabs her hooks under the band pulls down the shorts and the underwear down to her knees.

She

drops your drinks spins around

looking

for the drunk see anybody and then the other guy who is out of body.

He was shakes

his head like that.

Very strange story.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:58:48] Let’s add a couple things to this story because it’s going to get even even

louder

and it’s a way that people love to kind of engage with this

particularly in the way that you guys do it

because I first wanted to establish that you know, this is somebody you’ve actually talked to it’s a real person and he does have this background police is a cop, you know, I’ve trained Observer the other thing that correct me if I’m wrong, but at some point he verifies with his brother.

And his brother says yeah, I didn’t want to talk about it. But yeah, I remember that experience to I remember that first encounter on July 4th. And I you know and you hear this over and over again with families, you know where everybody is kind of berries it or sometimes it’s subconsciously buried but there’s reason he is independent verification that some of this stuff happened.

And then the other part like you mentioned it later he gets married and he has verification of his he’s complaining. He’s sharing some of this stuff with his wife and then at some point now he’s moving off the bed and he’s cold as ice when he comes back to the bed. So there’s kind of this contact with the physical world.

And then we launched into these other stories that you’re telling like with the bar thing is unbelievable. And then what happened or is the what happens in the astral realm stays in the astral

Rob MacGregor: [01:00:03] back?

Into the cosmos soaring. It’s he says it started like a Star Trek episode. Where you go? Yeah everything. The stars are like lions you’re shooting through space and then he thinks about what he thinks of the akashic record is best mansion He thinks about the mansion and then he slows down and stops and there’s this Mansion.

He’s hovering above it and he says it’s hard to describe. It’s so huge and so beautiful and there’s all of these different rooms and each room has this incredible large vase. I’m at that has this art and it’s just incredible and that that’s the stories of the individuals each one. Each person has this supposedly has.

This room in this vast mansion and so we’re waiting. You know, I’m waiting to hear this. What’s what’s all the knowledge that is gaining and then it turns into something else completely that he goes down in the center there in the plaza area and he meets this older woman wearing this long dress and.

She approaches him and kind of acting like a guy and at some point she tells him that I’m not really an older woman, but I can change my images to I feel comfortable like this and people don’t recognize me and he didn’t he said I always wanted. That’s what ways is concerned about being recognized.

She was being concerned about being recognized. But so anyway in a Flash she she changes and she’s a younger one. And very true he was not average-looking. I guess, you

Alex Tsakiris: [01:02:10] know, I love the way, you know, the details of what he tells us their knowledge in there. Is this kind of telepathic download where she’s able to answer all these questions.

So right we normally say with a spiritual higher ordered being and then shifts and he goes. Like switching guy, you know, so Jess has got it. She was hot. You know, she was pretty good superhot, you know, but Julia she’s pretty good-looking

Rob MacGregor: [01:02:44] suddenly. They don’t have any clothes on and then he wanders did I ever have any clothes on?

And so he can tell that she wants to have sex and this we wrote about this on our blog and several different episodes and if became very controversial some people are very. Upset by this story of going to the akashic record and having sex and they thought this was some kind of lower being that he

Alex Tsakiris: [01:03:13] is he doesn’t have he doesn’t have sex here.

I mean, I

Trish MacGregor: [01:03:16] know he has an orgasmic

Alex Tsakiris: [01:03:18] has the most amazing and and also, you know talk about tantric stuff. He’s not talking about it just in terms of sex. Although this is a guy who likes to out-of-body travel the topless bars talking about it as true spiritual union of

Rob MacGregor: [01:03:35] these. This is levitation sex

Alex Tsakiris: [01:03:38] everything you could Omni magazine here baby Prime stuff, you know, so it’s all that that that stuff that they kind of touches them all these things.

And then also I want to emphasize the other point, which is to me really important like you post it to your. Form and you get some really smart people and some deep people on your form who are going. Hey, I’m you know, I have spirit communication abilities and I think this is a lower realm other people, you know, not necessarily.

So we’re going to talk a minute, you know, people need to check out your blog because you guys post a lot of this stuff there. It’s an ongoing community and there’s some deeper thought that you guys follow up with on that. So, I’m sorry, but I want to share all that because it’s fantastic. Please continue the story.

Rob MacGregor: [01:04:23] Yeah, well that’s connect

Trish MacGregor: [01:04:24] one of the women who commented on this kind of Cannon we talk about her and Aliens the backyard because she’s had a lot of experience with with abductions and out-of-body travel this kind of thing. If she felt Connie’s thing was we don’t really know how complicated. The other side is or how complicated you know, when you go out of your body, we don’t we don’t really know and

Rob MacGregor: [01:04:46] you know, the Matrix of

Trish MacGregor: [01:04:46] reality is

vastly complex and she’s had experience with somebody in one of her former doctors who became British it very close to and that.

She had contact with him and sexual Manner and she said it was similarly incredible like nothing Beyond any kind of sexual experience that. She’s ever had the same thing that he said so, you know, I just want him to go on and on and it was just kind of makes you want

Alex Tsakiris: [01:05:24] Well, I love the openness that you have about that, because just in the sense that I think it’s, to  me, the only way to really understand, even to begin to understand the data, is to look at the possibilities. I don’t think we have to take everyone’s story and give them equal weight, that’s not what I’m saying, but when we find, like you do, people, and you vet them the best you can, and you get these accounts. I like the way you guys are able to just lay these out in a book and then say, “Okay, they don’t all fit together perfectly with one answer,” kind of thing. And that’s certainly the story with Wes Meeks, and I’m not trying to pigeonhole it down and say it either has to be true in this sense or it has to be that way.

So how does the story end, these guys are still in contact Wes Meeks, he’s still having different experiences but he’s still in that astral realm, kind of doing…?

Rob MacGregor: [01:06:26] Yeah, but he’s a little frustrated because he’s not getting out that much anymore. The couple of times I’ve talked to him, he would actually like to be a psychic detective, using his abilities, and I told him that’s a very difficult road to go. We did and investigation into psychic detectives and one man, actually, because he knew so much about this murder, it was the Boston Strangler case actually, that he became a suspect.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:07:07] All of the time, all of the time. I’ve talked to a bunch of psychic detectives on the show and if you’re going to go into that field, the first thing you have to know is you’re going to be a suspect in every case.

Rob MacGregor: [01:07:17] Exactly, because you know too much. And the Boston Strangler was able to talk his way into these women’s houses, without having to break in, and now they thought, “Well, he’s trying to talk his way into the police investigation too, this could be him.” And what they did is, they gave him this truth serum, a combination of…

Trish MacGregor: [01:07:43] This is George Hardy.

Rob MacGregor: [01:07:44] George Hardy, right. They gave him a combination of drugs that effected his nervous system for the rest of his life. We met 25 years after the Boston Strangler case and he’s still very upset about that and not in good physical health.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:03] I spoke with a medium not too long ago, again, just a delightful person and somebody I really liked at the end of the day and respected, but this ties in a couple of the different stories we’ve been talking about already. She had an experience with her mom passing that opened her up psychically. And then in this opening up, a spirit comes to her and says, “I want you to help me resolve my case. I was murdered and I’d like justice,” and you’ll hear about this, I’m sure you guys can attest to this. We’ll hear about this a lot from people who get into the psychic detective stuff and some people go there and some people don’t. She didn’t want to go there, but this spirit kept pestering her. So finally she calls the local police department and says, “Here’s what I have,” and she immediately becomes a suspect, but she’s got a family and she has a pretty good alibi, so she’s able to get over that, but it’s pretty upsetting in her life.

But the other thing that happens with it, a couple things happen with it. One is, it doesn’t lead to a prosecution, which is another thing that skeptics particularly have a problem with. It’s like, “Well, they’ve got him, right?” It’s like no, they can give all of the information in the world and it might not lead to a conviction because there’s this whole legal process. In her case, the detective, after he retired from the case, years later, a couple of years later, contacted her and said, “I’d like to work with you  more, because we weren’t able to do anything. We think you’re right about who you identified as the suspect, but we weren’t able to go there. Now I’m a private investigator, I want to go there.”

Trish MacGregor: [01:09:52] Was it resolved?

Alex Tsakiris: [01:09:53] No, it never was resolved. It brings up a bunch of interesting questions, again, back to what happens in the astral realm stays in the astral realm. This person who’s stuck in the astral realm is trying to resolve their case, her case isn’t resolved, it isn’t meant to be resolved or whatever.

So do you have any thoughts about that? And also, this  medium had the ability to talk to ET and I wonder why other mediums don’t lead with, “Oh, yeah, of course I’m talking to beings from other planets all of the time,” but again, that seems to be, strangely, outside of the swing zone for a lot.

Trish MacGregor: [01:10:34] Back in 1987, I think it was, when Adam Walsh vanished, a friend of ours was an artist and psychic, was working with a Cooper City Cop and he wanted to drive around the mall where Adam was last seen and Renee was an empath. So they were driving along and all of a sudden Renee started gasping and then she just starts sobbing. She said, “Adam Walsh was decapitated.” And about two weeks, three weeks later, they found his decapitated body.

Rob MacGregor: [01:11:06] No, they only found his head.

Trish MacGregor: [01:11:08] Oh, they only found his head. So years later, we were with Renee, a young girl had disappeared from Greenacres, Florida. So Renee says, “Do you guys want to come with me to the police station and see how I do this?” I said, “Sure.” So we went to Cooper City station and Renee did her thing and she had the little girl’s toys and eventually she led the police to this field that was fenced in and she said, “I think the body’s in there, and I believe that the boyfriend did it.”

Alex Tsakiris: [01:11:39] You know, the other interesting thing about that story, and in a way it kind of brings us back full circle to the synchronicity thing, doesn’t it?  I wanted to throw in, Marisa Ryan was the the medium that I was referring to and her connection with ET, in that she’s talking to ET and again, it blows me away. If ET is out there then why isn’t every medium leading with, “And of course, ET is out there too and I talk to ET all of the time”?

Trish MacGregor: [01:12:15] Well, I think he should be on your show.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:12:18] I don’t know, you know, maybe ET has been, who knows? We’re probably reaching the time limit of what people can bear to hear, but we could go on and on and on. We haven’t talked about a lot of these topics so I’d love to have you guys back on.

Trish MacGregor: [01:12:39] That would be great.

Rob MacGregor: [01:12:40] There’s a lot more.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:12:42] There’s a lot, lot more, including Rob and I are yoga bros and he not only teaches meditation, but he teaches, yoga.

Rob MacGregor: [01:12:50] I didn’t start doing yoga until I was 40 years old. Now I’ve done it for 31 years.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:12:56] That’s awesome. I’ve done it for a lot of years too and you mentioned Iyengar and my first teacher in Dallas was of that lineage, and actually brought Iyengar to Dallas. A whole interesting thing to talk about there, we want to talk about the dark side, because Iyengar was not a very nice guy and he was kind of mean to some of his students. And I even saw that firsthand in a little workshop that we did where he, kind of had not evolved in so much, with all of those downward dogs that he did.

So, the spiritual path is interesting and the dark spiritual path, why are some of these people who seem to be advanced, seem to be doing some kind of pretty dangerous things, which has an interesting link back to the Wes Meeks story in that we’ve got to be perfect. And he’s not perfect, but I love the way that he says he’s not perfect, but that raises a bunch of interesting questions about what is true spirituality?

Rob MacGregor: [01:14:02] One other thing about Wes Meeks is that he had sent me his two notebooks and journals that he had taken notes after these experiences and it was really interesting going through them. And when I got to the one on the Akashic record, it differed a little bit from his telling it because he told it like he didn’t know what the Akashic record was but he was saying that it was this place, this mansion of knowledge, but in the journal he writes Akashic record right at the top. So little differences like that, but essentially the story was the same though, that he had written.

Trish MacGregor: [01:14:44] And he made the mistake of telling his wife, who threatened to divorce him.

Rob MacGregor: [01:14:45] That’s the other part of the story. His wife was very upset when she found out that the best sex… the Akashic record.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:14:56]. You know, we have to throw that in, I’m sorry I left that out because that’s a great part to that story. It’s so human, I mean, who writes this story down, but he wants to write it down in his journal. I guess that’s human enough. He wants to remember it and he locks it up and his wife finds it. This is like a question, you know, I don’t have a lot of experience with these experiences, I’m pretty dense, but I have been able to lucid dream, mainly through my son who was a lucid dreamer from an early age and was telling me, “Yeah, this happens to me.” It kind of spoke my curiosity in seeing if that’s real. And anyone who lucid dreams, if they’re honest about it, one of the first things they’ll talk about is, “Can you have sex in them?” And then it raises that same question of, what are your obligations or your responsibilities if you’re married?

So, our buddy Wes Meeks, he has this incredible sexual experience, but then he writes it down and his wife reads it and she’s pissed off. I mean that is in this real world, right?

Rob MacGregor: [01:16:18] Yeah, and even this woman we’re working with now, who is a retired veterinarian, an evolved person, she goes out of her body and has this experience too. She grabs this guy and they start doing it and she writes it and puts it right out front and she wonders why she did that but it was great.

So, you know, and she she wonders why I did that but it was great.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:16:38] Fantastic. Well, you know, the other thing I wanted to point people to, and I just pulled it up…

Rob MacGregor: [01:16:43] synchrosecrets.com.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:16:46] You can see it up there but you really have to visit it, just pulling it up there doesn’t do it justice. But I’ll have links in the show notes to all of that. And these books folks, good books. And if you’re an Amazon person and if you have the Amazon Unlimited, like a lot of you I know have, you’re going to be able to… Now, this isn’t helping these authors out and we need to help these authors out, but they’ve established a pretty good career so I don’t need to worry too much about them, but a lot of these books are available for free read on Amazon. So take advantage of that, you’ll get a sense for well-written books, well-researched books that deliver on what they promise. So The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, you can say, “Oh gee, that sounds a little too worked over by the publisher,” but it really works. There’s some good solid advice in there, it’s laid out in a way that you can follow it and then some of these other books are just incredible in their own right.

Before we let you go, tell us more about some of the books that people find most interesting, surprising. Rob, you’ve got to tell us about the Indiana Jones books. People are not going to believe that you did that. You also wrote a book with the Jedi Master, Billy Dee Williams.

Rob MacGregor: [01:18:21] Yeah, two books. Billy Dee Williams and I wrote for George Lucas for three years writing seven Indiana Jones novels starting with the Last Crusade, which I got the script, he gave me the script and I adapted it into a novel and that was on a New York Times bestseller list. So they said, “Do you want to try some original Indiana Jones novels?” It was his idea to go back to, like prequels before the movies, the 1920s to do the 1920s, which is what I did in the six original ones. They were pretty much open to stories that I wanted to pursue, they didn’t have a lot of restrictions at. George’s thing is that they mystical object has to be a real object that we know about some legend, that you can’t just make something up out of old cloth, that it has to be like the Omphalos in the Peril at Delphi, the first one is an actual object, mystical object.

So that was pretty much it and it was one after another. Four months to write one, the deadline, and then I had to start the next day on the next one and there was a lot travel, as Indian Jones is, you know, I’m going all over the world. And we didn’t have the internet at that time, when I wrote those, in the late 80s, early 90s. But fortunately, in my younger years, I would work at a newspaper for a year or two, save money and then travel overseas, so Central South America, Europe, North Africa.

So I had a lot of personal travel experiences and I always went to the ruins because when I started college, I wanted to be an archaeologist actually, and I found out that there were more jobs in journalism, so I became a reporter and I got a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism and worked on newspapers for 12 years before I met Trish and moved to freelance. But I would take these trips up to six months to start my own traveling different parts of the world and that really helped out for the Indiana Jones novels.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:20:40] What do you think, a lot of people are you’re going to be super curious about that, what do you make about maybe the deeper connection of the Indiana Jones with all the other work that you’ve done? Do you think Lucas was and is tapping into some deeper meaning there? It certainly seems like he’s on the on the verge of that.

Trish MacGregor: [01:21:01] I think that’s the archetype, you know.

Rob MacGregor: [01:21:03] There’s something special about the Indiana Jones character. He is a legendary character, an archetype of adventure and everybody knows him. And people ask me, “Well, what do you write about and what kind of books do you write?” and I always tell them, “You may not know my name but you’re going to know the one of my characters.” I didn’t create the character, but I gave him part of his early life.

Trish MacGregor: [01:21:37] And we got to go to Skywalker Ranch, which I’ll tell you is amazing, and it was in the days before they had security.

Rob MacGregor: [01:21:44] That’s where Lucas had his headquarters, Production Studio.

Trish MacGregor: [01:21:51] He has the most amazing library. It was just filled with occult books, it was round. He had a ladder that went around the room and our daughter was only about eight months old, I think, when we went and she just crawled around on the floor and I said, “Megan, here’s something you can tell your kids. You got to go to Skywalker Ranch and crawled around on the floor, in their library.”  

Alex Tsakiris: [01:22:16] That is a story to tell, that is a story to tell. Well, you guys have been awesome and thanks for sharing so much.

Trish MacGregor: [01:22:22] Well, thank you. You’re a really great host. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:22:25] Oh, it’s easy, it’s easy when you pick the right guests, which my audience did for me here.

So again, first of of many chats because we really have scratched the surface. But if you were in the dark about these amazing folks, Rob and Trish MacGregor, please don’t stay in the dark, go ahead and check out all of their books. You all have a great day.

Trish MacGregor: [01:22:51] Yeah, you too Alex. Thanks so much.

Rob MacGregor: [01:22:53] Thank you, Alex

Alex Tsakiris: [01:22:57] Thanks again to Rob and Trish MacGregor for joining me today on Skeptiko, and thanks to Mike Patterson for helping connect me with them and pointing them in my direction. So it was a great chat. I really enjoyed it.

I’m going to tee up one kind of weird question here from all of the different things that we talked about. What do you make of the Wes Meeks case? I mean, I think it speaks to so many of the issues with this interview. One is, are these researchers, are these authors credible? Have they done their due diligence in finding this case? Because if we do take this case at face value, it raises so many of the questions we have about the extended consciousness realm. I don’t think it’s wrong to question the trickster or the malevolent aspect of a spirit that gets involved in this way, but maybe that’s too narrow of a definition to think that all interactions we would have with some kind of divine God would be a certain way. So it raises all of those kinds of questions. 

It also raises a bunch of questions about the akashic field in the akashic records, which I find incredibly over-simplistic in a way, that makes me question it again. So, there are so many questions around that narrow little case that I find interesting, and that’s the reason I wanted to tee it up. So let me know your thoughts on that.

I always point people to the Skeptiko Forum for communicating, especially with me and people who are really listening to the show and desiring to have greater interaction, like I am, about these topics. Skeptiko Forum is a place to go and you can get there from the Skeptiko website, skeptiko.com. There you can find all of our previous shows, over 400 of them that you can download, listen to, share with people you think should be hearing it.

Well, I have a number of interesting shows coming up, do stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care, and bye for now. [box]