"The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee" by Mike Clelland

Aside from the overwhelming desire to just figure out what the hell is happening with the UFO phenomenon, it's also rad to have a subject matter that can still make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. And with all of our senses being constantly overwhelmed by technology from all angles, I find it more and more rare to really have an exciting, spooky experience these days. So when I stumbled across a few stories that not only involved graphic and bizarre UFO encounters but also mixed with terrifically creepy late night experiences with owls, I was intrigued to say the least. So I hunted down the source of these stories and was led to a new book by first time author Mike Clelland.

Mike Clelland became interested in this subject as a result of a strange personal experience. An experience that, at first seemed incredible, but didn't really sink in until he had the EXACT same strange experience a few days later. This all centered around a weird interaction with a group of owls. That's right, owls. This sparked Mike to start a blog about his experience and he soon was overwhelmed with readers leaving comments about having very similar experiences to his. Eventually, Mike began investigating the issue deeper and collecting first-hand accounts of other experiencers, and the stories he started to hear went beyond the bizarre and into the truly weird.

A young man named Joe was driving his 4 friends home one night when he and his friend Dave, in the passenger seat, saw a brilliant blue light descending in the sky. Both Joe and Dave were speechless until after they had lost sight of it beyond the tree line. After the shock wore off, they told the three people in the back seats what they had just seen. They were traveling about 55 mph when a white owl flew right up alongside their car with it's head turned, staring directly at the passengers. This owl was flying right next to the passenger window, close enough that Dave could have reached out and touched it. The owl hovered there for about five seconds and then flew off. Then, less than a mile down the road, another white owl did the exact same thing--again staring sideways while flying right next to the car staring in Dave's window. Suddenly everyone in the car began screaming, as if they were all feeling the same primal fear.

The types of experiences related between the pages of The Messengers range from the mundane to horrifically creepy. But one thing that is for sure, is that they were very real to the people who experienced them. Some of them never even realized that the incident was strange at all until the re-tell their story to Mike. And as Mike digs deeper and collects more and more stories another pattern becomes strongly consistent with nearly every person he interviews....they have also had some sort of sighting or contact with UFO's or what they believed to be extraterrestrials. And a lot of the stories seem to overlap, enough of which that Mike makes a pretty obvious conclusion that there is a connection between the two.

Corina Saebels was heading home with her family, driving slowly, and at a sharp bend, right in the beam of the headlights, they saw what she can only describe as a typical gray alien standing on the side of the road. "I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road and screamed. The children and I began to shake uncrontrollably, but oddly Rob (her husband) just calmly turned to me and said 'What are you guys so worried about? It's only a big owl!"

One of the most consistent issues that pops up with this topic is the idea of a "screen memory". (Hence the name of the Alien Workshop video "Memory Screen) The idea is that when aliens are interacting with humans they somehow are influencing people to see something other than a scary alien being, in order to keep them calm through the experience. And it seems that the most common 'screen memory' people remember after such an experience, is that of seeing strange 3-4 foot tall owls. In an interview with the author of possibly the most famous alien abduction story ever "Communion", Whitley Strieber explained that long before he started having abduction experiences "There was a white owl that used to stand in our back yard and watch the windows of my bedroom when I was a child. It made my folks nervous. This was during the time that they started nailing the screens shut". Something really creepy seemed to be going on here. But the further The Messengers goes on the more we discover that there are a multitude of owl experiences that are clearly not screen memories, but real, actual owls that are interacting with people. There are many people who tell stories about an owl that would follow them around town for several weeks or even months. They'd stay out in the front yard, on a light post or in a tree, and then would follow these people around town as they ran errands. Never interacting with them directly, but seemingly keeping an eye on them at all times of the day.

Clelland investigates every possible theory and scenario that could help explain what is going on here. Covering topics of shamanism to mythology, from the story of the mothman to the symbolism of the owl at Bohemian Grove. It's a really extensive journey and it is filled with an endless trove of incredible stories that mostly sound far too bizarre to have been made up. I highly recommend this book to skeptics and UFOlogy fans alike. It is endlessly entertaining, even if you don't end up believing that there is something of substance happening here.

Perhaps I should close with my own little story. Obviously, it can't come anywhere near matching the level of intensity that some of the stories in the book convey, but it's strange nonetheless. I read about this book last December and told my mother about it one day. And then a few weeks later I was back in Florida for the holidays and, surprise, I opened up one of my presents on Christmas morning and found she had gotten the book for me. I started to read it that very same night. The next day I spent running errands around town with my girlfriend and we pulled back up to my mom's house just after the sun had set. As we climbed out of the car I happened to look up at the power lines running behind my mom's house and there sat a tiny little screech owl. It sat motionless staring straight into my mom's back window. We tried to tread lightly to not scare it away and just watched him for several minutes. Then we crept around to get a look at him from the front and for a split second our view of him was obscured by some tall standing bamboo. As our view cleared again he was gone. We never saw him fly off. He had just disappeared that quickly. Now, this is most likely just a coincidence, but I probably haven't seen an owl in the wild in at least a decade. But the day after I started reading a book about the owl and it's connections to UFO's, aliens and synchronicities, here I was catching at a tiny owl staring intently into my mother's back window. Very. Wild. Stuff.

Thanks for reading and if you happen to read this book please let us know in the comments section one day. I'd love to hear your opinions and reviews.
Take care,

-Josh Stewart