Sightings – S2E03 – Wisconsin Ghost – September 25th, 1992
“Northern Wisconsin is a freshwater fishing paradise…and some say a haven for ghostly apparitions.”
Quick viewer-submitted segment about a ghost seen on “Ghost Island” near Hayward, Wisconsin.
Sightings is still on the “Friday Night Search Party” with a show called Likely Suspects; it’s still hyping up The Edge - “many shows claim to be outrageous, but only one show takes you to…the Edge!”
Sightings – S2E03 – Marfa Lights – September 25th, 1992
“What are these bizarre glowing balls of light? Some say natural phenomenon, some say alien spacecraft. We investigate the mystery of the Marfa lights”.
“They go up in the sky. When they’re up there, they just…have a big party up there.”
“I don’t know what they are, I don’t plan to know, I’m not sure I even want to know. But I know they do exist.”
“In America, there are at least 100 zones haunted by these mysterious light phenomenon.”
“We cannot say there’s no manifestation of the Devil, or flying saucers, or Indian ghosts. But there are no facts to represent that.”
“It’s just there, and it’s been there all the many years, and all these people trying to find what it is, I don’t think they will and I hope they don’t. It would be nice just to remain the Marfa mystery lights.”
Fun little segment about mysterious lights seen over Marfa, Texas; theorized by locals to be aliens, “ghost lights”, or the Devil, and theorized by science to be car headlights…but that can’t be the entire explanation, because reports of the lights date back to 1883, and it’s rejected by believers due to the rhythmic motion of the lights. So the current “scientific” explanation is a combination of car headlights, campfires, and atmospheric phenomenon.
It’s also an oddly international segment, with a cutaway to a “Earth Sciences” researcher at Stonehenge, and a Japanese team investigating the lights (and having the site blessed by a Buddhist priest)
Sightings – S2E03 – Encounter in Space – September 25th, 1992
“Startling new pictures of a UFO encounter that has top analysts locked in a heated debate. The authenticity of the pictures is above suspicion…because they were taken by specialists aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery…”
“For the past year, the government has avoided discussing what is possibly the most important 30 seconds of footage to emerge from the US space program…”
“You can look at these reports of flying saucers coming around our space ships…in terms of exploration this is very traditional. These are our sea serpents, these are our mermaids. 500 years ago when Columbus’ ships went out and the men peered off at the horizon, they’d see things, misinterpret them, and then come back and tell stories.”
A segment on the supposed alien sightings on the 1991 shuttle mission STS-48, now commonly regarded as particles of ice. Explanations here range from a battle between two alien spaceships, to one ship fighting a secretly functional Star Wars system, which is honestly the least plausible part here.
Interesting for skeptic Jim Oberg’s beliefs about how this is just nautical folklore for the space age, and Jack Kasher’s belief that UFO disclosure would happen…by 1995.
Oberg resigned from NASA in 1997 to become a “space journalist” full-time; in 2014 he campaigned for space travelers to stop bringing guns onto the ISS, which apparently they do? Jack Kasher, meanwhile, appeared in two UFO documentaries last year.
“El chupacabra strikes again. This time just across the state line in west Texas - where lots of people believe in the bloodthirsty creature - even though scientists say it doesn’t exist. Stuart Dyson - always tracking chupacabra reports - is here with the latest.”
“Chupacabra - the Latino Bigfoot - a man in Horizon City, Texas near El Paso believes one o'em killed thirty of his chickens in classic chupacabra style!”
“Chupacabra - the name means "goat-sucker” - because he likes to suck the blood out of his prey - and he’s especially fond of goats - back to you.“
Sightings – S1E11 – Dallas haunting – August 21st, 1992
“Ghosts. Many parapsychologists believe they’re collections of electrical energy, and conventional scientists agree electromagnetism is all around us. But paranormal researchers take it one extraordinary step further – they believe electromagnetism has a personality, that it can be the outward manifestation of a tortured soul in limbo.”
“Larry…there’s no reason for you to be in this house any longer. It’s time for you to move to the other dimensions of light.”
“To see if a spirit could be inhabiting the home, a Sightings camera operator stays at the house alone.”
Ghost segment pivoting around the idea of ghosts and electromagnetism, through the haunting of Larry Richard Roach, a Dallas electrician who died by suicide in 1974. Claims are made about strange electrical activity, and a seance is conducted, which the home owner bluntly says didn’t fix anything, even though she “could feel” the spirit.
Also contains a nighttime investigation, which turns up a light flickering on and off and the camera’s batteries draining faster than normal.
“To rid the house of the ghostly presence, [they] participated in a seance…our team of psychics appeared to make contact, but since then, the entity has returned.”
Update: this family moved out shortly after. They had a camera crew document them moving out. And now I’m screencapping some random family moving out of their house in summer 1992
Love how the Sightings team says the seance fixed it, even though in the original report, the homeowner outright said it didn’t
Our post-show teases are for a show “in the tradition of In Loving Color”, a comedy that’s “way out there” called The Edge, tomorrow after a full hour of Cops and a new Code 3; The Edge was a sketch comedy show headlined by Julie Brown, and featuring Jennifer Aniston, Tom Kenny, Wayne Knight, Paul Feig and Alan Ruck, and a gag where they killed off the cast at the start of each show. Aaron Spelling threatened to sue the show for parodying Beverly Hills 90210, something that becomes even more bonkers when you remember that show aired on the same network. It was cancelled after one season.
But now, Fox’s Friday Night Search Party continues with a brand new episode of Likely Suspects, next. I can find zero references to that programming block online, but it’s not a surprise given Fox was apparently 70% cop shows at this point
Stella Lansing was a middle-aged housewife from Massachusetts who in 1961 began experiencing strange and otherworldly events that over time led her down a bizarre path of UFOs, strange humanoid creatures, Men In Black, and visions of other worlds. She managed to capture most of these on different types of film. She traveled all over the States and seemed to capture strange things everywhere she went.
The picture above (left) is of 3 men that she took near her home in Munson Hill, MA. None of these three men were in the room when the picture was taken. The photo has baffled photo specialists for decades. It was nicknamed “The Occupants.” The picture on the right is an artist’s cleaned up version. It was later discovered that when the image was transferred to video tape, unidentified voices started to appear, which is interesting because her 8mm camera could not record audio. The voices appear to belong to the unidentified men, but sadly the audio is too fuzzy to make out what is being said. (Listen to it here).
Stella Lansing is such an interesting case, but there isn’t much information about her. However, Berthold Schwarz, a psychiatrist/researcher specializing in the paranormal, has written an interesting paper about her:
Schwarz, B.E. (1976), “UFO contactee Stella Lansing: possible medical implications of her motion picture experiments”, The Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, 23 (2): 60–8, PMID 780328
Sightings - S2E02 - Stella Lansing - September 18th, 1992
“Almost every time Massachusetts housewife Stella Lansing takes a picture, she gets unexplained images on her film. Using any type of camera at all with any type of film or video tape, Stella Lansing records what appear to be images from other dimensions…”
“We’ve all had strange things show up on our pictures: glitches, scratches, strange patterns of light and shadow. Weird images are bound to show up every once in a while, but researchers in the field of paranormal photography believe some of these photos are actually windows to the supernatural.”
“A frame by frame analysis of Stella’s Super 8 film reveals…a group of four men, which photo experts have named the Occupants.”
“Even more mysterious than Stella’s Super 8 image of the Occupants, is what happens when the film is transferred to video tape. Then, unidentified voices suddenly appear…”
“And we have to ask the question: how do we explain? Questions and questions and questions, but then it becomes fascinating, a real mystery of the first order.”
“The time-space barrier is smashed in some way by this housewife.”
One of the Sightings segments I remembered most. About Stella Lansing, who for decades had anomalies appear on photos she took. Every photo and video she took, in fact. Anomalies included clock face-like marks that extended out of the frame, strange lights, unexplained facial lesions, monks and other time-displaced figures, spectral disembodied limbs, and four men called “Occupants”. Transferring the film of the Occupants to VHS revealed mysterious voices.
Stella Lansing was tested many, many times, and was able to reproduce the anomalies on dozens of cameras of different types. She was also able to reproduce them even when her usual camera was swapped with a double last minute. Anomalies taken in this segment could’ve been light leak…but with no light source possible.
So, what’s the truth? Did Stella Lansing photograph other realities? It’s funny that the rational answer here is that she was an anomalously terrible photographer, who broke all her cameras the same way. But still, she produced consistent effects no matter the device. Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of information about her outside of a paper written in the 70s, and this segment.
But still. I like the strange nature of it, and the analog horror vibes of it all.
I found an obituary for a Stella Lansing who died in Massachusetts in 2016, which I assume is her. RIP Stella.
