ghosts

🅻🅸🆅🅴 Science Fiction, UFOS and the Paranormal with author Violeta M Bagia – May 22 Show #1

GRAB A STACK OF ROCK With Mike and the Mad Metal Man

🅻🅸🆅🅴 Episode – Special Morning Broadcast!

Episode 148:  Science Fiction, UFOS and the Paranormal with author Violeta M Bagia

Please welcome our newest guest!  From Australia, it’s author Violeta M Bagia of Melbourne, who has written a number of science fiction books including her Hart of Darkness series and more.  She is a UFO and paranormal buff and it is our pleasure to host her this morning on Grab A Stack of Rock!

This is a show we have been wanting to do for several years, but circumstances never lined up until now.  The goal was always to do a show about ghosts, UFOs and the unexplained, at the cottage, before it’s light.  We’ve finally found the right guest, and the right time!  For her it’s evening in Australia, but for us, the world is yet to wake up.  We will be live at 6AM sharp, which is 8PM Melbourne time.  We’ve seen and heard some weird stuff in the woods at night.  Now it’s time to share that special hour with the world.

On the schedule for this morning’s show:  The books of Violeta, Area 51, ghost sightings, Bob Lazar and Majestic 12, UFO sightings and much, much more.

This will be a show not to miss.  We still have a live episode of 50 Years of Iron Maiden for evening viewers!  Please check it out, and join us live if you’re able!

 

Click above for the link to the show!

Friday May 22 at  6:00 AM EST, 8:00 PM Melbourne.  Enjoy on YouTube or Facebook.

#1243: Checking Things Off the List: Creative Works in Early 2026

RECORD STORE TALES #1243: Checking Things Off the List: Creative Works in Early 2026

I have been relatively silent in Spring 2026. Like many of us in these uncertain times, I have been paralyzed when trying to think of the future. This is rare for me. In the past, when I have found myself unable or unwilling to create, I tended to throw the towel in and cry “I quit”! Then more sober minds gently remind me that talking about music is something I’m pretty good at. They tell me it’s OK to take a break without nuking everything. So, this time I haven’t freaked out. I’ve just created at my own pace, and focused what juice I do have on videos. Videos are a different creative process and it feels more immediate to me at the moment.

Every year, twice a year, I try to do something “new” creatively. This could be writing, cooking, or video making.  I can rarely plan ahead or field creative suggestions.  Something new always comes along.  It just happens organically every summer.  Some future summer, I swear, I will take up meat smoking at the cottage, but not this year. This year, a new investment has been made and new equipment acquired in another direction.

Drones came into my life in 2024 when I accumulated enough Amazon points through my work to buy one. I chose the Potensic Atom SE, a great drone for beginners but not with the 4k 3-axis camera that a better drone carries. It was not until I tried both that I appreciated what the better camera can do. In 2025, I had a misadventure with the Ruko company and not one but two of their drones.  While I loved their 4k camera with brushless 3-axis gimble, I didn’t enjoy that their drones are prone to crashing.  My more primitive Potensic didn’t seem to have that weakness.  If only it took better pictures, I mused.

Welcome to 2026, my new Potensic 4k drone with brushless 3-axis gimble.  I upgraded.  My parents enjoy my photos and want to see what I can do with a better camera.  They made it happen.  You can really see the difference.  You’ll see how the horizon is always perfectly level.  That’s the 3-axis gimble.  Thank you mom and dad!

New thing #1 in 2026:  New improved drone.  Check ✔


Music: “SMC” by Def Leppard


Music: “Mighty Morris Ten” by Episode Six, featuring Ian Gillan and Roger Glover of Deep Purple

My summer creative goals are usually cottage goals.  The drones are a perfect example.  You could not ask for a better camera in the most perfect setting.  I’m all about “set” and “setting”, as they say in psychology.  Mindset, and physical setting.  The cottage is the setting that gives me the best conduit to my creative side.  I used to do a lot of animation videos from the lake, and I’d like to return to that.  Since those days, live streaming from the lake is a creative highpoint.   I started in 2020 using a primitive phone and Facebook Live, and they got better year after year, with 2026 being hopefully one of the best.

Because I love the night up at the cottage, and also because strange things have been seen and heard there, I have always wanted to live stream from the spooky dark.  The ideal topic would be UFOs and the paranormal, I reasoned.  I put the idea on the shelf as one that I hadn’t fully formed.  Something to do someday, sometime, if the right circumstances came to be.

In 2025, while in a hospital emergency ward waiting to be seen for a rib injury, I spent my idle time reading the dystopian science fiction of Australian author Violeta M. Bagia.  I remember complimenting the book and comparing it positively to Firefly in tone.  Since that time I’ve learned that Bagia is not only a Blaze Bayley & Wolfsbane fan, but a UFO and paranormal enthusiast.  Due to her location in Australia, her best time happened to fall at 6 AM EST, while the cottage in the woods is just waking up from the pitch black dark.  It became obvious that I had my special guest and my setting for the UFOs and Paranormal episode.  Please welcome to Grab A Stack of Rock on Friday May 22 at 6:00 AM EST:  Violeta M. Bagia!

New thing #2 in 2026:  Finally doing the UFO and Paranormal episode from the cottage.  Check ✔

Coming May 22: Sci-fi, UFOs and the Paranormal with author Violeta M Bagia

But that’s not all.  Harrison and I still have 50 Years of Iron Maiden to wrap up, and we’re so close!  We are ready to cover The Book of Souls: Live Chapter, and as usual we do live albums as live episodes.  Not wanting to delay 50 Years of Iron Maiden another week, I decided to do two shows in one day, at two extremes of the day:  sunrise and sunset!   This isn’t a goal I knew I had, but I’m excited to do it.

New thing #3 in 2026:  Sunrise and Sunset Hour Shows in One Day.  Check ✔

Two Live Show Announcement for May 22 2026

I have a long long weekend coming.  Feeling the strain, we’ll be taking some extra time at the lake that weekend which will give me plenty of time to prepare and do two really good shows.  That always makes me happy.

It’s already late May.  That is rather late in the year for my creative side to start percolating, but start it has.

 

 

 

 

#532: If You Have Ghosts…

GETTING MORE TALE #532: If You Have Ghosts…

Many rock stars claim to have seen ghosts, or had supernatural experiences.  Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath and Mick Mars from Motley Crue are notable examples.  A black shape that Butler saw scared him “shitless”.  Ke$ha even claims she has had sex with a ghost, though that seems a little outlandish.  Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek of the Doors think they may have been contacted by the spirit of Jim Morrison.  Sting thinks there is one in his house.  Ace Frehley claims a ghost threw a book at him, though substance abuse may have been a factor.

Tales of spirits and hauntings go back thousands of years.  As old as civilization itself are tales of the supernatural.  Yet over all this time, nobody has ever captured any tangible evidence that would satisfy science that ghosts exist.  This certainly does not mean ghosts do not exist.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  We are still learning much about the universe.  Skeptics have good reasons to be skeptical, while others have decided to go ghost hunting for themselves.  Ritchie Blackmore was well known for performing seances in his Deep Purple days and over the decades.  He stated that he has contacted many spirits, and “ghosts are very real, but not in the physical sense.”

blackmore seance

Artist’s probably very accurate impression of an actual Blackmore seance

The only experience that I simply cannot explain I have had happened when I was in grade 9 or 10.  I was sleeping, it was the middle of the night.  I was awaken by a shocked feeling that someone has just hit me hard in the face with an object like a pillow.  Like if you wanted to prank your brother or sister awake and smacked them in the face with a pillow as hard you can in the middle of the night.  I woke up with a start and there was nobody in the room, nor any object that would have hit me in the face.  My pillow was under my head the whole time.  Was it a ghost?  All I know is that I can’t explain it.

This reminds me of an experience Mick Mars wrote of in Motley Crue’s The Dirt.  Something (a ghost or an alien) seemed to shake his bed regularly.  He could physically feel it, just like I could feel the pillow smacking me in the face.

One night 10 years ago, I have the opportunity to try a little ghost hunting myself.  I wrote an email about it to a friend, so here are the fresh details from that night:

12-09-07_1628

We were in Mississauga at a party.  These two guys lived in the house and somehow the conversation got to weird stuff they’d seen.  Including:
 
  • A man standing at the top of the staircase, looking down into the basement.
  • A child wandering around the house.
  • A pale woman at the front door.
 
All these figures were solid, not transparent, seen by more than one person, and more than once.
 
They also:
Heard yelling, the sounds of people falling down stairs, and someone banging on the dryer in the basement even when the house was otherwise empty.
 
And they saw:
  • Coins on the floor where there were none before.
  • The dryer was known to move a few feet even when unplugged, blocking a doorway in the basement.
 So we turned off all the lights and went down to the basement to shoot some video on my cameraphone.  We shot ten minutes of video.  In the first minute, Alex dropped the camera because he was startled by seeing a face in front of him.  The face was not on camera but we ran our asses off out of there.  In the last minute, upon replay, we got a very strange light on camera.  I can’t explain it as the room was pitch, pitch dark.  Yet you can see a tiny pinpoint of light on camera, bright and distinct.  And that creeped me the fuck out!
 
I still have it on video and can’t explain it.
 
I can explain it now.  I reviewed that video many times.  It was disappointing to reason out that there was still one obvious light source in that pitch black room.  The screen of the camera phone itself had a slightly blue colour.  Same colour as that pinpoint of light.  It was just the reflection of the screen on the glass window of the dryer.  A mundane but simple explanation.  I’m sure most are.
 
*All due respect and inspirational credit to 1537 for regularly using Lego in his artwork.  I am but a mere ghost of your talent, sir.