[imagesource:davidriedel]

In a long, personal essay, David Riedel, a Torry Award-winning author for his novella Terrestrial Issues, and his short stories The Space Beneath and The Body, bemoans ever having laughed at his father.

Born and educated in Bosler, Wyoming, in America, David is the son of Patrick McGuire, a cattle farmer who shot to infamy after recounting, during a hypnosis session, the alien abductions that would regularly occur on his farm (image above).

Uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago, a fractured and static-filled video shows Patrick discussing cattle mutilations under hypnosis with the famous UFO psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle, per David’s write-up in The HuffPost:

“We come up on a cow that was dead. They cut the nose off, tongues out and the sex organs were gone,” he recounts as though he is sleepwalking through a nightmare. He goes on to describe in great detail a “spaceship” that landed on his ranch and took members of his herd ― their distant, terrified animal cries filling those dark prairie nights.

…he recounted abductions by “Star People,” who demanded his actions in conjunction with their plan for humanity. These Star People told him of a coming climate apocalypse.

A couple of years after these revelations were made public, Patrick become destitute without a home or family, claiming that government forces were keeping him that way because of what he saw and said.

Patrick passed away in 2009 in a Colorado hospital due to cancer at the age of 67. David is now lamenting how he snickered along with mocking comments about his father’s wacky, tinfoil-hat-wearing ways.

“I did not speak to him before he died. His last years were spent in homelessness, though he hadn’t always lived that way. His last words, so I heard, were about grand conspiracies and sinister deep states, though he hadn’t always spoken about such topics. My father’s legacy in our small Wyoming town ― and inside our family ― is stained with his tales of alien abduction, interstellar prophecy and the insistence he was chosen, though he had not always been chosen.”

A recent turn of events, a mind-shift, as such, around the possibility of alien life, has caused David to rethink everything he knows about his father:

When I first saw the bold headline “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin,” published June 5, 2023, in The Debrief, I initially didn’t think about whether the headline was true. I didn’t contemplate what the recovered crafts might look like or that “non-human” was just another euphemism for the same thing we have been talking about since 1947 ― I thought about my father.

I can see him now as though he were alive today, black cowboy hat tilted, face tanned and cracked from the high plains sun, saying, “Who’s laughing now?” I’m not laughing anymore, but not because I know what that headline is saying is absolutely true and proof lies just around the corner; I’m not laughing because I should never have laughed in the first place.

David refers to the current paradigm shift around UFOs (now referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)), with news surrounding these phenomena steadily growing and becoming more widely accepted as a real possibility. To refresh your memory of the latest developments:

There was a congressional hearing in 2022, the creation of a governmental department called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and a NASA hearing devoted to encountered ― or not encountered ― UAPs.

And now a new whistleblower, former intelligence official and AATIP task force member David Grusch, claims a government cover-up. “These [programs] are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” he stated to NewsNation recently.

He goes on:

Whether this is all true or not, it is unmooring to read that U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is demanding disclosure on a subject that, only a decade ago, would have been political suicide to even mention. To read former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo state, “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone” is surreal, and stranger still is reading about governmental UFO agencies and “Black Money” in The New York Times.

In other words, what was once most likely the premise for the next X-Files reboot is now front-page news, gaining mainstream consideration by the serious, the rational, the institutional and the scientific.

It is a strange cultural moment to be in, and we are all feeling it. For David, especially though, remembering how he refused to listen to his dad all those years ago, imagining him saying from the stars, “Who’s laughing now?”

Image: David Riedel

[source:huffpost]