Ancient Sumerian Tablets, UFO Encounters and African Shamanism — Paul Wallis with Lionel Friedberg

the fifth kind there was this disc that was sitting in the cloud absolutely steady dead storm huge and underneath the disc was a triangle met at what what looked like a metal triangle reflecting sunlight so i see what was metal and the triangle was connected to the disc with like a tripod affair to the disk no sound no windows nothing at all it just sat there in the sky uh people have often asked me how big i'm going to make a judgment call by saying probably the size of a 747 aircraft which didn't exist at that time but that's how big this thing was our thanks to surfsharkvpn for sponsoring this video vpns virtual private networks are a really useful tool for protecting your privacy and securing your personal details online search vpn is a service that protects your information by encrypting all the data that you send through the internet keeping anyone unwanted from seeing it along with privacy and security surfsharkvpn offers the ability to change your location with the click of a button allowing access to sites features and streaming services otherwise restricted to certain locations get fully protected follow the link in the description sign up and use the promo code fifth kind to receive an 85 percent discount plus you'll get three months for free surfshark offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you try it and you don't like it you can easily cancel your subscription and receive a full refund with surfshark you can swim under the radar in the sea of online content lionel friedberg has spent his life in film he's an emmy award-winning producer a director of photography on many major films a documentary maker with national geographic nasa and the discovery channel among many others and a new york times best-selling author his latest book forever in my veins how film led me to the mysterious world of the african shaman has just been released and is charting around the world lionel welcome to the fifth kind tv thank you paul thank you very much it's a great pleasure to be with you it's great to have you with us congratulations on your new book which does what it says on the tin it leads us from the world of film into the mysterious world of african shamanism and i want to dive right in to that topic and go right back to the beginning and i think your earliest encounters with african shamanism were when you were working as a props man in what was to become zambia it was back in the 1960s and your job which you were doing fantastically uh have just been reassigned to a local and this created a bit of a crisis for you so tell us what happened next and how that led you into this amazing world yes that's exactly how it happened um i was living in northern rhodesia at the time which was a british colony and britain was giving all its colonies away they were all getting independence and so northern rhodesia was slated to become zambia in 1964. i'd been working this was the first television station in central africa and it was an extraordinary experience because we did programming for local vernacular in vernacular languages for local tribes and at night we we cater to basically a mining a copper mining white audience so we lived in many worlds in the station but when independence came and we be we became zambia the station was nationalized it was originally privately owned and when we were nationalized we all got little pig slips from the government to say thank you very much you've done a wonderful job but bye bye in six months time you have to leave you've got to give your job over to a local person which we all totally understood it made total sense none of us argued with the concept of that but my big uh problem was what was i going to do now my dream was always to go to hollywood and work in this town where i live in now and make films because i was a film fanatic a movie fanatic and we had a wonderful young guy who worked for us i was an only child and when my parents moved up to northern rhodesia originally from south africa which is where i grew up in the apartheid system and northern rhodesia was like a breath of fresh air after apartheid i can tell you and then when zambia came when it became zambia i worked at the station and suddenly we were all out of a job and i had no idea what i was going to do with my life so i said to this guy who worked for us at home uh a member man from the member of the bemba ethnic group i said david um i i really don't know what to do i don't want to go back to south africa which by the way had a a fairly thriving film industry even at that time we're talking about 1964 now i said i don't really want to do that what should i do you know i really want to go and live in america and work in hollywood and all that and he said you know he he he and i um often spoke about things we used to sit outside under the fig tree in the mango tree and talk about photography and whatever else and he said i will find someone who may help you and i said you know like like whom and he said trust me and i did i implicitly trusted him so came the day there was david and i trundling into the bush in my little blue vw beetle on this little dirt road we went to an outskirts outside a town called andola where there was a small um cluster of of houses uh out in in the boondocks of course and on the edge of this was a single house and david sit there that's the place we go to right there and park park your car right there and i had no idea who or what we were in for and he knocked at the door and this little old woman opened the door hunched over it was a piping hot day and she was covered up in a coat whatever else she had a skin pigment problem she was a member of the bemba group but she had a skin pigment problem so she was an albino and uh wrinkled up and you know extremely old and she beckoned us into her little house she spoke no english whatsoever and she told us to sit down on the floor which we did david next to me he was going to translate and me over here and on the floor was a grass mat in the middle of the grass mat was an animal skin bag i had seen something very similar to this as a child when i was growing up in south africa when i was about seven years old because one of my nannies had taken me to visit a friend who had a similar little setup in her room so when i saw this i thought oh this woman is a she she she's one of those healer type people you know which i've been exposed to as a child and turns out that's exactly what she was she was in zambia they call them nangas in south africa they call them sangomas which is another word uh for a a traditional healer um this these people do many many things they diagnose illnesses they can find missing persons they can foretell the future they can prescribe medication and everything is done the paradigm in africa is it's all done with the help of the ancestors of the ancestral spirits and her tools her medium to the ancestors are what was in this little bag and what was in the bag were a little a group of bones and stones and pickables and little trinkets and she told me she picked up the bag she told me to blow into it which i did say my say my name which i did and she sprinkled a little bit of snuff into it she turned the bag upside down and then the bag these the stones the bones and stones fell on the grass mat now the way they fall is supposedly influenced by the ancestors my ancestors not hers her ancestors allow her to speak to my ancestors who can tell her what the bones are saying to them that's essentially the idea behind it all and you know the minute this little old lady's peered at these burns the very first thing that happened was that she pulled back as though she was blinded by a light and she said to david she sort of covered her eyes and she said what are these bright lights in my eyes the minute she said that i knew that she wasn't fooling she was for real i'd better pay attention to what she had to say because she'd seen the lights in the television station where i was working yes in the studio so i thought you'd better pay attention to what this woman has to say to you and for the next hour or however long it was there was this endless amount of information that she gave me david was trying very very hard to keep up with her and i was trying to keep some notes she told me the most extraordinary things and every single one of those major events that she foretold came true over the next 60 years it was absolutely extraordinary how this little old woman in that little hut in africa basically peered into my future she foretold the illness that i eventually developed here in california she said you know she said all sorts of things i'll give you just a couple of examples one of the things she said to david was you know and my big question what i was looking for was an answer to my dilemma what was i going to do with my future and the one of the things she said to david was he will cross the big water and he will go into that direction and the direction that she was pointing in was to the north he will cross the big water that way and you know david is telling me this i have no idea what it meant but i'm making a note of all of these things plus a lot of other things he she said to him at one point he will go to a place where there are more lights and he will work with big lights and famous people she said to him one day he will go to a world where there is no color there is only white in that place you know i had no idea what this meant david had no yes and i don't even think that she knew what she was seeing in the bones she was obviously having visions that she fully didn't fully understand i mean and you know remember zambia is a landlocked country this little woman had probably be never been more than 10 miles from her hut she'd never seen the ocean she had no idea what the ocean looked like [Music] it's very interesting that method that she used this little pouch with bones in it and items you can go to north america and you'll find the same method used by shamans there in that culture which is very intriguing i want to come back a little later to the the role that the ancestors play in in the nanga's process but i know one thing she predicted was really intriguing and that was she said that you would work with someone who was close to the most evil man in the world yes and that was that was to come true and i imagine as all these things came true over the decades that followed it sort of sucked you in and made you realize there's more and more to this shamanism than i thought your life has really been a series of amazing adventures and it must have been a series of moments where you went wait a minute yes as you recognize another one of these prophecies from this old lady had come true and it's almost as if lionel i think you were destined to write forever in my veins because every time that happened it really was pulling you back and saying look at this remember this yeah there's something here and this is very much part of what you share in the story of forever in my veins there's another beginning moment i'm interested in which is from the 1970s you were working on a documentary project with peter becker you're back in south africa where you grew up yeah and i know there was something very significant about that project for you it took about a year i think tell us what happened well that was a series on the history uh i'm not on the history but on the the cultures if you like and um basically to identify to a white audience who their black neighbors were you know the writing was on the wall for the the government in power at the moment the afrikaans nationalist government in power even during the 70s even though nelson mandela was only released many many years later and apartheid only ended many many years later by it by the mid 70s the the inner sanctum of the of the apartheid regime knew that the writing was on the wall apartheid could not go on forever it was time for the white man to get to know his black neighbor who were those people what were all the other tribal groups all about the white community knew absolutely nothing about this there was no point of contact whatsoever there were separate amenities for everything they were even separate beaches for people the train never met we knew nothing about our black uh neighbors and so it was decided that we should do a series identifying and and describing the histories and the cultures of some of these major tribal groups in south africa and there are 11 official languages in south africa today which gives you some idea of how many of how diverse the tribal community is in south africa these various national groups and they all have histories and they all have amazing cultures and stuff so that's what the series was about and uh two of the shows peter becker was an anthropologist who was he had studied african culture for many many years he began his his life as a school teacher but he developed this love of anthropology and he did a lot of research among the tribes and um he uh was very very respectful of african um religious beliefs and the rituals that they practiced uh uh particularly um rituals of of of of transcending from from from from childhood to adulthood each tribe has different uh rituals that that that one goes through and and also this whole idea of the ancestral role in society which is there's no direct communication with the supreme being they all believe in that but the only way to reach that is through the ancestors you talk to your ancestors your ance --- d and looked at us oh at that very moment remember we're running film and we're running a separate tape deck running uh magnetic fill a tape recording the sound can and these two devices are connected together lots of electronics and things and can go wrong but everything is going smoothly it's all happening the minute this old man turned around to look at us everything stopped working the camera jammed the tape stopped working everything died i went into panic stations as did peter the laughing stopped instantly i said to my sound man what's going on he had no idea thank goodness we had you know a little technical buffing with us and out he comes with these vault me they're measuring the lines everything's got power in it the camera's got power the tape deck has power peter's microphone has power but nothing is working it was very clear both peter and i that something was at play here that we didn't understand there was something supernatural happening that was influencing yes the scene it was no question about it yeah there are so many i just want to pick up on a number of elements you mentioned there because there are so many interconnecting elements so far in the story because yeah first of all we're going to come back later to the um unusual longevity of this holy man yes we'll come back to that later because that's quite relevant and then electromagnetics and how that relates to the way that this man is operating what he's able to do the connection with the ancestors is really interesting i actually think the beer pouring beer crops up in so many ancestral narratives about what how we began as human beings beer is right in the middle of those stories and then the aspect of connecting with ancestors you you mentioned that in a lot of african countries you have christianity existing alongside uh indigenous narratives and spiritual practices yes right right in the roots of christianity christianity was a kaleidoscope of beliefs right at the beginning and there are some hints at aspects that kind of got edited out as orthodoxy narrowed down and one of them has to do with ancestors there's an amazing verse you probably know in the book of hebrews that says since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses let us run with perseverance the race knocked out for us and the picture in that verse is that those who have gone before us uh have not gone before us they surround us and they are very interested in the lives we lead and that was a truth that the writer of that christian book knew that perhaps in the west we've forgotten but it seems very very connected with african shamanic practice no doubt well i mean look even jesus said himself did he not he said many mansions hath my father's house well that means that there are many many layers and levels and realms it's not it's not you're not just as we see it there are many many dimensions to the spiritual world um i i've interpreted it that way um i don't think that he's referring to um you know i i mean i think that christ was probably one of the most enlightened individuals and we really don't we have not fully interpreted what he meant in so much of what he said because some of it was so unbelievably profound and relevant today when as we find out about things like this like i'm like the kind of thing i'm describing we've never really understood it because the early translators or whatever or writers of the biblical books you know didn't get it all um and of course the the bible let's just talk about that for a second has been redacted and translated so many times that we have lost so much of the essence of what was really meant particularly when you go back to the old testament but i think it pertains to the new testament as well and i think that there are there are indications in there you know that there's there's more to this than we tend to normally think of life the world the universe is a an amazing place and there are many levels and realms um that exists and perhaps it was to the advantage of the church to confine it and you know contain it and compartmentalize it and keep it at a smaller level um but really i think uh the if we if we really if we really got to the original text of the bible it would open up a whole new understanding to us of what's really going on and and the awesome vastness of it all and the mystery of it all you know yes you are absolutely speaking my language line all my my most recent two books are exactly about that going back to the original languages and saying hold on there's a much bigger picture there's far more going on here than we've realized absolutely i want to come back to your your encounters because you've encountered a number of very interesting sangomas nungas through the years and often when they meet you they will say you have an elephant yes with you there's an elephant spirit with you now you know back up on us so what's what's the story behind that i'll tell you because that was one of the most extraordinary things that this little old woman had told me and i wish i knew her name i don't even know her name but this little old lady who had now had such a place in my life she one of the things she said was beware of the of the bush because one day there will be a great beast and that great beast may kill you i had no idea it sounded scary very scary i mean what is she talking about you know i know i i'm gonna go back in time to the year 1967 where i decided to as as a cameraman i took on a job to cover a safari for three very wealthy americans who flew out from california to mozambique to go on a hunting safari the the man who called me was a swedish producer who you know often did films uh and got uh or things like that organized for people and he calls me up and he said there's a guy coming out with two friends and they're going on safari in mozambique and they want a film made uh coverage made of their safari are you interested would you go along would would you want to do that i said yes not because for any other reason other than the fact that hunting and killing wild animals has never made any sense to me whatsoever i just don't understand what the kicks in what people get out of that where is the fun in that i don't i don't understand so i thought well if you go along on the safari which is obviously well funded it's going to be very well organized let's see what what what are these guys what do they get out of this killing wild innocent wild animals for what for trophies to take home and put on their walls you know what is it all about it doesn't make any sense to me at all so i took the job and um i flew from johannesburg to what was then known as lorenzo marx today called maputo at that time mozambique was a province of portugal today it is uh independent of course and then from there i flew to baira met these guys when they arrived from their flight from the states and in we go to the bush and they all had licenses there was a huge hunting concession in the middle of the country now mozambique was pretty undeveloped at that time wildlife thrived everywhere it was honestly it was like the garden of eden in many regions in in mozambique it was absolutely wonderful since then wars and civil descent and you know uh all kinds of unrest and all the rest of it has basically decimated wildlife in many parts of of mozambique as it has in so many parts of africa sadly but those days wildlife was everywhere so we go to this hunting concession which is huge and all of these guys have permission to shoot you know like two buffalo a number of zebra this that the other they could each shoot one elephant and we had two white hunters who led the expedition basically to tell these these three guys you know what to shoot and where to go and whatever else two two two two people who were ahead of a the safari company that operated this this concession this hunting concession two very nice guys um they were all extremely nice people but you know every night i would try and get them to convince me that what they were doing was okay you know of course they would always dismiss my arguments people have been doing this for millions of years forget about it you know people have been killing for you know stopping such a wimp you know so what could i do i had i had to cover this carnage and it really was carnage um one day came the turn for this one white hunter to shoot his elephant and one of the white hunters one of the leaders of the expedition picked one out an old bull and said that one on the edge of the herd that's the guy that you must aim for but you know for god's sake don't miss try and hit him right between the eyes because that's a clean kill anyway um i set up my camera right behind him next to me is one of the trekkers who was assigned to me to carry my battery it was a big heavy-duty wet cell battery almost the size that you have in a car today you know those days everything was heavy uh and i have a film camera 16 millimeter area reflex on my shoulder with a big brace you know everything weighed a ton those days unlike as video cameras or where you can you know you could run with them all you do is this today you know anyway so yeah so i set up behind the hunter the american and he takes aim and he shoots and he misses and the herd stampeded they went wild because they they they knew what a gunshot meant they didn't you know they knew what hunting was all about and they stamped peter they fled in every direction except for a lone cow a single female elephant in the middle of the herd she had a baby at her feet next to her and she knew the minute she heard the shot she knew that her baby might be in danger and she looked at the hunter it was in front of me and she decided to charge him because she thought her baby was in danger so he's in front of me he tries to take aim to shoot her and the white hunter the leaders behind me says no no no don't shoot her and you know so he runs out of shot and i'm alone completely frozen in place because i can't move with a stampeding elephant getting bigger and bigger and bigger in my frame the guy next to me carrying my battery in portuguese is yelling come on come on come on come on let's go i couldn't move i could not move and when the elephant and i'm not exaggerating the elephant must have been about six to eight feet away from me before the white hunter decided that he had no option for the attitude he had to shoot her which he did and he got her right between the eyes and she stopped dead and she looked at me i made a connection with her the minute this elephant looked at me i made a connection i feel she knew i was not the one responsible for threatening her baby or her child or who had just shot her we made this connection she fell down onto her front legs slowly fell on her side her eyes glazed over and she died my heart was pounding what was initially terror for me now was absolute sadness i felt absolute remorse and i had filmed every all of this the camera had never stopped running for a moment and i felt that when she fell over like that and her eyes were locked with mine we had made a connection something mysterious had happened i did not understand what but i did feel that something had happened we had made this connection with one another that evening let me just go to this uh that evening at base camp you know the alcohol is flowing and all of these guys are talking about the day's events and you know uh the hunter who missed you know he was talking about getting an elephant another day and whatever else and i went to sit by my self on the side of this room and this that building where which was our base camp and it suddenly dawned on me my life could have ended that very day had that car not been shot because she was stampeding she was trying to protect her child and she was killed right in front of me and we made a connection i felt that we were now connected our spirits were connected and this was foretold by that little old woman this is the great beast that may kill me in the bush she saw this now let's put that aside on many many occasions in later years during the making of the tribal series and a lot later when i was living in the states and i developed a very very serious kidney condition and i went back to africa many times and met many shamans sangomas every time they threw the bones without fail one of the first things they would always ask me was what is this elephant that's with you they could see in their bones that somehow there was this the word is in glove which is a the zulu word for elephant what is this ingrown you've got with you and was i going to tell and admit that i think that that elephant spirit has been with me ever since no i wouldn't confess to that but i know that that is what has happened and i kind of think in some mysterious unfathomable amazing way that makes me feel unbelievably humble that that that animal spirit has been protecting me over the years yes i know it's impacted your life in other ways we hear a lot from people in the comments when we publish our videos you have experiences that seem to suggest we really are all connected with each other with other animals with the planet with the cosmos in an amazing mystifying way and i know that was part of the impact on you of that experience how has it affected how you've lived your life i know you're a vegan but are there other ways in which this this amazing sense of connection has altered how you live well first of all what i what i will admit to is that i i have um an in --- driving in a station wagon towards the plant you could see this this cloud of white dust up there on the horizon and as we got when we got to the plant the guy at the gate uh said to us um you know you guys get down to the plant because there's something up in that cloud so the director said what you know what is it and he said we don't know but there's something in that cloud up there um we went down to the parking lot the director went and met the manager of the plant goes inside to go and discuss the day's filming but i was at the car i set up the camera and i put on the longest lens we had i don't remember the exact focal length it probably must have been about a 300 millimeter lens and a couple of guys sauntered over to me in the lot and said yeah yeah there's something up there we've seen it we've seen it and i said like what does it look like they couldn't describe it and i said all right well so i was looking through the camera up at the cloud couldn't see a thing and it was a very very quiet day but then a little breeze came up and as this breeze came up the cloud sort of opened up a little bit and my word inside this cloud was a glint of metal and i thought you're right there is something in there and i focused up on it and uh this breeze continued and it eventually cleared and there was this disc that was sitting in the cloud absolutely steady dead storm huge and underneath the disc was a triangle what what looked like a metal triangle anyway it was kicking off it was kicking off sunlight uh reflecting sunlight so i assume it was metal and the triangle was connected to the disc with like a tripod affair um to the disk no sound no windows nothing at all it just sat there in the sky uh people have often asked me how big i'm going to make a judgment call by saying probably the size of a 747 aircraft which didn't exist at that time but that's how big this thing was and the minute i it cleared and i saw it i ran i turned on the camera and started running film on it i had always wanted to see a ufo i was a ufo fanatic ever since i was a child i read george adamski's book when it came out as in the 50s i had dreams about that and then i saw the war of the worlds in 1953 and i said i want to meet a martian you know so i was totally open to unwanted eventually to have an experience that similar to this but you know when it does happen you kind of are taken aback because it's it's nothing like you think it's it's going to be and um but this was definitely not man-made that was for sure so we ran film i ran film and after a while it got covered up again i stopped running i must have run about 150 feet of film and that's the equivalent to you know a few minutes of screen time anyway we had we had work to do the rest of the day was spent at the plant we photographed the digging over the mining of the potash the town growing up and that night i sent the film back to montreal by rail we i used to go down to the nearest rail head and send it back to the lab in montreal and i made a note on the on the can of that particular piece of film please hold for our return you know the all the other cans had specific lists of what we'd shot with the camera sheet you know identifying towns houses bulldozers whatever else except this one i i couldn't describe what it was i just said hold for our arrival so weeks go by and eventually we returned to montreal and now it's time to go and look at uh uh russia's the dailies of what we'd shot on this trip and you know it took a couple of hours to unravel all this film of all these boring little towns and things have been shot and at the end of that the projections said should i run this piece you know that that you have here that says hold for arrival so oh yeah yeah put it on please the director was there uh the the other member of the crew was there the head of the camera department was there and so a couple of other people i don't remember i'm talking about 1966 now i don't remember too many details as who was in the audience but when we saw this on the screen big this was clearly something very very strange and the head of the camera department said wow you know maybe we should send that to the states because they've got a program going there called project blue book i think let's find out where they are let's send them the footage and see what they think of it we sent them the original footage we didn't make a copy oh and the reason is that those days when we shot film you had an option of shooting on two different kinds of film stock you should shoot negative from which you made a print or you could shoot reversal which was a positive you get a positive image called was called kodachrome uh kodachrome made a wonderful reversal film it was called so what comes out of the camera you could look at or make a slide out of or make a movie out of and project and so we didn't bother to make a copy of it and uh the the head of the the the lady who ran the camera department she packaged it up and had it couriered to project blue book in i think it was dayton ohio at wright patterson air force base listen yeah and uh i know that uh because she told me that that they signed for it they they received the film and you know end of story other things happened i worked on another little documentary and then one day i went into the camera department and i said hey frank frankie did we ever hear back from those folks in the states about that that that thing that we shot in saskatchewan and she said no i'll call them which he did they denied receiving it their answer to her was what film you know no we didn't get that film yeah we know even though they had signed for it even though they'd signed for it yeah um they denied outright receiving the film so so you know this is really right in the thick of that long period of silence denial non-disclosure very cover-ups very frustrating i'm thankful things look like they're beginning to shift a little bit i think disclosure may be getting closer all the time i really do think so particularly with the recent incident with the uss limits of san diego i mean that footage was extraordinary right and was on that yeah we'll have some disclosures later this year with the senate intelligence briefing so we'll be ready for that and see what comes i hope so i hope so and i hope biden does something about unlocking some of the stuff but you know the russians have information i'm sure the chinese have information i know the brits the brits certainly do and the french must have you know that's right i think america is trading behind in the disclosure process more has been declassified by other countries for sure i wanted to ask if there's if you heard anything in your travels among the nangas and the sangomas that relate to what might be happening in our airspace that might relate to our cosmic neighbors do they talk about these phenomena at all well one of the most i i never he wasn't in my series but one of the most well-known sangomas in south africa was a man by the name of credo muttwa and kratos uh is is world renowned as an author he wrote an incredible history of these people the zulu people called in dhaba my children in dhaba is a zulu word which means meeting have a meeting let's sit down and have a meeting in dhaba my children which he wrote decades ago and uh in an interview which i think i actually saw on either youtube or the gaia channel here in the states uh he clearly says uh in it you know that um [Music] and and and he's written about this as well he said when i was a child um i encountered a ufo and he grew up in the northern part of south africa he said he was he was a herds boy as most little little guys are when they grow up in the in in in tribal areas you know they take care of the of the of their fathers and the the the tribe's cattle that's what he did and he must have been about seven or eight years old and he said that he encountered these little people and i think he was describing either a grey or a white yes hovering above the ground and they took him inside their ship and he said and that's basically i i must i have no idea how long i was inside there they examined me i wasn't frightened um and he said you know after that i developed this power of mine to be a sangoma that's that gave me my powers yeah i'm i met a child um at a conference two years ago who was of one of maybe 30 or 40 children in zimbabwe about this might have been about maybe 10 or 15 years ago at a school in zimbabwe out in the middle of the middle of nowhere a private school where a lot of children were sent out to boarding school and one day a ufo came down into the bush next to the school and it was play time and all the kids said oh you know i started running to go investigate what this whatever it was is this is this aerial school you're telling us about i think i i'm not quite sure i think it's the um yeah i think it is yes yes uh i think it's it well it's a it's a very famous case the bb's bbc uh the bbc was there at the time because zimbabwe it was early days and then the bbc before they got kicked out by robert mugabe were covering stuff and they flew over and interviewed all these children and john mack also i think went and spoke to the students as well too i believe so i believe so yes so i was at a conference and i met one of these these uh who she now a young lady at that time she was a child as a young girl and she told me that she was one of the many children who actually ran across the over the fence into the bush to go and look for this object and that she was coming around the corner and she said to me as i came around the corner there were these two beings in front of me um they were hovering they weren't touching the ground she was almost describing again what many people describe as greys or maybe whites these tall whites but with the the elongated dark eyes personally i think that those might be hybrid creatures or these are not the masterminds behind the mission i think they're probably either robotic or hybrid uh with some degree of of of of um you know a a a combination of either robotic and and and real who knows workers yeah maybe like and she said i saw them and i stopped dead in my tracks and she said i looked into the eyes of this one and as i looked into his eyes i couldn't move and i felt as though they were downloading information into my into my eyesight into my brain because i was rooted to the spot and she said i have no idea how long i was there but when it was finished they just turned and went and she said i had this headache because i knew i had been fed a lot of information this is how she described it to me when she was a child now here's the extraordinary thing that a lot of those children many many years later uh beyond their teenage years early adults started recording this event and they started drawing this event and they were now living in very different parts of the world some people had gone overseas some people was living in zimbabwe and a lot of the drawings and the stories were almost exactly the same this and this girl i said to her what do you think it was telling you and she said what it told me and i know it's true because all my drawings and my dreams have been the same thing that we are destroying our world we are destroying nature and we must stop doing that because if we don't we will not have a world to live in anymore and i know that that's the message i got now if you think about it why would an event like that happen in the middle of nowhere in the wilds of africa this is the kind of thing that should happen on fifth avenue or on the lawns of the white house or in trafalgar square that's the message that we need but you know we're hostile creatures that's right we would shoot them down if they tried to arrive there exactly we would either you know we'd either arrest them or blow them to pieces so maybe they were trying to get the message through to us through these children i think that that's what happened it's an environmental message it's a message of compassion and a message of peace you know travis walton who you no doubt know who was uh taken aboard a ufo in arizona many many years ago when he was a lumberjack basically you know cutting down trees and although they made a film which made it look like a horror story it made it look like it was a very very antagonistic dark story he said that's not really what happened at all he said i went to investigate this craft in arizona this man we were working in the in the in the in the forest we had to thin out the trees and we saw this disc and i went up to it and his buddies were in the truck and they said don't go there you don't know what it is you know but he was brave enough to do that you know gung-ho and he goes there and he said this beam came out and i got zapped by the beam and the next thing he woke up and he was inside the craft and there were all these faces of these alien creatures looking over him and he said they weren't antagonistic they weren't threatening me at all he said i believe they actually saved my life because what was probably really happening is was as i approached the craft the craft wanted to move away but this energy beam came out and hit me and my heart may have stopped beating and they were healing me he says that's probably what was happening they were being benevolent towards me yes hostile that is really interesting because i hear from a lot of people who contact me who've had close encounters and sometimes the after effect of t --- don't think we fully understand it but it is so it does exist it's outside of that and therefore we can manipulate it we can access it absolutely i'm absolutely with you on that that's what happened i mean there's no question in my mind to move to a different topic but it all relates um i don't know if you know i published a book recently called escaping from eden and the subtitle is uh does genesis teach that the human race was created by god or engineered by ets now i know that you're part of a little group called the galactics and you talk about questions like that and so i wonder in your group of galactics what your thoughts are on that question and in all the amazing things that you've seen shamanic and otherwise through your career yeah how would you speak to that question what are your thoughts you know i have to tell you that there are more people who think i'm crazy than i can even begin to name including every member of my family they really do i i go to a number of conferences and we're very fortunate here in la because once every year in palm springs there is an event called contact in the desert uh which is an extraordinary event to go to because you have all of these paradigms being examined extraterrestrials yes alternative healing the paranormal looking at alternative histories on and on and on it's an amazing place to go because you meet fascinating people as i have i've been there many years but of course this year it didn't it didn't take place last year it's it's online this year it's online this but it's not the same thing when you sit in the room and when you can meet and talk personally to someone like eric von dunican you know chariots of the gods guy you know and others like that and graham hancock and on and on and on it's wonderful it's absolutely wonderful because you can sit and just shoot the breeze with these amazing minds it's wonderful in answer to your question i i was a supervising producer for a series called mysteries of the bible for four years and we looked at biblical texts and you know after having done a number of stories of the bible one day we were having a story conference and i said to the executive producer here at the studio here in l.a the production company was based in in washington dc in virginia i think it was either art the odds and entertainment network or the history channel one of those we're having a story conference you know what should the next season shows be about and my suggestion was why don't we do one because we've been doing all these biblical stories from the old testament and the new testament why don't we do a show about who wrote the bible who wrote all this stuff down where did these books come from how was the bible compiled who was responsible for putting all this information together and they said yeah a great idea and you know who's going to write it and i said i'd like to write that one myself because i'm particularly interested in the topic and so i went away and after less than a week later i went back to the executive producer and the student and i said i'm sorry but you know there's no way there's no way that i can do justice to the subject in one hour do you think the network will give us a second hour another hour and that's being very audacious because that's breaking the rules you can't do that it's a fixed series you know and you just don't do things like that and he looked at me and he said well because of the nature of the topic maybe they will i'll ask and they said yes so i went away to do some more homework it didn't take long before i went back again with the tail between my legs and i said two hours won't do it either can we get another hour i thought he was gonna fire me but he didn't and guess what the network said okay sounds like a good idea we'll do it as a sunday afternoon special outside of the main series we'll do a special called who wrote the bible three hours so i went away and i wrote this and i you know first hour is the first five books of the bible the second hour is the old testament and the third hour is the new testament looking at some of the authorship and where some of the sources came from where did these books come from so it was an absolutely fascinating experience for me surrounded by research i had a great team of researchers met extraordinary people and i will tell you that i have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the books the first five particularly genesis the first book of the bible genesis um we're talking about something that that defies our normal understanding you know it's full of what i regard as as as clear examples of extraterrestrial encounters definitely um i would even go so far as saying that you know if the story of moses receiving the ten commandments actually happened and by the way there's not a shred of evidence that it did happen but that aside and if he did ascend onto a mountain called you know zion uh uh called sinai and did encounter this being in the flames and was given these ten commandments i believe that that might well have also had been an extraterrestrial encounter a code of conduct if you like it wasn't just from some holy spirit i really do think so but when you look at the creation stories the hebrew word for man adam is adam and adam means earth yes okay the bible very clearly gives the genesis gives the the series of events very very clearly as to what happened first there was the big bang there was the firmament then comes the earth then comes this then comes that then comes the creatures of the sea then comes the creatures of the land then comes humans it's all in the right order evolutionary wise of how it really happened but what are we actually talking about here and when you look at some of these stories of the creation myths and all the rest of it i mean we're looking at ancient sumerian texts we're looking at stuff that is you can clear it as clear as a bell for those who can read those ancient texts from sumeria that part of the world it's the same story and even if you look at the story of noah and the ark that's that's the epic of gilgamesh there is so much similarity and i think that what's really happened and let me just stop for one moment and go off on a little tangent because i must in 1970 i did a documentary about raymond dart raymond dart was an australian by the way who was working in south africa as a professor of anatomy in johannesburg and he developed an interest in in in early hominid fossils because he was the first guy to describe an australopithecus africanus fossil one of the first hominid fossils found in africa this the skull was found the brain case was found and then the jaw was found but the cranium was found and then the mandible was found and they fitted together perfectly and it looked kind of like an ape but it wasn't the brain case was larger than it ate but the teeth were human-like and he said my word we're looking for an extinct creature that is more human-like than ape and so he started this research he was the first guy to do this and i wanted to do a film about him because he was the guy who actually came up with the idea that that that humans started to use implements for to get their prey millions of years ago and in order to do that they had to develop stone implements you know axes and whatever else so it was a fascinating documentary but one day driving back from one of the locations the place was called makapan in the northern part of the country and i said to him you know you've written a book about your first discovery which was in 1924 and you called it adventist with the missing link i said to him do you think we ever gonna find all the links in that chain in that missing link and he said i don't think so he said there are too many other elements at stake i don't think that we will ever find all those components because there have to be other things at play he himself this great anthropologist you know world respected said to me there's more to this than we think and i think he's absolutely right i honestly believe that we have been we encountered a long long time ago how long ago who knows millions of years hundreds of thousands of years i think yeah and how much of our dna do we understand we don't for a long time they were saying oh that's junk dna that's junk dna throw that away we don't need that i think we've been tweaked i think we've been bioengineered yes i think we have been bio engineered by encounters with with with with species from other worlds by the way i don't think they've all been believing and i don't think they've all be as nice as we would like them to be some of them may not be because there have to be so many out there we certainly not alone there must be millions of species out there as we know now i mean the size of the universe and as we know how many extra exoplanets are there just in this in our neighborhood four thousand already you know um well lila you and i are absolutely singing from the same hymn sheets my beliefs are the same and for me as well my way into this topic of our patio contact bioengineering by other cosmic neighbors i reach that territory through studying the bible and going back and saying wait a minute what's what's the etymology of that word that we translate this way what's the etymology of what do the words actually mean and this uh picture that you just painted for us that is the picture that emerges the sumerian story and the story of our being tweaked as you say by others who helped us along the way and i've found not only in the bible but in ancestral narratives all around the world there are memories that different cultures have curated of these interventions and i wonder in your journey with african shamanism do you find any memories of those interventions in the shamanic traditions and stories no i have not but krita muttwa speaks to a very great extent about that in his writings he really does yes uh often but i'm quite sure that in australia you know with the aboriginal people um there must be so many examples again of what we're talking about as there are here in north america the same thing with the indigenous people from here the safe beginning yes they have they have stories about the star people and they have stories about star people nurturing uh our life the life of our ancestors absolutely something that really intrigues me so coming back to your book forever in my veins it's a very intriguing title tell us how you came to that title how we can get your book and how we can keep up with what you're doing the title refers essentially to the fact that even though i'm a white caucasian guy now living in california i regard myself as an african i was born there and i discovered and experienced the absolutely amazing wonders and mysteries of that continent they have never left me for a moment i've made lots of films i've met extraordinary people i've experienced their cultures their spiritual beliefs africa is an extraordinary continent it's absolutely fascinating and it it's in my blood it's in my veins it always will be i am essentially an african people say to me here you know what are you originally and i say i'm an african-american and they love but i am so the forever in my veins means that and the the the subtitle if you like uh of the next level down is that film is a very is a drive also in my life it's always been in my life ever since i was a child bless my mother's soul she dragged me to the cinema we were knowing when i was five years old and i started making movies when i was 11 and i haven't stopped ever since so that's also in my events and i've been able to combine those two elements and you know the other thing about what the title really means is that a sense of of mystique and mystery and wonder will always course through my veins that there is always so much more to know and learn we live in an amazing cosmos universe world planet call it whatever you like and it's it's a driver it drives i mean we're on a cosmic journey and how how neat is that and that pulses through my veins as well you know wonderful and it's very obvious your passion and energy are absolutely extraordinary is it can i say how old you are i'm 76 now 76 and you had this energy and enthusiasm and passion that is is bouncing off the walls and i think you are a great you are a great advert for all the insights that your book carries and all the stories that you've curated for us where can we get your book oh thank you thank you for saying that paul i do appreciate it the book is available now on amazon.com all the amazon sites around the world uh here in the states it's also available on barnes noble and the major bookstores those that are open with this pandemic uh will carry it as from the as from next week but it's available now on amazon.com forever in my veins and the subtitle is you know how um film led me to all these amazing adventures and i'd love people to to derive their own adventure story out of that because we all can you know there really is so much more to every single one of us and i just wanted to be the prod to get everyone to feel the same way as i do wonderful thank you so much lionel it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you today we could talk forever but we'll pause there and i hope we'll talk again another day but thank you so much for being with us today on the fifth kind tv thank you paul it's been a pleasure thank you so much for having me thank you take care the fifth kind check out our official website at fifth kind dot tv you