Jersey Devil with Frank Edward Nora

So Frank, how’s New Jersey these days? Well, New Jersey is like Antarctica at this point. It’s very frigid, a lot of ice and snow everywhere. Other than that, it’s Jersey. There’s nothing else like Jersey. It’s one of the greatest places in the world and a very weird place as well. The garden state. Yes, absolutely. Welcome to Mondo Frico. How’s everybody doing today? My guest is going to be Mr. Frank. Do we do Frank Edward Nora for your guest appearances as well? Yes. Frank Edward Nora. Yes. You all three of them. Okay. I wasn’t sure. Frank Edward Nora. We’re going to talk a little bit about the Jersey devil. Frank is a big proponent of the state of New Jersey, as you just heard at the intro. And so what if you had to say, what’s your favorite thing about New Jersey?
besides the Jersey devil, obviously, what would it be? Well, I mean, to people outside New Jersey, it has this horrible reputation and people think it’s just this dirty smelling, like piece of crap place to live. But when you’re here, you understand, first of all, it has pretty much everything. It’s like, if you took the entire United States and sort of crushed it down into this tiny, tiny, tiny area, New Jersey is that. So we have weird, We have the mountain lands in the north with people who are hunters out west. Down south, we have these weird pine barrens, which we’re going to talk about with these weird hillbilly-type people. We have cities. We have seashores. We have everything. And it is by far the most densely populated state in the United States. But beyond all that, so people that are here generally love New Jersey. Because you get to know all the roads and towns and areas.
It’s almost like driving through different dimensions. They’re so distinct. Like I would take drives even down to where my parents used to live. And each of the different ways I could go had such a different feeling. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in other places. But beyond all that, there is just this weird sense of strangeness and greatness that is very hard to pin down and put into words that exists here in New Jersey. And everyone knows about it. You know, there’s that magazine Weird New Jersey that very much touches on all of that stuff. But it is something of a magical place. And the fact that everyone looks down on us just makes us more, you know, makes us love New Jersey all the more. In fact, there’s the New Jersey Hall of Fame opened recently in the American Dream Mall. And they have a whole movie about that aspect. It’s about New Jersey overall, but about how people in New Jersey, you know, take that as a mark of pride. And of course,
As we’re going to talk about, we have the best state monster of any state. We have the Jersey duck. The best state monster, of course. And it’s certainly a different monster, I would say. Definitely. Well, if folks don’t know, Frank has a show called The Overnightscape that’s been going on now for 24 years. I couldn’t remember. It was like 23 years. 23 years. 23 years. Okay. Yeah. And you can catch it at the overnight. I misspelled night there. Dang it. Overnightscape. I forgot the T. Yeah. Theovernightscape.com. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. That’s more like it. That’s it. Theovernightscape.com. And so you can, I’ve been listening to Frank for 23 years now. Yeah. Pretty much. I think I caught you really early on. So.
Well, you were doing the, what was it called before that? You were doing a different show. Well, you were kind of doing a bunch of different things prior to the Overnightscape emerging. And I remember I listened to that stuff and contacted you way back when. What was it called? Bluffcosm.com. Yes, Bluffcosm.com was my first internet radio website. And then when podcasting started, I actually took your XML feed to make my XML feed. We both started real. We were some of the first podcasters, you and I. I know. Isn’t that crazy to think about? I’m like, it’s been, yeah. So we just entered our 27th year of doing the show, the Static Radio. And then I’m doing this thing here. It’s goofiness here, Mondo Frico. That actually appears on Static Radio as well. But yeah, so it’s been a long time going.
going here? It’s amazing. I’m trying to decide, you know uh if it’s i like to think of it as something that’s been really, really good and positive. But then i also think about oh gosh i’ve been doing this for 27 years. Is there something wrong with me you know you gotta ask yourself these things. I don’t know. I ask myself that all the time, what, what is going on with this stuff? But, uh, you know, I have faith in the people of the future that they will discover our works and enjoy them on into the far future. Yes. Yeah. Let’s just do that. Let’s go with that. I mean, it’s been an interesting ride and, and you and I’ve actually did a thing on another project called prior caster. We talk about all that stuff. So, but here on Mondo, you know, we talk about weird things and I think, uh, let’s just go into the quiz, shall we? Yes.
Quiz. Quiz. Quiz. All right. So we’re going to go into the quiz on the Jersey Devil. I’m going to ask you five questions. They should get harder as we go along. So the earlier ones will be easier. The later ones should be harder. And it’s multiple choice. So don’t, you know, you wait for your choices in case. All right. First question. Where is the legendary home of the Jersey Devil? Is it A, the Pine Barrens, B, a slightly damp corner of the Newark Airport baggage claim, C, the Appalachian Mountains, or D, the Great Dismal Swamp? That would be A, the Pine Barrens. All right. You got it right. This is an easy one. You also mentioned the Pine Barrens already. Yes, already, yes.
So as we move along here and get a little tougher, what is the most commonly cited number of children that Mother Leeds had before the birth of the devil, the Jersey Devil? Would it be A, 8, B, 10, C, 12, or D, 47, but 45 of them were just very enthusiastic squirrels? That would be C, 12. Oh, my gosh. It was the 13th child. Yes. It was the devil. Yes. All right. Two for two. Frank is killing it. All right. So let’s move on here. Number three. The period of most intense sightings that brought the creature national and international attention occurred over a single week in what specific month and year? February 2012 when he lost his car keys near a Wawa. July 1890, January 1909, or December 1855? I’m going to have to guess the 1855. Going with D, 1855? Yeah.
It was January 1909. You were very close. Okay. Very, very close, right? I mean, they’re all old. I mean, the Wawa one was obviously out of the… It was not anywhere near it. So, okay, well, you’re two for one now. Still going to win it, I think. So, in 1909, one of the most famous reported encounters involved a postmaster and his wife. In what specific town were they claimed to have been trapped in their house while the creatures circled outside? Was it A, Trenton, B, Gloucester City, or if I said that correctly, C, Atlantic City, D, Freehold, or E, inside a hollowed out artisanal cheese wheel? I would have to say Gloucester City. Oh, Gloucester City. You want to change your answer or you think that’s it? Final answer. All right. Gloucester City. So I actually came close to saying it correctly. So that was right. All right. So you got
Three for one. You’re doing fantastic. You’re going to win now. This is inevitable. You’re in the Super Bowl. Can we say that? We’re not saying it about monsters. It’s a big game. Yeah, it’s a big game. The historical non-supernatural Leeds family in New Jersey was significant. Which of the following is true about Daniel Leeds, who founded the family’s presence in the state and whose almanac printing business was may be related to the legend. Was it A, he was a famous Quaker abolitionist who fled the state. B, he was a prominent early New Jersey Almanac printer who was in a political and religious feud with the Burlington Quaker establishment. C, he invented the Taylor Ham versus pork roll debate just to annoy people. Or D, he was an explorer who first mapped the Pine Barren regions. That’s a mouthful there. I think the answer is B.
B, he was a prominent early New Jersey almanac printer who was in a political and religious feud with the Burlington Quaker establishment. Yes, final answer. That’s right. Wow. Four correct, only one wrong, which was a year, which I always think those are the hardest questions, to be honest with you. Don’t you? Yeah, it can be tough getting that actual year. Yeah, nailing down a year is just too much, I think. Well, congratulations, you won that. So you really, you know your devil lore. Let’s take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and I’m gonna read a little story and then we’re gonna talk about it. Here we go. Mondofrico. Mondofrico. Mondofrico. Mondofrico, that’s what you’re listening to and watching right now. So here’s a quick story about the Jersey Devil, just to give you some background in case you didn’t know.
The Jersey Devil is a legendary cryptid said to inhabit the remote pine barrens of southern New Jersey. The most popular version of its origin story dates back to 1735 and revolves around a woman known as Mother Leeds, often identified as Deborah Leeds. Having already given birth to 12 children, the distraught Mother Leeds supposedly cursed her 13th unborn child in a moment of frustration, exclaiming, let it be the devil. When the child was born, it was initially a normal baby, but it quickly transformed into a monstrous creature with a horse-like or goat-like head, bat-like wings, cloven hooves, a forked tail, and a generally grotesque appearance. Growling and screaming, the creature killed the midwife and some of its siblings before escaping up the chimney and flying out into the pine barrens where it has supposedly been lurking ever since.
The creature sometimes historically referred to as the Leeds Devil is most commonly described as a bipedal kangaroo-like beast that moves quickly, hops, and emits a terrifying, blood-curdling scream. Over the centuries, the Jersey Devil has been blamed for everything from crop failures and livestock killings to simply terrifying locals and visitors of the Pine Barrens. The most famous wave of sightings occurred in January 1909 when hundreds of people across New Jersey And Philadelphia claimed to have seen the creature or its strange cloven footprints in the snow. Oh, you had snow now. This massive panic led to the school closures and factory shutdowns and even prompted a $10,000 reward for its capture. So you could see how that would have helped out with the quiz immensely. But I like the whenever you do that, you know, the pre. I think that’s always better if you ask me. But I always give the guests the choice. So.
So what do you know about the Jersey Devil, Frank? What has your experience been as a native New Jerseyan? Well, it’s something you always hear about. And, you know, in New Jersey, even though it’s very small geographically, the North and the South, it’s kind of like, you know, we here in the North really don’t really visit the South very much and vice versa. And they wanted to secede at times. And we were like, let them secede. So It’s a South Jersey phenomenon. And I’m more from, well, I guess you could say originally from Central Jersey, now in North Jersey. So it’s felt like something that was far, far away. And I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to the Pine Barrens, but it’s such a big part of our state identity, right? Because I do think it’s one of the best monsters because, you know, most states, I mean, so many states have Bigfoot, you know, which, you know, it’s shared by many states. There’s Champy up,
between Canada and New York. But again, they’re sharing it. We have Chupacabras in West Virginia, which has so many, which I went to last year, has so many cryptids. Oh, yeah. They have a lot of things there. You know, but Jersey has just the one big cryptid, and it’s named after the state, and it’s unique. So we have great pride in our Jersey Devil. And of course, the hockey team named the Jersey Devils after the Jersey Devil. And, you know, it’s something that It’s just always a part of the legend of New Jersey, you know? Yeah, the hockey team. There’s no other hockey team that I know of named after a cryptid. No, other than those sort of like, you know, minor league baseball teams. No, well, I’m talking national hockey league. Yeah, the top level teams. Yeah, I don’t think there’s another. There’s no big feet, big foots, yeah. Yeah, I don’t think, yeah. And I mean, that’s quite an accomplishment because, I mean, the Devils have been around for,
Ever, as far as i know yeah i remember when they started. But yeah, it’s been around a long long time so that’s something so you think that this because you have a kind of like the the jersey devil is only in new Jersey, right, and only happens in usually around the pine barrens and stuff like that, do you think that it is uh more animal or more supernatural or paranormal? Well, my theory about the cryptids may be a little different than other people’s because I think a lot about interdimensional geometry or higher dimensional geometry. So the idea is that we live in a three-dimensional world. But in theory, there could be another three-dimensional world stacked on top of this one in the fourth dimension. And there could be doorways between these worlds that could exist.
we’re very close. So let’s say we might be two millimeters away from a whole nother three dimensional world. And there could either be standing gateways or different animals, creatures or beings could naturally be able to cross over to this between the two worlds. So the idea is that if you had life forms, like all of these cryptids that are reported, and I do believe in the concept of when there’s smoke, there’s fire. This phenomenon of mysterious creatures that are innumerable sightings but impossible to pin down and get samples of or anything, to me would be a sign of a being that can transfer back and forth between these worlds. So I think that, for example, an area like the Pine Barrens, it could be an area where they talk about the fabric between the two worlds being less dense. And a creature like this that is native to, say, the next world over,
could accidentally or deliberately cross over into our world and then just cross back over, being that we have no capacity to travel interdimensionally. We don’t have the technology, as far as we know. We’d be at the only thing. We could try to encounter it when it was here. And you could have stray, like, for example, did you hear the story that’s going on in India right now? There is one elephant that has gone insane in India and has and is going from town to town killing people has killed 22 people already, right? Elephants, yeah, I just saw this story. It’s just from the other day. Elephants are usually very peaceful and, you know, obviously don’t, but this one elephant went insane and hasn’t been caught yet and has been murdered, or like I said, killed 22 people already. So this might be, the Jersey Devil might be an example of a type of life form where one of them went nuts, you know, the rest of them are very peaceful flying around in the other dimension, but one of them, maybe one of them
went crazy and accidentally or deliberately came over here and shouldn’t normally happen. But when one member of the group gets enraged or has some kind of sickness, it could happen. So that’s how I’m looking at this kind of thing. Yeah. So do you think the Mother Leeds story is the fabrication aspect of things to explain away the Jersey Devil as opposed to its origin story, as it were? Yeah. I mean, You know, that story strikes me as something that’s less likely, in my opinion, more of a fanciful sort of explanation for something like that. But we have a lot of like there’s a lot of stuff like this in New Jersey. Like when I was growing up, I actually made a movie called The Evil Farm, which is actually I believe it’s on YouTube or the Internet Archive. I eventually did that back in the 80s because we heard all of these local legends. There were things like the glowing grave, like you pass this graveyard in the middle of the night. This one grave starts glowing like super bright.
there was the, the pig woman’s castle in, in New Jersey where this, this half woman, half pig lived there and killed people. And we had the devil tree, which is one of the biggest things right near where I grew up. It’s still there. It’s this evil tree. And it actually, they turned it into a park at one point and everyone tried to destroy the devil tree. Last time I went there was a few years ago. There are these ax marks in there, burn marks. You just cannot destroy this tree. And it was just like evil tree. So I made up my own, fake one called the evil farm you know but we were but even back then in the 80s they’re in new and i don’t know if it’s like this everywhere just all of these weird myths and legends of these things that are happening um so maybe the fabric between the worlds is is less dense here in new jersey the interesting thing to me is I’ve, as you, as you explain kind of your take on it, which is a a very interesting take that, um, you know, it’s like, as we progress in our,
understanding of the world, right? We have less and less of those kind of stories, right? So that we don’t have the immersion of these kinds of stories so much anymore. I’m trying to think of something that would be more contemporary. I guess Slender Man might be something that’s more contemporary. I don’t know. I don’t really yet. Slender Man feels to me like something that was always sort of fictional that sort of people became obsessed with. I don’t know if it’s originated with actual sightings or something, but I’m not super familiar with that. I’m not into the creepy pasta stuff. Right. Right. Well, exactly. And so that’s what I’m saying. So we have a harder, as a society, we have a harder time kind of, these things don’t get created as often and then they don’t take off the way that they did in the past. Right. So, you know, the Jersey devil has, um,
uh, what I would call documented sightings. I mean, these people literally experienced something, you know, fully. And, uh, I mean, there’s, uh, I believe there’s newspaper articles and other, you know, um, uh, documentation of the day as it were back in that time period that, that says this happened kind of like there’s Bigfoot sightings, like there’s other things, but, but there was documentation that this actually occurred to these people. And you know, they have as much as they could, they have documented what happened. But the question remains though, you know, what was it and so forth. But your explanation is, makes a lot of sense because you know, if let’s say we, like for instance, if we just take a real world example, if you’re walking around in a park and you will come upon an ant hill, right?
and you take a stick and you poke it into the anthill, all of a sudden the giant appeared out of nowhere and he ruined our house, right? Or however the ants would associate it. And then you just walk away, never to be seen again, ever. You’ll never come by those same group of ants ever again in their lifetime or yours perhaps. And so that could easily be happening to us and that’s why it’s so unexplainable because… It’s just like, you know, we’re the anthill. And this thing just kind of waltzes in. Yeah, the idea is that it was, you know, there wasn’t really any great intention perhaps to find these incursions into our world, right? It was just sort of something more akin to an animal than an intelligent, you know, human-type being. So, yeah, super random. But you know that we know someone whose father saw the Jersey Dome. Yes, yeah, I know. So there’s been many hosts on my podcast network.
the Urban Escape Underground, and this one guy, Brian Jude, who hasn’t been around on our channel for many years, but apparently his father saw the Jersey Devil, I think, going out to his car one morning in the driveway and was face-to-face with this creature that I believe matched the description of the Jersey Devil, which does sound a lot like a dragon as opposed to anything else, if you really look at the descriptions. More than they’re saying it has a horse head. It’s like any other cryptid. Unlike any other, it doesn’t sound like anything else. Yeah. Skunk is a Bigfoot. I mean, it sounds like Bigfoot. Yeah. This one seems like as a horse head. Well, that’s kind of like a dragon. It has leathery wings. Well, that’s kind of a dragon like, you know, so. But anyway, apparently he saw this thing. I don’t know. Apparently, I don’t think it must have run off or he ran off or something. But apparently Brian Jude has been part of Jersey Devil groups hunting the Jersey Devil for many years now. So.
I don’t know if they ever made any progress, but I just, it’s just interesting that we know someone whose father saw the Jersey devil. So. Right. Yeah. So I mean, it’s like a six, six degrees of separation. Yeah. Like a few degrees, I guess you to Brian and then Brian to his father. Yeah. So, and that was not, I’m trying to remember. Cause I have, I remember him telling the story on a show back in, you know, like the early late two thousands. Yeah. And so I don’t think it was, I mean, it was like in the, 80s or something. It wasn’t that I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, in the 20s, or the 10s, or something. It was like in the 80s, or something. So which is a long time ago now, but not as long as you, you know, not as long as I think, but yeah, which is interesting. So it’s not like it’s, you know, ancient history or anything like that. It’s within, you know, a generation. So that is wild. And I would say that my theory is somewhat supported by
the somewhat maddening, like, promises of UFO revelations that the last couple of years, right? We, it almost felt at one point, what was it, like, a year or two ago? It felt like they were finally revealing stuff and showing footage and everything. And then it all kind of went away. But they showed actual footage from the military of these orbs or these discs that were traveling at speeds that no known human technology could travel at, just instantly disappearing and then kind of reappearing. as if they’re shifting, uh, you know, through higher dimensional space, which again is, is sort of what we’re talking about for these creatures potentially, but this is actually, they have actually have videos of things. I mean, I guess there’s other ways things could disappear, just teleportation or whatever, but right. Uh, to me, that’s how I, you know, like how, whatever kind of tell, but that’s how I interpret it, that, you know, there could be these other worlds very close to here, which would not be all that exotic if you actually knew about them.
Right. Or the mechanisms behind them would all be matter, energy, space, time, as we understand it, just a higher dimensional geometry. And I have a hypothesis, I guess I would call it that, you know, we Mondo Frigo talks about all these things, right? We talk about aliens, we talk about cryptos, we talk about paranormal, supernatural. I have this theory that it’s all the same thing. So the the Even though everybody loves to categorize, we are a species of categorize. We love to catalog things. We love to categorize things as a human. And we constantly do that in our everyday lives as individuals. And then as a group, we do it even more. But even though they’re different, it may be the same phenomenon. It just happens.
we encounter it in different ways. It’s the whole, you mentioned the mad elephant, but it’s the whole thing where, uh, the blind men, uh, touch the elephant and one says he’s skinny. One says he’s fat. One says he’s wiggles because we’re never seen in the same situation or under the same circumstances because it’s also random. And so, um, you know, and we’re not prepared, right? So we can’t, measure it you know we can’t you know figure out what’s happening. It happens usually so quickly that by the time it’s over, we just go with our gut, right? Oh gosh, that was, you know, this. Well, in fact, I don’t know, but that’s an idea. Well, I, I do agree as, as a theoretical framework with the idea that’s all the same. And in fact, uh, on my channel, there’s a guy, Dave in kentucky who did a series called sermons, interpreting the Bible, especially the early books. And then some of the apocrypha
from more of a technological standpoint. So instead of these things that they’re talking about were technologies and perhaps this interdimensional aspect. And if you look at the Bible in that way, it makes total sense, especially some of the parts that were edited out of the Bible, kind of like the book of Enoch, where Enoch, who is, I believe, Noah’s grandfather or great-grandfather, blatantly goes into a UFO and rises up into these weird other dimensions. In something that was part of the Bible at some point, they’re talking about a flight and a UFO. So I do think that it’s, and again, only in recent years have we had access to kind of like all of the ancient writings all around the world. You know, I love reading, you know, the Rig Veda, you know, the ancient books, the Sumerian legends.
South American legends, and they all tell the same story of this race of somewhat humanoid beings, though have more capacity than us, greater technology, larger, more powerful, and their relationship with the humans. How could it be that every society on Earth is telling this same story? And I’ve never heard of some sort of grand comparison of all this ancient literature to see what’s common between them and these civilizations that should have had no contact whatsoever. We’re talking about civilizations that are continents apart. millennia apart, all telling the same story. So my view is that for some reason, we here in this world are not allowed to know about these other worlds. We’re not supposed to know about these other worlds. That’s why any time we see a UFO or one of these creatures slips into our world, it’s a mistake. It’s not something that was meant to happen. That’s why they’re so relatively rare. Could be. Well, having…
Having seen a UFO in broad daylight, I don’t know that it was a mistake. Now, and I don’t know if you know this story or not. I’ll do it real quick. Back in 2005, I was out in the yard playing with my kids around 4 o’clock in May, which is broad daylight. And I was showing my kids planes going overhead because we happened to be in the flight path that day. of planes, and they like to see that. And I look up and i saw a sphere, a metallic sphere fly over my house from horizon to horizon that i far i could see in less than 30 seconds. And I just happened to catch it in the corner of my eye. And I was able to track it across the sky as it went over us and at at altitude, right. So I was looking
Things probably around 10,000 feet. My guess is it was somewhere in that neighborhood because it seemed to look similar height as what we were looking at earlier. And it just went over. And the thing is, I think my thought was that this probably happens more than we care to believe. And you just have to be there at the right time, looking in the right place at the right time. It’s not like now where we have planes going over every day all the time. But maybe there’s only whoever was flying that. If it was a robot, I have no idea. Was anybody in it? I have no idea. But whatever it was doing, maybe it’s one of two things on the entire planet. And it’s just crisscrossing. Maybe it was doing a survey. I don’t know.
And I just happened to look up at that point in time to catch it. And so, yeah. And so I don’t know that we’re not supposed to see it. I just think that we, we don’t plan to see it. And so half the time people just ignore it or they don’t allow themselves to see it, which is another issue. I think there’s also, and I don’t know what it is exactly, but there is, The general population, I think mostly ignores all these things. And so that’s why it doesn’t happen to more people. Not saying I’m special or you’re special or anybody special. I’m just saying that, you know, some people notice more than others and some people are just so involved in their minutia that they don’t notice anything that’s not part of that. And I think that’s where some of this lands. Yeah. I think, uh, do you remember there was a movie, a documentary
That was real big about 20 or 25 years ago called What the Blank Do We Know? Do you remember that one? Oh, I vaguely remember that, yeah. So I know I watched it. I don’t remember much of it. But they had the one scene where it was in Hispaniola, I think, when the first European ships were arriving. And they said that, and I don’t know if this was based on reports or just theories, but that the natives that were there could not, even though the ships were right in their field of vision, they could not see them. like it was something that they were not at all familiar with. So only one of them was able to see the ships. And then when this person said, no, touch them on the shoulder, look out there, then they were able to see it. So the idea is that there could be things that are right in front of our eyes that we just, we don’t see or perceive or acknowledge at all because there are things that we don’t. So you could say that there could be a lot more mysterious things in our fields of vision that,
we simply cannot acknowledge or see due to some aspect of perception. Yeah, I think so. Even now, more than ever, we’re constantly surrounded by radio waves. Everybody’s got a Wi-Fi router in their house now. You’re surrounded by this thing transmitting and receiving radio waves constantly, constantly. And then you have your cell phone, same kind of thing. When the cell phone goes, there’s constantly stuff going around. You cannot see any of it, right? Because we’re not built to perceive that. But, and if we were built to perceive it, it would probably drive us incredibly nuts to have that happening constantly. And so I think, yeah, some of it is just gets blocked because we do have a, an advanced filtering system. Have you ever heard the thing where you never see your nose unless you really try?
But your nose is always in your field of vision. Well, there’s also the blind spot test. If you find them online, there’s so it’s when you do it, you realize that you’re not seeing what you’re really seeing. So for example, you know, each of us on either side of our field of vision, there’s a spot where whatever the back of the eye is, whatever, there’s a thing there that you can’t see, but your mind fills it in. So there’s tests where there’s like a pattern of bricks, let’s say, and there’s a, there’s an area where there’s a blatant white dot, let’s say, And if you move it towards your face, you are perceiving in your slight peripheral vision, the white dot disappears and you just see the brick pattern continuing, which shows you that your brain is essentially photoshopping things all the time on your blind spots. And that shows that your mind is photoshopping things in your field of vision to remove them. Right. So that’s it. So it’s a very simple thing that you could see yourself that you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.
Right. We’re seeing like the light goes into our eyes and then it goes through a process of interpretation. So you might say if there if there was a thing like if it was if your brain was programmed, oh, edit out all of the weird creatures that are floating around, then you’d never see them. Right. And it almost catches you off guard in a way. I think that’s an interesting thing. But so let’s we’re going to meander back. We kind of got off a little bit. Let’s meander back to the to the Jersey Devil itself. So. you’re thinking that it probably is something that comes from a possible another dimension. And I love the thin spots in the veil, which that is totally, as you were talking about it, that’s totally, you mentioned Photoshop, from working with editing of graphics and so forth, because everything’s layered, right? And so there’s an infinity.
Infinite amount of layers that can happen. So why isn’t there an infinite amount of layers in our reality, right? And so it just kind of comes in and comes out at will perhaps at by accident. Perhaps we don’t know yet But so you don’t, you think it’s a creature still, but it may be it and other dimensional or other Kind of worldly in a way creature and as opposed to something that was born in this one. Am I getting that right? Yeah. When you say another dimension, it sounds very exotic, but it would be just, in theory, another world just like this one, just with different stuff there. And the idea of how does it go back and forth, I mean, I do think that all life forms, us included, have a higher dimensional aspect to our own bodies. But for some reason, we don’t know how to sort of move things
in this higher dimensional way. I think it would be totally in the realm of possibility that a life form, a creature, an animal like the Jersey devil could just have a capacity to perceive where the fabric is less dense and to go through. It’s just simply to, you know, the idea is that if we’re already four dimensional or five dimensional physical bodies, Right. You could imagine there could be any number of ways to sort of propel yourself in a four or five dimensional direction. We just we lack that because I think that for whatever reason, we’re sort of meant to be we’re meant to stay here in this one particular world. We’re not meant to explore other worlds just yet as a species. But for these other other beings, I think it would be completely possible. And again, if you were able to sort of see it all.
understand the whole process, there would be nothing supernatural about it. It would simply be part of nature that we’re not familiar with. So nothing magic or shimmering doorways. It’s all, it would all be quite understandable. So if you had the opportunity, if I could, if I could tell you tomorrow, I say, Frank, I’m coming over, we’re going to run down to the Pine Barrens and we’re going to see the Jersey devil. Are you in? Absolutely. I would, I would love to see something like that. I, uh, I’ve had a lot of weird experiences, but I have not seen an actual cryptid with my own eyes. Or I don’t think I’ve seen a UFO with my own eyes either. There was a few times. I think I may have seen one of the drones from New Jersey we had a couple years ago. Oh, really? The Jersey drones? Oh, wow. I may have seen one early, early in the morning. But my hairdresser actually saw a line of like 40 drones pass over her house. Oh, wow. Like low? Low? Real low? Yeah, like a line of 40 of them, each one the size of a small car. Oh, wow.
You know, and that was that whole thing. Just again, you talk about these phenomena that happen. Who even talks about the drones in New Jersey from just a couple of years ago? I think it was 2024 that all happened, if I’m not mistaken. It was actually that’s how Mondo Frico became a thing was talking about the Jersey drones. So that’s what hatched the idea for doing this was when the Jersey drones showed up. partially and there’s other things involved, but yeah, that was one of the big first. And yeah, there were explanations promised and the explanations were, if you recall, the explanation from the administration was it was a mix of hobbyists and a military and that’s it. Like they didn’t go into any detail. Well, I don’t know that you, I can’t buy a small car drone. Yeah. It’s not a hobbyist thing that a drone like that is,
corporate or military there would be no, there’s no hobbyist level at that. Yeah. I have two drones. One is very very small and the other one is probably like uh RC car stock, you know, guys uh, plat, you know, area, not that heavy, but, um, yeah. And so, yeah, you can’t, I mean, getting anything much bigger than a box is, you know, your standard shipping box is, I mean, that’s not in the realm of, of personal ownership. They don’t want you to, you know, that’s become there becomes a whole other issue. Whenever people can pick up small children with a four rotor device, then they don’t really like people to do that. So, yeah. The other thing about the Jersey Devil that comes to mind is for many years, my my my the way I viewed the Jersey Devil was it must have been in a book somewhere.
They took an illustration from Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, one of those books. It was Sir John Tennille’s version of the Jabberwocky. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which that was the image I had of the Jersey Devil, which is actually similar. It was sort of bipedal with the wings and sort of the head on the long neck. And I just found that strange that I don’t know where that originated, but it seemed like the Jabberwocky, which was an imaginary creature, like looked a lot. And that’s the question was, I guess, Alice in Wonderland was written before or after the Jersey devil stuff started to be reported probably afterwards, right? 18 afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. 18, mid 1800s, maybe offhand. I’m trying to remember 1830s, 1840s, maybe, I don’t know. I need to look it up. But yeah, so that, that vision, and I would have to look up the illustration, but that’s how me and I think a lot of other people, because I think it was in a book that said, this is what the Jersey devil looks like, but it was the, it was the Jabberwocky from, you know,

1. So it was probably very similar. So I don’t know if Lewis Carroll could have been inspired by the stories of the Jersey Devil, or I don’t know. It would be Sir John Tenniel, because I don’t think in the Jabberwocky poem, he doesn’t really describe the Jabberwocky. So the illustrator would have would have been the one who would have decided what it looked like. Yeah. Jabberwocky poem was written in 1871. Okay. Whimsical language and so forth. Yeah, interesting. But it’s kind of interesting, you’re right, because i do remember that um the look of the jabberwocky and that uh it does have some, you know, it looks kind of like the jersey devil in a way, I suppose. Yeah, and then there was a movie by terry gilliam and uh called jabberwocky with the michael palin and terry jones i think
   Yeah, yeah, vaguely. And they have like a life-size, you know, this huge Jabberwocky creature in it that they were fighting or whatever, so, yeah. And then, I think, being that the description of Jersey Devil is very much like, again, similar to a dragon, and how dragons are, perhaps you could say, are like a cryptid from history, where it seems like so many cultures have reports of dragons and histories of dragons, even in The Chinese zodiac dragon is one of the animals and all the other animals are real, like an ox and a goat and, you know, a dog. But then there’s a dragon, you know, there’s a dragon just stuck on there for good fun. Yeah. So, you know, what is up with that? And, you know, are were dragons something that were commonly seen and then somehow all disappeared? Similar to that, if you go to the Cloisters in New York City, the museum called the Cloisters, they have these incredible tapestries of unicorns.
   Right. They’re super famous. But and apparently the tapestries were so expensive to make. They cost more than castles. You know, that’s how insane it was. But they show all of these these really specific looking unicorns, you know, which are sort of like very sort of thin horses with the one horn and how people were hunting them. Like, why would these people spend what the equivalent of like a billion dollars today to make a tapestry of this thing that’s just completely fake? a figment of your imagination. It doesn’t make sense. Well, and the way you just said that it reminds me it’s like we talk about things going extinct all the time and also being discovered. And so why can’t this something that it couldn’t have been something that was, you know, real, maybe not all the magical properties of it, but something that was real and and fairly um uh you know, maybe they’re on the edge of extinction and that’s why they kind of
   gave them all this magical properties because it was something you didn’t see every day. You know what I mean? So it’s like, um, why I always get in this argument with people, not argument, but I always take this down. It’s like, why do you think everybody in the past are idiots? They weren’t, they were just, they were just as smart as you are given the, their circumstance. And actually, in a way, I would say they were smarter than we are today because most people today cannot accomplish the things that were accomplished back in those days by the average person, right? So people can’t, they can’t even have a garden and make it survive, you know what I mean? So it’s like all these people fed themselves, they clothed themselves, they made everything, and today we just buy everything and so
   You know, really, who’s smarter? And that’s one of the arguments that that academics make on all this stuff is, oh, well, they’re just a bunch of idiots and they just made up a unicorn. See, that brings up that brings up a good point, because we do rely on the academics and the experts, the museums and things for what is real. Right. And so they’re the idea maybe that they have recovered bodies of Jersey devils, but it’s been kept from the public. this all gets into conspiracy theory territory, but I don’t know if you’ve heard of this persistent stories all around the world of giants, especially giant humans that used to exist. And the idea that there was ample evidence and bones and histories of all this, but it has been suppressed. So if you can find this online, like especially the Smithsonian Institution, et cetera, has innumerable, incontrovertible evidence of giant humans, humanoids,
   in their archives, but for whatever reason are suppressing it, saying it never existed, hiding it or destroying the evidence. And that’s the thing. I mean, if we rely on these groups, you know, if there’s a super rare thing, say there was a Jersey devil body recovered. Only if it was if that group decided to reveal it to the public, would we know about it? If they decided to suppress it, then we wouldn’t know. Yeah. So many. Yeah. It’s so tough. It’s so tough because we we have um, we have proof. There is proof. I need to talk about conspiracy theories, but we have things that were conspiracy theories that have been proven to not be. For instance, I don’t, and I was just reading an article. I know this doesn’t have a direct connect, but after world war two, you know, all of this, uh, famous and very expensive artwork was stolen, uh, during the war, right? It changed hands. It went from people who owned it to, um,
   to people who we didn’t even know who they were at that point because it just went underground, right? And the US government put together a plan to make modern art be more valuable so that that way they could bolster the value of art. And that’s why Jackson Pollock became so valuable was because the government, and it’s it’s you can go read about it, it really happened, they funded it completely, and they got all these people on board that were, at the time, would be considered influencers what we use today, to say this is the greatest art ever in order to change the market so that these pieces of artwork that were stolen wouldn’t have as much value they wanted they they basically snowed the world into believing that
   that these artists were the ones that were the masters and not the Dutch painters and all these people from the past. And it came out, it came out that they really did this and they pumped a bunch of money into it and got people to write articles and go on and on and have sales and basically totally changed the market. And it’s like, I’m like, why? I mean, these things, I mean, I understand the reasoning was because a lot of bad people got a hold of a lot of really expensive things. And so they wanted to get rid of that element. So they crashed that market. But yeah, I mean, so if that’s true. It goes to show how you can, you know, this is a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart because I’ve always felt that a lot of this, you know, contemporary art is kind of worthless and people have been either
   intellectually bullied or brainwashed into believing that it has value, but it just goes to show you, you know, I think this is one of the more blatant examples, but there are very sophisticated techniques to change how people fundamentally perceive reality. And so the idea that, you know, like people, you know, used to, I believe used to be more curious about things. I don’t think people today aren’t really asking those questions anymore. When you looked at conspiracy theories in the past, it was all about asking questions, you know, who’s really running the world, what’s out there. But now it’s sort of devolved in the conspiracy theory world to just another branch of politics. And people aren’t asking those questions anymore. So when it comes to things like cryptids or the Jersey devil or anything, people need to be curious. And I also think that if you recall, you know, I’m old enough that I lived in the pre-internet age, always hungry for, when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, always hungry for
   information and stimulation and something to, to engage you and you would have to seek it out, right? You’d have to, um, you know, your parents would have all these old books and we had the Encyclopedia Britannica from like the 1950s. And I would always go in there and look for stuff, go to the county library and just browse the stacks, look at old magazines. This was sort of like a lifestyle back then. And I think that stays with you for life. You’re constantly seeking out information and, Asking those questions. But now with all of the Internet and the phones and yada yada, the the the reflex or, you know, to be curious or to search, I think is a lot less. Yeah. And I think even though everything’s available, you’re right. Yes. Yes. It’s easier than ever to find things like we just looked up Lewis Lewis Carroll because we were talking about. Yeah. And it’s easier than ever to do that. But people still don’t do it. They wait for things to come to them.
   They don’t go find things. And yeah, that is an interesting take on it that I really hadn’t thought about because you’re right. It doesn’t it doesn’t take anything to find it. But just a small sense of curiosity. It just all goes to the theory related to Jersey Devil and other cryptids and UFOs and everything else, which is that these are phenomena in our world that are there is at some level of authority, a desire to suppress so that the the general public does not either know about it or they know about it, but there’s not enough evidence for it to be something that could be considered quote unquote real. And that we can see with these examples that it would be the main thing to do would just be to throw people off the scent, get people to stop investigating. Um, you know, I’ve, I’ve found that, you know, one of my favorite topics is the nature of the world we’re living in, which again, goes into the theory of maybe these other dimensions and stuff. But, um,
   I noticed something, remember a few years ago, everyone got into the flat earth theory, right? Which I think is a natural place you get to when you’re just trying to figure out maybe this world is not a ball floating through space. Maybe it’s something else. Thinking more inter-dimensionally, everyone that starts on that journey now encounters the first step is this flat earth theory, which to me is asking the same question, but giving a kind of a bad answer. And I noticed like 80 or 90% of the people that had started on that journey of discovery got stuck on flat earth and just believed it. And their investigation was over. Where did that come from? It just came out of nowhere in like, what, 2008 or something or 2010? It was everywhere online. And it derailed these investigations. It’s going to be the average person who has the mind for it that’s going to be investigating. Again, cryptids, Jersey Devil, all these things are part of the questions. It doesn’t seem like the world is exactly as it’s been described to us.
   But these roadblocks are put in our way to derail the investigations. And, you know, yeah. So that’s just one example of something that seemed to have been deliberately set up to stop people from getting any further in their investigation. The interesting thing about that is that, you know, going back to that art world, but to the government, the government funds certain things in scientific endeavor. If you want to be funded by the government, you have to go with what they’re asking for. And I mean, it’s not like $2, this is like billions of dollars. And so all of these folks run to that funding because they need it, right? That’s how they continue their research and everything, but it’s not on what they want. It’s what on what the government is going to fund. And so that controls a lot of, a lot of scientific research is,
   controlled by the government in a weird way through all of this grant money and so forth. Well, I mean, there’s a movie that’s quite controversial. It’s made by Ben Stein, famous from Ferris Bueller and Win Ben Stein’s Money, called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed. And it’s certainly very controversial. It’s going to upset a lot of people, but it has to do with scientists that want to explore intelligent design as origins of life and how they ran into what you’re talking about, funding issues and reputation issues where they weren’t like super religious people who were saying, you know, I got to follow the Bible. They’re like, no, there’s scientific avenues to, we’re not saying it’s true. We just want to explore this scientifically. And they were shut down at every angle. This is not something you could, this is not something you can investigate. This is not a science that can be explored. Stop it, stop it, stop it. And, you know, whether to me, science should not have rules like that. Science should go and explore everything. Science is the type of thing where,
   If I discover something, it’s not like, oh, you got to believe me. It’s like, hey, the other scientists can reproduce it and can show that it can be consistent. These results are consistent. So it’s not something about belief. It’s not something about, oh, it’s dangerous because these scientists are exploring this. But if you watch that movie, you’ll see that it’s not just talking about this topic. Physics, I think, is another example where apparently, I don’t know too much about it, but I was talking to someone that knew more about it, that this string theory took over physics and it was a similar thing. You could only get funded if you were focusing on string theory, which has no practical experimental avenues to test it. But so it’s the idea that so other aspects of physics were not being funded. So this happens in so many aspects of scientific research where many, many avenues of research are completely shut down and they should not be. That’s not the nature of science. Right, exactly.
   You should come up with your hypothesis and see what happens and then see if somebody else can get the same result. And then if we get enough of the same result, then bingo, bongo, we’ve got something that’s real. But if there’s things that those in control don’t want people to know, they’d have to cut off any scientific research into it that was getting close, let’s say. These all are very paranoid theories, but yeah. You say that, but the reality is prior to the economic structure that we currently have, you could do that. If you could sustain yourself as a farmer or as a farmer’s kid or something like that, and go out and look for the Jersey Devil, you would be able to do it.
   because no one could stop you. But now we have this whole other thing that is happening where the government controls the funding, so you can’t. I mean, in the economic situation, you cannot do that if you want to survive unless you have some other means, right? Somebody actually put it in the chat on YouTube. It says, asking for funding to investigate Santa Claus They’re being an honoree here. F that noise. Let private funding from nutjobs fund those other nutjobs. Which is fine to say that. But the reality is that’s the argument. They’re not nutjobs necessarily. If you believe there’s a Santa Claus and you can run an experiment that says there’s a Santa Claus, then why shouldn’t other people be able to confirm that? Yeah.
   Uh, and the other thing is, you know, and I know I’m, I’m feeding into a bit of what, uh, what Frank likes, uh, in a way, cause I know him on the economic front of things, uh, is, you know, why do we have this economic system when it’s, it’s clearly broken at this point? So, you know, the realities are we could fund multiple different things fairly easily in a, uh, a different economic system. Yeah. And it’s just another example. Just search for the true nature of the Federal Reserve and you’ll go down a rabbit hole that no one, no one, no one says it’s a conspiracy theory. It’s all true and no one contends. When you understand what’s going on with the Federal Reserve, it’s the most infuriating thing you’ll ever know. And it’s hiding in plain sight. So that’s another rabbit hole people can go down. Yeah. And the Federal Reserve is not that old. No.
   called it the beast from jekyll Island. What was it? 1912, 1915, something like that yeah i’m gonna look it up. See, look at this. Yeah. Do the quick work here. Uh, December 23rd, 1913. 13. Okay. Yeah. So not, it’s not something that, because everybody just assumes that, oh, it’s just something that’s been around forever. Again. It’s again, it’s a great example of something where it’s in plain sight and you hear about it every day. Most people don’t understand the actual nature of it, which, again, is not being hidden. It’s just probably way too complicated mathematically for the average person to understand. And people just don’t investigate, you know. Right. Don’t care. It’s almost it’s actually the Jersey Devils older than the Federal Reserve. There you go. Yeah. Well, Frank, give me just a second here.
   And we’re going to wrap this up. Let me play a little thing and then we’ll have some closing comments. This is Jonathan. And this is Heaven from the OpaGhost podcast. And you’re listening to Mondo Frico. Toodles. Thank you. OpaGhost is actually in my neck of the woods. They’re here in the Midwest. So they tell all kinds of good stories over there. But, Frank, people can find you at the Overnightscape. You’ve been doing this for a really long time. Obviously, you are. I think is that for the Overnightscape Underground? I think it is. Well, Onsug.com. I don’t know if I have Onsug on any of those services, but Onsug is the name of the network. Yeah. I’ve been rather lax in recent years. Maybe I do. I have to double check. I set all this stuff up 20 years. I set everything up 20 years ago. I can’t even remember what I did.
   awesome.com yeah that that’s with all the all the other yes all the other shows all the other the network and everything yeah so it’s uh and then of course, your show is the overnightscape yes uh and and it’s had other names over time, but that’s the main one now going into the future, correct? Absolutely. And we’re very about much about the future. We have uh just surpassed 16 000 hours in audio on our network, and we want to preserve it all into the far future. There you go. And you can catch The Overnightscape on all your podcast platforms. It’s been there. It’s been around for so long. You’re probably like me in the sense that I end up discovering where the show is available rather than people ever asking to host the, to be on the service or whatever. You just find it. I’ve seen it all over. Yeah, I’ve seen it all over the place over the years. Yeah.
   Well, thank you, Frank, for being my guest today and talking about the Jersey Devil and a whole lot more. I’m going to play some music out. You sit tight. Don’t go anywhere for just a minute for me. And everybody else, we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.