Daniel Noah
Appearances
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
we were given this sort of like V we were brought on a like VIP investigation with two guys who we later remet as part of planet weird, Carl Pfeiffer and, um, and Connor, um, I'm forgetting Connor's last name at the moment, but, uh, who work with Greg and Dana Newkirk. But, but at that time they were just, they were like the in-house investigators.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And I, and I remember they, they, we did some stuff with them that at the time I remember thinking like, Oh, we're being conned, you know, like there was, there were like voices in the room and there was like stuff moving on the table. And I, I just completely dismissed all of it. But the second year we were there,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
we went to a friend's room late at night and there was a, and a Ouija board came out and, and, you know, I, I was like rolling my eyes at this. I thought it was ridiculous. And I think it's sort of important to say that I had not had my hands on a Ouija board since I was very, very young kid. So, so, um, uh, you know, look, I, I, I always feel like I have to say that, um,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
you know, I'm a behind the scenes kind of person. I never stopped being uncomfortable with being a story. And there's, I think part of what's hard about being an experiencer, if you're
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
a person who isn't, um, you know, who doesn't necessarily enjoy, um, attention, you know, is the fear that you're coming off as seeking attention or that you're somehow aggrandizing your experience or, or, um, you know, portraying yourself as some kind of Messiah or something.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So I, I, I always feel like I need to say that cause it's always this little voice in my head as I'm talking about this stuff.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
It's not like... But I have... I've been accused of... making this up to get to garner attention. Wow.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. That's amazing. It's been inferred. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, or that I'm enjoying it too much or, you know, things that are, that are to a guy like me, like really uncomfortable to hear that perspective. Cause so not who I am. I'm all about, you know, I'm a producer. I'm about throwing light on other people and, and,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
It took me a very long time to be able to talk about any of this stuff in part because I was just so uncomfortable about making myself a story. But anyway, that's a very long-winded way of saying that various combinations of people went on the Ouija board and there was no response. And then a third combination came up of which I was a part.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And I have to say that I looking back, I now do believe that what happened was probably because I was on the board because I've now done. I didn't touch a Ouija board for years after this experience, and I recently started to do it again every time I do it. there's an extreme response.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't even know if I told you about when Greg Newkirk was over at my house last year and we went in my backyard and it was even more extreme than what happened at Stanley. Um, it was, it was great. It was insane what happened on that Ouija board, but, um, Anyway, we started, you know, the planchette started to fly around.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And Elijah, check me if you feel like I'm embellishing anything, which I sometimes worry I'm doing. It was moving with a speed and force that to me, with someone who was like... touching it felt like it didn't kind of defy physics a little bit, like how for the, how forcefully it was moving around.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And, and I remember I kept taking my, like kind of float, making sure my fingers weren't pressuring it enough to cause that kind of movement. And I noticed that the other three people were doing the same thing. So we had this interaction with, with you know, someone who,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Interestingly, we all were referring to as a girl, even though when we went back and read the transcript, realized it never identified a gender. I thought it was interesting. But a little girl named Ava who described drowning in a lake and her mother allowing her to drown. And it was very affecting. And I think that was, for me, I think it was the first of what became many times subsequently when
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I was experiencing this on a really deep and cellular level. And, you know, like, yes, I'm watching the planchette move around and I'm seeing that happen. But I'm I'm also my whole body is moving. like a tuning fork. Like I'm like, you felt something else extreme. Yeah. I think a lot of people did that night. I don't know.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So anyway, we conversed with her for a little while, and then eventually we asked her, was there something you'd like us to do? And the response was the word, follow. And then we said, father, where? And the response was the numbers three, two, and four. And then it just went cold. I remember everybody in the room saying like, she's gone. And it indeed was over.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And then someone who was in the room had looked on her phone and she said, oh my God, room 324 is one of the most haunted rooms in the hotel, apparently. And so we were like, I guess we got to go to room 324, right? So by now it's in the middle of the night. And this was an interesting phenomenon. It was the first time I'd ever experienced. It felt like maybe 20 minutes.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
But when we kind of went back over the timeline, we realized it had been hours that we'd been on the Ouija board. Um, so a very small group of us, I think Elijah was you and me and maybe two or three other people. We, we, we went up the stairs, we were on the second floor.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And as we ascended, there was a couple standing there who were in hysterics and, and they had just had some kind of an experience and they were kind of incoherent. And they, what we finally got out of them was they had just seen the figure of a child like a ghostly figure had appeared in front of room three 24.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And there was an immersion game going on. So there was a lot of stage stuff. There was. That did occur to us. But also, I think it's important to say that the festival was over. Yeah. So, so there was like all those people had gone home, but anyway, sorry.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
They didn't say a little girl. They said a small figure. Yeah. They, they saw a ghost. Yeah. Yeah. But I remember the, I was pressing them for details and, and I remember the guy said something and, that was really profound and has really has always stuck with me and been kind of for me a little bit of a doorway into an understanding of how this stuff works. I said, what did it look like?
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
It's been about, it was about 10 years ago. Yeah. I think it was, I think it was 2014. I think you're right. Yeah.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I mean, 10 years later now having had so many experiences, I, I, I, I understand that on a very deep level that, that, that I think sometimes these things circumvent your ocular nerve and they just go straight into the mind, you know, which is where the things that you see exist anyway. You know, you, you're, you're processing information that's coming in through your eyes and you,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
form a model of a thing based on data that you've interpreted. And I think paranormal things, sometimes they just go right in there.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Well, I think that our first visit to the Queen Mary was the one that was the most frightening to me. And that was about six months later. So what I will say is that, you know, I left that experience. And by the way, we learned that a friend of ours who had been in the room a couple of days later texted all of us.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And unfortunately we can, none of us can find this article, but he had found this little news item from like the turn of the century about a little girl who had drowned in a lake on the property. And really, and her name was like Evelyn. I think it wasn't. So really the name that came through on the board was Evelyn. or it's like a V E I think.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And so the name of the girl who had drowned was Evelyn. So it was, it was, that was maybe in some ways, weirdly the most corroborating thing that there was this actual news story of someone who had died that matched the story that we had, that we had been told on the board. But I, I left there and,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
feeling like, um, very kind of excited because it's, it's, it's exciting to think that there's more to life than, you know, it's, it's like adult, the paranormal is adult Disneyland. It really is. It's so, it's so thrilling. And, um, but, but even then I still wasn't quite ready to go all in on it. And Elijah always teases me because
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
you back when, you know, the beginning of our friendship when I was a skeptic and he would always say, you have so many, like the most paranormal stuff of anyone I know. And it's, and then there was this weird kind of cognitive dissonance of that. I would tell these stories and then I would like dismiss them. And yeah, So then the Queen Mary happened, which maybe is such a long story.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I'll try and keep it really brief, and we've told it many times before, but we basically respected the Queen Mary. We were guests of the ship for a few nights because we were working on a project that involved the ship, and we kind of treated ourselves to a ghost tour without permission. So we were sneaking around the ship, and we went somewhere that we really should not have been.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And became lost in the bowels of the Queen Mary. It was really like a horror movie. We could not find our way out. And we ended up in this very kind of dramatically scary area where there was this deafening metallic banging. And we heard two men talking in this room. And when we went in, the voices just evaporated. But the banging was... And we eventually got out.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And then that night, I was kind of tormented in my hotel room. There was like violent banging on the door and my phone kept ringing off the hook. And that was the night that I began to understand that while – there were four of us there and all four of us saw and heard the same things.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I was experiencing them in another way as well, you know, that was, you know, more on the, you know, I guess a kind of sixth sense, you know, a vibe, a feeling. And so you asked me if I've seen things. I don't see things. And I've learned – That there's different kinds of sensitivity. Oftentimes what's happening is that I'm feeling feelings that aren't mine.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And they can be so strong that I've even had times when I've been having a conversation with someone who is – has a hidden emotion that I feel so strongly that it actually starts turning into like information. Like I'll, I'll like, like I'll, I'll start like forming a, um, not a visual image, but like a, like a model of a person. that the person I'm talking to has traumatic feelings about.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I'll start like sort of getting a sense of that person and understanding what that person did to the person I'm talking to to make them feel the way that they feel. And I've checked this a couple of times
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, there's been a couple times when I've actually said, you know, I've taken a risk and asked about it. And the people have been...
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
like stuff like how the hell did you know this you know and i've said i don't know i don't know but it tracks so so okay the very long-winded way of answering your question when did it start for me after the queen mary then something else happened in my home that you know it was like a series of things happened that my girlfriend who's now my wife ariel and i experienced together and um and then it just it just kept happening and kept happening it kept happening and and
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
to the point where I lost track and I started to replay the tape of my life and realize, Oh, this has been happening my whole life. It's, it's, it's, you know, and, and I think that for some reason, which I, I, I, that's actually not for a, for some reason, I'm coming to understand what the reasons were. Now I'm very engaged with them. You're very engaged now.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I have some theories about this. Cool. I think there's a few possibilities. One is that And this is Jacques Vallée's theory. It's not mine. Passport to Magonia. But is that there are entities that root around in our brains to find costumes to wear that will be somewhat familiar to us so that when they present themselves to us, we have a context for them.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So there's your friend in an apartment in Japan. There was some entity whose true form we can't can't possibly know who poked around in his brain and went, Oh, he saw the ring. Right. That's what I'm doing today.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So, you know, so that, that's one, the other, which I find really interesting is that we, I mean, this is, you know, I'm, I'm, I have only a casual understanding of this, but you know, there, there are, It is understood that when a person encounters something for which they have no context, they can't always perceive it as it is. And there's the famous story about –
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I'm not sure if it was Columbus' ships. There's some Native peoples who had never seen ships before, and there were all these ships descending on the shore, and they literally couldn't see them. They just didn't see anything on the horizon, right? Yeah. you know, was that true story or not?
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I don't know, but it's, it's the point of it is that the other possibility is that it's not them putting on costumes. It's us dressing things up a costume. So we, so he, you know, what, whatever it was that he encountered. So our perception is colored by our own inputs, right?
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
He made it look like the ring because that he was in Japan and that's what, what he just like put it into a form for himself that he could, he could, he could, um, you know, that was what he was expecting to see.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Option, in some ways, it's my favorite. And it's one of the things that I found so puzzling when these experiences start happening and I continue to is how cliched they often are. You know, when you tell these stories back and you're like, Jesus, I sound like I'm telling the story of, like, you know, a straight to video Halloween movie. They're so riddled with, with genre cliches.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Like for me and the queen Mary, like three knocks on the door, you know, it's give me a break. But what I started to wonder is, is the reason these are cliches that they're true, right? That, that was consciously or unconsciously storytellers have been documenting the way that paranormal phenomenon works and,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And Philip K. Dick, I think it was 77 when he went to a sci-fi convention in France and shocked everyone by... delivering this speech, you can watch it on YouTube. It's mind blowing in which he, he says something I'm paraphrasing, but he says, you know, I'm about to say something that no one has ever said publicly, but I believe many have experienced. My work is not fiction.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I thought it was until I was visited by a being from another dimension who told me that they had been feeding me these stories in order to disseminate the information to humankind. People said he's schizophrenic. He's schizophrenic. you know, and, and he, I mean, you should watch this thing. It's unbelievable. He described, I've never seen it. Yeah.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And he, you know, he is a woman that he says he immediately remembered as soon as she showed up at his door.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
It's really, really out there stuff, but there are cases of there's, um, there's this book called a dweller on two planets and I forget the name of the kid who wrote it, but it was written in like the mid 1800s by this very, um, just ordinary, I think maybe not even particularly well-educated child. Like he was, He was in his 14 or 15 or something, and he started automatic writing.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And he wrote this incredibly long book that he said, it's not me. I've channeled this being, and the being has a name. I can't remember offhand what it is.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
something the something like it sounds like something out of conan the barbarian and so this book which is written in a like the language of this book you you can read it's still in print you're like no 14 year old wrote this it's not possible right and And so the book was published posthumously, and people initially said, oh, schizophrenia, which maybe it was.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
These things are not mutually exclusive. But what the book was, allegedly, was a description of Atlantis. And there are technologies that are described in this book that were like 100 years ahead of their time. He described cell phones and televisions and air conditioners and just all these things that didn't exist and were not even a glimmer in humanity's eye at the time. Yeah.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Um, and, and, you know, you wonder like how many of those are out there that didn't get published that we don't know about.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Didn't he say at one point, I'm receiving messages from aliens? I think he actually did say that.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, here we go. Yeah. Tesla thought he'd picked up a signal from intelligent aliens. Yes. Wow. Interesting. He did say this.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Well, after the Queen Mary, when I kind of went, okay, this is a thing, I had been so outspoken in my disdain for people who believed in this stuff that I was kind of in this really tricky conundrum.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Variously well and not well. I get, you know, I felt like I was in the closet for a while and really nervous about what, what happened when I started talking about it to my intimates and then, and then also professionally, like, well, what, you know, if I, would people think I was crazy? Would they think I was lying? You know?
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So I, little, I mean, little by little, I started kind of coming out to people and friends and family. And some people were like incredibly, endlessly limitlessly fascinated and couldn't get enough talking about it.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And others would kind of uncomfortably change the subject and occasionally, you know, get a little contentious of accusing me of being looking for attention or making things up or being gullible. That was one I heard a couple of times like, Oh, you've been tricked. You know, I heard this whole pitch about how we were tricked at the Stanley and
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And, you know, so because, you know, to your point, you know, so that, you know, because they knew we would talk about it and be good press for the hotel.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Like, not me. I mean, that was where I learned that sometimes the gymnastics mentally people will go through to like concoct a scenario where something was staged, become more outlandish. Then it was a ghost, right? So like I had this long debate with someone about the Stanley where his position was that it was a trick. It was a hoax.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And I started going like, okay, let's walk through how they did it. And, you know, so it, so it, it, it involved that Jen Yamato, who's, you know, at the time was a senior writer for the LA times was paid off by the Stanley hotel to bring in a rigged Ouija board and,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
that was connected by magnets to like a military grade machine that was in the, they somehow knew what room we'd be in and it was in the floor upstairs. And then they hired this couple, you know, it's just at certain points like that, okay, that sounds very expensive and involves a great deal of cloak and dagger amongst people I consider intimate friends. That doesn't seem very plausible.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Whereas the ghost scenario is pretty clean. But, um, but then, you know, what, what, what started happening too was like, you know, my, my anxiety about what would happen professionally is that, you know, and Elijah, a poor guy bears witness to this all the time. We'll, we'll go, we'll, we'll sit down for a meeting about a movie or something.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And the person's like, Hey, can we talk about your paranormal stuff? Like it's, there's, there's just people who are fascinated by this everywhere. And some of them are experienced versus some of them are just curious. And, but, um,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So then, you know, we ended up starting the podcast network SpectraVision Radio, which has kind of ended up largely my fault, but, you know, is really heavily leaning into this space and, you know, a very dedicated examination of all different aspects of the paranormal. And actually, we haven't even really started rolling out most of those shows yet. They're still in production.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
in various um states of production um but uh so it's it's it's it's interesting how one of the things we've realized and you probably see this too is that people who are horror fans generally are also really interested in the anomalous experience there there's yeah like this this blurring of or like this distinction between what's real and what isn't or what's fiction some don't though i've encountered some people are like the opposite
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Including some of our close friends. Yeah. Who, you know, whom I debate with about this stuff all the time. I mean, I don't think he would mind my saying, because Mike Flanagan has been very open about that. He always says, you know, I'm open, but nothing's ever... And I, you know, after I saw Midnight Mass, I said, dude, you... I promise you, you're an experiencer.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
You did stuff on that show that is such an accurate... You captured so accurately what it's like to have a paranormal experience. There's no way you just guessed what it's like. I'm convinced he's like I was before the crack of the egg, so to speak.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I don't want to throw anybody under the bus. We can be general.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Well, not globally, but there are a couple of specific relationships that I just don't talk about it anymore with those people. And, and it sucks because there are people who are really important to me and, and, and there's a part of my life that I keep hidden from them. And I, and it, so it, it's, it doesn't, it doesn't feel good.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And, and occasionally like something, and you know, these are people who just, I guess they're not listening to me on podcasts or, you know, like I, they're not somehow not hearing about it anywhere else, but well, that's fine. I mean, we listened to our friends on,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
give interviews you know i don't think anybody does really but um but yeah but there were two there were two specifically that i you know i don't want to say you know who but but that it really bums me out that they reacted the way that they reacted and they and they reacted in a way that was like not only disbelieving but it was like kind of insulting it's like really like what kind of stuff
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
That's a wrap. That's all the questions I had.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
you know, one was like, you're gullible. The thesis was you're gullible. And the, and the second was, you're just trying to get attention. Both of which are hurtful, you know, things to say, or there are certainly hurtful things to hear.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I have sympathy for skepticism, A, because I was a skeptic, but I also... acknowledge that there's more to reality than we know is an extraordinarily humbling act. And it requires a real courage of saying like, hey, I don't know what's happening. I am not in control. I'm maybe not at the top of the food chain. I'm not the big dog in the room. And it's hard. It's hard to admit those things.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And I think certainly in Western culture, Contemporary Western culture, we are ferociously dedicated to denial of spirituality as a culture. It's, you know, almost everything we do is about a denial of ambiguity. We are not good with ambiguity, Western culture. We are totally intolerant of it.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
it's as organized as it is because it doesn't want to allow for ambiguity. Right. So it's, but yes, you're, you're, you are correct. But, but, but, you know, you know, most organized religions, they have rule books, you know, and, and they're, I'd love a rule book that explained what's happening, you know, in my weird universe. I don't think it exists. The outright, the,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And there's Dogman, which... I've gotten some, yeah. Which is a werewolf, essentially.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. I believe in everything. And the reason I believe in everything... Are you a vampire-pilled? What's that?
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
The... I think that we're living in some sort of holographic reality and I can see that. And so as a result, anything's possible. And, and so I think, you know, just like Elijah has a friend that went to Japan and saw the girl from the ring, you know, if, if, if was the girl from the ring there, what does that even mean? That question? Was she there? He perceived her.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
So it was as real as a pencil to him. So, you know, it is, anytime anyone says they experienced something, if they believe it, as far as I'm concerned, it's real to them. Yeah. And then, so then you get into this philosophical question about reality existing in the subjective versus the objective. I don't believe in not believing in things. It doesn't, it doesn't to me, it's illogical.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
To say certain things exist and certain things don't. Because nothing exists and therefore everything can.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I've forgotten the name, but that six-part series that you did with the Scandinavian girl.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, that one really haunted me. And I found myself just riveted for all six hours. And... And I still think about it a lot. Of everything you've had on, it's the hardest to accept, but they just don't seem like they're lying.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, and they were, you know, we live in an era where, like, even when they were, like, 20 or whatever, you know, they were recording everything. So they've, you know, they've got these videos and recordings that, you know, it would be one hell of a long con if they were making this thing up.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
by virtue of how outspoken I am about this stuff and the work that we're doing in the documentary space, just meeting more people in the, you know, like we've been talking recently and like, like this is maybe off the record if that's okay.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah. But, but what, one of the things I'm learning is that there are certain things that even people like are not talking about publicly. And so, like, you know, we've been, you know, there's things that we've learned from some of these people that. I heard some of that stuff in those girls' stories. And I was like, there's no way they read this somewhere.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
They're referring to things that I don't think have ever... I've never seen written about or talked about. But I have heard people in the know describing. And that was one of the things in particular about them that really... got under my skin. It made me believe it.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Look, the UAP disclosure movement, if that's what we're calling it, is an incredibly complex cat's cradle of people and agendas and intuitions. And it's, you know, there's... It's hard to know what information you can trust. But they're definitely, this term catastrophic disclosure is a really interesting term. And this is what Danny Sheehan says. This is not my idea, it's his.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
But he always says, the assumption, is that what's meant by catastrophic disclosure is that it would be catastrophic for society. But that's not what that means. It would be catastrophic for all the people who have broken the law to hide this stuff for decades, whose lives would be destroyed, whose fortunes would be lost, and whose freedom would probably be revoked because they'd be incarcerated.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
That's what catastrophic disclosure refers to. And what is holding back... People who are in possession of the knowledge of what's happening with UAPs and the actual physical hardware that's been recovered. What is holding them back from disclosing it is not fear of ontological shock. It's the fact that they're lawbreakers. And that they, to disclose this stuff is to incriminate themselves.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
There's billions of dollars in government money has been shifted around and illegally. This is stuff that's in possession of the military industrial complex, which is not necessarily government. It's largely the private sector. And this is what we're up against with UAP disclosure. I hope I'm not getting myself murdered by saying this on your podcast. I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure it's fine.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, it's a web. What the quote-unquote powers that be have done, dating back to Roswell, is it's part of a program to humiliate people who come forward so that no one wants to do it. And it's systemic and it's designed. It's very much by design. But these whistleblowers now are finally –
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Taking that on and, you know, the fact that that there's such respectable people have sat on the floor of Congress and testified under oath about this stuff is helping, you know, it's helping. And, yeah, but, you know, the it's there's there's reprisals against these people that range from like.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
humiliation to to actually completely destroying dismantling their livelihood you know and so so we're just you know everyone people are terrified to talk about it i think that's why there's such a particular stigma around aliens yeah yeah it's like 50 years of conditioning yeah it's yeah and it's and i think it it's it's that i think it's that i think it in it you know
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, well, we, we just, um, we just premiered Jim Hosking's new film, Ebony and Ivory, um, who did the greasy strangler, um, a fantastic fest. Um, and so that that's coming draft house releasing is putting that out at some point in 2025. Um,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Uh, we've, um, we've got, uh, a new movie that we're, we're getting ready to make with a filmmaker named Kyle Edward Ball, who made a beautiful, very important horror movie last year called Skinnamarink. Um, so we're, that's something that we're, we're doing with, um, we partnered with, uh, Josh Safdie and his company, um, and we're doing it at A24. So we're shooting that next year. And, um,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And then, um, on the podcast front, you know, we've, um, Mitch Horwitz's show is, is currently, um, is currently, uh, uh, unfolding, uh, extraordinary evidence. It's actually exactly about what we were just talking about is the, the problem of proving the paranormal in a laboratory. Um, so, um, so that, that's currently rolling out and, um, and then, uh,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
The new season of Euphemat, Jim Perry's show, the first episode just came out, which actually features Elijah and me going back to the Queen Mary to revisit the experience that we had there and very fascinating, fascinating results. So that's current. It's called To the Queen, and that came out, it was dropped about a week ago.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
We're getting ready to drop that recording on the Ufamet feed. Oh, great. Oh, nice. People can hear that.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, Jack, thanks for coming out. Yeah, thank you for participating.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
oh boy, you sure you want to go over here? This is going to take a long time. Yeah.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
No, I was a hardcore, extremely rigid skeptic. I didn't believe in anything. And I, from a very young age, I had a really, really deep and profound fascination with
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Tales of the Supernatural in the space of fiction, you know, which I think had a lot to do with just a lot of childhood trauma that I found a platform to process through the Twilight Zone and universal horror movies and, you know, which is I think one of the,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
great assets that tales of the supernatural brings to humanity is it is a chance to work through really difficult feelings in a kind of imaginary theater you know um so so i i i'd always been very attracted to that stuff and and and studied it and and you know i went to nyu i studied
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
dramatic writing and you know even then i was always sort of academically delving into an understanding of the machinations of supernatural stories and the psychology of them in terms of you know what they do for people and what the appeal is but i didn't believe in anything and and if if anything i was even maybe a little bit hostile toward um people who believed i i thought hostile hostile yeah yeah physically
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
Yeah, he gets to give ferocious beatdowns. No, he doesn't. No. Just judgmental and I kind of rooted myself in this perspective that people who believed in this stuff were kind of weak and that they were buying into a really base wish fulfillment that satisfied just really universal human emotional problems of dealing with death and loss.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And, and, you know, I, I, I didn't, I thought, I thought it was all imaginary.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I was, yeah, I was, I mean, I'm still a writer.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
I was a, I was a, a, a well-paid unproduced Hollywood writer, which is a thing I didn't know existed until I became one. Um, I did that for about 10 years. That was the time that Elijah and I met. And, uh,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And, you know, I met Elijah at a really pivotal point in my own life in which I was thinking about getting away from the studio system and refocusing on indie film where I felt like maybe I could kind of take control back. work on projects that I cared about and have more agency to actually get them made. And so, you know, when Elijah said, Hey, let's start a company.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
It was, it was, although I had not thought about being a producer until he proposed it. It was a very, it was a welcomed opportunity for me because I really was, I was very, very tired with the grind of, of Hollywood.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
There's, there's a lot of different ways to answer that, but I, but I think there's, there's when I first started experiencing things and, and, and then there's when I first began to realize that I'd been experiencing things are sort of two different, two different ideas. Well, so when, after SpectreVision started,
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
came into being and started to have a presence, we would get invited to these events like conventions and film festivals that were horror themes because we were making horror films. And they were often put up at famously haunted locations. So we found ourselves... at these haunted places.
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
And one of them was the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which I think very famously, well, they purport to be, I think, I think they claim they're like the most haunted place
Otherworld
Interview with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah
man-made structure in the world or something and and but you know the the the story is that stephen king had an experience there that led to the shining and that like room 237 is based on a room at the stanley hotel so i of course thought this was a bunch of poppycock and um but so we were there together and and um actually ironically it was our second year the first year