Hi. It’s been a long time since I’ve addressed you, the reader. I think it’s time that we talk. Got a minute?

I guess I should start in the beginning, when the idea for the GhostTheory blog was born. Back in 2006, I lived in Los Angeles and was playing with the idea of creative writing. Photography and poetry were my hobbies and they went together like cemeteries and Nikon cameras.

I used to take my camera and dog with me on long walks exploring different cemeteries and their hidden beauties. It was a way for me to decompress after work or something fun to do on the weekends. It was during this time that I began to think about the similarities between the paranormal and an Operating System. You see before being into cameras and written words, I was into computer Hacking. I still am, but I used to, too. (That was a Mitch Hedberg joke btw.)

Anyway, I was working with FreeBSD UNIX back then and at work we had just deployed a new technology called Jailed Environments. This new tech made it so that within the Unix operating system, we could create a “Jailed environment” to house inside another operating system. Kinda like a Matryoshka doll but for Unix. This allowed us to create virtual environments and sell them to customers as standalone servers. We, like wardens, were in charge of running the system of Jails that housed anything from services to system users. As Root user, or warden, I was able to log into the server and see the dozens of Jailed environments and users accessing files and requesting data…running along, seemingly unaware that they existed in a Jailed environment or “virtual world”.

This is when I began to think of this technology as a model for the Simulation Theory. Let me explain by giving you a long winded example. Imagine a regular user account in a Unix system as a human being. Now imagine the Root user of that system as God, or the creator of the system. With that said, let’s look at a day in the life of user JoeyShmoey:

One day, JoeyShmoey is going about their daily tasks of uploading some files via FTP. Nothing too crazy or advanced, he is just logging into the system to rename and reconfigure the files. Okay, normal usage for the server and the environment. It’s an ordinary day in the life of the electronic being, the system user. However on this one particular day, as JoeyShmoey sends large amounts of data to the open FTP protocol, he discovers that if he sends some garbage text into the FTP protocol or server, he can get it to do something very strange, resulting in him gaining super-level or Root access. JoeyShmoey has found an exploit on the FTP server that will give his regular self access to the entire server and its users.

Now with Administrator privileges, JoeyShmoey is somewhere he’s not supposed to be in and has access to things he’s never had access to. Without knowing exactly how he did it, he has hacked the system and gained root-level access, or Super User. In his jailed environment (Earth), JoeyShmoey has learned that he can hack the applications and services around him to gain high-level access (Consciousness). Once he has hacked into the system he is free to roam and explore (Astral projection) the entire system, including services, users, and databases.

As he gets more and more comfortable with exploring the system, JoeyShmoey is having the time of his life…learning and gaining information at levels never imagined. Suddenly he stops dead in his tracks and recoils in horror. Among the processes and services running, he sees several Jailed environments that exist in total isolation. He gets closer and inspects the jails and sees the world inside of them. The users going about their daily tasks, unaware that nearby another universe of jailed users mirror their existence. They are all in the same OS, just in different partition with no knowledge or access to each other. It was engineered that way by the creator or Super User (Non-Human Intelligence). All this time JoeyShmoey was under the impression that his world and universe (Operating System) was absolute. That there definitely was life in the only universe that he knew of, not that there were many other universes alike. And that those were all clustered and maintained by something that lived on the outside of those clusters. He has just realized that his entire existence could have been crafted with a few swift keystrokes by a system operator:

sudo useradd -m -d /Universe168423/Milky_Way/Planet-Earth/North_America/U.S/New_Jersey/ -g Human JoeyShmoey

…nothing but infinity 1s and 0s. Stardust.

Our friend Joey is in the midst of an existential crisis. All because he saw a little tear in the fabric of time and space and grabbed onto it with both hands and pulled as hard as he could, out of curiosity of course. Whether he likes it or not, whether he accepts it or not, he has just found the truth by hacking the system: He’s been living and operating inside a shelled universe all this time, that was meant to keep him and others like him from knowing the truth. And now he can no longer go back into the only world he has ever known. He has tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge and is hungry for more. There is no going back. Especially not to the jail he was born into and expected to die and respawn in. He’s taken the red pill.

If you ever come across an out-of-place white rabbit, will you follow it? Will you take the red pill?

I’ve written over 1,700 articles and have been on radio and television throughout my writing career with GhostTheory. With that came a lot of work and responsibility to my audience and GhostTheory crew at the time. By 2010 there were hundreds of thousands of hits coming into the website each month and we were churning out articles three or four a day. Not to mention the interviews and traveling I had to do across the country at times. It was a busy but fun time as a writer and paranormal researcher.

The money I made from the website was all based on advertisement, so we were not rolling in the money but we made enough to keep the lights on and fund some excursions. That wasn’t the issue, we weren’t in it for the money. We started to see problems after 2011 when it came to website traffic and user engagement.

By then there were dozens of blogs that were joining the blogosphere and stealing content without remorse. We were spending a lot of time tracking down these blogs that would copy/paste entire articles from GhostTheory without giving us credit. At the same time, I began getting a lot of threats and racists slurs thrown at me every so often due to our skeptical and debunking nature. The attacks were first against my grammar, then escalated to my logic and reasoning to finally graduating to death threats and racial slurs being sent.

Back in the day, there was a popular television series called “Paranormal State”. They were some Pennsylvania college ghost hunting crew, that formed at just the right moment when reality television was picking up steam. This was back in 2007, when television producers were putting out crap television shows. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a guy named Ryan Buell had a new television series called Paranormal State. Buell came onto the scene riding Ed and Loraine Warren’s coattails. He worked hard to usurp the roles of Ed and Loraine Warren in the paranormal field. The Warrens, of course being two old-school grifters in the field.

We began writing articles about their practices and questioned a lot of their evidence. One thing to remember is that this was a hit television show in its heyday and had a massive amount of MySpace and Facebook followers. These followers were ruthless and perfectly proselytized Buell’s monotone message that hauntings almost always had something to do with a demonic possession.

Anyway, every hit piece that we put out against Paranormal State was met with a barrage of insults and death threats. There was this one person who was so offended that we were writing articles against Ryan Buell and his team, that they started their own blog dedicated to supporting Paranormal State and to attack my personal character. Even Ryan Buell said something about GhostTheory.com in one particular interview done by the blogger. Buell did not have anything good to say about us. In the end of all that drama, years later after the show failed to keep an audience, we come to find out that Buell lied about a pancreatic cancer diagnosis for whatever scam he had going-on, was arrested for theft, drugs, and domestic violence against his boyfriend. The man is a grifter, just like those he tried to usurp. In the end, GhostTheory came out victorious against all those years of drama and abuse from Paranormal State’s followers. However that wouldn’t compare to the level of pettiness and grift that came from these two so-called “Vicious Brothers”.

In 2011 a movie titled Grave Encounters was released by Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, known as The Vicious Brothers. The movie received very little attention however I was made aware that the Vicious Brothers had written a character based on me. It wasn’t a compliment either, they resorted to the old racist trope of the Mexican Gardener. The character in the movie is a Mexican man named Javier Ortega, who is a gardener with a heavy accent and limited command of the English language. The main character, a ghost hunter, then proceeds to bribe the gardener a few dollars to admit on camera that the property he worked at was haunted. As if to say, that Javier Ortega is uneducated and can be bought with a few bucks. I mean, what other interpretation can there be?

It was such a long time ago that I don’t remember much from it, but someone who had seen the movie had reached out to me to tell me that they found it offensive. I had no clue what Grave Encounters was or who the Vicious Brothers were, yet clearly I had offended them in some article I or another one of my writers were responsible for. My guess is that it had to do with GhostTheory ramping up the exposure since there were so many new groups claiming outlandish things. Around that same time, I was being interviewed on shows like Weird or What? hosted by William Shatner and countless other radio interviews. I had met with dozens of Hollywood producers and agents that were looking for stories, but wanted them for free. They were looking for hosts of television series, but had no idea what the subject matter was, as long as it got viewers hooked! I remember one phone conversation I had with a producer of a popular Discovery Channel series. This person was so convinced that what the audience needed was the english speaking version of Jaime Mausan. She said that for someone to be such a controversial figure like Mausan, he had a huge following and the viewership and his television show in Mexico reflected that. This producer wanted to replicate the same format of his show, which was basically commenting on fake UFO videos found on YouTube and asking the audience from time to time: “Well, what do you think?“

So in 2012 I started to feel the burnout. I was constantly writing and updating the site only to spend the rest of the day sending Cease & Desist letters to bloggers stealing content. I was getting racists remarks on my blog on a constant basis and I had just gotten married. I needed a break.

So I took a two week trip to New Zealand and Tahiti and when I came back had decided to change my life.

I would still update GhostTheory every so often, but I was at limited capacity. I had started my journey into Martial Arts and trained for many year in Los Angeles while taking the task of writing a book. Around this time, I had found out that some European Video game company had take the name “Ghost Theory” and had developed a virtual reality type video game based on our success as a brand online. The company, DreadLocks ltd. took our name and likeness and build a video game based on the paranormal in an attempt to get money on their KickStarter. They were able to raise thousands of dollars or pounds and had a lot of support from anonymous people who all believed in the game and DreadLocks ltd. However, to this date, the company has not released the video game GhostTheory and has kept all the money they had raised through Kickstarter.

I sent their executives an email about this dirty tactic of stealing my brand/likeness. Of course they ignored it. Take a look at their Kickstarter: “Ghost Theory – A serious take on paranormal research”

For those of you that don’t remember or know, this is what GhostTheory.com looked like in 2012:

Dreadlocks ltd: A serious take on the paranormal

GhostTheory.com: Skeptical approach to the unexplained

They didn’t even try to hide it. Yet somehow they managed to trick thousands of people into donating for their startup, which never actually “started up” and all that is left from that KickStarter campaign are angry donors that are left perplexed and without a Ghost Theory video game. What was going on in this online world of the paranormal? It seemed like everything and everyone associated with the paranormal were crooks and grifters. I needed an out.

Eventually I made the move to Brooklyn, New York and lived out there for several years. I continued in my journey through martial arts and became a Krav Maga instructor teaching classes in downtown Manhattan. My wife and I decided to have a baby and as soon as he turned a year old, we were already planning on leaving the United States. By then I had already started my own tech company and worked from home 24/7 which allowed me to move out of America and to Europe, to a remote place in the mountains of Greece. I wanted to reset and focus on what matters most to me. However the need to write never left. That itch was still there and it waited patiently to be scratched.

It’s December 1st, 2023. A long way from 2008 when I first registered GhostTheory.com. And man, has the world changed….

First off, I hope that I find you, dear reader, in good health and spirit. I want to first acknowledge that without the help of Scott, Gary, Henry, Lindsay, and Val I could not have done this. With their help, we were able to reach so many people and do so much with the blog. They will forever be my friends and part of GhostTheory.

Next I would like to give thanks to those of you readers that have been with us form the beginning and continue to check in from time-to-time. I promise I didn’t mean to abandon you guys, I just needed to go outside and touch some grass. I needed that disconnect from everything related to the paranormal and unexplained. I was going far too deep into the rabbit hole. Gnostic texts? Gateway Tapes? The Law of One? What the fuck was I doing? In fact, during the pandemic, we were isolated from civilization up here in the mountains that it allowed me time to reintroduce myself to the world of the paranormal. And it looks like I’ve been away far too long.

So, they’re not called UFOs now?

The 2017 NYT article about UAPs shook Ufology to the core, and since then we’ve seen and heard countless stories from government whistleblower coming forward. Claims of Human trafficking and other nefarious things being committed by secret shadow corporations using UAP tech are all over the headlines. This is a far cry from the headlines of 2008. Because of Google and other data manipulators, the paranormal conversations have moved from the blogosphere to more centralized discussion (Social Media / YouTube). This was an obvious plan that many of us in the Tech sector saw happening way back in 2014 or 2015. The way Google stopped crawling websites, and issued penalties for not having your website up to whatever web standards they had just implemented. What did that mean for GhostTheory? It meant that Google stopped showing GhostTheory in the results pages, and instead drove traffic to Social Media platforms or Video platforms. (Reddit or YouTube)

YouTube took over for Bloggers. The term Vlogger was born and from that point on, written words were no longer in. What was “In” was taking content that you read online and making a 10-15 minute YouTube video about it and cashing in the money. As we expected, most of the content we had researched or written about for years was up for grabs and many never gave credit and thus the era of the blogger can to an untimely and unjustly end.

So, people like to watch videos, not read. What’s the big deal?

It’s not a big deal at all. Those of us that like reading, this isn’t an issue. However the tech giants do not like independent thought or autonomy. They like to control the flow of information and gatekeep it. So hardly any traffic from these search engines make it to GhostTheory. If you want UFO news, go to Reddit, Twitter, YouTube or TikTok. Crazy right?

Now we have a new issue at hand: Artificial Intelligence.

With ChatGTP on the rise, creating or stealing content just got waaay easier. As I type this, there are thousands of bots that go around creating blog posts by the dozens hundreds of new blogs that have just been created as a “Blog farm”. These groups of fake blogs are only meant to pick up the vestiges of the traffic left behind by the search engine giants. The blogs read like something cut and pasted but somewhat coherent. And this is just done to monetize whatever traffic is left for the bloggers by other people who do not care for the topic, but would rather make passive income from the clicks.

So yeah, I was tired of it. I was tired of it all and wanted nothing to do with it for years. Then one springI was out running on a trail near a local village. This trail took me through some wooded parts and near a small fishing village by the sea. I came across a few people who told me about these strange, bright lights that had scared many in town the previous few nights. Without hesitation, I went back home and called up my friend who speaks Greek and is a sharp translator and by that afternoon we were driving around interviewing the witnesses and inspecting the sites. In that moment, being out in the field taking pictures felt like I had scratched that itch that’s been bothering me for quite some time.

I wrote the article and had fun doing it. It has over 4,000 views and continues to draw in a few curious people a few times a week. But that’s a far cry from the thousands of views we’d get from a single article in a single afternoon. This is why the old format of how GhostTheory operated is no longer viable. It’s not GhostTheory Vs. a reality television show or Ghost Theory Vs. Ghost hunting crews….

No, I don’t want to repeat that. What I want is to tell stories that are fiction and Non-fiction, to have open discussions about things that are related to the paranormal and the unexplained. I want to connect with you, the reader, in a way in which I was not able to before. So if you have made it this far reading this, please know that better things are coming.

After all these years, what’s the Theory?

Well, nowadays we have virtual reality that works alongside Unix operating systems to create “virtual servers” across the globe with a push of a button. We have Artificial Intelligence writing code and helping build networks. It’s here and it’s being adopted by many in the tech field. I used it everyday to get tasks done and automated. The more I use AI, the more I feel almost like it is an extension of my own consciousness to a certain extent. With that, the similarities between the world of the paranormal and the world of the binary are ever more apparent.

Since 2008 we’ve seen the United States government go from “Aliens and Ufos are not real” to “They are real, they are here, and we’re in contact with them.” And it didn’t just stop there…no, we got to learn that all these years the CIA and them were aware that the paranormal and the laws of physics are at some level entangled. Look at the drama with AAWSAP and the SkinWalker Ranch book that came out a few years ago. This is hundreds of millions of our tax money, going from the Pentagon and into research for this stuff, which was once regarded as conspiracy theories for basement-dwellers. Well, we are at a point where somewhere in the world there is an AGI entity with artificial consciousness and free will. This is not ChatGPT (AI), I’m talking at Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and it’s pushing us closer to The Singularity.

Once that happens, once we connect our consciousness to the operating system around us, then how will we distinguish reality from virtual reality? How will we discern magic from physics? The paranormal from the 1s and 0s that flow throughout nature?

I don’t know, but I’m willing to follow that rabbit.

Aren’t you?