The Getting Spooked Reading List #5
Okay, So Maybe Not Reading—But Sometimes Watching Things Is Good for You Too! Seven YouTube Documentarians or Video Essayists Worth Your Time
ANNOUNCEMENT: Weird Reads with Emily Louise and I made an appearance on Erica Lukes and Jack Brewer’s Expanding Frontiers Research livestream last week. This organization rightfully appeared on the previous reading list and they are two of the best researchers in ufology currently. As such, I was very honored to make my second appearance. You can view the replay here.
Prior reading lists can be found in the Table of Discontents.
While this newsletter has primarily been reliant on the written word for citations and analysis, I am not solely a bookworm. In fact, I watch an embarrassing amount of YouTube, for both research and pleasure. (Rest assured, the research expeditions I do on YouTube are almost always more pain than pleasure.) Nevertheless, I am always happy to find other writers or documentarians presenting their research on this accessible platform where some nuance and intellectual rigor is sorely needed. For this reason, I am happy to present to you some of the best documentarians/video essayists I watch regularly on YouTube.
Hollyweird Babylon / Johnny Law & Order
One of my more recent viewing obsessions is Hollyweird Babylon, all thanks to Weird Reads with Emily Louise getting the channel recommended to her one day. The disintegration of actor Randy Quaid into a conspiratorial morass was always an underexamined Hollywood story I was interested in, but until this channel put together an excellent documentary on the subject, the public could only get bits and pieces of the insanity. After this remarkable history lesson on Randy Quaid, I quickly watched the rest of their output, including a more recent treatise on the “Hawk Tuah Girl” and the existence of true Hollywood “vampires” as well as a neatly constructed history of Bill Cosby that sets his association with Coca-Cola and long rap sheet of sexual assault side-by-side in a captivating way. With a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood history accompanied by fearless endeavors into the strange and even parapolitical—see some of Coca-Cola’s suspicious activity in the Cosby series—Hollyweird Babylon is a channel destined for greatness. As if that weren’t enough, the creator has a sister channel and Substack publication under the name Johnny Law & Order that both have material worth checking out. I recommend “Psychopathy and Sleaze: The RFK Jr. Story”, “The Godmother of Elvis Sightings”, as well as “Patient Zero: George Lincoln Rockwell” for Getting Spooked readers especially. Even some of the straightforward archival material on the Johnny Law & Order channel may catch your eye, such as nearly seven hours of Corey Goode deposition tapes.
While having a subscriber count that is shockingly low considering their prolific nature and general depth of investigation, Anomaly Documentaries is one of the most unsung channels on the platform. I was introduced to their channel through a semi-thorough exploration of fundamentalist Christian cartoonist Jack Chick’s biography. But as the name of the project suggests, it covers a wide array of anomalies, frauds, and strangeness spanning all facets of history and culture high and low. Readers of Getting Spooked might find value in the quick and dirty facts Anomaly uncovers about the Ashtar Sheran cult or the Raëlians and the Clonaid scandal. Personal favorites include an exhaustive investigation into the John Titor hoax/ARG and the so-called Bosnian pyramid—the latter of which highlights the dangerous nationalistic fervor that can be stirred up through fringe archeology. While some of the video titles and thumbnails might make casual viewers think they’re in for YouTube clickbait, the videos themselves are carefully scripted, well-researched, and generally never deceptive. Anomaly is exemplar of what the general “strange story” channel should be more like. Start at “The Judge Who Sued His Dry Cleaners for $54 Million” for a quick, odd, but non-paranormal story that will make you want to tear your hair out.
Parapolitical content is somewhat lacking on the YouTube platform, at least in my experience. That which exists is often missing the necessary depth or adequate citations—both qualities very important to me. As luck would have it, the channel Eyes Wide Open has you covered. Tackling broad subjects from the origins of the military-industrial complex to more specific instances of covert American warfare like the CIA’s Operation 40 group. In their video on the former, Eyes Wide Open keenly notes how Laurance Rockefeller’s funding of various ufology and parapsychology groups could have been a keen move to sidestep public attention placed upon secret military aircraft—an industry he was heavily invested in. Their series “The History of the CIA” is what caught my attention, kept me engrossed, and has me in for the long haul. It’s the high school history lesson you never got but always wanted, covering the darker side of U.S. foreign policy, covert warfare, and hidden agendas. Finally, we have a YouTube channel that cites Peter Dale Scott, Jim Hougan, and Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin and maintains a cool, scholarly, but not emotionally hollow demeanor. I look forward to Eyes Wide Open’s ongoing incisive series on George H.W. Bush.
Full disclosure: I am married to this documentarian. However, her thorough research and well-done documentary projects had my attention long before we met. It was Emily’s video on the iconic Coast to Coast AM tale Mel’s Hole that was my first viewing and I’ve been locked in ever since. Emily covers everything within the realm of the fringe, true crime, paranormal, and conspiratorial and does it all with the care of a careful archivist, documenting the strange through newspaper clippings, genealogical research, and other material. Although I may be revealing my biases by declaring that there are no bad videos on her channel, I remain steadfast in that assertion. However, the Weird Reads magnum opus may well be the feature length exploration into the story of Alternative 3, a mockumentary and novel that blossomed into occulted truths for the paranoid, examining how its various tendrils have affected conspiracy culture and the UFO sphere to this day. A recent interesting documentary recalls a San Francisco socialite, supposedly hexed by a tarot reader, dealing with spooky activity while navigating the weirdness of the 1970s Bay Area. I am personally partial to the series that seeks to makes sense of the ufology scene of the 80s and 90s, touching on cattle mutilations, underground bases, and alien abductions—leaving me in heavy anticipation for future installments. In fact, given our constant collaboration and similar views upon the fringe, I’d say Weird Reads is the closest analogue to Getting Spooked on the YouTube platform. If I haven’t convinced you to subscribe by now—after several fun appearances on The Getting Spooked Podcast, multiple citations within articles, and even a guest series—I have failed you as a writer and podcaster.
I was initially drawn to Oki’s documentary work because of an early video on the exploits of sociopathic comedian Dan Nainan, but I have stuck around for years because they only get better with each video. With an engaging style, the channel stays true to its namesake, covering a variety of “weird stories” often within the realm of American conspiracy theories and the fringe. More recently, they have released a feature-length documentary covering the Bundy Ranch standoff with a depth that is truly commendable—including some boots on the ground journalism with members of the sovereign citizen family in Nevada. One of the most relevant to Getting Spooked readers would be their 20 minute overview of the Bennewitz affair, an excellent primer on the subject that has affected ufology so completely. Other fringe culture stories are covered, such as Oki going gonzo at a Super Soldier conference in hopes of appearing on James Rink’s Super Soldier Talk (“How I Infiltrated a Bizarre Conspiracy Cult”) or his exploration into a paranoid crank who got elected to a local school board in California (“The Man Who Trolled a School Board”). He also did an impressive investigation into Alex Jones’ “gay frogs” claims, unpacking the partial truth within Jones’ rant. All videos are of impressive production quality, some I would argue better than the average modern streaming service documentary. See “The King of Stolen Valor” for an example of this, a documentary on the life and crimes of “soldier of fortune” Jack Idema featuring emotional testimony and shocking archival footage and audio. Oki’s Weird Stories is yet another YouTube channel that punches way above its weight in overall quality.
Barely Sociable / Slightly Sociable
While Barely Sociable and its sister channel Slightly Sociable have respectably large audiences, it rises above the standard YouTube true crime/unsolved mystery channel. It holds a specific interest in the stranger unsolved mysteries, the behind-the-scenes narratives of brazen business crimes, and even—at times—the paranormal. See the fascinating feature-length video “The Music Industry’s Darkest Secret” for a combination of these topics, presented in an interesting visual style and delving into the dark underbelly of an ubiquitous industry. Getting Spooked readers might find Sociable’s quick explorations into vanished antigravity researcher Ning Li, the Oakville blob mystery, or even the alleged disappearance of a notorious UFO hoaxer of particular interest. More recently, videos on both channels have caught my attention and illustrate a willingness to speculate on hidden motivations in business and crime—particularly a duo of videos covering the grave robbing market, eBay’s controversial gangstalking case, and possible overlaps between these topics. If anything, it’ll make you wish they uploaded more often, though the infrequency of releases is no doubt a product of the care put into each video. Maybe the mind-bending, heartbreaking, and mysterious death of Marshall Iwaasa can send you down enough rabbit holes to tide you over.
While many of the channels examined previously come at paranormal subject from a place of critical distance, skepticism, or do not touch on the topic all that much, Think Anomalous serves as one of the best channels dealing with the paranormal from the believer side. What sets it apart is sober presentation style—a marked difference from the sensationalism inherent in genre on YouTube—and the fact that it is generally very well-cited with books or articles that may make for good further reading. I have been following the channel for a long time, captivated by their analysis of the Solway Firth spaceman photo when it came across my recommendations feed. Anomalous phenomena of all stripes are covered, though I am much more interested in the unsung high strangeness (see “The Zaragoza Goblin, 1934” and “The Sandown ‘Ghost Clown,’ 1973” for the more unusual incidents). But even the more well-known paranormal incidents are covered well, such as the Jackie Hernandez poltergeist case and the Villas-Boas incident—the Bosco Nedelcovic explanation of the latter is given a mention. You can test your skeptical limits with the channel’s compelling arguments for the validity of the Patterson-Gimlin film and the paranormality of crop circles. Think Anomalous even did a refreshing duo of videos questioning the revelations of To the Stars Academy and AATIP, indicative of some critical thinking that is often lacking in the modern-day paranormal scene. I do not share beliefs completely with the channel, but I truly respect any and all paranormal researchers willing to dig this deep on Fortean events, doing the legwork without accepting arguments from authority blindly. It’s what Charles Fort would have wanted in a YouTube channel, notwithstanding the fact that he gets a nice retrospective himself.
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Thank you to The Anomalist for linking to the most recent dispatch from Forbidden Science. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.
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