Becoming an active member of the Fortean community doesn’t (unfortunately) guarantee you will ever have a close encounter of the 3rd kind, a ghostly apparition or a Bigfoot sighting in the woods. The one ‘paranormal’ experience you will have, guaranteed, are synchronicities—lots and lots of them; most of them trivial, and a few others… not so much.
Yesterday I had one of those, when out of the blue and with no special reason to do so I decided to listen to an old episode of the Somewhere in the Skies podcast, in which the host Ryan Sprague interviewed an old pal of mine: researcher/author/musician/film producer Christopher O’Brien.
It was a few hours later that I learned—through Ryan’s social media no less—that Chris had just passed away, after suffering a heart attack while driving. I’m sure he would have found my synchronicity only slightly interesting, given the incredibly rich life he had in the pursuit of what he called The Trickster.
Chris was one of the old ‘boots-on-the-ground’ UFO field investigators, and quite possibly one of the few living authorities in the field of cattle mutilations, having personally researched over four hundred cases between 1992 and 2002. During that period, his phone number was pinned in the bulletin board of many County sheriff departments in the southwest of the United States, and whenever a rancher lost a cow under mysterious circumstances which defied conventional explanations, Chris would be among the first to check out the gruesome carcasses devoid of genitals and blood, with no tracks pointing to natural predators or foul play.
In the last season of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries there is an episode devoted to cattle ‘mutes’ showing Chris giving his opinion about this phenomenon, which gained prominence in the 1960s with the death of ‘Snippy’ the horse (the case which grabbed Chris’s interest on the subject when he was just a kid) and continues to this day, claiming the lives of cattle heads to the detriment of bewildered ranchers who don’t know whether they should blame their misfortune to aliens, devil worshippers or some secret government program.
Incidentally, long-time UFO journalist George Knapp also has a new show on Netflix, Investigation Alien, which starts off with some of the same mutilation cases showcased in the Unsolved Mysteries episode yet, strangely, Chris doesn’t make an appearance in it, despite the fact that he was the first UFO investigator to research the infamous Skinwalker ranch—he was in fact (according to him) the one who suggested the Shermans to sell their property to Robert Bigelow. Perhaps Knapp wanted instead to feature his colleague Colm Kelleher, with whom he co-wrote Hunt for the Skinwalker, the book that gained global attention to this location in Utah.
Or maybe the reason for Chris’s absence is because his ideas with regards to the mutes (and UFOs in general, for that matter) had nothing to do with the pro-ET agenda Knapp is pushing. Having had researcher David Perkins as his mentor, Chris’s ideas centered around the Trickster archetype, which he thought was an Earth-based force devoid of true sentience, yet capable nevertheless of manipulating our myths and religions through paraphysical apparitions (and the occasional exsanguination of cows). To Chris, the Trickster had the ultimate metaphysical purpose of coaxing humans into exploring outer space, so we would finally leave our tired old planet alone.
Despite his ‘out-of-the-box’ way of thinking, Chris was also heavily invested in the scientific gathering of material data that could help us further our understanding of the UFO phenomenon. Inspired by his friend Ray Stanford, he collaborated with UFODAP, a project seeking to place automated cameras and sensors in different UFO hotspots all over the planet, which would be able to discriminate ordinary objects from the truly anomalous through AI deep learning—just like Avi Loeb’s Project Galileo. Seems there is always someone in the field trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of joining efforts with those who have preceded them.
Chris’s passing is particularly sensitive for me on a personal level, because he was one of the few researchers I was lucky enough to meet in real life, something truly exciting after having spent so many years listening to him as co-host of The Paracast podcast. Our first meeting happened in 2013, at the second Paradigm Symposium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chris was there promoting his latest (and also last) book Stalking the Herd, in which he condensed his massive cattle mutilation database to create what is probably the most complete and definitive volume on the subject ever written. Chris was fun to be around and liked to party (perhaps too much) and during one of our long hangouts at the hotel bar he regaled me with a few of his personal UFO experiences, which made me suspect the phenomenon had its eye on him since the beginning of his life, as it often happens with many researchers (though few dare to admit it publicly).
The second and last time we coincided was in 2016, at the International UFO Conference in Arizona. Chris was sharing rooms on that occasion with his long-time friend, Zuni elder Clifford Mahooty, whom he jokingly used to call Chief Horndog (you can probably guess why).
Chris’s joviality and expertise will be sorely missed, but fortunately one is able to find scores of podcast interviews with him online. The old Paracast archive would be a great place to start, and as I said earlier, Ryan Sprague’s interview with him on Somewhere in the Skies would be among the last podcasts he might have guested in. You should also check out the Radio Misterioso archive, since his friend Greg Bishop had him on many times.
Farewell, Chris. May you find the answers you sought so passionately all your life.
