This is Contact in the Desert, Event Horizon, now America’s largest UFO and unexplained phenomena convention. Together we will all compare notes in a rare and wonderful way, I mean how often do you get the opportunity to hang out in a hotel bar with dozens of people you see in documentaries or listen to on the zillion podcast episodes exploring the phenomena? It has become glaringly obvious that something is going on, now if we could just define what it is.  Is it extraterrestrials, is it extra-dimensional beings, are they the old small-g gods, are they a control program, plasmoids, ghosts, big-G God, the Matrix, greys, Nordic aliens, Reptilians, Venusians, a big government Psy-op, aaaaargh- what if it is all of the above!?!? As challenging as these concepts are, it is a fun brain-flex as it forces one to think in a multitude of directions.  I consider it my multi-disciplinary hobby, Cosmic Philosophy.

You can still get tickets if you want to join us and try and figure it all out.  In the meantime, we sat down with Captain Ron Janix, the co-owner and co-producer of Contact in the Desert- Event Horizon.

JTV: Hey Ron, Joshua Tree Voice here.  Are you ready to go, everything all lined up, any changes to make in the programming?

Captain Ron: God, no, we’re getting ready to print the book, so it’s damn close. Yeah, all that’s locked in, the schedule, the speakers, all that’s been locked. It’s just a lot of last-minute stuff, as you know.

JTV: I hear ya, now you’ve been running it for what is this, your third year, right? For running the show at least. Have you been going to the show previously as an attendee and podcaster?

Captain Ron: This is our third year, yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with Contact of the Desert since 2015, where I got to know the previous owners and I acted as a host and I loved it. It was honestly my favorite week of the year and I think it was an incredible event. I was just really interested in it and it was a great opportunity for me just to be the little bit involved that I used to be.

JTV: I’ve noticed just since attending last year that most of the speakers and authorities in this unusual field of study have started making a move into more of an exploration into consciousness. Particularly as a way to understand things that didn’t always add up, things skeptics were able to tear apart like the abductee phenomena. A lot of incidences where the neighbors didn’t see anything but there was supposedly a craft overhead, perhaps it’s because it’s not perceptible to everyone because consciousness and reality are maybe a little bit more flexible than we want to admit. So it seems to be less about the UFOs and the aliens and more about the nature of reality. Is that something you’ve seen go on over the years?

Captain Ron: That’s spot on. That’s exactly the case. It’s more about getting to the true nature of reality, and the reality of these situations. Also about things like AI and how artificial intelligence will affect our understanding of these things, as well as consciousness and the way consciousness affects the way we perceive these things and perhaps affects the things we observe. I think that’s a very important thing to bring out, that it’s not just the old nuts and bolts UFOs.

JTV: It’s really lucky that the name of the conference is Contact in the Desert and not the UFO show because it allows you to evolve as the philosophies and theories evolve. 

Captain Ron: Exactly. you know, another element that is really moving into the forefront is telepathy. You know, we have Dr. Diane Hennessy-Powell who is behind the telepathy tapes. Have you seen that stuff, it’s awesome.

JTV: Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve listened to some of the episodes I haven’t watched it though, it beat out Joe Rogan for listeners which blew a lot of minds.

Captain Ron: It’s really good and it’s really interesting and it deals similarly with how consciousness works. We might be way off on how this works. There was a kid who a few years ago in the UK who was blind. He was like nine years old and he went to the eye doctor with his mother and he read the eye chart. But he’s blind, but it was like, is he seeing through her eyes? Is he using her consciousness? How does that whole thing tie together? So something else is going on that we clearly haven’t figured out how it works yet.

JTV: For sure, I mean anybody just paying a little bit of attention has will have a bunch of inexplicable experiences in their life, seemingly impossible things happen a LOT. I used to piss my daughter off when she would come back from school, and within seconds I would know there was something off.  I’d ask “Hey, did you get in trouble today, something go wrong, what’s up?” I was like, able to pick up on the energy and just bust her. She literally said at one point, “I don’t even try to lie to you. It’s a waste of time.”  Plus she’s a good kid. So she doesn’t need to. 

I was listening to the last podcast interview you did, and one of the things you brought up was synchronicities and how they seem to get magnified at the show.  What came up, and this is a weird one, and I don’t know if there’s any meaning to it other than maybe reality giving me a wink, perhaps I’m being cosmically flirted with and encouraging me to do things like this interview with you. But for the last nine weeks, every week, I find a dime, a shiny silver dime just in the middle of a sidewalk or a store aisle. Nine weeks in a row, never a nickel, never a penny. Always a dime. 

Captain Ron: I love it! That is incredible. There’s a guy who’s speaking at our conference, he does the podcast “Area 52”, I just heard him talking about a story where he has that. He and his brother like were in New York or whatever, he told his brother that he sees dimes all the time. His brother was like, that’s ridiculous. There’s no way. And he said, well, let’s both look this weekend and he found like a dozen of them and the brother found zero.

JTV: Crazy, and I don’t know what to attribute that to. Am I supposed to testify against someone? Am I going to drop a dime on them? Is that what I’m being told to do?

Captain Ron: Right? What does that mean? But it’s something. It’s not nothing. That’s how I feel about these things. It’s not nothing and you shouldn’t just dismiss it. I think there’s something more behind it that it is trying to tell us something. And it is weird the way these things happen. Dan (his publicist) and I were talking the other day and I sent him an email. Hey, Dan, don’t forget to get this to me, and he was on his phone texting it to me.

That information. It’s like, did I trigger the universe to tell him? It does feel like it’s all connected somehow that we are all part of some grid. You know, I’m not a big believer in a lot of this woo stuff at all. However, there was certainly something to that. There’s something more, more than just coincidence. That’s how I feel.

JTV: Yeah. Researchers are starting to theorize that we may have a wet quantum computer in the microtubules in our brain that can grab information from any moment in time and utilize it. So I joke constantly that I’m exercising my microtubules and am gathering as much information as I can so I can send it back to me in the past. Like as soon as I really get good at this, I’ll be able to do some day trading that’s going to knock it out of the park. Quantum reality is incredibly weird.

Maybe as weird as putting together your panels and lecture series.  I mean you have dozens of them from most of the prominent experts. I’m sure everyone wants one, especially if they have something to sell. It is such an interesting world with so many fascinating speakers but you’ve got an equal amount of complete bullshit artists and nutcases, you know, how do you vet? You can’t really make those judgement calls or I suppose you just do the best you can or you might throw away the baby with the bath water,. Though most of the UFO world doesn’t throw away much, they don’t even throw away the diaper. It seems even when something’s been disproven a million times, many still accept it as the foundation for whatever scenario they’re trying to build and sell as a book. You must be in such a tough spot. You want to prune, you want to curate, but it’s hard to do that without so much blowback.

Captain Ron: It is. It’s terrible. And I don’t want to dismiss anyone’s beliefs either. You want to be careful with that, you know, but it is very hard to navigate the misinformation, the misunderstanding, the disinformation. All of these things are very hard to navigate. So as we move this conference more and more towards, scientific exploration, as well as, you know, an academic take on these esoteric topics, it becomes tough because we’re dealing with an unknown and the fact that you’re dealing with an unknown makes it tough. So the more outrageous claims, you know, maybe they’re real, but it’s really hard for me to digest some of the ideas that a lot of people have.

JTV: Well, you’re not in any position where you can name names or call anybody out. And I would never even ask you to but I’ll tell you, I did listen to an interview with Dr. Steven Greer, who has a LOT of stuff to sell. I listened to a recent interview with the guy and every cell in my body just wanted to scream at him to just stop making stuff up! I do not believe that he met with every important person in the world and was offered a billion dollars in hush money that he turned down to be heroic.  Just ludicrous. I’m going to start referring to him as the Napoleon Dynamite of the paranormal industry. He’s probably got a supermodel girlfriend, but she’s on another planet

Captain Ron: He’s very controversial and a lot of people really struggle with him, absolutely.

JTV: It’s like you said on the Last Podcast on the Left interview, when a one-in-a-billion thing happens to a person, that’s amazing. But if 50 one-in-a-billion things happen to them and they came out of it to hero and they turned into Flash Gordon and they shot lasers at other aliens, it’s a bit too much. I often want to suspend my disbelief, but there are no industrial-strength-suspension-disbelievers that would work in these scenarios. It’s too much.

Captain Ron: That is one of the filters for me, that too much happens to the same person. I feel like it’s already a strike of lightning. Now you’ve had 15 of those and they’re all these different unrelated things, you know? It’s much more implausible to me. I gravitate to the cases like Travis Walton, this one thing happened this one time to him and five other guys were there and saw it. Now that’s interesting. It’s been 50 years and they stick exactly to their story. I find that compelling and I don’t feel it should be dismissed.

JTV: I did have some odd life experiences, even one regarding cattle mutilations. This isn’t something I’ve really put out in the world, but my Grandfather was a Sheriff in a small town in South Dakota named Menno. There was an outbreak of cattle mutilations one summer. I used to drive around with him since there was really no crime there. He was the Sheriff to a pretty peaceful community. It was like Mayberry RFD.  One day I was hanging around with him, just a kid, maybe eight. We were driving around and he got a panicked call. He was given an address to a farm, we went out and there was a small crowd around a cow that had part of its face taken off. They didn’t let me get too close because I would poked it with a stick or something like a kid would do. But I saw the face and I saw the genitals and it was just all carved out and there was no blood. The farmer was super freaked out because he said he saw what he thought were black helicopters off in the distance the night before, they weren’t making any sound but helicopters were the closest thing he could describe it as. Anyhow, all the cows had come home but one. He waited till morning and immediately went out looking for it. The cow was pregnant, as most are on a dairy farm and they finally found it in a field, the one we arrived to. It was bloated and it had no blood there was no blood anywhere. They searched their whole farm and it’s all fenced in and there was no sign of blood and by the way, cows contain a lot of blood. What they did find was the calf. The calf had been born to that cow and was about two miles away from where they found the cow’s body

Captain Ron: Wow! Two miles seems a lot for us calf to move.

JTV: Right. And that’s the thing they say, calves never leave their mom. They just don’t. And moms never leave the calf. There were an additional 6 or so cows that got mutilated in a short span and people were panicking and aggressively demanding that he get to the bottom of it. But he just had no idea, no one did. He ended up having to go on the news and say it was rabid badgers just because they needed an answer. He admitted that was just a lie, just to give them what they demanded. Then it just suddenly stopped happening.

Captain Ron; Wow.

JTV: So, it’s tough. So many weird things to sort out.

Captain Ron: Yeah, right. But who knows what it is? I mean, we can’t tell what that is. I don’t have an answer for what that is, but it’s something, and it’s something more than badgers or an easy response. You know what I mean?

JTV: Yeah. Badgers don’t have scalpels, then the other thing is the misinformation that seems to be so directed. There are a bunch of players in the scenes that seem to have some ties to government, that are also out there with amazing claims of having done this and seeing that and do all these things, but a lot of it seems to be intentional misinformation. 

Captain Ron: Yeah, right.

JTV: When they volunteer to help with disclosure it should be easy to just tell the truth. You know, there’s a term in espionage called the “useful idiot” and it seems quite probable that the government is using people to put weird stuff out there just to distract us. Nothing to see here. 

But why? When somebody says it’s a Psyop, why would they waste that time and energy and effort just to see, what, just to see what they can get away with? It doesn’t add up.

Captain Ron: And the guys like Richard Doty have publicly explained that this is what they purposely did. They intentionally misled people to have a certain train of thought that they wanted people to believe about aliens.

JTV: But any any understanding of why?

Captain Ron: Well, no, but it’s always to lead them off track. Doty says he wanted people to take a certain track of belief. That’s what Richard Doty says. He would mislead people intentionally so they would come to conclusions that were knowingly false.

JTV: Is there any rational reason why the US Govt. would bankroll a disinformation campaign if there wasn’t something real and significant they did not want us to see?

Captain Ron: Exactly. Google Richard Doty, he’s worth listening to. It’s very interesting. I mean, he’s a disinformation artist by trade. He says he was paid to disinform people specifically about this issue. The fact that we even have a guy that does that is incredible to me. Why? Look over here because what we have over there is a lot worse. Yeah. There must be more, but I do agree with Dr. Greer in the sense, that the information is probably housed with a very small group of people. I don’t think most people in the government or military know the inside track on what’s happening with regards to the UAP topic. I do think it’s probably an unacknowledged black-budgeted project. It makes sense that it would be that way. Why would they let other people know?

JTV: Well, my current, I guess, hypothesis is that what it “is” is something that just so completely blows minds. Ontological shock is the best term for it now. The nature of reality and time and space is extremely weird. The more we learn about things, well-documented things, such as quantum entanglement and the like, it’s super, super weird. So if we only know the tip of the iceberg, how intensely strange is the rest of it?

Captain Ron: And that’s mainstream science, not even stretching into metaphysical ideas and it’s already mindblowing. Contact in the Desert is all about that and a ton more.  We have dozens of exhibitors and back-to-back panels for 5 days.  This is going to be a great show. Much more of this will be thoroughly discussed.

JTV: Right. And so if 1% of what we know is super weird, the other 99 is going to make my head explode. I agree that there probably is some government organization or group that has found out that… reality isn’t real. We as the observer can read minds, we can bring information through time, we can do all this stuff. And it’s just too much for most of society to handle. 

Captain Ron: I agree. I think it’s very plausible that that’s the reason they don’t release this because they know it’s much more than simply being humanoid people on another planet that built a nuts and bolts craft and flew it here. I think people could get their brains around that. That’s pretty digestible. But if it’s the kind of stuff you’re talking about, that I explore too, if we find out that everything we believe is wrong… oh boy. You know, maybe we’re living in a virtual world. Maybe there are infinite different planes of existence or something very abstract. People will not be able to digest that.

JTV: I wonder how the development of a quantum superintelligence is going to handle this.  It may just casually blow the lid off every illusion. It reminds me of something I read about superintelligence and how it’s going to be a million times more intelligent than humans are. There was a joke I heard that scientists weren’t worried about superintelligence taking over since they could just pull the plug. So they developed it and when it was operational they asked the superintelligence “Is there a God?” and the superintelligence welded its plug to the socket and said, “There is now.”

Captain Ron: That’s fantastic. I love that nugget. You know, I heard something similar the other day. I heard that AI, as it becomes more intelligent than we are, could already be manipulating us and we would never even know it. That’s scary as hell.

JTV: Well, I mean, already I eat a lot of stuff due to manipulation. You know, an ad shows up right around the time it thinks I’m hungry, it shows me a pizza and there I go. Speaking of go, can people still get tickets right up to the event?  

Captain Ron: Absolutely. The hotel is sold out, but there are plenty of places nearby and there will always be tickets available, the venue is huge.  I’ll see you there.

That wrapped up our time, but there is so much more than what we could fit in with this short chat.  I hope you take a moment to go check the Contact in the Desert website, I think you will be surprised at the scope and scale this weekend provides. It’s pretty much Comic-con for the for the metaphysical now.

Captain Ron Janix, the co-owner and co-producer of Contact in the Desert- Event Horizon is also the host of “Beyond Contact” a podcast where he creates an easy entry point for those with an open mind and non-judgemental ability to process new information as he interviews most, if not all, of the subjects and individuals you will find at the actual convention. We hope to see you there!  And just to be safe, watch out for rabid badgers.

contactinthedesert.com