Close Encounter Of The Heard Kind: Is There A Real Audio Recording Of A UFO?

In a 1981 police recording from St. Helens, Oregon, a strange mechanical hum fills the air over the Columbia River. It is not the whoosh of a jet or the whine of a helicopter. It is a sound that has been studied by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and it may be one of the only authentic audio recordings of an unidentified flying object ever captured. On this episode of Dead Rabbit Radio, host Jason Garbner plays that recording and explores a parallel story about Islamic exorcism in Sweden, weaving together the question of how paranormal forces interact with us while we are awake, asleep, and even dreaming.

The Islamic Exorcist and the Logic of Jinn Possession

The episode’s central argument comes from a 2022 article in Contemporary Islam by Michael Marlowe, profiling a 30-year-old Islamic exorcist in Stockholm who goes by the pseudonym Raheem. Raheem became an exorcist because his own mother was tormented by a jinn when he was growing up. In Islamic tradition, jinn are not simply demons; they are beings with their own societies, religions, and free will. There are Muslim jinn, Christian jinn, Jewish jinn, and even atheist jinn. An exorcism, or ruqya, begins not with holy water or shouting, but with dialogue. The exorcist asks the jinn its name and its religion, then appeals to its own moral code: “Do you think Jesus wants you to do this?” Sometimes the jinn