Dave Schrader paced back and forth in front of a crowd of roughly 200 people on Saturday, March 8, 2025, at the Zlock Performing Arts Center. Massive in stature, with a personality to match, he cast a long shadow over the crowd.
All photos provided by the author.
Schrader, who had already been on stage for more than twenty minutes at this point, was in the middle of a story about a stranger who had approached him with an unusual problem: she believed a demon was breaking her fine china. Without missing a beat, Schrader put on his best Devil voice and gave us, presumably other hellspawn tasked with paranormal activity, our marching orders. He asked one group to torment sinners, another to assist a “reality-TV president,” and the last, of course, to cause general mayhem by destroying dinnerware. “Do you think the Devil has a slow cousin he sends to mess with old ladies?” he gently teased.
The crowd erupted.
Schrader commanded the stage like a seasoned comic, ready with a rapid succession of battle-tested bits. But funny as he could be, the audience hadn’t traveled to Newtown, Pennsylvania to listen to him tell jokes.
“You know, not everything is demonic,” he declared. The air in the room shifted. The crowd, a varied mix spanning from teenagers to senior citizens, wasn’t laughing anymore. Schrader paused, reflecting on the statement. He broke his uncomfortably long silence with a question: “How many of you have had a dream visitation?”
Around one-third raised their hands. Schrader next polled how many have heard spirits, then how many have seen them. The number jumped to half.
The crowd was in search of something. Schrader, host of the Paranormal 60 podcast and formerly of popular programs Coast to Coast AM and the Holzer Files, was offering to be their guide, like so many others who would take the stage throughout the day.
This was my second year at the Bucks County Para-con, a now annual paranormal-themed event held at Bucks County Community College, and I was also searching for something, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was after. I stumbled out of the auditorium after Schrader’s lecture with his questions still ringing in my head. I’ve never had a paranormal experience. Or have I? Would I know if I had? Para-con would be as good a place as any to find an answer.
Upon leaving the auditorium, I was confronted by a circle of vendors stretching across a single hallway and foyer, a dozen or so tables hocking all variety of Forteana. I quickly grabbed a cup of Bigfoot Blood—a blue-ish coconut-flavored cocktail, an oddly tropical choice for a creature often associated with the Pacific Northwest—from the cash bar before approaching representatives from the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, an organization devoted to the study of UFOs. An older gray-haired man who was tall enough to pass for a Pleiadian in a human disguise convinced me to sign up for MUFON’s mailing list, then nodded at literature on the table. “Feel free to take whatever you want,” he directed.
I looked down and noticed a magazine on top of a pile of newsletters. Its cover read, in big bold font: THE HOLLOMAN UFO LANDING: NEW EVIDENCE.
“I was stationed at Holloman,” I offered, pointing to a copy of their flagship publication, the MUFON Journal.
The man and a woman beside him appeared shocked; their eyes widened. He asked me to repeat myself, so I explained that I was in the Air Force for four years when I was younger, and my duty station was Holloman Air Force Base—a real military base in Southern New Mexico, but one with a speculative history that alleges secret meetings between the government and gray aliens during the height of the Cold War. I’m not that old. I enlisted during the first Obama administration.
“Did you see anything?” the woman asked, half curious and likely a little suspicious. Anyone who knows anything about UFOs knows that you always have to be on the lookout for military intelligence.
“I worked in a gym—helped people with physical therapy so they could pass their PT test,” I shrugged.
They seem disappointed, maybe expecting I had a juicy UFO encounter to share.
“I guess I saw some drones,” I added, hoping I hadn’t ruined the moment. “I think they might’ve been testing Reapers while I was there.”
No luck. I’d lost them. They were already back to recruiting other stargazers for cosmic investigations as I stuffed the copy of MUFON Journal into a bag I brought along. Such is life at a paranormal convention, where everyone is looking for a story that might provide a gateway into the unknown.
If I’ve learned anything from attending events like this, it’s that everyone wants answers. The speakers, the vendors, and most of all the attendees. Increasingly, Americans are turning away from churches and looking to the skies, or within themselves, for insight. As of 2023, the Pew Research Center estimated that 22% of Americans identified as “spiritual but not religious,” a vague qualifier that lumps together non-traditional spiritual beliefs. What unites this group, according to Pew, is that they were likely to look outside the church, outside the government, outside formal structures for answers.
For some, that means places like Para-con.
Never was this clearer than in a late lecture given by Peter Robbins, a one-time research assistant to ufologist Budd Hopkins and co-author of books like Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Bentwaters/Woodbridge UFO Incident, Its Cover-up and Investigation. Robbins, in many ways, was the polar opposite of Schrader: his head barely poked above the podium he stood behind; he spoke in a measured, almost monotone manner; and there was no room for humor in what he was preaching.
Robbins had come to Para-Con to speak about moon photos from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and how they can be a valuable resource to researchers, but almost from the jump he veered off-course. “Pareidolia,” Robbins intoned, “is the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in random or ambiguous visual patterns.”
A running theme at Para-Con across the two years I’ve attended has been the deceptiveness of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, a government agency that has stymied ufologists since its formation in 1958. Last year, for example, MUFON Pennsylvania State Section Director James Krug argued that NASA alters or misrepresents evidence it posts publicly when, after interpretation by the UFO community, that evidence points to UFOs. Robbins was quick to agree.
“First, the general shape,” Robbins observed, using a laser pointer to encircle an object of some kind in a picture taken on Mars, “looks like a piece of old wood, or something. Could that be some degrading rock formation? Sure, why not? But, but, but . . .”
He’d shuffled through a series of slides by this point, asking us open-ended questions about the pictures we were being confronted with. Could they all just be examples of pareidolia as NASA suggests, or is there a totality of circumstances that might lead us to some other conclusion? He clicked along to the next slide.
“Now we’re coming into the land of more problematic images,” he said, looking over at what appeared to be a box on the surface of Mars. He’d helpfully drawn a red circle around the object so we couldn’t miss it. “Unless you visualize dumpsters on Mars. That, if it’s fully authentic, came over.”
“Oh, come on!” a voice shot out from the front row. “We can see the rover tracks!”
Robbins, still in mid-thought about the space dumpster, paused and turned to face the heckler. The man, an older gentleman I observed earlier in the day fondly trading stories with Bigfoot researcher Stan Gordon, was visibly angered by Robbins’s line of questioning, and he motioned aggressively at the image on the screen, which to his credit did appear to suggest a path laid by one of NASA’s Mars rovers. “What are you trying to tell us with these pictures?” he yelled up at the ufologist.
Robbins, puzzled, stood silent for a moment. Every ufologist, every truthseeker for that matter, will come to a moment in time where they have their faith tested and must defend their statements, their theories, their beliefs. What of Robbins? He looked down at his accuser and responded, coolly, “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to answer that to your satisfaction.”
In the end, even with an expert present, we weren’t any closer to answers. I guess the search must continue.
