Scott McEwen is the author of many books and the co-author of the bestseller American Sniper, which was made into the movie starring Bradley Cooper, and directed by Clint Eastwood. In the first half, he talked about American Sniper and the grueling 18-month process required to train Navy SEALs who go into the toughest battles for America. The SEALs are an elite special operations force that conduct small unit operation missions in various environments. They are the ones who took out Osama bin Laden, but have also done many other difficult missions that are lesser-known or that we don't hear about, McEwen pointed out. In looking at the lives of various SEALs, he found that the 'Hell Week' and early training were a crucial part of their development. By the end of their first month, about 75% of the trainees will have dropped out or been asked to leave, he detailed, but of those left, most make it successfully through the rest of the training.
He discussed meeting the late Chris Kyle (American Sniper was based on his life), just after his third deployment in Iraq. In addition to being one of the best marksmen in US military history, McEwen found Kyle's life story compelling, and also wanted to bring attention to America's long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that some have forgotten about. He was pleased with how the movie of his book turned out, and Eastwood was actually his first choice as director. McEwen said he was the one who set up the meeting of Kyle with Bradley Cooper, which led to him being cast in the part. He also talked about Kyle's untimely death in 2013, when a mentally unstable vet shot him at a gun range in Texas.
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In the latter half, MIT and Princeton-trained physicist Dr. Claude Swanson shared evidence for different spiritual or paranormal aspects such as the afterlife, ectoplasm, orbs, and the soul. Spirit voices are sometimes picked up as electronic voice recordings, he noted, citing an intriguing case from 1948 when a Catholic priest was trying to record a mass. The recording picked up the voice of the priest's deceased father calling him by his boyhood name. The curious substance of ectoplasm is manifested by certain gifted people during seances, he explained, and could be thought of as energy that can leave the human body and interact with a torsion field to take on its own life as it interacts with a higher dimension.
The soul, he continued, is primarily made up of torsion energy-- a kind of semi-physical "twisting of space" that can maintain itself over time, even after the body dies. Kirlian photography, he added, has been able to pick up torsion fields. Swanson talked about the late British spirit voice medium Leslie Flint, who was said to produce voices of the deceased but seemingly not through his mouth. In an early instance, people complained at a movie theatre that voices were emanating around Flint as he sat in the audience, though he was not aware he was causing it, Swanson recounted. He also touched on the idea of a "shift" coming in our near future (possibly related to an Edgar Cayce prediction), brought about by a solar flash that will damage electronic devices and affect our consciousness.
News segment guests: Charles R. Smith, Kevin Randle