Fresno Famous

Note: This is the first in a series (hopefully) of interviews with local bloggers.

There’s something weird happening in the night skies above Interstate 5 — strange lights floating over the highway, scaring the crud out of amateur videographers who can hardly hold their cameras steady.

Michael Banti won’t say the lights are from aliens come to earth, but he’ll also tell you why they aren’t from a helicopter or passing airplane — at least any we know about. It’s how Banti handles most of his posts on Weird Fresno, a dose of healthy skepticism mixed with more than a hint of X-Files kookiness.

The blog, which focuses on the totality of local supernatural lore, relates all sorts of odd little stories, from small town ghosts (the Walnut Girl from Armona), to aliens on surveillance tapes (you really gotta see it) and something called the Watts Valley Wolf Ape.
Here Banti talks to Famous about what it means to believe.

I love the idea of Weird Fresno. Tell us about the blog? How’d you become interested in the paranormal and how do you go about finding these stories/doing research/etc.?

I had become friends with several bloggers in the community and decided to do my own. I wanted to do something different and decided to write about the paranormal, which I have been involved with in one way or the other for almost 10 years now. Most of the stories that I write about are local legends that I’ve either heard from people, or something I found on the Internet. Others, like the UFO ones, there are several sites I frequent and get information from. Sometimes I’ll just use Google and see if I can find anything interesting, but that doesn’t happen that much.

You have several posts about these strange lights being spotted out toward Kettleman City and you’re planning some sort of investigative trip out on I-5. Does UFO=aliens?

Not always. The term UFO itself stands for Unidentified Flying Object, which means that at the time of the sighting, the witness could not identify what they saw. Most of the time, it’s either some sort of weather phenomena or man-made object. But not always. During the 1980s there were sightings of a black triangle-shaped aircraft throughout California, and only seen at night. This turned out to be the stealth fighter and bomber, which at the time was top secret. I think most unidentified craft are top-secret government projects. Not that I’m saying I don’t believe in alien life, just if they did visit us I don’t think they would be traveling out in the western part of Fresno County, where those lights were seen.

One of our most popular posts is one your started, looking for ghost stories in the area. What do you think draws people to the paranormal? What draws you to these types of stories?

It amazes me how many people have a story to tell. I think what draws some people, as with myself, is the mystery of it. We live in a scientific age, where most things can be explained, yet there are still things out there that cannot. For others, they have had personal experiences and now they pursue this field in search of answers. For myself, it’s a bit of both. I've had experiences in the past (as a child, my mother’s house was haunted) and I’m also an extremely curious person. There’s obviously something going on, yet mainstream science chooses to ignore it for whatever reason.
I would love to hear people’s stories, no matter what they are. One of the reasons why I started the blog was to get out there the weird things going on in the area. Both northern and southern California are ripe with stories and I feel the Valley has them too. Hopefully this blog will get them out there.

But isn’t everyone who believes this stuff some kind of X-Files conspiracy freak? The irony being most people have at least one “ghost/UFO” story of their own.

I don’t think everyone is a conspiracy freak. But there are those out there that will want to believe so bad that they will take any evidence shown to them as the absolute truth. And some people take advantage of these believers, which is sad. But most people I’ve dealt with just want to know what’s going on and are very level-headed about it.

Do you believe?

I do, to a certain extent. I’m a skeptic on most things and I need to see hard evidence to convince me, especially with ghosts. Showing me a picture that’s very pixelated and claiming a ghost isn’t going to convince me, nor is showing an out-of-focus video with a white light in the sky and nothing else and claiming it as an alien space craft. And there are so many hoaxers out there looking for attention that sometimes it’s hard to believe anything anymore. I think that’s why this will never be mainstream. Science just can’t take it seriously when the field’s own people can’t even police themselves.