Ever since he was a child, George Noory has been fascinated with all things paranormal, extraterrestrial and just plain creepy. Noory is a guest speaker and moderator at the Edinburg UFO discussion and town hall panel starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 15, at the Edinburg Conference Center at Renaissance. Festiva was able to catch up with Noory to discuss the festival and some of his current projects, including a paranormal dating website he launched in June, paranormaldate.com.
Festiva: Have you ever visited the Rio Grande Valley before?
Noory: No, this is the first time. I was down in Del Rio, Texas, earlier last year but this is my first time down that way and I’m so looking forward to that.
F: What will be your role during the panel discussion Saturday?
N: I’m going to be moderating, keeping it (the panel) moving and flowing and making people laugh. It’s a Q&A, like a live interview with everybody where we let the audience ask questions. They call it a town hall gathering as well, so we’ll be taking a lot of audience questions and participation there.
F: Can any kinds of questions be asked?
N: It’s primarily UFO driven but I’ll open it up to anything. It’s open to everybody on the panel.
F: Can you tell us a little bit about your current projects you are working on?
N: Sure. Strangely enough, there was a woman who came up to me at the Del Rio event I was at, and she said ‘You know, I love coming to these events to see you, but I really come to meet people.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? And she says, ‘I can’t find a date. Guys just don’t understand me … they don’t get me.’ So I heard it from her and I heard it from another place I was in, so I came back and talked to some people and I said, ‘You know what? We should be doing a paranormal dating site, and they loved the idea so we started paranormaldate.com. It’s already got 19,000 members for people who just want to meet other people of like-minds. It’s grown rapidly. Some Hollywood producers called us up a couple weeks ago, and they want to do a reality TV show based on it — we’ll see. It’s free to join and if they stay and want to connect, just use the coupon code ‘GEORGE’ and they can get a discount.
F: When did
paranormaldate.com start?
N: It went online June 3; a day before my birthday. So it’s about two months old and really growing rapidly. We have an offer out there that if anybody meets anybody and decides to get married, we’ll do it live on Coast to Coast, on my radio show.
F: What is “Beyond Belief with George Noory?”
N: This is a streaming television program and people can get to that by going to beyondbelief.com. I’ve been doing that for three years. It’s an off-shoot of the radio show and it’s a number of 30-minute TV shows of interesting guests and you get to see them live and up front basically. The topics are much like Coast to Coast, you know, unusual, spiritual, alternative energy, bizzare, you name it, we do it.
F: Would you consider you expertise to be more in the extraterrestrial field?
N: I’m pretty well-rounded to cover just about everything from the unusual, the supernatural, to conspiracies to breaking news. I’ve been a news person all my life but I was always interested in the paranormal, but I hit it all.
F: What are some interesting stories from “Coast to Coast” that have stuck with you?
N: There was one from a police officer. They had gotten a dispatch that somebody might have had a heart attack so they get to the house, and a little old man let them in and they saw another little old man on the floor face down. They ran in there, rolled him over and it was the same little old man who had let them in the door. They turned around and that guy was gone. It was bizarre. We get calls like that all the time. I got a call from a woman crying one night saying all the stars were burned out — she couldn’t see them. So I started playing with her and said, ‘Stars only live a certain amount of time and then they burn out. The light you see from a star may have burned out thousands of years ago but it’s still just coming.’ And you know, she was really upset — she was outside in her hot tub with her boyfriend, and I asked her what the weather was like and she said, ‘cloudy.’ (laughs) And I went, uh-huh, that’s it.
F: Do you have any sort of filtering process when it comes to people calling into the show?
N: The only thing we filter for is the quality of the phone and whether somebody was totally inebriated or not. Other than that, everybody gets through. The better calls stay on longer, the crummier calls I get them on and get them off, but we do it with dignity. I don’t try to put anybody down.
F: When did your interest for
the paranormal start?
N: Oh gosh, I was 11 years old. I had an out of body experience at a very young age. From that moment on, I was obsessed with the unusual and the paranormal. I said I was going to go into broadcasting — that’s what I wanted to do, and boy, I did it. I was just 11 when that all happened to me and now I’m 110. (laughs)
F: Do you attend events like the Edinburg UFO Conference often?
N: I do. I attend events all over the country, including live stage shows with a full band and orchestra, which I don’t think we’ll have at the event. This will be strictly a panel that’s put on by the city and a couple other organizations. You got to love it, and I do. I’m looking forward to some of the guests like Mark Goddard, who I used to watch as a kid. He was in “Lost in Space,” and he’s going to be out there. There’s a number of great guests going out and I’m really looking forward to it. It should be a great weekend.
