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You're probably already aware of CAST's new true crime investigative podcast, Lost in Panama. But if you haven't caught up, new evidence and testimony has recently been uncovered in the most recent episodes. It is shining new light on this case. The first four episodes of the series set up the foundation of what is known about this case.
including a deep dive into the suspicious tour guide, the mysterious photos, and the remains. But episode five launches a whole new direction of investigation into this case.
A woman connected to the confirmed homicide of her own son tells us that she knows the same men responsible for her son's death are also responsible for Chris and Lisanne's deaths. Not only that, but she presents to our team a full, detailed story of exactly what happened, how the women were abducted and killed. And somehow, it all adds up. All the pieces start to fit together. All the pieces start to fit together.
or at least start to make more sense. As time begins to run out on the investigation, but with this major breakthrough in hand, the team in Panama must attempt to assemble a compelling enough theory of the case in order to push the Panamanian government to admit that there's more going on here than meets the eye.
We need them to reopen this case so that a much closer look can be taken at all the new evidence coming to light and the families affected can finally find some closure all these years later. Will they do it? Listen to all episodes of Lost in Panama, available now wherever you get your podcasts. This episode contains disturbing content. Listener discretion advised.
While making season one, we came across some really interesting information that, to be honest, just didn't fit into any of the episodes. So we've collected those segments for you to hear today. We also received questions from listeners, and some of those questions will be addressed in today's episode. We're going to be covering the history of Orgone.
The origin of reptilian conspiracy theories. We're also going to talk a little bit more about Sherry's death, as well as give you an update on the current state of the Oregon Warriors. My producer Kate and I both have interacted with the Oregon Warriors on Facebook.
throughout the months of production, as well as since the podcast has been released. And there are some interesting new developments among the Oregon Warriors, including a possible new leader. So we're going to talk about all of that and more on today's episode. From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist, a podcast about regular people who turn sinister simply by embracing opportunity. This is our epilogue episode for our series on Sherry Schreiner.
I'm Hannah Smith. This first section is part of an episode that we ended up removing because it just didn't feel like it propelled the story along. It felt like a sidebar, but a very interesting sidebar. So I want you to hear it. So we're going to play it for you right now. First, let's talk about Orgone, the magical puck that Sherry claimed could crash UFOs
She made it by putting crystals and metal shavings into a resin mold. She used a cupcake tin as a mold, and so her orgone looked like little pucks.
But Sherry did not invent orgone. And actually, it has a pretty interesting history. My guess is that Sherry heard about orgone first from this man named Don Croft. He founded a collective of people who called themselves Etheric Warriors, and they were dedicated to making and distributing orgone, but they called it gifting orgone.
If you'll recall in season one, I mentioned that Sherry reached out to Don Croft. She wanted to join forces and she claimed that she could help him bring Orgone into the Christian sphere. But Don Croft was just not interested. And then after he rejected Sherry, she decided that his Orgone was D-O-E or dead Orgone energy. But even before Don Croft, Orgone was around. It was discovered or invented by
by a man named Wilhelm Reich. And this is Sherry's version of Orgone's origin story. They can study Wilhelm Reich, who they threw in prison and destroyed all of his work because President Eisenhower commissioned Reich to find a way to destroy aliens and UFOs.
Because they discovered there was a problem in America. There's UFOs everywhere. And so Wilhelm Reich discovered that what we call positive orgone energy would destroy alien ships. But we picked up where he left off. Because when I started praying to the Father on ways to tear down the strongholds of Satan, he led me to orgone energy.
Like so many things in Sherry's ideology, like so many conspiracy theories in general, there is some truth to her story. Wilhelm Reich did invent Oregon, and he did die in prison. In 2012, I started interviewing guests about the work of Wilhelm Reich and Oregon Energy and Oregonite.
I was interested mainly in the different approaches to etheric energy use. That's Jeff Brady, host of the syndicated radio show In Other News, in which he explores fringe belief systems. He considers himself somewhat of an orgone expert. He's certainly a proponent of it, and he has studied Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich's story is one of great success and great failure.
He was a Ukrainian-born psychiatrist and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. He actually helped run Freud's hospital in Austria in the late 1930s. And Freud respected him. He called him the best head among his associates.
When Hitler came to power, Reich made his way to America. And by the time he was 35 years old, Reich was a world-renowned theorist and clinician. But he became obsessed with the idea that sexual repression was really harmful to people and that it could be cured by having lots of orgasms.
And then he announced that he had discovered this cosmic energy, and he called it orgone. The name is derived from the words orgasm and organism. Reich believed that orgone was the energy force that people tapped into when they had that sort of post-orgasm sense of well-being.
And it's his discovery of orgone and the subsequent ongoing obsession with orgone that he had that would lead him down this bizarre path and eventually land him in prison. What Dr. Wilhelm Reich had done is he created the orgone energy accumulator that builds up a charge of orgone and holds it. And he did this by constructing...
Reich's orgone chambers were made mostly of wood and metal, but he believed they could accumulate the orgone energy that he said is needed to build a house.
exists in the atmosphere all around us. By sitting inside of the orgone chamber, he believed that you would be exposed to this sort of intensified, concentrated orgone energy, which he believed had all kinds of positive and healing benefits. In 1941, Reich sent one of these orgone chambers or orgone accumulators to
to Albert Einstein. He wanted Einstein to take scientific measurements of it so that he could measure the etheric energy and give it his stamp of approval. And Einstein's team did attempt to take measurements, but pretty quickly denounced it as unscientific and unmeasurable. But Reich wasn't deterred. He continued to make these orgone chambers and promote them as these sort of like positive and healing rooms.
But he got in trouble because he started to sell these orgone chambers, and he claimed that they could cure cancer and what he called madness. He caught the attention of the FDA.
here in the United States with using orgone energy as treatment. And the orgone energy accumulators were in the offices of many psychologists, psychiatrists throughout Manhattan and probably other states as well. Reich died in prison, but the promise of orgone proved irresistible for people looking into alternative medicines.
And it's really not that surprising that Sherry Schreiner saw Wilhelm Reich as this pioneer and hero. Reich also had a small group of followers who believed him and believed in the power of this orgone energy. Reich also believed in aliens and UFOs and claimed to have spotted them in the sky. He believed you could harness and propel orgone energy through the use of pipes. And
and he would regularly shoot it up into the air at the clouds. He claimed that it could relieve droughts. Perhaps this is where Sherry got her idea for orgone blasters, which are the big metal pipes sticking out of buckets filled with orgone. And the pipes point toward the sky, and Sherry said that they could dissolve chemtrails and also just keep the weather nice around your house. Because if you saturate an area in orgone, the chemtrails can't stick.
They can't stick. And that's another problem. That's a huge problem they have with the orgone because orgone eliminates chemtrails. There are organizations that still offer orgone therapy today. And you can book an orgone therapy session or join an orgone society. Sometimes it pops up in celebrity circles. Like in 2013, Jaden and Willow Smith posted pictures of themselves at crystal shops and then later making orgone.
Sherry Schreiner later heard about this, and this is what she had to say about that. But you can see what they're doing with these mind-controlled kids in Hollywood, that Jaded and Willow Smith, they've been totally MKUltra'd to death to where they can't even think for themselves. They had a Hollywood article about these kids joining an organized society.
Now, as far as I know, I think Don Croft is the only one that copyrighted the term "Orgonite" just fine. Nobody else can use it. So it has to be one of his groups. It's got to be Don Croft. And so, uh... And they're making all this junk orgone. If you want to make real orgone, you have to use clear quartz crystals, fiberglass resin, uh, copper wound in a clockwise direction. It's very simple. It has four or five ingredients to it. I have directions on my website.
That last clip always stands out to me because Sherry talked about orgone as this magical tool that literally had the same power as prayer. It could protect you from bad dreams and keep demons out of your house. It could literally crash alien ships, she said. And yet this wasn't some ancient text or legend.
rare natural element. You could literally make it yourself with ingredients that you can find at any hardware store. Sherry has instructions on how to make it on her website, orgonblasters.com. And there's a photo of someone making it and it's just this table in a garage with four cupcake pans and a gallon of fiberglass resin. Some people literally cut up metal sponges and sprinkle that into their orgone to use in place of metal shavings.
But we make pure, pure ether energy orgone blasters. It does exactly what I say it does. But they want to ban it because it's causing the UFOs to crash all over the world. You see lightning, the meteor showers, there's UFOs crashing everywhere folks. It repels evil. It repels the giants when they come, the locust invasion. It'll keep them off your roof.
It'll repel aliens and demons, keep them out of your yard, your house. Sherry died in 2018, but the Oregon Warriors are still around. There are still many people who believe that Sherry was a prophet of God and consider themselves her followers. While Kate and I were researching for this story, we made contact with multiple Oregon Warriors through Facebook. So for this section, I'm going to bring in Kate, and we are going to tell you about what we have discovered.
Hi, Kate. Hello. Happy to be here. So, yeah, let's just start off. Maybe just start telling us kind of like how you started to make contact with the Oregon Warriors and we can just kind of go from there. The Sherry Schreiner Facebook page is still pretty active and it's still getting...
Like followers. How many followers are there approximately like now? She has about a little over 2,600. Okay. Yeah, and she's gotten quite a few more followers. I think that COVID has really...
kind of lit a fire in the Oregon Warriors group, and they are starting, or they started to and have continued to be very concerned about, you know, the vaccines and mask mandates and all sorts of things like that. So they kind of predicted that the rapture might be happening, the end times. Typically, if there's a group, right, on Facebook now, there's like a group page, but
The Oregon Warriors before this, they just wrote on Sherry Shriner's personal Facebook page. There's posts on her page like every day, right? Yeah, it's consistent. And yeah, it's kind of sometimes it's like, are they still talking to Sherry? Yeah. Like they'll send her messages, say, we miss you, Queen Shaz, and things like that. Or they'll just post, you know, it's a place for them to post videos, conspiracy theory videos mainly, whatever.
communicate with each other. But then you said, oh, there's this new Facebook page. This new Facebook page was created in 2020, and it indicates that there is a divide happening among the Oregon warriors. But before we get into that divide, let's talk about the purpose of this new Facebook page. For a while in November and December, they were talking about gathering to
bring in the end of the world going to a remote location and camping out until Yaw comes and saves them. They were going as far as asking people what skills do they have that they could bring to this camp. You know, like, is anyone good at starting fires? Is anybody, you know, good at cooking this and that? You know, and they're talking about bringing gloves and hats and soap and
and toothbrushes, things like that. They said once this starts, you won't have access to banks. Were they waiting for something to happen that would clue them in that it was time to go off the grid and meet up? Yeah. Around in December is when the COVID vaccines started rolling out, or that's when the plans started to be made for rolling out the COVID vaccines.
The consensus among the Oregon warriors is that the COVID vaccine is the mark of the beast. The Oregon warriors took the government's campaign to vaccinate the country as a signal that the end times are beginning.
And so they started to prepare to go into hiding because pretty soon, they said, all of the people vaccinated with the COVID vaccine will become members of the New World Order. So we need to go and we need to isolate. I'm not sure where exactly they were going to do this, but it sounds like very remote locations.
area completely off the grid. Whether or not they were actually serious about doing it, I'm not entirely sure, you know, because this was, I'm sure most of these people never met in real life and they're probably all over the country. I mean, Sherry talked a lot about how vaccines are a government ploy to, you know, insert chips into your body and be able to track you and things like that.
In 2009, when the H1N1 vaccine became available, Sherry talked about it on her show. It wasn't the first time that she had mentioned vaccines. She actually had a website dedicated to the dangers of vaccines, theywantyoudead.com. But here's a couple clips from a show in 2009.
This whole swine flu thing, folks, of course it's poison. Of course it's designed to kill you. It's everything that I've said it is over the last couple of weeks. Most of the people who take this vaccine will be dead within two years. They'll be dead. Sherry said on this show that the New World Order was going to force people to get the vaccine and that if you refused to get the vaccine, that they would try to hang you. They would be bringing out the gallows. And there have been watchmen over the years saying,
yelling and sounding the alarms that gallows were being brought into America. Gallows rearing its head in the codes now, and that tells you how late we are in time. The gallows are starting to show up, and that's going to be as a judgment for those who refuse. This is H1N1 vaccine, the gallows are coming up. It's the vaccines giving people these diseases. You're not going to get H1N1 unless you get the vaccine, because then you're carrying the live virus. And what's the Bible have to say about putting live, unclean things in your body? It forbids it. The Oregon Warriors are
often reference Sherry's teachings. They look at things that she said on Sherry Talk Radio or in her articles as prophecies. And so they're always trying to correlate the things that she said with current day events. So when the COVID vaccine began to roll out, they became fearful that the government would force everyone to get it.
And I think maybe part of the reason that they want to go into hiding is I've seen people talk about COVID camps, which would be camps they would put people in who refuse to get the vaccine. I just want to point out that if the government is controlled by the New World Order and the New World Order is planning to put microchips into all of us and then gather up anyone who refuses to take the vaccine and hang them or put them in a COVID camp,
Why are the Oregon Warriors posting about their plans to go into hiding in detail on a publicly available Facebook page? Maybe they finally put that together because the post stopped in January of 2021. You know, they haven't been posting on the Facebook page as much in 2021. But they mentioned in January that they might be moving over to something called Telegram.
So like Telegram is like a messaging thing that's apparently extremely encrypted. So now let's talk about the divide among the Oregon warriors. What's going on with that? So there is a new leader who is claiming to be the sister of Sherry, Queen Rachael. So she would be the same status as Sherry as far as actual sister to like Lucifer and Jesus and everything? Yeah.
Yes. Yeah, everyone's like, Queen Rachelle has taken Sherry's place and is now, like, continuing the message. There's this detail that I didn't mention in season one. Remember when Sherry released her final book, Interview with the Devil? You know, the book in which she rewrote Genesis to include herself, saying that God actually had 14 children, two sons, which would be Jesus and Lucifer, and 12 daughters, right?
Sherry said that she was one of those daughters, that she had grown up in heaven, along with all the other daughters, and that she had been sent to earth and put into the body of Sherry Shriner. But she also said that another one of God's daughters, someone named Queen Rachael, was also sent to earth at the same time. Sherry never said who Queen Rachael was, but she talked about her on multiple occasions on the show and wrote about her in Interview with the Devil.
This is from a show in 2015. And once, someone called into Sherry Talk Radio to ask her about Queen Rachelle.
Yes, sometimes Sherry opened the line to callers, and this person asked her who Queen Rachelle was on Earth. Sherry confirmed that Rachelle is someone currently on Earth, but she wouldn't reveal her identity. After Sherry died, one of her longtime supporters revealed that she was actually Queen Rachelle. And I'm not going to reveal Queen Rachelle's real name.
But she knew Sherry, like actually knew her in real life. She got into all the conspiracy stuff after 9-11, which she said that was like a pivotal point. And...
Queen Rachelle and Sherry actually met on a Bible Codes Yahoo page. Oh, really? Right after 9-11. Yeah. Wow. And then they split off together. They said that there were too many, like, government infiltrators in the Yahoo page. I didn't realize that they went that far back, though. Yeah, Queen Rachelle, I think—
Also, kind of what made sense for her to step up is that she also does Bible codes. So she also... She does? Yeah, she does the Bible codes too. And so she's been predicting the end of the world and seeing these messages in the Bible codes.
There are some Sherry loyalists who don't support Queen Rachael as the new leader. It seems very familiar to, you know, the Mike Hall, Richard Brown, Stephen Mineo, where they say things about like how Rachael is not human.
A reptilian that has infiltrated? Yeah, so they don't respect her. And which, that's one of the things that I talked with Pam about, because she is definitely one of those people who has fully accepted Queen Rachael as the new leader of the group.
Pam is a relatively new follower. She came around after Sherry died, so her allegiance is to Queen Rachael. Although she still recognizes Sherry as a prophet and the daughter of the Most High God. But she follows Queen Rachael. Kate reached out to Pam on Facebook. Pam is extremely friendly and, you know, ended every message with, take care, y'all bless. So then I asked her,
about the kind of divide in the Oregon Warriors group. And she said, Sherry said that the Warriors would divide again. And they did. They say that Queen Rachelle isn't who she says she is. They also think that I'm not human. They also think that Pam is not human? Yeah, yeah.
She said, so I was like, oh, people think that you're a clone too. And she said, the guy said I had a long neck, alien hybrid maybe. One of Sherry's longtime supporters, this person,
February, she posted on Sherry Schreiner's Facebook page and said, there are no other queens on this earth. The only two that did come down here are Queen Chazirazi and Queen Rashael. That's it, period. They are queen fighting warriors here that Father Yaw sent down to do his will. For the most part, it seems like the longtime supporters of Sherry are on board with Queen Rashael being the new queen.
Sherry's husband, Arch, was never a true believer. In fact, he was never really involved with Sherry's ministry at all. But one of Sherry's daughters is, and she has most likely met Queen Rachael in person since Queen Rachael and her mother were so close. And even Sherry's daughter has said, yes, Queen Rachael is the new leader, and she is Sherry's sister.
So Queen Rachael is now the leader of the Oregon Warriors. And although she claims to be able to interpret Bible codes, and she also claims to be the sister of Jesus and Lucifer and Sherry Shriner, the literal daughter of God, to have been born and raised in heaven for ages until being sent to earth on a mission to
She doesn't have the same vigor for the mission that Sherry did. In general, she's just a more relaxed leader, and she doesn't spend so much time online with the Oregon Warriors. There's this other big difference between Sherry and Queen Rachael, which is Queen Rachael doesn't ask for money, as far as I can tell. It's possible that she is asking people privately to donate, but I haven't seen any posts about it.
It also just doesn't seem like she's going on Oregon missions. The biggest thing that I've seen that she's done is predict the end of the world, which isn't nothing. And she started organizing the group to go off the grid into hiding. I was pretty alarmed when you sent me that video, which I don't think we can play because it's of a child that someone posted on Facebook, probably the child of an Oregon warrior. It's of a kid. I never know how old children are.
What would you say? Maybe eight? Eight? Yeah. Yeah. And he's outside. He's excited. He's singing a song about Yahushua. But he starts off the video by saying it's nine days. Nine days until we go up into heaven. Nine days. So this child has been told that the world will end in nine days. Yeah. And he's singing a song about it. He's happy. But, yeah, he's...
Completely. Like, he is acting like he's an adult organ warrior. Like, he's saying all of the things that organ warriors say, and I think hearing it from a kid was very jarring. Yeah. Especially because, you know, when you think of, like, other kids who are religious, it's like, oh, okay, your parents...
you know, probably take you to like church or, you know, some sort of like official gathering, things like that. There's, you know, a book, but this it's, it's gotta be purely just this mom talking about it to him, playing Sherry talk radio, things like that. And for some reason that's very off-putting to me.
Mostly the Oregon Warriors still look back to Sherry's teachings. They listen through her radio show archives. They read her articles and then post quotes of things that she said or wrote on Facebook. There was another thing that one of Sherry's longtime followers wrote on Facebook about Queen Rasha'el that clues us into how the Oregon Warriors think about their new leader. But it also tells us how they think about Sherry's death.
Queen Rachelle's the only one down here since Queen Shazirazi was taken up alive by her father, Yaw. Now you can't fool the elect. Officially, Sherry Shriner died of a heart attack. Her heart had given her trouble over the years. And in 2015, she said on Sherry Talk Radio that she had been hospitalized for a heart attack. And then in January of 2018, her heart failed her. But the Oregon Warriors don't believe that version of the story.
She said that what happened was that Sherry's heart was on 20%. She was being attacked almost all the time, but they were particularly going to attack her worse this time, and they planned to kill her.
and finish off her heart. This is MJ. We heard from her in season one. She's an Oregon warrior, and she also believes that she is an angel in the flesh. One of the 144,000 people, part of the group that Sherry called the elect, that would be the first group of people to be sent up to heaven during the end times. This is MJ's account of Sherry's death.
The medical records say that she died of a heart attack. She did have a history of heart attacks, but we know what caused her heart attacks. And we know that she didn't die of a heart attack. We know that father just took her, took her out of her body. She was in a room sitting at her desk and she was, she had her eyes closed and she was listening to her praise music, her worship music, because that's what she did before going to bed.
She cleaned up her room. She was told to clean up her room. She didn't know why. But father said, you're coming home. Well, we need to talk about the reptilian stuff too. Do you have stuff to talk about for that? Boy, do I. Oh boy, do you. People are really curious to know more about the origins of the reptilian conspiracy theory.
The idea that reptilians exist is not a concept that Sherry Schreiner created. Other conspiracy theories also believe this. So Kate did a little bit of research into where this idea came from. It originated kind of in fiction in like the early 1900s with an author, Robert E. Howard. He wrote Conan the Barbarian.
Okay. Yeah, but he wrote another book called The Shadow Kingdom, where there are serpent men. So that was kind of like the first time that that idea was introduced, obviously. He...
This was, you know, fictional. What year did that book come out? The Shadow Kingdom is actually a short story that he wrote, which came out in 1929. And then, you know, lots of popular culture things have things like that. I wrote down it's in Marvel, Doctor Who, Star Wars. But in 1998...
David Icke wrote a book called The Biggest Secret, the book that will change the world. This was kind of the start of the reptilian conspiracy theory. So that's when it was popularized. In that book, he pointed to the royal family and he said the royal family for the beginning of the monarchy in the UK, they have been reptilians. Oh, okay. Okay.
So interesting, because that would line up with, I mean, Sherry also believed that. She was always vilifying the royal family, the queen, you know, as being reptilian. So she probably got all of that from David Icke. David Icke said he had prophetic visions, which is how he knew about the reptilians. But it's interesting that you say that Sherry Shriner got that vision.
From David Icke. I mean, to me, it's pretty clear that it was directly inspired by his teachings, but Sherry being Sherry, she denied that. Of course. What did she say? There was a Sherry Talk Radio—well, she talked about it—she denied it quite often. So she said in Sherry Talk Radio in—
You know, I've been trying to make it clear on this show for so long that we're not dealing with humans and our government folks. So this is what we're battling against, folks. I know a lot of you can't grasp your minds around, oh, that's David Icke material. Well, you know what? I was talking about this, you know, same time I even heard of David Icke. The same time I was doing War Gone two years before I even knew Wilhelm Reich, that he had done War Gone.
These are what I see. These are the things the Lord leads me to. That's kind of classic Sherry, is that she clearly got information online from other sources and then claimed that she had come to it on her own, that, you know, YAH had revealed it to her through the Bible codes. One thing in my research I found very interesting was that there was a public policy survey published
in 2013 that found that 12 million Americans believe in reptilians. Wow. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people.
While making this podcast, multiple events happened that made these conspiracy theories feel less obscure, more mainstream. First, on Christmas of 2020, there was a bombing in Nashville, Tennessee. The bomber claimed to believe in many different conspiracy theories, including that 5G networks were somehow perpetuating COVID-19. He also believed in lizard people.
Then, of course, the January 6th insurrection on our nation's capital, which was fueled in part by conspiracy theories and QAnon. There's one more segment that I want to share with you before we wrap up this episode.
I've spoken with a few people since the podcast has been released, people who used to be involved with the Oregon Warriors in some capacity. And I think it's important to include some of those stories, people who did not become heavily involved with Sherry Schreiner, whose lives were not consumed by all of this. First is Holly. Holly reached out to me on Twitter after the podcast launched, and she said that she used to be internet friends with Sherry, and she'd kind of forgotten about the whole thing until the podcast came out.
Holly grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and she was always kind of interested in aliens and sci-fi stuff. And then she stumbled upon Sherry Schreiner. Originally, I found Sherry through when I was younger. I was probably around 14, 15. Just a nosy kid on the Internet looking up weird stuff. And I came across, I think it was a website or a page called The Watchers.
Watch for files? Yeah. And I vividly remembered a banner on the page and it had all like very like flashy colors. There was little emojis. I think there was an alien face in front of the White House. There was that. And then I think I just fell down a loophole. I was an odd child. Like we grew up spending a weekend with my dad watching like the X-Files Stargate. So like there was an interest in like aliens and extraterrestrials and space there. So I feel like that's how I easily fell down the rabbit hole. Holly says that she was never a hardcore believer.
And the most appealing thing to her was the orgone. In one of her shows, she had talked about, have you ever gotten that like ringing in your head or in your ear? And it just come out of nowhere. And I remember her saying that that was them trying to brainwash you or trying to take control and they were in your head. I remember that. And that was when I was like, right, I need to get some orgone. And I remember I looked it up. It was 2010 that I posted on her Facebook page asking where can I buy it?
I remember sending my address into this group, which is extremely dodgy now, considering a 15-year-old would have done that. And someone sent, I don't know if it was Sherry herself, but someone actually sent me out a piece of orgonite or orgone. And I actually have it here as well somewhere. Oh, you do? While we were talking, Holly pulled out the orgone that was sent to her from an orgone warrior. This one is small. It's shaped like a heart.
I've never seen one in real life. Well, I'm actually seeing it over Zoom right now, but it's the closest I've ever come. Yeah, it's fairly old. Like, there's chunks taken out of it as well. I was regularly liking and reading and listening to her talks and her shows that she would have people on. Yeah. Did anyone in your family or your life know that you were interested in this or that you were being involved with Sherry Online? No. No. No.
When I was going through her website and her Facebook and listening to all these like chat shows that she had, it would have been in our kitchen on like the family computer as well. So it was quite public.
But no one really questioned it. And I remember when I first messaged you, I was telling my sister and I was like, I was explaining who she was and what had happened. And my sister was like, I'm not really surprised that you got yourself into something like that. And she made a comment that it was lucky that I'm from Ireland and I didn't live over there because God knows how far I would have gone into it or how deep I would have gotten into it.
So I suppose it's lucky in that sense. But no, like everyone knew that I had an interest in conspiracies, aliens, space. And I think it was kind of reassuring to know that I was this American woman, you know, from across the seas. Like it was no harm. So when did you what kind of made you stop listening to her? Did it just happen naturally or was there anything that made you stopped being interested or listening to Sherry Schreiner?
The only reason I can think of was that at that age, I would have been doing state exams. And my mom, being very strict, would have like knocked off internet access, would have turned off the internet. So there would have been there would have been like a period of time where I wasn't online. And so that I just I just fell out of it, I suppose, naturally due to like school exams. Do you consider yourself a conspiracy theorist now?
A little bit, yeah. I feel like I would consider myself, I make the joke quite often that I'm like a mild tinfoil head. Now I'm not that extreme to like I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I'm not, Covid is a conspiracy. But I do really really enjoy conspiracies and especially conspiracies at like a government level. So yeah I do, I would consider myself like a mild tinfoil head, yeah.
What are some of your, what's like your favorite conspiracy theory? 9-11. And I know like, because we didn't experience that entire situation over here. 9-11, I do enjoy the conspiracies behind that.
What do you think is so appealing about 9-11 conspiracy theories? Because I have to say, the 9-11 conspiracy theories seem to be a very common denominator amongst a lot of people that we've talked to that have been interested in Sherry Shriner, are currently interested. A lot of people seem to... That was like the moment that they became interested in conspiracy theories, was like the 9-11 conspiracy theories. So like...
What do you think is like, I hate to use the word fun, but like, what do you think is fun about it? Like what's appealing about that conspiracy theory to you? There's just so much information. There's so many theories. Like I,
Personally, I don't think there's any hard evidence to prove what really happened. Again, everyone that, if you mention it to anyone, they'll all have a different opinion on it. And again, being in Ireland, we have a different political state. We're quite different. And politics, I feel, in America has control of everything.
And looking at that from an Irish point of view and just an outsider point of view, like it was huge. And there's people who claim that they were there when it happened, that claim that the government had an involvement and everything. It was just, you can read about it all day and you'll have no definite answers. Then it's just one big mystery, I think. Yeah, I have an undergraduate in psychology and criminology and we've often talked about cults and cults.
their mental states, but I never would have guessed that Sherry, this little old American woman, would have such a control over a group of people. So I'm shocked. I was shocked when I heard about your podcast. Lastly, I want to play you part of my conversation with Gary. We heard from Gary in season one, but this part of the conversation got cut out of the episodes.
Remember, Gary grew up in New Jersey, and he met Steven Mineo at a friend of a friend's house one night. A few people had gathered to get high and watch conspiracy theory videos. Gary thinks he was about 19 years old at the time. Prior to me finding my church and I got married and I met my wife and everything settled in, prior to that,
I was really into the Sherry Shriner stuff. Okay. So how long would you estimate that you were into the Sherry Shriner stuff? A good year and a half, two years.
The night that Gary met Stephen, that was the beginning of his exploration of conspiracy theories and his involvement with Sherry Schreiner. And similarly to Holly, it was the orgone that captivated Gary. And actually, the second time we hung out, that's when he brought out his orgone puck. Sorry to laugh, but... That's okay. That's when he brought out the orgone puck. And I remember that because when he brought it out, we were all amazed. We were like, wow. You were. You were amazed. Interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. Because did it look just like was it like Sherry Shriner puck? Like it kind of looks like a gray like rock. Yeah, like a like a rock, like a clear rock, like something like that. And how did that go down? Like if you think back to him, like showing that to you. He brought it out. We're on we're on the room. We're on this computer looking at, you know, conspiracy stuff. And he brought out a rock.
And then he said, like, this is what we need. This is what we need to put out. He said, like, I'm making this. You know, Sherry's trying to sell this. So what we need to do is, like, we need to get this and, like, put it all over the town, all over the city. I never did that, but I did have, like, one of them. Gary never bought Orgone because he didn't have a job. But he said that if he had money at the time, he would have spent it on Orgone because that was what he was interested in.
Eventually, Gary stopped hanging out with Stephen, but they stayed in touch. And after that, Gary went through some very dark years. He said he was spending most hours of his day watching conspiracy theory videos online. He was becoming anxious and afraid of everything. He joined a church, and he said that that was one thing that was helpful to him. It was a step in turning his life around.
He actually invited Stephen Mineo to go to church with him once. But Stephen declined, saying they didn't need to go to church. They just needed to prepare. I don't know. He said, like, just get a gun and be prepared for the end of the world. Do you have a gun? And do you are you at all in that mindset of like, are you a prepper or a truther or anything like that?
No, I don't have a, I don't have a gun. That's for sure. But, um, I mean, I don't want to, I wouldn't say I'm a prepper. I think spiritually it's, it's like where I am right now is where, you know, God has intended for me to be, you know what I mean? Like everything is God's will. Of course we have to be prepared for everything, you know?
But is that just more of like a spiritual preparation? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Whereas Stephen, you know, he had like bulletproof vests and, you know, he was preparing for an actual war, I think. Yeah. You know what's crazy, what's ironic about all this? What? As much as he was like preparing for all this and from what he told me and like what he told my friends, like,
He knew he didn't even get a chance to like, let's say it does happen. You know what I mean? He didn't get a chance to live that out. I don't know. Is that like weird to say? Like weird to think? No, it's it's I've thought a lot about how it's bizarre how he was so prepared for this one thing.
You know, the economic and societal collapse of America, you know, and alien invasion. But there was other, obviously other real dangers that he wasn't prepared for, you know. And I don't really know exactly what went down, you know, in the final days and months of his life. But it seemed to me like he had a real mental breakdown because he had put so much of his trust in Sherry Shriner.
And then she betrayed him and he lost his grip with reality. Yeah. So sad. So sad. It's so sad. Something I've thought a lot about is why do some people become consumed by conspiracy theories and others don't? Why does one person find Sherry Schreiner and think it's interesting and funny, maybe a little weird, but
And another person hears the same information and decides to dedicate their entire life to the cause. I don't have an answer for this question, by the way, but I think it's one worth asking. Yeah, I'm thankful that it didn't. That's why I know that there's like God really exists because, you know, I'm thankful I didn't dive deeper into that.
You know, look how Sherry, look how Steve wound up. Look how the other girl wound up, you know? So I'm, I'm really thankful that I didn't dive deeper into that. You know what I mean? Oh, I, I, yes, I totally know what you mean. And, you know, obviously you're a man of faith and you believe that God helped you. I'm not saying that that's not true, but I'm also just saying like, you know, no one helped Kelly, you know, and no one helped Steven. And so, um,
I don't know. Can you identify anything in your life that was like a real help? Like when your mom shipped you off to Florida, was that like a wake up call? Like get out of this. Yeah, that was definitely a wake up call. Yeah. When I moved out to Florida, you know, I kind of like, yeah, because Florida is a lot different from New Jersey. You know, Florida, there's things, you know, not there's nothing to do in New Jersey, but
Florida, there's the beach and then there's a I will go to the skate park all the time. And, you know, just like keeping my mind off the Internet. I remember like keeping my mind off the Internet. I enrolled back to school and, you know, I mean, everything didn't everything didn't like it didn't work out 100 percent in Florida.
But I eventually moved back to Jersey a year later. But when I moved back to Jersey, I was enrolled in school. I wasn't, you know, into that stuff anymore. Now I look back on it. I mean, as a kid, you know, you don't really have too much experience in the world. Be careful what you believe in.
The Opportunist is a cast original podcast. It's produced by me, Hannah Smith, and Kate Mays. Editing, sound design, and music editing on this episode by Matt Sewell. Colin Thompson is our executive producer.
Our podcast art is by Code of Arms. The Opportunist is written by me, Hannah Smith. Original script and some interviews by Tony Rousseau. The ending credits song is A Lot to Look Forward to by Lester Norton. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for season two coming in June. That once mattered doesn't matter anymore Someday when someone says to you
Darling, you and I are through. You'll see what you have to look forward to.
