Before 1995, records of Winston's activity are more fragmentary, but he appears to have been an active participant in discussions in such newsgroups as alt.alien.visitors, alt.dreams, and talk.religion.newage as early as 1992. He himself only remembers getting involved with the internet "about 1993 or 1994."
Winston's style of posting is as distinctive as it is voluminous. Although he occasionally writes original material about his telepathic dog Yogi (now deceased) or his adventures on and around Mount Shasta, he prefers to collect accounts of strange and unusual phenomena from a wide variety of sources including UFO magazines, Web sites and supermarket tabloids.
When he has gathered enough material, he then posts these massive digests -- often hundreds or even thousands of lines long -- to newsgroups where he thinks they might do some good. His criteria are simple enough.
"I am inspired by two spiritual masters from the inside of Mount Shasta and my guardian angel as to what I post," he says. "The space people also give me inspiration."
He himself makes little or no editorial comment on the material he collects, only adding an occasional "JW I believe this also" or "JW Has anyone else heard about this?" as a footnote to a 300-line opus on bigfoot or a list of the hundreds of types of aliens in his records. At least on the surface, many of these blind anecdotes seem to contradict each other, but Winston is undeterred by critics who point this out.
In fact, many also consider him one of the gentlest people ever to post to Usenet. If he has ever said anything critical or negative about anyone, no record exists. He describes himself as "one of those two times on Sunday and once in the middle of the week type Christians," and believes that God even loves the UFOs -- nefarious cattle-mutilators though they may be -- "very much."
"Everything has its place"
Beyond the assistance of guardian angels, this broad inclusiveness is the cornerstone of Winston's elaborate personal mythology of the paranormal, where telepathic dogs, malevolent reptoids, some 36 different types of "gray" alien, and even stranger creatures all find room. When asked whether there was anything he didn't believe in, he only said, "I think everything has its place and should be investigated."
Of course, he has his favorite obsessions, including the idea that the Earth is hollow and honeycombed with a labyrinthine network of lost civilizations, alien bases and other mysterious factors. As he says, he is "very interested in some people who live underground underneath Mount Shasta," which forms the geographic heart of all his dreamlike speculation and encounters.
Like most of the sources he digests, he believes not only that a shadowy "secret government" is running the world -- and repressing the truth about UFOs and the paranormal -- but that the sins of modern civilization are ripe to produce catastrophic "Earth changes."
"I think the space people are trying to make themselves known to us so that we will not have to go through a lot of bad changes that have been forecast," he says. "I think our secret government is trying to keep them from doing this."
"I was fairly normal"
John Winston was born on June 5, 1932, making him 67 when he agreed to this interview. Although he says "it seems like I was led to get into this sort of undertaking by the space and spiritual people," he remembers his childhood as "normal" and enjoyed a "fairly normal" adolescence. In high school, he played on both the football and track teams and won a district tennis championship.
Significantly, he says he did not think about UFOs very much until he was "about 23 years old," when he started to see unidentified flying objects over the Lompoc, Calif., area.
This would put the dawning of his 40-year interest in the paranormal in 1955, early in the 1950s "saucer flap" and just two years after Donald Keyhoe christened modern UFOlogy with his Flying Saucers from Outer Space. Of all the hundreds of books written about unidentified aerial phenomena in the last half century, Winston still cites "the books by Mr. Keyhoe" as one of his two primary influences (the other is the 1959 film 'Journey to the Center of the Earth').
The experience left Winston with "a desire to find something, and (he) left all to find it." He would become a tireless investigator into the supernatural from then on, eventually emerging as what Rene Mueller of SpiritWeb called "one of the most curious persons on the internet."
"It was a lot like the call that Abraham got to get out of his country 'into a land which I will show you,' " he says. "I was shown where to find my guru and teacher Merle Fagot, who became my teacher for about 8 years."
As a result of this tutelage, Winston has since been "taken up on a space craft in the astral form, down in the desert of Southern California," and had numerous other adventures, many of which he has shared with his internet audience.
Stanford, Science-faction and the Internet
While Fagot instructed him in the mysteries of Mount Shasta, spirit guardians and other new age secrets, Winston was keeping busy raising a family and working as an electronic technician and instructor at Stanford's linear accelerator, a work environment that he says gave him "a good idea how scientists and physicists work to discover new things."
He remembers the Stanford scientists as being interested in flying saucer phenomena, but he notes they "didn't mention it at work for fear of losing their jobs."
"A tall boss I had finally retired and it was written up in the newspaper that he was very interested in UFOs," he says. "I worked with him -- closely at times -- for about 18 years. He never mentioned a word about UFOs and I didn't know that he was interested in them until I read it in the paper."
Winston, however, was completely open about his interests even then, "giving out books and information about UFOs" to California Naval personnel. Shortly before he retired five years ago, he even hosted a community television show called 'Science-faction.'
"It dealt with the supernatural and science," he says. "We talked about ghosts, ESP, UFOs and other things." His beloved dog Yogi, which achieved notoriety on the internet after Winston revealed that the dog possessed telepathic powers, also appeared on the program, but studio personnel finally requested that Yogi no longer appear after the dog "got to where he was too much at home and he would relieve himself on the artificial flowers on the stage."
Science-faction ran for about four years, Winston recalls, eventually ending two years ago after more than 100 shows.
Meanwhile, the internet beckoned. A friend suggested he should post his thoughts to the Usenet group alt.slack, which is best known for propagating the Church of the SubGenius, a self-proclaimed "joke religion" with a baroquely complicated conspiracy-cosmology similar to that outlined by Winston's posts.
Today, he is still delighted by the internet, saying "it's good, just like the telephone," and has little problem with the explosive growth that has left many other online veterans of the early 1990s bitter and disillusioned. He says he is online "9 hours a day or more -- 7 days a week."
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