At 5:40 a.m. one day in Novmber 2008, Jamie Havican decided to take his black and brown miniature Dachshund Charley out for a walk. “I went out front and as we were walking down the driveway I was looking on the ground for snakes or whatever,” Havican recalled. “We got to the end of the driveway and I noticed an object over the gulf to the northwest. It was like an orange object and I stared at it for about 30 seconds. It looked like it was sitting still and I let the dog finish what it was doing.”
Havican rushed back into his home to look for something to photograph the object with, but the film camera he found had no exposures left. Returning outside without a camera, Havican looked for the object but found that it had vanished from where it had hung in the sky. “So I walked out and I was looking up and down in the sky — all of the sudden I saw it and it was almost directly above my house at a few thousand feet,” Havican told the Catalyst. “It looked like plasma almost, so it was really weird. It looked like liquid, but it was orange and yellow and it sat there for – I don’t know – a good 20 seconds. It blinked out which is weird – kinda lost all its light. Then it came back and then it went out. As soon as it went out I could see the clouds behind it.”
Jamie Havican has searched the night sky each week for unidentified flying objects (UFOs) outside his Englewood home since his first sighting three years ago. “That there is what really got me going,” Havican said. “I was crazy because I believed UFOs were either misidentifications or top secret aircraft. I tried to go back to bed that morning, but I couldn’t. So that’s when I started researching all the time about UFOs.”
Havican searched for others who had seen the same object that morning, but came up empty handed. However, he did find David Ryals’ online report of a similar object spotted in the morning as well. A few phone calls later, the two decided to watch the night sky together. “So, we did our first skywatch on April 13, 2009 and that night we saw 13 objects,” Havican said. “I don’t know how many were satellites, but out of the few we saw there were a few that definitely did not do typical things like satellites, [like] stay in a straight line, you know? Some of them changed directions – they lit up, they went out, they dropped in altitude.”
Now armed with a $2,000 camera, laptop, a military grade night scope, tripod and other accoutrements, the duo hold weekly skywatches just after sunset. Usually it’s just the two skywatching, but they do invite others on occasion. “I wish there was more interest in it,” Havican confessed. “Where we’re at, our county has the highest average age in the whole United States. So there’s not too many 20 or 30 year-olds that want to come out and skywatching.”
Havican has even invited some skeptics to Englewood to see the UFOs for themselves. “I’ve done that to about eight people so far,” Havican said. “It’s good to be a skeptic — you have to be a skeptic — but there are people out there that’ll take the extra mile to go out of their way and try to disprove somebody. Spend some time skywatching and try to see something before you go ahead and say they’re not real.”
Were the skeptics made believers? “Yeah,” Havican laughed. “All of them have so far.”
In April 2009, they began an online radio show to discuss what they saw while skywatching and later found individuals who wanted to be interviewed. “My first guest was this guy named Terrell Copeland who was on the UFO Hunters TV show,” Havican told the Catalyst. “I interviewed him and then I found it was pretty easy to get these big name UFOlogists on the radio show so I just started interviewing all of them. It gave me a reason to sit down and talk to them for an hour. They wouldn’t do it if I just called them but if I say they’re on a radio show they’d do it.”
After racking up a total of 150 interviews in just over a year, Havican decided it was time for a change. In July 2010, Havican’s Florida UFO Radio was renamed Inception Radio and founded the Inception Radio Network. “I started my own little network where I just did my show and I carried a couple other shows like Bill and Nancy Birnes from UFO Magazine and UFO Hunters,” Havican explained. “I carried their show and it just evolved where I’d pick up this show here and then that show and finally now we have like nine or 10 great shows on the network. It’s gone great.”
All of the Inception Radio Network’s shows are available on iTunes as podcasts and are streamed on its website in addition to a variety of mobile phone applications including Shoutcast and TalkStream. Havican has an FM microstation that broadcasts the network’s stream on 99.7 FM for those living near Englewood. In addition to UFO-centric shows, the Inception Radio Network has programs on music, politics and other paranormal topics. “Most of our shows are guest interview shows so most of them are kind of serious, but we also don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Havican said.
The Inception Radio Network’s podcasts has garnered over one million visitors since its launch in 2010. “We’re going to continue growing and being notable,” Havican told the Catalyst.