Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
Pilot Took Mushrooms Before His Flight - The Joe Emerson story
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Joe Emerson is a pilot who took a flight and intensionally tried to crash the plane to wake himself up from a bad dream.
What is the shocking story of Joe Emerson, the pilot?
Imagine you're on a flight and it's in the air and a pilot in the cockpit suddenly decides, I'm going to crash this plane and this would unalive you and everyone else on it. Now the pilot, his name's Joe and Joe, he's a commercial airline pilot. He's been doing it a while and he likes this job. But one day, boom, Joe gets hit with some terrible news.
his best friend Scott just suddenly passed away from a heart problem. And Joe is devastated like this is his best friend and he's never lost somebody close to him. And he takes this really hard and pretty quickly he starts getting depressed and he starts drinking heavily to deal with it. And as the years go by his depression only gets worse.
especially around the yearly anniversary of Scott's passing. And eventually Joe's wife is like, you're not doing well. I think you should talk to a professional. So he does. He goes to see a therapist and therapist tells him to consider seeing a psychiatrist and getting on antidepressants.
Here's the thing though, apparently if a commercial pilot goes on antidepressants, the airline will no longer allow them to fly and he would have to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to keep his job. I guess it's their policy. So Joe's like, nah bro, and he doesn't take any meds. He doesn't want to lose his job. Instead, he just keeps working all the time and self-medicating with alcohol.
And almost six years have passed since Joe lost his best friend, and he's still feeling it. And at one point he flies to Washington State to be with his other friends. I guess they're gonna have a memorial for Scott. And during this memorial, in remembrance of Scott, Joe and his friends, they do a lot of partying. Like, a lot of partying.
And the group decides they're gonna do what we'll call medicinal mushrooms. Joe's never done this before, but he's like, all right. And so he takes these mushrooms and he starts feeling pretty, pretty good. And he stays up all night and he's having a lot of fun. And a few days later, it's time for him to leave Washington and go back home. And allegedly he's been going hard.
Like he hasn't slept in like 40 hours or something like that. And he goes to the airport and he gets on a plane and he's ready to fly out of there. But he's still allegedly kind of tripping from the mushrooms from a few days before. Like they're still in his system or something. Now, he's not on duty, but because he's a pilot, he's gonna ride for free in the cockpit jump seat.
That's where off-duty pilots sit when they take a flight and they're not piloting. And as the plane takes off and it's in the air, Joe starts to get a really bad feeling. a feeling like he's trapped in this airplane and he'll never be able to get out.
And suddenly, bam, a bad trip hits him like a freight train, and Joe feels like he's stuck in a nightmare, like none of what he's experiencing is reality, like the pilots flying the plane aren't really pilots. And he doesn't know what to do. And he believes the only way out of this is to make himself wake up. And that is when he looks up to the ceiling of the plane and he sees two red handles.
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