Paranormal Awareness Radio Show

Our Guest, Bill Missett

After flunking out of Virginia Tech in 1959, (due to a failed English exam of all things) I joined the Navy for four years, went to San Diego for 18 months, Great Lakes, Ill. for journalism school, and then the remainder of my time in Puerto Rico. 

I went from hanging out a great Southern California beach (South Mission Bay) to hanging out at a gorgeous Puerto Rican beach (Luquillo).  It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.  In California, I was on the staff of the base newspaper at the San Diego Naval Training Center.  In Puerto Rico, I was the editor of the base newspaper, and assistant manager/newscaster/tech at the base television station. I was in the midst of the action during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.  The U.S. military was deeply involved in both, and I saw a lot of peripheral action related to both historic events.

My family had moved to Wyoming during my Navy hitch, so I went there after my parole in 1963.  Went to work at my father’s newspaper, the largest daily in the state, in 1963. Six months later, I was tapped by the owner to go to the Hammond, Ind. Times, where I really cut my teeth in a highly professional newsroom for the next two years, until 1965.

I then went back to Wyoming as state editor, where I met and married my first wife, Patricia Kay, the mother of my two sons.  After several years in Wyoming, brother Tom was named publisher of the Oceanside, California newspaper at age 26, the youngest daily newspaper publisher in the nation.  His editor quit after a year, and Tom asked me to become his managing editor, which I did in 1968.  When I arrived, the newspaper had less than 10,000 circulation.  When I took early retirement in 1992 at age 52, it had 50,000 circulation.  I administered a 55-person newsroom.

During my 24 years in Southern California, I became a music critic, continuing my deep interest in music, and attended hundreds of (free) concerts in San Diego and Los Angeles, and received thousands of  (free) LPs for review. I “discovered” Jimmy Buffett, and am acknowledged as the first reviewer in the nation to promote him.  I was also point man for the U.S. “discovery” of such groups/artists as Pink Floyd, Genesis, Cat Stevens, etc. all of whom I saw “live” many times.

I also got deeply involved in open ocean competitive bodysurfing, competed throughout Southern California, and eventually founded the World’s Bodysurfing Championships, now in its 35^th year.  I spent a lot of time in Mexico, visiting surf spots in Northern Baja, and really fell in love with the Mexican way of life.  In the early 70’s, I started hearing about a fabulous surf break in Southern Mexico, which I first visited in 1979.  I took a leave of absence from my job in 1987, and lived in the small town of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, for the next 18 months.

During my stay in Puerto in 1987, I met my second wife, human rights attorney Patrice Perillie, who was in Mexico as a featured speaker at an international symposium on human rights at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City.  We met on the beach in Puerto Escondido in 1987, and have been together ever since.  We moved to Puerto in 1992, ran a restaurant, built a home, and have lived here since.

In the late ‘70s, I had an experience of spontaneous two-way mental telepathy, and became a 20-year student of “metaphysical phenomena,” which I eventually realized was our inherent spiritual nature at work in every instance.  I was planning on writing a weekly newspaper column on this “emerging personal spirituality,” but instead I wrote three books, jointly entitled “Awakening The Soul.”