INTERVIEW: Jack Osbourne and Jamie Kennedy open an X file in Utah

Photo: From left, Jack Osbourne, Jason Mewes and Jamie Kennedy star in Jack Osbourne’s Night of Terror: UFOs. Photo courtesy of Discovery / Provided with permission.

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Jack Osbourne is fast becoming one of the most important paranormal investigators on television. He has welcomed audiences to several ghost hunts over the years, and now he’s back with a TV special on discovery+ called Jack Osbourne’s Night of Terror: UFOs. For this exploration of the Uinta Basin in Utah, Osbourne employs the help of two of his celebrity friends: Jason Mewes of the upcoming Clerks III and Jamie Kennedy of Scream fame.

“This is my third or fourth time going to the area to investigate,” Osbourne said in a recent joint interview with Kennedy. “I’m pretty familiar with it, and it’s kind of to the point where I know people out there, which is kind of funny and weird to say. … Everyone always thinks of Skinwalker Ranch, like it’s confined to just some 1,000-acre ranch, but it’s not. It’s the whole basin, and there’s documentation going back to Spanish conquistadores.”

Kennedy, too, had been to Utah a bunch of times, but mostly Salt Lake City, and he had never been to the basin before this investigation. He described the remote area has a “beautiful” and “perfect” landscape for a hodgepodge of events.

The Uinta Basin is world renowned for being one of the purported hotspots for UFO phenomena. There are many theories why the basin — and it’s most infamous property, Skinwalker Ranch — always appear on top 10 lists for locations of unexplained anomalies in the sky. To help Osbourne, Mewes and Kennedy understand the region and its history, they sought the help of UFO expert Ben Hansen, who accompanied them for the TV special.

“It was kind of one of those things where the good folks over at discovery+ were like, we want to do a bunch of specials,” Osbourne said. “I was like, yeah, so we did one big ghost hunt. I did a Bigfoot hunt, and while on the Bigfoot hunt with Jay we were like, it would be fun to do this and bring Jamie Kennedy on board. Coincidentally Jay and I used to live together at one point, and it was across the street from Jamie’s house. So we’d always crossed paths over the years and run into each other in various kinds of scenarios. I know Jay and Jamie are pretty tight, so we were like, yeah, that sounds like a great time. My big thing with doing any paranormal investigation is everyone takes it so damns seriously, and we take it seriously. But it doesn’t matter if you can’t have fun and do it with fun people. Just as many times we got freaked out, we were laughing our asses off. I’d much rather work with guys like Jay and Jamie who know how to crack a joke and roll with the punches. It was great. I couldn’t ask for a better trip out into the deserts of Utah.”

Kennedy concurred. He called the trip awesome, and he said there’s no better fun than heading into a deep cave that seems to stretch forever with two good friends. “If you’re going to run into a werewolf or an alien, you better have fun doing it and be with people you trust,” Kennedy said. “Jack has all the bells and whistles. I knew he was into this stuff, but he basically has all the alien-hunting tools you need. You have it all, bro. … We also met with multiple, multiple elders of the Native American community and different tribes. You could tell when we talked about certain subjects how they were a little uncomfortable, and that’s when I was like, this is so real because they wouldn’t talk about it.”

Kennedy has had a fascination with UFOs since he was a child. His father would talk about aliens and spaceships when Kennedy was a young age; he would hear stories of Roswell and Area 51.

“My dad was a normal guy, but he believed that aliens were among us,” the actor said. “And he was very passionate about it, and then when I became an actor — I was in Scream, and I was in Ghost Whisperer, and I did other horror movies — and people asked me about this stuff all the time. And I’m like, ‘I’ve never seen any of that stuff. I’ve always wanted to, but I’ve never actively pursued it.’ … I think Jack is a realist. He’s a very practical, pragmatic person. He wants to believe it, but he’s going to look at all the evidence to disprove it first because he wants to believe it so bad. And he kind of trained me and Jay like that, so I was going in looking in the sky going, ‘Ooh, what’s this?’ … And Jack’s like, ‘That’s a satellite because you can tell by the trajectory.’ So I want to see it, and I’ve been around it my whole life, but I’ve never seen it. But this trip, I would say, it was the first time that we definitely saw things that are unexplained.”

Osbourne said he grew up in the era of The X Files, a TV program he watched religiously. That show opened him up to the world of the unexplained, and he fell in love with UFOs he thinks by the age of 8.

“It was always just a hobby as a kid,” Osbourne said. “Anytime I have the opportunity to go do something at Skinwalker or anything in the UFO realm, I just jump on it instantly, and it’s an amazing time to be investigating this stuff just because of the disclosure stuff coming out and the government acknowledging certain bits of footage that they have in their possession.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Jack Osbourne’s Night of Terror: UFOs, featuring Jack Osbourne, Jason Mewes and Jamie Kennedy, is now streaming on discovery+. Click here for more information.