David Riedel — Son of Pat McGuire

David Riedel — Son of Pat McGuire

Name(s):	David Riedel

David Riedel — Son of Pat McGuire

David Riedel is the son of Patrick McGuire and the author of a personal essay published in 2023 addressing the Pat McGuire Contact Case and his own evolving assessment of his father's experiences. His account provides one of the few primary-source documents written from the perspective of a family member who grew up in the shadow of a parent's contact claims.

Growing Up as the Son of "The Alien Guy"

Riedel grew up in Wyoming during the period when his father's contact disclosures were generating intense local ridicule. He has described:

• The social consequences for him and other family members within the Wyoming community
• Being identified as the child of someone considered unstable or delusional
• The specific cruelty that attaches to children whose parents are publicly ridiculed

Riedel was not a believer in his father's account during this period, and the damage to his family's social standing contributed significantly to his skepticism and his distance from his father.

Finding the Video

Years after his father's death, Riedel discovered a video of his father online — described as a recording of a recording, shot off a television screen, full of static, the image fractured as if the broadcast were arriving from a great distance.

The video showed his father under hypnosis, describing cattle mutilations and the Star People in the methodical, half-present manner characteristic of deep hypnotic trance.

Riedel described the experience of watching this video as affecting in ways he had not anticipated — the specific strangeness of encountering his father in a context he had not witnessed, speaking about things he had spent his life dismissing.

Not at the Deathbed

Riedel was not present at his father's death in the Colorado hospital on May 14, 2009. This was a deliberate choice. He chose not to be there. He chose not to hear his father's last words.

He has written about this decision with the specific quality of regret that accompanies choices that cannot be undone. The absence is not presented as callous but as the product of years of distance, skepticism, and the accumulated weight of growing up in a family defined by something he could not accept.

The 2023 Essay

In 2023, Riedel published a personal essay addressing his father's case and his own position on it. The essay was written in the context of the following developments:

• Congressional UAP hearings (2022–2023)
• Whistleblower testimony by David Grusch (2023)
• Growing bipartisan institutional recognition that UFO/UAP phenomena warrant serious investigation
• The shift in cultural and political climate around UAP from taboo to legitimate policy concern

In the essay, Riedel wrote that he believed something odd and unusual had happened to his father. He stopped short of endorsing the extraterrestrial interpretation. But he explicitly stated that he was not so sure anymore that his father had been wrong.

The phrase "not so sure anymore" is regarded by researchers as significant — representing a movement from active dismissal toward genuine uncertainty, in a person with every personal and emotional reason to prefer the dismissal.

Significance

Riedel's account is important to the McGuire case record for several reasons:

1. It provides a family-member perspective on the social cost of contact disclosure
2. It documents the intergenerational consequences of a parent's contact experience
3. The 2023 essay represents a contemporaneous re-evaluation of the case in the light of changed institutional and political circumstances
4. The specific language of the essay — "odd and unusual," "not so sure anymore" — provides a carefully calibrated assessment from someone with no professional or ideological investment in UFO research

His account does not confirm the case. It documents his movement from certainty of dismissal to genuine uncertainty — which is, researchers note, a different and more honest position.