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Thank you. Tonight we have an amazing
episode. I mean, let's face it, most of
them are amazing, but I really enjoyed this conversation.
I am joined by Keith Thompson, who is an author, independent
journalist, talk radio host, former TV talk show host, and
former U.S. Senate staff member.
His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, and
the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of Angels and
Aliens, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed the most
fascinating book written on the subject, and he's also written
the book The UFO Paradox, which we'll be focusing on today.
If you are interested in Keith's books, please click the link
down below at the bottom and sit back and enjoy.
Hey Keith, welcome to Mind Escape.
How are you? It's I'm doing well.
I'm glad to be with you. I'm looking forward to our
conversation. As am I, as am I.
I really appreciated your book The UFO Paradox.
I have yet to read Angels and Aliens, but I look forward to
reading that as well here soon. Why don't you give us a little
bit of your background on how you got into the UFO topic and
got interested in this field? OK, I'm, I'm one person who does
not come into it with a UFO experience, you know, of my own
that I struggled with an abduction like say, Whitley
Strieber or, or and I did not come at it like Budd Hopkins or
David Jacobs, the two researchers who, you know, work
with abductees to try to find a common pattern.
I really came at it from, from this, from the standpoint of
really asking fundamental questions about philosophy and
about the nature of reality. I've always been interested in
those questions. I've always had a, a really, I
guess the word, the salience. They've really had a resonance
for me going back to experiences of my own, which led me to start
reading philosophers and thinkers like Alan Watts, for
example, and to make sense of my own experiences.
The UFO phenomenon. Well, I'll tell you really how I
got into the UFO phenomenon specifically.
I was, I'm an independent journalist and author and I, I
would say my, one of my first journalistic assignments was as
a, as an elementary school student.
I it was my turn to give a current events report in my 6th
grade class. The idea was every student would
have would take a turn to stand up and bring in news, news
clippings, a background of the story and sort of tell it, tell
it to the class and why it interested them.
And the idea wasn't to do it as a reporter, but it seemed to be
a natural way to approach it. I guess I've always had an
instinct to based on following reporters like Walter Cronkite,
the legendary CBS News reporter from the 60s and 70s, I think
even into the 80s, I always had a certain draw to their, you
know, to telling the telling the news.
So in this case, there I was growing up in Northwest Ohio.
There was a sighting in Michigan around a college campus and it
lasted for about 3 or 4 days. Continuous sightings of lights
and objects that were anomalous didn't make sense, didn't fit a
pattern. And AI told the story to the
class about how a Pentagon consultant named Jay Allen
Hynek, who became legendary in the UFO field, flew into
Michigan and did what he was supposed to do.
He he was hired by the Pentagon basically to be the front to,
to, to front for, you know, to, to be the face for the public
response, the government response.
What he didn't really understand when he signed on to that was
that they expected him to explain all of these things
away. He, being an astronomer, thought
his job was to tell the truth, and he understood.
There was a tension that he understood the government was
not eager to say there was something in the sky that didn't
seem to belong there or didn't have an explanation in
conventional, reassuring terms. But he said, ultimately, that's
not my job. I'm not here to be a front man.
I'm here to present my analysis so he.
That was Project Blue Book too, by the way.
Yeah, Project Blue Book. And he, he, he came, he came to
feel, he, he came to Michigan, he traveled around, had probably
had a driver. He went to all the places where
the sightings had happened, including to an A place on the
edge of town, a marsh or swamp, and the the word swamp is also
legendary in the UFO field. Thanks in this case to Jay Allen
Hynek, who concluded that at least it was a possibility that
one of the sightings could have been, and he put it very, very
conditionally, could have been swamp gas, which is a natural
phenomenon in which decaying vegetation around a swamp will
give off luminous phenomena. So he at a news conference which
he called, which is called to for the purpose of summarizing
what he found, he referred to that he said it is at least
possible. We can't exclude the possibility
that one of the sightings in this in this collection of
sightings might have been swamp gas, marsh gas.
He was instantly mortified when before he barely gotten that
phrase out of his mouth when the reporters jumped out of their,
you know, their metal seats, the chairs that had been assembled
in the auditorium and went out to what were in those days pay
Tele, a Bank of pay telephone calls that they they called
their their news bureaus and said, Pentagon says it's all
swamp gas, which is not what he said, but it was understood as
what he said. So to to bring this idea to kind
of bring it home from my own interest, that fascinated me.
It fascinated me that he put out something conditionally and that
there was such a an instantaneous interpretation of
what he'd said. It was when I, even as a young
person, 12 years old, I knew that this was part of the story,
that this was about stories, what's credible, what's
believable, and that people approach this phenomenon with
beliefs. They weren't as objective as
they thought. So I was drawn into the
structure of the stories. In the same way that one reads a
good novel. If it's a good novel, you want
to keep reading, you want to identify with the protagonists,
attempt to make sense of of the case.
So I, I told my class about this and when it came time for
questions, one of my classmates said, what do you think they
saw? And I said, I don't know.
I said it very honestly. And I, and I, and I, it was
because I didn't have a, a dog in the fight or dog in the hunt.
Not knowing seemed to me, but I did say this.
I said it did not seem that swamp gas was a accurate
representation, the best interpretation.
But again, that isn't what Hynek saw.
I was struck even with my my classmates, they didn't want
those those subtleties either. Yes, but do you think, Keith, it
was a flying saucer? Was it aliens?
And I kind of stuttered a little bit, stammered.
I said, well, that's what some people, I mean, you know, that's
what some people think. Well, what do you think?
At this point? My teacher came up to the front,
said Keith, thank you for you've really handled this well.
I said, oh, really? She said, yes, you, you were
holding the ground for it's OK not to know.
It's OK not to have answers. And she said class, What Keith
is saying is it's important to keep an open mind and ask
relevant questions, follow the evidence wherever it leads in
anything, whether it's something that's mysterious and
controversial like UFOs or anything else in life.
Well, I have to tell you, that was like a benediction for me.
It was like a blessing to be 12 years old and to have an adult,
your teacher, give you that kind of a pat on the back and say
you've brought a discerning awareness to this.
She, she, she called me Mr. Thompson.
And then she said, Mr. Thompson, you have the makings of a, of a
scientist or maybe a detective or reporter.
Again, follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Well, that's a nice, that's a nice selection.
A reporter, a detective or scientist, all of all of whom
are committed to the idea of getting at the truth of things,
at least in principle. Journalism is supposed to look
at all sides. Science is not supposed to have
a be wedded to a preconceived conclusion with we've generally
thought that's what religion is about.
And science was supposed to be a different way of knowing based
on empirical evidence. And the same with being a
detective. And what kind of detective would
in in advance say, well, I'm going to exclude that hypothesis
because it doesn't appeal to me. No, whatever the hypo good
detective doesn't exclude anything in advance.
Maybe the Butler did it. So I wrote my first book, Angels
and Aliens more than a couple of decades ago.
And in that book I explored the parallels between the the
phenomena and the figures from myth, especially Greek myth.
So, and attempted to show that at this at that point, all of
our best efforts to explain UFOs ultimately revealed more about
who we are. That's a big part of my approach
to this is namely that we like black and white solutions, but a
lot of life is Gray. And I just so I, I, I'll
conclude this by saying I'm been at this UFO game for quite some
time and I'm still not at all reluctant to say I don't know
what a UFO is. I know that extraterrestrial,
the extraterrestrial hypothesis is still, you know, the most
popular interpretation. But I think there's a huge
overlap between these phenomena and the paranormal.
And I think the philosophical implications of the paranormal
are important because mainstream materialist science says, well,
the paranormal can't be real. Well, why can't it be real?
It's a, it's a, a body of data that challenges our assumptions.
So in any case, that that that's really how I began it.
And I wrote my follow up book last last year called The UFO
Paradox, which we can talk about as well.
Yeah, I like I said, I identified a lot with the UFO
paradox. I've had my own weird
experiences in the sighting, but you know, I'm very familiar with
altered States and the consciousness side of things.
And even when I was when my cousin Maurice and I were making
our documentary as within so without from UFOs to DMT, you
know, I realized there was always an element of weirdness
with the sightings. It was never like a fully
conscious sunny day outside. You know, there's oh, I woke up
from a dream or I was under the influence of something or, you
know, there was always something connected to the experience.
Very rarely do you hear about an experience where somebody's like
dead sober and it's broad daylight and there's a million
people around which there are some and we can talk about that.
You have it in your book, the Ruah, Zimbabwe one.
But you know, you, you explained your your origin story
perfectly. And I appreciate that you read
your own book 2 for Audible. I think that you have a good
voice for it. And it was it was a good listen.
You talk about the kind of Tharnold sighting is kind of
like it right after you talk about the Ann Arbor swamp gas
stuff and how the media misinterpreted his words to
describe the sighting. And then all the sudden, you
know, that kicked off a misunderstanding.
You know, the term flying saucer just stuck.
And then, you know, kind of like what you were describing
everybody getting on the phone about the swamp gas, something
very similar happened. And as humans, we have a knack
for playing telephone quickly. Do you think that that this
modern myth got kind of set off on the wrong foot because later
on you describe his daughter saying that he thought they
looked more like flying sting alive Stingrays or something
along those lines. So do you think that we kind of
got this image stuck in our head and then that got the myth going
and then kind of almost like a mind virus, if you will?
That's a great question. I when I talk about the mythic
structure of the UFO sightings, people often hear me say, oh,
then you're a debunker. You think they're just myth and
I go, no, that's, that's not what I'm saying.
But thank you for raising that question.
Let's see if we can broaden the conversation.
Myth. Yes, does.
It's common, common language and politics my opponent has
purveyed is purveying myths, which means falsehoods,
fabrications. But myth refers in its original
sense to a kind of story, kind of narrative that goes much
deeper than just true or false. It it speaks deeply to the human
psyche. It's highly symbolic.
So I just, I described Kenneth Arnold, who was a deputy sheriff
who was in a private airplane one day, 1947 June, I think June
25th, if I recall the day he, he saw out, you know, ahead of him
9 objects flying in formation at a he was a very good pilot.
He knew how to configure speed, calibrate speed.
He, I don't remember the speed at the moment, but he said that
we're going much faster than anything we could, could make
sense of. And he, so he called into the
called into the tower. What?
What I'm seeing looks like this. Do you have any craft that meet
this description? They said no, and they said so
with a kind of quizzical attitude.
Like we know Ken Arnold, we work with him.
He calls in regularly. He's a pilot, but he's
describing something that makes no sense at all.
I wonder if he maybe is a little off.
That's really what began to happen.
So he landed at one of his maybe in Oregon.
He was, it was over Mount Rainier that he saw these.
So he, I think he landed in Oregon, Bellingham maybe.
And already the journalists had, you know, listening to the radio
or, or got word that there was something.
So he was greeted at the airport and he climbs down the, you
know, the side of his plane and has a impromptu news conference.
And he actually said that the that the objects moved as like a
saucer skipping over water. He did not describe them as in
the shape of a saucer. That's a relevant point because
a journalist made an error, an interpretive error at the time
and said that the that Kenneth Arnold had described seeing
flying saucers. So I call this the origin story
of the, of the UFO phenomenon. And by that I mean in, in, in
traditional cultures, so-called primitive cultures.
I prefer the time, the term primal cultures or first world
cultures. The, the, the tribes, if you
will. Anthropology has documented as
well they have they have origin stories.
Each tribe has a story that they came from the gods or their
ancestors came from the sky. And so I thought, wow, this is
Ufology. This is the origin story of of
the modern UFO phenomenon. The Kenneth Arnold story is like
the tale that keeps being told. And the tale that kept being
told was that these were shaped like saucers.
So people began to identify saucers, They began to see
saucers. Now that raises a lot of
interesting questions. Could could it be that if this
is an intelligent phenomenon and it appears to be, it appears to
have the characteristics of intelligence, is it possible
that this this it's a shape shifting phenomenon that decided
in response to the expectation that it began to look like
saucers? I mean, it's a it's a wild idea.
If there's an interactive, conscious relationship with this
phenomenon, that could be a possibility.
In any case, you're right. Several decades later in the
1980s, after Kenneth Arnold had died, his daughter Kim Arnold
came forward and said, I have something to tell, that my
father did not want to tell at the time because he was already
beleaguered by being the flying saucer guy.
And he, she gave an interview, I believe it was coast to coast AM
in the middle of the night. And, and they said, well, what,
what did your father see that he didn't talk about?
She said, my father was always mystified that he, that he had
supposedly had seen craft, technological hardware from
another, you know, another Galaxy.
He never said that and he never saw it.
He told us privately and he kept it private, that these seem to
be living, they seem to be breathing, they seem to be have
respiration and they were translucent.
The colors they were, they were like like living beings that
were breathing. And he even said they had the
beat similar to the human heart. And I felt, he said to his
daughter and to his wife that they were more likely from
another dimension. Of reality that we don't
understand. Perhaps they were from what we
call death. They were from the realm that we
go after we leave this world. Well, that's a very advanced
kind of if. If he had said that at the time,
first of all, what would have happened is if there would have
been even more doubt about his sanity.
He was already assumed to be maybe a little nutty because
he's the guy who saw the flying saucers, which he didn't say he
saw. He said he saw objects that move
like saucers over water. Well, if he'd gone with his
larger interpretation, he saw living beings breathing and
having the beat of the human heart.
And they seemed to be from beyond this world where we go
when we die. He probably would have had to
take a test, just a psychiatric test, just to keep his aviation
license. So he kept that to himself.
Here's the here's an interesting part.
And that's why I talk about the paranormal.
That day when he flew back to Boise, ID, where he was from, he
got in his car at the airport and drove home.
And that night, there were in his house orbs of light moving
through the through the house in different rooms, which had never
happened before. So did he did whatever he saw
have some relationship? Did he have some sense of deep
connection to this, to these events?
Had they chosen him to be the witness?
Who knows? But whatever it was, you could
say followed him home. He didn't see Kraft in his in
his home. He saw beams, beams of light,
which he also kept to himself. And it turned out his his wife
had beliefs about reincarnation and had had telepathic
experiences. So right there we have a larger
framework in which this is far more consistent with esoteric
philosophies, initiation ceremonies.
Was there some kind of initiation that Kenneth Arnold
supposedly seeing objects separate from him?
Is there a bonding that he had with this event that it followed
him home? You're probably familiar with
the the idea of the hitchhiker effect that became famous with
Skinwalker Ranch. This paranormal Wonderland in
Utah that has it's famous for being a a geographic location
that has a great deal of a paranormal phenomena, Bigfoot,
human creatures of various kinds.
And what what what has been alleged about Skinwalker Ranch
and other paranormal hotspots is that when researchers, when they
come in to investigate, will go home and they will take the
phenomena with them. So this is stuff that I, I
continually try to broaden the frame of reference.
The UFO as ET hypothesis has been very firmly cemented in our
minds thanks to Steven Spielberg.
I continue to believe that close Encounters of the Third Kind is
still the the best movie in terms of what he portrayed.
But, and I'll tell you one more detail about that.
He worked closely with the astronomer Jacques Valet, who,
as you know, is the one researcher who has tried to open
the door to these larger connections decade after decade,
saying with his marvelous French accent, I don't I do didn't
simply do not believe the the ET hypothesis is the best
explanation for all of the data all.
Passport to Magonias kind of a lot.
Book called passport to magonia. He was the really the first to
make the comparison he said these do not appear to have
begun in 1947. We appear to be dealing with a
phenomenon that has a much larger history.
And in order to study it, we need to study culture, we need
to study folklore, We need to study what we call mythology and
folklore. And of course, at the time, many
of the pro ET hypothesis researchers who are the majority
who had concluded that if they are real, they must be
extraterrestrial craft. But again, must be.
That's not how science works. That's a hypothesis.
That's one interpretation. But the expectation was so
deeply cemented even before Steven Spielberg that many
researchers said, well, Jacques Valet has lost the plot.
He thinks they're just mythology.
He said, no, no, no, I'm not saying just mythology.
Raise your opinion of mythology. Don't say just mythology, just
mythological meaning, false or fanciful, or folklore as
something that is oh what the folk out in the hinterlands
report that I've become far more appreciative of what the folk,
the folks say. Folklore means.
The stories that people tell who do not have necessarily advanced
degrees doesn't mean you don't have an opinion.
Early villagers in the United States, people out in the
folkland, were reporting that fiery rocks were landing in
their fields. And the experts at the time
said, well, that's fine, but that is impossible.
There are no fiery rocks. If you if you tell me that the
rock that you're pointing to seems to have been involved with
fire, that's because maybe somebody burned the rock and is
trying to pass off a fake story. What they didn't realize these
were meteors. The meteors were real.
They didn't have an explanation at the time.
So I used that same analogy to say that the UFO phenomenon is
real. It and it and it has precursors
in myth and folklore. And it's a bigger picture that
probably ultimately challenges our views of reality.
And, and that's where I, you know, come down and say that the
materialist view of science, while it's been very helpful, is
not the full extent of science. It's one approach and it does
not give us any real clarity about what the nature of
consciousness is, what the nature of mind is.
Materialism excludes mind. So I'm saying the UFO phenomenon
is one of many phenomena, including much of the the
paranormal per SE, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition,
psychokinesis. I say all of this needs to be on
the table if we're excluding that in advance because we want
a simple hypothesis like the ET hypothesis, which I don't rule
off the table, but I question the the explanatory power of the
ET hypothesis. I don't think it accounts for
the richness of the data. So to summarize, I would say the
UFO phenomenon is ultimately a call, if you will, a call from
the cosmos. It's a it's, it's a way of
saying your maps of reality are not finished.
You live in a bigger realm than you realize.
And to make that clear, here is some here's a phenomenon that's
going to confound you. And I'm a big believer.
Be willing to be confounded. Sometimes being confounded is
the most authentic response. I don't know what's going on
here. How often do we do we studying
politics right now, following the political scene?
I'm very often aware. I don't know what's going on in
the current debate between Trump and his adversaries.
I don't think I've got enough information to evaluate
specific. I'm fine with not knowing.
I'm a big advocate of not knowing as a, as a precursor to
opening to new knowledge. If you've got all the answers,
you're not going to be open to new information.
And I in the best sense, I'm a science guy.
I'm in the sense of science. I don't think science is going
to explain necessarily everything, but science in its
best sense was why don't we take an empirical approach?
What does the evidence say? And, and regarding anybody of
evidence, what are, what are the, what is the best
hypothesis? Then we can test the hypothesis.
So with that in mind, I use use the UFO as a framework to ask
bigger questions rather than smaller questions.
Yeah, interesting by. The way I think they ultimately
the questions take us back to esoteric, spiritual, mystical,
philosophical issues. I think the phenomenon is is a
kind of initiation process and should remind us of the
Elusinian mysteries. Initiation rites have played a
great role in in in the development of human
consciousness. And by the way, the, the idea,
the connection between the UFO phenomena and the DMTI mean I'm
not an expert on DMT, the psychedelics, but I, I believe
the psychedelic frame of reference is ought to be brought
in to the UFO phenomena. Which is not to say that if
you've had a UFO experience, you must have been on psychedelics.
It's not what I'm. Saying I mean the the the DMT
thing too, or psychedelics in general.
I mean DMT we produce in our body.
We know for a fact it's produced in the brain now.
So it's not like, you know, if there's an endogenous component
to it as opposed to some sort of exogenous experience or taking
something or whatever. So that was the connection
there. Not to say that people aren't
having real experiences or whatever, but just, you know,
the hypothesis of the documentary we made was that the
mind is essential for all these experiences.
You know, 'cause we don't know any other part of nature that
has these similar experiences. Not that other, you know,
animals or plants don't have DMT in them or whatever, but we're
interacting with the world in in a very different way, whether
it's advanced or different or whatever.
So well and. Also after Gallimore with a
wonderful new book out the The Death of Astonishment.
Death by Astonishment. I've not met Andrew, but we've
corresponded. He he makes a very solid case.
He he approaches, by the way, the DMT phenomena as a
scientist. He says, I kept trying different
explanations. This will explain it.
He finally landed in the union world and he was not a union.
But in order to understand it, people said, oh, this you need
to read Carl Jung. Jung's thinking will probably
explain these are archetypes and so forth.
And I don't want to go down the the Jungian rabbit hole here
today. But point is he he what he found
is that this Jung may have something to say.
Jung's thinking may have something to say about DMT, but
he noted that the DMT experience of these machine elves, these
creatures who seem to have these playful, teasing, provocative
elf like figures that are encountered, do not seem to be
related like other psychedelics are, to the psychological
framework of the user of the traveler.
That the. The basic idea in most
psychedelics, the mushrooms and LSD and so forth, is that your
mental set and your mental and the setting in which you do a
psychedelic journey, the mindset you bring and the physical
setting and the emotional setting are very important to
shaping the phenomena. What he found and others other
DMT researchers find is that it doesn't matter what the mindset
of a person is, They're invited to to take a few hits of a vape,
that of DMT, and it's a very short journey.
I've not done it myself like 10 minutes in length, but it seems
like eons when you come back that you encounter what appears
to be an autonomous realm, an ontological realm to use the
fancy term for philosophy. A realm of being that is
discreet. That and it will very often the
first time DMT user will be greeted when they come into
contact with these beings. Oh it's good to see you again,
Welcome back. Wow.
They come back and say, I, I, I had a sense I'd been there
before. So it suggests the realm that
we're in relationship to and the DMT brings it forth.
Could the UFO phenomenon be the same, same kind of thing?
In fact, there is some you can, you can make an analogy between
the UFO aliens and the DMT beings.
Are they, they would just put it this way, they may not be the
same, but is there a, what do you call it?
A. Trickster.
Well, an overlap Venn diagram. If you do a Venn diagram, you've
got the UFO aliens and the DMT beings.
There would be a certain amount of common territory.
What is that commonality? I actually think of the UFO
phenomenon as a series of Venn diagrams.
We need religion, spirituality, we need philosophy.
We need anomaly studies. We need good paranormal
parapsychological research. We need field research.
Just get the best stories and and try to look at the larger
patterns that Gregory Bates and the anthropologist had the
phrase the patterns that connect what are the patterns that
connect phenomena from different realms.
That's the ultimate quest of knowledge is to to Charles
Darwin attempted that when he he was just a he was a British
naturalist who enjoyed taking walks.
He was a man of leisure. And he began collecting samples,
fossils and, and noted the birds from this island are similar to
the birds on that island. And he pursued those patterns
and the result was the the great evolution, evolutionary
synthesis, which we're still trying to wrap our minds around
the implications of the origin of species.
By the way, I don't think evolutionary theory has figured
everything out, and I don't think it negates the idea of a
God or a larger intelligence. But certainly nature does
evolve. And I think that the phenomenon,
the UFO phenomenon may be part of an can be understood in
evolutionary terms that there's something that is not, not yet
our reality as we know it is not finished.
It may be it's emerging. There are new aspects of, of
nature that are making themselves known.
And so that's another frame of reference.
I I I bring to this to my studies.
For sure. Yeah, No, I I love that topic.
We've talked about the hallucinating mysteries and what
was probably going on there a lot on the podcast.
We've had Andrew Gallimore on the podcast probably 6 or 7
times over the years. He's actually in our documentary
too. No, I mean, I identify with a
lot of that as being somebody that's definitely experienced a
lot of these States and compounds and things like that
and had weird experiences myself.
You know, there's no answers. And like you said, the best we
can do when you're dealing with the mind, since we don't have
the way to quantify it all yet like we do, you know, things in
the material world, we just have to do the best we can use
philosophy, psychology, the science and neuroscience that we
can, you know, use to quantify and just slowly pick away at
what's what. I did want to go back though to
the myth aspect of it real quick before we move forward.
Do you think that myths arise spontaneously in response to
what our civilization most needs to integrate?
Like UFOs are a mirror for our technological anxiety or
spiritual hunger? Almost like young.
You mentioned young. Almost like his approach or
thoughts on the phenomenon. Yeah, it's, you could say
there's a phenomenon called mythogenesis.
How how do myths emerge? And here I I cite Joseph
Campbell, his famous book The Hero with 1000 Faces.
He's popularized the hero journey.
So he he defined the monomyth as the idea that that is that
there's a mythic structure that is at the heart of all world
myth. And in Jung's term, all
psychological myth of psychological phenomena come
down to this idea of a of a protagonist who goes forth in
the light of day and has an encounter that takes him off the
beat, hit him or her off the beaten path.
And it is the way nature keeps discovery going.
And the hero's journey is understood as the Odyssey.
You know, we see it in Homer, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
great mythic structures. That's why we go to the movies.
That's why Marvel Comics are so prone to powerful motifs,
especially for younger audiences.
People say, go to the movies. Now it looks like it's entirely
for juvenile audience. So, yeah, because we've stopped
teaching our young people the great myths.
So it's up to them to go to the movie theaters to to watch Iron
Man. And they're drawn.
We're drawn. Yeah.
So we are drawn to to myth. We're drawn to these deeper
stories. It's why we pick up a novel at
the airport and we read it for four hours on the flight.
It's called What's Why We read a page Turner because a
compelling, a well written novel or a well written design
screenplay, a movie that is captivating deeply.
It's because it resonates with these deep mythic structures.
So I think the the and, and I think Steven Spielberg was the
genius at that. By the way, let me share
something with you about. I go back to, I brought up
Jacques Valet, the French astronomer.
He was brought in by Steven Spielberg back in the early 70s
to work on when Spielberg was working on on the on the
phenomenon and trying to find a plot that that is that captured
the biggest part of it. He knew about Ballet's books, so
he brought, he said, Jacques, I want to meet you.
Come, come to me in LA. So they did they they worked
together and valet brought a vast amount of field research.
For example, the, you know, the sense in which in, in close
Encounters of the Third Kind, the Richard Dreyfuss character,
his truck stops, it stops the engine, it turns off all the
lights. And then when the phenomenon
goes back off into the sky, that the, the, the car starts up
again. The idea that people all around
the world were transfixed by the idea of what was going on at
Devil's Tower in Wyoming. That is also a powerful theme.
So Valet brought a lot of that in.
And then at one point it became clear to Valet that what
Spielberg was planning to do was have this culminate in the giant
mothership. He was going to resolve the plot
as a classic extraterrestrial landing.
And Valet said to Spielberg, Steven, it's your movie.
You'll do what you want, but you will resolve, if you resolve all
the ambiguities, all the richness of the data, which is
far more nuanced as an extraterrestrial event in a
definitive sense, you will overly define this phenomenon in
a way that the evidence doesn't indicate.
And, Spielberg said to Valet. I understand what you're telling
me. I've studied the phenomena
you've brought to me. I've studied the cases.
You're right, it is far more subtle.
But here's the deal. I work in Hollywood.
My day job is to make movies. People who go to this movie are
going to want the handshake. He used the term handshake.
You remember the French scientist who, who, who, who
used a musical 55 notes do do, do, do, do, do and and he had
the hand gesture by which the connection was made.
He said. People are going to want the
handshake about I said, Steven, I know what you're saying.
I understand you want to make a great movie.
But he he did believe that what, what, what Spielberg would be
doing was making that ending so compelling that people would
assume that UFO means extraterrestrial spacecraft.
What UFO means is unidentified aerial flying phenomena,
something's in the sky that we can't explain.
It could just as easily come from other dimensions of
reality, not from a, just necessarily from a physical
place. Or it could be some third
option. It's, it's from another, another
physical place, but it, it, it manifests in terms that for us
we can only call paranormal. So anyway, that's a that's an
example of the of the tension between storytelling and another
example of it's how the major UFO abduction researchers Budd
Hopkins and and David Jacobs were both very forthright in a
curious way, very candid to say they would learn to exclude
cases as probably not real abductions.
Oh, really? What would what would be
examples of cases that don't, that don't, don't seem to be
real abductions that were probably only psychological.
And they both basically said if it doesn't fit the emerging
profile of little short Gray aliens, the ones that are
supposedly 7 feet tall who don't fit that profile, those probably
are just psychological. Well, wait a minute.
Whoa, whoa. Because you have a lot of
sightings that that preference, that show a preference, a
predilection for the short Gray reptile aliens.
If anything doesn't fit that they're excluded.
What I'm saying is there is among UFO researchers an
unavoidable desire to remove the strangeness and to regularize to
make the phenomenon credible. Because you know, if you're a
UFO research, if, if you're an engineer, teach a professor of
engineer at a university and, and there are a good number of
engineers who professors of engineers who, who actually are
interested in the UFO phenomenon.
They have a hard enough time selling this as even
extraterrestrial. They don't want little elves
from mythology. They don't want to hear about
parallels between UFO abductions and fairy abductions in the
Irish and Celtic cultures. That's way too weird.
So I'm not saying that the the researchers are dishonest, but
there's a natural attempt to rationalize, to make the
phenomenon more rational than it really is.
What I'm saying is the UFO phenomenon is actually stranger
than we think because it's there are too many kinds of creatures
with too many kinds of morphologies and body types and
anatomies. So I'm a big believer in let the
evidence be as weird as it it needs to be.
Don't oh, don't close down. And I so I think that that these
these researchers on abductions have given us 2 concrete a
picture. The idea that these are literal.
Well, the abduction issue is a is a is a complex 1.
And I don't want to do it in a. Yeah, we can.
We can do that later, maybe even have you back on and you know,
discuss that a little bit more fully because that is, I mean,
that's what we looked at in our documentary and going into
making it. You know, when I first started,
I've always been interested since I was like 1213, pondering
the universe, whatever. But when I really got into these
ideas and concepts and things, I was much like what you were
discussing. Like I'm, I'm very about science
and observation. How can we quantify these
things? And slowly I realized through
researching, talking with people, having my own
experiences, that there's a far more, it's a, it's a far bigger
Gray area than just rational materialism or something along
those lines. Like you said, there's a lot of
people that want to turn this into a solid flying disc with a
physical being from another planet getting out.
As opposed to some sort of whether it's our own part of our
own psyche or a piece of something or something we're
encountering in an altered state that's communicating with
something in a different dimension or something that, you
know, it's basically what we're talking about is metaphysics.
And that's kind of the conclusion that I came to as
well, which is that there's a metaphysical component to this
and that the very few, like I said, rational daylight, whether
it's, you know, a physical encounter somebody had or
something. I'm, I'm actually more skeptical
of those these days than I am of the actual people having weird
experiences in altered states or in liminal spaces or waking up
or falling asleep or so light outside and they wake up or
something along those lines. Because I feel like a lot of
people can connect with that as opposed to I'm sitting in my
backyard and a metal disc lands and some being it's out.
Not that I feel like that's not in the realm of possibility,
It's just that going in I felt like that was more likely as
opposed to now where I feel like that's far less likely, if that
makes sense. Well.
That's one of the one of in in my assembly of the Venn
diagrams. I bring in also the shamanic
tradition, shamans. The shaman in traditional
cultures, primal cultures was that figure who was expected and
trained very eccentric would probably be considered a
psychologically disordered person according to contemporary
psychological diagnostics. But the shaman was that being
who would use, you know, would would light the fire and have
ceremonies and conduct discourse, intercourse, if you
will. I don't mean it in the sexual
sense, but exchanges with the beings from the upper and the
middle and the lower realms. Most shamanic cultures have a
well defined cosmology of beings at many levels.
When I discovered that when I found my way into the
anthropological evidence of shamanism, I said we can't
exclude the possibility that maybe today's UFO abductees are
unwitting shamans. They are drawn into the same
realms that the shamanic cultures are speak of with their
with their different levels of beings, non ordinary
mythological creatures. That simply because our
philosophies and our cosmologies in the Western mind have
excluded all those phenomena doesn't mean the phenomena are
excluding us. If I often say when we have a
consistent body of evidence, and I mean the whole entire
phenomenology of the UFO world, the abductions, the contacts,
the the visitations, the sightings in the sky, the sense
in which the sightings in the sky often correlate with deep
psychological experiences that would not necessarily go with
seeing a light in the sky. What is it about the sense of a
person who witnesses something in the sky and has a
transformative life experience that cannot be explained by a
conventional light in the sky? So when I, so I often say when
we have a phenomenology, a broad body of data that doesn't fit
our maps, maybe at some point the wisest question is maybe
it's the maps. Maybe our map.
Has anybody checks our checked our maps lately?
Are they up to date? By maps, I mean our theories.
And we don't literally carry around maps with us.
But the Western model of, of, of science involves theories,
which, which are mappings. You could say in the same sense
that the adventurers who came Magellan and other adventures
who came in ships, they had maps of the ocean of the sky.
While our maps don't appear to be final.
Whoa. And not up to date.
We don't even include consciousness even in the
Western materialist framework. We don't have an understanding.
We don't even have a framework for understanding the act of
observing. We don't account for awareness
and for psychological we don't have a good map of of of
interior life and it's relationship to the outer life,
which is where synchronicities come in, right.
And synchronicity is by definition a meaningful
correlation between an internal state and a psychological state.
If famously young was working with one of his patients who had
was telling about dream of beetles, a particular beetle
called a scarab. And at one point it while the
the the patient was telling Jung about his dream of a of a
certain kind of beetle, Jung heard a kind of knocking on the
window. So he got up and opened the
curtain and there was that very beetle on the window.
And that's when Jung began to work with the the physicist
Wolfgang Polly. Yeah, from the Manhattan
Project. Yeah, so basically.
So we need a model that talks about evidence that mind and
matter far from being 2 fixed positions, mind is here, matter
is here. Going way back to Descartes,
they don't communicate. These are separate categories
somehow meaning is entirely inside us.
The outer world is composed of dead, inert matter.
Well, what we have with synchronicities and other
paranormal phenomena, you have a precognitive dream that you're
going to be walking down the street and see a person dressed
in these colors and that this the, you see a scene which the
next day the, the based on the dream, you see that scene
another you well, great, let's, let's, let's draw bigger maps.
I'm up for drawing bigger maps. And that's the true scientific
enterprise. It should be the religious
enterprise as well. But too often most religions
define given map. It's with a particular book and
a particular interpretation of that book.
And I don't want to go deeply into that, but I'm spiritually,
and I think it's good. Good science and spirituality
are the same, the same enterprise.
Yeah, and Young and Polly, I think they came to the
conclusion that it was when mind meets matter is what the
synchronicity is. Those two different, you know,
mind and matter kind of intersecting is like, oh, that's
when you have this epiphany or this synchronicity or whatever.
Yeah, those are that's I, I, if you're interested in
synchronicities, I implore people to go look into that.
The communications and letters between Young and Polly 'cause
there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
And they actually there's another young short story.
I think it's Man's Search for Meanie and not, not the Frankel
book, but there's another one, a young one.
I can't think of the title right now where he's talking about a
mountain climber that he was that was seeing him.
And the mountain climber came to him in the, you know, he was
climbing in the Alps and said, you know, I keep having this
nightmare that I'm going to die up on the mountain or die, you
know, And Young said, well, don't go up there alone.
So he started going with somebody else.
And then finally, I think one day he, you know, decided to
just do it himself and he goes up there and dies on the
mountain. So it's like, it's one of these
things where it's like, was he foreshadowing his own death or
was there something to those dreams and those thoughts?
You know, it's it's an interesting thought experiment.
And this brings, this brings up the whole question of what's the
role of skepticism and, and, and, and, and critical thinking?
I became aware and when I was 12 years old and I had that
assignment to cover this case and, or I made that my
assignment, brought it to my class about the Western Michigan
sighting. I That's when I first had the
introduction to the debunkers. And by debunker, I mean that
class of skeptics who speak in the name of science very often.
Carl Sagan was famous for this. And now Neil deGrasse Tyson is
sort of the latest TV scientist. I don't know what real science
he does apart from being on TV. And they tried him out as the,
as a, as a representative of science and generally in, in
televised debates about the paranormal and extraterrestrials
and the UFO phenomenon. The generally the last 15
minutes of an hour long show is now we're going to bring on the
skeptics who basically dismiss it all.
So I, I don't think skepticism. I do.
I distinguish between genuine skepticism.
Well, like what? What happened?
Tell me your story. Is it possible there's another
interpretation? Asking good critical, critically
minded question, not needing to believe anything in advance is
different. That kind of skepticism is
healthy. When someone says I saw your
wife with another man, are you going to say, oh, that's
interesting, or are you going to say where, when?
Tell me how I can find you. I want to confirm that you know,
of course you want evidence. You just want basic information.
Yeah, this is what good detective stories are about.
There's a kind of toxic skepticism that passes for
skepticism. And that's the debunker who
immediately says, well, this UFO stuff is really nonsense.
Oh, tell us more about that. Well, because we know that
reality doesn't do this. There aren't these the speed of
light question. They could not get here from
Alpha Centauri. All of these could not is not
therefore could not therefore is not we can't explain it.
Therefore it didn't happen what this does and I I got I got wind
of this early before that's why I went the route I went to study
people like Jung and Joseph Campbell and myth bringing in
mythological thinking. It doesn't make it easier to
bring this stuff in, but it's important to bring it in If we
have if, if they're if they're a phenomena that well.
So what happens is with the debunkers.
That's what I want to. I'm going to stay on that point.
The debunker basically says in response to a witness testimony
that didn't happen. We know that reality doesn't
behave this way. This kind of knee jerk dismissal
of phenomena drives the phenomena into the underground,
if you will, to the deep unconscious of the culture.
So what makes the UFO phenomena difficult, challenging, and
ultimately an opportunity to think big is that it brings in
the human unconscious. Because these phenomena are
officially dismissed by the official agents of culture.
In science, academia, and the news media, there's always the
giggle factor. I can't tell you the number of
and I don't mind. I I find it amusing the number
of podcasts and media events I've done for this book, The UFO
Paradox. They begin with The X-Files
music. They bring up the interview with
The X-Files music. And I don't mind.
I'm always aware, Oh, this is where the interview is going to
go. We're going to go with a little
bit of tongue in cheek. I'm up for that.
So it's it, it takes a certain amount of calibration to say,
OK, I'm I'm dealing with a phenomenon that is officially
has a big laugh factor associated with it.
And to me, that's just part of the, the working conditions of,
of exploring phenomena like this, because it's no way around
the fact that debunkers set the terms.
And I, I'm not here to do, I'm not here to complain about that.
The debunkers, it tells us a lot about their psychology.
The immediate impulse to debunk a phenomenon is not a scientific
impulse, even though it is often done by people who claim to be
speaking in the name of science. It's it's closer to the
phenomenon of the Vatican officials who who paid that
famous visit to Galileo and said, you've got to stop saying
that the Earth revolves around the sun when we know that the
sun revolves around the Earth. And he said, well, you don't
have to take my word for it. I've got this thing called a
telescope and I look into the sky with it and you can see and
also my table over here, all my computations.
You're welcome to spend the afternoon and we can talk about
my computations. They said no to all of that.
We don't want to read your computations.
We don't want to look through your telescope because we know
from our faith how the universe is set up.
And if you keep saying this, we're going to put you under
house arrest. Well, he did get a kind of house
arrest, a kind of genial accommodation.
They told him to settle down and stop making these claims.
Then in the late 1960s, I think finally the Vatican said, oh, by
the way, Galileo was right. Oh, thank you for correcting
that long standing error on your part.
So whereas it was, it was the Vatican who made it necessary.
And the Vatican, I mean organized religion in general,
made it necessary to have a separate body of evidence called
science that didn't depend on faith, where you could challenge
faith assumptions. Now it is the people who act in
the name of science who are actually far more dogmatic and
dismissing this phenomena in advance in a way that is not
truly scientific. It's one of the perplexing
aspects of. All this.
Yeah. I think for me, what I realized
too, I'm not, you know, you see people out there and I've
interviewed Mick West and I think he's, you know, he's a
nice guy. I could see where I, he rubs
people the wrong way though, in his, his quest to, to debunk
these videos and pictures and things like that.
But I, I'm more in the camp of the cognitive bias stuff.
So like I've noticed from interacting with the community
and stuff like that, I've met a lot of cool people.
Most people are honest. There are grifters though.
There's grifters, there's mentally ill people, there's
people that are very stubborn that treat it like a religion
that. You know, somebody who believes
the Bible word for word but doesn't understand the origins
of where any of it comes from, that kind of a thing.
So there are people like that in the community.
And again, I'm not here to like, you know, question anybody's
experiences or anything like that.
But I will say that when I listen to stuff or I see stuff,
I'm, I'm using it, I'm, I'm approaching it through the lens
of what I understand about human cognitive bias, whether it be
apophenia, pareidolia, you know, just bias in general.
Even Dunning Kruger. Oh, I, you know, I could, you
know, fly that plane better understand this better, whatever
the, the case may be, you see a lot of that too.
So I, you know, it's tough because like I said, I, I do
witness a lot of stuff online where I'm like, how are even,
you know, is Facebooks gotten bad by the way too with the fake
videos and the AI and CGI hard to and, and, and it does fool
people. And I could see that if you have
no experience with any of this and you know, whatever, But at
the same time, it's like if you're looking at this through a
critical lens, you have to be completely honest about all the
flaws that are there too. So while I love science and I do
understand what you're saying about like the Neil degrasse and
the Bill Nye and all that kind of stuff, I do think that there
are legitimate scientists that do entertain this on a, on a
honest level as well. And those people have
interesting ideas of what it could be and what what it can't
be and things like that too, so. Many of them will admit
privately they don't do it publicly for the same reason
that that Kenneth Arnold kept to himself the larger speculations,
including that he went home that day.
His house was filled with orbs of light that would have been
the most self cancelling, that would have completely cancelled
everything he had said that day about the objects that seem to
be skipping like saucers. So what I'm, what I'm getting at
here is a lot of these researchers who do take it
seriously and do science keep to themselves, their own that many
of them have mystical experiences.
They have they have profound psychological experiences that
raise for them the question of what is real.
And now I get asked a lot do is my book about disclosure.
Do I cover disclosure? My response is almost always I
cover nothing but disclosure. But I don't think I mean by that
what you mean. I think the main disclosure is
the phenomenon that can do these things, that presents itself in
these forms that that cross the boundary between mind and matter
in ways that again, are self canceling.
A good UFO report is going to almost Whitley Strieber, the
author of Communion, the great abduction story of the about the
20th century of you. He put on the map this idea of
the abduction experience. He happened to be a very gifted
writer. He wrote this book called
Communion. He has talked about how if he
could do it over again, would he have told all the details of the
probing that the creatures did of his body and the deep
embarrassment about many of the aspects.
The So anyway, what what I'm getting at here is to me, the
disclosure is the wildness of the events themselves versus the
current emphasis on government disclosure as if it is certain
that the, you know, the government has the answers.
Any day now. This is the if there's a, if
there's a mythos or a narrative at the heart of the UFO
phenomenon, I don't know of one that is more fundamental than
this one. Any day now, the lid on the
government cover up is going to blow sky high.
I've been at this phenomenon long enough to know, and being
an older citizen, if you will, that this has been going on
since the 1940's, the expectation of an imminent
disclosure. The government knows more than
they're saying, which by the way, I believe is true.
I don't disregard the idea that there is been, there's been
government dissembling, hiding stuff.
But I think the best hypothesis is, and I know there are people
probably listening to who might, who might disagree, who really
do believe the government has figured it all out.
And they're they're now doing a strategic disclosure in doses we
can tolerate. Again, we've heard, I've heard
this for so long. I think that what the government
is hiding is that this phenomenon has us outclassed.
I agree. I, I, I don't think we, I, I
think and I argue with people all the time.
I, I have friends that believe what you're saying that we have
craft that we've back engineered and you know, the Bob Lazar and
all the secrecy. And I disagree.
You know, like even the Manhattan Project, which was our
most top secret project we've ever had, had, you know, moles
and leaks and you know, the Canadian stuff where, you know,
and the, the we even told Russia about it and they didn't
believe. I know it was a Roosevelt told
Stalin that we had this thing and he didn't even believe them
and this kind of stuff. So like, who's who's the UFO
Oppenheimer, who's the UFO Einstein or Niels Bohr or
whoever, Like we don't have that.
So like that tells me that this is a far stranger, weirder
thing. So to think that our government,
which seems, let's face it, not great at concealing things like
that, you know, I mean, I, and you can make the argument that
we're better at that with the military stuff, whatever.
But again, look at the Manhattan Project.
I don't, I don't think that we have this stuff nailed down
'cause I don't know who are the scientists, who are these
intelligent people behind the scenes that are figuring this
stuff out, 'cause I have yet to see anybody like that come out
where it's like, Oh my God. Like, you know, and, and I, I, I
maybe you disagree, but I just, I don't see this, these people
that we've had in the past that have brought us into this
paradigm that we're in now coming out and saying we have
this or we know about this or whatever.
It just seems like, like you said, we're outclassed or we're
so far from understanding what's going on that we can pretend
like we're on top of it, but we're really not, or something
along those. Lines, yeah, there's just so
much of it repeated about we have fully intact craft that
have been captured and in the back.
Engineer, where do they, where are they recovered from?
Are they always generally on government?
Why are there no craft that land in, you know, central?
I don't even mean the White House landing.
Why don't they land on the White House lawn?
That's a old cliche. But why don't they land in in
places where there are witnesses that take photographs, that
they're always they're recovered fully, fully intact craft?
And they crash. They're so advanced, but they
crash everywhere. They crash and Ross Coldheart,
the the Woodward and Bernstein, I guess of the of the UFO field,
the sole researcher, the sole journalist who makes this his
thing. Remember the the the guy Jake
Barber 8 months ago or has it been a has it been a year yet?
Newsmax, not Newsmax, but net whatever his network is covered
this this guy who anyway, the point they don't they don't pan
out. Jake Barber was supposed to be
the breakthrough, the paradigm shift that that is going to now
hasten disclosure and there's going to be and something's
going to happen in 2027. By the way, Ross Coldheart says
he knows of a of the location of a craft that is a mile in size.
Larger, Well, very, very, very, very large craft underground.
Where is that Ross? I can't tell you National
because it would hurt our national.
Sounds like an Alien versus Predator movie.
Yeah, it really does. It's it's this is always, you
know, there's a new movie coming out, the new, the new disclosure
movie coming out in November. A lot of the people who were
interviewed in that, I know them and they, they generally and,
and I, I trust that they, they said, they say things like I
have talked with people who have had their hands on these craft.
I can't tell you more, however, why?
Well, because in some cases because of their own alleged
national security clearances, at some point it's put up or shut
up. So bring it.
I think what for me what what comes down to is this phenomenon
has become so deeply enmeshed in the national security
intelligence military framework that it is it has come to define
the phenomena and there's a lot of the phenomena that doesn't
fit the national security intelligence state framework.
So I mean, there are people who are out out this very weekend,
probably doing close encounters of the fifth kind, trying to
call the craft in. I say, yes, OK, now that makes
sense. Go if if you, if you really
believe, if, if your evidence is that you are able through the
state of your consciousness to invite this phenomena in, let's
go for it. That is far more productive in
terms of evidence gathering than this.
This refrain of the government has the answers.
And by probably 2027, it's always a pushing.
There's always a date that keeps us moving forward with this
phenomenon. I've sort of begun to identify
those frameworks as you know, it's kind of disinformation, but
it's it's willing disinformation at some point when we when we
believe these explanations about disclosure being imminent.
Again, the the greatest disclosure is the events
themselves and how they confound our rational categories.
That's the disclosure that I try to document.
And I, I think the other thing that gets lost too is people
think of the government is this monolithic entity where
everybody's in, you know, communication with each other.
And, and I don't think that's true.
I think a lot of these departments have beefs with each
other. They're different, they have
different people, they have different moving parts.
On top of that, they're just human beings too, You know, like
we can talk about scientists just being human beings that use
the scientific method or priests being human beings that have a
way of faith or whatever. These are just human beings that
work for this entity that they could have their own beliefs.
This could be, we could be this thing of disclosure could be
colored by people that you know, like anything else.
There's people that are Christian or Buddhist or
whatever and they have their own thoughts on life and philosophy
and death. Same thing with this.
There could be people within the government that truly believe
this stuff. With the myth stuff and the
mythologizing stuff. I think that's where we have to
be careful when you're looking at this.
If you truly want to know something, you kind of have to
pick apart the myth and understand what was the origin
of this myth. Kind of like you do with the
kind of thorn old stuff. Because I think that when you go
down the wrong path, it colors your future trajectory on
understanding. And I think that that's kind of
where we've gotten with this, where we've gone so far down the
road with this idea of flying saucers being from outer space.
That now there's so many people that believe that, or at least
it's in the zeitgeist and psyche and everything that it's hard to
get out of that. So when you're talking about non
physical States and psychedelics and altered States and near
death experiences and things like that, well it's like it's
hard to get people to shift from that because they're so set in
their ways on that. Just like people get with
religion, just like people get with anything else.
So. Well, and my friend Jeffrey
Cripple, Perezia Cripple of Rice University, runs an division.
They're called the Archives of the Impossible, and he has
written numerous books about the just about the entire category
of the impossible. These phenomena are impossible
not because they really are impossible, but because they
fall outside the paradigms of what we call possible and so
that they are officially impossible.
But he says we must pursue the impossible, what we call the
impossible. That's the largest requirement
we have with all of this. And so I associate myself a lot
with Jeff Cripple on that. And there are researchers.
I, I noticed one of the researchers recently said he
believes there are now easily 6 categories of aliens that are,
that are making contact with us and that they are at odds with
themselves. So they're not even on the same
team. And I kind of said, what is your
evidence for that? Not that there aren't pretend
potentially such, but saying with such certainty that we know
it. We now know, see the, the, the
degree to which our language says, well, we now know that
there are 6 species of aliens. And it's very clear, really very
clear. These things get repeated.
Instead, they're very clear that they are at odds with
themselves. And so the tall Gray, the short
Grays and the tall whites are at deep, deeply at odds with
themselves. OK, that's myth making, doesn't
mean it's false, but it's uncorroborated and it and it
falls out into the realm. So ultimately, this phenomenon
poses a great challenge. How do you determine fact from
fiction? It ultimately comes down.
So yeah, the debunkers have their role.
Genuine skeptics. Well, people are gonna listen to
this back and forth we've had for the last 15 minutes now and
be like they're debunking or they're skeptical.
No, what I'm saying is there's something real.
And I think you would agree there's something real at the
heart of this. However, it gets bastardized or
colored in a wrong way or, you know, people are people, You
know, we're all flawed. So you have to accept that some
people are wrong, or some people are delusional, or some people
just don't know what they're talking about.
Well, and I think there's you can make a distinction between
having a degree of certainty. There's something going on
ontologically. Again, it's a fancy word for the
division of philosophy that this studies the nature of being what
exists, what is real. So there's something going on.
It is on the interpretation that my critical thinking comes in.
I'm an agnostic about various interpretations of the real
thing that is going on. So yeah, if you just tuned in
the last 15 minutes, this Keith Thompson sounds like a debunker.
He sounds caustically skeptical, a blah, blah, blah.
I'm skeptical of interpretations.
We need better stories, need better interpretation.
I need to hold them more lightly.
I don't know if this is exactly true, but I've heard that
Jacques Valet, who I've quoted this researcher who was one of
the first to originally bring in, let's look at mythology,
let's look at cultural reports for hundreds of years and do
that within the framework of the UFO phenomenon, he was recently
quoted as saying. In one of his podcasts, he said,
I don't find the UFO discourse fun anymore.
He's 89 years old. He's been at or 80 some years
old, been at it for a very long time.
When he says this is not fun anymore, I think he's referring
to these waves of overbelief at the interpretation level, these
expectation that there's going to be disclosure that never
comes. So then people then dismiss the
whole phenomenon because a particular interpretation
doesn't pan out. The debunkers can say, oh, see,
there's there's nothing here, There's nothing to see here,
there's something to see here. And we need to keep our
interpretations reasonable, not rash, not not not They need to
be evidence based. So, you know, if there are 66
species of aliens fighting among themselves, Well, tell me more
about what's the source of that story.
I'm a I'm a reporter. I want to track that story.
Teach me how I can verify what you're saying.
I come at it that way. If I wanted to prove what you're
saying, Sir, about the six species that are at war with
each other right near on this, right here on this planet.
Now, how could I pursue that to confirm what you're saying?
They often get very quiet as well.
I was told by somebody who's in the know, but he will lose his
security clearance and he will be court martial.
OK, that that one again. Okey doke.
Yeah, I, you know, and, and I got tired of that as well.
Not that I I look, I never had any belief that any of that was
going to come out anyways. If anything's going to happen,
it's probably going to happen. Like that movie Arrival where,
you know, something just appears.
We need linguists. We need psychologists, We need
scientists. Yeah.
Our best people. So, you know, this idea that,
you know, that something traversed, you know, the Galaxy
but somehow crashed here by accident, you know, and it's
happened many times. Well, you know, then they have
to come up with this idea. Oh, it started happening after
we created the atomic bomb and you know, it started wiping
these things out from other dimensions and now that's why
they're landing in this dimension and turning physical
in this dimension. It's just like it's, it's,
there's so much layer upon layer of I don't want to say BS 'cause
I don't think it's BSI just think it's people's imaginations
running wild or people putting pieces together.
And how could this be true? And again, I have nothing
against, you know, thought experiments and talking shit or
whatever the case may be. But the problem is when you
start debating people or going after people or whatever, you
better have some information, some, some ducks in a row.
Because I think that it looks bad when you don't and that you
see a lot of people looking bad out there.
And I, I don't know if you're on X, but you know, yeah, I was
doing X spaces for a, a long time and trying to implement the
idea of philosophy and teleology, epistemology,
ontology, and, and integrating that into these conversations.
And there was people resistant to it, but there was also people
that were also interested in the, in those ideas.
And I think that because it's a, it's based in metaphysics, I
think that's the way you have to approach it because we don't
have the tools yet to quantify that.
So what I tell people is at very least it's interesting because
we're all being subjected to some sort of a mind virus of
believing something that doesn't actually exist.
That's that's the worst case possibility.
The best case possibility is kind of what we're talking about
now in my opinion, where there's something greater than us that
we can't quantify yet that's out there that hopefully we slowly
can, you know, whether it's understand it or communicate
with it or whatever it is. But yeah, I think that, yeah, I
just don't like dogmatism. I don't like it on either side.
I don't like scientists being super dogmatic and using
scientism. And I don't like the complete
believer that's unwilling to hear anything else other than
what they are, you know, they're pre predisposed ideas of what
this could be. So I'm kind of in the middle on
all that and I, I, from what you've explained, it sounds like
you are too. Yeah, I am.
And a matter of fact, I, I did mention, you know, that
Spielberg had that enormous impact that valet was concerned
about. You're going to over define this
as extraterrestrial. Now, by the way, I love the
closing of close Encounters. I the, the, the, the ship
landing and the, the, the human abductees all coming back out,
the ones who'd been taken for decades.
And they they named they said I'm Sergeant Smith, U.S.
Marine. My my code number.
Is this my anyway, the the powerful dramatic ending
Spielberg is now at work on on his next movie.
He's doing a movie in 2026. Apparently it's still on for for
release. He's calling it disclosure.
So I'm, I'm cannot wait to see what Spielberg, who has shaped
this phenomenon so, so powerfully, what he does with
disclosure. Is he going to go?
I imagine it's going to be a mix of yes, disclosure.
What does the government know? There are probably going to be a
character protagonist who's on to his secret but whose life is
in jeopardy because those in the know don't want it to be
revealed. That'll probably irresistible to
Spielberg. But by my reckoning, Spielberg
is a sharp enough cultural observer to know that there's
also an aspect of disclosure that pertains to what you're
what we're describing as the metaphysics that ultimately this
is the disclosure is about maybe our purpose, the larger purpose
of life that they, it, whatever this phenomenon are, is is is
trying to advance our understanding of this could be a
test, a an initiation. So anyway, is is he going to
play the wisely, play the edge between the disclosure of
government secrets and the disclosure of metaphysical
truths? Because I think they're bound
up. I don't dismiss the disclosure
thing, the government disclosure conversation.
I just finally say, at what point are we going to get beyond
the endless prediction? As I say, the old.
I would love it to be, by the way.
I would love it to be true because that would mean that we
do have the ability to keep secrets and we do have advanced
stuff like that. I just don't know where the
people that would be working on those things are coming from.
They've never seen the light of day ever.
They don't. There's never been any sort of a
real leak, you know, other than these ones that you know, you're
Lazar or whatever. You know, it's just, there's no,
there's to me, there's never been any real credible person
that didn't have some sort of questionable thing attached to
them in regards to that in in my opinion.
But again, I'm happy to be wrong.
I'm not saying that that's impossible or whatever.
I'm saying that everything that I've seen to this point points
to that being kind of just like, you know, somebody dangling a
carrot in front of a pony or something like that.
Well, let me say this you know the the famous disclosure case
some ways the paradigm case for a government cover up is Roswell
1947. Something landed something
crashed in the desert near Roswell Army base in in June of
1947 government first came out with a story that said a disk
has been recovered the next day. It wasn't a disk after all.
It was just a weather balloon. And and there's a pretty well
orchestrated, a pretty well confirmed case that the military
official who posed with the remnants was not telling the
truth as he saw it. So look, something more than a
weather balloon crashed. Was it an extraterrestrial craft
in the in the storm that night or that week?
Was it something of our own that went amiss?
Yeah. Was it?
Military came out and said it was a nuclear detection balloon.
Well, they certainly, I mean, I've talked to people who, who
just are very, very evidence oriented, who keep their
theories at a minimum. And, and they, they talk about
the fact that there's good evidence that the, the military
did go door to door in Roswell after most of these scraps were
picked up, raked off the desert floor.
If you picked up any of that, and if you're holding on to any
of it, you're going to get in very serious trouble.
I believe those conversations apparently did happen.
I mean, I have no doubt that that's a reasonable.
So something was so top secret they released, they were willing
at first to say that it was a flying saucer.
That's what they led with, then they backed off from that right
there. Yeah, I've got the article from
the Roswell Daily Record up there on my wall.
Exactly. It is legendary and it's it's a
myth. It's mythic.
And again I say Roswell is a mythic case.
I said, oh, you mean it didn't happen?
No, I, I, I just have to come to realize the term myth is, is.
So we need to recover language from sets of assumptions that
mythic thinking doesn't mean false.
It's by definition the Roswell is a mythic event, but I I find
that a phrase that doesn't close conversation, it should enlarge
the conversation. So I I still don't know.
I also don't think we're likely to probably know anything that
comes out about Roswell. By the way, what would
constitute good proof of the crash saucers?
Yeah, you would be. People would be assuming.
Yeah, you would have to know what alien technology looks
like. Well, you know, and did what
what Trump knows or doesn't know about.
And he's he makes playful remarks every now and then, just
as Obama did. Obama pretended as though I know
what happened, but I can't tell you the full story.
Well, OK, that's, you know, you're on with Jimmy Kimmel.
Is this the framework in which you want to have this
conversation Late night comics And he's smirking and you're
smirking. So what's the smirking?
Is it is it to say that you're that you're that you're
furthering the cover up? Or are you saying in other
words, what does what did Barack Obama was was he briefed the
idea that there's going to be a briefing.
Jacques Valet has come out with the idea that this this subject,
for whatever reason, is so highly classified that the
president is not even considered to have a need to know.
That's a pretty. If it, if it was true, I think
that that would actually probably be true, given the, the
way that our top secret and the contractors and that whole
structure works. I I actually believe that if it
were true, that that would be probably true.
Yeah, I do it it, it has a ring of truth through it.
So, you know, and Valet often says, as I say, he says I may be
the only one or the the longest researcher.
I do not know what a UFO is. I say that too.
I often say, well, I'm second to Valet.
He's been at it longer than me. But I don't know what a UFO is
except that it is a very powerful, it's a it's a powerful
force. It involves light.
It involves effects on witnesses that create experiences that
that, that result in experience. You know, partly we have to ask
ourselves, are these, is this a real phenomenon that does impact
our consciousness by creating scenarios that are believable
about abductions? See, I, I'm often asked by I
was, I was asked, I was on the Larry King live, the late Larry
King. And he asked me, do you think
the abductions are real? You know, that kind of gravelly
New York voice? Is it real?
I said, well, it depends on what we mean by really.
No, no, no, I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Is it real? Are people being abducted?
So what I thought of on the spot, I said, Larry, here's how
I'd put it. If you or I had the experience
that is called a UFO abduction, we would believe it really
happened. It is a real experience.
He goes, oh, OK, OK. So I mean, he was actually
willing to. He stopped.
So I think the abductees are reporting real experiences.
But like Plato's cave, the famous, you know, the famous
paradigm of people sitting in a cave and they're looking forward
and they see movement against the walls.
What they don't know is that there's a fire behind them.
And those are shadows that are being cast.
So the we believe the shadows are the primary reality.
One of the prisoners gets loose and sees, oh, wait a minute,
those are just shadows. The primary phenomenon is behind
us. So if the experience of
abduction is real, what is the what is at the heart, what is
creating? Are they at this at the level
that many abduction researchers say they are, political
experiences? They're happening just as they
say. There's so much about them
involving the jump cuts and the and the loss of time, the
missing time, that consciousness is a very important part of
this. And when there's a lot of
missing time in an experience, it suggests there's an
alteration of consciousness that also suggests is something real
is going on. But don't take it at face value.
That is a good rule of thumb. Something's going on here.
But don't take it at face value or question taking it at face
value. Assume that there may be more
going on that is going to ask a deeper set of questions than
both sides really want. The debunkers want this to be
easily dismissed. The believers in the ET
hypothesis wanted to be deeply believed.
And there's a lot of us in the middle who say something's going
on here. Like Jung said, something's
going on, something is happening, something is seen.
The question is what? Holding that what in greater
with a greater degree of transparency, openness,
playfulness, being entered, being willing not to have to
reach final conclusions at all times about everything.
This phenomenon can really drive the dogmatic mind crazy.
And maybe because I don't come at it from that way, people say,
you know, you don't seem to have been driven crazy by this.
So many researchers who followed this a long time that doesn't
that they don't end up well. And I've actually noticed that
too. I think the reason that many
researchers end up badly with this phenomenon is because they
approach it with an expectation of imminent rational
interpretation. It's all going to be made clear
anytime soon, John Keel KEEL, one of the early researchers of
the 1960s, said. This phenomenon will wreak havoc
on your mind. If you want to follow it, you
need to you, you need to have a framework that can hold
ambiguities and allow for ambiguities to exist.
Because if you don't, if you need everything to be tied down,
this phenomenon will run roughshod over you.
And I think that's true. I don't say that in a spooky
sense. Oh, it will run roughshod.
Stay away. No, I don't.
I don't. I don't go there.
Operation Trojan Horse. Check it out.
People Trojan Horse. And actually, people most
probably know him from Mothman Prophecy because they made a
movie about it back in the day. And he, he, he, you know, he
would be on the road. He would be on the road studying
this phenomena. Does he check into a motel?
And he'd get phone calls at the motel from people who, who, who
that he, who would not have known he was there?
He found himself in a paranormal vortex.
In other words, he said, this is not a level 1 ET hypothesis.
This isn't just greater craft from another part of the
universe landing. This is something that's landing
in our psyches, and I am questioning my own ability to
stay sane. That was a moment of lucid
awareness when a researcher says I questioned my own ability to
stay sane if I need to believe every hypothesis.
So he became a kind of radical agnostic about the
interpretations and said basically cautionary, go toward
this phenomenon carefully. Go, go, go at it.
Careful. Now I would say the same thing.
I again, I don't want to sound spooky.
I don't want to sound warning. I try to make it an adventure in
thinking, you know, an adventure in cognition and asking.
Aristotle famously said philosophy begins in wonder.
I continue to wonder. I'm filled with wonder about all
of this. And so it keeps me in a place of
essentially a positive, I think positive disposition.
Yeah, no. And I I approach it in a very
similar way. That's why I wanted to have you
on. And actually after talking with
you now, I think we're, you know, and there's not too many
people that have these takes in the community.
You know, you mentioned Kreipl and you know, there's a few
others, but Valet. But like, I don't know, I mean,
when I was making that documentary, I had the
hypothesis that it's, you have to, you know, almost like use a
Cartesian doubt. And at very least what, what
could be happening on the biological level is whether it's
the modern myth of the UFO or the ancient Greek myths and the
Titans and, you know, Zeus and whatever.
Maybe what we're doing is we're creating these things that, you
know, like I said, it's almost like dangling a carrot to
further us and like, it's some part of our psyche that we don't
understand. That's our mind's using us to
evolve without us knowing, if that makes sense.
So we create. This part of our mind that we
don't even know exists is backing in.
As for Jeff, Krypel often says, I think the phenomenon is US.
I have often urged him to unpack that a little better because to
say that it's just us kind of implies, oh, maybe it's just
something in the social psychology that is, but he's
actually saying it's, it's something much bigger.
When he says the UFO is about us, he means bigger part of
being that we've stopped asking questions about.
Therefore we think could only be other.
So that's a that's a framework. Wow.
So this is a part of us that is bigger than we know about which
you know, points. Ultimately, I'll leave with 111
image when Whitley Strieber and his wife, Ann Strieber, the late
Ann Strieber were after they wrote, he wrote the book
Communion. They in that book, he said, if
you've had your own experiences, send us a letter.
Get in touch. So he got they got thousands.
Whitley and Ann Strieber, after he wrote Communion, got
thousands of letters from people all around the world.
And she came out of her Home Office one day in their home and
said Whitley and she'd been studying these letters, reading
them with a group of volunteers. She said, Whitley, this is about
this. This phenomenon is fundamentally
about what we call death. And she used that phrase about
what we call death, didn't say it's about death.
It's about the realm that we call death and that we don't
know what that. So there is there's a big
overlap with postmortem and the UFO phenomenon.
I also have deduced that most people that are interested in
this topic aren't just interested in the flying saucer
or aliens or whatever. They're interested to know what
happens when we die. We all want to know what happens
when we die. We all die, and we all want to
understand that on a deeper level.
So I think that from my own analysis, from interviewing all
these people and doing over 300 episodes of this podcast, making
a documentary, talking with all sorts of people, people are
interested in death. That's what this it's all, it's
all a death cult, if you will, not in this that sense, but just
in the sense that we all want to know what happens when we die.
And I think that this people believe that this is the best
route to understand that as opposed, you know.
If there's a disclosure coming about the nature of reality, I
think it's probably as as likely to happen less through the UFO
phenomenon as we normally understand it.
The field that I'm finding a lot of whispers about right now,
supposedly both the New York Times and Washington Post, for
example, are on the verge of publishing a big articles.
I don't know if it's entirely true, but you follow the smoke,
there's generally fire. And what they are covering is
the near death experience because the evidence for thanks
to resuscitation techniques becoming so advanced that it is
actually one of the most rich, robust data that the number of
the of of the growing preponderance, the growing
number of credible near death experiences.
People who leave their body sense the other world have
perceptions that are not consistent with being with the
material frame and coming back with reports of another world
and afterlife. That appears to be something
that that. In other words, it may be the
near death experience may be the case that breaks the paradigm.
I almost died twice in the last three years, literally bled out,
was unconscious. And I wanted to ask you this
too, which people can go back and listen.
I've done episodes on my experiences, but the in your
book you talk about your near death experience.
Can we? I want to do this Mike's mind
melters, which is just five questions, but can you please
just give us a little bit of a, a brief synapsis of your near
death experience that you talk about in UFO Paradox?
Yeah, I will. I will give it and I will keep
it brief and I'll and I'll hold myself to that.
It's an experience I decided not to talk about, partly because
I'm old enough that I had the experience before the near death
experience was well known. I had not read Raymond Moody's
book Life Afterlife. I did not know about the stages,
the tunnel, the encounters with with deceased relatives and
friends, and I had a near drowning experience.
I felt myself. I thought I was rising above the
I was coming out of the water and finally I was struggling for
so long body surfing off the coast of Hawaii that I thought I
said to myself, I'm going to die.
I had a very lucid sense that I was not going to survive this.
And I suddenly realized I was rising above the scene itself.
I was out of I had an out of body experience.
I knew nothing. I was 20 something at the time
knew nothing about out of body experiences.
I saw the body of Keith floating in the water, and I overheard my
friends on the coast who had told me, my one friend named
Mary said to another friend of ours.
I told Keith, referring to Keith, who was struggling in the
water. I observed from this sense of
awareness, this vast sense of awareness.
I heard her say. I told Keith not to go out.
I told him it was too dangerous. I told him to be careful.
So I said to Mary, I, my continuing sense of awareness,
who was no longer that body or identified with that body.
I said, Mary, it's OK. I'm actually fine.
It's all OK. This is OK.
Meaning this entire thing, I knew that I had died.
I was, I was dying or knew that I had died.
And I said to myself, oh, dead isn't dead.
That phrase came to me. Long story short, I don't, I did
not get one of those statements from the larger intelligence.
It's not your time. But instead I went back to my
body. I got sent back, if you will,
and I came onto the shore and I told my and my friends, you
know, rescued me and helped me get they knew what I had gone
through. And I, one of my friends that
day said to me right after it happened, man, we thought you
had lost it out there. We thought you had given it up.
And I said, oh, God, he understands.
I said I did, I did. I, I, I died.
But I came back understand. They'd never heard of the near
death experience either. It did not exist.
Oprah had not made it, had not put it on the map of popular
culture. I didn't know either.
So when they, when I saw the look in their eyes when I said I
had died, when I came back, I knew they were looking at me
like I had gone out of my mind and that I would now be faced
with I'd had a trauma. I need to have treatment and
I'll come back and realize I had just had a complex
hallucination. I got it and I also said it's
not true what their interpretation.
I know that I had a real experience.
So turned out I, I started to study and I found out about
Raymond Moody's book. I studied the near death
experience. I met Doctor Kenneth Ring, one
of the other key researchers. So I had, I didn't have a UFO
experience. I had a near death experience
and that had a profound as I began to realize, oh, it fits a
pattern. There are stages.
By the way, let me let me keep one key thing.
When I saw relatives and friends passing before me, I did see
deceased relatives, one of whom I did not know had died.
I had a great Uncle Sam, who I believe was alive.
I saw him among the dead. So after my experience was over,
I survived. It came back to my body and was
Keith again. Keith in this form.
I called my mom. I didn't tell her about the
experience because I'd already had enough feedback.
This doesn't go well when you talk about it, which is also
common with the UFO experience. It doesn't go well when you say
you've had a UFO experience. Trust me, doesn't mean don't,
but it doesn't mean you will. You'll, you will.
You'll face the grilling of your lifetime.
I asked my mom. I said, have you seen Uncle Sam
lately? She said, oh, did you not know
he passed away? When he passed away in June, it
was six months prior to my near death experience.
I did not know that. So that is a level of accuracy.
It's one thing to say you saw your great, you know your
grandfather, but you knew your grandfather was dead.
Maybe it was a hallucination, but you see an uncle that you
have a reason to believe is still alive.
That's good proof too. You know, and I, I don't know if
you've ever read Evan Alexander's book Proof of
Heaven, but he had a similar story about I think a sister
that passed away or something along or no.
But anyways, there's these stories of these people that
like didn't know they had a relative and that relative died
and they met that relative in that space or they had a sister.
Like that's actually pretty interesting.
And I think that if anything like what's go if, let's just
say from a skeptical mind, like what could be happening in that
experience that would cause that I couldn't think of anything.
And I've had my own brushes with death as well.
So yeah, I mean, so did did when you came out of it, did you have
any sort of like remorse that you came back?
I know some people are like they wanted to stay in that realm or,
you know, that's actually more common, I think, with people
that have their heart stop. I don't know if your heart
stopped, but. I don't know exactly what
happened. I don't know what my physical
status was, but I do know I did not have that because I did not
have many people long to wish they could go back because they
come back so badly injured from something automobile accident.
They're crippled, they have injuries, they find life.
Hell, I didn't have that experience.
I will say I did have the one of the other confirming aspects of
this was, as I say, I heard my friend Mary on the shore way
beyond my hearing ability. It was not my body in the water
that was hearing her say this. She said I told him that it was
unsafe. I told him to be careful and I
told him not to go out there. So after I survived the next
morning, after having a night of rest and food and watching
movies and keeping to myself the powerful experience that I'd
been through, I said to my friend Mary, can we go for a
walk? I want to talk with you.
She goes, sure. So we went for a walk and I said
I heard what you said on the beach.
She said, what are you talking about?
I said yesterday you stood there with Moore, another friend of
ours who was on this trip. We were all in our 20s.
We were body surfing and stuff, I said.
I heard you say why did he go out there?
I told Keith not to go out there.
I told him it was too dangerous. I watched the blood drained from
her face as I told her that because we were both in our 20s,
we were not in touch with philosophy of mind.
We didn't know about the near death experience.
We didn't know about. We didn't ask questions about
the nature of consciousness. But we both knew that if I had
overheard her, then the game conditions that we call reality
are different. I'd had a paranormal cognition.
She knew it and we she and therefore she said so you did.
You did have this experience. Maybe you did die.
She didn't know about the near death experience either.
So there was a coming back. You know, part of what this is a
larger conversation, but whether it's UFOs, near death
experiences, paranormal experiences in general, one of
the things that happens when one has these is 1 is lucky.
You get to make you begin to ask new questions.
I began to read Alan Watts, for example, the philosopher who's
written such popular books. I love Alan Watts.
Yeah, so he's one of the best WATTS, for those who don't know.
I began to ask spiritual questions.
I began to read esoteric literature.
I began to practice meditation. So I got on a kind of path that
I would not have gotten on. And I think this is an untold
story of our time, that people are having anomalous
experiences, experiences of realities beyond our framework,
and they evoke deep metaphysical questions.
So that larger question is these experiences provoke larger
inquiries into the nature of reality.
And that to me is one of the added values.
I mean I'm not the same person as I was before my near death
experience or being with my mother in a Hospice and
watching, I'm convinced watching her relatives come and come to
get her. I saw in this Hospice room.
Well as I lay there with my mother at this is after my own
near death experience, I saw beings, filmy diaphanous,
vaporous beings approaching my mother and I saw her face.
I saw her smile. I did not know about near near
deathbed visitations and after I had the experience, I started
reading about those two. I said it's a common thing that
the that the dead already dead come and take you to where they
are. Where is that?
Is it right here, but in a larger set of dimensions?
I'm inclined to think it is. I think the dead are actually
very close to us, but they're separated and people have
experiences of their mother or father or other.
It's because they it's a frequency issue and you, you and
you sometimes you just find yourself on the same frequency
and your mother comes and says I'm fine or dad says I'm great.
Keep up doing what you're doing. Yeah, it's.
Interesting. Yeah.
And especially, you know what I know too, about the people
reaching out towards their loved ones at the end and saying final
things like, oh, I'm surrounded by, you know, this person or
that person. So yeah, it's super interesting.
And actually this is something that we've tossed around my
cousin and I'm making for our next documentary, something on
the near death experience since I've had one.
My mother had a traditional near death experience and it's
definitely something we've talked a lot about on the show.
But I want to pivot. Let's let's start to wrap it up
here. I want to do Mike's Mind Melters
and then wrap it up after that if if you're OK with that.
Sure, let's give it a shot. Are you ready to melt your mind,
Keith? All right.
All right, I'm going to ask you 5 philosophical questions.
Just answer them the best that you can and there's no right or
wrong answer #1 what is something you believe in that
you know is probably wrong or illogical, but you are just not
being honest with yourself? Whoa.
What is something that I believe in that is probably not real?
Is that what you said? Yeah, like wrong or illogical,
like somebody that believes in God, but deep down they might
think that that there's some, there's nothing there, something
along those lines. Boy, that's a good one.
I don't have an immediate, I don't have an immediate
response. I have an error in believing
people are more open than they really are, and I tend to be
surprised at the unwillingness of people to question their
confirmation bias. Not that I'm 100% accomplished
in that realm. I have my own confirmation
biases that I don't know about, but that, you know, when you
have, when you have, what is it? You have cognitive dissonance,
something that tells you what you're seeing is, is different
from what what you're seeing is inaccurate.
How do we respond to that? I generally say, oh, if there's
new evidence, maybe I should question my confirmation bias.
Maybe I should question what I believe.
And I think that I might be more inclined to think people are
willing to question their deep biases than they really are.
OK, that's a good answer. I'll accept that.
Number 2. Do you think there is an
objective purpose for humanity, and if So, what?
I don't. I think there is purpose for
humanity and I don't think it's a single single anything.
I think meaning is based, is deeply based.
This is a, this is a universe of meaning.
It's a meaningful place and we're here to learn and, and
this is not this the, the physical game, the physical
world is not the final, the final anything.
It's, it's a realm that I think the soul, if you will, the
deepest part of who we are, chooses to come into this realm
to learn about limitation. You know, you, you, there's the
sense in which that we, we wonder when you have a mystical
or aha, a big experience, a peak experience, you sometimes
realize there are no limits. But in fact, what you're what
you're having then is a soul experience.
And I think the soul that that limitless place comes here to
learn something about life in form that and limits and
boundaries that are difficult. And that's what suffering is
about. Coming to terms with those
boundaries that make no sense to us.
Why do people suffer? Why, if there is a God, is there
such cruelty? These are deep.
These these are deep curriculum questions.
I like it #3 do you think humans are special or separate from
nature? If your answer is yes, give me
your best example or explanation of why.
Separate There's something we bring to the game that is
implicit in other animals. Primates, dogs and cats.
They're aware and we're aware, but we're aware that we're
aware. We have what's called
metacognition. We know that we know.
And it's it's a source of great suffering because you can sit
and ruminate. Why did I do that when I could
have done this? I should have known better.
I did know better. The kind of the Woody Allen
character that he plays at all of his movies, the constant
ruminating about what I should have done, could have done,
didn't do, did Rodney Dangerfield.
So there's a dilemma of our we are aware that we're aware and
we can reflect on our experience.
I think that is that is, I don't see it in dogs and cats,
although I see dogs and cats as very aware.
I mean, if you, if you don't see awareness in dogs and cats and
primates, you're not paying close attention.
So the, we are different. We we are the next level of of a
kind of consciousness that includes knowing that we are
conscious and learning to live into that.
That's the growing edge. OK, yeah, I like that.
Yeah. You know, a lot of people give
answers, but there's a lot of proto versions of things that
like tool making and like recursion and things like that
that, you know, you could point to.
But there's, again, there's a lot of proto versions of things
that we do that are found in animals and primates and things
like that. Number four, what do you think
happens when we die? I think we, I think what I had
in my near death experience, I think the near death experience
is, is a paradigm for what we do.
We separate. We, we, we see the body, we see
others around us. We don't often know what
they're, they're so concerned about.
And I think the, the uncertainty is the is whether the Buddhist
and Hindu traditions speak of reincarnation, recycling of, of
lives. The Christian and Islamic
traditions speak of a heaven that's a static place.
So which is it? I don't necessarily think it is
one or the other. I think part of, I think partly
it's your belief system. What where I saw family in a, in
an afterlife. It could have been a, it could
be where part of our my ancestors are.
That's one of their bodies. That spiritual body, an energy
body maybe is in a place like heaven.
Another part of them may reincarnate.
I tend to feel there's there's a, there's a pretty good body of
evidence for either reincarnation in the human realm
or depending on the degree of spiritual knowledge and freedom.
I think what let me let me summarize I think the state in
which you pass the the what's called the Buddhists call the
bardo realm the degree to which you stay lucid in that place as
you see enormous possibilities of things to re identify with on
your way out. Identify with the light appears
to be a common theme and by by by doing so you will you'll have
an adventure. I think there is a post mortem
adventure. I think what we take from this
life into into a post mortem subtle bodied life is very much
worth considering. There's the I think the proper
distinction is not between life and death, but birth and death.
I I believe life continues, survival continues beyond birth
and death for sure. I like it.
I mean, there's tons of possibilities and infinite
possibilities and waking state and life.
Why wouldn't there be in death? Final question, this is my
favorite quote. 2 possibilities exist.
Either we are alone in the universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying. Arthur C Clarke and I think I
have an idea of what you're going to say, but do you think
there's life elsewhere in the universe or do you think we are
alone? And I let me, let me, I'll
change that a little bit because I know now your thoughts on
metaphysics and dimensions and things like that.
Do you think that there is life elsewhere in this physical
universe that we can quantify and see or examine?
Or do you think that we are alone?
I think that the the most probable is that there is
there's other life that is just when you grasp the enormity and
I don't know how many billions and billions and billions and
billions. Carl Sagan used to love that
kind of language, but stars and galaxies and so forth.
It is very seems to me far more likely that something we call
life is quite common, but it is also where are they?
Where are they? So there is something poignant
about our sense of being so alone and and of being unique,
but it may be a regional belief and it so that that's kind of
where I'd I'd I'd land with that.
I think it's probably the the odds are that life is
profligate. It is very numerous.
Yeah, I like it. I mean, statistically, that's
what the evidence gets behind. But you know, you never know.
What if we were the first? You know, we're the ones that
are going to spread the seed across the universe, if you
will. Or yeah, something along those
lines. I think it's in one of the
schools of Buddhism that says the human birth is is an
incredible opportunity because the beings lower than us often
don't have enough consciousness to to even aspire to anything
higher. And the beings higher than us
are just so enjoying of being in a bliss state that they don't
have any motivation. There's something about being in
this in in between realm for humans where we have enough
motivation to aspire to something larger that is
actually part of what we already are.
I like that. I like the idea that that middle
realm between in between the two is what it means to be a human
being, to ask about questions of meaning, and to pursue questions
of meaning as one of the most noble things that we can do and
be. I like that and I appreciate you
answering all my mind melter questions and.
Listen man, I want to wrap it up here.
We've been doing 2 hours, which didn't feel like it was 2 hours,
but I'd love to have you back on in the future.
There was a lot of stuff we didn't get to.
We didn't really touch too much on the cripples research or the
Rua Zimbabwe sightings and things like that and the the
angels and aliens. Maybe we can talk a lot about
that. Maybe next time I get you on
here 'cause there's just so much to talk about with this topic.
And I, I feel like these kinds of conversations are at a
premium because I think we both know the other kinds of
conversations and the nightly, you know, 800 number style UFO
shows with the people calling in and, and there's nothing wrong
with that stuff either. But I just think that these
ideas, the way that we talk about this stuff rather
philosophically, you're using in the context of metaphysics and
things like that. I think that these conversations
need to occur more so people can hear other possibilities and
other ways to talk about these things.
Well, I love your approach, Mike, that you, you have a long
form interview style and it's who would have thought, you
know, that the podcasting phenomenon would come along to
make it possible for the old fashioned long dialogue,
symposium type conversations could happen with the frequency
that that this medium is making possible.
So thank you for what you do. I appreciate it and I appreciate
you sharing your time and your research and your personal
stories and stuff and even your near death experience.
A lot of these things can be very personal.
Some people don't even share them.
So I appreciate you sharing all that and I appreciate you being
an ambassador to the more intellectual side of these
topics. And like I said, I'd love to
have you back on sometime in the future.
Maybe sometime after the new year, we can get you back on
here and discuss all the other stuff.
And we're going to end this one the way we end all of our
podcasts, which is we love everybody.
Stay safe out there, and we'll catch you next time.
Peace if you would like to support mind escape, there's
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