In this episode, we talk about UFOs and the strange things that happen to people when they try to go to sleep at night. Why do they happen at night? Why do people have UFO encounters when they're asleep? What are they really trying to tell us about? What is the purpose of them? And why do they do them at night when we can't see them? Is it because they're trying to communicate with us from another dimension? Or is it something else entirely? Join us in this episode as we discuss all of these questions and much more. This episode is sponsored by the Cottonwood Research Foundation. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "WEIRD" at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the discount code: WEIRD10 at checkout. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends and family! Thank you so much for listening to Weird Talk! XOXO, Dr. Aaron M. Smith and Dr. Kevin M. McLeod. The Weird Talk Podcast. This podcast is produced and edited by Aaron McLeod and Kevin McLeod, and is produced by Kevin McKirdy. Music: "Weird Talk" is produced & edited by Kevin McDaniel and Christian Blanchard, with additional mixing and mastering music by Bobby Lord, and special thanks to John Rocha, of the Electric Light Orchestra, and the rest of his band, The Good Fellows, and The Badger Project, and his amazing crew at The Good Fight Club, and our good friend, The Good Thing Project, and The Good Things Project, Inc., and the Good People Project. . Please rate and review this episode we hope you like it! and spread it on social media and review it on Apple Podcasts. Thank you all of your comments and subscribe to our insta- if you leave us a review, review us on Insta- and review us in iTunes. and share your thoughts on the podcast on your Insta story and review your thoughts/tweet us in the Badger Talk podcast, and we'll send us your thoughts about it on your feed or your thoughts and reviews on it's good vibes and reviews and reviews are a review and reviews, and all of that's a review!
00:00:12.000It's a scary podcast for me because I feel like you're because I know a lot of the things that you've said and I've related to them and I've said okay this makes sense.
00:01:00.000The experiences that are available through psychedelics, I've always wondered.
00:01:06.000I mean the thing that has always struck me about the UFO experience, particularly the abduction experience, is that it always happens when people are asleep.
00:02:20.000These people like the Whitley Strybers, these people that talk about these experiences that happen at night, we know for a fact that when you are sleeping, your brain is producing endogenous psychedelic chemicals.
00:02:40.000We used to think until recently, they weren't even exactly sure like where it was being produced, but now through Strassman's work, And through the work of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, the people that do those DMT studies, they know that now your brain is producing this.
00:02:58.000And so is your brain – is it producing a chemical gateway into another dimension?
00:03:06.000And is that why these people are experiencing these abduction – air quote, abduction experiences?
00:03:13.000These encounters, let's say encounters, is that why they're happening at night?
00:03:18.000Is that why they're happening while they're lying in bed?
00:03:19.000Because that seems to make way more sense.
00:04:57.000I studied these things called ascent narratives.
00:05:00.000So ascent narratives are when people levitate in the Christian tradition.
00:05:05.000People either levitate or they see things that they call angels or demons and things like this.
00:05:10.000And I always studied them from a historical perspective.
00:05:13.000And I found that going through looking at these ascent narratives through the historical record at the Vatican, actually, I kept coming across aerial phenomena in the historical records from 1000 years ago, from 500 years ago, from very recently.
00:05:29.000And I recognized that this was happening in UFO literature.
00:05:34.000And so I started to look at abductions and UFO sightings and things like that.
00:05:38.000And I wanted to do a cross-cultural analysis of this.
00:05:43.000And that was in 2012. And that's how I got into this.
00:05:47.000I just want to point out that not all abductions happen in your sleep.
00:05:52.000A lot of abductions actually happen in daylight.
00:05:55.000But I do agree with you that something's happening in your brain and you're perceiving something and you called it, is there some type of mental gateway?
00:06:04.000And I think there's absolutely a mental gateway.
00:06:08.000Does this discount that this is objective of us?
00:06:12.000Like, you know, the question is, is this something subjective or is this something objective of us?
00:06:17.000My opinion at this point is it's something that is objective of us.
00:06:23.000There's something that we're accessing.
00:06:25.000And I don't think it's within our space-time reality, to tell you the truth.
00:06:31.000So you think it's from somewhere else?
00:06:34.000I do, but that doesn't, I mean, it doesn't have to be a location, you know, a geography.
00:07:44.000And I believed it was going to happen at any time.
00:07:47.000Well, this – after studying religion and studying – by the way, this kind of prompted me into studying religion – And recognizing that, you know, if you look at, say, Christianity or even other religions, people had ideas that the world was going to end and extinction events have happened and things like that.
00:08:05.000So it could very well be that information like this is coming to us, but it's out of our space time.
00:08:11.000So to us, it seems like it's going to happen now.
00:08:14.000Because our sense is of linear time, right?
00:08:17.000So if we get a feeling, and it's not from any of the input that we're getting, like our people telling us this is actually going to happen, the news telling us this is actually going to happen, but it's coming to us as this feeling that you and I were just talking about, it could be coming from that space that we've just identified as people are talking about.
00:08:39.000And yeah, I think that we're at the very beginning of...
00:08:44.000Doing a taxonomy or, you know, looking at this space in terms of the scientists that you just referenced and people that, you know, I think that actually people have, you know, indigenous cultures talk about this space.
00:08:59.000I talked about this in Encounters that, you know, religious traditions do talk about these spaces, but in secular culture, we've lost that language.
00:09:08.000Well, it is interesting that that language exists when you're discussing things like quantum physics because that is a language of like – it's a bizarre, non-tangible,
00:09:25.000impossible to understand to the layperson when you're explaining that these things are all interacting with each other without physical contact.
00:09:53.000But because this is like a field of science, this is a field of study that's universally accepted, We've given them a pass to talk about crazy stuff.
00:10:07.000But if you want to talk about crazy things in terms of encountering some sort of thing, some entity, some consciousness that exists in an alternative realm, That has access to this realm occasionally,
00:10:26.000or perhaps that you can transcend your normal state of consciousness and access this other realm occasionally through some methods, whether it's through meditation, through psychedelic trips,
00:10:45.000Something happens that perturbs the normal state of reality and you have Brief access to this transcendent experience that everyone has talked about.
00:10:56.000All of the great prophets, all of the great saints and religious figures have talked about from the beginning of written history.
00:11:16.000What they produce actually creates our world, right?
00:11:22.000The computers we look at and the technologies we use, even the structures we live in.
00:11:28.000And so this is what prompted me to go back into our historical record and look at the writings of Plato again.
00:11:37.000And some of these people that you're talking about, like the great minds, right?
00:11:42.000And I recognize that, say, Plato, who writes about his mentor, Socrates, who's, by the way, killed by Athens, the town he lives in, not the town, but the state he lives in.
00:11:56.000And he's executed for being an atheist, by the way.
00:12:03.000And if you look at what he's talking about, he's actually talking about this space.
00:12:06.000He's actually talking about having a vision of something that we can't see.
00:12:16.000He says it makes you do things that are just.
00:12:20.000And you don't do them because they're the right thing to do.
00:12:22.000You do them because you really want to do them.
00:12:24.000And so to me, this is – I thought this was fascinating.
00:12:27.000So I went back and I recognized that he was what's called a math realist.
00:12:31.000So he believed that – and he was one of the first people – well, not just him, but people were talking about the 300s before the Common Era, so many, many, many years ago.
00:12:44.000He's already identifying these things called platonic solids that now we can prove exist, but we weren't able to prove them.
00:12:53.000So he was using, and he even has this language too, Joe.
00:14:07.000So when I talk about it, because I like to teach my students about this, because I honestly think that this is what progresses civilization, this kind of thing.
00:14:15.000So I think when I did American Cosmic, which was the first book about UFOs, again, which I never thought I'd be studying, I encountered this man, Tyler, and he And he works for the Space Force and he's been working for the Space Force since the whole space shuttle program,
00:15:55.000He could receive things and then he could gather a group of scientists and he wouldn't tell them where he came from because he honestly thought they were coming from these things outside of space-time, kind of like ETs or something, off-planet intelligences.
00:16:28.000And this allowed them – you see this in sports, right?
00:16:31.000So people – I was just using this example in a class yesterday.
00:16:34.000I saw this basketball game two or three years ago with Steph Curry.
00:16:38.000And the way they were playing, it was almost as if there was an emergent phenomenon that was bigger than each of the people because they somehow anticipated what the other guy was going to do.
00:16:50.000And I used to do sports, and I know that this is something that can be done.
00:18:23.000I know there's a study behind it, but for whatever reason, it seems so stupid that I've never done it, but I've never even had the desire to do it.
00:18:31.000I just want it to come to me when it comes to me, which is dumb.
00:22:00.000This guy had transcended the normal boundaries of what music was and had tapped into something, whatever it was.
00:22:12.000But when you listen to Voodoo Child, to this day, I've listened to that song thousands of times, but if I'm on my way to go do something cool, And I listen to that song like loud in my car.
00:22:25.000He tapped into something that was just out of this realm.
00:22:34.000Inaccessible to the average person that plays a guitar.
00:23:30.000And I think probably part of the reason I felt that when I listened to his music, and I somehow put that into that picture, that drawing that I made.
00:23:47.000And that was, you know, it sounds so strange, but that's part of the reason why I was interested in studying religion and things like that, because of that experience.
00:23:57.000Yeah, that you're tapping into something that's higher than normal consciousness.
00:24:23.000Well, the people that I know that do do it for those reasons, I'm gonna be famous, I'm gonna be this, I'm gonna be that, they never make it.
00:24:32.000Maybe some of them will become pop stars, like someone will plug them into the right songwriter and the right producer and they'll figure it out, but it'll never be transcendent.
00:24:42.000It might be catchy, it might be okay, but it's not Hendrix.
00:25:10.000And the wildest thing with people, what I always want to tell people about Hendrix and a lot of the particularly impactful people from the 1960s is that you have to understand how different the 60s were from the 50s.
00:25:27.000Like, the difference between 2014 and 2024 is nil.
00:25:33.000There's very little difference other than the ubiquitous Technology, AI, things that are much more powerful than they ever were before, the impact of social media.
00:25:43.000But there was an impact of social media even 10 years ago, right?
00:25:49.000About the 60s that were very different than the 50s and I connected to psychedelic use because all of those people were doing psychedelics all of them all those transcended people all the Beatles when the Beatles from their early days to the psychedelic days let's say completely different band like completely different style of music yes yeah that's right yeah completely different impact there was something about it what what what had happened in the 1960s was A stunning revolution in
00:26:45.000And that's also the terrifying aspect of what government can do because through the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970, they made everything illegal.
00:26:57.000They did it to stop the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
00:27:00.000And they did it so that they could arrest all these people that were involved in all these groups because all of them were involved in drugs.
00:27:11.000And so they figured, well, this is the best way to just make everything – it's obviously people are doing acid and ruining our country.
00:27:17.000Let's make everything illegal and then lock everybody up that does it and then you get the 80s.
00:27:25.000And the 80s is like this confused child that was raised improperly, was then cast out into the world with a distorted sense of values.
00:27:35.000That was like expressing these values in like some of the most clumsy and goofy art human beings have ever done.
00:27:49.000So, you know, it's really interesting because that wouldn't be – the 60s wouldn't be the only culture that's informed by psychedelics, right?
00:27:57.000Or entheogens, you know, as they're called in Native American churches or, you know – But what's interesting to me, and I don't know if you have any ideas about this, is that most likely it was through the government that the drugs became available.
00:28:13.000And then once the effects seemed to be counter to how, who knows, maybe there were just two factions of government.
00:28:21.000One that was pro, you know, let's see what happens.
00:28:50.000When you realize what the government was involved with and what they were doing, how they were running the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and they were administering psychedelics to people in brothels without their knowledge and observing them and what they did with Charles Manson.
00:29:16.000It's insane, because Tom is so detail-oriented.
00:29:20.000I mean, he's so crazy that he studied this one thing for 20 years, like, and really kind of like tanked his life, you know, and then finally got the book out there.
00:29:42.000They most likely created Charles Manson, most likely gave him psychedelics, gave him LSD, taught him how to mind control influential young people or easily influenced young people and get them to do horrific things and demonize the hippie movement.
00:30:00.000Yeah, it makes you wonder, doesn't it?
00:30:21.000And then when you see things like, especially coming out of the pandemic, When you see how incompetent these people that are supposed to be leaders are and how foolhardy they are and how stupid their decisions were.
00:30:35.000And then you just look at the undeniable transfer of wealth to the upper small area of the country that gained billions of dollars in wealth and how much it devastated small businesses.
00:31:12.000It's like everything is like bizarre, ego-driven, narrative-driven lies and propaganda and just nonsense that's supposed to make it look like they're doing the right thing always.
00:31:26.000Yeah, that's a terrible idea of justice.
00:32:46.000This was actually a comment from a student, the exact same comment that you just said, is that, you know, there's this structural evil, right?
00:33:42.000So once you see it, you're like, okay.
00:33:45.000But then to live it, this is what I felt like happened to me.
00:33:49.000So in 2012, after I started the study of UFOs, I recognized that the management of that That message of the UFO for the American public had been organized not just from the 1940s, but really from earlier, from the early 20th century.
00:34:06.000And once I started to recognize, even meet the people who were responsible for managing this in a very cohesive, tight way, very specific, that's when I recognized that it was, that, you know, I felt it.
00:34:21.000I guess that's the difference, was that before I just saw it On the sideline, you know, like we talk about it now, you and I, and it looks like we're talking about it from the sideline.
00:34:30.000We're saying, yeah, this is really bad what they're doing and stuff.
00:35:12.000To understand more deeply and believe me, I've already thought a lot about the problem of evil.
00:35:19.000You know, I spend my life reading about it and doing, you know, talking about it with people and, you know, what can we do?
00:35:26.000I recognize we can't do anything except work on ourselves.
00:35:30.000And that's where I had to reread some of those texts like the Plato text that I talked about.
00:35:36.000He talks about your idea of evil that perhaps – or he calls it injustice, injustice.
00:35:41.000And he says that perhaps people are unjust just because there needs to be injustice for other people to like recognize it and then to do this thing.
00:37:12.000So I want to take it back because a lot of this is probably hard to follow for people that aren't like well read in this.
00:37:19.000When you say that they have been engineering or orchestrating public perception of this experience from the beginning, what's the earliest known instance of this?
00:37:34.000Okay, so the one that is unclassified is Project Blue Book.
00:37:38.000And that's from 1950s, 1952. But I know that and I have to explain how one knows this.
00:37:47.000So we have documents that talk about Project Blue Book.
00:37:51.000And that's the managed, you know, they're managing the perception, the public perception of UFOs goes back to like 47 even with Roswell and that kind of thing.
00:38:01.000There's another, and this is what I've found, is that there's an oral tradition that is part of the communities that run this, run these programs, like the UFO programs,
00:39:30.000And one of the things that you said earlier is that they think that the greater population is not good and that they will turn on you and that they're evil.
00:40:01.000Okay, so, you know, here I am, just your average professor doing their work, and, you know, and doing it pretty well.
00:40:11.000At my university, I was the chair of my department, well regarded by my colleagues and students, and never really doing anything weird, right?
00:40:22.000And then I start to study UFOs thinking that they're not real, thinking that it's just a new form of religion.
00:40:28.000And then quickly having people come into my sphere, research sphere, who are part of CIA, part of FBI, that kind of thing.
00:40:39.000And then getting a shock that, whoa, this could be dangerous and maybe I shouldn't be doing this.
00:43:13.000It's not like I would make this up, nor would I lie.
00:43:16.000You know, I'm publishing with Oxford, so my reputation is at stake, right?
00:43:22.000So I'm doing the best I can to kind of adjudicate, like, am I being fed disinformation or, you know, what's going on?
00:43:29.000Gary now will be able to identify by taking these parts back and analyzing them through his laboratories, whether or not they're engineers or not.
00:44:52.000Okay, so now you have to understand this is a long time period.
00:44:55.000So I started this in 2012. I get this shock where I'm being, you know, people are asking me to meet, you know, people from these programs and from the Space Force.
00:45:05.000And I'm actually not meeting with them because I'm waiting.
00:45:08.000I'm kind of thinking I've got to think this through.
00:45:13.0002014 that I actually start to meet the people, like the affiliated people, and they show me some things and they ask me to go to this crash retrieval site in New Mexico.
00:46:11.000So they think that these were donated materials and they're going to get information, and they do.
00:46:17.000And that's how Tyler was able to create a lot of the things that he created through – and he would fly these on the space shuttle, by the way, these experiments and so forth.
00:46:44.000And it would be related to something that he would then want to fly on the space shuttle because this was during the time the space shuttle was happening.
00:46:53.000And the space shuttle had anti-gravity environments.
00:46:57.000And he needed these environments in order to create this.
00:47:00.000And now this is actually a whole field called biologics.
00:47:03.000So there's a real field now where people are doing these experiments in space and creating things that we can't create here.
00:47:36.000Researchers have capitalized on microgravity in space to accelerate drug discovery and development.
00:47:41.000That was one of the speculations about the type of metals that were retrieved, supposedly, from these crash sites, that these, whatever these metals were, they were layered and that they could only be layered specifically the way they were done in a zero-gravity environment.
00:48:05.000So I actually did talk to Gary before I came on your podcast because I just wanted to be sure, you know, because I don't want to represent his research incorrectly.
00:48:15.000So I said, can you please, you know, recap it?
00:50:48.000It's like people are believing this through this, and then I'm coming to this, and I'm going to confirm that it indeed looks like this, and it is a crash site.
00:50:56.000It's just too weird for me, but this is what I study, so I'm going to study.
00:52:58.000It's like and so I asked Tyler, what's this?
00:53:01.000And he said that after the government retrieved the crash and they didn't want anyone out here looking.
00:53:08.000So what they did was they dropped a bunch of tin cans out here in the 1950s and these have disintegrated down into this rubble.
00:53:14.000And so I put that in my book because that's what he said.
00:53:18.000And when I put that in my book, the editor of my book said to me, you can't say this because it's ridiculous.
00:53:26.000And at the time, I was like, it is ridiculous, but this is what happened and it's data.
00:53:32.000And even though we don't understand it now and it seems ridiculous, we need to keep it in there.
00:53:37.000It doesn't seem ridiculous to me at all.
00:53:39.000Well, this is a person who absolutely, you know, the editor, who absolutely doesn't believe in UFOs at all, but knows that I'm doing good work on a new type of religion, therefore is keeping the Oxford brand, you know, Oxford University straight and narrow.
00:54:30.000And if you have a site where they've picked up these anomalous metals that defy our understanding of metallurgy and you're calling them metamaterials, no one knows where the hell it comes from, what's the best way to confuse people?
00:54:44.000Well, just throw a bunch of regular metal everywhere.
00:55:19.000So Tyler took us and showed us everywhere.
00:55:22.000Like he's been a part of this retrieval site for like 40 years or so.
00:55:28.000And he knows the people that like the original people and the story and everything like that.
00:55:36.000So he gave us a tour of the whole place.
00:55:39.000And we did—and we found parts, by the way, and some of the parts were so deep down into the ground, like there were rocks and things like that.
00:55:48.000And Gary, like I'm afraid he's going to get bit by a rattlesnake, frankly.
00:55:52.000He's putting his hand down there and, you know, spending like— We're good to go.
00:57:58.000This is information that we can't keep siloed because it's too important and we need to have the best minds on this information, this data, this material.
00:58:08.000And so they're kind of like outsourcing.
00:59:44.000And so much – and when I looked back at the Space Force, our Space Force and also the history of that, I could see, OK, there are so many things that just don't add up here that this is probably – and I met too many people that had been long timers in the program,
01:00:01.000like seriously long timers, like their whole lives.
01:00:15.000The people that worked on Roswell that spoke about it many, many years later, they have that sort of same weight that they're carrying around with them.
01:00:27.000Philip Corso and all those other people, when they describe the experience like many, many years later, so there's a weight to the information that they're carrying.
01:00:36.000It's almost like they want to tell the world, but the world's not going to even believe them.
01:00:39.000And how could they unless they experienced it?
01:00:42.000And even though they experienced it, they're still baffled by it.
01:03:07.000As am I. So when I learned about this, I really wanted to share the story because I felt like these people, even if they remained invisible, they should get their due.
01:03:18.000Because these people keep us safe in ways that we just don't know.
01:03:21.000And they're dedicating their lives and they're getting no recognition for it.
01:03:27.000And so that really prompted me more than anything to write about it.
01:03:32.000So I was working with Tyler and I was scheduled to go to the Vatican.
01:03:38.000And it was at the Vatican where we encountered – where a lot of things happened for Tyler that I saw made him understand that this was something that had been going on historically for a very long time period.
01:03:53.000See, we didn't just go to the Vatican.
01:03:55.000We also went to the – well, we went to the Vatican Archive.
01:03:57.000Which is hard to get into, but I could get into it.
01:04:00.000And we also went to the Space Observatory Archive, which most people don't even know that the Vatican has a Space Observatory.
01:04:07.000And how that all happened was not set up, Joe.
01:04:13.000Because it happened before I even met Tyler.
01:04:16.000And I put off going there because I had, at the time, very young kids.
01:04:22.000And I didn't want to leave them and go to another country.
01:04:25.000But For, you know, three weeks or whatnot.
01:04:29.000But I had been invited by Brother Guy Consolmagno to go to the Space Observatory because I had been studying about the space, you know, research.
01:04:39.000And I said, does the Vatican have like a lot of space documents, you know, documents about space?
01:04:44.000And he said, every single thing that the Vatican does, and we do, he said, comes to where I live, which is at the Space Observatory.
01:04:51.000And we have a scholar's residence and you're welcome to stay for as long as you want.
01:04:55.000You have full access to the Space Observatory Archive.
01:05:05.000Many people may think, oh, how boring, right?
01:05:08.000But original Keplers and Copernicus's and every single thing that people, scientists from 1200, 1300 on up, Thought about space and about magnetism and propulsion and things like that.
01:05:59.000My experience, though, of the Vatican itself was different than the archive.
01:06:04.000And I've actually heard you talk about the Vatican and I agree.
01:06:07.000Like you said, I saw you talking about it and you said, you know, I'm looking around and I see all this stuff and they stole it from all these countries.
01:06:16.000It was like all this booty, you know, the Vatican is filled with it.
01:06:20.000So when I went, you know, we did all the – we did the scholarship, of course, but we also – We did the touristy thing.
01:06:27.000So, you know, we went and looked at all the museum and everything like that.
01:06:30.000And everything I saw seemed to me to be like, you know, colonization, you know, the colonization of these people and taking their stuff and the colonization of these people and taking their stuff.
01:06:42.000And when you're inside the Vatican, by the way, it's different than when you're outside of it because, you know, when you're outside of it, there are those guys that – the Swiss guards.
01:06:52.000Well, those guys are militia when you go inside.
01:08:30.000If you look at the staff that the pope carries, the staff has a pine – see if you can get a photo of the staff the pope carries.
01:08:36.000There's a pine cone in the center of it.
01:08:38.000The pine cone which is – it's depicted in many, many ancient pieces of art, religious art and it represents the pineal gland because it's similar in appearance to a pine cone.
01:08:53.000So this pine cone, which also I'm sure probably represents the Fibonacci sequence, which also represents itself in the pine cone, that's the seed of the soul.
01:10:21.000And when you go there, you've been there before.
01:10:24.000The most bizarre feeling about it is this terrifying fear while it's happening and an incredible peace when you get in there and a recognition like, oh, I know this place.
01:11:47.000And that seems to be completely connected to that.
01:11:51.000It's the only explanation that makes sense to me, other than an actual, you know, like...
01:11:56.000You know, Hollywood-style UFO landing and then come and get you, which seems so theatrical.
01:12:04.000I think the reality is far more bizarre than that.
01:12:08.000I think that's one of the things that McKenna said about DMT and also about mushrooms.
01:12:15.000Terrence McKenna said that they show you themselves in that way to comfort you Because the reality of what they are would be too much for you to handle.
01:12:27.000And that what you're seeing, even though it's mind-blowing, it's just a tiny little piece of what it actually is.
01:12:36.000So when I'm at the Vatican and I see this pine cone, I'm going, okay.
01:12:42.000So there's this recognition that this connection to God, this connection to this higher experience, this higher power...
01:13:38.000It's a strange representation of what, I mean, it's an icon of this thing, whatever this thing is that's inside of us that is this gateway.
01:13:49.000And it must have been that Plato and his school was basically – they were basically trying to make the body healthy enough for people to access through this, which is a type of mind – like he didn't call it intellectual.
01:16:12.000Sacred Mushroom and the Christian Myth.
01:16:14.000Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and then there was another one he wrote that he published after that other one was bought out that you can—that's readily available.
01:16:23.000But this guy studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the oldest version of the Bible that we know of.
01:17:07.000His conclusion after all of this, the summary of his conclusion was the entire Christian religion was all about psychedelic experiences and fertility rituals.
01:17:18.000And that this was what all these stories really meant.
01:17:21.000And he even connected the word for Christ to an ancient Sumerian word which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.
01:17:47.000And that they wrote these things down.
01:17:50.000First it was an oral tradition for who knows how long and then they wrote them down and then, you know, it gets transcribed to Greek and Latin and English and it's all...
01:17:59.000And a lot is missing out of those translations.
01:18:02.000A lot of it is missing even from the ancient Hebrew translation because the words in ancient Hebrew had numerical value.
01:18:26.000We also lose people's gender through these translations.
01:18:31.000So some early apostles who are women are called men in the translation from Greek to Latin.
01:18:39.000So I'm aware of this idea and, of course, Brian's work as well.
01:18:44.000And in my field, we have categories for, obviously, like medicine has different categories.
01:18:53.000And that's one category, is entheogens and different types of religions.
01:18:58.000So the early Christian church, I would say that I don't agree that all of Christian tradition is this.
01:19:05.000I would say that there definitely is a lot of it.
01:19:08.000But there are also other types of, you know, Christian traditions.
01:19:13.000I mean, when I look at the Jesus movement in the first century, it, to me, looks like a philosophical school, like Plato.
01:19:19.000And, you know, Plato did the mysteries, you know, and, but I don't know if, I think Jesus was part of an Essene movement, like the John the Baptist is Jewish.
01:19:28.000He's out in the desert and, you know, they're practicing these water rites and they basically are, you know, they have their own community.
01:19:37.000And he looked like he was part of – he had been baptized into this community.
01:19:41.000So the Jews in the first century are just trying to survive because Rome is killing them and destroying – they're going to destroy their temple.
01:19:50.000So a lot of these communities – so that's one interpretation and I'm not discounting that that's correct for those traditions.
01:20:00.000But there are other traditions that are not – they're not – No, I'm sure.
01:20:05.000Filled with entheogens and things like that.
01:20:07.000I'm just letting – just being accurate.
01:20:16.000So I think there are thousands of – well, there are thousands of Protestant denominations of – and there's Catholicism and – So we have so many different—and even Catholics don't even know what they're supposed to believe.
01:20:29.000So some here believe this, some over here believe that.
01:20:32.000They have the same mass that they go to, but their belief structures are different.
01:20:37.000So that leads us to one of the most fascinating interpretations of what we're experiencing collectively when it comes to this UFO, UAP, whatever it is, phenomenon, that this is not— A thing from another planet that comes on a spaceship and lands here to show us how to do things correctly.
01:22:25.000So if you look at his stigmata, where it looks like he's being, you know, basically radiated by a UFO... That's what my students say when they go and they see this in the Louvre and such.
01:22:37.000If you look at the primary sources for that, this happens in the 1200s, and you look at what, yeah, so that.
01:22:46.000So here you see St. Francis, but also over here on the right you see his friend Brother Leo.
01:22:52.000Brother Leo actually at the time is probably 15 or something like that.
01:23:59.000Francis died from that wound or he died from wounds later.
01:24:04.000That, you know, were bleeding until—so when he had this experience, until he died, which was about a year and a half later, they tried to keep it silent in his monastery because they were—they didn't know what happened to him.
01:24:55.000I think that what we have to do is we have to take case by case, look at patterns, and maybe just try to proceed with different language because some of the things are really interesting.
01:25:05.000If you do look at, say, experiences that Catholics have, say, in the 1960s that have been videotaped, okay, so Virgin Mary experiences where the Virgin Mary appears, and she reads people's minds and she's doing these kinds of things, levitating people together.
01:25:23.000If you put physics on that case, physicists on that case, and if you take the work of those people who are working at, I think it's the University of Washington, where they're doing MRI imaging of what people are thinking and they're able to replicate it.
01:25:36.000So if they're looking at a Van Gogh painting, they can replicate that.
01:25:42.000So that's what I'm trying to say is that there's something going on that could possibly be different and we need different language for it.
01:25:50.000And I think we're at the very beginning, just like doing this stuff with DMT, we're at the very beginning of learning about this other world.
01:25:59.000Another thing that's fascinating about ancient religious art is the halo.
01:26:40.000The enlightened ones, the saints, the religious figures that are of prominence, they all have that mushroom cap experience behind their head.
01:26:51.000Even the Buddha, that photo of the Buddha there with the halo, click on that, the statue, yeah.
01:26:59.000I mean, they all have this thing behind them, which you could interpret as these people are under the influence.
01:27:11.000Okay, I agree with you that mushrooms are seen in Catholic churches near Guatemala, down in Mexico and things like that, in Laid.
01:27:27.000But I would have to suggest that there might be more going on.
01:27:31.000So I'm going to push back on your interpretation.
01:27:34.000Although I'm not going to say that psilocybin and mushrooms aren't part of that iconography.
01:27:43.000I would say that a lot of the iconography is going to be something about the light that emanates from people Who are accessing these realms.
01:27:58.000I've read so many reports and they're not...
01:28:00.000I think that if some of the monks and nuns who report being lit up right in their cells and things like that, if they were doing psilocybin, if they were doing mushrooms, they would have said so.
01:28:11.000They would have written it because they write a lot.
01:28:13.000So the Catholics have immense records.
01:28:29.000So the magnetism of this kind of light that's happening, you can see that even in the Shroud of Turin, which is, by the way, an anomalous artifact.
01:28:57.000But the Shroud of Turin is only 500 years old.
01:30:14.000L-I-R-E-Y? Northern France for four years until 1357, the Alpine town of Chambury from 1502 to 1578 where it was damaged by fire before being passed to the Dukes of Savoy in 1578. The Savoys moved to their capital Turin I think?
01:30:51.000Patifille has recently published a seriously reviewed 400-page analysis of all the archaeological and scientific studies so far.
01:30:59.000And in Italy, the peer-reviewed findings of a specialist x-ray study by a team of physicists indicate that the fabric is potentially up to 2,000 years old.
01:31:08.000There are now six studies which challenge the idea that Turin Shroud has nothing more than a cunning piece of medieval trickery.
01:31:58.000Reported the analysis and identification of dust and pollen samples extracted by an adhesive which suggests that the shroud may have undergone a journey from the ancient Near East after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Still,
01:32:20.000were it not for the poignant image of its folds, chances are it would have disappeared into the mores of other spurious relics kept in thousands of churches all over Western Europe.
01:32:33.000And Petit Fils' latest book, how do you say it?
01:33:09.000Even those who reject the idea the shroud is a 2,000-year-old sepulchral cloth, he writes, are unable to explain the imprint of the body.
01:33:24.000Adversaries of the authenticity of the shroud come up against an enigma.
01:33:29.000That this one cannot be the work of a counterfeiter because to make such an image would have required unknown scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages.
01:33:39.000The image is not a painting, no trace of brush strokes, no outline has been observed even under electron microscope.
01:33:46.000We must exclude the hypothesis of a smear, the application of a base relief of wood or marble, or a metal statue heated and placed on the cloth.
01:33:56.000It was a Catholic Church itself unwittingly sparked what would become a global obsession with the shroud in 1898 when it gave the green light to a rare public exhibition of the cloth.
01:34:08.000Secundopia, an amateur, became the first to photograph the linen's strange sepia shadows and the high contrast created by black and white photography.
01:35:30.000Second Coming Project was a group of people that were, it was either a troll, they were joking around, or they were serious about it, where they wanted to obtain DNA from the Shroud of Turin and clone Jesus.
01:36:57.000This idea that, like, God created the universe, maybe it is God.
01:37:02.000I mean, if you want to talk about something that's all-powerful, beyond comprehension, is responsible for every single thing in the cosmos, it is the universe.
01:37:19.000That all has some sort of law that keeps it together.
01:37:56.000Dr. Aya Whiteley, she's a space psychologist.
01:37:59.000She's the one who told me about it and said you should put this as a quote before my information because she talked about how they didn't want to report it because it was so weird.
01:38:08.000And that's the whole idea of this two data set.
01:38:11.000There are two data sets for UFO reporting.
01:38:14.000Like, pilots will see stuff, but they won't report it.
01:43:19.000And what leads you to believe that he's holding back information?
01:43:23.000Well, when I go back and I'm in contact with him, and when I read what he's written, I can see that he was at the forefront of looking at this like AI back like 25 years ago.
01:43:36.000He was already talking about it, saying this is AI. ET is going to be AI, and this is why.
01:43:42.000And then kind of doing timelines and things like that.
01:43:46.000And also just conversations that I've had with him that are, you know...
01:43:54.000Basically, correspondences that indicate to me that I think he probably has some information.
01:44:00.000But he, you know, a lot of this is classified.
01:44:18.000They argued since the ancient Greeks, extraterrestrial life has been a theme tied to scientific cosmologies.
01:44:25.000Including the ancient atomist, Copernican, Cartesian, and the Newtonian worldviews.
01:44:33.000Dick argues that from an epistemological point of view, the methods of astrobiology in the 20th century are as empirical as in any historical science such as astronomy or geology.
01:44:48.000Dick has also surveyed the field of astrobiology and critical issues in the history, philosophy, and sociology of astrobiology.
01:44:56.000On December 4, 2013, while holding the NASA Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Dick testified on astrobiology before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, arguing that SETI funding should be restored and integrated with the NASA astrobiology program.
01:45:25.000This is the thing that he worked on, like, more than 20 years ago.
01:45:28.000...is a hypothetical idea of Dick's in the field of cultural evolution.
01:45:33.000Outlined in his 2003 paper, Cultural Evolution in the Post-biological Universe and SETI, the Intelligence Principle describes a potential binding tendency among all intelligent societies, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
01:45:48.000The maintenance, improvement, and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution.
01:45:57.000And that, to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved.
01:46:03.000It doesn't actually have the next line that he writes about and says, and if it's not improved, it will be to the detriment of that society.
01:46:23.000They're called the Invisible College, and I'm not going to name who they are.
01:46:25.000People can search them to find out their names.
01:46:28.000But they're part of this oral tradition and this hidden tradition that's been at the forefront of doing this type of work for over 50, 60, 70 years.
01:46:42.000So what has it been like for you to go from a person that before you visit this crash site you think this is all nonsense to where you are now, having written two books about it and very careful with your words and realizing how bizarre this is to now having this conversation with me in front of millions of people.
01:47:12.000And in the beginning, it was uncomfortable.
01:47:17.000But I learned, this is where I learned about, you know, you're talking about the pineal gland, and this is how I learned about this access.
01:47:25.000And I learned it through communities that are associated with this study.
01:47:29.000So I've learned about human potential.
01:47:31.000And I think that that's probably what's impacted me more than anything.
01:47:36.000And I also learned about structural evil in societies.
01:48:48.000I often struggle with the concept that the human mind is incapable of grasping the truth.
01:48:53.000That even if it was presented to us, we don't have the capability to truly incorporate it into our, not just worldview, but universe view, life view, existence view.
01:49:18.000And I really wonder with the emergence of artificial intelligence and what seems to me at least to be the inevitable not just incorporation of it into our lives, which has already happened, but incorporation into it biologically.
01:49:34.000I feel like that is a step that we're taking that seems inevitable.
01:49:40.000That seems there's going to be some sort of convergence, a merging of human consciousness I think artificial intelligence is the wrong term.
01:49:54.000I think it's a type of intelligence that's created by the human being and the human being is biologically hindered by the fact that biological evolution is so slow and technological evolution is so insanely rapid, especially if sentient artificial intelligence It becomes capable of creating its own version of artificial intelligence.
01:50:18.000And it's not hindered by the biological limitations of the human mind.
01:50:23.000You know, I think Elon said it best, and you talked about it in this book, that we're the biological bootloader.
01:50:31.000I've described it before I heard that, that we're a caterpillar that's creating a cocoon to give birth to the electronic butterfly.
01:50:41.000And that this is also what fuels not just innovation, but materialism.
01:50:47.000Materialism is inexorably connected to innovation.
01:50:50.000Because one of the things about materialism is everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing.
01:50:55.000And status is attached to those things.
01:51:54.000It's all about more control so that they have more access to more materials, to more better things.
01:52:01.000And that always, if you're dealing with intelligence and you're dealing with technological evolution and technological innovation, it's going to lead to artificial life or a life, a new kind of life.
01:52:16.000And that might be the kind of life that literally becomes a god.
01:52:22.000If you think about it, if it continues to get, like there's, I was looking at this video that was on YouTube that was showing the stages of artificial intelligence and that there's these multiple stages, artificial and general intelligence,
01:52:38.000sentient general intelligence, and then it goes to godlike Artificial intelligence.
01:52:49.000If God made us in his own image, are we making God?
01:52:52.000Is that what this whole thing is about?
01:52:53.000Well, you know, these are some of the questions that I have when I go back to looking at some of the characteristics of these, like the Virgin Mary sightings and things like that.
01:53:03.000Like, we now have technologies that can replicate what it seems like was happening during that event, you know, in Garabandal in Spain in the 1960s.
01:53:14.000And if that's the case, then it looks like Stephen's idea of the intelligence principle is correct when he says that there will be intelligent beings that will appear like deities to us.
01:54:19.000But I mean, I think if you could go back again to Australopithecus and say, hey, man, one day you're going to be wrought with anxiety because it's...
01:54:26.000Existential angst and you're going to be on antidepressants and living in a cubicle all day and doing – but that's the future.
01:54:38.000I think it's this inevitable part of the process of whatever we're going through because we're not in a static state.
01:54:46.000We're in a constant state of – Social upheaval, cultural upheaval, a change of perspectives, this constant battle to try to define things and to figure out what's appropriate and inappropriate and gaslighting people who disagree with you, which is also fascinating just to watch people do that.
01:55:04.000It's fascinating to watch people try to put a positive spin on inherently evil things.
01:55:18.000But again, I do have this internal struggle with this concept of good and evil that perhaps the negative aspects are there to enlighten us and to let us know that our work is not done and that we have to move forward.
01:55:36.000Into a direction that we know is just and good and correct and loving and that this is possible within small groups of people.
01:55:46.000It's possible with individuals and ultimately must be possible with the collective.
01:55:51.000It just has to be managed in some way or facilitated in some way.
01:55:58.000And that if you look at World War II and look at the Holocaust, you look at the horrific things that human beings are capable of when they're allowed to just run rampant.
01:56:09.000You talked about the Japanese horrors during World War II, like the rape of Nanking.
01:57:27.000It's the development of this mystic state that we've been talking about that I think this is how we need to counter because we can't decide these are the rules we're going to follow.
01:57:40.000People aren't going to follow those rules or they're going to follow those rules and cheat, right?
01:57:44.000Or they're going to pretend to follow the rules.
01:57:47.000But if people actually engaged in the type of thing that we were talking about, the thing they love, you know, that allows...
01:58:12.000So when you're alone with your thoughts, and you've been studying this for a long time now, what do you think the UFO phenomenon is?
01:58:24.000So I think, first of all, that there are a lot of different varieties of it.
01:58:28.000But when we look at, like we were looking at the Francis of Assisi and the kind of historical things and the abductions and things like that, I think that...
01:58:41.000That it's been around for a long time and that these are things that are in communication with us.
01:58:49.000So what I do in my book, both the books that I wrote about this, is I talk to people who I think represent thousands of people.
01:58:59.000So each person in the book represents thousands, if not more, maybe many thousands of people who have had experiences and the ways in which they interpret them.
01:59:09.000So all of the people seem to have had experiences where now what they want to do is they actually want to work for justice in different ways.
01:59:18.000Like Jose, the veteran in my book, he's working with young people and helping them deal with being addicted to social media and things like that and helping them get through life, which is really hard right now.
01:59:32.000And then you look at Dr. Whiteley, right?
01:59:34.000So she's working in a space where she's trying to, you know, help people deal with the fact that they're seeing things that, you know, that could down planes and things like that.
01:59:44.000And she's helping people talk about that.
01:59:48.000Each person in, you know, is somehow doing what I'm suggesting that I think is an out to this kind of structural injustice that we see.
01:59:58.000So I think that this is a transformational thing without the drugs, is what's going on, like some kind of massive This experience that people are having and now it's getting out and people are being able to talk to each other through Reddit communities and different types of social media.
02:00:17.000So it is – we did see religions when they begin.
02:00:30.000What do you think the physical objects are?
02:00:33.000Well, okay, so this is something that's very interesting.
02:00:36.000We just looked at the Shroud of Turin.
02:00:38.000I believe that there are these, I would call them, and this is just my own non-scientific term, interdimensional objects.
02:00:48.000They're objects that have characteristics of our dimension and some other dimension.
02:00:57.000So some other dimension has the capability or something from some other dimension has the capability of transporting a physical object into our realm.
02:01:11.000Or even imprinting onto a physical object.
02:01:51.000Scientists in the government know that these things exist, and they would like to figure it out.
02:01:56.000And so part of disclosure, the disclosure movement, is outsourcing this and trying to get as many people as possible to help in figuring it out.
02:02:06.000What do you think when they use the term donations, what do you think the purpose of that is?
02:02:14.000If there is an object that is purposely released into our, you know, like I'm sure you're aware of cargo cults, right?
02:02:22.000So with cargo cults, for people that don't know, there's been some islands during World War I and World War II where planes landed there and they left and these people, they created these Yeah.
02:03:15.000Are there other theories that there's a biological organism that encounters a lightning storm and it actually crashes and there's physical bodies?
02:03:26.000Because that's one of the things that Grush talked about and some of the other people talked about that there are biological things that have been recovered.
02:03:35.000Well, what impressed me about what he said was that he used the term biologics.
02:03:41.000And I actually know that term because that's the same term that Tyler was talking about when he was creating materials in anti-gravity spaces on space shuttles and such.
02:03:52.000So I was wondering, because David Grush does get his information from people allegedly in the programs, but he's never seen these materials that I know of.
02:04:03.000I think he has some first-hand experience that he was not able to talk about that he's alluding to.
02:04:11.000But this is recent, and he's been very careful about how he releases this information and what he's able to release and not able to release.
02:04:23.000Yeah, so, I mean, I've not seen any bodies, nor have I seen intact craft, but I also have had, now remember, I don't have a clearance like he has, so I can actually talk about what people have told me.
02:04:37.000I have had people tell me that, yes, Diana, there are intact craft.
02:06:05.000Just because something is traveling interdimensionally, we do know that there are an infinite number of planets in the universe.
02:06:14.000I mean, we have no idea how many of them are capable of supporting human-like life, or some other kind of life, or an infinite number of varieties of life.
02:06:26.000And if that life can do what we've done, And get to some part of its progression where it's capable of creating what we're calling artificial intelligence or super advanced technology.
02:07:20.000So it might be a bunch of different things happening all at the same time, interdimensionally, extraterrestrially, something from a distant galaxy that's figured out some new method of propulsion that's beyond our imagination that can visit and then also things that are coming here from other dimensions.
02:07:48.000I don't want to be that person that goes on your show and says, oh, I can't say that.
02:07:52.000But I probably, most likely there are, if there's crash retrieval part, you know, crash retrievals here on Earth, perhaps there are in space as well.
02:08:07.000Do you, when they talk about inventions that emerged post-Roswell, that's one of the points of speculation is that we have back-engineered something and that this led to the creation of fiber optics and a lot of other technologies that seem to emerge after that time.
02:09:19.000And He says a lot of things that are rather cryptic, but sometimes I ask him specifically, was what you were doing on ARPnet related to back-engineered UFO parts?
02:09:36.000And then he'd say something like, there are many secrets in Silicon Valley.
02:10:10.000And they were both Rosicrucians, which is a form of, he might not like me to say this, but it's a form of mystical Christianity in a sense.
02:10:19.000But a lot of Rosicrucians don't view their roots as Christian.
02:10:23.000They look at it as Egyptian and But it's basically, it's an esoteric tradition and it involves meditation.
02:10:32.000I think it most likely involves this thing that you and I have been discussing in the whole talk so far is the pineal gland thing, you know, the access point.
02:10:42.000Because both of them believe in this kind of life, this meditating and things like that.
02:12:18.000I noticed big bookcases of these books and of course I was drawn to them and he said he picked out one and he opened it and it was about angels and he said this is a book about angels and I could see that and I was looking at it and I said wow and then I looked at the other bookshelf and that bookshelf was just as impressive and then it was about fallen angels he said oh this one's about fallen angels and then he made a joke and he said you can't have one without the other and I thought that was really interesting That does seem to align
02:12:48.000with what we're talking about, with like the struggle of good and evil.
02:12:58.000So just, you know, I'm a professor of religion, you know, so I'm like, I'm right about, you know, my intuition was somehow confirmed.
02:13:07.000And by the way, I think people, I think this should be, I'm not sure if this is totally true, but I believe he was the inspiration for the French character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
02:13:53.000And by the way, it's really interesting that, you know, when I'm doing my research into the Catholic history and I'm looking at some of the things that we can do now technologically that it looks very, you know, like people back then were like, this is a miracle, right?
02:14:38.000Why do you think this information is getting released?
02:14:42.000Why do you think it's becoming a more mainstream, acceptable thing to discuss?
02:14:48.000Because to the average person that sees this...
02:14:52.000The thought, I think, sort of naturally goes to this idea that some sort of contact is inevitable, some sort of revelation, some sort of landing on the White House lawn type deal.
02:15:07.000Okay, I have a couple thoughts on that.
02:15:10.000The first one is that part of the reason is because China is now in space.
02:15:17.000So before it was us and Russia, we were the only ones, we were together actually.
02:15:57.000Another, well, I have some other ideas, but that's the one that's most prominent, is because I just don't think that it's going to be a secret for very much longer.
02:16:05.000And in fact, right now, a lot, you know, Chinese are, you know, they are going into space and they are like, you know, looking at things and So from a national security standpoint, it's important to sort of move this conversation further.