American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - UFOs & Religion: Vatican Reveals Hidden Link (ft. Diana Pasulka)

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington who has written three books: Heaven Can Wait, American Cosmic and Encounters (links below). The first was about Catholic purgatory and when Pasulka began documenting historical accounts of “divine” or “angelic” visitations in the Catholic tradition she started to notice commonalities among them and modern alien and UFO experiences. Thus began her documentation of the modern religious aspects of the UFO phenomenon along with her journey into classified secret aerospace work in the United States. Her book Encounters served to destigmatize “disclosure” as a global, transhistorical phenomenon that transcends our myopic western frame. It was an honor and a privilege to have her on American Alchemy! You can find Diana Pasulka's books here: Heaven Can Wait: https://a.co/d/0mcVUCo Encounters: https://a.co/d/56UXbUC American Cosmic: https://a.co/d/9VCSbYo I'd also like to give a huge shoutout to Ammar from YesTheory for helping out on this interview! Check out the YesTheory channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@YesTheory/ For a deeper dive on UFOs, government disclosure, and the theories behind why these are kept secret, check out my full length documentary with UFO Whistleblower David Grusch here: https://youtu.be/kRO5jOa06Qw?si=S0zHzMiLT2Dm_0jj P.S. check out this very creative paper Dr. Pasulka wrote with Grad student Mark Burchick about the intersection of AI, religious studies and the phenomenon: https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/4uGGCn5NLJI77V9jt9AbfM/ *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium

and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. Well, I think that being alive is an anomalous experience. It is.

I've been trying to interview our next guest since I started American Alchemy a couple of years ago. Her book was perhaps the biggest catalyst for my early interest in UFOs. Her name is mentioned in literally every interview I've done. Diana Pesulka. Diana Pesolka. I love her book, American Cosmic. I love her work. And yes, she's American Alchemy's White Whale, or Moby Dick, if you will.

I've never been so trolled in my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We finally caught up to her in Palo Alto, right after the launch of her new book, Encounters, and before Gary Nolan's Soul Conference, a meeting of some of the best academic, military, and civilian minds in UFO research at Stanford University.

We don't believe or disbelieve in my field, but I fully didn't believe. I was like, why are people believing in these things that they miss see, say, in the sky? Diana is a religious studies professor at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She's versed in the classics and maintains a deep knowledge of Catholic history. While doing research for a book on purgatory, she wrote, called Heaven Can Wait in 2014, she began to document dozens of historical cases of nuns, priests, brothers, and saints

who had reported direct divine or angelic contact. But here's where the story gets interesting. Dr. Pesalka did her own translations of these contact experiences. She didn't take the official church translations for granted, and in many cases, her direct translations didn't exactly sound like the official versions of the story. Take St. Francis of Assisi, a 12th-century Italian friar. The popular narrative is that St. Francis saw Christ under the appearance of a seraph or angel on Mount Laverna in Italy.

But the first English translations of this experience from Thomas of Solano don't mention anything about Christ. Instead, the original translations describe Francis encountering as sound infuri, atmospheric sparks, and a flaming torch. Telepathic communication between Francis and the torch occurs, in which Francis is treated harshly and wounded with rays of light that rip through his hands. Francis's wounds get interpreted as Christ's stigmata. This looks very similar to things that people talk about today.

Radiation damage. Yeah. Could this be the same radiation damage that occurs in what we now call UFO experiences? The people getting like burns, so that's ultraviolet that's like ionizing radiation. So that would be light being blue shifted into the ultraviolet as its lens across the bubble that the craft creates and you're getting literally a sunburn. Are modern gray aliens just the angels or demons of times past? had like, you know, witches sitting on the chest of people feeling paralyzed in medieval times. It's like our overlay is this classic alien kind of motif.

And what about flying saucers or discs? Are they just the flaming chariots or burning shields or wheels of antiquity? Zeke'll stall the wheel, baby. First chapter. I'm waiting. What we're talking about is in some sense a modern reformation. Just as Martin Luther believed the Word of God was all one needed for salvation, Diana is going back to the original texts and translations of divine contact events and finding all sorts of commonalities

with modern-day alien contact experiences. This is a new form of religion. It's not just a religion because we do have UFO religions, right? Yeah. But this is a new form of religion. And the contemporary mythology defines how we discuss or recollect these experiences. As French philosopher on Riebergen-Sone wrote, the eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

People have been seeing the same stuff. Like so the tick-tack of today was the flying butane tank of the 1950s. It's almost like you have like a meme library in your head, and then you have this higher platonic thing that's happening, and you attach the closest meme that you can to it. Yeah, exactly. So are we just now getting closer to the root layer of religion, understanding its proto-architecture, its universal timeless nature? Maybe we're looking at the source code.

The point is we're all getting a little closer to the light, seeing beyond the shadows of Plato's cave, and Diana is helping us get there. So on that note, please enjoy this riveting, simulation-breaking conversation with this week's American Alchemist, Dr. Diana Walsh Pesulka. Different parts of the rain have different activities. But you know that, don't you? Maybe you should interview me. Diana Walsh Peselka is an amazing religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington.

She's the author of two books, American Cosmic and Encounters. And I think people don't even realize that before David Grush, you were almost the first person in the civilian context to out these sort of secret space programs. And the book is incredible. I'm so grateful you're here. I know we've tried to make this happen a few times, and I'm just honored to be with you.

Absolutely. I'm so happy to be here, and thanks for the invite. I think the first thing that maybe we want to talk about is that American Cosmic opens at a crash retreat. site. That was in 2016 that I went with people that I had to have as pseudonyms. Okay, so now Gary Nolan has come out, and that's actually a relief to me that he's come out as himself. And the reason why we went was because Tyler, who's still a pseudonym, for a person who is a mission controller and works in the Space Force, and I'd been studying this topic, but

truly I didn't believe in it, right? I just was on the fence of belief or disbelief. which is kind of the method that we use. We don't believe or disbelieve in my field, but I fully didn't believe. I was like, why are people believing in these things that they miss sea, say, in the sky? And belief has gone up. And so I wanted to know why.

And I had a feeling it had to do with entertainment media, right? And that's what I was looking at. And the implication with Tyler is almost, because he worked on the NASA Challenger mission, and he had a colleague an astronaut famously died in 86, and he worked on a lot of space missions since then and high up in NASA. And the implication is almost from your book that he's using his consciousness in some way in mission control. Or was he somehow, because he feels very tapped into some sort of network where he gets ideas.

He says that he goes to a room where there's a machine, and he doesn't know exactly what the machine does, but he gets a lot of ideas about biomedical innovations and goes on to actually start. start companies that are super successful. And so what is the link between space, fair, and consciousness? Is there a clear link? Well, okay, these are things that I think we're working out. Yeah. So what I noticed was exactly what you noticed. So the trajectory of his professional life was incredibly lucky. Yes, yeah. Like this was a guy who was so lucky that it just seemed improbable. Right. How could you be that lucky? Right. You know, I mean, also, he wasn't the best in college, almost flunked out even. That's interesting. And didn't go to the best college, right?

And so the more... How did he get in the space? I know. Well, he told me all these stories about how these things happened to him. And every time he told me a story about this, I was like, that's highly unlikely and improbable. But it did truly happen. Right. So he began to like, see what he did. I begin to like study him, right? Yeah. So he had a protocol. He used these things that I later called protocols. But they reminded me as a person who studies religion, these protocols that people use in each religion. And one of them obviously is prayer or meditation in the Eastern traditions. Actually, at the time, I started to practice these protocols because I was really incredibly busy.

And drank too much coffee, you know, didn't sleep well. It wasn't a bad life. It's just that I was really busy. So he would talk about connecting. He would go into some type of a state. When he woke up, he made sure he got a lot of sleep. He made sure that he was hydrated. Well, now we know why hydration is really important because our bodies are like 80% water around that

and water conducts. So if there are electrical things happening, you just have to be hydrated. And so he made sure he was hydrated. So he made sure that his biophysical cell was able to connect with this thing that he said, he explained how it felt, it would feel like a signal coming in. And then he would get the information that he needed to do these technologies

or create these businesses. So this is kind of a crazy, weird question, but Jacques Valet has clearly influenced you a lot. Yes, yeah. In some ways, the godfather of modern UFO research, one of the early pioneers of the internet, but also talked about how UFO's work is sort of control system, intermittent reinforcement to sort of maybe control societies

in ways that we don't even fully understand. And he's also interested in fallen angels. You talk about this in encounters. That's right. And also demons. And so angels and demons, what does it? have to do with modern uifology yeah yeah okay so yeah so this is a scene in encounters

yes where i'm i'm having lunch with jacques valet so we're in his study and it's really amazingly beautiful here in the bay area um and he starts to um explain a couple of things to me and i notice a bunch of books on shelves and i noticed those things right yeah so i go And I start to look to see what he has on this one shelf. And then he takes one of the books off. And it was a book about angels. And he says, of course, you can't have one without the other, right? And so we went out and had some coffee and pastries in his living room.

And so we talked and he asked me what I learned from Tyler. Yeah. He said, what do we learn from Tyler? And at the time, I was like, you got my book. You know? I was thinking, you got my book, Jacques, you know. But then I thought, what did we learn from Tyler? So I couldn't really answer him.

And thankfully, I took too long to answer him because he picked up another book and he said, you need to read this book. And whenever he says that to me, of course, I'm going to get the book and read it. But this one was weird. So he showed it to me and it was the history of Satan. It just had these big words on it that says Satan.

And again, if I wasn't a little bit concerned before, I was absolutely concerned at that point. I was like, you know, Jacques de Lee is handing me this book that says Satan on it. And so he said, look at the pagination. So I, you know, looked at the pagination. It was 666. Whoa. Yeah.

I thought that was so, you know, of course. Wow. It was a really weird moment. And he said that in the States, we think of the, we think of Satan or the devil as really, really terrible, right? But, you know, he said that the French, they have a different view of it. And it's a much, it's less sensationalist. That's what he was saying. And then he had another bookshelf, and it was the same thing.

So he picked out a book and it was, he made a joke. You know, he's really funny, as you know, right? He's super funny. And so he made a joke and he said. It feels like he's always trolling you a little bit. I'm serious. That's exactly how he is. He is.

And it's almost like the work that he talks about where, you know, it's like the hand of, the sound of one hand clapping the Zen cone or whatever. The absurdity of the phenomena itself, it almost feels like it comes through him, and the way he speaks is sort of, like, confusing. And it's like he throws like a smoke bomb, and you're like, what did you say? And you, like, you end up trying to parse it even more than you would

if it were immediately clear, because he would just be like, okay, yeah, I'll meet you at this place or whatever, but he uses a word, and you're like, what's going on there? Yeah. And then you're more motivated to do it. Yeah, yeah, I agree. My son, burn it.

It is from the devil. I've never been so trolled in my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Throughout this whole study, you know, I was just like this normal kind of professor of religious studies doing my thing. And all of a sudden, my life, you know, becomes this crazy town. Well, that the hermeneutic reading of American Cosmic is that you start out this analytical, rigorous academic. And it's all of a sudden the, you know, observer observed, wall breaks down and you are sort of converted yourself into a UFO believer. It's so interesting.

I know. It's really, really so strange. Here's why Diana's book American Cosmic changed me and many people I know forever. It starts off not only skeptical of UFOs, but as a pretty rational academic take on the subject. In fact, the first half of the book almost reads like a dismissal of UFOs as a modern sci-on, discussing how TV and media are very interesting. influential in defining how people recollect their alien or UFO sightings. For example, she talks about Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, seeing aliens with eyes wrapped around the rim of their heads. But were they just being subliminally influenced by the CBS show Outer Limits that also show aliens with horizontal slit-like eyes? The show premiered just a couple

of weeks before the couple's reported abduction experience. Diana also writes about the monolith, in 2001 Space Odyssey, and how it may not represent an alien artifact that inspires tech innovation, but actually a digital screen that manipulates our 3D lower reality. In fact, 2001's director Stanley Kubrick said in a 1969 interview that interpreting the monolith as an alien artifact is the movie's most superficial interpretation. Kubrick even initially experimented with the monolith literally being a screen that flashes targets for the apes to hit with rocks, almost a visual hunting manual, flashing shapes and colors for the apes to learn increasingly abstract concepts and evolve. In the novelized version of 2001,

written by Arthur C. Clark, the monolith above astronaut David Bowman's bed was actually just a TV. So is the monolith just the smokescreen in Plato's cave? Diana goes even deeper on the possibility of a UFO sciok. She gets into modern UFO cults like Dorothy Martin and her followers. a group of Midwestern rapturists that believed that they were recipients of a UFO prophecy about an impending apocalypse in 1954, which of course never happened. Okay, so media subtly influences our UFO experiences. The monolith isn't an alien artifact, it's a screen that manipulates our reality, and we have a bunch of crazy UFO cults running around.

Our modern UFO is just a sci-op built in a Disney studio, but as soon as you're ready to write UFOs off is a big sci-op, something kind of crazy happens in the book. She meets the pseudonymously named Tyler, who worked as a NASA mission controller since the 80s, but also worked in an alleged secret space program where he used specific protocols to mentally download information

instrumental for biotech companies that he founded. He's definitely atypical of a space force guy, you know, rocket scientist, you have a certain stereotype of these guys, and they're not driving really awesome cars are flying around in jets, but that's what he was doing. He actually said he was interested in what I studied. And, you know, I study Relative Studies. Now, he's not the first aerospace guy who's asked me about my work.

So I had been asked by some people that I later found out were part of what we call the Invisible College, these scientists who study, you know, this topic. And I had been doing some work on pretty much historical angel events. Yeah. And they wanted to see what I was doing. Yeah. And I thought, who are these people from an aerospace company who are interested in this? And so I sent him the work, right?

She also meets Dr. Gary Nolan, a tenured Stanford professor and microbiologist with his own mental protocols. Dr. Nolan would later go on to use his Stanford lab to attempt to do material science analysis on what he thinks might be UFO crash parts. Tyler takes Diana and Gary blindfolded to a UFO crash site in New Mexico together. It was a secret place. on government land, it was a New Mexico crash retrieval place. And it was a place that, you know, it was not Roswell, but this is what Tyler told me. He said there were a few crashes that happened in the 1940s. They then find UFO crash materials with anomalous isotope ratios not generally found on Earth.

We did find things, but they weren't easy to find. If they were placed there, they were placed so far down rocks that had been there for, looked like a hundred years, you know, like stuff that you just couldn't get. If all of this sounds insane, it initially did to me too. But reality is insane. Or at least it's a little weirder than you think. It's so interesting. I know.

It's really, really so strange. The thing about it is it's a both and. So you say, you know, at first you think the book is going to be about Walt Disney did it all and sciop dust and things like that. Yeah. Well, it's both and. Yeah. It's like, yes, there were siops that happened. And yes, there is a phenomenon that exists.

And so I guess that is the hardest thing to convey is that people want either or. You know, they want to either there's nothing and we're being fooled and, you know, bad on you, government or, yeah, whoa, it's really the space people are here and they're going to save us. What if, I mean, it's way more complicated than that. And what if per yours and Jacques Valet's work where you can compare how. past, you know, St. Francis of Assisi or the ecstasy of St. Teresa feel like modern alien abduction experiences and or Jacques Valle and passport to Mugonia would say, you know, in Celtic medieval island you might see a leprechaun or a fairy and now you're seeing an alien. What if it is both? Because I've never seen a document leaks from the government that says, we are going to wholesale

fabricate UFOs. Like, that never exists. What you do see a lot of is Walter B. Smith, the director of the CIA in 1953 saying, we're going to play up the phenomenon for psychological warfare purposes in the Cold War. That's right. So you're using an existing underlying phenomenon for your own purposes. That's right.

And so the modern space alien stuff, that might be the smokescreen we're seeing. We're just seeing the veil and we're seeing these sort of low level memes or motifs. And yet in a weird way, this has been going on transcending space time. This has been going on across history in these really profound ways. That's not a sci-op.

That is so real. Yes. And the experiences people have are real. Totally, totally real. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a 75. $25-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th. The powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th. And the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale, at Yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. In the late 1800s, while sleeping in her small cell in a Catholic convent, a young nun named

Sister Maria was awakened by a shining object, like a flame that appeared to emerge from her room's wall and hover above her. No one in the convent believed her, but she convinced the mother's superior to stay up with her one night. Lo and behold, the flame emerged from her. from the wall and hovered over the two women. The mother superior determined that the flame must be a soul stuck in purgatory in need of prayer. Now cut to the 20th century, Melissa in her early 20s saw a ball of light come through the sliding doors of her apartment, bounce around the room, go down the hall, and into the other room. She followed the light around the room before it went back outside through the same sliding doors.

This is an exact description of a UFO encounter from John Mack's 1994 book. abduction. Mack was the head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department who devoted the end of his life to studying alien and UFO experiences. And this description of an orb bouncing around Melissa's room sounds exactly like the 19th century Catholic nuns experience. Are these two experiences the same thing, one with a religious overlay, and the other interpreted as paranormal or extraterrestrial? In the age of disenchantment and secularization, where even garden variety people who follow religion often don't actually believe in the metaphysical reality of the religion. It almost feels like the most charismatic thing that you can believe is something that really marries science and religion, which the UFO thing does. Yes. Because it is both

nuts and bolts and space, and it is angels and demons and spirituality. Yes, right. And so there's something highly charismatic about it that I think we would both say on a go-forward basis, it's probably just going to keep growing. Yes, yes. And so what I'm getting at, I guess, is it can be really negative and it can be really positive. And so how do you make sense of that? That it's just like angels and demons and it can be both. And there's a book called The Devil, then it's about the history of demons and science. And, you know, whether it's, you know, James Clerk Maxwell or Laplace or Descartes. A lot of these people had experiences with sort of demonic entities. And so, and Socrates spoke to a demon, so one letter off from demon. And so it's like,

and then some of these inventions are like really positive for humanity. And that at other times, they're cataclysmic and destructive and horrible. So what's going on? Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, that's a big question, you know. How am I going to answer it? I don't know. How about if I have a conversation about it? Okay, let's do it. Parapetetic. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Dialectic. Dialectic. Yeah. So it is true that you say the UFO meld science and religion, right? And it's not going away. Okay. Well, this is what I saw before I wrote American Cosmic and I said, this is a new form of religion. Yeah.

It's not just a religion because we do have UFO religions, right? Yeah. Okay. But this is a new form of religion. and this is this is going to happen and I kind of I kind of tried to stay with that thesis you know this is how it's going to happen and I talked about how media is going to kind of it's the infrastructure that's going to you know it's just going to disseminate through all kinds of different screens right and we're just going to be converted through these screens but I didn't

I didn't figure that I would have experiences myself going through the study of it and and that I would then think, okay, something is happening here. And that's what happened. Yeah. Well, that's, and now I'm just going to be open about it because it feels like the cats out of the bag with all this stuff. I used to try to maintain sort of impartiality. And then, you know, the book I would always give people

when they were skeptical is a book called UFOs and nukes by a guy named Robert Hastings. Yeah, a great book. Amazing book. And it's super dry and hard-headed. And that's why I would give it to people. And I recently connected with him two weeks ago. Wow. He was like, I've had a lot of anomalous experiences since I've started studying the phenomenon.

I've had a lot of weird experiences since I've gotten into this. And I've never said this before publicly, but my dad's godfather, is a guy named Rod Serling who created the Twilight Zone and made the most famous UFO documentary in the, I think it was the 50s or 60s. And then I made this thing with Grush or whatever, like a couple months. ago and it's just this weird thing where you start to feel even more connected to it and a completely impart you the goal of science is to stay impartial but it's sort of impossible with this and everybody I know who's at the forefront of disclosure whether it's you or Gary Nolan or any

they admit that they've had sort of anomalous experiences themselves and so have you had you don't have to talk about it if you don't feel comfortable but have you had any experiences like that Well, I think that being alive is an anomalous experience. It is. And that we just have defense mechanisms to keep us from recognizing it. Yes. And I think what happens is that the UFO comes along and busts your defense mechanisms. Yes.

So you saw my defense mechanism bust in American Cosmic. Yes. And a lot of people did. Yes. And then it went out and busted theirs too. Yes. Because I was so honest about it. I was like, this is going to happen.

It's a new religiosity. You know, let's do this academically. And then boom, oh, what? This is for real? It is for real. And then, okay, if it's for real, what does it mean? And that's my follow-up was like, so I, you know, my follow-up was like, if it's for real, then what it means is that we better take life pretty darn seriously.

Yes. Okay, so if it doesn't cause you to go off the deep end, I think what it does is it causes you to, I hate to say this word or this term, but go on the straight and arrow. Yes, absolutely. Because if you don't, I basically don't drink anymore. I have very little caffeine. I never have caffeine. Wow, wow.

And you feel more sensitive to reality in a way. And then you end up having to go in the straight and arrow. You have to. It sort of forces you. Yes. It's a forcing function. That's what, that's what, oh, very good. It is.

It is. It's a forcing function. Yes. I'm going to now use that term. I tried to understand what it was when I told people that these people aren't holy. Yes. But they are doing this and they're doing this because they have to do it. And that's not a choice.

These visitations in a way are kind of like a modern mystery event. People don't just walk away traumatized in some cases they do. But in other cases, I mean, transformed for the better. Well, it's almost like as you study this, you become a, and this is not scientific terminology, but like a higher frequency but non-specific amplifier or receptor. And so as you get deeper into it, you pick up more, you become much more sensitive. And bad stuff can glom onto you more easily. And so it's almost like CS Lewis, the screw tape letters where you have to be hypervigilant.

Yeah. But you also are tapped into really good stuff too. Yes. Yes. And it's like an amplification or intensification of what somebody who isn't on the path yet. That's right. Let's talk about a specific example. The one I love is St. Francis of Assisi, where the UFO experience becomes a forcing function to become a better person, but also that involves a lot of hardship for him. He starts out this sort of popular, you know, life of the party guy, and then he has a UFO experience and basically like dies from it. Do you want to tell the

full account? Yeah. Okay. So what happens is that Francis is praying, and something comes out of the sky and the way that it's described is that there's a lot of like sparks and it seems kind of spinning and there's an there's an eye right that comes down and and there's different versions of it too so that's what people need to know is that there's the artistic version of it and the dogmatic version of it so the information i was able to get was that the angel was that the angel was was harsh with him. Okay? Now, I'm not quite sure what that means,

but that's how it gets translated. So it deals harshly with him, and he receives burns, maybe. So this is then interpreted as being the stigmata. And it's interpreted as the angel, like Jesus talking to him, like, you know, this messenger coming down and talking to him. Now, this isn't unlike things that you see today, like, like in contemporary, you know, UFO.

That's the thing that I was trying to point out was that this looks very similar to things that people talk about today. Radiation damage and all the stuff kick green and Gary Nolan talked about. I mean, that's when it really hit me was I was actually at the New Mexico site and we hadn't gone there yet. It was a night before. And we were all just hanging out having a beer. And Gary decided he was going to share his research with us. photos and everything and took like two hours to go through a lot of this stuff and i was horrified you know because he's doing he's in and in fact part of his motivation was to try to stop this from

happening right to people do you think that my mind went for whatever reason when you were talking about the story of st francis of the cc to the ark of the covenant and the holiest of holies and you have to be a certain level of purity to make contact. And if you don't, then somehow it does violence to you or something. So do you, okay, so this question of your purity or else, okay, so in a lot of traditions that have these, you know, that discuss this contact with non-human intelligences, whether we interpret them as like deities or, you know, UFOs or whatnot, a lot of them do have this idea, similar idea, as in the Merkaba tradition, right? You do have to be, and by the way, you also see this in a Socratic tradition,

but strangely, it's with philosophy. You know, so you have to be a certain age, and you have to have done so much math and purified yourself in order to understand philosophy, like truth and things like that. So, yeah, so you see this. So now, I don't know if that's true or not, But this is, you know, this is the historical fact that people believe this and people have prepared themselves to do this. Now, listen, when people ask me, because a lot of people do, I have people say I go talk to a class or, you know, do some podcast and I'll have somebody ask me, how can I make contact, right?

And I don't recommend that at all. Yeah, right. Right. Especially not in some sort of recreational, you know, like it's fun or whatever. Like, good luck. Yeah, yeah, I don't recommend it. It's dangerous. I think if it happens, it'll happen when you least expect it.

And you should just, reality is set up the way it is for a reason, I think. Yeah. You can just move through your own life and contemplate virtue and get where you need to go through that. And then I do think, yeah, it's like staring at the sun for too long when you kind of study this stuff. whatever. It's the heroic dose. Yeah, yeah, totally. Just don't do it. Just don't do it or two steps forward, one step back and you know, but really, yeah, don't go, don't always go looking for it. Do you think that the Last Supper was some sort of hermetic ritual, was like maybe, maybe a mystery ritual? Like there's another religious studies professor at Princeton, I believe,

named Elaine Pagels. Yeah, I know. I know her. You know her. Yeah, yeah, she's great. And she wrote Beyond Belief. Yeah, she's great. And she talks about the gospel of Thomas. Yeah. And how Jesus takes Thomas aside, whispers secret words to him. And maybe the whole thing, even if you read the book of John, the whole thing, there's a reading of it where the whole thing feels a little more choreographed than you might expect. Yeah.

And so do you think maybe the wine was like the Kekegon, you know, this Greek drink spiked with Ergot that maybe allowed. him to see beyond the veil. And then there's this other sort of this. We're getting deep conspiracy territory, but I'm friends with Randall Carlson and, you know, Brian Rerescu, and they suspect maybe Jesus never died. And Joseph of Arimathea actually just took Jesus in, who was lifeless when Pilate sort of poked him, but actually resuscitated him with herbs. This is probably all very heretical for your religious studies professor. So if you feel like you need to say this is bullshit, Please, just let me know. Elaine Pagel also studies.

Yeah. So she studies heretics. Yeah. Okay. Well, so is there any chance? We don't have any. We're not like practitioners, or if we are, we don't bring it into our work. Certain Gnostic interpretations of the New Testament maintain the belief that Jesus actually never died, that the Last Supper was all more of a choreographed mystery ritual than meets the eye, where Jesus was sedated and then resuscitated.

Take Luke 2210. Jesus tells the disciples, Keep your eyes open as you enter the city. A man carrying a water jug will meet you. Follow him home. Then speak with the owner of the house. The teacher wants to know, where is the guest room where I can eat the Passover meal with my disciples?

Already there are references to something going on behind the scenes. Who's the guy with the water jug? Then in the book of Matthew, Jesus says, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. So he knows he's about to be betrayed. And then he drinks hyssop, an herbal sedative. Maybe so the Romans think he's dead. In fact, the popular account has Jesus dying within six hours while on the cross,

which doesn't really make biological sense. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas goes even further. These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke in which Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death. So all of a sudden, the disciples supposedly betraying Jesus is maybe his closest confidon, recording the secret knowledge of immortality. Joseph of Arimathea, who is supposedly a disciple as well, indicating that there are more

than 12 disciples, then comes to retrieve Jesus' body. Joseph embalms him with herbs, myrrh and aloe, which you might do if you were trying to resuscitate someone. text even reads that Pilate granted Joseph the corpse of Jesus, using the Greek term Potoma, or a lifeless body. But when Joseph asks for the body of Jesus, he uses the word soma, meaning to save, heal, or make the body whole. Finally, when the disciples go to roll away the stone of the sepulchre, it had already been rolled away, maybe by a recently resuscitated Jesus. Is there any chance? Do you think that the Last Supper was a mystery ritual?

Okay, so I have to talk as a not practitioner here. Sure, sure, sure. You know, and as a religious studies professor. Yeah. So, listen, when I look at that ritual, you know, the Last Supper, which is, they're Jewish, so it's a Seder, right? Yeah, exactly, Passover. Yeah, yeah, okay. But we have to wonder why it was uptaken then into the Roman Catholic Church, because it wasn't like the Agape feasts.

They weren't really that. They weren't that ritual. Right. So then let's think about this. What distinguishes like certain types of institutions or societies from some sorts of institutions that are more like smaller institutions like tribal villages or indigenous communities, they basically believe in the presence of, you know, spirituality in many, many things, like in forests, rivers, you know, skybeings, in trees and things like that.

So there's a sense of presence. Well, then, you know, what happens in the institution of Rome is there's this like, there's no presence, right? And so you make this, what they're doing is they're recreating presence. I think so. And what do you mean by presence exactly? Well, okay, so if you're Catholic and your Orthodox, you know this, that that ritual is supposed to be when,

The priest does the transubstantiation of, it's supposed to be the actual presence of Jesus. You hear the bell in the mass, it goes deep, and then that's the presence. It's also the bread and the wine become the blood and the body. And that's not symbolic for Catholics or for Orthodox. It becomes symbolic for Protestants. And so, wow. So is this Catholicism more sort of, cannibalistic than we realize or something like you're eating yeah it is i mean yeah there's like an

altar yeah i mean i hate to tell you this and you'd be shocked yeah this is this happens to my students yeah when we talk about you know i say okay when you went because but a lot of them are protestant so they they don't know that this is what catholics and orthodox christians are doing when they're like doing this thing on the altar and this brings me back to the let's talk about reney gerard yeah let's do Because René Girard is like, this is exactly what he's talking about. Because he talks a lot about structural violence, right? Structural violence. So he basically asks, why are we so mean to each other?

Like, why do we always feel the need to kill one another? Like, what is this? And so I think about my life, you know, as a young person, going through college, then going through graduate school and all the books that I read, like some of them really stood out to me. And they were Plato's Republic. which asked could never be a just society. And there were the Gospels of Jesus, right?

Obviously, I became a religious studies professor. And there was Renee Gerard's work. Really, each of these texts say that this is structural. You know, so when you think, like, you know, as a kid kind of growing up with parents who were liberal, you know, we got to save the world. Well, yeah, we do have to save the world. But the thing is, is that it's structural. The bad is structural. Right.

You can't do you can't do enough. Yes. And Gerard is interesting because, yeah, he had sort of a bit of a cult following as a professor. And I think there's a Roberto Coloso, quote, there are foxes and their hedgehogs. You know, there's people that know a lot about a lot. And then there's somebody that knows one thing, and you can apply it. It's sort of grand theory of everything. Oh, yeah, that's him.

And that was Renee Gerard, because he was sort of a hedgehog. Yeah. And in his case, I think he thought that the history of the world was the history of violence and you had these sort of pagan scapegoating cycles. And there's something, the only thing that is, in some sense, he situates Christianity as a non-unique religion because it's just another scapegoating story. That's right. But the way in which it is unique is that it sort of signals the end of history because for the first time the mythology and the story is taking the side of the scapegoat and not the mob, not the masses, which then you sort of unlock this idea that is both maybe

saving of humanity, but also destroying it. Like it sort of signals the end of the world or something, because the scapegoating rituals are cathartic control processes to keep society moving forward, where you have sort of rivalrous interactions around kind of desires that everybody have that are a more. emergent, and the scapegoat is then ritually sacrificed, and then society, that pacifies society, and it can keep going. But it can't keep going if you know that you're doing a wrong thing in scapegoating this character. And so there's something about Christianity, which is subversive and messes with this technology

that keeps the world going in a way that shows the seeds of the apocalypse. That's right. That's right. So the thing is that we, and by the way, A plus on that. Thank you, thank you. That was really amazing. Okay, so the thing about it, though, is that, so the Christian recognition that we kill Jesus, right? Yes.

We are the ones that. Yeah. Depravity. Right. And so he rightly, remember, we talked about a defense mechanism. Like a student asked me the other day, you know, is there, you know, is what's hopeful or is there something? something to hope for. And I said, yes, you know. But in part of the answer, we're talking about religion. Does religion offer hope? And in one sense, yes. But in another sense, it's a defense

mechanism, right? And it defends us against. So, you know, religion springs up as a defense against our need to be this violent and to hurt each other like this and to kill the neighbor, you know, because we want what the neighbor has. And Christianity, the the beauty that Girard interprets Christianity as being. And by the way, a lot of times I don't think Christianity lives up to Gerard's idea. Because once we then perform this constantly, we become, like, you didn't even know

that it was a sacrifice, this mass. You know, so the reality of it is is that we're in the ritual and we kill we kill this innocent victim. We're killing a perfect, good person is what we're doing. And then eating them, right? Okay. So, but once we start to do this again and again and again,

we just don't know what we're doing anymore. And then people act, we become programmatic. Yes. People don't have. So that's why I think something like a UFO then comes in to break that up and basically say, there's something here, And it's actually not within your program. Yes.

And I think if you see the synchronicities, you sort of know you're on the right path. You know you're in some, like, exciting whirlpool. Yes. When you see the signs. Yeah. Okay, I learned a bit about this, actually. Yeah. Tyson Yon Kipporta's book, Sand Talk, is really good, by the way.

But he calls these synchronities and these kinds of things that happen. Yeah. Extra cognitive events. Yeah. Okay. And he says that there are natural things. What they do is they, and I got this from studying creativity, is that they actually provide dopamine, right?

Wow. Yeah. So when you're, like, doing something that's really creative and maybe even productive, like creating the technology or something, then you're going to really enjoy it. Like, you know, when people get into a creative space and they just go and they can't stop, that's what's happening with them. Yeah.

Wow. So it's like intermittent reinforcement where, like, you get a little dose of the dopamine. That's right. That's right. I kind of think that synchronicities are more how it actually is. And that when we get out of our program, we actually go, whoa, okay, this is how it is. But then we just go back into our program because we're all trained, right, to on a program. That brings back to the Gerard. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, the defense mechanism theory that we have of life that we figured out. Yeah, we did. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. What do you think is the relationship between time and UFOs? Is there some interesting relationship? Are they from the future? Are aliens and close encounters of the third kind just experiences with our future selves.

Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, that's a really good question. Okay, so what's really interesting is that, okay, so after the, you know, around 2019 or so, I started to meet people who were people from technology communities, right? Tech, techies, basically. Yeah.

And a lot of them really resonated with Tyler and recognized themselves. And a lot of them were creators of AI. And some of them did quantum computing and things like that. And so I started to engage with them because I was learning from them. And I was learning about this whole idea of, you know, what are these things, right? And so I thought that their ideas were very interesting because the normal idea is that they're extraterrestrial, which means that they're from another solar system or even our solar system, who knows,

and they've somehow, you know, have some kind of craft that comes here. Yeah. This is supported by craft retrieval, you know, talk and stuff like that, and they come here. But that doesn't accord with what people see when they see them in the sky. You know, they kind of disappear and reappear, disappear, reappear. So this is to suggest something entirely different or that, you know, we just don't understand that technology that they have. So AI people being really smart and generally very self-confident believe that they could figure it out. So they've been talking about the temporal aspects of it, right?

So they're, and by the way, this guy named Stephen Dick, who is a NASA historian and has been for like 40 years, he's now retired, but he's on the research team for the Galileo project. I've corresponded with him for about a long time for since the beginning of my study, which is in 2012. He's been doing this for a long time. And more than 20 years ago, he suggested that these were AIR. a form of AI or that if we met them, they would be a form of AI. And so this accorded with what Jacques Valet said, that they're technological. Right. Or it's like cellular automata, yeah, these sort of control systems that it's like if you were trying to get, so this is like rats in a prime number maze, they don't understand

the concept of prime numbers, right? So there's no way you can say turn right every single time you hit a prime number. Right. But with Pavlovian conditioning or intermittent reinforcement, you could get them to run a prime number maze. They don't know what they're doing. No, they're just going on the impulse to get the treat or whatnot. But they're implementing some grand plan or kind of plan in the process, a plan that you know. Right, right. And so maybe these are AI Envoy von Neumann replicators or something that nip at the herd in ways that we don't know. It's like, why Betty and Barney Hill and why Antonio Villas Boat?

Like why these specific people, but it might be moving us swaying society in a specific teleology or something. Well, yeah. So in conversations with some of these AI people, they were basically saying that now that we, you know, we have that the discovery is true of superposition. And this, you know, what it shows us is that there is this, you know, place beyond space time. And there's information there. And so this is information coming to us. And it's intelligent. and that it doesn't have the same, it doesn't have the same, it's that the carrier is different, right? So it's not us. Yeah. Well, let's, I just before, I don't want to forget this, because we were talking about Tyler,

you go to the Vatican Observatory with him. Yes. And he has a conversion experience. Yes. And so, okay, can we talk about that? Because that seems like this profound thing where he bursts into tears and he says, all I want to do. I don't care if I ever go back into the space program.

All I want to do is help people. Yeah, because he was really doing a lot of this. He wasn't really conscious about what he was doing. He was just doing it, right? This was his job. He was doing it since he was really young and he was really good at it. He knew what to do. He knew how to do it, okay?

So then when he met me, I told him what he was doing. And that forced him to start to think about, wait, this has been happening. And so when we went to the Vatican, this priest, comes up to him. And then they engage. And then the priest somehow immediately decides that he's going to take on Tyler, like a mentor or something. And he even blesses the project. Yeah. So there's a picture of him blessing like the project, which hadn't even been named. Or it may have been named. I don't know. It was American Cosmon. He blessed it. He's just a really nice guy. I'm just going to call him Father Kay. Okay. Father Kay would take us to

his chapel, which was outside the Vatican in Rome, it was at a hospital. And he would take us on his round. So we would go to the hospital in the morning, do mass, and then go on his rounds. And he would take us to people who were ill, some of them terminally ill. And he would have us help him give, like, it's not mass rights, but it's a right of healing to very sick people. And he would do that. And some of the people made a huge impression on Tyler because there was a man who was fairly young and, you know, was there to he was terminally ill. And I don't think that Tyler had ever been around somebody. He dedicated their lives basically to other people. I saw that he started to get internal and started to become like reflective about himself. And I could feel that that this was happening. But I didn't know. it was going to happen. I just could sense that something was happening like this. So then that's when we went to the observatory. And in the observatory, the observatory is the Catholic Observatory.

It's run by a Jesuit monk who's, you know, an astronomer. MIT train. Yeah, yeah. He's like really, you know, he and Tyler can have some good conversations, right? So the people that are there and populate the observatory are the kind of people that would be like in the space program, but they're super religious. They're Catholic. And so I had this feeling that when Tyler met them, that it would be over for him, that he would definitely know that there was, you know, there was something great and truthful. And, you know, there was something like a God, right? Actually, strangely enough, the International Space Agency people were there, like 30 of them or so, and they were all really young.

Yeah, it was like a whole thing for the International Space Agency, young astrophysicists and stuff. Interesting. And they actually knew who Tyler was. Wow. Yeah, because no one knows who he is here. He kind of got overcome with, like, I wouldn't say emotion, but maybe it was emotion. He got overcome with, like, the epic nature of what was happening and of what we were doing and looking at like actual books that were written by Copernicus, like first, first

editions and stuff, you know? I mean, it was really amazing. And Copernicus had a, you know, he was obviously came up with the theoretical model that the solar system revolves around the sun and that we live in a heliocentric universe. But he had a very interesting relationship with the sun. It was almost like a very spiritual endeavor. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Isaac Asimov actually has a great book called The Kingdom of the Sun, and it's about our relationship to the Sun throughout history, and there's a whole section dedicated to Copernicus, who was a very mystical thinker when it came to the Sun.

How fascinating. I did not know that. Yeah, and I think of the Sun, too, is like, it's so, it's like a nuclear fusion reactor. Yeah. And it sort of powers the Earth. And Henry Berksano, which we just spoke about as, you know, kind of French mystical, but also kind of science, maybe pseudo-scientific thinker in the early 20th

century, late 19th century, also thought that the sun specifically spurred on evolution. Like it was somehow essential to the evolution of mankind. And so maybe it's a combination of the electromagnetic field of the earth, the new sphere, you know, Pilar, Dijodon, and then also this sort of the sun as well. That's fascinating. Anyway, back to, so Tyler is studying this stuff. And do you think in some ways for Tyler it was a convergence of, of Catholic faith, but also his life being dedicated to space.

Absolutely. That was, it probably made him realize just how profoundly meaningful his past life had been. Yeah, I think so. I think that's exactly what happened. Because I knew that he had a profoundly meaningful life, but because he was in this community of being secret, you know, the fight club community that I discussed, no one could ever know it. So then to have him recognized by international space scientists, you know, the European international space scientists, it was a beautiful thing to tell the truth.

And then he decided to convert. And here I am doing this, you know, this study for years and years. And then this kind of happens. But also what happens is he changes his idea of what these things are that he's feeling, he's getting signals from. So he feels that there are more. in line with what, because we were studying saints who had these experiences. And he was thinking that they're more in line with what they were, you know, experiencing too. And he comes from a line.

You've talked about Tielovsky, the father of Russian rocketry or Jack Parsons, who claimed to be kind of in contact with entities. You know, Werner von Braun would say all sorts of trippy stuff. You know, he's the father of German rocketry and then went on to run. the NASA Saturn project, which took us to the moon. And so is there something about the history of the American, or just space programs in general, that is more consciousness-based than we somehow realized? The Russian space program was inspired by early rocket scientists,

like Konstantin Tzeolowski, who had basically constructed his own cosmic religion or worldview around space. This included a belief that humans would colonize the Milky Way, achieve immortality, regulate the forces of nature at will, and transition our biosphere into a new sphere, a mental network. He also believed humans would achieve time travel. His American counterpart, Jack Parsons, was equally unbounded by convention. He was part of the Pasadena cult OTO, along with Scientology creator El Ron Hubbard.

The two would perform sex magic rituals, and Parsons even received a past-life regression, in which he was Simon of Magus, a biblical character who used black magic to levitate. All of that is to say maybe the true history of American and Russian space programs is stranger than meets the eye. Yes, they were doing some extraordinary types of rituals, and they definitely believed that they were in touch with these beings. They presented them differently. So the Parsons crew, yeah, they were way out there.

And they were doing this in the L.A. desert, right? and stuff, and they were doing ritual magic, and they believed that they were in contact with, you know, extraterrestrials and things like that. All right. On the Russian side, though, they were doing the same thing, but it was under a Christian veneer. So Chikoski believed that he was actually in touch with angelic beings,

and he talks about it and writes about it, and that these beings are in constant contact with us if we're able to receive their knowledge. So do you have a sense of the relationship between the secret space programs and religion in its totality? Do you think that these things are two sides of a pyramid that sort of converge at some omega point or something? Are you asking about the religiosity of the space program?

Yeah. I am asking that. Yeah, yeah. Is it sort of a Gnostic religious initiation process? I'm still trying to figure it out, but I do have some data on it. Yeah, yeah. So it looks to be, and actually, strangely enough, at the end of one of Tom DeLong's book, actually, he talks, he makes a reference

to the gods are still with us, the Greek gods are still with us, which I didn't know about, actually, until about two weeks ago. And it was really interesting to hear because I had just given a talk that I didn't want recorded. I went to New York City and I was giving the talk and the name of the talk was, the muse is real. Okay. I went first, from the very, like, first idea of muses, you know, thousands of years ago for the Greeks. Yeah. And then how they kind of, they never really go away. So even the founding fathers, quote unquote, of our country, like Benjamin Franklin,

did you know that they were actually part of a Mason lodge that was a Muse Lodge? It was dedicated, yes. I knew he was a Freemason. I don't know. He was part of a Mew's Law. Yeah. It was like the Seven Sisters. Wow.

Yeah. It was a French muse lodge. Talk about a guy with a million ideas. He invented the bifocals, a certain type of harpsichord. You know, famously he was involved in electricity experiment. Like, he was a complete polymath. And so it was probably tapped into all sorts of ideas. Well, they knew it to be real.

That's what I was saying in my talk. It wasn't just something that we think of them today, the muses. And we often think of them as just like motifs or allegories or, you know, But we never actually think of them as something that could be real. Yeah. Well, the etymology of the word genius is attendant spirit, and it's kind of original. That's right. That's right.

That's right. Okay. A lot of our words come from muses, by the way. Like museums is about the, in fact, museums were supposed to contain the spirit of the muses. Did you know that? Isn't it interesting that we have a lot of museums in D.C. And a lot of architecture about the muses. It's everywhere.

Well, it's also in the space program. So what I found was that when Tyler would do these launches, there would be a lot of iconography that he didn't actually understand when I met him. I would ask him, I say, why are they using this Greek goddess, you know? And he's like, is that a Greek goddess? It is indeed. And they would use Latin, and they would send it up into space. Really? Yeah.

And so he said that, and by the way, it wasn't medieval Latin, which is a Catholic form of Latin, a Roman Catholic form. It was like first second century type of Latin, which is Roman Empire Latin. You know, what does this mean? I don't know. Other than that, I think that there's almost like a parallel type of religion that's happening. Well, we have a mutual friend, Dr. Eia Whiteley. You introduced me to her. That's right.

New friend for me. She's written about in your next book encounters, which is an incredible book. And I think what she talks about and writes about and deals with in her professional life is when you talk about space technology, whether it's rocketry or anything else, it's so complicated and it's so hard to get right. Even SpaceX succeeded on its fourth attempt when it was on the verge of failure and bankruptcy and it was almost like a spiritual reckoning that Elon had to go through where he put half his money in and almost failed and then it finally worked. And that almost feels like the story again and again, Jack Parsons famously said after he read The Golden Bow by J.G. Fraser,

He said, I read that book and I realized science is a form of magic and not vice versa, which no other scientist or engineer would ever say, but it humbled him so much, we're making rocketry. And so what somebody like E.O. Whiteley deals with is once you've dotted all the eyes and crossed all the T's, the tech is so complex that if there's any sort of mind matter interaction, you have to get that right, too, in the case of space. That's right. And so she deals with like the, you know, the mentality of a fighter pilot.

And McDonnell Douglas, which is an aerospace corporation, at Wash U and St. Louis had a parapsychology program. Aerospace was definitely interested in parapsychology at some point. Yep. And the dirty little secret about parapsychology is your internal state really dictates how good you are at the thing. It's almost like the Book of Acts with Jesus, where you have to reach a certain level spiritually to do well with it. Yeah, so like your body's an instrument. Yeah, and it begs this question because 2017 and on is when the UFO thing really started to become more popular and kind of in the Zykeyes since Leslie Kane wrote her article about, you know, ATIP and the fact that we even had a UFO program. Yeah.

But that was the same year that due to a lawsuit, the Stargate stuff, you know, the psychic spy program was actually sort of arrested from the government and made public. And so there's a part of me that thinks that maybe the. there's more of an emphasis on nuts and bolts. And actually, the more interesting stuff is sort of parapsychological and involves mind over matter and consciousness. But what do you think? Yes, I absolutely agree with that.

So the thing is, is that here you have in 2013, you know, I begin my study in 2012, do the normal academic search for the space program information. Immediately see how much is classified in that. I can't do that. And then think, okay, I can do field research, right? And I can learn from people, which is, you know, your next best bet, right? And not that I'm trying to uncover anything to tell you the truth, because I don't actually care to tell you.

I mean, honestly, I didn't go in with any kind of an agenda. Yeah. I just went in because I was curious and I saw that my former research, basically, you know, my former research was basically on aerial phenomena and Catholic history. but interpreted as angels and souls from purgatory. You know, so I've been doing the research. I just, it was post-20th century. And so then I recognized that it was still happening.

And I thought very interesting. And so that's what got me interested in doing that. But I think this whole focus, I don't want to be conspiratorial, but yeah, this whole focus on nuts and bolts takes us away from what I found really to be the case. And it sounds like they were interested in your work on St. Joseph, the Divine. and you could levitate and other kind of historical figures in Catholic history that could literally levitate. I remember one time I was talking with Hal put off and he said to me, I was like going

really deep on science and like, you know, vector and scalar potentials that, you know, kind of quantum field breaks down into and how that could, you know, be the mechanism through which telepathy occurs or, you know, whatever. And he just, I remember he cuts me off and he goes, or it could be, the medieval secret society that knows how to levitate and they put these metal capsules around them and I was like, what? Like that was the weirdest thing he had ever said

and I just remember that forever. Like it was as if maybe the levitation history that you know is somehow tied in with, yeah, the UFO story and maybe we go down these really deep rabbit holes of science and, you know, how to reconcile UFOs. You know, we talk about Al Cubierry, you know, warp drives and whatever, and maybe it's just sort of the human body is somehow way more integral to this.

It seems like, it's not just the human body in and of itself, it's like groups of people, too. Because I noticed that there was a lot of, so I have because, you know, I've been a scholar of Catholic history. And I'm in conversation with Hal, actually, about these very things, about levitation in the past and meditation here and now. And looking at the data, right? And so what's interesting, and I have looked at so much data.

I mean, I have the Joseph of Copertino records, right? Yeah. And been reading them, and they're pretty intense. And it's really difficult to read through the whole thing without coming away saying, heck yeah, that guy levitated. Right? Joseph of Cupertino was a 17th century Franciscan friar that would experience ecstatic visions as a child. And many people witnessed him levitating while participating in mass.

He was deemed holy by many of these witnesses, which the church thought was subversive. Eventually, they imprisoned him in a small cell forbidding him to join any public gatherings in the community. He had his own strict protocols of asceticism, only eating solid food twice a week and adding bitter powders to all his meals. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost!

or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton for the stay. And so when I started to look back at some of the research data that I had from my Catholic history stuff, I started to notice the people who were the people who were said to have levitated or who received these miraculous interventions and things, they seem to either be doing protocols or they were children or they were somehow childlike or had a childlike goodness about them. And so I don't know, I haven't concluded

anything about this. This is just very initial data collection. Amari, do you have any of that? Just something like in the book while I was listening that you, that you, keep coming back to is the idea that you can't take the context outside of the experience of the experiencer and and in a culture and in a in a moment of time where we're so obsessed on you know a hyperindexing of data and collecting more and doing more it was very it was a fresh perspective to to really get to fully consider someone's full story and the circumstances that they come with for why they might have had that experience. That was more of a statement, not a question.

But it actually helps me because I was going to bring that up. Okay, amazing. So when we look at the history of UAPs here in the States, right, okay, we've got actually three traditions, research traditions. We have the invisible tradition represented, I would say, by people like Alan Hineck, okay? So they're in the intelligence community, and there are things going on and there's research going on, but it's not public at all. It's not transparent for probably good reasons. And then what happens is that you get people like who do it as their hobby. So you get euphology and it's public facing and it's public scholarship about UFOs. And then from there,

you get academic scholarship. Okay. So you have, again, you have people like John Mack. John Mack comes long, he's a Harvard University psychiatrist, and he's actually in conversation with Bud Hopkins. He's looking at experiencers. And then what we have is we have a fourth tradition, all right? And that fourth tradition has just arisen in the last less than 10 years, okay? And I use myself as an example of it, because you have somebody who stumbles upon something that I'd never thought to study, but recognizes that I've been studying something similar to it, if not it, my entire life, and meets this person named Tyler, who's part of the first tradition, right? The secret tradition.

And what happens is a collaboration. And then a transparency that we've never seen before. And so what do we call this fourth tradition? Okay. What do we call this fourth tradition? All right. So what I've tried to do is I try to say, hmm, what kind of tradition would this be? And I thought, you know, the strange thing about it,

let me actually talk about the context of it, the research context. We never talk about that. What's the research context? Well, you and I just talked about Jack Parsons and Chikovsky in Russia. So we actually talked about the context of them creating something entirely novel that actually does something operational and gets us off of Earth, right? And so I decided to, look at my context, the research context between somebody in religious studies and somebody in the space force, boom, collaborating, almost accidentally, it's emergent. Yes. It's an immersion thing.

So what comes out of it is completely what people use the term emergence for, you know, something bigger than its part. Because we're just these kind of parts that come together, right? And all of a sudden, we work together and something comes out of it. Well, that, I think, brings us to a question, which is, like, are we on the verge of an epistemological paradigm shift? Because I think about the Invisible College, which was Jay Allen Hinex group with Jacques Gle, which is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Robert Boyle's Invisible College, which was kind of at the start of the Enlightenment. That's right. Sort of study science, which at the time was considered heretical and outside of the confines of the trick.

It was dangerous. And I think about how the Enlightenment started. And there's a good book by Francis Yeager. about sort of the Rosicrucian roots of the Enlightenment and the Invisible College is sort of a Rosicrucian... Oh, it totally is. Yeah, yeah. And the goal of Rosicrucianism was sort of to marry the science and the spirit.

A lot of the early Enlightenment proponents were also alchemists. And it feels like we are now living in a time where science is, you have kind of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, like very shrill kind of defenders of the materialist paradigm. And then you have kind of dogmatic relationships. religious fundamentalists and they have bifurcated or cleaved since the Enlightenment. And now emergently they're coming together. Like the fact that a religious studies professor is collaborating with the Secret Space

Program person, he's a mission controller, he's worked on all these missions since the challenger in the 80s is wild. Yeah. And so where are we headed? Yeah. Well, that's the thing. So I was trying to quantify it today, you know, so to kind of say, well, what can I lead people with?

And I thought, that's probably not the best thing to do because I'm just a part. The idea of disclosure, as it's currently happening, being a very colonial concept. Because it assumes that it's like this newfound, like, we're discovering this for the first time. I think when we are trying, when we try to reduce things so much to like the observables that we can write in these specific formats and we and now, and we think that the human account of a story is the weakest. I mean, Johnny Harris is really like, the weakest scientific measurement is when you actually rely on the human story. And I'm like, but what else do we have? That's all you have. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, that part was fat. I had never heard that perspective and it clicked. It clicked so well. Yeah, I know. So that's part of also the reason that I wrote it was that disclosure can only happen because the U.S. government has the information. Yes, exactly. And it's like, really?

And that, but you talk to other countries and you talk to people in, um, Native American tribes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Aboriginal Australians, Indigenous Australian tribes. And they've had, they even have these, you know, different initiation ceremonies for it, just like you and I talked about the Merkaba tradition, you know. And so, yeah, so I just wanted to put a light on that just to kind of, I don't think I could ever balance out that, that discourse that's happening now. now, but I wanted to put it out there. There is some hubris in saying, we are now going through disclosure or whatever.

And it is what frustrates me about the sometimes the super anti-UFO people. And often the anti-people, UFO people were super pro UFO, like it's two sides of the same coin. And it's like, you're relying too much on the intel community. Like, sometimes people will come

after me because I interview people in that world or whatever. And I'm like, they could flip tomorrow and it wouldn't change my belief in this stuff. Because I know there's so much outside of what they're talking about. And maybe there are ways in which the government is spinning things, but, like, I don't care. There's so much open source knowledge you're overrelying on the government and studying this. And I think encounters is a really great kind of comprehensive overview of how you can study this outside of official channels.

Do you ever get skeptical when you hear, like, when we, the biologics thing messes with me. And it messes, you know, it's sometimes it's, I do. think this is, it's the interesting thing about the UFO phenomena is that it is the intersection between something that's a little parapsychological and consciousness based, but it's also sort of objective and real, and that's really interesting and cool. But when I hear people say, you know, there are these many races and it's like grays and tall whites and reptilians or something, I don't know, there's a part of me that believes it. I'm like, okay, maybe. But then there's another part of me that just feels like I have like an allergic reaction to. I'm like, this is

like even my i have a very open i'm very high in the openness scale and i'm like i don't know do you have any beliefs about that or well i mean i'm used to hearing stuff like this because i study religion yeah so in religions you have those things too like you have non-human intelligences of all sorts that are identified like you know um the medieval angelologies right of you know so of the catholic church you know they describe the different angels and what they do and, you know, things like that. So to me, it's like this taxonomy of entities, right, that people are now doing with DMT.

Right. So it's kind of interesting to me. You know, maybe there are these things in these other dimensions that are, like if two people sit down and they're taking, you know, DMT or they're doing it, and they have the same experience, but they don't talk to each other. Like, what's going on there? This is like Andrew Gallimore and the Imperial College and stuff. They're sort of mapping the spirit world.

And then it's really interesting. I mean, it's interesting as long as you don't become literally a believer. Well, do you think any of these things are walking among us? I know what is that doesn't belong among us? Oh, gosh. Like when you read like penetration by Ingo Swan or something and he's like, you know, he's this famous remote viewer who's like involved in the beginning of the Starget program. But then you read, you're halfway into the book and he's like, and then I'm at the supermarket and I see one.

And you're like, what? And she's beautiful. And she's beautiful. She's ravishing. And she's ravishing. So these things you see. in religious traditions too. Yeah.

And you also see them in, somebody just emailed me and told me about traditions like that in Haiti, you know, and that he came to the United States and he could believe that we didn't have any belief in this at all when he would see things like that when he was there, okay? And, okay, so what do I think about that?

There are things we don't quite understand about, well, there's so many things we don't understand. Yeah. I mean, what am I gonna say? It's like, there's these kinds of questions, I don't think I could say publicly. Well, I tend to think human biology is fairly, what always interests to me is the variance of humans. Like, I meet certain people and I'm like, you are on some other thing.

And then I tend to think in a lot of these cases, I'm like, but you bleed real blood. You're just like the Shylock lie. You bleed normal blood and you go to the bathroom and your body functions in a biologically human way, but you are sort of very tapped into something else. Okay, so there's a couple stuff. This is my non-public research. Yeah. So I can't actually talk about it, but I can answer your question if you want.

Okay. All right. So when I'm doing, I've done some research with people who talk about either mediumship or even possession. And what you find is that the boy who was at the basis, his story was used for the Exorcist, the first Exorcist movie, who then turned out to be like an aerospace engineer. I guess, did you hear about that? That boy? I didn't know that. Yeah.

He grew up to be like an aerospace engineer. engineer. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. I worked for NASA, I think. Crazy. Okay. So listen, though, is that while after, you know, because it took a while for him to get depossessed, apparently. Okay, so this is the story. But afterwards, there, he had, he went to the bathroom a lot. He urinated, like, tons and tons and tons and tons. So much that people are like, how are you even, it's not even possible. Okay. Well, you also see this with other kinds of, like, mediumship and and things like that. So something is happening physiologically to them. And I don't know what it is, but it has to do with water. That's so interesting. Hydration. Yeah. Well, I could, I did you know the memory of water stuff out of Japan? Yes, I do. Yeah. So it's like maybe water holds more semantic content than we, then we realize or something. Yeah. But I had a, like, an experience at Skinwalker Ranch. I smelled sulfur there. Yes. And that's right. It's common there. It's a sign of like the devil. It is.

is yes and i proceeded to have the worst month of my life and then at the end of the month i felt like i was saved by god like god swooped in and saved me and i pray i prayed the whole it was horrible like every day like some gnarly weird wow it's like in a dark energy vortex and it i and there's on camera there's a video of me just candidly being like i smell something weird and it smells like sulfur it smelled like the sulfur whatever oh really you know i'm a hydrogen sulfate gas monitor. Yeah. And because, you know, like in mines and things like that,

that gas, people smell, the sulfur smells for you. Yeah. So I wear this so that if someone says that they smell something like that, we know the weather it's really gas or if it's something happening up here because people that have had instances. Is that anything coming out? No. Okay.

No. So. Just like, what is that? Are we swimming in a soup of this stuff? Like, it's kind of, yeah. Yeah. So I guess that's the sobering moment, right? The sobering moment is to recognize that it's a real kind of phenomenon.

Is that why it's being hidden from us? Like, sometimes I think Carl Sagan, who grew up writing about UFOs in his diary and would debate with his mentor all the time about them, and then somehow flipped into being super anti-UFO, you know, him writing the demon-haunted world. I think of that as somewhat of a double entendre. And, like, maybe it's like the world is haunted by demons, literally. Yeah. And then it's like the screw tape letters. You have to be, like, very hypervigilant about following the godly path, whatever that is. Yeah.

And, like, fending them off. Because you have, like, wormwood and screw tape and, you know, a bunch of bad entities. Well, I think that we can safely say that evil is real, right? Evil is very real. Because, look, we have human trafficking and things like that. These are evil. But we're talking about, like, supernatural evil. Yeah.

Because, you know, the human trafficking is human evil, right? But we're talking about something called supernatural evil. So it's another category of evil that we're talking about. And I think when you get into the UFO scenario, you know, when you start to go into the communities and you're, you know, a little bit self-aware, you know, it does that thing that you explained earlier, you know, it's like a forcing function. Yes. And it causes you to see the reality of things that we weren't. taught to believe in because we live in a fairly secular society. Even if we're religious, we're still secular, right?

So it's like the re-enchantment of the world. It really is. Are we on the verge of a paradigm shift? A re-enchantment of the world. A breakdown of the cold scientific paradigm that's run its course. Science has become the pervasive mythology of our time. It has a founding myth, the Big Bang, a miraculous event for which we don't really have

too many plausible causal explanations. a teleology of primitive-to-progress evolution which makes us feel safe and rituals that involve lab coats, beakers, and microscopes to gain deeper access to the secrets of the universe. In other words, it has all of the elements of a religion. Yes, scientific breakthroughs require domain expertise, hard work, time, and diligence. But then there's a final step that no one can dissect involving spontaneous revelation. Whether that's Einstein constructing the photoelectric effect while bored at his Swiss patent death, Wolfgang Pauley dreaming up the architecture of the hydrogen atom, Heisenberg at Helgoland, or Dirac staring at the fire in Cambridge. This last revelational step of science is inexplicable and irreducible,

and it seems a lot like what we used to call divine inspiration. So what drives these epistemological shifts that seem to occur for mankind throughout history? Well, in her latest book called Encounters, Diana writes that she refrained from teaching her students one thing about Plato's cave allegory, the existence of the puppet masters. Who's controlling the shadows on the cave wall we see? Who's dropping the monolith and manipulating our reality? Let's talk about Simone. Yes. Okay, so Simone's in the book. I have a chapter devoted to her. She does believe that we're living in a time of a revelation, literally though. And what is being revealed is that we, is AI. And AI, she thinks, is whole.

because it will take the power out of a group that has had it for a very long time and distribute. It's kind of like another French revolution, but a definitive one. But depending on how it goes, it could be like the Gutenberg press or in a subversive, or it could be, you know, Biden just came out with regulations around it. And there are a few companies that feel like they're really on the frontier of, I think AGI is overhyped in BS. But like, you know, the harder core research. and then you have the CCP using AI for draconian 1984 like purposes. And so I do think it could go either way.

It's like up to us. Like history is being written. All the UFOs are similar. They're these sort of like generic templates like AI, UFOs. And it's almost like this Gallum-like thing that we're actively creating and they can be evil or they can and totalitarian or they can be good and personally empowering. Well, you see, this is where I kind of differ. Okay. Let's get into it.

Yeah. Okay. So how I differ is I don't think it's up to us. The only thing that's up to us is our personal salvation. Ah, I love that. Yeah. And when I say personal salvation, I'm not talking about that in a strictly Christian way. I'm talking about that in a human way.

Every one of us has, you know what that means, right? When I say that, we're all implicated, every one of us. And that's necessary now. Totally necessary. like you said, that's why I like your idea of the forcing function of the UFO and AI. Yes. And so that's good. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, worshiping them is bad both. Oh, of course. Like I met that I interviewed the Google engineer that left because he thought that Lambda was sentient or whatever. And I came away thinking, because I actually worked in AI at Google before getting my job. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. And I came away.

I always was cynical about the AGI narrative, the idea that we'll have some hard takeoff and artificial. general intelligence will realize that human meat space is like not being used efficiently and like kill us all or whatever. I just always was kind of cynical about that. And I think it's mostly statistics on steroids and not sentient, not actually conscious. But I came away from that interview being shocked at his belief. And like I couldn't argue with his belief. And some people might think about my own belief in UFOs is similar or something. And so I was like whether or not the AI is conscious or not, the sociological repercussions of people impugning consciousness on the AI, that is going to be drastic and massive.

Yes, totally. And it's the same with the UFOs. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yes, I totally see. You sound like a religious study scholar. You know, you're doing the meta, look at it instead of like, you know, just taking it at face value. You're like, the belief in it is the issue. It doesn't matter whether it's real or not.

Right. Right, well, and then if you have a parapsychological worldview where belief is fundamental, then all of a sudden, you know, that's a false dichotomy. That's right. That's like the most powerful thing. Yeah. What humans believe, or if you're a follower of Plato, but belief is somehow just central to where society goes and what happens. But the thing that we're asking now is, you know, at this time in human history, I think that we need to see ourselves.

How do, how, you know, the Greek would be like noesis, knowledge of your primal. How do you, there's clearly no, you know, formula. Well, there kind of is, and what is it? Okay. It's like self-examination. Yes. It's like, how do you feel now? Why do you feel that way?

Yeah. You know, somebody comes into your space, are they in need? You know, oh, what are you going to do about it? Kind of thing like that. Yeah. Like, these are the kinds of things that, um, that we just need to, we need to pay attention to us. And like I said, the UFO is probably out there to, to get us out of our program so we can actually do some self-examination.

How do you feel now? Pretty awesome. Me too, yeah. In Encounters, Diana also interviews a friend whose father was allegedly part of one of the Secret American Space programs, something like the one Tyler from American Cosmic was in. One thing her friend told Diana about her father gave me goosebumps and will probably stay with me forever. She says, a joke my father and his friends often exchanged consisted of one word.

simulacrum. Can I make one more point with you might? Okay. If you want to shatter the Western mental structures, the Western minds, so to speak, which is now permeating the whole earth in its materialist dualistic philosophy, the way you do it is you take something that's supposed to be in the spirit world, because even in the West we can make allowance for the spirit world, We can study it through mythology, through religion, through imagination, through poetry.

But the one unforgivable sin to the Western mind is when something that should be in the spirit world transgresses and shows up in the physical world. That traffic is the cardinal sin for the Western mind. So it has great power to shatter the belief structure of the Western mind when that occurs. And that's precisely what's occurring in this abduction phenomenon. Very good point. Thanks very much for talking with me. Good, good, good. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one.

Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery. during online deal days, plus $30 off your first online order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.