Danny Jones Podcast - #227 - Ancient Religion Professor: UFOs, The Paranormal & Esotericism | Jeff Kripal

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Watch the after show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Jeff Kripal is a professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Jeff takes a closer look at paradoxical thoughts on the UFO phenomenon from a historian of religion. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School & is the author of eight books, including Changed in a Flash. SPONSORS https://babbel.com/danny - Get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime subscription. https://bubsnaturals.com/DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. https://ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY to save 15% on your first order. EPISODE LINKS https://jeffreyjkripal.com Jeff's books: https://amzn.to/3UZEzCk FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Trauma & extra sensory perception 05:24 - The history of religions 08:26 - Elizabeth Krohn; struck by lightning 20:39 - Study of near-death experiences 26:38 - DMT 32:10 - Filter thesis of consciousness 36:08 - Noosphere connectivity 38:26 - Jeff's personal beliefs 42:18 - Science VS Experience 45:23 - What happens after death 51:48 - UFO's 58:51 - Advanced propulsion & energy 01:06:47 - Demonic possession 01:13:30 - Spirituality of the flying saucer 01:20:12 - Historical transcendence 01:21:21 - Human obsession with mysteries 01:24:19 - Dystopia 01:27:23 - Artificial Intelligence 01:29:25 - AI materialism vs mediation consciousness 01:32:11 - Chris Bledsoe 01:44:27 - Rosicrucianism 01:56:20 - Sex & aliens 02:13:56 - John Mack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before the episode starts, I just wanted to say thank you to all the new YouTube subscribers we've gotten this month. It has been growing like a weed, along with Spotify and Patreon. If you have not yet subscribed to the channel, go down and hammer that subscribe button below the video. Leave a comment and enjoy the show. These things happen. The phenomenon is real. Clairvoyance is a real thing. Precognition is a real thing.

All of these things are absolutely part of the human condition. but you can't put them on call, which is what you need in a scientific experiment. You need to replicate things and you need to be able to falsify things. And ultimately you need to be able to quantify things. And you can't do any of that here. But it doesn't mean they're not real. It just means you can't do ordinary science with them. And what the remote viewers were trying to do, certainly as I understand it,

they were trying to use these things for espionage. And sometimes they worked very, very well, but they did not work all the time. And so that's where the science falls, but the reality still pokes through, as it were. My own feeling about it is that you need trauma to induce these things. So go back to the David Morehouse story. Well, he didn't become a remote viewer,

until he was shot in the head. Right. And you mentioned Elizabeth Crone. Well, Elizabeth didn't become psychic until she was struck by lightning and almost died. So I think there's something about trauma and illness and suffering that opens people up to these capacities. And these capacities often come online after a traumatic event, whether that's physical or emotional or sexual or everything altogether. And sometimes it doesn't, they don't come online at all. Sometimes the trauma is just, it just mangles people, essentially.

So I don't think we understand this at all, Danny. But I think trauma is somehow involved in it. And I think that's why these are not scientific, as it were. You can't induce trauma in a scientific experiment, by the way. Not at least, not morally. Not ethically or morally. No, no IRB at any university would allow. you to traumatize human beings, you know, over and over, which is what you'd have to do

to operationalize or study these things. And even then it may not work at all. You might just, you know, kill the person or traumatize the person. David Morehouse says that this, these extra senses and this extra perception that people have, people like him, acquired through head trauma. He said that's something that everybody has either buried down and deep inside, it just needs to be sort of let loose somehow, and there needs to be some sort of event that brings it to the surface. I think it's trauma. It's trauma.

I think it's trauma that lets it lose. Of course, I do think these are part of the human condition, and we all have these capacities. It doesn't mean we all have access to them. Do you think past humans in maybe harder times had this stuff come to them more naturally, and it was sort of an normal thing. And then as we evolved and built cities and self-driving cars and iPads and phones,

that this stuff just sort of got buried. Yes, I do. I think the assumption is that, you know, things are getting better and we're evolving to, you know, more and more abilities. But I think actually the opposite might be true that we've lost a lot of these abilities,

but maybe for good reason. You know, I mean, anesthesia, I mean, antibiotics, painkillers, I mean, these are not bad things, Danny, but they certainly suppress the pain and the suffering that allowed people to access to these abilities and these other realms, as it were. So I think there is a, you know, to invoke my field again, I think the modern human being is more buffered, which a word used a lot. The psyche is put together in a way that is much more egoic and stable and rational than it was, say, five, six hundred years ago.

Our ancestors were much more open to other realms and other kinds of beings, but they also suffered more. They lived very much shorter lives as well. Right. So it's not like we want to go back to that. I'm not suggesting that. But I think acknowledging this is extremely helpful because it gets us out of this notion that if you can't demonstrate something scientific, it's not real.

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It just means it's not amenable to the scientific method. That's what it means. And there's a lot of things about human experience that are not amenable to the scientific method. So for people that may not be familiar with you and your work, can you give people an introduction into how you got into this field and what exactly you're doing today? Yeah, yeah. So I was trained in a field called History of Religions at the University of Chicago in the late 80s and early 90s. And essentially, this is the comparative study of religion. But really broad, Danny, like from ancient Kvar to the contemporary near-death experience.

So it's like everything. Now, when you're trained in it, you focus on a particular area and a particular culture and a particular language for sure. but the goal is to understand the most extreme forms of human religious experience comparatively to sort of look for patterns and see what's similar and what's different. I started out actually in the early 90s I was a scholar of Hinduism actually. I studied Indian languages. And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, I got very interested in the American counterculture through a place called the Usslyn Institute

in Big Sur, California. And what I was really interested in was how did these countercultural actors understand Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or whatever the Asian religion was? And what did they embrace and what did they not embrace about these cultures?

And it was really that work mostly in California that that exposed me to or I encountered human beings who kept telling me extraordinary stories about things like near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic experiences, UFO

experiences. I heard the whole gamut and I realized that historians and scholars of religion just didn't have any way of dealing with that. We had ways of dealing with it, but it was not dealing with it. We would say, oh, that's an exaggeration or that's a legend or that's some kind

of power play. That's a And I realized that, no, none of that really worked. People actually did have these experiences. And so I wrote a number of books about what most people would think of as the paranormal. I wrote a book called Authors with the Impossible, which maybe we can talk about. I wrote a book about comic books and science fiction called Mutants and Mystics. I wrote a big memoir manifesto kind of tying all the books together called Secret Body. I worked with a man named Whitley Streber, wrote a book called The Super Now.

natural, three words. I wrote another book with a near-death experiencer named Elizabeth Crone called Change in a Flash. I wrote a book about scientists and engineers called The Flip, which is about their own extraordinary experiences and how they flip their worldview

after these. And I work mostly now with frankly experiencers, and I try to understand what they saw or what happened to them and how we understand this theoretically or comparatively. So that book changed in a flash with Elizabeth Crone.

How did you get introduced to her? Yeah, it's actually a funny story. I was invited, as I often am, by a student of mine, to come over to the Texas Medical Center. And they were having a panel on near-death experiences in something called the Institute for Spirituality and Health now. and Elizabeth was one of the speakers. But anyway, Elizabeth told this story of how she was struck by lightning and how she had this really wild near-death experience.

And she told this all in the medical center in Houston. And I went up to her and I said, Elizabeth, that is a great story. And you should write a book. And she said to me, well, I don't know how to write a book. And I said, well, I don't have a great story, but I know how to write a book. And so we worked for a couple years And we published Change the Flash And it's basically the first half of the book

Is her telling her story And the second half of the book is Is me sort of trying to make sense of it In the context of the study of religion Anthropology and history and that kind of thing So what is the story? Can you give me a recount of the story? Sure.

I mean I'm not Elizabeth. Right. Well, we can pretend. Yeah. My joke is, you know, I'm the warm-up band for the Beatles and she's the Beatles and she really is and so what happened was

Elizabeth this is 1988 and it's the art site of her grandfather's death so it's the first annual it's the first annual memorial of her grandfather's death

and she wants to take her boys to the synagogue to hear the name of her grandfather read out and she puts them in a car they're two and four something. I don't know if they're ages. She

goes to the synagogue and she gets out of her car and she's holding this umbrella and she literally gets struck by lightning in the parking lot of her synagogue. And she has this extraordinary two-week near-death experience. Here on earth

it lasts maybe two minutes. And she comes out of this experience. She knew she was going to have a daughter in the future. She knew she was going to get divorced. She knew all these things right away. And then she started to have all of these extraordinary sort of pre-cognitive experiences.

Like she knew a family member was going to die who then died like the next day. She got a phone call from her dead grandfather like at three in the morning. You know, if the phone rings at three in the morning, it's always something bad. And she started to have nightmares of things like earthquakes and plane crashes. and stuff that would happen the next day and the news. And so she got very overwhelmed by all of this. And it took her, well, from 1988 to 2018 or 2017, to tell the story.

And the reason she waited so long is she didn't want her kids to be made fun of. She didn't want her kids to be the kids with a strange mother. And so we wrote. this book together and and it's it's done really well actually a lot of people have read it um we were just on myam bialyx um podcast i don't know if you know my name bialik she's on the big bang theory and yeah i watched that i listened to that podcast last night yeah so myam loved the book and we had a long conversation around it and it really it really deals with this issue of what is

the soul or what is consciousness do we survive bodily death what do we make of near death experiences. How is Elizabeth's near death experience related to the Jewish mystical traditions? Mystical traditions? And how do we understand the imagination? How do we understand dream? How do we understand precognition? You know, it gets into all these questions. I think in a pretty plausible, useful way. So she explained, I remember listening to the podcast that she explained that after she got struck by lightning, she walked inside the synagogue with her two boys. Yeah.

And then everyone was like, we need to go, we need a doctor. And then she turned around to look back outside and she saw her body laying there. Right. And then that's when she realized that she was dead. Right. Right. She didn't know she was dead. And she didn't.

She was wondering about why is no one paying me any attention? Oh, nobody was interacting with her. No. No. And the thing that she was all obsessed about right after the lighting strike was her shoes, actually. because she had just purchased these new shoes and she was so proud of these shoes and they were toast.

Totally destroyed on them. They were where the lightning grounded out so they just blew up basically. And so there's humor in it and there's a moment where as someone asks for a doctor in the house and of course it's a Jewish synagogue, it's all doctors.

It's all doctors. It's a Jewish city. And lawyers. Not only is it a synagogue but it's right near the medical center. Of course, it's filled with, and the man who happened to be the expert on lightning strikes was actually there. And he was the one who treated her and got her back. He's like, no point calling 911. They're just going to call me. Yeah.

Well, that's exactly what he said. That's amazing. Yeah. So then she saw like a light. She noticed she was floating. She saw a light. She followed a light somewhere. Yeah.

And then she went to some crazy garden that she couldn't put words to. She couldn't describe the colors with words. Yeah. Yeah. She was in a garden for two weeks. and talked to this male voice who was... The voice was her grandfather's voice, but she was pretty sure it wasn't her grandfather.

She thought it was God. Yeah, she thought it was God. And then there were these mountains and this light on the other side of the mountain. And she knew if she went towards the light, she wouldn't come back. Oh, really? Yeah.

And so she stays in the garden. And what's so interesting about working with Elizabeth was I was like, you know, the garden and the mountains and God is a male and all of this stuff. It's so Jewish. And I said to her, I said, you know, how do you understand that? And she was really sophisticated about it. She basically said, look, everybody's going to have their own experience of the afterlife.

They're going to experience it the way their culture or their religion or they're set up to experience it. But there's still something there. So she had this very both-and kind of position that I found very useful as someone trying to think about religious experiences across the board. So was this garden she was in? Was that sort of like a metaphor for purgatory or for like a... It wasn't a metaphor for her. It was like a, but like how do you interpret that? How do you interpret the garden where like a, like with your religious studies background?

Yeah. Where was that? And do you think that she made a decision not to go to the light, meaning not to pass on to the afterlife? And she decided to go back to the earth or the space time we live in now. Do you think that's something that happens to everybody or most people? I think it happens to a lot of people. I don't know if it happens to most of us.

I mean, obviously, some people have no choice. If you get your hit by a truck, you're not going to have much of the choice. So I talk about this in the book. And first of all, let me back up. First of all, the garden is a very Jewish visionary display. You know, paradise is a garden. And the Jewish tradition talks a lot about the garden of the afterlife, as does, of course, the Christian tradition coming afterwards.

So I think that kind of visionary landscape, but I think it really was a visionary landscape. I don't think it's a metaphor in the sense she's just talking like that. I think she really experienced herself in a garden. So that didn't come from any prior knowledge that she had. I think it came from her Jewish background. Okay.

Whatever, however we understand that. Okay. But I don't think she consciously created it, Danny. I see. I don't think she's, it's like a dream, you know. It's like when you get up in the morning, you're like, what the hell was that about? Right?

It's some part of you is telling you a story that's not you, but it is you. And I think the garden and the mountain is something like this. It's some part of Elizabeth's background that is trying to speak to her in symbols, let's say, or a visionary landscape. But it doesn't mean exactly literally what it is, if I can put it that way. And the reason I say that, I've explained this on, in many, context. I work with many people and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions probably people have near-death experiences and they're all different. But they also share these patterns, you know, that are similar to. And so when you look at the whole thing, you can't say,

oh, it's a garden because that then locks out all these other experiences and all these other human beings, but you can't sign your name to any of their experiences either. So you have to back up a bit and say, well, something's mediating this. Something is using these mythical landscapes or these visionary landscapes to communicate something, but it's not exactly what is there. And, okay, so that's a theory, but it's a very helpful theory because it allows us to appreciate a whole bunch of things and not just one thing. and that's really my goal as a comparativist is to keep all that stuff on the table and not to start shoving stuff off the table I don't like right now in the real world after she got struck by lightning how long did it take for her to get brought back to life so again your phrase the real world yes the real world the world that you and I are sitting in right now we of course privileged this world and we think it's it's it's the real world but maybe Maybe it's not. Maybe the world Elizabeth was in was more real in some sense than this world. But to answer your question, two minutes. She was out for two minutes. Maybe, maybe around there.

I mean, she was unconscious. She was lying in the parking lot in the rain charred and wounded by the lightning strike and completely gone, completely out. Heart stopped. We don't know. We don't know. I mean, how would we know? Couldn't they check her pulse? Well, I think once they started to, well, they eventually ran out to her, right, in the rain. Oh, it was after two minutes.

In the parking. I mean, it took a while for people to realize what had happened, right? Right. So I don't think we know, I at least don't know the medical details. Okay, I got it. We know the medical details of other people who have had near-death experiences because they're recorded. They're in an operation or an operating room. This is in the wild, as it were.

So we don't really know. But in Elizabeth's story, she's out for about, she's gone, she's dead for about two minutes. And then she comes back online and she, of course, wakes up and she's in a lot of pain because she just, I mean, she's just been struck by an immense bolt of electricity. But these experiences then develop over a series of months, actually, after the, after the, the strike, as you often see, by the way, a near-death experiencers. And again, that's the trauma that I'm trying to get. A near-death experience, by definition, is traumatic. Yes.

I mean, you almost died. Right. And that might be a car accident. It might be a heart attack. It might be an operation that went wrong. It might be a lightning strike. Something has to go very, very wrong. And, you know, as I say in the book, what we call the near-death experience, I think it's

been happening forever as far as we can see back, but people just died. They just died. And so, of course, we didn't hear those stories. But with the rise of medical technology, we now have this ability to pull people back. We can resuscitate people who would otherwise be dead. And guess what? They come back with a lot of these stories because they have these experiences and they remember them. And so there's a whole modern literature now around the near-death experience that didn't exist 50 years ago. Right. How did she know when she was out that she was gone for exactly two weeks?

And then did she say, like, can you give me some more details on this light she decided not to follow and how that worked? Well, so the reason she gives for the two-week answer is that there were spheres or planet-like objects in the sky, and they were somehow measuring time. And so she has this sense of two weeks because of the way those planets or those spheres moved. The light, you know, she definitely senses, well, she senses an other, a kind of twin or an angelic other with her all along, but she also recognizes that if she goes towards the light

on the other side of the mountains that she won't come back. She won't come back into the plane you and I are in right now. But she chooses to do that, of course. She chooses to come back and she's told she's going to have a daughter and that she's going to get a divorce.

And by the way, the lightning strike, it struck her wedding ring. She was holding the umbrella by the wedding ring was on the umbrella. So there's the role of the ring and the marriage and the divorce and the child, all of this is really significant to Elizabeth's story. And of course, I got to know Barry, too, the first husband.

And, you know, he's wonderful. I mean, he talks about all of this. And the near-death experience in Elizabeth's language really changed her and was partly resulted in the divorce, by the way, because she was just a different person. So what changed her afterwards? Well, this is what I talk about. I mean, she understood that she is not her body,

that she has this spiritual essence or soul that survives bodily death. And she became much more spiritual, but she became much less religious in her modern language. I mean, she couldn't get the rabbis from her synagogue to take her experience seriously, but she could get the Habad kind of Orthodox community to take it seriously. So, but she, she, she, she's very uncomfortable with, with Orthodox Jewish kosher laws around food and gender and sexuality.

So she's kind of in this middle zone where the part of her tradition that will listen to her experience is precisely the part of it she doesn't like socially or ethically. and I think that's the case for a lot of people by the way Danny I as a historian of religions again I'm really interested in when people have religious experiences that don't actually fit in to their religious upbringing or what their culture or community wants and I'm interested in those because there's a kind of purity there

there there's a kind of integrity there that I think is really powerful and honest and if you have have a religious experience that matches your religion perfectly. Well, it wasn't that convenient. Yeah. My colleagues always come in and say, well, of course it did. You know, I mean, it's constructed.

It's just the culture. It's doing its own thing. But when somebody has an experience that doesn't fit into their culture, then I'm like, well, what about this then? You know, like, that's interesting. Maybe something's going on that isn't actually specific to the religion or the culture or the community. And so that's why I'm interested in.

It's not that I'm perverse or inappropriate. I'm just really interested in people's experiences when they don't fit in. Because I think there's a kind of quality there that you don't find in other kinds of experiences. Yeah, the near-death experience is really interesting when you get to understand some of the stuff that Andrew Gowler. Alamoire talks about. You're familiar with Andrew? Yeah, I am. He's doing the DMTX study in Tokyo.

Fascinating what he's doing. He's basically, for people who don't know, he's doing these long, these extended state DMT studies where they put people on intravenous DMT, like a slow drip, and then they're trying to essentially map the DMT realm. Right, right.

And figure out what's going on there, what are these little elves they're seeing, and try to understand it more. And it's, you know, there's, I don't know if they're how comprehensive or real the studies are regarding the pineal gland and the DMT that gets released when you die or near death experiences. But what have you found or what have you discovered when it comes to how DMT in our brain creates these sort of psychedelic experiences? Yeah. So I think the psychedelic analogue. or comparison is really powerful.

If you look, and I've spent a lot of time with psychedelic researchers, I'm not naive here. If you look at people's psychedelic states, they can be really wild. I mean, they can see things and experience things that make UFO encounters look tame. Right. Okay?

All right? Yes. But they also really happen over and over and over again. And so the researcher is always, I think, kind of push back on this. It's just a theory of the imagination again. And I don't mean the imaginary. I mean, the imagination is somehow giving access to this other realm. And it's mediating this other realm in a really powerful way.

But it doesn't mean that what's being imagined is not there. and I think with Gallimore's work, which I know a little about, I mean, I have one of his books and have dipped into it, I think the near-death experience is like the psychedelic state. The penioglan theory is essentially, the theory essentially says that what happens in death is the penioland secrete's DMT into the organism, and the person has this psychedelic state essentially that allows them to die in a fairly peaceful way.

And my experience of that is, you know, years ago I was invited to a DMT seminar in England, actually, and they asked me to bring Whitley Strieber. I think they just wanted me for Whitley, actually. And I was like, well, Wittley Strieber doesn't do psychedelics. He's wild enough. I mean, he has these experiences of what he calls the visitors all the time without psychedelics. And they're like, yeah, we know, but we think it's endogenous DMT release. In other words, we think his body is releasing DMT, and that's how he's having these experiences.

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Now back to the show. That's like, wow, that's an interesting idea. And so I talked to Willie about this. I'm like, Willie, will you go to England with me and talk to these people? And he's like, sure, but I don't do psychedelics. You know, I'm basically strange enough in his own way. But that was the theory. And I think that's a plausible theory.

We don't know if it's true. But again, it gets back to this issue of trauma. that I was talking about earlier. You need the trauma, you need the near death to activate the penial gland to release the DMT that then helps mediate this experience.

And the question, Danny, is, for someone certainly like myself, is, are you making that argument reductively or non-reductively? And by that I mean, do you think it's just the penial gland and the brain's on drugs, essentially?

And so you're hallucinating? Yeah, is it like stuck on, is it broken and stuck on repeat? Or, or, and I think this is what these researchers really think, is the DMT acting as a kind of mediation or as a kind of opening of the portal that the soul is then going through. And I think it really matters which of those options you choose, you know. Let me put it this way. And I'm going to sound a bit nerdy here, but. The reigning model in neuroscience is what we call the production model.

And that's the idea that consciousness is entirely produced by material processes. In our case, a neurological kind of light show in the brain that is very patterned and very organized and it produces Danny or it produces Jeff. That makes no sense, actually, of a lot of the phenomenon that I'm interested in, like precognition and out-of-body. experiences and all of these encounters we're talking about. So people in my world, at least since William James, and probably earlier than him, people like Frederick Myers and way back, essentially argued what's called the filter thesis, or what we call the filter thesis today. And this essentially says that the brain is certainly mediating these states of consciousness,

but it's actually not producing them. And so what you want to look for is instances in which the brain is being shut down because then other things can flow in. In a filter thesis, the brain is a filter. You're shutting most things out so that you can eat things and survive and reproduce in a kind of Darwinian sense. And so what you want to look for is when does the brain shut down? And of course, psychedelics is a great way to shut down brain processes.

Meditation is a great way to shut down brain processes. Car wrecks, lightning strikes. You can go on and on. But every instance of this shutting down the brain is probably going to be traumatic to the person unless you can integrate it into the ritual of the system, which is I think what meditation is. So I think it matters a great deal. What I'm trying to say is it matters a great deal.

how you understand the relationship between brain and consciousness or brain and mind. And I think the reigning scientific model is certainly the production thesis. And so when the brain shuts down in death, guess what? Consciousness just blips out like a light bulb. Because the material base has ended. Right. But in Elizabeth's view, and I think in Whitley's and in a lot of these experiences, that actually doesn't actually end consciousness.

So clearly consciousness is not dependent on brain processes. Clearly it's something else is going on. And that's where this filter thesis comes in. And you can call the transmission thesis. You can call all kinds of things. But it's essentially a different understanding of how the brain and the mind are related. Is this connected any way to Chardon,

Chardin's theory of the Neuosphere? Yeah, Tehar de Chardin. Tayhard is his first name. Yeah, Tayhard. Probably, I mean, so I know a lot about Tehrahar. I can tell you funny stories about Tehrard, Mr. Dan, too. He was a Catholic paleontologist who had a, basically his view was that God worked through evolution and that the noose was this sort of cosmic mind that was going to develop, you know, in the future.

when human beings were integrated, more integrated in some way. And so he talked about the newest fear. You know, and some people have connected this to the Internet and, you know, have kind of gone in that direction. It's really not what Teilhard was saying. He was much more interested in evolution as a kind of mystical process through which God creates human beings and eventually consciousness

and eventually this sort of new cosmic mind. So I would say that most religions have, a filter thesis. In other words, they do not understand the body as producing mind or consciousness full stop. Most religious, most traditional cultures see the soul or the spirit as somehow independent of the body and the brain. And so when the body and the brain dies, the soul or the spirit does not. Now, again, that's open to conversation. I don't have an answer there.

But I think someone like Tejard, who comes out of a Roman Catholic, mystical tradition definitely was working with some kind of filter thesis, although he would never use that language, and I would never impose it on him. Yeah, it's interesting when you think about this sort of like unifying consciousness, like this newosphere. And basically, and do I have this right, the idea is somebody like across the world can come up with this crazy new idea at the same time, like somebody on the polar opposite of the planet it will have the same idea, right?

Like somehow we're all connected in this sort of layer of consciousness that envelops all of us. Well, so a lot of religious practice implies this. So, for example, if I were to, I'm not a religious person, Danny, but. Oh, you're not? I'm not. I mean, not in a traditional way. Do you leave in God? Yeah, I do, actually.

we can talk about that I'm framing this so in a particular way It's all right, it's all right We can go back there Let's say I were to pray for you Okay Okay Well that ritual implies we're connected

In some way And that I can pray to this deity Who can then somehow impact Danny's life I mean there's a kind of trialogue going on there There's a kind of triangle there But also in a lot of psychical experience somebody wakes up in the middle of night and says, oh, Grandma just

died. They know instantly. So clearly there's a connection there between the loved one and the person who wakes up. Well, what is that connection? What is going on there? And so that's the kind

of, one of my colleagues calls it co-inherence. That's the kind of Barbara Newman's her name. That's the kind of connection that is so deep it needs religious language to describe it. And I think a lot of the reason I invoke prayer is

it implies the same thing, even if people don't talk about it. If you're praying for someone, then you're connected to that person. You believe on some level you're connected to that person and that your mental act can somehow affect physical events.

Which is a remarkable thing, Danny. If that in case is true. Right. So why being a person who studies religion and has dedicated your life to religion, how could you not be a religious person? I knew you were going to come back to that. It goes back to the taking everybody seriously thing. If I sign my name to a particular religion, it means I've locked out all these other people. And so it's not that it's not that I don't, religious views.

In fact, I think I believe everything, Danny, which means I believe nothing. Because the religions exclude one another. Well, I can't exclude other people. I just can't do that because I think people are innately, inherently, inherently religious and have these experiences. And I want to take those experiences as seriously

as I take my own experiences seriously. And so I can't fall back and say, I'm this or I'm that, because in my own mind, that doesn't allow me to live with and take these other people seriously. So it's not that I'm, I often describe myself as the most religious person I know, but I don't actually have a religion. Not at least one I can identify.

Hmm. What do you think God is? I think God is us. I think we're God I think but not Danny but not Jeff but we

tap into some some greater reality you know that we call God in the Christian or the Jewish or the Islamic traditions but that other traditions

call other things you know that you don't have to be theistic or or personal about it you know there are religious traditions that acknowledge that other greater reality but don't turn it into a person or a god hmm god is us can you expand on that so let me let me put

it this way if i experience an alien and it looks a lot like i do my my inclination is to think it's somehow me that i'm i'm projecting to deal with i'm i'm i'm dealing with i'm i'm dealing with my own greater self by having this kind of experience. And it looks a lot like me because it is me. And so I have never, ever heard about an experience of God that didn't come from a human being. Ever. Okay, my dog does not talk about her experiences of God, okay? Nor did many of our cats or any animal.

I have only heard experiences of God from other human beings. beings, which leads me to think that there's something really human about God, that God is somehow this deeper self or cosmic mind behind or within humanity. And it's not that Jeff Krepple or Danny Jones is God. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we tap into and we exist because of this greater life force that lots of people have chosen to call God. And I'm like, okay, call it God. That's what you want. But other people don't call it God, Danny. They call it a whole bunch of other things.

And I'm like, well, that's true too. That's your experience. Going back to the near-death experiences, have you ever, I mean, well, first of all, what sort of actual experiments have you guys done? And how do you do, like, do you do experiments on people in hospice? and go, like, study them and figure out what's going on in their mind. No, I don't.

How do you guys do a proper scientific analysis of what's happening in these people's minds with near-death experiences? How can you do that in a measured setting? Well, first of all, I leave that to the scientists. There are psychiatrists and scientists who do exactly that that you're talking about. I don't.

I'm a historian. I'm a humanist. I listen to people's stories and I write about them, but I don't do that scientific laboratory study that you're referring to. Your question presumes, by the way, that science somehow tells us the truth, and history and confession and autobiography don't. So I think that's wrong. I think that's fundamentally wrong.

and I think we live in a culture that conflates scientific method with truth. And I just think that's mistaken. I just think it's mistaken. It's just wrong. Scientific truth is really useful and it can do all sorts of great things. I mean, we're talking on a piece of technology here. I mean, we used a refrigerator. We used a coffee machine.

I flew here in a plane. All those things are wonderful things. But they're practical things. They don't tell me why I exist. or what the meaning of life is, they do things. They can create cool things, but they can't tell me any of the questions

I want to know the answers to. Did you ever do any... Do you ever talk to anybody who had traumatic experience as a young kid? Oh, yeah, sure. And then maybe grew up, like, for example, I have a friend who had childhood leukemia. Yeah.

And had the first six years, seven years of his life were just living in and out of a hospital. Yeah. And, you know, it really dramatically changed his worldview after that. Elizabeth's like that, by the way. If you read the book, she was raped for six years as a child from the age of six to the age of 11. And she definitely relates her near-death experience to her early-death experience to her early. associative states. And she uses the word dissociative. I'm not

using it without her. So I definitely think there's a connection between early childhood trauma and later religious experiences. But again, I'm not proposing that in a reductive sense. It's not that I think the near-death experience can be

explained by the childhood sexual abuse or rape in this case. But I think they're definitely related psychologically and and biologically even So what do you believe actually happens when we die?

I think we die into our imaginations on sort of the far side of this world the immediate thing that happens I think is that we experience our imaginations in a really dramatic way whatever those imaginations are. I think

I don't know what happens after that, what happens after the mountain, the light at the end of the other mountain, because I don't have any memory of that. I do notice, again, as a comparativist, there are actually two forms of literature today that are very prominent.

One is the near-death experience literature. The other is children who remember previous lives. and they don't they're seldom compared Danny so the question for me is okay do we live once or do we live many times

and different religions again opt for different solutions by the way some religions have a kind of one life model and other religions have a cyclical kind of reincarnational model and I think if you look actually at the data as the scientists would say it's it's both you see both

in the data, you have children who really remember previous lives, which by the way ended traumatically in almost every single case. Really? Yeah? Yeah. And you have those children in Christian cultures, as well as Hindu and Buddhist cultures, by the way. They don't privilege. Certain worldviews allow those stories to circulate more easily, for sure.

But you also have these cases in cultures in which there is no reincarnation. and the lives one of the things when I talk to the researchers here one of the patterns they see is that the previous life was overwhelmingly male and the reason is overwhelmingly male yeah the reason is that they speculate

is that in most cultures males are much more likely to die violently than females much more it's not a universal rule I mean there obviously you can die violently as a female as well. But generally, generally they identify

male in the previous life when their life was ended by gunshot or murder or war or whatever the case was. And also in these other cultures, Danny, this gives them a very powerful way of talking about gender and identity, by the way.

Because this notion of being a woman in a man's body or a man and it's not unusual at all. in a reincarnational worldview. It makes total sense, actually. Well, you were a woman in your previous life, and now you're in a man's body. So, of course, somehow you're more aware of that

than you probably should be. You know, because we're, in these worldviews anyway, we're designed to forget our previous life so we can focus on this one and imagine that you're Danny Jones and I'm Jeff Kriple and this is it. Well, it's not it in this bigger worldview. How come there are only kids imagining or remembering previous lives?

Why don't you see older people doing that? So again, we just have theories. We just have ideas. Of course. But there's a lot of literature actually on this. And generally these memories erupt around the acquisition of language. So say around three. Oh, okay.

And they disappear around five or six, maybe seven. And the idea is that they erupt at language because the child actually has these memories and you can articulate them. But they have to be suppressed and forgotten so that you can be this other person. You can have this other life. I mean, Danny, it's hard enough being one person, right? Can you imagine if you were two people or three people or four people or five or six? I mean, you would be really confused. Yeah, I bet.

Yeah, I mean, at least I would be. Yeah. So there's a, there's a model on why these memories. And they do really only, they tend to manifest between three and six or seven. You know, you also hear lots of crazy stories of kids having these crazy visions and UFO experiences and stuff like that more than anyone. Like, there's more of these sightings around schools than any. Yeah. Than anywhere else.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes, so first of all, I mean, let me say this. Let me say, I don't have answers, Danny. It's not like that I can tell you what happens to us when we die, or I can tell you who God is, or I can tell you any of these big questions. But we should be having this conversation. And I don't just mean Danny and Jeff. I mean, in the broader culture, we should be focusing on these cases, because these are the ultimate and most important questions

I think a human being can ask. And I think, so what shuts down the conversation I'm against and what allows and encourages the conversation I'm all for. So again, this gets back to your question of religion. It's, I want to keep everything on the table and restricting myself to one particular religion takes a lot of stuff off the table that I just don't want to take off.

So in some ways it's a more generous view than a particular religious or cultural identity. In other ways it's problematic. I don't want to romanticize it. You know, I'm lonely. I don't have a community. I don't, you know,

there is a heavy cost to this. So I don't want to romanticize the conversation or the the process, but I think it's really important. I really think it's important we do this. What was you another question that I just flew off? I don't remember. One of the things I also wanted to talk to about was,

I wanted to ask you, how did you get wrapped up in this whole current UFO community that is taking shape right now? Yeah, no, that's a good question. I remember you, I watched your talk at the Soul Conference, which I believe is with Australia. No, no, it was at Stanford. Oh, was it Stanford? Yeah.

We were looking up something on our Patreon show earlier, and I said it was in Australia. That was weird. Well, Ross, Ross Colthard is from Australia, but the Soul Foundation is based at Stanford with Gary Nolan and the Stanford Medical School there. Okay, cool. Anyways, so I don't know how I mixed that up. I was watching your talk, and you mentioned that someone. somebody, some sort of propulsion expert, reached out to you and asked you to do a talk at MIT. Yeah.

Yeah, so the way I got into UFOs, first of all, I love UFOs. You do? Yeah. I can't stand them. No, you like them, too. I wish I could see one. Well, I did see one with Chris Bledsoe. That was the only UFO I've ever seen.

The reason I love the UFO is because, it's not because I understand it. It's because I don't understand it. And I don't think anybody else does either. So it's a kind of ideal framework for a professor or an intellectual or a writer. Because you're dealing with a topic that is open and rich and very much a part of people's lives, by the way. The way I got into it was I was writing about the counterculture, and I was talking to all these experiencers. And they were telling me all these wild stories that,

as I often say, couldn't happen, but did. And a lot of these involved UFOs. And so I started to write about the UFO. I think the first book I published on the UFO was 2007, was Essel in America and the religion and real religions. It's filled with UFOs, by the way. And it's about the American counterculture. It's about remote viewing.

It's about Russian-American diplomacy. All of which involved the UFO, by the way. And then what happened was I wrote this book called Mutants and Mystics that ends with a long chapter on Whitley Streber And then I wrote another book called Authors of the Impossible Which has two whole chapters on two French researchers, One Jacques Valet and the other Bertrand Moust Writing pretty much entirely about the UFO

Or largely about the UFO And I just became this strong voice In the American Academy for taking these things seriously in a historical context, in a religious or spiritual context. I never pretended to be the scientist or the engineer. I want to stay in my lane, as I often say, and I want to talk about these things historically. I think they're central to the history of religions. I don't think they're tangential.

But I don't think we actually know what they are. I think people imagine them in a kind of science fiction framework today, or they imagine them in a kind of nuts and bolts way, but other cultures and other previous time periods have experienced them similarly and differently. And so that's what I want to bring into the conversation. It's this sort of, again, this bigger picture. It's very much like the near-death experience

or God or prayer or whatever you want, however you want to talk about it. It's like, look, I just want to shake people and say, look, it didn't begin in 1947. It goes back thousands of years as far as we can see. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things I talked about with Diana when she was here. And she was talked about how she originally got like introduced to this whole UFO topic and how much it is depicted in religious texts. And she pointed out that there's a word. You could probably correct me on this.

But there's a word in the Bible that means cloud or something. Yeah. And it was it was they removed it or something from the Bible or what was the story behind that? the word that meant cloud that was often in the Bible. And she believes that when people are talking about clouds, they're really talking about UFOs. I don't really know. I don't know that word.

I mean, she's probably talking about the Hebrew Bible and the pillar of fire and cloud that guided the Israelites through the desert in the story in Exodus. But I don't really know. I mean, Diana is correct that religions filled with this stuff. I mean, this is what fascinates me about it. So it's like everywhere, but you won't talk about it.

Why won't you talk about it? I think this is what generates religious ideation and religious belief. I think it's what's behind religion, actually. But we won't talk about it, or we land on some kind of mythology or worldview that is common today, but makes no sense in the second or third century. So again, I don't. I just want to, I want to be the person in the room poking people saying, hey, what about this?

Gosh, precognition or mental telepathy is like common. It's like as common as water in these religions. Why aren't you talking about that? Why do you think it's only modern parapsychology or science that can do them? People have been having these experiences for a long, long time. And they've been thinking about them and creating models. and frameworks that we call religion to make sense of these things. Right.

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And why didn't he want you there? Yeah, I think his name is Charles. Charles Chase, I think is his name. Charles invited me to MIT. It was really a salon. It was a kind of intellectual salon. And he had spent his life in propulsion technology, and he was retired now. And his basic hunch, which I think is correct, actually, is that whatever,

whatever is propelling or manifesting as the UFO is probably involved in human levitation. Human levitation, Danny, is one of these topics that you can't talk about if you're a historian, but is really pretty obvious. I mean, it's pretty embarrassing, too. The embarrassing fact is people float. I don't think that's embarrassing. Well, it is too... That would be pretty fucking cool if I could float around.

It's, first of all, it's often unconscious or uncontrollable. The person doing it is not in control. What kind of floating are we talking about? We're talking about lifting off the ground. You know, so we're talking about people who, you know, Teresa of Avala or Joseph of Cupertina were two of the people who are usually talked about here. Well, Teresa prayed to have this not happen. She prayed to God to take it away.

Her floating abilities. Yeah, and he did. God did. And Joseph O Cupertino, he couldn't control it either. He would like scream every time it happened. And then he would float off the ground or shoot up into a tree or a statue or something. So can you real quick, a quick aside. I want you to, when was Teresa of Avalos?

16th century. 16th century. And where did she live? Spain. Teresa, 16th century, Spain. Okay, got it. Yeah. And Joseph of Cupertino, I want to say 17th century.

Italy, for sure. Okay. Teresa is very learned, became a doctor of the church. Joseph is not learned it at all, but was basically imprisoned or controlled by the church and kind of moved from monastery to monastery to church. Because people loved him, by the way. They felt like you did.

They're like, cool, I want to see this guy float. Well, the church didn't like that. You know, they want to control sanctity, and they want to control teaching, and they certainly wanted to control and hide Joseph. So that's what they did. So what I'm trying to say is

these things happen. This is part of history too. It's not controllable in a conscious way. And what Charles thought, he thought if I came to MIT, I could talk to the engineers and the scientists there,

and I could talk to them about human levitation, UFOs, make some sense of this. And I couldn't, of course. I can't make sense of it. But I think they're related. You know, because if you listen to people who encounter UFOs, first of all, there's a lot of levitation involved.

They'll float off their bed. There's also levitation involved in demonic possession cases and in all kinds of religious situations. But, you know, the UFO, as it's often talked about, doesn't. doesn't fly, you know, modern propulsion methods is basically about blowing stuff out the back of the, of the machine, and it propels you forward. So you have a controlled explosion, essentially, is what you have. And the UFO doesn't do that. It seems to just float there. You know, it seems to violate gravity in some really fundamental way. And human levitation clearly violates gravity in a fundamental way as well. Have you ever seen anybody levitate? No. Okay.

No. This guy? What's it? Has the propulsion guy? No. I don't know. I doubt it. Okay.

Again, these things are, this is what we're going back to our science conversation. These aren't things you can invoke. You know, these are things that just happen. And often they happen in ways that we can't control. Oh, look, you found him. Can you punch in on that a little bit? Yeah. Go up to the top when we read the title.

Charles Chase, former head revolutionary programs at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, now head of the UN Lab on A&D's place in a new business model for global challenge engagement. So that's Nick, by the way, Nick Cook. That is not Charles picture. Well, Nick Cook wrote the article. Yeah, yeah. They do talk about, gosh, he's in here somewhere. I have nominated this talk by Charles Chase at NCW's featured post 2020 because it embodies

so much of what our call to action campaign this year has been about, addressing global changes head on through the untapped power of the aerospace defense agency. He goes on to talk about this is a pretty cool thing right here. Charles explores all this in his 10-minute presentation and more. In it, you will hear about some of the activities he has been working on at UN Lab, his new ventures alongside DARPA and the Office of Naval Research. And he talks about propulsion. down here.

Breakthroughs. Charles concludes towards the end of his talk. The question is, will they, will they what? He's talking about... Will they? What was he talking about? The lack of... His moonshot program at L.M. identified many of these, a few years

ago, tech like energy storage, tidal energy, and water desalination. So the... This guy's interesting. So the hope is, look, here's the hope. The hope is if we can figure out how UFOs defy gravity, then we can create new energy and create new means of transportation.

Exactly. That's what they're trying to do. I think that's where this is going. And, you know, when Charles invited me up to MIT, he was, again, this was an intellectual salon. This wasn't, I don't think this was anything major. and I think he was just exploring. He was fishing for ideas to do obviously what he's doing now. Well, that's fascinating that, you know, people that are deep inside these private aerospace contractors are doing all this research, talking to people like you, the religious scholars.

He's a propulsion expert talking to a interested in a religious scholar. Yeah. No, listen, I know. I live with these scientists and engineers, and I talk to them. But again, it's one thing to say these things happen in human history and human experience. It's another thing to operationalize them and turn them into a technology. And again, that's where I stay in my lane, Danny. I don't do what they do.

I don't know how you do this. All I know is that the historical records suggest that these human beings floated off the ground. Absolutely. And he was asking you specifically about that to talk more about it. Yeah, he was. Yeah. That was about, I don't know, that was about six, seven years ago now. Since then, there's been a, there's a wonderful book on this, by the way, called They Flew by a historian named Carlos Iyer, who basically takes to task historians for not looking at the same material.

I mean, it's overwhelming, Danny. It's overwhelming as a historian if you start looking at this. It's just, it's obvious. It's like, yeah, this seems to have happened. And what sort of demonic possession cases have recounted this floating phenomenon? Well, lots. I mean, just first of all, look at the popular culture. You know, I mean, you'll see floating and levitation all over the demonic possession stories.

Yeah, see in movies. Yeah. So I, let me say this in the most diplomatic way I can. You don't have to be diplomatic. Yeah, well, I do, actually. I am not a fan of demonic language. What do you mean demonic language? Well, a lot of people when they interact with UFO accounts

or they interact with possession accounts, they immediately go to the demon language. They say, oh, well, this is real, but it's a demon. I mean, well, how do you know that? Right. That fits your religious worldview. I get that. But maybe your religious worldviews off.

Let's not jump to a particular, assumption or interpretation. I also think because of my traumatic thesis that a lot of paranormal phenomena are because of human suffering. And so the idea is that you're going to get a lot of demons, by the way,

that are part of these visionary landscapes because people are suffering, Danny. People are in real pain. And so I think to just demonize this further does a great disservice. It really hurts these people. I think what they need is to be listened to and to be taken seriously. And maybe their trauma and their illness is in fact producing the paranormal phenomenon. Maybe that's part of the phenomenon. But we'll never know that if we just say,

oh, it's demons, you know, and this person needs to be exercised. No. No. Maybe the exorcism will help. But it'll help if the person believes their demons as well, is what I'm trying to say. There's a kind of paradox there. Right. Right. Yeah. I'm sure you're, I know

you read, you're familiar with Diana's book American. Was it American Cosmic? Which he talks about Jacques's library where she, Diana talks tells a story about how she went to Jacques's place in San Francisco. And she went to his library and he has all these books on angels and demons.

And he gave her, handed her this book all about the history of Satan. And she said, if you want to understand this whole phenomenon, you need to understand this book, read this book. There are 666 pages in it. It's in French, too, by the way. It's in French, wow. Yeah.

Are you familiar with that book? Yeah, I am, actually. It's published by Carmelite Nuns, by the way. So I think this goes back to our question about why aren't you religious, Jeff. the reason is this again that to understand demonology or to understand Satan or to understand any of these things

I think requires one to step out of that worldview and to look at it in a way that is comparative and can say oh well there are a parapsychological phenomena involved in possession cases I mean people float off the ground but that doesn't mean that this is Satan or this is a demon

It might mean that the person thinks it's Satan or thinks it's a demon, sure. But I don't honor anyone's religious beliefs. You know, I mean, people can think it's all kinds of things. You know, believe it's all kinds of things. Okay, that doesn't mean it is. You know, from a comparative or a global perspective, it's something else is going on there. And I think with Jacques's work, I think he feels that the history of esoterrorism and certainly the history of Satan in this Carmelite nonsense

has something to do with the UFO as well in a comparative sense now. Because you're getting at the same kind of phenomenon. And at the root of this, at the root, you're looking at me funny, Danny, at the root of this conviction is that human beings have a capacity to experience God, or reality as it really is.

There's a kind of direct link there. But there's also, sometimes when they have these experiences, this science fiction movie goes off and they experience demons or angels or deities, or spacemen or aliens or visitors or whatever. So this folklore that develops around these cases is really important. It gives us an access to it.

But if we interpret it literally, we're in trouble. because then we can only interpret that particular case literally or we shove it back into some kind of framework that makes us comfortable which may be wrong which may be inadequate I suspect it is

I suspect all of our frameworks are inadequate What do you think is going on when people are possessed and they have been with exorcists with exorcisms? I think they've experienced a lot of trauma and that they're mentally suffering and that some part of them is breaking off of their other part,

and they're seeing this other part of them as the demon or the possessing the entity. Have you ever witnessed an exorcism? No. I have not. And I don't want to, by the way. Have you ever talked to an exorcist? No. No.

No. I've read exorcist. I've read about exorcism, but I haven't actually talked to an exorcist. And I'm sure if it's an exorcist, they're going to believe that most of the cases are psychiatric or not really demonic and they're going to believe some of the cases are. Otherwise, why would you be an exorcist? But there are lots of forms of exorcism, Danny. There's a lot of, there's exorcism and religions all over the world. So again, this is my question.

Why is that? why are human beings always possessed by essentially the local entities of the particular religion or the particular culture? Why is that? Well, that to me is a really good question.

And it pushes back to me, it pushes back on the human for me and it's that, well, there's some part of this human being that's breaking off and it's taking on whatever the cultural form happens to be in the local area. Yeah, so the spirituality of the flying saucer?

Yeah. Why do you think that's important? Well, it's what I'm working on now. And, you know, it goes back to this idea that the, you know, one of my jokes is, you know, strange beings come out of the sky and mess with people. That's called religion. It's also called the flying saucer or the UFO. I think if you look at people's encounters with flying saucers or UFOs, there's a kind of transcendence there.

There's a kind of awe and inspiration there. And by transcendence, I mean, they can't really be explained by our social location, by society, or even by nature, which is what science wants to do, by the way. It wants to build a model of the UFO that's based on, the mathematics and principles of material science. And I think that's mistaken. I think the saucer appears to human beings as not part of this world, but yet a part of this world.

So it appears at a particular moment in time, at a particular crisis point, a transition point. But it also talks about a world that is not society, is not the world, it's not the place of the person. And to me, that's the most defining feature of the UFO phenomenon, is that otherness that I don't want to reduce to things we think we understand. Going back to this propulsion guy, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you're aware, but there was a lot of science going on

and a lot of research going on in the 50s into anti-gravity and into the physics behind anti-gravity. And there were two guys, a father and son, their names are escaping me right now. Steve, you could probably find them.

But they were really making progress in this anti-gravity study. And then it all went dark. Like it stopped just out of nowhere in the 50s. And a lot of people speculate that it went dark because it went into some dark, you know, compartmentalized government program with, you know, like Lockheed Skunk Works and some of the stuff they're doing a groom lake. You know, that's always one of the biggest, you know, one of the most interesting things to me because, you know, if we, if humanity was to discover something like this, something that is beyond materialism, something that is spiritual in nature that, changes people's worldviews.

That is going to make war and military and even the idea of nation states sort of obsolete in a way. Well, okay. First of all, I'm very aware that some people

are interested in the UFO because of the technology and the hardware as it were or the sources of energy or the anti-gravitation. or whatever language you want. I see my role as a kind of warning or a caution there that, I mean, you can do the history of science and you can do the history of military technology, and great, go do that. But what I'm trying to say with the spirituality of the flying saucer is maybe it's not about any of those things.

Let me back up and give you an example. So last night we had a Jain lecture at my university on Jainism, which is an ancient Indian religion. And one of the images of Jainism, Jainism is basically a strongly dualistic religious system in which the soul separates from the material world and realizes its own infinite immortality and becomes a sphere, by the way, often. but the images of these realized human beings is just a cut out it's a cut out of a piece of metal or a stone and it looks exactly like a space alien it looks exactly like a space alien and it kind of almost 1950s sense

and I'm like what is going on there I mean that's an example of what's what I'm trying to talk about because in this religious system, it's precisely removing oneself from the material world, from the cycle of life and death, through which one realizes one's own innate immortality or infinity. I mean, they would not say God, God. I mean, they don't use that kind of language, but they would certainly acknowledge a kind of super state of the human being. And I'm just trying to say, as a historian, look, cultures have,

have had these experiences and they've even experienced the soul as a sphere. And they've talked about the soul as a sphere, by the way. Jainism is one, but Neoplatanism is another. I mean, we can go through a whole series of ancient systems in which the spirit or the soul is literally seen as a flying saucer, as it were. Okay? Why is that? Well, probably because that's how human beings experience transcendence,

experience this spirituality of this soul that's above all human beings. human culture in all nation states and all religions. And again, I think that's the promise of the flying saucers. You look up. You know, it's up. It's not down here. And they do violate our airspace effortlessly. Right?

I mean, this is something that comes out even in the military reports. So there's something hopeful, I think, about the flying saucer that transcends any particular nation state or any political system or any religion or any human. and culture and it's a kind of global realization and I think that's where the spirituality of the flying saucers I put it really comes in I think that's what really is attractive to a lot of people

that are that are really fascinated by this topic today and it may not be conscious Danny I'm not saying that that's a conscious or an intentional fascination but this notion of up you know I mean that's how our ancestors thought of transcendence

we were we were stuck on this two-dimensional plane and we couldn't go up. And so the gods came from the sky. They came from the heavens. This is why angels have wings. This is up is up. Well, we've been up. There's, there ain't anything up there. Right. So now, so now transcendence comes from some other dimension or comes from some other time, you know. We've, we've, we've displaced it towards, towards other realms, as it were. So that's what I'm trying to struggle with here is, is, what is our contemporary fascination and what do they look like in this bigger picture as it were?

Yeah, and if they are something, like if they are souls or if they are something spiritual, how come they crash into the ground and leave debris behind and we can find bodies and take them to a secret lab? Again, we don't know any of that. I know those were the stories, but we don't know that.

That's the problem with this whole thing too. And I think that's what's part of, that is hugely what's responsible for the huge fascination with this topic. Yeah. Is that we don't know any of it. And it's a secret that is being held by some dark force that we can't control. And if this hypothetical secret was let out of the bag, I tend to think maybe we wouldn't be so interested in it anymore.

And by and large, people would not want to talk about it as much anymore, right? I think that the human mind is really drawn to things that are mysterious and not understood. Yeah. Like if the classic example of a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn, if that were to happen, I think we would just find something else to be attracted to. And, you know, I just was part of this other conference at Rice called Brave New Worlds, Who Decides? I was the title. And I was in charge of interviewing this novelist named Michael Rogers.

And our conversation was really around utopias and dystopias. And my question to Michael was, why are all of our stories about the future dystopian? why is it always bad? What about utopia? What about a story about the future that's good? And it turns out Michael wrote a novel called Emails from the Future, or Email from the Future, which is about a very positive future. And so, again, I think this notion of something crashed and we have bodies and, you know,

there are dark forces involved. I think this fits our science fiction and our Netflix and our television series. but I'm not, I just don't know if any of it's true, because I'm not part of any of those organizations or systems. And I also know as a historian of religions that the future is really good in a lot of these systems. And they too have talked about what we call the Flying Sasser or the UFO. They've also integrated it.

But in a worldview in which, you know, human beings become gods or human beings commune with God. There's all kinds of ends or means to where the world is going or where humanity is going. But it's usually something really good. And so I'm, Danny, I guess I'm skeptical of the dystopian futures that were constantly given. It's not that they may not happen.

Of course, I grew up in the 1970s, by the way, in the nadir of the Cold War. I mean, I assumed I wouldn't live to see 40. I assumed that there would be a nuclear exchange and the Earth was over. I mean, that was the reality in 1975, by the way. It's still a possibility today, unfortunately. So I'm not against a dystopian concern about the future, but I don't think it's useful.

I don't think it's helpful. If you think, Danny, that the future is bleak, the chances are very high you will act on that. and as a culture and a community we'll all act on that dystopian imagination and it will be bleak we will create a future that's bad if we have a utopian vision

of the future that is positive the chances are high we will act on that and we will create a utopian future or world so I think there are lots of good reasons to be skeptical and to be dystopian but I'm not because I think

optimism and a kind of future-oriented utopian vision is much more effective and much more positive on the ground yeah I mean and this kind of gets into the discussion of artificial intelligence you know there's a polarization and a lot of smart people talk about you know the fear of AI and

AI taking control and a lot of people are very optimistic about AI and how it can help us and all this stuff. You talk about also a connection between artificial intelligence and the abductions experience. Yeah. Let's talk about AI. Okay. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Verso. The older I get, the more I'm prioritizing my health.

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So, yeah, can you expand on that? Like, what sort of connections have you found with artificial intelligence and these experiences people have? First of all, people who have reported abductions have been reporting artificial intelligence for decades. This is not a new thing. This goes back to the 50s or 60s. Oh, really? Yeah. People have been talking about the robotic nature of what they're encountering for a half a century or more. And they've also referred often to the hive-like activity of the creatures.

So the kind of notion that they work as a group and they're not individual like we are. That's old news. also in abductions you often get the distinct impression that whatever is interacting with the person is AI and that makes a lot of sense to me if I were if I were a biologist or an anthropologist I would not go into the angry tribe of the angry monkeys I wouldn't do it it's just going to get thrown against the wall I would send a machine in that was expendable and that could bring back a lot of data, but that was not me. So if abductions are about some kind of actual anthropological experiment from some other intelligence or some other future humanity, it makes a lot of sense to me. They'd use AI.

I would use AI. The other thing I would say about AI, I'd say a couple things. First of all, it's been around a long time. I use AI every day when I drive to work. My truck has assisted lane assist It has everything It even goes slower and goes faster

Depending on how the cameras read the traffic I mean it knows darn well what it's doing I put my life in the hands of AI Every single day So I don't have any Any doubts about the usefulness of AI On the other hand A lot of the fears of AI are driven by materialism again

It's driven by this production thesis that I talked about It's the idea that mind or consciousness is created by material processes. And so if we can make a computer and get it sophisticated enough, it'll eventually become conscious. That's the idea, right? Well, that's materialism. That's the production thesis. Well, what if it's wrong?

What if material processes don't create consciousness or mind, but they mediate consciousness from mind like any human? Well, then suddenly AI is no longer this evil thing. that it is in some people's minds because it can't actually ever become conscious in the way a human being is conscious. Right? So I think the whole debate, again, assumes a particular model

of the relationship between matter and mind. And I just don't buy it again. I don't buy the model that the fears are based on. I just don't. I just think it's wrong. Yeah, and also, you know, if humans do eventually encounter non-human intelligence, it would most likely be in a post-biological form.

And what makes us think that the abduction experience is non-human? It might be superhuman. It might be future human. It sure looks like us. It sure acts like us. It sort of acts like us, but sort of doesn't. And I'll give you an example. Take Skinwalker Ranch. A lot of, well, dogs were turned into goo. They're melted. But human beings never were. So whatever that is that's interacting with humans at Skinwalker, it's drawing moral distinctions. And they look very human to me.

Okay? I don't know if it is a human. I'm not taking a position on what is present at Skinwalker Ranch. But I'm saying the stories look very human to me and they're making moral decisions along human lines. That's all I'm saying. And so are the visitors, so are the aliens, so are the UFO-nots. They're all, they all look very human to me.

Yeah. Which suggests to me they are, which suggests to me that they're somehow relying on our own forms of consciousness. they're certainly interacting with human beings in a clear way. And again, this goes back to our God talk or God conversation. I've never encountered any language of God other than in a human being. You said that you met Chris Bledsoe. Yeah.

How did you get in touch with Chris Bledsoe? And how did you find out about him? Through Diana. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I met Chris through. I was lecturing at the university where Diana teaches. and I met Chris then.

Yeah, and I spent a lot, spent hours with Chris and read his book, UFO of God, and, you know, I'm very familiar with it. What did you, what was your reaction to his story when you met him? And have you ever met anybody that has experienced anything like him? Yeah, I have. I mean, Wittley Sreber. I mean, Willie is very much like Chris in the extremity

and the nature of his experience. I think Chris, I mean, I don't want to pass judgment on Chris at all. I think he suffered a lot. Yeah. I think if you read his book and you talk to him. Tremendous amount of suffering. There's tremendous suffering and tremendous trauma, by the way. And I think all those things or a lot of those things that happened were very real,

but I think they're somehow related or connected to his trauma and suffering as well. And I don't mean that in a reductive way, Danny. again, please don't hear me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the UFO is somehow a product of his suffering or trauma, but I think the trauma and the suffering allows those things to happen. And I'll even say to be revealed. I'll use religious language. I think what Chris experienced is a kind of revelation.

And I think people, and by that I mean, these people are not making this up. they're receiving this from seemingly outside. It's being revealed to them, and so they become the prophets or the means of expressing these stories. But the experience itself is very much one of revelation. It's very much one. It's passive. It's something that is happening to the person.

It's not, the person is not hallucinating. The person is not making this up. These things are really happening. But again, Chris's experiences fit into a much larger history of religions. I mean, that's why he calls his book UFO of God. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, you know, from a religious perspective. Willie Streber, you know, we haven't talked about Willie, but his experiences are similarly extreme and very much about things like implants and abductions and an anal rape, by the way.

Really? Yeah. I mean, it's very extreme. And, you know, the way I talk about, I talk about Willie in many ways. But one of the things I often say is Willie is essentially a shaman in a culture without shamanism. He's essentially experiencing this other reality in a way that is extensive, but not, now, that's Willie right there. Communion. Yeah, he wrote Communion in 1987, I think, is when the book came out.

out. And that's the cover, by the way, that freezes the image of the alien and the public imagination. In some ways, that book began the contact experience. Not entirely. There were certainly contact and abduction cases before it, but it really sets the tone for what comes later. Now, does Whitley see the same sort of light orbs that Chris sees? He, you know, one of the visions or one of the experiences, he talks a lot about, is that at one point, he calls them the visitors, they appeared in their true form and it was a ball of light. It was this beautiful ball of light that was cascading all of these different colors.

So the short answer is yes. He certainly talks in that way. Did you ever go sky watching with Chris? No, but I've actually spent a lot of time with Whitley, including my job. joke is never room with Whitley Streber it's a mistake and there's laughter

in the back things happen, weird things happen and I think Whitley's the real deal and I think Chris is probably the real deal too but I don't know Chris like I know Whitley when Chris came here

we went out to the beat we went to dinner when we first met he came here we went to dinner down on the beach right across the street from here and after dinner he was like, hey, you want to go across the street and try to see if we can summon some orbs. I'm like, of course I do. And Stephen had a video camera with him

and we brought it out there to try to catch some of the stuff on video. And Chris had one of those low-light monoculars that captures video and basically like sees really good in low-light. And we sat out there and stared at the sky for like two and a half hours. And after about an hour, 45 minutes, two hours, we saw these

orbs that were hovering coming off the horizon moving around weirdly and they weren't airplanes because we also saw airplanes we knew we could see the airplanes and the flashing lights and they were following a very clear

flight pattern all of the airplanes that were coming into land in Tampa airport but these things we saw were not that they were moving very slow I mean the only thing

I could imagine them being is somebody on a boat way offshore with drones covered in like with a huge like illuminated drones Jones, right? Moving around in weird directions and then disappearing. And I quite literally filmed this myself on this video camera. And addition to that, there was like shooting stars that were

appearing above our heads. And meanwhile, Chris is standing next to was praying to the sky, saying, please show yourself to Danny. We're recording a podcast tomorrow. Please God. Please reveal their self and there was shooting stars and there was orbs and I saw them and I filmed them we even showed them I don't know if you still have the video footage on the

on the computer there Steve we could probably show it to you I have it on the Mac but not this one here right um but anyways that you know I went that was one of the things that I saw with my own eyes and I don't know how to explain it it wasn't planes it wasn't satellites

unless satellites hover above the ocean like 50 feet. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I just want to honor that, but I also want to just observe as, again, as a historian of religions, that the whole notion of summoning is classic. I mean, that's magic. That's a magical summoning is, that's like as old as the hills. And so what's going on there to me is very traditional and very, very human and very real.

I'm not questioning its reality at all. I'm just saying it has a history. And it's part of the spirituality of the flying saucer I was talking about. It's a very magical worldview. And by magical, I mean the idea that the human mind can influence the material world. Right? That's what I mean by magic. And generally, we say that's not possible, right?

We say that if you intend something or you summon something and then you see it, it's just a coincidence. It's just an accident, Danny. It can't happen because we operate with this production model. Danny Jones is stuck in his head and his body. And for him to imagine orbs of light coming off the water, that's nutty. That's just, you're just self-suggesting is all you're doing there. But if you work with a... Oh, here's the video.

If you work with a filter or transmission thesis, then you do have access to reality. And you can influence it. you know, through the mind because your mind's already part of reality. It's already hooked up to what's out there. And so I Watch this, yeah.

Is there audio on it? Yeah, turn the Go to the bottom and hit. Okay. Okay, so. So that's a plane. Yeah. That top left one is also a plane.

You can see it flashing. Yeah. But see the one on the bottom? These two are the orbs. I'll rewind it. Yeah. Why run it to the beginning? Watch it come off the horizon.

Look at that. See, it just popped up off the horizon of the water. Yeah. And the thing is it fades out. Watch. The plane lights don't fade. Now it starts, now it's going the other way. Another one popped up over it and you'll see it get brighter.

It changed direction. And it fades out. Now look at that one getting really bright. And it just faded out to nothing. Now it's gone. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, again, I don't, yeah, I don't know what to say. about that. I don't know either, but

I like, I've never seen anything like it, and I say this every time I talk about it, I've also never stared at the sky for three hours. Right. So if I wanted to stare at the sky and imagine cotton candy appearing out of the heavens, maybe I could summon cotton candy. I don't know. Maybe. I doubt it, by the way.

It's just interesting to think about, you know, you can what could the human, what is the human mind capable of? A lot. If you really focus hard enough on something. And like, we, I haven't gone sky watching since then, right?

I was in the perfect situation with the perfect people to go out and spend hours staring at the sky. There's no other, I got kids, I got a family, I got this job I got to do. Like, who has the time to focus on some spiritual thing and something that's not

real and you know, you know what I mean? Like we're, we're ants building things. We're like these, machines that are just constantly working towards something to bring in money to pay our bills and to just live these lives, wake up and go to work. We are ants and totally ants. I mean, I think of that every time I fly into a city.

I'm like, these are ants. But what can the mind do? It depends on what you think the mind is again. It really does. If you think the mind, if you're in the production thesis again, well, the mind can't do much. We can do whatever Danny Jones can do. Okay, fine. But if the mind is God, whoa, suddenly, you know, you tap into this larger reality and the brain then just becomes this portal or this mediation of this cosmic being, well, you can, that can do pretty much anything.

So I think what the mind can do depends on what you think the mind is, is what I'm trying to say. And I'm always trying to push people on that, on that exact thing, because I think deep. There's deeper assumptions behind what they say and what they say is possible and what they say is impossible. And I'm like, that's just your assumptions. Sorry. And I always go back to history again. I'm like, well, this happened and that happened. So clearly it happened.

Just because it doesn't happen here doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means you've cut it out of reality. Okay, you've cut it out. Big deal. So what? Chris also mentioned to me there was, I'm going to forget the name of the people they met, but they met a bunch of people that were really interested in them and trying to study them and understand what they were seeing and how to see what they were seeing.

And one of the guys was explaining to Chris's son, Ryan Bledsoe, about this idea of, or it's not an idea, it's a real thing, Rosicrucianism. Yeah, yeah. I know a lot about Rosicrucianism. Can you explain what Rosicrucianism? Rosicrucianism is and where it came from. And it seems like a lot of people are, they practice these protocols, these Rosicrucian protocols,

but they don't necessarily know about Rosicrucianism. Well, again, this goes back to your God question. So Rosicrucianism was, you know, I'm speaking obviously off the top of my head here, but it's a European tradition. It means the Rosie Cross, by the way, is what it means. It probably comes out of Germany. It originates probably in the 17th century.

It's probably originally a fiction. Whoever is writing these tractates, there is no Rosicrucian tradition, you know, in the 17th century. This person is writing these tractates or these texts claiming there is. But it's, again, if you study religion, what you know is every religion is constructed or invented. there's no such thing as a religion that's not in some ways fiction, you know, certainly at its beginning. So there were a lot of European intellectuals and early scientists.

They weren't yet called scientists, by the way. That didn't happen to the 1820s. That wanted to be in this Rosicrucian tradition. Because in the Rosicrucian tradition, the idea was you were invisible, you were secret, you were influencing history, but you were also dealing with forms of knowledge that the public couldn't accept. And that was why the tradition was secret or esoteric or hidden.

Then Rosicrucianism becomes essentially its own tradition, and people start calling themselves Rosicrucian. And today you have Rosicrucian traditions. You know, back in the 40s and 50s when I was writing about that period, there were actual mail order catalogs, or you could become a Rosicruci. Really? Yeah, yeah.

You could become this, yeah. And Rosicrucianism, as a general ideology, you know, if I could sort of summarize the ideology, it's that there is a secret truth. Particular scientists and intellectuals are tapped into this tradition, and they, therefore, are part of this rosy cross tradition. It's been very influential in the UFO world, by the way. J. Allen Heineck and Jacques Ville, both, were attracted to Rosicrucianism.

They weren't formally Rosicrucian. There's no such thing for the most part, although there is now. Yeah, there's a Rosicrucian church right down the street from here. Well, so there you go. But there were no Christian churches, by the way, either in the first century.

I mean, religion is like that, Danny, is what I'm trying to say. It's a kind of, I don't want to call it, it's not a fiction in the sense of not real, but it's something you, construct and then it becomes your construction. It becomes what you imagine it is. It is.

And this is hard for people to hear, but I mean every religion starts out as essentially a cult. It's a little group of people that then grows and develops a scriptural text and an architecture and a tradition and then it becomes its own thing. And

if Rosicrucianism does that, then it does that. But most of these movements don't do that. And they they're not successful in institutionalizing the charisma, as we say, of the founders. Yeah, so basically the idea of these protocols that some of these people who follow Rosicrucianism follow is the idea is you want to somehow tap into this other state, not necessarily another state of consciousness, but you want to sort of tap into information

that exists, whether it be like the Neuosphere or something like that. And through doing things like drinking a lot of water, you're essentially trying to use your body as an antenna to some other realm and get downloads, just have information downloaded into yourself. Well, yeah, that's not Rosicrucianism historically, but I mean, I can see a contemporary Rosicrucian saying something like that. You know, I, again,

you know, there's this notion of the invisible college, which was prominent in the 17th century, and particularly in England, and essentially what it, and Rosicrucianism was connected to it. It's kind of a German version of this. The idea was, again, these early scientists and intellectuals were dealing in truths that the public wouldn't be favorable to,

but they nevertheless were convinced they were true. And so the reason you have an invisible college, or a group of intellectuals who interact with one another but don't meet in public or don't form a tradition is because it's dangerous. It's off the social radar. Dangerous to who? Dangerous to the public.

Dangerous to the believing public. So, for example, the invisible college was early science, essentially. Well, early science was very much against what the Catholic Church was doing in a lot of situations. The church was saying things like, well, you know, we live at the center of the universe and, you know, or there's no such thing in terms of Newton now. There's no such thing as gravity or so. And I'm not speaking for the church. I don't want to say that they condemned every one of those.

But there's definitely a conflict between the believing publics and the intellectuals and the scientists. And they're coming at truths in very different ways. And so the scientists or the early scientists or the intellectuals were organizing themselves around what they call the invisible college. And Rosicrucianism is a type or a kind or a related movement of that in Europe at the same time. So they, this invisible college had some sort of knowledge that they kept secret because they believed it would hurt the public. But I don't understand, though. How could any sort of new idea hurt the public? Well, what if your idea was that the humans were not at the center of the world,

that we were just one species of... Right, but that idea helped us. That idea helped us understand the universe. That idea was widely rejected in the 19th century when it was advanced by Darwin. Yeah, but just because it was rejected doesn't mean it's harmful or dangerous. Well, again, the invisible college, it's not that they're invisible in the... 19th century. There's no invisible college in the 19th century.

Actually, there is. I mean, when the early scientists who were, who thought Darwin was right, they formed something called the X club. And again, it was the same instinct.

It was, the believing public is very much against evolution, very much against Darwin. So if we're going to talk about this in freedom, we need to meet in private essentially. So it's to protect themselves? Absolutely.

Not necessarily to protect the public. Well, I think both. I think, I think... Like these people really just care about humanity that much? No, no. We want to protect the world. No, no, I think it's primarily to protect themselves and to prevent harassment and censorship.

Remember, there's no science in the 17th, 16th century. There's no same thing. And the European world was dominated by forces that were certainly not scientific. Today we have professional science and it's established in our universities, in our government, in our culture. But that was not the case in the 16th and 17th century for sure. So I think we can take today and we can make the mistake of just assuming all of the things we assume and projecting it back onto the past where those things just weren't true. You know, people were imprisoned and lost jobs and, you know, sometimes were killed for having views that went against whatever the believing public thought.

Right. So don't, let's not underestimate that. You know, there's, for example, there's a statue, if you go to Amsterdam, there's a statue of Baruch Spinoza in one of the squares there. Well, Baruch Spinoza was an amazing intellectual. but he was excommunicated from his Jewish synagogue. He was a heretic. He was absolutely condemned and excommunicated in his own life. And he was afraid, you know, essentially.

And so I think that's the instinct that the people in the invisible college of the early British tradition were worried about. It was the same kind of assault or harassment. And do you think this kind of thing is still happening today? Intellectuals are still harassed and censored for all kinds of reasons. It depends on the culture, of course. I mean, like, do you think people that are outspoken in the public today have knowledge that they're keeping close to the chest or not talking about publicly or keeping it a secret because of the fear of being excommunicated or the fear of getting in trouble? I think the risks today are much less than they were two, three hundred years ago. Oh, for sure, for sure.

Right now, I mean, you lose your job and, I mean, yeah, your life can get ruined if you lose your job and you get your reputation destroyed, right? That's not the same thing as getting. You won't be thrown into prison or killed. Exactly. But you would have been. You could have been. I'm not saying you would have been. I mean, there are lots of cases of people who were not, but there's also lots of cases of people who were.

I mean, please remember. I wrote a textbook on how to compare religions, and some of the early comparativesists lost their lives. You know, I mean, it was a crime to translate the Bible out of Latin, by the way, in the 15th and 16th century. It was a crime. There were people who were severely punished for it. And so things that we assume today, we can't assume in the past.

And even in my own lifetime, I know, I mean, a lot of my early, work is on gender and sexuality. And you couldn't speak about gender and sexuality in 1980 the way you speak about it in 2024. There's no way. There's no way. And so young people, they assume a certain kind of freedom, I think, in terms of gender and sexuality that we just didn't have

in the early 1980s. Didn't exist. We fought those battles. And a lot of things that we assume today just to be kind of automatic are, because people suffered for it. People fought those social battles. Women couldn't vote.

Right. Black people were enslaved. Right. I mean, come on. There's all kinds of things that our ancestors did and assumed completely differently than we assume today. Are you familiar with the John Marco Allegro? Sacred mushroom in the cross? Yeah, yeah, sure.

I'm familiar with it. Yeah, I guess his theory was that these ancient religions, I guess he spent decades deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was a linguist. And he found that one of his conclusions was that these religions were basically fertility cults. Yeah, I don't, I doubt it. I mean, there's a strong fertility element in the history of religion, so I don't want to question that. But I think Allegro, I don't want to speak about Allegro because I just don't know enough about him. But he's very much part of this countercultural movement. Oh, is he?

Yeah, I mean, he's probably writing. Brian Mayer Rescue talks about him. Yeah, he's probably writing in the 60s and 70s. Traditional Christianity developed through a literal misinterpretation of symbolic narratives found in the roles by writers who did not understand the minds of the essence. Again, I just don't know, Danny. I can't speak to that. The whole notion of fertility cults,

so that's a common theory, by the way, in the 1800s. There were a lot of people who were making that argument about religion in general, that it goes back to ancient fertility cults. Again, I doubt it. I mean, that's part of the picture for sure. I mean, human beings are sexual beings for sure. and their religions have always integrated that or spoken to that. But is that the single source?

No, I doubt it. Yeah. And it's interesting, though, that these beings that people encounter in their recollection, they aren't sexual animal. They have no reproductive organs. Well, sometimes they are, of course. I mean, this is one of the things that you get in the abduction narratives a lot, is there's a lot of sex in them.

Really? Oh, yeah. I mean, human beings have sex with these alien entities. Oh, yes, yes, yes. You're familiar with David Huggins, right? Well, Huggins is just one of, I'm sure there are thousands of these. I mean, I'm thinking of the very first abduction case we have on record is Antonio Villis-Bowas, and it's sexual through and through. Can you explain that one? Yeah, from memory now.

Okay. So, yeah, there you go. Brazilian farmer. He's out in the farm. It's at night. He's farming at night because it's cooler at night. A ship comes down and they rub a kind of goo over him. And a female alien has sex with him.

Really? Yeah. And then kind of points to her belly and points to the stars and then takes off in the spaceship. I mean, it's clearly a sexual abduction. Go back up, when was this, Steve? 1950s. Go back to the Wikipedia or whatever that describes the story. Yeah, there you go.

Antonio Villas Boas. Yeah, this is the first case. From 1934 to 90, died in 1991, a Brazilian farmer. See, in October 15th, 1957. Yeah, plowing his fields. There you go. So, yeah, a red star in the night sky. He's farming at night because it's cooler.

Right, right, right, right, right, right. Began descending and land in the field, extending three legs as it did. He attempted to leave the scene on his tractor, but when the lights and the engine died, after traveling only a short distance, he decided to continue on foot. However, he was seized by a five-foot-tall humanoid

who was wearing gray coveralls in a helmet. His eyes were small and blue, and instead of speech, it made noises like barks and yelps. Three similar beings then joined. the first in subduing Boas and they dragged him inside their craft once inside the craft. Boas said he was stripped of all his clothes, covered from head

to toe with a strange gel. He was then led into a strange semi-circular room through a doorway that had strange symbols written all over it. Whoa. The room of the beings took samples of Boas's blood from his chin

and after he was then taken to a third room and left alone. for around an hour and a half. During this time, some kind of gas was pumped into the room, which made Billas become violently ill. Wow. Huh.

So, I can't believe I've never heard of it. Well, there's a lot of cases like this. So what I want to say, Danny, is that sexual intercourse is everywhere in the abduction accounts, and it has this long prehistory in the history of religions. This is what I was trying to say earlier.

and I want to speak about the abduction cases and the sexual components of them in this larger historical context. And one of the reasons I think that abduction cases are so problematic is for religious reasons, frankly. I think to the extent they're heterosexual, they involve human males and female deities or female aliens, they don't fit in anywhere into the traditions.

Yeah, this is David Huggins, and he has these drawings. You've watched his documentary. I'm in the documentary. Are you really? Yeah. How did I miss that? I don't watch the documentary in over a year.

There's a whole chapter on, and I mean, Brad comes to Houston and he interviews me about David. You know Brad? Yeah. Wow, that's incredible. Of course you know Brad. He made the documentary. Yeah, Brad. Oh, of course I know all about this.

Wow. That is, it is such a fascinating story. Well, there again, it definitely involves sexuality. And, you know, what do you do with that? Well, one of the things you do with that is you related to these earlier accounts of mystical encounter and sexuality. That's what I'm trying to say, that there's just bigger story here. And people will look at Huggins or they'll look at Villas-Boas or Streber, by the way, is heavily sexualized as well. They'll look at those cases and they'll say, well, this guy's just crazy.

I'm like, no, he's not. It fits into this larger pattern that goes back actually thousands of years. So that's what I'm trying to do with these questions and then the abduction accounts. And this, of course, is what gets alighted or erased in contemporary conversations about technology and propulsion systems and the military and nation states.

All the abduction stuff just gets cut off. It does. Yeah. Well, this is why. What do you do with this? Yeah, this is too crazy, right? This is too weird and crazy. But it happens. It happens. It happens.

Being molested by a female alien who takes your baby hybrid to outer space. Well, so Elizabeth was in a garden and saw mountains and talked to God as a male. I mean, again, this is the nature of these kinds of experiences, Danny, and this is what I'm trying to say. What did you make of David when you talked to him? So I just spoke to David on the phone. Did you really? Yeah, I didn't meet him. I just spoke to him on the phone. I thought you meant you just recently talked to him.

Okay. Yeah. Right. You didn't meet him in person. Yeah. I think David, again, is telling us the truth and he's painting the truth as he remembers it. I think these people are being very honest. And in David's case, going out of his way to illustrate what he remembers happening, I think we need to use all of our tools, all of our disciplines, all of our histories to understand these things and not just dismiss them as hallucinatory or crazy.

That's what I think. So in the context of religious history, what were people saying specifically about these sexual encounters? Well, they often interpret them demonically, by the way. Really? Yeah. I mean, it was women who were having sex with the devil and becoming witches or magical practitioners. There were always ways to condemn the human being for these kinds of encounters. if a nun, for example, was mystically married to Christ, that's okay.

That became part of the tradition. But only, again, under certain circumstances, they were still essentially harassed by the Inquisition. You know, Teresa Vavala was very concerned about the Inquisition, by the way. And when she wrote her veto, her life, they locked it away. You know, they put it in a safe, essentially. and her confessors asked her to give the finger to the presence. Essentially, they called it giving the fig, but it was essentially giving the finger. Because the idea was as if you were vulgar with the devil, the devil would go away.

Vulgar with the devil. Yeah. So my point is it's not that I want to, it's not that I believe the demonic interpretations, but that's what we have done historically is we have demonized people who have these experiences and I'm trying to say, please stop that. Right. Please don't do that. Let's look at the sexual components as they are, as they're reported,

whether it's David Huggins or Whitley Streber or Antonio Villas-Boas or whoever it is. And remember, those are three men, by the way. And that's... But they're getting molested by women. Yes. Not men, not male aliens. Yeah, that's correct. And what do you think that was about?

What do you... What would they... Why would they, it's got to be... Again, what was that about? I mean, that's the... I don't know how to process it. Well, good. That's the conversation, Danny.

Right. That's what we should be talking about. And do I have an answer to that? No. Do I have... But you've thought about it more than most people. I thought a lot about it. And I personally, one of the things I really think about these cases is that they're heretical

or dismissed because they don't fit into our religious narratives, which are all about communing with a male deity, not a female deity. I'm not following you there. Well, we have a male deity in Western monotheism. So you can commune with a male deity. You can't commune with a female deity.

What do you mean by commune? Become one with or become very close to. And again, there are two images in the mystical literature that express this. One is sexuality, one is death. And those are the two means through which one becomes one with the divinion.

So you can commune with the deity through sexuality or death? Or become the deity. I mean, again, there's a whole conversation here in the history of religions. Becoming the deity is dangerous too, by the way, because then you're declared heretical and you're open to all kinds of accusations. Commuting with the deity is safer. Okay.

Because you're not claiming to be the deity. You're a human being who's sort of communing with the deity. But historically, you've done that through gendered and sexual language that is heterosexual only for women, not for men. Because God's a male in the Western imagination. But not here, not in these cases, not in these abduction cases. And I think that's one reason they're so problematic.

Wow. It's fascinating stuff. It's a rabbit hole. It is a rabbit hole. it really is. Yeah. And I don't, again, I don't have an answer for it, but I think that's what we should be talking about. Now, is this stuff talked about in Ramakrishna?

It's framed, yeah, in some ways it is. It's framed in different ways in the Hindu tradition. You do have encounters with female deities in the Hindu tradition, but certainly not exactly like this, as you're seeing here. This is a very Western, very contemporary example of it. But I do think looking at these other Asian traditions gives us a good way of making sense of these things. And like this insectoid that appears in David's visions a lot, well, the praying mantis appears all over the world and is quite common in human folklore and extreme religious experiences. Really? Yeah.

Can you give me an example? Well, the praying mantis appears in a lot of abduction cases as some kind of alien presence that is either overlooking the encounter itself or is somehow guiding the process in the natural biological world through the insects. And how is this praying mantis depicted in historical stories? Sometimes it's connected. with divination or telling the future or it's connected with whatever the conception of deity or the godhead is. For example, in Africa, the praying mantis was very popular among the surrealists,

you know, the surrealist art movement in the 20s and 30s. So it enters the human mainstream in different ways through folklore, through religion, through art, in this case through abduction. Again, I don't understand it. Yeah. I'm just saying that that's not unique. Right, right. That's, that's, that's, there's a whole history behind what David is, is seeing and reporting and painting.

Yeah. Yeah, I have a friend who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, like two streets down from David. I was thinking about going up there and maybe, maybe trying to visit him. Uh-huh. He'd like that about it. It'd be fun. He's getting up there in age. Yeah.

Well, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it, Jeff. It was a pleasure. What else are you working on now? Are you working on any new projects or books? Well, a couple things. So I have a book coming out called How to Think Impossibly. It's about how to think about these extreme experiences.

How to think about insectoids. How to think about souls. How to think about UFOs. How to think about time and belief. And as I say, everything else. And I think we need a new theory of the imagination. And so the book attempts to do that. A new theory of the imagination.

Yeah, in other words, it's not just imaginary. It's like the main, it's like the mind-brain thing. Maybe the imagination is a portal. Maybe when we encounter something, it's going to set off this science fiction movie in the mind, but that's not actually what's there. You know, the imagination is translating or mediating this presence. It has to. That's what we do as human beings.

But we err when we interpret those landscapes literally. So I'm looking for essentially a third option. It's not a debunking option. This isn't about just the imaginary, but it's not a literal religious belief option either. It's not like there's an actual insect entity there or there's an actual seven-foot alien there. But something's there.

The human being is clearly encountering something and it's responding with this elaborate visionary landscape that we find ourselves in. And sometimes that landscape has physical effects, Danny. I don't imagine this in imaginary ways. You know, Joseph of Copertino literally floated off the ground. How? Well, partly through his imagination, partly through the religious imagination. Wow. It's fascinating stuff, man. Yeah, it is fascinating. It's like the coolest stuff in the world. It really is. I don't understand why everyone isn't like

talking about this stuff, to be honest. Do you have you ever experimented with psychedelics? I think that's another whole rabbit hole. So I wrote a book, Aslan American Religion or No Religions, it's filled with psychedelics. You wrote another book. You've written many books. I've written loud books. That book is filled with psychedelics.

A lot of the psychedelic leaders and writers just assumed I had done psychedelics because I write so sympathetically. Right, right. And I was like, no, I never have. Sorry. But I did. I got tired of their questions. And so I took a trip down to Brazil and I took a long retreat and I took ayahuasca. And I did that.

And I did not have the experiences that you hear reported a lot on ayahuasca. But I had a lot of the same phenomenological or physical kind of qualities that you hear. The energy and the explosions and the. that sort of thing. But no, I didn't have the... Nothing transformative? No, no. And, you know, my friends were like, well, you didn't need it.

And I was like, well, that's a good spin. I mean, I, okay, I think I'm just dull. I think I'm just, yeah, hopeless. But I really tried. That was a very long and very significant engagement with the plants, as it were. Have you ever seen the interview with Terrence McKenna and John Mack? No, I haven't. I'd love to, though. Fascinating that those guys got together.

Yeah, you know, John is a dear, I don't know, I didn't know John Mack. I didn't know Terrence either, by the way. But our last donation to our Archives of the Impossible at Rice was the John Mack Papers. And we have about 150 boxes or about 450 linear feet of. John Mac's files and correspondence. So I'm very close to that material, but I, you know, John Mac died in 2004, and I was not into this world then.

I wasn't into this UFO world. I think I remember him. I was at Harvard, actually. I was teaching at Harvard, and I went to a lecture on Hindu mysticism, and a very elegant gentleman stood up at the back of the room and asked about aliens. And that just had to be John Mack.

I don't know who else would have done that, you know, at that time. What year was that? 2000. 2000. Yeah, yeah. It might have been 2001. It was somewhere in there. So I think I, you know, I think I was in the same room with him, but I never, I never knew John Mack, personally.

Well, thanks again, Jeff. I really appreciate you. This was a fascinating conversation. People can go find you at Jeffrey. J.Criple.com, is that right? Right. And yeah, the other way, too, if you really want to spend some time with me, I'm doing a retreat

in Tuscany in July, it's something called the Pari Institute, P-A-R-I. It's called How to Think Impossiblely. And that's by far the best way to interact with me if you want to come to that. But otherwise, the website is Jeffreyjaycryple.com. Okay, perfect.

I want to keep talking to you about some stuff that I don't want to put on YouTube. So we're talking, we're talking, for a few more minutes, and that's going to be on Patreon for people that want to watch that. Okay. It's linked below. And that's it. Good night, everybody.