Inquiry with Kelly Chase - Disclosure Exposure: The Psychological & Spiritual Reality of UFO Contact with Daniel Noah

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Recorded live on August 2nd, 2026 at the historic Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, this episode of Inquiry brings Kelly Chase together with SpectreVision co-founder and SpectreVision Radio director Daniel Noah for a deeply personal conversation about the emotional, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of anomalous experience. Both begin with their own unlikely paths from skepticism into direct experience, tracing the strange accumulation of events that forced them to reconsider what they thought was possible—and the equally strange sense of mission that emerged in the aftermath. From there, the conversation turns toward fear, trauma, and the transformative nature of the anomalous. Kelly and Daniel explore why contact can be terrifying even when it isn't necessarily understood as threatening, the relationship between trauma and anomalous experience, and the ways shame and secrecy can isolate experiencers from the very communities that might help them make sense of what is happening. If disclosure means revealing something that was hidden, they ask what it costs to disclose not only classified information, but the most vulnerable and difficult-to-communicate parts of ourselves. Finally, the conversation asks whether the prevailing cultural idea of "Disclosure" may be missing the heart of the phenomenon entirely. Craft, bodies, government testimony, and physical evidence may be part of the story, but for experiencers the deeper rupture is often interior: a confrontation with consciousness, the immaterial world, and the limits of what we can know. Kelly and Daniel explore the radical loneliness of learning to discern truth for yourself, the strange networks forming between experiencers, telepathy and individuality, creativity as a form of disclosure, and the possibility that transformation requires us to expose both our greatest gift and the wound from which it emerged. Topics explored: UFO disclosure | anomalous experience | experiencers | Daniel Noah | SpectreVision Radio | Philosophical Research Society | direct experience | skepticism | contact experiences | downloads | sense of mission | experiencer networks | fear and the paranormal | trauma and the anomalous | adverse childhood experiences | shame | secrecy | abuse | courage | vulnerability | personal disclosure | spiritual transformation | consciousness | evidence and subjective experience | John Keel | Operation Trojan Horse | Whitley Strieber | Communion | Diana Pasulka | Encounters | cultural stigma | disclosure narratives | the immaterial world | radical loneliness | discernment | telepathy | individuality | creativity | the Fool | the shaman | humiliation | the hero's journey | death and rebirth | the gift and the wound | human transformation Inquiry with Kelly Chase is brought to you by SpectreVision Radio. Produced in partnership with Voltage.fm. Referenced In This Episode Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences — D.W. Pasulka Communion: A True Story — Whitley Strieber Operation Trojan Horse — John A. Keel The Mothman Prophecies — John A. Keel Support The Show Patreon: inquirywithkellychase.com Substack: inquirywithkellychase.substack.com Connect with Kelly Website: kellychase.media X: @kellychasemedia Instagram: @kellychasemedia TIMESTAMPS 04:01 Why Disclosure Matters 07:01 Kelly Becomes Experiencer 11:33 Daniel Awakens to Paranormal 14:26 The 2021 Download 19:48 Coming Out Publicly 22:38 Recognizing the Anomalous 24:06 Fear and Contact Signs 29:34 Trauma as the Phenomenon 34:18 Shame And Secrecy 37:15 Courage To Speak 38:26 Mission And Return 42:19 Disclosure Is Devastating 44:33 Media Suppression History 49:11 Why Nobody Cares 52:10 Experience As Evidence 55:38 Loneliness And Discernment 59:11 Humiliation And The Fool 01:03:11 Hero Journey Closing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Earth, a love story, coming to you through Spector Vision Radio. I'm Robin Lassiter, a lifelong experiencer of the strange and otherworldly. In this podcast, we explore the journey from consensus reality into the weird, wild, and very real worlds of anomalous phenomenon. What are the implications of contact with NHI? How do we make meaning, as humanity rediscovers itself through a new ontolitan? lens. How does anomalous experience move through our bodies and reshape our collective stories, relationships, and cosmologies? Join me as we explore how NHA, UFOs, and all extraordinary experience drives the evolution of our spiritual and mythopoetic structures. Discover what it means for

who we are, who we are becoming, and the more beautiful world we can create together. Spector Vision Radio If you're listening to this right now, you know the world is full of encounters with the unexplained. It was just a shadow of a man standing at the edge of my bed. True terrifying tales submitted by listeners like you. The next thing I know, there were two long metal rods coming at my head. Large triangle shaped something It was so freaky

It looked like it was coming closer Like out of the forest I thought to myself What on earth I do remember that bright light It looked at least seven, eight feet tall This thing staring at me I remember thinking to myself

What the hell is going on This thing was blacker than black We're chanting Halfway through It had stood up on his high legs And walked the rest of the way So join us on the belief whole podcast as we shine a light into the dark and explore the bizarre phenomena behind some of the strangest encounters you've never heard. Coming to you from Spectrevision Radio.

This fall, the Caribbean gets even stranger. I am blinded by a bright white light. More true tales. I knew it was some sort of demon. try to enter our home. More haunted history. When Great House Plantation is where the slaves were making the sugar key. Caribbean Mystics returns with new episodes every Thursday.

We're diving even deeper into Caribbean folklore, paranormal encounters. I saw this shadowy figure coming right over the wall. UFOs. I don't want to panic her until I'm seeking in. aliens and UFOs in the sky. And a strange magic moving through our history and culture. I was raised by grandparents who practiced Obeah or witchcraft. Caribbean Mystics.

Now streaming on all podcast platforms. Spectrevision Radio. Welcome back to Inquiry. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. I'm recording this on the last day of, of what was one of the strangest and most consequential summers of my life. It was a lonely sojourn into the underworld, a long, hard stare into the void. But in the words of the philosopher, Albert Camus,

in the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me, there lay an invincible summer. The tower is one of the most feared cards in taro. It represents the sudden and often violent collapse of a way of life that can no longer sustain itself. That's why it's always been one of my favorites. No matter how deep the burn, I'm always ultimately grateful for the flames that burn away that, which is false. And this summer, I've had one hell of a bonfire. One of my favorite moments of the summer was getting to do this talk that I'm about to share with you alongside my friend and Spectrevision Radio founder and director Daniel Noah at the Historic Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

Thank you to the lovely team at PRS for hosting us, and to everyone who came out for that. It was so great to get to meet so many of you and to reconnect with old friends. The focus of this talk was the personal and psychological ramifications of disclosure for experiencers of the anomalous. I think you can sense from this talk that I was still feeling deeply vulnerable and unsure, but I left that night with a renewed conviction that, God help me, this is the only word. that I want to be doing. And so I'm diving back in. I've been writing nonstop and feeling more inspired than ever. For anyone who would hope that they'd seen the last of me, I regret to inform you that I am entirely back on my bullshit. Starting this week, we'll be back to weekly episodes.

The first few will be interviews and conversations that I recorded over the summer, and by about mid-October, I should be ready to launch some new deep dives and field notes episodes featuring the avalanche of new research that's been absolutely consuming me these past several months. I'm really excited about where all of this is headed and I've never felt more ready. Before we dive into my talk with Daniel Noah, I should mention that Daniel has a new podcast of his own, launching soon called Dialtone, featuring conversations with his friends in the world of the strange and anomalous and beyond. Daniel's work at the intersection of the entertainment industry and the experience or world puts him into contact with all sorts of fascinating people, many of whom I think

will be of particular interest to listeners of this show. I hope you'll check it out and hit subscribe so you don't miss any upcoming episodes, including an episode featuring yours truly that will be coming out at some point in the coming weeks. All right, without further ado, here is my talk with Daniel Noah. You're listening to Spectrevision Radio Live. Captured live at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, this is Disclosure Exposure, a conversation between Spector Vision co-founder

and Specter Vision Radio Director Daniel Noah and writer, researcher, and host of inquiry with Kelly Chase, Kelly Chase. For decades, conversations about UFO disclosure have largely focused on evidence, government secrecy, and the question of what may or may not be out there. Today's episode opens a dialogue on the rarely addressed yet vitally important emotional, spiritual and psychological effects of direct experience with non-human intelligence, and what happens to experiencers in the wake of public exposure.

Here's Daniel and Kelly presenting Disposure Exposure. Hey, everybody. Hi, everyone. Hi. Kelly and I were saying on the way over here that anyone who showed up for this event probably has a really good reason for being here. So Kelly hosts a show on Spectrovision Radio Network called Inquiry, which is absolutely vital, and I hope everyone will watch and listen if you don't already.

But one of the things that's really important to us at the network, and I think to Kelly and me in particular is normalizing open dialogue about this topic. For so many years, experiencers have been ridiculed and humiliated and made fun of. And even organized discussions are still, they take place in quietly in booths and diners in the Midwest, at odd hours. And so, you know, we really want to contribute in any

way that we can to holding our heads up high and saying this is real. It's happening to us. It's happening to many people that we know. And so that's really very much the impetus for the work that we're doing at the network and then also for tonight. And there's so much focus right now on disclosure as a political movement and all of the kind of maneuvering that's happening there with politics and espionage. What we want to do. want to talk about is what disclosure means personally. And I think just looking at the word disclosure in this context, it's actually almost funny that no one ever considers what that means in terms of the personal cost.

The context of it is always what it means to politicians and the CEO of Lockheed Martin and so forth. So to get things started in the spirit of normalizing, Kelly and I are each just going to take a couple of minutes to tell you just the broad strokes of our own narratives of how we realized that we were experiencers and sort of how we got from A to C. Triple Z. Why don't you go first?

Sure. So I am coming up on the anniversary of the anomalous experience that changed my life on, it'll be on August 14th, and that was five years ago in 2021. Up to that point for most of my life and certainly all of my adult life, I really thought I had it all figured out. I was an atheist, I was a strict materialist,

and I just didn't really believe in or want to have anything to do with the woo. But the woo apparently wanted to have something to do with me. So I had, in the spring of 2021, one, we were coming out of the pandemic, and there was that congressional report that was due to Congress over the summer, and the Navy had just acknowledged some of these leaked videos as legitimate, and the stories were in the news, and I was getting ready to go back to the outer banks where I had gone as a child with my family, and I had seen what I believed at the time

was a UFO. And, you know, this had been kind of this detail that was incongruent with the rest of my life. I was this atheist materialist who'd seen a UFO and lived in a haunted house and had for cognitive dreams. So like how I squared that, I don't know, but I was very committed. And I went to the Outer Banks that week and I was like, I'm going to figure out this UFO thing. And of course, I didn't. What were you doing at the time? What was your life at that time? Oh, at that time, I was a marketer and I was very, that was very much my identity and I was very committed. I wanted to be a chief marketing officer by the time I was 40. And that was really my focus. Yeah.

And so I got really into the UFO stuff, almost to the exclusion of everything else, and got really, really obsessed, as I'm sure some of you in this room have experienced that kind of weird manic thing you get into. And about three months into that, I ended up having this experience one day in my bedroom. That's difficult to describe because it was an experience of being outside of time and space that happened spontaneously out of nowhere in my bedroom one morning. And, you know, our language is so bounded by time and space that I feel like, as I start talking about it, I end up losing it. But it was a very complex experience where I

was shown my own history, the history of our solar system, the history of the galaxy, and like just so much information coming in all at once, but without being confined by time. So it was just like, and I don't remember most of it, to be honest with you. And I was told at the time that I wouldn't remember most of it. But I came out of it with something that is weirdly the hardest part to talk about in all of this, but that I'm very committed to talking about because I talked to so many experiencers who feel this and who have a lot of shame about it, which is that I came out of it with a sense of mission, with a sense that I knew the work that I was supposed to do, that I would be supported in that work, and that it was time for my life

to change. And so I did. I started my podcast, and I started bringing people along on my journey through the UFO rabbit hole. And very quickly it took off. And I ended up kind of right in the heart of the beast with the disclosure movement really quickly. And it's changed my life. It took me a while after that to even really accept that I was an experiencer still, even as I was doing this work.

You know, I'm really grateful to people like Darren King and Mike Cleland, some of you in here probably are familiar with them, who are dear friends of mine who kind of helped me process through all of that. But yeah, it's been, I think over the last five years of my life, that process of coming to terms of being an experiencer has been magical. It's been destabilizing. It's been annihilating. It's been terrifying.

It's been challenging. But it's also been so beautiful because I've met so many other people who are having these same kinds of experiences. A lot of you are in this room. And it's really, I think there's something really beautiful and emergent happening, something vital, I think it's reconnecting us to who we are that's making us the main characters in our lives again. That's reminding us of our own creative potential and our own potential to make an impact in the world and that we are co-creators of this space together. And so I'm really honored to be here with you guys today and to all of you who are asking the same questions that we're asking.

You're with friends here, and I'm really glad you're here. One of the things I struggle with in telling my stories, so I'm by trade a filmmaker, I'm a film producer and a screenwriter, and so I'm obsessed with the narrative, and the paranormal has no interest in traditional narrative flow and logic and structure. And I've said to a few friends, I don't think I've ever told any single person the whole story, and I don't think I ever will, because it would take the length of my life. And it's probably resonant for some of you that when you're really locked into it, it's every day there's two, three little things that are important. And I have them all cataloged, but I could never communicate them to another person. So I'll try and keep this distinct, but it may be a little messy. Like Kelly, I was a skeptic, although I had a profound, deep, passionate love of tales of the supernatural.

as an artist and in fact started a company called Spectrovision that's known for making films in this space and even as all that happened I didn't believe in anything and in fact I was a little conceited about it I was judgmental of people who believed in this stuff I thought they were weak I thought that it was a very simple example wish fulfillment and I was very superior about it

A story that I will not tell now is it would take all night, but I had an experience in 2015 at the Stanley Hotel, Anestis Park, Colorado, which is famously haunted, that was absolutely undeniable. And I left there thinking, if I'm practicing what I've preached, my criticism, of people who believe in this stuff, I have to actually react to the evidence, right? And the evidence is telling me that something paranormal just happened.

I still managed to sweep it under the rug. Six months later, a second incident took place on the Queen Mary. And then there was no way I could avoid it anymore. Once I acknowledged that it was happening, it was almost like that scene at the end of the sixth sense when the wedding ring falls on the floor, I realized, my God, this has been happening my whole life. And unsubtle ways, that starting as a child, I had clairvoyant experiences all the time.

I talked to my grandmother in my head, who lived several miles away. And so it was almost comical how obvious it was, and I hadn't seen it. Interestingly, also in 2021, and Kelly did an episode about how many experiences had life-changing experiences that year. Anybody else? 20-21? Class of 2021. I was up in Three Rivers, California, with my wife, and was sitting and watching the sunset,

and I had an experience that was extremely discombobulating, and it was very similar to what Kelly just described. I had a sense of an sentient being that was, I'm going to do my best to explain this, outside the membrane of our reality, who for some reason or another, decided to beam a bunch of information into my mind. And as Kelly was describing, it was almost like my brain became a supercomputer.

And I wasn't learning anything. I just knew it. And I was processing this immense volume of complex awareness at lightning speed. And as it was happening, I realized, oh my God, I've received this before. I don't remember when or where, but I know that this is not. the first time I've gotten this, and I've been walking around with this nagging feeling that I forgot something important, and this is it, this is what I forgot. And every time I've said, don't forget, don't forget, and I have forgotten, and I'm not going to forget this time. And I scribbled a few keywords down. I don't know. I think it lasted 45 minutes, but it was like a lifetime of information. I suppose if I'm, I should say,

say what it was. I'm a little, I feel a little shy talking about it, but, but, well, that's exactly what you just said. It was a directive that essentially, some of this is very beautiful and some of it's a little scary. So, plug your ears if you don't want to hear the scary part. The, what it was essentially is that we are here to love. learn and we fucked it up. Whatever it was we were supposed to learn, we didn't. And it's kind of too late. And someone has decided they're pulling the plug. Now, I don't know if that's in five minutes or in 5,000 years. But now that we're in the end game, it is essential that certain people who are being activated find one another to

to create, the word that came to me was matrix, and I don't mean like Neo, I mean a matrix of minds that were creative minds, and to me that means scientists, artists, who together would create a matrix of energy and ideas that would have an impact because the job of the job of these people who have been activated is to help hasten along the spiritual evolution of humanity as much as humanly possible to prepare for the end. The end is the wrong phrase, a transition.

So all of this happened, I had no context for it. The next day I wrote it all down, it's like a seven-page essay that I've occasionally shared with people. I've given it to you. Yeah, I've read it, yeah. It's crazy how close it was to things I was also. Some of you in this room may really resonate with what Daniel's saying. What Daniel's saying is something that I have heard from probably over a thousand people,

honestly, like through my work, through the emails, that people reach out to me, that people are getting some version of the same information, and a lot of it is some of it's being communicated and downloads. Some of it's like just a knowing. Some of it's, you know, people are getting more direct communication if, you know, if that's the kind of communication they receive from like individual intelligences or that sort of thing. But there is this sort of like emergent thing happening and this sense more than anything that like we're supposed to find each other. And like there's this thing that we're all supposed to do together and not necessarily just experiencers that like that the experiences who are doing this are kind of like the beginning of that wave. But that this is something, this is like a team sport for all of humanity to include.

engage in together. And it's like, I don't really know what that is. And I don't really know what we're building towards. And I don't really know what we're doing, but we all just keep showing up and like the connections. I just had coffee with somebody this morning who, before I went in there, I'm like, he's, I'm going to go in, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to talk to this guy and he's going to tell me about his sense of mission and his creative work. And that's what happens over and over and over again. And we all don't know what we're doing. But it's very important. So all right, I'm going to wrap this up. So all of this started for me in 2015, I've now brought us to 2021.

I was closeted with all of this. I told almost no one. I had no idea how to talk about it. And eventually I was invited. We were publicizing something that had nothing to do with any of this. And the publicist said, hey, have you heard of the podcast spooked? Does anybody know that show?

It's like a big listener story, ghost thing. Hey, does either of you have a ghost story? We can book you on this show. It's a big show. It'll be great exposure. And I decided, okay, going to come out. So weirdly they just reposted the episode last week. I don't know if anybody heard it. So I did. I told my story, which at the time was all about ghosts and

oh now I'm in retrospect. I don't know that that's actually what was happening. But so the word was out and and what I found was that all of my fear about how people would react was unfounded. What I not really accounted for was that I'm in a creative community, people were very curious about it and very interested. But the part I hadn't anticipated was that as someone who is, you know, quote unquote, Hollywood, and the way I always say this is like, I'm just a guy in a chair, but, you know, that is the perception when you work in the movie business, that it was, I started receiving mail, emails from people who were expressing how unusual it was to hear someone talk about this who has something to lose so that you couldn't

write them off for looking for attention. And I suddenly kind of had this light bulb moment of, I already have a brand that makes material in this space. It's not that big of a leap to extend that into the nonfiction space. It seems to be helping people. That led to the birth of the podcast network. And it's hilariously, it was only six months ago or so I went, oh my God, the Matrix. I didn't even realize that that's what was happening, but I literally realized the directive was to create a matrix of like-minded individuals, and it's people like Mike Leland and Darren King

and Mitch Horowitz, you know, whom a lot of you probably know, and I think some of the most vital and soulful minds in this space are all a part of this beautiful collective. And so I also will say, I didn't know what a download was. I learned about it when I read encounters, by Diana Posulka.

And when I got to that chapter, I was like, holy shit, this has happened to other people. And then they all get the same message that I got. I couldn't believe that. So, yeah, that's how we got. Yeah, and I think, you know, what strikes me when we tell these stories, too, is like you were saying is how hard they are to tell.

And, you know, we saw so many variety, like, so much variety in this room of the people who are like, I've had an experience or like I've maybe had an experience or I haven't had an experience. And I think so much of it has to do with our capacity to recognize the anomalous. I mean, even to recognize that you've had an experience that falls outside of consensus reality takes a certain amount of bravery and I think like a combination of other factors, sometimes it just needs to be so abrupt that you're kind of dragged by the hair and forced to face it.

But for me, like, looking back at my life and recognizing that I had had anomalous experiences throughout my life, but that I was so convinced that the anomalous was impossible. And as long as I was convinced of that, I was sort of locking myself into that reality to a certain extent. So I never want to be in this, like, I can never, like, judge someone else's subjective experience, and I don't want to be someone who's, like, forcing someone to be like, yes, you are an experience. You know what I mean? But I do have this sense that there is, that there's nothing terribly unique about experiencers that I think that that isn't just simply true or unique about humans in general.

Yeah. Well, so I think there's a great way to talk about fear, which is something we were talking about last night at dinner. And I've often wondered if everyone has had contact. I think it's, it's important for me to say that I've had more confidence. than what I just described. And part of what I've been going through is as I, even at the beginning of my journey of being, as I was still closeted,

I was obsessively researching the paranormal. But interestingly, I refuse to read anything about aliens. Nope, I wouldn't listen to a podcast, I wouldn't watch an interview, I didn't want to know, right? Which is, in retrospect, is very telling, right? I sort of accidentally started hearing about the abduction experience, and I went, oh, that's why I didn't want to hear this, right? It was, you know, every single box I ticked, missing time, strange, inexplicable memories of cartoon characters visiting me in my room when I was a child. One I hear a lot

that I don't think I've ever seen in a book Is a face in the window as a child Had that You know strange marks on my body I still get them I still get them I get you know and I travel a lot I go out to remote places because I'm a glutton for punishment

I As much as I'm afraid of the contact I also can't seem to stay away From it And I'll go out to these in real places and I'll come home and I have these three little marks on my forehead. Yeah. Little bloody mark.

I don't know what they are. So, fear. I've been reading Dolores Cannon who was theorizing that the reason we feel fear when contact is coming is that it puts us into a state to be receptive to contact. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I will say for someone who experiences the paranormal constantly, I never stop being scared, ever. It's, and it is, it's scared is an understatement. Primordial paralyzing terror.

Sometimes the terror is what clues me in that something is happening. I feel the fear before I'm even aware something is off. And what I've started doing is, I've started practicing, tolerating it. Fear has a function in our terrestrial lives. It lets us know we're in danger. But I think that when you're having a paranormal experience,

fear is not necessarily telling you you're in danger. There is something so, forgive the pun, alien about these experiences that I think we have this involuntary physiological revulsion that is impossible to shut down. And so what I've been trying for myself is almost like a form exposure therapy. There are certain places that I go at night where there's shit happening and I can count on being scared there. And I force myself to go and I spend a little more time every time and I go a little deeper every time. This is something Whitley Streber wrote about

in communion. And what I've come to realize is, oh, this is not going to get better. It's not lessening at all. So my job is to tolerate it and not run away. And what I've come to wonder is that is the fear of test, if you can push through the wall of terror, is there something waiting on the other side? And I'm here to tell you that I have now had three experiences where I was able to tolerate it long enough to make contact. One of the things that is seemingly very unique in my case is they let me take their picture. I should do a slideshow at some point. No, I'm like, I am so, I am not a videos person.

I'm not a pictures person. People show me this stuff all the time, and I'm always like, I don't care, actually. Like, it just doesn't impress me, you know what I mean? But Daniels, that's like the craziest collection of videos I've ever seen. Like, it's very strange. When they're getting, they're getting weirder. Yeah. Yeah, just even a couple weeks ago, I took one on Joshua Tree that I can't even process.

So, you know, what is all this about? Well, I think, and this is, again, what Kelly was saying, I think part of what's a little uncomfortable about this is that you never want to cast yourself as a hero, right? It's distasteful, and I don't, and that's never what I'm trying to do here, but I also can't deny the fact that I look at this and I go, well, they let me take their photo, and I'm a filmmaker. That seems kind of deliberate on someone's part.

So I've started investing in gear that is very sensitive to thermal cameras and night vision cameras and really organizing efforts to go out to places where I typically have contact. And I'm walking out with unbelievable footage. What does fear mean to you in this situation? I mean, to me the fear is it. because I think and I'm having a hard time I won't be able to articulate it super well because it's still kind of a half-baked thing

that I'm working on but a lot of the episode I did recently, the weaponized wound was all about the role that trauma plays in the anomalous and that's been something I've been thinking about a lot and as I'm sure some of you in this room know I've gone through some personal traumas lately

and you know I was having a conversation with Jeff Kriple about some of this. And, you know, he said to me, he said, trauma is the phenomenon. And I was like, here's the thing. I feel like in a lot of ways I've like studied at the feet of Jeff Krepple.

Like I really felt like, and, you know, I put it in our show and all these things. Like, I really felt like I understood what he was talking about, about this connection between trauma and the anomalous. But when he said to me, no, it is. the phenomenon. I was like, I don't know, Jeff. Like, give me a minute on that. But the more that I look into it, the more I really do think that that is what it is. Like, we don't, um, what is that saying about like, like, hard times make good men and good men make, how does that go? I won't even do it. But, but this idea that like, that to become, to transcend oneself or to become better than you are

or to change in really any meaningful way that, like, we need to be kind of, we need to be disrupted. We need to be knocked off course. We're very prone to kind of locking into these loops. And I think, you know, it's occurred to me at various times in my adult life before this ever happened. I'd, you know, I'd just be going to work every day. And I would get to a certain point. And I'd be like, have I made, like, when was the last time I made a decision? Like, truly made a decision.

Not like, what am I having of the four things in my refrigerator for dinner tonight? but just went somewhere and even just turned down a street, I wasn't planning to go down that day. And because we just get so lot, like we need to get shaken up in some way. And I think that when we look at things like, you know, I come from a mental health family. I was the daughter of psychiatrists,

and so in a lot of ways I'm deconstructing a lot of that. But there's also value that I find there. And I think that when you look at things like, they call them aces now, which is like adverse childhood events. And in terms of, like the trauma that people experience in their childhood, something that we've connected to the anomalous and to people having, you know, being open to anomalous experiences later,

or having psychic gifts and that sort of thing. You know, these aces that you have when you're a kid, they don't just change you in that. They literally alter your DNA. They change your DNA for the rest of your life. And then you're, you pass that on to your child. children. And so, like, trauma is literally making us who we are at a cellular level. It is changing us and it is changing what we are individually. It's changing us what we are as a species.

And so, you know, we have, we live in a society now where, like, we have removed the friction, or at least we're trying to, like, remove any friction in any kind of relationship. No one's, everybody's got an anxiety disorder because nobody feels like they're supposed to feel anxiety. You know what I mean? Not to, there's anxiety disorders are real. Please keep taking your medication. But like, but you know what I mean on a, on a grander scale, right? Like, we're, we're, we're all anxious because we feel like we're not supposed to be anxious. But like, it's just, I guess I'm going with all this. It's like, like, like, we live this life there where we feel like we don't have a coherent role for suffering and trauma in our society. And we also don't

have a coherent role for the anomalous in our society. And I think that those things, things are related and that they're important and that our ability to sit with integrate and transcend discomfort and suffering and the unknown and our fear and all of that is like absolutely critical to whatever this challenge is that we feel is coming yeah and i think very importantly when it is a common phenomenon that someone starts realizing that they may have a trauma from their early childhood and it's unclear if it was contact or perhaps molestation and maybe both right it and there's probably some people who will never know which one it was but i think this is a really important window into the complexities of this and what we mean when we talk about what

disclosure means on a personal level um there there's this film that i'm dying to watch the narcissists the Narcissists Playbook that's just been released, which Evan Rachel Wood has come forward to describe her relationship with Marilyn Manson. And, you know, what we understand about when you're the victim of abuse is that it thrives on secrecy, right? The abuser puts you in a position where you believe that if you tell anyone about what's going on between the two of you, you are going to look so weak and guilty and complete. The shame that is imbued in you as the person who is being abused is what allows the abuse

to continue. Well, there's a lot in that when you're an experiencer. There's a shame, as Kelly said, in talking about this stuff. And this is where I think trauma and suffering and mental health and being an experience are all kind of jumbled up. You know, I'm someone who grapples with depression. and I'm very happy to say that I've gotten on top of it through both good hygiene and wellbutrin. A hell of a drug.

I'm very grateful for it. But for years, the reason that I wasn't able to get help was that my depression was like a person, a demon who was born of my mind and knows every. everything that I know and knows exactly what to say to me to tear me down, make me feel weak, and convince me that I can't tell anyone about what's happening between us. Well, these are the voices that we have in our heads as experiencers, too. People are going to laugh at you. They're going to make fun of you. They're going to call you a clown, right?

And I think that these things have everything in common, right? Everything in common. And what we also know about abuse or depression or anything that thrives on secrecy is that the way to take its power away is to expose it. It's like the story of the person who's having a recurring nightmare being chased by a monster. And finally one day in the dream they stop and turn around, face the monster, and the monster melts.

And that's it. That's the end of the recurring nightmare, right? I mean, it's not always that simple. Marilyn Manson didn't melt right away. But there is a great power in simply refusing to be complicit in the secrecy, which is a big part of what we're up here talking about. But I'll tell you, even as much as I've very decisively and decidedly cast myself as a spokesperson for this, I never stop feeling terrified to say in front of people,

Even a group here who I know you came, you paid $12, you want to be here. I still am scared to talk about it. I'm scared of what you think. And I don't think that will ever go away, just like the fear of contact will never go away. It's part of the challenge. And, you know, Kelly and we're talking last night about I teach at USC. And something that I talked about in that class is what is courage? and because the American archetype of courage is John Wayne.

He fears nothing. That's not courage. Courage is when you're scared and you do it anyway, right? That's what courage is. And for those of us who are living through the age of disclosure personally, it never stops requiring incredible courage to be open about this stuff. It never gets easier. Yeah, I mean, I think, okay, there's two things I want to say.

One is that, is that I think that this thing that we're talking about, this sense of mission, the reason we're talking about this isn't because of we're like, us and our experience are friends are very special, and we just wanted you to know. It's because I truly believe, from the bottom of my soul, and this is something that's been communicated to me, is that we all have a mission. Every single person on this planet has a divine mission for which they have been incarnated here

at this time in this moment of extreme challenge for the human race. And that this thing that seems to be waking people up, you know, like Daniel was saying, like, oh, I'm a filmmaker and it lets me take pictures of them, right? Like there is a thing that the phenomenon on wants from you. And what it wants from you is for you to be the person that you were when you were eight. Like the things that excited you then, the things that you knew you were the best at

in the whole wide fucking world, like you were. And it was true and you were right about yourself. And that we, I think very critically, what this process looks like is a return to self and a return to the person that we knew ourselves to be before the world convinced us otherwise. And that the process of this is, listen, it's beautiful, it's affirming. When you get there, you're like, ah, yes, I remember this person. But it is, it is devastating. Disclosure of any kind only happens because something was hidden. And something was only hidden because it needed to be hidden

because someone was either doing harm or afraid of doing harm or because they knew that if this thing got out, that it was going to cause some kind of problem. And the problem with lies is that they are like a demon in a way and they just accumulate more lies and it accumulates more cover up and it accumulates. And so this is something that's been happening to us as a species, this like amputation of the part of ourselves

that knows that we are more than just our physical body and that we have this connection to the cosmos that is meaningful and profound and that what we do here matters. And as we have had that amputated from us, it has done an unimaginable harm. And in our individual lives, in our families, in our communities, in our country,

and like as a species, like it scales from the individual all the way up. And coming to terms with that, coming to terms with the harm that's been done, coming to terms with what has been lost. You know, like when I had my anomalous experience five years ago, the over, there was like this, I had this, like, unitive feeling of connection to all of the universe and this understanding that, like, I was love and it's all love,

have always been love. And then as soon as it was over, the devastation was complete. I've never cried like that in my life. And it was because I could see the damage that had been, literal damage that had been done to my soul throughout the years that I spent having kept that part of me closed off and hidden.

And that's something that I still get really sad about sometimes, even though I came out of that experience with this understanding that that needed to happen so that I could talk to people who don't believe, so that I would know how to connect to them. But I think that as we go through this disclosure process as species, whatever that looks like, because the government's not going to tell us the truth, so we can forget that.

But they're going to tell us some stuff, and they're going to tell us some stuff that's going to rattle some people, and it's going to cause questions, and it's going to make people ask more questions, and then they're going to start on their own process, And I think that this is going to take off in a way that they don't quite understand and that none of us can see coming. But, like, I'm concerned with the way in which the modern disclosure movement has sort of framed this, like, a game. You know what I mean?

Like, we're going to get the answer. And then, you know, the president's going to stand on stage. He's going to say the thing. We're all going to be like, I told you. I told you. And there's going to be a parade. And you're going to. And I don't think that that's what, I don't think disclosure is a parade.

I think disclosure is a nuclear warhead being detonated in the atmosphere. Metaphorically. Hopefully, no. Yeah, it's metaphorically. Metaphorically. I think it's that devastating, that annihilating, that leveling, and that. But I don't say that to be scary, because I don't, I think that the fear of it is like the natural response to the unknown to changing.

It's the natural response to changing. I think that we as a species sense that if we're going to get through whatever is coming next and I don't think we have any real consensus on what that is, but whatever it is that's coming next that we are going to have to become something different than what we are now to get through that and that that transformation is going to feel like a death

but that it's not a death and that we can get through it. We can't do this and I know we can't. Disclosure Day, which I'm sorry, it was not a good film, but was very interesting culturally for its content. But the wish fulfillment of, to your point, a single incident happens

where everyone in the world learns at the same time that it's real. Even though I wasn't liking the movie, even that got me a little choked up because I would love that. But to your point, it would probably be so destabilizing that it wouldn't necessarily be,

it wouldn't feel like wishfulfilling at all. But also, it's kind of happened already. I mean, there's been, people have testified on the floor of Congress. And, you know, every year in my class at USC, again, hi, guys, I touch on these topics just a little bit because it's a class about filmmaking. But I always start by saying, who knows what I mean by disclosure? I don't mean that. Sorry, I asked my classes.

And there's no hands go up. And I say, are you aware that there have been high-ranking members of the military and intelligence community have testified on the floor of Congress that aliens and UFOs are real? No one. No one. I don't blame them, right? This information is strangely not disseminated. I was raised by an investigative reporter, my stepfather, John Ziamek, in Chicago.

He was a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times, and he was obsessed with UFOs and was constantly going out and chasing stories. Again, the cognitive dissonance of how I didn't believe in this stuff, it just never stops being hilarious. So I watched him. He interviewed Benny and Barney Hill. He knew J.L. and Hinek. He interviewed the first guy ever to report Kenneth Arnold.

It's because he'll start saying names. So he would bring these stories to the paper, and every single time the editor would say, we don't run this kind of thing. And he'd go, but I have it. No, we don't run these stories, right? So that's just one small example of one reporter, but you have to start to wonder,

how many attempts have there been over the years to report on this stuff that have been suppressed? They call it the dead stuff. spike in journalism. It's when you take a piece of paper and with a story on it, you put it on a spike, it's just going into the trash. I know, you know, now the dead spike is digital, but John Keel, who wrote Operation Trojan Horse, one of my heroes, who was like probably many people in this room, was not someone who was particularly interested in this stuff. And he wrote the Mothman prophecies. He was just a journalist who just wrote any kind of free

freelance magazine stuff. He stumbled into this topic and he had an idea to put out what was the equivalent of a Google alert. I can't remember what it was called in the 60s, but basically you could put these notices out on the AP wire. And he, so he was like, okay, anything that has the word UFO or alien or flying saucer, no one had done this before. And what happened was every single week, he was flooded with stories, many of which were not actually making it off the wire into the papers. And he realized, oh, my God, this is happening everywhere, every day. There are very clear and distinctive patterns, but the real revelation was not only is the information not making it to the public, but if you read the way that these stories are written,

everyone's talking about them differently. So, again, if the internet were around then, there wouldn't be anything, any clear words to search. Like it was just, this information was just scattered, like Post-it notes in the wind. And so that turned his whole life around. He became someone who became dedicated his whole life to reporting and wrote a series of incredible books on UFOs.

So it's out there And, you know, for anyone that I, because I've been waving my arms in my own world and saying, hey, UFOs. So, you know, people in my life who have a casual interest in this stuff will sometimes go, what is this UFO stuff, you know? And like, how can this be real?

I know about it. And I always say, listen, it's all out there. It's not hidden. You can go, in five minutes online, you can find volumes of evidence that this stuff is real. And not like in weird corners of the Internet. The CIA records, FBI records, now the Pentagon is releasing information. It's the moment kind of has happened.

Yeah. And nobody's paying attention. It's very strange. Yeah, it's really interesting. Like my husband is one of these people. and he, who just doesn't care. Like, he, there's something about this information that does not stick to people.

Like, you know, and I've even had conversations with my husband where he's like, he's very happy for me. He thinks this is all fantastic, but he does not care. And he will not care. Like, that's fine. And he, and it's not that I've asked him, I'm like, do you think I'm like, like, it's okay if you don't believe in this?

He's like, he's like, no. He's like, you're smart. We've known each other for like 20 years. He's like, I've known you for a long time. He's like, if you say it's real, I think it's probably real. He's like, he's like, it just doesn't, like, impact me at all. And I was like, fair. Okay.

But I think about that. I think about how many people have a hard time, like, just letting it stick. And how I was one of those people up until five years ago also. And so there's this kind of, like, weird, cordoned-off world that those of us who are aware of this topic are living in. And I don't know if anyone else is feeling this, but something that I actually, I don't even know if I've expressed this to anyone. A real concern that I have about disclosure is that like in the way,

in the same way that I think a lot of experiencers when you watch films, obviously there's some that do it very well, but in a lot of films and that sort of thing, like these experiences are not portrayed in a way that's very accurate, partly just because they resist narrative and structure in a way that makes them like difficult to put on film or to get anyone to fund it. And so I think that's obviously at least part of the issue. But I just don't feel like we have a way of like really conceptualizing this stuff

culturally. Like it's not something that's been that's out there. And that can be like really frustrating. But what I worry about is this kind of like big D disclosure coming in and then suddenly like it all gets greenlit and you kind of see how like, like for me at least, when I hear what's being talked about in like the mainstream disclosure narrative, it does not in any way reflect to me my experience or the experience of like the people who are close to me who are experiencing contact.

Like I'm, I hear all of these things that are kind of like adjacent, you know, we're talking about crafts and bodies and all of this stuff and like I know that there are people who are having those experiences as well, but for the vast majority of experiences, that's like not really what the nature of what this thing even is. And so then I worry like, okay, so we get big D disclosure. Is this suddenly going to become mainstream, but in this weird, like, bizarreo way that it does not read as real or, like, that seems somehow wrong, you know,

that, like, that we get this kind of, like, mainstream idea of the anomalous, but that it's so garbled and maybe, like, intentionally garbled, that there ends up being this kind of, like, weird alienation from it, that, like, it somehow doesn't really change the math, you know? Well, it's the cloak and dagger parts of it. you know, it's the evidence. And this is, comes back to the phrase

extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, but this is deeply problematic if you're an experiencer. Because if you're an experiencer, what you understand is that the experience is evidence, but there's no way you can prove it to anyone else.

And this extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence to me is a very convenient cover for skeptics and I can tell you, like I have friends who are skeptics. First of all, I'm convinced that most

skeptics are actually clairvoyance who can't handle it. That was me. The reason I know is that I lived it. But, you know, I have friends who say, I want to believe I just, you know, show me. And what I think is, it's not happening with that attitude, okay?

Is the phenomenon is not here to perform for anyone. The phenomenon is waiting for us to catch up to it. And this is, I think what you're saying, is that disclosure can mean many things. On a literal level, it can mean the disclosure of material evidence, information, right? what is that? It's the alien with the blanket

at the end of Disclosure Day. Woo, man. You know, as Trump, you know, walks out with J. Rod and, you know, and we all see an alien on live TV. That is a kind of disclosure, and it would change the world.

But it's only a small part of the story. The, perhaps the A story, to put it in narrative terms, is disclosure is about the immaterial world. It's the spiritual world. It's the inner life. It's the inner experience.

This is what non-human intelligence is waiting for us to evolve into. As Kelly said, I am more than my body. And this is unfortunately what we haven't, we're not evolving into very well. Now, if you're part of the problem, what you're describing Kelly, I think, is that there are, again, as someone who's a storyteller for a living, one of the most basic tenets of storytelling is, it doesn't matter what the circumstances are of your life. If you speak your emotional truth, it will be universal. I don't think that applies if you're an experiencer. And feel free to disagree. But it's so specific.

of an emotional experience, I have found it almost impossible to meet non-experiencers in the middle with this. They cannot understand what I'm talking about. And I've realized, I don't know that they're going to. And it's very lonely, and I don't know what to do about it, honestly. They have intellectual curiosity, but there's a limit to how much they can actually understand

what it is we're trying to convey. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is just a loneliness in this. And, you know, the thing is that the anomalous is very destabilizing. You know, our brains are set up to work on these kind of like rigid models, and it's meant to create all of these shortcuts, and it basically just convinces you that, like, you've got it figured out, but we don't actually know anything. And we're how don't even where I want to go with us?

It's, I think that, I think what's really hard about the anomalous is that it just destabilizes everything. It destabilizes your relationship to what you know to be true. And that it puts you into this hall of mirrors where you've got to figure it out. And when you're in that place, you desperately are looking for someone to give you the answer. And there's often someone who's willing to give that to you, unfortunately. But I think that there is a process in this, this thing I was talking about, about getting back to that, like your eight-year-old self,

that there is a radical loneliness that you have to embrace. Because at the end of the day, there is no real such thing. There is no such thing as disclosure because no one has ever once been able to just tell someone about the phenomenon and the person was like, oh, really? Well, no shit. And then, like, they just believe it. That's not how this works. Like, you have to go there yourself.

So disclosure and coming to terms with all of this is always ultimately going to be something that you're going to have to, we have to do it on our own. You have to go to this place where you figure out how you know what's true and that you have to be able to hold on to that kind of in the storms of everything else that's raging around us. And I think that there's a paradox in there that's really important because like something that so many experiencers talk about like on the flip side, like the other side of that coin is that this also seems to be connecting us in really profound ways. The ways that, like,

you know, we talk about experiencers kind of finding each other and this weird network that is, that is being created, you know, all of that is going on all the time. But there's also, so there's like this connection and there's this, like, there's the telepathic way in which the phenomenon talks to us. And I think a lot of experiences have received messaging around telepathy and this idea that we need to kind of remember that capacity in ourselves and to and so and so I've wondered in some ways if part of the reason that there's that dualness in it is because if we were a telepath like how do you be a telepathic species without losing what makes humanity special which is like our each unique individuality and I wonder if part of what this process is

that we're going through is for us to move to that, we have to first be able to become a telepathic species without eradicating what's unique about us. We have to be able to move through the fear and to learn how to hold on to that essential core of ourselves, even when everything else around us is falling apart and we have no real fixed point or like no real place to like say for sure

that we know what's real, that you have to anchor into yourself and find that discernment in yourself and find that answer in your self, and find that answer in your own. yourself and that maybe that's the only way that we can move forward if we're to become the kind of species that we need to be. Yeah, and it's one thing to have the courage to talk about vulnerable things, but it's another thing entirely to talk about vulnerable things in a vulnerable way. These are two very different things.

And in other words, to be vulnerable in front of other people is hard for every It's especially hard when you're talking about something that you realize 70% of the people are going to think you're crazy. Right? It's extraordinarily vulnerable. The vulnerability of it may be the point that you were saying, suffering and trauma is the phenomenon. And I think always about the tarot and the fool, which is a fascinating card, right? card, right? Because the fool is the idiot. But the fool has no number. Fool exists outside of the deck. And one could make the argument that the fool is in fact the most evolved of all the

cards in the tarot because the fool is unafraid of humiliating himself. This may be the most advanced form of existence is to be unafraid of humiliating yourself. And this was, you know, this was the role of the shaman at one time. You know, the shaman was filthy. The shaman was crazy. The shaman was disgusting. But the shaman got that way because the shaman

was willing to face the things that no one else in the village would face. This is also the village idiot. And it's what the artist does. And it's what the experiencer does. And this all gets back to courage again. And, you know, it is, you know, again, My standpoint is always in the creative arts,

but one of the things that I've understood to be sacrosanct in creation and creativity is nothing has any value, but doesn't cost you something to expose. And when you take in a work of art that's empty, it's because there was nothing personal in it. There was nothing exposed that cost the artist anything. And this is another form of disclosure. It's also why an overall,

overwhelming percentage of experiencers and contactees were either already artists or become artists. I think it's not an accident. So to bring this back to what, so John Keel famously said he believes that roughly 30% of the human population has some touch of clairvoyance and 10% have a lot. And this quote of his, and I'm obsessed with, which I'm going to paraphrases, he said, if you're amongst the 30%, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're amongst the 70% who do not have any clairvoyant abilities, nothing we say will ever convince you. When I read that, oh boy, it was, it was like getting struck by lightning because it was everything that I was living. And so, I think this is maybe taking me to my final thesis here, which is if you are an experience, It is your duty to humiliate yourself.

Be open about it. Tell everyone, screaming from the rooftops, and know that there is a community of people who are here who are like-minded, who will support you. I've gotten in my life to where almost everybody I know that I talk to as an experiencer, and when I find myself in some kind of event where I realize I can't talk about that, I'm like, oh, this is going to suck. I'm like, what do I have my hands?

Every other topic is so boring by comparison. All right, well, that's my network speech. Yeah, I guess, you know, I would just build on that and just say that like, wherever you are, whether you're a lifelong experiencer or this is just something that you're curious about, you know, I really do think that when you engage with a phenomenon, it engages back. And, you know, that is something that I say with both encouragement and caution, because I think that, I mean, it's the hero's journey, right? It's like any transformational process,

and there's some very, very, very dark moments in the hero's journey. And what the phenomenon, in one way or another, it's absolutely insane, the insane variety of ways that this can manifest in people's lives and what that looks like. But the core of it is essential and the same, whether it's a horrific experience or a transcendent one, whether you're a lifelong experience or someone who's just had something strange happen,

which is that like it is going to drag you into the heart of yourself, into the things that you don't want to face, into the things that you know about yourself, but that you have neglected, into the core of both your gift and your wound, and it's going to show you that those are the same thing. And the humiliation part is that to truly give the world your gift,

you also have to expose your wound. You have to show it. And it is, it's annihilating, you know? But that's okay. That's okay. We are clearly, whatever's going on here. I think people who don't even believe in any of this can tell that something's going on with the human race

that we're going to have to evolve in some kind of a way. We are going to have to change fundamentally the way that we are existing on this planet if we're going to move forward. And the only way to change is a process of transformation and of a death and of a rebirth. And so I guess my message would just be

that this is hard work, but it is important work that I think that this is something that is going to snowball over time and that those of us, you know, the experiencers in this room who are questioning and who are doing this work and who are, we are navigating the underworld with our dim flashlights and doing our best. But I think that this work is important because more people are coming after us, a lot more people are coming after us. And the work that we're willing to do now and the fears that we're willing to face now

are gifts that we're going to be able to be able to be. past to others as they come inevitably along behind us. And so I just, I just want to say thank you so much to all of you for being here, to being a part of this community for supporting the work that we're doing, for the work that I know so many of you in this room are doing. It's just a real privilege to be a part of this community. And I'm just very grateful. And I really hope that all of you will spend some time thinking tonight about who you were when you were eight years old and how you can honor that person. You've been listening to Inquiry

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