Inquiry with Kelly Chase - Gods, Ghosts, & UFOs

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Today we’re sharing a special preview of a brand-new podcast called Gods, Ghosts, & UFOs—a show that explores the haunted edges of human experience, where the spiritual, the supernatural, and the anomalous collide. This preview episode is split into two parts. In the first half, Kelly joins hosts Jordan, Mallory, and Tom for an intimate and wide-ranging conversation about the cultural impact of the UFO phenomenon, the power of storytelling, and what it means to navigate a world where the boundaries of reality are breaking down. In the second half, enjoy another episode preview where the GGU team explores abductions, Sky Watcher’s “living taxonomy” of UAP, the James Webb telescope’s latest anomalies, and what it means to stay curious in a world fraying at the seams. If you love Cosmosis, you're going to find a lot to sink your teeth into here. 👉 Follow Gods, Ghosts, & UFOs here: GodsGhostsUFOs.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Hey friends, it's Kelly. Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to let you know that what you're about to hear is something a little different. Jay and I are tied up with other projects this week. So instead of our regularly scheduled programming, we're bringing you a sneak preview of a brand new podcast called Gods, Ghosts and UFOs. This show is smart, witty, and deeply respectful of the mystery. It doesn't just chase phenomena. It asks deeper questions about what they mean and why. they matter. I think it's going to resonate with a lot of you who already love Cosmosis. The episode you're about to hear is a mix of things, so you can get a feel for what the show is like. In the first half, I sit down with Jordan, Mallory, and Tom for a wide-ranging conversation about the shifting cultural narrative around UFOs and what it means to live through an ontological crisis. We're sharing this episode on the Cosmosis feed to help get the word out. So if you like what you hear, make sure to follow gods, ghosts, and UFOs wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also find it at gods, ghosts, UFOs.com, and the link is in the episode description. All right, let's get into it. All right. So the person I've come to trust the very most on the subject of UFOs is the woman who created the UFO rabbit hole podcast. I don't know of anyone who has managed to synthesize a more comprehensive perspective on this topic. than she has, or who has developed a better sense of discernment to help cut through the, shall we say, bullshit. And she also happens to be humble enough to probably hate this introduction, but too bad. Welcome to the show, Kelly. Hi, everybody. How's it going?

We're so happy you're here. Thank you. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. I know you've got nothing to do. You're sitting around. It's fine. You know, just time to burn. This is great. I told Jordan, I try to minimize the number of times a week. I have to do my hair. So when I'm, oh my gosh, preach. Kelly, let me try to describe you to yourself like in a way like as almost like an introduction. You're a relatively recent newcomer to this whatever community. Yes.

And it's based on an extraordinary experience you had. And my understanding is that you began the podcast as a way of understanding it. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I've only been doing this for about a little over three years now. And it's been a wild ride. So here's my question. The phenomena itself is so incredible and diverse and fascinating, but what really interests me is sort of the effect that it's had on you. How have you changed in the sense of being open-minded, staying skeptical, making yourself vulnerable to it? One of the coolest but most difficult and destabilizing, but also kind of exhilarating parts of doing this kind of work, is that it gets you to a place where you start quite.

questioning everything, not just in a conspiracy theory sort of way, but like, how do we know what we know? Like, what of my knowledge do I know for a fact is correct? And recognizing how contingent most of what we know is, that there's like a very small subset of knowledge that comes from lived experience. But the vast majority of the knowledge that we get is given to us from other people. And we build our civilization and our stores of knowledge and all of these things on the idea that we're able to basically trust the people in the institutions that we have put in charge of different pieces of our collective knowledge. And the thing about getting into the UFO is you start to realize how flimsy our hold on what reality is actually is. How much the people that we put in charge either don't know or have in some ways lost, if they ever had it,

the will to really serve the people. They're usually serving some kind of other interest. And it takes you to this place where you end up questioning everything. And I think that that kind of process is extremely destabilizing. But there's also many fruits to be found in that work also because I think that intellectual humility is something that is entirely missing in our culture. You think about, you know, gas prices go up or milk prices go up. And suddenly everyone on the internet is an expert on how.

gas prices are set and who isn't responsible for this and who's, you know, who we should be going after with pitchforks until the next day when they're given the next thing that they're supposed to be mad about when they're an expert on that. But there isn't a lot of actual inquiry going on and people make commitments to ideas from an ideological perspective. And once they do that, they're no longer willing to kind of consider other evidence. Intellectual humility is going to be a takeaway for me. That's such good language. I understand why there is a resistance, right? I think people are worried about being duped.

You know, they're worried about being lied to or manipulated. What do you think the place is for skepticism when it comes to intellectual humility? I think skepticism is probably one of the most important pieces of this. And I think that sometimes in the UFO community that people can get really frustrated with skeptics and debunkers. I will say I think debunking is different than skepticism. Debunking goes in with the conclusion that this isn't real. and then kind of works backwards from there, which is, you know, kind of a very biased viewpoint in and of itself. But true skepticism isn't like just about criticizing something or trying to disprove something or being constantly suspicious of things.

I think that true skepticism is about taking personal responsibility for your own knowledge and opinions. It's understanding that there could be flaws in your own logic and that true skepticism and healthy skepticism starts with a healthy skepticism. of yourself, of your own thoughts, of your own beliefs, of your own models and frameworks that you're bringing to the equation. And I think that when skepticism is approached in that way, that it is extraordinarily valuable. And I would, I'm sure there are many people who would disagree, but I would still consider myself, even as an experiencer, even as someone who has encountered the UFO phenomenon and believes that it's real, I would still consider myself a skeptic, because I think that skepticism is about a mental approach to how you take

things. It's not an unwillingness to accept anything beyond consensus reality. Amen. Being open-minded is, that's not the same thing as gullibility, is it? I'm interested in what, and how are you finding yourself less relatable as you go deeper? Like, what is it harder to engage? Like, what's this process like for you? I'm definitely way more weird. So many of the conversations that people are just having out in the world feel so scripted now. It just feels like I go out with people and everybody's like mad about the same thing that like the internet told them to be mad about that day. And it's not that I don't see the issues and the things that they're talking about.

It's that I have a very different relationship now to information that is coming to me through the media, through algorithms and, you know, how I feel about various authorities, structures. Just as a, for instance, if you take David Grush at his word, what we're talking about here is a rogue faction of the intelligence community that is apparently overseen and governed by no one with a functionally limitless budget that has taken control of asymmetric technology that could change the entire world. And there doesn't appear to be anything we can do about it. And so when people get all stressed out about the presidential election, it's hard to, like, go there. Do you think that in the case of feeling sort of strange or unrelatable that you might just be early and that maybe this thing turns a corner and that people will feel more relatable when they start to experience this stuff and that there will be more people to connect to and in closer and more meaningful ways?

I do. I really do. I think even just over the last three years that I've been doing this, I've seen huge changes. You know, I just put out an episode about an anomalous experience that I had that connected me to somebody else who has these like really interesting sigh abilities that are kind of hard to believe. But he managed to prove in a lab that something distinct is going on with his brain state. And it took me a really long time to put that episode out because it just felt like how do I tell people that through this string of absurd sounding synchronicities I got connected to this guy and he's got he's an ex-man. He's got superpowers apparently. How do you tell that story? But then in the meantime, like the telepathy tapes has come out and there's all sorts of other conversations being had. And I feel like a story that I was afraid to tell a year ago, there's suddenly a kind of place in the culture and in the conversation for that story to take place and for people to really absorb it.

And so I do, I see it changing rapidly. I think that due to a variety of reasons, the consensus reality is kind of fraying at the seams and that it's kind of shaking people just enough that I think more and more people are willing to consider. ideas outside of what they normally would have considered. We cannot tell you how utterly thrilled we were. And I congratulate you on your wonderful podcast. I'm an avid listener. Thanks to Jordan. Oh, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. Do you want to put in a plug for Cosmosis? We created a docuseries. It's called Cosmosis, UFOs, and a new reality. It is available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV. If you're international, we've got it on Vimeo. If you're looking for a place to watch it, you can go to watchcosmosis.com, and you'll find all sorts of links to platforms where you can find

the show. I've seen it. It's fantastic. Top to bottom. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Kelly. We are grateful for what you're doing. We hope to see you again. Oh, well, thank you so much. Hey, this is Jordan. We had that conversation with Kelly a few months ago and thought that the Cosmosis audience might appreciate our more recent follow-up on some of those same topics. So coming up is our discussion on the latest from Skywatcher, a frankly pretty bad take on abductions we found in the news, and new data from the James Webb Space Telescope. We had a great time with this episode, and we think you will too.

And it seems like Kelly and the Cosmosis crew agree, or you wouldn't be hearing this right now. Oh, and last thing, if you dig what we're doing, we hope you'll go check out our show at gods, ghosts, UFOs.com, or just look for gods, ghosts, and UFOs wherever you get your podcasts. And we're off. Welcome to God's Ghosts and UFOs, the biggest podcast in the universe. My name is Jordan, and I'm here as always. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app

and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you. stay. Hilton for the stay. He's locked in this liminal space with Tom and Mao. That's me. And we're here to talk about all the things that they

said weren't real. Today, that's going to be UFOs, alien abductions, and strange light from outer space. And then Tom and Jordan want me to talk about a strange experience that I had on a silent retreat a few weeks ago, so we'll end with that. Well, first we're going to start with

something news-e, newsish. I think, shouldn't we just changed the name of the show to UFOs, UFOs, and UFOs, because that sort of seems to be how it's sort of shaken out a little bit. We've made it through two whole episodes before this without directly talking about UFOs. Well, we're back. Through the entire episode. We're back. Let's face it. We're back with it. Yeah. So there's this group called Skywatcher, and they're putting out videos, and they're a kind of a collective of dudes, some of whom are PhDs, some of whom are, are well known in the UAP community, who were out in the desert with high tech.

And it's a fascinating sort of endeavor. They have something that they refer to as like a radar dog whistle, which they claim attracts UAPs consistently, which they then observe using drones and people in helicopters, and they post shaky, grainy images of things in the sky, which is brand new, you know, in the UFO world.

Just the shaky, grainy images. But what's interesting is that they're collecting data, right? And they're very into collaborating, sharing, peer review, I guess some kind of reproducibility. And they have established, what they refer to as a living taxonomy of different types of UAP. Nine, they claim.

There's class one, which is a tetra, shaped as a tetrahedron, which tumbles on multiple axes, a lot of tumbling going on with these things. The classic Tick-Tac, which we remember, right, from the military fighter jet images. that the New York Times released in 2017. There's a thing called a blob, which is orb-shaped and pulsing and contains an internal light.

Tends to be orange, I think. There's something called a beam. An IR-only orb-shaped UAP. So some of these can be seen visually. Some of them have to be seen with different technologies like infrared. A mantaray, which looks like a mantaray, does a lot of tumbling,

a bright star, and that thing called the GER. jellyfish. I'm not sure if you guys, we talked about the jellyfish video when it was like the thing that could only be seen with certain technology that was flying over military bases and that made everyone really excited and happy. There's something called a hornet, something called an egg. Okay, cool. I immediately thought of Carl Linnaeus because that's who I, that's just how my brain works, the celebrated 18th century Swedish doctor and biologist who functionally created our system of taxonomy. Very interesting dude. And Carl Linnaeus said in his

philosophia botanica, in natural science, the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation. So I got my Linnaeus quote in there. So I'm happy about that. Naturally. Would have expected nothing less. There's so much more to talk about with this skywatcher crowd, including stuff easily, you know, classified as my own personal opinion. But that I think is the gist of it. It's fascinating.

It is. What do you guys think? There's so many competing theories about what these things are and what they're for and whatever. But based on what I've heard about the behavior, I mean, even just in that video itself, in the way that they were talking about how they are and aren't able to interact with these things and how they seem to avoid direct observation, et cetera, it seems like, I have the suspicion that one of their primary objectives somehow in some sense by some

perspective is to like tease us into trying harder to learn about them like sort of like you know math is really boring to kids unless you make it unless you gamify it somehow right um and so if you just dangle a mystery in front of someone in just the right way they'll start to do everything they possibly can to untangle it and figure it out and these things just seem perfectly calibrated to provoke our curiosity it's like they'll come when they're they're summoned but not really like you can't get too close. Like there was a point in the video where they talked about the helicopter pilots said like never experienced this in my life. We went up here. We tried to get close to this thing and it was like there was this ceiling of air that kept us from like going any farther and we couldn't figure out

why and we eventually just had to come back like home. And it like very very very weird and just continues to be persistently mysterious. So then I came up with that take or that that that was my response to this story. And then literally like last night I read this. thing in John Mack's passport to the cosmos, which I decided to read, I literally decided to start reading this book two days ago. And he said, it is as if the agent or intelligence at work here were parodying, mocking, tricking, and deceiving the investigators, providing just enough physical evidence to win over those who are prepared to believe in the phenomenon, but not enough to convince the skeptic. In this apparently frustrating situation, there may lie a deeper truth

and possibility. It is as if the phenomenon we're inviting us to change our ways, to expand our consciousness and ways of learning, to use, in addition to our conventional ways of knowing and observing methodologies more appropriate to its own complex, subtle, and perhaps ultimately unknowable nature. Like, there you go, John Mack. That's really good. The trickster element, right? Yeah, yeah. And even those guys in the video were like, well, what these things look like to the naked eye is not what it looks like on video. Right. Yeah.

I noted with some degree of frustration that you were... What do you think, Mel? I find this delightful. I've been having some thoughts about... I have a media background. We all do. We're all artists, right? The thing that makes this conversation,

the timbre of like, oh, there's something that's encouraging us, tricking us, playing with us, like almost like a loving parent or a babysitter. Like, this is so cute to me. And it's a totally different tone than, like, turn on any, any special that's about aliens or ghosts or UFOs.

And what kind of music are you going to hear? Spoopy, theremin. What kind of, yeah, what kind of words are they going to use? They're going to use words like unnerving, terrified. Like in the article that I read today. Yes, exactly. And so the tone ends up being like, you're not. And I just keep wondering, like, what if it was the magic school bus?

Like, what if we were like Paddington on his new adventure? And I understand that because it feels like we're on the brink of annihilation when we're toying with reality, I guess, and what we might be assuming to be reality. But that's literally what babies do. That's what babies do. That's what we've all already done. So I think it's a really apt comparison. I'm so interested in what could be a much more neutral conversation or even delightful conversation possibly than what I feel like I've been ingesting my whole life, which is basically just the X-Files and like, which is wonderful and fun.

But like, is this, does this need to be scary? Or are we talking about hornets and eggs and tic-tacks? Like it's just a bunch of bugs in my backyard. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's funny. The idea of this stuff being scary and threatening. Oh, we can't tell the general populace because everyone will plots. But if you think about it, even in the sort of like the canon of UAP phenomenon started about the time we got the bomb and hidden information by the government who is reverse engineering stuff so they can weaponize it, you know. It's not free nuclear power for the masses. It's scary bad man has technology, arms race, bullshit. and then it's constantly brought to us as weapons capabilities when in fact, clearly it's something that has way more potential, right, for humans.

And when I read the Skywatcher website, honestly, it's cosplay military stuff with these guys. You know, I'm like, okay, I'm going to read you guys an excerpt from the Skywatcher website. in like a worldwide wrestling announcer voice. Because that's just the only thing I hear. So it's like, Skywalker. Capabilities. A pioneering approach to air domain awareness.

Integrating operational expertise with beyond frontier technologies to enable greater multi-domain awareness. Tactical data acquisition. Certain multi-censor deployments in threat area. What the fuck does that? What's the force? What's the threat area? Multi-centered deployments and thread area.

Just keep thinking about Pete Hegseth on the signal chat going like, Opsack is secure. Okay, well, I will. American flag socks. To be. Flame emoji. Fist. To be in America.

To play the, to play the literal devil's advocate. That's really good. I think, I do think that people, people approach this stuff from wherever, from wherever, from perspective they're most familiar and like all these guys who are doing the skywatcher program are defense contractors like that's going to say like they're from this world they are military adjacent or ex-military yeah right that i think and to their credit one of the guys james barber character of this whole thing you know he did this like two-hour interview with ross coltart and like whatever and i came away from that feeling like here's a guy who has been working as a defense contractor

in these different capacities for like a long time and he's he is like he is a black ops guy like he's but like in the sort of boring way, right? Where it's like, yeah, you have this real business that you do real business with. And then like every once in a while, some other sort of entity taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, we need you to come do this job for us. And then you go do the job. And most often the job is like fly the helicopter over here, pick up this thing, bring it back over here. And that's your job.

And like, don't tell anyone. And so he comes at it from this sort of angle of I want to do better. I want to do more. But like the guy is still a military type dude. You know, and the people he knows are all military type people. And the investors he knows are probably like in that world too. So naturally this thing is going to sound like that. That's their language.

Those are their paradigms. People do what they can with what they have. I come at this. I can't shake myself of all like a lot of my religious sort of language because like that's kind of where I'm from. Like I grew up religious. And so like a lot of my language, a lot of my understanding, a lot of my paradigms, like that's the material that they're built out of.

I don't necessarily think that any of these things are wrong. And I also think like, Mal to your point, like, can it be more fun and less threatening. The answer is yes on both sides. People have been injured by these things. And like, there's, of course. So there's truth in sort of both both ends. Like I, I wouldn't say I'm 100% convinced about anything, but I find this narrative very compelling that a little bit of all of this is true. There are secret programs that have built UFO type machines that fly around and like do sort of nefarious things. But then there are also like non-human intelligent crap that like are flying around and doing their things. I think that there's probably a really big scope of things going on.

And the fact that the Skywatcher program is summoning nine different kinds of UFOs, you know, are we going to sit back and say, well, that's probably all of them. Sure. Skywatcher program. They've probably seen all of them. There's probably nine. Now we know that there are nine kinds of UFOs. Like, what percentage of these things do you think these guys have managed to see?

And it's probably not 100%. Maybe 50, maybe 20, maybe 10, maybe 5%. Like, and if it's a lower percentage than 100%, it means that there's like a lot, more out there that we could potentially find out about it or not or whatever it's yes and it's everything right several years ago my my friend when she was pregnant she decided to do home births and so she did hypno birthing and i learned a decent amount from her during that time but the thing that really stuck with me was that she talked about how the purpose of hypnoburthing in many ways is to remove a lot of the sort of culturally imposed ideas about how painful and how

scary, the process of birth will be that it's like, you know, you see all this stuff in media of just women just like screaming and bleeding and sometimes dying and like, and then in comedies even like, yep, it's the worst thing. I tore whole to hole. It's going to ruin your life. Like, just like this thing that that basically prepares you to feel like, oh, this is going to be, I need to get the epidural. This is going to be the worst day of my life. I know it's going to be amazing, but I'm going to be ripped open by a human and it's going to be awful. And to try and actually remove a lot of those ideas and instead remind yourself just how natural this is, that you don't have to do anything and your body will do this, that there are like, you know, Bush women

who just like literally drop a baby and then keep working through the day. There's a way to prepare your mind for something unknown, possibly difficult, maybe not straightforward. Even something like death can be approached with a mindset that doesn't make you suffer quite as much. And like allows you to approach these subjects that, yeah, might include some complicating things about reality and humanity and our futures, but also doesn't just need to be like, we're about to be annihilated and everything about this is scary. I think that the way we prime ourselves and honestly, the necessity of, various different, because you're talking about people who speak different languages.

Part of the reason we do that is so we can talk to each other. It's like, yeah, we've got military people over here who are speaking that language. Might be good to get some artists involved. Thank you. See, my issue with this is, I like, I have no issue at all with what they're doing on its face. What my issue is with what is being implied. Because they are hardcore materialists and they're like, they brag about how there's no emotional component and they don't feel like this

a religious experience. And I'm like, how quaint, how adorable that you're taking this real 20th century approach to a 21st century issue. And the idea that like, they're not gay or, you know, no homo UAP observation because they're not, you know, emotionally, you know, attached. And I'm like, cool, you're going to have the experience that you're already setting out the parameters of your experiences. If you're somehow discreet from these things you're observing, you're not. And like, there is the individual's relationship to the phenomena itself, whatever it is. They can't separate themselves from it and to pretend that they can or use the intermediary of technology is fine. I guess, I mean, I really do like the idea of data analysis and collection. I really do. I love that,

actually. But to deny this entire other aspect of the human experience and how we interact with our environments and to what extent we are part of or are our environment or what it says about us. I know that that's sticky and chaotic and in its own way scary, but I just don't want these guys rocking up and with their fucking threat areas and like pretending that they've got ownership of the knowledge because they don't. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this is naive, but could it be inevitable that eventually all of this will be more.

accessible that just the way most technology is you look at how like there used to be two cameras in the world you know like like film cameras like you could make movies if you lived in France or if you lived in LA you know and now everyone has a camera like 12 year olds have cameras and they can make movies wouldn't it be cool if we could use that dog whistle that seems like well so they talked about they talked about two different kinds of dog whistles and and in the the video that came out just a couple of days ago, it was about like the radar, like the materialist dog whistle. But in the next one that they tease that they're planning to talk about the the side phenomenon stuff. Like people are, you know, and you could talk about that too in terms of the

increasing accessibility. Like once it becomes more culturally accepted that that stuff is real, then more people will become interested in it. More people will try to kind of track it down and use it and try to figure out how it works. And so I think that there's sort of an inevitable democratization of not only the technologies that they're using to dog whistle, but if you thought of psychological abilities or sci abilities as a kind of technology, then that is also going to be democratized to some degree. So, you know, I look at something like Skywatchers, like, these guys, they have no mandate.

Like, they're doing this just because they feel like it. And then they got money, they got enough money to buy the stuff that was expensive that they wanted to buy and go to the places that they wanted to go to be able to do the kind of things that they wanted to do. Because it's defense department stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but there's nothing to say that anybody couldn't do the exact same thing they're doing, right? With enough money.

Yeah, with enough money. And it is becoming like more, it is becoming more accessible. So the things that they have to spend a lot of money on now may not cost so much in a future. True. My point is that you don't need all the gear to have an experience or to be open to the experience or actually have your, maybe you have your own internal. Unless the experience that you want is capturing it on radar. Right, unless you, yeah, unless you're, yeah, right. Yeah.

Right. Which is, in its own way, worthy and valuable, I'm just saying that, like, it's, I, I object strongly to the degree to which we have been hyper individuated and made to feel apart from our own lives and our own worlds and just turned into passive consumers. Like someone will feed us the information that is our, frankly, our divine birth, right? You know what I'm saying? and do it in such a way that is. And it's probably because I'm trying to emotionally process the idea that everything

that I was taught as a child about what it means to be a citizen or a good person has been basically like smeared in shit and handed back to me to eat. And I'm not, I don't really love that. Like I woke up and realized that I grew up on the Death Star. I didn't want to do that. Didn't want to do that. But here we are, you know what I mean? So then it's like, well, what are we going?

going to do. I keep thinking, Mal, that thing you said, there's so beautiful about AI being a child and how we must parent that. You know, it's not enough that it exists or and it's like just mimicking and, you know, telling you whatever it is you want to hear and therefore not to be trusted. I mean, it must be guided. Anyway, I feel very soapboxy today. I'm sorry about that. I mean, I bring my soapbox to every conversation. Yeah. Mal, I think you've got a story about abductions today, and I want to hear it. You know, this is some classic fair over here. It's an article from Mirror, which is a publication out of the UK, I believe.

And it's got what many articles about alien abductions do, which is like kind of, it's written a little strangely. I have no idea why the story was written right now. Both of the people who are written about in the article or the main two people who were talked about, their abductions were in 1989. So I'm like, I don't know why this was written. But there's a lot in here, I feel, that is very interesting to discuss. The title of the article is, I was abducted by aliens. Here are the signs that you might have been, too. They're referring to a British man named Philip Kinsella, who was abducted in 1989,

which was the same year that Linda Napolitano was abducted. I don't know if you've heard of the Manhattan Alien Abduction. I was able to watch just a little bit of. of on it, a little bit of it on Netflix, and I look forward to finishing it. She has a wild story. So she and Philip were abducted the same year. She was abducted in downtown Manhattan, and 23 witnesses saw her being lifted over the Brooklyn Bridge. So one of her quotes, I think she told Vanity Fair, if I was hallucinating, then the witnesses saw my hallucination. So they call her abduction, like the abduction of the century for that reason. And,

British Kinsella's story is a bit different. He, so she claims to have an experience where she was like lifted and levitating in her house, lifted out her window and like flying over Manhattan and people saw that happen. Philip claims and there just, I have to say there's some trigger warnings here because this is not a pleasant experience. And this is, this is part of this as well, is that he says that he was levitated and moved through his house before being strapped naked to a board and probed. And then it all, then the, and then the article just drops without explaining that he's clairvoyant. And then it says that he shares six signs that could indicate you've had an alien encounter, but they only share one sign. So that's what I mean about the dubious writing.

You're like, everybody just take this with a grain of salt. I want you to know that this is what we have to dig through in this area right now. And maybe eventually, Skywatcher will help us have little encyclopedias about this stuff. We'll do a list of a six. Maybe you got to dig, whatever, nobody reads after the first ad anymore. Right? Right? It's like six signs that you could be it that indicate you had an alien encounter. Levitating, strapped to a board, multiple witnesses. I don't know what's happening, probing.

Well, he says the sign that's talked about in this article is implants. So he says that like implants the size of about a grain of rice that he says is covered in organic tissue. Those are his words, organic tissue. So your body doesn't. reject it. So he has like a little lump behind his ear and then also like these three little triangular spots that he thinks are from his addiction. Abduction. Abduction. And an abdiction and a benediction.

They also bring up Fran Dresher. Are you guys familiar with the fact that Fran from the nanny, the sitcom in the 90s, has been open about her and she and her partner both when they were in middle school. But like they were on drives with their fathers and apparently had

alien encounters. And she, She claims that they have implants and that they have this, that matching scars on their hands, because they do have scars on the same place on their hands. But he's like, nah, I don't think that's what it is. But apparently, according to what I investigated, he hasn't denied that they were both abducted. He's just like, I don't think the scars are admitted. Definitely. I was definitely abducted, but. Nah.

I draw the line at implants. Franz. Franz Wild over there. I had no idea. I had no idea. Did you know that John Lennon saw a UFO in like 1975 and like gave interviews about it and in the liner notes of what whatever record came out, Walls and Bridges or whatever record? He goes, I saw a UFO August something something 1975. And then they killed it.

It's quite opening about it. Did you happen and did he happen to go into specifics? Like was it a blob or was it? He absolutely wanted to. No, it was more of the OG sort of like blinking light sort of like saucer craft. with the thing on top that he just watched fly over, you know, down the river and just, you know, got a damned good look at it. It didn't report being abducted, but I don't, you know, anyway, I didn't know the Fran Drescher thing at all. I didn't know that that woman had been abducted

and witnessed by whatever, two dozen people. That's wild. Yeah. So there's a quote in the article that I pulled because he was offering tips on how to spot potential implants. And he said, such as noticing an itchy spot or a specific problem area. And it's like, okay. So anybody with a bump on their body. Guess I was inducted. People who has have an itch. Or, you know, immediately in the Manhattan Alien Abduction Netflix limited series, they get into hypnosis. and the idea that basically, like, the reason that you need to spot signs is because it's possible your mind has been wiped

by after your alien abduction. So then only through hypnosis will these things come up. And listen, I'm open to this. Like, I genuinely am. But I also think there's a lot of danger here. There's just so much, there's so much that I feel like this is just a lot to pull apart and to work through as a continuing conversation together.

because the idea that it's like, well, you know, I went to my possibly nefarious hypnotist, you know what I mean, who had an objective of some kind, and I showed them a bump, and then we talked about aliens, and then I remembered, like, like, no, I don't know anything about Fran's experience, right, other than what I just, what I was just able to uncover with just a rudimentary Google search, but mentioning, we were in the car with our dad, both, like, she was in the car with her dad and her partner and producer, eventually. I think that they divorced eventually, but they both experienced this in the car with their dad and I'm like, hmm, I wonder if they've ever seen close encounters of the third kind

where their dad was driving around in a car and saw some lights in the sky. This is what makes this territory so tricky for me. As willing as I am to completely listen to someone's experience, I'm concerned about the possible ripple effects of just people dealing with how hard is to be a person, how difficult it is to have been harmed at any point in your life and then to have to deal with that, and to sometimes really want answers and to find bumps and think, well, maybe I'm the way I am because this, I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Like, I find this area a little concerning. I've heard stories of people who had abduction experiences where the memories were sort of altered or they had a childhood experience in which

circus monkeys came into their room. You know what I mean? And then years later they were like, I guess that's what I could sort of, you know, apprehend is what was happening when I was five, you know. And it reminds me in my first nightmare where I was four. And in the living room of our home in Fort Lauderdale and behind the living room chair,

Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street rose up very slowly. And it was fucking terrifying. I'm like, fuck, was I abducted? You know? I don't think so. But like, but there must be data of people, you know, by this point, do we not have, hopefully a collection of data of people going like, okay, I was abducted and it went like this and it was like this.

And what do these stories, stories, I mean, these accounts, you know, have in common. The, like, how you might have been abducted article in the mirror doesn't do a lot for me. No. No. But anyway. Yes. Me neither. Right.

But yeah. It's interesting. We pick these headlines partly because it's like, hey, you may have seen this story because like this sort of went out to a wider audience. Then frankly, I mean, my media consumption habits are a little bit, let's call them esoteric at this point. And so I hear about a lot that I find very compelling and very convincing. But like it's not going to penetrate the wider, you know, awareness or attention sphere of the media economy. And so I know right now that there is an ongoing and well-funded effort to try to catalog

many thousands of abduction stories and experiences, reported experiences, to try to do the kind of data analysis that we're talking about. Like that's going on. Right. And aren't there people who are like, this is categorically different from PTSD trauma, like physical abuse? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is categorically different. And so I'm actually going to pull up another John Mack quote. Because the whole idea, he was one of the pioneers, frankly, of hypnotherapy-induced recall of abduction experiences. Recovery. And so people, yeah. So people would come to him with stories.

Sometimes they would come to him with stories that they remembered and they wanted to talk through. And sometimes they would come to him with fragments of things that they didn't understand. And then he would help them through, like, with hypnotherapy, like come up with fuller versions of those stories. And this is what he had to say about it. So John Mack was, he was a very. he was a very serious clinician and scientists. This is not a trifling person. This is someone who took he took data very, very seriously. And he came from a paradigm of strict materialism. He came from a very secular background. He was a classically trained psychiatrist and psychologist. He was

not interested in the weird, crazy things. What happened to him was that he encountered a lot of stories that he had a hard time explaining. And so I'll read this quote. He says of the experience of talking to this growing number of people who had these types of experiences, he said, I was then faced with the choice of either trying to fit these individuals' reports into a framework that fit my worldview. They were having fantasies, strange dreams, delusions, or some other distortion of reality, or of modifying my worldview to include the possibility that entities, beings, energies, something could be reaching my clients from another realm.

The first choice was compatible with my worldview, but did not. not fit the clinical data. The second was inconsistent with my philosophical grounding and with conventional assumptions about reality, but appeared to fit better what I was finding. It seemed to me to be more logical and intellectually more honest to modify my cosmology than to continue trying to force my clients into molds that clearly did not suit them. I think this is a really, really critical like a posture to take when it comes to talking about abduction stories. Because now, you're right, Hypnotherapy is really, really tricky because we know two things. For sure, we know two things.

We know that it is possible to access repressed memories that are true and real with hypnotherapy. It is possible to help someone access true memory that actually happened that they did not have access to before. We also know that when you are under hypnosis, you are highly suggestible and you can come up with memories that never happened. Both of those things are true. And so it stands to me to reason that plenty of the abduction stories that come from hypnotherapy sessions may not be true. They may be interpretations of other experiences or something. But it seems really disingenuous to me to then categorically dismiss all of them as being untrue. And if any percentage of them are true, then it's like, well, then we have another thing to be talking about.

Okay. Once again, I'm going to go back to my personal obsession of reported reins of books. out inflation 19th century America. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

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Over 150 years, people claimed that it rained blood and or meat. And these accounts made it into the newspapers. And it was quite extraordinary. You'd have some very poignant accounts of people saying, okay, look, you can tell how they give their names. Neighbors came and either witnessed it or witnessed the aftermath. They all gave their names. They all asked for this phenomena to be explained. And they described the phenomena.

It was a clear sky. there was a little wind, there was a red cloud, whatever it was. And you have accounts from people stretching well over a century who could not have known each other. Some of them were lawyers. Some of them were slaves. Right. The slaves didn't get to write the papers, but they did give their accounts to people, which was then mediated through the newspapers. My point being is that when you amass that much data, you can start to compare.

And the thing that shined through with these reports was that, that the stuff that was maximally consistent were the eyewitness reports of the events themselves. The stuff that was the most scattershot, crazy-ass, chaotic were the so-called scientific explanations offered simply to make the weirdness go away. And it was all over the map, right? So with my point being is that with these abduction narratives, you can look at that and start to see, I would imagine, not only the outliers necessarily of stuff that may, you know, you know, well, this isn't really supported by other data. But you can start to see through lines, thematic, through lines, for lack of a better word,

in terms of how, when, where, and what happened. I think that there's just, I like the word do you use, Jordan, about posture. I feel like that's what a lot of this, if you're interested in this stuff, if you're listening to this podcast, then you're probably working on your posture. Because really, God knows I need to. I can't just take I can't just take Philip Concella's story and be like

And that happened isn't that crazy I can't actually I don't have enough information I've read you know I've read one article about him And I've started a Netflix series About a related event You know like related quote unquote

But I can try my best To put that on my little In my mind spreadsheet of Hmm another story Another story like that That reminds me of this other story And there's like an open curiosity that can be very difficult to maintain, but that we are capable of. Yeah, absolutely.

That isn't the same thing as writing everyone off or taking everybody as full forced fact, which we just know from being alive you can't do. We can't do that with each other's stories day to day because every once in a while you meet someone who just really wants attention and is willing to lie to get it. Yep, that's true. There's a vulnerability to that openness that a lot of people aren't necessarily willing to invest in or expose themselves to. Yeah, we talked about this from Kelly. Yeah, it's not gullibility. We're afraid of being the dupe. We're afraid of being gullible and naive.

But I think that an open curiosity is not the same, as a willingness to say, I'm not going to clamp down on a conclusion about this. Right. That's just the scientific method. That's just understanding that science is to continue. to evolve. That's exactly right. The scientific method is we don't know and we reserve the right to change our minds if we get new data. That's the whole point of it, not like that didn't happen because that can't happen. Yeah. That's stasis. I love the way that you framed it too, the idea that it's like, this is the best data we have. Like this is the data we're working with

on these topics. And it's exciting, but it's limited, you know. Well, also the abduction, the whole abduction part of the whatever, alien, UFO, UAP thing is always scared the shit out of me. Right. It's deeply, it can be really awful and traumatic. Right. Where these things, you know, I've heard stories where these things are like, stop screaming. Why are you screaming? You know, we're going to erase your memories later.

And they just don't even, whatever, things that look like, you know, praying mantises. I'm like, you know what? Yeah. I just don't want to, no. I just don't. Yeah. I just don't. That's a no.

Philip Kinsella, his alien abductions, he described them as seven to eight foot dinosaurs. They were like, they were reptilian. The reptilians. I have no desire. I don't want to be levitated by dinosaurs in my bedroom at night. Right. I mean, I feel very similarly about people's ghost experiences and experiences with the paranormal. It seems like some people seem to have these experiences that where they just know not to be

scared. Like an EMT sees a person who's passed away on like you EMTs and nurses, man, they have so many stories that seem really non-threatening. It's like, and then I saw that person and I went back to their room and they were dead. So I don't know why they were walking or, you know, I've, I've definitely been on Reddit a time or two in me like, nurse go stories. Oh my God, hospices and hospitals? Oh my God. Totally. But then there are other people who seem to be tortured and mortified and terrified. And, you know, the truth is that there could be, there could be explanations for this, but we don't have them yet. You know, we just, we don't have them yet. Yeah. And I think that they're also very, very personalized.

Like when people do come to any kind of understanding, I mean, I've heard a lot of accounts of people who are, and sometimes they'll try to communicate it, but it's very clear that, like, they have, for themselves gotten a kind of like closure of some kind on it like they they feel like they understand it on a deep level for themselves and maybe even in the context of like the world like they're like I feel like this is what it means for me and for us but like they can only use words to communicate that and it's just not it's just not good enough and they just can't like they can't get it out and and a lot of time and then you know some of some of those people they'll say listen like I have you know there are parts of this that I can't share because I don't know how to share it or because it's just not, I know that it's not really appropriate

to share it because like it won't make any sense to you or it won't, you know, so it's like, I think this is a deeply phenomenological phenomenon. So, um, and I think that's true. Phenomenological phenomenon. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that. I feel like I need to pay a fine for having said those words together. Too many syllables. Yes. Yes. I want to share just a very quick sort of treat of the last story. And this is like the most boring of them, so I figured we'd save it to the last. And this is about a mysterious light from the dawn of time, which is challenging everything we thought we knew about the early universe. That's a bit hyperbolic, but we're going to go with it. So once again, Mr. James Webb, the friendly neighborhood space telescope, not to be confused

with its old comparatively blind Hubble is literally and figuratively opening up the aperture on our understanding of the cosmos. Recent imaging shows an unexpectedly bright glow from a galaxy called Jades G.S. Z-131, a name that just rolls right off the tongue. Everybody knows that one. That's a very, very popular galaxy. So this galaxy is super, super old. It's about 13.5 billion years old, which is about 330 million years, million years shy of

the beginning of the universe, assuming you buy the Big Bang timeline, which, well, We'll go into that some other time. The point is that the glow is from a Lyman Alpha emission, a kind of hydrogen radiation that we shouldn't be able to see from so long ago, but because supposedly all that kind of light got absorbed by this thick gas that filled the universe so soon after the alleged Big Bang. But somehow we are seeing this light, which means somehow the light from this galaxy, this particular kind of light broke through that fog.

So what does it mean? Well, at a high level, it's just another big piece of anomalous data, which we've been talking about, right? Smacking into the windshield of our cosmological assumptions, forcing us back to the drawing board, if I may mix my metaphors, to figure out how and when the universe happened. I love any piece of data that comes out of the James Webb stuff because I think people, scientists, astronomers are more willing to be open-minded about some of this stuff because it's so far away. It's so distant. It's not personal. So it's like, well, it doesn't really matter. Like, was the Big Bang?

Was there a Big Bang? Okay, well, we don't know, but it's our best guess. Okay, great. Was it 13.8 billion years ago? Well, remind me again what a year is. Is a year the measurement of time that we get from measuring how long it takes for the earth to go around the sun? We do the best we can.

We have this sort of like box of tools that don't really work. But we're like, well, we're asking big questions here. We see these lights in the sky. We're trying to pull this apart. We got a lot of really interesting data. And we think this is what happened. And I think that it's, it is really, really important for us to be very open to the idea that like at any time we may build a bigger telescope. And we may see some stuff that's just like, oh, that theory that you had.

Yeah. No, that wasn't it. Sorry. Yeah. That's what Mal was talking about about us being babies. I feel like we're just getting in. in terms of, you know, intellectual object permanence where, you know, universe mommy has like, it actually exists after tick, you know what I mean?

We're like, holy. Universe mommy. Oh my gosh, it's still there. Oh, my God. What the implications? You know, I think that's what I think we're there. You know what I mean? And the UFOs are like, he.

Yeah. You know, do you jangle my keys. Yep. I honestly, it makes me think of Buddhism. Beginners mind. It's where we want to be. And it's scientifically from a detective standpoint where you always want to be. The truth is that Carl Sagan famously talks about how the more that he knows, the smaller he feels.

Very, very smart people like Einstein and Carl Sagan saying, yeah, I'm a baby, basically, you know. Like this is what this is what gurus and wise people do is they realize how a little, they know and that state of openness allows them to honestly to transform which is kind of what a lot that's what life is really doing right i can't help but think that so much of this is about just trying to maintain that state and to realistically gather this in a way that we're not making an assumptions i listened to a talk several years ago about a man saying that it was impossible for you to even really truly understand your mother if you really love your mother you're so close to your mother that it's like, yeah, but you weren't present for the first 20, 30 years of her life. You'll never know her

completely. It's, it's, we all contain multitudes. The universe contains infinite multitudes of multitudes and we're all the universe. Like, you know what I mean? It's just like, it is impossible for us to know. So a state of not knowing, a state of nothing is actually kind of the goal. The first card in the major arcana of the Turot deck, at least the commonly accepted Turot deck, going back a few centuries is called the fool. And it's the fool who embarks on the great journey. And he's kind of a moron. But he's open.

And he might walk off a cliff or he may, you know, end up in the greatest situation he's ever been in. But partially it's just his openness and his willingness to embark upon this journey that is the prerequisites for its greatness. You know, he's not just a dipshit. He's actually going down a new path. Mal, I feel like this is a good segue to your experience of the silent retreat. I guess just to tease the experience, I've been meditating in earnest. Because for a long, long time, I considered myself like a busy body ADHD workaholic who could only meditate distance running. I just didn't think it was possible for me to sit in silence.

and eventually the state of my anxiety and depression became something that needed some very active. I needed to learn how to not be in the mind. My mind was toxic. Like it was a completely toxic place. And so that's sort of what brought me to meditation was, is it possible for me to just like turn this off? So I could get like a 20 minute break even. That's kind of the way I approach this. And honestly, I think this is the way people come to all kinds of spiritual resources and mindfulness resources is often just for a

little relief. So what I haven't predicted, or what it wasn't ready for, was that as I've kind of gone deeper into meditation, I'm starting to have, I grew up religious. And so I'm accustomed to having what some people might call spiritual or mystical experiences. And I'm hoping that won't make people immediately think of me as someone who is completely unrelatable. I hope it's actually a relatable thing to hear somebody say that. But I'm accustomed to feeling moved in the face of something I don't quite understand or to feel like my mind has been opened a little bit in a way that makes me feel loved by God, I would say. You can use whatever word you'd like. But what has been happening to me is spiritual experiences I don't recognize at all and that in some

ways feel a bit scary to me. And that's what I experienced this time around on my silent retreat. I would say that the intensity of seven days of silence or longer. You know, some people do this for months. But I think it's just a way to sort of boot camp your meditative practice. And I didn't go in searching for like, I'm going to go to the next left. I was just like, I think I need to brush up on my meditation skills because I'm starting to get a little more stressed than I would like. That's basically why I went. And I came out feeling like I was all shaken up like a, like a soda.

a can and or and I think I might have said this before like Mrs. Potato Head with like all the pieces put in the wrong places. But the strange thing is is that my life is taken on a new clarity and somehow the even though the experience I would say was like a little unsettling and maybe a little disorienting, I actually feel clearer and refreshed maybe is the word. It's like, whoa, you're not what you thought you were, huh kid? Why don't we just start? again. Oh, I'm loving this. Yeah.

I kind of want to go deep on this. We are going to go deep on this. If you guys, listeners, watchers, whatever, however, you're consuming this episode of content, as we like to call it. Ow. I know. I did that just for Tom. If you want to hear the rest of

Mel's story about the silent retreat and becoming rearranged Mrs. Potato Head. Head over to godsghostuifos.com. That's where we keep all the cool secret stuff. And that's also where you can go and talk to us and to other maybe terminally curious people. Terminally curious. And we're going to say goodbye. I'm going to say see you next week. And I hope you come back. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. We love you.

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