Inquiry with Kelly Chase - How to Inquire: What UFOs & Anomalous Experience Can Teach Us About Epistemic Collapse

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

The world feels like it's coming apart at the seams—and it's not your imagination. In the span of just a few months, the Epstein files have exposed elite networks of abuse that were mocked as conspiracy theory for years, the U.S. government has confirmed Havana Syndrome and openly acknowledged its directed energy weapons program, UFO disclosure has moved from fringe forums to executive directives, and AI has advanced to the point where visual evidence can no longer be trusted. Each of these stories is destabilizing on its own. Together, they produce something else entirely: a collective epistemic crisis. The shared map we've been using to navigate reality is disintegrating in real time—and almost nobody seems to know what to do next. In this inaugural episode, Kelly Chase introduces the premise of Inquiry: why the anomalous experience community—people who have spent years navigating the collapse of their own models of reality—may be the most prepared guides we have for this moment. She traces how knowledge is built, why it's more fragile than we're taught to believe, and what it actually means to ask better questions when the ground is shifting beneath your feet. Topics Covered epistemic collapse, UAP disclosure, the Epstein files, Havana Syndrome and directed energy weapons, AI and the crisis of evidence, anomalous experience, the philosophy of knowledge, and what it means to inquire honestly in a post-consensus world. Inquiry with Kelly Chase is brought to you by SpectreVision Radio. Produced in partnership with Voltage.fm.  Referenced In This Episode Through The Looking Glass [Pt 1]: My Initiation in the Anomalous  Cosmosis: Origins Support The Show Patreon: inquirywithkellychase.com Substack: inquirywithkellychase.substack.com Connect with Kelly Website: kellychase.media X: @kellychasemedia Instagram: @kellychasemedia Watch Season 1 of Comosis: UFOs & A New Reality Prime Video Tubi TIMESTAMPS 01:21 Epstein Files Shockwave 03:51 Directed Energy Revealed 05:52 UFO Disclosure Tease 06:53 AI and Epistemic Crisis 10:48 Why Everyone Feels Frozen 14:21 Cutting Through the Maze 16:23 Meet the Experiencers 19:51 My Worldview Breaks 23:07 What Happened in 2021 27:16 From UFOs to Inquiry 29:21 How Knowledge Is Built 35:12 Population Count Paradox 39:49 Experiencer Resilience 42:24 What This Show Will Do Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's only March of 2026, and already this year has delivered an avalanche of stories that would have sounded utterly unhinged to the average person even just a few months ago. And these things aren't just bizarre or controversial. They are fundamentally destabilizing. These are the kinds of developments that force you to reevaluate what you thought was possible, what you thought was fringe, and what you thought could be safely dismissed. Perhaps the most notable among these is the ongoing release of the Epstein files. This massive and yet still largely censored and incomplete, dump

of millions of documents has not simply confirmed the misdeeds of a few wealthy sex offenders. They exposed communications, flight logs, coded references, network patterns, and horrifying admissions that look disturbingly similar to claims that were mocked for years under labels like Pizza Gate and QAnon. For nearly a decade, those narratives were held up as examples of collective delusion. Anyone who suggested that elite circles might be involved in organized exploitation, trafficking of minors, or ritualized abuse was treated as either dangerous or insane, something which caused unspeakable damage by tearing apart countless families and communities. But now, we're confronted with documents that don't just contain vague insinuations about these exact

sorts of crimes, all things that were once dismissed as deranged conspiracy lore. Now, whether every extreme interpretation is correct or not, the confirmed reality is that powerful individuals were entangled in organized exploitation of children, and the casual, often joking communications surrounding it, are disturbing enough to shatter the idea that such depravity at elite levels was pure fantasy. Even the most skeptical observer is forced to admit that something, very real, is going on here. And the most destabilizing element isn't that powerful individuals behaved monstrously. History has never lacked for that. What's destabilizing is the implication that a network of influence and protection around these monstrous acts seems to extend across

political, financial, and cultural institutions. The names cut across party lines. The connections do not fit neatly into left versus right narratives. If even a fraction of what these documents suggest is materially true, they we're not looking at partisan corruption. We're looking at a class of people operating above ordinary accountability and operating by a set of values and assumptions that can really only be called demonic. And these are the people whose hands are on the global levers of power and control. But the chaos isn't contained to the Epstein files. A stunning wave of shocking stories has been unleashed in the last few weeks, leveling any sense of certainty that we may have had in its wake. In an abrupt and stunning reversal, the U.S.

government suddenly acknowledged that Havana syndrome is real and that American personnel have suffered real, physical, and neurological injuries as a result of being targeted. Not only that, they claim to be in possession of a device that they believe causes it. The Pentagon has been studying a radio frequency energy device believed to be associated with Havana syndrome, which they obtained through a covert operation. Members of Congress have been formally briefed on the program. In that same week in January, a flurry of of other stories confirmed not just that directed energy weapons exist, but that the United States also has them and is using them against human beings as well. In early January, U.S. forces

carried out an operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture and removal of President Nicholas Maduro and his wife, effectively abducting a sitting head of state, which we can just add to the list of things that would have seemed preposterous even the day before it actually happened. And in the same week that that story about Havana syndrome hit the press, President Trump publicly claimed that the United States deployed an advanced sonic weapon during the raid that caused Venezuelan soldiers to bleed from the nose and vomit blood. A few days later, the official ex-account of the Office of the

Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering published a post that said simply, yes, the Department of War has directed energy weapons. Yes, we are scaling them. For years, claims that invisible energy systems could silently incapacitate people were treated as fringe speculation. Yet officials now suddenly speak openly about microwave and non-kinetic weapons capable of affecting both electronics and the human nervous system. The shift is not only technological, but psychological, because concepts once dismissed as science fiction are now being described within the language of real-world military operations. Yesterday's toxic brain rot conspiracies are becoming government talking points, literally overnight. Just a few weeks later, President Trump stated that intelligence files related to UFOs and extraterrestrials will be released, seemingly confirming that disclosure, whatever that means, is right around the corner.

UFOs are no longer confined to late-night radio and hobbyist forums. They're the subject of congressional hearings, military assessments, and now executive directives. Whether the forthcoming disclosures contain extraordinary revelations or bureaucratic anti-climax is almost secondary. The cultural shift has already occurred. The mere fact that elected officials are treating the topic as legitimate destabilizes decades of dismissal and stigma. And the hits just keep coming. China has unveiled surveillance drones the size of mosquitoes. Declassified documents seemingly confirmed that the Lyme disease outbreak came from a secret U.S. bioweapons.

program. Every day, it seems like some new conspiracy theory is being confirmed as true. And layered on top of all of this is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, which may be the most destabilizing development of all. Advanced AI systems now generate text, video, audio, and images that are often indistinguishable from human created material. Deepfakes have reached a level of sophistication that makes visual evidence unreliable without forensic verification, and even then our ability to make those determinations is rapidly vanishing. At the same time, AI agents are increasingly autonomous. They aren't just answering simple questions.

They set goals, execute multi-step plans, and interact across digital ecosystems in ways to blur the line between tool and conscious agent. Serious researchers are openly debating whether complex self-modeling systems could approach something like machine consciousness, with some believing that it already has. This debate largely springs from the fact that we've created a kind of intelligence that is so much different from our own and which is evolving so quickly that we find that we can't meaningfully say whether it's conscious or not.

And that probably isn't even the right question to be asking. There have also been reports of individuals developing intense psychological attachments to AI systems, reinforcing delusions or experiencing what some clinicians describe as AI, induced psychosis. When a technology can mirror your thoughts, validate your interpretations, and generate endless, personalized narrative feedback, it becomes more than a tool. It becomes a cognitive environment. That changes how human beings relate to reality itself. These are just a handful of developments from the past couple of months, which taken together create a cumulative effect that's difficult to overstate. Each story on its own might be absorbable,

In combination, they create something else entirely. The destabilization is not only political. It's epistemic and existential. It's moral. When too many previously dismissed possibilities enter the realm of the plausible at once, the shared map people used to navigate the world begins to disintegrate. That is the atmosphere many people are sensing right now. It's the recognition that the boundaries of what counts as real, possible, and trustworthy

are shifting in real time. And none of us really seem to know what to do next. Even the conspiracy theorists who've been saying these things the whole time seem to be at a loss. I want to share this TikTok video from user Big Tug with 2G's that I think pretty brilliantly sums it up. So, I mean, I nailed it. I'm honest, I'm as shocked as you. Some of those were a little out there. Every single one, every single one was true.

I'm honestly as shocked as you guys are. I thought I was making some shit up back there. I mean, I want to say I told you so, but I really just wish none of this was real at this point. I mean, it was fun when it was maybe not real, and now it's all very real. And once again, it's every single conspiracy theory is correct now. I'm just terrified.

I mean, on top of all that stuff, I'm pretty sure they just confirmed aliens are real for real this time. So I don't know what they expect us to do with our lives. I mean, the Wayfair furniture thing was real. That was such a long shot. Oh my god. I mean, the whole point of these conspiracies is that when they come to light, people get, uh, to put in jail. That's just not happening. So like, the fun has been taken out of this completely. I mean, I don't know what we do from here in terms of conspiracies. I mean, I want to make up new ones, but God forbid those become real.

I feel like I'm wishing things into existence at this point. I mean, the pizza thing? The fucking pizza thing? And also, it's not as important, but Jeffrey Epstein did make micro-transactions. Just I did everything bad. I knew it, but I wish I didn't. What makes this moment even more surreal is that almost everyone seems frozen. You would think that revelations of this magnitude would produce mass protest, institutional collapse, or at the very least, some unified public demand for accountability.

Instead, there's this strange collective paralysis. People are stunned. we're not springing into action. We're numb. We're scrolling. It feels like we should be doing something, but no one seems to know what that something is. Part of the paralysis comes from the sheer scale of the storm. It's not just one scandal. It's not just one institution failing. It's convergence of elite corruption that crosses party lines. I say this with respect, love, and compassion for wherever you are in your journey. But anyone who still thinks that this is a left versus right battle has failed to fundamentally understand the severity and complexity of the

situation in which we find ourselves. I really hope you come around. Whatever happens next, we're going to need all of you. Because legacy institutions and the people we count on to keep us safe have not risen to the occasion. The disconnect between what the major media outlets are reporting on, what is actually happening, and what the public is feeling has never been more pronounced. These institutions were supposed to be watchdogs. We were taught that they existed to hold power accountable on our behalf. It now seems painfully naive to have believed that the public were the masters who were being served. The people who were supposed to have guarded the gates appear to have been guarding something else entirely.

And then there's the government. And not just this administration, all of them. When powerful figures across the political spectrum appear entangled in Machiavellian levels, of corruption and deceit, appeals to electoral salvation start to feel hollow. Are we supposed to believe that we can vote our way out of systemic rot that implicates the very class of people who control the levers of policy, finance, and enforcement? That seems unlikely. But what exactly is our alternative?

The revolutionary playbook assumes clear enemies, clear demands, and a clear alternative waiting in the wings. None of those conditions exist right now. And to be clear, virtually no one is seriously advocating for revolt. I certainly am not. The paralysis is not because people are plotting insurrection. It's because the situation doesn't map cleanly onto any familiar response. It feels like we need to act, but acting without clarity would be reckless.

We can't even establish baseline facts. Information floods the zone from every direction. Some of it's confirmed, some of it's distorted, some of it's deliberately manipulated. We know that what we were told for years was not fully true, but we don't yet know what is true. And it's not really clear what steps we could take to even figure that out. That is the heart of the paralysis. When the ground shifts this dramatically, the instinct is to look around for someone who understands the new terrain. Instead, we see other people looking back at us with the same unsettled, bewildered expression.

It's not apathy or cowardice. It's the recognition that we are navigating a reality that has become more opaque, more technologically mediated, and more morally compromised than we were prepared for. And none of the old scripts tell us what to do next. So that's what this podcast is about. It's about finding a way forward. It's about trying to trace our way back to some kind of baseline certainty about what's true and what isn't, about what actually matters, about what this place is and why we're here. about what it means to be human and how we reclaim our agency in the middle of all of this. I'm not interested in relitigating

every conspiracy or chasing every new rabbit hole that pops up on the timeline. That way lies only madness and oblivion. If we try to follow every thread, we'll spend the rest of our lives running in circles inside of someone else's maze. And I suspect that that's part of the design.

The hopelessness, the demoralization, and the paralysis don't feel accidental. They feel like a strategic outcome. And if that's the case, then it's working. We've been subdued not by force, but by overload. We're not going to escape this hedge maze by navigating its endlessly twisting corridors or by becoming better at obsessively decoding every new drop or headline. At some point, we have to stop tracing the walls and start cutting through them.

We have to plow a straight line through the branches until we're back outside in the daylight. That means stepping back from the frenzy and asking deeper questions that don't shift with every news cycle. It means asking what's true in a more durable sense, what it actually means to know something, about what things are good and worthy and true, and about how we can reclaim all of that that has been taken from us, hopefully before it's too late. That's the work here. It isn't about escape, denial, or endless reaction.

It's about clarity, discernment, and agency. If we're going to move forward, it won't be by chasing the maze. It'll be by remembering that we were never meant to live inside it in the first place. For most people living through this moment, the decision... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. How many discounts does USA Auto Insurance offers?

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sometimes decades. These are people who've had experiences that simply don't comport with our existing models of what is real and what is possible. People who have seen UFOs or encountered non-human entities. People who have had contact with dead relatives or witnessed what they could only describe as hauntings. People who have had out-of-body or near-death experiences. People who have had pre-cognitive dreams that came true with unnerving specificity or who have sigh abilities like telepathy, remote viewing, or even psychokinesis.

The range of experiences that fall under this umbrella is vast. And the only thing that all of these people reliably have in common is that what happened to them doesn't fit anywhere in the official story of reality. Within these communities, people often refer to themselves simply as experiencers. It's a word that carries a lot of weight, not because it makes any specific claim about what the experience was or what caused it, but because it centers the irreducible fact that something happened and that the person it happened to was permanently changed by it.

Because when something happens to you that doesn't fit the official story of reality, it doesn't just raise questions about the experience itself. It raises questions about everything. If the thing you just witnessed is real and you know that it is because you were there, then what does that mean for the framework you've been using to decide what's real? If that framework failed you here, where else has it failed you? If the world is capable of producing experiences like this one, what else is it capable of that you've been confidently dismissing? These are not comfortable questions to sit with, and they tend to arrive all at once in the immediate aftermath of something you have no words for, at a moment when you were least equipped to handle them.

And because the official story of reality has no container for what just happened to you, the people around you, even the ones who love you the most, often can't help. In many cases, they can't even fully believe you. The result is a particular kind of isolation that experiencers describe with remarkable consistency, regardless of what kind of experience they had or when and where it happened. You find yourself living in two worlds simultaneously, the ordinary consensus world that everyone around you continues to inhabit without apparent difficulty and the expanded, destabilized, and often terrifying world that your experience has cracked open. Navigating that split and finding a way to integrate what you've encountered without either dismissing it or being consumed by it tends to become the central challenge of the experiencer's

life. And admittedly, all of this may sound ridiculous to you. It certainly used to sound that way to me. I wasn't someone who had any kind of patience for this thing. I suspect that the of me who would have just rolled her eyes that everything I just described is not so different from some of you who might be listening to this right now. And if that's where you are, I'm not here to argue with you. I'm just going to tell you what happened to me, and you can decide what to do with it. Because in August of 2021, after spending my entire adult life convinced that anyone claiming to have had one of these impossible experiences was either crazy, lying, or selling something, I very unexpectedly became one of them.

I want to give you a sense of who I was before that because I think it matters for understanding what happened afterwards. I had been an atheist for most of my adult life. And more than that, I had been what philosophers call a strict materialist. Materialism in the philosophical sense is the position that reality is fundamentally physical, that everything that exists is made of matter and energy, the consciousness is simply a product of the brain and nothing more, and that anything which cannot in principle be measured, tested, or explained in physical terms

is either an illusion or a misunderstanding. Materialism is the worldview that underlies most of mainstream Western thinking. It's the waters we're all swimming in. And many people, even religious people, adopt it as a matter of default, without even really thinking about it. I, however, wasn't a casual materialist. I was a committed one. I found the framework intellectually clean and emotionally comfortable.

I looked at the people who believed in God or in the paranormal or in anything that couldn't be empirically verified, and I felt, if I'm being honest, a gentle but genuine condescension. I thought they were filling the gaps in their understanding with comforting stories because they weren't really willing to face the cold reality of what the evidence actually showed. I was very settled in that view, and it had never seriously occurred to me that it might be. be wrong. That is the person who sat down on her bed on a quiet Saturday morning in August of 2021, surrounded by books and notebooks in the grip of a research obsession that had completely overtaken her life over the previous three months. That obsession was with UFOs. It had started innocuously enough, a passing curiosity sparked by news coverage of an upcoming Department of Defense report on what the government was now officially calling unidentified aerial phenomena. But the more

I dug into it, the more I found that I just couldn't stop digging. The evidence that something genuinely strange and genuinely real was happening in our skies was overwhelming once I actually examined it. And the evidence that this reality had been systematically dismissed, stigmatized, and suppressed for decades was equally overwhelming. I was genuinely shocked by this revelation, though I really shouldn't have been. I'd actually seen a UFO myself when I was 13, a little light executing sharp right angle turns at speeds that no human technology could account for. I just simply never allowed myself to register what that meant. I had filed a memory away somewhere in the back of my mind where the things I couldn't categorize went

and then continued on with my life and my tidy, materialist worldview, as though it had never happened. Recognizing the fact that I had been willing to do that, that I had seen something with my own eyes that directly contradicted my model of reality and it simply chosen on some level not to know it, shook me in ways I was only beginning to understand. And then, on that August morning, everything accelerated dramatically. What happened next is genuinely difficult to describe, and I spent a long time wrestling with whether to talk about it publicly at all for reasons that I think will become obvious. The short version is that I had an experience that I can only call obliterating. It lasted perhaps two minutes.

And in those two minutes, I was somewhere else entirely, or more accurately, I was outside of the somewhere and some when that I had always taken for granted as the basic structure of existence. Time, space, and the boundaries of the self simply ceased to apply. What replaced them was something so vast and so internally coherent that I've never found adequate words for it. I stopped expecting to. If you want the full account, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to the episode of my previous podcast, The UFO Rabbit Hole, called Through the Looking Glass Part 1,

where I did my best to describe it in detail. I'll have that linked up in the episode description. What I'll say here is that I came back from those two minutes permanently changed in ways that I am still trying to reckon with. The changes themselves were impossible to miss, even if I couldn't explain them. I'd walked into that morning a committed atheist and a strict materialist, and I came out of it with a bone-deep conviction in the existence of something I could only really call God, though I still struggle to articulate exactly what I mean by that. It completely altered my relationship to meaning and purpose,

and I came out of the experience with a new set of values that were organized around ideas that I had previously considered soft and unsurious. I also emerged with an urgent sense of mission. Within the hour, I had written out the outline for what would become the U.S. a rabbit hole. I suddenly had the unshakable conviction that almost everything that had been important in my life before was now irrelevant. Whatever this new path was, this was what I was supposed to be doing. And it was, in fact, the only thing that I could do. What made it so hard to sit with was not just the obvious and frightening question of whether I had simply had some kind of a mental breakdown,

something I very much considered. It was the deeper implication that something had happened to me, that something outside of myself had reached in without my knowledge or consent and fundamentally altered who I was. That is a profoundly uncomfortable thing to carry around, and I handled it in the way that most people handle profoundly uncomfortable things, which is to say that I mostly didn't. And yet, despite not wanting to sit with any of that, I found that I couldn't walk away from it. The podcast consumed me. Within months, I was deep inside the world of uphology and high strangeness in a way that I never could have anticipated, and what I found there was nothing like what I expected. I had assumed going in that the UFO rabbit hole was primarily about craft

and evidence, about making the case for something anomalous and potentially non-human in our skies. What I discovered was something far more complex and far more disturbing. It was a crash course, not only in the strangest edges of reality, but in the intricate webs of narrative control. and deliberate deception that surround them. I learned about the history of psychological operations, government secrecy, and institutional disinformation campaigns designed to keep this territory stigmatized and inaccessible. And crucially, none of this remained abstract for me. These things became my life.

I became close friends with people who have extraordinary experiences and extraordinary abilities that I can't explain. My own life was periodically disrupted by brushing up against the instruments of secrecy in ways that I never would have believed were real if I hadn't stumbled across them myself. If you want to hear more of that story, I'd point you to the episode of Cosmosis called Origins, which I've also linked in the episode description where I talk about it in more detail. But what I want to focus on here is what happened to my questions. Because very quickly, the question stopped being,

what are UFOs and became something much more fundamental? What is the nature of our reality such that people encounter things like this at all? And from there, the questions just kept getting deeper. How do we know what we know? How do we determine what is true? What are the actual limits of our models of reality? And how would we even recognize those limits from the inside? Those are the questions that the experiencer community has been quietly grappling with for decades. largely in isolation and largely without the tools or the cultural permission to pursue them rigorously. And they are now, unmistakably, the questions that the rest of the world is being forced to confront as well. I think that there's something really important in that convergence,

because I've come to believe that the anomalies, the experiences and phenomena that don't fit, that get dismissed and stigmatized precisely because they threaten the coherence of our official story, are not distractions from the serious work of understanding reality. They are the most direct route to it. The places where our models break down are the places where we learn the most about what our models actually are. And right now, the whole world is seemingly standing

at the edge of a very large breakdown without much of a map for what lies on the other side. That's what we're going to endeavor to build here, not a new orthodoxy to replace the old one, but something more durable than that. A set of tools for navigating uncertainty, for distinguishing signal from noise, for asking better questions in a world

where the old answers are no longer holding. But before we can do any of that, we have to understand how we got here. We have to understand how knowledge actually works, how it's built, what it rests on, and why it's more fragile than most of us have ever been asked to really consider. From the time that we're born, we're told...

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with us in your corner. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. VALTHUFF. While supplies last, selection varies by location. See associate or Lowe's.com for details. What things are. At first, it's simple. Someone points to an object and says ball or dog or rock. And just like that, the word attaches to the object. This is how our initiation into the world begins.

And that initiation is critical to our survival. Think about a rock. Before you know the word, it's just something on the ground. After you learn the word, you don't just see it, you recognize it. You can distinguish it from the grass or the sidewalk. You can say the word, rock even when there are no rocks around and someone else will know exactly what you mean. That shared label allows you to coordinate and communicate with other people. It creates agreement about what exists, what is possible, and what matters. And that basic agreement is the foundation upon which all of human knowledge rests. Language brings us into relationship with reality. Then you go to school. Now you learn that rocks are made of minerals. You learn that there are three

primary types, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. You learn that they form through heat, pressure, erosion, and compression. The simple object you once picked up from the ground now has a history. It participates in processes that unfold over immense stretches of time. The rock isn't just a rock anymore. It becomes part of a system. Later, the description deepens again. You learn about atoms and chemical bonds. You learn that the solidity you feel is the result of electromagnetic forces. You learn about crystal lattices and molecular structure. The rock is no longer just a category or even just a geological artifact. It's a configuration of matter held together under specific physical conditions.

This is how knowledge builds. We move from naming to categorizing to modeling to theorizing. Each step increases explanatory power. We're no longer just able to say what the rock is called. We can say what it's made of, how it's formed, what conditions shaped it and how it fits into larger systems. Eventually, we can trace its elements back to stellar nucleosynthesis, to ancient stars that exploded long before our solar system even existed.

The rock in your hand is no longer just a thing you can skip across a creek or throw at your brother. It becomes evidence of cosmic history. It carries a story that, at least in principle, stretches back to the beginning of the universe. That kind of vision can feel almost god. There's a sense that if we just keep going, if we refine our instruments, sharpen our math, gather more data, everything will eventually be accounted for. In much of Western society, belief in an all-seeing God has quietly been replaced with a belief in an all-explaining framework. The assumption is that reality is fully knowable and that every phenomenon has a logical

material explanation waiting to be discovered. This idea is the primary article of faith of our modern world. But there's something we rarely stop to acknowledge. As explanatory power increases, complexity increases with it. The deeper we go, the more we realize that what seemed simple is layered, what seemed solid is contingent, what seemed obvious depends on systems we can't see directly. The rock feels solid in your hand. That's true at the level of everyday experience. But you can't understand why it's solid without physics. You can't understand physics without mathematics. You can't understand mathematics without delving into the more fundamental axioms beneath it. Each layer only makes sense if the layer beneath it holds.

What we call knowledge is built on stacked assumptions, each one resting on another. And yet, no matter how much you learn about rocks, unless you become a geologist working in the field, maybe, your direct experience with rocks will probably not change very much over the course of your life. The additional layers of knowledge you carry about crystal structures or tectonic processes are not things you discovered firsthand. You know them because someone else told you. A teacher told you. A textbook told you.

A scientific institution verified and transmitted that information through a system designed to preserve and refine our knowledge over time. That system is fundamentally trust-based. We trust that the scientists conducted their experiments carefully. We trust that the data was recorded accurately. We trust that peer review worked the way it was supposed to. And to be clear, that trust has largely paid off. The scientific enterprise, despite its many flaws, has produced extraordinary results.

And we do not have a better alternative for building shared cumulative knowledge at scale. And to be honest, it seems unlikely that we ever will. But a trust-based system inevitably creates blind spots. Most of us don't personally verify the majority of what we believe about the world. Our understanding rests on chains of inference. If this foundational claim is true, then this next conclusion follows. If that conclusion holds, then this larger theory could make sense. The structure can be remarkably stable, but it's still conditional.

If something early in the chain turns out to be flawed, misunderstood, or incomplete, the consequences ripple outward. One wayward data point can cause the entire framework to shift in ways that force us to reconsider what we thought was settled knowledge. And here's the thing that I find most striking about all of this. The fragility I'm describing isn't confined to the strange edges of reality. It isn't just a problem for people trying to evaluate UFO evidence or make sense of anomalous experiences.

It lives in the most mundane, seemingly uncontroversial facts about the world. the ones we never think to question precisely because they feel so settled. Consider something as basic as this. Recently, scientists raised a surprising question about something most of us take for granted, the total number of people alive on Earth right now. Official estimates, such as those from the United Nations, currently placed the global population at about $8.2 billion. But a recently published study suggests that that figure may be a systematic undercount,

created by the way population data is collected and modeled. The researchers analyzed data from more than 300 rural dam resettlement projects across 35 countries. Dam resettlement happens when a large dam is built and the entire communities are relocated because their land will be flooded by the reservoir. In those cases, governments and developers have to count people carefully in order to determine compensation and relocation support. The researchers compared those on-the-ground resettlement records with widely used global population maps which divide the world into grid cells

and estimate how many people live in each cell based largely on consensus data and modeling. They found that these grid-based data sets may be missing large numbers of people in rural areas. In many of the regions studied, the resettlement records showed rural populations that were 53 to 84% higher than what the global models had estimated. Now, not everyone agrees with the implication that Earth might have billions more people than the official 8.2 billion. Demographers and other experts point out that extrapolating from rural undercounts so the entire world is difficult and may overstate the case.

But the very existence of this debate shows how much our knowledge depends on models, assumptions, and methodologies that are not immediately visible to us. We can't literally count every human being on the planet. It would be impossible to knock on every door or track every family across every region of the world. Instead, we build models that combine census data, satellite imagery, demographic projections, and statistical assumptions to produce a global figure. These models are indispensable. They allow governments to plan public services, aid agencies to allocate resources, and scientists to study, disease spread, or climate impacts. But they also introduce layers of abstraction between what we estimate and what might actually be the case on the ground. If those underlying models have built-in flaws,

if the assumptions they rely on systematically misrepresent reality, then the numbers they produce can be wrong in ways that matter. And it's not just the total population that's affected. Population figures feed into policy decisions about health care, education, infrastructure, and environmental planning. If we undercount rural populations, then the needs of those communities may be underestimated or ignored. Resource distribution,

disaster preparedness, and economic forecasts all depend on accurate demographic data. A shift of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the statistics, would change how we think about development, equity, economic growth, and risk globally. This example shows how even something

as seemingly straightforward as how many people are alive, rests on models, trust, inferred data, and assumptions. When those models are questioned, it doesn't just impact one number. It ripples outward, challenging a whole network of conclusions built on what we thought was basic objective fact. The contingency of our knowledge becomes clear, not because we can't know anything, but because what we know is constructed, layered, and always subject to revokely. vision as we refine our instruments and methods. And if that's true, of something as apparently straightforward as counting people, it's worth asking what else we're taking on faith without realizing it. The same epistemic vulnerability that allows a basic demographic fact to be

systematically miscounted for decades is the same vulnerability that allows far more consequential things to go unseen. Elite networks of abuse operating in plain sight. Technologies, dismissed as impossible that turn out to be real. Phenomena reported consistently across centuries that somehow never make it into the official story because they have no place in the models we've already decided are correct. The problem isn't confined to the extraordinary.

It runs all the way down. So here's the idea that I keep coming back to. The Experiencers. Most of them didn't go looking for what they found. It arrived unbidden. It upended everything they think. thought they knew and it left them to navigate the wreckage of their old worldview largely alone, without maps, without institutional support, and without the luxury of being taken seriously by the

people around them. They had to figure it out in real time and usually in isolation, how to go on living in a world that had revealed itself to be far stranger and far less certain than they had been led to believe. And many of them do figure it out, not perfectly and not without cost, but they find ways to hold the uncertainty without being paralyzed by it. They developed through necessity a kind of epistemic resilience, the ability to sit with open questions, to resist the pull of false certainty in either direction, to keep looking without needing to arrive. They learn to take their own experience seriously without building it into a dogma. They learn to ask better questions, rather than reaching for easier answers. That is exactly the skill set that the rest of

the world needs right now, and it needs it urgently. Because what's happening right now, the collapse of institutional credibility, the flood of destabilizing revelations, the sudden vertigo of not knowing what to trust or who to believe is structurally the same thing that experiencers have been living through for years. It's ontological shock at a collective scale. And the question of how to navigate it is not fundamentally different from the question those individuals have been quietly working on all along. The anomalies were always pointing here. The UFO that doesn't behave like a physical craft. The near-death experience that returned someone with knowledge they couldn't have had. The precognitive dream that comes true in specific detail. The contact experience that leaves a

person permanently altered in ways that follow recognizable patterns across cultures and centuries. These things were never just curiosities. They were data points that our official models of reality couldn't absorb. And the fact that they couldn't be absorbed told us something crucial about the models if we had just been willing to look. We are now, collectively, at the point where the models are failing in plain sight. And the question of what to do when your model of reality fails you is no longer a question for the margins. It's the central question of this moment. My previous podcast, the UFO rabbit hole, was an object-level inquiry. I was chasing a specific phenomenon and following the evidence wherever it led.

This podcast is something different. It's an inquiry into inquiry itself, into how beliefs are formed and how they can calcify into prisons, into how our perception of reality is shaped and filtered and sometimes deliberately distorted by forces ranging from government and media to technology to the fundamental limitations of our own senses. It's about the mechanics of how. how we come to know anything at all and about what gets in the way of seeing clearly in a world that has very strong incentives to keep us from doing so. The anomalies are still here.

The UFOs and contact experiences and consciousness research and side phenomena that first cracked my own worldview open. But they aren't the destination anymore, at least not for me. But what they are is the most useful diagnostic tools I found for stress testing our models of reality, precisely because they are the places where those models most visibly and catastrophically fail. When something doesn't fit the official story and we can establish that it is nonetheless real, that gap between the experience and the explanation is where the most interesting questions live. That is where I intend to spend most of my time. This means that the show will range widely. We'll explore the science of belief and the psychology of perception.

we'll look at how narratives are constructed and weaponized and how to develop enough critical distance from the narratives you live inside to evaluate them honestly. We'll spend time with philosophers, scientists, experiences, journalists, and independent thinkers who are working at the edges of what we think we know. And we'll keep returning to the anomalies. Not because I think they hold all the answers,

but because I've learned that the places where reality refuses to behave itself are the places where it most reliably tells the truth. I don't have a map for where this goes. What I do have is a deep conviction that the questions matter, that asking them rigorously, honestly, and without flinching is one of the most important things any of us can do right now. And I have the belief, grounded in my own experience and in the experiences of the remarkable people I've been lucky enough to know,

that there is something on the other side of this disrupting. that is worth finding. The world is stranger than we were told. It is also, if you can find a way to stay present with it, rather than flee from it, one of the most extraordinary invitations that has ever been extended to our species, an invitation to finally see things as they are, rather than as we've been told that they are. Welcome to Inquiry. I'm Kelly Chase, and I'm glad you're here. You've been listening to Inquiry with Kelly Chase.

If you haven't already, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast. And if this episode resonated, consider leaving a comment or a review. It genuinely helps more than you know. Inquiry is brought to you by Spector Vision Radio. Production support is provided by J.E. Peterson and Tyler Morrisett at Voltage. If you'd like to support the show, join the Patreon for ad-free episodes, monthly Zoom calls, access to our private Discord server, and more. Read all of my field notes and support my written work, subscribe to my substack.

You can also follow me on X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and just about anywhere else. And also, Cosmosis, UFOs, and a New Reality, the series I wrote and executive produced alongside director Jay Christopher King, is now streaming for free on Amazon Prime. You'll find the links for all of that and more in the episode description. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on alolotion.

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