Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The Great Dangerous Books Podcast] Jacques Vallée's 'Messengers of Deception' with Kelly Chase

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Fan favorite, James Madden, has a brand new project with his brilliant co-host Jared Zimmerer called The Great Dangerous Books Podcast. Check out this episode to catch the vibe of the show, and if you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.  Get Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallée Subscribe to The Great Dangerous Books Podcast Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube In this episode, Jim and Jared discuss the complexities of the UFO phenomenon with special guest Kelly Chase, focusing on Jacques Vallee's influential work 'Messengers of Deception.' They explore themes of manipulation, the unconscious, and the power of images in shaping belief systems. The conversation delves into the psychological impact of UFO experiences, the dangers of ontological shock, and the need for critical thinking in the field of ufology. Throughout, they emphasize the importance of self-awareness and the challenges of integrating extraordinary experiences into one's worldview. TIMESTAMPS 01:28 Introducing Kelly Chase and Her Work 03:09 Exploring Jacques Vallee's 'Messengers of Deception' 05:17 Vallee's Perspective on UFOs and Manipulation 09:47 The Reliability of Jacques Vallee 12:05 The Nature of Reality and Ideological Structures 15:04 The Impact of Ontological Shock 18:45 The Role of the Unconscious in UFO Phenomena 22:08 The Dangers of Manipulation and Belief Systems 27:44 Connecting Modernity and Public Manipulation 32:56 The Internet's Oppenheimer: Valet's Perspective 35:32 The Power of Images and Human Manipulation 39:57 Gnosticism and the Quest for Knowledge 44:05 The Nature of UFO Phenomena and Human Belief 47:35 The Intersection of Science and Mythology 52:11 Critical Inquiry and the Nature of Belief 55:32 The Joy of Inquiry and the Dangers of Ufology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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show that you probably are familiar with our dear friend, Dr. James Madden. We did a bunch of episodes with him on the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. He was on our docu series. He's the author of the book, Unidentified Flying Hyper Object, which is absolutely phenomenal if you haven't checked that out. And he has a brand new podcast himself with his friend, Jared Zimmerer, and it is called the Great Dangerous Books podcast. I would really encourage you guys to check that out. I had a very cool conversation with them that we're sharing with you guys here about one of my favorite books in Uphology, Messengers of Deception by Jacques Valet. So please check out this episode. And if you like it down in the episode description, you will find all of the information so that

you can follow the Great Dangerous Books podcast and Jim and Jared. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right. What's up, Jim? How you doing, Jared? Good to see you. Doing good, man. We have a special guest. Yes, Friday. Friday, we've got a special guest here on the dangerous great books, right? So first, though, what are you reading, Jared? So this week, I actually picked up a Gijek essay in, what's it called? Critics and Critique, I think. Crisis and Critique, yeah.

Yeah, it's called the hologram of conflicting universalities. It's pretty interesting. It's kind of his take on what trans, kind of trans, kind of trans-cultural. cultural capitalism has caused in regard to universalities. So kind of interesting. I don't mean. Maybe that one warrants an episode. I don't know. It's pretty good.

Yeah. G. Jack should be on our radar. So, no, and I think in. How about you? Yeah, for sure. So, okay, so I'm having my life changed by DeLuze's difference in repetition. Okay. I've gone out a rabbit hole, as it were, with that book this week.

and continuing to plug my way through a series of unfortunate events in my in my reading project there so yeah but it's been it's been a pretty big deluse week for me so that's nice and i think we've talked about this before jared i think deluz is going to be on our radar for the show at some point here so probably multiple episodes yeah but as we mentioned we have a special guest this week uh the the listeners are the legions though we i should note we now have over 100 followers. Okay. So the legion of dozens has like, lay, it's just a sense. And so we, we, we have a special guest this week. Our special guest is Kelly Chase, a friend of mine. Kelly, for a while, hosted a podcast called the UFO Rabbit Hole on which I appeared several times. And it's now simply Cosmosis. Is that right, Kelly? Yeah. And you should think of Kelly as, like, the Renaissance woman of the weird is how I would describe your. So, like, Kelly, Kelly wrote a book about the UFO phenomenon based on, on a lot of episodes. If you ever listen to a podcast by Kelly, her episodes are, are mostly pre-written, right?

Kelly, like, so that she's basically writing essays and producing, like, really academic work about this. Okay. Um, but so she's, she's had that podcast. She has a new podcast co-hosted, uh, with Jay, right. Okay. Uh, she's been co-produced. I guess we'll call it on a television series, Cosmosis, right? Uh, is a part of the team that runs a media company called Cosmosis.

That's, that's branch out all sorts of areas. Recently had a foray into an academic conference in, in, in Britain, right? Okay. So, um, and, and, you know, we brought Kelly in to talk about. a book that would fall into what's called UFOology. Maybe we'll get into what that is and isn't. But I think Kelly would agree with me that, like, her vision is to move beyond, like, that kind of neural limit and to really become this sort of Renaissance woman of the weird, right?

Is that all fair to say about you, Kelly? No, that's, that's very, very and very kind. I appreciate that. Yeah, my work has progressively moved into just the space of general weirdness. You know, I said about the UFO ramid hole for a while that it became a UFO podcast where We never talked about UFOs. But I'm still fascinated by the UFO because I think it's an entry point for asking some of the most interesting questions we have to ask about the nature of our reality and who we are and where we are and all of that. So it's still central and from a spiritual sense, but I'm less interested in like the physical craft.

Yeah. Yeah. And Kelly, I don't know if you've listened to the last couple episodes, but what we've what we've been doing is. So for instance, last week you looked at Freud's uncanny, right? what did we do the week before that, Lovecraft. We did Lovecraft, okay. And in each case, you know, what we emphasize in the episode is when we approach the weird space, we cannot just take the surface phenomenon at face value, right?

And that's sort of the debate, I think, that people fall into, okay? And I think for Jared and I, correct me if I'm wrong, Jared, is what's really important for us is we cannot give our own unconscious a pass when we deal with the weird. Right? Like we have to look at what is the unconscious contribution to our investment in these kinds of things. Okay. And before we can take the weird seriously, we have to like really get to the point where

we can like trust ourselves, right, to have a mistrust for ourselves. Uh, in approaching it. Right. And, and that's why, and I know, I know, you and Kelly and I have spoken many, many times. I think that's something important to Kelly. That's why we wanted to talk about this book, Messengers of Deception by Jacques Ville, which is, I think, a great object study in, I think, both how that message can be announced and systematically unheard in a field of the weird.

Right. So, yeah. And so, so Kelly, I know you're very familiar with Velae's book. Can you can maybe start with some background on the text at all? Yeah. So I think Messengers of Deception, to me, is one of the most important books in the field of uphology. But I think that it's about so much more than that and that it should be read by people outside of the field.

It's really valuable. I think that people need to start with understanding who Jacques Filet is. And he's this guy who really has been at the bleeding edge of the future, of what humanity is becoming in more ways than one. His interest in uphology is kind of, I think even to this day, he would describe as kind of his silly little hobby on the side. And not necessarily. It's the focus of great inquiry for him, but it's not really what he sees as his life's work. This is someone who is a computer scientist and has played a large role in kind of the creation of the Internet and the conceptualizing of what our world is going to look like moving into a more interconnect. future. And, but I think that you need to understand all of these things together with

Valet, because what he's really talking about in his books is about, partly about the weirdness of this phenomenon, but I think he's also very often talking about the ways in which, um, our basic ways of apprehending and understanding our world are, are deeply flawed that we're very epistemically vulnerable as human beings and that we're, a lot easier, we're a lot more easy to manipulate than we think. And I would say he never says this explicitly, but I think what comes through in his work is this idea that this manipulation isn't something that happens kind of like incidentally or sometimes or in certain cases, but that it's in many ways kind of the default setting for the reality that we encounter on a

day-to-day basis. And I don't think that a lot of people are reading him that deeply and in that way, but I believe very strongly that that's how he intends to present and what he, the world that he's trying to point to. Yeah, 100%. Jared mentioned that he read an essay by Giac recently. And, you know, one of the things that a lot of us have learned from Giac, who, you know, is a sort of Slovenian madman of contemporary philosophy. is that ideology does not operate consciously.

It operates in the unconscious. And I think you're getting something very close to that in Valais' messengers and he's kind of outing how there are ideological structures operating in the unconscious background of the UFO phenomenon, right? Which leads to, I think, also to very interesting ambiguities as to what is Valet actually up to. Okay. Um, so, you know, Kelly, I think you would agree too is like, like a lot of times when people want to cite the legitimacy of the study of the UFO, they'll say Jacques Valet. I've done the same thing. Okay. Because he's what he has it. He has a doctorate from

in France, right, in in astronomy or some kind of advanced degree in astronomy from France. And he has a PhD from was it Northwestern University in computer science, right? So he's a highly credential scientists who took this stuff very seriously in some ways, written several books about it. But also, he seems to think that there's something very sketchy about a lot of the classic UFO cases, right? And what you get in, partly in, in messenger of deception from like the dean of UFO studies, is he goes through a lot of the classic cases, including like Roswell, right? And comes out as saying, I think this may have been. I mean, and he actually goes through a case, I believe it's in France, where he's pretty convinced that French intelligence staged a UFO abduction, right?

And he talks about all sorts of stuff for this and like South America, et cetera, et cetera. So it's interesting thing with Valet, like he writes some earlier things that really motivate the like the reality of the UFO. But then he comes back with this book to say, uh, be careful. Right. Be careful because it does seem that there's a lot of chicanery that goes on with this, right? Okay. So I think like when I, after I read this book, I came away with this very ambiguous attitude towards Jacques Fillet, right? That he, the right hand and the left hand are like giving and take. Yeah. Yeah. I've posted about messengers of deception because I was thinking about this conversation that was coming up. And and, you know, I did mention at some point in a reply that I don't find Falet to be a particularly reliable narrator. And people were kind of like horrified. and confused by the fact that I said that. But I think that that's another understanding

that we have to bring to Jacques Valet is that like this is a man who almost certainly has held and almost certainly still holds clearances. I would eat my hat if he doesn't, right? The things that he's been involved in, the company that he keeps from the UFO side into his, you know, more mainstream work, it all has him bumping up against some of the most secretive projects

that, you know, government has undertaken over the last several decades. And all of them, I would argue, come back to major mechanisms of control that are utilized against us, against the human population by our government, and that he has a really deep understanding of those things. I don't think that it's fair to, like, reduce the phenomenon to that. But he does point out aggressively, and I think in messengers of deception a lot, the way that there is this kind of, of mimicry between the way that the phenomenon controls and manipulates us and the way that we have been controlled and manipulated by human beings, sometimes under the guise of the phenomena.

Of the fact. Yeah. And, um, but, but the thing is about having all of those clearances, being somebody like that is that he can't just tell you what's happening, right? He's always pointing. He's always kind of like telling you a story where it seems kind of boring, but then you're like, oh, wait, something in here actually doesn't make sense. And, you know, actually, I think you are someone who helped me understand Jim that so many people who write in this space are, their work is redacted.

It's heavily redacted. But if you know how to look for the redactions, if you understand what the redactions are, then suddenly you are able to paint a bigger picture. And I think valet is famous for that for kind of telling part of the story, for telling something it's a little apocryphal for like combining something or, you know. And so I don't find him to be particularly reliable. But I think if you're educated on his work, that you can still. find a lot of value there. Yeah, Jack, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I kind of read this is sort of like he's gone back into the cave of Plato's cave, and he's pointed out the fact that there actually are shadow makers, and that some people in the cave that are chained up also

have unconscious, you know, psychological realities that are giving those shadows certain forms. Right. So I see this kind of as a sociological text of, yeah, things are there, but they're not exactly what we've been told, maybe, or there's also a subconscious reality. that's going on, the kind of cult-like reality that's going on that spreads this message in a way that we just need to be aware of, right? It's just kind of opening our eyes to the fact that maybe it's not everything we've been told, but there is something going on, you know? Can I do two passages to where I think he just lays out his thesis really, really clearly, okay. Yeah, please. And the one on page 20, he's like, clearly he's doing that, right? He had talicizes

this. He's on page 20 of Messengers and deception, which, by the way, just, you know, it came out in 1979, which I think it's an interesting time. But anyway. So, quoting Valle, I propose that the UFO we see is, among other things, a device which creates a distortion of the witness's reality, that it does so for a purpose, which is to project images or fabricated scenes designed to change our belief systems, and that the technology we observe is only the incidental support for a worldwide enterprise. of subliminal seduction, end quote.

Okay. And then if you go to page 178 towards the end, okay. Sorry. Okay, so this is the end of part two on page 178. Valet says, I don't think we should expect salvation from the sky. I believe there is a very real UFO problem. I have also come to suspect that it is being manipulated for political ends.

and the data suggests that the manipulation may be human beings with a plan for social control. Such plans have been made before and have succeeded. History shows that having a cosmic mythology as part of such a plan is not always necessary, but it certainly helps, end quote. Okay. All right. And so, I mean, I think once you've seen like just that, it's very hard to think that Jacques Filet is someone that can be read at a surface level

in all his other work about UFOology. Right. And maybe everything else, right? Because he is saying something out there is kind of spoiling the epistemic stew, right? That we don't have an unmediated access to this phenomenon. And I would say we don't have an immediate access to anything. Okay. But he's saying like the UFO is not an exception to that.

And it is, like our access to this is being mediated through systems of information control, data control, social control, et cetera, et cetera. And it's, and he's clearly saying he thinks, the phenomenon itself is a vehicle of those very those very structures, right? A vehicle as it were, yeah. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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And I think I'm glad you talked about the fact that it was published in 1979. I think very relevant to those passages that you just read is the fact that Jacques Thalais has said that you shouldn't trust any UFO cases or like abduction cases before 1975. I mean, sorry, after 1975. And, you know, I think that the implications there and, you know, for people who have done a lot of kind of deeper research into what the government has been capable of and the sorts of things that they were experimenting on in, you know, the 60s, 70s and 80s, you know, there is this kind of implication that they might have the ability to manufacture or fate some of these, the aspects of these encounters that people have with UFOs or with non-human human human. human intelligences. And, you know, I think for people who are less initiated into the UFO world, it's important to know that a very important and under-talked-about aspect of these encounters is that it completely transforms people.

It transforms their belief systems. It transforms the ways that they think about themselves and the greater cosmos. They're everything. It can really, it's such an ontoloch. ontological rupture in someone's world that you almost have to stitch it back together with some kind of a story and that that makes it really easy to then rewire somebody. And I think he means this quite literally. There's a researcher, Colm Keller, was one of the early Skinwalker investigators and has been involved in a lot of this for quite some time. And he did a talk at Archives of the

Impossible where he talked about bi-directional mimicry. And the example that he used, was that it's kind of, it's just accepted for people who aren't as initiated. It's just accept the people in euphology, basically accept that the black triangle UFOs are some kind of reverse engineered technology, but it's human technology, right? The problem being that there were all kinds of sightings of these black triangle UFOs flying low and slow over residential areas or over highways in the middle of the day in front of, you know, crowded highways and that sort of thing. And so this aren't we mean like many, many reports of that.

Oh, yeah. Very common. Yeah, very common. One of the most common kinds. And so then the question becomes if this is our secret technology, like that's just not how we behave with our technology. And his argument is that that we reverse engineered their technology to create these black triangles, but then that they are now showing people these black triangles in the

sky as a like that they're basically mimicking us, mimicking us back. But I think that that happens with far more than just like how these things represent materially or technologically. I think that we are also or the powers, there are certain powers that be that are manipulating us in the ways that this phenomenon has manipulated us, that it, that it has learned what works and what can be done to a human being to make them completely abandon their belief system and adopt a new one. Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things that, um, I've noted, you know, okay, so like this notion of like the, the word ontological shock gets, gets thrown around quite a bit in, in discussions of UFOs and things like that, right? And, um, you know, for what that, what that phrase actually originally meant when like Paul Tillick coined it and, you know, as like a reader of Heidegger, I mean, that, the notion of ontological shock was to say, like, one came to realize like the utter contingency of all of our stories about things, right? Like one came to see that that human, the human, like the human conception does not seem to be the measure of things.

And so now there's this sort of sense of utter groundlessness of all of our, our practices, our narratives, our myths, et cetera, et cetera. And it's, I find interesting how like, in that sense, how unontologically shocking most reports of UFOs are. right it's like okay so that there's like a different kind of like like aircraft is weird and like maybe would be distressing that there might be a history of technology that we're not privy to that there's like you know gray aliens or have you it would be weird but it's not but it doesn't fundamentally question like ontology right it doesn't change the categories of being right and that that's that sounds to me like maybe what's going on with a lot of this is people are having truly uncanny, not necessarily in the Freudian sense that we talked about, but having truly uncanny experiences.

And so that Jared has that earlier, and then just grabbing things that are in like the human, you know, imaginary, you know, like available images and just throwing that on this, right? And I think this goes to your point, Kelly, that once you, like, if you do cause a legitimate unilateral shock, like you've caused people to realize, hey, it looks like we don't get anything right about the world, right? They are going to be vulnerable for whatever is slithes by in the unconscious, right, to put, to put some hold on that, right? And that's my read on a lot of these phenomena is I think I think people do hit something that makes no sense whatsoever to like any common human story.

And then now they are just, they are open to suggestion of things to their own unconscious or things from, you know, whatever could be like seeded into the popular culture, etc., etc., right? And valet, I want to go to a passage here on page 48. This is one of my like real eye-openerers in this. Yeah, on page 48, Valet says, The link between the images of the UFO world and those of human foreclose resides in the psyche. The technology of UFOs is not designed to carry little men from one physical planet to another.

It is designed much more simply to trigger the already existing imagery. we are all carrying in our brains. It is the imagery of Magonia, of intelligent beams of light, dialogues with strange creatures. Emerging fully armed into our local universe, like Athena being born from Zeus's head, the UFOs do nothing more than provide the physical support

for our own dreams, end quote. Okay. That, I think, is an important thing. It seems like what Ballet is saying here is whatever's behind this phenomenon is good at tapping into the human unconscious, right? And like giving physical support, giving external affirmation of, of fantasies that we are inclined to unconsciously, right? Does that make sense?

And I think that that may explain a lot of like just the transformative nature of this is like, it's like what you've been unconsciously looking for all along, suddenly gets affirmed to you. Yeah. I think that's a real date. I mean, it's something that, like, in the work that I've done, I see all the time because, you know, I've kind of been in the business of shaking people's etchusketch. And, you know, that that was really what where I started with the UFO rabbit hole was making the case that like there's that I don't know what's going on here, but something's going on here. And it's far stranger than, you know, we had been led to believe. And that as a result, reality is far stranger than we've been led to believe. And people, that can be really fun and exhilarating that process of kind of opening up and there's suddenly inquiry and you can the world is reenchanted in a certain way but it's also can be deeply destabilizing and you know it's it's really tough when people are coming out of that and trying to figure out you know i've had to and i talk to other people in this work who do similar things like you have to

be careful and be ethical about how you're even engaging with these people because people become so porous and so open to suggestion and to any kind of a story that's going to put their world back together again in a way that makes sense. And, you know, I think that the real message of valet and the lesson of uphology, if you're brave enough to take it, is that you don't get to put it back together again and remain intellectually honest or even more important, I would say, intellectually sovereign. Right. Yeah. That's a good point, Kelly, because like it could be like who says after an ontological shock you ever get an ontology back? Right. Right. Or really there's always the risk that you're just going to fall back into another kind of prepackaged in the unconscious ideological structure. Right. It'll feel new, but it's not. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I actually think of Freud's use of either going to go into a stone age or into madness, right? So it's a return to a previous age. And sometimes in certain circles, things like demons get attached to these images or to these, you know, appearances that happen. Like, yeah, that's a medieval way of being able to explain certain phenomena that within a certain structure does make sense. But whether or not that's true is the real question, right, of whether or not that's actually what's going on. It's an easy tag to put on some of these things. The way I always put is it's not as if the concept of demon was ideologically innocent either. Right.

That wasn't mediated through a historical moment that have purposes, et cetera, et cetera. Right. You know, and I think there's this, there's this real. Okay. And I don't think Valet is denying it, right? And I'm not denying. I don't think you two are. But there's a real that people are bumping into it in this thing.

For sure. right uh the the thing that i think is missing from all these conversations is a mistrust of our identifications of what that real is right and in an unwillingness to like sit with the fact that maybe all of our identifications of it like are not trustworthy right yeah right i mean and so like there's here's another passage from the text that i found like this is where i think he makes an almost a jijackian point okay it's on page 55 of L.A. says, you can find scholars who will, quote, prove to you that the supernatural powers of Jesus never existed. You can also find scholars who will, quote, prove to you that they did exist. Does it

matter? Of course not. It only matters to the experts who have staked their academic reputations on either side of the argument. The effect of the belief in Jesus, the impact of the doctrine based on the story of his life and death are real enough. Socially, historically, the consequences are beyond question. I claim that the same now applies to flying saucers because enough people believe in them. Enough people believe that contact with them is possible. Enough people even believe that they have secretly achieved such contact, end quote. Okay.

I mean, what he's saying there is like, it's, okay, you know, we could pretend something into existence. that then gets out of hand and now goes on its own. This is what I mean by a hyper object, right? Okay. Like, we could pretend something in existence. And I'm not weighing in on the bill with the patterns like that, right? But we can pretend something in existence and then be stuck with it. And it's up and running.

And it has real effect now. Okay. And I think, I mean, this is clearly what you're saying with the UFOs. It could be that much of this has been pretended into existence, either accidentally or intentionally. And now it's up and running. It has a kind of cognitive life of its own. It's in the unconscious, right?

And like anyone who's like tried to talk about this topic in a serious way and wants to like bracket whether or not a UFO is literally a spacecraft or literally little green man or what have you will run into this. Because like no matter what, it goes back to oh, so you're talking about aliens, right? Oh, so you're talking about spacecraft. And the point is, I don't know what we're talking about, right? But it doesn't matter because the ideological germ is in the unconscious now, right? And it's going to have an effect, right? As Liz Jijak likes to put it in Lacanian way, the big brother, big other may not exist, but it still insists. It still has an effect, right?

Yeah. No, I think all of that is really important. And I think it also points to, you know, I really do think that, and I know that we've talked about this before, Jim, but, you know, in some ways, valet is the godfather of modernity. And this kind of new world that we're moving into a willing one or not. I think you could argue that he's not. But he's certainly somebody who's had a front row seat for a lot of it. And, you know, stuff that you guys even talk about on this show, you know, something

that I found really interesting recently is that I didn't realize. And maybe this is new. Maybe everybody knows this. But I didn't know that Sigmund Freud and. Edward Bernays were related. I believe they were like uncle and nephew. Really? Yeah.

I had no. Through Edward Bernays is. Yeah. And I had no idea. So for people who weren't familiar, Bernays is kind of the father of modern PR. And really of mass public manipulation of sentiment opinion. He kind of invented that or at least popularized it and shared that stuff widely.

And so all of this stuff was happening at the same time that Val Lillian. is writing this book, this is recounting, you know, him going around to these tiny little UFO groups and the 60s and 70s. You know, just because he was interested. He wanted to talk to these contactees and it was these fringe little groups

and it wasn't like the internet was around. And, you know, the people that he would run into at these events would be like extraordinarily high level members of the military intelligence apparatus. And we can explain these events. are we're talking about like UFO conferences at like in you know at that at like a shady motel six in like a rural Arkansas right yeah or like a back room in a library somewhere or like your local diner and it's like 10 guys you know and and yet you would find these like high level

military intelligence guys like what are they what are they doing what they doing and you see that still now, like this investment. And I guess I'm going with all of this is that when we became a more interconnected species, it opened up this doorway for us to be manipulated, not just on like an individual level or like in one little community, but through these like vast networked communities. And the power of that, I think really can't be underestimated. And that there were people at that time who like, that's really what they were. were thinking about and that they're still thinking about. And when you start to understand, like, what's been disturbing for me is I was a marketer before all of this. And I used to joke

because it would get a laugh at the, you know, marketing conferences that marketing was psychology for sociopaths. But I really believe that now. And I'm glad to have gotten out of it because I think that they're like, like when you start to understand how like personal, individual psychology and marketing techniques and PR and, you know, think tanks and all of these things are, and then the intelligence community, the actual tactics that the intelligence community uses to gain people's trust to infiltrate communities and to influence opinion. Like all of, they're the same thing. It's the same, it's the exact same playbook. It's the exact same mechanism. they are all painfully easy.

They're easy and simple to the point that like no one wants to believe that it could work on me, right? Like there's no way. Like me, the other people, it works on them, but it can't possibly work on me. I'm unconscious, but you're mad. Right. I'm in perfect control. And so I really think what he's talking about is he's talking about, he's saying something very important about the UFO community and the extent to which it's been manipulated and turned upside down against itself. but he's also, I think, saying something larger about our society as a whole.

And, you know, he's using the microcosm to show the macrocosm. And let me, let me, this is a gem from the book, if you don't mind. I'm sorry, I'm all like. Oh, no, please. I'm doing this like close Rita valet. Okay, so I'm on page 68 at the top, he says, based on what you can observe, you have no way to know the truth, even if you have a Nobel Prize in physics. besides, your television set influences you in other ways.

It determines what toothpaste you use, how you shave, who you go to bed with, and how you will vote in the next election. In some respects, I think UFOs are similar to television sets. They are physical objects, the products of technology. They are also something else, the tools of a major cultural change. I think UFOs are perpetuating a deception by presenting, their so-called occupants, and he puts occupants in scare quotes, as being messengers from outer space. And I suspect that these are groups of people on earth exploiting this, this deception. And quote. Yeah, I mean, there, he said it, right? And I have in, like, something

else, that's my work on this. I call Valet the, you know, the, like, like, I see what Ville is doing, because I don't think he mentioned this, but he was very integral in the development of the internet, right? At least that's the story, right? He was very like integral in the defense department or the contracting the defense department developed the internet, right? I actually see like Velae is like the Oppenheimer of the internet, right? And the way that Oppenheimer like, he got into this thing that he got in, he got like into making this piece of technology and he was never clear to him why he was doing it. And he and he and he unleashes it on the world. and he's like, oh my gosh, I'm death, right?

Like, what have we done? But yet he did it, right? And he knew it was coming, right? And he knew precisely what a world changing, not for the better this thing is. And that's how I interpret like Valet's work, as he sees the internet as even, maybe even a bigger threat to humanity,

of a different kind threat, right? And he's saying, oh my gosh, what have we done here? Like, you know, where is this gonna go? What is this gonna do humanity in terms of our ability to think for ourselves in terms of our ability to to actually keep our own unconscious at bay, et cetera, et cetera. I think he's seeing it. And I think for him in a lot of ways, the UFO might just be a metaphor, not just a metaphor,

it might be a metaphor and maybe more else for that, right, for the fact that we've got this like technological tiger by the tail now that is the internet, that is, that is digital technology and is going to so fundamentally change things, right? in ways that will undermine, like, our very sense of what it was to be a human subject. And leave us to the playthings of these manipulations of our unconscious, right? But that's how I read Valais as, like, overall, like, overall. Right. So I'd be interested to hear from Kelly.

The, it does Valet have a hypothesis or in your work, you've seen the hypothesis of why this kind of manipulation? Like why images, why, why these flying saucers, why, you know, a continuation of the narratives of some of these experiences that people claim to have had? It's just, it's to me, it's to what end? And maybe I'm thinking too rationally about it, that there may not actually be an end for it other than just trying to confuse. But is there a hypothesis there as to why? I think that he, he argues in a lot of different ways about that. that in general, it has to do with a couple of things. I think one is, and I actually think this has

been really illuminated well by Diana Pesolka in her work, in American Cosmic, in particular, and also in encounters, is that, like, it has to do with the power of images that, you know, for whatever reason, sight is our most important sense in a way. Like, I mean, there are people who would argue that, but even even going back to the Enlightenment, part of the place I think we got ourselves a little bit in trouble in the Enlightenment is this idea that like seeing is believing, right? Like just hearing something isn't enough, feeling something isn't enough. Like really you have to, if you see it, though, you can say, I saw it. So I saw my own two eyes, right? And so I think that there's something about the power of images on the human mind and that we, I think, really underestimate,

maybe, especially growing up in the culture that we all have, where we're living so saturated in images that we don't understand that like an image is literally putting something into your brain. Like it's not, you're not just reading a book. You are taking an image into your brain and that we as a species are, you know, our entire culture, our ways of communicating all of it and the things that we value most and that we prize as being the most accurate, it's all mitigated by images. And so I think that that is part of it. And that,

but I think that the reason that this has been used and that it's, is because like it's so, it's just, it's effective. I think this has kind of always been the story with us. I think if you look at something I found really interesting is that there's a, an economist named George Lowenstein, I believe he's at Carnegie Mellon.

but he wrote back in, I believe the 90s, he did some work on the psychology of curiosity and trying to figure out what actually happens in somebody's brain. And he identified these triggers. I probably won't remember them all, but there's four triggers for involuntarily inducing curiosity in someone. And this would make people so curious that they would actually like bribe the test, the people who are administering the test to give them the answer. even though they could have gotten the answer for free after the test. And like some of the ways to involuntarily trigger this curiosity are presenting people

with a sequence of events with an unclear ending. You know, it's the introducing of something like absurd that doesn't make sense in a situation without like showing them how that's going to resolve. And it's also the idea that someone is that someone knows something that you do not. And so I think that like the, The UFO kind of perfectly does all of these things. It engages the human being. It captures us.

It literally hijacks our nervous system and along the same reward centers as like sex and drugs and chocolate. And it captures you. And I think it also serves then as that kind of initiation event, that call to adventure and the hero's journey. It gives people this, it kind of wakes people up and it gives them this feeling they are at the center of the story. and that important things are about to happen. And I think people are very programmable in that state. And I think that you can make them believe all kinds of new things about the world around them and about themselves that they wouldn't have been as willing to believe without the introduction of this thing that kind of like ruptures their expectations of the real.

Yeah, that's really good. And I think that the way I'm hearing that also is kind of an invitation to a certain type of gnosticism. That is kind of unending, you know, like not an honest. I'm not against all the Gnostics by any means. But I think that there is a certain kind of narcissism seeking secret language that can, or secret knowledge that can end up being your entire lifetime's journey towards some kind of never-ending story versus a narcissism of like self-care and certain aspects of that. But that's really interesting to kind of invite people into that without giving them a certain direction of where to go. That's really interesting. I love that, Jared, just I'm not a Gnostic, but when I do.

Right. we all do a little if we can't but I knew to help it's kind of harder is it like to want to be in on the real thing that no one else is exactly yeah yeah I look at that a lot of that

not surprisingly to the sort of like psychoanalytic lens of death drive okay in that the fact that there's this thing that you don't know and you're constantly defeated in your attempts to know it, then becomes utterly addictive, right? Like, like the most dissatisfying thing that could happen to a phyology

is that they found out what it is. Okay, because then what would be left? What would be the unattained object that causes desire for them, right? It's, it's the Licanian thing that, like, what we most want is not to get what we want, because then we would be left utterly lifeless, right? and that we're kind of hooked in our own defeat, ever chasing the thing that we feel like we had, but we never did have, right? And I really think the UFO thing really taps that.

Like one, like one, you do, you get the esoteric, like I'm in on the real thing, but you never get the real thing, right? So it like, it satisfies this sort of like like need or desire to have like an Gnostic elitism. But then it also satisfies this like like this desire to get in our own way. Right. This desire for defeat, it's desire to like encounter an enjoyment of a land. Right. I really think that the UFO phenomenon is a great example of seeing that in real time of how we can get sucked into that.

Right. Yeah. And also like Ayn Le Canaan, I'll say, I'm not denying that there's a real, there's a Dostang a thing that we're desiring in this. Okay. But once again, though, we have to look at how easily that puts this vulnerable,

ideological manipulation. Right. Yeah, I think, you know, I think what's really important, too, is I think that there's a way in which people don't want to move on or they get stuck before the kind of integration phase. I think that everybody at some point, like you had this impossible thing happen to you and now you have to grapple with it. And in some way, you have to integrate this back into your reality and into your person. And but I think a lot of people get stuck there and can get kind of hide. jacked there, not just by nefarious others, but, you know, it's like in those experiments where they put a rat in a cage and, like, it can have hit this button and get food or it can hit

this button and get like cocaine water. And like, it's going, it's going for the drugs every time. And it'll just hit that button. I hit that button and hit that button. And I think that that initiatory period where you feel like the universe has winked at you in particular, where like you feel like you are now at the center of some great unfolding and that you have some important part of it and that you're going to get to know because that's kind of the headspace that people get into immediately after these kinds of events that if people aren't willing to kind of move into the next phase of the hero's journey, which is just like fear and disorientation, right, and not knowing what your next move is. Or you can be the rat in the cage and just keep hitting that button,

hitting that button, hit in that button. And I think a lot of people get stuck there and that it's like a real hazard in some ways of this kind of inquiry is that you can literally make yourself crazy. Yes. It happens. Yeah. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right.

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Oh yeah, please. So I'm on, I'm on 236. Um, ballet says, discussing the two hypotheses I presented above, I have shown that neither of them fully accounted for all the facts. I still feel that the UFO phenomenon represents a manifestation of a reality that transcends our current understanding of physics. It is not the phenomenon itself, but the belief that it has created, which is manipulated by human groups with their own objectivity. Because I'm going to come back to that, but end quote there. Interesting. So what Valé is saying there is saying, look, I don't think any of the going hypotheses, it's aliens, it's just us playing with our own technology, us, meaning like an elite and military leaders. something like that plan of technology, et cetera.

He thinks none of that actually explains what happens. And I agree with him. Like if you've looked into some of these cases, it is very difficult to explain this stuff in conventional terms, right? Even if you like do your best to like be ideologically critical of it and like, like there's still this like kernel of like, wow, it does seem you can't fit this in. Right. Okay.

But what's interesting here he says, yeah. But that being said, going back to that quote, It is not the phenomenon itself, but the belief it has created, which is manipulated by human groups with their own, their own objective. So I'd see that. So like he's saying, it's that like the manipulated hyper object here, right? The ideology that speaks us, whether we, us speaking it, that's what's being manipulated, not this sort of real that people are running into.

Okay, I think that's an important. And I think that's important for like, Jared and my bearing to all these kinds of things. Is that right, Jerry? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now, continue with a lay. He says, I continue to be impressed by one fact I mentioned in my earlier book,

Passport to Magonia. Such sightings have been made in earlier times. Similar effects have been described. Even the UFO occupants, once getting any quotes there, appear identical to denizens of medieval Magonia. This suggests a reality of mind beyond whatever technology is activating UFO energy. I continue to regard this phenomenon as a manifestation of a reality that is larger and more complex than a simple visit by interplanetary travelers, the reality of Magonia, end quote.

Okay. Now, interesting there, we read a quote earlier where he referred to Magonia as a structure of the unconscious, too, where he says, like, you know, we've, we have dreams of fairies and gobbels and ghosts and things like that. And then this phenomenon, like, gives us like a like a physical marker that license us us to believe in our own dreams. Okay. So I think that it's interesting, though, like, so we can't, I think we can't really take the lay perfectly seriously that he's saying, oh, it turns out UFOs are elves, right? Or that they're goblins or that they're the fairy folk. I think what he's saying is things have been reported as fairy folk are being reported now

as UFOs. Do you see that? I think that's a very important thing to see here, right? And he's not putting his foot down on saying, oh, the medieval stories are true. He's not doing it. Right. I think he's saying that there there are structures of the human psyche archetypes, if you will, that this triggers. Okay. But that's not a description of what it is. It's something else. Right. Yeah. And I think that's so important because I think there's like a certain kind of criticism that's become the default in like academia and in the mainstream that has this kind of idea that like we are very enlightened and we see things as they are. And but and and and then we judge everyone else as being these kind of. of like backward idiots who were kind of making stuff up out of holdoff when ever they ran up against something that they didn't understand.

But like we are constantly also doing that, which is what this book is about. And it's about how when people through whatever mechanism are pushed kind of into the fringes into the frontier of the known, that we have these these same tendencies to just kind of like mythologize and to make to make things up and to and to believe very deeply. in those things and that those beliefs do have real weight and meaning and impact. And, you know, an example is I just got back from this academic workshop at the University of Exeter and it was about the idea that plasma might be a substrate for intelligence or consciousness. And that would be a very huge deal because that's the fourth state of matter and 99% of the visible universe is

plasma. And so this idea that like plasma could be behind everything from, you know, UFOs to Sasquatch to fairies to angels to deep. You know what I mean? That that could be what we're actually dealing with. I think it's a really interesting idea. It also shows you how like, like, nascent we are in all of this, right? That we're just getting around to talking about the stuff that like 99% of the things that we know about are made out of, right? And like we're just getting there.

But then, you know, some of the conversations. It's a great takeaway a line there, Kelly. I like that. of came. Like, we really don't know what we're talking about at all, right? But, but then you see, like, and this was a really cool conference because you had people like Robert Temple and Bernard Carr and Timothy Eastman and, like, you know, very legitimate scientists and, you know, astrophysicists and plasma scientists. And also, like, philosophy of mind guys and, you know, people who are to psychedelics and the holographic universe and, you know, and I was there for some reason. And, you know, but some of the conversations that came out of that I thought were so important because, you know, some of the people were asking, and I'm so glad to hear people ask this, like, okay, but if everything, if all of this weird stuff, if we're just going to say that it can be explained by plasma, have we not just brought ourselves back to materialism? And like, and like, like, if that's okay, but like we need to support that if that's, if that's the case. You know what I mean? And also like, just because it looks like it's intelligent, how do we?

actually know that plasma could be intelligent, like what would that look like? How do we? And in raising all of these larger questions. And so I just saw once again that tendency to fill this space. We're like, oh, plasma. Plasma sounds like a great answer. And it's a great answer because we know nothing about it. And so we can really just sort of like project whatever we want onto this idea that of plasma intelligence and feel like we've somehow arrived at an answer of it.

We have it. We're just mythologizing. Yeah, exactly. And I love that point you made there. I think you know, it's one of my stalking horses. Like things like materialism, idealism, I don't find it have any explanatory value whatsoever. Because I think they ultimately like amount to the same thing. There's one stuff, right?

You know what I mean? And it may be that humans are not good at ontology. Like that, that is a possibility here. Right. And our attempts to have grand categorizations like that may just not be what we're set up to do, right? I'm open to that, right? Um, and I think I love that the point you made also, Kelly, is that, look, um, you know, the way I said, like, we all think everyone else has an unconscious but ourselves. Well, that's, that's a historical thing, too. We act like, oh, yeah,

prior generations. They were just like, they were just the dupes of their own, you know, you know, needs for religious comfort or what have you. And now we're beyond that, now that we've had the enlightenment. And as if like somehow, like, we can, we could like get by without the fundamental background structures of the human mind. And like we could exempt ourselves from it. You know what I mean? I think that's the important thing here is to say the same. And I actually said this in my book on it is like the same scrutiny that we give to like

classical religion psychoanalytically, genealogically, right? Critically. We need to give to everything else then too. Right. Like like no one gets a free pass on this. And whether it's whether it's our allegiance to. contemporary science or our allegiance to something like uithology or have you, it all has to be tested critically, not just scientifically, okay, but also in terms of what are the rudiments of

our investment in it, right, our emotional investment. That also needs to be explored, no less than we need to explore that for a classic religion, right? Yeah, and it's tough because you don't, there is no way to operate intellectually or even just in your day-to-day life without making some pretty hard epistemological commitments. Like you just, you have to. And there's no way forward without it. And I think that like what's been so valuable to me about studying uphology and getting so deep into this and in ballet's work in particular is just this understanding that like I can't

stop myself from doing that. I will do that, but that there needs, you have to find a way as much as possible to remain aware of the places where you're just like kind of mythologizing, where you're where you're closing a gap without really having the means to support it, where you're like, well, that sounds right or like that comports with what I believe to be true. So I choose to also believe that. You know, like I, I, the, becoming more aware of that, There's no way to do it perfectly. There's no way to not get caught up. But, you know, leaving that little bit of humility and openness there when you're,

and being able to recognize what parts of your belief structure are manufactured or contingent, which is basically all of it, it turns out. There's like these small little kernels of like things I feel like I actually know to be true. And most of them don't transmit well to others. you know, get it coming back to nosis. And it's a, it's complicated. It's not comfortable and it's not easy. It's not, this isn't fun.

You know, I have a friend who's an artist. And he told one of his classes he teaches at a university, his whole studio burned down, like his life's work. And, you know, ever since then, he's told his students at the beginning of every year. Like, if you can think of anything else in the world that would make you happy, you should do that. Anything else. And like I would actually say the same for uphology at some ways.

Like if you can think of anything else, it would make you happy, you should go do that because like uvology is not going to be a thing that's going to make you happy. I mean, I might say that's that that is a really profound, I think, encapsulation of a lot of what we're trying to have to achieve in the show is that I think that is true of any truly honest inquiry, right? If like if you are not open to a possible result that would make you very unhappy with things, right? Then you're not actually engaged in inquiry. And of course, we could never be sure of ourselves that we aren't rigging the game to avoid that dark conclusion. But I think this is what we what we call an imbecile in Giacian circles is that that someone who like knows that we're constantly subject to our own unconscious subversions. and yet still goes forward attempting in a futile way to beat that, right? And so you're always going to have to go back to the beginning and start over, right?

Because you can never really, really be sure of the ultimate motive that's holding you to this thing, right? And yet you have to try. Yeah. Yeah. But I like that a lot. Like if there's anything else that would be it to make you happier, right? We'll do it. If it's not worth being unhappy to do this.

then I think we can't really trust ourselves in doing it. I completely agree. And I, you know, our mutual friend, Daniel Elizondo is someone that I really, really, really admire in this regard. Because Daniel has is our generation's Richard Dolan. He's like a brilliant, brilliant researcher. He's forgotten more about like the history of this field than I'll ever know. And as a result of like seeing so much like he's got some pretty dark takes on. on what's happening.

And the, but his capital D on that dark, by the way. Yes. Yes. Some of the darkest things I've ever heard of. And it's it's it's hard to know some of these things. And like, but, but Daniel is just one of the most joyful people I've ever met. He just loves it. He loves the whole thing.

He's just like, do you see how crazy this is? Like, do you see how absurd it is? And he and he just kind of like runs toward it and does it with just like, without judgment. for the people that he's like learning these horrible things about. And with just like a, in a bottomless well of just curiosity and just wanting to understand and to connect the dots that I really admire that. I try to be more like Daniel.

Very cool. Very cool. All right. So probably we're getting up to an hour here. And I know Jared does have like a legitimate job. We can't. Boo. I am a lazy academic who's never worked a damn day in his life.

So I want to be respectful at time. Kelly, do you have any takeaway for our audience? I would just say that I love the, I love what you're doing with this podcast. I think that there are so many dangerous books. and I joke often in uphology, I think this applies to really any community that the best place to hide information from the UFO community is in a book

because I think a lot of people buy them maybe as decoration or as so they can like snap a pick of it and put it on their Instagram but it just becomes so obvious to me all the time people aren't actually reading these books and you know it's one thing even right. Yeah, you're finding

fight every day. I'm sure. And I'd really encourage people to do that. I think valet in particular is somebody that gets all kinds of lip service, but by the way he's being discussed or not discussed, I recognize that almost everyone who's talking about valet has not read valet and hasn't taken the time to understand his body of work what he's trying to say. And that's just one person, like start there. But I mean, I think that if you're trying to shortcut your way or I hate to say it, podcast your way to like listening to podcasts to, you know, understanding some of these deeper concepts, like this stuff can help. It can provide you a roadmap.

But like you really've got to do the work yourself. And I hope that people, right. I hope that people aren't just listening to you guys talk about these great, dangerous books. I hope they crack some of them. Probably your audience is not the choir. I'm preaching to preach you from the choir. choir here, but I do hope that more people in general are cracking these books and giving them

a look. Yeah. Yeah. And I like that too. Like maybe would you agree, Kelly, that like if you're going to jump into this, into this like pool, cesspool maybe or study, messengers of deception, good, good first foot in. Yeah. I think you should start there because I think too, I wish I hadn't waited so long to consider which parts of this were human. You know, like this is, the UFO really is this kind of blank canvas on which you can project all kinds of beliefs and suppositions and hopes and dreams. But there is a lot of this stuff that the phenomenon, the modern phenomenon, as we know it, is inextricably tied up in the technology and politics and power plays of the last,

you know, 80 or so years. and you can't understand it outside of that. Anything, any understanding of the phenomenon that you have divorced of those things is is just another fairy tale. Yeah. And this book will give you a good BS detector as you went to that field of study. I agree. Yeah.

Absolutely. Jared, you got a takeaway today? Maybe we'd have to start having an end-a-show takeaways. Yeah, I just think that, you know, similar to what we've been talking about, this whole show is about trying to wake people up to the fact that there are four, at work that are both external and internal, see you potentially being manipulated. And so we want people to be able to think for themselves,

step outside of that box. And part of the reason we've been starting with a lot of essays is just because we want people to actually read these things. Yeah. I can invite them to a 15-page essay, and then we'll get into the larger works as we go. But yeah, I really appreciate it having you here on the show. Kelly, it's been really wonderful to connect with you

and to chat with you. Thank you for everything you do for sure. So thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you. It was such a pleasure. such a pleasure. I would, I'll do it anytime. Jared, we, uh, we, we, we've utterly failed in restraint on that with start, though. Like we, yes, I've done it just turned out to be. Yes. Yes. I'm, we're not disciplined that. Um, yeah, I guess my takeaway would be, you know, look, uh, like, you two have an unconscious. Okay. And, and, and, and, and be wary of that. Like, be wary of yourself. First and foremost, beware of yourself. First and foremost,

because without that, you will get sucked into things unawares. Yeah, I think that's important. Kelly, do you think you want to plug? We have... If I met McRathly. Yes, so we've got a bunch of new content coming up on Cosmosis. People can check that out. We're switching to a much more kind of like video in the field style.

I'm actually just today about to go out and start shooting a bunch of new stuff with my creative partner, Jay Christopher King because we're kind of tired of all of the, you know, the narrative wars and the, you know, all the things that happen in this space. And we're trying to just get back out into the field, um, where things are, where weird things are happening to people and, and trying to get as close to the signal as possible. And so that's what we're going to be doing over the next, um, couple months. And you'll see that all rolling out on the podcast. I'm really excited for people to see what we're working on. Cool. I know. I'm sure we will check back in with you at some point here. Absolutely.

dangerous, great books. I'd love that. Cool. All right, man. All right. Well, great episode. Great episode. Yeah.

Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. Thanks, guys. 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. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us.

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