Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] An Interview with Mike Clelland: Owls, UFOs, and the Unfathomable Unseen

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

In this episode, I spoke with author, illustrator, and researcher, Mike Clelland. Mike is the author of several books, two of which we’ll be discussing directly in this episode. The first is The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. The second is his latest release, The Unseen, which is a fiction book that deals with many of the themes of his other work. He also provided the illustrations for the book The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us by Mac Tonnies, that we’ll also be discussing in this episode. You can find links to all of his work below.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowBOOKS BY MIKE CLELLANDThe Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO AbducteeThe UnseenMore Books By Mike ClellandFOLLOW MIKE CLELLANDTwitterWebsiteGET THE EPISODE BRIEFGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

If we find anything suspicious, like new loans are changed. to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we're diving into something completely different. So far on our journey down the rabbit hole, our progress has been linear and logical. We've taken on both history and the ontologies of uphology in a methodical way, starting at the beginning and allowing each new idea to build upon the last. Where we haven't gotten to yet is the weird world of

experiencer narratives. And that's been intentional. For experiencers, I don't need to spell out how all of these things are related. And for non-experiencers, that's where the wheels typically fall off. Even among those who are fully ready to embrace the idea that there is a non-human intelligence present on this planet, there are many who lose the thread at the point that anyone actually has a direct encounter with this intelligence. And I'd argue that, in most cases, it's not because these people aren't open-minded, but rather it's because experience or narratives are bizarre and often unintelligible to the point that you're left with nothing solid to hold on to. It sounds crazy, and so it's all too easy to default to the assumptions about experiencers that come preloaded in our larger cultural context, that they must be nuts.

That's why, over the course of this podcast, we've been methodically building an understanding of our reality that is both nuanced and scientifically sound enough to actually support these experiencer narratives before we attempt to weave them into this ridiculously complex tapestry. With the waking up inside the cave series, we'd begun that work in earnest, but we're not there yet. And yet, today, we're going to go there. As is the experience of many who begin to pursue a coherent and consistent line of questioning with regard to the UFO topic, at a certain point, the high strangeness of it all begins to creep in, whether invited or not. It seeps through the seams of our carefully constructed ontologies, hinting to us that something vast and unfathomable lies beyond. If you're ready for that, you're going to love this episode.

If you're not, that's totally fine. But I'd challenge you to give it a try. Like with any other idea that you're not sure what to do with, you can just put this one on the shelf for later. Maybe you'll come back to it with a new understanding, and maybe you won't. Considering ideas is not the same as accepting them, and all that's called for here is your open-minded consideration. So let's get into it. In this episode, I spoke with author, illustrator, and researcher Mike Cleland. Mike is the author of several books, two of which will be discussing directly in this episode. The first is The Messengers, Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee.

The second is his latest release, The Unseen, which is a fiction book that deals with many of the same themes of his other work. He also provided the illustrations of the book, The Crypto-Torrestrials, a meditation on indigenous humanoids and the aliens among us by Mac Tonys that we'll also be discussing in this episode. You can find links to all of his work in the episode description. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Mike over the last few months and do have been one of the very first people to get to read The Unseen before it was published. In both Mike and his work, I have found a kindred spirit, a mirror reflecting my deepest and most mystical experiences back to me, not just as they are, but with added layers of complexity and authenticity.

In encountering his work, I find that I understand the weirdness of my life more deeply, even as the questions that are raised by that understanding remind me that I know so much less than I thought. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Here's my interview with Mike Cleland. I want to start by talking about something that's woven throughout your books and throughout experiencer narratives in general, which is synchronicities. I've found that even people who don't identify as being an experiencer per se, find that when they begin to explore the complex landscape of topics that surround UFOs,

that that interest is often sparked by a synchronicity. And even when it's not, as you begin to go down the rabbit hole, people often feel that synchronicities seem to be guiding their journey in some way, introducing them to new ideas and new people at just the right moment. And I'd say that's been my experience in my own work, and that so many of the friends and collaborators that I've met in the field, yourself included, have come to me in that way. So I'd really just love to start there. What do you make of synchronicities? And why does so many of us, especially when we began to approach these topics,

suddenly have this unshakable feeling that something about our lives is being orchestrated in ways that feels impossible? Okay, so that's a good question. The synchronicity question is at the core of all of this. So you said, why does it feel like our lives are being orchestrated? So I can't say this is true. But one reason would be perhaps our lives are being orchestrated. I can't shy away from that one. I don't know if that's true. Wow.

I can't shake that feeling sometimes. I just had this conversation recently. So I have had my own direct experiences, call them contact experiences. I don't like the term abduction or abductee, but there's not many other words that fit. So I use the term direct contact. That doesn't quite work either. But experienceer, anyway, so I've talked to thousands of people. I think that would be safe to say at this point after over a decade of digging into this,

well over a decade. And there's a pop culture kind of narrative that surrounds the people who have had this experience. And it would be people driving on a lonely road at night being taken out of their car and being taken on board a flying saucer or being taken out of their bedroom and floated out a window and then arriving in a room and lying on a table. And I've heard those stories. I've certainly read those stories. Those show up in the books by Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs and to a lesser degree in the books by John Mack. So I've certainly read those accounts. I have talked to almost no one who tells exactly that account, like close to zero, so close to zero that statistically zero would be the

correct number to round off to. So that's our pop culture take on the mystery, you know, people being taken on board flying saucers, but I never hear it. What I hear is people being plagued or overwhelmed by synchronicities, coincidences that have such a high chart, coincidences that seem to be important in a way that they cannot shake. And that more than anything is what I'm more than UFO sightings right so someone who's had these experiences well you know here I'll tell you two or three UFO sightings stories that I have and there oftentimes they're like a little dot in the sky they're not very exciting but when they start talking about the coincidences and the synchronicities in their lives that for me is the

core of the mystery and that is the thread for me that is easiest to pull on is the synchronistic stories because they're often connected to a deeper part of their own life experience, let's say, or their own life journey. That might be a better way to say it. Yeah, absolutely. I think what I find so interesting, I have a monthly call with my patrons. And we come and I keep it very open-ended. We can talk about whatever they want to talk about, you know, whoever shows up. And inevitably, we end up talking about synchronicities a lot. It ends up being the thing that I think is perhaps most accessible to people, but also the most, as you were talking about, the most profound and the most impactful. A lot of the people who show up to

those calls have seen UFOs, but the thing that's really sort of niggling at them is some strange synchronicity that they've been dealing with. And that ultimately ends up being where the conversation goes. Really identify with that. Yeah. Yeah. And there's other things that can cause synchronities too. I think anyone, so I wrote an essay for a journal, and there's a series of books called the Sink book, S-Y-N-C, so Synchronistic book. And a fellow who's studying synchronicities,

Alan Green, I think he was Alan Abadassah Green at that point. His pen name is Alan Green. He, so I wrote an essay for one of these books. And I was talking to a friend of mine, and she knew of my stories, and she had listened to me, talk about owls and my issues

and the nuttiness of my research. And this was early on, this is going back 12 years or so, And I remember I felt like I was really on to something. And I said, you know, people with UFO contact experiences, they have more synchronicities than, let's say, Joe normal. And she rolled her eyes and said, anyone on a spiritual path will have more synchronicities. And she was right. Now, what that forced me to do, correctly or incorrectly, what I did was I said, oh, given that model, then the UFO contact is part of a spiritual path.

And when you look at it that way, it's very productive. A lot of richness comes back when you look at the UFO contact experience, not as a science fiction sort of thing or an exploitative sort of thing or even as a real thing. Because I talk to very few people who say this like it truly happened to them. Most of the people are in this place of like, wow, I have a dream that implies this or something feels this way. But very, very rarely do I have people say, I concretely know this happened to me. Everyone's just a half a step away from saying that.

So I think that this contact experience is much more elusive and mysterious, and the synchronicities tend to be the most tangible thing that you can latch on to and say, yes, this powerful synchronous event truly happened. And that is the thread that is the easiest to pull on. Certainly it was the easiest to pull on for me. And because I could document them. I could write it on a piece of paper and put the date on it and that kind of thing was very easy for me. But to look at memories from a long time ago or very fleeting memories was very little concrete in that area.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So how did you end up writing a book about owls and synchronicities? And what do you see at the theme of the connection between the two? An easy one. Yeah. So talking about what has overtaken my life for the last bunch of years. So I had a powerful event, which I can, which I've told many times. And it will get sidetrack if I told the whole thing.

So I went camping in 2006 and saw a bunch of owls with a woman named Kristen. And it happened twice, almost the exact same thing, two times in a row, four days apart, two separate camping trips, different part of the mountains, where we saw three owls. And they flew around us at sunset. Now, that is not much, right? That's not much. But it changed my life. So I'm looking at a real owl. I hear a voice in my head that says, this has something to do with the UFOs.

And by implication, it meant my youth. So I started looking into my own experiences. And as I did, I reached out to researchers. And are you familiar with Leo Sprinkle, a researcher out of Wyoming? He was a clinician. He was a psychologist. And he taught for a long time at the University of Wyoming. He was a doctorate in psychology.

I think I've got that right. And he pointed me to people and introduced me to people. And everyone I talked to, I would ask the question. Have you ever had any odd experiences with owls? This is researchers and people who claim the direct contact experience. And what happened was I was flooded. I was flooded with accounts. It wasn't 100% of the people,

but it was like a goodly amount would say, you know, no one has ever asked me that question. I have the weirdest story that involves an owl. And I started documenting these things and collecting them and sharing some of my own stories and putting them on my blog. And very early on I put a little post on my blog or a little banner on the site. bar of my blog and it said, I want to hear your owl stories. And I have a different website now and it's on there. And every time I do a talk, I say like, hey, if anyone has any owl stories, I want to hear them.

And so consequently, if anyone anywhere in the world has an odd experience with a UFO and an owl, I'm about one or two Google clicks away. So I'm getting those stories. I'm asking and I'm receiving those. And within those stories is a form of, I don't know how to say it. There's just, there's a tone and a quality to some of these stories that imply such a richness to, I'm going to say it, to reality itself. There is a richness folded into these stories that points to a deeper reality that is running parallel alongside our reality. These feel like a myth, like an ancient myth, many of the stories I'm collecting. And that is very much what I'm drawn to. So it feels like I'm asking for something. I'm receiving it. I'm receiving exactly the types of stories that float my boat.

And so, holding on that thread of owls and UFOs, I thought I would get a few stories and it would run its course. And that was how many years ago? We're like getting close to 20 years. And it has been unrelenting. And I am so grateful because it has been engaging in fun and exciting and continually compelling as far as the accounts I'm getting and what it implies. So I'm really grateful that, like I say, I did not choose owls. Owls chose me. And in the big picture, I'm really grateful because it changed the direction of my life. And it's been rewarding and fun.

I love that. What's so funny, Mike, is that I've never personally had a synchronicity with an owl. But I cannot talk about you to anyone without them having a synchronicity with an owl. It happens all the time. Like, it's crazy to me. Actually, Jim Madden, he's a frequent guest on this podcast. I talked to him about your work and he was like, oh, I'm listening to the owls above my house hooting right now. And then the next day he sends me a photo with one of his sons sitting on the ground and there's just an owl sitting on the ground just a few feet away from his son, just looking at his son.

And it's just so interesting to me how I literally can't talk about you to anyone without owls somehow coming into their life. It's really something, honestly. I've given up at this point. So I'm at the point now where no one needs to prove anything to me, right? So I feel strongly that owls are connected to some sort of highly charged humid events. And I would say that UFO contact is one of many highly charged human experiences that owls may show up in. But wow, I was getting blooded with owl synchronicities at a certain point in my life. And it gets toned way down.

And what has happening now is other people are having them. And then they contact me. So we do have this feeling that owls are very powerful symbols, and they have been for many cultures throughout history. So can you talk just a little bit about the cultural symbolism of owls and how it aligns with some of the narratives that you've collected? So all throughout human history, like so ancient man would have been able to understand that owls fly in the dark. They fly in night. They're creatures of the night. So they could have stepped out of their cave and seen an owl and understood. that it was flying through the forest in complete darkness. That is something that must have

seemed magic to our ancestors. Now, we can say they have highly evolutionarily evolved eyes that are capable of seeing in very low light conditions and they have a heightened sense of hearing and that we can do scientific testing on their ears and their eyes. But yet, that magic still remains within the owl's mystique, let's say. People contact me all the time. And they say, oh, I saw an owl that landed on my fence just outside on my porch. And they talk about it like it's the most majestic, powerful, eerie. Like, are they're scared or are they in awe? Boy, that doesn't happen if people see a bunny rabbit, you know, on their backyard.

So owls, they come preloaded with a lot of majesty. And so if an owl can fly into the night, that very quickly becomes a metaphor for traveling into the dark. or traveling into the alternate realms or traveling into the land of the gods or to the land of the dead, they go to that other realm. And that's consistent in many of the world's traditions. And you take that one step further. So they go to the land of the dead. They go to the land of our ancestors.

They go to that other realm, the land of the gods. And then they come back with a message. And I got it so many times. In my stories, people would contact me and they'd have these elaborate experiences with an owl. and they would say the owl was sitting on the window sill. And then halfway through the letter, they would no longer call it an owl, and they'd say the messenger was on the window sill,

and I understood that kind of thing. So it just was understood that these were messengers. My direct experience, with my initial owl experience with Kristen in the mountains, I was looking at a real owl. I heard a voice in my head. This has something to do with the UFOs, a message.

In my head, a message. And it changed the direct. of my life. So I understand the power on this. And I would argue that present day, the experiences that I'm collecting and that I've experienced myself, people have been having these all throughout human history and that this is something normal. People have a powerful experience with an owl. If we were back in a tribal village a few hundred years ago in South Dakota, and we had a powerful experience with an owl, we could go to the edge of the village and knock on the teepee and meet the shaman, and the shaman could talk us through what that may or may not be. Now, you would go the

next valley over, the shaman might have a different lineage and a different tradition, but the village had an understanding of the power of the totem animal of the owl. So I think that's been around since the dawn of man. We're like westerners now, we're materialists. We don't have that connection to the archetypal animal, the owl, in the way we once did. So what happens now is we have Google and we have essentially me. So if someone has a powerful mystical experience with an owl, they'll find me, or not everyone, but enough that I feel like I've got a full-time job. And so I've been collecting and archiving these stories. Now, let me just present day, Harry Potter, the most popular book in the history of publishing, or series of books in the

history of publishing, has a pet owl. And the owl delivers the mail. It is perfect. It is perfect. The owl as messenger, it is embedded into the core of our present day pop culture mythology. So it's not shared around the campfire by the elders. It's right there on our bookshelves, in libraries. It's right there. The same mythology, the owl as messenger. Oh, that's so interesting. I hadn't made that connection, but I won't be able to unsee that now.

So something I really appreciate about your approach in the messengers is the very human approach that you take. You're not just interested in the nuts and bolts of what happened in that experience, but how it fits within the greater narrative of the person's life. You're concerned with questions about what was going on in their life at that time, how the person interpreted their anomalous experience, and the impacts that it had on them afterward. So can you talk a little bit about what researchers can learn by taking that approach that they would otherwise miss? Oh, I'm not telling another researcher what they should do or what they shouldn't do. I think this is all a very personal journey. And as far as me, it's funny, a friend of mine, I don't want to use his name.

It's a good friend of mine. And he runs his own website and stuff. And he's pretty opinionated. And he got back to me one time and he said, Mike, you're driving me crazy with all this owl stuff like you. Like you were like, oh, it's just making crazy. He said, you are not being scientific. And I said, what do I care? I'm not a scientist. And I thought that was a really good answer. I loved, I was really proud of myself. That was a good comeback. And it's true. I'm not a scientist. This has been an entirely subjective experience for me. I am not objective. I am not. I know I'm not. I, me, was confronted with a mystery. An owl said this has something to do with the UFOs or whatever. In the presence of owls,

I had a voice in my head. So I am now for better, for worse, obsessed. And the obsession has been fruitful in the sense that it's rewarding and exciting and interesting. And I get to meet and talk to wonderful people. But I'm on my own journey. This is my own spiritual journey. This is my own trip into the darkest part of the forest. And I'm just trying to share that. And I'm trying to write it in book format in a way, or in books and in talks and in podcasts and such where I can get my point across. But this has been a singular experience for myself. So the reason I ask those questions is after many thousands of people, this is difficult number to come up with exactly. So I would say thousands of people have reached out to me with their owl and UFO stories. And I

try my very best to get back to them. I can't get back to everyone. But I have seen a pattern where their life will be going on along in one way. This is me. I'll use me as an example. My life was going on in one way. And I had an owl experience. And it didn't, it had a UFO in the, in a implied. I didn't see a physical UFO at the time of the event, but it was implied by the voice in my head. My life changed. And I will also say that I started, I had a way, I'll throw my life. I would have these odd psychic flashes. So these are the questions I ask. What was going leading up to the event? What happened afterwards? How did your life change after? How did your spirituality change? Did you change religions? And then how would you write your psychic abilities?

And then do you have any healing skills? Like healing abilities? And you don't have to guess like the kind of stories that I'm hearing that would bring those kinds of questions about where people would magically realize that they had hands on healing abilities. This is very common. So once again, I'm not looking at the big totality of the UFO subject. I'm looking at the thinnest little sliver of owls and UFOs. And this is what I'm finding, that the owl seems to be connected to a transformative point in people's lives. Now, it's not 100%. So sometimes I ask these questions to people and are like, nope, got no psychic abilities.

Nope, can't heal anyone. Nope, nothing changed to my life. But I did have this powerful owl and UFO experience. So I'm at peace with that. It's not 100%, but it is certainly enough that I have seen it as a pattern. and it is fascinating to me. This is something I share, and people have actually, it's so funny, researchers are curious.

Like, people have said, you can't share that. That's your information. You have to keep that secret. I'm like, what are you crazy? No, this is not my job to keep stuff secret. So when I talk to someone on the phone, someone contacts me if their owl and UFO story, talk to them on the phone,

got my clipboard in the corner, I write, Reiki, like the Japanese healing modality, energy healing. I just write it in the corner and I just wait. talk me talk and they tell me their story and they tell me their, you know, I'll, the UFO. And then I say, hey, what do you do for work? And they say, I'm a Reiki therapist.

Or they say, oh, I'm like, just got my level three Reiki certification. And these are often, like, not, you know, women with turquoise earrings in Sedona. There's truck drivers and, like, not the kind of people you would suspect to be Reiki healers. Now, this is something I cannot prove because I have not crunched the numbers. That's totally anecdotal. But I don't think I'm very far off. I would say 50% half of the people who have a UFO and Aal experience, half of them are Reiki healers. Or do, if they're not Reiki healers, they're doing some sort of healing modality that is in the same flavor and the same mood as Reiki healing.

That, to me, is mind-blowing. Mufon, it's a very conservative organization that does research into UFO sightings. And they have a checklist. and write on the checklist. It says, you know, oh, what time did you see the UFO? Which way did it fly from? Can you draw a picture of it?

Two of the questions are, one is, has your religion changed or your spirituality changed? And the other one is, do you have psychic skills, psychic abilities since you're citing? So it's well understood. It's not just me that's stumbled on this. It's well understood in the researchers in the field,

including the very, very conservative people at Mufon are well aware of this. First of all, I appreciate your statement. so much that you're not a scientist and what you're doing here is not science. But I do think there's something really valuable in your approach because I think that what people can miss is that transformational nature of these encounters. I mean, for me as a researcher who's been doing this for a while now, that to me has emerged as by far the most interesting part of this, probably

because of how much it's profoundly changed me and my life on a personal and spiritual level. But then how I see it impact other people as well in the outreach that I get from listeners. And I don't know what that means. I don't know. And it's not something that we can set up an experiment really to look at. It's always going to be anecdotal. But I think to deny that part of anomalous experience or to not take it into account is to kind of miss the forest for the trees. So I think there's a lot of value, especially when we're dealing with something so unknown to allow ourselves to open our mind up to ideas that don't make sense and that are really surprising. If we ignore the surprising patterns that emerge, like that in and of itself, even if we're not doing science, that in and of itself isn't very scientific. Well, the scientific method is wonderful for doing certain things, but I think that, you know, Woodward and Bernstein weren't beholden to the scientific method when they were writing about Watergate, right?

They were adhering to journalistic ethics. And then in a courtroom, it's not scientific in a courtroom, but you're dealing with a legal framework and people go to jail on anecdotal evidence. And I've called myself a folklorist, right? So I feel like I'm collecting modern stories, modern folklore, present-day folklore. And it dovetails beautifully with folklore from our ancient past and from our pop culture and from our, I would almost want to say our collective consciousness because these are, I'll accounts show up all over the world, very similar. And, you know, how that works, I don't pretend to know. All I can do is speculate.

Sometimes I feel like I speculate too much, but I try to speculate as little as possible. But I just want to get my ideas out there. I do not know if my ideas are correct. You know, in the book of the messengers, I tried my very best to look at the owl mystery backwards, forwards, upside down, you know, every way I could think of. And so I came up with a lot of maybes, but very little. little that I truly know concretely. And I want to be clear about that.

Absolutely. I do think, though, there's something about truly anomalous experiences that force us into the role of the storyteller. Because when we don't know what we're dealing with, everyone is kind of put into a position when they have an experience like that of interpreting it. And in that way, that interpretation in and of itself, even when it's approached with as much objectivity is possible and with a true desire to come to some sort of rational conclusion, it's ultimately a creative process because we just don't know. And so I have wondered sometimes

if perhaps a more literary approach to understanding these is necessary because in some ways, any way that we choose to express our anomalous experiences to another human being, it's a story that we've told ourselves about ourselves that we have no real way of verifying as true. I don't know if that makes sense where I'm going with. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you go to like a UFO conference, right, where a UFO conference, you have permission to turn to the person next to you and say, so what brings you to a UFO conference? And very often they'll say like, oh, I had a UFO land in my backyard and these beings came out and they told me they were from the Pleiades and they were here to bring benevolence to mankind. And so people will extrapolate and paint a picture around their

experience. And then another person will say, oh, Oh, a UFO landed in my backyard. And these bastards were from these like where they were here to study us scientifically. And I don't want to be part of their thing. And so, you know, it's akin to kidnapping what they did to me and my family, that kind of thing. So you have two diametrically opposite interpretations of what might be the very same event, a flying saucer lands in someone's backyard. Yeah.

No, exactly. Exactly. Something that I really resonated with in the messengers was the idea of the maybe people. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that and what sorts of experiences typically fall into that category? Well, so there's a preconception that like people are very forthright and they know what their experiences. And I've met plenty of those people say concretely that they've had these experience. They are far outnumbered by the people who are trouble and confused and trying to make sense of their direct experience. So here's this friend of mine, Derek.

This is very early on in the story. This is one of the very first really powerful owl and UFO stories I had. Young guy, he's out camping with his friends in the deserts of Arizona. He was from the east. He was blown away by the desert. Laying out at night, there's a million stars. And then him and his friend look up at a cactus. On top of the cactus is an owl.

And they both get this kind of sinking feeling like, oh, that's intense. Which is normal. That's the response most people have, or many people have when they see, you know. The owl flies off. Moments later, a triangle-shaped craft comes right over their camp. And I sat with Derek and he tried to describe that he fought to describe how this craft was hugging the terrain of the landscape. And he was not describing a helicopter or a jet plane or anything. It was something terribly unusual and it really distressed him.

A few days later he has another sighting. He's driving in a car in Arizona, the sunroofs down and there's this weird dot like following the car or above the car. And then he says, you know, this was sort of a point in my life where I was struggling. in searching a young guy. And then I had a spiritual awakening. Like, okay. Like, I didn't ask him. He just came out with that. And he said, oh, and I had this dreams where it felt like I was being floated through the wall. And he just had a handful of these little stories. But he did not have the concrete memories that, like, you would want someone to have. And I couldn't make him have these concrete, like, I couldn't ask him leading questions. I couldn't. If he got hypnotized, I would be very

cautious to take that as gospel. So whatever. Story emerged under hypnosis, I would be cautious to take that as gospel. So, like, I sensed, like, oh, something more might have happened, but I couldn't prove it. So this is the way I say it. Like, if I had a staff of 100 and a $10 million budget and I researched someone who might have had a UFO contact experience, I could spend all that money in manpower. And I'd never, I might find some interesting stuff, but I would not get what I would call an answer. So I'm only one person.

I can only just kind of vaguely have a conversation with not vaguely. I can have a very deep conversation, but I can get a vague impression on what might have happened, but it's not my job to say what might have happened. It's like my job is to tell their story. And so I just kind of sense that maybe these people had UFO contact. So the maybe term is actually I don't use that term anymore. And the term I use now is seeker. And that seems a little better.

The people who have had these experience, the owl and UFO experience, tend to be a seeker would be a very loose word to say. But I, like on the cover of the first book, The Messengers, Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee, and I've had people listen to my experiences and tell me that I was an abductee. And I didn't like it. I thought it was rude. And they were out of line. And I didn't want to hear it.

And now I'm kind of coming, they're probably right. But at the time, I didn't like it. So I'm not going to do it to anyone else. So that was a term I came up with. To go a few tears down rather than the. very provocative term of abductee. Well, I think it's really interesting how that can kind of open up for people. You know, I came into this work not really identifying as an experiencer.

I'd seen a UFO. And then after doing this work for a long time, I actually realized that I had seen another UFO, but I didn't think of it as one because it didn't look like when I thought a UFO should look like. And I progressed to the point where I do consider myself to be an experiencer. and it's a big part of my life, but I don't consider myself to be an abductee. At the same time,

what really struck me in your work, okay, so after I read, I read the unseen first, and then I went back because I had the messengers on my bookshelf and I read the messengers. And I really got obsessed

with this memory that I have from when I was a kid. I remember it was, I was probably like seven or eight years old. I was living in Iowa, and I remember being in a car with my family, my dad was driving.

my brother and I were in the back seat and there was a big storm that came up and it was raining really, really hard and the water was rising on the road and it was getting dangerous to drive. And my dad wanted to pull over and stop somewhere and ride it out. But then my mom looked out through the back window and there was a tornado that was following us, like right behind the car. And so we didn't have the option to stop. We had to keep going and it was very scary. And intellectually, I've always remembered that it was a tornado.

But whenever I, I've always had a very clear memory. Like, I have memories that go back to when I was before it was even one years old that have been verified, like things I couldn't have known, events I couldn't have remembered. But when I put myself back in that memory and it's always been this way, it's not a tornado. It's a UFO. And so I got obsessed with this idea and I called my mom. My dad's passed many years ago. But I called my mom and I was like, am I crazy?

like the tornado thing happened, right? And she was like, yeah, it happened. But apparently my dad wasn't in the car. It was my mom and my brother and I. And she was the one who was driving, but the tornado was there. And that's one of those things were like, there's nothing to hold on to there, right? There's no reason for me to read anything more into that. And I'm very aware of the fact that I was young. I was impressionable. That was a scary moment for me. And so who knows? And maybe I saw something on television around that time. And all of the those things I regard to be very possible explanations, but there's something about it that I can't let go of. There's something about it that's that haunts me. And I think there's probably a lot of people, like you're saying, you have those kinds of not quite, you wouldn't consider yourself to be an apt-up tea, and yet there's something weird where it doesn't quite line up at the same time. And the story I have with Kristen is not that exciting of the story. We saw some owls. right they were real owls you know it's kind of odd but but it changed the direction of my life yeah it's really fascinating there's another idea from the messengers that i think is really

important to highlight especially for people who might be newer to these ideas which is what you call the paradox syndrome can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that so as far as the paradox syndrome i had to just pick a name for a pattern that i was seeing and what i was finding was people would share accounts that were confusing, like they were very difficult to tell, because they didn't really have a true beginning and didn't have a true end. And there was no punchline at the end. It was like a regular story has a beginning, middle, and end and a conclusion. And you can go, oh, that was a good story. The people will tell these stories that are all mixed up. And that overlap with a sort of weirdness that doesn't have an easy answer. Are you familiar

with a Zen Cohen, right? Yes. So a Zen Cohen is a question. that cannot be answered. So like a Buddhist monk would tell the student to meditate on, let's say, what is the sound of one hand clapping? There is no sound of one hand clapping. It's purposely absurd. And within the lore is this absurdity. And Jacques Valle has written beautifully on this. Whitley-Strieber has written beautifully on this. And that absurdity, to me, brings with it a form of confirmation. I'm cautious to say confirmation. That implies a lot. But what I say is when people tell me a story that does not make sense, that it's open-ended and absurd, my ears perk up. I pay extra close attention to their story. My second book, which is called Stories from Messengers, the problem is to tell someone's

story is basically like telling a novel. There's a lot there. And it's often confusing and mixed up and scrambled up. And that was a difficult book to write because I chose 19 separate stories. And each one of these stories was not an easy story to tell because it didn't have a good beginning, middle, and end. But it had that confusing overlapping and I'll tell you wild synchronicities embedded into these accounts. And so those stories sound more like a dream. It follows dream logic rather than our day-to-day waking logic. And that is what fascinates me about these accounts. And that also, I can say many points in my life

where my own direct experience seemed to fall into that paradoxical madness and people often get very lost because this mystery presents itself as a conundrum made real. Yeah, absolutely. In the messengers, you definitely tell stories, including your own, where it's pretty clear that what you're talking about is real actual owls. But you also talk about cases, particularly ones that seem to have this paradoxical kind of nature to it, where owls are potentially serving almost as a screen memory.

Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that and what that looks like? Well, so early out of my research, I reached out to a lot of people. Bud Hopkins was still live and I had long conversations with him about exactly this. as well as Dave Jacobs, who's still around, and then owls certainly show up in John Mack's work. So you would ask a UFO researcher, hey, do you have any accounts of owls? And they said, we get owls all the time.

All the time they show up, but they're screen memories. Now, screen memory implies, so the textbook screen memory would be, wait, here's the story, this will cover a lot. You're familiar with Dolores Cannon in her work? Yes. So Dolores Cannon did a form of hypnotherapy where she worked with people. Not often. She worked with people who had UFO contact in the later part of her life, but she also didn't, almost like a form of, like, hypnotic divination. It was pretty hard to sum up. But she was a hypnotherapist doing clinical work, you know, helping people reducing stress and stopping smoking, like the recognizable benefits of hypnosis. And she had a meeting with her coworkers at the clinic she was working at. And they had a monthly meeting and they would check in and check. And they had a monthly meeting and they would check in and check. And she was said, you know what's showing up in my work is that people, when I put them under hypnosis, they'll start telling me these weird UFO stories.

And she was, this is like, I have to figure out whether I'm going to follow this or not. Is this a real thing that I should pursue? And should I, like, I have to decide whether I follow this path and ask, do I ask more questions about the UFO thing or do I stick with my career? So she leaves the meeting. She drives home. And on the drive home, she's driving a truck and she's in Arkansas. And there's a big owl on the road. She pulls up to the owl and she's in a big truck and the owl looks over the hood of the truck looking right at her.

Now, you take the biggest owl in the world and the smallest truck, the owl simply cannot look over the hood of a truck or even a little car. They're simply not that big. So she gets home. She actually saw the owl a number of times. It flew further down the road and would stop and she'd have to pull up to it and they look right. So she later realized like, that's impossible. there's no such thing as an owl that big. So I saw something. She looked it up and she tried to research owls and there's no owl that matched the owl she saw. And so the question I would ask,

as a researcher, what was happening in her life leading up to the event? And she was at a point in her life where she said, am I going to look into this UFO mystery? And obviously, yes, she did look into the UFO mystery because that was, that turned into the core of her career. So what happens, oftentimes, the owl on the lonely road is very common. And people will see that and later, let's say, go under hypnosis and the hypnotherapist will say, describe the owl. And they'll say, well, it's got a bald head and big black eyes and it's skinny and it's got a little spacesuit on. And I don't think that's an owl. But that's also true of deer and raccoons and giant squirrels and firemen. And so there's other things that show up as this screen memory. So the

implication would be that these, let's just say the gray alien would be standing in the road, would be able to put a psychic impression into the mind of the observer. So they would be looking out their windshield at a gray alien, but they would recognize, they would see, their perception would see the screen memory, whether that's done through technology or whether that's done through psychic means. I can't answer that. But it is very consistently reported in the literal. literature. That's so fascinating. I'm really intrigued by that. So I'd love to switch gears a little bit and talk about your newer book, The Unseen. I was absolutely thrilled to have the privilege of being one of the first people to read the book. I read it very quickly. I started reading it one night before bed and I read it literally until I just passed out and then woke up in the morning and finished it. And I just loved it so much. And I'm so excited for it to be out in the world.

I'd love me to talk to your sort of your motivations and process for writing the book, because I know that this was a giant undertaking for you and kind of a departure as being a fictional work. So here, I'm going to turn the tables on you real quick. So this is interesting for me. So you read the unseen first, which is a book of fiction. And then after that, you read The Messengers. Yeah. How did those dovetail together?

You must have sensed a similar mood and flavor in both those books. Yes. And reading the unseen made me want to. read. I mean, I'd already had the messengers on my stack of books to read, and I was excited to read it, having had conversations with you. But the unseen resonated with me so deeply. And there was, on its surface, nothing for me to relate to in terms of like similarities in my own life. But it spoke to kind of quality of the anomalous experiences that I've had. You know, when you say the maybe people you've changed them to seekers, I really identify as that, right? I definitely

identify as a seeker. And the more I surrender to that process and to the radical mystery that you end up confronting in these topics, I ended up really identifying with the character and with the story. It's interesting, there's a recurring dream that I've been having since reading the unseen. Yeah, which is that I am in this decaying city. And no one seems to notice. that it's decaying, but everything is just like a mess and falling apart, but people are going about as soon as this is just like a regular landscape. And I notice that everything's falling apart, but I feel like I can't really say it to people, like they're not going to hear it or it's going to make me weird or something to say it. And as I'm kind of moving through this landscape,

I start hearing the sound of water. And I start following that sound. And I have this sense that If I just follow that sound of water, that it will take me to a stream, which will take me to a river, which will take me out into the wilderness. And I just have this feeling that that's where I need to go, that it's like necessary. And so the dream is just following this sound of water. And I've had that a few times since reading the book. And when people read the book, they'll understand how that all relates. But I feel like they're very connected. Wow.

Okay. So your question was like the premise and how the reasons of. the unseen. Like, why did it? Yeah, kind of the process for writing it. Okay, so I was professional illustrator all my life, and the world's changed, and I started writing books. But turn the clock back to 2010, I wanted to do a comic book.

I wanted to do a full-on comic book. And I got so on fire. Like, I was obsessed. This is very much like me. I get super focused on one thing, and I just, like, pursue it. I won't let go. So I was like, I'm going to make this comic book. And then I wrote a treatment for it.

I did a lot of sketches for it. I should put more of those sketches up online. That's on my checklist of things to do. I knew what I was doing, and I knew this, how I wanted to present the story. And then I reached out to a few people that I knew in the comic book industry. Graphic novel might be the better way to say it. And I just realized, like, oh, this is, it's too much work.

Like talking to people and they said, you don't want to do your own comic book. No, don't do it. You'll burn yourself out. It's usually done as a team. One person draws, one person does this lettering. One person does a coloring. So anyway, so I had this nice, tidy treatment. and I just put it on a shelf.

And I picked it up after writing the three owl books. And then I looked at this thing and I said, you know what? There's something here. There's something to this story. I like this story. And so I started writing it. And initially, when I started trying to write it as a book,

oh, dear God, it was frustrating. It was so difficult. There was this kind of love-hate relationship. I would work on it, and I would back off, and I would work on it and back off. And so there came a point when I was like, oh, I've done too much work to not finish it. And then for about the last two years,

I just was full-time working on the book and didn't take on much other work. For good or for bad, my life was singular in its focus. Now, the story, I tried to write a UFO story without using the word UFOs. There's synchronicities all over the book. I never use the word synchronicity. I never use the word abduction. There's events that are implied, but I never quite say it. So I tried, tried to tell a story here, like an above-the-water story.

And that's the pop culture story with the spies and the romance and the journey through the desert. But below that, I was trying to tell a deeper metaphoric story of symbolic importance and initiation and gods and goddesses, life after death. And so those types of things were told below the water line, let's say. And the process was, wow, was it like a turn inward? And I made a decision that I was going to go for it. My sister recently read the book, and she is not interested in these subjects at all. And I knew it was going to be tough on her to deal with these esoteric mysteries that are presented in the story. And I said, Jeannie, if you're confronted with something in the story, you don't understand.

Just keep reading, but try to tap into the emotions underneath that. And just let that be the thread that pulls you through the story. And she got back to me and she really liked the book. And she may have just been saying it, but I think she meant it. And so that was my premise, too. I wanted to tell a story just like full of emotion. Because when they talk to people who have had the direct experience, they're not talking about, you know, metallurgy or they're not making conclusions

about beings from another world or physical realities. They are talking about their own emotions. They are saying, I was in awe. I was terrified. I felt like I was drowning in the mystery. So they're talking about complete internal emotions as far as how they're framing their experience, how they felt in the moment. And that was what I was really on fire to get onto the page. Well, I really think you achieved that.

And all the effort behind it, I think the beauty of the book is that you don't feel that effort at all. Your prose reminds me of actually one of my favorite authors. One of my favorite books is Shop Girl by Steve Martin. Oh, no. Have you read that one? No, no, but I remember when it came out. So, yeah, keep going. Yeah, it's one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite books.

And what I love so much about his prose and yours is that it's so spare and so simple. And yet, you feel fully immersed in the work itself, in the emotions of it, and even in the environment of it, it ends up being somehow more fully realized by kind of the sparness of the prose itself. I felt really immersed in that world. And I really, I think that it's wonderful as a contribution to this feel, but I also think that just as a work of literature, it's beautiful. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. One of the characters in the book, Tony, was based on a researcher in the field who is sadly no longer with us, Mack Tony's. I actually wasn't familiar with him when I first read the book, but then I realized that I already had his book on my shelf, the Crypto-terrestrails, because I'm, like, chronically 100 books behind.

But I've been diving into that and really enjoying it. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about Mack for people who might not be familiar with him and his work and why it is that you decided to include this fictional version of him in the book. Going back, there's a character named Tim Bonal, and he still is a podcast, but his podcast was really quite groundbreaking at the time. And he did a podcast now about 2000. This would have been around 2007. He interviewed this fellow Mac Tonys. And I remember listening to him. I'm like, I got to talk to this guy.

So I just called him up. This is back when you still had dial up phones. and like ancient history. So we get to be friends and we would talk often. And so between about two, I think it would have been 2007 when I finally connected with him. So 2007 and he died in 2009 first. So for two years we talked on the phone a lot.

This was a very difficult chapter of my life. This was early on when I was realizing that I quite probably had UFO contact experiences. I was not at peace. And he was a very calm, thoughtful, open-minded, supportive friend in this time of my life where I was struggling with these issues. And he was not at all emotional about it. Like if I got emotional or I went literally teary-eyed, he would stay just strictly to the story and like, like, isn't that

interesting? You're getting so emotional about this. He didn't say, oh, buddy, take a deep breath. None of that. He was just like, this story that you're telling, this story that is unfolding is remarkable. he recognized that. So he was great, a great friend. And I write about in my third book on the thing called Hidden Experience, there's a whole chapter about Mac Tonys, and many people have gotten back to me on that book. That book isn't selling very well. That book seems to be people who have had UFO contact experiences. They resonate strongly with it, and not many other people do. But there's a whole chapter on Mac in that book. And he finished the cryptotorrestrials. And it's my understanding that there was a three ring binder with a manuscript that was close to being done,

printed with red pen marks and red edits on his desk when they found him. He was 34, I think. He died of an undiagnosed heart condition. And I talked to him shortly after he'd been in the hospital and he had passed out at work. He was a barista. So he worked at Starbucks. He made coffee. And there was pictures of him, lots of pictures of him with coffee on his website.

His website is still online. It's called Post-Human Blues. It's been archived. It's there forever. Some of his friends had gone through and carefully archived everything. He was a wonderful writer very early on in the blogosphere. So at a point in the book, when one of the characters is a woman says, So what are you writing?

He says, no, I'm writing a book of short stories and a nonfiction book. So the book of short stories would be his book, Illuminated Black, which is a collection of short stories. And then his nonfiction book would have been the Cryptotterrestrials. He actually wrote a few other books, but that was in my mind. It was Mack writing those books. So there came a point when I needed to do the illustrations. I had the manuscript.

had been sent to me by the publisher. Mac had already died, and it was so emotional for me, so emotional for me. The night I got the word that he died, I had severe chest pains, and I didn't know what that was all about, and I was driving alone at night,

and I was in Moab, Utah, basically the setting of the story in many ways, and of the fiction story, and I was driving home from Moab, I had heard that he died, and I went to a coffee shop and got a double latte and drank it in honor of him

because he loved coffee. and we talked a lot about coffee together. The story of the unseen is also a love letter to coffee in many ways. So I drove home and listened to, I had my iPod, generationally back when those were still happening. And I had my iPod loaded with all kinds of interviews. He was guest on a lot of podcasts. And I listened to all his podcasts driving at night in the desert with chest paint.

And I was of the age. I would have been my early 50s, I guess, right near 50. And so it was a super emotional point. So some months later, I am set to do the illustrations for the book. I have a three ring binder at my house with the printed version of the PDF. The book is short. It's only like 80 pages or something. That's a remarkable little book.

And I opened the first page. I was sitting on the couch. I was going to make some notes about the illustrations for each chapter heading. And I read the words, The Crypto Terrestrials by Mac Tonys. And right next to me, my stereo goes, clunk. And it spits out the cassette.

There was a point when CD players had this kind of cassette. You could stack six CDs and you'd plug the cassette in. It would shuffle six CDs. And I was alone in the house. I'd never done that before since. I wrote an essay. This is something. This is typical.

This is the Paradox Syndrome. I can't start one story without getting dragged into another story. So I wrote an essay in 2007, in November of 2007. And it's a very first blog post on my blog. It's called cat and string, and I said, I play with the string with my cat. And the cat thinks the string is alive. The string isn't alive. The cat gets all amped up.

The cat can only achieve its catness, its true catness, by playing with this string and thinking it's alive. But this is the UFO enigma. The string, it's connected to me. The cat's not looking at me. The cat's looking at the spring. The cat plays with the string. Eyes dilate. Mac Tonys, we had never met long before he had published.

I didn't know him from anyone. I got up one morning and wrote that essay in a kind of flurry. Mack wrote an essay where he had a laser pointer with his cat. He wrote the same essay. I put him back to back in one of my books. He wrote the same essay within a month of each other where he was playing with a cat with a laser pointer. Same thing.

Cat's looking at the little red dot on the carpet. Mac is controlling it. The little dot is just a projection. The cat fulfills its catness by playing with that red dot. So are we as people fulfilling our humanity by being fascinated by these things in the sky? So I was a guy who teaches like lightweight camping techniques and things like that. So I'm very much going to the woods, no technology, sparse, spare. So I wrote an essay about playing with a piece of string.

He wrote an essay. He was a futurist. He wrote an essay about a laser beam. And that, the closest laser beam to me was that CD player, which was run by a laser beam, which was within touching distance of when I was sitting on the couch. And I heard the clunk as I read the words, the cryptotorrestrials by Mack Tonys. So it felt like Mac was in the room. I can't say that he was, but wow, that is what it felt like.

There, I did the thing I answered. I had a long, long, long answer to a very simple question. Well, I love that answer. And I also really love that metaphor of the string and the laser and the cat. Because through all of these narratives and through my own experience with these kind of synchronicities and anomalous events, I think so many of us come to that kind of a suspicion that there is something about that. I actually don't ever expect to get any kind of an answer to any of this. Good. You'll keep yourself sane that way. Yeah. Like I've invested my entire life in this. I walked away from my career.

I've made this my full-time job. It's all I think about from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed. And I don't expect to find the answer, even though I find it frustrating. And even though I sometimes wish there was a button I could push and just not think about UFOs for like 48 hours, I'm so grateful for it because it's made every bit of my life better.

And I think that so much of our culture and the way that our modern life is set up, is about consuming stories and being manipulated by stories, and everything is set up to keep you from living your own story, and that there's something about the phenomenon that forces you into being a main character in a story. And I think that that actually is at the heart of what it means to be human. And so I love that metaphor of the cat and the string and the laser pointer so much, because I feel like it's a great illustration of something that I've been sensing

that haven't been able to put words to. Well, that's the analogy of the shadow on the cave wall, right? You're not looking at reality. The reality is being orchestrated by someone holding the laser pointer. You're just seeing the little dot. There's something theatrical happening within this lore. And by the fact that it's theatrical means that it has a whimsy and it has a drama and it has an intensity, it has the ability to present you with fears and sorrows and hope.

and just like a good story would. So I'm being confronted with owl stories. And within these owl stories is somehow, for me, proof. I can't say, I don't say that it's going to be proof for anyone else. But for me, embedded within these owl stories, is proof of a deeper reality that is running alongside our reality. And that, not many people get that life lesson. And I feel really blessed to have had it.

I agree. I agree, because I feel like as much as the endeavor of this podcast has been a very scientific, objective approach and trying to go from a very analytical viewpoint and either explicate or even create these really structured ontologies so that we can approach this from an intellectual sort of way, the lived experience of this. Like I said, I think that there's so much to be gained through approaching these narratives as narratives and assessing them in that way. and not necessarily trying to force these different ontologies onto it, because ultimately we find that the lived experience of any individual person alludes all of these different categories that we try to force them into. I agree totally. I've said that I am a disciple of the story, right?

So the story to me is all that's important, because that's what I resonate strongly to. And as I said before, I am not being objective. I am being totally subjective because this is my own deeply personal journey for my own selfish reasons. I want to try to make sense of this. I want to integrate this. And I like you, like I gave up a long time ago trying to get to an answer because that's like saying, what is God?

Right? That's a great question. Boy, that's a tough one to answer. So you're in a place or I'm in a place where these things cannot be answered literally. They can be answered metaphorically or through symbology. I think the owl is as a symbol. The UFO is a symbol. And I think synchronicity is this magic event that we all can understand.

And that has been my grounding force that I can tap into these elusive story elements and feel them deep down. And that's where I find my piece. I really resonate with that. So what do you hope that people take away from the unseen? So on a surface level, I hope they enjoy it and it races along and it's fun for them as far as a book. like, yeah, we're a thriller. Yeah, I worked really hard to. People said, oh, it's a page turner,

and that wasn't by accident. I wanted it to be that way, so I wrote it that way. And I wrote it to be the kind of book that I would like to read. So on a surface level, I think I just want someone to say, great book, wow, that was fun to read.

That was just zip right by. And then in a deeper level, that lesson, that there is a deeper reality running parallel to our own and that it overlaps with us and intersects with us and makes itself known in the strangest ways,

and then recedes down below. Like a porpoise on the surface of the water just will make itself known. And you can't know too much about the porpoise from the boat. You can sense its direction, but not much more. So hopefully, the story of the unseen

comes from the thousands of accounts that I have received. Like many of the accounts in the story are my own. And often of strangest ones are my own, I have to say. And then I have to say, massage them and tweaked them and kind of made them work into the narrative in a way that propelled the story forward. But if you read that story and you think, wow, this is really weird,

just rest assured that most of the weird stuff in that book truly happened now. I'm going to take a big step back. True. Truly, quotes, like, I don't know what true is anymore. Right. So people tell me these stories and they sound like, wow, that sounds like you're in a dream realm I'm hearing that story. But a story doesn't make it true. But the opening page, the very first line on the book, says, this story is fiction. The emotions are real. And that was my mantra in a way. Well, I really think you achieved that. So I know that this is an absolutely brutal question to ask an author who just got done pouring their whole heart into a book. But will there be a sequel? That's a great question.

answer is don't ask me that right away. So I think it was you that said we had a phone conversation. After you finished the book, you asked that same question. I was like, you could hear my heart stop. Like, oh, God. Like, that was, it's like asking a woman after she gives birth. You can have more kids? And she's probably not ready right then. But oftentimes women do have more kids. So I would have to say, I have a little notebook with some notes on what may or may not be in book, too. So it's on my mind. And I'm not going to give anything away, but when you get to the last page, it is sort of set up for a book, too. And that was not my plan, but wow, that's how it turned out. Yes, I feel like people will want that.

So we'll see if the muses speak to you. So, Mike, it's been absolutely a pleasure talking to you. I'm so glad that we've gotten to do this. Over the last few months, you've become one of my just absolute favorite people to talk to in the space. and I'm so glad that we were able to share this conversation. So thank you for being on the show today. Well, thank you. And we had a conversation.

I called you up out of the blue. And, you know, and honestly, I do this. Like, I just, I listened to you on your show. And I was like, oh, I know, there's like, so I knew when we talked that this is how it would play out. So, yes. So thank you. I was, I'm honored and this was a joy. So thank you.