Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 25: James Madden [Pt. 3]: The Cave, Morlocks & The Spectacle of Disclosure

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

In this episode we welcome back my dear friend and friend of the show, Dr. James Madden. This is the third episode that we’ve done together, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. My interviews with James Madden have become some of my most downloaded episodes, and so I know you guys love hearing from him. And I love talking to him, so we’re just going to keep doing it. The deeper we dive into the phenomenon, the more necessary it becomes to not just interrogate what we think, but how we think—and to find new frameworks to help us do so. A philosophical approach gives the means to do that. And I’ve been so grateful to Jim for how generous he’s been with his time and his thoughts as we navigate these deeper waters. As you all know, over the past several months Plato’s Cave has become a central touchstone of this podcast. It’s an idea I keep returning to, again and again, because as my own trip down the rabbit hole continues, I continue to find new insights within it. And so today, with Jim as our guide, we’re going to return to the Cave, armed with the new ideas we’ve developed over these past several months, and see what new revelations might reveal themselves.With this episode we’ll also be returning to our discussion of Whitley Strieber’s groundbreaking new book, Them, which we discussed in the last episode. Strieber’s decades of deep research and thinking on the topic of non-human intelligence as well as his own ongoing contact experiences have led him to develop a nuanced, challenging, and at times unsettling, understanding of “the others”—including how they operate at the fringes of our awareness and what they might ultimately be trying to tell us.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 Now EPISODE BRIEFBECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase. Memberships start at just $5/month.GET 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

Do you believe fairies exist? Each day, more people are coming forward with stories of encountering otherworldly beings. Join me, Joe Hickey Hall, on the Modern Fairy Sightings podcast, as we hear from people who are ready to share their experiences. Like a tree stop walking, and he walked with this weird gait. It had to take a double take, because in front of me were two elf-like. goblin in things. So the red light was gone and now this flat shape is forming. They then stopped, look around at us, chuckled and then just vanished in front of our eyes.

Whether you're already a believer or full of intrigue, come open-minded and open-hearted and make your own mind up. The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast on Spectrevision Radio. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. In this episode, we welcome back my dear friend and friend of the show, Dr. James Madden. This is the third episode that we've done together, and I'm sure that it won't be the last. My interviews with Jim have become some of my most downloaded episodes, and so I know you guys love hearing from him, and I love talking to him, so we're just going to keep doing it. The deeper we dive into the phenomenon, the more necessary it becomes not just to interrogate what

we think, but how we think, and to find new frameworks to help us to do so. A philosophical approach gives us the means to do that, and I've been so grateful to Jim for how generous he's been with his time and his thoughts as we navigate these deeper waters. As you all know, over the past several months, Plato's Cave has become a central touchstone of this podcast. It's an idea that I keep returning to again and again, because as my own trip down the rabbit hole continues, I continue to find new insights within it. And so today, with Jim as our guide, we're going to return to the cave, armed with the new ideas that we've developed over these past several months, and see what new revelations might reveal themselves. With this episode, we'll also be returning to

our discussion of Whitley Strieber's groundbreaking new book, Them, which we discussed in the last episode. Strieber's decades of deep research and thinking on the topic of non-human intelligence, as well as his own ongoing contact experiences have led him to develop a nuanced, challenging, and at times unsettling understanding of the others, including how they operate at the fringes of our awareness and what they might ultimately be trying to tell us. Before we begin, I want to preface all of this with the disclaimer, or perhaps it's more of a challenge to the listener. In this episode, Jim and I briefly end up in a place that I tend to avoid going on this podcast, which is into the realm of political and economic commentary. I usually avoid these topics like the plague for a number

of reasons, not the least of which is that in our current political climate, there are certain words that immediately shut down all thinking and discourse. Words like left and right, capitalism and communism, have lost all nuance and depth in their meaning and have come to embody grotesque caricatures that are used to fuel the 24-7 outrage cycle of the news media. So, this The challenge that I want to issue to you is this. If you feel your hackles going up at the mention of some of these words, give us the benefit of the doubt and hear us out. I promise you that if you're able to separate these words from the script that we've all been so rigorously trained on, that you'll see that we're not advocating for or against any of these particular groups or ideologies.

Rather, we're engaging in a kind of discourse that rarely happens these days, especially not out in public, which is an attempt to release our own personal political opinions and proclivities in order to have a deeper conversation about the stories and ideas that shape the walls of our cave. I hope you'll be willing to go there with us because as loath as I am to discuss anything even somewhat adjacent to politics, and even though it's not something that we're going to do often or perhaps ever again, I don't think that we can have a complete and honest conversation about the nature of our own cave without acknowledging these things. So with that in mind, let's get into it. Here is my latest conversation with my friend, Dr. James Madden. Well,

hey, Jim, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Kelly. It is always my honor to come on your show, so I appreciate it. Well, it's so awesome to have you here, and I've been wanting to talk to you because I know that in the last episode, we got into to a little bit with Whitley Streber's them. And I know that's something that you and I have had some conversations about and that you've done a lot of deep thinking on. And so I wanted to get you on the show just to kind of get your thoughts about them. I'm not sure where you'd want to start, but I'd love to hear what you think.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I read that book basically on your recommendation. Like you gave me the heads up, but that was coming. And I'll admit, that was the first book I read by by Streber. And take it back. He co-wrote the book with Jeff Krepple. I had read that before. Oh, right.

Yeah. And even going back to that book, you mentioned this in some of your recent work, how there's this sort of, I want to call it a prejudice or a bias where a lot of people will admit, yeah, you know, I actually think there's something to the UFO thing and the evidence for it is too good to deny. But then as soon as we go to the actual experiencers, to the actual, say, abduction cases, et cetera, et cetera, then it's, oh, that's too far from me. I can't do that, right? I was that guy. I was totally that guy. I was willing to entertain. Yeah, I mean, you've got these military types who seem to be serious people were seeing this stuff. And I got to a point where I couldn't really ignore the direct evidence for it. But I was very disdainful of any talk of the actual experiencer stuff, right? And I think this came to be both in reading Jeff Kreppel's work that he did a Streber at his other book, Super Humanities. You know, I think now we need to quit using the word anomalous for all this, okay? Because it's turning out what was called the anomalous is not the anomalous.

I mean, an anomaly is something that doesn't make sense in terms of the way things ordinarily go, okay? But go back to Streber's Them. That book, he wrote on the occasion of going through the archives again, of all the letters that he got from people who have had these experiences. And what does he say in the book? There's hundreds of thousands of these letters that he got more or less unsolicited over many, many years.

Once you go that fall, once you see that, and this is a point that that Krippel makes in the supreme entities is, you have to the very least say that there is a pattern of human experience that's emerging from this evidence, right, from these reports. And whether you think that pattern represents something veridical outside of our minds or if you think it's just merely a psychological function or some sort, it's no longer anomalous. There is a recurring, repeating, very similar in content in a lot of cases, pattern to these experiences. And that's the very mark of an objective phenomena is that it comes back according

to some sort of law-like structure. It's not anomalous, right? It may be rare, but it's not anomalous. And then one wonders how rare it is. And I think that's what we're all wondering about now. And for me, that was like the first big turn on that I got in reading streamer's book was, you know, when he talked about just the vast reporting he got from people. And this is not like when you could just send a text. Like these were handwritten letters written mostly in the 1980s, 90s and forward. Big of the effort it took to do that. And there were hundreds of thousands of people that sent those letters.

And I find that, okay, now the same way that the evidence will wait for the UFO, I can't really resist that. and now the evidential wait for all these sorts of very, very disconcerting experiences associated with it and going far beyond it, I can't really discount that either now. Yeah. Yeah, it's so fascinating what it's like to go through that process, right? Because I think it's probably really been over the last year that I really mean that transition. I was in the weird position of I actually met Whitley at the December Inquirer Anomalous event before I had ever deeply gotten into it. work. I had read communion years ago, and I knew some of his stuff from like the zeitgeist,

but I hadn't really gruffled with it because I was so deep in my other research that definitely was like not the experience or stuff. Right. And I sat there in like second row or something and just right in front of him watching him speak. And although the things that he was saying were absolutely incredible to me and something that a me of only a few months before that might have had it real trouble with. There was something that resonated inside of me that said, like, this guy isn't lying. And that in of itself, you know, we talk about On Plagable Shock a lot on this show, that becomes very real when you start to recognize the breadth of human experience and how just the process of grappling with the breadth of human experience makes you reevaluate your own experiences

and your own consciousness and all of that. But since then, I've really gotten into his work. The reason I sent you them, and I was so excited for you to read it, was because we had just gotten done, I think, with our second episode together. And I felt like it echoed so many of the thoughts that you had been having and some of the stuff that you were writing about, which was so interesting because I know you hadn't read streamer yet and you hadn't read them.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit, what you were excited to find in that book? Let me, can I make one more initial point? about what we were just talking about in transition of that. Does that work? So there's this little piece I read by William James just the other day. And William James, the American philosopher, writing around this turn of the 20th century. And it's really a curious little thing. Like somebody sent him a questionnaire about like kind of a general survey of religious views at the time.

And so James, who is this kind of great defender of a value of religion, in this questionnaire says, well, I think, the best case for religious belief is a kind of experience. And then he says, I have none of these experiences myself, but I'm aware of them being common enough and following a certain pattern enough that it that's enough for him to ground a sort of belief in these things. And of course, for William James, that becomes like very broad. He was into some very interesting quote-to-court anomal stuff. So it's interesting because I have had no experiences of these sorts, like whether religious or with the phenomenon, and I'm not looking for them either necessarily, right?

So I'm sort of a non-experiencer believer now, very similar the way James was in that once you really open mind and look into this and you don't just dismiss someone as unreliable because they report these things that you look into, are they reliable and then look at the report, not just the report is enough to make them unreliable. I think it's a game change.

And I think in a lot of ways, a lot of us are having that kind of William James moment about this where we had a convention, convenient way of dismissing this stuff, but it's gone now. Right. And now for me, that is a little ontologically shocking because, though, you know, I've always had like any Catholic or sort of ontological permiscuity, I've never really liked it, right? And now, now it looks like that box is really open to me now. And there's a lot of things that I used to not entertain. It's making my thinking harder in a good way.

So, but then to go to the question you raised is like, what kind of blew me away in streamer. Well, first, this issue of just the scope of the reports of the phenomenon. Okay. But even more so as a connection to my prior work in this area is, I forget which chapter is exactly, but it's the chapter he talks about Morwarks, right? And the letter, I think he actually has letters from two different people in consecutive chapters about this, is they both go back to an event where somebody It was driving home on a freeway, like in rush hour in Long Island. Am I right? I'm pretty sure, yeah.

It was on the same road either way. They were on the same road. But it's like rush hour kind of thing. And one of them sees what looks like a jetliner, but it's not quite right. It's like a little off, right? The proportions are weird and stuff like that. But it looks like a jetliner is going to crash into the freeway. Okay.

And it comes close. Right. and he pulls off the road and I believe in streamers accounting that this guy is himself a psychologist who is an expert on perception so this guy knows that hallucination is a possibility but he still doesn't think he was loosening this

he takes his off ramp and then at the off ramp there's this strange experience with sort of like evil clowns bouncing around and stuff like this and he sees someone in a car in front of them talking to them And if I remember right, the other letter that streamer got about this was from the guy in the car in front of them telling about the experience, but from a different first person perspective. So what's interesting here is now we're able to get two views. We're kind of triangulating in on this thing.

It's very hard to say it didn't happen when you have two independent letters coming from different sources, recounting what seemed to be the same events from different perspectives. And I think at the end, does it like a billboard take off like a spaceship or something like that? Yeah, there's a big kind of, they describe it as like a carnival style billboard that has these like light bulbs all over it, but it's sort of indecipherable. They can't really tell what it says. But it's something that is so strange being there and yet everyone around seems to not even be clocking this weird billboard or a strange bouncing clowns or any of that. Exactly. And so one of those I think the story resonated with you so much is I don't like airplanes and I'm a little afraid of clowns. Okay.

It hit my own subconscious in a way. But more importantly, what I find, what I find is from of the story is the fact that everybody else in the freeway is not like calling 911, is not saying, oh my gosh, a plane almost hit, right? It's not in the news. But clearly, it seems to me something happened here that these two men encountered, okay? It should have been obvious to everybody there when you've got planes, you know, buzzing the freeway and billboards taking off like spaceships, right? even if they couldn't see the clowns bouncing around, but no one else that we know of makes any report of this. And it should have been, you know, massive panicky news, right?

But it didn't happen. I think the show is how, when streamer rings us up in the book, how our consciousness is not designed just to show us what's there. It's designed to sort what is relevant to our current concerns, right? So most of the people, it seems, driving on that freeway just said, oh, yeah, there's a giant airplane about to hit the freeway here, but I need to get home for dinner, click going to a different file. I mean, I'm not saying they consciously thought that, but that seems to be that's how we work, right? And other people

were pulling off, taking that exit where the clowns were hopping around and the billboard takes off. And, you know, gee, I've got to get my kids from basketball practice and I'm just not looking for anything but that I'm focused in. And it connects back then with a lot of stuff we've talked about prior episode of the show and that I've written about in Substack and such is about how we've got this carefully constructed environment for ourselves, our umwelt, and

it's sorted for relevance to our tasks. It's not there just to simply show us what's there. The things that we see are there, but there are a selection out of possible things to be seen. And I think when you read this story, you ask yourself, okay, so what the heck is in the room with me right now that I'm just not seeing

because it's not relevant to my current task? And that could just be something minor like I'm not hearing the phone ring or something like that because I'm worried about the book I'm reading. But it can be something bigger like structurally for our whole lives. We've just not been concerned in the right way. And thereby we're missing very, very important things in our environment. And once you see that as a human possibility, which I think the psychology on this shows it, the phenomenological philosophy on this shows it. And then things like what Streber is reporting as anecdotal but seemingly well-granted experiences show that in fact we are probably missing a. great deal of what's around us because of our tunnel vision, our cave dwelling status.

And that to me was like, okay, he got me at that chapter. Like, boom, I'm in. Yeah. I loved that. And I had this really weird experience the other day, actually, that made me think of this. It was very synchronistic in a way, which is that there's been like some sort of water main break or some sort of sewer issue on this street that's kind of like adjacent to my building. And they've been doing a lot of work over there.

And for the last couple days, there's been kind of at regular intervals, this really loud, like, you could feel it in your teeth, like metal on metal clanging that happens to a very steady cadence. And I'm someone who gets very, I'm very bothered by sounds and one of those crazy people. And I was just sitting there being so annoyed by the sound, like feeling I wanted to crawl out of my skin. The sound was so annoying. And my husband comes in and is like, oh, they stopped. And I hadn't even recognized that they had stopped. the clanging. I was still in the clanging somehow. Like you're the way that our brains latch on to one model or one thing or one pattern and just stay in it to the point that I

didn't even notice when it stopped. I was still being actively annoyed by something that was no longer happening. Right. Right. It's it's really fascinating. And imagine you know if you are driving you know we know that humans have amazing abilities to dissociate themselves from things like whether it's from a prior trauma, right, even for something that's going on right now that you don't want to face. We have this gear of just taking something that is just too much for us. And we don't want to deal with and just put it in some other cognitive box. And I think the whole thing, I think we see this in Streber, we see this in Krippel's work. I think they're trying to get to see is it looks like we have a massive case of psychic dissociation that's gone on on a cultural level, at least since the Enlightenment.

And I think we could even say even a lot of other traditions that allow for the quarter quote anomalous are still attempting to kind of put a grip on that to give us an easy relevant sorting for it. Right. And that I think it is what we're all like starting to see now is that we do suffer from this civilizational level case of dissociative disorder. Right. Absolutely. And I loved also that he brings up very early in them the Morlocks. I know you really like that as well for anybody listening who's not familiar with the story of the time machine by H.G. Wells. It's just a short story. And you don't need to know a whole bunch except that there's a time traveler. He goes way forward in time, I think, like 800,000 years or something. And he comes to this place where it looks like humanity has sort of divided into two different species.

And above ground, there live the LOI. Is that what they're called? Yes. Yeah. And they are these kind of waif-like ethereal kind of beings that have all of their needs met and seem to live in this sort of utopia. But they're also, like, not very bright. They're very easily distracted. And they've never had to strive for anything.

And so they're kind of useless in a lot of ways. And then below grounds, though, you have the Morlocks, who are these more like kind of scary ape-like creatures. And underground, this time traveler finds is where all of the kind of machinery that's running this society. above ground exists and it's run by these morlocks who then just come up to the surface sometimes at night and eat the above ground people and I felt like that was something that was an idea that actually I had been circling for a while and I couldn't even remember what the story was I forgot there was even a time machine involved so it was a weird synchronity when I read the book that it was this idea that was percolating under the surface about the morlocks but I'd love to hear your thoughts on

that and Striever's decision to use the Morlocks as sort of this centering piece at the beginning of the book. Yeah, you know, it is a little distressing if we take it that Strieber knows things that he doesn't say in his books, right? Right. Chooses that as his going metaphor, that in fact we are unwittingly being harvested by other kind of organism that's always been in our environment. In fact, like we're sort of their original genetically modified crop, right?

Okay. That's a little distressing. The point I've made in earlier conversations we've had is I talk about how you've got this tick that like frames its world according to certain perceptive capacities it has that sorts it towards its relevance. And it may have no idea at all about the bird that hunts it, right, or the other insects that hunt it. Okay. Because it dealt with them by camouflage, not by conscious evasion or something like that. So it doesn't even know what's out there, right? Okay, so I know this is dark, but I think Whitney is suggesting this by that example is once we admit that our perceptual picture is selective, right, or even if it's not selective, it's just not designed to get everything right, then we don't really know what other organisms ultimately are in our environment, right, that are operating in corners of possible perception that are not ordinary perceptions for human beings. And then it would seem then, for all we know, that there are Morlocks out there in our Uber Umbfeldt, right, who in somewhere other have cultivated us or harvest us or whatever your suggestion is, but it seems like now you can't really rule a lot out.

And what worries me is, I don't really know what progress in answering those kinds of questions would even look like if what we're saying is we're dealing with something that we're not designed to deal with, right? Right. Like how would the tick ever come to know anything about the human being beyond the narrow mode that it has access to it? This is something you've talked about recently is, you know, the incremeasibility harmoninical problem there is very intractable, very intractable like that. Because it's not just that we go to a remote island and we encounter a culture of human beings I've never encountered before. But we've all got like the basic same perceptual apparatus. We're set up to see the same spectrum of light, all that. So we can like point and grunt. and maybe get things going. But what we're talking about here might not be something that has anything like our five senses in its way of getting around the world. And in that case, what would progress even look like to understand that? I don't know.

But it seems that we have to entertain the possibility of just that very thing. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's one of the scarier ideas that comes up when you start accepting the reality of the presence of a non-human intelligence or potentially a lot of non-human intelligences on this planet. It's stuff that Lou Elizondo talked about a lot while he was still early on doing a lot of podcasts and that sort of thing about what if we're not at the top of the food chain. Right. And recognizing that if there is an intelligence on this planet that's a lot smarter than us and a lot more advanced than us, that there's the possibility, the very strong

possibility that in some ways we're not really running things. And there's kind of two possibilities. Either we are being used and controlled in some way or we're completely incidental to them in the same way that the ants in your backyard are completely incidental. And both of those ideas are terrifying because what if suddenly we were in their way, you know, in the same way that like if you're going to build a pool in your backyard and there's an ant colony back there, you're not going to worry about the ant colony. I'm just cutting the lawn. Right. There's that great line It's in contact In the film

I've never read the book But in the film contact Where James Woods is like the Defense Department You know A skeptical guy And Jory Foster is the scientist believer And He's saying like we're like ants to them

Right And she's like well yeah Why would you fly across the universe To destroy an ant colony It wouldn't be worth it to us If they're here They must need us some well right And James Wood says

I don't know What if you're just on your way someone else you happen to step on an ant cowl. Their being beyond us doesn't give us grounds for pessimism or optimism. It seems to be utterly open. One way I like to put this is very often you hear people in talking about the phenomenon. They'll speculate, well, you know, it only makes sense that they would do it this way, right? Or if we arrived at a planet, we would expect that we would do X, Y, or Z.

Or if we had to deal with a being that was far inferior to us, we would expect X, Y, or Z. And so we're kind of applying this theory of rationality, this game theory that allows us to predict human decision making very, very, very well. But I don't think there's any reason to believe that our game theory would apply to a non-human intelligence, especially one that we do not have any evolutionary link to. You know, I've used this example before, but I can understand kind of what a bear is up to because like a bear, I have. have to eat and we're both basically omnivorous and I like to date and bears like to date and I want to protect my y'all at the result from dating and so is the bear. So we don't really get each other much about at a broad level because we have this common evolutionary history that's left us with the same sorts of motives that makes sense, right?

But you go to a jellyfish, I don't understand the jellyfish as well, but to some degree I get it, jellyfish wants to do the jellyfish version of all those things, okay? I mean, who says evolution would have to go according to anything like that? What if you had highly complicated, asexually reproducing things? So there's no analog to like our dating desires in them. I don't know what that would look like, but that's the point. I don't know what that looks like, but I don't see a way to rule that out, right? Or basically evolution here has worked on this interest in protecting your genes or something like that.

Well, could there be other ways that complexity could have been developed? that wasn't about like protection of genes, but sharing, whatever, right? I mean, but it seems to me like once we've opened this box, there's no reason to think our game theory applies. So then our abilities to predict what these things are up to, I think we grossly underestimate how difficult that problem. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the absurdity of the phenomenon,

which was argued really well in the paper I discussed in the last episode, the absurdity of the phenomenon seems to indicate that something like that is more true than not true. Because the complete unintelligibility of it to us suggest that we don't have a model to deal with this. Right. Exactly. You know, as an aside, but still sort of on topic, I think maybe my favorite episode of UFO Rabbit Hole

was that last episode. Oh, thanks. Yeah, I really do. Because, well, and of course, I'm a philosopher, right? So I'm into that sort of thing. But also, because if you're coming to this show now, you're probably, or most of this sort of material that's out there, you're already moved on the evidential issue, right? And now the issue is, okay, what do we think about this thing? And I think

we have to be careful because there's a way we've been told that we should think about this thing for a long time, right? You know, it's definitely extraterrestrial. And that's in the message, it's extraterrestrial and it's crazy to think it's extraterrestrial, ergo it's crazy, right? That's kind of been the way it's gone. And I think what we have to do now, though, is to realize any easily understood hypothesis as to what this is is probably wrong, and we're probably being cajoled into thinking of it that way. I don't know if I've gone to stye up on you there. Because I think anybody who really thinks about this thing for any amount of time is going to say, we should not assume any category from our Goldilocks ontology is going to

apply to this thing. Because the phenomenon itself suggests that our ontology is not the full story of things. And it seems like whatever the phenomenon is, it's beyond that kind of ideal limit of human understanding. Absolutely. And I think, you know, going back to the extraterrestrial hypothesis,

I'm very much with the belief that we shouldn't take anything off the table until we have really good reason to do so, which can be frustrating. So we're just adding things to the table instead of taking things away at this point. Yeah. But if I was going to bet and take anything off,

the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the one that I would ditch. And the reason, for that is because it's the only one that you ever see represented in the media. It's the only one that the government ever talks about where they're like, well, it's not aliens, you know, which even then is putting the idea of aliens in your head. It's like when someone says the F word, like you've already heard. You know what it is. Yeah. So I had the distinct good luck of teaching a course on the UFO and philosophy

religion while the balloon flap was going on last winter. So with my students, we actually got to watch the White House or the Defense Department briefings and stuff like that. And the use of the word alien was very curious in that, right? It was, you know, we definitely know it's not aliens. It's definitely not aliens. And it was sort of strange because it's like, why are you bringing that up? You're denying it. But in bringing it up, you got the word alien out there.

And so that's one where I think the very fact that it's been so often suggested to think of it that way is maybe evidence again. against it. It's being the real story. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, the other thing I was really excited about when I read them and why I was so excited for you to read it was that I feel like Whitley does a really masterful job of sort of drawing that analogy between them and the Morlocks. But I feel like there's the other side of that, which is the above ground people. And I think that's something that you've dealt with a lot in your work. It's really interesting what they're Like, you know, they don't need to worry about any of their needs. Everything is provided for them.

And the places that they live, the buildings that they live in are described as really futuristic and highly advanced, but also decaying. They're falling apart also. And the people seem to like not really notice that or be too concerned about it. But I'd love to hear, you know, your thoughts on that. Yeah. When I read it for the first time, I was thinking, oh, this is Nietzsche's last man. Right.

This is the post-nihialism, just absolutely boring and managed humanity that Nietzsche is so greatly feared. So I've always thought the point of that, the original story was to say, you know, we're coming to a point of such easy, complacent conformity that we're going to be easy pickings for something that will harvest us. You know what I mean? And this too, I mean, dark, but as we solely become Nietzsche's last men, we've become more manageable and then thereby whatever more walks in our environment who have, than kind of like cultivating us, it's going to make us all the easier for them to harvest whatever is that they want, right? I'll admit that that strikes me when I see that in the book and the fact that once again, I think Streeper knows some things and is, I think, dropping hints with the metaphors. And yeah. Yeah, it makes me think of, I actually don't know if this is true or not. It sounds true. But I've heard that cats are the only animal that ever domesticated themselves.

And if that's true, if that's true, it's true. Humans are probably the second, right? Because I look at my cat all the time and she's this like perfect apex predator and she can do all of these amazing things. But she also has been treated like a baby her entire life, like a literal human baby. And she asks like a baby and she won't even chase a toy with any kind of besto because she's never had to. And it's so funny to watch this little predator that lives in my home just be completely domesticated. She could never go outside. Like, I've had outdoor cats.

There are a whole different thing than what my cat is. And it makes me think about, you know, us and the way that we're headed. Like, I think often about in this field, people talk a lot about 2027, what might be coming. There's these rumors that there might be something coming in 2027 that's come from kind of the experience or community and the intelligence community. And one of the most common connective threads that I've found through these different theories that people have about what's going to happen is that the grid would go down. like permanently or at least for long enough that, I mean, because if the grid went down in the

United States, like right now for three months, I don't think we have a country anymore after that. I think that we have descended into absolute. Yeah. Yeah, right. But 100 years ago, if they were like, all right, electricity's done forever. We had a good ride, but it's done and it's not coming back. People still had skills. They knew how to survive.

We were packed into cities where there's only two days worth of food. It would have been a little bit messy, but it wouldn't have been that big of a deal. People could have moved on, even just 100 years ago. But now it could end us if the grid went down. Right. You know, it's a unique weird example of a little connect is, was it during the Vietnam War, was it Operation Phoenix where basically the United States was bombing the rural areas to make it so that people would flee into the cities, which then, why?

Because it's a lot easier to manage people and monitor. in cities, right, than it is out in the rural areas, especially you have guerrilla warfare going on. You wonder to what extent that for whatever reason, we've all kind of like endured a sort of Operation Phoenix over the last hundred years, right, where we've increasingly been put in a situation where we're unable to sustain ourselves off the grid, right, outside of the city. And then that thereby renders us dependencies on these systems. And what I find the most interesting is the degree to which that we are all on the grid or we're dependents or many of us are cognitively

in the sense that what we think about is so managed now, right? Not just what we eat, our access to it, but it's our access to ideas. And our ability to think of all those ideas is mediated increasingly through these systems, right? And the danger to that, just in general, if somebody finds a way to turn off the light switch, it looks like we're even going to cognitively shut down.

We don't know how to read any, right? but also there's starvation and all that stuff. But one wonders, like if you want to go all the way and entertain the most big-scale scenarios for this, and I think I'm a philosopher, that's what I do, then one wonders, could it be that there's some kind of Morlock at work here that has wanted to make us maximally dependent on certain systems and thereby the most easily controlled?

If someone came to us with an ultimatum, you know, submit to this or we turn off the law. light switch, we would have to say, okay, we're in. We wouldn't really have much choice at this point because everything is built into these systems now. Yeah. And it fits interestingly in with the UFO lore, right? You listen to what David Gresh is saying.

And if what he's saying is true, then our government and other governments have had access to this kind of crazily advanced technology that seems in many ways to have maybe been gifted to us, whether through a crash or actually just given, since the 1930s, which is exactly the timeline we're talking about here. And that if it's true, when you see the explosion of technology from the middle of the last century to now, it's like, could this be something that was done to us intentionally? Because our society has become colonized entirely by technology. Yeah. And also, you know, keep in mind some of my weird reviews about hyper-operative. objects and things like that. So if you think that technology can take on a life of its own and the

way that Pizza Hut can take a life on its own, right? Well, I like how you put that. Have we been colonized by some? And it could be that our Morlocks are something that we set loose. Like, we introduce some technologies and we set loose and they have taken on lives of their own and are now colonizing us. And I don't think you need conscious AI for that. And I have my doubts about conscious AI. But I think all you need is systems that have interests, right? As soon as you have that, if they're operating at scales that we don't understand anymore, guess what? We're not running this. So I think independently of the phenomenon, I think I could make a case that we are in fact being run by Morlocks of our own doing, even independently of the phenomenon. And I think if you

read some philosophers technology like Jacques Alou or Gunther Anders, I think you would see very much. I think there's a case to be made for this. And people were making them. that case already in the 1950s, that we have loosed something on ourselves that we don't run anymore. And I think the case you're making is, okay, maybe that initial seating, though, like how we got these things that we let loose that we didn't really understand, there's interesting question of why that all happened at once in the 1940s. It's almost like you have this punctuated equilibrium thing going on, this sort of creation event going on, that does call for an explanation, right? Absolutely. Actually, if it's cool, I'd love to

There's this book, and I talked about it before, I believe, in my interview with Diana Pesolka called The Society of the Spectacle by Guide to Board that was written in the late 1950s. And I'm going to read just a few sentences out of just the first couple of pages of this that I have highlighted. And what's so crazy about this is reading this. This could have been written about TikTok, and it was written in like the 1950s. The great book. It's a great book. It's amazing. I really recommend it. It can be a little tough. So I picked out some parts that were a little easier, but, okay. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself

as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life views in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as as instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is

nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. The spectacle, cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, but as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is a world vision which has become objectified. The spectacle grasped at its totality is both the results and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealistic of the real society. And like this guy knew what was up. So can you hold up your copy of DeBorg's book?

Okay, yes, I love that cover. And I know the listeners will not see that, but the cover of DeBord's book, that edition of it, is just a bunch of people sitting in a movie theater with their 3D glasses on looking at a screen. And I think what the passage you just read explains that perfectly. So what do they have?

There's a spectacle in front of them. So it gives the illusion of a common experience, okay? But in fact, it's really discharges. forcing them to look away from each other and look away from the real world they're in and look at the spectacle instead. So the illusion of the common experience of the spectacle doesn't give them a common human solidarity. It undermines that because they're all really alone in that theater and they're not together in it. And for them to be together in it, they would have to look away from the spectacle and look at the real world. And I think it's very difficult to resist

saying that DeBoard is absolutely correct about where we've gone. We are all looking at common spectacles, which paradoxically isolates us. Like, our looking at the common spectacle isolates us. But why?

Well, because by looking at the spectacle, we're guided by it, we're manipulated by it, et cetera, et cetera. And we don't see what's there. And kind of connecting the things we saw earlier is when you're looking at the spectacle, your attention's on that. You're dissociating from the real,

reality around you. And so the spectacle distracts us from each other and it may distract us from one of the most fundamentally real things around us that we're missing because we've been constantly like pulled over to this other common illusion, right? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot lately about how much time I spend in a day dissociating in one way or another. And I like the really good deep dissociation. I don't just want to watch a television show. I want to watch a television show and play a mindless game on my phone at the same time because then like then I can achieve like maximum dissociation from my surroundings and you know how much time do we spend with our loved ones on the couch with everybody's got a phone in their hand I've started taking pictures

I'm the oldest of six and I miss my siblings I never get to see them enough and when we all get together I have a million pictures of everybody sitting on the couch next to each other with their phone in their hands. Like, and it's rough. It's messed up, you know? It's messed up.

Right. At least let's all watch the same TV show. So at least we can have a common spectacle, right? At least among us, right? Right. You know, the, I'm going to box your names.

I know you know them, though. The weird studies guys. Oh, yeah. J. F. Martel and Philport.

Yeah. I'm, I'm actually, I've been really delinquent on my substack, but I think the next one I'm going to do is going to be kind of a follow on to something that they suggest. in their episode on the UFO. One of them, I forget which one,

actually claims that the UFO is the end of capitalism. Okay. And I think what he's getting at there, giving the person he's quoting when he, the person he appeals to and making his claim, and I think DeBorg has made the same claim here. So the Borg is saying that modern capitalist society requires the spectacle because we have to all be,

like, being pulled forward by these illusions so that we just keep the buying going, right? Rather than like worry about solidarity. You help yourself to disagree about the politics of that. And I think the idea that the UFO is the end of capitalism is to say the UFO kind of shatters the spectacle, right? Reality is like jumping in and interrupting the preferred consensus story about things, right? And it's going to force you to look. It's the really, really dark questions now, which is going to break up your attention from the spectacle, right?

I like that. I think it's a great suggestion. But what's happened, though, in the last, like, 75 years is the UFO has been like co-opted into a spectacle itself, into a popular culture. And so like the thing that should maybe was our last chance not to be distracted from the reel. It was like the reel's last attempt to remind us that it's here has just simply been co-opted into the spectacular machine now as to be one more distraction. Right. Yeah. No, I was actually thinking about that exact thing earlier. today and I'll see if I can say something articulate about it about how so much of this does come back to like I was watching the Y files the other day I really like that it's on YouTube and there's a guy I don't

if you've seen it but he does these rundowns of popular conspiracies and he tells it as it's told in its most sensational form but then at the end he kind of fact checks and it goes through or whatever and it's kind of a running theme in there that he calls out the fact that in all of these stories where humans are interacting with some sort of alien or higher life form that they're telling us that we need to all come together and live as one. And basically, he reads it as being very communist. And there's always some sort of like side note where he's sort of deriding that. And to be clear, I actually have no dog in this fight between communism and capitalism. I wouldn't really go to the map for either of them personally. But there is that kind of tension. And I think that it's partly because it comes back

to this idea of like, who do we want to be? And in some ways, big part of that question comes down to what do we want the mechanisms of control to be? Because with capitalism or with communism, you still end up with mechanisms of control. One values the collective. One values the individual. And in any kind of situation like that, there's winners and losers in that scenario, regardless. And something I find really interesting about capitalism is I've read some weird stuff. But I was reading like early, early anarchist economics theory from like the... Oh, see, Kelly.

You've read weird stuff. I remember. I know. Right? And everyone's jacked. But I was reading, I don't know why. I got weird during the pandemic. And I got into some like early like 1800s anarchist theory.

Once again, I don't go to the mat for anarchy either. I'm just interested in these different systems. But a suggestion in there that's really stuck with me and that I can't unsee now is that free markets and capitalism are. ultimately not the same thing. Because there exists within capitalism. So like if I was going to buy something from you, the fair price of whatever that was would be for like the materials and then your labor, right?

Like that that would be if we were living in a just society, that would be what the price of that thing was. Then I don't make money. Yeah, exactly. But then you don't make money. And so, but that difference between the just. price and then what someone actually pays for it like as a marketer i'm very aware of how that face in between is created and it's through lies it's through psychological manipulation

you know yeah it's through the spectacle so the question is what do you want that mechanism of control to be and i think that people have this idea that within capitalism you're dealing with the free market and everyone's free but it's like no i think the manipulation is more carefully concealed within capitalism and it's something that we understand less. And actually, I think, you know, once again, I don't want to, when it's not a politics show. I think it's important, though. This point you're making is important politically and I think it's also important, even

for understanding the phenomenon. Okay. Because I think right now, when we talk about capitalism versus communism, right, or something like that, we are thinking in the political categories that we're really, relevant to our grandparents. Okay. And it seems to me that the dialectic has moved on. And there's this other thing that's going on here, this corporatism thing.

Okay. And it's not capitalism. And it's not communism, right? And it operates by this spectacle. And it operates by these giant hyper objects that we call corporations and economies and things like that. And inasmuch, though, is we continue to operate in the old categories of communism versus capitalism versus fascism, right?

we miss what's actually going on and we're falling into the system of control because we're not diagnosing our real situation. So I think something like the old categories of left versus right are a spectacle, right, pal, right? They dupe us. They dupe us into thinking of those categories which is leave us right for the picking to the Morlocks who are really stalking our world, right? Whether they be the defense industry or aliens, I mean the fact that we continue to think of the world in old categories that may have worn out their usefulness leaves us looking at a spectacle that is not there anymore at least, and we're right for the picking. And I think going back to the phenomenon, and as much as you think of this thing in the ultra-terrestrial versus extraterrestrial

categories of the classic literature and UFOology, I think we're probably missing something. I think we're probably falling into a dupe, right, by someone, something, by some system by some individual, whatever, but we're falling into being duped because we are thinking about this in categories that don't fit it that are convenient to someone. And that's why I think what we have to do, and I know it's not my job as a Johnny come lately to give advice to you, aphology, but I do think what we have to do is we do have to kind of live in skepticism for a while here. We have to live in skepticism in the sense of there's something going on.

I don't know what it is. And I mistrust my own attempts to say what it is because I don't know that I'm not just falling into outmody categories and doing it. 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 usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.

Absolutely. I think that's super important. And I think it's something that we need to talk about more. We talk all the time, but I do have a few projects in the works that are more innovative. visual media format. And as I work through how I want that to work and what I want that to be, something that I'm really passionate about and that I'm absolutely going to stick to is that I don't want to create anything that uses stock imagery of UFOs or stock videos of UFOs. Unless it's like an actual recreation that's been made as faithfully to the actual situation

that occurred to that person, I'm not willing to do it. Even then, I almost insist upon there being an element of unrealism to it where you can tell that it's animated or you can tell that it's so that you're letting people know that this isn't actually because I. That's important, friend. That's important. Yeah. Right? Because I feel really strongly about this because so many of our ideas about what UFOs are and what they look like and what those experiences are like come through this really visual media. And what people don't realize is that like, okay, if you want a picture of UFO to put on your website, right?

There are all of these like stock image websites. That's where you would go or you could hire somebody to create it, but you're probably not going to do that cost thousands of dollars. So you go to these stock image websites. And there are artists out there who just create these things. And they put them up there and they know somebody's going to want it. And that becomes the image that then people have in their minds of what a UFO is. And I'm not like coming after the artist or anything.

They're just trying to make a living. But I think that with something that we understand so little, but we can't use these like arbitrary visual strenlins as a relative to speech. And because I think it misleads us deeply. Because there's a kind of, there's a cultural connotation with that image now. And to act like you operate freely of that is naive in where you're going to be victimized by in your own thinking. This is one of the reasons why going back to Jeff Kreppel in several his works, he plays with the word supernatural.

Okay. And he writes it not as one word, but as I think it's not even hyphenage, just super. natural. Because his view is, like, what we're learning as we find that the anomalous is not, in fact, anomalous, it's not that there's a nature and then somewhere else is super nature. It's turning out nature is pretty darn super, okay? But then if I go to some of my friends and talk about that in light of like very traditional religion, what are you saying? Is it natural or is it supernatural? And what I'm saying is that category seems to be breaking down or that dichotomy seems to be breaking down. And in as much as we continue to cast in those terms, we're missing it, right?

We're missing it, right? Is it nuts and bolts or is it wooey? Once again, that's a categorization now that I think is part of a false trail, whether it accidental or not. And I think in as much as we're like indulging the imagery of these false categories, we're just letting ourselves at a subconscious level still operate by them, right? Right. And it's hard to get out of them because our shared.

agreement about the nature of reality and of what words mean and our shared ontologies and all of that are absolutely necessary to maintain what we have going on in the world right now, to maintain, you know, global commerce and supply chains. We can't be disagreeing about the basic ontology of the world. This kind of global monoculture is the platform upon which all of this is built. And for us, to dismantle it, we couldn't do that and still have 8 billion people on this planet. We would take huge population losses and there would be insane chaos and a lot of people would die. And so our survival has now become enmeshed with that monoculture.

And so we can talk about all this stuff and we can point to all of it. But like I probably have an Amazon box showing up today. You know, like I don't. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. In fact, I hope I do. Just because usually I do. You know, there's a good book coming today. So I'm excited.

Right. Exactly. And the thing is, once again, we have to make a cave. We have to sort for relevance. We have to sort for our concerns, right? We have to sort for the best we can do cognitively, right? And this is why, you know, the work of some phenomenologists like Merrill Ponte really interests me in that we have to admit also that that's going to be a moving target, right?

And that we have to look at like, we're interacting with a world that, that gets a vote in this just as much as we do. And so we have to be open to our recategorization of things. As he puts, always return to the beginning, always return to the beginning, always return of the beginning, always return of the beginning. But note that he's also saying we have to return there. So it must be we go somewhere beyond the beginning. We do make commitments, right? We do stake a claim to things.

We do say this, the categories we're going to operate by. But then always admit that we're just kind of waiting to be robbed at those categories at some point. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to turn it a little bit to talk about disclosure and this whole process that we're going through within the framework of all of this and understanding that disclosure itself is a spectacle and that I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Like, what do you make all this? So I had a Twitter, I guess, well, it was Twitter at the time. Now it would be an X rant about this. I had a stream about this where so just using David Grush as our example.

that's a safe example, right? He's telling the truth or he's not telling the truth. Okay. No, by not telling the truth, I didn't say lying either. But what he says is true or it's not. If what he says is true and if we include not just the congressional testimony, but what he said in his interview with, was it Ross Colthardt, right? Then the full X-Files lore is true, right?

The whole thing. The whole thing. You know what I mean? Like the whole X-Files lore is true. Okay. If what he says is false, then, I mean, this guy really seems to be who he says he is. And if what he says is false, then either he's lying or someone's pumping him with his information, right? If he's lying, then someone thought it would be okay to let him to get away with doing that.

If someone's pumping with this information, somebody think it would be okay for that to happen. Okay, so what I'm saying is, if what Grush is saying is false, then there are people, very important people who want us to think the X-Files lords. is true. Okay. I think both of those conclusions, the X-Files lore is true or the people who run our lives want us to think the X-Files lore is true. Those are both, I think, equally distressing conclusions to come to. Right? Right. Because either way, there are Morlocks of some kind running. Either way, there are Morlocks, right? So I think post-grush, that's a, dude, that's, write that down, put that on a t-shirt, right? There are more links. Either way, Kelly, Chase is right, that there are Morlocks, right?

Either real ones, or there are people, the real Morlocks want us to think there are real Morlocks, right? And think of it because, okay, we just said this. Whether we like it or not, our very rational standing depends because of our social nature on our ability to take information from other people. And that for us means now it's going to be filtered through this governmental media thing. And there's at least somebody in there, if what Grush said is false, that wants us to believe this, right? And if that's the case, then what?

What can I trust? It seems like then I'm thrust out of the cave into the unknown, or if it's true, I'm thrust out of the cave into the unknown. Okay. And even though I don't, as you know, I have no insights behind the doors and anything, I'm just a pure talking on my rear end speculative philosopher. So I don't know. I don't know what that guy says is true.

I don't have to even have a hunch one way or another, right? I would leave it to other people to say that. But for me, as a philosopher, it doesn't matter because either. way, the epistemology of the situation has changed. It really has changed. Right. And that's what I find the significance to be with the Grush do. Yeah, I find it, it's very disorienting. And also, I mean, you know, you and I have talked before about Ballet's book, Messengers of Deception. And, you know, I've definitely been accused by some people of being overly credulous with regard to David Grush and Lou Elizando and some of these people who are coming forward. Because I do

tend to believe them more than I don't believe them. But I think that the reality of what's going on is probably somewhere between these two scenarios that we're talking about, right? That like, there is both a deep state that is carefully controlling this narrative, but that also there are these people within the intelligence community who are coming forward in a more or less righteous way because they're trying to take a principled stand on something. And it really muddies the waters. And it's interesting watching, like you were talking about the balloon situation earlier this year. I feel like that was one of the first times that we really got to see those two hands wrestling for the remote kind of in real time. Yeah.

Because we were getting all these like mixed messages about what they were. Are they anomalous? Are they not anomalous? And it was all happening so fast that I think that was a really interesting time. I love that metaphor. Like they're trying to get the remote that controls the projector for the spectacle. Yes, exactly. You've got the good stuff today.

You know, and so on the Grush thing, like once again, I'm with you, it's hard to say that that guy doesn't think he's telling the truth. Right. Okay, so that's not, but the point of it is what he's saying is what he's saying, is that true or not? And there it gets much more complicated. One of the things that's troubled me from the beginning of it, going back to the Ross Colthard interview that he had is I was really, I remember we even like texted that day. I was like, it's like the full X-Files lore. It's like everything, like everything, you know, Richard Dolan ever dreamed of was in there, right? Because you're like all the old school people and nothing against that, right?

It was in there. And the analogy I use is, let's say, theologian colleague of mine comes and tells me, he's like, look, the Vatican just claimed to have found a witness that just, it's like a first century, very reliable witness that affirms every line of the gospel of John. Like every line, the whole Christian lore in its most like systematic sense has been affirmed by this one thing or maybe just a couple things. As opposed to there's this one witness that can like make this great case for turning water into the wine, that miracle. The former one becomes much harder for me to believe because like you're asking like this one thing to bear the weight of all these unexpected events. Okay. as opposed to just, okay, there's just this one unexpected event that this one reliable witness is attesting to. I think the probabilities there come out bad in that idea we're affirming the whole lore, right?

So it would be easier for me if all that was said, just like, hey, man, turns out, Rod will happen. That would be easier for me because if I have to take it on trust, it's much less likely that someone's wrong on just that one crazy thing as opposed to the entire lore as predicted. It turns out to be true. that to me has been this kind of like epistemic puzzler about the whole thing. Yeah. And I think a lot of people feel that same way. And it comes back to something that I think that people have not really started to grapple with for the most part, especially people newly coming to this topic, which is, you know, you hear these people all the time talking about like, where's the evidence? Where's the evidence?

And as I've talked about in past episodes, the evidence is everywhere. I've got bookshelves and bookshelves of evidence. Is it proof? That I think is debatable. But the evidence is overwhelming. And so I think what people are really asking for is proof. But when I don't think that they really maybe thought through the people who are just like demanding this proof is what would constitute proof to you?

Because if David Grush had shown up at that hearing and then been like, bring them in boys and wheeled in some crash materials and a body on ice, like would you be convinced? They walk out with gray aliens and said that's not right. Yeah. Right. I don't think I'd be convinced by that. I think I, even being as deep into the site as I am and materially believing that David Grush is telling the truth about what he's been told, at that point, like, how would you know?

If someone presented you with an alien body frozen, how would you as the layperson looking at that thing, know what you were looking at? What is that? 100%. I think that's a problem. So first of all, this is another thing that you've done recently where you made that case where people say, well, there's no proof. there's no proof, okay, but there is evidence. There's a lot of evidence. And at some point,

evidence will fall short proof while still taking us to the point of belief, right? I mean, you have to believe a lot of stuff without complete proof based on evidence and a lot of very important things. But then also, what would count for like completely settling me to go from your belief to like absolute certainty, knowledge, proof kind of stuff? I don't know because in our environment, in our spectacular environment, anything can be faked. Anything can. And even if they, like, rolled out, you know, on news nation, the gray aliens, that could be faked. People could be duped into that. So I don't know. I don't know. But I do think the preponderance of the evidence is such that I think we have to say the anomalous is not really anomalous. And there's something going on. And will we get certainty with it? No, but I've long since given up

uncertainty in a lot of ways. Okay. A lot of things that have gone on in the last. three years internationally and nationally for us. There's now a huge mistrust of institutional authority, right? Like you know where we know maybe we weren't told 100% about certain things because it would be better for us to be told these things. Okay. I wonder how much now the resurgence in the popular imagination of the UFO phenomenon is just also one more consequence of that like we're not or many of us are not quite as

interested in trusting the institutional narrative anymore. But once again, though, I think people have to understand. Once you turn that corner, and I'm recommending that you should turn that corner, you have to then admit the consequences of that are deeper than just I'm buying that like Oswald didn't shoot Kennedy or something like that. You're admitting that you live in a pretty fundamentally constructed environment and you need to have an epistemically reliable environment in order to actually like get around. But you're admitting maybe I don't have that. So the ontological shock can come by way of epistemology. I think that's what we're seeing here.

Yeah. And I think that's what's so challenging about this idea and why it kind of just bounces off of people, why they're so unwilling to even consider the idea is because I think at a gut level, people know that, that like the idea of the reality of the UFO, the reality of a non-human intelligence on this planet, especially in light of everything that we've been told is it is not true. It's devastating to your ontology because, you know, the thing that I've had to go through and that you and I have talked about a lot is recognizing that this problem of how do I prove to myself, like what would be sufficient proof in this situation? You start realizing that UFOs aren't actually fundamentally different than anything else in that way. The problem of proving something is something that we don't even notice or think about because we have these institutions.

that we have been programmed to trust, basically, that have told us what is true and what is not true. And we just trust that someone much smarter than us figured that out and they've told us, and now we know, and we can trust that. And it helps us get around in our world and it's the foundation of our society and look what we can do.

You know, right. But when you start to really interrogate your own belief system, you start to recognize that there's very few things that you actually have direct knowledge. of if it's not something that you have learned through experience or doing it physically, you don't actually know. Almost everything you know is something that's been told to you by someone else. And so it creates this kind of like ontological crisis where you're like, well, what do I know?

And I think the answer that I've come to is that I know basically nothing. Right. Ludwig Vickenstein in one of his work on certainty has this really insightful point where he says, look, we don't arrive at fundamental judgments by first learning how to make a judgment and then figuring out what the fundamental ones are is we learn how to make judgments by accepting certain fundamental judgments and then like apprising things in light of those, right? Right. You don't teach your kids how to reason by telling them to do inductions about whether or not

the soda you put in the refrigerator is still there in 30 seconds. You just tell them, no, it's still there. And like, if you don't believe that you're crazy and thereby judge other things in light of that, not arrive at that. You sort of mean. And so what is it then? We need this set of certainties that we just, you know, operate by that we accept. And as we become more global citizens, the range of certainties we need are broader beyond what anybody can manage. And so what do we do?

We fall on to institutional dependency to get those certainties. And now what's happened to us, we don't really trust those institutions anymore, right? Right. where are we? We are standing on grounds with no grounds. Absolutely. And I think, you know, going back to this idea of the whole left-right thing that we're all so locked into, and that for some people, is there defining personality trait and the main thing that they think about all day? Is this left-right dichotomy that we've been forced into? And every day you're given a new set of things to be mad about on that battle-pright, right? And you see it so much in the UFO community right now because there are a lot of

people on the left side of that debate who are like very, very concerned about the dominance of sort of right wing voices and politicians within this movement. Like it's definitely a by the partisan movement, but they're all worried about like it's got to be the right ones and all of that. And I find it really strange because it actually doesn't surprise me at all that there's more people in the right wing of our government that seem to be willing to look at this because it comes down to what you're saying, which is like the right now, the left in this country is the establishment party and the right is the anti-establishment party. If this was the 90s, it would be reversed, you know?

Yeah, I mean, think of it. In the 60s, like the in the 70s, like the UFO thing was, it was an issue for the left, right? It was all wrapped up all these other like anti-authoritarian things, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. And so people get so stuck on that. And I think that we need to take a step back a little bit and try to get out of that left-right thing and understand where some of this is coming from. I think it makes a lot of sense that you're seeing more right-wing Congress people willing to take up this mantle because the government is lying to us as like a big part of their platform right now.

Yeah, I think this is a great point. I think because the UFO is the end of quote-unquote capitalism, which I think what the weird studies guys just mean by that is the end of normal. right it's the end right whoever is most vested in the spectacle and whoever is most vested in like at least changing to a new spectacle that is going to be the divide in the UFO thing not the prior politics right so if currently the quote unquote left is kind of enjoying the greatest benefits of our current spectacle that's going to be where like your anti-unufo thing is going to lie right and if the current right quote unquote right is you know

vested in undermining the current version of spectacle and creating their own probably, then if they're going to be the pro-UFO, right? Right. But I think as we get to the point where they realize that the reality of UFOs and a non-human intelligent presence on this planet, that tells us that the government and all of our institutions of higher learning and the media, like this kind of trifecta of the places that serve as our sources of truth, that all of them were wrong.

They were either wrong or they were lying. those are the right yeah yeah I thought I had a copy of it on my desk here but I don't but there's this great paper written by a couple of social scientists in the early 2000s where it's on political sovereignty

in the UFO and their claim in the paper is and I think at the time the cutting edge source on the UFO was Leslie Keene's first book it was generals and something yeah yeah they cite heavily and they make the point though is like look the evidence that Keene has in this

book is it's impeccable. They're like, it has to be looked into, but no one's looking into it because their claim is all of our power structures, whether they be religious, political, et cetera, et cetera, economic. They all have this like humanistic bias that we're the top dogs. And so the top of our hierarchy is the top of the hierarchy, period, full stop, at least short of like the will of God. And so if that gets interrupted, then we're going to have to flip the system or our current hierarchy, our current spectacle is going to be put out of whack. And when people ask, why is it that leave it aside the idea that we want to beat the Russians to reverse engineering, the laser beams or something like that? Why would the government not let this out? It's because that humanistic bias that is written into all of our current power structures. To whom would you be loyal if you knew there were Morlocks, right? It would seem there'd be this race to who could bribe the Morlocks first, not who could bribe the current President of the United States first, right? Right.

who that's a dark though right yeah and so i think that's something that we easily miss right yeah yeah and it makes you wonder if there are morlocks which as we've discussed there are it's just like what is the form that the morlocks make what's getting post grush there are morlocks one way or another you've got to say it right and so then we have to figure that the morlocks whoever they are whatever they are see what's happening and so they're going to happen put into place a plan for how they're going to hold on to control, right? And so I think it's really important to have these conversations now. What I'm so passionate about with the podcast is not getting anyone to believe anything in particular. I very strongly don't want that. And I really try,

I actually hope that when people listen to this that they don't know what my politics are, because I try that out of it entirely. I don't want that to be obvious. And if it's obvious, I'm not doing my job in a way. Because I think that the most important thing is to help people think for themselves and to see for themselves. Because the world is about to change so dramatically. And we're going to have to decide what thing we're going to become next. And whatever the Morlocks are already have an idea about that. And we're very easy to control right now. We're very easy to manipulate, especially through the media and all of that.

And so we have to just start thinking, for ourselves and deciding who it is that we want to be as a species because that's going to become fundamentally important very soon, I think. This just occurs to me now, and it dovetails with what you're saying is, okay, look at all your ancient mythologies. Their claim is there are Morlocks, man. There are Morlocks. They're trying to run us.

Look at your classic monotheistic religions. Read St. Paul. What does St. Paul say, man? There are principalities and archons out there trying to run stuff, right? You know, St. Paul's saying there's Morlocks. And I assume you're going to find that in other religious traditions with which I'm less familiar. It's not until the Enlightenment that we're told no more Morlocks, right? Everything's transparent.

We've got a democracy now. Nothing to worry about. Complete transparency. The world is boring but manageable. Go about your business. And the people who say you can't believe in Morlocks would be the one who are most interested in they're actually being Morlocks. And it's very recent history that, you know, we assume that we're running things on this planet. It's actually before modern institutions.

We didn't really assume we were running things. Like whether you were a polytheistic pagan or a monotheist, all these views had that we weren't actually the ones that were the most important things running things in this universe. It's only in the Enlightenment. And that makes me wonder, was that and a very important thing to get rid of if indeed you want to be the Morlock, right? Well, and I love that because you cube this up perfectly. because as we're sitting here, having this conversation, what I'm realizing is that, so there's a line. It's maybe two sentences that I ended up not addressing in the Sixth-Lare model paper

from Ballet and Davis because it was just getting too long and I felt like it was a side note. And this conversation has ended up being, I feel like, kind of a perfect explanation of that that I threw out and that I wanted to go back for at some point. I feel like we did it unintentionally. But that idea that they have in there is that basically it's only, started in the Enlightenment, this idea that vision, like seeing is believing, that vision is the primary mode by which we will apprehend truth. And I think that that ties into exactly what you're saying, because you can say, well, are there Morlocks? Well, no, do you see any Morlocks?

Yeah. Yeah. Show me the Morlocks. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Never mind that we've carefully constructed the categories that you can think in that to exclude the more. Morlock or to like any talk that would define you as insane. Well, then of course we don't see them. Right. Right. And I feel like this whole episode really has been about seeing and sight and what means.

Yeah, I agree. And that in some ways, yeah. I like where we've, I kind of like where we've landed. I do too. You know, look, I mean, I am on this whole thing, I'm unsettled, right? And both in the sense of there's anxiousness about it for me, but also I don't really know what to say about it. I've written manuscripts on, here's what it might be, but I'm just saying here's what it might be.

Because once again, we have to mistrust any attempt we have to make sense of it. But I think this is like, we're admitting the human condition now that we are in a very unsettled state. And we always have been. Right. Yeah. No, we haven't. I've been thinking a lot lately about because it was only about a year ago that I was in that class with Diana, which is where you and I met and where I got really obsessed with the cave.

And I thought at the time that. that I understood it. And I remember I even read Plato's Republic and talked to Diana about it and, you know, kind of gave her my thought. And she basically said like, no, go read it again. Try, you know, and like nicely in the nicest way. She's been so sweet and generous with me. But just realizing that so much of this last year and through the writing the cave series

and all of that, it's come back to that realization and that I feel like maybe it's a Dunning-Fruder effect thing. But I feel like I'm only just now beginning to understand what the cave. really is. And an idea that I struggled with early on that I know it was something that you and Diana was like the basis of your friendship and why you guys kind of vived with each other was this idea that the cave is not an allegory. Diana would say that in her class all the time that the cave is not an allegory. And I'm like, well, we're like what it is though, right? Like it is. But no, like I'm beginning to recognize that the cave is not an allegory that like we are in

the cave right now. It is a structure of human existence. Right. Right. And I think it's always important note for Plato, or at least as he has Socrates say, right? Philosophy is akin to death. His preparation for death. To be a good philosopher would be to be dead. My read on that, and this is controversial, is what he's saying is getting to that point of being outside of the cave is not an unaided human possibility.

Because we're cave dwellers. And I just love the fact that, in fact, we were once literal dwellers in. Right. I mean, so I'm sort of like an archetypical memory here, right? We are cave dwellers. And to be out of the cave would to be not be human. So, and I'm not saying like I have my own philosophical religious commitments and things like that. I'm not saying you can't have those. But I think you have to admit that those are not unscathed by the cave you begin in. And then thereby you're going to have to like say always, yeah, as best I can do. Right. Right. and who knows what from outside the cave is going to reach in here and change the game. Right. And how sometimes whatever this non-human intelligence is, whether it's Morlocks or, you know, Pleadians on their light ships, who are just here to give us free energy, but it kind of doesn't matter what it is. But the thing that's really exciting about our beginning to recognize that there is a non-human

intelligence present is that just the knowledge of that kind of becomes a thing that can, make you aware of the cave. Right. Exactly. I think that that's a really great way to put it. And if only you knew you live in a cave and you could live with that, there's a kind of like Heideggerian authenticity that's available to you now. Like you're admitting, I'm committed to these things and yet I realize this could all be off. Because I know there's stuff out there that I cannot understand and it showed up and did

things to Streber. It seems like I can't rule that out. and thereby I have to admit my whole view of things is not as well ground as I thought it was. And I have to live with that. But I think that's authentic human existence. And it doesn't mean I'm not committed. Right. Well, you know what?

I feel like we did it. I feel like we mailed this. We said the words. We did it. But thank you. Thank you so much for coming back. It's so fun to have these conversations with you, people listening. Jim and I actually have conversations like this all the time.

And it's always like the highlight of my week when I get to. And so thank you so much for coming. You've been such a big part of me grappling with these ideas. And I'm just so grateful for how generous you've been with me and with your time. And it's always wonderful to have you. That sentiment is absolutely mutual, Kelly. I appreciate you giving me a place where I can think about this stuff. A friend I can think about it with.

And also a place where I can say these ideas publicly so I can, you know, I want to be told I'm wrong. You know, I think we have to put these things out there into the hive mines so our ideas can be challenged. And this is a great place to do it. So it is always, as I said, we started an honor and a privilege to be able to come on your shows. And like I said, you know, if I have a drive someplace, like a long drive, I send Kelly a text and say, hey, you want to talk about stuff? Yeah. Weird stuff.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Jim. Yeah. Thank you. For me, like, I will have a dream about a series of things, and then that next day, those things will sort of pop up. And sometimes it's like, oh, like, I know I'm going to run into this person, so I'm dreaming about them the day before or whatever. You know, I was just flipping through my dream journal this morning. And when I opened the journal, I opened right to a page that was about Walton Goggins.

And I actually met Walton Goggins yesterday. It just felt like another weird, like, oh, cool, I need to keep dream journaling.