Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 28: James Madden [Pt. 4]: On Paranoia, The Uncanny, and Hellier

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Today we welcome James Madden back to the show. As “spooky season” draws to a close, I didn’t want to miss the chance to explore some of the darker themes that have been inspiring both Jim’s recent work, and our ongoing conversation about the nature of the UFO phenomenon—specifically the paranoia that comes from our uncanny encounters with things that lie just beyond the limits of our own personal caves. You can find Jim’s most recent musings on his substack in a piece entitled Specters of the Thinking Machine: The Uncanny Suggestion of the Non-human within the Human, which I have linked up in the episode brief. In this episode we’ll be exploring the themes of that article, as well as exploring a work that has become something of a touchstone for me in my exploration of the darker contours of the UFO phenomenon, the phenomenal docuseries, Hellier.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 NowEPISODE BRIEFFOLLOW JAMES MADDEN GET THE BOOK: Unidentified Flying HyperobjectSubstackTwitterWATCH HELLIERBECOME 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

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Caribbean Mystics. Now streaming on all podcast platforms. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we welcome James Madden back to the show. As spooky season draws to a close, I didn't want to miss the chance to explore some of the darker themes that have been inspiring

both Jim's recent work and our ongoing conversation about the nature of the UFO phenomenon. Specifically, the paranoia that comes from our uncanny encounters with things that lie just beyond the limits of our own personal caves. You can find Jim's most recent musings on his substack in a piece entitled, Spectors of the Thinking Machine, the uncanny suggestion of the non-human within the human, which I have linked up in the episode brief. In this episode, we'll be exploring the themes of that

article, as well as exploring a work that has become something of a touchstone for me in my exploration of the darker contours of the UFO phenomenon, the phenomenal docu-series Hellier. If you haven't seen Hellier, I really can't recommend enough that you do. Continuing in the tradition of John Keel's The Mothman prophecies, this genre-bending work is a fearless and unflinching immersion into the experience of encountering the phenomenon, the authenticity of which only resonates more deeply

for all the ways in which it unfolds like a fever dream. Hellier is challenging and nuanced and unself-conscious in a way that few other explorations of the intelligence behind the phenomenon managed to be. And perhaps we owe this fresh take to the fact that the team behind Hellyer, Dana and Greg Newkirk, Carl Fifer, Connor Randall and Tyler Strand, don't come from the UFO community, but from the paranormal world. And though I'd argue that this is what makes Hellier,

so good, it certainly has also made it divisive within the UFO community, which isn't surprising. The fact that UFOs seem to be, at least some of the time, technological craft, grounds the phenomenon just enough into the materialist paradigm that it allows many who study the phenomenon to contemplate the unknown without ever really letting go of the guardrails of consensus reality. And as I've argued in recent episodes on the Six-Lare model of anomalous phenomenon, and in the introduction to the Skinwalker Ranch series, uphology has been hindered in many ways by its unwillingness to grapple with the stranger and less convenient aspects of these encounters.

The paranormal community has no such squeamishness about the truly weird, and so we should perhaps be more open to their input. Regardless of where you personally land on Hellier, I think this conversation is an important one and a worthy next installment in my series of conversations with Jim, I've been pleased to see that these episodes are consistently fan favorites, because they are certainly some of the most fun episodes for me. I'm also excited to finally announce in this episode the release date for Jim's new book, Unidentified Flying Hyper Object, UFO's Philosophy, and the End of the

World. For listeners of this show, the themes of this book will be familiar. Unidentified Flying Hyperobject is a rethinking of the UFO phenomenon that challenges us to first, rethink ourselves in what is revealed to be a much larger cosmos. Diana Walsh Pesolka, author of American Cosmic and her new book out this week encounters, shared the following praise for unidentified flying hyperobject. Quote, this is the book I wish I read before I had ever considered learning about UFOs or the works of Plato for that matter. Dr. James Madden, a philosopher, does what no philosopher or author has attempted yet. To theorize the UFO as relevant and absolutely necessary for the

expansion of human science and its long-held philosophical categories and assumptions. To theorize the UFO as relevant and absolutely necessary for the expansion of human science and its long-held philosophical categories and assumptions. This isn't the first time Madden has aided and abetted my understanding of the radical and revolutionary potential, the philosophy offers for those who choose to know. I've seen his lectures on Plato and read his published works, but this book argues that the UFO is necessary now for humanity's cognitive breakthrough into a freer and more deeply meaningful life experience. Madden places some of the best thinkers on the topic like Jacques-fil-A, within the Western philosophical tradition, and explains

how their thinking expands and improves upon that tradition. Unidentified flying hyper-object makes sense of the UFO as no other past treatment has, and it will rightly go down as necessary reading for those interested in virtual reality, UFOs, and philosophy as history, but also as the contemporary means to free one's mind, end quote. I really can't tell you guys how great this book is. Unidentified Flying Hyper Object will be released on November 27th, but Kindle pre-orders are live now on Amazon. The link is in the episode description. And as a side note, I'm honored to be releasing this book as the first publication through my new publishing house on Tocalyps Press. I'll have more to share about that new venture in just a few days, so stay tuned.

For now, let's get into my conversation with the brilliant James Madden. Well, hey, Jim, welcome back to the show. I'm so excited you're here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. This is our All Hallowed's Eid edition, right? It will come out this day, but that's where we're taking it. Yeah, it's still spooky season. The veil is thin. I thought this was the perfect time for us to talk about something that you and I have talked about a lot on the phone over the last six weeks or so, which is a series that I am completely enamored with. I know you're a big fan as well, which is hellier.

And so I thought, what better time to talk about goblins and euthanauts and cryptids and all of the above than during spooky seasons. So, yeah, I was really excited to get you to watch Hellier and to get your thoughts. I kind of pestered you a little until you did. But I'd love to hear initial impressions of what Hellier was like and what you thought was exciting about it. Yeah, I found myself, you know, I wasn't able to put it down. We watched it, I think, an episode of night for consecutive nights. And I had to, like, discipline myself not to binge it, right? Because I do have to stay employed in some sense.

I was very impressed by it. Like I've never, I've always kept that, not that I've kept the paranormal at an arms leg, but that kind of paranormal documentary kind of thing. I've always been a little suspicious of it. But this was one where, not that there was anything, you know, to be critical of, but I found myself compelled by it in a way that I hadn't before, right? I think the fact that it operates primarily through synchronicity, which I think is the most accessible path into the weird.

I think that was very important for me. And it's something that I've had an experience with, you have had an experience with, synchronities, I think at some point in their life. It makes it compelling in a way, because they're not starting out with the goblins. They're starting out with the odd coincidences that seem to pop up for us.

And so it made it easier for me to not have to go into like that kind of very difficult to believe testimony. It begins with a very common experience that points to the weird. And that really is what brought me into the Elyers. Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree.

I think that there are a lot of people who struggle with it. I think because of, you know, there's definitely elements of witchcraft and the team behind it. They all have more kind of like a ghost hunting paranormal type background as opposed to a UFO background. And so I think the framing of that is a little different, whereas the consensus reality within the UFO world skews a little more. nuts and bolts. I think for the people who are in that place, it can be a little challenging to

cross over to the spooky side. But there really has been a convergence over the last few years between people recognizing that the structure and the content of anomalous experiences that we've tended to relegate into these different categories, whether it's epology and the paranormal and cryptids and all of that and never the two shall meet. Suddenly we're realizing that things like UFO encounters and Bigfoot encounters and fairy encounters and ghost encounters often start with a wady crying in the woods. And so I think that's interesting. And the whole thing, the whole series is almost this sort of ode to John Keel. Yes. And not how much we're about spoiling, but it's all tied up with the moth man and some of Keel's other work. And

what is hellier in a lot of ways? I see it as it's sort of a retelling of what, John Keel was telling us in the 60s and 70s, right? That there's a unified, disunified story of the weird going on here, and the UFO is one aspect of it, right? And so that was one of the things, too, is it really got me, you know, I had always kind of been more of a Trojan horse, John Keel guy, than a moth man. And it made me go back and me look at that stuff again and tell you more seriously. Yeah, actually, I think that's what finally got you to watch it.

As I told you, it was like a modern day mocked me and process. I think of the Mockman had been the sort of missing link for me in a lot of this stuff too, so that moved me. And, you know, there was early on, I can't remember which episode it was. And I'm sorry I don't have notes on that, but they, I think it's after they've made

the initial trip to Hellyer, they notice how you have this like broad a cave network throughout the Appalachian country and into the Midwest. And there's talk about how these, I found this fascinating me, is that you have these stories in all these little mining towns about some people call them goblins, some people called them aliens, some people called them fairies.

But when they sit down and they start to look at how the kids drew them and stuff like that, there's a kind of similarity among all the stories. But at the time, no one was connecting the dots, right? Because these towns weren't communicating, right? I mean, it wasn't an internet. that television wasn't worried about what was going on in Appalachia and these places and all that. And so that no one had connected the dots. I thought that was a very important lesson for those of us who want to take a lot of these sorts of phenomena seriously,

is that we can't expect that the conditions that are here for us in terms of dissemination information are available all the time or always have been available. Secondly, then I found out, this is one of the things that really pulled me into it is, so you have this phenomenon where people are seeing, let's just call it what they call them, and the television series Goblins popping up in all these little towns. You could explain that because there are really little green creatures running around in the minds. It could be a literal, straightforward interpretation of it.

There could be someone going around putting all these people on. There could be a literal, you know, sort of put on version of it. There also could be something going on in a kind of collective unconscious or a collective mind, right, that all these people in similar socioeconomic circumstances are going through to get and it's having this sort of interaction with human nature and bringing out these kinds of fears, therefore manifested in these kinds of perceived phenomena. And then, and of course, we can even divide that into like, is that because it's all just in their heads or that things that are in our heads actually become real?

There's like, you know, something that young entertains, right? What I found was beautiful about the television series is all those options throughout the whole thing never got resolved from it. Like, it seemed like those were all live possibilities in the end. It could be like a literal paranormal realism. It could be a literal, you know, paranormal as put on. It could be literal. Our collective unconscious makes things real.

It could be simply no. It makes us think we see things that never got resolved from me in watching the show. And I think that is one of the strengths in the show is they don't weigh in. They just give you, here's what we went through. And they entertain all this hypothesis in the end, none of which is overwhelmingly verified. And you end up just saying those people went through something very good. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's what I like so much about the show. And what I'm so impressed with is that they don't come from the UFO world. And yet in terms of a piece of art, really, that speaks to what it's like to encounter the phenomenon writ large. I don't think anyone's done a better job. And I love all the things that you just said about, you know, if you explore all these different options without it ever resolving into one that feels totally satisfying.

And it also does this other wonderful thing that I think happens when you encounter the phenomenon, which is that there's always this suggestion that something's being kind of like orchestrated at a higher level that you can't quite get to. Because like the point you made with the goblins, you know, them being seen in all of these different mining towns and there was no real way for anyone to connect the dots at the time and that sort of thing. Going back to Keel, because I've just been rereading Operation Trojan horse for some research I'm doing, he talks about how so many of the flaps that have. happened in like 50s and 60s would happen on the same night, but in like non-adjacent state. You know, like this, it seemed to pay attention to. So if you had one in Ohio, you wouldn't have one in Pennsylvania because there are some regional newspapers that might report across those borders. So if there's one in Ohio, the next one over might be in Arkansas and in Iowa. And it would happen in multiple states at once, but never next to each other. So with the news reporting,

at the time, there was no way to connect those dots. And so you have this hint of something that's still operating at a level above us that understands how we do things, but we don't understand how it does things. Yeah. And again, and this is my own narcissism, because this is one of the things that really compelled me

is that issue comes up explicitly in the film in some ways or in the series. And it fits a lot of how I like to think about the phenomenon as a hyperoptic, okay? Because at a certain point, I think it's Alan Green field, right, proposes to them that you are being put through a ritual. There's initiation ritual going on and you are unknown characters in it. Okay. And so what do you have there? You have a higher level intelligence that is operating through these lower level intelligences unbeknownst to them.

Like they are being moved around as if they are parts in a kind of machine or cells in an organism under the control of a much broader perspective. So they're in a rich, that they're not necessarily performing, right? There's something bigger than that that's performing the ritual. And I think I found that very interesting because it fits how I think about a lot of stuff. But also, this is where I think there was a limitation in how the hell you're, or the weird HQ people thought about this is, it seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there's an assumption that if there's initiation ritual going on,

they are the objects of the ritual. They are the ones being initiated. And in the end, you get the same. very great spoiler final episode where they're performing a ritual in a cave and they have these objects that they're using to perform the ritual they haven't considered though that in the bigger ritual that they believe they're taking a part in their sub ritual that they might be more like the ritual objects and not the subjects that are like being initiated through the process do you get my point right that it might be that their role on this wasn't to be the person

initiated into something new, their role in it was much more like, I'm, you know, like the wine being poured out. I'm the herbs that are being burnt or something like that. And so I think a kind of humanism creeps into it, that they assume rituals being put on for our human benefit. When in fact, maybe it is, maybe it's that the ritual is being put on for someone else's benefit on a much grander scale than we are. And here we are doing our rituals that are amounting to objects in higher order rituals so that we're sort of, we're in between, we're in the middle, but the middle isn't the point of the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, and when you sent me that idea and we talked about it, that really pulled me over because it struck me as being very, I mean, I don't know that I can say

that it's true for this situation, right? Like, how could anyone say? But it rang very true to what my experience of the phenomenon has been, you know, even in the way that like, our, friendship has unfolded or various other people that I collaborated with in this space, I sometimes feel like I'm just being moved around in ways that don't totally conform to my will and where I feel like I'm not the point, where there's something bigger that I'm not seeing. And I think a lot of people, when they're experiencing a string of really profound synchronicities or that sort of thing, that sort of feeling that you're being jerked around is something that really emerges. And you can see in the sort of paranoia that develops in the team in various

people at various times throughout the show. Like, that's a paranoia that resonates very true for me. I feel like you and I talk a lot about paranoia because both of us have experienced that at various times and various ways throughout our own encounter with the phenomenon. Yeah. You know, and I thought while I was listening to your episode with Sharon, I remember you guys took it up explicitly is it could be that you experience a sicknessity that does guide you right that is clearly you know beats chance but yet you might not be the point of it like it might be your behavior needs to be guided not for your sake but for the sake of this larger whole that you're part of right and i think that that question the question in hellier always remains at a little is like

what are they trying to make us do assuming that the end is us right not what are they trying to make us do to what end that might completely transcend us right and maybe I'm being unfair to the people on the show but that seems to be though a question that we don't very quickly ask right there is always a sneaking humanism that we assume if something's guiding us it's for our sake that we're being guided not it something above us or even below us on the hierarchy right if there is irocy there right well and there does seem to be some kind of an implied hierarchy And I think that they do a really masterful job, whether it was intentional or just sort of how it unfolded for them. And I think it was probably a combination of both.

But in laying out the possibilities for what that next rung up the ladder that's controlling things might be. I mean, Alan Greenfield talks about the third order, which seems to be something kind of akin to the ascended masters or something along those lines. There's this almost like twin peaks-esque idea of almost like some combination of, ultra-terrestrials and cults that culminate in these small kind of mining towns. There's an idea of euphonots who might be more human than we might expect them to be. They use the word euphonauts a lot, which I like because it kind of de-centers the UFO and asks the bigger question. We're so obsessed with the tech.

It's in the UFO community that I like the term euphonauts because it kind of de-centers the tech and asks the bigger question about who made it. And it comes back to the conversation that we had in our last chat about the Morlocks. And, you know, if there are Morlocks, well, we find that there are Morlocks. And so who are they? And what are they? And I think they do a really great job. And a more nuanced job, I think, than is usually done in the UFO community in terms of diving into the spookier and honestly, probably the more probable answers to that question.

Yeah. I mean, in the series, they have clearly. straight into someone else's territory and they are not running things anymore, right? They're getting this information that is proposing courses of action to them. They're almost irresistible, right? But they have to keep going. They have to keep looking. They're almost so they're being moved.

They're being moved around, right? And there's only the question of like, who is moving them into what end, right? And okay, this brings up something else we've talked about recently is, you know, if you go to any older American city, right? I recently spent a couple of days. I live in a small town, like I spent a couple days in a big American city. recently. It is amazing how much very, very odd, I mean, that's wrong word, but just extraordinary esoteric occult-like art and architecture you see in every single major American

city, right? Like everywhere you know, there's some sort of winged lion at the head of something or some gargoyles and like architecture clearly is trying to tell us something and in a lot of it tents more towards neo-pagan ideas than it does to like Judeo-Christian ideas. is and things like that. And you think, well, that's all there for a reason, right? I mean, why do we put art in our environment? Why do we put architecture or an environment? It is to guide us. Then you have to start asking, so who is really guiding us, right? Who really is making these decisions into what end, right? And I think what in Hellyer is, you know, what that looks like maybe in the backwoods, right? But I think you can go to any major American city

and see what it looks like there, too. And it does seem that we are in an environment that is, like, seeking to guide us. And for the reason, that are probably not fully explicit to us. It's done at this like subconscious level or at the level of synchronous or something like that. And it does raise for me sort of like once again, like we talked to a lot, who are the Morlocks? And there are a lot of attribution you can give to that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's such an incredible point because it gets really to the heart of that question of the Morlocks because all of these great American cities, like I live, you know, right near Cleveland, Ohio and like so many cities in this kind of part of the world, it was built by the Titans of Industry at that time period. And so it's a lot of like art deco buildings and imagery and that sort of thing, all of which is very occult, by the way. Yeah. You know what I mean? And that's what you see everywhere. And it makes me think, you know, somebody whose work I really admire is Mitch Horowitz, who is one of the greatest modern writers of the occult. And he points a lot to, you know, he's written books about, I think there's one called Occult America that I

have about just sort of occult history because we tend to think of ourselves as being this Christian nation. And yet all of our architecture, our money, all of these things seem to be very tied to the occult. And then you look at the elite people, the moneymakers, the titans of industry, the people who built the cities, that sort of thing. And they seem to be telegraphing in every direction that they are somehow paying like homage at the very least to the occult. You know, Mitch has done some really interesting work talking about, and I've been reading a lot of Napoleon Hill, who was this kind of early mid-century guy who, one of his most well-known books is called Think and Grow Rich, and it's just based on like, and I mean, it's very occult, right? Like, it's about Andrew Carnegie

and all these Titans of Industry and how they made their money and how you could do it too. But all of the whole process that he lays out inside of that is, it's a cult protocols, all of it. And, And I just find it fascinating, you know, bringing that back to the idea of the Morlocks, that there is this very clear tie between the occult, the elite, and the sort of hidden history of our country that we just don't talk about. So somebody made decisions about all this architecture. Somebody made decisions about all this Art Deco stuff, right? But they didn't consult you and me about that.

So somebody, when someone is seeking to form our environment for some reason, and it's done at this, like, this is what esoteric means, right? It's what I call it means. It's done at a level that's not available to the vast majority of us, right? So I think it's hard to reason that when you just look at this art that doesn't necessarily fit, we build our cities around. It doesn't necessarily fit the official sort of surface religious story of the country, right? That seems to me that's just what esoteric means, right? And that's just what I call it means. And you have to ask, why is that there? Right. I, uh, last night was watching the piece of high art. the film Ghostbusters, the original 1984.

That is high art. But what, I mean, it's interesting, that's a film. Like, there's, it's kind of saying something out loud, right? Is you've got a building in the middle of New York that was constructed as a giant cult antenna, right, to communicate with these, like, spooky ancient Mesopotamian gods and stuff like that, right? But you can see, even in, like, popular comedy movies, there's this suggestion of this, built into our very urban planning, right?

Are these occulting influences? Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. And I think they do a really wonderful job in the series of kind of unpacking all of that without getting too on the nose with anything. It seems as though things just sort of unravel, but it does ask these bigger questions about who is running things.

And when you have a really powerful synchronous city, I'll use the example of when they're on the road and there's literally a tree. blocking their path and find this blue star balloon tied to this when they get out to move the tree and that ties back to another synchronicity with a balloon. And then later they find out that has to do with a ritual that Crowley did called the Star Sapphire. That's what's called. But there's so many moments like that where they're just incredulous because there's this synchronicity that seems so pointed and so personal and sometimes even like funny in a way because it's so on the nose. And when you experience something like that, it's really hard not to, you stop feeling like,

oh, maybe this is just some projection or this is just my own subconscious sorting out what I should do next. And you start looking around and being like, what is the nature of my reality that something like this level of orchestration is even possible? And I feel like that can make you, it can make you paranoid. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. Right. Or I think, I mean, I think in general, the idea that there could be other forces working

above me or below me to influence me is like the very definition of paranoia, right? I mean, that's right, that they're out to get me one way or another. And actually, this is something we've talked about quite a bit lately, and I've been thinking writing about it, is the idea that there are things that compose me, like other organisms that compose me, and that there are non-living things that compose me. right, that get a vote in what I do, that get a vote and what I do and think and say in ways that I'm not entirely aware of, like, just to admit that there isn't unconscious, right? And it's partly constituted by these other things that compose me. The way Tim Morton puts it is there's a

sense in which I'm constantly being haunted from within, right? There are non-human entities that are within me, but they're like holes in me because they're non-human. And they get a vote in my activities in ways that I may not be able understand. I certainly don't understand what's going on in my gut biome while I'm speaking to you, but that's getting a vote in what I'm saying, right, in my cognitions. It is to be haunted, right? It's to be haunted in a way by like the very things that compose us. I think we can make the same case for like also by like the systematic things that we belong to.

Right, right? And so what I'm getting at there is once you realize that we're like our common sense Goldilocks ontology way of looking at things, the middle-sized dried goods is itself constituted by things below it and serves a role in things above it, well, then there is a kind of paranoia that comes with that because there's always something else operating in this sort of paranormal space, in this super natural space, right, that is not you, but somehow intimate to you and gets a vote in what's going on. And once you realize that, you're going to start asking questions, like, who's running this?

Who's running me? Who's running all these other things? And I think that is in a way paranoid. Right. And I think what's so hard about delving into these realms and like one of the real pitfalls and stumbling blocks of it is that at a certain point, that paranoia is a result of the recognition of the actual structure of reality. Yes. And so in learning how to navigate that space where the paranoia is probably warranted, but you also like, need to just go about your day and not completely lose your marbles. I think that's something

that Hellier, I think, does a good job of grappling with or at least showing what that looks like because various members of the team get really paranoid at certain points and other members of the team have to reel them back in. Conner's a struggle, doesn't he? Conner kind of struggles the most, right? Yeah. And Greg, I think does too. I think he gets really kind of grounded by Dana in some ways. And like, but they all kind of have that moment, you know, and I think that happens. I've had those moments many times on this tree. I think to live in an enchanted world is going to carry with a certain kind of anxiety or paranoia.

Right. Like as soon as you admit that there is a broader intelligibility or a broader consciousness, right? As soon as you admit that there's more going on than fits our ordinary common sense and scientific categories, I think inevitably there is a kind of paranoia that comes with that because the most apparent thing before you is maybe not the final story. I think this is kind of the attraction of materialism in a lot of ways is that it disenchance the world so that there's no need to be paranoid.

Like we kind of know what's going on more or less, right? It's all dumb, right? nothing's acting. Whereas once you turn this corner towards a more enchanted new the world, now there's all sorts of agency and what are the limits to it? Where is it? And so how do you ever really know what's going on when there could be levels of personal agency that are not aware of always operating the background? Right. So I think inevitably to live in an enchanted world is to risk a kind of paranoia. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I follow all of them on Twitter and or X or whenever we're calling it these days.

I really appreciate Dana's posts on this sort of stuff a lot. Like she posts often about how to develop your discernment and your kind of psychic abilities, if you want to call it that. But that the way that you can get better over time, that kind of feeling into these various weird spaces in a way that can help you stay grounded and not lose your bearings. Because navigating that paranoid space, I think really is a skill that can be developed, but I don't think it comes naturally. And I think early on is when people are the most vulnerable.

But if you can learn to regulate a little bit in those spaces, there is a way to kind to navigate through them without completely losing your marbles. But you have to work at it and you have to stay aware. Yeah, I think one of the interesting is I think Connor's a Catholic, right? I think he brings that up. But I think he first he said faith, right? And I think also, I think he's at one point given people medals, like like whole Catholic holy medals.

Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, like, I see this as a Roman Catholic, right? We're pretty ontologically promiscuous. We live in a very enchanted world. And, you know, there's a kind of paranoia that comes from like the spiritual warfare that Catholics think is going on. But there are mechanisms have been developed for dealing with that to give us an agency or It's a sense of agency in dealing with it.

And similar to, like, what is Dana's practice? It's a way of getting a sense of agency to deal with the paranoia of admitting that you live in a world where spiritual warfare might be a thing, right? Or at the very least that we're not the top dog guiding intelligence, not just on the cosmos of the whole, but maybe even in this room, right? And you think that idea of a spiritual practice that comes as a kind of a paranoia buffer is important. I think you do see it in Connor there in his Catholicism. Yeah. And like you said, with Dana as well, and I think it's so cool to see what both of those different practices look like, literally in practice. In practice, yeah. And getting warm nicely. I like that. Right. And not having an issue with each other, you know, like they're good friends. And they seem to deeply respect each other's different worldview and different approach. And I think that's really valuable. But it is just this reminder that, you know, going back to a lot of kind of Diana Pesalka's work, that. this kind of like sterilized version of religion that most people in the United States are kind of

initiated into or indoctrinated into a religion is this sort of like dry, dead thing, that it's really has always been a response to, and our attempt to grapple with the kind of numinous and weird and the things that we sense are bigger than us. I think you can go so far as to deal with enchantment by disenchanting. I think that's what like fundamentalist religion does, is it actually disenchance the way, right? Whereas then it's not a way of dealing with the enchantment then. And I think, I think other ways of being religious allow for the enchantment to happen, like let in a little bit of paranoia to keep the enchantment. Right.

Right. Absolutely. And I think speaking of like weird synchronicities and paranoia and all of that, I feel like you and I've had a lot of kind of just like weird synchronicities. And it happens a lot when I start working with people on certain things. I feel like once you get aligned in that way, it's almost like you're on the same guitar string that gets plucked. You're literally on the same vibe. And we had a weird experience earlier this month that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of this kind of conversation around paranoia and who's running things where. So you had texted me one night about something that you were working on and reading about and there was a word in there.

And I didn't know the word. And I was tired and I was like, well, I'm going to go to bed. And tomorrow I'm going to look this word up and get back to gym. And I went to sleep. And I had this really weird dream early in the morning that I immediately woke up and felt like I needed to write down, which basically that's not something I ever do. And my first thought was, I need to tell this to Jim. And like, you and I talk all the time, but I don't feel compelled to tell you about my dreams, like, usually. But it was very particular that I needed to tell you about this dream.

So I wrote it down and I sent it to you. And then after I sent it to you, I went and looked up the word that I didn't know in your text. And I realized that like the dream that I had sent you was like little vignettes almost kind of like explicating that exact word and what it meant in different ways. And which is even funnier because it happened in a dream and it was like a Freudian word. It's a Freudian word. And I was already having proveniscities about this before that. Right. So I had read an essay last summer by Freud, like in the English translation called The Uncanny. And when you get into the essay, Freud is sort of doing some etymological work on the German word in Heinlech, which gets translated in English as uncanny. Sometimes it's translated as alienation too. And I was already familiar with that very rich German word because it's all over Heidegger. And he talks about being homeless in the world, being alienated in the world. So already there's kind of not really a seriously, but a resonance, okay?

Read that essay this summer and then got back to it this fall until I wanted to write something about it for my substack. And as soon as I started doing that, I'm noticing Unheimlich is showing up in like everything I'm reading. Like I'm reading an essay by William James. And he leaves it untranslated, right? I mean, it just keeps coming up this word in Heinlech. It's a weird word to come up, although not entirely extraordinary because I am a philosophy

professor and it's a philosophy term, but it's coming up. And I just out of the blue say, hey, California. I'm having some weird coincidences around the word unheimlich because you were talking about coincidences that week in your show. And then you have this dream and it's, it is right out of Freud's exposition of Eunheimlich in his essay, right? He associates the experience with repetitive behaviors, right? He associates the experience with suggestions of mortality and he associates the experience

with suggestions that underlying everything. We might just be like machines, right? And your dream, am I right, Kelly, pretty much hit all three of those categories. Yeah. Right. And how does that happen? Like, how does that happen? Because that was my dream.

Yeah. And another incredible thing is in the essay is Freud wants to account for the synchronicity experience in terms of the underlying psychological mechanism he sees as behind the experience of the uncanny. So we had an experience, we had synchronicities about synchronicity. You see me, like, it operated this strange second level thing, right? That's cool. So I went ahead and changed the essay then, right?

Yes, and I've got that linked up in the episode description, so people can check that out. And so that's a case where just between you and me, you start working in this with this kind of material, the space, these things do seem to come up. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I'd love to unpack that a little bit more in terms of what the uncanny is. is and what Freud? What did he say about that exactly? And what does that look like?

So for Freud, the uncanny unheimlish is, it's a species of the genus frightening. So something's frightened us. Okay. And a subset of that is the uncanny. And he notes something weird about the German etymology of unheimlish. So it can mean unhomely in the sense of that which is unfamiliar and like kind of displacingly unfamiliar, but it can also mean familiar. It's like the history of the word is really almost contradictory.

So it can mean homely and it can mean unhomely. And what Freud does with that is he says, well, it seems like what the uncanny is is it's what makes you say the family secret aloud. Okay, like in his, you know, every family's got its things it doesn't talk about. But those are kind of the best known things, but we choose not to talk about that. Like it's there all along, but you don't bring it up at Thanksgiving, right? You don't talk about Uncle Roy's drinking at Thanksgiving. So you've got this family secret about what Uncle Roy was really up to, right?

But we don't talk about it, although it's well-known. It's secreted because it's well-known. And what the uncanny is is the revelation of the official secret coming out. okay and it's got that family that familial that genetic implication to it so it's always some secret about our origins about where we really come from okay and for Freud it seems to operate at the level of human individual and like the human species so he thinks what we find really horrific in because he's writing an essay about horror literature right about gothic literature what we find really horrific are those things that kind of say the quiet part aloud about what

real human origins are, right? That we are just mortal beings that are one step from death, right? That we are ourselves below the skin subject to all sorts of mania and obsession and maybe we're crazy too, right? Okay. That's why it says we find stories about madmen, so compelling but horrified. That below the surface that we are just mechanical machines, no different from, an animated doll or something like that. Like, think of all the horror. franchises that are built around animated dolls, right? And he thinks what goes on in this kind of uncanny experience is that we find horror frightening because it's saying the official family secrets of the human race allowed, right, over the dinner table. Right. And you can see something

like, like, why is something like hellier uncanny, right? Because there's this really, really displacing thing going on in the background and what's going on. It's. being bubbled up, right? It's showing itself in ways that, like, we have to admit the family secrets, right? Why is, like, encountering esoteric art in the middle of the city uncanny to us, right? Because it's saying the family secret aloud. Yeah. Yeah. No, that really strikes me as true. And it, what I like so much about, you know, we keep coming back to with Hellier and we talked about how they pursue a lot of different possibilities to what, like, kind of that secret is, but it never fully resolves itself.

And yet, not just limiting it to Hellier, but to the euphological landscape in general, the shape of the secret is always the same. Like it has different names and it has different lore attached to it. But regardless of what you're talking about, all of the lore comes back to really basic ideas that come down to our origins and our connection to this. thing, whatever it is, to the phenomenon, to the fact that we aren't really running things,

that they just kind of let us think we are, but that we aren't actually. It's those same basic ideas. And in some ways that we are being used in a way that we don't understand and that we probably wouldn't enjoy if we knew. We're like dolls. Or we're tools and ritual. Yeah, exactly. Right. And that, I don't do this in the essay, but that's my kind of take on Hellier is it horrifies and it fascinates because it's bubbling to the surface our real place in things that were like dolls, we're tools being used in a ritual. Yeah. Right. And kind of whether it's like the reptilians or it's goblins or it's some aliens coming from another planet or it's the Ananaki, whoever like insert the answer here. Those are all just different, just different

gothic tropes about the same basic human self-revelation. Right. Right. Whether our trope is the alien, whether our trope is the goblin, whether it's the Anaki, right? They're all showing us, look, guys, you're not running the show, your tools, you know, your objects in a broader, and maybe a beautiful ritual, but in some broader ritual, right? There's a, is it encounters the Netflix documentary series that came out in the last month?

at the end of the second episode, this very, very brilliant person, what I think was one of the aerial school kids says, what's important for all of this is not what we find out about what the phenomena is, but what the phenomena tells us about ourselves, right? And then what I won't spoil, but like what the cinematography does with that at that moment is brilliant. But the thing is, yeah, there's a self-revelation of our place in things that comes with the phenomena. And that seems to be maybe the important message, not whether or not there are green men in the caves, right? It's the fact that we can be moved around with the promise of

green men in caves tells us about who really runs the world. Yeah, exactly. And that is uncanny. Right. It is. It's very uncanny. And I think that to me, I think the show's brilliant. And obviously, as with anything, there are people who are critics of it and don't enjoy it. But I also feel like people who get too caught up into the particular methods that they use or whatever, or even asking themselves, is this show itself a put on? Like, are they pretending all of this in some way? I feel like it really misses the point because to me what's so compelling about it and what makes it like you were talking about so bingeable is that it follows that structure of that revelation where you feel like, You're almost there. You're almost there. Surely the answer is just around the next corner.

These things couldn't be aligning so well in this way if there wasn't going to be some big payoff. And you never get there. And that in of itself is to me that what the experience of encountering the phenomenon is like. And I enjoy so much, you know, in the last episode when they're doing this ritual and they really feel like this was the thing they were supposed to do and nothing is happening. It's like getting them nowhere. And Tyler has this moment where he's just like, we have to make this better. The point of this is that we have to overcome this. Like we have to move past our despair and, you know, feeling that we've wasted all of this time and recognize that the act of doing this, of going out into the woods with your friends,

of following this wild hair, of asking big questions is in and of it. self, a valuable endeavor, regardless of the fact that you're probably only ever going to be able to approach the truth, kind of like asymptotically. Like you're never going to get there. Yeah. As an aside, I remember watching that. And I said to my wife, like, because he was in, Tyler was in college at the time. I was like, man, I went Tyler in class, right? I wouldn't come or take my classes, right? It would be fun. This is the important thing I get from Hellyer. Okay, it'll fit with what we said this. We get moved all over Appalachia in the Midwest.

We go through 15 episodes of being dragged around in the Midwest. We go through all these different, you know, maybe it's really goblins. Maybe it's UFOs. Maybe it's human trafficking cult, right? Maybe. And nothing's ruled in. Nothing's ruled out. Okay.

And we don't ever get to it. We don't ever get the answer. We don't find out which of the tropes is the true one. Is it aliens? Is it the, you know, the cult? What is it? And I think you realize the point is it wasn't to find out about which of those tropes is the true one. Because those are all just our Goldilocks ontology ways of making sense of things that probably

have little to do with how things are on themselves, right? The point was the revelation about us. I think that's where Tyler gets to them. The point is what is our place in things? Like we aren't running things. We are playing out in someone else's ritual from above or below. And I think the very, the frustrating thing about it should actually be the most satisfying thing about it, because that's with a real revelation of what we have to learn from, how he is. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's people out there doing amazing work in this field, and this is not to denigrate any of that. But, like, I personally, I'm not a journalist on the case.

You know what I mean? I'm not doing any of this to get at the big answer. And there's sometimes, you know, I'll get emails from people who are like, you didn't push that person hard enough or you should have asked the harder question. And I'm like, I'm not really here to do that. I want to ask bigger questions about the structure and nature. of reality and of consciousness and of our place and things, all of which I think we get at in a better way and in a more clean way by approaching it

intellectually, you know, I don't want to have any classified information personally. Oh, no. And I think that, yeah, no, and I had over the summer, I spent a few days with a few people in the community at somebody's house just saying all, yeah, staying up all night, talking about all the things we don't get to talk about in our normal existence. And that was a point that I made a few times and that I think it is really, as I was making the point, I was kind of making it to myself as well. And it's something that's become really part of my ethos in all of this, which is that I don't think that getting closer to the

truth of the phenomenon helps you see it any more clearly. I think that there is an event horizon with the phenomenon after which when you go over that event horizon, Suddenly you're in the upside down. Suddenly you're in Bizarro world. You're Alice in Wonderland. And so it's kind of become my goal to edge as close to that event horizon as I can. Because I think there's a point that you can cross over it where you're in the fun house and there's no way to find your way out anymore.

You know, and I know. So the final ritual in the last episode of hell you're out. There's part of it, I guess, I could see someone look at it and say it's kind of cringe because they go through it and then quote, nothing happens, right? But I don't get a sense that like the Leducerks and their band of, you know, Mary pranksters were thinking that like literally the God Pan was going to manifest before them like in a movie or something like that. I think that the point is they got to bring some closure to this thing, both as a piece of work and in their lives. They have to do something to bring closure to it. What do you?

We ritualized that. They had to bring closure to it somehow. And I never saw them thinking, oh, they were going to like make a ghost appear or a, you know. deity appear by doing this. It was a way of bringing some kind of closure to it. And I think it was a good non-answer answer, right? Whatever, whether it's Pan or the Mothman or, you know, some long dead saint, what have you, they don't dance for you, right? They don't know. Right. You know what I mean? The idea that like, we're in their ritual and then we're going to like use a ritual to bring them about. That's like, once again, really bad humanism, right? And I don't see them indulging that in the

film, right? Another point I'll make is if the new clerks came out and said, we made this whole thing up. This was like just carefully staged, you know, we sent the emails to ourselves, all this stuff. It wouldn't change the film for me as a piece of art and as making the point that I would want made, right, about what a real revelation of the human place of things is. And so I think it was the weird studies guys had an episode. I don't think it was on hellier this one. It was on the unbinding. Yeah, I know they've done Hellier too, but I think this came up in the binding when they talked about seeing the story from the inside or seeing the story from the outside, right? And we can ask outside questions about anything we want to, right? But at some point, I think you have to let yourself just be in the story. Not because you're going to be a schmo and be convinced by something you shouldn't be convinced by, but there might be a structure of experience that's not going to be revealed to you unless you just kind of let the story have its way for a while and be inside of it, right? And I think this is something that the weird studies guys get so well is that it could be. And this goes back to Emanuel Comp, that the really fundamental way to interpret reality that

gets us to it, the heart of it, the closest is actually aesthetic, right? It's aesthetic. If they're good story and good stories do have something to tell us about how things are, right, and how we are and what we really are. So I find myself with Hellyer, I don't care if they made it up or not. I think it's a very good piece of uncanny literature or uncanny reportage, which one Fair enough. I don't think they may know. It doesn't matter because either way, I think it does reveal the fundamental tension

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You know, something that I referenced in the last episode about Skinner, Walker Ranch, but I think really applies here, is in Operation Trojan Horse to bring it back to Kiel. He talks about how he sees the biggest blunder of the UFO community in general and investigations of UFOs being the ways in which people end up hyper-focusing on whether or not the people reporting the experience are credible or if they really saw what they think they saw. And there's really no way to get at that. Like, there's no way for, you know, for me to prove that you had some experience that I wasn't there for, especially something that leaves behind so little evidence and so little residue in general. And we spend all this time then

interrogating the intellect and the character and the integrity of the person who had the experience instead of looking at the experience itself. And I think that that ends up being a real waste of our time, which isn't to say that people don't lie or there aren't hoaxes, but the useful or utility of entering into that experience and asking what it means kind of transcends these larger questions about like, is this person lying or telling the truth in some ways. Yeah, so it's, this is how I would put, I think it's the same point is, you and I find hell you're really compelling. Whether it's true or false, what does it say about us and what we really worry about and

what we really think that we take that show to be so compelling, right? there's something implicit about our view of reality that is revealed by the fact that we are unnerved by Hellyer. Yeah. Once again, it's sort of self-alish that comes there. Like it's on the, that something's uncanny tells you what your family secrets are, right? Right. And I think the fact that Hellier really does strike a court with a lot of people tells us

something we're all trying to keep in the basement, which is maybe something else is running things. If it doesn't resonate, then it's not. for you, you know? And I think when you make something, it's really hard to make something that everyone likes and also make it compelling. For something to be truly compelling, there needs to be something personal and resonant about it that for some people to love it that much, there's going to have to be even more people who are like, this is stupid. Yeah. Exactly. Or I'm not saying like you can make a story true just by making it compelling or something like that. What I am saying, though, is that a story is compelling tells us a truth about us. And so even if Hellyer were a

complete fabrication, I do think I learned something about what may be chained in my basement, right? How can you know that way? Right. And I think that's true of any piece of art, though, that you find compelling, right? I think the question is not always to ask, is it true, right? But why is it so attractive to us? Although, and then what's got, I have no reason to think that Hellyer didn't go down the way they've depicted it to go down. There's also another thing that's interesting that's going on there is that I also tend to believe that it happened more or less as portrayed.

But at the same time, in any kind of a documentary or reality television kind of a situation, very, very rarely are you getting things in real time? I'm sure that there are elements of that show that were shot in real time as they were together. But like that team isn't together all the time. Part of it is like, we were filming this day, you know? And I'm sure that there's stuff that they save

for that time when they film and there's stuff that they have to recreate because it happened and they didn't get it on film. And I think that's something about visual media that, you know, we're right to be somewhat skeptical about but you kind of lose the forest for the trees if you get too obsessed with all those little details. It's kind of not the point.

Yeah. And look, it is a TV show, right? So there's a documentary filmmaker, Aero Morris, who is, except for the New Kirk's, my favorite, document maker. And he wrote a book called, I forget if it's believing a scene or seen as believing. And it's basically the book is about why he thinks that photography, and I think he would include documentary film as a species of photography, is the most manipulative artistic genre. because it's the one that we tend to trust the most, right? It most closely reproduces visual experience for us. When you look at a painting, it's easier to say, yeah, but that's just a painting.

You look at a photograph, it's easy to lose that to confuse the photographs with reality. And Morris's point is like anytime you look at a published photograph, that's one of many hundreds that person probably snapped that day. And they chose the one that makes the point that they want made, right? And so he's saying, well, that's no less packaging of the real than any other art. So I'll say this Hellier is packaged, like any visual art and it is packaged so as to compel. Okay. It doesn't mean it has to be mistrusted. And I think, once again, that a certain packaging resonates with us actually might be the most important message from a piece of art.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, stories in and of themselves have a certain shape and people who, who understands stories well, are able to construct stories even out of reality and out of real events in such a way that it resonates with people. Like, I've actually always really loved the quote. And I don't know this is one of those that was just like attributed to Mark Twain or if you actually said it. I feel like every quote gets attributed to Mark Twain if you don't know who said it. But it's that great stories happen to people who know how to tell them. And I've always really liked that quote because it strikes me as true on multiple levels.

Right, right. Yeah. It's sort of that like once you have the eyes to see synchronicities, you see them all over, right? And that could be because now you're telling yourself tales or because your ability to understand the world as a tale lets you see what's there. Exactly. And I think when you're actively engaged in living your life, this is something that came up in that conversation with Sharon. Your life starts to take on more of a narrative structure. And so in some ways, I really do. do think that great stories happen to people who know how to tell them and not just meaning that people who know how to tell great stories can kind of take the grist of their life and turn it into something that is more interesting. I think that people who have an understanding of narrative structure and are actively engaged in that actually do have more interesting lives than people who don't. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least what is interesting, they can see it because that they see themselves in terms of the narrative structure so they can see the structure that's there.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you can see that a lot in the new Kirk's work, which I really appreciate is I think that they're, I think that they're working on that level. I think that's what's so compelling about it to people and that so many people who I talk to who really love Hellier just want to like hang out with them. There's this feeling that like you just want that to be your friends because I think as adults, we don't do nearly enough of just like clomping around in the woods with your friends

looking for bogey men. You know, I think that's something we all miss in a way. One of the things that really struck my wife and I when we were watching Hellyer is a lot of times you'd see the New Kirk's house and they're just like lounging around with like five different books, you know, talking to each other about the books they're reading. And then I look around my living room and that's exactly what my wife and my son Cormack and I were up to that afternoon. We were watching Hell, you're, it's like, you guys are sort of like scholarly book geek people. I get you. I understand you.

Right. Yeah. I'll say this. You know, this comes up a lot of times when I think about Willie Streber. Okay. So like a lot of people when I first got into the UFO thing, it was really the nuts and bolts that got me. Like, oh my gosh, man, the Tick-Tac. It looks like there's a picture of that.

Once again, pictures, right? But I didn't want to talk about like the abduction thing, you know? And you made this point. I was like, well, someone's in this craft, presumably. So why isn't that it bothers you to talk about the beans and the craft and what they may or may not be doing to people if you want to talk with the craft, right? So then suddenly you're like, oh, my gosh, looks I do have to entertain the abduction thing. So now I'm getting sucked in there.

But then once you go UFO, you go abduction, like, okay, then what? So what? Bigfoot, let's do that too, right? Now I watch Hellier. I'm like, oh, now it's like, it's UFOs, it's abductions. It's maybe Bigfoot and ghosts now and goblins. And what happens is you just now opened up to all these strokes, right? And you find yourself taking seriously things like you dismissed when you were a kid, right? Maybe that's when chairman is, right?

Right. Well, and I think that that's, you know, going back to that idea of alienation and madness and that sort of thing. I think that there is a little bit of that in the uncanny and around these ideas as well, because my biggest fear when I started all of this was that I, would lose my marbles and that I would become a crazy person. And the way that I would have defined that was entertaining ideas of things like reptilians and goblins and mantids. And while I hold all of these ideas very loosely and I have come to no conclusions, Bigfoot is in my pantheon of things that are possible at this point. And along with all of these other things, and if I had

known when I started that this work would bring me to that, I wouldn't have done it. And I know that's right. Yeah. But if you had it back, you do it though. Am I right? Yes. Having done it, I'm glad that I did. But if I had known, because that was the thing that I was trying not to do. And now I'm there. And I'm glad that I did. But it does alienate you. There's a certain percentage of the population, and it's probably larger than I'd like to consider, that just the most basic things that I think might be true makes me an absolute looney tune to them. I am a crazy person. I am a nut. I am an unreliable narrator.

And there's an alienation that comes from that. Yes, 100%. Definitely feel that. Right. And I think, too, is you do have the ability, though, that, like, like, you. you seem to be ontologically uncommitted, right? Like you keep it at all your arm's length. You may not affect myself.

I'm uncommitted, right? But that's to say I'm not, I'm uncommitted. I'm not saying none of that stuff happens, right? And it seems like you can't say, or it's hard to say the world is a little bit weird, right? It's sort of like once you let some weird in, the official consensus story, it just unravels, right? So you let it, if you let in the nuts and a UFO, then you've got perity of evidence with other things. right and then you have parity of evidence other things other things other things and if you crave consistency you're going to have to like sort of say now the world is weird right and I think that's

one of the probably the sort of psychological mechanism ought to have is if I let anything in then the whole weird comes with it right and that's why they can't they have to dismiss a Kelly Chase right they have to right exactly and kind of the wall that I've built is like I'm not willing to say goblins are real I'm I am willing to say the world is such that people see goblins. And like, goblins existing are in that, they're a possible answer to why it is that the world is such that people see goblins. Exactly, right?

I like how you put that. But then what you've done that though, now the weird as expanse for a hypothesis, right, is a broad. I must confirm, but it's abroad. You have to entertain it. And then there's a displacing paranoia that comes with. with that. Yeah. And the possibility of goblins. Exactly. Yeah. And once again, I don't think the point is the

goblins, but that doesn't mean that aren't enough. Right. You know, that's important. Right. Right. But to kind of be a member of polite society, you have to say no goblins. No gobblings. Exactly. Exactly. But no. I think I may have been ruined for polite society. that was. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm a very, I think I'm a very fun dinner companion, but just only for the right kind of person at this point.

There's plenty of people who would not be interested. Yeah. So I would say, I don't know, if you do official show endorsements, but I would recommend hell you're, even if you're deeply skeptical or not, I do think there's a lot to be learned just about ourselves and our, like, psychology by watching that, watching the series. Yeah, absolutely. And it's free on Amazon Prime and on YouTube. So it's really accessible. You don't have to pay for it. And I would challenge people, because I hear from people when I say I love Hellier. There's always a certain amount of people who were like, I thought I respected you. And that's fine. Like I'm not trying to change anybody's mind here. But I do think, you know, if you've made it this far in this conversation, but you're skeptical about Hellier, try watching it and just see where that friction comes up for you. And kind of. kind of interrogate that and be like, what is it about this thing? And you don't have to come to the same answers that like Jim and Kelly have come to about why that bothers you. But I do think if you

want to truly be an independent thinker and to make actual progress around the question of UFOs and other anomalous experiences, that you have to be able to delve into ideas that make you uncomfortable and understand why it makes you uncomfortable. And if you get to the end of that and your answer is, well, because that's absolutely bat-shit, like, I think that's okay. I'm not saying the answer I come to, but erecting walls around certain ideas and saying that you will go no further than X, when you've never really considered what lies beyond it, then, you know, you're missing the boat and you're missing a big part of the picture. Yeah, 100%. And I feel those frictions in a lot of places in Hellyer, but once again, the point is to, it's a stress test. I think it's like

How there's this really good stress test of exactly where are you with these phenomena. Another thing too I want to mention, and this goes back to the Jock-Keel thing, is I fairly recently had a conversation with very, very bright man, okay, a physicist, right, who asked me about the UFO thing, right? And went right to, well, it seems perfectly plausible that there would be aliens from the planets out there someplace, right? And I asked him, but why do you assume that that's the going, that's the hypothesis? I mean, it was like, it was that just either, either this is all false nonsense or it's aliens

from the planet. But those are the only two, that dichotid. Right. And that is something that has been, as John Keels do believe, that we've been saddled with by various constituents since the 1950s. But since the 1950s, very smart people have said it's a false dichotony. There's other explanations in between it's false and. It's aliens for the planet. And I think Hellyer does a great job of showing you the panoply of possible explanations for this stuff

and how it does dovetail with all these other weird things. Because I do think we should be worried why we've been kind of pipelined into thinking of it in terms of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and not all these other things that people like John Keel and Valet have been entertaining since the 60s. And Hellier does a good job at that. Yeah. It really does. It really does. And I think Hellier in many ways brings us back to kind of what we've lost in the community. I think I said on the last episode, I've been going back to valet and keel and just things in general that were written. Like I will basically, if I'm at a used bookstore, I go to the paranormal UFO section. And if there is any book that was printed before like 1975, I just buy it. Because I don't care what it is. I don't care who wrote it because there has been this sort of homogenization of the field.

And I think that when it was mostly outsiders working in kind of these weird, fringy outside groups, that they were able to have bigger thoughts than we allow ourselves to have in these kind of larger town hall type social media experiences that we create for ourselves, whether that's Reddit or X or any of that. And you can see how the nature of the conversation has changed and that not just have we not really made progress since the 70s, but like we have regressed. And we've fallen victim in many ways to so many of the things that valet and Kiel and so many others warned us against. Yeah. Their predictions on all of those fronts come true. And I would recommend the listener read Diana's. American Cosmic in that light. So I think she's giving us a very good account of how that has

happened and why that has happened. And you have to be read careful to see that. But I think that is a very important and underappreciated part of that work. Right. I mean, it's also true with new book also. Yeah. Well, and another book I would like to recommend is your book that's going to be coming out later in November. We have a release date, which we are announcing here first, which is November 27th. At the time of the release of this episode, pre-orders will be available, and I'll have that all linked up. But I'm so excited about your book because I feel like it gives us a way back to kind of hit reset on uphology in some ways in terms of how we think about the phenomenon. And I'm so excited to be releasing this book because I think it's brilliant.

And I think that a philosophical approach is exactly what we need because it's not just about having good ideas. It's about how to think about the phenomenon. And I really appreciate how you kind of both given models for how to do that and sort of shown how to do that also through your own thinking in the book. And I just, I think it's phenomenal. Thank you. I appreciate it, Kelly. And once again, this wouldn't have happened without you. So I'm excited about it that there will be a book link,

philosophical treatment of the phenomena available for good or ill, right? I'll probably write another one where I go another direction at some point, but I'm excited about it. And I think you're right. I'm not, I'm going to float hypotheses in the book, but I want to kick it to people to then go, you know, verify or disconfirm those hypotheses, right? And I do think we need more refined thinking about the problem. And I think the tools of training philosophy can play a role on that. And I'm hoping to at least get that going, right? Absolutely. And we'll definitely be talking about the book more on the show leading up to the release and afterwards. Also, something I'm extremely excited about is the next episode that we do is going to be a little

different in that there are two amazing books coming out in November, Jim's book and also Diana Pesalka's new book Encounters, which Jim and I have both been lucky enough to get our hands on a at a time. And as I was reading Diana's book and then also editing your book at the same time, I just, there were, there's so much beautiful interplay between the ideas that you both present. And I, it struck me that the better episode, because Diana had already agreed to come on the show, would be the conversation that didn't involve me. And so this episode is going to be Jim and Diana in conversation about their books. And so I absolutely, I'm so. I'm so excited about that conversation. I think it's going to be really special. That's going to be fun.

I'm honored and excited to do it. And I've got my printed copy just full of sticky notes and questions for Diana that I can't what to do. So, a lot of fun. I know it's going to be great. I absolutely can't wait. So yeah, this has been, as always, a super fun conversation, Jim. I'm so grateful, as always, for your friendship and for your thinking and just for, you know, be willing to bat around these ideas of me and, you know, watch shows I tell you to watch. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yeah.

I do watch the shows that Kelly recommends to me. No, I'm thinking I've really enjoyed this. And so I'm looking forward to more documentaries from Planet Weird. So keep in coming. Now receiving frequency. A padlock, right? You and I look at a padlock that's on like a locker and it's got the dial and there's like three numbers, right?

And the first number, you have to hit it. And the second number, you have to go around and pass it once and hit the second number. then the third number is where the thing unlocks, right? We put so much, like, onus on that number, the numbers, the numbers, the numbers. But if you, like, scrape those numbers off and replace them with, like, emojis, or with Arabic or dots or something, it's basically all doing the same thing. Maybe religion or all these stories, these spiritual stories, are all sort of, like, the different iterations of those symbols that I was just talking about.

One is numbers, one is emojis, one is glyphs, one is glyphs, one is dots but it's all kind of operating completely the same underneath and that's just basically giving people symbols or stories or guide rails or guideposts to sort of like get them there the numbers the numbers the numbers it's all doing the same shit underneath unlocking the things and those three things that you have to hit are one unlocks the gears and that lock opens up and what is that lock I don't know that's a different question I'm not answering that one