Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] The Ontocalypse Is Upon Us

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

After months of work, its finally time to share with you all what I've been working on. Welcome to the Ontocalypse.Learn more about Ontocalypse Productions:Website: ontocalypse.comTwitter/X: @ontocalypseEmail: [e-mail] 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 NowBecome 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

Strange Familiers is a weekly podcast which explores the weird corners of the world. From Bigfoot and other cryptids to ghosts, UFOs, folklore, and forgotten history. We don't just talk to authors and researchers. We talk to actual witnesses of the paranormal. As he came in, the power flickered off again. I don't think I had ever been as scared of anything. It flickered back on and he was right beside me. And he got really close to my face and he said,

from things you don't understand. We don't just talk about haunted places and spooky forests. We go there and we take the listeners with us. It's like it's right up on us, but there's nothing there. I know. You just hear that? Yeah, I totally heard that. It's right there.

Strange Familiar's coming to you from Spectrevision Radio. Wherever you listen to podcasts, we're at strangefamiliers.com. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly, chase. As most of you know, I started this podcast two years ago after my own trip down the UFO rabbit hole triggered a radical shift in my worldview that changed me in profound ways that I'm frankly still trying to process. Getting your edges sketch shaken like that is not an experience that's easy to convey. But if you've ever been there, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Lauded author and thinker of the anomalous, Dr. Jeffrey Kriple, coined the term the flip to describe the experience of having one's worldview leveled by a tectonic shift in perspective. The UFO phenomenon is often compared to a Zen koan. Like the proverbial sound of one-hand clapping, a koan is an idea that is designed to provoke the great doubt in the student, which opens the gateway to the initial insights of enlightenment. In order to conceptualize the sound of one-hand clapping, one must be able to conceive of a universe in which such a thing is possible. In the world of consensus reality, the UFO phenomenon can't exist. So to encounter the phenomenon either in person or through the avalanche of evidence

is to hear the sound of one hand clapping and realize that the world that you occupy is not the world as you imagined it to be. The great doubt seizes you. What is the nature of our reality? such that the UFO phenomenon exists with all of its Baroque and bizarre paradoxes? And what is the nature of the intelligence behind it? Or now that you mention it, what is intelligence? And what are we?

And what is anything? The process of the flip is often talked about in terms of ontological shock. The process of questioning not just one's beliefs, but the foundational concepts and categories that one uses to make sense of everything from the being you see in the mirror to what the dead. definition of is is, can trigger a visceral kind of shock in people. And like skydiving, whether you later see the experience as exhilarating or annihilating, mostly depends on how and where you land. But like with any other life-changing loss and or liberation, once the shock and

newness wear off, you're left with a space to fill. You have to decide what you're going to build there. I started to long for a word that transcended the immediate of ontological shock and spoke to the transformation of what follows. To only talk about the shock of it feels like talking about the blast of a meteor strike and not how it buckles the land and boils the oceans. The right word came to me one day, ontocalypse, an apocalypse of one's ontological frameworks and categories, of meaning itself. That's what I had experienced, and it changed everything about me. And through starting the podcast, I quickly, and with profound relief and gratitude, realized that I wasn't alone.

I talked to people literally every day who have experienced some version of their own ontocalypse many just in the last two to three years. Over the summer, I ended up talking about the ontocalyps a lot with my friends, J. Christopher King and Jordan Flowers. We were having an ongoing conversation about the rising tide of people having their own flip moment, often leading to a full-blown ontocalypse, and what exactly that was going to mean for the world. As you guys know, Jay is the director of the experiencer group, and both of us were struck by the increasing number of people who were going through this process in real time. If people start moving through ontological shock, they tend to

find themselves left with a bottomless well of questions. They often want to talk, they want to process, but many people also find that the things that they suddenly very much want to talk about aren't the kinds of ideas that most people are willing to even entertain. They're isolated, and that can be really hard. But more than anything, even if they can't find people to talk to in the course of their normal lives, most people going through this just want to know that they aren't alone, that other people have gone through this, and that there is some kind of a way forward toward making sense of the world again.

The problem is that for people who go looking for those answers, there aren't a ton of great resources. Or rather, there are a million great resources and no easy roadmap to navigating them. In a subject that touches just about every facet of human experience in some profound way, there is no clear place to start. And while there are a lot of people who are ready and willing to tell you what to think, the conversation that most people really want to have is how can we even begin to think about this phenomenon that shatters all of our paradigms? How do we decide what information is credible? How do we begin to make sense of the new reality in which we find ourselves? What does this mean for how we should live our lives? How weird does this

thing really get? Am I losing my mind? These are the questions that people actually have. But that's not what people find when they go out looking for easily accessible resources. Uphology has been fighting an uphill battle for decades just to get to the point where we can begin to have the conversation about the reality of UFOs in public. It's only in the last few years that we've really been able to start making the case that UFOs are something real and worth talking about. But with the recent whistleblower revelations out of Washington and rumblings of much more to come in the coming months and years, the reality is that the tide is turning and it's turning quickly. There are more people than ever who are ready to move the conversation forward from the idea that UFOs are real to what it means for us that they are real. Jordan Jay and I started to talk about the media and resources that we wished existed. It should reject sensationalism.

It should amplify and enable the best scholarship and research in the field. It should be accessible, grounded, and human. It shouldn't offer definitive answers where there are none or tell people what to think. And instead, it should cultivate resources to help us ask better questions. And it should be executed at a level of quality that speaks to the profound importance of the subject matter. The more we talked about the idea, the more we got excited about it. And we realized that between the three of us, we had all the skills we needed to make it happen. And so Antacalypse Productions was born.

Antacalypse Productions is dedicated to creating high-impact media projects, focused on helping people to understand and integrate the emerging realities at the bleeding edge of science and culture. Our first project in this new media company launched earlier this week as we announced pre-orders for the first book being published by Ontacalypse Press. Unidentified Flying Hyper Object, UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World by Dr. James Madden. This first of its kind philosophical dive into the UFO phenomenon is already changing the conversation in uphology, and as earned high praise from the likes of Diana Walsh Pesolka and Jeffrey Criple. This book represents exactly the kind of thinking that is urgently needed now

and the kind of scholarship that we want to champion through our media projects. A big thank you to Jim for allowing us to shepherd your brilliant book through the publication process. And congratulations on hitting number two on the UFO new release charts on Amazon on your very first day of pre-orders. It is well deserved, my friend. And next week, as our team heads out to the Soul Foundation's inaugural conference at Stanford, we'll begin production on our next project, a three-episode docu series entitled The Beyond, UFOs and a new reality.

With this docu series, we want to start where most other media projects leave off, with the reality of the UFO phenomenon, and move into asking the bigger questions about what this means for the nature of our reality, how we got this so wrong in the first place, and how people people can reclaim their agency as opposed to just waiting for the government to share a scrap of disclosure. And we won't just be asking the big questions. We'll be sitting down with some of the very top minds in the field to bring you the most cutting-edge research and thinking. And after the Seoul Conference, we'll be heading out to New York City for the Inquirer Anomalous Conference where we'll continue production. And as a side note, that conference is sold out for in-person tickets. They went

really, really fast, which is no surprise, given the speaker lineup, which includes Diana Walsh Balsh Voselka, Mike Masters, Peter Scafish, Leslie Kane, and more. But live stream tickets are still available, but those are also limited to make sure it's a good experience for everyone. So if you're planning on grabbing one of those, I wouldn't wait. Anyway, I couldn't be more excited about this new venture, and I just wanted to tell you guys about it. This whole project has really grown out of the conversations and community that have sprung up around the podcast. And I'm just so grateful to all of you for being there. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And for anyone who's interested in supporting the project, there are a couple of ways that you can do that. Through a sponsorship with the Allied Arts Foundation, we're able to accept tax-deductible donations. A small portion of the proceeds will go to fund the arts and the rest will go directly to our production costs. You can make a donation atontacalypse.com. We're also accepting traditional investment

for people who are interested in making a larger contribution, and you can get more information about that by emailing info atontocalypse.com. And now, I just wanted to take a few minutes to let you hear a little bit from my business partners, Jay and Jordan. I'm so excited to be working with both of these gentlemen. I have so much respect for both of them as people. They're both immensely gifted and competent in the work that they do. And they make me laugh. And best of all, after months of long conversations with both of them, I know that we have a shared vision and mission when it comes to the impact that we want to make in this field. And I really just couldn't be happier about the team that we've become.

Up first is Jordan Flowers. So what got me into the subject, I would say I would sort of break that down into two components. I think there's like what piqued my interest initially and then what has really sustained my interest. And I think what initially peaked my interest like many others was the 2017 New York Times article. and the three videos. When I watched those, I had a reflexive sense that there was a there there.

And, you know, that quickly led to, I don't know what the truth is, but I have a high degree of confidence that the truth is interesting and it's worthy of attention. So that's when I started to try and educate myself on the topic, reading as many books as I could get my hands on,

and that sort of led to what ultimately sustained my interest as well. So, you know, what sustained my interest is I find the topic completely intellectually fascinating. And I think at a deep level, the topic appears to sort of reside at this nexus of consciousness and physics. And I've always loved reading on these topics. I think that's because with these topics, we're sort of forced to confront our own ignorance.

And that requires a lot of learning, which I like. And we don't really understand how consciousness works. And we don't really understand why our best physical theories like quantum mechanics, why they work the way they do. And so that was fundamentally interesting to me. I remember my wife asked, hey, why are you interested in this? And I recall saying that it actually maps on to these preexisting interests that I've had. And, you know, that conversation with my wife sticks out because it was only about two weeks later that Lou

Alizondo was on a podcast and said something to the effect of, you know, the answer may reside at the intersection of consciousness and quantum mechanics. And when he said that, I got chills down my spine and I took it as some kind of affirmation and became more convinced that I should dedicate more of my professional time to the topic. So that was sort of one of the first spooky coincidences for me in the subject. So my background, I've had several roles in finance, and investing on Wall Street. That was sort of where I'd started my career, and then I moved into operations and consulting roles

for Fortune 100 clients. When the pandemic hit, I left the corporate world to pursue more entrepreneurial endeavors, which I found to be incredibly rewarding. During the pandemic, I created a small business here in my community, started as a passion project,

and it's really grown into something bigger. I'm currently in a very fortunate to be in a position to where I'm now dedicating a majority of my professional time to advancing the UAP topic. Looking at the field through the lens of my professional skill set, I would say the main problem that I noticed was a dearth of funding. So there are many great projects out there, both for-profit projects, nonprofit projects, but many of them seem to suffer from a lack of capital.

And it's my opinion that achieving impact at scale and having the broadest impact really requires capital. So I thought, hey, these are areas where I can potentially apply my professional skill set and hopefully add some value to the topic. I think one of the ways I wanted to do that was both through helping specific projects on the capital raising front, but then also creating potentially novel funding methods in the space for nonprofits and for-profit projects.

So I continue to work on those endeavors. The reason that I think funding is so important, achieving the broadest impact requires capital, raising capital requires a solid business plan. A solid business plan has to be scalable, and then achieving economies of scale requires a lot of collaboration and consolidation of efforts. And so that's where I've began a lot of my time with the subject

is focusing on reaching out, getting to know folks in the space, to find ways to potentially collaborate. And that's really what led to me getting to know Kelly and getting to know Jay. And I think we really found a great place to collaborate where all of our skill sets really complement each child. other. I tend to think that we are on the verge of a revolution in our understanding of reality. I would love to help the public metabolize this new reality and to offer up tools and frameworks to

help navigate the space. You know, Kelly had an amazing segment on Plato's allegory of the cave. and if I were walking out of that cave into a new world, I would certainly want a friend there to help me adjust, to help me think through it, and that's what I hope to offer with this project. And now you'll hear from Jay Christopher King. I moved out here to the East Coast from Minnesota and started at School of Visual Arts back in,

gosh, what was it? 2000? Yeah, back in 2000. And I spent time in my undergraduate and my graduate degree pursuing fine art and then film. So my bachelor's degree is in fine art from SVA. And I got my graduate degree in film from Bard College upstate. And I quickly realized, you know, I had some success in gallery shows and in fight art contexts showing at places like the Raina Sophia Museum in Madrid and James Cohen Gallery in New York and

even the Museum of Modern Art. And before I even got out of school, and that felt amazing. But I quickly realized that the marketplace and especially the very competitive and expensive realm of the East Coast and New York City in general, it wasn't really sustainable to be an experimental video artist that was like a challenging place to be. And so I quickly got into television production, which at the time I was enormously embarrassed by. I was super embarrassed. And I started as an intern and then quickly within a few months got my first gig as an associate producer basically by throwing out ideas as if I was a one-man brainstorming factory,

while doing things like taking out the trash and making the coffee for the actual producers. Like, I was that guy that was, like, annoying people with ideas. But it paid off. It really paid off and it paid off very quickly. And that got me my first producing gigs. And I produced reality shows and nonfiction documentary programming and travel shows and food shows and all manner of things in the realm of quote unquote nonfiction, like light, scripted nonfiction for the most part. And I got to a place where I recognized that though it was

very interesting to be traveling around meeting all these people that I wouldn't necessarily otherwise, it didn't really align with my values. I mean, it was interesting being on, say, an animal planet show, like watching people save baby birds and stuff like that up in Maine. It's heartwarming, but it wasn't really where my mind was. It wasn't really where I thought. felt like I was destined to be if destiny was a thing, if fate was a thing, if anything like that was a thing, or if I just had hopes and dreams earlier on in life, which I definitely did. And even then, I recognized that I needed to do something that had more impact. And I quickly got to a point where I kind of started getting back into investigating my

own history as an experiencer, as an experiencer of UAP phenomena, non-human intelligence, what people think of as hauntings, other things along those lines. And so I transitioned back through art and assisting the historian Richard Dolan, who works in the uphology space, and then started doing support groups for fellow experiencers, which led me to co-found the experience. group where I'm the director today. People I'm most inspired by in the field, it's hard not to be inspired by people like Jacques Follet because of the breadth of his work. And I love that he's a polymath.

I think that that is really intimidating and cool, that he's one of the first people that mapped Mars, that he helped create the internet, and that those are kind of like weird bylines to what we understand as kind of like the main thrust of his thinking. which to us is uphology and anomal studies in general, right? All of the books that he's written in the space, what, 12, 14 books in the space. On a variety of subjects, I love his diaries. I think that they're very generous. I think that just the amount of openness,

for somebody that has such a reputation for secrecy, he's been extraordinarily open with regard to what he's done on a literal daily basis for over 50 years now with his diaries, which I think is pretty fascinating. Other people that I'm really inspired by are people like Diana Basulka and Leslie Kane, both of whom I feel privileged to know.

Leslie's work, I think, is incredible, and for people that are really looking at evidence-based inquiry into this field, I can't think of a person that has had more impact in the last decades than Leslie Kane, certainly in the last decade now. On top of that, in terms of people I'm inspired by, I would say people like John Mack and Bud Hopkins. People have been talking a lot about John Mack in the last few years for a few different reasons

because there's been kind of the reinvigorated rebirth of the John Emac Institute run by Karin Austin and people like Darren King are involved over there, which is great. But you know, Bud Hopkins, I think for me personally, he is such a touchstone in so many ways because he was an artist, that he was a New York artist, and he actually lived a few blocks from where I went to school. I found out much later. And so I feel like this weird connection to him in a strange way, that he was an artist turned researcher,

and that he really collected this community of people around him, and that he was so inspired by what he saw and so fascinated by what he saw, that he kind of fell into the role of creating a support network in New York City and creating a support network for other experiencers. And in days where I'm like looking back at his autobiography or things like that, I think it's really amazing how closely aligned he and I are in many ways and how he fell into it and I fell into it in a very similar way and in the same neighborhoods even.

I find that really fascinating. So as far as a creative vision for the docuseries that we're working on, I just mentioned Bud Hopkins, and I think that that's a perfectly good reference point to point back to, actually. If you look at books like Missing Time of his, he had an amazing ability to inspire people by showing them how to do the work in the right way. The whole first 50 pages or so of Missing Time is him doing a boots on the ground, investigation of a landing case over here in New Jersey. And I know that park. I know where it

happened. I've gone out there. I've looked at the site. I've looked then and compared it with the chapters and things like that. And I love that he was so evocative in describing that case and describing how he kind of mapped out the terrain that I was able to easily find it without any pictures. I think that's fantastic. The fact that he could do that and that he could also so accurate describe the kind of inner workings and the motivations, the fears, and the hopes of the experiencers that he was working with in his books is absolutely fantastic. And I think that, you know, being brave and pointing at a larger map, a larger outer map for what's going on, was something that he was incredibly adept at back in 81 and through the 80s and 90s. And along those

for the creative vision of the show, I think all of that really tracks. Like, I want us to be able to be evocative and to evoke space and to make people feel like they're really in these situations. I really, I think it's important. We've had some conversations about this privately, about how much we'd love the viewer to really be kind of a protagonist in this show and to really be able to reclaim their own agency, to be able to be kind of the star of the show and walking around through this bigger environment

that we find ourselves in. And so I love the idea of by the end of the show, the viewer as protagonists being really inspired by the stories that they hear so that they can go out in the world and approach anomalous study and approach this line of inquiry in their own way and with the skills that they already have

and to kind of walk through the world with a newfound sense of ability in some ways. I know that sounds really big, but why not swing for the fences, right? I think inspiring people is something that's not done enough on TV, and I hope that we can do that with this series. I love what we've been talking about with regard to Antacalyps, and I think that in many ways,

what we're looking at is trying to make a landscape for anomalous studies, and outreach efforts in the public in Western consensus culture and really be able to push the boundaries so we can push the conversation like years ahead of where it is. We've had private conversations about how so many of the public versions of this conversation are just starting to kind of stumble into a place where John Keel was already natively existing about 50 years ago. You know, the talk of like, oh, they're not always saucers.

Sometimes they're orbs. This is exactly the province of texts like Operation Trojan Horse. And recognizing that there's been 50 years of inquiry since then, I don't think that we have a lot of time to waste. And I respect the mindset of some people in the community that we have to kind of have a no child left behind mentality with regard to kind of like dragging people along into the field and waiting until our most dense uncle is understanding

of the fundamental reality of UAP, but I don't really think that it has to be our job to do that as well. And I think that we can do that in a really articulate, fun, enticing, genre-shattering way for the future. And I know, again, it sounds kind of big, but I really think that we can do that. I really think so, too. There's much more to come from OnTacalyps.

So be sure to give us a follow on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it and sign up for our email updates at OnTacalypt. lips.com and we'll keep you updated. We'll be back with a new episode very soon, and this one is a doozy. In the next episode, we welcome Diana Walsh-Basalka back to the show to discuss her phenomenal new book encounters. But in this interview, I handed the mic over to James Madden, and the conversation that they had was a euphological, philosophical tour-to-force that I absolutely can't wait to share with you. I'll have that out soon. Until next time. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.

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