Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Through The Looking Glass [Pt 3]: Upsight & The Future of Human Consciousness

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Welcome back to The UFO Rabbit Hole.  Today we return to the old podcast stomping grounds for the long-awaited part 3 of the Through the Looking Glass Series. In this episode, we follow Tom Matte as he heads to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in search of answers about his strange psi ability that he calls Upsight. What the team of scientists, working on chief scientist Dean Radin, found once that got him the lab was nothing short of groundbreaking. Could this help Tom finally get the answers he’s looking for? And what does all of this imply about the future of human consciousness? Today we dive back into the deepest part of the rabbit hole to find out. REGISTER HERE to attend Kelly and Tom’s free online talk hosted by IONS this Friday, February 6th at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST If you aren’t caught up on parts and 1 & 2 of this series, you’ll want to start there. You can find the full episodes here: Through the Looking Glass [Pt 1]: My Initiation in the Anomalous Spotify  Apple Podcasts Through the Looking Glass [Pt 2]: The Strange Tale of Tom Matte & Upsight Spotify Apple Podcasts Referenced in this episode: Investigating the Brain Processes Underlying an Unusual Visual Experience: A Case Study The Institute of Noetic Sciences Tom Matte’s Website The 8 Stages of Upsight Vision [Free Download] Dave Rossi’s Interview on Jess Michel’s podcast, American Alchemy TIMESTAMPS01:34 Recap of Previous Episodes 02:31 Upcoming Live Event Announcement 03:19 Introduction to Tom Matte and Upsight 05:13 Tom's Journey to Scientific Validation 07:29 The IONS Study and Its Findings 11:24 Understanding Brainwave Patterns 20:27 Implications and Future Directions 26:16 Tom's Personal Upsight Readings 31:44 Exploring Non-Local Consciousness 33:11 Challenging Current Models of Reality 39:10 The Filter Hypothesis and Anomalous Experiences 46:03 Scientific Insights from Non-Human Intelligence 49:22 The Broader Pattern of Anomalous Experiences Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm your host, Kelly Chase. If you're newer to the show, today's episode is a little bit of a deep cut. Today, I'm dropping part three of a series that I started way back in February of 2024, while the podcast was still the UFO rabbit hole, called Through the Looking Glass. This series has taken me a long time to get through, because it's still unfolding in my life in real time. Over the past several years, I've been continually astonished by the new revelations and the strange paths of inquiry that this story has dragged me down, very often kicking and screaming. It's not at all an exaggeration to say that it has challenged every belief I've ever had and is completely rewritten my understanding of reality and what human beings fundamentally are

and are capable of. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this episode is probably not the best place to start. A lot has already happened, and in the interest of time, we're going to be hitting the ground running today. In part one of Through the Looking Glass, I shared in detail about the life-changing anomalous experience that I had in 2021 that changed my life and the long, complicated journey that followed as I looked for answers about what happened to me. And in part two, I shared the strange tale of the inexplicable way that my own story became entangled with that of a man named Tom Matt,

who developed an unusual sciability that he calls upsight in the wake of a prolonged period of drug-induced psychosis. To follow along today, I'd recommend going back and listening from the beginning, but at the very least, you'll need to have listened to Part 2 with Tom's story to really make sense of what we're talking about today. I have both of those linked up in the episode description. And before we dive in, I want to share something that I'm genuinely excited about. On Friday, February 6th, I'll be joining Tom for a live online event hosted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. This event is called From Sight to Upsite, Humanities Emerging Perceptual frontier. It takes place on February 6th from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. And that's Pacific time.

Tom and I will be talking about his experience with Upsight, the early research conducted with ion scientists, and what these findings might suggest about perception, consciousness, and how we relate to reality itself. The event is online. It's free to attend and it's open to everyone. You'll find the registration link in the episode description. All right, let's get into it. When we last left off, I had shared with you the story of Tom Matt and how after a severe mental health crisis, he developed a strange sigh ability that he calls Upsight. The simplest way to describe Upsight is this. In virtually every moment of his life, Tom sees detailed three-dimensional imagery projected into space around him almost like a hologram layered

over the physical world. These images appear to him as if they're out there, occupying real space, with depth, structure, and form. And these images aren't just precise and complex. They're interactive. Information is communicated to Tom through images and symbols that are constantly popping out at him. And when he focuses his attention, he's able to manipulate these images himself

and even conjure his own. If you've ever seen a sci-fi movie where someone interacts with a floating holographic interface, that's not a bad place to start. Tom describes upside. as something very much like that. He also at times experiences encounters with non-human intelligences,

including beings commonly referred to as grays through upsight. These beings seem to be more than just images, but to have an awareness of him. Sometimes they even seem surprised that he can see them. This connection is what eventually led Tom to seek out the UFO community in his search for answers about what he was experiencing.

And that's how I ended up meeting Tom in one of Diana Walsh-Basalka's online classes back in the summer of 2022. From there, a very strange series of synchronicities revealed that some of the information that Tom was receiving through Upsite had also been shown to me during a profound anomalous experience that rerouted my life. Once again, it's a very long story, so if you want the details, be sure to check out Parts 1 and 2. By the time I met him, Tom had already spent years trying to understand what he was experiencing. Despite the fact that Upsight was so strange and the fact that none of the countless experts he reached out to had ever heard of anything like what he was describing, he remained steadfast that if he was experiencing this, that there must be other people out there who were experiencing it too, and believed that if he could find a serious scientist to take the case on, that he'd be able to prove the existence of Upsight in the laboratory setting.

I was admittedly skeptical about all of that. I hadn't yet learned the lesson that you shouldn't bet against Tom when he puts his mind to something. On a call a couple of months later, Tom told me that he had actually found a scientist who was willing to look into upsight. I asked him who it was. With the twinkle in his eye, he said, If you could pick any scientist in the world to take this seriously, who would it be? Without thinking, I said the first name that came to mind. Dean Radin.

Tom smiled and told me that that that. was exactly who he meant. And I was shocked. Dean Radin is the chief scientist at the Institute of Newetic Sciences and one of the most respected researchers working at the intersection of consciousness studies and anomalous human experiences. He is not someone who casually takes on cases like this, and ions is not a place known for chasing sensational claims. Their work tends to be cautious, methodical, and deliberately conservative in how conclusions are drawn. Under Radin's direction, a team of researchers agreed to work with Tom to see what they could learn. Tom flew out to ions to spend a full week in the lab undergoing a series of tests

designed to examine what was happening in his brain when he engaged upside. And against all expectations, they didn't come up empty-handed. The results of that work were eventually written up in a paper titled, Investigating the Brain Processes underlying an unusual visual experience, a case study, published in the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition. The authors are Cedric Conard, Cassandra Veton, Garrett Yount, Mateo Vega, Fadi Cuyallet, and Arno DeLorme. So how did Tom manage to make this happen against the odds? And what did this study find about Upsight?

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ion scientists and two of the authors of this paper, Garrett Yount and Arnaud Delorme to talk through their findings. One of the first things I wanted to know was what it was about Tom's case that compelled their team to take it on. Here's Garrett Yount. Yeah, that's a great question. And it goes to the mission aspect of it. So you may be aware that our founder, Edgar Mitchell, who was the secret person to walk on the moon. You know, part of the first generation of spacefarers for our civilization was a huge proponent of the,

belief that we're not alone in the universe, that we have galactic neighbors, and they have been visiting Earth for a long long time. And also that the whole UFO phenomenon is not just physically based. There's the consciousness domain to it, which is very important enough. Ignored and I think what leads to a lot of confusion. So this is part of our legacy, this idea that there's a consciousness-based domain to the UFO phenomenon. And so that's something that really got me interested when I started talking to Tom, because been part of his story when he's telling me about upside and the experience, he shared that our galactic neighbors show up there sometimes.

The fact that this is not a physical-based visitation. This is a purely consciousness-based visitation. It's like, oh, this is right up our alley. you know, this is really interesting. So that's honestly what got me curious enough to continue talking with Tom. I've never seen something that's basically it's persistent and seems to have its own flow and yet being able to interact with it. It seems like an entirely unique type of visual experience,

unlike what I've read about or been exposed to in terms of hallucinations or psychedelic, psychedelic-induced visual experiences. This seemed entirely unique to me. And I would also add that Tom's attitude toward it was really important because he really was curious and so he was willing to follow scientific procedures. He really wanted to understand that he knew he's not the expert, he's not scientist, so he came to us and it's like,

you know, tell me the best way to do this. And it was refreshing that he doesn't have ego attachment to it in a way. You know, it's not like he's trying to prove some special power he has. I don't get that vibe from him at all. His life is more like, this is part of the evolution of the human race. And, you know, it's exciting and how to be understood it. And, you know, he's excited to find other people that have the same experience as part of what's going on with us humans.

Being interested in Upsight is one thing, but figuring out how to make it conform to the scientific method is another. Upsight isn't something you can point a camera at. It isn't something anyone else in the room can see. There's no external signal to measure, no physical object to examine. Everything Tom experiences through Upsight is private, internal, and, at least so far, it's inaccessible to anyone but him. So if you can't measure Upsight directly, what can you? you measure? The only option is to measure Tom himself. More specifically, to look at what happens in his brain when he engages upside and to see whether that looks different from other familiar

mental activities like imagination or visualization. That was the basic logic guiding the experiment. Garrett explained it this way. You know, as you mentioned, lots of people are just going to say, well, he's crazy. He's having hallucinations. He did a bunch of drugs. His brain is fried. So the first step was to say, okay, what kind of brainwave signals can we look at that would potentially distinguish it from other known states of mind and other states of perception and visual perception in particular? And so again, this is just the first step, the first pilot study. So the first easiest step was to try to measure the brain waves. between the condition of upside, which he experiences, and then some other condition,

which is a known condition of the brain that's not on site. And so the one that we picked was basically recalling an image. So generating an image in your mind. You know, just right now imagine a dolphin something out of the water. All of our brains can do that and it's happening and doing it right now. And so this is a super simple question to start with is, So the brainwaves look different when you're just imagining an image versus seeing an image through upside. It's just as simple as that.

It's not meant to understand the whole mechanism. It's just supposed to start with. Okay, does it look different than what happens when someone just imagines an image? That was really the goal of this first step. What the team at ions needed was a way to isolate upside as cleanly as possible. They weren't trying to prove what upside is or where it comes from. they were asking a narrower question. When Tom is actively engaging Upsite, does his brain behave differently than it does during other kinds of internal experience?

To study UpSight, the researchers designed a task that compared it directly to something familiar and well understood, visual imagination. Tom was seated in a dimly lit room in front of a computer screen. Over the course of two days, he completed four experimental sessions with short breaks in between. across all sessions, he completed hundreds of trials, giving the researchers a large amount of data to work with rather than relying on a small sample. Each trial followed the same basic structure. First, Tom was shown a photograph on the screen for 10 seconds. The images were drawn from a standardized set of photographs, commonly used in psychological research. And importantly, the researchers carefully selected only neutral images, avoiding anything emotionally intense or disturbing, so that emotional reactions wouldn't influence the results.

After viewing the image, the screen went blank, and Tom closed his eyes for 30 seconds. During that time, he was given an audio instruction telling him which mental task to perform. In one condition, he was asked to mentally recall the image using ordinary visual imagination, the same way anyone might picture an image in their mind. In the other condition, he was asked to engage upsight and modulate the imagery he experiences through upsight, so that the key element of the image appeared for him to focus on. At the end of that 30-second period, Tom was instructed to open his eyes and look at the same image again for another 10 seconds. This second viewing was used to perform whichever condition he hadn't already completed for that image.

In other words, every image was used twice, once for visual imagination and once for upsight. The order of these two conditions was randomized. Sometimes Tom would imagine the image first and then engage upsite, and other times he would engage upside first and then imagine the image. This was done to prevent the order of tasks from influencing the results. Each full cycle, viewing the image, closing his eyes to perform one task, viewing the image again and then moving on, lasted just over a minute. Once that cycle was completed, a new image was presented and the process began again. While Tom did these tasks, his brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography, or EEG.

EEG measures electrical activity in the brain and allows researchers to look at patterns associated with attention, perception, and cognitive processing. It doesn't tell you what someone is thinking, but it can tell you whether different mental states are associated with different kinds of brain activity. The key was comparison. If Upsight were simply a form of imagination, you would expect Tom's brain activity during upsite to closely resemble what happens during visual imagery. If it were something else, you might expect to see a different pattern. So what did they actually see when they compared

those states? That's where things start to get interesting. When we talk about EEG, we're talking about patterns of electrical activity in the brain that oscillate at different speeds. These rhythms are often grouped into frequency bands, alpha, theta, gamma, and while the names can sound technical, the underline lying idea is very straightforward. Different rhythms tend to dominate when the brain is doing different kinds of work. Rather than trying to decode the content of what Tom was seeing, the researchers asked a more fundamental question. Does his brain enter a different state when he engages upside compared to when he simply imagines an image? Arnaud DeLorm, one of the scientists who worked directly on the EEG analysis, explained how they approached this comparison. We were interested in

looking at the brain difference between when he was looking at the picture and doing upside. And so the first brain waves are hard to study. So yes, you have alpha, beta, etc. So these are the standard brainwave maze. So alpha

is 10 hertz. And that's called the relaxation rhythm of the brain. And then you have other rhythms, right? The theta rhythm. So feda is about twice lower than alpha. So alpha is about 10 oscillation per second, 10 hertz. FEDA is about five oscillation per second, five hertz. And FEDA has different roles and also depends where in the brain FEDA happens. So, for example,

if it happens in frontal areas, we have demonstrated and others have done too, if I ask you to remember numbers, like four numbers, for example. Let's say I ask you to remember 10 numbers. Basically, the amount of beta you observe in this frontal region right here is proportional to the difficulty of the task. And then you have other brainwaves. You have beta, which is twice faster than alpha, so 20 hertz. And these are linked more to motor preparation and motor events. So in his case, we found most of the difference in alpha. that's in the first figure of the paper.

So we have one curve that represents the brainwaves for the upside, and then one curve that represents the brainwave for the control condition, and what we observe is mostly a difference in alpha, a little bit in beta, but mostly in alpha. So how do we interpret that difference? Well, alpha was greatly decreased during upside. So from our perspective, if you consider that alpha is a resting rhythm, basically, the brain is not doing much when alpha has high amplitude. Because basically when alpha is high amplitude, it means that neurons are synchronized.

They oscillate all together. So they don't do much. You're just resting. And when they stop acceding and doing different things, you have a decrease in alpha. And our interpretation is that his brain was working more when he was doing upside. That last point is key. In everyday terms, alpha activity tends to be strongest when the brain is relatively idle, eyes closed, relaxed, not actively processing much information.

When alpha drops, it usually means the brain has shifted into a more engaged active mode. Neurons stop moving in lockstep and begin doing more differentiated work. What the researchers found was that during ups and up, site, Tom's alpha activity dropped dramatically compared to when he was simply imagining an image. And this wasn't localized to one tiny area. It was widespread, especially in regions involved in visual processing, spatial orientation, and sensory integration. In other words, Tom's brain wasn't behaving as if he were passively daydreaming or picturing something in his mind. It was behaving more like it does during active perception. When the brain is taking in,

organizing and working with complex information. This tells us something important. When Tom engages upside, his brain reliably enters a distinct, high engagement state that cannot be reduced to ordinary visual imagination. And that finding alone is enough to move the conversation forward. But what does it mean exactly? First, and most importantly, the researchers did not set out to explain what upsite is, where it comes from or what it ultimately means. This was not a theory of everything paper, and it wasn't trying to be. It was a first pass, a pilot study designed to answer a much narrower question. When Tom engages Upsite, does his brain behave differently than it does during ordinary imagination?

The answer to that question was yes. Across hundreds of trials, Tom's brain activity during Upsite was consistently different from his brain activity during visual mental imagination. When he was asked to simply recall or imagine an image, something all of us can do, his brain showed one pattern. When he was asked to engage upside, it showed another. Those differences weren't subtle, and they weren't random. They showed up again and again under controlled conditions. That matters because one of the most common assumptions about experiences like this is that they're just imagination, memory, or fantasy playing tricks on someone. If that were the case, you'd expect that.

the brain activity during upsite to closely resemble what happens during ordinary visualization. But that's not what the researchers saw. The study also suggests that upsite doesn't map neatly onto what we think of as hallucination. The neural patterns observed didn't match what's commonly associated with disorganized perception or pathological visual experiences. Now, the authors are careful here. They don't claim that pathology is impossible, and they don't pretend the single case settles that question. But they do show that a simple, this is just a hallucination explanation,

doesn't adequately account for the data. Another important point is consistency. Upsight wasn't something that flickered on and off unpredictably during the experiment. When Tom was instructed to engage it, the corresponding brain patterns appeared. When he wasn't, they didn't. That kind of reliability is one of the basic requirements for something to be taken seriously in a laboratory setting. At the same time, this paper is very clear about its limits. It doesn't claim that Upsight accesses an external physical reality. It doesn't claim that the images Tom sees exist independently of him. And it doesn't claim that Upsight involves non-human intelligence, non-local consciousness, or any particular metaphysical framework.

Those questions are very intentionally and explicitly left open. What the paper establishes is more modest, but that doesn't mean that it's not groundbreaking. upsite appears to be a distinct perceptual state with measurable neural correlates that cannot be reduced to ordinary imagination alone. It is internally consistent, reproducible within Tom, and observable through changes in brain activity. That alone is enough to justify further study. In other words, the paper doesn't tell us what upsight is. It tells us that upsite is not nothing. It's not just an overactive imagination or a simple hallucination.

Tom's brain appears to be processing something when he engages with upsight. And once you cross that threshold, once you establish that there is a real measurable difference between imagining something and whatever Tom is doing when he engages upside, the conversation necessarily changes. The question is no longer whether this experience can be dismissed outright. The question becomes how we expand our inquiry to learn more about what exactly it is that he's seeing. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

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The ION study is a huge step forward for Tom, and I actually just want to pause here and say how proud I am of him for getting to this place. It took over a decade of searching and running down every lead and emailing countless experts to get to the point where he is finally beginning to get some answers about upsite. It's challenging enough for someone who's experiencing things that most people assume are impossible to talk about it, even with the people closest to them. Tom's courage and persistence in putting his story out there is commendable. And the fact that he didn't give up, even after years of getting doors slammed in his face, is something that I have immense respect for. I've never met anyone like Tom, and it's so cool to see what he's managed to accomplish. And even though this paper is just the first step, and there's still a long road ahead in terms of understanding upside,

I have no doubt that Tom will continue to defy expectations. One of the biggest open questions is whether Upsight is unique to Tom or if there are other people who are experiencing this as well. And if there are other people out there who have Upsight, would they be able to see the same things that Tom sees at the same time? Tom thinks that they would. That question is now the focus of the next phase of his journey. His goal is to find other people who have Upsight and see whether it's possible to confirm that more than one person is able to perceive the same thing. at the same time. Based on thousands of messages he's received over the last few years from people who claim to have similar abilities, Tom estimates that maybe a few hundred of them have something

more or less like upside. His hope over the next couple of months is to meet up with some of those people in person and see whether they're interacting with the same perceptual field in the way that he expects. If that turns out to be the case, the next step would be to bring those individuals back into a lab setting and attempt to study the phenomenon under controlled conditions. In parallel, Tom has also been working on a set of protocols that he believes could help people develop upside themselves. This framework is called The Eight Stages of Upsight Vision and it's available as a free download. I've linked it up in the episode description if you want to explore it further. In the meantime, Tom started exploring new ways of working with Upsight. One of those has been offering

personal upsite readings. During a reading, Tom focuses in on the energy of the person he's working with and asks them to open up to him while also holding in mind the questions or areas of their life where they'd like insight. From there, he simply observes what comes through with Upsight and describes it as it unfolds, reporting what he sees in a kind of stream of consciousness way. Tom offered to do a free reading for me last August, and I was eager to take him up on it. Whatever upside is, after all of this, I felt connected to it in a way I couldn't fully explain. So of course, I was curious to see what would come through during my reading. I don't know how I'm still surprised by how things unfold with Tom, but I was genuinely shocked by how profound the reading turned out to be.

I didn't know what to expect, but it was precise and personal in a way that really floored me. It wasn't just that it spoke directly to the questions I was holding in my mind, but that it referenced very specific people and situations in my life with a depth and coherence that was hard to dismiss. All of it was wrapped in my own personal metaphors and symbolic language. There were countless small details that meant something very specific to me, things that Tom doesn't know and that in a lot of cases no one else knows either. Because the reading was so deeply personal, it's hard to talk about in detail. And honestly, I'm not sure how interesting it would be.

it would be a lot like listening to someone else's hour-long dream, and so I'll spare you that. There's one moment, though, that I do want to share because of how uncanny and honestly how funny it is. It's a good example of how upsight visions during these readings can be both incredibly on the nose and deeply dreamlike at the same time. This is not just a library now. This is one of the libraries like Library of Congress. You're in a basement with those big wheels that have books around them. That's what I'm seeing. And you were right next to the door where the security people come in and you were holding a book open.

But that's not what's important about this scenario. What's important about this scenario is you're watching these other people come in. So you came in to look at this book. You got access to this space. But now that you're in this space, what's happening there is more interesting to you than what you have in your hand. And what you have in your hand is exactly. exactly what you're looking for. So I am watching you. It's almost like a detective or a spy show, but I'm watching you behind the book stacks or whatever they are, watch these other people come and go.

And they're there. You're there. You guys are not supposed to be there, but you're surprised by somebody that's in this room with you. All right. Let me see if we can see what that is. And I'm following this person. This is, oh God, this is so weird. You know the Rankin' Bass, Mr. Heat Meiser, one of those characters, it looks like one of those characters. So I'm going to use the word character. This is a character of a human being, of somebody. I don't know who it is, but it's a character, and it's the cold one. It's not Mr. Heat Miser. And if you don't know what this reference says, we can, I'll tell you later. It's the cold one. Okay, so the whole library is getting chill. So this person is in there, and I'm watching these waves, these cold waves, and you're watching this cold waves come to you,

And you're seeing the waves come to you slowly. You've got your book, all right? And you see that you're trying to make a point whether you want to be touched by these waves or not or you want to leave. So you're literally walking to these waves. Imagine like a cloud. And you're slowly touching this cloud. And you're like, oh, okay, it's not so bad. But you're, all right.

So hold on. I don't know if you're trying to get in, but this thing is keeping you at a distance. And somebody just. just played a trick on you. Oh, this is so specific. You know when a kid gets behind your back and pushes you, right? You know how when a kid gets behind you? Somebody just did that to you. And you dropped your book, right? And I don't know who it is. Then you're standing up and you're looking around and you're like, you don't need this. You're literally walking out the door. You put the book down, right? You literally put the book down and you're just walking out of this.

I'm going to use the word secure space. This is a library. This is the kind of, I've seen these on all these libraries of all these, you know, where they have artifacts and stuff. This might sound like nothing on its own, but to me it was incredibly personal and specific, like having one of my own dreams narrated to me. I wasn't familiar with the character that Tom was describing, but the person who came immediately to mind when he was describing the scene was none other than the godfather of modern euphology Jacques Follet. The imagery lined up almost perfectly with an email exchange I'd had with him

just a couple of days prior to the reading, one I hadn't been able to stop thinking about and one that had reframed how I approached my research moving forward. In my own internal symbolic language, that character could only have been him. But I filed that away until the reading was over. After we finished, I decided to look up the character Tom had actually been referencing. The character's name is Snowmiser from the 1974 stop-motion film The Year Without a Santa Claus. I'd never seen it. When I looked up Snowy, I laughed out loud because respectfully, they look a lot of like. So what's going on here? How is any of this possible? Somehow, on multiple occasions Tom and I have

seemingly been able to access the same information without any conventional means of communication. He appears to access that space much more directly than I do through focused attention, concentration, and will. In fact, Upside is so active for him that it bleeds into a his everyday life whether he wants it to or not. I don't have that kind of access, at least not in a way that I'm able to consciously control. And yet, we independently encountered the same very specific imagery of DNA with a third energetic strand running up the middle and some other anomalous structures. And in my upsite reading, Tom was able to surface deeply personal, timely information about things happening in my life at that moment in time, things that there was no way he could have

had prior knowledge of. I don't know what to do with that. And in a lot of ways, I remain healthily skeptical. I don't want to rush to an explanation, and I don't want to collapse uncertainty too quickly. And yet, I keep being surprised, not once, but repeatedly. And at some point, repeated surprise becomes something you have to reckon with. I've had to ask myself if this information is really all that surprising, or are my fundamental assumptions about the nature of my reality, just wrong. So the question I'm left with is not, is this real? The question is, what would have to be true about the nature of reality for this to be possible at all? One implication I keep circling back to is that consciousness may not be strictly local. And maybe information isn't either. By non-local,

I mean not fully produced by or confined to the physical boundaries of an individual brain. The dominant materialist view is that consciousness is generated by the physical process. and that it is therefore both produced and contained by our anatomy. Thoughts, memories, and awareness are understood as the output of neural activity occurring nowhere else but inside the skull. But what if that model isn't complete? What if the brain is not the sole source of consciousness, but a mediator or interface, something that constrains, filters, or tunes into information that is not entirely local to it? In that case, consciousness wouldn't be strictly private or self-contained, and information wouldn't always have to be transmitted through ordinary sensory channels to be accessed.

That idea is unsettling because it runs against how we've been taught to think about minds and bodies. But it's not an idea that comes to me only through Tom. Variations of it appear through physics, neuroscience, and consciousness studies, usually at the edges where existing models start to break down. And as hard as it can be to wrap my mind around this possibility, at this point I've had too many personal experiences to deny it. It throughout my life I've had experiences that are hard to square with a purely local time-bound model of consciousness.

For example, on New Year's Eve in 2020, I was watching fireworks from my window with my brother when I was suddenly overtaken by a certainty that something was very wrong with our mom. Without really thinking about it, I turned to him and told him that she was sick and that it was in her chest and that if she got sick in the next few months, she could die. Just a couple of days later, our mom called to tell us that she had cancer. She went into chemotherapy just as COVID lockdowns began, and we spent months terrified that she would get sick while immunocompromised. She didn't get sick and she recovered, but that strangeness of that event has stuck with me. I have no way of explaining how I knew that or why I felt so compelled to tell my brother in that moment.

Over the last few years as the result of doing this work, I've also found myself in the deep end of the high strangeness pool. I've had a number of uncanny encounters with psychics and mediums of various kinds, experiences that would have been easy to dismiss individually, but which start to form a pattern when taken together. In October, Jay and I attended the International Remote Viewing Association Conference, where legendary remote viewers like Lynn Buchanan, Dale Graff, and Paul H. Smith, gathered with about 100 people, many of whom were also extraordinarily gifted psychics. I watched remote viewing exercises unfold with the level of precision that was genuinely startling. In multiple sessions, participants were asked to describe targets that they had no sensory access to, including locations, objects, or scenarios that were sealed off from them entirely. People worked independently, often in separate rooms, recording their impressions without knowing what anyone else was seeing. And again and again, those impressions converged with participants describing the same shapes, movements, and unexpected.

details. When you see that happen once, it's interesting. When you see it happen repeatedly across different exercises and different groups of people, it begins to challenge your assumptions about how information is accessed. And I'll just say, I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of attending a murder mystery dinner with a bunch of gifted psychics, but let's just say the game doesn't last very long. So as difficult as it is for me to fully wrap my mind around, I'm past the point of skepticism about whether accessing information non-locally is possible. What I'm still searching for is a framework that can support that reality without flattening it into fantasy or dismissing it as pathology. If consciousness can extend beyond the local body, if information can be accessed outside of linear time and space,

then the problem isn't whether these experiences are real. The problem is that our current models of reality aren't built to hold them. There are a number of different ways to think about a reality that could support something like upsight. Some treat consciousness as fundamental. Others treat the brain as a filter or receiver. Some focus on information as the base layer of reality or on a participatory and relational model where observation plays an active role. Each of these frameworks makes room for non-local access in a different way and each comes with its own strengths and unresolved problems. What matters here is not choosing the right model.

We genuinely don't know which if any of these frameworks accurately describes the nature of reality. Versions of this problem have occupied physicists, philosophers, and neuroscientists for decades and in many cases centuries. People far smarter than me have wrestled with it and come away with more questions than answers, so I'm not going to pretend that I can solve it here. What I can do is acknowledge that the question itself is unavoidable. If experiences like upside are possible, then something about our assumptions regarding consciousness, information, or reality itself needs to be reexamined. Rather than rushing toward an explanation, I think the more productive move is to slow down

and ask better questions, questions that can help us narrow the field of possibilities and sharpen the inquiry moving forward. One of the most persistent questions that follows from all of this is why anomalous experiences and abilities are so unevenly distributed. If something objective is being interacted with, then why do some people seem to have these experiences frequently and intensely while others report only one or two relatively minor incidents over the course of their lives? And still others appear to have none at all.

In the last episode, we briefly talked about the filter hypothesis, which is the idea that the brain normally limits or filters out most of what is in our environment in order to keep us functional. From that perspective, anomalous experiences may occur when that filter loosens, allowing access to information or perception that is usually excluded from conscious awareness. Trauma is one of the factors that appears to be capable of disrupting that filtering process, which is why it shows up so often in experiencer narratives. I'm not going to re-argue that case here since we explored it in more depth in part two of this series. But suffice it to say that the pattern of trauma unlocking unusual states of consciousness is one that appears too often to be ignored. I'd argue that there is almost certainly something to that.

At the same time, trauma clearly doesn't explain everything. Not everyone who has an anomalous experience reports a history of physical, psychological, or emotional trauma. Many people describe these experiences as arising spontaneously without any obvious precipitating event. Others associate them with meditation practices, psychedelic use, or other structured approaches to altering consciousness. Some people report having anomalous experiences for as long as they can remember with encounters or perceptions forming some of their earliest memories. Others describe them emerging much later in life, often during middle age, without any clear explanation for why they started when they did. And that range matters. Any explanation we take seriously has to be able to account. for the full spectrum of how humans interact with the anomalous. It has to explain not just the

most dramatic cases, but also the subtle ones. It has to make room for lifelong experiencers, late-onset experiencers, people who seem to open up through specific practices, and people for whom these things happen once and never again. If a framework can only explain a narrow slice of that reality, then it's probably incomplete. Another major question that follows naturally from all of this is what exactly experiencers are interacting with. This isn't just a question about the structure of reality in the abstract. It's a question about whether human beings may be capable of engaging in two-way communication with other forms of intelligence, including non-human ones. We've already touched on this earlier in the series, particularly in part two, but it's worth

revisiting here because upside doesn't just involve perception. In many cases, it appears to involve interaction. Tom doesn't just see anomalous images. He experiences it as responsive. And in some instances, the content that comes through feels less like passive observation and more like an exchange. And yes, in certain instances, he even sees non-human entities like grays. As strange as that sounds, it's actually not unusual with an experiencer accounts. Across UFO encounters, contact narratives, and sigh phenomena, people frequently describe receipts. receiving information in ways that feel intentional rather than random. Sometimes that information arrives symbolically. Sometimes it comes through sudden flashes of insight and understanding.

Sometimes it feels instructional or even corrective. Whatever language you use for it, the through line is the same. People don't feel like they're just witnesses. To use the word from Whitley-Strieber's famous book, they feel like they are in communion with something. That brings me back once again, to the DNA imagery. Tom and I both encountered the same anomalous features on a strand of DNA through entirely different kinds of altered states around the same time, but months before we had ever met or had any knowledge of each other. On its own, that coincidence was already destabilizing. But what really forced me to widen my frame was realizing that we weren't the only ones. This is where I want to play a quick clip from American Alchemy. In this interview,

host Jesse Michaels is speaking with experiencer Dave Rossi. Before his encounter, Dave was a blue-collar construction worker with no background in advanced science. But after a life-altering interaction with the blue plasma-like being, he became consumed with quantum physics, high-voltage experimentation, and extended electrodynamics. During the interview, he brings up something that stopped me cold. Do you think humans themselves, like, were like these hard drive avatars or something of something higher? Because I think about, you know, DNA uses binary code. So AGCT, you basically just have, you know, base pairs. You have two, two combos. I'll tell you something. I think of DNA if you, if you want, that is highly controversial. But yeah, tell me. I think there's a third strand to our DNA.

I think that the two helixes that we're used to, I think there's a third one down the middle that that is physical but exists at the plank scale, and I think it's electrically conductive. How would that not dawn on like all these biologists and geneticists? You've interviewed someone who knows. Okay. I think I know you're talking about. You've interviewed somebody who knows. Yeah.

I remember being absolutely floored the first time I saw that interview. It came out just a few weeks after I'd released part two of this series. Up until that point, the fact that Tom and I had independently seen the same third strand of DNA, had already forced me to seriously reevaluate my assumptions about reality. But what hadn't occurred to me, which in retrospect probably should have, was that other experiencers might be encountering the same thing. From the very beginning, Tom has been convinced that this imagery reflects something objective about DNA that hasn't yet been acknowledged or discovered by mainstream science. I wasn't so sure. Mostly because if some non-human

intelligence wanted to communicate important information about the nuances of DNA to humanity, I am not the person you would choose as your messenger. Everything I actually know about DNA came from high school biology, and to be honest, I've probably forgotten most of that. For a long time, I assumed that the DNA was somehow symbolic, that it was a kind of cipher, a personal synchronicity meant to bring Tom and me into contact with each other rather than a literal truth about biology. So the idea that other experiencers were also seeing the same thing, and that there might be scientists who are aware of this and quietly investigating it, genuinely shocked me. Now, to be clear, I haven't been able to confirm those claims,

so I take it with a grain of salt, and I think you should too. But given everything that has happened, it feels like it's worth mentioning. And to be honest, I certainly wouldn't be surprised if that turns out to be the case. Over the last couple of years, I've become increasingly convinced that there's a real and under-explored relationship between scientific advancement and communication with non-human intelligence. A well-known example of this in uphology comes from Diana Walsh-Bosulka's work, particularly her book American Cosmic. One of the central figures known by the pseudonym Tyler is widely believed to be Tim Taylor, a NASA engineer and wildly successful biotech entrepreneur. According to Basulka, Tyler believes himself to be in communication with

off-world intelligences, from whom he receives fully formed technical insights through what he calls downloads, insights that he then tests and implements through rigorous scientific work. In short, he believes that many of his inventions and innovations in the aerospace and biotech worlds that have made him a very rich man came to him from non-human intelligences. This belief among people on the bleeding edge of innovation that their ideas come from a source outside of themselves is a pattern that keeps repeating. And this isn't just limited to modern UFO adjacent figures. History is full of scientists and mathematicians who attributed their greatest insights to non-ordinary states of consciousness or encounters with non-human intelligences. Serenivasa Ramanujan believed his mathematical discoveries were revealed,

to him by a goddess. Nicola Tesla described receiving complete inventions in sudden flashes of vision. And Friedrich Kekle, credited a dream of a serpent biting its own tail with revealing the structure of the benzene ring. Over the last year, as this story has continued to unfold for me in ways that have been both deeply personal and genuinely surprising, I've been directly involved with or privy to several conversations with highly respected scientists and mathematicians around the world, including Nobel laureates, who quietly admit that many of their most important breakthroughs arrived in similar ways, fully formed, unbidden, and accompanied by a strong sense that the information did not originate with them. I'm generally hesitant to share

stories I can't independently verify, especially when the people involved aren't ready to speak publicly, and many of them are, quite frankly, still in the closet about these experiences and for good reason. The stigma associated with the anonymous. The stigma associated with the anomalous, especially in the mainstream academic world, is enough to put someone's career in jeopardy. But I've seen and heard enough to be personally convinced that this isn't just a curious pattern. It may be something much closer to the engine of human progress itself. Which brings us to the most uncomfortable question of all. If information is being communicated to us, then who or what is doing the communicating?

And why? Is this exchange meant to benefit humanity? Is it indifferent to us? Or are we participating in some larger process whose goals we don't yet understand and in which our own interests may be secondary at best? It's a question that I think we have to face head on if we're going to make progress. Once you start taking anomalous experiences seriously as real phenomena, another question inevitably follows.

Are these experiences random or are they part of a broader pattern unfolding over time? Our abilities like upsight, a glimpse into humanity's future, and what we might become. I'm personally cautious about using the language of evolution here because it's so easy to overstate what we mean by it. Evolution doesn't necessarily imply progress, intention, or destiny. It simply describes change over time in response to conditions. Still, when you step back from individual cases and look at the distribution of anomalous experiences across history and cultures and generations,

it becomes reasonable to ask whether we're seeing shifts and how human consciousness operates rather than just isolated outliers. Anomalous experiences are not new. What appears to change is their frequency, their clustering, and the cultural conditions that allow people to recognize and talk about them. There are periods in history

where reports of visions, encounters, revelations, and altered states spike. Often during times of social upheaval, technological change or profound uncertainty. What stands out about the present moment is not just the volume of reports, but how many people describe similar effects on their lives afterward. A reorientation of values, heightened curiosity about consciousness, increased sensitivity, and a sense of being pulled toward meaning-making or creative work. Over the last few years, I've noticed a striking number of people independently reporting pivotal anomalous experiences clustered around the same time period,

particularly in and around the summer of 2021. I don't claim that this represents a statistically verified surge. We don't have the data infrastructure necessary for me to make that kind of a claim responsibly. But at a certain point, anecdotal volume becomes difficult to ignore, especially when the patterns recurrent across unrelated communities and domains. And what's interesting is that this apparent clustering doesn't seem limited to one type of anomaly. Reports from that period include UFO sightings, encounters with non-human intelligences, spontaneous sigh experiences, vivid, pre-cognitive dreams, and sudden cognitive or perceptual shifts. Researchers working in so-called window areas have described a similar increase in overlapping phenomenon during that same time frame. When anomalies start appearing together, rather than in isolation, it suggests we may be dealing with changes in underlying conditions.

One way of framing this is through thresholds. Complex systems often remain stable until they don't. Pressure accumulates quietly and then a tipping point is reached where new patterns suddenly become visible. Consciousness, whatever else it is, appears to behave like a complex system. skills, perceptions, and modes of awareness do not necessarily spread linearly. They can emerge in clusters, sometimes rapidly, once certain conditions are met. Another way of looking at this is environmental. Consciousness does not operate in a vacuum. It's embedded in biological, social, and physical systems that we are only just beginning to understand.

Changes in technology, information density, electromagnetic conditions, or even large-scale disruptions to social reality could plausibly affect how consciousness is expressed or accessed. I'm not claiming a single cause here. I'm pointing out that we have reasons to suspect the environment matters more than we tend to acknowledge. There's also a simpler possibility, which is that nothing fundamentally new is happening at all. It may be that anomalous experiences have always been this common, but that cultural filters are weakening. As materialist assumptions lose their grip and consensus reality phrase at the seams, people become more willing to question the limits of what's possible. Experiences that were once dismissed or suppressed become easier to

recognize and articulate. In that case, what's evolving may not be consciousness itself, but our relationship to it. Whatever the explanation, any serious framework has to account for scale. It has to explain not just why one person has an anomalous experience, but why may many people do, why they often cluster in time and why their effects on individuals' lives show such consistent patterns. If we can't do that, we're probably still mistaking symptoms for causes. I don't know whether this represents biological evolution in any strict sense. And I'm not committed to that framing.

What I am committed to is the observation that something appears to be changing in how people perceive, interpret, and interact with reality. If anomalous experiences are becoming more common or more visible, then the task is not to mythologize them, but to understand what conditions make them possible. All right, so it's time to wrap this up, but to be honest, I don't really know how. Every time I try to put a bow on this story, every time I try to contain it inside a neat conclusion or a stable framework, it spills over the edges. It leaks through the cracks. The harder I try to hold it in place the more it resists being contained. And maybe that's what it means to be standing at the edge of the unknown.

There's a famous parable about a group of people, blindfolded, each touching a different part of an elephant. One feels the trunk and insists it's a snake. Another grabs the leg and says it's a tree. Someone else touches the flank and swears it's a wall. None of them are lying. None of them are wrong. But none of them are seeing the thing as it actually is. What they're describing isn't the elephant.

It's the limits of their contact with it. This moment feels like that. What we have right now are fragments, overlapping impressions, anomalous data points, experiences that don't line up cleanly, measurements that point towards something without resolving into a single coherent picture. Taken individually, each piece seems incomplete, even contradictory. Together they don't yet form a stable hole. And that can feel unsatisfying and unsettling. But this is often what knowledge looks like before it coheres.

Before the blindfold comes off and before the shape of the thing snaps into focus and suddenly, retroactively, all the confusion makes sense. We're not there yet. So maybe the work right now isn't to force these pieces into a story they're not ready to tell, or to pretend that we can already see the hole when we can't. Maybe the work is simply to stay honest about what? where we are. To resist the urge to collapse uncertainty too quickly and to recognize the confusion at this stage isn't a failure of understanding. It's a sign that we're touching something beyond the scope of our current understanding. And I can't think of anything more exciting than that.

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