Pints With Aquinas - Aliens, UFO's, and the Catholic Church, w/ Dr. Paul Thigpen

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Locals, ask your questions here: https://mattfradd.locals.com/post/2705252/questions-about-ufos-and-aliens?aid=4570516 Get Paul's book here: https://amzn.to/3KZuFth Dr. Thigpen's Fiction Novel: https://amzn.to/3qlFXif In Plain Sight: https://amzn.to/3eEcxta

And we're live. Paul Thigpen, lovely to have you back on the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Pull that mic so it's a little closer to your mouth so we can hear. OK, beautiful. Yeah. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you. Mics have advanced so much, haven't they? They're just incredible. Like it used to be that you had to have a fully soundproof room

in order for them to be terrific. But now it's they're pretty directional. Yep. Yeah. So thanks for putting one now they're pretty directional. Amazing. Yep. So thanks for putting one in front of my face here. Yeah, and you were on back when I had the Matt Fradd show, like four or five years ago, maybe, you were on there. So it's really great to have you back on. Good to see you too.

It's been much too long since I've seen you. So you've written a book, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith. I cannot wait to dive into this topic. We'll have so much fun. It'll be great. I remember when I was a kid, I would lay on the road with some of my friends and we'd have glue conversations.

God, life, the universe and everything. And it was usually after a few beers, you know, you'd look up into the stars and you'd start to wonder. And I know in the start of your book, said something similar happened with you. Mm-hmm. It's something I've been interested in all my life. And my experience was out in the, in central Georgia, in rural Georgia long before there were streetlights and things that would light on my back visiting my grandparents' farm. The Milky Way looked really milky.

It was so magnificent. And just one day, one night lying there and saying, you know, I think probably only angels could do these big distances. Even then I knew the distances were great. But what if we could go out there? Who would be out there waiting? And then what if they could come the other direction? I don't know. I ran back inside. But I wrote a paper on it when I was in elementary school. I was an atheist from the age of 12 to 18 and after I came back to Christian faith, it was a topic of how would my faith accommodate this? Because I believe my faith is true. And then many

years later when I became Catholic, same same question How would the Catholic faith accommodate this if we were to find out? There are things out there and they're intelligent and they're not human now. I just want to kind of may preemptively attack an Objection that might be raising within people's minds right now and that's it. Well, this is all tinfoil hat stuff But isn't it the case that people throughout history have been interested in this, who have been more than rational? Oh my, you know, we are the exception in history, the last couple of generations. Going back

to the 40s, there's a historical reason for that, involves the US government, where the culture took a turn to begin to dismiss and mock this kind of thing and tinfoil hat. But the truth is for 26 centuries the best minds, so many of the best minds of Western civilization have talked about this subject and taken it very seriously. 26 centuries? So all the way back to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and writers, church fathers, medieval, Renaissance. Can you give us some examples of the like what like pre-socratics or Aristotle or who? Yeah, so you have well both Plato and Aristotle kind of you know their philosophy, their assumptions led them to believe that there could only be one cosmos and so that kind of ruled out things for them.

Although even they thought that there could be non-human extraterrestrial intelligence and that they thought that the stars were actually animated or could be animated. That they had a, Plato thought that the demiurge had given them a soul. So in that sense, those were non-human intelligences from outside the world. They were extraterrestrials. But their philosophy had them say, no, there's only one cosmos. What did they mean by cosmos? Universe.

So we usually translate it worlds. And that's kind of where the discussion began historically, are there multiple universes? Because we didn't even think about planets. We didn't, according to Aristotle, everything that was heavy earth all came down to the center of the cosmos, the universe, earth, and therefore he would have never had a concept of planets that were actually balls of rock out there because the rock would have to be here instead. So science was all wrong basically and very influential.

But Democritus, who was the first one to talk about atoms, that kind of thing, he thought that not only that the universe was infinite and made of atoms, but that they were an infinite number of universes and that every possibility was actualized. That was just a natural principle. If it's possible, it'll be so that you have all these universes going on at the same time. Can I share something with you that you might find interesting that sounds totally off what we're talking about? I was chatting with my daughter the other day and we were saying infinity is this interesting thing, right?

But if to begin with the number one and to count upwards, like you can never come to an end, right? So suppose we were able to give every one of those numbers a sound like one, two, three, four. Yeah. Then there could be nothing we could say that wouldn't apply to one of those numbers because there's not even an infinite amount of sounds you can make with your mouth. So that I'll be taken somewhere. Does that make sense? For those numbers, of course. Yeah, that's a great thing. Even this sentence I'm saying now would refer to one of those numbers.

Exactly. Yeah. Sorry. No, and it's great. And so that was kind of the idea is that if it's potential, it's actual. And yeah. So he was the, the atomists were kind of opposed to the Platonists and Aristotelians. But so even in ancient times though, they, he, you know, he was an example of people who followed him that, yeah, there are other, other places where people can exist and people, I mean, you know, actually human beings are at least intelligent creatures. You had Roman writers writing about creatures on the moon,

living on the moon. So it's an old idea. And you know, the Church Fathers, the ones that were really well-trained in literature and philosophy, they knew all those discussions. And so they sometimes took them up too to talk about these things, not as much as… Anything substantial from any of them? You have some really interesting stuff. Pope Saint Clement, right after Peter, has this document where he talks about the oceans out there, which to them kind of went to the horizon and either he fell off or maybe even if the earth is round it goes all the way around, and the world's beyond that. And so Origen, who lived not long after him, he's not saying Origen because he had some

pretty wild theology, but he said, okay, well, looking at this text you can interpret it two ways. Either he means lands on the other side of the ocean, which people then didn't even really think much about. But that makes sense. He would use the word world the same way centuries later than the explorers of North and South America. They spoke of the old world and the new world on the other side of the ocean.

Could be that. But Origen said he may also be talking about totally different places where there are different life forms because the whole point of what Clement was saying was that in God's providence, wherever there are people living, God has given them the natural creation to support their life and to be a home for them. So if that's what he meant, that would be the earliest Christian source we have talking about worlds out there that are inhabited. You have others who are just making the point like St. John Chrysostom saying, you know, it's easy for you to just think of another world and easy for you to think of other cities and in fact entire worlds.

For God, it's even easier. In fact, it's just easier for him to even make them. So he can't. He can't. He can make those. He's all powerful. And that becomes the theme for others as well that, of course, God could do that. You have folks saying he could do it, but he hasn't, but usually because they're influenced

by Aristotle and Plato and their sense that... So Plato thought, for instance, that the demiurge, as he called it, so it was his notion of a creator but not an all-powerful creator out of nothing, as the Hebrews taught us, the Jewish people taught us. He believed that the demiurge, and Aristotle too, that what we have as a universe had always existed. So that's one of the places Aquinas later had to correct them and say, no, it has a beginning, God brought it in out of nothing. But he believed that it was more fitting if there's only one Demiurge, that there would

only be one creation and that somehow it would be less than perfect to have more than one. It would be redundant, perhaps. So that's kind of the kinds of arguments you're getting for saying, nope, just one, and again, they're not even talking about planets at this point, just entire universes. They don't really realize that there are balls of gas and rock out there that are like our planet. Aristotle would have said, his attitude was, will the world of change and growth, which would include living things, change, growth, death, decay, is just the earth and the next realm up, like moon and beyond, is unchanging. And yet even he, so that would rule out life, but even he speculated that there could be life on the moon.

So all this to say, it's starting with the Church Fathers. And you have St. Augustine gets in some ways involved in the discussion in kind of an odd way but by the time you get into the Middle Ages, then you have lots of talk about it. And St. Thomas probably had the most things to say, St. Thomas Quintus. Really? I haven't… Not in general, in particular, but the things that now relate to the discussion, like whether there could be a multiple incarnation, like whether the stars could be animate so we actually

have a form of intelligent life out there. Oh, he addressed that point. Yeah, he's out for the possibility, yeah. Something other than angels, some kind of soul like Plato thought that animates them and the stars are their bodies. So, you know, he allowed for that possibility. He talked about the multiple incarnation possibility. To which he says yes, by the way, doesn't he? Yeah. That Christ and even the Father and the Holy Spirit could become incarnate. So he says that and the interesting thing is a few years after he dies, the scholastic

philosophers, philosophers kind of following him, have pretty much filled up the universities, Paris and others in Europe, and the Bishop of Paris has to come out a few years after that and say, okay, you guys are, I have a hundred things that you said that really need to be corrected, you started saying, and one of them is that God cannot create other worlds. And he says, that's contrary to our teaching that God's all-powerful. Of course he could. And so they start backing off right away and saying, okay, really, he could create, because they actually said he couldn't do it, but he could create it, but he hasn't. Or if he did it, then it means that he's doing it by continuous miracle, because it's contrary to the laws of physics.

We've heard that before in modern times, where people think they know science. They've got it figured out, and it doesn't fit their science, so it can't be. What's the What's the strongest objection that you hear from Catholics about why there can't be aliens or why it wouldn't be fitting for there to be extraterrestrial life? Yeah, most of them sounds dismissive, don't know what a philosophy to even know the the kind of philosophical arguments that Plato and Aristotle would have had about why somehow is more arguments that Plato and Aristotle would have had about why somehow it's more, pardon me, more perfect to have only one creation and one race. But in general, you have things like this, that number one, it's not in the Bible, and that one's easily dealt with. Yeah, well, microbes aren't in the Bible, and molecules aren't in the Bible, and dinosaurs

and duck-tailed platypuses aren't in the Bible, but we know they exist. The Bible wasn't intended to be an exhaustive account of the chain of being. And Aquinas himself says that in talking about certain things. And then, so that's one easily responded to. You have others saying, okay, but our faith teaches we have a special relationship with God. And would it be special if there were other races out there that also in some ways? Let's talk about that. Yeah, because I think as Catholics, we would think of Mary as the pinnacle of creation, higher than the angels. And if there is another world that is fallen,

and if there is another incarnation, then there presumably is or could be another mother of God. And then how does she stack up against the Virgin Mary? And how certain can we be that she's less glorious or more glorious than her? Like all of a sudden, it starts to get weird real quick. Yeah, it does. And it even seems like you could be impugning, right? The greatness of Mary by saying that, well, potentially there could be some other alien woman out there who is even greater.

Well, to deal with that issue, as in all things Marian, you have to go back to Christ first. When we have the big argument in the church about, can you call Mary mother of God? To answer that question, you had to figure out whether Jesus was God or whether it's a man and God kind of joined together like a hybrid which is what the historians thought. Excuse me, so you couldn't really answer that question. Actually, can I get you a cup of water? I'm sorry. That might be good. Yeah, I'll be right back. Oh, you'll be right back? Do you want me to keep talking? Oh, you're that fast. Okay, you're fast.

Oh, no, it's all good. Thank you. Thank you. So, it's a similar kind of question that before we can even begin to talk about that, that's why I talk about toward the end of the book, you have to talk about what would be the nature of another incarnation and what would be the possibility. It raises all kinds of questions about what are the possibilities so

Because even before you get to the question about incarnation you have to get the question about fallen or not fallen before that you even have to get to the question of Made in the image of God in the sense that they're destined for the atypic vision? Rational. Or could it be, well not just rational, so rational, free will, and then immortal. In other words, you know, if you're not created, if your soul is not created to be immortal, you're not destined. I mean, isn't that Aquinas' argument for the reason we must be immortal, is that we are rational? I mean, maybe you could take a different approach than Aquinas, but Aquinas seemed to say, the brutes won't survive death precisely because they're not rational. Well, you have eventually Humani generis, a papal encyclical saying really clearly,

kind of responding to some of Darn's evolution stuff, that know that immortality is a gratuitous gift from God. And there are those who say that God could not create creatures who are both rational and not immortal. Oh, he addresses that, does he? Yes, he does. I mean, it's in passing because he has a lot of other things to do. Okay, so it's possible for something to be a rational creature that hasn't been given the gift of immortality.

Okay. Interesting. Okay, so it's possible for something to be a rational creature that hasn't been given the gift of immortality. Okay. Interesting. And my take on, we could spend all day about this, is that that might very well be what the Neanderthals were on our own planet. That they, we have all kinds of evidence now that seems to suggest they had some kind of rational intellect, some kind of free will, but don't think they're given to mortal souls. I mean, we are the only ones on this planet that were. So you could get into that in a lot of different directions, but I think we may already have an example of a race like that. But it surely seems possible to me, especially in light of that in sick people and that immortality

is not inherent to even rational creatures. I see. Yeah, you're right. So it's a big leap from could there be extraterrestrial life to, as you say, is there sin, is there immortality? Yeah. So the place to start is, okay, could God have created others? Okay, and of course, this seems to be, unless it's inherently illogical, which is part of which you have to... Yeah, of course he could. Yeah, he's created others.

Yeah. Might he be predisposed to do it? That's an ancient argument called the Argument of Plenitude, of fullness, the notion that God, everything we know about God is that he's filled this life, this planet with life and every little, even in volcanoes and down the depths of the ocean and stuff. Sure seems like his tendency to fill life everywhere. Actually, well, I love what you're doing right now because it reminds me of a conversation between a Christian and an atheist. And the atheist wants to rush to the absurdity that your God would die on a stake

so he doesn't have to punish you. And you wanna slow the conversation down and say, let's just say, is it possible that there's a creator and sustainer of the universe? And do we have any good reasons to think that's true? Let's go one step at a time or else things will seem absurd. So I love what you're doing there,

cause you're doing the same thing to maybe the Christian skeptic that wants to rush ahead, and you're saying, no, let's just pause and just say, is it possible that God made creatures on other worlds, rational creatures, even? Does he have the power to do it? Is it inherently the watch? Yes, yes, yes. So once you, you know, okay, if that's a possibility, then you have to start asking, all right,

are they made in the image of God? In the full sense, not just rational. We usually think of rational intellect and free will as being image of God. But you know, in maybe Sirach, where there's a passage where it talks about we're made in his image because we last forever, we're immortal. And that really is a part of the image of God in us, that we reflect his own immortality in a pale way. So would it be possible for there to be creatures that, and C.S. Lewis kind of proposes this too in his fiction, creatures that God has made good and their goodness is just for this life and they are rationally free will and they can love and all those things, but they're

not made to survive death the way We are so that would be a possibility. Okay The other possibility that they are made to survive death that we are then the next question becomes kind of what's their moral status? What do you mean what's that I said so far I'm talking about spiritual status kind of why yeah, you know, yeah What what kind of soul we've got. Moral status then becomes, okay, did we fall or not? Did they fall or not the way we did? If they did not, then that's an exciting possibility. Lewis looks at that too.

Exactly. Uh-huh. What might it be like for a race never to have fallen? If they did, then that branches out into other questions. Okay. Then does God have plans to redeem them? And if so, can it be a plan different from ours? Could it be that redemption on earth? What Christ did here has a spillover effect after that? Wow. I see how this would be an incarnation. I see how this be an incarnation The other thing Aquinas says in the Sumer is that it wasn't strictly necessary that God become incarnate to save us That's the other point I was gonna say

Yeah, yeah here but it could God could do it another way because he's got So that leaves open that possibility that he could redeem them in something other than incarnation. But how about the incarnation here? Could it have like a spillover effect or not? And then you start getting into the Apollinarian controversy in ancient, the ancient world where you, yeah, thanks. I don't even know if I want to go there yet, but anyway, so you've got all these possibilities

that you have to at least lay out first. If they, I mean, it could even be that God doesn't, is going to redeem them. You've got a race that he's not going to redeem. People say it's contrary to his love, but what if they had testing in the beginning the way the angels are an example of that? The demons that fell, there's no chance of redemption for them now. What if they were an embodied species somewhere that was kind of like that, that where especially where each one of them, the angels had their individual test, yes or no to God. Humans have to deal with original sin, whereas our first parents and then have repercussions for us. What if there's a species out there that, like the angels, the individuals are given

the test? And so you could have a mixed race. Some are fallen and some are not. I mean, there's so many things in our Christian here, His incarnation here having a spillover effect, and there's some things that are said by some of the Church followers about how the crucifixion was here, but the blood reached to the heavens, that kind of thing, and to all the universe that might suggest that that's the case, and I'd certainly allow for it. But then when you start looking at some of the ancient controversies, you see, okay, this guy named St. Apollinaris, he's actually a saint but he got something wrong and it was that he thought when they're trying to

figure out how did the nature of Christ's divine nature and human nature come together, he said, well, his human nature is the human body and the lower part of the soul, not the rational part, but the part that just animates us, makes our cells multiply, that kind of thing. But the higher part, rational part of the soul, intellect, was replaced by the Word when the two joined. So Christ didn't have a human intellect. He had the Word instead and then everything else human.

And the church came back and said, that doesn't work. The principle was what was not assumed was not healed, meaning what the Word did not take to Himself was not healed. Wouldn't it follow then that if some alien nature was not assumed? Yeah, that's where you were going. And that's where I'm going. Yep. So it's a question.

I mean, what if, because we tend to assume that it's going to be so much like us. We don't know. I mean, if they're there, what if they were more similar to bees in certain ways or something? So that, you know, trying to say to an alien, well, here's an incarnation and he took on our nature and stuff. Well, that's not our nature at all. I mean, how would it? It could be healed. I'm not saying it can't be. I'm just saying that there are reasons to think that

if he was going to do an incarnation for them, that would have to be their nature. Besides the fact he's also in Scripture, he's called the new Adam, you know, the second Adam, and he undoes what the first Adam did. And out there, they're not the descendants of Adam. They're not the children of Adam. So if he's kind of the second Adam, do they going to need their own second? I think this objection that I'm about to pose is really an ad hominem. But I think there's still something to it in that as people abandon faith in the supernatural,

they still seek transcendence and utopia, and maybe that was a big part of the impetus to the UFO craze in the, whenever it was, 60s, 70s, earlier in the United States. Yeah, it started with the 40s. Yeah. So, as I say, it's not a great argument, but what do you say to that? Well, I would say I understand that well. I mean, my atheist period, I ended up getting into the occult and things because I still had this longing for the transcendence. That's

exactly how I put it after my conversion and was trying to feed that desire with something like that. And I think that is, yeah, that's a good reason why you have a lot of secular people who are thinking about this. And in fact that is, yeah, that's a good reason why you have a lot of secular people who are thinking about this. And in fact, you're actually finding, I mean, I could point to you in secular writings and podcasts and stuff about the issue of UFOs that they're starting to think about, what if, you know, it's almost as if matter and energy isn't everything. It's like there's a whole other dimension here. And it's almost as like there's a whole other dimension here and it's almost as if there's a consciousness that gives rise to the material universe. And I'm sitting there thinking,

guys, you know, we've been talking about this for 2,000 years. Of course, you just don't have the words for it yet. We are talking about the revelation that is in Christ. Yeah, that consciousness, I mean, you may not quite have figured him out, but the consciousness is God and he does give rise to the universe. He creates it. And yes, there is stuff that's beyond, you know, matter and energy and there are, if you want to call it another dimension, yeah, the dimension of the existence of angels. They don't move through space. They don't have bodies.

So I think, yeah, they really are the longing. But at the same time, that gives me, at least in my book, the opportunity to make some connections with them and say, you know what? These things you're saying, you're really getting at something that's true and real. Have you ever considered that the Christian faith is talking about the same thing, but in a much more detailed way that could actually change your life. So that's happening.

During your atheistic period, did you get big into UFOs and caught up in that stuff then? No, no. That was kind of interested before I became atheist at 12, and then, you know, again after my conversion at 18. So I didn't get it. But I do know folks, you know, who after my conversion at 18. So I didn't get it. But I do know folks, you know, who've kind of lost their faith and they're looking. There's actually a name for it among theologians who talk about this kind of stuff. It's called the ETI myth.

And it's the notion that extraterrestrial intelligence, ETI, the notion that aliens are going to come here and save us. It's kind of a messianic notion. They come here and they reveal to us that you... It's an apes revelation. Yeah. Sorry. Well, I was going to say, even it strikes me at the level, it's not just the popular level, you've got... I won't mention your name, but the person who I think heads up SETI, which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where the big radio telescopes, they're out there searching for any kind of signals that might, radio signals that I indicate.

And they take very seriously that there are, they've got to be intelligent races out there. Maybe we can catch some radio transmissions from them. And this has been going on for years. And very intelligent person and all that. But she actually said, you know, an essay I wrote that, and we all know kind of, I'm paraphrasing, but if they come here, if they survive this long, then that means they've got to really get beyond where we are culturally and that means there wouldn't be any organized religion because kind of basically everybody

knows that's backward stuff and all that. And then they would be able to tell us the truth in a way that really, and I'm saying, you know what, you don't realize it, but that's a form of the ETI myth that they're going to save us from ourselves. Heaven's gate, the cult, you know, back in the, when was it, the eighties, whatever it was, I mean, they were really explicit about these guys are gonna come down and take us away and save us.

Have you heard of Father Seraphim Rose? Yes. He wrote about the UFO craze. I believe he was very critical of it. Yeah, yeah. And again, I would agree that there are a lot of folks interested because it's filling some kind of a gap. But again, like you said, it's ad hominem.

It doesn't prove anything. That's like saying to the Christian, you only believe because you're afraid of reality, you're afraid of death. Even if that were the case, it wouldn't be an argument against God and Christianity. Yeah. All right. So you've got all these possibilities that open up and I mean even look at the devotional level of talking about the incarnation

so you have a creature out there that and and we're able to tell them what God has done here and And they don't have hearts, you know, that's not part of it and so What do you mean by sacred heart devotion? I don't even know what that is. So much of what is specifically human about our Lord and part of our devotion would be alien to them in that way. So it's just, it opens up for me a strong possibility that if he wanted to, if he wanted an incarnation to save others out there It would yeah, probably be something else and one of my students that

Something Catholic years ago undergrad. She actually was the first one to point that out to me because we had just been studying the Apollinarian Yeah heresy and Trying to explain the Eucharist to a planet without wheat. Yeah, or even without drinking I mean and You know to anticipate getting to marry Yeah, or even without drinking. And to anticipate getting to marry a race that may not even have mothers, that may have clones or may clone or may bud or may all kinds of things. But what I did want to say is that, so the notion that we're special and folks would say, okay, that would make us not special anymore.

So my first insight there is from St. Augustine. He once said, God loves each of us as if there were only one of us, and he loves all of us the way he loves each of us. And every parent of more than one child understands that completely. Your first child comes along and you say, I just love him so much, how can I possibly love him more? And then a second child comes along. Do they say, okay, now I'm going to divide my love between you and you? No, you say, oh, I love this one too, just as much, since we're my only child.

And God, who is love, infinitely more than that, He's able, so that love is not divided, it's multiplied. And so I would say a similar kind of thing here that for him to have another intelligent species out there that he loves that maybe has even been incarnated in, it doesn't diminish his relationship to us. He's God. He can love each race as if it were... It's like we're anthropomorphizing God, right? We're saying, I can't understand how I could do that.

So it's inconceivable that God could do that. Yeah. Or even less than a human being. Because most parents, again, I mean, maybe they have favorite kids or something, but they have the experience of, no, I love each one of you best. It would be like somebody who was raised by wolves and believed themselves to be the only human and yet somehow they believe in Christianity and they think to themselves, if there were other humans, God couldn't hear me because his attention would be divided. Yeah. Yeah. And you actually get some of the skeptics that have, I mean, one of the reasons I'm writing the book is you've got skeptics

out there, have for centuries, who say they don't like the Christian faith anyway. And they say, oh, yes, he exists. And that's, that disproves your religion. And that's one of the things that they would, Oh, he's going to be incarnate all this time? Oh, that's ridiculous! Is that the primary objection from, say, atheistic skeptics of Christianity regarding aliens? What's the best objection you've heard from atheists about why the existence of extraterrestrial life would disprove Christianity? Well, they have several. The least convincing is the one about, well, it's not in your Bible. Sure.

We've already talked about that. The second one would be, this science is showing us that it's a tiny little planet in this vast universe, and you're really saying you've got a special relationship with them, which of course you say, and as writers have during the history of this debate for centuries, wait a minute, value is not determined by size. And just- Can I interject something there? I believe C.S. Lewis addressed this as well.

He said that an atheist looks at the vastness of the universe and concludes that God must not exist because, as you say, we can't possibly be special. But he said, but if the universe were quite small, surely atheists would say if God existed, you would expect a much grander universe. So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. It is. And with this, the same kind of thing. So you think this little ball of rock in the middle of all these billions and billions of light years of things is that he's actually going to pay any attention to what you're doing or you or that kind of thing. And again, if you understand the faith from the inside out, you say, that's not an argument at all. In fact, it's our claim that we are special. If he really did

come here, that it's proved by that, that all these other possibilities out there, he'd still suffered and died here on this planet. That would be another analogy I'm thinking of is suppose alien life does exist light years away somewhere. It would be like them saying, do you really think if humans existed, they'd be concerned about us that far away on that little planet? Well, maybe. It turns out they really are. They're doing a podcast about it right now. We make so many assumptions, really, about these kinds of things. We're about God's nature. So they would do that. And I think, again, that's rather easily used. I mean, one writer about it several centuries ago, I had so many in the book, I can't keep

them all straight, but made this comment about how there's a sense in which this great glowing gaseous ball of fire that we call stars, magnificent and great, everything is, on the big scale of things, is still not as valuable as a single human soul. The sun will die one day. The sun will burn out. The soul will still be existing. The fetus aborted will not. Yeah.

Yeah. It'll still be there. Yeah. So I have a question that's kind of related to the whole, just so you know, Neil talks to us in the end. Sorry. And that's totally normal. But, um, so I've heard before, there's the,

I don't remember where this is from, but the whole, oh, aliens, it kind of implanted the seed for humanity or like, you know, abducted an ape and gave it rationality, stuff like that. That, to me, doesn't seem very compatible with Catholicism. Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah. That's a good point. The whole like, you know,ism. Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah.

That's a good point. The whole like, train us to like gold, that kind of thing. So there would be certain parameters if you're going to remain a Christian. I don't see how that could be commanded. And at the same time I would say, oh really, how would you prove that? You have, you know, there's one.

Certainly if that were true, they would disprove Christianity though. Unless, and I don't want people to take this wrong, unless there would be some way to argue that that's how God did it. Yeah. But I don't think so. That feels like a stretch. You have, I mean, you have people who say that.

One that's not a stretch is just the idea that there's an alien civilization that sent out a bunch of like, you know, micro organism, like seed bombs. Oh yeah, fair enough. And bombed a ton of planets with that. That's the notion of panspermia that we actually all have the same origin of life. And there are people who say, no, that could possibly be Christian. I'm open to the possibility. But you bring up a good point, Neil.

Like, there are certain parameters as a Christian that we're going to want to have as we talk about aliens. So what would some of those parameters be? So if you're going to remain a Christian, what are some things that you can't think is true about aliens? If that makes sense? Yeah. Number one, that they were not made by God. OK, you know, he's great of all.

Number two, that if they need redemption, that it doesn't involve God. Is there anything about, anything non-spiritual that we, that could be positive about aliens that would disprove the Christian faith? I don't know what to disprove it, but the kind of thing that Neil just mentioned, to try to say that humans are actually created by a reptilian race, as I usually think. I see. They're reptilian. And you see that and you say, no, I don't see how

those can be compatible. And it's a, I mean, people listening to me, they believe in it, they're gonna be angry at me, but I think that's kind of a fringe thing. That's not central to the UFO discussion. You have folks, you know, there's one guy who's by his own admission, formerly Catholic, and he was in the CIA and claims that high level folks in CIA told him at one point that this is true and that we have this whole line of hybrid retillions who are now the elites controlling the world. And obviously he's not Catholic anymore, he talks about it as a past thing. I said, okay, if you really believe that, I could see why it wouldn't be. But so, yeah, things like that, some kind of claim, like I was saying, that that God didn't create us, but that there's no God and we are created by this alien life.

I say, yeah, that would. They came and tried to manipulate. We couldn't go there. As Neil said, that it's because you're saying they are creators and not God. That could life have come on a meteorite from another planet where God, maybe so. And we know that the story of Genesis is, it's real and it's historical that he did have first humans and created life here. But the language is so poetic and figurative, it's wide range for how he might have done

it. The whole, the church's whole discussion with Darwinian evolution has kind of demonstrated that that something we might not have suspected about how God did it could very well be the case. It doesn't change the fact that he did it. All right, well here's a question. Do you think we have any good reasons to think that aliens exist? Yeah.

Yeah, we do. We, uh, we have eyewitness testimony. Yeah. Eyewitness testimony. We now have extremely sophisticated instrumentation, um, showing that UFOs exist. They're, they're not just seen by people like with the Navy pilots, they're on the radar here, they're on the radar on the ship and on the plane and the infrared sensors are getting that and just stuff that, okay, it's definitely not hallucination or

imagination or anything like that. Now, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily alien, could be something else. I'm convinced there's no way it could be human technology at this point. It's can you so far be on you drill in on a specific instance, maybe a recent instance that many of us may be unfamiliar with and just sort of flesh it out for us. Well, several. I mean, they wouldn't get too much into detail, but we had kind of leaked, although it wasn't contrary to law, I don't think, videos of UFOs that were being observed by jet, you know, fighter jet pilots and by the

craft, ocean-going craft that had them on their radar on this really sophisticated infrared detection system. The pilots and people on the ship could see them and they were doing things that we call them the five observables, things that we would have no clue how to have technology. So since 2000, the thing is, I mean, some of this footage is from like 2004, that kind of thing, reported finally in the New York Times, 2017, 2019. But it's been going on for a long time. And you have some of the pilots say, you know, off the coast of Jacksonville, off the coast of California, this is, we see these things every day for years. What? They're saying that. Yeah.

Who's they? The pilots. Yeah, the Navy pilots. They're the best in the country at what they do. And they're coming out openly now and saying, yeah, we see them. So that now finally the Pentagon has had to say, okay, we're going to have a new process in place where without ridicule or without, because the pilots have always been told in the past, you're probably going to lose your career if you report that thing. I mean, we know that they've had so many pilots say that, that, no, you can report it without retribution. And now the reports are coming in. Are reports coming in from countries other than the United States?

Yeah. Cause every time you watch a movie about UFOs, it always takes place at Washington DC. It's because it was made by Americans. Of course. But sure, rush it up. Some wild stuff in Iran. Lots of things in Brazil. Give us an example. Well, just, you know, the things coming and playing around with the pilots and all this like playing games with them and that kind of stuff. In Brazil, oh my goodness, there's a documentary coming out about that. If you're going to take any witness testimony at all where they're actually where things got out of the craft and walked around the town. In Brazil? Yeah. You have to break this down for us.

This is too fascinating. I'm just telling you, it's all over. It's Russia and Russia, they seem to like their, I want to say attracted to, interested in everything nuclear that we're doing. Could be the vodka. Well, I would say all around the world. So, ever since we started having the atomic testing out there, the Southwest. That's the whole Roswell thing. All that stuff is nearby that where all that was going on. But then since then, they show up at nuclear missile silo sites and do things. They show up nuclear powered vessels. They show up at power plants like the one not far from, not too far from where I am in Tennessee. They just seem to be showing up at those things all the time. And the reason I'm mentioning this because

of Russia and the United States, there was one base where we have all kinds of testimony from the commander of the base, the men who were there. They actually eventually had a press conference that included talking about a book's been written. It is well documented that one night this red circular saucer kind of thing comes down starts hovering over the silos in their underground, you know, hovering there. Men are seen, they know what to do. It's there some time. And then all the missiles were online where they could be launched immediately if the president were to call and give, you know, and one by one they begin to go offline and they haven't done anything. There's what is going on.

They can't figure out why the system is malfunctioning this way. And then the thing leaves and they all go back on. If people wanted to look up that specific thing, what would they type in? Maltzrum, M-A-H-L-S-T-R-O-M. If you put that in, it'll come out. And when did that occur? I think that was back in the 80s. And then what we found after the fall of the Soviet Union, people interested in this stuff,

but I wanted to talk to Russian generals and others, kind of find out that they had a situation that was even scarier than that where everything's online and and with certain things, you know switches turn with launch toward us and Then comes down hovering over them same kind of thing and all of a sudden they all get ready to launch and they think it's Gonna be World War three And we can't do anything about it, and then it disappears and it all goes back to normal and we can't do anything about it and then it disappears and it all goes back to normal. Now, okay, you could say that doesn't prove aliens, you know. It certainly, I don't think, can be Russia or China doing to us and if things are happening to them and it's again happening around the world. Australia's had its own, oh my goodness, Africa, some of the things that have

happened. Tell us, tell us. Rwanda, an entire. Rwanda? Rwanda has had it. South Africa, some of the things that have happened. Tell us, tell us. Rwanda, South Africa, I think has had some too, but an entire school of kids, the thing comes down the middle of the day, the kids see it, they kind of interact with the things that the teachers see it and then it leaves. And so John Mack, who is a psychiatrist at Harvard, may have been the chair of his department, I don't know, but he starts studying this stuff. And there's a documentary where he's interviewing the kids. It's really believable. And ultimately, the teachers, all these years later, so this was, I don't know, 30 years ago maybe, all these years later, the kids still tell the same story. Nothing's changed.

They're all in agreement about what they saw and what happened that day. They draw pictures of what they saw. It looks a lie. And so he's interviewing them and he's a psychiatrist. He said, they seem to be telling the truth. And then another teacher, you know, who was there saying, yeah, it's all real, but they told me I lose my job. Tell us about this Brazil incident.

Cause you said people or aliens apparently got off the craft and walked around. What happens? And again, I mean, I have to reserve judgment. All this. I know you're sort of reporting cases that you've read about. Yeah. Yeah. And then a documentary is about to be done.

I'm reporting cases that you've read about. Yeah, yeah. And then a documentary is about to be done. James Fox is the guy who creates them and he's done others of eye-opening. A little sensational sometimes a presentation, but that's to get enough viewers. This is called… It's like our clickbait thumbnails. It's the same thing. Yeah, okay.

All right. A moment of contact. It's coming out in October, so next month. And he has been down there for years talking to witnesses. And what did they say happened? Okay, there's apparently a crash. And you know, that raises another question too, if they got this kind of technology, how could they have a crash?

My response is even the best technology is flawed. You know, it's not perfect. But anyway, crash and then around the town, they start seeing people start reporting these creatures that look a lot like the description of the grays. Tell us about them. Well, they're humanoid, but their hands are very different. They leave footprints. They actually have got these of, they're different.

They seem to kind of communicate telepathically. Anyway, they show up and then you've got witnesses of several girls that saw them and went and got their mother and the thing was still there and it was injured. Well I guess when the mother came it wasn't there anymore but they had footprints, they could draw how it looked and the mother agreed. And then they finally started talking to people that had been in the local hospital and the body, one was dead, one was still alive, they brought it and the guy was told again, you're going to lose your job if you ever tell anybody about this.

I mean, he was the x-ray technician was taking x-rays and they said, do not look, just do the machine, don't look at it. And when he happened to kind of look to see it, they, you know, got him with a rifle, but it was. My kind of two immediate objections, which aren't necessarily substantial is one. I don't, I, I'm, I'm afraid of the fact that everyone's just an idiot like I am and that there's no great, uh, ruling class trying to hide these things from the public. Uh,

it also seems, um, the fact that in all of these instances there's some power that's hiding it so that we have no evidence of it also seems to lean in favor of the fact that these perhaps weren't real things that happened. Why is it the case that the the bosses and the generals are all trying to hide this and say you'll lose your job? Okay, in the case of Brazil, it was because of, if the story is true, because of pressure from the United States. Why in the United States?

Right, it goes back to the Cold War. In modern times, now we have accounts of things up in the sky doing wild things all the way back to ancient Roman times. It's pretty amazing. The Middle Ages, other things, battles going on in the sky, flying shields, the Romans call them over a battlefield. What? They were flying around. Oh yeah, that document's in the Vatican archives. And so, you know,

you don't know what to make of all that. But in modern times, the kind of modern UFO phenomenon began with the so-called Foo Fighters in World War II. So allied pilots up there doing missions and these lights would come, start tracking them, around them, interacting with them. They thought the Nazis have developed some kind of technology we're not familiar with. But it was happening to the Nazi pilots too. And probably the Japanese pilots. And we know that because they talked about it. Oh, afterward, yeah. It all came out. They just, you know, so we thought you guys had that stuff.

No, we thought you had it. So they nicknamed them Foo Fighters. And so that was kind of in more recent times, the first time you actually start having a whole series of things going on by very reliable observers, jet pilots or pilots anyway. Then starting in the 40s, Roswell, it was one event, but there are others down there. Could you break open Roswell for us? I wouldn't want to go into too much details, but here's the point.

Again, I'll make the point that maybe you're afraid of. I'm not saying that you necessarily ascribe to all these things, But I know you've studied them. I think there's a there there, you know, there's a there there, but that doesn't mean you believe every report, every description. But see, there's a lot of people watching who are like me who've really done no research into this. That's why I'm asking, tell us about what happened at Roswell. Okay. Let me say first, before I forget, there's a man named Ross Kultart, who is a top-notch Australian investigator, an investigative

journalist. He's won national awards, pardon me, in Australia. He was a skeptic about this and just started set out to do it. And he's produced a book called In Plain Sight, and it made him a believer of the research, and he's still getting all kinds of contacts. So for people who, this is all new, I'd send them to that book first of all. Okay, In Plain Sight. In Plain Sight, Ross Coulthard, so C-O-U-L.

And I just want to remind people right now that Paul's excellent book is linked in the description below, Extraterrestrial Intelligence of the Catholic Faith. Are we alone in the universe with God and the angels? So, yeah, I love you got to click it, click it and and buy it. I love that on the back of this book, right? Usually in the back of books, you've got quotes from Peter Crave and Scott Hahn saying what a great book it is. You've got John Chris system, say now, but the great Isaac Newton, Padre Pio, C.S. Lewis, all talking about aliens before we get to Roswell, though, can I ask you what did Padre Pio, C.S. Lewis, all talking about aliens.

Before we get to Roswell, though, can I ask you what did Padre Pio have to say about aliens? Oh, no problem. Yeah, that's the wildest quote in the book. Shall I read his quote? Let me read the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. So he's in an interview and the interviewer just happens to ask him about aliens.

And so this is Padre Pio. Just read right into the mic. It's documented, officially published by the Capuchin Order. Okay. Question. Father Pio, some claim that there are creatures of God on other planets, too. Answer. What else? Do you think they don't exist and that God's omnipotence, I can just hear him saying that, God's omnipotence is limited to this small planet Earth? What else? Do you think there are no other beings who love the Lord? Second question. Father, I throw a reply. I think the Earth is nothing compared to other planets and stars.

P.O. replies, exactly earth, and this last one is a zinger. On other planets, other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did. Padre Pio said that. Yes. Wild. And, you know, with him, it's one thing for, as I quote John Paul II, a little girl asked him in a public audience one time, Holy Father, what about the aliens?

He doesn't, in his reply, he doesn't say, no, that's contrary to our faith. He doesn't say, we don't know, science has to tell us. He doesn't say, if they exist, then so and so. His simple answer is, they're God's children too. John Paul II said that? Yes, yeah, publicly. Of course, P.O. and John Paul II could be flat out wrong. There's no reason to.

There could be. So my point with all of these is not that it proves it, but that it does demonstrate that you can be a faithful, well-catechized Catholic and still hold that these things exist. It is not contrary to the faith. If it was okay for Padre Pio to hold it, it's okay for Dr. Paul Big Ben and others to hold it. So you've got John Paul II, but the interesting thing, and others, so Blessed Anne and Catherine Emerick, the great Catholic visionary,

and of course there are problems with their visions, but she says she saw life out there. Wow. Yeah. And you get others as well. But with Padre Pio, the amazing thing to me is that, okay, you can just say with John Paul, okay, this is opinion, and you know, so from opinion, with Padre Pio, the amazing thing to me is that, okay, you can just say with John Paul, okay, this is opinion and, you know, it's a firm opinion. With Padre Pio, you have to wonder. Yeah.

Because he knew all these things that were divinely revealed to him. He could read souls. He knew things that were happening remotely, what scientists today would call remote viewing. He knew all these things that God had just told him. What if it was that kind of thing? You can't claim that it is. I wish I'd been the interviewer. So, Father, do you say this because it's your opinion or do you say this because God revealed it to you? I would love to have asked him that question. Tell us about Roswell. Okay, so, 47, 1947, still I think, out on a ranch in rather remote New Mexico.

You have a rancher who's going on his ranch and he finds what looks like crashed craft of some kind and debris from it and all that kind of thing. So he reports it to law enforcement authorities and people out there look at the stuff. But anyway, it eventually or very soon gets to the Air Force and they come out, restricted all that kind of stuff. And we have witnesses that they had all this stuff to kind of put on trucks they took to Wright-Patterson Air Force basins here in Ohio. And when that first happens, the Air Force guys actually say,

it's a crashed UFO and it goes all over, because all over the world. Who's the law enforcement? The US Air Force representative said it is. And then, so it goes all over the world and it's making this big thing. The very next day, they call a press conference, they say, sorry, we were wrong. It was just weather balloons. And they have a picture of, we're just seeing myself, the guy had examined it and said, this is not anything that I know, even though, and he's holding the weather balloon and it's kind of a deer in the headlights thing. If you see that, if you find that picture online, keep that up. Oh, it's there, it's there.

Yeah. And toward the end of his life said, they made me lie. You know, he said, I can't hold this in anymore. They made me lie about this. And then later on the Air Force changed the story again and said, well, actually it was this that we were doing. So. I found that I gotta put it up.

You gotta, yeah, yeah. Hold on. So anyway, I'm just saying, you know, I found that I got to put it up. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. Hold on. So anyway, I'm just saying, I can't know for sure exactly what happened, but you've got the books, entire books about this where you've got people who've been interviewed who had different parts of the Roswell encounter with the people who are watching what the Air Force was doing with moving stuff and the people over here did this and the claim is that yes there were actually two crashes, there

two vehicles that crashed and that they actually had bodies and something still alive took it out. So I want to get to why it might be the case that the US government would want to keep this hidden but it doesn't seem to make sense that this government this government, which you say is kind of bent on preventing this, this information from getting out to allow people like this and others to claim that he was being told to hush things up. Like why wouldn't they silence him if it's that important to the government?

Well, let me have evidence that they have silenced some people and people who disappear. You have people who have at the end of their lives on their deathbed say, they threatened me, they threatened my family, all that kind of stuff, but I'm telling it now. And that, I mean, lots of people. And then of course you do have lots of pilots, for instance, military pilots who are saying now, I was told it was the end of my career if I reported this thing. So there is plenty of testimonial evidence that the government has. But more importantly, this is the Cold War, right? Okay, so Russia's doing all kinds of stuff trying to position itself with us.

And the Pentagon is terribly concerned that Russia with these, I mean, there are other UFO flaps. I mean you had not just this stuff going on, you had things flying over Washington DC being chased by jets and caught on radar and all over the world they're talking about it. And then Los Angeles had a similar kind of thing where they're going to fire at the things. So Pentagon's panicking and saying the Reds, the Russians could use this as a pretext for some kind of attack or an occasion with an attack because what would happen is when these things, flaps, as they call them, UFO flaps would happen.

People start calling in, reporting all this stuff. The lines are all jammed. Back in those days, that kind of thing could happen. Is a UFO flap a sighting? What is a UFO? A series of sightings or a bunch of sightings. We have a bunch of them and you have a lot of people and it happens over a period of days usually. So that happened in Los Angeles, that happened in DC, it happened in other places.

And so they're concerned that the Soviets could make use of that and actually have some kind of attack while everybody's looking over here at that stuff. That seems to be one of the reasons. We now, in 1960, the Brooking Institute, it was a think tank, I think it still exists, that NASA had do a study about kind of the implications of what our research is in space. And there's a small section at the end where the Institute says, I'm paraphrasing of course, but by the way, if we ever get in, have information that shows that this kind of stuff is real, we got to be really careful because we look back at what happened to the Aztecs when the

Spanish came and it just destroyed their whole society to realize that this is advanced technology out there and it could cause total social panic and disruption. And so if we do, the government was going to have to decide whether it should even release that information and if they should get scientists and all that. So the primary reason, just to sum it up for me, the primary reason you think the U S government is hiding this stuff is what? Well, it's because I, yeah, it's, because in the Cold War, they thought it would,

it was a matter of national security. Second, they didn't want the American people to know that they were not in control of our skies. And I mean, even today, I think that's one of the reasons they're resisting it so much. If you've got our nuclear powered aircraft carriers, all these jets and stuff, and these things are flying over doing all kinds of things that they cannot, they can't change. I mean, they're all of our most sophisticated equipment and stuff. It's flying the rings around them. We can't even control our own airspace or the, and this is often during training, which

is totally restricted. Nothing is to be allowed to be over that air, airspace. It's embarrassing for the Pentagon. If, if, if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are illustrative of the competence of the U S government, I failed to see how this is a possibility for them to cover something like this up. That's always the big question. And yet, um, think about, for instance, the shorter time period, but the development of the nuclear

bomb. So many people involved in that for a period of years, and it was kept secret. It did not until we did it, it wasn't even out there. If you just look at the details of this stuff, you see that a lot of, I'm going to say a coercion intimidation threats, a lot of misinformation. That's the other thing. We also have now documents that were classified and unavailable. The Freedom of Information Act has allowed people to get them from back in that earlier

period, the Cold War period. And you have one document with the CIA basically saying, okay, we've got to keep this stuff under wraps. So the way we'll do it is with ridicule and mockery of anybody who talks about it. And we will actually lean on the media, the national media to do the same. It worked. It worked. So you have all these people, they're not keeping it secret, but they talk about it

and they're totally ridicule. So anybody else sees something, I'm going to talk about this. But if they were wrong and they were kind of enthusiastic about this thing, mockery would also be an appropriate response or at least an understandable response from the media. If you're talking about the government or the observers. There could be another reason these people are mocked. It might be that they are loons and should be.

Yeah, they've been plenty. Sure. Okay. They do that kind of stuff. And that's that's been one of the things that's kind of set it all back. Yeah. But you've got, I mean, there's a press conference. When was that? In the 90s, I guess. They brought together folks from around the world,

but especially then, and included the guy at the airport space. It was not about where they had the, or not the base, I guess, but the silos and that kind of thing. If they're not credible, nobody is. And if they don't have the kind of knowledge, not just intelligence and integrity, but kind of knowledge as our best trained pilots and commander of the base, you know, if they don't, If we can't believe them, who can we believe? And so many of them. I mean, again, I would just include you in plain sight, Ross. Is there any prominent alleged UFO sighting that you think is false?

That's a good question. I think some of the…I don't know how prominent they are, but I think probably, and this is a good question for us to talk about too, a lot of the…some of the abduction claims of the alien abduction are either kind of made up for people seeking attention or that they're demonic. And that's one of the things I'm getting with the book, and I knew it was going to come. A lot of Catholics and other Christians say, this is all demonic. It's just demons. We can explain it. It's all demons. Which is the kind of thing you hear throughout church history, whatever, there's something that people can understand. It's either demons or aliens. And I would agree that yes, there are some of the accounts of so-called alien abduction. People are, what they remember is that something, maybe beings showed up in their bedroom at night or something, it's usually at night, or they could see a light coming in from the sky.

And then they're paralyzed and they're taken by these things back to a ship and experiments done and stuff. You've heard it. Oh yeah, movies, movies about it. Some of those, even secular observers looking at that say, gosh, that sounds a lot like the old, in Catholic history, the old notion of demonic encounters with demonic abductions and stuff, or even with the fairy folk kind of thing. And I'd agree. And you even have some people who claim at least that, who are Christians, that when that happened, at some point they looked at the things and said, in the name of Jesus

Christ, leave me alone. And that went away. Cases like that, yeah, I'll be the first to say, yeah, that's demonic, I think. But you can't paint with a broad brush the whole experience. And especially, that's why it's so important. I really do believe Well, I'm convinced about you know as convinced as you can be without having the evidence in your hand, but there are crashed Vehicle materials that have been retrieved The government has turned them over to the private aerospace industry with contracts so that they can honestly say oh, we don't have anything like that

and that if that ever there plenty of people saying that have been in high positions. If there, if we ever, that ever becomes public, you know, then you say, okay, why would demons need a bolts craft to get around? What do you think would happen if this stuff was said to be authentic by the US government, if they came out and just started admitting at least a couple of things, what would happen to our society? How would people react? Yeah, and that's why I wrote the book. You know, you have folks like all the way back to the Brooking Institute report that say, oh, it'll be panic and everything will fall apart, especially people of faith. You know, they made a point about that, religions will be. On the other hand,

every survey that's been done by sociologists of religious figures and leaders saying, okay, do you believe it exists or could exist? And they said, yeah. And they said, well, if it were revealed, what would it do? And they said, oh, just increase my faith in God. It wouldn't bother me. So that I don't think, I think the panic thing has been well overstated. However, because you do have folks out there saying this would disprove

your faith, and people hearing that are people who said, where does it fit my faith? That you would have a lot of people all of a sudden in doubt or confusion who are believers. And this book is written for them to be able to say, look, this is a discussion that's going on for a long time. First of all, don't think it's a silly discussion. That's only literally because of government manipulation, that our last couple of generations have thought that you've got all these best minds because it's not just Catholics. I mean, it's all every philosophers and Benjamin Franklin. I'm like, is he had the wildest ideas about this? John Adams, Leibniz, Descartes, I could just go on and on with the ones who said, of course it is. But so first of all, Catholics and other Christians have been talking about this for centuries and it didn't make them panic. It's okay.

You don't have to panic. We can accommodate this. We accommodated the Copernican Revolution where all of a sudden science makes it clear that, like, we believe that the Earth is not the center of the universe, not the center of the solar system even. It's okay, we can accommodate that. So to help them see that, because you have folks saying it would destroy your faith, and then you have the other group of folks, kind of New Agey kind of folks, who are going to say, oh yeah, they're real, they're our space brothers, they know better than we do the reality about God and the universe, and they're going to they're our space brothers, they know better than we do the reality about

God and the universe, and they're going to teach us the true religion, because all the religions in the world are wrong. Independent of how people of faith might react, just on a societal level, what's the fear of how people would react? That they would, well first of all, lose all confidence in the government. Yeah, okay, just real quick, I still confidence in the government. Yes. OK, just real quick. That's I still I'm not clear why that's a compelling reason. I mean, you said that the Pentagon would be embarrassed at these.

They don't control the skies and things like that. But why does it matter since very little seems to have happened? That's that's affected people on a wide scale. It seems to have affected pockets where crashes are said to have happened or aliens are said to have done certain things, but most of us walking around don't have this experience. So why would it?

I guess if people knew that it was a reality and the Pentagon finally came out and said, yep, yep, they're there, we've had contact with them. Sure. Then it's like, okay, so you really haven't had control of the skies all this time. You haven't had control of these other things. People have been, even if they're believing in the abductions, people have been abducted and yet nobody stopped it. So what can they do? And if they weren't actually

showing up on the White House lawn instead of just flying over the White House like they did back in the fifties, if that's what it was, to begin to wonder who could protect us, who couldn't. Oh, I see. I could see people having that idea that this thing could show up in your, these people talk about things show up in their houses, in their backyards and hovering over their homes. It would become a primary concern in say the presidential debates and things like that.

They call it national security. Oh my gosh, it's a national security. Now I'm not concerned about that. The argument can be made that if they're real and they're out there and doing all this stuff, though you get the weird kind of adduction stories, if they have that technology and they were hostile in general, they'd own us. They could have done anything. In fact, that's one of the arguments why it's not Chinese or Russian.

If they have that technology, they don't know. Besides the fact that the same technology has been reported since the 40s. And we know for sure Russia and China didn't have it then. And we didn't have it then. Not even the Nazis. You know, they get it. So. What's the theory on why they haven't made themselves more evident or more apparent to the public? If they're that powerful, why do these things all seem to be hidden?

Surely they would have greater power than the US government to suppress these things. Why haven't they done anything about that? I want to say this again, just to make a point. The book is not about what we're talking about now. It's not about UFOs. There's an appendix at the end because my publisher insisted I'd have to write a little bit about what I think. It's about just the more general question, if there were a disclosure, would it, can our faith accommodate it? And the answer is yes. Which is, yeah, good, good, good. So, we're spending a lot of time talking about it because people are interested in it. You know,

I've studied a lot in the last year, a couple of years, the more recent developments, but okay, the question again was, oh, why wouldn't they be revealing themselves? So you have people speculate about that. The scariest one is that you have from intelligence officials who kind of know how things like this operate that they seem to be doing reconnaissance, meaning preparing for something. So the Independence Day movie scenario or that kind of thing that they're watching and figuring all this out. But they've been doing that for a long time.

Another would be what they call the zoo hypothesis. They think we're cute. And they're here and just like in the zoo, you're not allowed into the cage, you just get to observe They don't want to actually interfere Possible what's going on. They just want to observe Or like excuse me, how would they communicate with us necessarily may be so different, you know If you're you walk by us and and hill and the ants are doing stuff you want to observe them all and they see you And think what what is this?

How are you gonna talk to him? I see that's good to have fair rooms or something. Yeah These are just speculations But if they're creating crafts that aren't so Different to our own. I mean they they appear to be material they appear to fly through the air I mean, they're not at least in that sense. They don't seem to be so different as we do to ants Unless that's another possibility that these are actually Remotely controlled and if there are figures on them like the ones they saw in Brazil, I said their avatars their AI The comparison is made somebody says, okay, I'm

going to go study, you know, 50 years ago, the Papua New Guinea and the head hunters and the, you know, we know that they're violent. They know that they eat people, all this stuff and I want to go study them. But if I had the opportunity instead of landing there and trying to deal with them. Send a drone with a drone. Or a robot, of course I'd do that instead. Interesting. So they wouldn't eat me. Um, and these are all, I'm sure there are people listening right now. So Paul, you were just crazy.

This I'm doing is throwing out. No, you know, you asked the question. Why it's not crazy. This is the beauty of philosophy. It's you, you get to entertain these, these possibilities, but it does sound though, that you are a believer and that you do think that many of these things, enough evidence. I'd be very surprised if somehow the government or anybody else was able to come out and say, okay, we'll show you this is our own technology, and it has been all along. If they did, I'd say, okay. I just don't see how, at this point, that could be possible human technology.

They're doing things like hypersonic speeds, I mean really, really fast so that if one of us were on that craft, the human, the acceleration would kill them. They do things like make those kind of things and they make a right turn at that kind of speed which would just crush them, if they were human, crush them against the side of the thing. They have transmedium, and this is all demonstrated by, you know, things that we have, records of videos and, you know, radio stuff, radar stuff, that they can come from outside the astros from space into the atmosphere and then at some point go into the water and come back out.

It's called transmedium. They can go through those in the the same crap without breaking a sweat. We have... Do we have footage of that? Is it on YouTube? And a lot more than... Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna ask you to look it up, Neil. I'm just like... I guess I'll just stuff later, but sure. Yeah. This was some of the stuff. And it's very

blurry, but the word is that this stuff was, you know, now that Congress is demanding hearings and they're having closed hearings, they're seeing the really clear stuff, longer video, and they're coming out saying, why haven't they told us about this? And that's why we're about to have more hearings in Congress about it. So I'm completely unaware about what's going on with this. So what was maybe a recent UFO sighting or something that's taken place and what's happening in Congress right now about that?

Because I'm not aware. Okay, so for instance, in one instance, it's called the Gimbal incident. Another one is the Tic Tac incident, because the thing looks like a little Tic Tac vest mitt. You've got the, what are they called? Go Fast incident. Anyway, in general, these things have taken place since 2000.

We're kept secret, the pilots, you can't talk about. But then finally, beginning in 2017, you have people involved who say, we can't keep this secret anymore. They don't break their nondisclosure agreements, but they come out and it came out in the New York Times in 2017 and again in 2019, where they're quoting these folks, they're interviewing people that, yes, the government has had this black budget agency going on. They've been interested all along, they've been lying about that. And here's some video footage from, one is off Catalina Island, Southern California coast, other stuff is happening

off of Jacksonville in the Atlantic Ocean. And you see the thing coming, it's doing all these wild stuff like that. It's well, I mean, I could go on and on, but just take a look at the things. You know, we're getting reports now that when they go underwater, they go really fast, maybe hypersonic speeds, and they're not creating disturbance in a wake, that kind of thing. When the thing splashes in it or there's no splash water, it just goes in. We have very sophisticated, the Navy does, very sophisticated tracking stuff for what

submarines do. And they're tracking this stuff. And they can't talk about it when it was brought up in the last congressional hearing. They said, we'll have to talk about that behind closed doors. They didn't deny it, but it's happening. So since 2000, some that involve military personnel and situations. So it's not just your Aunt Josephine saying, oh, I saw this thing in the sky last night.

It's trained military pilots, especially pilots, but the people on the ships as well. Instrumentation that is the most sophisticated we have. Multiple forms of instrumentation. And this is another good reason to think that places like America and other highly developed nations would have more access to things like this. Because they have the instrumentation. But again, you have it happening in Iran, Brazil, Russia, China keeps a lid on it, but there are people who say, yeah, we know that China seems up to.

I just want to get back to your particular question, which was... I don't know. So we're still... I'm sorry. Yeah, it's all right. Let's have some water real quick. At this point, seems to me there may be a slow disclosure going on with the government. That was my point. The fact that they have let some of these people come out with non-disclosure agreements

and say this much and stand up to the edge and kind of wink-wink about the rest of it. People like Luis Alessando, who was actually the head of the Black Budget post-study thing and kind of finally came out. Maybe that's why they're finally letting them now talk about it. That their plan is ultimately that it's going to get out So we might as well do it kind of slowly so people don't panic But you still have by all testimonies people within the Pentagon pushing hard against this Either because again, they don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want government to lose face

they because again, they don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want government to lose face. They have been a number of folks, including Luis and others, who say that within, especially the Pentagon, you actually have people of a certain religious bent who either believe is demonic or somehow that if the information came out, it would contradict their faith. And so as a group,

they're pushing against any kind of disclosure of this. faith and so as a group they're pushing against any kind of disclosure of this. So the other thing is, and for people that probably, well I'm going to say probably crimes committed in the cover-up. In part, if nothing else, things have been kept from Congress, from the committees that are supposed to by law have oversight of these things, they haven't been told. And that's what's got Congress so angry right now, the people involved with it, the intelligence committees, both House and Senate. So they had hearings May 17th. The government put up as their witnesses to people who knew nothing. It was embarrassing. And then that

frustrated them so much that they're coming back, they're going to have more hearings with people who really know. And they've put in legislation that now allows folks, even with non-disclosure agreements, to go through this channel to Congress to say, this is what I know, including about crash materials. Even if they're people who aren't government officials but who are with the private aerospace industry that some claim have been given these things to study and try to reverse engineer. So all that stuff's happening that's gonna happen soon now. The witnesses and then people I could go on

so many characters I could mention out you know the public right now but Gary Nolan, Stanford professor, was nominated for a Nobel Prize right now. He was approached by the CIA some years ago saying in his office saying, here's some pictures of what's going on the brains and people and their bodies and stuff and it came from contact with UFOs, can you help us understand this? He's gotten very public recently and talking about things, but he says for instance that he knows personally the whistleblowers who are going to take this method and take it to congress. Now congress will probably start out by having,

in fact, they already are having closed door hearings about a lot of this stuff. So it may not all get out in public, but I think it's gonna leak if they do. How do you know that? Like, what would people look up to see anything about these congressional things? Well, we already know about, you know, obviously the ones that took place, but... Just speaking to the mic. Oh, yes, sorry. The things that already took place. But you have people that have actually, like Gary Nolan, who've actually been briefing, Louis Lozando, have actually like Gary Nolan, who've actually been briefing Louis Elizondo, been briefing congressional staff members who are preparing for the hearings.

So it's going to happen that the whole January 6 thing kind of overshadowed stuff for a while made them back off in the timing. But I think I can guarantee you it's going to happen unless Lord help us. I just hope the Pentagon doesn't, in order to try to hide things, find some way to start getting us into war or something. To distract us. That's an awful thing to say, but it would not be the first time that war has been excused. Are you tracking with Paul here? Because I'm trying to really understand why the US government would be so incentivized to hush this stuff up. And what I'm hearing is there may have been crimes committed to keep this secret. It might be that they do not wish to seem,

sort of incompetent, not being in control of things, but I I'm not really sure what the consequence of that would be other than, people might seem to want to maybe overthrow the government for those more powerful who would be more willing to do something about preventing alien attacks? What do you hear? To me, I think that there is a sense in government of I see a lot of incompetency in the form of, well, this is how things have been, so we shouldn't

change this, this is going to change the status quo, this is going to shake things up and be weird. To me that's like the core of the argument that the government doesn't want to say or do anything about this because it's like, well they're afraid that it would be disruptive in some vague sense and so there's so much of their life that has nothing to do with that, so they're just like, okay well I'm I'm just gonna you know, try to compartmentalize that as as best as possible To keep peace or something like that and that's what has been done. And so that's the kind of status quo Okay, that kind of makes sense to me

Yeah, they still I think they still would use the panic argument, you know that this will make the people panic What do you think? We know for sure because of the release documents from the past That the CIA and the Pentagon did collude about that kind of thing and this yeah Yeah, we got to keep this second. We got to influence the media to make this is public public record There is this actual now it's public but they had the Freedom of Information Act in which allows you to go back and Request anything that has to do with a certain topic They'll redact redact what they have to but they'll like yeah we have a CIA report from back then where they're

saying that we have this is what exactly we must we must not let this be yeah well it's not an admission of extraterrestrial life it's that we cannot let everything we can't figure it out And so we've got to suppress it through mockery, dismissal, and we will also use the media, we'll use our influence in the media to do that. And they were successful. Have you read any academic papers that argue against, either argue against, it's difficult to argue against,

extra stress your life, okay. It's difficult, not impossible, difficult to prove a negative, right? Especially when you don't have access to the vast majority of the universe around us. But have you read academic articles that have made compelling arguments as to why these things aren't extraterrestrials, maybe by examining a great deal of these cases and offering plausible reasons to think them, think them false or something other than extraterrestrial activity? Have you even looked into that?

I have. I mean, you just, that's part of the problem is that the academic world also influenced by this government effort has been dismissive for so long, they won't look into it. Oh, I see. You lose your funding. You know, up until recently, you would lose your funding if you even talked, wanted to write a paper about it in so many places. Thank goodness.

So you're saying the US government's putting pressure on academic institutions? What the US government has done with the media has led to this climate. But also I can just about get, I think it's probably very likely that any, you know, the government funds a lot of research. But what I'm asking you though is that that wouldn't, that would explain why there is an academic papers arguing in favor of extraterrestrial life. What I'm asking you is have you read academic papers that are arguing against these things? Surely the government would prefer that and would promote it. They don't, they won't touch it at all because within the academy for a generation, you know, two generations now, it's been, don't you dare write anything about that. If you do, you get no funding, you'll probably lose your, you know, your career. I mean, that's, I'm not making this up, but you have all kinds of academics, so I'll tell you. I still

don't understand if the government is hell bent on mocking these things and are even encouraging people to mock people, right? They're clearly open to talking about it so long as it dismisses those who would say UFOs are here. So why not fund people to write academic papers that disprove the sorts of things you're saying might be true? Let's just say that the closest thing to it was the government did issue some reports, Blue Book maybe you've heard of, where issue some reports, Blue Book, maybe you've

heard of, where they had in particular Blue Book, Jay Allen, Hynek, who was a physicist. And they made it look like, oh, we're going to examine all this stuff and we're funding and all that. We now know by Hynek's own admission later from the beginning, it was a snow job. They're going to say, your whole point of doing this is to disprove it, come up with reasons why even if you yourself think it's something real. So we'll say swamp gas in Michigan, for instance, or that kind of thing. And Hynek was the one who said that. So what you do have is you have a couple of times where the

government is financing that kind of thing. In retrospect now with the Documents Release Freedom of Information Act we're finding that the government basically said this is the conclusion you will come to. I see. So yeah I mean that's the closest you would come to to having some kind of academic study trying to disprove it. But it was just a tool of the government. Why do you think people and I'm study trying to disprove it. But it was just, it was a tool of the government. Why do you think people, and I'm not trying to come off as incredulous. I'm just trying to get to where people are. But why do you think it is people are so reluctant to, is it,

is it just this fear of being hoodwinked into something that's ridiculous? I mean, that's probably where I'm coming from. It's like, there's enough crap to worry about. I may, you know, I just like, sure, I'm open to it. If it, if's enough crap to worry about. I may, you know, I just like, sure, I'm open to it. If it impacted my life, maybe it is, right? And I'm just not seeing it. But until I see it, I'm really not open to investing a lot of mental energy in it.

But why is it, do you think that you encounter this sort of reluctance to take seriously these events? Look at the history of science. If you've ever read, you know, the nature of our structure of scientific revolutions, you know, the book where he talks about the paradigm changes in science, the pattern is always, you get this outliers information and people studying things and they're things that are anomalous, they don't fit the pattern. Those people are always ridiculed. They're always said, you're stupid, don't even talk about this kind of thing. And then finally, you know, what happened with leading up to Copernicus, you know, and then finally the evidence accumulates and then everybody says, oh, guess we're wrong.

You know, they won't say it very loudly. And then all of a sudden it becomes all the rage to study it. I think that's part of how science has always been, even though the way science presents itself is that if it's new, if it's interesting out there, we're supposed to study it to find out what it is. That's happening. I mean, you've got people like Avi Loeb, a Jewish astronomer at Harvard, was the head of the astronomy department there and he is looking for evidence of and he's been very open in the book and now he's put together the Galileo project which is scientists who are going to be studying looking for evidence of perhaps extraterrestrial technological equipment that has come into our thinking, he's got

some cases that look like they could be. And finally now, with other stuff happening, his colleagues are beginning to say, maybe you're not so crazy, but the resistance to that because it doesn't fit. I mean, the whole thing with quantum theory, I mean, that's... Do you think it's also a part of kind of human psychology to want things to make sense and that things will be made to make sense because we don't like living with uncertainty. And so when aberrations appear, we quickly seek to squelch them in order to, but also in the world of science, just like in some of the other worlds,

you've got a reputation to protect. And if you have invested your whole life in developing this theory and all this stuff, and then somebody comes along and says, you know what, none of that may be true, then it's just like, where else? They just shut it down. Don't you dare challenge, you know, my whole life's invested in studying this. And I'm not the only one to say this. There's scientists out there like Abbie Loeb saying that. I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, in the academy until now, finally, recently, you know, Princeton now has a new

group of folks, including theologians, that want to look now has a new group of folks including theologians that want to look at this issue. None of that's been the case for 70 years. Yeah, I guess an interesting question to ask would be, if we grant, and it seems to be an apparent fact, right, that these people are coming out saying they were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, they were threatened not to say things. Right. If we grant that and we grant the general reliability of these people, what could be another reason they were told and threatened other than aliens?

Like could it be that their aliens don't exist and aren't revealing themselves to us? We aren't encountering them and these US kind of officials don't wish to be made a laughing stock by these maybe rational and competent people who might just happen to have the wrong idea about how things went down. And we're all too eager to believe them because it's interesting stuff, but maybe they're maybe they're embarrassing. Yeah, you could have folks. I mean, they're folks who say it is American technology and that's what's going on.

That's why all the cover-up stuff. Oh, I see. You don't want your enemies to know what you've got. Yeah, there's no way we're this smart. But I don't see how that possibly could be at this point, especially since the other countries are experiencing the same kind of thing. And because things like the tic-tacs that they talk about recently have go all the way back at least to the 40s, the, showing the same kinds of amazing capabilities. I guarantee the Russians

and Chinese didn't have it back then. Some claim that the Nazis did. I don't think so. Yeah, no. Where did the idea of the flying saucer come from? How did that enter into our imagination? Oh, Kenneth Arnold. I think that was also in 47, a lot of stuff again happened in 47. A pilot out in Washington State reported that he saw these craft that were circular flying, and the way he described it is they looked like saucers kind of skipping over troubled water, kind of thing, that's paraphrased. But then the reporters came up with the term flying saucer to describe what he was saying.

I see. And it stuck. What about the idea of the alien with the gigantic black eyes and the gray, kind of reptilian skin? Where does that come from? Well, it's interesting. There's a guy named Whitley Strever who wrote about his experiences with alien abduction and saw that kind of figure. And apparently, anyway, he put it

on the cover of a book that he had. And he's way out there and the things that he thinks. But I mean, I would not agree with a lot of what he says, but it's the classic, what we call the gray, where they're kind of gray and big, almond eyes. And if there's anything like a nose, it's just slits and small mouth. And that book hit, you know, bestseller list, but all of a sudden people start calling him from all over saying, it's the same ones I saw. They came to my house. And now maybe the figure was there a little before, but apparently in the popular consciousness, this is, people think that they look like other things too. And again,

I'm not saying that all those are real, they could be hallucinations. There are definitely some people that, you know, mental issues and that kind of thing. But you're asking kind of how it got under the culture. And I think Sieber's book and where people just start recognizing that's, yeah, that's the same thing I saw. But you get the kids, you know, that were involved in that, where the thing came down at the school, they claimed, that's what the figures looked like, that's how they drew them. Yeah, it's these are difficult questions because in order to ask some of these questions, you would need to know the intention of these alleged aliens. If it is merely to gather information.

Why wouldn't it be the case since their technology seems to be so much more advanced than ours, that they could learn what they need to learn through bugging our phones, the way Amazon bugs our phones and is almost omnipresent through our technology. Isn't the fact that they have to come here physically an argument against them in a way? Would they have to or would they want to? I mean, is it a have to or want to? So for instance, yeah, I think if they were able to, but yeah, in the fighter pilot

scenario from, you know, just a few years back, the fighter pilot's out, he's chasing this thing and then all of a sudden it starts engaging with him, not with weapons, but flying by him, doing all this kind of trickster stuff with him and he sees all this going on. And then it takes off and it's gone. That's part of the thing. Instantaneous acceleration is one of the five observables of these things that they can do.

And so he's communicating with the guy back when they're in training exercises. And when you're done, I can't remember what's called your gap point or something, but anyway, when you're done, you have been given secretly information about the latitude, longitude and altitude of where you're supposed to go back when you're done. It's all part of the training. So it's done. He's on his way back to the guy and it's probably 60 miles away or something like that. And he tells him to come in and the guy says, it's already here waiting for you. It's right on the spot where he, now how did the thing know that it's, yeah, maybe they are able to bug all that stuff. I don't know. But that's a good point. You got to distinguish between have to want to.

Yeah. What are the other five observables? Let me say, okay. So you've got that one. Um, all right. You've got, just back up a little bit. Five observables. Well, let me see. Okay, so you've got that one. You've got... Just back up a little bit. Five observables of what? Of the kinds of things that are showing technology that we don't seem capable of. Okay. Unless the government really has figured out this kind of stuff. So hope I can remember them all. I've got them in my book. I have to find the page. So one is hypersonic velocity, sometimes many times the speed of sound. The kind of maneuverability at those high speeds

that would just seem impossible, making a perfect right turn when you're going like that. Instantaneous acceleration. So one of the ones that they have on the video, the report started, was about 80,000 feet in the air down to the surface of the ones that they have on the video the report started was about 80,000 feet in the air Down to the surface of the water in a second or less than a second in the net when I think went on down into the water inside the water to Transmedium which means they can go through different media So they can go from space to air to atmosphere to water saying craft then don't seem to break their stride in doing it. Okay, oh and then the last one, signature management, which is, it gets called different

things, but a way of saying that they seem to be under intelligent control because they actually respond to the observers in certain ways. So even in our own technology we have ways of, if a pilot of a plane can tell if it's being observed on radar, it's getting the transmission, that it does things to either scramble or confuse it, they're getting, it's called a signature, they're getting it doing stuff like that where it's intentionally trying to be stealth, which also includes the thing that all of a sudden they can just disappear and it could be instantaneous acceleration. It could be some kind of visual sheet, you know, shielding, teething. I think those are, those are the five main ones there.

Awesome. So signature and again, the example of the, the thing showing up at the place, 60 miles away, instantaneous when the other guys go on to the rendezvous point, so to speak. Um, that would be, you know, the signature God thing too is showing that it's intelligently controlled. Let's take a quick break. Uh, when we come back, I want to ask you some of your favorite UFO alien movies and those that you think might be kind of like, yeah. But then we also have some really interesting questions

from our local supporters that want to ask you. And I want to tell everybody who's in the chat right now, if you want to get your question answered, make sure you send us a super chat because we've got a ton of local questions and we'll be back in a minute or two. Thanks. Exodus 90, you've heard of them, haven't you Neil?

I have. Well, the guys behind Exodus 90 have started Exodus 21, they're calling it a 21 day restart. So for 21 days, you along with the friends you invite, pray and read through the first two chapters of Corinthians while practicing disciplines such as 20 minutes of prayer every day, abstaining from unnecessary screen time time that doesn't include points with the coin, it's obviously abstaining from meat on Fridays and fasting until 4 p.m. On each weekday. You can take this short opportunity to introduce your brothers, cousins, co-workers, fellow parishioners and even your neighbors. Be kind of weird if you didn't know them. Just assume they're Catholic and want to

torture themselves 21 days on how to live like Christ and prepare them for Exodus 90 in January. watch themselves 21 days on how to live like Christ and prepare them for Exodus 90 in January. So check it out. Go to Exodus90.com slash Matt Exodus 90.com slash Matt to get started. I did Exodus 90 once and I lived like a boss monster for the first 31 days and then failed miserably. So Exodus 21 sounds super doable. You would have done great at this. Yeah.

I would have crushed it. Although probably because 21 days was the goal. I would have like faded out around the 11th day. I don't know. Exodus 90 dot com slash Matt. Go check them out to get started. People who have done it just says it really rejuvenates their prayer life and helps them. Exodus nine zero dot com slash Matt link is in the description. Click it and check them out. And that starts January? No, you can start whenever. So Exodus 90 is going to be starting in January. So this 21 day can be like a little test.

I see, I see, I see. But honestly for me, I just do the 21 days. So you can do it whenever you want. Go check it out right now. Exodus90.com slash Matt. It's a great way to grow in friendship too with people in your community. Check them out.

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It's really, really good. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. And also when you sign up on the website, you get three months for free. So if you just download the app and sign up that way, you got to start paying monthly, but you can try it for three months. That's a long time. And you can see if you like it. And if you don't, you can cancel and you won't be charged a cent. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. Finally, I want to say a massive thanks to everybody who's beginning to support us on locals. Locals is a free speech platform that will enable me to continue putting out content laugh long after YouTube

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at which point I will quit the YouTube channel, sell my house and go live in the forest somewhere. And read newspapers, ink on paper newspapers. Yeah. And just read all of the newspapers that I've put together. Thanks so much. Music This is so much fun, Paul. I want to thank you for allowing me to get into all of these UFO topics because I know that that's not what your book's about. I just find it super interesting. But just for the folks at home, reiterate what your book is about. And I want to let people know, get a link in the description so people can pick it up.

Sure, yeah. So the book is basically answering the question, if we should have disclosure of extraterrestrial intelligence, non-human intelligence from beyond the planet Earth, would it undermine our faith? Or could the Catholic faith accommodate that, the way it's accommodated other scientific discoveries? Because there are plenty of people who say that it would undermine our faith.

And my answer is, yes, we could accommodate it. It would not undermine our faith. And so it's kind of looks at both the history of the discussion in Christian circles. And then- And that's an important thing to know about as an informed Catholic, whether or not you side with there are these things or there

aren't. The fact that these things are coming more and more into the public awareness means that you will be confronted with them. And so being able to respond intelligibly is going to help bring people into the Christian faith or at least show that there's not a stumbling block in Christianity to also believe in UFOs. So that's actually know some folks who've, you know, kind of inside information about stuff and it's said then, and they've said, I'm my faith is trouble now. Yeah. I want to help them. Yeah. It's cause I think it's, it's really, it's not just my thoughts. I mean,

it's 26 centuries of the discussion of this, that this is not new at all. The Catholic theologians have handled it. All right. We got a $50 super chat from a Vodio Tova. I don't know if I pronounced that right, but you are so kind. Thank you so much for sending this in. He says, this conversation reminds me about a good secular book I read that involved a disgraced scholar and world governments, space travel and an extraterrestrial encounter.

It's called project Hail Mary by Andy where or wire highly recommend to read he says I've heard of it I haven't had it. Yeah, but I haven't read it. There's been some interesting fiction from religious points of view They you know one that has a Jesuit missionary in the future. Who's was not by the missionary he's a scientist and he goes to another planet and discovers the things there that is kind of threatening his faith. So the Jesuits, we have a lot of Jesuit astronomers. The Vatican actually has two observatories.

Isn't that an argument against what they're finding? I'm just checking. No, just, no, it's just kind of- I'm not joking, I'm making fun of the Jesuits, sorry. Yeah. Well, yeah, the Jesuits are all over this, of course. But anyway, so even Brother Guy Consolmagno, if I'm pronouncing his name right, in talking about that particular book said, well, it's not good theology in the book, it's not even good Jesuit theology, which is okay, that's, I don't say it a lot.

But it's just interesting that people, even science fiction writers have thought about, okay, there are religious implications to this. What would that be? That's by the author of The Martian, too, that book. I'm just looking at the book. Oh, okay. Interesting. Same person wrote The Martian, wrote The Hail Mary Project.

We're getting this question quite a bit. This comes from local supporter Bernadette. She says, how would we distinguish between demons, angels and UFOs? It's a good point, because even I mean, you could say something like, well, if you say in the name of Jesus, leave and it does. That's evidence against it for it being demonic. And that could be true. But it could also be the case that an alien abase Jesus Christ or feels like he is unwanted and wishes to be respectful and leave.

So that's not a knockdown argument. Yeah. So how would you distinguish? Maybe these things people are seeing on the screens are angels revealing themselves or... And they could be. That. The demons, again, I really think... I mean, you have a parallel thing with this with poltergeist, the whole poltergeist phenomenon, where you have Father Herbert Thurston, who back in the early 20th century was looking at all these very carefully documented cases of poltergeist stuff, and his conclusion was that, yeah, you have some that as soon as the priest or the exorcist comes in, the things obey the command in Jesus' name, and they hate sacramentals, and they hate sacraments, and all that stuff. Which have this huge number of cases where it makes no difference at all.

They just, they act more like naughty children who are disturbing a mass or disturbing people. They don't seem to be demonic. And so I do think it is a pretty important thing that if you're a Christian and you're, especially if you had something like an encounter, that if you were to say in the name of Jesus Christ, leave me alone, it stopped. And yeah, that's pretty good evidence that it's demonic. I don't think they would. But what about these things that we're seeing, presumably, or allegedly seeing, that we're

not having contact with, how would you even begin to know whether this is something revealing itself or an angel? I would say if they're just lights, then yeah, there's a possibility that, say, angelic, for instance. But I suppose if we're finding it. But if you find a craft material Yeah, angels don't need crafts to fly around turns out. Yeah, and demons don't need it either people some people would say okay that the demons would do all this stuff as a

form of apparition to Convince people like get them away from God and make him think about it. I mean he's just Okay, that could happen With a figure that appears to you another case in North Carolina where it sure sounds like that kind of thing. But if we actually do have, you know, materials from crafts that have crashed and they've been around for a long time and they've manipulated them and they've examined the chemical composition and stuff, it doesn't seem like an apparition or any kind of trick by a demon. It's a real thing.

You pointed out earlier that one of the reasons you think the US government is suppressing the evidence is because they don't want to be made to look foolish. Why then would they allow shows like X-Files and others which demonize the government for doing just that to exist? There's certain things they can't just can't stop, you know. But another thing that just occurs to me is that, and I think I mentioned it in the book, but I should have added it in the discussion a while ago, is that another reason they can have is that, the old saying is, tell your friend, tell your enemy, that if they actually have stuff in possession and they're reverse engineering or trying to, if that's public, then the Chinese know it,

the Russians know it, and that a part of the silence is we don't want our enemies to know what we've got and what we're doing with it. So that makes sense. And that's the one, if that's the case, that's the one case where I could see that's a pretty good case for secrecy. If it actually would help the enemy. And I suppose too, if the government were to be very heavy handed in preventing shows

like X-Files and others to exist, that would just fall in favor or it would add strength to the argument of those who want to say UFOs do exist. Look how defensive they are. Look how, you know, sensorial they are. Well, you've got folks like there was a series, a couple of series, TV series were called Dark Skies, but one by Bryce is Abel, who's now kind of at the forefront of examining these things. He's a big Hollywood figure and a really sharp guy. And he says that at one point when they had done the premiere for the first episode, and he was having a private party, that a guy showed up at his house and basically was saying, from somewhere in the Pentagon saying, would

you let us help you with some of this stuff? Because some of it you got wrong. He was portraying aliens and all kinds of things. And yeah, they don't really do that kind of stuff. It's just wild. But he's not the only person in Hollywood to say things like that. If you ask Luis Alonso, I think someone did about, so what movie seemed to you to be closest to the truth of what you know? And he said Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he had not even watched for a

long time. What is it called? Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is that a movie? Oh my goodness. You're in trouble,, that's like the big alien. Is it really? Close encounters of the third kind. Of the third kind. Oh I'm so excited. Oh you've got to see it. I'm gonna do it. So he said this is that's the closest thing he couldn't give. Yeah, Spielberg. So he couldn't give details, but he said, either he or someone else, you know, they had to wonder whether Spielberg had a government agent who was actually feeding him

stuff because it's so similar to things that this guy knows and can't talk about. Wow. Just interesting. I don't know, people might think I'm crazy. It's okay. I'm old. I can, you know, anyone thinks you're crazy. I think you just, we're just asking questions and as you say, science does as well as exactly. And if it's not contrary to the faith to lean one way or the other is I think reasonable. I mean, if I'm wrong by thinking that, that there could be aliens and even close, you know, I could say I'm convinced at this point, there could be aliens and even close, you know, I could say I'm convinced at this point, I could be this convinced. And if that's wrong and that's heretical,

well then St. John Paul the second and Padre Pio, St. Pio and Blessed Ann Cancer and Emmerich and all bunch of other folks you have to say, yeah, they're all heretics. They're all people to hell as on someone recently claimed. So you say you can be unconvinced. to say, yeah, they're all heretics. They're all people to hell is on someone recently clink. So you say you can be unconvinced. Um, and by unconvinced, we don't mean, I mean, I don't think anyone could show you something that would disprove the existence of aliens, right? You can't, it would just have to disprove certain UFO cases. So what case, if there was a case that was shown to be false, is there one particular case that could be shown to be false that would change your confidence in the existence of extraterrestrial life? With regard to UFOs, no again I think it's

just likely because the universe is so big and God's so, you know, the plenitude argument that he just fills things with life and he's so creative. But about UFOs in particular, if the government were to come out and not just say but demonstrate, here's a craft we've got that can do all the things you're talking about. That would weigh very heavily on me. Oh, I see. Yes, we do. We actually possess this technology. And of course they might actually have it through reverse engineering. That's the other

thing. That they got the idea for the A.L.A.s in the first place, but they don't want to talk about that part. I don't know. See, it can't be disproved. Isn't it true that the proof of a good theory is that it Not the idea for the A.L.A.s in the first place, but they don't want to talk about that part. I don't know. See, it can't be disproved. I mean, isn't it true that the proof of a good theory is that it... Not the proof of a good theory, but the fact that... Is that it can be disproved? So it's like if every piece of...

If every objection I give to you or someone who believes in UFOs can just be used against the skeptic, I don't know if that's a good sign of... No, here's... I'll give you another example of that. Okay, there are folks out there, I'm not going to make fun of them or anything, but who, many of them Christians, some of them Catholics, who think that what's going on with the government right now, with the leaking of this disclosure, it seems to be, that it's actually part of the Antichrist plan. That the Antichrist government, you know, figures behind the government, they're leading us up to the place where they're going

to have a false flag operation in which they publicly say, the president or whatever says, yeah, they're real and they're here and they're out to get us. And so we need a one world government to protect us from them. And then the Pope will get in, you know, the non-Catholics will say, and because the Vatican's known this all along, it disproves their faith and so what? They're gonna come up and say, well, we need a one world religion too,

and it's gonna include the aliens. So that the whole thing is a falsifying argument for the Antichrist to have one world religion, one world government. So think about it, if tomorrow, President Biden came out there and said, they're real, here's some video of it, He's just, how can you argue with this? And yes, we've known all along and that kind of thing.

These folks already have a, you know, something they would say, Oh, see, it's the false flag. I don't care. They can make the videos look that way. But the government's been lying to us about so many other things. Do you think Biden is aware of extra tertiary life existing and this big US government coverup? He might not be aware of much. Bless him. I was going to say, I was like, sure, once he's aware of it. All right.

You have people on the house. My point is this, like if someone were to ask President Biden, and maybe they have in a conference, like is this evidence of extraterrestrial interference or visitation? It sounds like he would say not at all and seek to cover it up. I don't know if he would do that. I can imagine him being indifferent to the topic.

You've got former presidents doing some interesting things. Yeah. So you have Clinton, or first of all all you have Reagan actually had a sighting you had Carter actually have a sighting themselves You have People to present joking but not so joking that they were told you don't have a need to know back off of this The way it seems to be is that the information is highly compartmentalized, you know, in silos, because that's how you keep it a secret. And I think most of the people who have studied this would say that if this

is all going on, the president's been kept in the cold, all the presidents mostly. Even then you do have, and you even had Clinton at one time saying, no, I can tell you, here's a question from a kid, you know, can tell you we're not real, we're not staying that kind of thing. But even since then, Clinton has said some stuff and Obama has said some things that kind of like, well, an interview with Trump, it kind of, well, there's some really interesting things out there, so if they can't go any further. But here's something really interesting.

So you have Tom DeLong, who was, what was the band he was a hit of? I don't follow that kind of music, but who's now gotten into focusing on disclosure and that kind of thing. Making a claim, if I got all this right, that he had been in conversation with, oh, golly, now I'm going gonna forget his name. He was one of the top advisors for Hillary Clinton's campaign, Podesta, John Podesta.

And that they were talking about this kind of stuff. And then people were just saying, oh, that's a bunch of bullies. And that maybe Hillary was thinking about if she was elected that she was gonna reveal. And then the WikiLeaks with the Democratic National Committee with emails where John Podesta is talking about this kind of stuff.

What's he saying? He's basically talking with, you know, representative of the government about, I mean, not saying it is, but this is an issue we need to talk about. I wish I had the words in my head. I don't. But anyway, basically confirming what had been said and that people were scoffing about it. Yes, this top advisor, Hillary Clinton, was talking about disclosure. So as far as Biden, I have no idea what he might know. But even if the presidents don't know, that doesn't prove that it's not there at all. Because they've fair enough.

There's a lot they don't know. Lou Klassen asks, and this is a good question. How is it that Mary, a member of our own species, is the queen of the universe? If there are potentially millions of other rational species in the universe, would a queenship extend to them as well? Yep, talk about that in the book. Part of it, again, you have to go back to Jesus, understanding him and understanding the incarnation. There are people, some theologians out there, who claim, yeah, there could be other incarnations, and then they'll go on to make a statement like,

so if, but the Jesus of Nazareth would not really have any relationship to that person and he might even be more important to something. I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, that's in the story in Heresy. You're saying that the incarnation means that the divine Son of God chose a man, united himself to him, and these would be different men. No, what the church has said all along is there is only one eternal Son of God who takes on a full human nature, but he doesn't unite himself to a man. He

becomes a man. He takes on that nature. And then Aquinas come along saying he could do that more than once. So that if there were another incarnation, it would not be two lords, two saviors, two Jesuses, so to speak, it would be the same eternal Son of God who has a human nature and has that nature. So anything, you know, you studied theology, the whole notion of comunicatio iumata, the communication of properties within Christ that in Scripture and in tradition, we are able to say things of the person of Christ that apply to his divine or his human nature. And so you can say that God was born in Bethlehem. Now his divine nature wasn't born, but because his human nature was born, you can say it

of God. You can say that God died on the cross. He did. So, okay, so all that's to say then, you could say the same thing in this situation, that anything you can say about our Lord here, you can say, not the historical details of the other incarnation, but it's the same Lord, it's the same Son of God who's being incarnate. And so whatever you can say, He's Lord of the universe, yeah, that one's Lord of the universe too. Why? Because they're the same person. I don't see any problem with that, but we're talking about Mary. Right, so that's where we get next. So here's the question. I

don't mean to cut you off, but just to maybe make a bit of a finer point on this is, fair enough with Christ, but doesn't your commitment to saying Mary is Queen of the universe preclude you from saying that there could be another Mother of God in a different universe in the same sense that Mary is Mother of God? A different universe or within our universe? A different planet, different universe. Okay, a different planet. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so what, so the next step is step is Jesus Christ is Lord of the universe. You can say that of his other incarnation because the person who is Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Can you say that if he was incarnate through a birth process, actually had a mother, that's not a given. It could be through cloning or something else. Could you call that person Mother of God too? Yep. Okay. Right, would be. So is Mary Queen of the Universe? She's the Queen Mother of the King of the Universe? Yes, she is. Would, if he has a mother when he is incarnated there, could she also be called Queen of the Universe?

I would say if that's true, yeah, she could. It would not take the dignity away from either of them because he would relate to each mother as if she were the only, you know, he would love each of them as if they were the only one. I like that's, that's feels problematic to me because now you're saying that there's potentially multiple queens of the universes. And if queen of the universe is means anything, surely it means that there's a special dominion that she has that she can't share with multiple other mothers. I don't, yeah, I don't think, I don't see that, I guess. That a Queen could very well

share. But again, all this doesn't inevitably lead to, even if there's another incarnation, it doesn't inevitably lead to another mother, that in another species they could reproduce in different ways. But even, I talk about in the book, even if that were the case, in the end, maybe initially uncomfortable in the end, no, if they're both his mother, just in different incarnations, then... Yeah, let me try another pass at this, because it might just be that I'm not understanding, but it seems to me, I grant your point that if there have been multiple incarnations, that we can still say Christ is King of the universe, and maybe there's different titles that different planets ascribe to their Christ.

They may not call him Christ, but this one being is Lord of the universe. We can say that. But it does seem to call into question Mary's queenship of the universe unless you want to say there was no mother for these other Christ's that he was brought about in some other way but if you're going to say that it's possible that he was brought about through an alien mother or multiple alien mothers on different planets or universes then it seems to me that you're going to have to say that there are multiple queens of the universe and at that point it seems to water down or minimize Mary's universal queenship.

See, for me it doesn't. It doesn't minimize. And I guess that's the difference in things. And you might be right. So why does that? So the same principle that we talked about with St. Augustine that you can love every child as if they were the same one. He could love every mother and treat every mother and she would have, and the Mary I know is so humble, I

could imagine her saying, I'm very happy to share this title and to be Queen alongside you for the, there'll be several things, and it wouldn't take away from me, and my book. I can understand how for some people it would, and it may very well be that there is no other. Either there's no other incarnation or there's- Is it possible? Right. Let's say if my intuition is the correct one, and there's some theological development here such that it turns out no, what we say about Mary being Queen of the universe would preclude there being other Queen Mothers, right? Then that would be one of those things, parameters I was talking about earlier, that whatever we say about aliens, we cannot say that there was a Christ

born of a mother, because that would interfere. You see what I'm saying? Unless, I guess another, it's one of the things you learn in this thing to think about other options, unless her being his mother, that she just was not designated that way. What does that mean? That her was not given the title queen. I see. I see. Fair enough.

Yeah, because we know that Christ could be born. What if it's a species that doesn't even have kings and queens and rulers that way? So wouldn't it have even been an issue or a title for her to have? Fair enough. So I'm saying, could be. It's one of the things this subject does is opens up your mind and you say, oh, well, actually there's another possibility here. And believe me, there's no way, and I say it in the book, I love Our Lady. There's no way, I mean, any disrespect. I'm trying to look at the issue in light of these possibilities, what might

be the case. And there's no way I want to take away from her role. She's Queen of the Universe, no way around it. Yeah, what were you gonna say, Neil? Well, Paul basically just addressed it, but that's something about the UFO conversation that I like a lot is I think it encourages us to broaden our minds. So rather than like another race of humans

just living on a different planet, that would have a queen, that's like exactly like the way we think of queens, that would have a different name and the exact same role and then they'd be competing. I think it's much more likely that if there was some kind of redemptive process for an alien species that they probably wouldn't have the, like, kings and queens are a human concept, right? In as much as maybe we reflect the image of God,

God has kingship, but our kingship is just a reflection of that, and so it's a construction. So to say, yeah, that if there was a queenship of some other, you know, Mary-like figure for an alien species, it'd probably be completely different from anything we could even think of or imagine. And then the other thing is, unless I'm, you should correct me on this, but I think that Mary's like immaculate conception and queenship over the universe was also not necessary,

right? That was just something that is fitting, but not necessary. So that could also be, you know, something to consider. But what's interesting though is if we do find another alien queen mother who wasn't perfect, then that would call it. That's a whole different issue. Yeah. Scodus' argument for the fittingness, but either way the church has defined it.

So you either go with it or don't. Yeah. But again, we've, yeah, it's been defined for, for the human situation, but it hasn't defined. That's another thing, a point we need to make. The Church has not spoken, authoritatively or definitively, about so much of what we're talking about. You have folks who, alright, someone the other day was complaining that, okay, how there's

a passage in the Catechism that reflects something in the Psalms about how you put them over all things, mankind stuff, and everything under its feet. So, okay, so that proves there can't be anything else out there. But all you have to do is look at that in the, just like Scripture has to be interpreted by Scripture, Catechism has to be interpreted by Catechism and Scripture. You look at the Psalm where it says you put all things under its feet, okay, so that means the universe will actually look at the rest of the thing when he starts naming the things

that have been put under His feet they're all either inanimate stuff on earth or Animals that are lower than us. It's not talking at all about what's beyond so you can assume that all things means that kind of all things Similar kinds of things in the catechons. It'll say in one place, you know that that man's the only creature Kind of made the image of God with the body, stuff like that. But then in another passage it's saying the same thing, but it says the only creature on earth, that way. So that it seems to be, when they're saying it here, they're being explicit about what's

implicit there. For the, at the very least, you can't just prove text and say, well, that's what the catechism said, that's which is what this person was doing. That's why I believe there can't be. You can't get that from that passage in the catechism said. That's which is what this person was doing. That's why I believe they can't be yeah That's you can't get that from that person the catechism at all Your something or other just sent in a question he's forgive me I don't want to mispronounce your last name, but thank you for the super chat. He says the youtuber Thunderfoot proved that the UFOs of the Pentagon are in fact planes and a duck

Did you watch him? So much noise for so little. I mean, you can't possibly be expected to watch every alien debunking video, but are you familiar with that? Or I'm not with that. I am familiar with other debunkers and, um, and believe me, the debate is lively. They'll come out and say, oh, there's, you know, sometimes, you know, those are birds. Yeah, I'll agree.

That looks like birds to me. But so much of what's done in the debunking community is not taking up. They'll cherry pick their evidence and then they're ignoring all this other stuff. So, I'll say I've never read that particular one, so I don't know. But the kinds of things we're talking about, the kind of the five observables, yeah, we don't have a prosaic explanation. We have two other older super chats too. One from Rick. My dad has always speculated that Elijah was actually taken by aliens and that aliens may very well be angels. What are your thoughts on that, Theodora? Great question. Excuse me, which I wish I had gone ahead and addressed in the book.

I didn't because I wasn't taking it very seriously at first, because you also have people saying that in Ezekiel when he has the angelic vision, except for in the cherubim, that it's wheel within a wheel, so it's actually a space. It's part of the broader notion of ancient aliens. There's a TV program on the History Channel that does that, trying to prove that all these ancient things are really aliens, including the scripture. And I wish I had addressed it because there are even some Christians, even some Catholics who are taking that seriously. Yeah, that could have been actually a spaceship or that kind of thing. Well, I just take it up by spaceship.

Especially for secular people who are doing that, this is the way I approach it to help them understand. All right, one of the things that everybody kind of engaged in this issue, at least on this side of affirming that they hated is when someone has claims to have had some kind of experience, even if it's just seeing something, that because for them it's a foregone – the critics – because it's a foregone conclusion say, well, anything doesn't exist, so that must have been just XZ had to be well we know it is don't exist so it had to be just a weather balloon had to be swamp gas I mean that's actually been

used before it's had to be this or that and the people are saying but you're discounting everything I'm saying about it that that doesn't fit at all you're only forcing it into this category because you're already concluding. You're presuming that things don't exist. You could say the same thing about people who will look at biblical text that way. Let's say, okay, the witness, the experiencer who wrote or gave the tradition that was written down about these things was very insistent. This is angelic and this is, you know, all the things that it was. So for someone to say, well, I don't believe in angels,

but I believe in aliens. So I think it's an alien craft. It's the same kind of thing. You're making it according to your preconceived views. And that, especially for the Christian, especially for the Christian, things used, and that especially for the Christian, this is part of divine revelation, that it was an angel. So there's no way I'm going to say, no, actually it could have been an alien instead, because it's said to be an angel. And the Characters of Fire, okay, maybe because it's not said that it's an angel, but I don't think so. I don't want to force those things into the ancient alien paradigm.

Yeah, that's a good, that makes a lot of sense. Hey, BornAgainRN asked a question. Yeah, so he asked a question. It's hard to find because it was in live chat, not top chat. Oh, I see. It's referencing stuff that I don't know anything about, but we'll see if you guys do. So he says, how would Dr. Thigpen respond to claims that Marian apparitions are UFO slash demonic encounters since they involve people suffering radiation Silver disks etc. The part I have never heard before this is this is a similar is it more to it. Sorry

No, that's it. This is a similar thing to what we just answered and you do get it you get within the secular kind of UFO community if you want to call it, that's what they call it, and especially the ancient alien things that Marian apparitions are also. Not just Ezekiel's wheels, but Marian apparitions are also that kind of thing. And then you get non-Catholics who don't like the whole Mary thing in the first place saying, well, it's demonic deception. You know? Well, I mean, for a Catholic, you're going to say, okay, the demonic stuff is, I'm sorry,

but you know, these things are real. Yeah, people sometimes, I don't know if they've been injured by it. That's an interesting question. And sometimes there'll be like a silver disc in the sky, that kind of thing. But again, if it's an approved apparition by the church, then in my book, I'm going to take that as the... We still don't have to believe it. We don't have to believe it. So yeah, we could say maybe something else is going on there. Still, isn't it context? Isn't that so much of it? Like if it's in the context of a religious experience in which somebody claims to be the mother of God,

unless we want to say, well, these are aliens manifesting themselves to us and deceiving us for their own ends. Well, what were those ends? Well, an increase in the Catholic faith or something? So. Yeah. I mean, it would take,

just like for some things when you're talking to an atheist, you know, it'll take me a lot more faith to believe that than it does to believe this. That it would take me a lot more faith to believe that aliens would come do that and imitate that. And for whatever purposes than it is that, you know, since I already convinced that Mary's real and that she appears, that it is what it says it is. It's good claims to be. But I see though, if you are somebody who believes in aliens and not the supernatural to use that term

Then you've got to account for it in some way. Yeah, and so that's that's off of the Fatima, especially Yeah, I've seen that in a lot of places Yeah, Fatima or than other and then I won't say just Protestants but non-catholics anyway saying oh demonic Yeah, it's all demonic because we already know That Mary's not gonna appear and then she doesn't have that power and et cetera, et cetera. Hard to get outside of our own biases to look at things objectively. Yeah. Weave88, who's a local supporter says, is Paul aware of Fermi's paradox?

Yep. What is that? I can look it up. That's the notion that if there are so many possibilities for life out there, given how many stars and how many inhabitable planets to gain and stuff. Where are they? Why don't we, why haven't they shown up? Yeah. And my answer is, well, if you start looking at the UFO stuff, sure seems like they have. Your argument is that they have.

They have. I mean, they sure seem to have. You could have other answers to that question, so the astronomical distances that maybe they don't have the kind of technology that would get them here, and so there's their way out there. It's interesting, from a spiritual point of view, Christian point of view, C.S. Lewis had the notion that it could very well be that one reason God has, if he has different species, intelligent species, that he has them at such astronomical distances from each other. In particular, it's because the earth is under quarantine, that he did it so that our evil

wouldn't spread to other intelligent races that have not fallen. A silent planet. And yeah, right. And there are people, it's silent, right, and there are people who have wondered the biblical statement that says, things here on earth that angels have longed to look into, the suggestion that they couldn't. So that's part of that notion that he has. So even from a spiritual point of view, maybe that could be the case. They're not here because God has made it so that they can't. We're contagious.

You know, they can't do that. V. Krauss, who's a local supporter, says, my fiance and I have gone back and forward with this quite a bit. He says that since they are not mentioned in scripture, they either don't exist or it doesn't matter if they do. On one hand, the universe is huge and for me it's hard to believe that we are the only ones who are considered intelligent life. However, I find it harder to believe that God would create a people who would not be included

in salvation and as far as we know, we are the only ones Jesus came to save since he came in human form. We've addressed this, but if you want to say something else, you're welcome. Yeah, yeah. Just that, um, what was the first part of the question? His point was, it's not in scripture, so either they don't exist or it doesn't matter. See, that second one, it doesn't matter if they do, is I think a more compelling point. And it is. And I don't think anybody's saying that our salvation depends on knowing that. What's given in scripture is what we need to know for our salvation. Right, good point. So that either they don't exist. But here's an interesting thing from St. Augustine, that in his day there were people saying,

well, wait a minute, in Genesis story, we talk about creation, it doesn't mention angels. Surely God would have included angels when he's talking about all the different things he's created. So, doesn't that give us a problem about the existence of angels? And you know, his reply was just got two things. One is that, well, it could well be that when he talks about the lights in the sky or something, there are heavenly things that he's talking about angels, including in that. But his other interesting speculation is that this is traditions coming from Moses at a time when the people

were given to idolatry. And if he had said to them, oh yeah, and there are these creatures that are almost like divine, they're out there and they can do all this stuff and they're powerful and everything else, that maybe the concern was that they would worship them. And in fact, we know from not just church history, but even from the New Testament, that even as late as the New Testament, there were some people who had begun worshiping angels. So, I guess the speculation was, so maybe God thought it better not to tell them at that stage, and that they would learn about it later when they were better able to handle it and not be tempted to idolatry. Think of that as a parallel to right now. All right, if he had told us in scripture

to people, there are creatures out there and they're actually smarter than ours and, you know, poor can do things we can't do and stuff like that, would it have been a temptation to people to worship them? Well, you actually have this movement right now within the UFO world that looks to them as saviors in the ETI myth, you know, that they're a messianic kind of thing, that they're going to help us. Maybe he's held it back all this time to prevent people, especially, you know, in earlier centuries from worshipping them. Who knows? I mean, it's just, again, it's Augustine's, he's using Augustine's speculation in a different situation. Local supporter Aquila says, how would or could we determine if they have immortal souls as opposed to being simply creatures like the rest of creation, regardless of intelligence?

This gets back to something we asked a couple of hours ago, right? I was of the opinion, I think Aquinas is too, that if someone is rational, that's a proof of their immortality. But you said that no, not necessarily, and the church has actually clarified this, that immortality is a gratuitous gift that may or may not be given to those with who are rational. So that's a good question. How could you even determine whether something has an immortal soul? It would have to happen by communication, you know, with them at first. I mean, people often ask me, okay, if you could actually, they landed and you could actually communicate,

what would be your first question? And I would want to get at the notion of God. So I'd start out by saying, so how did the universe come to be? How did you come to be? Is there a reason for you to be here? Is there something behind all that? And to find out if they're basically like secular atheists saying, oh no, the Christians always been and da-da-da. But if they were to say, X created it, or it came about through the will of X, whatever they would call them, that'd be the starting place. Okay, so you have a notion of God. And then you'd have to get out there and think, okay, what happens to you when you die?

And see what is it. And we wouldn't have proof anymore than, I mean, the only proof we have for ourselves is that you have the resurrection, the great proof, and we wouldn't have that for an alien race for us. I mean, maybe they would have had something like that, but now we have other kinds of things even like near-death experiences. But yeah, how would you get the proof? What I would want to do is get to what do they believe and what do they think and if

they said, oh yeah, we live on even after our bodies, say, well, how do you know that? Try to find out if they have a very strong notion of immortality, that might be evidence for it. Not necessarily. But to prove it, it would get to the last part of the book on eschatology. You know, they're going to show up in heaven. Would you baptize an alien? That's the question. That gets also into these questions.

So all these speculations we've talked about, are they, we'd have to find out through some kind of interaction with them, are they in the image of God in the sense of immortal spirits or not? Are they fallen or not? Is the life, passion, death, resurrection of Christ for them what He did here in the Incarnation also for them or just for us? You'd have to get all those questions answered before you could baptize anything. And so you couldn't get there right away. You had people thought about this for centuries actually. So you have one wag, he was Lutheran, so he's probably pulled in front of the Catholic Church

saying, yeah, so they baptized, in fact, what if one of them wanted to be ordained, a priest? And he said, so they might, you know, on the case of just like having a conditional baptism because you already have been baptized, allow it. But I think they'd probably have to call an ecumenical council to decide whether you could On the case of just having a conditional baptism because you already have been baptized, allow it. But I think they probably have to call an ecumenical council to decide whether you can even ordain an alien or not. It's just kind of funny stuff. Yeah.

Which just, again, tells you people have thought about this for centuries. It's amazing. We have a couple of super chats. Yeah, I wanted to read the second one if it's okay. This comes from, well, Jean again, right? I looked it up. John Roussis according to a Google search. And they're a mental hacker,

according to their handle. So everyone should turn on their mental VPNs. He says, I always find it strange that living species elsewhere bothers us so much with a new breed of dolphin is discovered in the ocean. It doesn't change anything. The aliens are just more distant dolphins. What are you talking about? How does he not understand?

Are you kidding me? Finding a new species of dolphin is no way near as terrifying as a rational frigging breed of creatures invading earth. But thanks for your question, John. It's all right. It's all right. Well, you know, I mean,

I think I've mentioned this in one of the footnotes too. You know, there are people that claim that, even Lewis thought that maybe dolphins might actually be an example of somebody. Goodbye and thanks for all the fish. Sorry, have you seen the movie? A little bit of rational.

What's that? Sorry, have you read the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I should have, but I haven't. Where dolphins are really the supreme race. But in this case, just say, what if they actually are rational stuff, but then they're not immortal? Another kind of thing, kind of like the nannothals maybe. But so maybe that's why he chose the dolphins. But yeah, it would expand our,

I mean, people are upset about it for all the reasons we've talked about. Do you have any doubt that there are extraterrestrial, I keep saying aliens, let's just say aliens. Do you have any doubt that there are rational aliens visiting earth? Any doubt? I mean, it's difficult to talk about all kinds of things. Are you convinced that it is the case? Would you put-

At this point, I could be convinced otherwise of the kind of thing I told you about where they were able to actually show you that they could do all the same things, that humans could do all the same things, and we've been, you know- And as you've become more and more convinced, has it changed your life in any way? Has it changed your day to day?

People ask me that, you know, has it changed your life? What, um, it's broadened my mind and thinking a lot. It's forced me back into the ancient church controversies and historical theology is my field. And it was the ancient church teaching that brought me to the Catholic church. And to go back and say, wait a minute, that brought me to the Catholic Church and to go back and say, wait a minute, that's an historian idea. Oh, that's an Apollinarian idea. Oh, that's… So it's pushed me deeper into all that and brought me closer to the

Lord. Let me throw it out. I don't know what else to say. But it's humbling and that's a good thing. I talk a lot about humility in here. What an important trait it is for scientists as well as for theologians, and that we need a sense of wonder. What I define wonder is humility in the face of mystery. That the folks I have the most problems with in this discussion are the ones that think they've got it all figured out. And this is that, so therefore that's all true. And you find it among the scientists,

you find it among theologians and believers, you find it among all kinds of things that we really, you know, the whole thing Shakespeare or Horatio, there are things in this world that your philosophy's never dreamed of. I quote that in the book, I think that's probably the case. Not contradicting what we know from the faith that's been revealed by God, but expanding all of a sudden.

Oh, I mean, it happened to the Jewish people, right? I mean, we look at the Old Testament and say, oh, it's so clear that God Himself was going to come to earth. You know, the everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, He's being called, and all these things. And the Messiah is more than just a political hero. He's also God in the flesh. But to them, it wasn't obvious at all, it was blasphemous. Now looking back, the whole vision of what God's plan was is so much deeper and richer and bigger than they thought it was. But until we actually got the evidence of it, it was hard to see it. There's also the example of the Americas and the Native Americans and was that not a threat to the faith of Christians at the time? It was.

I mentioned that in the book too, that there's a fascinating thing with St. Augustine where someone brought to him the idea of the antipodes, which means kind of feet going the other direction. I don't know if you ever heard the notion that people, even them, were saying that, well, they're probably not flat or maybe it's like a disc around, but that there are these stories that there are people who live on the other side, and so they're called antipodes because our feet are going this way and their feet are going that way. And so what do you think about that?

And his answer was he ruled it out. And people have, the reason I mentioned the book is people have used that as an example, saying, so see, he thought there couldn't be extraversical intelligence. But he said he ruled it out. But for this reason, he said, because the church teaches definitively that all human beings are descended from Adam. And that's important because of original sin and all it says about that. If you're telling me that humans are on the other side, and we know this vast ocean is

on in between us and them, and there's no way that the technology of his day or the knowledge of his day to get from here there, that would mean that these are humans who are not descended from Adam and that kind of thing. So what's the problem there? His science and his technology was, science was that we couldn't, humans couldn't get from where we are to there. He knew nothing about the ancient land bridge, you know, prehistoric land bridge between

Asia, and he knew nothing about that even in those times there were amazing ships kind of getting around. So he thought given the technology he had and the limited knowledge he had of geography that we couldn't get from here or there, therefore they don't exist. Now we know they do exist. We are in Tibet. We are on our side of the planet. But if you were alive today, say, oh, I didn't realize we could have that kind of technology to get us there.

So it's just something we've got to think with this too, where scientists and theologians, they have to kind of imagine, you know, they're outside the box. If something is the case that we thought was impossible to be the case, then it must be the case that there is a way that that thing... Exactly. Exactly. I'm looking in the Summa Theologiae right now in the Tertia Pars. I'm trying to find where he talks about the potential of multiplicity of.

Oh, here, let me look at it. So it should be my foot here, but I'll have to. I've got a lot of references to the Aquinas. Yeah, I just wondered is. Is Marie George, unless she's retired now, some years back had sent a really wonderful book that she had written from a, she's a Thomas philosopher at, was at City University of New York, I think.

And I just depend on, I was so grateful to her, I learned so much from reading hers, and she and I come to some different conclusions in different ways. I think she's open to the possibility, but thinks that probably they couldn't be fallen, if I'm remembering right. Oh, here we go. I found it. You found it? Okay, good. Do you mind if I have a look at it here? No, please.

So this is from Article 5 in the Tershippas, Question 3. Can each person assume? Here's his answer. Well, here's his respondio. Whatever the son can do, so can the father and the Holy Ghost. Otherwise the power of the three persons would not be one, but the son was able to become incarnate. Therefore the father and the Holy Ghost were able to become incarnate. Here's his main answer. As was said above, assumption implies two things, the act of one assuming and the term of the assumption.

Now the principle of the act is the divine power and the term is a person, but the divine power is in differently and commonly in all the persons. Moreover, the nature of personality is common to all the persons, although the personal properties are different. Now whenever a power regards several things inently, it can terminate its action in any of them indifferently as is plain in rational powers which regard opposites and can do either of them. Yes. Therefore, the divine power could have united human nature to the person of the father or of the Holy Ghost

as it united it to the person of the son. And hence, we must say that the father or the Holy ghost could have assumed flesh even as the son. Yeah. How about, okay. What's actually in? This is the tertiopaz question three, article five. Five. Okay. Go to seven. Can one person assume two individual natures? That's the even more immediate one. Okay. Tell us what he means by that that and then I'll read the said contra.

Okay, so first he said, okay, could the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I'll do it. Now he's saying, could the one Son, Son of God, could he have done it more than once? Yes, that's even more... I see what you're saying now. Okay, so here's the said contra. Whatever the Father can do, that also can the son do. But after incarnation, the father can still assume a human nature distinct from that which the son

has assumed for in nothing is the power of the father or the son lessened by the incarnation of son. Therefore it seems that after incarnation, the son can assume another human nature distinct from the one he has assumed. How wonderful is Aquinas? I just love him. So they could be numerically different incarnations of the same sun, the same person, which is the part of, you know, they get in here when I'm talking about all that. I don't want to bore people, but I really want to see what he says and respond to you.

Would that be okay if I read that? Yeah. Yeah, and stop me if it's getting too far afield. I don't want to bore people, but I really want to see what he says and respond to you. Would that be okay if I read that? Yeah. Yeah. And stop me if it's getting too far afield. But he says, what has power for one thing and no more has a power limited to one? Now the power of a divine person is infinite, nor can it be limited by any created thing. Hence it may not be said that a divine person so assumed one human nature as to be unable

to assume another. For it would seem to follow from this that the personality of the divine nature was so comprehended by one human nature as to be unable to assume another to its personality and this is impossible. For the uncreated cannot be comprehended by any creature. Hence, it is plain that whether we consider the divine person in regard to his power, which is the principle of the Union or in regard to his personality, which is the term of the Union, it

has to be said that the divine person over and beyond the human nature, which he has assumed can assume other distinct human nature. Yeah. So, you know, a little simplified the way I have it in my book is another matter related to the modern ETI discussion is St. Thomas's consideration of whether multiple divine incarnations could take place. Though he focused only on the possibility of multiple incarnations among humans on earth, that was just the scope of his question, his reasoning could apply as well to the possibility

of multiple incarnations among various ETI races on various planets. St. Thomas concluded that God has chosen to become a man only once, but he could nevertheless have chosen to do it multiple times if he so will. God's power is infinite, he insisted, and his capacity to become incarnate is not exhausted by a single instance or even multiple instances of that action. In addition to his incarnation in Christ, then God could have chosen to join to his divine nature, quote, another numerically different human nature. Yep, there it is.

Have you ever heard of Monsignor Paul Glenn, who wrote a tour of the summa? It's really great. He goes through the respond. He goes through each article and summarizes it and it's free online. So here's his summary of that art. That main response we just gave is quite short. He says there is no conflict or contradiction in thought that one person should assume a human nature distinct from the human nature assumed by the sun, nor indeed is there contradiction in the thought that the sun should assume a human nature distinct from the human nature assumed by the Sun Nor indeed is their contradiction in the thought that the Sun should assume another human nature distinct from the one he did assume Yeah, now again, he's only talking about human nature, but he didn't have this in mind

He was a Ryan in his science and speak thinking that there is only One cosmos and we're the center of it and that those things out there plants and stuff They're not balls of rock on which they could be inhabited. That's a whole different realm of unchanging kind of stuff. So it wasn't even in view for it. So we have someone in chat, Ted Krasinski, who says, Aquinas sounds like a nerd. That's what I think it's about.

He is, but revenge of the nerds, bro. Yeah. That's really cool, though. That's pretty much directly addressed in the Zoom. Isn't he amazing? I know, the things he thought of. I freaking the sim. Isn't he amazing? I know the things I fucking love him What did he say recently that I read? Well, okay. So this this gets a bit far afield, but something people often tell me is that

Like I'm not very friendly if I don't want to be someone said to me recently. They're like my wife thinks you hate her I'm like, oh my god. No, I think she's great But I've had multiple people say that to me, right? And I've always said, I've got a bad poker face. You know, so if I'm not interested, like it's very difficult for me to prove. But here's the thing, we all like to rationalize our sins. Right, so here's what I'm thinking about all this.

And I just crack open the sumo one day and he's got two articles on the virtue of friendliness and affability. He even says it's a matter of justice that we show signs of affability to those that we are with, because anyway, so I read that. He just smacked me across the face and now I'm a lot more friendly to people. I meet who I don't want to talk to because it's a it's a matter of justice that we show a general love, not a love that's reserved for those

we're intimate with. That would be a matter of hypocrisy Yeah, anyway, so Aquinas just oh What if you could think of it? He's probably already thought yeah I mean even addresses the fact that he says that carnivores or carnivorous animals were not Vegetarians prior to the fall. Mm-hmm. That's fascinating, right? So it wasn't like the full made animals that are now carnivorous, carnivorous, they were carnivorous prior to the fall. He addresses wet dreams.

He addresses, OK, he addresses a lot. He addresses like. Doesn't he do if pets go to heaven, too, if dogs? Yeah. And that was the point we brought up earlier. He says dogs don't go to heaven, but. But he says a lot of weird things about the afterlife. He even seems to say that there are no plants in the afterlife. Plants. Yeah. And trees.

Well, see, I think I would go with that. You would go with that. And the afterlife, that's I don't. Why do you want plants in the afterlife? You want to eat salad in heaven, Matt? Yeah, that's not me. What you're talking about? The beauty, the beauty of creation. Don't you want to eat salad in heaven, Matt? Yeah, that's not me. What are you talking about? The beauty of creation. Don't you want to see something that resembles that?

You have all that beauty in the beatific vision. No, but he says, I'm pretty sure he says, we're not going to have that. Well, that's what I'm saying. I don't think we need any of that. We have the beatific vision, and in him we have everything. There's going to be hunting in heaven.

I think there would be the joy of hunting in heaven. So there's going to be animals in heaven. But let's see, but maybe I'm wrong there, but I'm pretty sure he does say that. With animals, you know, Lewis once said that, you know, he, I love Lewis so much, he, in his book, The Problem of Pain, he has a whole chapter he devotes to animal pain, because that seems like such a senseless thing that animals will suffer and they're not morally, you know, there's not some kind of punishment for, or a result of their own moral choices.

And he proposes in there that maybe by certain special acts that even if they're not inherently immortal, and they're certainly not made for the beatific vision, that God might grant some kind of preternatural gift beyond their nature for either the sake of our own happiness or for his own that he would just enjoy having the critters around. Now not in the beatific vision, but something for the elect. So one wag who was reading him wrote in and said, stop me, well. No, no, please. He writes in and says, oh, so animals in heaven, where are you going to put all the mosquitoes?

And of course, Lewis wasn't saying that every year. And Lewis responded, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could be very conveniently combined. That's very good. I'm allergic to mosquito bites and I grew up in Savannah. Are you really? So, I mean, not terribly, but. So that just really hit me like, oh gosh, you're so far eternity, you're swatting these

things by me and they don't die. They keep biting. Yeah, Trentatting these things by the end. They don't die. They keep biting. Yeah, Trent Horn seems to lean towards the position. He I don't want to speak for him, so nobody quote me here, but he seems to in our conversation together be open to animals going to heaven. But he makes a separation between animals and things like mosquitoes, which he he kind of diminishes with some some term. And I think if you're going to propose that,

you have to clarify about the beatific vision. They are not made for the beatific. So you could perhaps be in heaven, but not actually be experiencing the beatific vision. You're just there for the sake of those who are. Here's something I've thought about. Sometimes when you think about heaven and like how we get there, it can seem silly.

Like how do we get to heaven? I don't even know what that means. It sounds insane. But it was, I think it was Pascal who said something to this effect that, well, surely it's significantly more difficult for us to go from nowhere to here than to go from here to heaven, right? That's a great point. Like, I don't know how I got here. I don't know what I was doing, where I was, who made me come here, but here I am. And it's a little argument about anybody saying, you know, I forgot to be able to work on Miracle. He can create out of nothing. If he can do that, he can do any of this other stuff.

Yeah. Actually, I was at Augustin or somebody, you know, it's the harder thing than bringing us out of nothing was to save us. Because they, you know, involved the cooperation of our will. Yeah. There's some questions from, I'll combine two. There's a local supporter, Eric, what is it? Music says, hey Matt, what would we say as Catholics regarding proof of ancient civilizations

with massive alien looking skulls, et cetera, or even drawings of seemingly proof of interactions with some higher intelligence or aliens? They were handed down knowledge. And I like this part. For context, I only saw this on some TV shows trying to prove alien existence, which I really appreciate the honesty there. Yeah.

And then there's also a $20 super chat from David Rodriguez in the same vein. Thoughts on the connection between aliens and Egyptians, Aztecs, etc. They all seem to have similar drawings of alien figures they might have worshipped. Could alien work with Satan? As Christianity spread, alien knowledge ended. Is that? I guess that's kind of a separate question there at the end, but ancient aliens, thoughts? Yeah. Again, I stayed away from it in the book and I probably should have at least said something but I think everything that I've seen anyway from all that stuff does not require

an alien presence. Okay. You look at the Mayan stuff, they often stylized the way they would represent intelligent creatures and we have, you know, Syrians, you have these wing figures and stuff that are meant to be creatures kind of like angels in our tradition. So I don't know that they necessarily were portraying, number one, nonhumans, and number two, if they were portraying something that people had actually seen or that was just part of their religious tradition that these creatures exist.

So that doesn't prove it to me. The bigger argument is that, okay, look at how the pyramids are built and the precision of how they fit against the stones and the stones that we carry so far, surely they couldn't do it. I'm not usually the one to go in the racist direction, but there are people who pointed out that if nothing else, folks who think this tend to be moderns who look down on those third world people, they couldn't possibly have had the technology for this because we're so much smarter. I don't think that's exactly what's intended by it. But I do think That there probably was just human developed technology long ago that that we've lost

So pyramids are not a sign of alien. I don't think they are. I don't think they could they could be but I saw this great Cartoon. Well, actually it was I guess it looked like a page from a kid's But I saw this great cartoon, actually, I guess it looked like a page from a kid's comic book and it's showing the pyramids being built by the slave labor and the task masters up there whipping them and that kind of thing. And this one guy, he's just pushing against the block and he says to the other guy, oh, this is killing me. And the other guy says, well, yeah, but just think one day they're going to look back at these magnificent things and say, human beings built these.

How wonderful. And then the next scene is from this ancient aliens history channel program and a woman is looking at the pyramid and saying, definitely aliens. So, no, I give them a lot more credit. I think they do a lot more than we give out. I tried to find that cartoon, but I found another one that's also good, which is an Egyptian picking up a stone and an alien behind him saying, bend your knees. That's amazing.

That's amazing. So, what are you hoping people will take away from your book? I'm hoping that, first of all, it'll kind of broaden their thinking a little bit about how great our God is and how creative. And we can assume everything, that we know everything that He's done or will do. But also, I just want Catholics who read it to understand that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence would not compromise our faith, undermine it, destroy it.

We have a lot of questions to ask about particular things, if we encounter them, but that the Catholic tradition in particular, I think the Christian tradition as a whole, but the Catholic tradition in particular is broad enough, rich enough, nuanced enough to accommodate that the same way it did the Copernican Revolution, the same way I did the discovery of humans in the Western Hemisphere and the other side of those oceans. I mean, there were some people at the time who questioned whether they were even really human. They thought they were subhuman, the Native Americans, because it didn't fit into their,

you know, or, well, how could they be human if God gave us the gospel and they've been without it for centuries? That would be unfair of God, therefore, you know, wrong conclusions. So that, that it need not undermine your faith. It could enrich our faith and if it should happen, don't let anybody tell them differently. Yeah. Be prepared for that. And then to a secular audience, you know, folks of Catholic faith is richer and broader than you think. I've run to people who just think, oh,

the Catholics would just deny it all or say it's all demonic. And not really. No, and they haven't for 2000 years. Yep. Well, I want to invite people who are watching right now to do a couple of things. The first is if you are aware of a good YouTube video that shows evidence of what you believe is, you know, alien spacecraft or whatever interference. Put it in the description below.

Tell us what you think. Do you think a lot of these things are just made up or blown out of context? Do you think they're real? I'd love to know that. And then finally, do us a favor and subscribe to the channel. We have 271,000 subscribers right now and I need more. I need, I crave more of you. So click subscribe and that bell button and that way YouTube will be forced to let you know whenever we put out a new video. So we have your link below

to this, to this book. We have in plain sight. Thanks for putting that up, Neil. Anything else you want to point people to? Do you have a website? You've got 800 books, I know. Just 60. Just 60? All right. Just 60. Another 60 is coming out. November, I'll just mention that.

Yeah. The Life of St. Joseph is Seen by the Mystics. Really, really enjoyed writing that. Brought me closer to St. Joseph to write that. No, I have a Facebook page, that's about all, but I've got more friends than I can handle now, so I can't really... And I will post on my Facebook if you're on Facebook. We'll post interviews like this and others on there if you're interested in that.

But no, the picture, it's about this, it's not about me, obviously. Just encourage them if they have an interest at all to read the book. And congratulations on having a gorgeous front cover. Oh, Thank you. Like, as an author, I know what happens when sometimes the publisher takes it and you're like, why? But that's really beautiful. Well, they, you know, I had some say so about it and they were very, the artists were very, designers very humble and saying, okay, well, let's work with that. So I was out looking up, I don't know if I actually found this picture or not, but I was describing what I wanted.

I wanted the spires of the church to be pointing up to heaven. And anyway, they did a great job. Are you doing much travel these days or are you? A little bit. My arthritis has gotten worse, so I can't drive much more than about three hours. So yeah, then the whole COVID thing shut down so much of the flying for a while But I'm doing I'll be in Fort Worth next year and then around Georgia and other places terrific Well, thank you for making the trip I know that flying is so much more unpleasant these days than it was say two years ago, isn't it? Yeah

It's yeah every time I go to the Atlanta Airport that in particular is such a pennant. I love the Atlanta Airport That's my favorite airport in the world. I honestly find it the most convenient airport in existence. I love it. But what I don't like is that all these shops are understaffed. And so you've got massive lines to the Delta lounge, massive lines to every, it's just so much.

I realized this time they have better signage than a lot of other, like even, I won't say what airport I came in to get here, you'll figure it out, but the signs weren't nearly as good as sound and clear. And hey, have you been to Atlanta Airport recently? They've got a holograph of the gun over the... What? They've got a holograph of a gun that turns around.

A hologram? I'm sorry, a hologram, yeah. I'm sorry, a hologram. Yeah, with the round circle with a line through it to tell people that you can't have guns. Where is that? It's over the security line. You just see it? Telling you no weapons beyond.

Yeah, it's a hologram. That's what I love about Georgians. There's clearly so much of a problem that we need to invent and project a hologram to remind people. Is that a hologram? That's awesome. I mean, they have it on screens and stuff too, but they have one hanging up over you. project a hologram to remind people. Is that a hologram? That's awesome. I mean, they have it on screens and stuff too,

but they have one hanging up over you. I wonder how problematic that is. How many people are coming in with guns? I don't know, but you'd think they would have hit them or gotten rid of them before they get the security line. It's like, if you're in the security line, you've got one, what are you going to do with it to get rid of it? I think I had a friend, uh, accidentally bring a bunch of ammunition in, not a bunch, but ammunition ammunition and then they told him like

You need to take this back to your car. We confiscated and So he took it back. It's things like that. Well, if you've got a gun, I presume they're not just gonna confiscate it Like with a water bottle you like take the friggin water bottle, but with a gun, you'd probably want that Well, you know, I one time got a different briefcase from what I usually used and didn't realize there was pocket knives down it Yeah, and so they are I got a different briefcase from what I usually used and didn't realize there was pocket knives out at it. Yeah. And so they are, so they just said take it. So yeah, so they do confiscate sometimes. No, but I think a lot of airports are not built well.

They don't anticipate the growth that their airport is going to receive. And so they end up just like throwing these long corridors off to nowhere. The Twin Cities in Minnesota airport, I hate that airport. It just feels totally, whereas the Atlanta airport, which is the busiest airport in the world, it's so well laid out. You just walk down the escalator, get on a train, go to your gate. And the sign up begins really good. They claim that it's also the most efficient one in the world. I don't know how you measure that, but I wouldn't be surprised. But it's still

so big. And just in the parking. I'm calling. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny as I'm getting older, I just desire to travel less and less. I think next year I'm going to go to Guatemala, France and Australia. I don't want to do that. And then someone invited me to go to Africa to hunt. I want to do that, but I'm not going to be able to.

That's three international trips. It's brutal. Like I'm almost at the point where I would rather like save up for two years and buy close to first-class just, just cause it's such a brilliant trip. You've been to Australia? No, I'd love to. Oh my goodness. Would you still, would you want to do that now? Yeah, despite everything I feel for one thing. Yeah, I can, I can tough it out getting there and coming back to be there. So, um, yeah, we did a British Isles cruise that we turned into a pilgrimage by making sure

every port we went to went to all the places associated with things at St. Thomas More and St. Patrick and all the St. Margaret's. Was it a nice cruise? A cruise of style? It was, yeah. This was before COVID. If we had waited a year, we couldn't have done it. So I liked that kind of travel and I'll put up with the airports, you know.

How do you think, how do you think the COVID lockdowns are going to change how we live in the, in the future or even now? Do you think there'll be more? I mean, we can get into that, but one thing I'm noticing and I'm trying to articulate is that with the COVID lockdowns, businesses in order to survive had to go online. Mm-hmm. That seems pretty straightforward. Okay.

Now that we're back in person, the person thing seems to be a money grab, money suck. So businesses don't function that well in person as they used to, at least in Stubanbill. I go to Kroger, I go to Lowe's, it's a brutal experience. I feel more comfortable asking a stranger in the parking lot where something is than someone who works there. They seem overwhelmed, right? So I don't know if it's because handouts from the government

or if people are learning to make a living online because they had to over the last couple of years that a lot of in-person things seem very unpleasant. Has that been y'all's experience or no? Well, certainly we've done a lot more shopping online because it's, it's most of the time just works better. Yeah. You know, having to go, we even have at the supermarket, we started, we were old folks. And so they were willing to, uh,

we'd send them the order and then they'd do the thing for us. And now why should we spend all that time going through those aisles of stuff when they, without extra charge, they get it all. Exactly. Bring it out to the car. I was at Kroger yesterday and I said to somebody, where are the black olives? I never had this problem on Amazon. Well, this is something, actually it was actually Kroger and now Walmart does it too.

They, you just online, you order all this stuff. But see, I think what they, I think what won't go away is a desire for friendly hospitable interaction. Yeah. So it wouldn't surprise me if we see big personless chains die down and they go online. But I think we are going to continue to see little stores remain where people feel welcomed and love like coffee shops and cigar lounges that were opening in Steubenville and things like that. What do you think? Yeah. Well, you know, I live in the North Georgia mountains and the nearest big, big town is Clayton.

Yeah. The whole county only has 20,000. And it's the same thing there. I love going to the little coffee shops, the little places and, and you know, the people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't look to shopping to fulfill my social needs. No, coffee shops, little places and you know, the people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't look to shopping to fulfill my social needs. No, but it's a pleasant interaction. It's a very nice thing. It's pleasant to have interactions.

Yeah, coffee shop, bookstore, and clothes. Because otherwise people are having interactions with people in church communities or communities with people who agree with them. It's still nice to go into these spaces where you can be Whatever you are politically or religiously and just interact with normal people and you know malls are shutting down like Grocery stores are exhausting and people are buying online Big chain restaurants like Taco Bell I don't go to that that sort of place but like people don't really want to maybe they will go there because they're addicted to crap food, but those mom-and-pop stores

I think like coffee shops where people want to have pleasant interactions with those people go there because they're addicted to crap food, but those mom and pop stores, I think, like coffee shops where people want to have pleasant interactions with those they live with, I don't think you can extract that from us as humans. Well, that's always been, you know, I grew up, my dad and mom had a little mom and pop store in Savannah, Georgia. What did they sell? It was a meat market. Dad was a butcher.

And all the kids worked there. I grew up working at a meat market. I can tell you about all the cuts of meat. But even back then, as the supermarkets were getting big and that kind of stuff, you had this faithful clientele always came because my dad knew them by name. He knew what they wanted. He would compliment them, you know, their appearance or whatever. They were interested in our lives, we were interested in their lives. And it was this face to face thing. Can I just have half a pound of ground beef? Well, sure. Can I have those that nobody else ever asked for? Sure. There's something. And it was always the case.

We had plenty of customers because it was so different from going in a supermarket and our prices weren't bad. Yeah. I think what's tough is like, whereas I would be more than willing to pay, and I more than willing to pay extra money because these are my friends here in Superville who own coffee shops and grocery stores. There's some little ones who I want to invest more money because I it's not charity. I'm paying for a town I want to live in. Yeah. Right. Yeah. People who can support themselves.

Right. But there are a lot of people who who just simply can't afford that. And they've got to go to the gas station for lunch or they got to go to McDonald's and that sort of stuff. But yeah, but it's funny, like even even McDonald's and Taco Bell, there's so much of Uber Eats because the experience is so unpleasant going to someone behind a counter who clearly doesn't want to be there. Yeah. And why should they want to be there? Like, I don't blame them for not wanting to be there, but. Man, have you heard of Mr. Beast Burger? Yeah.

Yeah. So I figured out I was Googling looking at it means friends. The way that the business model works is it's restaurants add that to their kitchen. Yes. It's not Mr. Beast's chains, right? But yeah, it's yes, that's right. So it's like local restaurants or whatever kind of restaurant adds it to their kitchen and they make these mr Beesburgers and ship it out separate from their restaurant as like a kind of

Not publicly facing thing because the only publicly facing part is that it's on these delivery apps, mr Beesburger, but it's coming out of these restaurants What I think is interesting because hopefully that you know funnels some money towards like local restaurants that maybe yeah, that is really So you can't go to one of these restaurants and buy a Mr. Beast burger? No, you have to get it delivered. Is it even advertised that they sell Mr. Beast burgers at these restaurants, but you have to get them online? Yeah. Interesting.

It's interesting how things are changing, hey? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, conferences, oh my goodness. I know they're still having conferences, but how many conferences are mostly Zoom now? The numbers are tending and then this religious world, that's a big development. For the longest time, you would go to conferences just because you wanted to meet all these people face to face from around the country or even around the world and compare religious notes and stuff. And now, you know, the last probably have a dozen conferences I've spoken at were

by Zoom. Yeah. But when you do go to an in-person conference, you do appreciate the human interaction, don't you? I spoke at the Apologetics Conference here in Steubenville in July and there really is no kind of getting away from it. There's something about a different space that forces a different mindset that makes you open in a way that you're not when you just, you know, click this expand version of

your YouTube video or whatever. Well in life, I came to the, you mentioned the Apologetics conference here at student level. It's been going on annually for a long time. I came into the Catholic church in 1993 and they were having, defending the faith conference. I guess it's the same when you're talking about. And I just said to my wife, we both come, I've got to go to this even though it's all the way in Ohio, Georgia, we're in Florida, wherever we were. And I went and it was at that conference where Marcus Grodi got up and said, I'm thinking about starting this new network of pastors, clergymen who are converts and we're gonna have this

little dinner after the thing's over, a little reception and talk about. So I went, that's how I met Marcus. Carl Keating was there, all kinds of other folks were there. That was my introduction to the Catholic community that led to my first publications like with Pat Madrid and his book, Surprised by Truth. I wrote the first essay as my testimony.

Marcus, eventually I was on his board, directors, I Truth, I wrote the first essay as my testimony. Marcus, eventually, I was on his board. The director, I was an editor for the company. Carl King, all these others. And it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't, you know, if it weren't ever a Zoom or something. It happened at a conference where real people were saying, you know, I just had this idea last night. Let's sit and talk and marvelous stuff. Were you a pastor?

Yeah. You were. I'm an associate pastor. I was a pastor? Yeah. You were. I'm an associate pastor. I didn't realize that. So was the coming home network kind of helpful in your transition financially or was it just sort of information? No, this was just the beginning of it. I mean, that's what I'm saying.

Oh, I see. Oh, you had already converted. Oh, you had already converted. Karki, Markus was there and he said, I want to create this network. So I'm kind of a charter member, you might say. I was there from the beginning. So it took a while before it would have been that place and I was already at comfort. But I always had the editing and writing thing to fall back on.

And then once I got my PhD to teach, so I didn't have to have to be a pastor to make a living. But for a lot of folks, of course. Do you ever write fiction? You did write fiction. You told me about that book. Yeah. What's it called? Well, the original title was Gehenna, which is the Greek name for hell. And second edition of it, they called it My Visit to Hell, which is awful.

I said, it sounds like something you'd write when you come back from summer break. Probably Atlantic summer vacation. Yeah, I joked to them, because it starts out in Atlanta. And I say, well, you know, some's some parts of Atlanta probably next door to hell. Same area code anyway. But what I did is took the basic plot line from Dante's Inferno and some of the characters, but then put them in a, at that point, 20th century setting. Now the revised version is 21st century setting.

So the circles of hell. The main thing I did differently was, if I'm talking too much, tell you what, if you look at Dante's thing, in his day, the wilderness was the scary place. It was the place where there were robbers and witches and ferocious animals to eat you. And the city was the place of refuge. So you went behind the walls to be safe. So for him, he portrays hell as this vast wilderness that's full of dangers. So I'm starting to do this and say, wait a minute, that's not going to work for today. For us,

the wilderness is the place of refuge and retreat and vacation. And that's where you go for fun and refreshment. It's the city that's so full of crime and danger and dirt. And, you know, it's just just so instead of having hell as a great wilderness I had it as a decaying city and that's really good and so that changed the imagery all the way through. That's cool. What advice would you, what's one piece of advice because I've got some but you've written 60 books and I've written like seven so we'll take yours over mine. But what would your one piece of advice be to somebody who wants to start writing?

Start writing. I think it sounds funny, but yeah, but how many people have taught, Oh, I really want to start writing. I said, okay, well, what are you writing? Have you, is you're writing this morning? You're writing today. Oh no, I'm just, you know, something, no, if you, you want to start writing, you've really just got to sit down and do it. Get something down the screen. You know, the old days is down on paper, but the screen and, um, that's the first thing. But the other thing I always say to people is read a lot, reading informs your writing.

The best writers are those who've done the best reading. I agree with that. The best advice I've ever heard is to write drunk, edit sober. And that doesn't mean actually be drunk, right? But it just means to not care, just to get it out there. Sometimes just taking that pressure off yourself. Like if I said to you, OK, you could probably write a bad story, right? Write me a bad story.

Just write a really, really bad one thousand word story. But write it because once you've done it, then it's so much easier. It's like it's easier to turn a car that's in motion than to try to turn it. Yeah. Yeah. We got to wrap up to get you absolutely. Dr. Pithigban, you're the best. Thank you so much.

You're the best. Thank you for having me. God bless all your viewers and listeners. Some God's good. And he's much greater than anything we've ever imagined. Amen. Thank you. Thanks, Neil.