Somewhere in the Skies - Anarchy in the UFO! w/ Miguel Romero

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

On episode 308 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by artist and researcher, Miguel Romero ("Red Pill Junkie") to discuss his essay, "Anarchy in the UFO!" - Expanding on the theories of Jacques Vallée and John Keel, Miguel considers the possibility that UFO events may be the product of a trickster intelligence, anarchically prodding us to provoke individual and societal reactions and developments, highlighting that the UFO is a symbol of anarchist subversion in the modern world. What role does anarchy and the UFO play in today's move towards structured and establishment studies of the phenomena? Miguel also discusses his highly anticipated project, "The Ufology Tarot," and then answers your listener questions. Follow Miguel's work at: https://absurdbydesign.wordpress.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Book your Cameo video with Ryan at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Official Store: CLICK HERE Buy Somewhere in the Skies coffee! Use promo code: SOMEWHERESKIES10 to get 10% off your order: https://bit.ly/3rmXuap Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2023 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms apply. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Hey guys, Ryan Sprag here from Somewhere in the Skies. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but this is the first time we are having today's guests on the show. So I am very excited. I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time. We have worked together actually on a book of essays, UFOs reframing the debate. Two of our essays were featured in this wonderful, wonderful book of all different essays, all about UFOs and the different ways to approach it.

And that is definitely something we are going to touch on today with our guest. And we're also going to touch on all of the current stuff going on in the UFO world and how things have changed from just a few years back. And whether it's an evolution or a devolution, we will leave that up to our guest. and I to debate about. But it's going to be super fun. We're going to have fun. If you haven't noticed a lot of our shows lately, we've been going back to the roots of somewhere in the skies,

you know, talking about the experiencers and the different thoughts and theories and opinions on what UFOs could be. And kind of moving a little away from a lot of the current government-esque UFO talk. But I want to return to having fun conversations. stations here at somewhere in the sky. So without further ado, let's bring him in for the very first time. We have Red Pill Junkie. What is going on, man? Hello. Thanks for having me. We've been, we've known each other for how many years by now, Ryan? And yeah, it's finally about time you have me. I know. I know, man. Hey, if it's of any

consolation, I still haven't had Greg Bishop as a main guest. even Paul Kimball. So I've got a lot of making up to do with the UFO community, the people who really got me invigorated and inspired. So I think I'm starting with you, my man. You're bringing me back into the reason I got into euphology. And that's to have interesting conversations about all of it, what it all could mean.

Some of the more profound questions that come with this. topic. Like I said, and kind of move away from this stuffy kind of government chatter that's been going on for the past few years. So that's kind of where I want to start with you, if you don't mind. What do you make of, and this is kind of a big place to start, but what do you make of euphology today in 2023? You know, just before 2017 is when our book came out. And when we really really tried to shake things up. It was stuffy and nothing had changed for a long time.

And then boom, this New York Times article comes out and it seems that everything changed. So where do you stand today in 2023 when it comes to the evolution or like I mentioned earlier, the de-evolution of

euphology, I guess? It's a great question. I will think I'll have to disagree a little bit with your stance that nothing was changing in euphology by the time that that book reframing the debate was published because I personally feel that by that time certain people within the field of euphology were starting to be more open and

starting to entertain the idea that it was important to pay attention to the witnesses, to their inner state of mind, to the transformational aspect that their experience had on them on a long-term basis, like did their encounter change their perspective about God? Did it change their spirituality? Did it have any effect on their relationships, on their job situation, their careers, things like that, things that groups like move on

who were like more interested only on the details, the technical details of their observation, just a fact, man, you know, how big was the object, what shape it was, you know? did it have lights or not were any kind of like marks on the ground so I think that by then euphology was starting to pay more attention

to the witnesses and also open to the idea that consciousness has something to do a very important thing to do with the phenomenon itself in ways that we are still not equipped to answer because if you ask people what is consciousness, they will give you a thousand different explanations.

The way it's the same way that maybe they'll give you a thousand different explanations of what the soul is or something like that. But this is something that I think some people in the field were starting to say, you know, UFOs seems to be connected to the witnesses in some capacity, you know, the co-creation.

aspect that our friend Greg Bishop has written about. And I think that then, with the New York Times article in 2017, we were back to square one, back to the idea of the 1950s. And even people in Eupholitan were trying to erase a whole chunk of history, like saying, well, let's forget about encounters with euphonauts. Let's forget about, you know, abduction. Let's forget about close encounters of the third kind, the fourth can, whatever. Yeah, let's just stick to tracking some radar,

the testimony of pilots who, for some reason or other, seem to be more reliable in some circles, the testimony of pilots than the testimony of, I don't know, farmers or the testimony of school teachers. Let's stick to the testimony of the pilots. Let's stick to the military observations. And what are UFOs? Where do they come from?

Well, who knows? But let's remember that it's a military threat. And by the way, we can no longer call them UFOs. We have to use the appropriate acronym. The now official acronym is UAP, which keeps changing, by the well, because before it was. identified aerial phenomena and now is unidentified anomalous phenomena, which is interesting. So if I see a big foot in the forest, is that a European?

Are they going to go and shoot it down like a Chinese balloon, a poor bigfoot or the Loch Nass monster, you know, popped up his head on the lock? Oh my God, you know, standing the missiles. I'm making fun of this because, first of all, guys, if you don't have a healthy sense of humor when you're dealing with the UFO phenomenon, you're going to have a miserable time. You know, it's something that is paramount. Take this in a lighthearted matter. Also with a, you know, grain of salt. But don't take yourself and your beliefs about the UFO so seriously. It's my, you know, humble recommendation. Absolutely, man. And I think that's kind of

what's missing in today's euphology or the discourse let's say on quote unquote UFO Twitter. It's not fun. Everyone takes it so seriously and argue. It's not even a debate anymore. It's just arguing. And look,

that goes for any community, any, you know, field of study. Like, this happens everywhere. But I think what we're seeing now is, like I said, everyone's taking it so seriously, because of that national security threat angle. So it's like, you know, we can't laugh about this because it's dangerous.

It's, it's going to harm us. When in reality, like, you look at the history of UFOs and how many UFOs have actually harmed individuals, at least physically, maybe psychologically, you know, and whatnot. But yeah, I think we're missing that absurd tricksterous, tricksteris. tricksterish fun nature to it all. And yeah, yeah, I think that's kind of what's missing. So thank you. I'm glad we could touch on kind of the current state of euphology. And I do want to circle back to that because I think your essay actually has a lot to do with that in terms of the structure of what we see today and how we need to break that.

But let's rewind a little bit for, for, for, Any of my viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with you, would you mind telling us the origin story, Red Pill Junkie? Like, how did you, first of all, where'd the name come from? And second of all, how did you first get interested in UFOs? The comic book origin story. Okay. Well, there's two different questions.

Obviously, I became interested in UFOs way before, you know, the Internet. and way before I chose the silly moniker, which, by the way, had a totally different meaning when I decided to choose it. When I went to college, I read a lot of Carlos Castaneda, the teachings of Don Juan Journey to Exlam,

books I highly recommend, despite the fact that there's a lot of controversy with Carlos, which we don't get into that, this is not the time or place to go into that discussion. But then when I saw the first Matrix movie, it was, you know, like a real, like, punch in the face. So it was so impactful.

Like, I got it. Like, I saw the, like, Morpheus, the character that is the mentor to Neo was, like, Don Juan, this Jackie Shaman, that supposedly was the teacher of Carlos, who became like a sorceress apprentice in the 1960s. And that idea, also the idea by the end of the movie, a spoiler alert, when Neo finally sees the matrix for what it really is,

it's something that also is shown not only in Castanera's books, but in pretty much all the mystical books about people when they kind of like lift the veil of reality and they deceive the universe for what really is, which is nothing but, you know, energy feels vibrating of different, you know, densities, and beings, human beings, being as glowing eggs, you know, like a cluster of that energy that is sentient.

So that is the reason what I chose the nickname, Red Pill Junkie, which was kind of like self-deprecating, you know, also, and also a reminder, of not taking myself seriously, but also to remind me how, you know, unlike in the movie when you only have to take the red pill once and you're instantly transformed, when you're looking to the UFO phenomenon,

it's like, you know, you're constantly searching for those red pills that are going to change your perspective and to briefly open your eyes into the nature of reality. the Matrix is one of the movies that I choose to call Gnostic. Like the Nostasis is very important in my life, the idea that the world is not what we think it is. Well, in the movie, it is a prison.

And to the Nostics, it was also kind of like a prison for the soul. But even if you don't take that negative connotation, I think we can all agree that reality is something much larger than what our feeble senses can detect. I mean, our senses were created over millions or billions of years of evolution and only to keep us alive, you know, only to detect threats, able to chase down food, to be able to survive. catastrophes, whatever, but they're not really equipped to actually show us what the world really is like.

And sometimes you can do that either through meditational practices or also through, you know, like in this t-shirt that I chose to wear today, the use of entheogens, like this one, for example, is inspired. This is Wichol Art, the Wicholest is a native group in Mexico that use Pejori or Hikuri, as they call it, in order to break the doors of perception, like William Black said. So that is what the Red Bill Junkie was at the time, the nickname that I chose, way before those assholes, you know, their right wingers. the male right proponents started to distort the term

and now when someone says, oh, that guy got red-billed, I always cringe and die a little bit inside because that's not what I meant and it's definitely not what the Wachoski sisters, you know, the original creators of the metrics who are trans women. There's definitely not what they meant

when they created a term Redfield. So I'm going with the OG term. Red pill is something that is not meant to fight of their right-wing rights. It's about changing your perspective of reality. Now, going with your second question, how I got interested in all this stuff. I was born in 1973. And yes, I take pride in the fact that I was born in the year of the humanites.

you know, this is something that we learn when we get into the euphal history. A lot of really interesting close encounters happened in that year. Basca Gula, for example, happened in October of 1973. I was born in October of 1973. So it's one of the reasons why it's one of my favorite cases. So having been born in the early 1970s and, you know, growing up, In the 1980s, I was exposed to Stephen Spielberg movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

ET, extraterrestrial, of course. There were a lot of really good and really influential UFO-inspired movies in that era, and I think that really got me like wonderstruck, looking into the night sky, you know, whatever few stars one can watch in Mexico City nights skies and wonder, you know, about, is there really anybody out there? Also, I have to admit that in the 1980s, here in Mexico, we have, like, the Mexican version of the TV show 60 Minutes. They have something like that here.

and there was a young reporter who was one of the contributors or the investigators in that program by the name of Jaime Mausanne. I don't know if the name rings a bell with you. I'm joking here. But Mausanne, in that show, he made a reportage about Edward Billy Meyer, you know, the Swiss contactee, who in the 1970s and the 1980s really

made a splash with these pictures of what they look like you know silver saucers with a very bucolic pastoral landscape of the of the Swiss Alps you know so the green mountains and you have that contrast of the

gleaming impossible looking saucer really had an impact in my own impressionable mind obviously you know with age I came to understand that those photos are very questionable. We don't get into the details of why, or if Meyer is only a hoaxer,

or maybe he actually had a few genuine experiences, and then he was kind of like trying to keep it going, keep the role going with the hoaxes, which is something that is very common. But like I said, it's another story. That's one of the things that I've really got me, you know, really hooked on an early age. And that fascination with the phenomenon persisted all the way to the 1990s. In 1991, we have a total solar eclipse here in Mexico, July 11, I want to say.

We had, during six minutes, we had a total solar eclipse that was visible in Mexico City and other parts of, Central Mexico. And as you know, some people observed something during that eclipse that was even filmed on videotape. Something that actually looks like

a gleaming object that was hovering over Mexico City and that was something that became instant news and I think that it also became news. worldwide. And because of that, Jaime Mao Zan was being asked as a guest on TV, on TV programs on a, you know, regular basis. And I was, you know, watching all those shows, you know, instantly hooked, trying to see what else was going on. Because apparently, it was the

beginning of a really active wave of UFO activity that happened on Mexico in the early 1990s. And that is the reason why, you know, I kept watching the news here in Mexico. And at the same time, when the Internet became available, I used the Internet when I was going to college to try to gather more information from news groups, email groups, chat groups, to try to learn more about what was in bulk back then. you know, Roswell, Roswell became very big in the 1990s.

Area 51 and Bob Lazar and the Gulf Free sightings and all that jazz and that's the thing that, you know, kept my fire going.

So it's, my interest in UFOs has never diminished. This guy's going from Ops and Downs because, you know, as all,

as everybody, you begin to become focused on your career, job, relationships, whatever. But my interest in UFOs has always been part, part of my life. And never being like, oh, yeah, you know, I got over it and then I returned. No, it's been always there. It's always there, man.

Somehow, some way, I know that feeling. Unless you're willing to give up your job, your relationships and any sense of an actual free life. This topic will consume you. And look, I was the same way. I can only imagine, like, the mid-90s, you and I probably were in, like, the same chat forums and had no idea who each other were back then.

But I have no doubt that we probably crossed paths digitally back then, you, me, and a lot of the other researchers out there. So that's cool. I love to see, you know, I love hearing how. people got interested. Some people, it's just a fascination. Some, it's a sighting or an experience. But yeah, I also remember, you know, in the United States growing up and seeing all these specials on TV, whether it was sightings or or Fox or, you know, of the best UFO videos of the year. And there were always so many from Mexico and specifically Mexico City.

And I just remember always asking my parents, like, can we go to Mexico? Please, please. I want to see a UFO. Oh, man. Those are the days. I miss those days, for sure. Right. Yeah.

There was a time when a cousin of mine and I wanted to become part of Mausanne's group of UFO hunters. They called themselves Los Vigilantes, you know, like the watchers. and these were people who were spending like eight hours or more on their rooftops with a video camera, just waiting, waiting to see something. And yeah, some of the time they actually managed to film a few interesting things. I'm not saying, oh, well, all those were UFOs. I'm sure there were a lot of which ended up being miler balloons or flares. or whatever, but that kind of like persistence paid off.

I remember, and this is something that I wrote about for Mysterious Universe, back when I was one of the writers, an experience I had back in those days, which was a really good learning experience. I went to a UFO conference here in Mexico, a small one, you know, like someone hired a hole or something, and there were a few speakers. And there was a guy in the audience who I knew, because I had seen him in a few UFO-related TV shows,

who claimed to be a contact team. And, you know, so he asked for the microphone and he says, you know, I've been allowed to say that there is going to be a massive sighting of flying saucers over Mexico City on the eve of New Year's. what year I think was 1993 or 1992 and he says and this will be the dawn of a new era

and the beginning of open contact with our space brothers and la la la and I was like oh my God this is my chance this is finally my chance I'm going to go and see something

so obviously what did Miguel do he spent all that night of New Year's Eve freezing my as of, you know, sitting on the rooftop of my uncle Fernando's house while the rest of my family were having a party and having a great time and eating dinner and I was there just, you know, hopefully, you know, waiting, you know, expectantly saying, you know, this is it, tonight's the night.

And obviously, I didn't see a goddamn thing. So I say that it was a good experience because it opened my eyes. open and made me realize there's a lot of charlatans out there and there's the UFO phenomenon is plagued with all these fake prophecies prophecies, you know, prophecies that don't come true.

Sometimes after predictions were made and actually did come true. So it's like you said, it's the trickster nature of this phenomenon that is toying with us, like saying, hey, here's the carrot. you know, following the car, that means dangling the car. So we can't, you know, keep like pulling the cart.

For whatever reason, we don't know. Maybe it's Jacques Valet control system theory, you know, the cultural thermostat. Or maybe it's just, you know, so they get a kick out of it. Yeah, pure amusement, man. Maybe they feed off our fears for pure amusement. Yeah, you know. the reason why the elves love to go and trick people because, you know, they enjoy it, you know. They make fun of us.

Right. Yes, they're not laughing with us. They're laughing at us, making it for sure. Well, okay. That's awesome. Let's fast forward to UFOs reframing the debate. This book came out in early 2017. if I'm remembering correctly.

Yes. Yeah, like right before, yeah, right before the big story hit in the New York Times. Crazy. Crazy how that worked out. So how did that come to be? What inspired you to write anarchy in the UFO? And how did you get hooked up with Robbie Graham and the editors and everyone over there at UFOs reframing the debate? So I think it was in 2010

when I became involved with this news site, the Daily Grail W.JW.W.com Greg Taylor, the owner, asked me to become one of his news administrators. At first, I was very hesitant to do it, like, my God, I don't even speak English, you know, Mexican, I'm going to be terrible at it.

I wouldn't even know how to find news or whatever. And he said, no, no, no, you'll be great. Think about it. I did. And at the end, I decided to, yeah, go for it. One of the best decisions I ever made in my life because the Daily Grill has given me so much. was no social media.

It gave me access to this community of people who were interested in the same crazy stuff as I was, you know, stuff that I couldn't even talk to, you know, friends over here or of my family. So all of a sudden, I had access to this group of like-minded people and that group became larger and larger beyond the confines of the Daily Grail community. Like one of the people who I got involved with, thanks to the Grail, was Robbie Graham.

I don't remember how exactly I found Roby Graham's blog, Silver Screen Sorcers. Maybe it was because one of my other common friends, maybe Greg Bishop or Micahans, one of them probably linked to Robbie and saying, hey, look, you know, this guy is doing something really cool, like analyzing Hollywood movies that have some kind of like alien of UFO theme and trying to, you know, like deconstruct the narrative of those movies and compare it with actual UFO history, you know, and seeing how euphology and Hollywood keep cross-pollinating and influencing each other

in a really interesting way that goes beyond the idea of just Hollywood writers paying attention to the UFO phenomenon. And because of that, I started to correspond with Robbie, you know, via email, he asked me at one point to contribute with a few guest articles for his blog. And I wrote about this really cool Spanish movie that I highly recommend called Platillos Volantes, which is about these guys in Spain in the 1970s. And this is based on an actual real case. These two men committed suicide.

in the most horrific manner. Like they lay down on the track of a, you know, train. And they let the train decapitate them. And the reason the story became famous is because they found a letter in the pocket, the breast pocket of one of these men who were wearing, you know, formal suits. And they were saying, you know, like, the Space Brothers are beckoning us.

We belong to the stars or something like that. So I really wanted to write something about this movie, which is really cool. And unfortunately, I don't think it's known in English-speaking countries. And I wrote a few other articles. And because of that, and because also I was trying back in those days to make Robbie come into our fold of excluded middlers or people who were no longer interested

in the Notsam Bolts or ET angle of the UFO phenomenon. I remember Robbie back then was full on Notson bolter, full on believer in disclosure. He even acquiesced me or

convinced me to participate in that I don't know if you remember that open online petition that was open in Obama's administration in the White House

that will gathering signatures to ask the Obama administration to come claim about what they knew about UFOs. This is something that was

organized by what's the name of this guy? Was it Steve Bassett? The Steve Bassett, yeah. The problem with that petition was, sorry, but it was so poorly, poorly written. Like, we want to know what the government knows about extraterrestrial visitation.

So, okay, you're already assuming that UFOs are extraterrestrial. So strike rider, you know. And number two, that you think that the government knows all about, you know, said activity. and because he had gathered so many signatures over 5,000, the White House was forced to actually, you know, say something. But they came up with, you know, the usual plan, BS, ah, we don't know anything about that.

We're not investigating UFO activity. Case closed. And the only thing that came out of that is that the next petitions have to go over that threshold that, you know, from now on, it's going to be over 5,000 signatures, you know, thanks to the beautiful weirdos, you know, that manage to gather, you know, and manage to get us embarrassed with this year. So anyway, getting back to Robbie, I guess that's the reason why Robbie, when he came up with the idea of writing or editing this anthology of different essays about UFOs, he invited me and he invited me and he invited.

all of our common friends, you know, Greg Bishop, you, Joshua Coaching, Susan Demeter, Jack Brewer, because he, and this is something that I really applaud about this book, it gathers so many different opinions about UFOs

from the, from the borderline skeptic, like, you know, this is, most of this is a bond of nonsense, to the people who are in the really not-sum-bossom, quotes, you know, only science can investigate UFOs camp, to more people who were dabbling with what we will call the love and light aspect of the final.

Mike Leland, right? Michael Leland is proud to say he's not a UFO investigator, he's not a scientist, he's only interested in delving with, you know, how the phenomenon has affected. people like him, you know, with experience, and how, you know, it goes beyond the idea of, you know, little scientists coming to this planet on metal craft to perform experiments. Yeah, okay, so how do you explain that with, you know, the shamanic-like experiences that Mike and others have had with owls

that are strongly related to UFOs, you know anyway i when i when i first uh was proposed this i say okay you know now here's my chance i've never i've never written anything i've never written a book and this is something you know that right you spend a few years in the UFO phenomenon people always say okay so when are you going to write a book because you don't become a real euphologist unless you have your name Of course, of something. Right? That's the right of passage.

Yeah. Like Peter Robbins says, you know, you clap, you click your heels, you touch your nose, you go a trill, you're an euphologist. Done. Welcome to the Brotherhood. Google Gobble, one of us, one of us. Exactly. So I said, okay, let's do this. Let's write an essay.

And I thought about it. What can I say? what can I say? And I came to this conclusion, after reading a lot of McKenna and after, you know, Ballet and John Kiel, I said, well, the one underlying factor about UFOs that nobody seemed to pay attention to is the anarchical nature of the UFO phenomenon. How it is so anti-establishment in its nature, in the way it behavior. in the way it behaves, in the way it affects society,

which is all the more ironic because now what everybody is asking is that the establishment pays attention to the UFO phenomenon, and not only that, we are asking the government and the establishment to solve the UFO problem for us. So you're asking the more square people, the more bureaucratic, they're more red tape

conscious people in the world to go and tackle something that doesn't give a fuck about red tape about rules, bureaucracy, you know,

memos, need to know, the UFO does not respect any borders, the UFO does not respect any rules. It doesn't respect the rule of gravity. The law of gravity is something that the Eurovo

phenomenon mocks. And this is something that people like Ernest McKenna said before us. There is a wonderful speech he gave at the Angels and Aliens conference. I think he happened in the 1980s. And I quoted

that speech for my essay. You can find it on YouTube, by the way. And he says that. You know, the awful phenomenon is kind of like the assertion of the goddess manifesting into our world to say to, you know, like the academicians and like the priests of science, hold on. You've gone far enough with your little ideas and your little models of the universe that you think are so cute and that are so precious. And we're just going to come here,

and we're going to grab your little models, and we're going to turn it to pieces in front of your eyes. And we're going to go and show that your science is nothing more that a sort of little limiting rules that are only useful to create toys for the rich. you know and I was like yeah fuck yeah you know this is the kind of stuff that

that maybe one of the reasons what I love the UFO phenomenon so much is because deep down I'm also an anarchist and I think that people who are interested in UFOs have a deep iconoclastic anti-structural anti-urarchical

attitude you know and which is why when I see euvologists who think their one goal in life will be to like be part of the system and be respected by the system

you know be welcome by the mainstream is like no that's not a role we're outsiders and we need to remain in the outside in order to keep attacking society well attacking the stupid

of society, the stupidity of societal ideas, ideas that need to be attacked. You know, always. You know, you have to look into a society and if you know where the society is festering because when you see that there are topics that you're not even allowed to touch upon.

One example I can give is Graham Hancock in his recently released TV series, well, Netflix series, ancient apocalypse. There were some people who went and attacked him and said,

this is the most dangerous TV show right now. It's like, really a TV show that is not even about, I don't know, pornography or about, I don't know, like, you know, horrible politics or about, you know,

Whatever you think, you know, like, oh, death metal, whatever, or drugs or something violent, something that is corrupting children's minds. No, it's about archaeology and about, you know, proposing that, well, maybe there was a commentary impact that ended a highly advanced civilizations 15,000 years ago. Now, the most dangerous idea ever, like, give me a break. And it's not like Graham Hancock is 100% right about everything. Obviously, he's not. And I actually also will criticize the attitude he's taking today in which he's always going after the archaeologists and painting them as the bodies or the villains in the story.

I don't think that's the right approach to do. But at the same time, I understand that after decades of being constantly attacked, constantly on. in their mind, constantly ridiculed. The guy is finally trying to make a victory lap after some of the ideas he's proposing is starting to get a certain validation, you know, the discovery of Gobi Kletepe,

starting to get more and more evidence of this commentary impact 15,000 years ago that might have ended the younger dry as ice age, you know, things like that. So getting back to UFOs, UFOs was also a forbidden, a burbotten topic, not too long ago. Let's remember what happened with James McDonald. James McDonald, this meteorologist that in the 1960s got interested in the UFO phenomenon

when I requested to see the Blue Book Air Force files in UFOs. And because of that, he learned about what happened with Robertson panel. in the 1952, when the Robertson panel decided, well, UFOs are dangerous because they distract people and they obfuscate the ability of the government to respond to actual threats. So let's better re-educate people into thinking that UFOs are nonsense.

And McDonald went and went after the Air Force, went after also Alan Heineck, because Heineck knew about the robots, the Robertson panel, but decided to keep quiet in order not to compromise his insider position. So he wouldn't cut off from like the source of information.

And because of his interest in UFOs, he got attacked by people like, what's the name of this? Menzum? No, the other one. Our devil in the tarot card, it starts with a K, his last name. Oh. Oh.

Oh, gosh. It's escaped me, too. How is this happening? Yeah. Well, he was attacked by a skeptics. Class. Class. Philip Class.

Right. Thank you. We did it. We did. And because of that, because of that, his life got ruined in everybody. possible sense. You know, he got kicked out of his job, his marriage got ruined, and he ended up killing himself. That's the reason why we chose, by the way, we chose McDonald to be our handman in the tarot cards, you know, because he was, you know, he was in a lot of ways he was

a martyr for the UFO cause. Nowadays, you don't see that, but still, you, you, you, You can get into a lot of trouble within certain circles if you openly talk about UFOs, particularly the topics about UFOs that nobody want to pay attention. Even people who believe in UFOs are uncomfortable when you talk about abductions, where you talk about maybe the relationship between UFOs

and consciousness, a relationship between UFOs. This is something that people who are in the nuts and bolts camp, they don't want to hear about that. They don't want to hear about radar returns and infrared videos and the testimony of pilots and maybe the meta materials and whatnot.

But you start to think, it starts to say like, yeah, you know, someone had a UFO experience and after that they became psychic. Let's not go that. Run away. Run away. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Well, there's so many avenues we could go down, Miguel. But you brought up a word that keeps sticking out to me when it comes to anarchy, and that's chaos, you know, kind of what needs to happen in order for anarchy to thrive, to survive, to succeed even. And you brought up in the essay this idea that. UFO sightings, anomalous experiences, paranormal, poltergeist to be specific,

often happen in chaotic moments, you know, in someone's life or in times of turmoil. And that's when you see a lot of activity happening with the UFO phenomenon. So I guess my question for you would be, in terms of the essay, anarchy in the UFO, and this idea of turmoil, whether external or internal or

internal. What does that mean to you? Why do you think that is that a lot of this stuff seems to conjure itself up in great times of turmoil or or or even chaos, I guess, if that's what I'm, if I'm kind of interpreting what you were writing. Right. Correct. Yeah. Well, it remains an open question to me whether the UFO phenomenon comes from outside of us or comes from inside of us. And obviously to a mystic that question becomes irrelevant, you know. A mystic comes to the realization. Well, there is no inside and there's no outside. It just is everything.

Everything is interrelated with everything else. But I don't think we're paying enough attention to the power of the human mind. And the way the human mind. can have an influence not only in ourselves, but also in the physical world that we inhabit. Like, for example, everybody has heard of the phenomenon known as stigmata. This is something that is very common among Catholic saints, like St. Francis of Assisi, I think he was.

the first known saint or mystic who after having like a vision like and actually if you if you read the accounts and if you see the way that is being depicted in art Diana Pasulka you know has has shown this to to her students and say well this is a UFO event you know some guys saw something in the sky and and this something in the sky shot down some kind of like ray into him and after that some wounds started to manifest in his body

wounds that are perpetually mimicking the wounds inflicted to Christ when he died on the cross the nails that pierced through his hands and through his ankles

and also the wound in his chest and in his forehead when he was put the crown of thorns obviously interestingly enough now when we know that the instrument romance

didn't actually conduct execution by crucifixion in that particular manner like if you're going to hang an adult on a cross

on a wooden cross you don't pierce and they nail through the bones of the palm because these are too fragile, too brittle. They wouldn't be able to withstand the full weight of the body. It's better to do it here, you know, but nevertheless, the wounds of the stigmata people

appear more often here. So what I'm going with that is that this is, This is one example of the incredible power of the human mind in our bodies. And now that we're talking about the stigmata, let's talk about something like alien implants. What if alien implants are a form of stigmat, are some kind of like manifestation that the body produces some kind of like foreign object that is just the product of one's strong belief that your world. abducted by aliens and the aliens left something within your body, you know? Maybe the same way that the body is capable of rupturing the skin and the blood vessels to create this wound in the form of the wound of Christ.

Maybe you also get to create some kind of like foreign object in your arms or, you know, in your earloaf, whatever. But not only that, because a skeptist will say, Yeah, yeah, well, we know about that. We know about the placebo effect and all that, but that doesn't explain UFOs. Well, maybe it does. Another wonderful example of this is the Philip experiment

that happened in the 1970s in Canada. These parapsychologists, they wanted to create a fake ghost, you know, and in order to do that, they created a very elaborate backstory of this totally fictitious person that in their experiment was going to be the ghost. They were going to contact a man by the name of Philip, who lived hundreds of years ago in England or something to that effect, and they even created a fake portrait of him. And they started to have these, like, seances, you know, fake seances,

in order to try to see if something happened. And at first they weren't having a lot of success, but they persisted, they changed a bit of, they started to make it look more like a traditional sense, like lighting the candles in a dark room or something like that. They started to use their rituals, you know, in order to fake their own minds into getting into this attitude. And that's when they started to get tangible results,

like the tables started to, you know, jump and down. and levitate and they started to paltargeist-like activity you know that is and how do you how do you explain that you know

that's something that shows that the human mind is more powerful than we give it any credit to and it's fascinating how if you go into the study the history of remote viewing SRI and all the people who got involved with it, a lot of those people also reported

having UFO experiences of their own, you know, and there was even people like Ted Owens, the PK man, he was someone who was investigated by Dr. Jeffrey Michloff, who is an American parapsychologist, has a wonderful YouTube channel, new thinking allowed that I highly recommend. And he investigated Ted Owens, you know, and he confirmed that many of the things that this person claimed happened, you know, when he predicted, you know, UFO activity that will happen on a certain area at a given time. And yeah, people reported UFO sightings, so where he reported, he claimed that he will use his contact with alien intelligence in order to bring rain in an area that was stricken by drought and yet

you know rain levels began to increase in that in that human area you know so and Mishlob doesn't really believe that he was in contact with ETs or aliens but he thinks that it was kind of like the fantasy that Ted Owens had to use to trick himself

in order to actually manifest this psychic activity, macro-psychic activity, that to an outside person, it will be indistinguishable from real, quote-unquote, UFO activity. And then, obviously, it begs the question, what is real UFO activity on what? Is it something that's come from outside of us, you know, that is controlled by an outside intelligence,

or is it something that is actually we are tricking ourselves, you know, just we just don't know it. Terence McKenna famously said that the modern man is so detached from his soul than when you encounter your soul, you think you're having an alien encounter. And that is something that I think about constantly, like saying, well, what if this? The other that we think that we are trying to get in contact with is just another aspect of ourselves that is so detached from our modern way of living that whenever we encounter it, we think it's from outer space.

Right. Well, I mean, you even have this quote in the essay, and I loved this quote. You kind of started the essay with this. A disc once presumed to serve as a vehicle for transversing outer space became a. mirror for surveying inner space, which is beautiful. I mean, it kind of, that really resonated with me, because I think it touches on what you were just saying. Like, how much are we the phenomena that we're trying to pursue, that we're trying to

unravel? And, oh, man, you bring up so many good points. A lot of what you said reminded me of, like, you know, Kenneth Arnold even, you know, a misquote in a newspaper. having seen, quote, unquote, flying saucers, when in reality, that's not even what he really saw, everyone after that started seeing flying saucers. So I guess, you know, you could take something like that,

or you could take the idea of crop circles. I think you touched on this in the essay as well, you know. While they might be man-made, the intelligence behind it or whatever is kind of pulling the strings to make that happen, could be something non-human, could be some sort of external force or done through consciousness that's creating these extremely elaborate designs in the crops,

even to, like you said in the essay, to the dismay of the actual crop owners. But yeah, kind of this idea of, you know, manifesting the phenomena in some ways. Do you think there's anything to that in terms of those kind of, analogies I brought up there. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week.

But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So, to learn more and to join, visit you. visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. More and more I keep thinking, and this is not something that I'm the only one who thinks

that way, but like when it comes, for example, to things like UFO hoaxes, you know, like obviously people who believe in UFOs, they hate the idea of, you know, joasters or conman hoaxing UFO videos or UFO photographs because they say, oh, well, this is a distraction and it undermines the credibility or the validity of the UFO phenomenon. And I can understand that, but at the same time, nowadays, I suspect more and more that hoaxes have a role to play in all of these, whether we like it or not. A complex, very controversial and very, very difficult, very, very murky role, but a role nonetheless.

It's almost like UFO hoaxers are some kind of like euophological placebo effect. You know, like what happens if a UFO hoax actually manifests, true anomalous activity. What happens if someone is driving and he sees something in the sky, he cannot explain it that it's a life-changing experience to them. And maybe, you know, 10 years from now, they realize, oh, it was just a drone or it was just, you know, SpaceX rocket launch. But nevertheless, maybe it actually triggers something in them, you know,

opens up something, cracks open the cosmic egg within them to be open to the magic or to release the magic within them, you know? So the crop circles, obviously, hoaxes made by people for whatever reason. But I cannot deny that maybe people who have been in contact with crop circles may have have life-changing experiences, you know, like incredible synchronicities, dreams, visions, or even actual manifestations of anomalous life phenomena or time dilations, things that are common, commonly reported among crop circles. And crop circles that someone, you know, did with a plank a few hours ago, but nevertheless

actually creates the magic and this is something that we have to remember like even shamans shamans are professional tricksters, you know, like anthropologists who went

to see and interview Maria Sabina who was this massatec shaman woman from Mexico who lived in Waxaca and who was the one who showed the American foreigners

the thing about silo-savid mushrooms. This is the thing that kick-started the whole counterculture movement in the 1960s. You know, when there was this momentous article in Times Magazine about these rituals, sacred rituals were secret rituals, you know,

because this tradition was kept alive in Mexico for hundreds of years away from the eyes of the church. Otherwise, you know, the inquisition would have gone after, you know, these practitioners. But in the 1960s, Maria Savina said, well, you know, I had a vision of Jesus Christ who said the time was right for foreigners or for outsiders to know about our sacred rituals. And this is like, boom, the beginning of the new age, the hippie movement, the counterculture, you know, Timothy Leary,

the Beatles, we wouldn't have had the Beatles if it wasn't for Maria Savina. It's just I'm saying, you know. Maria Zabina, most influential Mexican woman in the history of the world, period. But getting back to Maria Sabina, you know, anthropologists went to interview her and they noticed how she performed her rituals

and they realized that like any shaman, she commonly used slight of hand tricks, you know, often among her audience, you know, like for example, like how to she put the candles on the ground in order to make them look like she could instantly put them in the ground. whereas ask another person to do it and the candles weren't properly prepared so they will fall and it will show that,

oh, Maria, you know, has some kind of like authority or has some kind of power. And that kind of like suggestion is very important in shamanic rituals in order for the patient to get in this conducive state, in these rights,

state of mind in which they can heal themselves because that's the thing about shamanism. You know, that's the thing about shamanistic ritual practices. The shaman is not healing the person. The person is healing themselves by allowing themselves to enter into this mind space. And obviously the question is, will we be able to actually do that, do the same if we didn't need to trick ourselves? into using rituals and things and just using the power of our minds, well, that's the basics of chaos magic that became so predominant in the 80s. You know, when all these people in the counterculture, they say,

well, you know, all these stupid rituals in traditional magic, let's just get rid of that and we'll just, you know, come up with our own practice and our own ways, because at the end of the day, it's only here that the magic happens, is not in the wand or in the robes or in the candles or in the in the incantations that are said in latin or an oaken or whatever you know you can say that you can use a you know a beetle song you know as a magic incantation and if you believe in it it works the same so yeah I don't know I think that getting back to

Hoses. One of my favorite cases happened in the 1960s through the 1970s and 80s in countries like Spain and Latin America is the famous Umo affair.

To people who don't know about Umo, a lot of researchers and reporters started to get in the mail all these typewritten letters that were allegedly sent by extraterrestrial visitors coming from the planet Umo and giving a lot of really detailed scientifically sounding explanations about their technology, their homeworld, their customs, whatever.

And a lot of people believe that this was actual contact, you know, with an alien presence in our planet, you know, and, A lot of people believed in the Umo thing. Even Jacques Valet investigated, even though he never believed it. He thought it was some kind of like maybe counter spinach or sci-up experiment. Anyway, in the 1990s or early 2000s, it was revealed, but it was, you know, cooked that the letters were written by this Spanish guy

whose name escapes me right now. but anyway, the letters were a hope but nevertheless, if you look into the history of UFO sightings, there's been a lot of UFO sightings with that same famous Umo symbol that looks like two ellipses or parentheses are in opposition and there's a line traversing them.

Even the famous Voronish case that happened in 1980, I want to say, 1989 in the Soviet Union, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, all these kids were making drawings, and they were putting that Humo symbol. So what's going on there? Are you saying that either the KGB was behind the Humo affair, the Homo hoax in Spain,

and they were also behind this hoax in Warrenesh, or there was something going on, you know, And this is something that even Valet was wondering, what's going on? We know this is fake, and yet we're still seeing the same symbol in genuine cases. And I even wonder, you know, will you be able to, if you put some kind of like fake element

in a UFO story that is believed enough by sufficient people, will you be able to manifest UFO activity using those same symbols, you know. It's something that I think about that constantly. And I don't know the answer, but I suspect that, you know, the answer is yes, that even if it's not something that it is totally manifested by the human mind, it's like some kind of like Egregor or something,

like a tulpa, collective tulpa, maybe the UFO phenomenon is still used, that energy from our minds in order to kind of like disguises itself with it in a way. Like, well, this is what you want to see for some reason, you know? So let's use these guys, this, this, this, this visage, this avatar in order to interact with you. So you don't, you don't get too overwhelmed by our presence. You know, Turner McKenna used to say a lot.

The Eurovo phenomenon was nothing but the mushrooms trying to contact us and the mushrooms using the disguise of an alien invasion so as to not to alarm us too much. So obviously, all these things that we're saying are contradictory, you know. They're just speculation. They're just thought experiments. But it's the kind of stuff that I prefer to think about rather than say, well, you know, UFOs are either Etycraft or military spy planes or there are just, you know, total hoaxes and are total, you know, fabrications and delusions. That's, to me, that's too binary. Obviously, you know, no one denies that the United States and other governments have. prototypes that they're not telling us.

But I've always doubted that such prototypes will be as advanced than that they will look and display the same capabilities that have been reported in UFO cases since the 1940s, since the 1950s, or even before the beginning of the model. view of O'era, you know, if you take a look at wonders in the sky written by Chris Alberg and Valet, you know, all the stories about, you know, the airship in the 1890s in the United States or, you know, the shields in the sky that were seen by the Romans or by the Persians or glowing objects that were, you know, coming out of the oceans that were seen

by merchant ships in the 18th century, you know? Obviously, that's not a U.S. prototype, you know, it's something else. Yeah, kind of the absurdist nature or the ridiculousness, I think, of a lot of these things, too, really begs the question of, yeah, yeah, are we dealing with some sort of outside external thing, or is it all being manifested? through manipulation or deception, you know, the more you're, you were talking about, like, the role of a shaman, the more I'm thinking, like, oh, my God, is Miguel saying that Stephen Greer is a shaman, this guy who, you know, predicates his entire career on CE5, and is it real or it, or isn't it?

Or is it something that's not real that then becomes real? So, yeah, you're blowing my mind, man. This idea of like, yeah, could our, are creating. Yeah. Right. And getting back to Greer, you know, there are a lot of shamans in the Amazon jungles who are also assholes, you know, who are also seeking to take advantage of you, you know, and still your men. money and maybe even kill you if it suits their needs.

You know, there are people who use their powers for good, and there are people who use their powers for personal gain. And I'm not saying, you know, Greer is doing that, but I'll leave that for everyone to answer that. But obviously, obviously, I've discussed this idea with, friends when we discussed CE5 type of protocols and even people who can't stand Stephen Greer, they will go and admit, well, yeah, but the protocols do work, you know, and they use them correctly and they use them on the right set and setting.

I've also, you know, written and speculated of how similar are the UFO experience to psychedelic experience, you know, it's a whole other kind of one. Like, I wonder, should there be a proper set and setting for UFO events? So you don't end up, you don't end up with a bad trip like what happens in Skinwalker Ranch, you know? Maybe they haven't figured out the proper set and setting there. But yeah, if you use these types of protocols, and they weren't invented by Greer, you know, they have been used for hundreds of years by magicians and by mystery schools in order to, to obtain this, you know, contact.

Contact with what is the question? Is it contact with our higher self, with an aspect of our soul? Or is it contact with actual outside intelligences, you know, that are using our minds as a sort kind of like interface, nonetheless, you know, like some other aspect of our imagination. So now, you know, we're talking about imaginal experiences, you know. Experiences that are colored by our expectations are colored by our cultural baggage,

by our knowledge or our sci-fi lore. And it is somehow, you know, covered in that patina of, you know, mental imagery in order to interact with us. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Ronda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's

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Otherwise, if we didn't have that, it might be totally incomprehensible, you know. Right. Could be the only way in which to communicate as well. Yeah. Good, good point. Well, hey, man, I kind of want to wrap up our section here on Anarchy and the UFO because I've got some awesome listener questions that came in for you.

And the last one I want to kind of cover. for you personally here is this quote from the essay. The cliched saucer on the White House lawn take me to your leader scenario clearly holds no appeal for the UFO intelligence. Instead, they give cardboard

tasting pancakes to a lonely chicken farmer in Wisconsin. Instead of gathering genetic samples from the most prominent members of our species, such as Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, these space vegetarians rely on medieval methods to conduct husbandry with Brazilian farmers while collecting sperm and ova from

post office employees, Christian housewives, and horror novelists. That was probably my favorite paragraph in the whole essay because it speaks volumes of everyone wants to know why me. I speak to hundreds and hundreds of experiencers and witnesses and that's their first question. Like why was I chose in. I don't believe in this stuff, but it just fell into my lap. Or, you know, why don't they go show themselves to Avi Loeb or, or, you know, all of these theoretical physicists who push against the concept of this stuff? No, they go to a lonely chicken farmer and give them some, some goddamn pancakes. Why do you think that is? Why do you think the phenomenon chooses these individuals? Or do they? choose them, you know, going back to Greg's whole co-creation hypothesis as well. Yeah, well, back in the time when I wrote the essay, I was very big on the idea that what was happening here is some kind of grassroots type of contact. Like the best and most, our most sufficient way to change a culture is not from the top down, you know, like trickle down.

Trickle Down doesn't work for anything, not even economics, you know. That's why we're in the mess where right now in our world because of this believing trickle down economics. No, the real changes, the long-lasting changes happen from the bottom up. It happened with Christianity. Christianity, as Ernest McKenna, also famously said in his lectures, was a religion that opended the most powerful empire in the world, the Roman Empire, because it captivated a stable voice and, you know, and the peasants and, you know, the workers, you know, the workers, you know,

The people at the bottom of the societal status were the ones first captivated by the appeal of Christianity. It took a while, obviously, it took hundreds of years, but at the end, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And you can see a parallel with Eurofoals and the contact team movement in the 1950s. you know, like the contactees were housewives where people like George Adamski. George Adamski was flipping burgers, you know, in some joint near Palomar Observatory. And he called himself a professor in philosophy, but that was just a made-up title he made for himself in order to sound more grandiloquent and to be taken seriously. But nevertheless, you know, I mean, what I love about the contact team movement, which I see as a precursor to the new age movement that happened 20 years later,

is that it was like, you know, all these common folk who claim all these experiences with the other and they were trying to transform society, you know, from the bottom up, like saying, yeah, well, we need to take care of, better care of our planet. We need to stop spending so much energy in war. we need to stop, you know, making nuclear weapons. We need to change our economic system. You know, back in those days, there were all these economic ideas coming from people like Gabriel Green and all that, trying to come up with better solutions to economy than capitalism or socialism.

And that is something that fascinated me how even though I no longer believe, that the UFO phenomenon doesn't happen to also to people on the top of the societal pyramid? How could it? You know, it's so egalitarian. And obviously, if there are people in the government

that are interested in the UFO phenomenon, it's because they have had experiences of their own, you know? The thing is that they are better at hiding them or not being, you know, open about them. Same way with

you know, psychedelic experiences, you know, like, you know, only hippies are comfortable talking about, you know, their LSD trips instead of, you know, the high-paying stock investor in Wall Street, you know, because the stock investor says that it knows that if he talks about that, he'll be out of his job. But nevertheless, you know, the people who talked about this and the people who create an interest are the ones that are changing the cost. culture and our culture, if we analyze it, has changed dramatically in the last, you know, 50 years. It looks like a long time to us, obviously, especially to people who are waiting for disclosure to happen like next month, you know. They've been waiting for disclosure since 2017, you know,

and the old, the gray beers like us keep, you know, it's never happened. I mean, the cause happened, this is a marathon, you know. This is not a 100-meter race, you know. Take a breather, you know, keep your pace. But it is slowly changing, you know. I think it's undeniable, you know, like nowadays, everybody knows what a UFO is, you know, understand the acronym. There's not a country in the world that doesn't understand that those you,

three letters, you know, signify some kind of like alien presence. And everybody now is open to the idea of life being outside, you know, the planet. And nowadays, we are seeing in our culture, in our science fiction, we are seeing the eruption of this other noble idea, the idea of the multiverse. The multiverse is getting more and more predominant in sci-fi culture, you know. The Spider-Verse, everything anywhere all at once. So many other movies in the quantumia in like the idea that, oh, yeah, there's all these other worlds and they're all infinite versions of you out there.

So these things slowly but surely change the culture. You know, even if you, and this is something that I think I even wrote in the essay, even if you think that UFOs are total baloney, that are totally fictitious, there's no denying that UFOs have an huge influence on our culture. From the point of view of only from a meme standpoint, you know, the idea of the little flying saucer like, sucking the cow with a tractor vim, you know. It's something that people, you don't need to explain that drawing to someone in passing on the street.

Maybe 500 years from now, it will be as inscrutable as a painting in a medieval, in a medieval painting. Or maybe, you know, 15,000 years from now, you will see that and it will be as difficult to understand as a cave painting, you know. But this is, in our culture right now, UFOs are taking more and more a predominant, a very center role. And it's fascinating to see where will that lead us. Maybe we'll fizzle out, you know, maybe the interest will start to wane. Or maybe things will start to ramp up. I'm waiting to see, you know, when the next wave of UFO activity will start. That's something that is strangely lacking nowadays.

I was expecting a New York article broke. I was thinking, well, will this have an effect on UFO reports? I guess it did among the military, right? And among civilian pilots, definitely. They are less afraid to report that they saw something. weird in the sky that may or may not be truly anomalous. Some people say, well, they're just seeing the Starlink satellites up there beyond, above their planes, or maybe this is something truly anomalous. We don't know. It's a good thing that the stigma in those regards is starting to

lift. But at the same time, I want to see like everyday people also reporting more UFO sightings. The problem is, who are they going to report it to? Are they going to report it to the stars as Tom the Long wanted? If you wanted to create this app that will be like the go-to thing to report your sighting and to data mine all that information, you know, obviously for their benefit. You know, maybe they wanted to create some kind of like UFO version of chat GPT, you know, chat GPT and all these AI systems that are, you know, funneling all these online information, you know, to train the algorithm and to make it smarter and smarter.

Maybe Tom Dolan wanted to make the same thing and predict like the next year of a wave using that. I don't know. I'm speculating here. But yeah, nevertheless, getting back to my idea, I don't see a flurry of UFO activity reported by everyday people nowadays. and that is interesting. It's intriguing to me. I don't know why. Maybe people are too preoccupied with other stuff. We had the pandemic and people were inside their homes, you know, most of the time.

And people now are doing other stuff. But I want to see when the next UFO will happen, where, and how will that, you know, affect the, the, the current momentum that we're having culturally. Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, it's happening right now. Come on, Miguel. In the United States, in Canada, it's happening.

The balloons, they're invading. No, I'm with you, man. And that was actually one of my questions. That's one of our listener questions, actually, for you, is Monica on Patreon. asks. So I'll move over to these actually. Our patrons get priority to ask our guest's questions first. She wants to know, why do you think it is? This plays right into this. Why do you think it is? We don't hear so much primarily about alien abductions any longer. You like never hear about reports of these things.

And that also plays into what you just said. We don't hear a lot of civilian witness testimony anymore. You know, that's my big thing here is getting people to tell their stories. And I will say it becomes harder and harder when you would think that it would become easier and easier nowadays. So, yeah, to kind of piggyback off of Monica there, why do you think it is we don't hear so much about abductions anymore or even just flying saucers? Right. with abductions it's a it's an interesting question and this is something that even i even wrote in an introduction for mike lehland's book he released a book to mark the 10th anniversary of his blog hidden experience and and mike has you know he's he's his worst skeptic you know he's

been going back and forth, whether trying to ascertain whether he has had true UFO experiences or even abduction experiences, but he's been very reticent to, you know, even believe in his, in his own memories, you know?

And one thing that was clear to me when I was following his blog and I was seeing the responses he got from his postings and also, how he got in contact with other people who were also sharing their own personal experiences on the internet is that these people

no longer need the middleman, as it were, in order to share their stories to the world. By middleman, I'm referring to people like Bob Hopkins or David Jacobs, you know, like the UFO investigator who will contact the experiencer of the abductee.

Maybe they have some kind of like a counseling circle like Bob did. And that's how he managed to gather these stories, collect them, filter them through their own bias and their own opinions of what the phenomenon should and should do, and put them in a book like intruders missing time, silent invasion, whatever. So maybe the reason why we are no longer seeing those kind of books in the market is because the experiencers, they're no longer reaching to people like Bob Hopkins or David Jacobs or their successors.

They are just sharing their stories online with like-minded people through their blogs or through their TikToks or through their podcast. whatever. And they have that outlet, that creative outlet that they needed in order to not keep that experience bottled inside of them and festering inside of them. So maybe that's one of the reasons why we don't hear so much about abductions because, you know, we have, we had this major cultural shift through the arrangement. of the internet, through the arrival of personal blogging, through the arrival of podcasting.

So if you want to learn about those stories, you don't go to your local Barnes and Nobles. You subscribe to a paranormal podcast on Spotify or to a YouTube channel, or you subscribe to someone's I guess blogs are no longer that popular now in the days of social media and Twitter. But maybe that's one of the reasons. It's a social technological explanation rather of, oh, well, you know, the aliens are no longer taking so many people and abducting them, which I cannot say that's not the case. You know, I've heard some people within those circles, you know,

people who talk to guys like Mike, Mike Leland, that the mission or the project changed years. They are no longer in the taking people and making the experiments phase. They are now in the standby phase. You know, my standby is that they're waiting for something to happen, maybe some catastrophe or maybe something that will trigger the second phase of their grand project, which is, I don't know what, you know,

your guess is as good as mine, but that's what some of those people believe that maybe, you know, the aliens are now in another phase of their project and they are no longer interested. You know, they have all the hybrid babies they can get or they can keep on their motherships. And now they're, you know, I don't know.

Maybe the hybrids are now learning how to control all the teenage children who are having all these space rapes within the motherships and trying to keep them from not, you know, crushing them on a nastery or something. I don't know. I don't know. They're, you know, they're watching TikTok, Miguel, and they're wondering, what did we do wrong? What did we do wrong? I think that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. They're watching.

they're watching our YouTube channels and being like, oh, God, no, okay. Yeah. Phase four, we're terminating that. Phase four is done. The Avengers are over. Awesome. Exactly.

Well, I like that. Thank you for that. Here's another good one. Jake on Patreon asks, as an artist, Miguel, who are some of your favorite artists or ones that you draw inspiration from? It's a good question.

Well, Mike Clelland, and I keep saying this, I've said this before, but Mike Clarenin is a huge inspiration for me because Mike is a wonderful cartoonist and illustrator. Aside from his blog, hidden experience, he also had a separate blog. He called Little Boeing Marks, you're allusion to the little like curbs lines that sometimes you draw in order to depict movement, you know, what I'm talking about if you've seen, you know, any kind of comic strip.

So those are those are called the boymarks and Mike shared his art there. Among the art he shared there were the wonderful illustrations he created for Mac Tonus's posthumous book, the cryptotorrestrials. And the last illustration in that book is Mac opening the doorway of his apartment to meet the other. And it is a really powerful, powerful illustration. You know, he even put his little cats there, you know. And that is the thing that inspired me when the time came to say yes to Greg Bishop's request to illustrate his book It Defies Language

is a book that we did, I want to say 2015 or 2016 in some in some vicinity and that's the first book cover that I created. So, you know, this whole career

as an illustrator, as an illustrator which I didn't have prior to it defies language prior to all that. It happened because of my cleanup. Before that I was doing Other stuff, I was an interior designer working for architects, you know, designing staircase, designing cabinets, designing bars, designing bathrooms, kitchens, all that stuff. It was an interesting job. It was horribly in the sense of stressful, you know, you have to juggle a lot of things and you have a, you know, very tight schedules, timetables, budgets, whatever.

But that is what I was doing for a living for 20 years. But also before that, when I was a kid, I wasn't into comic books like Superman or Batman much. The thing that my mother got for me when I was little was these illustrating editions of literature classics. that were published in the 1970s, you know, like a comic book renditions of Dracula, Tom Sawyer, the hunchback of Notre Dame, crime and punishment, things like that. And these were actually done by a group of obscure Philippine artists that no one knew about,

obviously I guess because they were cheaper labor than if you commissioned this work for regular artists in the US or the UK and one of those artists was a guy by the name of Nestor Redondo you can look him up on Google he was a Philippine artist who before that he was an architect and I guess he had to switch careers as a way to survive.

But his artwork is fantastic. I've always loved it the way that he created his lines with, I guess, with brushes and the texture that he created with that. It is truly marvelous. It's something that I try to emulate in some capacity with the own style that I created for the UFO Taro project. I wanted to create something that looked a mixture

between old woodcutting illustrations, you know, like in the they did in the you know, 1600s or something. And the

modern, you know, pop culture, pop art of the comic era, you know, with the half-tone dot patterns. and different, almost like mangas, you know, the manga and image, manga illustrations that I like. I wanted to kind of like merge those traditions and create something that it looks kind of old

but also kind of new. And also using a lot of very, very defined black line art that are trying to copy, you know, the way that Nestor Redondo did his illustrations, which is fantastic. The way this guy was a master of the pen and of the ink, and he was a master of the way that he shaded his figures and using light and shadow in order to create an atmosphere. And yeah, definitely a big influence for me. Awesome.

Well, that bleeds into kind of my last thing. wanted to cover with you, Miguel, is the euphology tarot. What is this project? You know, I was, I had the honor of seeing a few of the, the very early samples along with a lot of your Kickstarter supporters over there as well of the euphology tarot. And I was blown away, man. So, yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about this project, how it came to be? And, yeah, kind of what the purpose of it is.

It's so cool. Thank you. Well, the project came about when a group of friends got together. We organized these weekly salons on Skype in order to, you know, as a salon, you know, you fool around, you chat, you share, you know, the latest gossip or scoop in a infology. also, you know, your personal things. And we were trying to come up with some kind of like project that we could tackle collectively and do together. You know, this is very much in line with the idea that Greg Bishop has of being more attuned with the right brain, you know, when it comes to to approach. the UFO phenomenon is like what we're saying you know like so many people want to

dissect UFOs with scientific tools and using analysis and try to put the UFO under a microscope okay that's all well and good but the UFO you can also approach UFOs through creativity through art through music you know some of the most interesting ideas about UFOs have come, not from scientists, but from artists, you know, like David Bowie, you know, John Lennon. John Lennon also had a UFO siding, by the way, on New York, you know, he saw, you know, a big UFO from his apartment. Same with David Bowie. And we wanted to see if we could use those type of tools in order to make something interesting with regards to the Yovo phenomenon.

But we were struggling with trying to come up with that, with what? And that's when Greg Bishop, very nonchalantly, very casually, he said, well, you know, I've always had this fantasy, almost like, you know, like a dream baseball project of a tarot deck. But instead of using the typical, you know, archetypes, we will use people like Jacques. Bole and Santon Friedman and John Kill, you know? And the moment he said that, everybody said, well, that sounds so goddamn cool, you know, that's, you know, we want that, obviously, you know.

And I was, I also found it cool, but at the same time I said like, oh, fuck, they're going to ask me to do it because I'm the artist and, you know, none of these guys can draw, so, you know, I'm going to have to get the brunt of. of the project. And at first, we were starting to fool around with it and say, well, who will be the magician? Oh, well, the magician will be

Jacques Valet. And we always said, of course, duh. Who'll be the, the, what's the name of the other? The hemma, who'll be, you know, the hermitage, the hermit?

Oh, John Kiel. Ah, great. Who will be the lovers? Well, you know, Betty and Barney Hill. Starting to get these discussions and who will be where and why and what kind of imagery we could use. You know, using the Riderweight Smith deck as a starting point of,

but not trying to copy that exactly because we had among the people in our group, we have someone like Susan Demeter who is a witch and who knows a lot about this history of Tarot. So she could explain to us, you know, what's the meaning behind, you know, the cup in so-and-so car, you know, what is trying to represent and trying to find, okay, correlations between that and the history of euphology. And we were, we were towing with that and I was getting like the pressure like, okay, you know, get going, you know, get cracking with this. And I was like, okay, you know, before I sign up to this, I need to do like one card to try to see if I'm up to this, you know. Otherwise, if it looks like crap, then, you know, forget about it.

And let's think about someone else, something else to do. And the first one that I did was the magician. And when I showed it to the guys, they were saying, no, this looks great, you know. you can do it, you know? And very naively I said, well, yeah, I guess, you know, it wasn't so much of a hassle, you know, it didn't take a long of time. How big a problem can it be, you know,

to make 22 or 76 more of this, you know, very naively. I imagine that. And we kept doing this, you know, our salons every week, and me trying to find the extra time between commissions or between a regular day job that I still kept at the time, and trying to do this on my weekends or my time off. But after, you know, six months or more,

we only had like two more cards to show. and we knew that that this wasn't the right approach and it will take forever you know it would take 10 years to do the whole thing if we were going at this space so at one point

someone suggested well let's make some kind of like kickstarts her campaign so Miguel can focus only on the cards and do nothing else and you know to sustain himself you know, will raise enough money so he can devote

you know a year or or more doing nothing but drawing the cards and I was like, yeah, perfect. That sounds great to me, you know. Hey, I'm having a whole year without worrying about where do I find

a project to get money and make sense to meet. Sign me up. It's the dream. Yeah. And obviously, right, That's a dream. But before the dream, we need to get real and really organize the campaign. And the first thing that we realize is that, okay, we need at least to show five cards,

just to show a proof of concept. So, you know, people realize take us seriously and take the campaign seriously. So it was until I finished the five cards that I said to the guys, okay, my work is done. Now it's your and now is your turn to get working on the campaign and to figure out,

you know, prices and budget stuff and where we're going to print it in the States and, you know, the perks and all of that. And so the guys did that.

We organized the campaign. We also showed the cards to some people to get feedback. Greg even showed the card, the first card, to Jacques, to Jacques Valet himself. Because in the back of our minds, we have this fear, you know, that if Valet thought it was a bad idea, then, you know, we might as well back away from it.

And yeah, at first, Valet, I think he said, well, you know, I don't think he understood the project. or what we were trying to do. Maybe he thought it was some kind of like, you know, just fan art in some kind of, well, it is fun art, but it was, he didn't understand the level at which we wanted to do this project. But Greg showed him the card and also told him the jail, the Haneck was going to be in the cars.

And I think at the sound of that, Valet got really, you know, changed his mind and said, well, that sounds interesting then. And he kind of got his blessing and also the blessing of people like Paul Heinek. You know, we also show Paul Allen's son, the card that is the emperor that shows his father, J. L. Haneck. And the moment that Greg showed him that card, I think that I'm paraphrasing, but Paul says something like, I don't know what that is, but I want it. You know, so we were getting this encouragement, especially for me, it was important for me to get the encouragement of people and say,

well, people think my work is not crap, so I can keep going with it. And we launched the campaign. It was more successful than we had ever dreamed of. We got almost twice the amount that we were going for, which was, you know, great. And we officially started the campaign. We launched the campaign on Halloween of 2021, if I'm not mistaken.

And after a month and a half, we had enough money. And I started, you know, working on the project. And that was my life, you know, for a whole year, for at least six hours a day, doing nothing but working on the cards, researching the cards, finding references for the cards, polishing the cards,

and then also keeping with the salons every Sunday to keep talking about the next car that I was going to do. And it was a really interesting, dynamic, fun, sometimes a bit stressful experiences, obviously. As the deadline keeps getting closer and closer, the pressure keeps piling and piling. But I want to have changes for the world.

It was really, it was a really, I want to say it was a magical experience for me because it was truly magical. And I'm not saying that because of having had the chance to do this, but also because there were a lot of synchronicities that happened, not only to me, but to Greg and the others, around the cards that are, that have really gave me the impression that we were doing something very powerful indeed, that we were really doing something that is not just

some cute you know like collection collector's item that is going to collect dust somewhere else I really think that when people finally get their hands

in the cards and start really playing with the cards I mean I'm not saying that there's going to be like you're going to have a close encounter of the third kind I think but I think that stuff is going to happen to the people who respect the cards, the people who use the cards in their practice,

or even to people who are not practicing magicians, but are nevertheless drawn to the cards for other reason. And maybe they begin a path of learning more about Tarot, learning more about euphology, you know, learning more about who was Stanton Friedman, who was James McDonnell. you know, who were the, you know, who was Bob Hopkins, who was John Mack, who was people like other people that were depicted in the cards. That is, that is our aspiration, you know, that is our hope. And the first car, the first phase of the project was completed successfully.

And our hope is that in the future we can. can continue with the second phase, which is the minor arcana of the cards, because we only completed the major arcana, you know. In the people who know about Taro, you know, there are 22 cards that comprise the major arcana, and the other ones are the major, the major arcana. And obviously, those are more cards to do, so we need to create a second campaign. we need to ask for more money obviously I'll need to have a lot more time to complete it

maybe we have to figure out something in order to break the project into different phases in order to show people instead of saying well you know just wait five years until Miguel finishes the cards and then I'll send you your deck

we're still trying to figure out that and at the same time we have received so many requests from people who didn't know about the campaign at first and who have seen the art world and say, hey, where can I get one? I want the cars. Where can I purchase them? Purchase them. And we don't have a store yet.

We don't know how we're going to do that. We don't know how we will be able to accommodate those people. Well, obviously, I will be thrilled, you know. if I can sell 10,000 decks, you know, and live off, you live off of it, you know, for the next five years, you know, I will be the happiest. But we'll still need to figure that out, you know. We are artists and we are UFO researchers. We're definitely not UFO businessmen. So we don't know.

We're figuring this out as we go along, people, you know? That's all I can say. It's a process, man. And I know a lot of people will really look forward to that next campaign because I'm one of those people who I love my hands on the cards. And it's, they're, they're amazing. Because for someone who isn't into taro, who never really gave it much thought, you know, I just admired the cards and looked at the fine detail of each card and each personality and each case history. And that's what I appreciated, whereas someone who's into taro will appreciate that. aspect of it. So I love this idea, this blend of like kind of the occult and astrology and

uphology, all of it kind of mixing together into this one artistic expression. And like you said, I think art has a lot to do with all of this in terms of, you know, how art is created and the mystery behind that. It is. It's a mystery how we create. And I think that, that really does play into a lot of this as well. So, dude, take as long as you need. Everyone will wait patiently. If we've learned anything in uphology, it's to be patient. So, no.

That's amazing. That's amazing. I can only say that the cards will be ready before disclosure. That's the only thing I can, you know, say with any. any shred of confidence. It will be here before the aliens land. I love it. I love it, man.

Well, hey, you have been very gracious with your time, so I do want to wrap this up. But before I let you go, any last words, Miguel, you want to give to our viewers or our listeners. We have a lot of new people coming into the field all the time, younger people getting involved, getting interested. Any words of advice

for anyone out there just getting into this topic? Yeah, I guess, and I don't want to get cliche about it, but my advice to people who are just getting into the UFO stuff and may be at a loss of where to go, what to do, what to read, who to listen to. who to believe in, is take it easy, you know, as cliche as it sounds, it's more about the journey than the destination. There were a lot of people who were smarter than you and I

who devoted the whole of their lives studying this thing. some of those people are depicted in our cards because we wanted to honor that passion and that devotion but those people went to their graves without ever finding the truth and that may well very happen

to you you know and that's okay because like I said the UFOs reward people in a different way not by learning the

ultimate secret of the universe and life but by showing you new avenues of exploration like Michael Lennon often says if you start

asking questions about UFOs and after a few years you don't start asking questions about the afterlife and God and the soul you're probably doing it wrong because UFOs is

in a way the perfect starter truck you know it's like some kind of like cannabis for the brain you start with UFOs but then you learn about

psychedelics you learn about psychic phenomena you learn about reincarnation you learn about ghost activity the poltergeist activity. You learn about bigfoot. You learn about ancient civilizations. You learn about all this stuff.

And all this stuff, if you do it right, will enrich your life in ways that you cannot glimpse right now if you're still in the starting point, you know? And this is, like I said, it's not about where, the path will leave you. Quoting Carlos Castaneda and the book, the first word book he wrote, the teachings of the one, all roads and all paths lead exactly the same to the same destination, which is nowhere. But the thing is to pick the path that works for you because it's the path that has a heart, the path in which you grow as a person,

You grow intellectually, you grow emotionally, you grow spiritually. And if you manage to find that in the UFO path, then enjoy the ride, man. You're going to have a blast. But you're only trying to find the fast, the answers of where UFOs? Where do they come from? What does the government know? Where are they going to tell us? that path is only going to bring you pain and misery.

So find the reason where you're choosing this path. See to it that are the right reasons. And if they are, enjoy the right and enjoy your path. That's beautiful, man. Wow. Hey, even as a seasoned researcher, I needed to hear that too. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Wow. I can't think of a better way to sort of end it, Miguel. This has been an absolute honor, man. I think this is the conversation I've been waiting to have for a very long time here on someone in the skies. So before I let you go and thank you again a million times, where can we find everything you're up to? And yeah, where can people follow your work? Well, first of all, Ryan, this has been an absolute blast. I mean, we've been talking for more than two hours. and it's, you know, it's been an absolute thrill. We could just keep talking for two more hours, and, you know, we were even, you know, finished all the topics, you know, that we have in our minds. As for, where can people find me?

Obviously, the first destination, I always recommend, the Daily Grail. DailyGrail.com. I still write for the DailyGrail. I'll keep writing for the Daily Rail. I'll keep writing for the Daily Rail until, you know, Greg closed the shop or kicks me out. And Daily Grail is one of the longest running sites that deals with these sorts of topics. And it does it in a very center-minded approach that is neither skeptical or, you know, totally in the believer camp.

We tried to find what, you know, Greg Bishop calls the excluded middle, which I think is always the right approach to take with these topics. And there's a lot of content you can find there. And also Greg Taylor, sorry, publishes books with his editorial. He was the one who republished passport to Magonia. And he was also the one who published things like Adam Goreightly's Sorcerous Books and Cooks. So also you would like to check that out those books. I designed the cover for Sousers Books and Cooke's by the way.

And if you want to check out that kind of stuff, like my designs and personal musings, you can also check out my personal website, Absurd bydesign.com. And yeah, that's definitely the reason why I chose that name is because there is an absurdity within all of these and it seems to be purposely, you know, by design instead of just, you know, a fluke. So absorbed bydesign.com, check that up if you want.

I'm still on Twitter until Elon Musk runs it to the ground, you know. You can also find me on Facebook. I think I'm also on Instagram, you know, so all those, all those social media that takes up all of our time and energy. You can find me there. You're there. Yep. Again, until that day comes where the tarot deck is done and the alien invasion occurs, we'll be on social media for sure.

Miguel, Red pill junkie, my friend, thank you. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation tonight on Summer in the Skies. My pleasure. Thank you. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One podcast network.