Somewhere in the Skies - Comedians on UFOs: Part 2

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Welcome to Comedians on UFOs: Part 2! We are joined by Tim Barnes, Michael Ian Black, Brian Huskey, Reggie Watts, Andrew Sanford, and Dean Haglund! UFO accounts can sometimes reminds us of a playful world. A humorous world. A species looking for structure and pattern and constantly being bombarded with both chaos and ridiculousness. And that if most definitely UFOs. And it's also comedy. Comedy gives us a communal experience full of confusion and raw emotional release. It makes us feel more human than ever. So when we're faced with something possibly non-human, we can choose to run away from it or fight it. Or, we can embrace it and sometimes, laugh about it. In this series, Ryan digs into the archives of Somewhere in the Skies to bring you a collection of interviews he's conducted throughout the years with comedians. And, as you'll see, a common thread starts to weave its way through these conversations. Why are comedians drawn to UFOs? How can we use it to both accept and possibly even understand UFO phenomenon? 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

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Spread. Hey guys, Ryan here. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, there's a very simple way for you to help out the show. Just click the Apple Premium subscriber button at the top of the feed. And you'll instantly become a premium member where you get all the same rewards as our Patreon members do. Early access to all main episodes and bonus episodes and content. Join our Apple Premium subscription. today and thank you for your support.

Welcome, guys, to Somewhere in the Skies. And we have a very, very special guest joining us today on the show. For any of you who watch the late, late show in the United States or possibly Comedy Bang Bang, one of my favorite shows as well, you will know him. He is a musician, a vocalist, a beatboxer, an improviser. But you might also know him from the UFO world. You'll know him as the person who asked two former U.S. presidents about UFOs, literally a dream for any of us in this UFO world.

And he actually did it. So we're going to talk all about those interviews with two former U.S. presidents, his thoughts and theories on UFOs, aliens and all that stuff, and about his music as well. So let's not waste any more time. I'm going to bring him in right now. Now, here he is, guys, Reggie Watts. Welcome to somewhere in the skies.

It's just good to be back. Just kidding. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. Of course, man. But I love that. I love that. That was very ominous.

What a way to start a UFO podcast. I want to know, first and foremost, before we even get to these interviews you did with Obama and with Clinton, what got you interested in UFOs? What made you ask those questions on television? Do you have kind of a story about what got you into this topic or what made you curious about asking about UFOs? Yeah, give us the origin story if you don't mind on that.

Well, I mean, with Obama, he was on and it was during the period right after the Pentagon released all the footage from the Navy. I think it was just all Navy footage, but all that with the Tic Tac and the Go fast and all that stuff. So they just released all that. And he was on the show you know, obviously not in the building but on the screen and I

asked him I well I had I had a feeling about asking about extraterrestrials for sure but then like I think the guy who takes care of our band, the guy who kind of like gets stuff for a band or whatever, Morgan Bender he

was like oh you should ask him about UFOs or whatever but I was kind of like bummed because I was like I was already going to him and I didn't want someone to be like, I took credit for asking for the, you know, whatever. It's fine. But I was going to ask him anyways. And so when it came time, I just kind of was like, oh, you know, how about them aliens or whatever? And I was just genuinely interested.

It was kind of a lighthearted question. I wasn't expecting him to answer sincerely in the way that he does because I guess Obama had never answered that question before. So that was kind of an interesting moment. I didn't think about that at all. I was just like, I'm going to ask him this question. I expect him probably to be shifty and whatever, like how politicians do it. But he just answers straight up.

I love that he was just, you know, and I was like, sick. So that was a great response. And then I didn't expect it to get as big of a reaction online. Obviously, people, the UFO community or the UAP community, obviously is like lived in the shadows and it's like a weird borderline community because there's a whole spectrum of people involved in this community right and uh there are diehard people there are people with personal experiences other people uh who haven't had personal experiences but like really dig really deep into rabbit holes and things like that and um but

in total that community tends to be marginalized and so i had so the reaction made sense in hindsight like that it would be so big like look what look what this guy he asked him look what you know and and because for me it was such an easy casual thing on stage would be like hey president Obama but them aliens and then not thinking about all those you know tens of thousands of people or you know millions of people that that are like yeah we've been wanting to hear something about this for a long time and you know this is so great to see this so I really think about it in that way but the second time with bill Clinton it was the show runner that kind of like, is like, you want to ask him about aliens again? And I was like,

sure. You know, why not? And, uh, and I can't remember his, his answer, but I think his answer is a little bit more vague. Um, but, uh, yeah. Well, you know what? I have the clips right here. Um, I figure, why don't we go ahead and play them? And, um, we'll get your thoughts on the other side. I've got Clinton, um, right here on deck ready to go. So let's just play that. And yeah, we'll see what he had to say when you asked about UFOs. Reggie, do you have a question for our guests this evening? Yes, I do. Tonight's question is, hello.

Hi. With the recent release of Pentagon footage of unidentified aerial phenomena and things like Project Blue Book and ATIP and all of these various things, in your former position and currently with the current information that's released, what's your viewpoint on what these objects that seem to defile laws of physics are? Well, first of all, that's a legitimate question now. And the short answer, but not the most meaningful one, is I don't know about this. But when I was president and I had a chief of staff, John Fidesa, who love science fiction, we made every attempt to find out everything about Roswell.

And we also sent people to Area 51 to make sure there were no aliens in a deep... Because Area 51 is very important. Who do you send? I told you that. Actually, I said my... Sandy Berger, who passed away, sadly, a couple of years ago, who was my national security advisor. But I said, we got to find out how we're going to do. deal with this because that's where we do a lot of our invisibility research in terms of

technology. Like how do we have fly airplanes that aren't picked up by radar and all that? So that's why they're so secretive. But there's no aliens as I know. On the other hand, Hillary and I went to Hawaii in 2018 to the big island where all the telescopes are on top of the mountain, you know, including the Kek telescope. the largest in the world, and several countries have scientific teams there. So after we tour the telescope, we went down and met with them.

And I said, do you guys argue about the likelihood of life and outer space? He said, we have huge arguments. I said, you do? He said, oh, huge. I said, what's the range? He said, there are those of us who think it's 85% likely, and those of us who think it's 95 for something. He said, these are people who spend their lives doing this.

He said, we think, in other words, it's very unlikely that there is not life. There are a billion, not a billion planets, a billion solar-like systems. There are lots of mysteries out there, which is why I think we should take good care of this planet. I think we ought to kind of hang on to it if we can't. And I think, but I also think it should keep us humble. There's a lot of stuff we don't know. Ladies and gentlemen. President Bill Clinton.

Yeah, man. So that was pretty cool. Two things I want to kind of ask you about with that one. The first being, Airy 51. Like you said skunk works. I mean, us in the UFO field know the lore, the history behind this deeply, you know, secret military installation in Nevada, where supposedly they work on UFOs, back engineer craft from recovered flying saucers, stuff like that. Do you have, what are your thoughts on Area 51?

Have you ever heard the stories about Bob Lazar, the dude who said he worked there and all that? What do you make of that whole mythology within the UFO world? Well, I mean, I grew up. I grew up, you know, I'm an old person. I was born in 1972. So I grew up during the age of the awareness of Project Blue Book. In fact, there was a television show called Project Blue Book. And so, and then there was also a show that many of your listeners, well, actually, some of your listeners might remember called Salvege One,

which was about a team of engineers and science enthusiasts that decided to build a rock. rocket in out of a junkyard. And eventually, so the whole show was about them, you know, engineering this rocket. And then eventually, you know, blasting off and going to space. But so there was a lot of, and science fiction was huge in the 70s, obviously off the tales of the 60s, the 50s and the 60s bringing science fiction to the imagination of so many people. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday,

May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry and the best heavy weight in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano, live only on Netflix.

Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. So hearing about Roswell, you know, and about the crash, potential crashed UFO, it all went along with my reality at that time with Project Blue Book and my fascination with alien abductions because there were shows kind of like on, you know, during my childhood, that would have been, you know, about people's recounting their tales and with sightings and potential abductions and stuff like that. So I was the kid that was in my backyard in a lawn chair staring up at the star. at night hoping that I would see something.

And so in regards to Area 51, obviously, like in the 90s, I was listening to Coast to Coast radio, and they would talk about, you know, things going on at Area 51. And, of course, all the stories about, you know, well, then there was like movies like fire in the sky, all these movies about aliens or, you know, Closing Cameras of the Third Kind, you know, thinking about Area 51 and also learning about skunk works. and also growing up on an Air Force base in Great Falls, Montana, and Malmast from Air Force Base,

I had the good fortune of seeing, you know, the SR-71 and seeing the stealth coding up front and, you know, just real close. I was literally like three feet away from an SR-71 as a kid, just like with a small road, you know, a guy standing there at attention, like, you know, guarding at different points of the airplane. But to see that airplane, one of still one of the fastest airplanes ever created, with that coating. Not quite Vanta Black, but on the same tip as this kind of like, it's a shadow, you know, on the airfield or at least outside of the hangars.

Seeing that, seeing the stealth fighter and many other amazing, you know, aerial craft. And then also seeing like the Blue Angels come through and or the Canadian version. the snowbirds, like seeing snowbirds come through there and do all these aerial formation. So I was absolutely fascinated with aviation of all sorts, but also aliens and science fiction. And so area 51, I think, is kind of a, to me, what I think area 51 is. This is a very long answer, but just, I think area 51 is, is all things. It's a little bit of everything. I think that, I think that, like, because it's such a focal point and it's such a secretive

place, of course, a ton of lore is going to be generated about it. Do I think a craft crashed? Possibly, you know, the thing is, there's a couple of angles that come coming at this. And I don't know if that's something we can talk about later, but like what is alien phenomena or what is extraterrestrial? What is the probability that there are extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials that have vehicles that have visited the planet that are doing this? Are they extraterrestrial or were they already here? Are they scout craft? Are they, are they autonomous? Are they, uh, does it have something to do with planet Nibiru? You know, does it the ninth planet? Or the nanaki coming back? Are like, there's like so many, uh, are we time travelers? Are we visiting

ourselves from from the future into the past? Are we trying to, is this some kind of an experiment, like a gardening experiment with like a slightly altered hominid species? Like there's, there's, there's all kinds of things out there that I hold a 90 to 95% possibility margin for because I always leave the margin that I could be wrong because we don't fucking know for sure, but I definitely lean more in like, I've seen too many things. I've personally seen UFO, our UAPs, outside of Great Falls. We can talk about that a little bit later, but like I, you know, I've seen these things and I have friends that have seen things and experienced things.

So, yeah, again, Area 51, I think is a little bit of like, perhaps it was an alien craft. Perhaps it was some kind of a craft. And I wouldn't doubt. I mean, it kind of makes sense. It's like we made a technological jump in such a short period of time with stealth coatings, propulsion systems, understanding of electromagnetic fields and how that affects machines. and, you know, just all kinds of things that were pretty rapidly developed. And I don't know if you could explain it through an escalation of arms race.

You could explain it through maybe there's a cosmic transmission of information that's out there that humans are able to tap into. Or they simply just had machines that they reverse engineered, you know, from the crash. I don't know. But I'm just saying, like, I'm open to all the possibilities. But I definitely think it's more than just some people, some engineers, and like this would be a cool thing. I think it's a little bit more. I love that, man.

Yeah, yeah. And who's to say it's not all three in some way, shape, or form? We truly don't know what these UFOs represent. There's probably a million explanations for each and every one. They're each, you know, as unique as a snowflake, I guess. Yes. Well, you know, you bring up another good point to you is, well, first of all, I got to ask you about your UFO setting.

We'll definitely get to that. Maastrum Air Force Base, familiar with the incident that happened there, the nuclear incident? Yeah, the chips that went across Washington, Idaho, Montana, and I believe North Dakota. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another incident, I think, where at Malstrom, where UFO supposedly like came over and shut off the nukes at some point. Have you ever heard that stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah. Was that, was that, was that Malmstrom? Yeah, because I remember that. Yeah, there was a, yeah, the, the, the, the, the story of, yeah, UFO's appearing over a silo. Yeah, turning, I think, yeah, turning off and then turning on the system.

Yeah, I actually spoke to, um, a gentleman named Robert Sallis. He was the dude in charge of, uh, the weapons that day. And, um, dude, he said, like, it was the scariest moment of his whole career. Like, he thought this is the end, you know, before, um, we all lose. And, uh, it's a pretty crazy. story. I definitely, I think people should check it out if you're not familiar with that guy's Nelstrom-American Force Base. Yeah. I loved hearing this story because, you know, if anything, if you want to like to say like, okay, let's say it's extraterrestrials. I do love, I mean,

there's two explanations, right? There's like, well, there's three explanations. One, they were tripping and they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, which I just don't believe, because military people, it's not easy for them to come forward. And yes, there's going to be some people are going to take advantage of the fact that they're in the military and they're going to just want to like have some sensational you know whatever excitement around something that they're saying and uh there could be some fibbing going on there but i'd say in general those people tend to not they don't really fuck around that much and when they get afraid when they're scared of something that happens generally it impacts them in a pretty traumatic way because they're used to things being in such a

structured ordered way when something when an anomaly occurs they really that really affects them i i i would especially when you're in a bunker, you're deep, like, in a bunker and you control, you're in, you know, you're like the person who authorizes, you know, who actually mechanically make sure that those missiles go off, those ICBMs go off. It's just a position I don't think, like, you'd want to fuck around with, and you have a career in the military and you don't want to lose your tricare medical coverage, you know, like, there's a lot of stuff going on there. But so I would, I would believe it. And I think that the other two explanations, one, there are some extraterrestrial or some unexplained phenomena. There's something that appeared over there and just flexed and said, we can turn the shit off. We can turn the shit on. Basically, get your shit together.

This isn't the priority. That to me is the message. This is not the priority. And then the other explanation, of course, is that it's our technology and that we're just kind of testing it. You know, it's like, hey, let's just send these vehicles and have them send out an EMP, whatever, and then like, see if that works. And like, oh, yeah, and it scared the shit out of these dudes. It works. I don't, I mean, that's a little less likely.

I don't know. I would also, I would say opposite to his problem. Most likely. Yeah, it is an interesting theory. You know, we do often hear, you know, the government with the capital G, when they hear the people are saying, oh, aliens crash or aliens versus. seen over this installation. Let the public think it's aliens. Just let them think that. It is an interesting game, I think. We play with intelligence agencies and whatnot when it comes to all this. So, yeah, you do have to wonder, well, what do you think about Clinton when it

comes to UFOs, Reggie? I mean, we know that Hillary was really interested. Pedesto was obviously very interested. I think he tweeted, you know, his biggest regret. when he was working with the Clintons was that he did not get the information out to the public about UFOs, which is crazy. And I know Hillary was working with the Rockefellers and they were looking into UFOs. And there's all these crazy conspiracy theories out there. But when you strip away kind of those layers of the conspiracy theories and just look at it, there's no doubt that Clinton's probably got closer than anyone when it came to this. UFO topic. Do you think they know more than what, you know, Bill kind of portrayed when you interviewed him on the late, late show? Do you think he knows more than he's telling the public on all this?

Man, it's so hard to say. I mean, it's, I guess, you know, people think that the, I don't know, presidents have, like, more power than they actually do. Like, they don't, they don't really have as much access as people like to think that they have access to. Um, it's not like, I'm president. Tell me all the secrets. Like, like, things are partitioned and compartmentalized, you know, on purpose so that we maintain an edge, you know, in our defense or offensive or defensive strategy militarily. So, uh, you know, I would believe that he wouldn't be shown everything. She wouldn't be shown everything. Um, but obviously you're around a lot of people that, you know, have different levels of like, how.

how well they can keep a secret. So I'm sure there's, I'm sure that they know more than they're letting on, but I'm also certain that they don't know all of it. So I think it's something like that. I think that he definitely knows more. I think he's probably talked, if he's that interested, he's asked a lot of questions.

Because how can you not? You know, like when you're, you know, you're like the presidency of the United States, you've had an interest in UFOs for a long time and or UIPs. And oh, yeah, how would you not, how would you just lose that curiosity? It just doesn't go away. When you're presented with the opportunity to know more, it's like just being a human being and we're all curious creatures, like we want to know more about stuff and won't settle for just like, well, you can't really tell you about that.

You know, you're going to keep digging. You're going to keep asking. like, you know, you meet someone and you're like, yeah, they used to be with Project Blue Book. Did you have any opinions? You know, whatever. That's going to happen. So I'm sure they do know more, but I don't think they know everything. I don't think that they know definitive stuff necessarily.

That's a good point. You know, presidents are temporary. So, you know, can you trust them with all the information once they leave office? I don't know, you know, especially when they get up there on their deathbeds and they're like, you know, you never know. You never know. They're going to pull the trigger and say, you. Yes, you know, aliens crash in Roswell. We've been covering it up.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't think that's a chance they're willing to take, in my opinion. I don't think so. I think Obama knows a little more. I think he's a really smart dude. And I mean, Clinton's a smart dude, too, but he's a little bit more aloof in a way. Maybe that's his personal projection.

But Obama, I get a sense that he definitely knows a lot more because he wanted what he said was, like, I mean, it's not really information we haven't heard of, really, the way he's saying it, but the fact that he's saying it is important. But I also think he knows a lot more, whether it's like these are special weapons programs. This could be like stuff, you know, this could be like ingad stuff. You know, it's like this could be whatever, the next stealth bomber. Like, you know, we're talking about sixth generation fighters. You know, we're talking about a ton of.

Or, you know, we're talking about those technologies that people believe that they're creating Plasmic Fields to create a false radar signature. You're able to project Plasmic Fields, which is kind of like, oh, that's interesting. It creates a physical presence and shows up on radar. Is that what we could possibly be seeing at the GoFast and the Tick-Tac and stuff like that? Is that some of that Plasmic projection technology? Is that why it can go from air to water at the same rate of speed? Because it's not really truly physical thing.

But, you know, who knows? I don't know. But, like, you know, I have a feeling that he knows more than Clinton would necessarily. Interesting. Well, you know, you mentioned Obama and his thoughts. Let's go ahead and play the other clip, Reggie. You'll get your thoughts on the other side on that. I'll go ahead and play that now.

All this talk about Dem aliens with the, you know, what are the UAFs or whatever they call them? You know, all the footage and everyone talking about it. It's like, what is your, like, I know it doesn't necessarily mean. Aliens, it's just a UAF, but I was wondering if you have a theory about that. Yeah, that's true. Well, he doesn't know what he's talking about. When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can't tell you on air. But you'll tell us off that.

Great. You know, no, look, the truth is that when I came into office, I asked, right? I was like, all right, is there the lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens in space? And, you know, they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no. But what is true, and I'm actually being serious here is that there are, there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they moved their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing

to report to you today. Unless, like, that... See, here's the question. Reggie might secretly... Reggie might secretly be an alien, right? You remember in men and black? And so when he asks all these questions, he's deflecting.

Think about it. You are not the first person to have this thought. Do we know what he looks like behind those glasses? Right? I mean, his eyes might blink in the wrong direction. So that's a question that everybody can think about. Reggie, is that correct? A hundred percentie. It's absolutely correct.

I don't know that. I feel like he was the one defunding there. I mean, he got serious for a second. And then he turned it on you and started going with the comedy. What do you think? Well, you could see that he was trying to discern, like, decide, like, how much he should say and how he should say it. There was this like a lot of like, what should I?

Because he wanted to say more, but he wanted to say, you know, as much as he could, I guess. I don't know. But there was definitely, it felt that there was this feeling of, yeah, just like he wanted to say more than he was able to say for sure. Yeah, I know. Which is really interesting because, you know, Obama was around when, suppose this atyp program was going on. So you do have to wonder, you mentioned Project Blue Book earlier.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this to kind of wrap up the presidents and UFOs. Yeah. Between Project Blue Book, you know, that ended, I believe it was in 1969. They said, there's nothing to see here. We can explain almost all of these things. And they're not posing a threat to national security. So we're not going to look into it anymore. And then they said we're done investigating UFOs.

The U.S. Air Force is done doing this. And then we come to learn that there was actually a secret Pentagon program called ATIP that had been running. Now, do you think between that gap between Blue Book and ATIP, there was all this weird UFO X-File stuff still going on in the government? Or truly was this, you know, decades-long gap between investigating UFOs with the U.S. government? that's a yeah i mean i just can't imagine them you know stuff like i don't know just going like yeah we know all the answers all this explainable we're done i don't think that that's true i think that there's probably an organization that just continues collecting these stories um and they keep archiving them and like putting them in different categories and just so they have all the information maybe there

was like a gap in like an actual official department that analyzed the information that went and investigated the information, perhaps. But the fact that, you know, Lou Alizondo and, you know, whatever, is this guy coming out and saying, A-Tip, I was ahead of it, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and no one's denying it. It was an actual thing. It's in the black budget, you know, whatever.

It was part of that funding and so forth. But also, you know, it's the government. So you just don't know. Like, is it like convenient timing? they're releasing this stuff? Is there a reason they're releasing this information? Like, are there a reason they're, you know, corroborating these stories from Navy fighter pilots, is, you know, radar technicians, all this stuff.

Like, there's that, too. There's that side of it. It sucks because it's like, I don't, I'm not naturally a conspiracy person, but I'm definitely a rationalist. And we also know as human beings as just having a circle of friends or a crew of people when you were growing up, just like the behavior doesn't change. Human behavior is human behavior. And if people want to keep stuff secret,

or if they want to keep a myth going, or if they want to project something, they want to keep a certain air about things, they craft, you know, disinformation techniques in order to keep us thinking, you know, keep us guessing. So, and, you know, some people say, like, Alizondo is a plant that he's a little bit of a shell,

that he's, like, kind of, you know, running interference in the community. because there are UFO experts that are kind of refute his, I don't know, his like intention, or his intentions. So hard to say, I think that there's definitely data collection the whole time, obviously, any story, it just kind of like got brought in and got put into its category and they just keep building that library of experience. And then some of it can be explained because they were running programs in a certain area at that time. so they can like, well, that gets nixed out. We were running like whatever, these like high speed, whatever drone things.

Like, that's not us. That's not us. That's definitely not us. That's interesting. But we don't have a record of that. You know, I'm sure that doing that at least. Yeah. Or we're doing that.

Yeah. Good point. Good point. You know, and they keep saying, you know, it's not Russia. It's not China. It's not these other superpowers who are trying to keep up with U.S. technology. But, and then they're saying it's not ours. So, you know, what is it?

What is it? That's the real question. You know, it's funny to me because it's like, I don't know, man. You know, I've been listening to a lot of, I've been listening to this book by, well, I guess it's, is it a compendium or is it a collection? It's, let me see. Where is this? Yeah, so it's this book that I mean, the Anunnaki Chronicles. Yeah, Zachary, Cichin.

And I've always been interested in ancient alien theories just because of the rapid escalation of or evolution of our species, just like happening. You know, you see that upward trend, and then suddenly it just goes, you know, like away from the expected evolutionary curve. We just like took almost a 180, a 130. and suddenly developed, like, you know, there's like Sumer, which just appeared out of nowhere. You know, like, oh, here's, here's, or if you want to say it, how they say, they would have said it would have been Schumer. But so like, Sumer appears out of nowhere.

There's like roads, libraries, you know, there's educational systems. There's taxes. There's trade. There's commerce. There's money. Just out of nowhere. We just suddenly have all this stuff, plumbing. And then all of our tales are built off of these, you know, these stories,

these, I guess, human origin, human, cultural human civilization stories that get borrowed. So you get like these, you know, you get Erychkegal, the goddess of the underworld, and that turns into, whoever that turns into for the Acadians and the Assyrians. And then you get to like Egypt and you have Anubis and then you have Karon for the Greeks and, you know, Hades for the Romans. And it's like all these like borrowed tales from way, way back then. But before then, there wasn't anything. So it's, it's, there's a lot of like interesting questions.

And also in the Bible, there, there are stories and, and other other ancient texts, but there are, there's stories of these lights in the skies and these formations that match the description of things that people are still, have been seeing since, well, since then, really. And then you have to ask the question, well, these are similar light formations and similar phenomena that human beings have been experiencing for hundreds of years or thousands of years. And only now could we say, oh, that could have been a drone, you know, that could have been like some weird experimental aircraft or that's a weather balloon or whatever. Because those things didn't exist, whatever, 120 years ago. We didn't have any of these things that you could say, oh, that's what it is. It's modern technology.

So then how do you account for similar sightings for thousands of years and then suddenly be like, well, now it's these things? Like, has it always been those things? Has it always been drones? Has it always been weather balloons? Has it always been Saturn or Jupiter? Yeah, yeah. Such a good point. You know, you look at this idea of the cargo cult, you know, when a civilization has no idea any frame of reference at what they're looking at in the world.

the sky. Let's say it was a, whatever, a B-29 bomber that went over their island and they've never seen a plane before and then boom, a new religion starts after they see this thing in the sky. So you truly do have to wonder these different cultures throughout history who have these, quote unquote, UFO sightings. You know, what springs up with that? What beliefs come from that? And what does it truly represent? Did it want to be seen and start a religion? Is that just by human condition? I don't know. It is fascinating, though.

It is. Yeah, I love it. And, you know, and then when you go back and you just look at the evidence of, you know, past societies, you know, you look at the pyramids, you know, and, of course, the argument of like, you can't get a razor blade between some of those, you know, 30 ton, 40 ton. You're like, how did human beings have the time, the initiative, the technology, you know, to build these things and the fact that there were no bodies discovered in any of those. the great pyramids, except for, was it, Kufu was found in one in the center of it? I think you're right. You'd have to brush up on my history. Yeah, but that was like the only one. All the rest of them were empty. And there were no carvings. There was, sorry, no hieroglyphs, no pictographs, like anywhere inside of these structures.

And then when one was found, it was a forgery that this guy wanted to claim that he had found the grave of something, blah, blah, blah, blah, other than they found that that was actually a forgery and there was a family of the person who claimed it that said, yes, it was definitely forgery. So, you know, what were these pyramids? What were they used for? Why are there similar structures in Egypt and, you know, Central America? Why, you know, do we have these pictures of these? It's either like human imagination, like, like looking at nature and going, like, what if the soul could be carried on the back of a flying eagle? you know, like, or the buzzard, you know, with glowing eyes. Like, is it just us having some mushroom trips going like, man, what if the universe was crazy? And then we're just like making these stories? Or are they based off of real things that occurred?

You know, are they, you know, the fact that Elohim or so Yahweh is a plural name, not a singular name. There wasn't a monotheism back in the early days. It talked about a system or the hierarchy of gods. And that these gods were called like the gods, the god of crux. creation, the God of heaven and earth, the God of water, the God of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Were these actual beings? Were they, you know, were we a work race that were created by, you know, manipulating, you know, genetic, or genetic code? Is it something like alien, like in the beginning of that alas, alien, whatever covenant movie where the guy's, like, pouring his, like, he's giving up his DNA into the waters of the earth in order to, like, create a new hominid species?

You know, I don't know, but it's possible. But then I can go one step, I can go one step further back than that, which is more, I think, kind of fun, a little bit more fun. Please, do you. Yeah. Well, sure. So basically, like, the idea of consciousness itself, like, what is consciousness? And is consciousness, is it a collective consciousness? Are we living in a holographic, a collective conscious universe?

This is some kind of a simulation of sorts without it and without necessarily thinking about computers and the matrix and everything, like something, a simulation of sorts like consciousness running the game of consciousness in order to strengthen the idea of consciousness and awareness. And in which case, if that's true, in all possibilities, as we learn in physics, at least, you know, theoretically, we talk about many worlds, multiple dimensions, variable possibilities, choose your own adventure style, like, you know, whatever. for the, you know, me choosing this, leads to this, leads to that, or blah, blah, blah, blah, but all the possibilities exist simultaneously on the horizon. Then we have to go back and think, well, the idea of extraterrestrials is highly likely, but also in a way that's more fantastic than just craft and beings inside of craft, influencing our society. It's more like, it's just the possibility of that occurring is very high,

because essentially history doesn't exist as we move forward. Like all of that stuff is just, they're just memories that are collectively sewn together to explain where we are in the present moment as we're experiencing reality in real time. So if I think of it that way, then, yeah, of course. There's like whether we're receiving, you know, let's say back in the day you're receiving ideas

from another version of ourselves that has a higher awareness and we're able to glean some of that and put it into our current reality and make an advancement, of sorts, whether it's that consciousness communicating over vast distances in order to influence itself just for the sake of influencing itself. I don't know. I mean, that's obviously getting kind of very esoteric, but I do like thinking of it that way

because then it means that anything is possible and not to take away from anybody's experience like an abduction experience or, you know, coming into contact with exotic materials or seeing something that definitely is not explainable. with a bunch of people. It just kind of, it proves that that's possible, you know, that that is a reality that we are collectively deciding the reality that we want to be experiencing at all times. Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

I really like that, that thought experiment. Yeah. Well, I heard you once, Reggie, say, that ghosts, actually. We're going paranormal now. Ghosts are like a temporal anomaly. And I absolutely love. that phrase in terms of, you know, in the UFO world, we've had people come forward and say that as well, you know, beyond reality, consciousness, but time and space that maybe these UFOs

represent time travelers, you know, or these little gray alien beings, you know, very and adrogynous and small bodies, big heads, you know, maybe their brains got bigger, body's got smaller. And this is a version of us in like, what, three, 500, a thousand years from now. And they're coming back to see what we once were. What do you make of that whole theory of UFOs and aliens being time travelers? I love it. I'm a huge time traveler fan. Like my whole existence is based off of experiencing time traveler, what I like to call artificial time travel, whether it's, you know, going into a VR's, simulation or whether it's telling stories with one another, or whether it's, you know, visiting somewhere and not having immediate access to your normal technology that tells you where you are in time. And then you kind of have like this weird flash. I'm like,

was this, was this what 1993 was like, you know, whatever. So I'm a huge, I'm a huge lover of time travel and the possibility of time travel. I think it's a very fantastic thing. I think that, that again, it's totally possible because everything is possible. And if all realities and possibilities exist simultaneously, then it just depends on, are you lucky enough to fall into, you know, a reality where that reveals itself?

So I think, I think it's very possible. I mean, I do like the idea of like this tourism. Like, like, what were we like? You know, back in time, come, come on a journey and take a sample and look at what we,

what we were like back in the day. You know, like we were, we were smart, but we also very dumb, and we also tried to segregate ourselves and divide ourselves and say that we were multiple different things when we were part of the same thing. But look how far we've got, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's like this disaster tourism. But, you know, and the idea of like us evolving, you know, to a point at which our bodies change and, you know, we've got bigger brains.

But then the question is, like, why this? planet you know like why yeah why why why why us why are we why are we special you know like why and and then that kind of gets me down to well it kind of makes sense that we're kind of running some kind of we're part of some kind of an experiment you know where it's like what what what the fuck are we doing here like you know why do we why are we like basically transforming reality the ingredients of reality the hard ingredients of reality and copying what nature does like uh bird flies well we better figure out how to fly. Well, you see how centipedes move.

Maybe we can create a thing like that. Oh, here's a tank. Okay. Well, here's a, you know, here's, you see how tough beetles are or whatever. They have that kiteon on there. It's like, what if we create an armor for us? You know, like everything we do, we're just rip off for us. The human species is a big simulation species.

We just rip off everything around us. That's all we do because we want to be that. We want to experience it. It's like, well, I want to be able to go underwater and, you know, for months. And it's like, well, let's create a boat. that enables us to live under there. But so, or space.

We want to go out into space. We want to take whatever this intersection of senses are, smell, sight, taste. We have to like move that point of consciousness to another reality in order to reinforce our connection to reality or just to see if it's possible.

Like we're always moving ourselves to see if it's possible. And I think like half of, or most of what UFO or UIP phenomenon, is people knowing that we are more than what we seem and seeking answers that lead to the fantastic. But the fantastic is quite possibly the reality. And for whatever reasons, we have these blinders on purpose in order to, like, kind of keep us, like us functioning, you know, like living like, I'm hungry now, must find food. Oh, cold, must need shelter.

Like, we have all these basic things to keep our entity alive. but the questions of who are we, where are we from, what is all of this? That's kind of, I think, at the core of every single human being, no matter how, whatever, gross an individual is being at that time, we all come from that place. We're a curious problem-solving species that is like become awake, you know, and are asking the question like, what the fuck is going on? I mean, basically is the, if humanity could be in capital, It would be like, what the fuck is going up?

Like, that's all we're doing. We're just constantly like going, what the fuck is going? Why the fuck is that? Why are you? How come you're, why is this? How come the, well, if you get, ah, you know, that's, that's all we're doing constantly. So it makes sense that we would want to figure out what is the mechanism behind it? What is, what is reality?

What's happening? And it doesn't make sense to be close-minded about reality because, you know, like I said, I've seen UFOs. I was a teenager in Montana. We were camping. We were in a valley. And we decided to go on a really long walk at night. And we did. We went through a cattle fence.

We were walking across this huge, huge field, a couple miles to get to a Butte. And halfway across that journey to the Butte, we, you know, I looked down this kind of system of plateaus and I saw three lights. And the three lights were kind of moving, but kind of at different distances, you know, from each other. they moved. And so I knew that most likely there were separate things, individual things, individual craft. And then at one point one stopped and you could see a bright light kind of appear under it and then it turns off and then it starts moving again. And I got my

friends, I kept looking at it. You know, I kept looking at those lights and I called my friends over and I was like, tell me what you see. I didn't describe what I was saying. I just said, tell me what you see and they saw the same thing. I see these three lights. I don't know if they saw this stopping, whatever, light underneath. But they definitely saw those things. Those are two of my friends. And we saw those things.

There was no sound. And it makes no sense why something would be glowing. You know, like, why would you, why would the Air Force create something or, you know, whatever, these craft that are glowing? And are they the same exact craft that were being chased across in 1950s? you know, by squadrons of fighter jets that are scrambled to follow these objects across the Canadian border.

Like, why hasn't that design changed? You know, I don't know, but there's just like, you know, like seeing that, I was like, wow, to feel, to see something like that is crazy, it does a crazy thing to your mind because you're like, if it is not, if it's not, if it is what I think it is, that's fucking insane that I'm watching,

that I'm seeing it in reality. It's like seeing a, you know, a magician do a trick for you in front of your face and you're like, I gotta, let me look at that. And you're like looking at the thing and you're like, that's not it. How the fuck? You know, like that trick where you're like,

is magic real? In that moment, that fantastic moment, that's what it felt like, what I was seeing that. I was like, I can't believe I'm seeing this. This is what I'm seeing. It is an unidentified flying object. It's definitely UAP.

It doesn't say that it is aliens. But I'm definitely seeing something that makes no fucking sense. Also, it makes no strategic sense at all. Like, I don't know why you would create craft like that. Like, I don't know what that gets us other than, like, aliens are attacking. Oh, shit, everybody's afraid. I mean, I don't know what that gets you either. I think you just want to make an efficient weapon that could infiltrate enemy, you know,

what aerospace or whatever space and then just, like, inflict what it needs to inflict and get the fuck out of there. I don't think he has anything about it being glowing. But anyways, all that ranting and raving. to say that I know that feeling. I know that feeling. And it's fucking crazy. It's amazing.

That's awesome, man. Yeah, so many people say, you know, having a UFO experience is euphoric in, in, you know, lack of a better term. Or for some people, it's terrifying. Some, it's beautiful. You know, I talk to a mother and a daughter in Michigan who saw the same triangular-shaped UFO over their home. You know, the mom saw it first, told the daughter, come out, come see this. with me. Daughter comes out and they're looking up at this thing and the mother's looking at it and she's like, oh my God, I feel this is so awe-inspiring. It's amazing. It's like, you know, it's white. It's bright,

white and it's so bright. And this is amazing. It's angelic. And she's like, what do you think? What do you think? She turns to her daughter. And her daughter, dude, she's on the ground in the fetal position, like covering her ears and saying how unbearably loud the UFO was. When the mom said it was completely silent. And then the daughter also said it was slick black. And they're like, interesting. I didn't know what to make of it, man. When they told me this story, they're having like completely different perceptions of supposedly looking at the same thing. So then you also have to wonder, like, is this UFO or whatever sources behind it able to change perception or, or is it amorphous in some sense? I don't know. But I think you're right. There's some sort of, um,

disruption to reality when it comes to these things. And people experience them so differently. You know, I'm sure your friends took something completely different away from that experience than you did. You just, you don't know how someone will carry on with their life after something like that, I guess. Yeah. It's, it's impossible because, you know, people,

there are instantaneous rationalizations that happen, you know, that, that are, you know, is your brain trying to protect itself? you know, it's running every scenario of what it could be. And some people choose to reduce something mundane. You know, there's that phenomena that people talk about where if there was a party happening, you know, somebody's living a room or something like that. And someone stepped into the room in a gorilla costume and waved its arms and then walked out and closed the door again, a lot of people wouldn't think of it as a big deal at all.

And some people might not even remember it. and there's something that happens when we see something so unexplainable or surprising or whatever it is. There's an instantaneous rationalization because they're like, well, it can't be what you think, what you think it is because, I mean,

or what you fear it is, let's say, or what you're hoping it is, because it's just probably not what it is. And so some people just kind of go like, I register it? Yeah. And then just kind of like let it go, whereas other people will be like, holy shit, that's the thing I've been looking for, you know, or that's the thing that because I've been looking for it, it resonates to me, you know, there's like something about it that's giving me information, whereas other people will be like totally terrified instead of curious.

So it totally makes sense. I mean, what do you expect? It's, you know, most of the things, people get surprised at the dumbest things, you know. when I say dumb, I just mean like the simplest things, you know? They're like, oh, shit. You know, I mean, look at like, you know, those healers or whatever, you know, that are just like, now you're healed, you know. And people are like, oh, I'm healed. You know, and they're just walking around for a while.

And their doctor's like, yeah, you made your injury worse. But like, you know, like people will believe or disbelieve things based on the availability that they have of self-awareness in that moment. And I think, you know, Herb, that's a wonderful story. But seeing that craft, it makes sense. Some people are going to be like, holy shit, this is it. You know, oh, this is them. Other people are like, ah, it doesn't exist. I'm out of here.

Gee, school, like, I don't know. You know, it's like, I'd rather not. And then, like, people ask them about it later. They're like, I don't know what it was. Let's not talk about it. You know, whatever. Like, everyone, of course, everyone's going to react differently. Hey guys, Ryan here. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is a labor of love every week. And with that comes many different costs to keep the show running. That's where our Patreon campaign comes in. You give what you think the show is worth. There's different rewards available all the time, including shoutouts on the show, early editions of main episodes, bonus episodes and content, and very soon, monthly patron hangouts, where we sit back and chat all things UFOs.

So I hope you'll consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support and keep looking up. Well, Rishi, I've got a couple of listener questions. If you're willing to stick around, we've almost been going for an hour. So thank you. Thank you for your time, man. No problem.

This first one comes from one of our Patreon subscribers. They get priority to ask our guests questions. And this is from And Deg, and they ask, what does Reggie, does he have a theory about what UFOs are? I know we briefly touched on that. But do you think it's possible that they could have been here? Ondeg wants to know longer before us. You know, there's this famous line from the X-Files, I think, where, you know, in like the second episode, the weird spooky government agent guy is like, Mr. Mulder, they've been here from.

a very, very long time. And I remember watching that as like a 12-year-old and that like gave me shivers. I'm like, wait, what does that mean? Like before us? What do you make of that whole theory that maybe we're not even the earthlings per se? We just came on a comet here and hitched a ride and came to Earth and there was something here before us. I don't know.

Does that make any sense to you that theory? Of course. Yeah, of course it makes sense. I mean, it makes sense again in the ancient alien. hypothesis, yeah, it would make sense. I mean, we, I just wouldn't be surprised. I mean, we hear about things like Lemuria and Atlantis and these civilizations that existed before us.

And, you know, again, I do think it's possible because the universe is, it's just too insane. I mean, we live in a reality that's too insane. And the more instruments we create to, like, analyze our reality. the more baffled we are. You know, like the smaller we look, like we look at scanning electron microscopes, you know, we go atom smasher's and we're studying like isotopes and, you know, all these things.

Then we're like, well, theoretically, you know, there should be this much distance between, you know, the nucleus or this or whatever. It's like, well, what is the nucleus from you now? Well, theoretically, it's like dark, dark energy. All these, like they, it just gets muckier and muckier, the smaller we look. And then as we look out, like,

especially with the James Webb telescope, we're looking back in time, but we're starting to see these anomalies where you're like, that shouldn't be there. Oh, that's surprising. Oh, weird. There's carbon dioxide in that and the atmosphere of that exoplanet. Like, it's just more mystery.

So we're sandwiched between mystery. Like the point at which we exist and how we're able to perceive reality, and no matter how many instruments we're able to peer, like, further back in time, or out into time, which again is looking back in time. But like, whatever, wherever we look, we keep looking more, more and more and focused in a specific direction. It's like fractals. It never ends.

Like just when you think, oh, that point, this thing coming at me right now, I know what this is. That's, oh, that's nothing. That's nothing at all. It continues to be nothing. It continues to be nothing. So I think that idea of beings existing, you know, here on this planet before this particular incarnation of consciousness that we are currently is as highly likely.

I couldn't see, I couldn't see why not. I mean, we, it feels like we were using the scraps of a former civilization. That's what we're doing. We're just like piecing together the scraps of an earlier, a more advanced civilization to me. Interesting. I like that. The whole fractal concept is fascinating to me. That UAP girl on Twitter, Reggie asks,

top three earthlings you'd send in first for contact if we were to ever make contact with whatever UFOs represent, whatever intelligence is behind them. Who would you put first in line, or I guess first second and third in line to make that first contact? Well, a lot of the people are dead. That's okay. You know, Mike Carl Sagan would be an amazing person. choice um you know i mean buckley be another person but i think uh well no i think let me think about this well i would love to i would love to hang out and say hi and just be like i guess what's going on you know i would love to so i'd put myself in there um and

i'm trying to think of someone a little bit oh well i mean like sun raw would want to for sure, but he's no longer around. But I think, I'm trying to think of like an artist, but it has to be someone who's, oh, you know what? Well, I don't know. That's a weird one. His art, it's to be someone who's a good communicator. I don't know.

I would say probably Alex Gray is an interesting guy, you know, or Sarah Silverman. Yeah, I put some of those people. I think Sarah would be great because she's a good, she's a rationalist, but she's also a very compassionate person. I think it requires people that are a little bit emotionally connected, emotionally empathic, but also very rational. I think that those are the people we want to send in there. I love that. You know, a question I didn't get to was, it seems to me, when I talk to people outside of the quote unquote UFO community, it's usually either musicians or comedians or some sort of artist.

And you said it right there. You know, you'd like to have an artist be one of the first people to make contact. What do you think it is about musicians and artists? I mean, if I went back in my catalog of shows, I would say, like, a healthy 30, 40 percent have been musicians or an artist of some kind. What do you think that says about these phenomena and those who seem to want to pursue that mystery, I guess? Well, I think as an artist when you're creating things, it depends on how you view what creativity is and where it comes from and so forth. But I think it feels like channeling to an extent. And it keeps your mind in an open state.

So in order to, especially for what I do, improvising, like you have to be open to all possibilities in that moment. And you have to also initialize something. You have to start with something. And as you start, you build on it because you're kind of listening to possibilities. And those things are collapsing into the higher probabilities. And then you just kind of allow those probabilities to kind of flow through you. And so I think that that element. And then also the dreaming, you know, the not quoting the Sandman, but like the dreaming element of being an artist, of visualizing a world,

imagining a scenario, seeing certain things. It's very like big, open imaginative, and you understand the power of limitless possibility. And I think that the idea that we're just, you know, some organisms, you know, with an endoskeleton walking around, just trying to survive and procreate. Like, I think that that's boring.

I think that that's very boring because why are we even able to think about those things? Why am I able to think about the thing that I'm thinking about that I am? You know, and I think that those are the questions that artists think about. And the same thing with scientists. You know, as I've said, science and art, those are the only two things that really matter. Everything is in between those things, but they're both interchangeable. Because science creates, well, science reveals fantastic things that we, that we may, most of us may not ever imagine. artists are able to tap into and project concepts that might be real.

So the two of them together, it's great. It's like it's empirical, but it's also visionary. But the empirical evidence also, which is great about science, is that they don't say that they know anything for sure. It's like we just know what we know in this given time, and this is the consensus of where we're at right now. Our understanding could change because our theoretical element is now, saying, well, maybe it could be, this could be a product of this.

It's theoretical. And then we invent some instruments or whatever. And then suddenly we're like, actually, a little bit of that theory is true. And then it evolves. So, and art kind of does the same thing. And that techniques evolve, ways of representing things evolve. You know, it's a never-ending cascade of possibility when it comes to what art can create and what it can project and how it affects people. And the same thing with science.

Science is like, well, we're curious. We want to find stuff out, but we also want to be empirical about it. And both methods are very, very interrelated because they inspire one another. You know, spaceship design is inspired by earlier science fiction writers. Science fiction writers write about certain formations of hierarchical society or non-hierarchical society, and then suddenly down the line, there's a civilization that starts using some of those ideas or whatever. You know what I mean? It's like they all influence each other.

I love that. Yeah, it's like a choreograph dance. We need both partners, the realists and the dreamers, for it to continue. Got a couple of music questions for you, Reggie. Cool. Nice. Let's go. Let's go.

Joss Horror on Instagram asks, have you ever sampled any sound from UFO or alien movies for your freestyles and loops? By the way, I love your work and thank you for talking about UFOs, Josh said. Oh, sick. That's awesome. That's my pleasure. It's one of my favorite things. No, I have not. But I do, I do do a lot.

I take a lot from science fiction movies. Like, yeah. So sometimes, like, in my sets, I'll be whatever, doing my thing. It may not be musical, but sometimes I'll, you know, I'll pretend I'm in, like, a giant, like, mech suit or whatever. And, you know, so I'm just like, or a jet, you know, or it's just like, you know, like all these like sounds that I hear and I mimic because I'm just fascinated with them.

So I do sample the things that I'm exposed to and use them vocally or conceptually in my pieces. Love that. I love that. Isaac, kind of in the same vein, Isaac on Facebook asks, does your understanding of sound rhythm and harmony affect your understanding in relationship with the phenomenon? If so, how? I think it does because, you know, again, we're just an intersection of frequency detecting sensors. And, you know, we're an intersection of those things. So most of us have all of the senses. Some of us don't or some of us have lost a few of those senses.

But we have enough of them that we can still localize ourselves in. in space. And so I think that being a musician, especially because music is so dependent on frequency and vibration, sympathetic, dissonance, harmonance,

like all of these elements that music, that music is, is what life is. And I think when you realize like vibe, intent, like I was on the airplane yesterday, or yeah, yesterday. And yes, I had a little bit of a hash edible.

But I was, I was, it was the first time I'd experienced this. I was on, I was on the airplane. The airplane took off. And as you know, there's a lot of sounds an airplane makes when it takes off. And some people are afraid of those things. But for me, I start to notice what those things are. So when you hear that after the plane is taken off, you're the, that's that's just the landing gear it's the it's the rotation of the tires after it's left the

tarmac they're still rotating and then as the landing gear go in you hear the speed roll off until they finally stop rotating and i felt that i felt it through the floor because i was closer to the front of the plane and the front landing gear i felt when that wheel stopped rotating and then i knew the flaps when uh were coming up because the plane's started to feel a little bit different. Then the noise, you know, all the noises. And then here's, here's an incredible thing. The guy next to me was sneezing.

And I wasn't wearing a mask. And I was like, oh, shit, this guy's just sneezing. But I knew that it wasn't COVID. Well, okay, I 98% knew. In my head, I knew that it wasn't because I knew that it was allergies. I could tell by the way he was sniffing and the way that he was breathing. that it was allergies. It wasn't, I'm sick.

I'm sick. So these types of things, and that was like yesterday, and that was kind of like a new moment for me in a way, because I started going to, oh, I understand what's going on with this thing. Or you're on a bridge and you're hearing it Creek or whatever. You're like, no, that's just the structure giving way because it needs to be flexible. Or, you know, or, oh, no, oh, that's actually, that is an earthquake. You know, like, there have been many times where I've gotten up from,

I was in a yoga class and I got up and I was like, earthquake or whatever. people thought it was crazy and they didn't feel anything and then like in the news report it's like a 3.3 or earthquake whatever you know so I think being a musician you know in short it if you if you want to not all musicians do this but but there's a higher likelihood that you're sensitive to vibrations and shifts in energy around you um and that's how improvisation works that's why music is so magical why it just like levit it feels like you're levitating when something really starts to take off and everything's feeding off of each other and it just it reaches a synchronicity where it's just like and it's all like synchronized and like those plates that you see people run vibrational frequencies and they pour sand on it and you see they'll turn

up the frequency and then you'll see the shape kind of look like this and they'll change the frequency and like that type of stuff you're aware of that that those molecules are taking on shapes according to vibration so I long answer but I love that question

because it's something I've been encountering or more sensitive to lately. I think that when it comes to phenomena like UAP and so forth or alien intelligence and so forth, I think that it lets you know that you have access to all of that, which is to say we have access to all forms of consciousness and alien or otherwise, because there isn't really, at least this is in my humble opinion,

there isn't such thing as alien consciousness. It's like we're we are all part of consciousness. And so it's just the revelation of different forms of consciousness. And also, and then I'll add this, I love the term life form. Because whenever I see an ant, when I see a, you know, like scanning electron microscope, you know, shot of a water bear or whatever, they're all life forms. They're forms of life. And these forms of life are all around us and we're all a part of it.

We're all life. But as humans, we like to think, well, because I'm conscious and I can decide that I can do this and do this or make this. Like, this makes me different from all the rest of life. It's like, it's just a bunch of bullshit. It's like we're all made of the same shit. It's all just frequencies and vibrations and formations of matter and consciousness observing itself. But anyways, that's that. I love it.

I love it. Life form. Life form for sure, man. Last musical question. Yeah. What is your favorite musical instrument that you've yet to use? Anything you just haven't been able to get your hands on or even start to practice yet? An instrument that I haven't used that I want to.

I'd say it's an instrument that doesn't exist yet. There's an instrument. I want, I use loopers for my performances. And there is no looper that I absolutely love. Like, I have an electric car that I 100% love. Like, I'm completely satisfied driving this vehicle, like 100%. And in my life, that's what I look for. I look for experiences of total satisfaction.

But I'm not so harsh that I'm going to miss it. Like, I do take note, like, you know, like flashlights. Like this flashlight, not this one particularly, there's another one, but there's a flashlight that I use that I'm 100% satisfied with. Like there's nothing I would change really about the design. Well, except for USB C port for recharging. But other than that, I'm fully sound about. So I guess what I'm saying is, oh, wait a minute, what was I talking about?

Yeah, yeah, no. The instrument you've yet to use is the instrument that's yet to be creative, right? Yeah, I'm back. I went too far out. But yeah, so why I said all that is because I don't have a looping pedal. There's no, I mean, the line's. which is my my, my, the most well-known pedal that I, that I use, uh, that line six is almost a, a perfect pedal. It's, it's very close, but not quite. And then the other

multi-track loopers I use, they, they do their jobs well and I can make music with it, but I can't, I can't rock that shit in a hardcore way intuitively because the controls are not intuitive. And so, So I guess I just say that there is an instrument that I want to play. You know, I would love to develop some kind of a cello-like-looking instrument that had multiple buttons that I could, you know, manipulate. And then I could also tilt, which would create effects or move forward, that would create effects that could hold close to my body, and I could just really integrate with and play rhythms and chords

and also trigger looping things. So the answer is that there isn't, that instrument doesn't exist yet. So I'm working on it. Love it. Love it. It's constantly evolving. Well, I guess here's one last question I found really interesting that I'd love to get your thought, kind of rough things up, Reggie.

Hampton Steve's on Twitter asks, is love an illusion born of biological necessity? I love that. Yeah, I think I saw that on Twitter. Yeah. I thought that was an excellent question. I'm glad that you've asked it. I think it's both. I think that there is definitely.

you know, chemicals that are released that are you responding to a vibe, a physical representation and a vibration that you get from somebody that you're with that says, hey man, you should hang with this person on a biological level. It's like you should hang with this person because you're going to make great offspring. Like that's definitely there. It's like, boy, you should get together with that person because those kids, they're going to be really cool. You know, there's definitely that,

whether that's true or not, that's the message that biology is like, yeah, let me hook on you so we can make more of you. But I think that love is a greater energy than that. I think that love is, yeah, love is like, to me, love is the building block of all reality. I think that all of reality is love. And I think that anything else is, you know,

not love. It's a, or getting, let's say it's further away from love. It's desynchronizing with love, whether it's like people who are frustrated all the time, or people angry all the time, or people complaining all the time, all the stuff that we can do as humans, we can choose to be however we want to be. I think that for some weird reason, it's, according to this current manifestation of reality, it seems to be easier to complain and to be frustrated and angry about stuff. And it's harder to just be like, you know what?

Like I think Sarah Silverman, I watched a thing on Instagram that she did. She had this realization that I thought was pretty great, where she woke up and this is probably, you know, some version of this is in Buddhist and Taoist's writings, but she woke up going like, ah, nothing matters. Everything sucks or whatever. And I understand that thinking like, oh, nothing matters, nothing matters. You know, why are we even here? What's blah, blah, blah.

But then she kind of like took it full circle and she was about. out to do a show and she does kind of like what I like to do before a show which is like people say what do you do before a show and I'm like I don't do anything I just like fuck around with people until it's absolutely time to get on the stage and then as I'm approaching the stage I say to myself you know what now this fucking matters um and uh just fuck it like that that's my attitude I go on stage and I just go up there and I just do what needs to happen in that moment and um and I think that that's kind of the thing that you arrive at when you're like, oh, all this shit that I'm so, ugh, ugh, you know, like, I do it every day with the news cycle. I need to take breaks. I really

honestly do. But I'll do that with it because I'm like, no, no, this is moving in the wrong direction, you know, and then I'm just thinking, how does this affect my general outlook in life? Like, am I really going to, like, ruin my day with shit that ultimately doesn't matter because as long as I'm being the best person I can be. I'm trying to project that in the world around me wherever I go. I'm trying to do my best wherever I go. And other people are doing that. And we're recognizing that one another.

It's like, oh, this person's trying. Oh, this person, help this person with this thing. Yeah, they have totally different ideologies, but they both fixed that plank that was loose in the fence. You know, like, these are things that I, that I live for in life. And so, so, yeah, I think that love is kind of everything. That's like the constant that's there if we want to listen to it. it's easy to forget and to get lost into all the dramatic things so your life can feel like a constant crisis.

Or you can be in what I like to call a solution-based mind state, which is like you can be affected by something. You can take on, you can process the emotion of something. But solve, create a solution so that that doesn't occur again or less likelihood, you know, of that occurring. But just being a solution-based, because otherwise if we're all just like, oh, fuck, everything sucks, everything. It gets us nowhere. And then we're 80 years old looking back on our lives going like, God, I was really healthy and I had an perfectly functioning body. And look at all that time I wasted. Like, fucking around with me being disappointed about shit when shit was mostly fine, mostly fine.

But helping each other is the important thing. I love that. I absolutely love that. Well, looking towards the future, Reggie, you know, we're scientific breakthroughs, technology. Like you said earlier, we had this huge boom back during the industrial age, obviously, and with space exploration. And now we're living in a world of, you know, where quantum physics is becoming more of a reality. And looking at the UFO topic that way as well, with all of this happening at a rapid pace, do you think we'll ever truly know what these UFOs or UAPs are or represent?

Do you have hope that we'll ever know the truth about what all of this stuff is? Or will it remain a mystery for forever? I know you always say life is, you know, always happening. Life just keeps happening. Yeah. Will we always live in the mystery or will we get those answers? What do you personally feel? I think we will.

And on some level, we already know, you know? I think, you know, it's like, but it's not. nice to have that certainty. You know, I mean, I guess that's something that we as humans, we love. We love, like, knowing something. You know, we love us certainty. But I think that, for me, I think that it's, you know, I've been doing, I'm been interesting, I'm interested in something I call the paradoxical state, which is, is being

aware of all infinite possibilities and being aware of. the absence of those possibilities simultaneously. Because in that moment, in that moment where those two things intersect, I call it the, it's a paradoxical state, in that state you realize all things are possible, but all things are not possible at the same time, which to me is the truest state of reality in a way. It just like it just cascades into an infinite like, you know, yin-yang positive negative. But I think that in our current reality, we can achieve understanding. We can definitely achieve knowledge through the discovery of things and the understanding of things and the acceptance of things.

And I think that we definitely will know. I mean, we have to. I mean, it's a phenomenon, right? It's something observable. And I think that we definitely will because if it exists, then it's reproducible or it's re-experienable. And there is an answer for its. existence because everything has a place and everything is useless simultaneously. But I think, you know, it's like, but, but I mean, without being cheeky, I do think that it is possible that we

will know what these things are because in a way, I think we kind of already do. I think that we're trying to match what we think it is with what it could be. And I think at a certain point, those things will meet at a scale at which we can all mostly, witness and agree and experience. I love that. Yeah, it's sort of a collective reality, as it were. I love that. I love that, man. This conversation went in directions I wasn't expecting that, and I'm so happy it did.

I thought we were going to talk about presidents and UFOs for like an hour. This has been such a rewarding conversation for me as a UFO podcaster. So obviously, I want to thank you for giving me way more time than I anticipated. But lastly, man, obviously, can you tease anything you're up to that you're going to be doing? And where can everyone find everything you're up to? Yeah, I mean, there's a few things up in the air right now.

Things being pitched, but I can say that generally, like, one is my book is getting finished, my autobiography. and that should be, I don't know, hopefully out within less than a year. So you'll hear about it. It's called Great Falls. And I have a couple of music shows that we're going to be pitching, kind of getting back to the roots of just having a show that I'd be hosting, and we'd have bands playing live on the show, but up-and-coming bands. And then, of course, the number one rule to playing on the show is that you can

have no backing tracks, no computer with a space bar that you hit. It all has to be played and performed live. Yeah, so that, and then also a project I'm doing with AI, a show that I'll be creating that revolves around AI and its current insane, rapid implementation and evolution. Interesting. That's a whole other conversation we could have. We'll have to have you come back on sometime, man. Please. Anytime. I know you're a busy dude.

Well, anytime. Man, I got to thank you for accepting the invitation for coming on a UFO podcast. And again, this is a very rewarding conversation for me. So thank you for joining me on Summer in the Skies. Thanks, Mr. Sprague. And enjoy Scotland. Cheers.

Cheers to that, buddy. I'll tip back a scotch for you, for sure. Please, please. The Summer in the Skies podcast is for, to listen to you 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 patreon.com slash somewhere skies. This is actually evidence of a parallel universe. Wait, what? So maybe these differences in collective memories are actually evidence of our universe, somehow becoming intertwined with another, if not identical, and very similar universe. So people's memories are correct.

They're just remembering something that happened in another dimension. Hence the discrepancy is that science, Scully. Theoretical science, at best, Mulder. Yeah. We're not going to do this parallel universe, sci-fi, gobbly. Good, nerd boy. Okay, so just please drop it. Because that crap gives me a headache. It's a lot better than some evil entities,

zapping people's brains with a hypno-ray gun. I never mentioned a hypno-ray gun. Guys, it's faulty memory because Ackham's Razor. That's Ozzy's Razor. Not Ackham's. It's always been Ozzie's razor. Maybe in a parallel universe it is, but in still, yet another universe is perhaps known as Ackham's Axe. It's not parallel universes!

Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. So, I know you are expecting part two of the series I conducted with Peter Robbins this week, but things aren't always as they seem. Or perhaps you're remembering things differently. Or, even more out there, maybe, just maybe, you're suffering from the Mandela Effect, something that was covered quite heavily in the recent X-Files episode titled, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.

You may know him from his role as Richard, the paranoid alien abductee on the TBS hit comedy, People of Earth. Or you might recognize him most recently because he was featured on the latest Darren Morgan episode of The X-Files. Today I am speaking with Brian Husky. In this standout episode of The X-Files, a stranger known only as Reggie something approaches Malter, claiming that he was once Mulder and Scully's third partner. but why don't they remember him? The episode dives deep into the Mandela effect in which large groups of people remember history

or events a different way, pondering the elusive question of alternate realities and alternate truths. As Mulder and Scully dig deeper into Reggie's claims, they soon realize that things may not be as they seem, and they even may finally find the truth that they've been searching for all along. Brian joins me to decide.

discuss his experiences on the show, his thoughts on the big and small picture of truth in today's world, and then we dive deep into UFOs and alien abductions. It was a funny and fascinating journey through the career and mind of one of today's most popular character actors. In an interview, I won't soon forget. And for those of you who are waiting for the second part of the James Forrestall presentation with Peter Robbins, it's coming at you next week, I promise. So, without further ado, the truth is out there, or somebody's truth is out there with Brian Husky. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies.

Oh, no problem. Thanks for having me. Of course. We were going to try to do this in person. We're both in the L.A. area, but, you know, circumstances permitting, I had to make my way back to the East Coast. So Skype is always a great way to do this. Let's cross our fingers. The connection stays and we'll get through this. together. Yeah, maybe you can get some sponsorship from Skype and just from now on, even if you're in the same room with people, you guys can just Skype from different laptops. Exactly. There's so many times where I've been in the same room with my girlfriend and messaged her over Facebook. It says a lot about where we are today in society, for sure. Or just your relationship. Or that too. Very good point. You've played some pretty recognizable roles that I'm sure most of our

listeners are quite familiar with. Most notably for me is your reoccurring role as Leon West on Veepe and also Richard on People of Earth, which is another show. We're going to touch on later, but I have to say, man, what are my favorites and my girlfriend's favorite is your character regular-sized Rudy on Pop's Burgers? Yeah, he's the other end of the spectrum from the visible versions I can, I do. Absolutely. And I'd love to hear later on about how it is to work, you know, in animation versus real life. But the real reason I wanted to have you on today was to talk about your role as Reggie something on the recent X-Files episode titled The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat. What a brilliant title.

Before we even get to the X-Files, though, Bride, I would love to just learn maybe a little about your training as an actor. You know, I myself, I studied acting in school. I paid my traveling actor-trop dues on the road for a couple years. So getting to hear from other actors is very rewarding. And I know you worked with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which is incredible, but I would just love to hear how your interest in acting first began. And I guess sort of your path to brought you where you are today. Well, I have always wanted to do comedy in some way, shape, or form. And I, you know, if anybody's heard other podcasts, I feel like people are like, this guy has like one story.

And that's the only thing ever tells. But it is like, this is like my origin story. But like, I have a, I have a framed speech that I made in second. great about how when I grew up, I'm going to be an actor, or no, I'm going to be a comedian. And I've always been interested in it, but I was, I kind of talked myself out of it a lot of times. I would sort of dip my toe into it, and then something would scare me and I'd back off. And I thought maybe I'd be a comedy writer. But it wasn't until, so I went through college and I sort of didn't join the acting program there. I was an English major, but I was interested in, you know,

maybe doing like an improv group. I went to the theater department and asked the theater head of theater department like if he had any advice. And he basically said like unless you devote your life to acting, you have business, no business, you know, playing with its tools and stuff. And, you know, for a freshman in college, that was enough to be like, okay, I give up. Thank you. So I started a band and I would do the band.

And then that was sort of got my performing, you know, jollies out. And then I, and then I started, I got interested. in photography. So up until probably about 28, that's what I was doing. I moved to New York to go to do photography and I was assisting and doing my own work. And I became roommates through mutual friend with Rob Cordry, who's an actor. He used to be on the Daily Show and he created Children's Hospital and he's another UCB person. And he's honestly the person who got me into doing it because he just said, you're funnier than my sketch group I perform with. We should start to do stuff. He started to take some classes ahead of me at UCB.

And this was early, I mean, literally like maybe the first or second wave of classes that they were doing way back like 20 years ago. And then once I started, I took some, the improv class, that was the thing that made sense. That was the thing that clicked for me and was the vocabulary and the approach that I needed to sort of feel safe, I guess, or confident. And honestly, like, I've taken one acting class at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, but everything else has just been improv, just doing improv shows and just trial by error, you know. So, you know, my acting training is literally improv through and through. And for a lot, you know, sometimes I did a show called selfie and we were discussing our respective training backgrounds. And a couple of the people on there were, you know, British Academy trained, just had like tools beyond what I could ever imagine.

And everybody was just like, well, this is what works for me and that's what has worked for me. But I will admit, and I've said before, I was like, I'm kind of terrified of acting classes. So I found my comfort zone and it seems to pay it off. I would say sober. I mean, again, like your extensive resume shows that there's definitely a room for improv in television, especially nowadays. You hear so often that, you know, this wasn't scripted or we just let the camera roll and see what happens. And I think, honestly, that's when you get the best comedy, for sure. And then the other thing I think I've learned over the years in doing improv is that it is another approach to the text.

Because for a long time, I had a problem but a fear of sort of the written text was I felt very beholden to an exact idea that the writer or director had in mind. And if you can't execute that, then you won't be able to figure out how to. So as far as improv gave me, it diffused some of the fears I had around feeling like the script was something that I had to execute in a very specific way. And I found that I sort of, in learning text and stuff, I will kind of improvise the scene. Like, I'll learn the text and then I'll kind of make it fit for my mouth if I have there's some parts that I'm hung up on. And then once I feel comfortable getting the idea of the scene by, you know, roughly sort of approximating the text, and I'll, then the text will sink in for me. And I can sort of own the words and then stick to the script a little bit better. But yeah, improv is just always, and now I know that it is, it is my acting tool that is most comfortable for me. And even if I don't create something on, you know, if I don't come up with sort of like a liner or improvise something, I know that. I'm still, I'm still improvising the scene. And I just tell myself that.

I was like, oh, I'm just improvising the scene, even though I might be doing it word for word. For me, it just kind of like takes away some of the scary burden that I kind of put on myself, you know. And I'm sure most actors feel that immense pressure. Yeah. I mean, the first, like the first time I did a, I did a part on House. And I discovered pretty quickly that they wouldn't mean to say exactly what was on the page. And, you know, this is early. on when I was just starting out, you know, getting big jobs, bigger jobs.

And I was like, oh, my God, if I can't say this word, right, I'm going to mess up. And now I just like, now I realize, like, everybody is, you know, finding it in the moment stuff. You just want to sort of not hang up production and cost people a lot of money or time. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, you're on strict deadlines at some point. You can only stumble through for so long. But, yeah, I can imagine it's a very delicate balance.

from project to project. That's pretty cool. And improv is, improv is writing, you know. And so if you sort of think in terms of like, all right, well, somebody improvised this script, they wrote this script at the time. I like to kind of put myself in the room with the person while they're writing the scene. And that kind of helps me to approach it sometimes, too. I just, I imagine sometimes I'm a magical Pegasus that poops out dollar bills.

And that makes me too. So there are different approaches for everybody. Yes, there are for sure. Well, I mean, fast forwarding to this past week, Brian, how did this opportunity to be cast in the X-Files come about? Everyone's dream as an X-Files fan is to get on this show. So I got to ask, man, how did this happen? I just got the audition through my agent, and I will give a shout out to Kamail Nanjani, because he and I had done a show together.

And then I guess shortly after that, he did his episode last year with Reese Darby, the one about, I think it was Mulder and Fox versus the Werewolf or something. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. One of the, again, one of the Darren Morgan comedy episodes. Yeah. And Camel just put in a good word for me.

Darren was like, who do you have any recommendations for this kind of part? And he was like, Brian Husky would be great. And so I wasn't right for that part, but I guess I, you know, stuck in Darren, or I was reminded that Darren, you know, Darren was like, oh, yeah, I know that guy. And so I guess he kept me in mind. And so when I did the audition, he wanted me. And I didn't know this until I read an interview recently. It's like he had to fight for me in the park, like, and stuff. And thank God he did because it honestly is like one of the greatest work acting experiences of her.

had. It was so fun. That's awesome, man. And I mean, the reception to this episode has just been incredible. I mean, probably the standout of the season. We still have what? Another five to go, I think, something like that. But, you know, Morgan's work has just always been the standout. And it paid off, man, for sure. I mean, your role in this episode was amazing. Yeah. And just as far as, like, the experience of it, I had no idea what the end result was going to be because and he told me is like everyone comes into my thing you know if they're hired they think that they have to sort of do the the ex file style of kind of like noir-esque

ogravitas or whatever he's like we're going to do a take like that and then we're going to do a super goofy one and then we're going to do one that just just is a mixture of both and I'm going to sort of choose what is what works for which part of it and I I'm not a big X files you know I watched a little bit when I first started, but I, you know, I'm not a big fan, like, I wasn't aware of his style or his approach and stuff. And then seeing the end result, I was like, oh, that's awesome. Like, I love, he, he's, he's like genre bending. You know, he's, he's doing sort of multi-layered, like, satire politically, socially to the sci-fi genre. And just this far into the X-Files canon, he's sort of getting super meta about like a

you know, and just the fact that they have all these flashbacks and references, and he's referencing himself. Right. Up in the episode is great. Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, now that the episode is aired and, you know, it's getting all this positive feedback, myself included, if that means anything. I think I've watched it at least five times now. But I'm sort of wondering, Brian, in your own words, would you mind kind of giving us the rundown of what this episode was about? I mean, you did summarize some of the, you know, the themes.

that Morgan worked with. But for anyone who has either seen it or kind of wants the breakdown from somebody in the episode, would you mind giving that to us? Do you want the sort of synopsis or do you want sort of what may be the larger, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do the larger picture, I guess. Yeah, I think the larger picture is this is a very apt and pointed criticism, maybe not even a criticism. I'd say it's sort of an identification of the polarization of our country and bipartisan politics.

And then it is a direct criticism of Trump's, I guess, spearheading of that or, you know, being the figurehead instigator of a lot of this tension. Because the episode talks about different perspectives of the exact same event, different perspectives on the exact same facts. And that's exactly what's going on now, you know, like facts. do not hold the same intrinsic sort of power that they once did. Facts are malleable at this point. Information is malleable. Truth is malleable, which is interesting in terms of the X-Files because there are, you know, it is the truth is out there. It is two people trying to sway the society as a whole that there's more beyond just what they see in front of their face. And now that's gotten to sort of like a basic level of like there's more going on than you, then you're being told, but you're being told to only accept what you're being told. So that's the, that's the thinky version of it, I guess. Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, I guess the less thinky version, the sort of more on the surface level is you, your character in this episode is the third agent, as it were, you know, there's Reggie, there's Dana, and there's Molder. And we even got a new opening theme with you included in that. And this is sort of based around the idea of the Mandela, effect, which plays a big part in this, which is kind of the, I would say, the catalyst for what you just mentioned with this big picture look at the episode. So I guess I'd love to hear kind of your idea of what you thought of when you read this script about this phenomenon known as the Mandela, or in this case, the Mengel effect. When I did the audition, you're just given the sides for, I think I was given the sides for two scenes, maybe three scenes.

And none of that information about the Mandela effect, the mingle effect, none of the sort of Trump criticism was in there. So when I read the actual script, I was like, whoa, this is, this is far beyond what I imagine what would be going on. In addition, I was like, whoa, I have so many more words than I thought I would be having. This is great. But I thought it was great. I mean, like I said, I think it's a really, if it was just an episode that dealt with memory being sort of malleable and sort of people's perspective of the same event being, I guess, separated. I don't know. If everyone, you know, it's like a Roshaman kind of thing.

Like everyone has a different view of the same event. That, I think, would just be a fascinating episode unto itself, but having this sort of political content behind it. was really great as well. And I don't, you know, I, I think the Mandela effect is, is plausible just in that memory and perspective is fallible and malleable. And people are far more, I don't want to say self-centered, but your perspective on the universe is, is your perspective. Yeah.

You can only, your lens on what the world is and your experiences is always going to be yourself. So I think that's just inherently true. I heard recently somebody said like you it's impossible to have sort of objectivity about yourself and I think that's true. Because even if you're like, no, I know myself. It's like I know myself within the parameters of what I know about myself or I'm willing to admit it by myself. I mean, I mean, that's a prime example of, you know, I've heard you in other interviews say like, oh, I went into an audition and I think I did horrible. And then, you know, once later you say you were perfect for the role.

You got it. Like, that's a good example. of like looking outside of yourself. You know, we only see this 2D version of ourselves. So you do have to wonder. Yeah, totally. And I mean, even in this episode, it was so cool that, you know, supposedly your character created the X-Files.

He got Molder the I Want to Believe poster. These were really interesting. Now, these are episodes that X-Files fans hold so close to their hearts, these Darren Morgan episodes, these, even the pilot, the pilot episode, you are now a part of in this reality. What was that like sort of going back and learning that you were going to be a part of classic X-Files? And I mean, even in the bigger picture, like being a part of a franchise that's been around for so long. Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's sort of above and beyond anything I could hope for because it's, yeah, I sort of got like the episode buffet where they're like, have at it, you're going to get to be in. this and this and reference this. And it's funny, like, not that I looked at all, but on Twitter, there are a lot of people were just saying, like, you know, I got to sort of live the X-Files dream of being in all these, these episodes and commenting on them. And, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty phenomenal. I remember just sitting back and being like, oh, ha, you know, just like screaming like I was watching the Super Bowl.

It was great to be like, I went in for my costume fitting. They're like, okay, so I think you have 32 looks. I was like, what? Whoa. What's going on? Yeah, there's so many, so many costume changes. That one, the run where they sort of show the various jobs I've had in my past, that was just like, you know, go in the room, change, come back out, shoot it, go back in the room, change.

And it was this, me and the costume department were like, go, go, go, go, move, move, move. Boot camp for, I can imagine. How long did it take to shoot your scenes? Well, it was a 10, I think it was, wait, no, it was an eight-day shoot, I'm pretty sure. Okay. Either seven or eight day shoots. And I don't know. Each one was different.

You know, some of them took a long time. Like a lot of the stuff that we did in the parking deck, those were like, you know, 12-hour days. Yeah, each one was different. Some were very quick, long, and involved. So I have no answer. All over the map. All over the map, yeah. How was it working with Duke of Ney and Gillian Anderson on this?

You know, again, you know, they've become so, the show is them. And then, you know, this person. And your role was very big in this, which is another thing. As like a featured role, you know, a lot of actors don't get that opportunity. You were like the bulk of this episode. How is that filming with like the two main stars of a franchise? Well, at first, I made sure that I rubbed their nose in it. I was like, I'm getting more screen time than you guys.

So just know that. You know, you're on your way out. I'm the new blood. No, they were great. They were really gracious. And, you know, I think once they kind of discovered it, that I was funny and nice to chat with because I'm sure they've had you know in that in doing that you sort of a you have a cavalcade of just people who come through who can do their job but sometimes

they're not the best to hang out with possibly once they kind of prove that I was not crazy they're like yeah you're cool we chat in between and but you know they're long days everybody needs to sort of like step aside and and and check their phone a bunch and I would definitely go off and can I run my lines if I have like a big soliloquy you know a few pages of dialogue to do and stuff but yeah They're really cool. And then Gillian posted a picture on Twitter just the very first day that I quickly realized like, oh, she, okay, they're very famous because I just, that was like blew up my Twitter. And as a result, a friend of mine who works at Deadline Hollywood is like, do you only write a story about you being on there? I was like, yeah.

Yeah, I guess let's do it now. Yeah. All of a sudden you get, you know, 10,000 followers out of nowhere. Yeah. Let's do it. Well, that's pretty cool. That's good to hear, you know, as fans, you know, who would never have access to information like that.

It's cool to hear that, like, they're so down to earth. And they're there to do their job, and so are you. And I can imagine, like, vice versa. There are some people that you've probably worked with in Hollywood and whatnot who aren't that, you know, accessible or inviting. So that's cool. Yeah. And I think it's also, you know, at this point, they've been doing it for,

A long time. Yeah. Breaking, coming back to it. So I don't know. I mean, I always appreciate working with people who do approach it as a job, you know, because ultimately, if you think about what we're doing, it's definitely not brain surgery and we're not saving lives and all that those kind of cliches. You know, if people do approach, do have that kind of air of, like, what they're doing is,

or they are more important than anyone else because of it. I'm always, it's a turn off, you know. Because it's just like, yeah, everybody has weird jobs. If you think about everyone's job, everybody's job is weird. So it's just like, we're unusual. That is a good point for sure. Well, I mean, sort of, you know, wrapping up the X-Files, talk, Brian. Another big part of the episode has to do with the final case that Reggie, Scully and Mulder supposedly solved together.

And that was finally finding the truth. Wow. Yeah. So we've got an alien that comes out on a segue. And this entire vignette was unbelievably ridiculous, hilarious. Very Darren Morgan. Let me tell you a great thing about the segue, the little, I guess what is called hoverboards. Yeah, yeah.

The actor who played the alien just brought that with him to me. And he was just riding in the parking lot. And Darren was like, oh, that's great. I want you, I'm going to have you ride that over to them. He didn't tell us that he was going to do that. But I'd seen them before riding it. So I was like, oh, I just figured it. that they knew about it.

And after we did the take, they like burst out laughing. It was like, we had no idea that was going to happen. It was really funny. Oh, that's really cool to know. Again, you know, just the idea that Morgan's willing to be, you know, open to whatever happens in the moment. I love it. Yeah. Well, getting back to that, you know, that idea of the truth, I would not be doing my, uh,

euphological work here, right? If I didn't ask you your personal thoughts about UFOs, man. The phenomenon, if there's aliens out there, what sort of stake do you put in these sort of things? You know, we talk about this every week on somewhere in the skies. But for you, someone coming in as an actor and doing this, I would love to hear if you did any sort of research into this stuff or what your personal take on all of it is. Well, you know, I got people of Earth. I did a little research on more so on people who believe in UFOs. And in doing that, I sort of learned about like, oh, yeah, this is probable and this is possible.

But I was more interested in researching people that have those beliefs. And because that's what the show is about, like, people who believe in aliens but are sort of like have to have a therapy group through the day as a result. But I, I, I've never been, here's my, here's my stance. If we are the only life forms out there, it's tragic, you know, because I don't think we're doing a good job of it right now. Yeah. But the probability of that is, is so small. But I don't, where I sort of like have a separation is like, I don't know if the technology exists where they could come to us. And I say that only because I think I have maybe.

comparison to the technology that is out there or the, who knows, like, celestial awareness that's out there, I think I have a very caveman perspective and sort of limitation as to what I can imagine. That makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It really is the lens you look through it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, going back to the episode, it's the kind of the Darren Morgan episode is the kind of thing of, like, I'm going to have, I have my perspective on that truth based on, you know, the truth I have for myself. And someone else might have a very different truth based on encounters they might have had. And so it's bridging the willingness or the awareness, the openness, I don't know what kind of nest is going to be to say like, oh yeah, now that is true. Now I have sort of proof of that.

And the thing, I guess in doing my research, the thing that was very solidifying for me was, and I can't remember his name, but there was a Harvard performance. who did a lot of profiling of people who said they were abductees. John Mack. Yes, John Mack. And for him to sort of put himself out there, you know, as this esteemed institution and say, like, I think it's true. I don't think these people are lying. I think there's a consistency in the narrative that they share and the sort of affect. And he's like, yeah, I'm a believer.

So, you know, that's that kind of thing. Like, well, science will prove it. And that helped it. Absolutely, man. I think it's, you know, it's whenever that convergence of science and belief come together, when I think we'll finally know that truth that you guys discovered in your episode. But it is interesting when you have people like a Harvard, you know, a psychologist or astronauts coming forward saying they saw stuff when they were out there. And it really does make you wonder, like, how true is all of this?

and these people claiming to have been abducted by aliens or made contact. I consider myself a skeptic believer. You know, I talk about this every week with people in all walks of life who have varying beliefs on it. So it's interesting. Have you spoken to people who feel that they've had encounters? Yes. I actually wrote an entire book where I interviewed hundreds of people about their encounters.

And again, you know, I had David Jenkins on, the creator of your show People of Earth, who said he, you know, he went to these conferences that they have or these support groups and talked to these people. And, you know, I sort of take the same approach of, yeah, I'm going to hear them out. And what my personal beliefs are, I sometimes try to set that aside and just live in that moment and say, these people firmly believe something happened in them, whether or not it was visitors from another planet who, you know, communicated with them. or took them up for experiments. I don't know. I was not there. So I try to keep the chance open that that's what may have happened.

But whatever is happening, it's affecting these people in many ways. And that's kind of more interesting to me, that sociological aspect to it all. Right, right. Yeah, because it's, you know, I guess the comparison might be the Salem witch trial, you know, where within a community, it's sort of a mob mentality takes over and skews. your interpretation of events to make a truth that's not there. But I don't know how that's, that's one of the things that's interesting to me about the show is that each person has individual real-life personal issues going on behind this larger event.

And at this point, it's been established that we have been, but we've all encountered these aliens and stuff. But, you know, initially you're like, we didn't know. So it could be, you know, like for my character, it could be the result of, like, trauma of his divorce and his own sort of insecurity and difficulties with like authority figures manifesting itself into a larger conspiracy, sort of like paranoia. So, yeah, I can see people having doubts even if someone like has a lot of proof and sort of belief in what they're saying.

And again, that's because, I don't know, it is, I keep going back to the Darren Morgan thing. is like when the the commonality between republicans and democrats conservatives and liberals if you look at it is like everyone wants to be safe and happy and protected and feel like they belong but there are two very different interpretations of what that means in execution but it's the same truth you know and so i think for you know as far as like believing in aliens people want to believe, I guess they want to believe that their experience of life is trustworthy and real and kind of solid. And when something like that happens, it's hard to make sense of it. And if you have the majority of people, I mean, like, no, that's crazy. It's very hard to be like, no,

it's not crazy. And I'm having a very hard time convincing you otherwise. Yeah, I think that that would be kind of daunting. Absolutely. That is a really good way to look at it. There's so many correlations between your episode of The X-Files and your character of Richard on People of Earth. I love it. I would love to see a crossover where Richard comes on the X-Files. I'm becoming very aware that I seem to be building a body of work of people who are maybe crazy or definitely have some serious issues going on. Because I just wrapped it last week, but I did a special last year and I'm doing another one this year for Adult Swim called Miss. their neighbor's house. That's essentially like a kid show that plays in an insane person's head.

And that's all about just someone sort of like trying to wrestle with his demons through a certain kind of lens. But then, you know, this year I did it after doing the X-Files and I was like, oh, I play a lot of crazy guys. You're getting pigeonholed, man. Yeah, yeah, very limited. I went to just some sane guy who just wants to question. That's when you hit us with like some huge, big budget biopic. Be like, oh, okay, okay. He's not just the crazy guy. Yeah, I'm just going to play a guy who serves coffee.

Yeah. Very boredful. After looking over your resume, Bright, I mean, it's amazing the amount of projects you've worked on. If there was one thing you could tell actors or writers out there about how to navigate such a respected career, what would that be? Wow. I'm hitting you with a curveball.

What advice would I give? I would say that you should. try to celebrate every job or victory that comes along, even if it feels like, you know, in comparison to someone else got a bigger job or whatever, it doesn't matter. Like, doing this is very hard. And you really have to kind of like have your own back and, and be proud of, of the, any momentum you get. Because I think I spent a good portion of my career early on being like, this is great, but this is cool, but I want this. And I wasn't able. And I wasn't able. to sort of like really savor, you know, the opportunities and experiences I was getting to have.

And then the other thing is just as much as you can be patient and know that even though something might not be happening now, everything is sort of footwork and your empire building a little bit. Even if you go for an audition, do great, you didn't get the part. If you make an impression on someone, that means something. and down the line, you know, hopefully universal pay off. But I think, you know, if I used to teach improv, I would just now in teaching that, I would say like if any of you people want to do this as a job, just approach it in a very best you can in a very zen fashion

and knowing that all you can do is go in, do what you can do, leave, and keep living your life. You have no effect on the huge, like, intricate web of people involved in a project who make decisions on whether you're part of that project or not. And even if you're fantastic, there might be something involved that is beyond your power. Like, he's fantastic, but he doesn't look good standing next to this person. And we've already cast this person. So for that small reason, we can't use him or her. So don't take it personally. As much as you can, don't take it personally, which is one of the hardest things to

in life in general. Absolutely. That's a brilliant outlook, man. Again, beyond being an actor, I mean, just in life in general, just don't take it so personal. And I think that's sort of a commentary on where we are at, at least here in America right now. Don't take everything so personally. So I will leave that up to the listeners.

But I have to ask before we go, what else are you working on right now? And where can we find out more about what you're up to? Well, I put a little plug in there for Mr. neighbor's house, but I just wrapped Mr. Neighbor's House 2, which is hopefully going to come out sometime this year, but I'm not, Adult Swim has a rather whimsical programming approach, so I'm not sure. But if you want to see the first one, it's on all my social media in the bio area. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at The Brian Husky. And then I'm on Facebook. Oh, and I have a fan page on Facebook called the Brian Husky's Brian Husky fan page.

And you can find out stuff there, but I'm not great at Facebooking. I tend to forget that it exists. Yeah, yeah, I think most of us have at this point. But we'll keep trudging on, Mr. Zuckerberg. Brian, this has been awesome, man. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, I really appreciate it. It was really fun to try to babble my way through these big ideas because they were, yeah,

There's a lot going on in the world right now, guys. Yeah. Hold on. Just hold on, please. We will get through this together. Get through this together. Cool. Awesome, man.

Take care. And thanks again for coming on Somewhere in the Skies. All right, man. Thanks for having me. Take care, Ryan. You too. Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of Somewhere in the Skies. And we're going to be taking a bit of a departure today on the show.

These are the episodes I love to do where we get to kind of stretch our muscles and talk to people. in all walks of life, about UFOs, about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, or even the future of space exploration and going to places we'd never been before. And for those of you who don't know, I'm, when I'm not a uphologist, a self-proclaimed term that we've coined here in the UFO world, I'm a playwright and a screenwriter, and I'm in that world of show business. And I absolutely love it. And you meet so many interesting people along the way. And you make connections you never thought you were. You would. And that's kind of what happened with our guest today. Many of you know Andrew Sanford, who has been on the podcast numerous times at this point,

talking all about UFO-themed movies and stuff like that. And he actually put me in touch with a comedian who we're going to be talking to today. And I'm super excited to have him on. We're going to talk about a new animated series that he has over at Comedy Central that just popped up and is making the rounds right now. So I'm super excited to talk to him. So let's not waste any more time. His cartoon or his animated series is called Maurice on Mars. And joining us today is the creator. And that is Tim Barnes. Tim, welcome to somewhere in the skies. Yes. Thank you so much for having me on. And I'm so like your life as a euphologist is so fascinating. First of all, I have to say, I'm not used to hearing the term euphologist, and I love it.

But you are the main character of so many science fiction shows and movies, a passionate UFO, someone with UFO interest, someone who wants to discover what's happening outside of our planet, who seeks new life, like they say in Star Trek, and who I imagine you have a lot of people in your life. life who don't believe a single word you say. And so that's what makes you a great protagonist. Like you're the guy. It's like I'm talking to the guy from all the sci-fi movies. Well, I really appreciate that. You know, full transparency, I am wearing an X-File shirt today. So that could not be more appropriate than today. But yeah, let's start with, I guess, how you and I first got connected. We both here in New York City. I'm in Queens. You're in an undisclosed location because I don't want people doxing you. But yeah, how did, of course, of course.

Let's get the seven degrees of separation between you and I, if you don't mind. Yeah, so our mutual friend, Andrew Sanford, connected us. I met Andrew at a show that a mutual friend of ours had. It was a one-man show about Star Wars that David Lawson did. And it was amazing. It was about his life growing up with, It was called The Prequels, and it was about growing up with the prequel movies coming out and how that affected his life. And Andrew was nice enough to ask me to open for that show.

And Andrew was also at that show. And we stayed in touch ever since. So actually, I interviewed the two of them in a podcast that I co-host with two other comedy writers called Yubnub that we kind of dive into all of the connective tissue of how I know Andrew and how I know Dave. which now leads me to you. Isn't it amazing how life works that way? It is, man. Again, like, I can't tell you the weird connections I made through this podcast alone. And that has to do with other comedians as well.

We've had people like Reese Darby, Kumal Nangiani, Brian Husky on the show, all because of their connections through, like, something they love, which is the X-Files. And some of them are even, I think all of them were actually on the show at some point, which is crazy. So I'm waiting. I'm waiting for that season 13 of the X-Files. Maybe they'll give me a call. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, it is what it is. Well, the real reason we're here is when I started looking at your work, I saw this new animated series that you came out with over at Comedy Central, which is Maurice on Mars. And I'm going to read quickly the sort of quick synopsis of this. Maurice on Mars follows the struggles of Maurice Robinson, a

20-something artist who snuck onto a utopian Martian colony only to realize it's repeating the same old earth problems, which does not surprise me one bit. It's brilliant, man. And I want to get into sort of how it came to be and everything, but let's start with who you are. Let's let the audience get to know you a little bit if that's cool. How did you first get involved with comedy? Do you do just writing or do you do stand-up? Yeah, what's your whole origin story? I mean, my origin story is that I grew up in South Central L.A. And I wasn't allowed to go outside as a kid, really. Like, I wasn't allowed to go around the block.

And it's not that I wanted to either. Like, I really loved TV. I loved books. I loved creating my own universes. I love movies. And I love science fiction in particular. And so it's a swirl of things. My first true goal in life was to invent Flubber.

because when the Robin Williams Flubber movie was about to come out, you know how you would get those schoolastic book pamphlets? I got myself the novelization of the Robin Williams version of Flubber. I read that. I went to go see the movie. I was dedicated. I was like, I want to be a mad scientist. I want to invent Flubber.

But I was so bad at math that I knew that that was impossible. And so then my brain was like, oh, well, clearly the thing that wants me to be a mad scientist is that these science fiction movies keep capturing my imagination, whether it be Flubber, whether it be Star Wars. And so I dove into really wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to create the stuff that I love. So then that was my huge passion. It still is I'd love to start, you know, creating movies.

I mean, this cartoon is a good step towards that in a sense. So went to Santa Barbara City College for a couple years to study, because they had a good film program there. Kind of stopped doing college, moved to, moved back home with my parents. And I was working at a movie theater. And I had this little thing where it's like I wanted to, I wanted to do comedy. And there were some people that knew that because I was a type of guy who would kind of repeat the same casual conversational jokes in any social setting just to see if they get the same reaction, that kind of thing. And so my two friends who had a band, they asked me to open for one of their bigger shows in L.A.

And I did, and to prep for that, I started going to open mics where it was like, I would be the only comedian type of thing. It was like poetry, open mics, music open nights. And I loved that. Did the show. It went pretty good. And then I kind of hatched this plan with my friend Ian Abramson, who I went to high school with, to move to Chicago and pursue comedy. we took some classes at Second City. I started to focus a little bit more on stand-up.

But parallel to that, I was still doing a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. So I was like in the stand-up world, but I was also being a video producer for different companies, being a podcast producer for different companies. And every step along the way, I kept trying to like sort of mold those two resumes together and get to a point where my resume would start to reflect the things that I wanted to do, which is essentially creating television, creating movies, creating just like fun, interactive stories for people to want to dive into.

And, you know, that's how I got here. I don't know if I can, you know, be cramped into one label. That's something I have a little bit of, uh,

uh, struggle with personally. But, uh, I think I'm just, you know, a comedy, comedy creator,

storyteller guy who does stand. up sometimes, but writes for television and knows how to edit a podcast every now and then. You know what I mean? You're hired, man. We'll talk off there. I need an editor desperately. No, well, and, you know, I've come across some videos. I know you worked on, was it the late show or the tonight show?

The tonight show, yeah, the night show, Kenny Fallon. Yeah, that was my first official TV writing job was on the reboot of all that on Nickelodeon. And that was a dream come true because I loved all that. Nickelodeon is a part of my DNA. It's a part of, you know, the comedy that sort of birthed my sensibilities was that 90s Nickelodeon stuff. Like, Hey, Arnold, Rocco's Modern Life, all that. Good. Kenyon and Kell, that kind of stuff.

So that was fun. Then I wrote for the Tonight Show for a year and a half all during the pandemic, a very twilight zone sort of situation where I'm writing for this, a historic institution of a late-night program from my apartment. And I had never met Jimmy in person, still haven't, never set foot in 30 rock for the job. It was just like a very surreal thing, but learned a whole lot from that. And since it was during the, it started off in Jimmy's house when I started when all the late night hosts were doing it in there, I was all the way to when I was in the studio with an audience and all that kind of thing. I feel like I wrote for five different shows. So I gained a lot of skills

from that. And then most recently, I wrote for a Nickelodeon sitcom, a new one called Warped, which is about a comic book store in a mall and the teenagers who worked there. And that was very fun. I wrote an episode called Plagiarize that featured Kevin Smith as a special guest, so that was really cool. I got to meet him in person. And all the while, in the summer of 2020, I had pitched this idea to Comedy Central

for this animated project called Maurice on Mars. And I've been working on that for two years. And now it's finally out. And I'm excited that people can see it. Sorry, I almost feel like I'm rambling on these things. No, man, see, this is what I like. I love hearing, like, the journey of a creative and how they got to where they are.

Because I'm the same way. Again, people know me on this show as a UFO person. But we all, outside of these, like, big hobbies or interests we have, it's more than a hobby for me at this point. basically a second job. I'm not going to lie. And I love it. It's as close to being Fox Mulder as I'll ever get. But I love hearing, like, what inspires you to create things and kind of that journey. And there's so many, like, tangent questions I want to ask, but I know we only have limited amounts of time. But, like, I think it's great that you got to work with Kevin Smith, even though you

didn't get to step foot in 30 Rock for the other job. And at least you got to meet Kevin Smith over at Nickelodeon, which again, I'm a kid of the 90s. I love Kevin Smith. I love Nickelodeon back then. So I think I think you won out in that one. I know. It's like two elements of the 90s came together in a way that no one would ever expect. You know what I mean? But yeah, he's really cool. I think I gave like absolutely zero impression on him. You know what I mean? Because I never know if I should like fan boy out or I always try to play it cool and I think a little too cool. But what was amazing is that he is so dedicated to providing joy to people, like the way that he just kept keeping the crew laughing throughout the day that he was on set, it was, it was absolutely

phenomenal. Like, he is, he's a true entertainer, Kevin Smith. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, a keeper. He's like a keeper of the, of the flame of nerddom, it feels like. Yes, we're lucky to have him, love him or hate him, love his work or hate his work. Like you can just see the passion and like, yeah, he made it to that level where like he can pretty much do what he wants. And he continues to do the things he loves. And you can tell that's in the world of pop culture and comic books. And it's amazing.

It's amazing to see someone like him and the trajectory is taken. And, you know, I'm assuming you and I are kind of the same way. Like if we ever reach that level, which would be amazing. and I think you're well on your way, my friend, you're well on your way, that you stay true to like what you love. And I think that's why he has such a big following. Yeah, definitely. He's like a, he is sort of a character in the same way that Stan Lee was.

Like he's created an essence that is beyond who likely the true Kevin Smith actually is. It's almost like he's his own superhero, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, it makes you wonder who's the, who's the, who's the, a real Kevin Smith, Kevin Smith or Kevin Smith. You know what I mean? Ooh. Yeah. He's got the glasses on and who's he doesn't. I got you. I got you. Well, I guess I got to ask who's the real Tim Bart? Have you ever? And I'm

sure you saw this question coming on a UFO podcast. Have you ever seen a UFO or what you think was a UFO? Have you ever had a weird paranormal experience? Anything like that. I mean, it's hard to, and I'm sure you've probably talked about this on the podcast before where like sometimes you have a dream that's a little spiritual. And it feels like there's some wiggle room in terms of like what could be an alien, what could be, you know, something that usually people think is sort of a metaphysical or religious experience. I will say that when I was a kid, I would very often, and I grew up in L.A., so lots of airplanes close to L.A.X. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

I would always think I was seeing a UFO at night, driving in L.A., where there's nothing but lights on the freeway, and then you look up at the sky, and you see something. And I'm sure that they were all just airplanes, but it was always just like, yeah, I think I just saw a UFO. I had that feeling very often. But no, no, I can't say that I have any specific visions or memories of feeling like I had an encounter with an alien. I had one dream when I was a kid where it was like I wanted to walk downstairs in this dream to get to the fridge. And I feel like I literally saw Satan at the bottom of the staircase. God. Wow. He clearly did not want you getting that midnight snack.

Wow. Can I ask, what did it look like? Is it like a prototypical sort of Satan? What do we have going on there? I think it was sort of prototypical. I can't remember exactly. It looked a lot like that sort of, you know, there's that one character in the canteena scene and a new hope that has the horns and looks like the devil. It's kind of like that, I think.

Okay. No, thank you. Yeah, I think the only aliens from the canteena I want to see were the fun, the canteena band, to be honest, they were fun. But I think L.A. is probably the best area to be an alien probing Earth, because it's nothing but, you know, it's constantly something in the sky, constantly hearing airplanes landing, constantly helicopters, you know, so it's the best. It is.

I spent two years in L.A. And I had the, you know, the opportunity to go out to, like, the Mojave and stuff like that and actually go out where there's, I can't believe I'm saying this, where there's stars. Because you and I have both lived in L.A. and New York where the light pollution is insane. And we don't see a lot of, there's not a lot of UFO reports in major cities, let alone New York or L.A., but you go just a little bit outside, either the Hudson Valley here in New York or, you know, out to like Joshua Tree out in California. And you will see something, something extraordinary, whether it's from another planet or not. That's yet to be seen. Yeah, whether it's because of the ayahuasca or that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we should have prefaced that. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's get to the core of this. Maurice on Mars. How does this project come to be? What kind of inspired you to tackle the issue of colonization? That's kind of the overall theme here. What if we get to Mars?

What if humans finally make it? And that is mirroring reality right now. Your series could not come at a better time, Tim. We're getting news, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, about we're almost there. We're there. We're getting audio from it. Yeah. Mars is something that I think every, you know, specular fiction writer,

every science fiction writer is obsessed with. And it feels like a symbol at this point of either a threat or an opportunity for peace. I feel like people have that same thing with aliens and UFOs, too. It's either a symbol of like someone who's trying to attack us, to probe us, to experiment on us, or people who are coming seeking to help us. And so using Mars as that symbol. And I've always been a fan of Ray Bradbury who wrote a book called The Martian Chronicles, which is a series of short stories speculating on adventures on Mars.

And he also has a lot of stuff that tackled social issues with science fiction as well. He has a story in the Martian Chronicles about these black people in the South who pitched together money to build a rocket that will take them away from all of the the dangers and the horrors of America onto a rocket to Mars. And then it's all about how the white people around them are reacting to this news. And then in another book of his, another collection of short stories called The Illustrated Man, there's a story called The Other Foot, where the concept is that black people left Earth many years ago, 20 years ago or so for Mars, and they've been living on a colony there.

And then 20 years later, all of a sudden, there's a lot of a sudden. lone rocket to the planet from a white man telling them, okay, we've, we've, we've destroyed Earth. World War III brought everything to a halt. We're, we're in extreme danger. Can we please bring some people to your, to your land here? We'll do whatever you want. So there's also a long history of like dealing with social issues. I mean, of course, with science fiction, science fiction being a sort of mirror to,

to what's going on in our actual world. And I had been going through this thing in the past five years or so where reading all this news about Mars, seeing that all these billionaires are planning, you know, to privatize space, to privatize to kind of bring an element of capitalism and of our Earth experiences to other planets and to outer space. It became pretty concrete in my mind that we are going to be on Mars in about 20 years or so. And so with that being a concrete fact, whether that's a little bit off or not, my question, whenever I was like a couple drinks in with someone at a bar or something, my goal to conversation,

because this is what I've been thinking about is, okay, what will happen to religion, what will happen to culture, what happens when there are two human cultures, one that's on one planet, one that's on another, and how will certain things translate when we know for a fact that we are, some people are going to be on another, an entirely different planet. And so with that circulating in my mind, we fast forward to, there's a global pandemic. I'm working for the Tonight Show from my apartment. There's the murder of George Floyd, which sparks this massive wave of protests, people having a social and racial reckoning in America and across the globe.

And I'll never forget it. It feels like, I believe it was the next. day after Donald Trump probably tweeted or stated that he was going to sick the National Guard on the protesters, the Black Lives Matter protesters, that the first SpaceX, the first private rocket launched in the space. And to me, that was the clearest vision of what is actually happening. You couldn't even write it. It's just like the world is on fire. The billionaires are going to, you know, the rich people are going to space. And so around that time, Comedy Central was looking for specific people to create something in the animated space.

And I kind of filtered all that stuff that have been swirling in my brain into this one concept called Maurice on Mars, which is a, like you said, it's about a struggling artist who works at a coffee shop on Earth, sneaks onto a Martian colony. That's supposed to be a utopia. The only job he can get there is also at a coffee shop. And the idea is that everyone who, to keep this a utopia, to make this utopia work, everyone gets a mandatory fact inhibitor chip that blocks certain Earth memories about things like war, things about all kinds of conflicts so that you can keep the peace on this colony. But since Maurice snuck on, he doesn't have that chip. And so he's literally the only person who can see how this colony is just repeating the same problems. So he's kind of the only hope for for actual change and peace on this colony. It's sort of a classic, you know, tree of knowledge situation or question happening there.

And it's also a parallel of an element of my own life. When I had first moved to Chicago to pursue comedy, I remember one of my first jobs was at a Dunkin' Donuts, a horrible job. And then I always had the night shift so I couldn't pursue my dreams of doing comedy at night because I was stuck selling donuts. So it's also about that sort of tension that I think a lot of artists have where you're not allowed to pursue the real thing that drives you because you got to pay rent,

you know, making lattes or whatever. So there's kind of a lot of that I tried to pack into. It's only going to be three episodes and they're all about five minutes, but I tried to pack enough in there that hopefully gets people interested and if they want more, maybe it could become its own show

or, you know, maybe I'll just write a series of novels with this character. Cool. Well, and that's a thing. Like, the way you explain, you know, kind of the overall theme of it, it's very powerful. And I think it's something that deserves a bigger space to tell that story and kind of convey the messages you're trying to get out there. And, you know, those three episodes, like you said, could literally turn into anything. It could turn into a movie, a cartoon, a novel. But it is.

It's these big ideas that have been around for a long time, but it's how you convey it to an audience. And I think, again, like, we're living in an age now where kind of, I guess, adult animation. Not like in the sense of like, oh, X, X, X, X, X, but like, adult. comedy such like family guy and stuff like that. They're a big thing now and they weren't really a thing some 20 years ago and kind of tackling those social issues. You know, love or hate something like family guy.

Like there were times they did tackle some really big things. Same with South Park. I mean, that South Park was so in your face with it that it was brilliant the way they tackle those things. So I love this idea of, again, someone going to Mars and just like you said, the same issues start to arise. Because just because you're going somewhere different doesn't mean it's going to change, I guess, the problems you had on another planet. It's an easy escape from the problems in my opinion.

And I love the concept, too, that Maurice is the only one who doesn't have these memories of, or excuse me, does have these memories of Earth. And nobody else does. And, you know, we can't run away from what we've done in the past. And, you know, just because we destroyed Earth and go to another planet doesn't mean we're not going to do the same thing over and over and over again. Oh, God, it pisses me off so much, man. And I was also... Yeah, please. I also really wanted to create the world of Mars in a way that was casual and not hyper-sci-fi.

because I think sort of like a hyper-ci-fi has already been done with shows like Futurama and, you know, this sort of, and I didn't want it to be a world where, you know, aliens necessarily exist. I wanted us to still have that issue on Mars that we have on Earth of not quite knowing if there is extraterrestrial life. But there is one character who very likely is an alien but is in hiding. And so a question is, you know, why, why is she there? Is she there to study human life? Is she there to escape something, some bigger thing that's happening with other aliens beyond Mars? Is she from Mars? There are a lot of things to be explored there. But I didn't want to, I didn't want it to be in that sort of science fiction lane where there are just tons of weird-looking aliens. everywhere. I wanted to be a very grounded science fiction exploration of humanity, basically,

and also funny, and I hope people find it funny, too. Yeah. Yeah, this ain't your canteena, for sure. Well, let's rewind just a little bit, Tim, if you don't mind. Could you tell us about the creative team behind this? I've got the little cartoona there. I know these are the animators. I believe they're in Brooklyn. And how did it come to be that you got hooked up with this company? And your voice actors, some pretty notable people, I might say. Yeah, tell us a little about the creative process, if you don't mind. Yeah, it was a bit of a journey.

There are a few different options of animation companies to work with, and I chose Cartoondah because they've done so many different styles of animation. and I felt like I could, and as someone who's new to both writing for animation and creating something animated, I wanted to work with the company that was a little more experienced. And so that was like a big reason why I chose them. And knowing that they could tackle a lot of different styles,

gave me confidence that we could figure out a specific style for Maurice on Mars. And beyond Cartoona, I was very excited to bring on this artist, Uche, who has this great webcomic called vibe check. And he's on Instagram as, I think it's U-C-H-O-M-A-A-A-A-A. And he creates these web comics that are so funny. I think he has a very unique style.

So we brought him on to design the characters. And I think you can see an element of that and the look of all the characters in Maurice on Mars. It's, yeah, and everything, it's all this very specific process for animation where we had whittled down who we wanted to reach out to for cast. And I think we ended up with a wonderful set of voice actors. We have Lori Beth Denberg from all that, of all that fame,

from the vital information for your everyday life. She's the voice of Beta, Maurice's boss. We've got this wonderful comedian and Saturday Night Live writer Clara O'Kane, who voices Maurice's co-worker Janice. We've got this great comedian, Sean White, not the snowboarder, the comedian, to voice this character who's like a combination of, he's a combination of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson. And his name is Braxton Tusk.

And so he pops up there and then. I do not want to meet that character. We've got a Shoke Condobolu. I used to produce a podcast that he would co-host with his brother, Harry Condobolu. And he voices this sort of Martian hipster. his name is Alster. And finally, we have Joe. He's the regular in the coffee shop.

He's always reading a weird, different book. And he's voiced by one of the greatest comedians of all time, Dwayne Kennedy, Chicago comic, who I think should be a household name. He's just the funniest person in the world. Some of the funniest lines in all three episodes are things that he just ad-libs while recording. And I think he's just like, it's the best. He's the best. His character's amazing.

And so, yeah, so with animation, it's the first thing you do is you get your cast. This was recorded in the height of the pandemic. So we sent specialized mics to each actor, recorded them all individually, one at a time. So we got different styles of them saying different lines. And once we compiled all of that, the first thing you get is the radio play. And that's just the audio, maybe with a few sound effects and gave some notes on that. And once that's locked, that radio play gets sent off to the animators. And before it actually starts getting animated, there is a storyboard.

So a storyboard artist draws images of what each shot will look like to match the radio play. And that gets edited into what's called an animatic. So there's levels of notes and approval for each of these steps. And the animatic is just those images playing alongside the radio play. Lock that down. You send it to the animators. You get one cut of it, since the notes, get another cut, since the notes. You say, can I get a blink here?

Can they smile here? Can, you know, his hand do this, that kind of thing. Wow. And I learned a lot about just having to be super specific with my notes because there was only a certain number of rounds of notes that I could give. And I am so blessed that Comedy Central made me completely unaware of the budget. So I'm sure that, you know, there probably were a few times that I, especially on the first episode, where it's just like I'm kind of wiggling with what's technically within the means, you know.

But since the first episode, especially, like I had to just, could be hyper-focused on being as specific as possible with my notes, knowing that there's a limited number of times that I can, can, you know, rev this machine until we get the locked episode. And it's been just a wonderful experience because it's someone who loves film, studied film. This animation is filmmaking, and it deserves to be treated as such. and there's so many talented people that are involved

and that it takes to make to make something like this possible. And I already had a lot of respect going in, but I gained so much more coming out of it. And I love animation and would love to work in that space more if there's ever an opportunity. Again, I'm rambling, aren't I? No, this is so cool. I think, you know, for me, and I hope the audience too,

Like I had no idea what went into making a cartoon or an animated series. And that's, I never dawned on me. Yeah, it's kind of like a play. Like you start with a radio play like in the old days. You just hear it. You imagine in when you're listening to these old radio shows, you are imagining what's happening. What do these characters look like? You're sort of molding it in your head and manifesting it.

And that's so cool. When you see a cartoon, you're like, oh, it all just kind of falls into place. But no, there's so many unbelievably complex steps going into it. So that's cool that you had like a learning process through it all. And now I have so much more respect on how these things are made. That's crazy. And it's crazy too to think nowadays, yeah, you can mail a mic to an actor in Zimbabwe

and have them, you know, voice a character for you. And boom, like things have changed. This pandemic has really changed the workforce. in many, many different ways. Like you mentioned, your work with all the late night shows and whatnot. Like, these were all done remotely, which is crazy to think. Like, we're kind of in this age where like, do we need all these, you know, 50-story buildings in New York City? I know.

Can we just all work from home? It's almost like we're cooking ourselves up to a matrix of individualized matrices. Yes, exactly, man. Well, okay, that's cool. Well, I want to, before we move on from this series, some of those social issues. You know, in the first episode I watch, you've got the idea of colonization, and you also have this idea of drones. And I don't know, maybe I'm off the mark, but when I watch the episode, these drones, they are, quote, unquote, like a law enforcement. And the way they talk, the way they do things.

It's very reminiscent of some of the social issues we're dealing with in today's world with law. enforcement. And that's kind of what I took from it is this, you know, we live in an age where we can literally profile someone in a heartbeat, facial recognition, stuff like this, which is terrifying and scary. And I kind of saw that played out through the drone characters in the first episode. So what are some of the social issues you'll be tackling in future episodes, too? Episode two is about sports on Mars And episode three is about the very first recession on Mars So when it comes to sports, the conversation is about

Why we attach so much emotional importance to teams And what it means to own a team And I'll just say it. Episode two is about it's about that Braxton Tusk character who's a combination of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos. He owns the only two sports teams on Mars. And so the question arrives, what... I love a monopoly, if I've ever heard one.

Yeah, yeah. What does it mean to have a monopoly like that? What does it mean to know that that's a monopoly and not care? And what, you know, what even is a sport? So we dive into all of that. I really think that just like, seriously, saying anything and then putting on Mars at the end is already fun and feels like there's so many ways to explore it. You know, so, you know, policing on Mars, sports on Mars, recession on Mars, I think it's just a great way to draw connections to what's happening at our own reality right now. But also, hopefully, you know, everything is universal enough that you can attach it.

to other things as time goes by. Yeah, and I just naturally find so much humor in, I mean, it sounds horrible. Like, the world is horrible. But I think, like many comedians, it's in those tense societal issues that a comedic eye can point out certain ironies and still make it funny, but still make it, you know, something that you can think about in a way that. that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so that was a big goal for, for Mreece on Mars. And I think, like, this is the first project that is, like, something I've made on my own and that I think expresses my comedic voice in a very concise way.

So I'm just super excited that it's out. And I hope that other people can connect with it. Yeah. Hey, guys, Ryan here. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is a labor of love every week. And with that comes many different costs to keep the show running. That's where our Patreon campaign comes in. You give what you think the show is worth.

There's different rewards available all the time, including shoutouts on the show, early editions of main episodes, bonus episodes and content, and very soon, monthly patron hangouts, where we sit back and chat all things UFOs. So I hope you'll consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to join, visit Patreon. patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support and keep looking up. And we should mention you are in the show. You do play Maurice, right? Yeah, we didn't even mention

that. I know. I do play Maurice and I, you know, as vain as that may seem, I do think of him as someone other than myself. And like, if you look at all my emails, whenever I give notes about him, I say, can Maurice do this? Can Maurice do that? Can Maurice say this? Because I have to separate him for myself. I think I would be absolutely. absolutely insane if I were, if I were, you know. But I think for, for the, the process, it was, it just made sense to make the character look like me. I, I was up until like the very last minute about the decision, I was kind of torn about, should I have someone else play Maurice? Should Maurice have a different look? But I think with this all, like I was saying, being so condensed

in what is my actual comedic voice, it ended up making. making the most sense to make Maurice look like me. But he's much younger than me. He has a little more hope than I actually do. And yeah, yeah, he's an all-around sweet guy, that Maurice. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Hey, a lot of people who listen and watch my podcast, you know,

they sometimes think I'm playing a character. And to an extent, yeah, we're all performing in some way, shape, or form. So I'd like to think of myself the same way. I come off very optimistic on the podcast. And then I unrecord, you know, push, stop. And I'm like, oh, God, the world is a horrible, scary place. But hopefully the aliens will come and save us all someday, someday.

But hey, there's our transition. There we go. Yes. Are the aliens going to save us, Tim? Before we get to that question, what do you think? What are your personal thoughts on alien life? Do you think we've been visited? We have thousands of people claiming they've seen UFOs or they've encountered beings or even been kidnapped by them.

I mean, this lore goes back centuries, decades, if not centuries at this point. But what are your personal thoughts on these bigger questions of, are we alone? And if we aren't alone, what would that mean for our planet if, you know, they did come and land here one day? Or we did get the Mars and find, holy crap, they've been here for, you know, millions of years. Those are a lot of big, broad questions I just asked. Yeah, what do you think about alien life? I think there definitely is alien life. I think it's foolish to think that there isn't. And so I'm naturally just always interested in that question of like, when we discover this alien life, how that will affect everything. Because I think it will be a situation that's similar to the discovery that

the earth isn't flat or that the you know the sun doesn't revolve around earth we revolve around the sun i think we have we tend as humans to have this very um selfish view of things and uh i think there is some danger in uh in how you know the classic the day the earth still situation uh of how we will react to um the discovery of of alien life um i also don't think it'll be oddly of the last few years, I have a newfound appreciation for the human ability to adapt. And I think that we would actually, the two sides of the coin for me are like the world will be on fire. They'll be worldwide panicked. Religions will have to shuffle to figure out how they're going to deal with this new knowledge.

Do you try to convert the aliens? Do you try and hear what their religions are? But at the other end of that is that we have the ability to, adapt to so many things that maybe this just won't be actually as big a deal as we think. I mean, the fact that the sort of UFO revelations from the government came out during this pandemic, it was like the height of just not knowing how to take any information in that that stuff started coming out. I, I, like what a, what, you know, the, the fantasy,

see prone part of my brain is like, okay, what is it going to look like when the government finally admits UFOs are real? And I honestly can tell you, it wasn't in the middle of a freaking pandemic and, um, you know, political that's right to do it. Maybe, well, hey, that's a lot of people think. They're like, okay, we've thrown everything else at them. Like, if we're going to tell them that we've known for decades, aliens exist, something crashed in New Mexico in the 40s and we got bodies. Like, now's the time. So I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe they're slowly getting there. And we got a space force now. Like so many things happened in the last few years that were in the height of misinformation and just not knowing how to take anything in that like I genuinely want to know. Like maybe Donald Trump heard, had some weird information that was like, you know, maybe this is maybe we should have a space force. I don't know. I don't know what it means.

So I definitely have this overall feeling that we are preparing for something. If I were to put my conspiracy hat on, I think the government is trying to prepare us for something. I just don't know exactly what that is. But maybe, you know, I think there's alien life. There has to be intelligent alien life, the equivalent of ourselves, or higher. But, you know, I want to talk, I want to meet, you know, I want to see an alien cow. I want to see an alien, you know, we're so obsessed with the intelligent part. Like, I feel like we don't like an alien bird or, you know, let's talk about those.

Like, I'm sure, has life technically already been discovered on a microscopic level yet on Mars or anywhere else? I'm sure it has. I mean, there have been several times now where astrophysicists or astrobiologists have claimed that life has been found. That they're, you know, we have the, the, the, the, lake beds that have been found on Mars where they believe that ice and water had been there for centuries and that there was most likely life there at some point. And then you've got these little tardigrate things that are kind of just making their way through interstellar space.

They can survive literally in any climate. And those technically, those are not from here. Those are extraterrestrial. Now, I don't know how much more people need to really, I mean, they found like my stuff in rocks on Mars, like in the 60s or 70s or something. But it's always, it's not enough, Tim. And I think that's what people, they want that Martian. They want that intelligent, sentient life.

But hey, if we've discovered microbial life somewhere, those are the building blocks up to what we became on our planet. So hopefully it's out there somewhere. But yeah, man, I'm kind of with you. You know, I've been studying UFOs my whole life since. age 13. And I know closer to any answers of if we've been visited by something, if that's what are piloting these claimed UFOs that people have seen. But I can say, of course, I believe in alien life. It has to be. Mathematically, it has to be out there. So, yeah, a lot of questions. There's also the switcheroo theory, right? Yeah, please, please.

From Mission to Mars, remember that movie? I think Don Cheadle is in it. where the idea is that Martians left their DNA on Earth in order and that we kind of. Interesting. So we're the aliens somehow. There is this idea of panspermia, they call it, where we were seated somewhere else in the universe. And we just happened. The meteor fell on Earth. And that's where we came out of the ewes and it evolved into the beautiful, I guess I'm using beautiful.

beautiful very liberally creatures that we are today. But yeah, you do truly have to wonder, are we alien to our own planet? That's a big profound question to ask and brings up a lot of societal questions too. Like, you know, what if we do find those aliens? How will that change the way we perceive ourselves? You know, when we see a creature with a billion arms or legs or something like in the movie arrival like something so what we never expect like abstract yeah yeah and then we look at each other and like wow your your skin's like two shades lighter or darker than mine and we're like having

riots and wars over this kind of shit like come on like look at this thing in the sky let's let's work together on this please please if there's one thing i agree with ronald regan on it's we have to come together and realize we're human you know so I don't know big big big questions um you mentioned the government i'd love to put that conspiracy theory hat on for just a second um we have gotten in the past few years uh word that there was a secret pentagon UFO program and that they were looking at all these military UFO videos stuff like that um crazy crazy and then we learned that um they're creating a new pentagon UFO program and there were just congressional hearings on UFOs. Again, dude, this is like my dreams coming true

in a time where like so much is going on that no one's really paying attention. But what do you think governmental wise, if you had to put on that conspiracy theory hat, why now? Why are they doing all this? You know, we have a crisis, not a crisis. We have a flowbone invasion and war going on in Europe right now. to deal with. And then we have, oh, by the way, these UFOs, our military are seeing, they're not Russia, they're not China, they're not ours. What the hell are they? That's literally what our government said. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, what do you think? Why are they doing this all? And if I'm trying to think of it. Yeah. If I'm trying to think of a practical reason,

um, perhaps this is an agreement that the governments have to say, we're all spying on each other, but we don't want each other to get in trouble because we know that's the deal. We're never going to stop spying on each other. So let's just say that we don't know who. That's the, that is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, we do. We have to admit, like, oh, yeah, we got drones over in Russia.

We got satellites. That's how we know what they're doing. It makes perfect sense, yeah. But I, you know, I really don't, I don't know. I, I, I, I, the, my brain goes to and, you know, you have this brain as well where you're always constructing plots and, uh, like if I were to make a movie or, you know, my brain goes to the idea that there is intelligent life and the heads of our governments are always making deals with them because they know that we can't handle the, the, uh, the level of intensity of things. So maybe there's a, maybe there's a space illuminati, you know, maybe there's an alien. What do they want from us? What do they want from us? Maybe they asked us to start draining the oil out of Earth,

because there's something they'll get from that, you know? Maybe it turns into a nice cookie or something once all the oil gets drained out. That's it. We've solved it. That's it right there. I love it. Well, water, too. Like a lot of these UFOs are seen over our oceans.

And a lot of people are like, huh, do they have an interest in our water? Is that a source of like propulsion for them? Or do they need it on their planet? So they're taking it? Like we don't know. But they, you're right. There are these connections you can make. And I agree.

I do live in that world of like creating movie plots. And I think it's actually, it hinders my, my perception of the real world a lot. Because, you know, with this whole Russia thing first started, two days in, I'm like, world's ending. Like the bombs going off, this is it. And it took my partner to sit me down, slap me, and be like, Ryan, this isn't a movie. Like, there's so many moving parts to these things. And, like, get out of that Molder-esque brain space for just a minute

and realize, like, the world's much bigger and far more complex than we can truly think. So I agree with you. Have you seen the show Brain Dead? I'm obsessed with the show. You have to watch it. Do you have Paramount Plus? I do. Yes, I got it just to watch the TV.

Tony's. There's the theater near me. This show is going to blow your mind. It only had one season and it aired on CBS of all networks during the 2016 election cycle.

And so it is about alien insects who land on Earth in Washington, D.C. And they they go into the brains of people in the Senate and things like that. Half of their brain oozes out of their ears.

And so they're in control of all of American politics. And like they are the reason for the intensification of all of American politics. And it is the most surreal show that you can imagine coming on the CBS network. And I just, I love it so much. It was so good. And of course, it probably got canceled, right? Yeah, it got canceled. But the creators of that are great.

Like, they have that show evil. And yeah, like, I'm just obsessed with everything that they make. So that my brain goes to those sorts of things, too, sometimes. Not that I'm a reptile, everyone's a reptile kind of like reptile, reptilian secret society, government kind of guy. But, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, there's a time and a place for those conversations. We won't go there today. But yeah. But I think there's a human need to, to, even if there isn't, to seek this concept of higher beings and higher powers interrupting. And whether or not aliens are real, I think that there could just be an element of that natural need that we have to have some sort of explanation.

for certain odd phenomenon and things like that. Cool. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, I want to touch on, there's been a few recent news stories, Tim, that have broke. And I'd love to get your thoughts on these as kind of an outsider to the world of UFOs. These stories are mainstream, and they're out there like never before.

We're getting stories in CNN, Fox, insert mainstream media outlet here. of UFOs, and it's become like a part of everyday conversation. And I've got a couple of videos. I'd love to play if you're willing to stick around. Yeah. And your thoughts on these. Let me pull up the first one here. This is a story about NASA.

And, you know, we've got this thing in the Pentagon starting, where they're going to look at UFOs over military installations, like hundreds of reports of these things. But then we've got NASA, who you presumably would think would be the ones to look for UFOs. getting in the game now. So I'm going to go ahead and play that for you now. Okay.

UFO news, there have been unexplained sightings of flying objects in the sky for decades. The Pentagon recently formed a new office to study UFO reports. And now it's NASA's turn. The space agency launching a new team to investigate who or what may be behind the unexplained sightings. Here's NBC's Gotti Schwartz. The effort to uncover the mystery behind those UFO sightings, is about to get some help from some serious space pros. NASA announcing it'll form a new and independent team

to investigate unidentified aerial phenomenon or UAPs, but instead of focusing on classified encounters with military jets, the agency plans to examine data they've already possibly captured and may even include recordings taken by civilians. Just last month, this video shot on an iPhone during an air show in Miami appears to show something shooting up out of the water with people swimming nearby. And I saw it and I was like, what in the, like, no way. NASA's review, pretty.

Like this possible sighting captured in Utah by a film crew in 2016. I don't think it's a bird. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's exactly what a UFO stands for an identified flag object. Once the investigative team officially launches in the fall, they're hoping to cross-reference things like video with other data, like satellite images, or low-orbit observations made by, the space agency. This is what we do at now. So this is not our first rodeo. We discover and explore

many, many things in ways that, frankly, at the beginning, look almost like a miracle. And then as we go forward, looks like something new we never would have guessed. It all comes just weeks after Congress held its first public UFO hearing in half a century following hundreds of unexplainable sightings by the military in restricted airspace. And while most of those are excited, expected to remain classified, including at least 11 near misses with military jets. More everyday Americans baffled by what they've seen are now hoping NASA could soon provide more public answers. Do you have enough data to say what these could be?

At this moment in time, we do not have enough data to really conclude. Does that mean that it's not extraterrestrial life? I'm a scientist. And if somebody asks me, is this extraterrestrial life? Frankly, at this moment in time, the simple answer is the right one. which is I don't know. So that, what are your initial thoughts on that?

NASA is finally getting it. I love that last part. I'm a scientist. So the most objective answer I can give is I don't know, which I love it. But yeah, NASA is going to be looking at like civilian UFO sightings, which I think is cool.

Like the government's just interested in like UFOs over military installations and like things, whatever, like breaching national security. issues. But now we have NASA, a government-funded program, who's going to be like, yo, you see a UFO, send us the video, we'll try to find an explanation for it. I don't know. What do you make of this? NASA getting involved. I don't know what to make of it. You would think it was something that more the military or something or something a little more, something that would at least give the illusion of we think that all UFOs are something,

to do with, you know, probes from other countries or some sort of spy gear. But the NASA of it all definitely makes you first think that this is something from outer space. Good point. I think that's kind of the big thing here is, you know, militarily, they're looking at things, you know, just that their pilots have seen flying in the air. But like space, breaking that barrier between sky and. in space is a whole different story. So I'm hoping we're going to get like more stuff from maybe there's videos that were taken

from the International Space Station or stuff like that. Yeah. I want to know more about this department and who's working there and what, you know, when they get a case and they go back to the office and that's. Can you imagine? Would you do at work today? Oh, just looked at UFOs all day. One of them seemed to be, you know, sucking up tons of water from the oceans.

Yeah. I can't imagine. One almost just, well, that video said too, like the Pentagon, 11 near misses, which is terrifying. That, like, pilots have almost or even, like, civilian airplanes have almost hit these UFOs, no matter what they are. Whether they're like an interstellar craft or like a drone, like people could potentially get hurt from these things. So, yeah, they probably should figure out what the hell they are, in my opinion. Yeah, is there also a theory that. that these UFOs could be, can they be us from the future?

Is that not a theory? Dude, okay. I think you are a psychic because that is our next video. You are the king of transitions. I'm going to go ahead and play our next video. That is what we call synchronicity, ladies and gentlemen. Let me pull this one up, and then we will definitely have something to talk about on the other side here. A lot of stuff in the papers over the last couple of weeks.

The American government, basically, is going public on these sightings of so-called UFOs, unidentified flying objects, by marine pilots. And the more marine pilots who report these strange sightings of objects that seem to move at incredible speed around them, changed directions suddenly, no power source visible. The more reports come in, the less inhibited they are reporting them. And there have been a lot of sightings. They're taking very seriously. They're taking it very seriously. What do you make of it? Absolutely. I think it's interesting that the US government has made this public. The reporters out, there have been over 100 incidents. They're calling them unexplained aerial phenomena, the UAP. There's been a hearing in Congress. Of course, there weren't many answers to the questions because that's the whole point about the phenomena is still very much unexplained. But I think it's a good thing that there are discussions being had and this information is being made available. But what's your private theory? You must have one. Do you think these are things from realms beyond?

Do you think there's something to do with development of secret weapons by China, Russia? I don't think it's a development of any state nation or non-state organization, not at all. I think when you see the video footage, it is quite remarkable. It does seem extraordinary as to what these machines are capable of. There is no explanation for it. There are several theories about could it be something that has been developed in a classified program, but then why would this information be made public? Absolutely.

If that were the case. Is it some sort of uncrewed sort of robotic type objects from another civilization? Is it something I heard one theory where a pilot was talking about potentially in the future they've developed time travel? Is it something that's come back from the future? So there are all theories going around about what they could be, but ultimately we do not know. ding ding ding so did that again i can't believe you brought that up um this tim pique a one of our whoops hold on sorry hi there we go there we go man we exactly what we were talking about us from the future this is a interesting concept and to hear someone like tim peak one of our like leading astronauts

on the international space station uh bring that up was really interesting because a lot of people just think oh yeah it's et t or, you know, yeah, it's something from another planet. But there's all these other theories out there. Could they be interdimensional? Could they be us from the future? So what do you think? Us from the future, why?

Why do you think they would be coming back to visit us if that is the case? I would almost argue that more interesting than it being us from the future. If it's us for the future, it's probably a tourist thing. or, you know, like you get a tourist experience of the past or just trying to capture certain things. And the question is, at all those spaces that you do, that people document these unidentifiedifying objects, what is so interesting about these spaces that you're seeing them?

If they're coming from the future, I'm not necessarily sure. But if they're coming from the past, if somehow this technology existed with beyond our knowledge in the past, and let's say you're Russia or something and you're trying to get a glimpse of the future so that you can control certain things in the moment. I don't know. For me, that's the more interesting potential for time travel with unidentified flying objects. Yeah, how do you feel about it? Have you talked about it on the show before?

Yeah, so there's this really interesting case back in 1980. This happened in Suffolk, England. there were two NATO bases, joint military bases, one owned by England, one owned by the U.S. And forgive the ambulance here in Queens, if you can hear it. Yeah, so two joint military bases back during the Cold War. So we were over there ready, if anything, got really heated and whatnot. And this UFO was tracked on radar and then went into this forest, which was actually, it was called Rendelsham Forest. It was between the bases. A UFO landed in the forest. So then you had all these

military personnel, some like 70 plus officers that went out and actually investigated what the hell is this thing that just landed between our military bases. And when they got out there, man, and there's been a handful or so of the officers who have come forward since this happened and said straight up UFO. Like it was like triangular in shape. It had weird lights. It was sort of just hovering there. And some of them, including the deputy base commander at the time,

he went out there with a tape recorder and was recording what was happening in real time. And he said that this UFO that was hovering, it pierced a beam through the bunkers on the base and like a fath. the nuclear ordinance that was being housed there at the time, which is insane. And this is available. You can listen to the audio recordings of this. I might even put it in right here if people want to listen to it. It's a little startling to hear this thing happening back in 1980 and these officers being like, holy shit, like, what is going on? Like, is the world about to end? Are these aliens? Is this Russia? Like, what is happening? So, um, one

of these guys says that he touched the craft. It got so good to the ground. He touched it. And immediately some weird code was like downloaded into his brain. I'm not kidding you. This guy has said that when he touched the craft, something went into his head and told him, we are from the future. We're here to tell you to stop messing around with these nukes. Like this is going to be really bad in the future. Hence why we're coming back and messing with them. so that you're like stop doing this. And yeah, so pretty crazy. Again, this is one man's claim.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, there is a few books out right now by a professor named Michael Masters who has coined this term. I think it's temporal terrestrials where it's not so much extraterrestrial from another planet, but it's us from the future. And he goes into sort of the evolution of, like you said, they could be tourists or they could be coming back to try to change things of like Quantum Leap in summer sex. Dr. Samuel Beckett coming back. I don't know. But maybe it's, yeah, yeah.

You know how on Google Maps, when they're trying to get those images of exactly what your neighborhood looks like so that you can do that POV thing, that 360 thing? Maybe it's just that. Maybe it's, this is a future Google tech coming back so that you can get a 360 image of every decade on earth so you go back in time

and then now you have a downloadable you can basically watch the past because there's a 3D rendering of it that we've gone back in time to get so you can look at your grandfather meet your grandmother and you can look at that's a little scary

I'm not going to mind Of all the things, that's the scariest that you... I want to go back and watch like the Lincoln assassination. I can't even imagine the things people would want to go back in the past at our present expense. I know, yeah. Yeah, really interesting thing. Yeah. What'd you say?

The Pornhub ramifications of that are I'm afraid of... Yep, yep. Hey, hey, we had to get. go there if we had to go there. Tim, man, this has been so refreshing, man, to kind of have this conversation with you. It's unlike most of our episodes where we just cover like specific UFO cases and stuff like that. But before I let you go, I'd love to just get an idea from you of why you made Maurice on Mars. What do you want the audience to really take away from the themes that you tried to convey in this. And yeah, what do you hope people take away from watching

the animated series? I'm hoping that they find the characters endearing and that they want to learn more about them. And ultimately, I just want this to be a fun show that makes people think a little bit in a speculative way about our future and how, you know, the future of the, what's happening on Maurice on Mars is potentially a result of what happens because of the decisions we make now. and Maurice on Mars intentionally takes place in an unspecific future. There's no time stamp on when Maurice on Mars takes place. And beyond that, I think just what excites me about some of the characters is that they just explore different questions like Beta Maurice's boss is a self-hating robot who doesn't want to be. identify it as a as a robot and as an entrepreneur and so there's questions about you know when when is

sentience and how do we define robot sentience from human sentience all very under the surface of this comedic cartoon right right that's only five minute episodes but and even just like you know if there were to be more we definitely would explore a lot about alien life what it would mean to coexist with aliens things like that so uh also Ultimately, I just hope that if there are people who enjoy science fiction and enjoy science fiction cartoons and enjoy a certain casual, low-key comedy, you know, that this stands out to you and that you might want more. That's all I can say. I'm the type of guy who can keep rambling until you start playing the concert. The theme music.

Que the Oscar speech music. No, man. I again, like I know we talked about it at the top of the show, but I think what science fiction and comedy do best is put that mirror back on us. And I think with Maurice on Mars, you've hit a very subtle way of looking at ourselves and asking these questions. And that's very important, especially in today's world. And I think that's what comedy does best. You know, it kind of brings the light out of the dark, whereas drama brings the dark into the light. I think you've really touched on some powerful things in the limited time you have in an animated series.

So I can't wait to see the future of the series where it goes from there. So, yeah, of course, the final most important question, where can we find Maurice on Mars? Where can we find everything you're up to, man? Give us the shameless case. Maurice on Mars, the best place you can find it is on Comedy Central's animated YouTube channel. So just go on to YouTube, type in the words of Maurice on Mars. If you like it, one like or share or a positive review will go a long way. And for me, on Twitter, I'm at Tim Barnes 4-5-1.

That's the temperature at which jokes burn. You can also find more stuff about me at Tim Barnescom. I just got that. I love it. Yeah, yeah. And I'm always tweeting jokes, writing for different shows. and hope, you know, you follow me and get some joy out of the stuff that I do, you know what I mean? Just, all right, don't we all love a shameless plug?

That was it. That was it. I could tell you're a humble guy. No, I loved it, man. I can't wait to check out your other work from here. We'll have links to the YouTube Comedy Central YouTube channel and the show notes and links to your stuff. But I've got to thank you for taking a chance and coming on a UFO podcast. I'm sure.

Thank you. I'm sure when I reached out, you were like, oh, what am I getting myself in me? But I hope it was a fun conversation. Yeah, and I hope that the regular listeners are not totally disappointed by my lack of intense knowledge. I want to learn more. I want to believe.

And yes, continue. And you're such a great host. If there's ever a reason that you would want me back on. Or if I ever get abducted by aliens, you're the first person I'm calling. Thanks, man. I've honored on both fronts. I really am.

No, we have a very supportive audience here at Somewhere in the Sky. So, guys, go check out the series, please, over on YouTube. And, yeah, yeah, it really made me look in the mirror and ask some pretty tough questions, which I think is all you can ask in today's world, and especially in these different art forms. So, Tim, once again, thank you for joining me on Somewhere in this, guys. Thank you for having me on. 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 Patreon. on.com slash somewhere skies. How do I explain how I'm here without spoiling everything? Let's just say Glenn Morgan, who originally created the lone gunman, has come up with

an amazing, brilliant way that brings Langley back from the dead. Does anyone ever die in science fiction? Is Langley alive? Long gunman Langley? You and I buried him in Arlington along with buyers and froike. You didn't answer my question. Normally the gunman came in, hack into something, Gomelder, here's the access code to that top secret facility he'd run in, beat up some aliens, saved the day. This time,

it's all about Mulder and Scully finding Langley. What are we looking for, Mulder? Knowing Langley, breadcrumbs. Oh, his birthday is wrong. It's a grave ticket's work at night. How am I back? How am I back? We're old friends of Richard Langley. We received a message. You should go. They're watching. Who's watching?

Langley's state of mind now is, well, it's confusion for sure. Langley? It's Mueller and Scully. Yeah. Am I dead? I'm thrilled to be here. Reviving Langley back from the dead? Am I dead? That's the whole question of the episode, isn't it?

Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. Today, I mark one off the old bucket list. I am speaking to one of the nicest actors out there about his recent appearance on last week's brand new episode of The X-Files. You know him? as the long-haired, bespectical conspiracy theorist hacker, Richard Ringo Langley.

That's right. I'm talking to Dean Hagland. We talk all about his return to the show, his thoughts on UFOs, and we even discuss the future for the X-Files and the lone gunman. So, without further ado, here's my conversation with Dean Hagland. One of the most memorable X-Files, I should say some of the most memorable X-Files,

episodes came in the form of the lone gunman. Everyone knows it. Everyone agrees. I'm sure for the most parts. So, you know, every week we waited to see if they'd show up to help Mulder and Scully and their pursuits. And the same could be said for the current season. And today we have one of the gunmen here to discuss his episode this past week. And that is Langley himself, Dean Hagland. Dean, thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. Thanks for doing this. Absolutely. I know we're almost a day apart time zone-wise. And I know you're probably getting barraged. So thank you for taking the time to do this.

My pleasure. Well, I mean, a lot of feedback. Your episode is aired. That episode was entitled This. We will definitely get into that. A lot of feedback. And it's been very positive. This is the X-Files back in true form in many ways.

And that included your character, making a very unique return. So before we get into the episode itself, I'd absolutely love to just maybe hear how the experience was finding out that you were coming back again, man. I know we saw you briefly in season 10. We can definitely touch on that. But this was you, man. This was just you. So I'd love to hear what you thought about when you read this new script.

Well, you know, it was even before I read it, I was told that Glenn Morgan was back. And of course, James Wong and Glenn Morgan created the lone gunman. The Ramon shirt, all of that was in the very first script back in season one. So I knew that not only would it be cool, but he has a handle on the whole Langley character and the gunman because they created it, right? So it was going to be fantastic. But, of course, the question always is, really? How are we going to come back this time? It's why it's like there was, you know, I couldn't wrap my head like, how was he going to do it?

So I was excited to read it just like everyone was excited to see it. And, of course, it was brilliant. and Glenn has always had such a wide variety of interests. And, you know, his library in his writing office was always filled with so many different subjects, you know, like the ancient rituals of Mithra and, you know, how 22 laws of branding, like all of these crazy things. So it was really cool then to see that he was up on the quantum computing D-Wave. whole brain emulation as it's known where you can there's services now that you can apparently

upload your personality onto a server onto the cloud so that an avatar can continue living being you in an artificial intelligent kind of way long after you're dead so

wow that that is insane to think that we're at that point I mean we look at like Twitter Facebook as almost an avatar but this is like multiplied by a And so that's exactly. And so yeah, so it's, yeah, the actual services that they're, they're out there as we talk, we're providing you value, you pay to get your personality somehow emulated by an artificial intelligent system.

And then that emulation then continues on your social media platforms, right? So even after you're dead, you could still be theoretically posting on Facebook and Instagram and all that sort of thing. Oh, wow. I know, right? I don't even know how to comment. I know, right? So that it's not that big a jump to go, well, if you have that done voluntarily, could you have that done involuntarily? And then your genius is then, you know, mined and utilized for nefarious means. You know, how cool is that? That is pretty cool. I mean, well, then let's kind of dive into that, Dean. I mean, you know, spoiler alert from here on out, if anyone hasn't seen the episode yet. But you're really, you're really. turn to the show this season was much, much more prevalent than the season 10 miniseries. So let's go through this if we could. If you could maybe just give us a primer on how they brought

you back, how this differs from what we saw in the comic books by Joe Harris, which was ingenious. Yeah. But yeah, what did Glenn Morgan decide to do with this one? This was pretty awesome. It was awesome. So the idea that then Langley, along with, theoretically, I I say Steve Jobs and all of these other geniuses after they die or upload it into a cloud server that is like, you know, in the monologue, I see it's like a heaven I designed. But including my friends who are New England Patriot fans are quite pissed. So for that joke. That was Glenn Morgan, by the way. That was great.

Yeah, yeah. So we create this world, or we're trapped basically in this world. and I manage a way to hack back to real world into Mulder's phone to tell them to try shut down the server. But, of course, there's a backup. Spoiler alert. You don't have to watch it to the end. Yeah. So that leaves that open, too.

So, you know, there is now theoretically a sinister virtual world that's worse than the syndicate of the X-Files of old, you know. So this idea of layers, you know, the whole thing with the X-Files was there's always layer upon layer of conspiracy and all these different shadowy characters that would come up from time to time that would, you know, have this ability to keep going deeper and deeper. And so Glenn just added a new layer, this virtual world that seems even more crazy and dark than anything that we'd seen previously. Absolutely. And what I thought was really interesting is, you know, we sort of got used. to this with the season 10 is that the episodes in between are sandwiched by Carter's, you know, mythology.

What I thought was really interesting is that this, what we all as viewers, not knowing like you did, what was coming next for episode two, is that this does tie into the mythology pretty interestingly, and I'm sure this isn't the end we're

going to see of sort of what Glenn Morgan was going for with this. So I guess my question would be, what do you think of the whole shit? in the X-Files. You know, we've had over a decade since the show, you know, left the air. And now we have this entire new conspiracy that's happening. How do you personally feel about where the show has headed?

And, yeah, what do you have thoughts on that? Well, I think I like it, actually. And I think it was necessary for the natural growth of the show. I think there's going to be a lot of potential for exploration, too, which Chris has always said, you know, there's more more stuff than ever that's relevant to the X-Files. So I think, you know, even though there was the thank you fans and everything at the end, that Easter egg at the end of the first episode of season 11, right, sort of made it sound like it was all over.

And Gillian said she's out too, but she said that before. That, you know, I think this new layer is really a fascinating way to go. and it seems rich for for potential exploration. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, we could literally go anywhere at this point, which you're right. The X-Files has always been very ambiguous in terms of like what the rules are. It's a show that sort of broke those boundaries time and time again. That goes with the lone gunmen as well.

So, yeah, it's fascinating. And I think it's exciting for viewers who have been following it for so long to be like, oh, you know, yeah, we do live. that a new generation. Some people don't know the previous X-Files. So yeah, yeah, I think it's pretty interesting. In terms of... I like it. Yeah, yeah, me too, man. I was so excited to see where it was going. So, you know, one X-file to another, approved for whatever that's worth. Totally. Well, how, I have to ask, how was it, you know, being in Australia and having to fly back twice now for the revivals of this show? How is the... filming process, Ben. I know it was probably different for season 10 in this new one.

Yeah. How was that, man? Stepping back into those shoes, into those classes. Oh, great, actually. Yeah, like riding a bike, really. You never forget. The season 10 was a little more fun because it was the three of us, David, Mitch, everybody was there, a lot of the same crew and all of that. For this one, because I'm all on the phone, it was Glenn, the special effects guy and maybe three crew members. And it was first thing in the morning, 6 a.m. So I got up at 4.30 in the morning. My ride was there at 5 and then hair and makeup.

And then 6 a.m. We start shooting. And so all of that you see, yeah, is like in a small room before a lot of the crew. I didn't see David or Jillian at all because their call time was 8.30. and I was done by pretty much 645, I guess. That's a professional right there. Yeah. Well, you know, that was always the thing.

We were, particularly the gunmen, we were often, you know, last on the call sheet after they have done UFOs and alien blood and, you know, all sorts of special effects. The last thing they wanted us to do was to sit there and not know our lines or screw around or anything like that. So for the sake of the crew, over the 10 years of shooting the X-Files, Bruce and I would always make sure we had our lines down, word perfect, ready to go from take one. You know, just because you saw how dog-tired these, you know, crew of 200 would be after, you know, stay up all night. And the production values were so huge back in the day. And so because I was so used to that, I came to set, knew all my lines, word perfect, way to, you know, everybody was like, oh, yeah, I think we got everything.

That was fast. Well, that's a wrap on Dean, everyone. Okay. Well, we'll say hi. And then I was like, well, I was going to wait around, but then my driver said, no, I got a whole bunch of other people to pick up. So you either stay out here all day or I take you back to your hotel. Now, I'm like, well, I'm not going to stay. What am I going to, you know, it'll just seem weird.

Some. Puts around. Yeah, exactly. Just looking on set. So I left it. Yeah, I was back in my hotel by 7.30. Went back to bed. It's like it was all a dream, I can imagine.

Literally, it was like all a dream. It certainly was. It was like, hey, did I just do that? That was fantastic. Yeah. And then saw some old friends of Vancouver and then flew back to Australia. So it went really, really smoothly. Wow.

I know. But it was great. It was like, it's always like riding a bike. Like the characters. you know, easy to get into. And there was no, oh yeah, how do I do this again? It was sort of like fast and dreamlike. Well, I have to ask, Dean, how, are you one of those people who, all right, so the

episode aired, and immediately every website comes out with their own review, every viewer has their own opinion. Do you ever follow that stuff online, like, as it's happening or the day after? How does that work in terms of you as an actor? Well, here's something I haven't told anyone yet. I haven't seen the episode yet. Wow. Okay.

I know. We don't, our cable package here in Australia doesn't have Fox on it. Okay. So we have to go and dig it up somewhere or download it illegally, which I am not willing to do, because theoretically that's, you know, biting my own hand that feeds me. Right. So I got to figure out how to see it. So that said, I have my Instagram account that's a little more active than my Facebook. Because Facebook, I just advertised my podcast, the Jill Pack Hollywood Hour.

And then some other tidbits here and there and some of my, and my artwork goes up on my Facebook page, the Dean Hagland page, not Dean Hagelin. That was such an early adopter. I just said yes to everyone. And I'm my 5,000 friends. Yeah, that happens quick. Yeah. I know. Gee whiz.

You're like, oh, oh, yeah. Okay. And now you feel bad going, oh, yeah. I'm unfriended you because I don't know who you are. Right. That's rude. So when those threads come in, I'll look at one or two of them. But generally, I find reviews start making you self-conscious.

And when you become a self-conscious actor, you're kind of wrecking your own ability to act. Because you should really be outside of your head when you're in a scene. You should be in the scene and not in your head going, hey, did I say that? How you? Am I looking cool? at the moment. Right. And if you're reading reviews, all of that gets into your head, you know, particularly if

somebody goes, you suck. And forever, it's like, oh, no, I suck. Then you're like, full of judgment and self-doubt and that sort of shit. So I tend not to, positive or negative, I tend not to read any of reviews. I think that's a fair assessment. I think that's a good way to go about it as well. That's the way we were trained in acting school, too. We were told never read your stuff, particularly, you know, if you're doing a play,

You got to do that play every night. You read something bad that night, or you read something a bad review during the date, that night your performance is totally going to be off because that's going to be rattling around in your head. Absolutely. I mean, the organic process of a play changing night to night, I can imagine it, you know, it's similar to television in some ways, even though the episode has been filmed. It's immortalized at that point. But, yeah, I think that's a good point. Yeah, either way. Well, in terms of looking cool.

I'd love to ask. I heard you in another interview say that you're filming for this episode. You were literally staring into the lens of the camera the whole time. I can imagine as an actor that had to be tough. Yeah, for sure. Well, and not just the lens. They put a filter over it that was reflecting back at me. So I'm actually staring almost into a mirror saying the lines.

And, you know, in terms of the self-consciousness, There's nothing worse than saying your lines into a mirror. That's the one way you're not supposed to rehearse anything because then you're only looking back. So you really have to concentrate by blurring and trying to look past that reflection deeper into what you would theorize would be Mulder on the other side of that glass. So you're trying to establish that connection, even though there was nobody reading the lines back to me. It was basically one long monologue. which is why I could do it all in about 45 minutes because it was like two or three takes,

do it in sections, and you're out of there. So, yeah, so having a reflective glass really was a challenge for sure. And, you know, they said get close. The one direction was get closer to the camera so that light, they just gave me a sort of a light bar frame around my face, so I was lit sort of flatly. and if I went too far back, I would immediately be too dark.

So I had to be forward leaning into a reflective mirror and get all the lines down, not flab up while staring at yourself. So, yeah, that's something they don't teach in drama school at all. I was just going to say, yeah, it's like every actor's worst nightmare that they never prepared for. Well, yeah, that and green screen, right? Like all these special effects now that you have to just, run around a big green room with a couple boxes here and there and some guy chasing you with an ex going, that's a dinosaur. Right.

This is, you know, all of that stuff. I mean, theater helps for that because often you'll work with a minimalist stage or just a black box. But when you're supposed to be, you know, scared of a giant monster chasing you, that's going to be added later, you really have to depend on your imagination on that one. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I have a good friend who was recently. in the, I won't say the name, but a very large DC property movie. And, you know, he's theater trained.

And that's how I knew him. And I asked him, I'm like, man, how did, what was the hardest thing about, you know, performing in this, this big budget, you know, superhero movie? And he said exactly that. It's a whole new breed of acting is everything's green screen now. So they actually teach classes just on how to act with green screen. So it's interesting. Yeah. And you could see at two where in particularly earlier versions, I can't remember there was one movie that it was like a supposed to have a retro Superman feel to it.

But there you saw a lot of the actors getting lost in green screen technology. And it was see, and it's really obvious when it happens. Yeah, very interesting. Well, I mean, stepping away from the filming just a little bit, Dean, I'd love to just touch briefly on the audio dramas that you were part of as a theater trained. actor. I mean, how was that process? How was the experience doing that project? That was actually really good. I did it here in Sydney. And so I didn't have any of the other actors with me. There was a famous, well, he's a really good voiceover actor here, but trained in in London. He was in 39 steps. That long-running play on the West End? The Alfred Hitchcock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They did it as a stage. version, but it was a comedy. Right.

I don't know if you saw that one. I did. I actually worked at it in New York now that you mention it. Oh, is that right? Small, small world, yeah. Saw it about 80 times, yep. Brandon was supposed to come from London to the New York one, but they recast them with the New York actor.

Yep, that tends to happen. Yeah, yeah. So he read all the other parts, and then I had a director who was patched in from Vancouver in my headphones and then we just sort of went as you do and you know, I don't know if you've done any animation but it's often, okay, line 165, give me three takes,

A, B, and C, and you're rolling. There you go, watch out, watch out, watch out. Okay, we'll use B. Okay, line 194, A, B, and C, go. And so you have to piecemeal it like that. So doing the books was kind of

disconcerting, but again, because we knew the character so well, And even with random reading, I knew exactly what it would sound like when it was completed. So I really enjoyed the process a lot, actually. Yeah, it was very awesome to hear everyone's voices together again. And like you said, everyone was all over the world recording this. So props to whoever edited and produced this thing, it was incredible. Yeah, yeah, it was your Herculean feat for sure.

Absolutely. Well, I mean, sort of moving away from all that, Dean, I'd love to talk briefly about your documentary. Getting back to UFOs, what we know best here at somewhere in this guy's. Right. Your documentary, The Truth is out there. You spoke to the late Roger Lear, who is someone we all know in the UFO community, but not many other people might know about. And this guy worked with, you know, removing possible implants from people who claimed abductions.

I would love if you would maybe give us a little, maybe just a little about what you think about the whole abduction phenomenon and how it was talking to Roger Lear. Well, Roger and I knew each other before that documentary through Jordan Maxwell. Jordan, I think, advised a couple of the writers on The X-Files on a couple things. And so I would be going, hey, this is a really great script, this X-Files, where are you getting this stuff? And they go, oh, well, you want to meet some of these guys? And, you know, you should meet Jordan Maxwell. You should meet Dr. Roger Lear.

So I have lunch with these guys. They're big fans of the show, so they want to talk to me. And then I go, you know, and then I learn about their research and stuff. And so, yeah, Dr. Roger Lear told me the whole origin of how he got into it, too. He didn't believe in UFOs. But there was a Mufon convention near his office one day. And he walked in just to look around and see what, you know, all this was. And somebody recognized him, right?

Because he was kind of a famous podiatrist. Johnny Carson, Jerry Lewis were all his clients. And they go, oh, hey, you're that. podiatrist, you want to look at these x-rays of this abductee, but he didn't know she was an abductee at the time. So just take a look of these x-rays, tell us what you think. And he saw between the big toe and the middle toe, or the, in the little metal t-tarsal area, an object, maybe two millimeters long, sort of a T-shaped thing. And it looks like she stepped on a nail or something, you know, said, oh, yeah, it looks like there's a foreign, like, piece of metal.

in there. And yeah, that's pretty obvious. Yeah. And then they go, yeah, but there's no scar on her foot. I guess, well, that's impossible. Something that big would leave an incision or, you know, even if it's a sliver, you would see where it went in. And he looked at her foot. She took off her shoe there at the Mufung Convention, and there was no scarring anywhere. And so he couldn't believe that x-ray was up that foot. So he said, come into my office tomorrow. And she comes in, And sure enough, looks around, there's no scarring, there's no evidence of anything of how that thing got in there. So he's done many off-foot operations before and puts it under general anesthetic and makes an incision. And there inside was this, you know, what he called a little T-shaped thing sort of wrapped in some sort of cheesecloth.

And the moment he took the tweezers to remove it, as soon as he touched that thing, she woke up out of anesthetic screaming. I know. And it's never happened before. So he, you know, re-applied and doubled the anesthesia, put her under again, and then removed that object. And when he took a scalpel that he uses to cut bone, so it's a bone scalpel, when he tries to cut the cheesecloth, the blade breaks.

At that point, he's now full in. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He sends it to a lab in. in San Antonio, I think it was, and the lab report came back that it was of rare and non-terrestrial metals of all things.

Rare Earth and non-terrestrial metals. I know. So then, this is like in the 80s, right? So late 80s, early 90s, this happened. So there was a friend of his in San Francisco, and he says, oh, this is it, the smoking gun. This is what we all were going to do. And back then it was, the internet was so, yeah,

It's just bulletin boards at the time. So we're going to do a worldwide bulletin board announcement of this findings that you've done, telling this story. And I'll set this whole thing up. It'll take me about 48 hours to coordinate all around the world, and we're going to do this thing. And as this guy in San Francisco is doing this, sure enough, a van pulls up. He's thrown in guys, guys in black suits. They drive him around San Francisco for eight hours, telling him what you're

friend found was just Silicon. Nothing that was Silicon. And because he was driving around for eight hours, he missed all these deadlines for all these bulletin boards. And when he got out, he was so freaked out. He called Dodge Rochlear. He says, I'm out. I'm not doing this anymore.

Forget it. And about an hour later, the lab from San Antonio calls and says, hey, we made a mistake. Is Silicon? It's just Silicon, that thing you sent us. And we're not sending it back either. so he didn't get it back the first one and and that was that then from then on he was full in doing this he said he removed about another 21 in his lifetime some of them were you know just pieces of wood some of them were actually just livers and stuff like that but yeah he had become a specialist of removing alien implants it's a fascinating sort of journey that i think someone like roger lear went on fighting physical evidence to this phenomenon it's something that is that is a fascinating sort of journey that i think someone like roger lear went on fighting physical evidence to this phenomenon it's something that is very, very rare. It's such a hypothetical topic, phenomenon to begin with. So to have someone actually looking for hard evidence, all the respect in the world for the late Roger Lear at this

point. Yeah. I mean, we all know, you know, sort of Dean at this point that the X-Files did use a lot of actual case material or had people on set, you know, sort of advising in terms when it came to how the military might have been involved with this or obviously the FBI. Right. Did you ever come across anything, I guess, while filming or in the script or even with lone gunmen in terms of that? If, like, the conspiracy, you know, correlated a little too closely with what you guys were working on. We all know the whole 9-11 thing. I know that's a great example.

That is a great example. Absolutely. But that was just, I think that was a weird coincidence. If you're saying that, you know, I've had, like, when I did, when I still did. do stand up, but I was touring a lot while the show was on the air. People would come to my comedy shows all around North America. And after the shows, some times there would be like, you know, I work for the FBI. You wouldn't come by the office.

You know, I went to the San Antonio office and got to sit in the head FBI. Or no, it wasn't San Antonio. It was Al Paso. You know, so there's pictures of me in Kevlar vests and wearing FBI stuff. And those guys would say, so these stories, particularly. And they would like say an episode and stuff like that. So where'd that information come from? And then I go, I don't know.

The writers wrote it. Yeah. Okay. And I go, why is it? Well, we can't say. So they would never tell me exactly what was co-relating so closely. But they were curious enough to actually specify specific examples and specific episodes to go, how did you get that information?

So either it is just luck of the writers. or, you know, somehow some classified information got onto the airwaves. Right. Well, I mean, we recently heard Chris Carter's comments on this, Dean. So I would love to know if you have been following this story at all. No. The Pentagon story here in the United States with a secret UFO program. Oh, yeah.

Have you been following this at all? No, I haven't. I just heard about it on another podcast guy told me about it, that they just, yeah, have a minute. it that they've been tracking UFOs for years. Yes. $22 million they've spent on this. And yeah, and they're all up on it.

And, of course, you know, I think of Mr. Steve Bassett and the Disclosure Project, the idea being that if there's aliens out there trying to contact the human race, this information should not be classified if it's going to, you know, move the evolution of the species forward, it goes beyond the need for secrecy and, you know, one country's espionage against another sort of thing. Yeah. Which I agree. Absolutely.

It's an interesting sociological thing, I think. Yeah, for sure. Because, you know, but as Richard Dolan said, okay, so if the government comes out tomorrow and says, yes, there's aliens and UFOs are real. Two things. How did the keep it secret? for so long. And how did the press be so complicit in this? So Richard Dolan and I, he's in the documentary as well. And, you know, I think specifically, is our sociological, is our society so fragile that

just the sheer realization that aliens are real, would that cause us all to collapse? And he said, absolutely, we would go completely anarchy crazy. I'm like, really? I can't imagine. But, but he seems think that this is why all of the secrecy is kept in place because of the fragile nature of the sociological fragility of the whole system. So I think it's more robust than that, but he seems to, from his research, you know, and he's a learned PhD, so I'm not going to argue with him on that one. That's a tough one. Yeah, I mean, I, Dolan actually published my book. So I do have somewhat of an allegiance to the man, but I do, I would take him to task on that as well, Dean, saying that the entire society would crumble. I mean, as a historian himself, he's probably seen this throughout history.

Society's crumbling when things happen and then being rebuilt. Something like this, I do wonder, it would be so paradigm shifting. But again, we always hear that idea that, you know, the world would go on. We've got to go to our job the next day. even if we knew there were aliens out there. So it's fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. And so, and then this is also the argument of why there's, you know, so many TV shows that have aliens in them.

It's like, oh, we're slowly being broached on the idea that they're one day will walk amongst us. And, you know, we're going to be fine with it just like all these TV shows have been fine with it, you know, that it's not 1950s. We got to zap them with guns and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Right. Right. That's a good point, too. Yeah. Well, I'm going to sort of put you on the spot here, Dean. I have to ask, you know, as we're sort of wrapping things up, in all of your time with the X-Files and the lone gunman, what is the most memorable moment that you can say you had where it was like, this is it? This is why I did all of this for so long. Yeah, you know, it's hard to single one out. It was all so fun. And, you know, there's,

oddly lots of laughs on set considering how dark the show was it was always like boy we're having really a great time and then when you see it all cut together it's like wow this is this tone is way darker than what fun we were having on set but you know

it's really been the fan interaction that has been most memorable you know some real close friendships have developed from it being able to go anywhere in the world literally like just moving to Sydney and not having, you know, miss a step, as it were, having lots of friends down here. That's been amazing, too.

No matter where you go in the world, somebody's going to know you or know about you anyway. But yes, probably the most memorable was the week we shot the first episode that was just the Long Gunman, because David was shooting some movie down in Los Angeles, and Gillian was going to be stuck in London for two. two more weeks at the beginning of season five. So they said, well, what do we do? I think, well, let's do it all Long Gunman Origin episode. So they shot, they wrote unusual suspects.

And it was just the three of us leading the thing. And we got the big trailer. Tom brought his video game system. And we sat all, we shared one trailer. So it was like the dorm room I never had. And it was really fun. And that was such a fun. episode too. So I'd say that was probably the one that sort of encapsulated how the fun,

the hard work for sure, you know, staying up until all hours watching the sunrise because you shot all night. And then the satisfaction, too, of having a really great episode come out of it. Oh my God, man. I mean, I can admit, I probably watched it four days ago or something. It's just it's one that you just always love. land on when you're when you're re-watching the X-Files. It's like, you know, I got to watch a Darren Morgan one and then I got to go

back to the lone gunman. It's just such a well-crafted episode. And whenever the X-Files did go back to origin, I thought that was some of the best work they did. So I know we're going to get one for Mr. Skinner coming up soon, so that'll be exciting. That will be excited, yeah. I'm interested to see

that one. I am too. Well, in terms of Julian Anderson, we did point out earlier that she said, is it for her, man. She is done. I get it. I respect that as an actor that she wants to move on. So I have to ask you, do you think this is the end of the X-Files on television? Gosh, you know, maybe in this incarnation, but it seems that all the writing is trying to frame something so that it can carry on. Now, to say that this is already a plan in the works, of course not, because executives at Fox now Disney, now that we're technically a Disney product. That's crazy.

That's crazy, too, right? So. Scully is now a Disney princess. I know, right? I know. What would that make you, I guess? Yeah, I guess with that blonde hair. I love it.

Yep, yep, yep. Oh. So, yeah, I guess those decisions, like anything, the way we consume entertainment now has changed, the way executives look now at licensing and products. You're looking for product locomotives now, you know this term. So you don't look for a movie script. You're looking for a locomotive that can drive the world so that you can hook TV shows, movies, action figures, comic books so that it can all sit on a platform, right? So that's the DC universe is that, Star Wars is that, Harry Potter's that. You have these certain worlds that are created, that you then go out of your way to then do multi-level franchising. You know, nobody just makes movies anymore.

Right. That's my point. Right. So is the X-Files potentially a product locomotive? I think it is. Will they want to? And is Chris Carter willing then to have Disney? do their product locomotive machine on it, we'll wait and see. But potentially it's there for sure.

Yeah. Well, you know what, man, you got my money. Carter, Disney, Fox, whoever, I will keep, I will consume whatever they give me. Oh, fantastic. That includes something I know you're working on. You can't talk much about it, Dean, I understand. But you are working on a graphic novel. This is so cool, man. Anything you can give us, even just like, you know, when to maybe expect it, what it might be a little bit about, what do you got for us? Well, let's see. I'm saying May.

Okay. It's going to be completed. Now, this has been four years in the works. And, of course, it's gunman-related. However, because of, you know, every time Glenn or Chris writes something, then I have to change up my writing a bit so that, you know, so I've gone back and rewrote the thing more than once. So it's going to be cool and it's going to be alternate timeline, but I'm writing and drawing it myself.

Hence why it's taking so bloody long to get it done. So everybody who contributed it on my Kickstarter four years ago, don't worry, it's common and I'm going to make it happen. And I have everybody's email address from four years ago. I hope you haven't changed it. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure nobody has. Well, it'll be worth the weight. I have no doubt.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, in terms of the podcast, where can we find the Chopac Hollywood Hour? What is the show about, Dean? I've been listening for a long time now, for any of our listeners who haven't. Yeah, please, let us know what it's about. We talk about movies, but also sociological stuff. There's always celebrity death in there.

We do school closures. We kind of talk about anything. And you can find it at Chilpackholywood.com. or we're on Facebook, iTunes, anywhere. You can follow us on our Twitter at Dean and Phil, spell out the word end, because Phil Lernets, who used to have an office beside my production office, and every morning we'd sit around the water cooler, yaking about movies or whatever,

and our assistant thought it was really fascinating, loved listening in, said, why don't you guys start recording that and just putting it up as a podcast? They were like, well, okay. And that's how that show started. So basically it's our water cooler chat of our week. And it's been going on for 11 years now. Absolutely free. I know.

Every Monday for 11 years. Can you imagine? That's insane. The dedication is just, I'm on like episode 39. And I'm like, I've got like a noose around my neck. So I respect that fullheartedly. And it takes a love for it to do it for that. long. So I'm sure it's a pleasure

every week. Well, yeah, and Phil and I have, you know, we've just produced a new movie called The Lady Killers, which is doing the festivals right now. We're working on other projects. So it's also, we have our production meeting on the air, as it were. So we're talking about not just movies we saw,

what we're reading, things that are influencing us, stories out there. You know, we're a lot on this, the Me Too talk. Phil is a violence prevention specialist who has been trained in that. So a lot of the ideas of misogyny and stuff like that are discussed. And every Monday, somehow a show magically gets on the air. That's awesome, man. Well, again, loyal listener. So everyone go check that out. And as a recent transplant to L.A. from New York

City, I'm always looking for stuff to do. And I heard you've got an installation going on here, man. When can we look for that here in L.A.? Well, this is, I had an art show at the Fine Arts Building on 7th Street in downtown L.A. Of my artwork of when I was in L.A. and when I get back, I give tours. Maybe, Ron, you want to go on this tour. It's of the historical vaudeville houses and movie palaces. The largest collection of on Broadway, 12 blocks long. And so I do a walking tour, hour and a half walking tour of downtown Los Angeles. and all of the really gorgeous movie theaters,

I paint it each one of them and put them in a book, which you can get off my website. And those pieces of art are now up at a salon in the Eastern Columbia building, right at 9th and Broadway. And if you go to art meets architecture.com, you can call to get a private viewing. It's by appointment only. So it's on the ninth floor.

You have to get past security and all that sort of thing. So if you want to see my artwork, you can just by going to ArtMeets Architecture and call to make an appointment. That's awesome. I mean, I literally was walking past the Orphium, I believe. Yes. Maybe 20 minutes before we started recording. And, you know, all of these beautiful venues are now urban outfitters or a Starbucks. So to know that you captured them in their process.

in their essence. That's amazing. I'll definitely be signing up for that very soon, probably when we hang up here. Excellent. Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating. It's kind of hard, if you're just walking down Broadway, you've got to have people actually, you know, stop and point this stuff out, because some of it's so close together. And some of these elements are kind of, it's overwhelming the amount of detail and stuff to see. So when I give it to a tour, where you got to stop, you frame, you go, okay, I'm pointing your attention across the street to this building now. Everybody, look at this. Here's a great story of what happened here in the 20s or, you know.

And then I will carry my iPad and will actually have clips from silent films like the location and then show you the building that it was filmed on. You know, like the, like when Harold Lloyd's hanging from the clock and safety last, that famous shot, that building is still on Broadway. the clock was a set piece, but the building's there. That's amazing. A frame of reference is always needed. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, so enjoy that. You can go, I think the books for sale off my Facebook page too, but definitely at dean hagglin.com. You can buy the book, my comic book, Why the Lone Gemma was canceled. Is there in digital form, eight by tens, all of that stuff, at deanagland.com. Perfect. A very interesting story indeed why the lone gunman was canceled. So definitely check that out too. Well, Dean, this past week's episode of the X-Files, it was an indication of where we are, both story-wise, and, you know, finding the true essence of the X-Files again. And I can't wait to see where the show might be heading and in what many consider, maybe final installment, who knows.

But I'm also super excited to see what you've got going on in and out of the X-Files and lone gunmen. So again, thank you for joining me today on Somewhere the Skies. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprig. So you're probably wondering what that song was all about. Well, this episode is a mashup of sorts. For the first in-studio interview, we are joined by my good friend and colleague, Andrew Sanford. Andrew is a writer and performer here in New York City.

As a writer, he has written a full-length graphic novel called Gwendolyn that was published in 2014. He has also twice been a featured writer in the 2014 and 2016 ABC Studios' new talent showcase. When he isn't writing, he is the host of the popular current events comedy podcast, Half-White Son of a Black Man. Today, Andrew and I have a light-hearted but deep conversation about the entire UFO and alien question. It was a refreshing and no-holds-barred discussion between a skeptic and a believer. Was one of us swayed either way?

Find out right now. All right, guys, so this is a little different. We're going to shake things up this week, and we're going to be talking to a buddy of mine, Andrew Sanford. This is the first studio interview we're doing. I've been listening to Andrew's podcast for a while now. I've been featured on it. One of the funniest things out there.

Andrew, thanks for joining me today, my man. Thank you, Ryan. Would you sweet words as such? Would you sweet words? You read the words that come out of your mouth. You're all nice and sweet. Thank you, man. You were actually on the second...

I think I interviewed you on the second episode. I think you're right. And we talked about aliens. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. I remember very specifically, actually, because it was something that I was very interested in, is there was something that happened at the time

that I can't remember if it was debunked or it was just something that was just proven to be kind of like a hoax in general. And I was interested in your thoughts. and how that affected you and how that kept you going as somebody who believes in this kind of stuff, when more often than not, we will hear stories that end up being false. Absolutely. How it is to, you know, keep hold.

And obviously, nothing has stopped you since. So I think you're doing all right. Oh, thanks, man. I do specifically remember this was the Roswell Slides. Ah, yes. Which made that might have been a separate episode because I feel like that was like last year, wasn't it? It wasn't too long ago. I feel like I brought you back on when that happened.

Too many hoaxes to count. No, that is a great point, though. And it's a testament to you. It's a testament to any researcher out there who's willing to keep looking at this topic. I won't say phenomenon because that's completely separate from the topic, the subculture of uphology, the study of it. You do. You run into hoaxes time and time again. When you're dealing with something so mysterious and just, you know, out there,

People are going to take advantage of that. They're going to... There's no easier way than to take advantage of someone's beliefs. Right. And if they're willing to believe, they will do anything, including opening their wallets. And we see it time and time again. It's sad, but we just hope that we can continue to do our own work

and get the most credible cases out there. And there's tons of them out there. And, you know, it's sad that the ones that get the most attention usually are the hoaxes or the very sensational stuff. But I appreciate that. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you, my man. Please tell people about your podcast. It is called Half White Son of a Black Man.

It comes out pretty regular. We're actually up to, we're on a nice steady schedule. Recently, it's, let's see, episode 82 just came out. Wow. And I would say about six episodes, I took the format and shook it up a little bit. I needed a change. Like, I remember at the beginning, I had an interview on every episode. And it was to interview actors who had day jobs that weren't your standard.

kind of day job or just working actors in general. So then that led into, like, it was that with like a roundtable. And then I kept it at just a roundtable and it would be different guests every time. And now I have these same two guys who are two of my best friends, Mikhail Page and Geron Young. You can go to Moonmont Chronicle.com to check out Mikhail stuff or you can look up Geron Young online. He's a stand-up.

And Mikhail's a writer. I always joke that I purposely have like one white guy and one black guy on there to split the It's like having a little angel and devil on my shoulder. older, but I won't tell you which one is which. Right. And I'm sure it's... Which is from week to week. Absolutely.

So now, yeah, like, I changed the format to add a little bit more improv in there. It used to be, like, very topical and topic-based. Now it's just more fun, and I usually bring on another guest. And, yeah, we just, we do some new segments and then talk about some topical stuff. But, uh, it, that always skews towards the nerdy, too. Like, I feel like I can't help, like, who I am as a person. You can't escape who you are. Yeah.

Well, I had, too, at the beginning of an episode. episode a few weeks ago talk about the fact that that Josh Whedon was making a back girl movie or might be making a back girl movie. It's not even officially yet, but it was so exciting that I had to just change the entire purpose of the podcast for the first five minutes to be like, guys,

Josh Whitten, back girl. Come on. You made both of you. Yeah. You know, in terms of who you are, what's the name of the podcast? Half-white son of a black man. Why? Why? Tell us why. My father is African-American,

A little Native American in there. My mother is a honky. Yeah, that was a name that I came up with a few years, like a title that I came up with a, I would say even a few years before I started the podcast. I started the podcast in 2014. I think the name was something I came up with in like 2011 when I was thinking of like one-man shows to do. Because I start like, I'm mainly a writer now and then I have the podcast, but I very much started my career wanting to be just a performer.

So I thought like a one-man show is. that title could be fun. And then at a certain point, I was like, I have to do something with this name because I really like it. And I was like, I could brand myself with it a little bit. So now you can go to half-white son of a black man.com, and I'm the guy that shows up.

So Mission Accomplished. It's a really cool logo, by the way. The whole yang-yang thing. My good friend Joe Cavatite drew that, who also drew my comic book, Gwendolyn, which is no longer publicly available. We had a publisher at one point, and then we just parted ways, which happens.

So we, I've been messing around with ways that it's, I'm pretty sure I'm just going to put it up on the website at some point, just so people can read it. Because I love it. It was a labor of love. And I, even if I have become a better writer since then, and I know Joe has become a better artist since then, Joe's amazing. But that book is all, he worked his butt off for this book. And it's painted in these whites and blacks and grays. And I'm like, my writing is okay in that book. It has made a million times better by how beautiful.

beautiful Joe's work is. I cannot sing the praises of that enough. It's phenomenal stuff. It's a really cool book. And I know we can have done many of them. You were the intro for it. I did. Yeah. The forward as it were, which was a complete honor. It was really interesting. You know, it follows this young girl. And please, forgive me if I'm butering this, but she was a demon. Yes. She's technically, she's about 225 years old, her human body. But she was possessed by a demon. And it's this whole race of, like, demon children. They can only possess people who are under the age of 11 because up until 11 your soul is not fully developed.

Sounds a lot like puberty. Yeah, right? Yeah, I was very, I'm always, I've always been obsessed with, like, adding mythology to things. So, like, for my first comic book, I was like, I want to do something that's steeped in its own mythology. But my problem was, I was like, I'm not going to fill people in on that.

They're going to figure it out by context clues. And it was a very much an early writer's mistake of being, like, let's leave them in the dark. Let's treat them like mushrooms. They're not going to know nothing. Yeah. But it's still, yeah, it's still very fun. And it's about her.

She's been in a, the character's name is Gwendolyn. She's been in a self-imposed exile for about 100 years. And then there's this new creation, this new birth of another of her kind, which there also hasn't been for 100 years. It was part of the truth. And that brings her out of her exile. So that's, yeah, it goes from there. It's this mystery to find out how this birth happened and why.

And then it also. tells the story of this character named Jerome, whose niece was kidnapped. And it's his story running parallel to Gwendolyn's. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was definitely, that's the most of one thing that I've ever written. Because there is, I wrote, we wrote the five, the first volume was about five issues. We wrote, I wrote five, drew five. He actually drew six.

There is a sixth out there. We just never got, like, certain things held up getting it out there. and we also wanted to release the second volume as one piece as well. Right. But I wrote all 10 scripts. Like, there was 10, like, it's out there. And I tied it off at the end, too. And there was, I always had these big grand plans.

Like, I love looking into the future, especially with stuff like comic books. And I always love people like Jeff Johns or Scott Snyder who can take something at the beginning of their run on like Batman or Green Lantern and have it tie all the way back like four years later. So that's, that was always in the front of my head when I was writing that book, was I was like, what can I set up now that can come back later in a real satisfying way? Yeah, who would you say is your biggest inspiration when it comes to your writing?

Ooh. I know it probably varies from John Redder John. Jeff Johns is definitely up there. I love Jeff Johns is... Jeff Johns is the first comic book writer who I ever recognized. It was one of these things where I was... I had a bunch of... I remember I mainly started collecting just, like, collections.

Like, a lot of people will just call them graphic novels, but it's a lot of times like what people consider to be a graphic novel is issue 23 through issue 27 just collected in one in one easy to hold collection so that's what I really started with because I was like oh we'll get these all the time and I started notice I was like oh I really like this book or this collection and this collection and I really like this one and I was like wait those are all written by the same guy and that just kind of started that there and he was like that was I love DC comics and he was like DC's number one guy now. I mean, he's even more so of that now, but this was at a point where he was writing

five comic books a month, which is crazy. I can't even imagine. Yeah. It's, and that's 22 pages of a book. Completely different stories, all tied to all these other things, and that's why, like, he's, you know, he's in charge of the movies now. Right. So I love Jeff Johns, and I've always loved Stephen King as well. Stephen King, like, comic book guys, there's Jeff. I could go on and on with different inspirations I get from different people. Grant Morrison, I always suggest people because he's just weird. It's just, and so unabashedly, like, doesn't care, just weird. And they're doing, he did this story called Happy.

I feel like I'm rambling a little bit. If I ever, once people get me started talking about comic books, I will, there's no escape. Just real quick, yeah, there's a book that he wrote that's called Happy. It's four issues. It is Sin City meets Care Bears. And meets It's a Wonderful Life. It's about this hitman who, on Christmas Eve, is visited by this little blue flying horse that is trying to get him to save this little girl.

It's fantastic. It's only four issues. It's so good. And they're doing a TV show of it with Christopher Maloney for sci-fi. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With one of the guys, one of the crank directors being the director and executive producer, the Neville Dean and Taylor. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

Comic books I can go all day. I love Stephen King. Stephen King, there's something about, A, he is always, for a man who seems like a pretty regular dude who lived, like, you know, for all in time, and purposes a regular life. He was a school teacher and then just struck it big as an author and has been writing since then and was, you know, arguably one of the biggest pop culture authors in our time. And he, yet he still is able to get these emotions for people that, like, I don't know if

he's ever met, like a little chubby 14-year-old that lived in Maine, or I don't know if he's ever met like a little boy who's in a giant hotel with his dad, but it's, you feel like he has. You feel like you know exactly, he knows exactly what they're going through. this emotion. There's also this crazy ability that he has, which is to it's like a narrative stream of consciousness. It's like this mix of somebody will be talking, it will

be from somebody's point of view, and then they will something will slip out in such this casual way that is such a deep personal in, like, thought that, the kind of things that we never say out loud. Right. And it's just in there just naturally for every character, and every time

it is spot on as to what this person is probably thinking. And I just envy that to no end. Like, he's able to just tap into that. Every, I feel like the biggest note you can get as a writer, or at least one that I often get, is that somebody will see one character in something that I've written, and, like, I feel like you like that character a lot.

You should put that love into the other characters that you have. And sometimes it's, you know, even doing that can only accomplish so much. Stephen King loves every single character that he writes. and it shows in the way that they're presented. It's crazy. Yeah. So, yeah, those are definitely up there on my influences writing-wise. I'd say those are some really good choices, for sure.

Well, writing has always been something that you and I have related on. We had in common. But, you know, there are things that set us apart. We have comic books. We have theater. We have writing. I have always been obsessed with UFOs, with aliens. This is a parent.

I have a podcast. the book. We could go on for days. But we've never really sat down and had a discussion on this topic as friends, as colleagues. So I kind of wanted to do that today. So if you, if you're up for it, man. Let's do it. I'm all about it. I'm all about it. I'm excited about this. I am a willing skeptic. I would love to believe a lot of different things. Like, I was raised Catholic. I am no longer Catholic, I would consider myself. I would not, I, agnostic and atheists and all these different things. Like, I think agnostic is the one where you, I would be open to the idea of there being like some kind of higher power or something different out there, but there's just nothing for me that has proven that yet.

And the same could be said for UFOs. And also another thing that we talk about often, which is the paranormal. Because there are certain things that I almost feel like, and I feel like I might be, if I'm jumping ahead, please feel pretty stop me, but I, um, when it comes to things like, crypto zoology, I don't consider to be crazy at all. I, I, like, I would believe a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness monster way before I would believe a possession or an abduction. Um, and that's just how I am. Yeah. Uh, but it's, I would want to. And then there's things like with what happened with Jupiter, I don't know when this will be coming out. Who knows things could have changed by then. But we're finding water and moons on the moons of Jupiter that could sustain life and stuff like that.

So, hey, you know what, if that changes, I'm out of here, whatever. That's, I lose. I'm willing, I am willing to believe, but nothing has pushed me over that plateau quite yet. That's, that's, that's a good point. The idea of a more scientific approach to this, you know, the idea that there could be some sort of single-celled organism or a bacteria on the water on a moon. Okay, let's go from there. That's an extremely scientific approach to looking at the extraterrestrial possibility.

But many people here on Earth believe that they have either personally been visited by some sort of non-human intelligence or that whatever these UFOs are flying around, that they are in fact extraterrestrial. So there is this huge dichotomy between the hardcore believers in the UFO phenomenon being ET, and those who are willing to say, no, yeah, there's got to be life out there. Mathematically, it's a given. So to tow that line, I think, is very important, first of all, remaining an objective, and to always have your eye on that scientific approach to it. What it comes down to me to is human beings love to feel special.

We love to feel special. We were modeled after God's image. we are, we are, we have domain over the animals and the fish in the sea and we are the divine human being. So of course, alien life must be interested in picking up our least important people in the country and, and studying them for several minutes. I, and I forget, I feel like this was like a quote that was like used for a movie, but it is like an actual quote, but it's just like, the quote is something along lines of either there is no, other life in the universe or there is and they want nothing to do with us. Either one is

equally terrifying. Yes. My thing is it's like, why would we be abducted? Why on this backwards, divided planet? What would some other race who has the ability to

travel the stars want to do with us? What? It's a really good question. I would believe in life on other planets sooner than I would believe that they would give a shit about what we're doing. Yeah, there's another

I would be perfectly willing to accept the fact that there is, of course there's other life out there. Of course, there has to be. Just, like you said, mathematically, there just absolutely has to be. It could be nowhere near us, but it's out there. But it

transcending time and space in a way that you're either following the Independence Day, model and it takes them 25 years each cycle to get to where we are, or they are able to do it so quick that it takes them like maybe a couple of hours or even a year, like to travel light years in a year? That's crazy. So why? Like, why us? Why? What? What? That's a good question. And, you know, that's where the whole idea of, of this phenomenon. And if they are here and they are quoting you know, studying us.

Why are we so important? What makes us integral to them coming, these vast distances, breaking every rule of logic and physics that we feasibly know of on our planet to do that? And many people believe that this entire idea of alien visitation is a anxiety. It's a fear of another. it's also an absence of belief in possibly a higher power, a divinity. This is now the replacement for that. When people have lost all hope in God in their life,

a lot of people will search for something else. And there are many psychoanalysts who've really looked into this. And they believe that the whole flying saucer phenomenon came around back in the 50s, or the late, excuse me, early to late 40s. Okay. You're looking at post-World War II. Everyone has these post-war anxieties. What comes next?

You know, all this evil we just saw throughout the world may have been vanquished, but when will it come again? So then this sort of manifests and manifests into different things. Who's going to be the next enemy? And that's what the idea of the other comes about. And it's such an evil, such an evil that is almost cartoonish. Adolf Hitler did, committed a... abominations, atrocities, like things that were maybe like seen and done before, but on that grandest scale and with that kind of confidence, you could argue that the only way to be able to

deal with something like that actually happening is to believe in something even worse, to believe that something could be happening. Because that, the Holocaust was out of people's control. You were on the, it was one of the first times where we get to see these horrible things happening and we over here and we are all the way over here with very little recourse. We eventually went in and helped and that but it took like a military movement.

People went to war. People died to stop this evil. It was a clear cut. These are the bad guys. We are the good guys because they are murdering innocence. That is a that messes with your head. That can shift around your beliefs, what you

know, what you think you know, what you don't know like everything changes. So the idea that they could be so warped that they have to believe like, no, I can't even deal with what is on this planet right now. This was something else.

This was from somewhere else. This is some other. And this is right, so this is around the 40s and 50s of the flying saucer stuff started, right during the Red Scare. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so that, like, the whole idea of an invasion of sorts. Yeah. Because isn't that pretty much what invasion of the body snatchers is a metaphor? 4-4 is the communism.

Many of the early B-Cy-Fi movies, as they call them, were a direct commentary on communism. And the scare of, not only the Red Scare, but the idea of these weapons being built that were so technologically advanced to what we knew before that they could wipe out the entire planet. Right. Yes, absolutely. Erely similar to now.

Yes, and that is where things get concerning. That's when I start to understand why they would want something to do with us because we were capable of that kind of destruction. But even then, it's just like, let them destroy themselves, and we'll come in and pick up the pieces. I think if we're ever to be visited by alien life,

we will be in the long gone. Many people believe... We're a risk. We're a risk. I've seen the Day of the Earth still both versions, and we do not handle that very well. That is a good point. I mean, a lot of people believe

that the first time putting aside the entire idea of ancient aliens. Arrival, man. Arrival, I think, nailed it beautifully. This idea that our first atomic bomb, when it was detonated, was literally a beacon to any life out there. Look at what that little thing off in the distance that we never bothered

to even look at. Look at what they just did. Yeah, exactly. Like, that thing could be seen from space. And then 72 years later, we're like, let's fire up the Tesseract, Boom, another beacon. It just starts calling out. Thanos is like, oh, they think they're powerful.

Sorry. Yeah, that's exactly. He slips into comic books. I have to apologize. It happens so easily. But, well, let's talk about that idea of invasion of another. There's something we've recently been talking about, that you personally found a interest and really excited me because it's something I haven't thought about in a while. War of the Worlds, man.

Yeah, the radio program, not just the book, not the classic piece of literature. Right. But a radio presentation directed by and starring one Orson Wells. The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on the air in the War of the World by H.G. Wells. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. we know now that as human beings busy themselves about their various concerns with infinite complacence

people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space but yeah it was a radio broadcast

of War of the World that the first I think this first two segments were done like actual news bullets. Yes. Of an alien invasion. It was so well done as we'll get into that it very well could have been happening. Yeah. And it freaked. It's debatable about how many people it freaked out.

And I love, I think there was maybe you had, because I know you said you pulled some quotes, but there's some Norse and Wells said, or no, there's something H.G. Wells said. Because at one point him and Orson Wells finally sit down to talk. about it years after it happened happened in my Massachusetts coming out um and he says something along the lines of uh you know like it's just like when somebody sees a ghost they're still like that you see the earth you see a person in a sheet and you know it's a person in a sheet but you still like you know you act scared and you run away and stuff like that he's like that's what was the reaction to people hearing war of the world

well with me said talk um wait a minute something's happening hump shape is rising out of the pit and then make a make a out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? He's a jet of flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men. He strikes him head on. Lord, they're turning into flames.

How the whole heels are caught it by the woods of fires. The gas tanked, blanks, with the automobiles, spreading everywhere. Coming this way now, to about 20 yards. The enemy is now in sight above the palisades. Five people in the streets see it now. They're running toward the East River, thousands of them, dropping in like rats.

Now the smoke's spreading faster It's reached time square People are trying to run away from it But it's no use They're falling like flies Yeah They knew but they still Like it's part of a

To Halloween It's part of like it's part of the fun Right this was broadcast on Halloween If not many people knew that But yeah This idea that there was like a third Of the listenership who Genuinely

This was an alien invasion happening. The rest of the people who were tuning in sporadically throughout the broadcast, they thought it was either some sort of natural catastrophe happening or the Germans. So, I mean, again, you know. I was about to say that I didn't even, I don't even think the attack on Pearl Harbor had happened yet on this broadcast had happened because, oh wait, no, it couldn't have, because this broadcast was like 1936 or something like that. Hitler was actually still empowered. Right. Yes, yes, yes. No, I'm thinking of.

of the, when they sat down later on, they were discussing very specifically because H.G. Wells brings up the fact that Britain and France were actively fighting in World War II when those two men sat down and we had not yet joined the conflict. Right. So it's very much like, oh yeah, war is, you know, war is just some spectacle until it's at your doorstep. Exactly. That's a good point. I know H.G. Wells, when they did meet up, he said, you aren't quite serious in America yet.

Right. This is the exact quote. you haven't got the war right under your chains and the consequence is you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict it's a natural thing to do until you're right up against it so yeah you hit it on the head and a fun little people who really understood that a fun little side note is the writers of Superman at the time

because if if Superman ever punches a Nazi I think it's maybe in like one cover of some issue or maybe it was just on the cover or it was never a story because they were just like it's insensitive to have this guy go you send Superman over to Germany, World War II was over in 10 minutes, but then it's still there the next day when you wake up. Yeah. So it's true.

Like we're not always, America's not always the best with that stuff until it's happening to us. And then we're like, now, wait a minute. This is not to joke about. This is a serious thing that we were joking about last year. Well, I mean, let's, you know, the broadcast aside, it was interesting. You know, there is a lot of controversy on, you know,

did people actually like, leave their homes. Did people actually commit suicide, thinking this was the end of the world? That's all up for debate. There's been no irrefutable evidence that these things happened. Apparently it was greatly exaggerated.

But people did panic. A lot of people called CB. The phone lines at CBS were ringing off the hook. That is proof enough in itself. And this is a time when it's not like somebody was like, oh, change the channel. It's like if you change the channel, you got three other radio stations to listen to.

That's it. It's this one, and you can listen to a little orphan Any, take your pick. Well, and, you know, even Orson Wells, he admitted, like, we do these kind of shows all the time. Why is this the one that everyone's freaking out about it? He said, the technique I use was not original. It was not even new. I anticipated nothing unusual.

So then people asked, you know, do you think you should have toned it down a little bit? You know, the language, the brutality going on in this alien invasion. And he said, no, you don't play murder in soft words. Wow. Check that way. It was a beautiful quote. He's the best. He's the best.

Anybody at home, if you know who Orson Welles is, if you don't know who Orson Wells is, go on YouTube right now and type in Orson Welles drunk and watch him do a commercial for champagne in the late 70s, Almasan champagne. And he is wasted. Oh, my God. It's only like a minute and 30 seconds. We'll watch it after we're done. Okay.

One of the funniest things I've ever heard My entire life. Oh, God. He's just out of it. And this is a man, classically trained actor, one of the best actors that ever lived, created what a lot of people

consider one to be the best to be. At least, even if people will say like, oh, well, it's not the best film anymore. It changed, Citizen Kane changed to the way movies are made. Just like Avatar.

Yes, I just put Citizen Kane and Avatar in the same little line. Hey, you know what? That's the thing. I love Her locker. Avatar changed. the way movies are made. We do CG differently now. We have

those awesome planet of the apes movies now because of Avatar. That's a good point. Yeah. But yeah, where the world is something where it's what I want one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up is because at the time, all it took was there being

one outlet for how people received entertainment at home. And something that was not necessarily new, but people were still getting used to a little bit. A, Something like the War of the World's scare could happen now, just as easily. All it takes is one Facebook story to start trending for some reason because some jerk thinks that it would be funny to throw different sources behind this and different people just not reading and just clicking and blindly being susceptible to whatever is thrown in front of them. And it could happen just as quick.

Yeah. Because people don't do research. Because there are things that are happening now that are way more important than something that. that if there was an alien invasion, we'd know. Or at least if there was a large scale, what happens in lore of the worlds, so the giant ships coming down, somebody would see something. Like, if there are these armada of ships. There are things like that that you wouldn't necessarily see,

but you still shouldn't just believe just on face value that people do no research into. And no matter what political line you follow, there are people that just don't do the research. yet another reason why I don't think we'd be visited by aliens anytime soon and another reason why I think that something like the War of the World's fiasco could happen now. Let me ask you this. When you have the U.S. government who back in the 50s

were officially investigating the UFO phenomenon, sending people out to meet these people, write up reports on what they'd seen, finding any scant evidence that they could of what these things were. And then, I'll tell you this, coming to the conclusion, that the most likely scenario is that it was alien, that whatever was going on was extraterrestrial. This was their official stance on it.

It was then stamped down by another committee who said, no, we can't put that out to the public. There'll be mass hysteria. We can't say that things are visiting. this planet. What do you make of actual historical documentation that the government once said that this is most likely extraterrestrial? I value information and I value education and people who are educated and are smart and there are times when our government is very much run by smart intelligent people. There are also times when our government was doing things like outlawing marijuana

because black people, it made black people violent and outlying saying that a white person couldn't get married to a black person because the loving that case, like I, if it was 50 years ago, my mother and father could not have gotten married. Right. Fifty years, that's it.

That's right around the same time that this committee of people went out and interviewed a bunch of people in Roswell and went like, well, if they're saying it's aliens, it's probably aliens. By the way, keep that black person away from my water fountain. I don't want me germs. Like it's That's where it starts to get tough with me

Is I Especially at the time I would be more apt To believe something like that now Because I believe that our Science has advanced in such a way That I would probably Like I believe there's more of a way

To prove that This was at a time when they were G men It was all dudes and suits Who went to church every Sunday Who were going And while that honestly puts a little bit more In the favor of If they thought they saw something

That it must be true because they weren't just going to believe anything willy-nilly. There's also an aspect of religion that does make people believe stuff really willy-nilly. So it's, I would call myself a doubting Thomas when it comes to a lot of this stuff. I have to put my hand in the wound. Like there is, human beings are fallible to a point where it's, even if there is a committee of 50 men back in, when did Roswell have it, 52? 47.

47. I was going to say 57. I was close. Give a check to me. Yeah, it's just tough for me to believe that when we were behind in so many other basic ways at the time. When we were still 47, we had just gotten finished locking up people from Japan on our own borders, American citizens, because we thought that they might be indirectly connected. And that's, don't get me wrong, that's a deeper fear, but that's still just a, it's hard to trust the same people who are doing,

that when they say, oh, well, this might have been an alien invasion. What if they wanted us to be scared? And that's, don't get me wrong, I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy, but at a time where you're trying to make people, when you realize that nothing has gotten your country together yet like a war with another power with an outsider, I would try to drum something up. It's like, all right, what's the next bad guy? Let's try aliens. Didn't catch on.

Fine, communist. Absolutely. A lot of people believe that the Roswell case, whether it was a crashed alien flying saucer on, the day the headline came out about it, it was they found a flying

saucer, something from space. The next day it was retracted and they said it was nothing but a weather balloon that's since been debunked. But... What is a weather balloon? Oh, that's a good... Really good question. In all my

research, especially into Roswell, I still do. No. Oh, wait. I think there's definitely a weather-balluted episode of Simpsons where the media are coming down. So I have at least, I have some tacit understanding. I'm glad your education comes from lovable. Oh, buddy. I put deodorant on my undercarriage because of the Simpsons,

and I didn't even realize that for like seven years. Well, you know, the Simpsons get it right every time. Let's be honest. A wonderful X-Files episode I had, by the way. Oh, man. Ah, so good. But back to Roswell. a lot of people believe that a lot of these things were top secret projects maybe what crashed in roswell was a spy satellite from a neighboring enemy country so if people are out there believing this was a UFO of extraterrestrial origin they're not going to be thinking oh my god a spy satellite from the soviet union crashed here it made it here oh my god we're going to be invaded by them. No, let's let them think it's

little green men in space. So it really is a big mixed bag of disinformation and persuading the public to believe one thing over another. Whether or not you believed that we landed on the moon, I do think that there's way more

to support the fact that we did that there is. I agree with that. That didn't just happen overnight. There was a space race. Don't get me wrong. But there was a period of time where that was something that we were actively pursuing. And it is arguable that in the late 40s, we could have been trying some things

that probably would have freaked people out and were also trying to send people into space. And it's something like that that could have just spread all over the side of the hill. And, you know, it's that not working, which is why it took a whole 20, another 20 years to get a manned rocket that we shot into the sky. Like, that didn't just happen.

Yeah. So it's definitely something where I, yeah, Yeah, I would just believe, I would believe human error quicker than I would believe any kind of intervention, outside intervention, because it's just so, it just seems so, like, bland or, like, blase are unimportant. Like, the things that, from what, it's not like, like, a skyscraper has disappeared, or like, an entire town has disappeared, or, like, it's always one person who was stolen in the middle of the night and then brought. back. Why? Like, that's what I always come down to. It's the why. When the why becomes more obvious, then I'll even start to entertain some more ideas. But I've yet to get a good why.

I can completely understand that. I have interviewed hundreds of people at this point. Everything from seeing a small blip in the sky that was probably a star, was probably Venus, was probably a drone at this point in 2017. Or they claim to have been abducted by aliens. Now, that spectrum is huge between seeing a light in the sky and saying you were taken by aliens. As a researcher, however, my job is not to judge the person by the story. Of course not. It's to hear the story out and relay that in the most objective way I can, keeping the possibility open.

Now, I'm not out to instigate this and say, oh, it's a Venusian from this planet with blonde flowing hair. They're here to give you the cure for cancer or to bring you to their planet to plant your human seed. You know, these are things that I can wholeheartedly admit are too far out there for me. The possibility of people being visited by something and being taken, I'm open to that being possible, whether or not it's a physical phenomenon is a completely separate thing. Sure. Could this be happening in their mind? Yes, I do believe so. And I don't mean in the terms of being delusional or making it up, but a lot of these people firmly believe these things have

happened to them, as vivid as the memory might be, or the memories regressed through some sort of hypnotherapy. They're astounding. And they're happening all over the world. you have to think about when the abduction phenomenon came into its prominence. This was back in the late 70s, early 80s, maybe, and there were many cases before that as well. It's before the internet. So you have to wonder how these strikingly similar stories were happening all over the world, from Australia to Japan to here in the United States, to Canada. And these people have never met.

Entertainment at this point was not feeding them. these stories. A lot of Hollywood were getting their subject material from these people, from case reports from Project Blue Book, this project I told you about, that the government did. See, you do have to wonder, you know, was this some sort of hysteria that just snowballed from there? But that always astounded me that people from all over who've never met are having these extremely connected experiences. Yeah, and it's, I mean, the mind can do it. interesting things. I'm not saying immediately, like, oh, well, clearly it's all their heads.

But there is something to be said for. There are a connect, like, there's the idea of, you know, most religions have angels. Across the world, most religions have something divine that comes down from the sky. And that could mold and roll and snowball over the years. And all of a sudden, it's not something divine that's coming out of the sky. It's something bad that's coming out of the sky. Or it's something good that's coming out of the sky. Or it's just something that's from above that is coming down and effect.

us. So, what you do is no longer in your control. It's the same thing for me for like demon possession. It's just like, oh, the devil made me do it. And alien made me do it. I don't usually act like this, but I got abducted. It's an excuse in a way to... And it's something I, you know, I make excuses for myself all the time without realizing that I'm doing it. Human beings need to excuse if they feel like they're not doing something that should be doing or they're doing something that they shouldn't. There's, I feel like it's almost an instinct to want to be like, well, I'm, you know, I'm having chips tonight, but I'll probably have a salad tomorrow.

Or like, I'm going to, like, you know, I'm going to have three drinks tonight, but I'm not going to drink for the rest of the week. Like, it's, it's excusing certain behavior. And when it's something that's belief-based, the excuse becomes not only more viable to yourself, but it becomes more, you're more likely to get believer from others. Like there's this shared hysteria like with Randy Quaid and his wife. Randy Quaid and his wife both believe that the same people that killed Heath Ledger are trying to kill them. And they've been around each other so long that like there's, and I forget, I'm sure there's an actual medical term for it.

But it is this kind of like shared psychosis. So that kind of stuff is possible. it is interesting, of course, that there's, like, the stories could happen all over the world, but I think that's also, like, a fun study into how we all aren't that different. And there are certain things throughout the world that we could just be affected by on a base biological level, like how majestic a bald eagle looks, like something flying through the sky is majestic. That will seep into your brain and could come out in other ways. Or, you know, people could be getting abducted by the other.

And then you have this whole idea of a phenomenon that things are happening around the world at the same exact time with absolutely no communication. Yeah. You know, they say that alcohol was created at different parts throughout the world. Yeah, there you know. These people have never met. Right. At the same collective moment in time, they all were like, ooh, this makes me feel good. Yeah, yeah.

This makes me lose my inhibition. I don't, I can do whatever I want tonight and not have to remember it tomorrow. You know, so you have to wonder, you know, is this some sort of, I don't want to say fate or destiny, but the idea that things can happen in synchronistic terms all over the world at the same time. And is the abduction phenomenon part of that? Or let's say, let's take a mass UFO setting, for instance. Something like in 1997, the Phoenix Lights incident, thousands of people witnessed a triangular formation of lights in the sky. massive, huge, people got video, this that, this that. We won't go into the case history because most of our listeners know about it. But while all these people were seeing the same thing, when they would describe it to people,

all of their stories were different on what exactly they were seeing. Weird. So that's when perception. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. While this may be happening in real time and a million people, you know, a thousand in this case, we're seeing it. they're all saying it was completely silent while the other person is saying it was so loud or it was going really fast no it was hovering you know it's it's fascinating whatever these things are they're having a different effect on people and a perception of what's happening is different too totally no and i think what's interesting about that too is it's it's something that is a constant for human beings like and it's something that only kind of grows stronger it's actually it's funny now that i was i was thinking about this a second ago like it's it's

funny to me that there haven't been more, like, we live in a world where there are people, we have flat earthers again. We have flat earthers again. Let me just, we have flat earthers. We have people that believe that the world is flat. Could you repeat that? We have flat earthers. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Um, like, that's, that's, that's bonkers. And yet, I'm not seeing nearly as many celebrities going, I believe in aliens anymore. Like, that's, what's weird to me is, like, now at a time where everybody has cameras and like it's not just like grainy shaky footage there's nothing it's a very very good argument like at the time at a time when we only like you at a time where it's like you know you couldn't

really fake a photo unless you're really really tried there was I feel like it was rampant with bigfoot sightings and locktuss monster sightings and UFO videos and photos and all this stuff and now when people have drones and gopros and all this stuff and nothing it's a very good argument A lot of people will argue that These things are so elusive and so advanced That as we progress with our own technology They're always a step ahead And remaining elusive

Yeah But then you've got to think Do they really care about one person on the ground With an iPhone being like, oh, I got you? Yeah, yeah You know what I mean? I will say I am having a fun time imagining Just a gray sitting in a circle of the shit

Like, oh They finally got iPhones like 500 years late, but whatever. All right, well, I guess we'll just throw off the cloaking device. Well, yeah, you got to reboot it. I don't know. I didn't know it was going to take them this long to figure this out. I know we've moved on, but this is the only thing we have.

When we crash in Roswell and gave them this technology of the iPhone, it took them this long. Are you kidding me? A lot of people actually believe that, Andrew. Hey, no, like, that's, it's, especially with, like, iPhone technology and stuff like that. It's insane. It's insanity. We have mother boxes in our pocket.

There's a comic book reference for you. We have mother boxes. We have science fiction is becoming science fact more and more and more. And it's still something where it's all, what's interesting about it is it's still manmade. Like most of the advances that we have are still manmade. And yet we can do something as phenomenal as make an iPhone. But we can't possibly make a crystal skull or the pyramids or Stonehenge or any of that stuff. That it was all aliens.

I assume you're not an ancient alien theorist. Not particularly. Let's give humans some credit. Yeah. Well, not even let's give humans some credit. Let's give slave owners some credit. And that's the only time you're going to ever hear me say that phrase. If you do not care if the person that is making your pyramid eats or sleeps or dies,

you're going to get it done pretty good. quick. It's going to work out. You're going to find that these people are capable of things that nobody thought humans were capable of. Because they sleep on each other. And they don't get to bathe. And they don't get to eat regularly. And they die all the time being crushed by giant rocks. And then it was probably just a process of elimination. It's like, oh, five people couldn't lift that rock. Do 10 people. Nope, that didn't work either. All right, 20 people this time. Like, that's what happened. It was like, it's not like they had the pyramids done in like a week. It took 40 years.

Right. Generations built the pyramids. Right. And died building the pyramids. It's a really good point. The Crystal Skull stuff too, is just like that's, it's, it's, that one, I can kind of understand because of like the smoothness, people always bring up how smooth they are and stuff like that. But it's still, like, people, human beings are, are able to do some amazing things.

They are incredibly capable when there is, when ego is removed. when drive is removed, not necessarily drive, but like when this idea that to succeed necessarily is kind of removed, when you're just doing something to do it, man is capable of a lot. Right.

So yeah, no, not an ancient aliens guy. That's completely fine. It's always, it all, yeah, I, yeah. The fact that that television show has been on for like 12 years now. Because it's, you know what, it's fun. It's fun. It's fun.

And it's another thing where it's, like, ironically enough, and this comes back to my humans want to be important thing. We want to be special. We want to be better than everybody else or everything else. So, of course, we've been visited by aliens in the past. But what's ironic about that is, I would argue that we are much more special having been able to do those things ourselves.

Yeah. With no alien assistance. Very good. But to insinuate that the aliens went down there to join. start our civilization or something, levee is quite a bit of importance against our race, which I don't think that we are necessarily like,

that's bonkers. That's like 3,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, there was somebody that was capable of traveling here, they would own us at this point. That's a good point. You had to wonder why, like, if they were visiting us so often during

the time of antiquity... So long ago! Why have they not intervened since? Yeah. Especially when they know that we're now capable of wiping out the entire planet in a heartbeat. Maybe that's part of their plan. Maybe they gave us the nudge at the beginning, you know, into the deep end of the pool, and now it's let's see how they fend on their own.

Maybe it's the grandest social experiment. Maybe we are a reality show for this galactic network. But even that, and it comes back to, like, religion or anything else, it's giving us a reason for being. I agree. Which is comforting, of course. But guess what? There might just not be a reason that we're here.

There might know. We're just here to be here and to live and to exist. And like you said, whether there is alien life or not that question of why we're here is the most terrifying of all. Yeah. Not knowing the answer. Yeah. Because at least for now, there isn't one. Yeah. There is no answer.

This is where religion comes in. This is where births. Exactly. It's all to comfort people. It's all to be like, well, especially, people who may or may not be special. Yeah. Like that's, or, or even just arrogant enough to think that they're special. Like, anybody who just kind of goes about their day-to-day life and is just moving through the day,

it's very easy for somebody like that to be like, oh, well, I can give all of this to a higher power. And I'll get rewarded for that at some point. Or things will be different. Something will change. And it's enticing and it's exciting. But it's also just very easy. easy to fall into that trap and to then your life kind of to an extent, arguably. I'm not here to come in and should.

Like I said, I was raised Catholic and I am very confident that I turned out to not be a jerk because I was raised with a set of morals that were instilled in me. Whether or not I believe the other aspects of that now, it doesn't matter to me because I know that I am a good person and actively trying to be a good person. but it can also have a negative effect and it can make people close-minded and it can make, and that can be said about any belief system

is all of a sudden other things have to not be true for your thing to be true and that's where it becomes problematic and that's the same with aliens or demon possession or religion or anything like that that I always come into trouble with is it's like something suffers

for one belief to continue. Something else has to. Like there was, like if you, if you are a Catholic or Christian, you have to believe in the devil. You have to believe in demon possession. There's no ifs, or butts about it. To believe in God is to believe in the devil

and to believe in demons. So then it's just like, well, to believe in alien abduction, while there are some things that have been proven to be a hoax, and this is where it could get tough as well, and this is where I admire you greatly because, like I said,

your resolve does not dissolve. You have, there's an extent, extent where you almost have to believe anything that isn't a hoax because it's one step closer to making what you believe be true. It's one more thing that you, there's one more notch. It's like, we're one step closer because this happened. This thing over here, not true, but this fiery triangle, thousands of people saw it were one step closer. It didn't get proof. Everybody's stories are different, but everybody saw the same thing. That's a win. And that's something you have to stick by. That's hard. And it could also mean that you have to, even if something

sounds so unbelievable, so crazy, because it hasn't been disproved, you got to go with it. Some of these stories I've heard, when I'm writing down notes about what people are telling me, the inherent need as a writer to want to edit immediately. Because you run into this problem of if I'm going to be a journalist on this topic, I want my readers to come away believing it. Right. You know, like maybe that's your goal. Maybe that's your objective is to maybe not change someone's mind, but at least open their mind. Absolutely. Now, if someone sees a UFO and then says, also it was piloted by a big foot, I'm going to be a little thrown off by that. Right. And I might not include the Bigfoot piloting the spaceship into the narrative. Now, that is, A, that is not

doing the person who you're interviewing any justice. If they believe this happened, who am I to say it didn't? Exactly. The more bizarre I've come to find out in this topic, the more I'm willing to believe it. Yeah, I get that. I absolutely. Specificity is key, man. Yeah. And that changes from time to time, absolutely. But if they, if they, If this is what they believe happened, and I come back to them time and time again, and they are telling me the same story over and over, and they haven't exaggerated it. They haven't added anything. I'm more willing to be like, yeah, I totally believe that happened to you.

You look at someone like Travis Walton. This man was supposedly abducted in the late 70s. He was a logger. He was with five other people. They all witnessed this man, get shot by a beam of light from the sky, and he disappeared. What happened, Travis, in your own words briefly? Okay, well, it was... Just another day.

Yeah, just another workday. Out in the woods, cutting trees. This is where? In the St. Grays National Forest in Arizona. There were seven of us. It was starting to get dark. We loaded up our chainsaws. You were a logger, right?

Yeah. And we were headed home. As we were leaving there, we saw a light coming through the trees. And when we finally got down the road to where we could see the source of the... this light, we saw a UFO hovering near the road. All seven of it? All seven of us. It was only 90 feet away. It was very clear and unmistakable. The minute it came into view, somebody yelled, it's a spaceship or something like that. We stopped the truck, and I got out and went toward it. Just you, not the other six. Not the other six. They were yelling at me to get back in the truck and get away from there.

Good thinking. Yeah, it would have been. Anyway, as I got closer to it, it started to move and the sound started to get louder. And that scared me. I jumped down behind some cover there. And the men in the truck were screaming at me to get away from there. So I raised up to go and I was hit. It felt like a physical blow. And I blacked out.

The men in the truck said they saw a powerful bolt of energy come out of the body. bottom of the craft and hit me. They said it just looked like a grenade went off in front of me. They said it threw me through the air about 10 feet. You were watching this right, Mike? Yes. They said I hit the ground limp, and they thought it killed me. He's gone for a week, two weeks, I don't recall.

Are those five people still alive? Yes. Huh. Most of them, I believe. Now, for those weeks where he was missing, Everyone believed that these men had murdered him. Right. That an accident happened.

They were covering it up. This idea of an alien abduction was completely made up. This made international headlines within the week. People for all over the world were coming to interview these people. They were put under polygraph examinations. They passed with flying colors. Meanwhile, the guy's still missing. Presumed dead.

Presumed dead at this point. They can't find a body. They go back to the site where this happened. Nothing. Several weeks later, he showed. shows up without having talked to these loggers within that time, supposedly, they had corroborating stories about what happened that night. Now, there you go, man.

You do have to wonder in a case like that. Yeah, there's things, there are exceptions to the rule with anything. Because I, as you very well now, I am fascinated by Ed and Lorraine Warren. because there's this idea when something it's things like that I honestly you telling me that story makes me want to go home and read all about it if you have a book I'll borrow it

absolutely yeah yeah and a movie it was more of a horror movie they did Hollywood ice did it yeah of course yeah um that to me is very interesting and that's when it's that's the those are the kind of stories where I will I will listen at the very least um like with the Warrens like I know how crazy

the Catholic Church is I know how extreme the Catholic Church is. The idea that the Catholic Church looked at these two people and said, yes, you go do this exorcism, is crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, the idea of doing an extracism is insane to begin with. But the fact that they break hundreds or thousands of years of tradition to allow these two non-priests, one of whom is a woman,

to perform an extracism, I could be wrong. I think I could be wrong in the sense. that I feel like they ordained. Given that it's the Catholic Church, I would put five bucks down right now that says that Ed was ordained to do it and Lorraine got to watch or see there, even though she's the one with inherent psychic abilities,

apparently. Apparently. So it's stuff like that that makes me, like I said, I'm tying it back to the beginning, I want to believe, I'm going to look up Travis Walton. I want to read some more about Travis Walton,

but it's, I got to put my hand in that wound, man. Yeah. I put my hand in that wound. Yeah. Putting salt in it. Yeah. Salt up my hand

It's shoving on that one What do you got for me? I got so You thought it would be kind of fun And I thought this could be a fun way To close this out here Wow, we've been talking for over an hour already So on my show, two of the segments that we do

We do a segment called Spin It Okay Which is where I'm not going to give you a spinet today But this is just a fun little taste for people at home Is spin it, I give my guests, a negative story And I have them give me the old Sean Spicer And spin it to me positive Tell me why it's good.

The other segment we did was called Explain, where I give people just the headline, and then they give me the story. Really have fun with it. I want to very much clarify, because I would hate to have this whole wonderful talk and then make it seem like I'm making fun of anybody at all. I purposely chose these two headlines

that I'm going to give you from Weekly World News. Oh, my God. Yes, yes, yes. I know it is ridiculous. I know it is stupid. I love Ryan. I've known him for many years now. I'm just going to have, we're just going to have a little fun.

This is just to close us out. Just have fun, not take this seriously, and I'm just going to give you some headlines. If we can't take this topic, you know, with a grain of laughter, what the hell is the point? Exactly, exactly. One, just the full story. Explain.

Explain. So this one from the Weekly World News, Uncle Sam owes me. Aging space alien applies for social security. what's happening there Ryan? Why would an alien feel like they're entitled to socialists? Into my money? To my tax?

To my tax money. Well, given that this creature most likely is not here on their own, you know, volition, they probably crashed at some point. Roswell, 97, were brought to Wright-Patterson and Airfield and then studied an area 51, and then was secretly led out into the public, disguised as a human being, would at that point want social security? They are now

a legal, documented individual of the great USA and Uncle Sam owes them. Okay, okay, okay. Now usually, usually it is a lot of fun when I do these headlines because the explanation is usually way different than what the story is actually about. I am almost convinced that you saw the rest of this picture because at the very bottom it says

says he's been employed in Area 51 since crash in 1947. I swear to God, I did not see that. The stories run deep, y'all. Oh, that's my favorite thing. That could not have been better. Okay, last one, last one. Headline, just the full story.

Just the headlight. Explain. Alien Bible found. worship Oprah. What? So, so aliens are I mean, this one actually kind of get. Right, Ryan, why are the aliens worshipping Oprah?

A whole Bible. Oh, I have two answers for this. Okay, all right, I'm excited. A, who, it's more of a question. Who doesn't? That's, yeah, tusha. Let's be honest. Tchay, my friend. Yeah, she's divinity. That's an excellent point. That's an excellent point. Personified. My second answer would have to be

look at someone like Carl Sagan. Okay. Done. Contact. I'm looking at them right now. Look at the beginning of, not the book so much, but the movie. You know, you start with this, the message being sent out into the universe from so long ago, from our satellites, beaming things out. Yeah.

From, like, maybe a broadcast from the Olympics in the 40s. Yeah. And then to... Battle of the networks. Battle of the networks. Yeah. That was a good one. I like that.

And then you have something like a Spice Girl song. You know, the further you go out, the better possibility of finding something. Maybe instead of the Olympics in Germany, where Hitler made an announcement, maybe other than that being the first thing that some alien civilization found, it was Oprah saying, you've got an iPhone, you've got an iPhone, you've got an iPhone. So you're saying this is their galaxy quest. Absolutely. Yeah, I get it.

That makes total sense. There's probably a ship out there that's just full of like Callisto music. And tiny little pieces and then like burned up coffees of tiny little pieces once that guy ended up being a fraud. Yeah, there's a whole show. Who knows that? I mean, look at like,

look at something like in The Simpsons, the episode where they create the, the miniature civilization. I think they just, was that a Triasso Horror? It was a Triasso Horror. It's a playoff of a Twilight Zone too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they become their God,

because it's all they know. We've learned to immatutututely. Exactly. Maybe on some far off planet, maybe closer than we think, there is a huge statue of Oprah. Oh, man. And they are just... I'm... You did even better with these headlines that I could have...

You'll have to come on Half White Son of a Black Man. I would love to you. That's all that is. When can we listen? You can listen. Every Saturday we usually release it. You can go to, you can look up Half White Son of a Black Man on iTunes or I think it's on, like, Pod Cruncher 2 and a few other, if anybody's familiar with Libson, anything that you get through Libson, you can listen to Half White Summer of Black Man on. Or you can go to www.com and download the MP3s for free.

It is hilarious. I listen every week. And it's not just because I know you. There's also a podcast. There's at least the first half of something that will hopefully be completed down the line, which is with my friend Joe Cavatit, which was in the sky from the shadows, is what it's called. that's basically us talking about the effects of, it was inspired by when Batman v. Superman came out and how Batman and Superman have both been molded by their interpretations and other media over the years significantly. Like, just for a little taste, Jimmy Olson and Kryptonite, both introduced in the radio show.

Not introduced in the comic books. If it wasn't for doing a radio show, we would not have Jimmy Olson or Kryptonite. I never knew that. We wouldn't have Batgirl without the 66 TV show. Wow. Yeah, there's all kinds of. It's all there.

Like, it's all stuff that is, like, the Christopher Reeves Superman movies affected what happened in the comic books. And, like, there's just, it's all from that. So I was, it was very much me being like, listen, Batman being like, listen, Batman is what people are going to be talking about 15 years from now you watch. That is a bold stage. It is, and I stand by it. And then, uh, there's another little fun podcast for a company I do work for called Stanford on the city.

There's about two episodes now. If you go to the New York Tour One Facebook page. You can listen to those on there. I love me, some podcasts. Me too, I mean. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a healthy debate.

This was a blast. I wouldn't even call a debate. It's a conversation. That's the thing. I am open to, like I said, I want to know more about Travis Walton. I want to believe. Look at that, guys. We got one more for Travis Walton.

As Mulder would always say, I want to believe. Exactly. Thank you so much, Andrew. Thanks, Ryan. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. your host Ryan Sprague. And I want to take a moment to thank our new Patreon subscribers. Special thanks to Kimberly P. Max F. Paul T. Teresa D. Chuck S. Neil D. Vulcans Cross. Jared R. Joe D. Bradley C. Bradley, J.H. Andrew A. Noah M. Victoria Z. Scott F. Ramesh. Ramesh. Joe G. Mark H. Ryan L.

Becca D. Pat McKay, UAP researcher, Bruce So, Arcane Industries, Lauren R, Chris, Thomas H, Thomas F, Jason L, Lenora, Tom M, Keith T, and Brian W. Again, a huge thank you to each and every one of you for supporting somewhere in the skies. Also a special shout out to our Apple Premium subscribers as well. Apple does not give us names of those who subscribe to our premium content there, but you know who you are, and I thank you again for your support. And if you're not subscribed to either of these, I hope you'll consider it today. Our Patreon and Apple supporters truly are the Element 115 fuel that keeps our sports model flying saucer of a podcast thriving and surviving. So again, thank you to all of you for your support. And now, on with the show.

Michael Ian Black is an actor, comedian, and writer. He's best known for being an original member of MTV's improv show, The State. He was also featured on Comedy Central's Stella and Viva Variety and Reno 9-1-1. And he starred in the entire Wet Hot American Summer franchise. He's traveled the world doing stand-up comedy, has written for television and film, and has published numerous children's and adult books. But recently, he started writing extensively about UFOs on his substack. So, naturally, I hopped on a train from Scotland to London

for a one-on-one sit-down with the OG MIB, Michael Ian Black. Michael, welcome for the very first time to somewhere in disguise. Thank you. I was thrilled to get the invite. Yeah, so, I mean, I... I have been in this UFO field for a really long time. And, you know, throughout the years it's been very static. You hear the same two, three people talking about it. And I was like the youngest person involved with this topic, like going and speaking at conferences and everything.

And it was the same UFO cases over and over. You know, Roswell and, you know, Rendell Shoe Forest UFO case here in England. And then 2017 hit and let the world just exploding with the UFOs. It went mainstream. It caught us all off guard. And it seemed that a lot of people in all different walks of life were starting to get interested in the topic. And you were one of those individuals who I started seeing kind of starting to talk about UFOs, which was really refreshing, you know, kind of growing up and watching you on television

and the movies and stuff. And now here you were, like on Twitter, talking about my main passion. And it just blew me away. And I saw that you had recently moved to England. Yeah, I'm here temporarily. Temporarily. A sabbatical, let's call it.

Okay, okay, cool. That was actually my first question for you. What kind of brought you here to London? What made you want to come here? Well, my wife, who's... outside this room and I have two kids who are now grown. They're in college and I wasn't working and it just seemed like while we're young enough, why don't we try living abroad for a little bit? So our original plan was to live in Italy for a year, but we couldn't get the permits in time,

the visas in time. So we were there for three months and then we had to leave the EU because we didn't have the visa. So the UK was kind of the only place we could go. So we thought, well, we'll just come to London for a little while. So we're here. Cool. How did I get to ask? How do you like it? I like it? I don't love it. I like it. It's a lot like living in New York where I'd live for 10 years. So it, you know, it doesn't have the same sort of, it doesn't feel foreign enough, maybe. Like, one of the great things about living in Rome was that it, you know, really was entering a different culture. I don't speak the language. I was, I felt like I was learning a lot every day. Here it just sort of feels like I'm living my normal life, which is fine and fun, but it doesn't have that same sort of heightened

excitement that I was getting in Italy. Right. Yeah. I did New York for almost 13 years. And coming here, it really was my, my fiancee calls it America Light. Yeah. Like everything's just a little cleaner, a little nicer. A lot more polite. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's cool. That's cool. I'm glad you're enjoying it over here. I've been here for about a year. And it's, it's been a good, uh, rest, I guess, from America. I don't know how long we're going to be here. But for me, as a UFO researcher, it's been really cool to kind of come somewhere where it wasn't Pentagon UFO programs.

It wasn't Project Blue Book. It's a whole other country with their own baggage when it comes to this whole UFO topic. And is the passion the same here as it is in the States or less? With the individual people, yes. However, they'll be the first to say, like, their government has absolutely no interest in this. Their mainstream media, BBC, won't touch it. And if they do, it still has kind of that stigma behind it. You'll hear the X-Files music, that side-eyed glance from a news anchor.

Whereas in the States, like, as you know, every night you're seeing something on choose, you know, Main Street media outlet, CNN, Fox, they're all covering it in a very serious manner, which I'll tell you eight, nine years ago was not the case. Oh, no. Like, you would be laughed at if you were on TV talking about UFOs or saw UFO. So I think that's slowly making its way over here, as most things do from America. So I think a lot of countries are starting to kind of take their position on it, whether from a national security stance or politically, it's been an interesting transition.

So, yeah, I look forward to where it goes. I'm trying to do my best over here. It's probably a good place to be just because it hasn't quite broken here, so you can be on the forefront of that. I'm trying. I'm trying, man. But the real reason I wanted to talk to you today is because you've been putting out some really good articles. or on your substack

that I and other UFO researchers have been paying close attention to you. Your voice is so refreshing when it comes to hearing about these things because it's the same, like I said, people talking about it. We kind of live in this echo chamber. So to have someone like yourself

who has an interest in the topic but isn't like living, breathing, sleeping it. I'm very much outside of this community. What do you make of that community? I'm interested to hear with someone on the outside. I, my, my sense is like any community, it runs the gamut from people who are, you know, grounded

in data and research to people who are just fucking out there. And, you know, I want to say like, you know, like the instinct would be to go, these fucking people are fucking out of their minds. But at the same time, like anybody who goes down this rabbit hole, the deeper, you get into it, the more your mind expands. And you're sort of like, well, wait a second, like, it's hard to dismiss anything as too far out there. You can say things are less likely than other things. And you can say, I think you're probably misinterpreting what you're seeing or experiencing. But because the hypotheses for what this phenomenon actually is are so vast.

And in a lot of cases, impossible to prove or disprove, at least at this point, I'm, I'm far less likely to dismiss anybody out of hand. So dismissing, that's another thing I kind of wanted to touch on with you. I want to rewind a little bit because one of the first articles I read was you stating that you possibly had your own UFO setting. Is that something you'd be willing to? Sure. I mean, it's a fairly mundane UFO setting as far as these things go.

There's only one odd element, which I'll talk about. I was in high school. I must have been a senior in high school, either right at the end of my senior year or maybe in the summer after my senior year, I was with my girlfriend and best friend. We were coming back from the movies, this is in New Jersey, driving back. We lived in a kind of wooded town, driving back through the woods. And I saw, and I saw. saw, we saw what looked sort of like a fireball, sort of reddish, orangeish, moving sort of slowly across the sky, too low to be, you know, like a meteor or something. It didn't, in my memory, it wasn't that far above the tree line. My initial thought was it might be like a small plane crashing. But there was no sound. And I wanted to follow it, but we couldn't, because, because there were trees, you know. And so we sort of watched it as far as long as we could. And then my next memory of that is waking up the next morning and checking the local newspaper to see,

like, had a plane crashed. And there was nothing. So that's the end of the sighting. But what's weird about it, at least in my mind, is the fact that none of us ever talked about it again. Like we never said, like, to each other, hey, wasn't that crazy, that thing we saw last night? And years later, like within the last year, I was talking to my kids about this. And I said to them, I was telling them this story. And I said, I bet if I ask my ex-girlfriend, who I'm still in periodic contact with, if she remembers this, she'll say no. And I don't know why I thought that. But I believed it.

And so I texted her. And I was like, hey, do you remember this? She's like, no, I don't remember this at all. I would remember that. And I'm like, yeah, you would remember that. why wouldn't you remember that? So I'm like, so I'm left with this problem. Is that a real memory?

Is that a false memory? Did I just imagine that? If not, why doesn't, if it's real, why doesn't she remember it? And if it is, if it's not real, why do I believe it to be real? Like, to my knowledge, I have no other false memories in my life. I've never encountered anything like that. I was talking to Dave Foley about this. And he said there is this expression in the UFO community called emotional dampening where people often don't talk about it.

And he was recounting, it's now public, but this had just happened to him, his own experience with Jeremy Corbell, where they were out. And Jeremy, and he saw a UFO, is the first time Jeremy had ever seen anything like that. And they had that same kind of emotional dampening thing where Jeremy didn't think to take out his phone. Didn't think to record it. And it was that same, like, weirdness around it. That same, like, weird behavior around it. So that's it. I mean, that's my, that's the entirety of my UFO experience.

Other than one time I was on LSD and we looked up and we saw something like, yeah, that's, I can dismiss that. That would be easily dismissed. Yeah. In the best of it was. That's so fascinating. You bring that up. Because, I mean, at this point, I've traveled the world interviewing UFO witnesses or people who have claimed even things up to close encounters and alien abductions. It really runs the spectrum.

And a lot of people claim the same thing. Like, I didn't think about taking photos. Like, they were so in the moment. And I often think whatever these phenomena might be, that's what they want. They want you in your shoes. in that moment more immediate than ever and just like experiencing this thing I had a sighting when I was a kid with my dad

and it was kind of the same thing like it stuck with me the memory was so vivid and terrifying that I it was very traumatic to be honest but my father like totally forgot it like blacked out of his mind you know come 2017 which we'll get to is when he and I like sat down at a bar

and central New York had a couple Beersen really talked about it and the memory started coming back to him. So I do find it fascinating that a lot of people have, you know, what Dave Foley called it, or even this idea of like a screen memory. Like these phenomena might want you to block it out. You don't know what happened within those fleeting moments of when an experience happened. But I do find that fascinating. Even the Phoenix Lights incident, you know, thousands of people saw it. But a lot of them say, It was weird. After I saw it, I kind of just shrugged my shoulders and went inside and nobody talked about it,

even though it was this massive thing that, you know, presumably thousands of people saw. So I don't know what to make of it. But I did find that aspect to your sighting pretty fascinating. Yeah, I find it interesting, too, just psychologically. Like, I just, that's the part that, you know, whatever, it's that, it's that weird paradox of, Did I see something? Did I not see something? And that inability to account for that reality, I can only imagine how people who have

missing time, for example, must feel. You know, just that sense of dislocation. And, you know, for me, it's a tiny, tiny thing. But for somebody who experiences it in a more profound way, I can't imagine what it does. Right. It really comes down to like how you decide to integrate it into your life. You know, like for me, clearly it changed the entire path of my life. I wanted to be a baseball player.

That's all I wanted to do. And now I'm like 28 years later, I'm here interviewing you. And you what, 5'8? Yeah, about pushing it. And your athletic skills are what? At this point, about zero. Let's be honest. But, yeah, that was.

So, maybe. Maybe they were pushing you in that direction. They were leaning. They were like, you know what, Ryan? Maybe head towards this way. Yeah. It's like that John Travolta movie phenomenon, right? Him with the light.

Well, okay. So let's move to 2017. Now, I know a lot of your rediscovered interest in UFOs really started when a lot of people did when this came out. What was that like for you, hearing when that story broke in the New York Times? It was almost the same experience.

because I was reading this. So, you know, from my whole life, I'd been interested in UFOs. It's not so, it's not, it's not, it wasn't like me seeing one. That wasn't the first time I had been interested. Like, I had been interested as a kid and all the way through. Um, but my interest waned, I think because of what you described, it's like, okay, we're seeing the same cases. Nothing seems to be moving forward. You know, I don't know.

I don't know what to make of this, if anything. And I started. to find myself basically in skeptic mode being like, you know, this just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. This is all probably explicable. You know, I'd been, I had read the CDB Brian book, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, pre-2017. I had been following the sort of alien abduction thing, just trying to make sense of it, trying to understand what it was. So like I had, you know, like a toe dipped in these waters. But then when the article broke, I remember reading it and going, this is, I don't know if it's quite ontological shock, but it, you know, it's creeping up there.

But what was weird to me was the non-reaction of the rest of the world. Like I sort of thought it would blow up like a bomb. But for months and months and months, it seemed like nobody was really paying any attention to this. and I was asking people on me, did you see this thing where the Pentagon's basic thing? Yeah, you know, if it was a real. And it seemed like for the longest time, people either hadn't read it or were just indifferent to it.

And I don't know. It made me, I guess I kind of shrugged my shoulders at it ultimately. I guess I just sort of felt like, I guess people don't care about this shit, you know? And still don't, to a large degree. I mean, most people don't, particularly, which I guess is okay. But for me, it was really, it was really like a bomb went off. And so from that point on, I started paying much closer attention, you know, and I've been following the updates.

And I've been doing, quote unquote, my own research, or at least just getting back into the field, you know, deeper into it. Yeah. And trying to understand all the different sides of it. There's a lot of sides. There's a lot of sides. And what's been interesting to me personally, about it is how it has opened my mind up to maybe a lot of different life aspects that I wasn't that keen to be receptive to, touching on religion, consciousness, all of,

you know, sort of larger paranormal stuff. And with most of it, I couldn't tell you today where I fall in terms of belief system. But I'm very interested in how people are experiencing life now and the myriad ways that people are just encountering reality, whatever that is, and how they're processing life. Like to me, that's the most interesting thing of all of this. Yeah, I remember interviewing this guy from Harlem, lived in Harlem, is a, whole life, total, like, hard-ass dude, blue collar, wasn't religious at all, and had what he believed was, I guess, you could say it was like an abduction experience where, you know, he woke up and kind of your prototypical gray beings were there and were guiding him along their

craft or what have you. And they showed him symbols. And he interpreted it as prayer hands with like a lightning bolt through it. And this kept happening. Like the same dream or experience kept happening to him. And he eventually kind of processed that into like prayer healing in a way. And all of a sudden dropped his entire life in New York City and became like a pastor at a church. And he kind of attributes all of this to these weird experiences he had, whether they're alien or angelic or some people think demonic,

it completely changed his entire perspective, this entire, I guess, spiritual being. So you do have to wonder, you know, like, could some of these experiences be connected to religion? You look at something like the work of, like, Diana Walsh Pesoka,

who's a religious professor, who leans heavily kind of into that theory, that a lot of this does have to do with religion, or religion. Has to do with this. What do you make of that idea? Like aliens could be, have kind of started our major religions. I know that's a little out there, but.

It's no less plausible than anything else. You know, it's like, I know, I know her work. I've read American Cosmit. I've watched her being interviewed. And the parallels that she draws between. I mean, mystical and religious experiences and classic sort of abduction experiences or encounters are profound. You know, when one, when I have looked into the history of this stuff and you, you see, you know, I'll display my own ignorance, but the paintings from like the 15th century that show, you know, these things was the German painting. and you listen to someone like Dan Walsh Pesolka talk about how similar descriptions of alien encounters are with religious encounters with saints or angels or whatever.

It's hard to draw different conclusions than she's drawing that these are similar, if not the same experiences. What does that mean? Does it mean that they're actual physical experiences that people are having? Is it something that we generate ourselves? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows at this point. But it's powerful to me. These are, and it seems totally reasonable that somebody who had had an experience like this would discuss it, would mythologize it, that it could become a thread and sort of the tapestry of religious life as humans know it.

I don't know. That's the safest answer I think any of us can give. Well, in terms of knowing, I mean, I recently spoke to Luis Elizando, former director of the Pentagon UFO program. And he was telling me, you know, it was so damn hard to investigate these things within, you know, the infrastructure of the government. funding, obviously, being the biggest problem with any government program. But the religiosity, extreme religiosity of a lot of his superiors, who said, dude, stop looking into this.

It's demonic. Like, you shouldn't be doing this. And he ran up against that time and time and time again, which is crazy to think, you know, we talk so much, at least in America, about church and state and this and that. And now you even have it. like within a government-funded UFO program where like these religious extremists are like, stop doing this.

You shouldn't be doing this. So you can't say that they're not connected. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. I mean, obviously the Pentagon and the military is traditionally a fairly conservative institution. It draws heavily from the South and from communities where religion plays a larger role than maybe in the general

population of America. So it's not surprising to me that you might bump up against that kind of resistance. It is surprising to me, though, that somebody of a high enough rank in the military wouldn't at least want to understand the national security implications of this stuff, even if it is demonic and be like, hey, do we have to fight demons now? Like, you'd want to know that. I don't, you know, but, you know, if you believe in your heart that, that, you know, if you believe in your heart that even talking about this stuff is going to open some portal to hell, I mean, yeah, I guess, I guess you would discourage somebody from looking into it. But it's a, that's a weird take to me. But, but, you know, what I don't doubt in any of this, or in most of this, is people's sincerity.

And that's, that I think is an important part of looking at the phenomena is, is understanding that for the most part, 99% of the people that you're going to talk to are sincere in whatever they're talking about. Unless you have somebody who has some sort of counter narrative or is purposely sowing disinformation or just trying to make a buck, whatever it is, most people I think are sincere in their experiences or in their desire to understand. So when somebody says, hey, you're dealing with demons here. Like, that's not my belief system, but I believe that they're sincere about. it and it's worth knowing more about that. Yeah, the sincerity really shines through, I think, with pretty much everyone I've spoken

to. Like, I know I've been lied to. I know I've been bullshitted. I know some people are fantasy prone or, uh, and things like that. And it's, it's hard. It's challenging to kind of navigate your way through a field made up of such, uh, ambiguity. I guess, which is also beautiful. Because like you said, you can interpret these things in so many different ways,

but how do you ever find answers to it is kind of where I'm at? I've been chasing this mystery half my life. I'm no closer knowing what the hell of UFOs are. I don't know if I ever will be. That's why the article was so interesting in 2017, because here for the first time, we were seeing, okay, here's video of something. Here's some tangible ones and zeros that we can look.

at, here are some names and faces associated with this. Here's a former majority leader of the Senate going, yeah, this is real, we're putting money into this. That was the first time that I felt like I could look at something and attach names and attach video and have the imprimatur of the government on it. Whether or not you believe the government is another thing. But for me, as a citizen, it's like, okay, the U.S. government is saying this, at the very least, that's fascinating. Even if, even if it's not true, why the hell

would they be saying this? Right. It's mystifying that we're at a point now where, you know, you can look at things like Project Blue Book back in the 50s and 60s. Okay, you know, this is post-World War two, going into the Cold War. Of course, they're going to want to look at this stuff in our skies that shouldn't be there from a national security standpoint. And kind of coming away from it saying there's nothing to it. We've explained mostly, I think it was 700 something cases they weren't able to explain, which is still a large amount. That's a lot. But they were able to explain most of it. Instead, we're done funding this. Like, it's not a threat. Over. And then we come to find out, you know, the Pentagon had covertly been investigating. And now it's like,

out in the open. We have this new Arrow group who are, um, who are, looking into this. Again, from a national security standpoint, so what do you make of that now that we have a newly established program within the Department of Defense in the U.S. investigating these?

On the face of it, I go, that's great. On the face of it, I go, that's unbelievable progress. Here are, you know, let's call them a blue ribbon committee of people with the proper backgrounds investigating

these stories. Obviously, I know within the UFO community, there's a lot of weariness about it. There's a lot of people thinking it's a smokescreen. They're going to end up covering up. They don't have the right access, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But just pulling back from all of that, isn't it a profound step forward that the United States government is saying, hey, we need to figure out what this stuff is? Not only do we acknowledge it's real, we're setting up an entity to study it combined with, you know, what NASA is doing now publicly for the first time, as far as I know, you've got prominent senators being very vocal about it. You've got at least a handful of Congress people being vocal about it, talking about it. I don't know if it's

crossed the point of no return or not, but it certainly feels that way where you're not going to be able to stuff this genie back into the bottle and go, yeah, it was just swamp gas anymore. It just doesn't seem like that's a possibility. So then the question in my mind is, okay, so then where is this leading? Because I have to believe that the other David Grush is out there who have testified already, they're saying things that must support what David Grush is saying, or you wouldn't have somebody like Marco Rubio out there saying the opposite. Rubio saying, yeah, there's other people who have talked to me, and they say what he's saying. he wouldn't put his reputation on the line if he didn't have some certainty about what he's being told.

I don't think Kirsten, Kirsten, I always get those mixed up. Jilla Brand would do the same. So I feel like as a consumer of this stuff, I'm being sort of led down the garden path a little bit. and I feel like, you know, I feel like there is a kind of quiet disclosure, soft disclosure happening, step after step after step. But I don't know where that leads. It doesn't seem like anybody knows where that leads at this point. That Michael Schellenberger article that came out that supported what Grush was saying but went further.

I don't know. You know, I certainly believe when, you know, somebody like Ross Colthard says, I've been talking to these people. They're saying the same stuff. I believe him. I believe his sincerity. So there's enough pings out there that are all sort of pointing in the same direction that makes me think, okay, this is a real thing that's happening.

This is a real nuts and bolts experience that people are having. Does it lead to actual craft? I don't know. Does it lead to actual bodies of entities? I don't know, but it seems like that's where we're heading. And to me, like with the 2017 article, like that's the biggest story in human history. And so, you know, when I jokingly say on Twitter, for example, you know, okay, Trump got indicted, can we get back to the UFOs? Like, I'm mostly being serious there.

Like, this is so much bigger than any sort of clickbaity news story of the day. And why aren't more people interested in it? And is that sort of collective emotional dampening going on? I suspect maybe it is. I think you're right. And I think I don't like to get too conspiratorial on my show, surprisingly, for a UFO podcast. But you look at when a lot of these things were kind of dropped in the United States, in the mainstream media. You know, 2017 article was a big surprise.

But like you said, society kind of moved on. Like, I have to go to work the next day. I don't know how I'm going to pay this bill. What are we having for dinner? Not like, oh my God, like UFOs. And then you look at like the first Pentagon UFO report came. out like right in the middle of the pandemic or you look at now this whole David Grush story which we'll get we'll get a little into comes out should be again like earth-shattering

information you know it made waves I haven't I work with the debrief the site that dropped that article and it hit the same numbers that the New York Times article did which is insane to think like this little kind of nizabeth website was able to accomplish that, but still, like, if I were to ask, you know, someone on the street right now in London, do you know David Greshes? They'd be, what are you talking about? And you have the whole thing going on in Russia and Ukraine. So you do have to wonder, like, is there some sort of strategy of dropping these things at certain times? I often wonder that, because when you have nations that have different,

we don't know what other nations have in terms of technology. You know, China is rapidly increased their military budgets, their craft. I mean, look at these objects that have been over the United States for God knows how long now, and we're just finding out about it. You do have to wonder, at least I do, what is the game here? with the Pentagon. What do they want other nations to think about what we're doing with all this UFO stuff?

And what do they want their own public to think? So I do feel like there's this weird chess game going on. Has that ever crossed your mind? Yeah. It seems to me, and I could be wildly incorrect, that for the Pentagon to basically be orchestrating a huge sci-op on the American population feels as implausible as the other explanation,

which is they're telling the truth. Both because it's just so outlandish and also because it's illegal. Like, they can't do that. You know? Like, you can't just, you can't just

and about such a, like, bizarre topic. Yeah. To just be like, Hey, UFOs are real. And here's a dude who worked in the program. And he's going to, he's going to, you know, say that we have 12, you know, we have a bunch of recovered craft. And we're going to hold hearings.

And we're going to establish this office to deal with it. Like, what? Like that, like, why would you possibly do that? And let's just say that's true. Like this whole thing was a sign? Then that becomes the biggest story in American history. history. Like, what the fuck was that? You know? Like, whatever's true is bizarre. Whatever's true is so out there that we're living in interesting times as the saying goes. My preference

would be that we have UFOs and the UFOs are real. But if the other thing is true, I'm almost as equally fascinated by that. I want to know that story also. Yeah. Right. And, you know, like, talking to these people who were part of these programs. Like that sincerity, like you mentioned earlier, does come through. When you're looking these people in the eyes and they're telling you, I've touched something like a material from something that is not from here. And that can mean, you know, a hundred different things. I believe that.

I do. I believe they believe, I guess, kind of like we said earlier, that sincerity. shows through. I think there are people within the government, David Grush, Luis Elizondo. I have been told we will be getting more whistleblowers coming forward. They feel empowered no to do this properly through legal channels.

That they do believe what they're actually saying. They're not being told, go out and play this weird puppet game of chess with the public. So yeah, I tend to agree with you. Either story, like you said, would be historic. and would change everything.

Well, think about, I mean, like, that would bring down a government. If it were to come out that the Pentagon just made this shit up, like, people are going to jail, I feel like, over that. Like, presidents are falling over that. Like, that's no small thing. I don't think. I don't think. And what could possibly be the motivation? Because if your goal is to fool China or to fool Russia,

into thinking we have something we don't have, it seems like there are back channel ways to do that. It seems like there are ways that you can manipulate sort of this sort of underground intelligence stream that we know is going out there for them to pick up and try to decipher as opposed to just going with a megaphone UFOs. Like that just seems crazy to me. Right. That's such a good point. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know where, like you said, I don't know where it's all heading, but I'm here for it, man. I'm riding the wave. It's been the most interesting time for a UFO researcher. it will continue to be. You mentioned NASA. One of the things that cracked me up was in your article

where you talked about NASA's recent panel, they did. And how fucking boring it was. Yeah. Which I guess we should have sort of expected, but four hours. They live streamed, I think, for four hours. And I fell asleep like 10 times.

I think the most interesting part was really when Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of arrow, showed up. Right. And out of nowhere, and I want to kind of transition to this a little bit later, is he said, yeah, I just had a meeting with the five eyes, and we talked about all this. And that's when, like, I think all the UFO people's ears perked up. They're like, the five eyes.

This kind of mythical thing we'd heard about with all these different intelligence agencies in different, you know, sort of Eurocentric countries get together and talk about intelligence. and that a UFO program was not doing that, that really got our attention. So now we know this government program is working with NASA and kind of putting all the heavy work onto them. Like, you're NASA. You should be looking into UFOs. So what do you make of NASA's role in all this from a scientific perspective? I don't have a scientific perspective. I'm not smart enough to have a scientific perspective. But I think that I as an entity, I think NASA is kind of interesting because they're a public-facing space exploration institution.

But it seems like they're all, you know, they're almost certainly involved in more sort of quasi-military or directly military, quiet stuff. I've never known, I don't think any of us know, sort of where the dividing line is there. They're not supposed to be a military organization. It's impossible for me to believe that they don't have a sort of military, that they don't have military applications associated with them. I've never understood why, I guess I do understand why they've never expressed sort of any public interest in UFOs before. clearly, you know, they want to be taken seriously as scientists. And up until very recently,

I guess if you had said UFO, that would tend to diminish their credibility. So I guess I understand that. But, you know, clearly they have like astrobiologists on staff and they study weird xenotypes and they go to the bottom of the oceans to look at what kind of worms can survive and, you know, volcanic vents and shit like that. So you go, all right, like they're clearly interested in all of this stuff. I did think it was cool that they were brought into this. I did think it was cool that NASA is now a part of this conversation. I also think it's necessary that they're part of this conversation. And I did think it was heartening in a way that the conference was so boring. Like it was it was heartening in a way because you go, oh yeah, they're just like bureaucrats like talking about bureaucratic shit. Right. So that to me says UFOs are now

mainstream and are now absorbed into the sort of public or the scientific consciousness, the scientific mainstream where they're going, yeah, we just need more, we need better data sets. And that's what we're going to do. We're trying to get better data sets. And here somebody's going to talk about how we're going to get better data sets. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, this is boring. But it was heartening to me, you know, because they weren't out there making noises. They were being very sort of, it seems like, purposely deliberative and boring the way you would want scientists to be. And then Sean Kirkpatrick is like, yeah, and we got these flying orbs that are going around. You're like, okay, well, let's go back up to that for a second.

Yeah. And I mean, there were some good moments in there. I mean, you have them even kind of debunking one of the new B UFO videos. The thing we've been told was the go fast. Right. Now became the go slow. They said it was traveling like 40 miles per hour. So there was no benefit to that.

Like, it shows that they're actually taking it seriously. And serious can be boring And like you said I would think serious should be boring For the most part You know I'm not I had no interest in getting into the lab

And doing the work Like I'll wait for the headlines I'm fine with that I want you to be deliberative I want you to be boring I want you to you know Take your time and get this thing right Exactly

So that was that was reassuring to me It was it was Well I guess that leads us up to today Demagrush this whistleblower comes forward his credentials are insane. Like if you look at what this guy's done, who he's worked with, the people who are actually vouching for him, it does truly make you wonder.

And the implication of if he's lying, like you said, these people can go to jail. Their reputations are, I mean, his reputation's gone. Let's be completely honest. Unless all of this is proven and he becomes this, you know, hero of not only the UFO community, but like humanity. Yeah. You know, in so many words.

Do you think we're going to see more of these people coming forward? Do you think this like house of cars is going to fall sort of? All I know is what I digest, which is apparently, yeah, apparently there's what, four other whistleblowers who are sort of lined up to come forward. Many, if not all of them, have already testified. I imagine once that happens, other people might feel empowered to come forward. where does it go? I don't know. And supposedly this next wave of whistleblowers are the firsthand people, are the people who are in the room, are the people who have touched the craft or dealt with the entities or whatever it is.

You know, one of the things that I think I've understood about the UFO community over the few years that I've been paying attention to it is that there's always the rug being pulled out from under you. You always walk right up to the line and sometimes say, well, maybe not this time. So I think I'm wary enough to not like have my hopes particularly raised that this will be resolved in a concrete way. But I'm certainly primed to hear whatever anybody has to say who's well credentialed then would be in a position to know. Like that to me is, yeah, fascinating. As watching it unfolding and watching an unfolding almost in real time, as you say, like every day, now when you turn on the news or you know you just read whatever UFO community boards that you read you're going to see something most likely pushing the narrative a little bit forward it's great

I mean it's the greatest story in history if it is born out to be true yeah but but let's say it is born out to be true, let's say we have these craft. To me, that's when the story actually begins. Like right now, we're just leading up to the story, the story of how we get to the story. If any of this is born out to be true, then everything just blows so wide open. Because then we're in a position where our fundamental understanding of who we are has to be re-evaluated if not utterly changed. I was going to ask you what, you know, this wording euphology of disclosure. What does that look like to you? I mean, we always envision like the president coming out.

Right. White House law and UFO landing, blah, blah, blah. What is, how big is that word in terms of what it would do? I've never really thought about for me what the definition of disclosure would look like. Sure, you could have Biden or whoever the next president is coming out and saying, hey, we've got these craft. They're created by non-human intelligence.

We've had them since ex-state. We've known about them since X state. That obviously would be the sort of marquee, disclosure moment, I guess I have a hard time imagining that happening. I don't know why. Maybe because the kind of shock and awe of that would be so overwhelming for people that I wonder whether we are in the midst of disclosure right now, that it is about the sort of slow unraveling of the truth. You take people up to this point, they sort of digest that for a little bit, you take them to this point, you let them digest that for a little while. That to me seems the more likely way to do. You take them, you

do it until you get to a point where a president can come out and say everything that you've heard about, I can confirm. And then people can be like, okay, you know, it's like it's still going to be weird, but maybe not as weird as it would have been if they'd landed on the White House long to use the cliche. So I think that's, I think that's what disclosure is. I think we're in the middle of it or in the beginning stages of it. I think that that's my sense of what's happening. I could be wrong. I think disclosure maybe is happening right now. Yeah, I think you're right. I think we're in the infant stages of something like that. The acknowledgement is huge for so long. And again, like we often look at this from the U.S. government perspective. There's world governments

everywhere. Like, it would be much bigger than just this one country's acknowledgement and dissemination of information on it. You do have to wonder, like, what, not Knowledge does, do the five eyes have, what knowledge does China, Russia, whatever, insert country here. You truly have to wonder, like, globally, what that would look like. It's profound. It really is. And I think you're right. It wouldn't be as marquee as we would all sort of hope.

I mean, that would be fun. It would be fun. I mean, I feel like that's a take a day off from work kind of day. Hell yeah. Marky version Two last questions Entertainment is a huge influence Western entertainment on like the whole world

There's no getting around that And the UFO subject and Hollywood I guess have had a strange marriage For very long I always use the example of like Top Gun was created to recruit young men into the Air Force. So there was a reason this movie was made and a purpose and an agenda, quote unquote. And you look at some of the early movies that came out about flying saucers

back in the 50s, based on purported actual events. So I guess that is my question. What role do you think the entertainment industry plays in all this? I mean, kind of coming from that world and then seeing how it's played out in movies, TV, pop culture. What role do you think entertainment has in maybe that even that disclosure, I guess? Well, there's a couple different ways to look at it. The first is I was and continued to be naive in a lot of ways. Like it never occurred to me as somebody sort of entering this industry that it would be manipulated by the U.S. government to further its own aims. But of course it has been, you know.

The example you just gave is perfect. But then you go, okay, so what's the story behind, you know, Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Like, was there, was Spielberg like in contact with anybody about moving this story one way or another? Or was it just sort of created Holcloth out of his mind? You know, I know there are people in UFO circles who think this, this, there was, there was some deliberate action there, that there was something, a bigger agenda at play. I don't know. That's one way. That's, that's, that's one side of this. The other side, the side that maybe I'm

more interested in is the way culture reflects itself and shapes itself. So, you, you get something, you get Kenneth Arnold looking, you know, seeing a flying saucer. Suddenly that term, flying saucer is in the public consciousness. Of course, some smart-allocke Hollywood screenwriter is going to be like, the day the flying saucers came, you know, and it's starting Arnis Borgnan, and here's Ernest Borgon, and here's Ernest Borgne, and are they fend or foe. And then that gets reflected back into reality of what people believe they are seeing, which then gets reflected back into popular culture.

And it turns into a kind of back and forth that not only sustains the narrative and the mythology, but also helps to create it. So how much of our reality is self-generated? I think that's a legitimate question. How much of, let's say, contact or these experiences are outside, in or inside out, how much of it, how deep does it go within our relationship to reality? How much are we creating reality itself?

You can distill that into pop culture, but I think it maybe raises sort of larger questions. Yeah, absolutely. It raises so many questions. I mean, I always, I've always looked at, like, you know, the entertainment industry likes to put that mirror back on us. You see a lot of movies now coming out about time travel, wishing we could go back and change things. That's happened a lot in the past, but you are seeing it play out in a lot of these big budget movies coming out right now. And you do have to wonder, like, is this kind of our want, our need to go back and change things, whether it's the pandemic we lived through or, you know, came out on the other side through, not clearly unaffected, or a warm. going on several wars,

the world at a constant rate. You do have to wonder, you know, that mirror being put back on it. Yeah, I feel like I'm seeing, maybe I'm not, maybe it's just the kind of thing that I'm drawn to in terms of pop culture, but I feel like there is a movement

artistically towards the same questions that I'm asking here, which is what is the nature of our reality, how much of it is a concept, construct, how much of it is, like, what even is, like, what, what is, what is foundationally reality? And I feel like you see that expressed in a lot of different ways. I mean, even something like Oppenheimer, I feel like is doing that, where you're creating

a godlike machine. You're fundamentally changing reality. And then, you know, jokingly, Barbie is doing the same thing. Barbie is saying here's this unreal thing that we're bringing into reality. How do they affect each other? It's a stupid example. But it, but, you know, and this, and, you know, the sort of jokes that are sort of being pinged back and forth comparing Barbie and Oppenheimer are funny. But there is actually some overlap there.

There is some thematic overlap there. You know, I don't know what to make of any of it. And maybe you can, maybe, you know, you can look at. a lot of different forms, artistic forms. And, you know, if you want to interpret it through that lens, maybe you can. It just happens to be what I'm interested in at the moment. So, you know, I may just be bringing my own biases towards it. No, I think that's a great example.

You have these movies that you think would never have anything in common, kind of melding together to make us really question things. And I think you're right. I've interviewed a lot of comedians, actors, musicians on this show, and those tend to be the people, creative people, who aren't afraid to ask the ridiculous questions. Yeah. Well, we trade in ridiculousness. That is our livelihood. Exactly.

Well, what role do you think comedy plays in a lot of this? I mean, Dave Foley's been on the show and talked about this. It seems to be a lot of comedians, quote, gravitate towards the UFO subject. And I find that fascinating. If I had to guess, and I don't know how many comedians are interested in this or musicians or actors in general. I haven't talked to many of them about it. If I had to guess, it probably draws in people who are sort of living on the fringes anyway in terms of the way that they think about the world, the way that they want to approach the world.

So much of comedy, for example, is about pushing boundaries and understanding where those boundaries are. And as we said from the very beginning of this conversation, the stigma around UFOs, you know, stigma is a boundary. That's taboo. Once you walk up to that line, and comedians are about taboo.

Comedians are about looking at taboo and trying to understand, like, what is it about it that makes it something that people are affirmed, afraid to talk about. Why can't we move into this subject? UFOs just happens to be one of those subjects. I imagine musicians probably feel similarly that, you know, obviously the most prominent being tombed along where I think a lot of people in the arts get into the arts because the world doesn't make sense to them. And UFOs don't make sense. Yeah. They just don't make sense.

So, of course, we'd be drawn to that. I love that. I can't think of kind of a better way to kind of wrap that up. Well, okay, last question for you. Do you have a favorite case? Anything you could really hang your hat on in the world of UFOs that kind of really makes you... And on top of that, like, what's your favorite theory out there

about what these things that don't make sense could possibly be? I don't know that I have a favorite. case, but a couple I think are really, I mean, so many of them are, they're all interesting. But the Zimbabwe school kids won. That one, I think it's just fascinating. What did they, I mean, they all agree. The kids were there. They saw this thing. They all agree on what they saw. They draw decades later, they're hanging, they're staying with the story. So what was that? What was that experience? What did they see? You got multiple witnesses, all. credible, no reason for them to lie. What was that? That I think is fascinating. I think the Phoenix

Lights thing is fascinating for similar reasons. You've got, it's a major American city. People are looking up. They're seeing this thing. You've got a governor coming out there, poo-pooing it, making fun of it, then turning around and going, yeah, I don't know what that was. Like, I guess what's interesting to me about these cases are not only that they happen and that they happen with multiple witnesses in the case of the school kids, maybe a dozen or two dozen, in the case of Phoenix, thousands.

What's interesting to me about cases like that is not even so much what happened to them, but the reaction around them. Nobody talks about the Phoenix lights thing outside of UFO communities. It happened in Washington, D.C., in what, 1952 or something? Nobody talks about that. I didn't even know about that.

Why don't, when people say, why don't the White House, why don't the UFOs, you know, come down in the White House long? Well, they did. Why are we talking about that? There's so many of those cases. And yet, they just get filed into the cabinet of, yeah, we don't know. Close the file. You know, flares. Close the file.

I don't know. I don't think it was flares, you know. We have a UFO landing in front of these school kids. Beans come out. Hey, man, how you doing? takes off again. Those kids, they're now adults. They still maintain what they saw was what they saw. Just file it away. I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of, I don't know what to make of people who weren't interested in that. I don't know why that doesn't spark the same level of fascination in most people that it does with you and with eye and with other people who are interested in this stuff. To me, there's nothing, I can't think of anything more interesting, more fascinating, more profound than these questions and the ancillary questions that they produce. It's such a rich subject.

I would be very surprised if in the next few years you couldn't major in this in college, that there won't be a UAP studies degree. There should be. or, you know, whatever you want to call it, anomalous studies degree. Like, there should be departments devoted to this thing. Because the world is so much richer and more complex and diverse than we know. You can look at any number of sort of ancillary topics and know that to be true. I mean, you can go from the James Webb Space Telescope to quantum mechanics, to near-death experiences, to the effects of meditation, to consciousness studies. All of it is worthy of study.

All of it sort of is right on the fringes of our understanding of the nature of reality. and somebody like me suspects all of it is connected. So how is it connected? Is it connected? I mean, start with that obvious question. How much of the fabric of what we understand to be reality is connected? Like, what the hell are we living in? What the hell is this?

It's the fundamental question of humanity. and UFOs just give us a different way of looking at it. It's a lens. Yeah. I love that. Man, I, that's it. My drop right there, Michael Ian Black. I can't think of a better way to sort of end this.

You and I are going to start the first university mythology while we're here in London, so be on the lookout for that, guys. But other than that, Nick, can you tell us what do you got going on? Nothing. I'm unemployed. That's why I'm in London. That's a perfect, a perfect way to put it. Yeah, that's why we're all here.

Awesome. Well, if people do want to read your work, where can they find what you're up? Well, I write about UFOs on occasion on my substack. Michael Ian Black is what it's called. You know, I'm on Twitter. I'm just sort of out there. You can see me perform my tour doing stand-up, not UFO-related stand-up. Yeah.

So I'm, you know, I'm available. Awesome. I can't thank you enough. Like it was so awesome to finally meet you. Like I said, off air, huge fan my whole life. And the fact that you're now talking UFOs, not a world I ever thought I would see. So if UFOs have done anything, it's definitely changed my paradigm and my perception of a Hollywood comedian. No, I just love finding people who are interested in this stuff because my wife, who's out there right now, is just like UFOs again.

I'm like, yeah, sorry. I know. I know that feeling. Trust me. My partner knows that feeling. Very well, too. So, Michael, I got to thank you. Oh, no, my pleasure. Thanks, Ryan. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One podcast network. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts,

we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply.