Somewhere in the Skies - Diana Walsh Pasulka: ENCOUNTERS

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at: www.betterhelp.com/skies and get on your way to being your best self. On episode 341, Diana Walsh Pasulka, returns to talk about her new book, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. In the book, Pasulka highlights a revolution that is currently underway. For the first time in human history, we are at the cusp of experiencing contact with nonhuman life-forms of all kinds due to technological innovations and research into the experiences of people at the forefront of this development. Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2023 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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by author and professor of religious studies, Diana Walsh Pusselker, to discuss her new book, Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Diana, welcome back to Somewhere in the Skies. So happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Now, it's been a while since we actually last spoke. I had you on to talk about American Cosmic, obviously, when it first came out. And then I had the rare opportunity to have both you and Leslie Kane in conversation on the show as well.

But now we are back. You are back with a brand new book, Encounters. But I want to ask, before we even dive into, Encounters, your new book, what has that journey been like since American Cosmic? I know so much has happened since the book came out. And what ultimately led to kind of this, I guess, American Cosmic Part 2 in so many words. Yeah, what has the journey been like since we last spoke about American Cosmic? Yeah, sure.

All right. So I started the research for American Cosmic in 2012. And I had, I must admit I was not a believer in UFOs. And I had been studying religion my whole life. And so when I came into UFOs, I had seen some parallels between aerial phenomena that was described, like, say, in the 1500s by European Catholics and then what people were describing today. And I thought it would be a really, you know, very uncomplicated look at this topic today, you know, what's been going on. The more I got into it, though, the more I recognized that people were actually seeing actual real things. and that made me like reinterpret what I had been seeing in the past.

And it was very shocking. And so again, also I met people that I didn't expect to meet. And these were the people that I didn't actually have language to describe them at the time. They needed to have, they needed to be synonymously referred to, right? I couldn't use their names. One of them was Gary Nolan. And he's now out as himself. But he's James in American Cosmast.

and the other is still, you know, under a pseudonym, although people, you know, say they know who he is and things like that. So one of the things that I learned from American Cosmic and that I now, when I look back on, I recognize the language that's being used today, like the legacy program language and the language of the, you know, some of the things that are that were being done then, like biologics. these are things that I actually didn't know that I was studying at the time, writing American Cosmic. That's exactly what I was doing. So I was working with people in what are now called SAPs or special access programs. And they were teaching me about biologics. And biologics now is something that is talked about at space research conferences and things like that. It's now open.

But back then it wasn't. So this was prior to 2021. So now I know because the language is all over the place, I'm like, oh, that's what I was doing back then. And so American Cosmic actually caught that. So it caught the language. It caught the, I actually published some peer review articles about biologics and things like that that are up on academia at UDU. And so what did I learn? I learned that there was a program and people were involved in studying this in our government through SAPs.

and that they were making some headway and that the headway they were making included this new discipline and called biologics, you know, the working on these things. A lot of it having to do with taking stuff into space and using that zero gravity environment to conduct some experiments that then help us with biotechnologies on Earth. And so this is what I was learning about. And then after American Cosmic was published, it was still secretive. The topic of UFOs was still something that people didn't talk about openly. And it wasn't until 2021 where, as you know, the Pentagon report came out. And then boom, you know, all of a sudden, American Cosmic, everybody wanted to talk to me because they had read American Cosmic and said, well, what do you know? I guess she was telling the truth.

And so that's what I learned. So encounters is the follow-up to that. I love that. Yeah, it's kind of like your research was running parallel independently to a lot of what would eventually come out in a lot of the media post kind of 2017 and onward. That's fascinating. And the fact that like it all kind of melded together now and converged into this new uphology. we've sort of seen birth since then. Yeah.

Yeah. Really, really interesting. Okay, so here's something I find interesting. When your first book came out, I can't tell you how many Reddit threads or Twitter threads were out there trying to figure out who these pseudonym people were in your book, whether it was Tyler D or the other pseudonyms that you used understandably at the time. You have a new one in this. book that I think is really going to get the conversation going again, and that is the gray man.

And I know this is a pretty big portion of the book, actually. Is there anything you can sort of tease to us about the gray man and their contributions to the book, why you felt it important to really tackle it in the way that you did? Yes. Okay, so that's the only pseudonym in the book, is the gray man. And the reason I had to do that is the exact same reason that I did that with Tyler.

And okay, so if I'm using a pseudonym, it's because the person has to have one. You know, it's not like we want that to happen. But it needs to happen. And this person is

is you know works worked with similar types in similar types of programs that okay so Tyler was was in and the reason why

I use gray man is because first he has some information that I think hasn't been explored, I start to explore it in American Cosmic and it's the worldview and not just the worldview, but the belief system of the phenomena that, you know, the belief system that a person

who's in associated with working in these programs, how do they view this phenomenon? This gets to that Jesse Michael's Grush interview where they actually get into talking about it. And they do talk about what is this? You know, what is the nature of this phenomenon that we're dealing with? And it goes beyond just the kind of science that we assume, like the nuts and bolts. And I did begin to get that, scratch the surface of it with Tyler D in American Cosmic, where he actually came to me and said, I'm doing the study and I believe,

you know, I've been told that your field is going to help me understand this phenomenon. And I couldn't understand it at the time. I was like, it doesn't make sense to me. Well, okay, now that I've been doing this, I totally get it. So with that new understanding of what this phenomenon can, how it exceeds our scientific understandings. I'm talking to a bunch of scientists again, right? One of whom is Graham, one of whom is Simom,

one of whom is Dr. Whiteley, okay? And I'm flushing out what it is about the phenomena that is really defies what we consider science to be. And so what I do for Graham's, man is I basically talk about his own experiences, which he has, and he's not the only scientist, by the way. There's like Dr. Kerry Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, had a very famous UFO experience. He called it a UFO experience, but he said, I don't know what it is, but we call it a UFO experience, so I'll use that language. And so he reminded me of gray man.

And so the gray man, his experience is very, very strange. And so he relates it to religion. And he also has a lot of spiritual experiences regarding this phenomenon. And he, you know, a lot of people, there's a lot of good and bad associated with the phenomena. Some people have really amazing spiritual experiences like Tyler D. Some people have experiences where they think that this phenomenon is really bad. And they are not, they don't like it, okay? And so, and it's, you know, they consider it to be harmful, all right?

So both sides of this are in encounters. Like, I'm not going to just focus on the good and say that the bad doesn't, the bad is as much there as the good. So, so Grayman basically talks about his experiences, which he considers to be aggressive, aggressive, you know, that this phenomenon is aggressive. but he also has experiences of things that he said if he didn't have those experience, he wouldn't have been able to deal with the phenomenon. So he talks about he has an experience of St. Michael the Archangel, which, by the way, he didn't know what it was.

But to me, as a person who knows the history of Catholicism and also Christianity, there is a being in Christianity called St. Michael the Archangel. and it has, it's very specific, it has a sword, and it slays demons and things like that. Well, Gray Man didn't know the history of this at all, but had an experience of this that he thought wasn't a dream. And that was such an amazing experience and the experience that, you know, associated with it, I felt like people should actually know about this.

And I actually know that he's not the only one. So what I did with encounters was I took the experiences of people who's like for every one experience in encounters, I've read 200 experiences very similar to that for each one. Interesting. So it kind of, it's kind of like an amalgamation of this one, I guess, theory or concept or perception of the phenomenon. Oh, that's fascinating. They're exemplary. So these are the examples. Like each person's example.

Yeah. You know what? 200 other people who've got. I was just going to say, Diana, in terms of the St. Michael thing, I interviewed a woman not too long ago who had seen some sort of crash retrieval program going into action out in the desert. Something had crashed. You know, she never said she thought. it was a extraterrestrial craft or anything like that, but something had crashed in the deserts out on the West Coast. And when the military came in, she saw several of the individuals who went off to the

site where this allegedly happened, and she saw the insignias on their uniforms, and they actually had patches that had St. Michael on them. And that really stood out to me. Right then and there, I'm like, okay, what is going on with this alleged UFO crash retrieval and this insignia on a quote unquote crash retrieval unit, I guess, using a religious symbol, you know, as their insignia? So right then and there, I mean, there's your connection kind of tying the religious aspect to UFOs. And that's very, you know, just in your face with it. I know with gray man, it's a lot more ambiguous. But yeah, does that ring any bells? Have we ever heard anything like that of these UFO programs?

Okay. Yeah. Is that something you could touch on? So I hate to be like, I don't want to do the thing that a lot of the people do who are, you know, in this field. They say, well, I can't talk about that. It's, you know. I get it. Yeah.

But it's true. So I'll tell you this, though. Yes, absolutely. So like I said, the reason that I put, so this is a follow-up to American Cosmic. Encounters is like American Cosmic 2, okay, where I go more in depth into the people and their experiences because I think that that's really what we need to focus on. You know, that this kind of stuff doesn't just, it's not just a crash. It's something that actually impacts people. And they're having experiences. And even the people that are in the programs are having experiences. And if they're wearing St. Michael or, you know, something that looks like a super power with a sword, you know, that shows that they want protection or they're, you know, they're indicating protection. And I think that this is something that isn't interesting and important. And I don't know the full significance of it to tell you the truth. I mean, I'm just being honest.

but I do know that it is a pattern and we should pay attention to it and that, you know, looking at the symbolism of the iconography, at least in the Christian tradition, you also see it in other religious traditions. You see a similar type of entity, I guess, you know, protective entity. I think that, you know, I would say that there's a really interesting letter to the bishops that John Paul the second. wrote in the 1980s that I didn't actually take a look at until I was doing this research and then I looked at it because I had heard of it and I thought, I wonder if this will have anything to say about this. And it's called the treatise on the angels. And it's, it wasn't for public consumption, actually. It was for the bishops of the Catholic Church. And Pope John Paul II comes along and basically says to them, you all don't believe in these things today, but they exist. And they intervene in human history and they still do. And I was like, wow. And he said, you know, and then he went on to talk about what these, you know, bad and good, you know, what they were.

And I thought that was really interesting and it does speak to, you know, these people's experiences of things that in secular society we don't believe in. Right. Now, I spoke to a, this is so fun. I spoke to an astrophysicist, literally yesterday, about this idea of in other, in, let's say, a non-human intelligence from somewhere else, another time, another dimension, what have you. There's always this, I feel it's a misconception that they would be peaceful, you know, that they would be so highly advanced. They've moved past warfare, this that, this that. And this astrophysicist told me straight up, he's like, I'm so sick. of scientists saying that because they have absolutely no idea.

You know, let's say they are a million to or a billion years older than we are. There's there's no evidence that would state, you know, that they would be good or they would be bad. And the reason I bring this up, Diana, when it comes to someone like the gray man and that individual taking these experiences as some sort of religious experience, and whether good or evil. Is that up to the observer or the individual when it comes to good or evil? Because even someone like David Grush has recently said,

you know, some of these individuals were left physically scarred by a UFO event. Clearly, a lot of them emotionally scarred. But some even radiation poisoning or, or marks left on their bodies or injuries. Now, to me, you know, like that could be completely just periphery to the experience itself. It doesn't mean that the intelligence or the UFO or the occupant behind it was trying to hurt that person, but it just happens to be an effect of the experience, I guess, the encounter. So I guess my question for you is when it comes to good and evil,

Is that truly a thing in the work you're doing? Do you personally think that some of these encounters are inherently good or bad, I guess? Yeah, so what an excellent question. And okay, so when we talk about the experiences that people have, so I consider evil to be something premeditated, a person intends to do a person harm, right? And that's evil. Okay.

So the question is, is this just collateral damage of an encounter? Right. You know, is this intentional evil? I mean, intentional damage or is it just collateral damage, right? All right. And, okay. So one way my work gets interpreted is that I'm looking at the history of this stuff back in the day, right? before we had cameras, before we had, you know, any kind of, you know,

technology that we could like really look at what's happening to people when they're burnt and stuff like that. Okay. So, so a lot of people then say that what people experienced back then, Diana says, is still happening today. Therefore, they bring this idea of angels and demons into the present and they say these are just angels and demons. But I'm not actually saying that. I'm not saying that it's not what people consider it. I'm saying that whatever's happening, yes, there's a progression.

You can still see it today. But I think that we need to be really careful and not be so quick to define what it is. So your question gets to this. And it's that, of course, when people, 300 years ago saw something in the sky hurt their friend, their neighbor, they're going to say it's evil because it is, you know, it's bad, right? Today, when we see a pilot going down or, you know, something happening to this person who has had then reports this experience, we're going to say, I don't want that to happen to me.

But we don't necessarily say it's evil because there's a whole baggage, that traditional baggage, that comes with this idea of evil. We just don't want that to happen to us, right? It's just, I don't want to be burned. I don't want to die, you know, that kind of thing. So we can honestly say these are the effects, right? But are they evil? That has value judgment attached to it.

And it also has a whole history of what evil means, at least in the Christian tradition, which is the tradition we've inherited usually in the United States, a good portion of us, right? this European Christian tradition of evil. So no, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that. I'm saying let's try to put on, let's try to leave the baggage beside, you know, away. And let's take a fresh look at what's happening. Now, when we take a fresh look at what's happening, I use gray man as an example. He's saying, this is not, I'm not going to let this happen to me, you know.

In an American cosmic, Gary was trying to find some type of, intervention to stop these things from from messing with people he wanted to invent a drug that we could take so that they could stop interfacing with us that means that he didn't view that interface as positive okay I don't know what he's thinking now I actually do talk to him about it but I haven't had an in-depth conversation with him lately about that so I guess another Here's another anecdote I can use to describe an answer to your question. I cleaned out my office the other day, you know, how you accumulate stuff. And my life is very incredibly busy.

And I do try to answer emails about the topic. And I also try to, when people send me things in the mail, the hard mail, I literally do try to answer it all. But it got to the point where it was almost impossible for me to do. do that. And I have some mail from when the book first came out, which was, you know, in 2019. So I've mailed from 2019. And I opened it and I read it. And one was this long letter of about, it looks like about 10 pages of written note from a person who's most likely in their 70s, maybe 80s. And they had experiences when they were young and throughout the whole life. And they read my book and they wanted to thank me. And they said, and what struck me in the letter was they

mentioned that they'd been following when pilots see these things. And they said, and then one pilot was killed in an altercation with one of the, you know, the saucers or, you know, whatever they called it. And then I stopped paying attention because I realized how dangerous these were. And I was like, wow, you know. So that's just one of so many, though. But, you know, so was that altercation just us not understanding collateral damage, you know, but it's certainly something we wouldn't want to happen. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it is fascinating. Yeah. Again, that that lens in which you look at the experience truly means everything, I think, from individual to individual. Another chapter in the book that stood out to me is in your first book,

many of us in the UFO field knew this term from the work of ballet and whatnot, the invisible college. But for those new to it, your book was probably the first time that they had ever heard what that was. And I'm sure it opened up a huge door for these people to realize, whoa, like there have been credible scientists looking at this topic for so long, kind of in the shadows, you know, and not through official channels, as it were. But in the new book, you take that even further.

You have a chapter called The Children of the Invisible's, which I thought was such a cool term. Perfect band name, by the way. So I think someone's got to definitely get that one going. But what was this chapter, Diana? What made you decide to kind of cover the evolution, I guess, of the Invisible College? Yes, so of course the Invisible College are the group of scientists led by Alan Hineck, who were needed to study this in an invisible way anonymously so that they could do, you know, so that they could keep their jobs and, you know, their scientific affiliations and things like that.

And they borrowed the term from the early modern time period when the same thing was going on, when, you know, when people like Galileo and Copernicus, you know, were being basically suppressed and their science was being suppressed. This has been the case, okay? So it's still the case. So there's a group called the Invisible College. Everybody probably knows who they are by this time. And they've been doing this work.

And so I'm lucky to know them and to observe their work and to work with some of them. But I also met extended Invisible College people. And this was the group that they were more involved with the perception management side. So there's the scientific side with people like Jacques Valle and Howe put off Eric Davis, right? They're doing science on this topic. And then there's the perception management side. And they are invisible more so even. And they're not, let's put it this way, they won't be writing a book called the Invisible College

about the stuff that they do. But their work is as important for our understanding of the phenomena because they are involved in the public management of the perception of it. And I met people like this and they were also involved in the scientific study of it as well. And what I found was that, strangely enough, I'd known a person. my whole life, who was the child of one of these scientists. And I did not know this. Although she had mentioned, she didn't even know it because, you know,

you don't know it when you grow up in it. And I had met her pre-UFO study when I first became a professor at the university where she was a professor too, a little bit ahead of me and in philosophy. And so I had met all of the first. of these people after American Cosmic. And it was, I would call it almost a traumatizing experience because, well, let's just say traumatizing. Not almost a traumatizing experience.

Because I not only did like I learn about, you know, the programs to study the phenomena, but I also learned about the management of that. And that was more traumatizing to me because I was like, whoa, these people are so organized. They have such incredible tools to at their disposal, basically. They apparently seem almost above the law, right? And that's really amazing. And I met the kids of the people in these programs. And the kids are either recruited into the program or they're really,

what's the right word to describe it? They're really confused, okay? And because, you know, they'd lived their whole lives constrained by their parents' clearances, constrained not to have certain friends, not to do certain things, not to go internationally, you know. They were basically put under the similar constraints as their parents and lived a certain very interesting life. and I actually could not write about these people, but I wrote about my friend because my friend's father has been dead for many, many years,

like 40 years or something, maybe even more than that, or I'm sorry, maybe less than that, but many, many years, 30 to 40 years. I say so in the book, I just can't remember. And she is retired. She was fine with having me talk about her experiences as a child of what she would call. She used to tell me it was called the secret space program.

And, you know, this is in the 50s and the 60s. And I mean, that was not when she told me because I hadn't been born yet. But she told me this when I became a professor at my university. And, you know, we both had kids and our kids were older than mine. But we'd go out and we'd like, you know, go to the strawberry patch or something like that. And then I'd take a picture of the kids and I'd send it to her. And she said, wow, this is so great. I don't have any photos from when I was a child.

And I was like, what? What? And she said, yeah, my dad was in the secret space program. Never occurred to me to ask about it. I thought it was just weird. I thought, okay, that's weird. But I didn't think to say, what are you talking about? I didn't think to say that because I thought it was just a one-off weird thing,

but she'd say it occasionally. And so later, as I met these people, I thought I really need to ask her about that. But I felt that I would overstep if I did. Finally, I just asked her. And she said, I'll definitely tell you about it. And so what I recognized was that, you know, there's this thing that people talk about the secret space program. It's absolutely a clown show, right? And it's completely ridiculous what people say about it, you know?

And but I guess there's an unacknowledged part of the space program. Even the space program says so. If you go to, you know, the historical documents on their website, website, they say, we leave it to future historians to discuss what is now classified because we can't. And they're really honest about that. So there's a way to talk about it without making it the clown show that it's become, but it's probably become a clown show to keep people from looking at it. Because who would want to be associated with looking at it? So that chapter is about those children. Because I personally had some issues when I met these people who were, you know,

you know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, and had been the children of these people that were scientists in this program, they didn't have normal lives. And it just seemed like it was, to me, there was an ethical issue at stake here. And I wanted to bring that up. Interesting. So in terms of those ethics then, Diana, do you see with the individuals you interviewed for, that chapter. I know it was primarily your friend. Do you see that perception management playing out at all with everything that's going on in the world of UFOs right now? I mean, again, like we could talk from 2017 on. A lot of people believe that there's some like crazy sci-op thing going on with all of this. And then you have this gentleman David Grush come forward. forward and really put out in front that, yeah, there's these Kladenstein UFO crash retrieval programs, no government oversight, things we all have been talking about for many, many years,

but here we are in front of a congressional hearing and hearing these things, literally. So do you see that perception management playing out right now? Is this, are the children of these invisibles possibly because, becoming a bit more visible as as Congress gets involved and, you know, whistleblowers come forward and all of that? Yeah. So I think that we would be naive to think that it's not happening. Okay. Because it's been happening. And we'd be naive to think that everything's really transparent right now. Hey, it's all transparent. We should take people at their word. That said, I also, this is my just my opinion, okay? So my opinion is that there's truth out there right now that has to be out there because of AI doing, I don't know if you saw a tweet that I tweeted the other day based on a person who is a really good researcher, identified that because a couple, like two years ago, I taught a class on.

on UFOs. And I talked about redaction, right? And I said, when AI is able to, and it probably is now, it's going to redact all these documents. It's going to anti-redact them, right? There's going to be anti-redaction AI tools. And all the history is going to be out there. So we've got a few things going on right now, Ryan.

We have not just AI, in a sense, becoming, you know, revealing things that have been hidden. We also have other countries in space other than the Russia, United States, who have been an alliance, by the way, in space, at least, if not on the ground. And so with that, a lot of those countries, like, won't abide

by any kind of secrecy that we might want to impose upon our own population, they might say, no way. We're not going to be that way. So there's a few things that are impinging upon us, the United States at the moment. And those two are probably the most, you know, one and two. Therefore, there has to be transparency. And I think that this is that the hand is being, you know, you have to show it now. And so I think that a lot of the transparency is out there.

But with that said, there's still a lot. there would be a lot of misinformation as well. You also have these pushback tactics, you know, that are happening to Grush and, you know, some of the whistleblowers. After they see what happened to Grush, no, they're not going to be public, you know, and who would want to. Yeah. So, yeah, so that's what I think is happening.

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.com slash somewhere skies. Kind of wrapping up the book, because I do, I've got some more general questions that I'd love to talk to you about because so much is going on. With encounters, Len Philpoo, am I saying that correctly? Okay. This was interesting because this took place in an area called Brockport, which I'm sure you and I are both familiar with, you having been to Syracuse and me being from there. I had never heard about this incident, which was fascinating.

I remember when you first sent me the book, you were like, you need to go to this chapter and look at this case. It happened in Brockport, New York. And I was, what? So, yeah, I would love if you could touch briefly on this chapter, if you don't mind, why you decided to include it. And yeah, a little about Len in those experiences. Yeah. So Len, so this is such a fascinating case because it has all the elements. First of all, Len is just a normal guy, right? So he doesn't have a clearance. He's not a space scientist or anything like that. He's just this normal guy who likes UFOs when he's a kid in the 19, I think so the 1960s. Yeah, the 1960s. He's about 16 years old when this really well-known UFO flap happens in Brockport.

New York in 67. And it's actually in Wonders in the Sky, Jacques Valet's reference book. It's actually included in that reference book. So I was able to talk to a couple of different people who were firsthand witnesses. And it was witnessed by over 30 credible witnesses in several miles, right, having seen this thing. And so Len is a guy who attended the Rice University Conference on the Archives of the impossible. And he had written to me prior to that conference. And he had shared with me a vision he had that he said he didn't feel like it was a vision. He's, he's an atheist, by the way. He was an atheist.

And he had this vision of Fulton Sheen, who is this really well-known. For Catholics, he's this really well-known Catholic bishop who I think he was also in New York. And he's a really well-known guy who had a TV show called Life is Worth Living Before Our Time, okay? And but it was, it's an amazing show. It's still being a radio show and a TV show. It's still being played in, in various places. Lots of people love it.

My daughter watches it. She loves it, okay. And he's just this really eccentric guy, Fulton Sheen. And he talks about how life is worth living, right? And, you know, and life is an amazing thing. And so Len has this experience. First, when he's 16, he has this experience of the Brockport UFO. And so when you go back and you look at all the records,

it had been examined by NYCAP. You know, it had gone through all, because it was such a widely seen UFO, and it conformed to all of the things that happened during UFOs that are so people can't. explain like a lot of people saw it but they saw different things okay one person actually saw it land and little beings get out and believe it or not nightcap and others discounted that sighting just because it was weird but they were all in on the sighting when it looked like the

stephen spielberg close encounters of the third kind kind of really cool looking craft with the little thing on the end of it you know it's trailing behind like so it was really interesting to have all this knowledge today and to look back at that site and the various people's interpretations of it, even, you know, trained eophologists looking at it and saying, that's just too weird, that guy really didn't see that. But he was actually the first one to see it. Right.

And he was the first one to report it. He was a night watchman. So Len saw this when he was a kid and he had the experiences where he went to his buddy's house and his buddy was like, something really weird was in the sky yesterday. I felt like he was watching me. You know, something really eerie. And so they all decided they were going to sleep outside of the buddy's house and try to do UFO watching. And surely a UFO showed up.

And it just didn't show up for all of them. It showed up for lots of people along Brockport throughout Brockport and also some towns near there as well. So I tried to do a lot of that kind of analysis in there of like known flaps. not just here in the United States, but also in Australia. And, you know, and the very common patterns that happen with these. And so, Len, this was the first encounter that he had where he recognized that this was real and that it changed his life. And then after that, he had very, he had a lot,

this is reported for people who have these encounters. He had other types of encounters of, like the vision of Fulton Sheen. And, you know, he then became, spiritual. He shifted from being an atheist to believing in God, but he doesn't necessarily have a religious tradition, like he doesn't have a Catholic tradition or he doesn't have a Jewish tradition or Hindu or anything like that. But now he completely believes in this other world and that we can have communication with intelligences in that world. And he has, you know, lucid dreams and things like that. So I thought he was a really great example of a person

who has this sighting and then has these experiences afterwards, but he's not religious, but he's also not an atheist. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims,

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I know, which is for, I would say, a majority of the population, the type of person we can relate to. So I think, again, that lends a lot of credence to the vast array of individuals who seem to be having these encounters as it were. So yeah, it was really cool to see you highlight that. Well, I do want people to read the book. So we won't give away too many more of what's in that, Dana.

But I do want to move to a few other things that you have been involved with lately, if that's cool. Awesome. The first would be the Soul Foundation, this new organization that is being spearheaded by Gary Nolan and a few other individuals. But you are now also a member of. of the Soul Foundation. Is this something you could tell us a little about what is the foundation and what role will you be contributing to the Soul Foundation?

Of course, yeah. So it's a foundation that will look at the phenomena, basically, and try to do really amazing research with the people who are, you know, Gary obviously is doing this research and has been doing it. And now the organization will provide, you know, the means to carry on with this type of study that is unencumbered from, you know, from basically oversight. So it's not a government foundation and it's not attached to a university. So it's basically free, you know, to explore.

Gary is a well-known scientist. He has a lot of connections in the community. So he is able to recruit people who are going to be instrumental in looking at this phenomenon. My role, and it makes sense when you think about it, since American Cosmic was published, I've been asked by university presses, like Columbia, you know, Oxford, to Rutledge, you know, to look at the new scholarship that's coming because now academics are feeling free to be able to study this topic because before it could harm their reputations and they weren't free to study it. Now they feel a lot more free.

So there's a huge body of scholarship that's on its way to being published. and it comes to people like me who've already published in the field to look at the scholarship and I'm actually a peer reviewer. So I look at it and I suggest to the press whether or not should be published based on what I know. So I'm in a position and by the way, there's a lot of the scholarship that's coming out. So I'm looking at it from the humanities and social science aspect, right? So like anthropology and, you know, religious studies, political science, that type of thing. So this stuff is coming to me.

So I'm already in a position to suggest people to the foundation who would be really helpful to the group that Gary's putting together, Gary and Peter are putting together to do this. So Peter Scafish and Gary, you know, asked me months ago, if I'd be interested in doing this work for them. And of course I would. So that's my position. I'm like an advisory council on, you know, if there's, and plus I could also, you know, add my own scholarship to that where it fits. So that's my role in the foundation.

I love that. Yes. And you are seeing this topic starting to show up in various university courses. and, you know, even online courses as well, such as independent ones that you do and just across the world. I mean, I know for a fact that your book and my book are currently required reading in two separate college courses in the United States, which I still blows my mind. First of all, that it's, yeah, the fact that like not only is it required reading, but for various different reasons, which I'd I think ties into the social science aspect to a lot of this. This is no longer just UFOs for science sake or academic sake.

This is something that affects all of us in many different ways. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's pretty cool that right now you can go to a college course and find a UFO book in the curriculum for different reasons, not just one historical aspect or political aspect. or political aspect, but for many different reasons. It's kind of what UFOs have always represented everything, in my personal opinion.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Well, I can't wait to see the evolution of the Soul Foundation. It's very exciting. The other thing I wanted to bring up is you were brought up in a recent interview that David Grush did with Jesse Michaels, a very well-known YouTuber. drop this documentary that I don't think anyone was expecting, but lo and behold,

there it is since David Grush had come forward and spoke before Congress. He hadn't really done any other interviews other than News Nation and whatnot. And then boom, he shows up in this like two-hour documentary. And Grush brings up and Jesse bring up your book, American Cosmic, within this conversation. So I got to ask, what was that like? And how do you think they handled your, your material when they were discussing it?

Okay. So, all right. So I have actually spoken to some whistleblowers about their experiences. They were interested in it. You know, they were confused about what it meant. And so I have talked to them about it. So it wasn't necessarily. And I know, I know Jesse and he's a great guy, super intelligent.

and always does great interviews. And so he had actually sent me the link and said, hey, check it out. And so I did, of course. And I was like really surprised that they featured American Cosmic. And though I do know that Jesse does agree, he likes American Cosmic. And he thinks it's, you know, like he said, he's convinced, right? And so the way they interpreted it, which I think,

I mean, it's literally how it happened to me was that, you know, they said, oh, whoa, all of a sudden we're going to be biblical literalists now. You know, that stuck out to me as something that how they interpreted it. And honestly, that was part of what really shocked me when I was doing the research for American Cosmic. I was, you know, I had been an academic looking at this from an academic perspective, not necessarily seeing. seen it as real. And then I was, you know, I was saw these as, you know, placing them in their historical context thing. You know, that's what we do. We place them in their historical context. You know, Virgin Mary apparitions, you know, they are, you know, because of the Cold War. You know, UFOs are because of the Cold War type of things like that. You know, they represent anxieties.

But I knew there was something more. And I am, you know, I do believe. but my belief was never to the point I was a believer, but I wasn't like, oh, these things are like, you know, angels are literal things that like hurt you or scare you to death and, you know, this kind of thing or show up and, you know, you weren't expecting it. But then when I saw that the same encounters were still happening to people today and people were interpreting them this way and they were like, no, these are real. And look, I have this burn, you know, and Gary Nolan's looked at it kind of thing, you know. I was like, what? Like, I was really, let's put it this way. It made me a lot more religious, frankly. It made me a lot more aware that our world is super mysterious.

And I had not, you know, if I think I know what's going on, I'm wrong, basically. So, yeah, it kind of was a wake-up call for me. And I felt that Grush had a wake-up call, you know, and Jesse had a wake-up call. And I felt like that's what they were transmitting out there to younger people who were watching it. You know, that, hey, you know, there's some weird things that are happening and, you know, wake up to it. I felt like that was how the work was being used. And I was approving of it. I thought it was good.

I was like, okay. The thing about it, that was I'm not saying, like, they showed, they did show Francis of Assisi. and you know he is known as the first person to have the stigmata which is are considered to be the wounds of Christ right on his hands right um so i've done the now the primary research for that like looking at primary documents of that the you know originating ones and i see that you know there's references to how the angel dealt with him he interpreted it it as an angel, but the angel looked pretty weird when you look at the primary documents. And of course they're going to interpret it as an angel, but it dealt harshly with him. And he developed, you know, wounds from that interaction. So, but I'm not, you know, it's really a difficult position for me to be in to kind of try to analyze this from the perspective of what's actually happening there.

And then basically concluding, oh, that was just a UFO. No, no, no. I just know that whatever it was, it dealt harshly with him and that it had gone through redaction. Just like almost all of these things in history, they get redacted for devotional purposes. And just like they do today, you know, I talked about. that in American Cosmic when people have experiences like Ray Hernandez's experience, you know, was reinterpreted by Mufon in Hangar 1. And that's a redaction. That's a, that's a, that's a

rewriting of his, you know, and he went on to talk to talk about it and to say how he felt about it. And for him it was a very positive experience, but it was made to be a bad experience. Whereas a lot of times they're bad experiences that are made to be good experiences. So there's this process of what I call redaction. We call it redaction in our field. We use that term. Okay. See, and again, I think that kind of circles back to your new book encounters.

And even a lot of the work that I do with experiencers is we strive to put forward the raw, uncensored voice of the witness and experiencer themselves. Yes. You know, not through the prism of Mufon or net-fons. or anyone, even like the person who originally took down the report. I want to hear from that person. Yes. I want to know what they believe they saw, how they interpreted it. Because how else do you get to the truth when, like you said,

these quote unquote redactions or biases get put onto an experience from an outside perspective. So, yeah, I think that is, that is a great example of, you know, interpretation, perception, kind of skewing an experience in so many words, I guess. I feel like I'm rambling. That's, that's right. Yeah, that doesn't get, I think it's the, in my opinion, it's the best way to do this work is to go to the source as much as possible. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about another project that you recently took part in, which has a strikingly similar title, I might add, even though we both know your book came first. Encounters on Netflix recently aired, produced by Steven Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment.

And you were a consultant on this project, but not only that, you appeared in it as well. So I have to ask, how do you think it went? It seems to be very well received by the mainstream right now. It's still trending in the top like five on Netflix right now. Yeah, how do you think it went? And what was that process like working with them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so remember, I think we always have to understand that

there's the scholarly work that is done about the UFO topic and UAP topic. And then there's entertainment. And within the, you know, within these two categories, they often go to, I mean, they often get mixed together, right? So it's, it's really difficult to kind of,

you know, they asked me to be a consultant to give them my view of legitimately, anomalous reports and places to go and people to talk to. And I said, yes, I'll do that, right? So I'll tell you the ones that I believe are worthy of looking into, definitely, and that appear to be anomalous. But then how that gets then put out there is entertainment.

Okay. So you're, and so I can't actually ever get angry if I am agreeing to be a consultant for, say, the conjuring, you know, and then it goes out there and I'm like, oh, they should have said that. they got that wrong. They may have got it wrong, but, you know, they're selling a movie, right? And, you know, so they're doing, you know, entertainment, really. So, and people love you the topic of UFOs right now. So a lot of, in people's minds, the entertainment gets mixed up with the reality. Okay. So that must be said. I think we have to say that. That said, I thought they did a really good

job. So when, you know, and I was criticized by a lot of people who are my friends who said, you should not be part of that project, you know, for these reasons. And I was like, gosh, maybe you're right. You know, maybe that was a bad idea. But it actually turned out really well. There were a few things in there that probably I wouldn't have put in there, you know, especially regarding the aerial school and things like that. But, you know, this is their project. It's not my project, right? So they make those choices. They're, I mean, they're not telling me how to write my book. So I'm not going to tell them how to create their, you know, docu series. But I thought they did a really good job.

I mean, they did concentrate on what people said and how they felt and their experiences just exactly like you and I discussed, right, just, you know, in the last five minutes. The people that I worked with, they listened to me. So I said, I think you should go here or this country. I think you shouldn't focus on the military UFO. I think you should do this, you know. and I think you should go to Japan where they have a completely different idea

and that costs a lot of money but they did do those things and I was really impressed with that so I had a really good experience doing this documentary or docu-series and working with the people involved with it and from what I can surmise a lot of people find it to be compelling

and I know a lot of experiencers obviously and they are telling me that it helped them. Like they, you know, it helped them understand their own experiences. And so to me, this goes beyond being just a docuseries. It's actually something that's helpful. And I feel actually okay with being a part of, very happy about it. That's great, yes, because I know you and I have probably been a part of some projects that we don't feel as similarly about it. about in terms of how they

end up. And again, that's that's what I like to call infotainment. Yes. You as the researcher or the academic, you're trying your damnedest to get the most accurate credible information out there. But then it goes through that entertainment

filter and it's, you know, it's, your baby's gone out into the world at that point. So yeah, I think you're right. I think they did a really good job. They handled the material very epic. which I thought was fantastic. You don't see that often in a lot of these UFO docu-series.

It's either sensationalized or it takes a very, you know, dark kind of horror-esque thing when you're dealing with like abductions or close encounters. But I think they really, I agree, they did a good job of focusing on the individuals who had the experiences, the aftermath of the experience, which is very important as well. I got to ask, were there any cases that you would wish they covered that they didn't? Aerial school obviously is a big one right now. And it was surprising to see them tackle the UFOs that have been seen in Japan. But any that really you'd hope that they had done in the series that they hadn't? Oh, so I did propose the Westall Australian school. It happened in the 1960s.

And it's as compelling as the Rua school. And in my opinion, but, you know, Australia is halfway around the world. And of course, my focus has been there looking at, you know, what's happened. Australia is a fascinating place, a lot of activity there. And that one was really fascinating because the people are now, I think in their 60s, and they are adamant that happened. And they have the same story. There were teachers involved who were still alive and are talking about it.

And they go really in depth into the various aspects of it. So, you know, they couldn't cover everything, right? But yeah, so I suggested that they do that one. And a couple of others I suggested. There was a lot that happened to Japan that I think had been really historically interesting that they could have, you know, they actually did get that footage and they did interview people and they did do kind of the history of extraterrestrial intelligent beings in Japan. I won't call them UFOs because they just have a completely different understanding than we do that I thought would be really helpful for people in the United States to learn about. And I think maybe that was just too much complexity for a docu-series, a Netflix docu-series, which is fine. But they did have an amazing amount of stunning footage that didn't make it in to the final cut of the series.

But again, it's their call. You know, this is not my, I'm not doing that series. I'm not the producer. I mean, I'm a consulting person, but that's, you know, that's not the producer. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, who's to say there's not going to be more? I've heard some rumblings. Yeah, I think most likely there will be. Once they say, you know how that goes. Once they see those ratings, they're like, we got something here. So hopefully. Your ratings were excellent. And, you know, my family, my family didn't even know I was in it. But my brother had texted me and he said, oh, you really need to watch this. This is really good. This is like one of the better ones. you need to watch this.

And I laughed. And my husband said, wait, don't tell him you're in it because he'll get so surprised at the end of it. Oh my gosh. Oh, yeah,

I was the consultant on that, you know, because I really wanted him to know. But he loved it. And, you know, so a lot of people who are not, you know,

who are basically new to the topic and, you know, it was really interesting for them. And people, my brother is not new to the topic, but he's certainly not in, you know, doesn't know,

all the, you know, the ins and out like you and I do. He didn't even know I was in the thing. So. But like you said, like this is going to reach an audience that far transcends the UFO community. And that's what's most important. And I think that's where we're at now. Like the topic we've been spending, at least me personally, half my life, researching and advocating for more information on, is seemingly going mainstream.

And you either embrace that or you say, no, I want this to be that indie punk band that never sells out and makes it out in the world. And I think for a lot of us, seeing Steven Spielberg get involved, again, with the topic of UFOs in such a serious manner and just having his stamp of approval on how legitimate this topic is, I think that means a lot.

to a lot of people out there who have experienced these things. And yeah, it's going to open a lot of ice. Yeah, I mean, think about it, Ryan. You know, we met way back when none of this was out in the open, you know, and, you know, we were accepted our, you know, fringe research position or whatever. And now it's completely mainstream. Yeah. You know, and I mean, it's like, it is.

It happens so fast, too, I feel. Yes. It has happened alarmingly quick, you know. And I always tell people, like, I'm, I will embrace it for as long as I can. If we finally get the answers to all this, awesome. Like, that'll be great. Will we like those answers? That's a completely different conversation.

But I tell people, Diana, I'm just riding the wave right now. And just picking up those gems when I can and learning, learning each day. And I just feel like that's what this topic has always been. Just a constant evolution and thought and aspiration and everything in between. I love it. I love UFOs. May I ask you a couple listener questions before we wrap things up here? Okay, cool.

Yeah. Cool. So this comes from one of our patrons. They actually get priority to ask our guest questions. This comes from the tree of life on Patreon. And they ask, religion and culture seem to affect how people identify what they've encountered, something we discussed earlier. Are there also preconceived biases that affect a person's emotional experience or interpretation? Is a person raised on stories of demons more likely to report their experience is negative than a person raised on angels?

Or is it the quality of the experience itself that determines that? I feel like we really did dig into that, but is there anything you want to elaborate on when it comes to that question? Yeah, that's such a great question. So this is where I'm diverging from John Max's view. So in John Max's later research, of course, he's the Harvard psychiatrist who did an analysis of people who had these experiences in the 90s. And he was at Harvard. and he had been investigated by Harvard for doing this, but it found to be completely fine.

You know, his research was fine. So he felt that the experiences were definitely determined by one's almost spiritual evolution. And so he liked to take the experiences and compare them to what he called shamanic initiations, right, which could be brutal, basically. But he said that these brutal experiences, if one accepts them, will transform one and make one better, right? Okay, so I tend to actually think that

in every universe of the human, we're going to think being, you know, being shot down if we were a pilot is going to be a bad situation or being kind of like, you know, this is not going to be good, like in every assessment of it. We don't have to be raised on,

angels, we don't have to be raised on demons to say, I don't want that. Right. So, so some of them I would say we could call them for humans at least objectively not good. So in that sense, I diverge from the idea that it's your inner orientation that's going to determine this experience for you. So I think that we can objectively say some things we don't want, some things are okay. That's fair. Yeah, I think, again, you stressed intent earlier, which I think plays like a key role in that as well. Cool. This is a good one. DM Peli on Twitter asks, with the rapidly increasing interest in UFOs, is Dr. Fasilkas, is she concerned about people manipulating this interest into a cult-like following for political gain or control? Yeah, I think so. So I think I just wrote a history of the topic for Oxford University Press.

And I actually, because that's a job that's almost impossible for any one person to do, I solicited the help of people that I know who know the topic really well, like people from the Invisible College, people from, you know, NASA, you know, people who've been doing this work for a long, long time. So it was like, although I wrote it, it was really a group effort to make it accurate. But some of the things deeply concerned me. So I went over a lot of the cults that had been founded by people who were experiencers, who had experiences of, you know, UFOs like Heaven's Gate and such.

And even people that, you know, other people too. And so the beings would tell them things that were found to be, lead to unfortunate circumstances like mass suicide or something like that. So I think that this, and I actually reiterated this in a Twitter space that I did with my colleague, Simone, and we had talked about AI and the phenomena. And I, you know, I mentioned this because somebody asked, and I said, well, yeah, there will be the trickster element, some people call it the trickster element of this, that you should beware. Like in, you know, cultures where there's been a continual history of transmissible

history of dealing with the sacred or dealing with paranormal things or supernatural things, there has also been ways to do that that have been passed down, right? So if you go to, you know, let's say Ireland, right? So they have like, and you're, near Ireland. So there, you know, there's a Catholicism that's been passed down that helps you understand supernatural things when they happen to you, you know, if they're bad. And there's kind of protections that you can take and things like that. But people who were brought up in the U.S. as secular people without, you know, even people who are religious, still we have this secular ideology where we don't believe in the supernatural. But when supernatural

things then happen to us, we're like, we have no clue about how to deal with them. And so, So I think that we definitely need to be careful about people coming in and basically saying, I have the answer. I know what this is. They live in this galaxy. And you should like follow me because I, I'm in direct contact with these beings. And I know what they want. And I can tell you what's going to happen in five years.

And it astonishes me how many people believe that. Like how many people. And we're talking about like rational people even and people with like, good jobs and lots of money, you know, and they go on the bandwagon of these people who say these things because they're so sincere, right? And they're sincere because they honestly believe that this is happening. But does that mean it's really something that you should believe in? You know, these are questions that would need to be asked at this point. And there's definitely some danger there. 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 Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest struggles in this field and with dealing with experiences, specifically, is that fine line between enabling something and accepting something.

And, you know, there will be individuals who, like we mentioned earlier, can take advantage of that, the uncertainty or the ambiguity of the phenomena for some sort of personal gain. or like you said, it gets to such a point that the delusion becomes real and they actually believe what they're saying and imparting to people who are willing to listen. So I do always find that a huge struggle in this field, one I contend with every single day of dealing with this topic and kind of being a voice in it. The struggle is real. I can put it that way. And there are cults and there are, there's an unfortunate side to a lot of this.

But on the flip side, there's a lot of revelation too. Oh, absolutely. I do want to say something too. A person really in this field, and Ryan, you will be a person I'm talking to here, there will be, what I've observed, okay, in doing this, and concentrating on some of the misinformation and the information management aspect of it, you could be approached and be made flattered,

be made to feel like you're super amazing and special and you should be like a star. And, you know, we can do this for you, but it's a trap because once you do that, you've been set up to fall. And there have been many, many, many people in the field We know about Miragemen and Benowitz and what happened to him. You know, he was a person who was vulnerable, you know,

and stuff was said to him by misinformation agents and things like that. Seriously, I mean, this happens in this field. And this is a very, this is something that you have, you cannot search for fame in this field. You know, you cannot want to be the UFO star. there shouldn't be a UFO star, right? And I've had people come to me and say, oh, you should do this, you should do.

And immediately, I'm like, I never talk to those people again because I know that this would be a downfall. This would be a bad thing. So everyone should be on their guard who starts to put out content that's actually good, you know. And if you start to put out good content, you're going to be on a radar. So you have to be, you know,

you have to be on your, you have to discern, you know, the motives and the agenda. It could be a good thing, you know, like the encounter series, you know, a lot of times you don't know until you go into it, how it's going to, how it's going to turn out. Very true. Again, I really do think it comes to intent with all of this. And I've been promised answers to things that my curiosity is always sought. and that's when I run away because like you said, that's the trap. And if these phenomena wanted us to know the answers, they would make it abundantly clear, in my personal opinion.

So the fact that they or it or has not done that, there's a reason for that. So I'm not going to take one person's word who promises you access to all of these answers. just the life's questions for reasons unknown. So, yeah, I would have to agree with you. Just be careful. That's, like you said, discernment is key, for sure. All right, let me get to this one here. Grant Lavak on Twitter asks,

could you kindly comment on the Seoul Foundation's plans to engage with national governance on the UAP issue? Now, I know for a fact Grant lives in Australia. So is Seoul going to be an international organization? Yes, definitely. And so I do know that they are in conversation already with different governments because different governments have different policies with respect to, say, crash retrieval or the phenomena. And they're not necessarily our policy. But Seoul is doing this completely above board, transparently. and with the knowledge of, you know, and oversight of our own government.

So it's not going to overstep, you know, if our government is saying, no, you know, you can't work with Canada on this or something like that. Gary is like, you know, he's been a scientist at Stanford and we have to go through what's called internal review boards in order to do like interviews of people and things like that. So we already have this established that we need to go through the hoops in order to do things on kind of like the up and up, right? So yeah, so they're going to, so they are, they're going to be reaching out to various governments. They already have. And they're going to be trying to make an international effort here as well as an effort that's more diverse.

So part of what they're hoping to do is to bring in, you know, the UFO field has pretty much been non-dive diverse, right? We can, I think, agree on that. It's this, usually this guy right here. Yeah, I know what you mean. But so, you know, but there are a lot of people that are diverse who have very important information and, and also contributions. You know, they have skills and contributions. So, so I know that this is also a priority. And I think it's important. Awesome. That's good to hear. I know Grant is all for international. relations on this topic. I mean, how else do you get to the answers to a global phenomenon without involving other countries? It mystifies me a lot of the time.

But awesome. Well, kind of in closing, Diana, there's some other stuff you're working on as well. There's a sole conference coming up. There's also a class that you're going to be teaching and conducting. Are these two things you could touch on briefly before we go? Sure. Yeah. So I do teach online classes occasionally.

And usually I teach them through a place called the morbid anatomy, which is there are these PhDs who work with medical schools to do, you know, accurate anatomy of, you know, like making wax and all kinds of sculptures for medical doctors to like basically do research. to, so they don't have to use humans to do this. So anyway, so this is a really interesting group and I'm affiliated with them. And so I teach a class on UFOs for the group, but I also teach it independently. And I also teach a class on the texts that I think are really important to our lives right now, which would be texts like Plato's Allegory of the Cave and, you know, things like that. and it's called these are the original red pills. That's what I call the class, the original red pills. So I'm teaching that class.

And also I'm going to be speaking at the Seoul Conference, and I think I'll be giving a history of basically right now, we're seeing a really interesting, this is an interesting time in history, right? So we're seeing the coming together of two parallel types of, types of research into UAPs, and that's the invisible college research that had to be done invisibly, which I know the history of that. And we also see now this academic research that's been going on in parallel, but hasn't been really rigorous because of the stigma attached. These are finally meeting. And I'm giving the history of those two traditions.

And I'm going to propose how we can work together. Okay. I love that. I love that. Oh, man, sign me up. I'm in. I'm in. Well, last question, of course, Diana. When and where can we get your upcoming book? Okay, so wherever books are sold. So it's McMillan, its imprint is St. Martin's Essentials, and it's going to be on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you know, bookstores, things like that. Awesome. Well, I have to thank you again. It's always refreshing and invigorating to have you come on. It's always a conversation unlike any other we have here on the show. So thank you. Thank you for joining me once again on Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you, Ryan. It's always a pleasure to be on the show.

Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network.