Somewhere in the Skies - Finding Common Ground Somewhere in the Skies

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

On episode 65 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan, Jason McClellan, and Maureen Elsberry sit down with author, podcaster, and anomalous researcher, Micah Hanks. They talk about some of the UFO cases Micah has researched and investigated, where UFO studies stands in the never-ending debate amongst skeptics and believers, and if philosophy is truly dead or not in today's scientific age. This interview originally aired on UFOmodPOD, now known as the UNKNOWN podcast. To learn more and to hear all episodes, visit: www.RoguePlanet.tv Guest Bio: Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher from North Carolina whose books include Magic, Mysticism & the Molecule, Ghost Rockets, and The UFO Singularity. He also hosts The Gralien Report and Middle Theory podcasts. To learn more, visit: www.gralienreport.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Official Store: CLICK HERE Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Closing Song, "N.A.S.A" by Futurecop!  SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms apply. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. This week, we flash back to an interview I conducted with fellow co-hosts of the original Rogue Planet podcast, UFO Mod Pod. Hosted by Jason McClellan and Maureen Ellsbury, we dove deep into the UFO topic from a fresh and objective perspective. UFO Modpod grew and evolved into what is now known simply as unknown. In this early episode, the three of us invite the mouth from the south. Hanks, onto the show to discuss several cases pertaining to his own UFO research, and then we dive into his thoughts and theories on UFOs and philosophy. Is, as the late Stephen Hawking once stated, philosophy truly dead. Or can it find a place in the ever-evolving UFO phenomenon and the study of it? Tune in right now to find out. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague.

We're talking about UFOs and aliens today, and I know you make your rounds at some conferences now and again, lecturing on the topic as well. And recently, you were at this interesting sounding conference called the Space and Alien Snowfest. So I'd love to hear about that event and your experience there. Yeah. Well, first of all, I wish all three of you had been there. And for the listeners, you know, we've all, the three of us, or I'm sure the four of us, these three guys and myself, we've all been to a lot of conferences together. That was the very first thing I was thinking while I was at this one. I get you not. It was a lot of fun. Part of what made this fun, that was the fact that it was kind of a

smaller crowd. And so it was a little more intimate. It wasn't insanely large and it wasn't this social movement kind of thing. There was a very interesting variety of people. My day arriving in California was very interesting because I arrived at the airport. The twin brother of the conference organizer picks me up in a Dodge Challenger. And he says, I'm here on strict orders from my bro to pick you and Stanton Freedman up. So I told him, I said, give me five minutes. I'll go inside this airport. I bet you I can find Stanton.

I went in the door, turned left, and there he was. He was standing right there. So I went up and I thought, you know, I haven't seen him since. Actually, I think the last time I saw him was the 2013 International UFO Congress. I walked up to him. Stanton, Micah Hanks here. And he looked at me. He looked me up and down.

And he goes, Micah, you look so much better than last time. And I'm like, oh, thanks. So, but we had such a great time. We get in the car. We're driving out through California and headed up toward the mountains. We're talking about, you know, Heineck and Hendry and the Center for UFO Studies. We're talking about really got deeply into Philip J. class. We began talking about the possible NSA.

Oh, there's one of those code words. They're listening. They were listening before. It doesn't matter. But talking about the NSA UFO files. And I have to say, this was a unique opportunity because I've met Stan many times. You guys have to. But I had never been in a car with him for five hours.

And this was such a treat. I'm sure that's a different experience. Five hours in a car with anyone is a different experience. Yeah. It was just fascinating because we stopped in Riverside, California, for lunch. And the weather was like spring here in the mountains of Asheville. and it just felt so nice. It was this outdoor little kind of dining area.

There were these little fountains. We started talking about the Valentich disappearance, which he had looked into. He'd been one of the very first people, incidentally, to bring that to my attention about six years ago. And, of course, I've done a lot of research into that particular case,

including having gotten to know Frederick Valentich's, well, it wasn't his widow. It had been his girlfriend at the time, Rhonda Rushton, who I've spoken with personally. And still working on that case. You know, it was fascinating to be able to share these thoughts, Stanton's feelings that maybe there was, if not a direct, operative or a clearance kind of capacity, that at very least in an informant capacity, that class may have

worked more closely with central intelligence and other kinds of agencies. And so to have this experience, yeah, it was surreal to say the least. And we got to Big Bear, great time at the conference. You know, Dolan was there, Linda Moulton Howe, who also got to spend a lot of time with and had a very interesting several discussions. And plus the attendees were really great. I could even tell you guys, I felt like I almost connected very spiritually with a lot of the people there. And it was just a really great time. Awesome. What was your talk about, Micah? I was scheduled to give two lectures. And because Super Bowl Sunday fell on the last day,

I only actually ended up having time for one. The lecture I gave was called the UFO Enigma. And where I went with this was, you know, although this was a UFO-friendly conference, I was doing the opening lecture. And by de facto, interestingly, I was doing a lot emceeing. I try not to do too much emceeing and things at these events, believe it or not, anymore at least I used to. And the reason why is because, you know, you start doing one thing and people recognize that one thing is being what you do. I was backstage. George Norrie comes up, my God, great to see you, puts his arms around me. Have you got your guitar? He wanted to know if I had my guitar, you know, and if we could do some songs and stuff, you know. And I've always

told you guys this, you know, that typically when I go to these events, I want to go there to be able to speak. And this lecture, Ryan, was primarily about applying science to uphology. I actually brought out some of the very best photographs that I've acquired over the years of various different kinds of UAP, as it were, one involving the alleged brown mountain lights. I think this is a natural plasma. And there's a skeptical group, including an astronomy professor here at ASU University in Boone, North Carolina, Dan Caten, very skeptical guy. Someone I also respect an awful lot because of his interest in the Brown Mountain phenomena for a number of years. And a

couple of really good friends of mine from Bell Laboratories managed to capture what I feel is one of the best sequences of photographs that shows one of the purported Brown Mountain lights, Overtable Rock, which I think the photo was taken in 2010. So that was one of the slides. Also a unique photograph that was

sent to me by a gentleman who is a digital archivist. He believed it was a classic daylight disc photographed near Edwards Air Force Base sometime in the 1950s. This photograph as it turns out, I'm convinced was a lenticular cloud, but I nonetheless was able to, you know, incorporate that into the lecture because the whole point is to be able to, like the Center for UFO studies and many other groups have done over the years, to try and really learn scientifically, if scientific uphology is what we're after here, to identify UFOs. You know, the IFOs are important to understand so that the genuine UFOs can be better studied. And so looking at plasmas, looking at, you know, different kind of atmospheric phenomena like the lenticular cloud format. nations, looking at a lot of different things, then finally bringing out a photograph sent to me by a Texas police office. This occurred in conjunction with the famous Stephenville UFO incident. Many people always talk about, oh, you know, it'd been a bunch of flares that were dropped, and it was just that one series of lights, and that was the whole incident. Well, that may be true, in part, that there was a series of probably what were flares that were dropped, and that people saw these and probably thought that they were a UFO. But around that time, a lot of people were describing aerial phenomena around Texas, particularly in the Stephenville area. And this particular police officer had sent this photo to a friend of mine years ago.

I'm no longer in touch with this individual, which is a bit frustrating. Because the photograph, although it's maybe not the most wow in your face UFO photograph, it's interesting. Nonetheless, it does appear to show two orange amorphous illuminations that as the police officer described had been hovering over the ground. He and his partner, who was in the passenger seat of the patrol car, they pull up onto this field. They see these two lights hovering, and as they begin ascending, he gets out of the car and grabs, of all things, he had a film camera in the car with him. Which sounds kind of funny for this day and age, but I'll point out that in 2001, the January incident that occurred there in southern Illinois, which is known by some as the St. Clair County UFO incident, where many police officers across many different municipal police departments observed one of these large triangular objects. The police officer that managed to get a photograph had a Polaroid camera in his car. So as strange and retro as that sounds, it seems that law enforcement agencies, you know, until within maybe the last 15 years or so, it's been standard practice to keep film cameras in the car with them.

I hope maybe by now many of them are using digital cameras or better yet phones now. But I digress. This photograph not only shows these two globes that were spotted by the officers ascending toward a craft. There's this craft that's illuminated by three points of greenish line. light. And what's even more interesting to me, this is the optical physicist in me. Bruce McAbee might be pleased when he, if you heard that I spotted this. But in this photograph, while people are generally looking at the blatant objects, there are three smaller points of illumination that are in the lower right hand area of the photograph, which is mostly darkened.

It was, you know, at night and the photograph was taken aiming upward, looking up into the sky. And it seems evident to me that the three points of visible light and then the apparent craft that they were ascending toward, I think are represented, although in reverse positioning, by three points of light, which are obviously the reflection of the lights off of the lens of the camera itself. And I know this because I've actually observed this in similar photographs. We've managed to, in the non-antagonistic sense of the term, we have managed to debunk certain UFO photographs by observing this same phenomena, the reflection of lights off of the lens of a camera. So long story

short, this same sort of reflective pattern in reverse and upside down appears in this photograph, which I do think lens credibility to the objects, and maybe a good optical physicist would be able to look at that and even be able to determine something about the distance either between the objects or possibly their

distance from the camera based on measurements that could be made in the known curvature and size of the camera lens. So, you know, it's interesting because these kind of things when you start digging deeply enough into it, it's not just a UFO photograph. It's a photo that tells a story. And so all of these things, Ryan, were really what I incorporated into this lecture, which was well received, considering that a lot of people kind of these days say,

why are you worried with UFO research? We know they're here. You know, Stephen Bassett has even said, we're beyond the period of having to do uphology. We're in the disclosure era. No more need for ufology. We know they're here. I differ. And we have social movements that are now saying we don't need to do UFO research is a real problem to me. Yeah, no, that's really irritating. And Jason and I say this all the time, too. It drives us crazy when we're posting about stuff and people comment, why are you even bothering? We already know they're here.

It's such a common phrase to people in the UFO sort of field that this happens. And people don't get it that, yes, you may believe that they're already here, but there are a ton of people who don't, A, and we don't have really concrete proof that's going to prove to everyone. that extraterrestrial life is visiting art. And that's why this is important. Over generalization, too. Like, they are here, so we don't need to probe any further. Like, okay, they, because you are convinced that some sort of extraterrestrial is here. That means every UFO we see is that particular race of extraterrestrial.

Like, let's give up. We already know. All of the aliens are here. Yay. We know everything about all. of the aliens. It's frustrating. We just throw research and curiosity and exploration out the window because we may have discovered one thing. No, not at all. The phenomena is huge.

There's so many related phenomena to UFOs and we know nothing. Even if we know a little bit, we still know nothing. There's so much out there to learn. So, you know, I get really frustrated with people who even, you know, looking at what is considered the most basic level, the lights in the sky. They think that there's no point in researching that, looking into that, investigating possible sources for that. I think that's absolutely ridiculous and irresponsible.

Yeah. Oh, it certainly is. You know, as a result of the various sorts of things you guys are all just pointing out right there, you know, I have over the last few years, we're going to kind of ask, you know, what am I actually trying to do as far as UFO research goes? Now, I mean, I've always known that I've wanted to be a person who tries to look scientifically at actual phenomena. You know,

I spend a lot of time at locations like Brown Mountain and other places where purported sightings are, you know, alleged to occur. That is one of the problems and always has been with UFOs

is that this is a phenomena that can tend to kind of occur randomly. You never really know when or where you might need to be at any given time with, you know, with the likeliest potential

that UFO is going to show up. So, and while I believe that, for instance, the Brown Mountain Light phenomenon is clearly some form of natural phenomena. It is, I think, nonetheless, a way that we can learn and observe and study what appears to be a form of aerial phenomena that's illuminative and very much like, and probably constitutes a similar phenomena to what is reported in a lot of these UFO reports. But the thing is,

is by the same token, I'll look at, you know, not to attack someone like Stephen Bassett. I've interviewed him and, you know, hung out with him a good bit you guys have. I think Steve's a nice guy. I really think I actually appreciate the work that he does, but it's interesting that suddenly from many UFO research, as it is, has become a political movement. When you go to these events and you see people showing up with antennas and tinful hats, you know, and glow in the dark, you know, trinkets all over them, I mean, you can kind of see that it's a social movement. They feel like they're a part of something bigger than they are by themselves. I think that's what we all really want. I would argue in equal measure that the skeptical movement of today is just as much a social movement as replete with the same dogmatism.

The belief-oriented UFO research tends to be associated with, which really to me often isn't even research. It's merely advocacy. And so as things have come down, and this really is really, I think, just happened in the last few months. I kind of got into a point when we entered the winter months. I got back from England last year speaking at a UFO conference there in Leeds, which was remarkable. In fact, I went down to London afterward and spent a couple of days with Mark Pilkington, director of the film Mirage Man. I bring his name up often and people are like, oh, you're friends with Mark.

He's one of them. Well, actually, Mark's probably more in line with me in terms of my own thoughts about the UFO phenomena than many people I've met, maybe with the exception of you guys. He's a very warm, generous person. I think he did a great job with his book and his documentary. At the core, there is something that they want to keep people away from, a real truth. back in the early 80s it was my job to confuse the UFO community. It was very easy to convince Paul.

Paul was a World War II veteran. He's very patriotic. He always flew his flag. Those type of people you can convince that, listen, you can't tell anybody else about this because it could get in the wrong hands. Would we use perception to help shroud what we're trying to protect? Absolutely.

If you've got an aerial platform that is highly advanced and the public who happens to get a glimpse of the thing. If they're convinced that it's from Venus, and there's no way it could be our military, well, hey, you know, that's awesome. Hell yes. It's been a cover story in the U.S. for a long time. Tell the media.

Tell anybody who will listen that they're using UFOs to cover up advanced technology when the truth is exactly the opposite of the words. We're really a byproduct of extraterrestrial intervention. What if we're their farm animals? What if they eat us psychically? I don't know. There's a lot of possibilities here that are not good.

Doty had this wonderful way to sell it. I'm with the government. You cooperate with us. And I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those faults. I'm going to tell you all kinds of lies. Whatever is going on, it's happening at a government level. Everything that I do is being watched.

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Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. Let's take one step at a time. You're looking at Richard Doe, the professional disinformed, trained to law. I think that he employs the necessary skepticism without ruling out possibilities, and I'm certain that he thinks that there are strange phenomena and actual quote-unquote UFOs, but he doesn't jump to conclusions without, you know, facts and data that merit those kinds of conclusions. And so, you know, for me, ever since coming back from England and the very positive experience I had with the English UFO researchers,

and I have to say that community does approach this subject very differently from the American audiences. It's a very different, at times I think, even slightly more intellectual approach that they employ. Talk about that a little bit. I'm curious to hear about that. I'll give you an example. Here's kind of what I mean. When we do research here in the United States, most UFO researchers are journalists and historians. You know, Richard Dolan, who is probably, I would say, contributed with his two and, now, three volumes set with UFOs in the national security state. He's contributed some of the most meaningful historical commentary to the UFO phenomenon.

Now, where I differ with Rich, and he knows this, and we get along great, I have a rule, and I told this to Linda Moulton, how at breakfast while we were out in California together, I said, I can love someone dearly and be friends with him and cherish that friendship for life, and I may not agree with a word they say. That's kind of how I feel with a lot of people in the UFO. community. I don't agree 100% with probably anybody, but that doesn't make them an enemy. You know, I find that I have more common ground with people than, well, of course, you know, folks, I guess, on the debunker side of the skeptic thing, and we'll come back around to that.

In America, though, it is primarily kind of investigative journalism and historical research. Part of the reason I think that that is is because of the difficult in being able to get out to a site and spot a UFO or no one's going to show up. So the research that ends up going on, although it can be scientific, is often done after the fact, which usually is reporting on the case and what the witnesses said that they saw, much like a journalist would do, or collection and interpretation of a broader swath of data collected over the years, which is really kind of what the historian does. Scientists often do this. But even if you look at Stanton Friedman, when I spoke with him on our way up there to Big Bear in the car, I said, you know, you're a nuclear physicist and a person who is almost really played the role of an investigative historian in general. journalist by going to the National Archives, digging up files and things like this. You know, that's not necessarily scientific work. He is a journalist and a researcher and a writer who is

informed by his, you know, extensive background in nuclear physics as a scientist, which has made him unique among researchers. In England, and I think many people here in the United States would kind of look at English researchers as being more skeptical. But I find that those researchers, yes, they are somewhat more skeptical, rather than leaping toward the quote unquote UFO equals alien convention of extraterrestrial hypotheses, English researchers, as I find, have gravitated largely toward attempting to look

for natural and man-made causes that may constitute euphological phenomenon. The Official Secrets Act, I guess, has also been more conducive to the release of UFO documents from the mod, as our friend Nick Pope will tell us about. Let's first of all find out where you stand on the issues of UFOs.

You were skeptical when you first took the job. Are you still skeptical? I'm less skeptical than I was. I think, you know, looking at the sorts of interesting reports in these files, the ones from police officers, pilots, military personnel, the ones tracked on radar, you know, there's material there that certainly makes me think twice. It's not all misidentifications of aircraft lights and weather balloons. Is there any one report that stands out as extraordinary or perhaps most convincing? One in the new files that I particularly like is a radar sighting where an object traveled 12, 10,000. multiple miles in 12 seconds, about 3,500 miles an hour. And that's on a military radar. So,

you know, it takes the evidence to a whole level over and above just eyewitness testimony. Could that be explained away by something like ball lightning? Would that show up on a radar? It really shouldn't. I mean, the assessment given at the time, and of course, science actually isn't quite sure about ball lightning. So that's almost explaining one mystery with another. But the military radar operators said, well, you know, it looks like a real. solid return. What about this case in Suffolk at the US military air base which people talk about as being

Britain's Roswell? Yes, Rendlesham Forest from December 1980. There are a few new papers on this in the files. This was extraordinary because a UFO landed and was seen by dozens of military witnesses and critically, they took a Geiger counter to the landing

side after this thing had gone and the radiation levels that they discovered. The MOD's defense intelligence staff said that they seemed significantly higher than background. But the other thing, too, that's interesting is that this conference I spoke out that my friend Anthony Beckett put on, he's a chemist by trade. I got to his house and he had Harvey Rutledge's book, what was the book it's called, Project Identification, the first scientific field study

of UFO phenomena. Again, a physicist's aims at trying to study UFOs. He had tragedy and hope by Professor Carol Quigley. These are the kind of books in his UFO library. That was immediately a great experience. And his focus was much like mine. He was trying to understand earthlights and earthlight phenomena. But he's putting on a conference called the British Exo Politics Summit. Of all things, despite the term exopolitics being in the name of all the subjects that repeatedly came up throughout the course of the weekend, the one preeminently was the secret space program, this idea about some technology, whether or not influenced by something from someplace else, but a technology that is from here primarily and which is built by us. So it's

interesting that in England, they do tend to kind of have a little more of a down-to-earth, I think, perspective on what UFOs may be, whereas here in the United States, we do have social movements, political movements even, which are aiming to get the release of the extraterrestrial data, which I think really we need a little bit more information to be able to assume that that is indeed with the government's hiding. I'm sure they're hiding something. I'm not sure it's alien. Well, Micah, you are, speaking of exopolitics, I read a recent article of yours. I don't know exactly how recent about, you know, sort of science and the UFO phenomenon and how that can be pitted against philosophy.

Would you care to elaborate on how you feel philosophy could help solve some, possibly some of these mysteries, or your thoughts in general on philosophy, either being dead or a way to look further into these phenomenon. Yeah, that's a good question, Ryan. Let me tell you this. Okay, so we know Sir Stephen Hawking, physicist who I admire greatly, and I've read a number of his books, even though a lot of them, he refers to them as being unreadable because of the technical matter, and I'm not talking about a brief history of time. It's his other stuff that he wrote before that, that is indeed very much more technically oriented, and one has to push themselves through it and often be able to have reference materials on hand to do so. And I don't blame to be able to understand all of it,

But I am a student of the science as self-taught, by the way, largely. You know, I've got a little chemistry hobby lab here at the Grayley and Bunker, in fact. And I am very serious about my scientific pursuits as a hobby and as a supplement to my research. Now, that said, you know, Hawking is someone who, by virtue of being a brilliant physical scientist, he will say that philosophy is dead. He specifically said on the last couple of pages in a brief history of time that the most well, known and eminent philosopher of his day, Ludwig Wittgenstein, said that all that was left for philosophers to study was language. That, I don't know if that's really a fair statement. For him to say that language is dead, and the reason why is because of Wittgenstein, well, let's just point out that Wittgenstein was a professor, of course, at Cambridge.

Hawking, of course, may not have taken into consideration that Wittgenstein was the most visible philosopher to him by virtue of where he was, and maybe also in part due to his disabilities. But I will also point out that Wittgenstein was no less influential. His tractata was a treatise all on language. And what he was really saying was not that philosophers only need to study language. He was saying that behind every word, if we break down or even remove language, concepts exist. And that words are our feeble attempts at trying to express concepts which remain that are deeper. And in that sense, we can also see that when someone says something like philosophy is dead, well, let's think. What do you mean by philosophy?

Do you mean philosophy in total? Do you mean classical philosophy, epistemology? Ethics or morals? I would not like to think that that's dead. I think the proper question to ask is if one says philosophy is dead, have we asked a philosopher what he thinks about that? Or Mr. Stephen, most qualified to make a statement along those lines. Let's get more to the point. He also says about UFOs that UFOs he discounts in this herch for alien life because why, if they existed, were they only showed themselves to cranks and weirdos?

Now, of course, we know from the work of journalists, the likes of ladies. Leslie Kane and many others over the years that only crank some weirdos see UFOs. We know, of course, that going back to the Blue Book era, that only cranks and weirdos were seeing UFOs when we actually had government officials. You know, Captain Jack Puckett of Strategic Air Command, 1946, prior to Kenneth Arnold, reported a near-mid-air collision on his way to Macbill Air Force Base in the summer of that year. He said it was a large rocket-like fuselage with no wings, two illuminated rows of windows, the size roughly double the size of the fuselage of a B-17 bomber,

and that it was producing a thick red plume of smoke as it passed by his aircraft nearly colliding with him going a thousand miles an hour, he estimated. He signed a sworn affidavit about this, which of course a breath after the Second World War, this would have been of highest national security interest that there might be what was at that time and could have only been interpreted as being possibly an enemy craft. This would have been a horrible thing for him to hoax or to lie about or to make up. Crank, weirdo, I think not. The reason that we need philosophy when it comes to UFOs is because science is really what we use. It is our best attempt today at gathering data and interpreting the natural world around us. But it began with philosophy. Philosophy and logical inquiry was the primordial pool from which the slime eventually crawled that became modern science.

There are still questions, which, for instance, if the universe had a beginning, what came before that. Now, Hawking will be quick to tell you that since that is not something that science can probably determine, that thus is not a question that science seeks to explain. Thus, you know, all such things is, you know, an afterlife, death, God, you know, all of these kinds of concepts are, are likened to being questions that science does not seek to address. Now, if science does not seek to address these questions, but they are nonetheless relevant and meaningful to us as thinking creatures. Well,

is it fair to say that no one should address those questions or merely that if science doesn't, perhaps someone else should. Hence the philosopher. I think that there's very easily a case to be made that philosophy is still important. Philosophy working in conjunction with science and mathematics can help kind of

temper science and move it in a productive direction. And I think that in equal measure, science at times, or rather scientists, can tend to get so dogmatic and also so skeptical that the spirit of innovation potentially might be hindered by a scientist who is not willing to think enough outside the box. So we do need philosophy and as it applies to UFOs when a scientist probably like they'd say about creation, you know, God, death, whatever, you know, that, well, UFOs aren't a subject that science seeks to address. Well, perhaps a philosopher should ask a scientist, why do you think that? You know, if it's a physical, tangible, apparent phenomena in our world, what about that should science? not seek to address. Hence, I have fundamentally come back to the point of thinking that philosophy is important in relation to UFOs. So, you know, whether or not you want to call me a UFO philosopher.

It's a good point, though. I mean, I think it was Heinek who said, you know, scientists often forget that there will be a 22nd century. There'll be a 30th century. They'll be so on and so on. And that, you know, there are things yet to be discovered. And sometimes science can hinder that. And Ryan, I'll say also really quickly that I saw a psychop article, well, SCI now, but, you know, formerly the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims to Paranormal. And the article was called the Secret Life of J.L. and Heinek. And the first issue it took with him was the fact that when he was a young teenager, you know, rather than going out and playing sports and stuff like everybody else, he had saved up money and bought a copy of Manly Palmer Halls, the secret teaching of all ages. I own a copy of that book. and in terms of being a book on hermeticism and philosophy,

as it relates to occult traditions worldwide, I mean, I think it's one of the most valuable books that's been written, if you're interested in that kind of thing, that a skeptical organization would use that as a point against an astronomer, a man who, after, of course, purchasing this book and trying to further himself intellectually at a young age, then, of course, he enters the sciences with hopes of trying to better understand the unknown mysteries of the world.

You know, that this would be a point of criticism is just, just ridiculous to me. The modern skeptical atheist movement, also a social movement, which is informed by the ideology of the mass, not by the individual, in my opinion. It's just shameful that skeptics have become so skeptical that they

won't even allow for an astronomer to read about such things as the occult and hermeticism. These things, they may not be directly relevant to a physicist or an astronomer, but that doesn't mean that these subjects are irrelevant altogether. I think it's just disgraceful the way that the so-called skeptic movement today has become one

that says if 90% of all UFOs can be explained, as many would agree, by the way, then why not? 100%. That's their whole modus operando when it comes to this subject. If we can explain 90, we can explain 100%. I think, therefore, it is not. It's like reverse Cartesianism. And frankly, it's bad science. Well, said. Well, Mike, I know that philosophy is something that occupies a pretty large chunk of your mind and something you talk about a lot. And you're a thinker. You like to think probably as much as you like to talk, and that's probably a good thing. He's a podcaster. That's right.

So let our audience know where they can go to listen to more of your philosophizing, as well as your other content that you're putting out on a regular basis. Yeah, well, for those who haven't gotten enough as it is, this might be enough to last anybody a year, just the short time we spent together today, and thank you for that. But if people would like to learn more about me, my podcast is the Grayleian Report, and the website is G-R-A-L-E, in Report.com. And then there's my website, micahanks.com. And, you know, as far as podcasts go,

there's also the Maverick podcasting website. Yeah, let me think here, maverickpodcasting.org. So those are the ways to find me. And, of course, people can always email me info at micahanks. Or follow me on Twitter at Micahanks. I've got my own name. Isn't that cool? All right, Micah. It's been fun. Thanks for hanging out with this, buddy. That's it for this week's episode. Again, you could find Micahanks hosting his weekly show, The Graalian Report. Available on the KGRRA Radio Network and in podcast form as well. Be sure to visit KGRARadio.com and Graalienreport.com.

To learn more about Jason McClellan and Maureen Ellsbury's work and to subscribe to the unknown podcast, be sure to visit rogueplanet.tv. My thanks as always to all Patreon subscribers for your monthly contributions to the show. If you'd like to help support the show and receive many rewards at many different Consider becoming a patron today. To learn more and to subscribe, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. We're on Twitter at SomewhereSkies and Instagram at SomewhereSkies pod. All past episodes, articles, and contact information can all be found at the official website.

Somewhereinthes.com. Thank you for joining me this week. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching. Somewhere in the skies. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com.