Somewhere in the Skies - Loving the Alien: Three Days in the Mirror World of Modern UFOlogy (w/ Eric Benson)

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

We are joined by investigative reporter, writer, and podcast creator, Eric Benson. Benson is well-known for his hit podcasts, Project Unabom, Suspect, and Death County, PA. However, he recently dipped his toes into the murky waters of UFOlogy, having embedded himself in a UFO conference recently held at Rice University. In his fascinating long-form article for Baffler, titled, "Loving the Alien: Three Days in the Mirror World of UFOlogy, he describes his experiences at the "UFO and the Impossible" conference, where a diverse mix of scientists, experiencers, and spiritual seekers gathered to explore UFOs (or UAPs) through both empirical and mystical lenses. As Benson will discuss, he found the conference's blend of rigorous science, conspiratorial narratives, and deeply personal testimonies a bit unsettling, but nonetheless, compelling. This is no more apparent than when he meets Nancy, an artist who shared both skepticism and raw vulnerability. We break down the piece and where he stands today on the fascinating community we call "home." Read the article: https://thebaffler.com/latest/loving-the-alien-benson Find Eric's work at: https://ericbensonwriter.com/ Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Email: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Proud member of SpectreVision Radio: https://www.spectrevision.com/podcasts Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 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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Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best have you wait 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. Today, we speak to a reporter and journalist Eric Benson. Eric Benson is the creator and host of the hit Apple original podcast, Project Unabom, about the American domestic terrorist, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.

Benson is also the creator of the highly acclaimed podcast series, Suspect, and the Wondery series, Death County, PA. But today, we're going to be talking about a piece he's written for the online magazine, The Baffler. in which he embedded himself for three days into a UFO conference held at Rice University in the U.S. What did he learn from the experience? Did his views change at all on UFOs or the subculture that continues to grow and evolve around it? This and so much more with Eric Benson as we break down his article titled Loving the Alien,

three days in the mirror world of modern ephology. While our government's official position is not to speculate on this subject, we can choose to let our minds explore other possibilities to use our imaginations. For if we consider that astro-scientists agree on one point that the possibility of life elsewhere is not only quite probable some field is there without a doubt. Let us suppose them that these objects are real space vehicles.

extraterrestrial origin and not an illusion of the mind. I'm Ryan Spreck, and you are now somewhere in the skies. Welcome, Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague, and today we have a fascinating interview for you guys. Now, every morning I wake up and make my coffee, and I start reading the news, whether it's what's going on in the world or whether it's what's going on in the UFO world. And I get Google alerts, just like everybody. Anything that has the word UFO or UAP in it, I'm reading it in the morning.

And there was an article that came across my Google alerts a couple weeks ago that was titled, Loving the Alien, Three Days in the Mirror World of Modern Uphology. This was written by a gentleman named Eric Benson, who was an investigative journalist, a podcast host, a producer, and everything in between. And I was fascinated by this article. Now, Eric would go on to go to a event at Rice University that was called UFO and the Impossible. So basically, the article follows his three-day journey into the UFO community through this conference. So joining us today is the author of that article, Eric Benson, and I cannot

wait to break back down with him. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today on Somewhere in the Skies. All right. Exciting to be here. Thank you. Thank you. No, I got to ask you first and foremost, have you ever been asked to be on a UFO podcast before?

First time. All right. The first time for everything, right? Well, the reason I'm having you on is UFOs. However, I do want to let our audience know. I actually knew of your work prior. to this because I had gone down this rabbit hole when I was actually writing a treatment for a play and a screenplay about the Waco Siege. And, you know, I went down the whole David Koresh rabbit hole

and the Oklahoma City bombing. And all of this kind of led me to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. And right around that time, as I was doing my research, a podcast came out, and it was called Project Unabom. And lo and behold, you were the writer, the host, and the producer of this. So before we even get to UFOs, aliens, and all of that, I got to ask, how did Project Unabom come about? And what made you want to really dig into that aspect of American history? Sure. Yeah, I got in, you know, I was aware of the Unabomber of Ted Kaczynski a little bit. You know, just it wasn't something I'd ever really kind of looked into. I was aware of it in the ether. I was aware that this was someone who was, you know, a notorious domestic terrorist, you know, the most famous male bomber in history.

but also someone who had a following. You know, had people who were interested in the ideas that he had espoused and written in industrial society and its future, the Unabom Manifesto. And I was aware that that had continued on and that that, you know, that even after Ted Kaczynski was arrested and pled guilty and spent the rest of his life in prison, that those ideas that he put out there were appealing to a certain segment of kind of people who were skeptical and hostile to technology as Kaczynski had been. So I thought that was interesting. I then, I think, learned at some point that there was even an archive at a university, at the University of Michigan of Ed Kaczynski's writings.

I thought, well, man, so there's a domestic terrorist out there whose writings are in this, are in a university archive. You know, so you have these, you have ideas and you have violence, and you have someone saying he committed violence because of his ideas, but then there's a complicated, of course, it's much more complicated than that. There's a whole, you know, the story of a person and of how he lives in the world and his particular psychology and so I thought man that's a that's an interesting topic to dig into and his ideas you know the you know the anti-technology ideas of Kaczynski the sort of what I always say is the trick of the manifesto is they always feel very relevant you know he he the kind of he was

really this kind of became a driving force for him in a very different technological moment but people read it now or just have an idea of Ted Kaczynski and they think, oh, iPhones, now they, you know, when I was kind of beginning of when I was making the show, people were thinking, you know, iPhones, social media, now they're thinking about AI. You know, it's always technology and our embrace of technology and then our desire to cast off technology and be rid of it and the sense that technology is, is in some ways really corroding us and what it means to be human. That is a universe.

I suspect they thought that 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture, it's a part of being a human being on Earth. And so in this kind of crime story, I could explore all of those ideas. Right. I love this idea of always being relevant because you're right. You know, at the time, he was sort of reflecting on, the technology at the time, whether it was like the advent of the internet or, you know, moving forward with that, then would come social media, then would come AI. So you're right. It does seem like a

universal problem and issue that every generation seems to face at some point. He just seemed to have taken it to an extreme that many Americans or humans in general would not. But it was such a fascinating journey that you took people on in that show, you know, while not obviously agreeing with what he did his actions per se, but sort of empathizing and trying to understand, you know, what would lead someone to become like this. And he even touched on some of the controversial stuff that he was involved with. Wasn't he involved in like some sort of psychological experiments at one point MK Ultra-esque sort of stuff, or was that all just conspiracy theory? So I think we do not believe that it was really affiliated with M.K. Ultra, but he was, as a

student at Harvard, he was a subject in psychological experiments performed by a psychologist there named Henry Murray, who had been involved in some government intelligence work at points. Now, I think, you know, there has been this idea that Kaczynski was kind of turned, by the experiments that this was the sort of, I would think of it as like the Frankenstein myth, you know, that we created our own monster, that this sort of post-war technological age, you know, trying to brainwash people with psychology,

kind of created the monster. And Kaczynski is the Frankenstein's monster that we then kind of have to live with. I think that's, you know, he very much pushed back against to that narrative. narrative himself. And I do think it's a, the experiment may have had an effect on him, but I think it's, it's probably gotten a little too much emphasis in what made Ted Kaczynski, Ted Kaczynski, who's a, you know, nothing if not unique. Yes, that, that's a good way of putting it,

for sure. Well, sort of moving to another series that you produce as well, Eric, uh, suspect. Now, this is an ongoing series that you've worked on different seasons. And more, I guess you could say in the, I don't like using the term true crime, but, you know, people who have been accused of crimes and whatnot. And the journey they take sometimes, you know, whether it's in prison or outside of the prison system. So what exactly is suspect and what made you want to help create this project? Yeah, suspect's a show. I like to think of a show about the criminal justice system, or I guess what people now kind of call the criminal legal system.

And the idea of the first season was really a top-to-bottom look at a case that was that was unresolved where the man at the center of an Emmanuel Fair had been charged with a murder, had gone to trial twice for the murder, eventually was acquitted of the murder. So we can't say he was wrongfully convicted, although he did spend a decade of his life in jail because he couldn't bail himself out. So he spent, he spent, you know, he lost a decade of his life in incarceration. So even though he was never convicted of a crime, he spent, he spent an awful lot of time behind bars. And, you know, the case originally came to us, me and my reporting partner, or Matt Scher, because it had to do with DNA,

because it had to do with cutting edge kind of DNA technologies. And this idea that you had gone from, forensic DNA starts to be used in the mid-1980s. Before that, there's no, you know, there's no way to use it in a criminal context. And it starts out you need a lot of kind of material, blood, things like, you know, pools of blood to get DNA from, then you can tell. By the time this case is happening, you know, in the, I think, you know, in the low, late in 2008 is the day, is the year of the murder, 2007, been a little bit. But, you know, the late aughts and then kind of continuing through because Emmanuel's, you know, journey in the justice system lasted until 2019 when he was acquitted, you know, you got to a point where you could take DNA from, you could take what's called touch DNA.

So if I touch you, you know, touch your jacket that you're wearing, they can test the jacket and say, oh, okay, well, my, you know, Eric Benson's DNA is going to be on your jacket. And then you get even secondary touch DNA. So if we meet, I shake your hand, then you go and touch someone else's jacket. My DNA can end up on their jacket. And so it's a really, really powerful scientific technology. and it tells you that there is someone's DNA on something, but it doesn't tell you how it got there, it doesn't tell you why it got there,

and it doesn't tell you exactly when it got there. And so we have been kind of conditioned through shows like CSI and NCIS that DNA is kind of considered the kind of gold standard forensic evidence. And it is in a lot of ways, but you can fall into a trap where you see DNA on something and you make assumptions and there is still a lot of investigative work that needs to be done. So in this case, this is a very complicated DNA case. DNA was the only evidence they had no one witnessed the crime.

There was really no one with any clear motivation for this crime for the killing of Arpenajanaga, who was the young woman who was murdered in this case. but there was a lot of DNA. And there was DNA of a number of different men because there'd been a Halloween party in her apartment the night before. And what do you do in a case like that where you have all of this DNA evidence pointing in different directions if you want to solve the case?

And they ended up charging Emmanuel with the crime. And so it was scrutinizing why they did that and how this happened and talking to the investigators, talking to the prosecutors, of course, talking to Emmanuel, talking to his friends, talking to his defense lawyer, really trying to build up a understanding of what happened in this case and how forensic DNA can, you know, in this case, you know, go wrong. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built

for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Interesting. You know, and we live in an age now where podcasting can actually sometimes change or influence these sorts of cases. I mean, there have been examples where people have been found innocent because of investigations that were done by reporters and investigators who would then go on to do a podcast. I mean, you've got that TV show now, only murders in the building, the comedy show. where that's kind of what they're doing a parody of, in so many words. With the work you've done, has there been any influence on the cases that you've actually covered in the show? Yeah, yeah, significant. I mean, you know, in the case of Suspect Season 1, you know, Emmanuel had already been acquitted. So by the time we've made the show. So there was nothing in terms of his culpability in the criminal justice system that had already been done.

And even if there was evidence discovered later that pointed to him, he can't be retried because we have rules against him. So he's been, he's acquitted, he's off. However, Emmanuel's life was really, really, really deeply affected for years and years by this case in a very negative way. And he, you know, after the show came out, I think it might have been a year after maybe even less, he's, you know, he sued. He filed a lawsuit, a big lawsuit that I don't believe has been kind of finished yet. But, yeah, I, you know, it wasn't, I don't believe it's necessarily directly because of the, you know, because of the podcast. But certainly the podcast, you know, shined a light on on what was going on in his case and maybe gave him, you know, the confidence to, you know, to decide to, you know, to decide to file a lawsuit. And certainly, you know, we gave him access probably to more lawyers because his case became more.

high profile. And we did another, for season three, we did a case that was a wrongful, a true wrongful conviction case about a man named Leon Benson, who was, who had been convicted of a murder in Indianapolis. And Leon's been 25 years in prison for the murder. And Leon was released while we were making the show. And I cannot say that the show itself was the cause. You know, Leon's lawyer, Lara Bazelon, actually helped make the show. And so we knew that she was working on

an innocence case for him. But he's, yeah, he's released. And of course, it brought, the show brought more publicity to his case. And, you know, he's also been pursuing, you know, financial restitution, which can be significant. You lose 25 years of your life

spending in Indiana State Prison, that's, you know, that's a significant debt to repay. Absolutely. Yeah, not to mention the psychological toll it takes too. Now, with an instance like that where, like, it happens in the middle of producing your show, did that completely, did you have to pivot in terms of like what you had planned out or like, how did that work, Eric? No, we anticipated it was going to happen in the middle of it. the pivot would have been that for a while it looked like it might not happen. Oh, okay.

Yeah, we thought because Laura had kind of brought the case and she was feeling very good about their chances of getting Leon released from prison. But, you know, by the time we started working, it was looking good. But then it kept dragging and it's very easy for something like this not to happen, for someone not to be exonerated because it's, you know, you're, you as a government are admitting that you did something very wrong. And so everyone really has to be aligned on wanting this to happen. The real, I think the biggest effect that show had,

and it was really, really moving, is that it brought together the sister of the victim, Casey Shane, and his, brought his sister who had been very skeptical of Leon's claims of innocence. and she, I think, through participating in the show, and hearing the show really became won over by Leon. And for the bonus episode, which came out to which we taped two months after the show came out, we all went up to Indianapolis and Casey's family and Leon's family came together for a night. and we all did an event where where Colleen, Casey's sister, and Leon spoke

and spoke to each other and they're now, I think, quite close. And so it was so that, that I think, that would not have happened without the show. I feel pretty confident in saying. And that's really amazing. And very rare that a victim's family kind of gets on board with an innocence case in that way. It's a very, very hard thing for a,

the family of a crime victim's family to flip after they've been told for 25 years that this is the person who, you know, who killed their loved one. And of course, it's always, you know, the thing, you know, certainty is very hard in this world, as we, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about with UFOs. You know, certainty, certainty is hard. And, you know, every case that we've done, and it's hard to ever be 100% that something happened because you weren't there and because they're always, you know, they're living, you know, there are little, you know, unresolved questions. There are things that don't line up about our reality, really, and about, in about every case.

And you can always, if you've come, if you've thought of things a certain way, it's, easy to find reasons why that's correct, even after a lot of evidence is pointing the other direction. And that's understandable. That's human. But Colleen, you know, very much to her credit, really was able to, you know, through a process, was able to really kind of come around to Leon's innocence, which, you know, which I think we believe in strongly as well. I think it takes a very special kind of person like Colleen to do that, like you mentioned, to accept this and, you know, try to make some sort of amends or establish some sort of respect for this person who has suffered greatly. They've both suffered in many ways. So, yeah, it's, I'm sure it's some sort of closure for both of them. I love that. I love that's kind of what you guys do in that show. So yeah, kudos on that for sure. You bring up a really good, I think, word that we can really play off of here, Eric, and that's reality.

Now, the reason I'm really having you on is an article I came across. Now, you know, as a UFO researcher, I've been doing this for 20-something years at this point. I live, breathe, sleep, UFOs, like many of the people that you met that you talked about in your article, which we will get to. And every morning I get 20 UFO stories in my inbox and email. And one of those had a very interesting title that caught my attention over all the others. And that was Loving the Alien three days in the Mirror World of Modern Euphology. The headline just was unlike any headline I'd ever read for a UFO article. So I said, okay, what is this about?

And the minute I started reading it, man, I was hooked to see someone who is looking at the UFO topic from an outside perspective. It was so refreshing to see what someone thinks. You know, I know these names of the people in your article, the Diana Baselkis, the Jeffrey Kriples, the, you know, who else they have? Lou Elizondo, David Grush. Like, these are names I see. Yeah, Gary Nolan. Yep. But, you know, for anyone else outside of the UFO world, they're like, who the heck are these people?

So, again, it was fascinating to see that. So let's kind of set up the article for everyone. Obviously, we want them to go read it over at the baffler, but we'll go through some of the highlights here. What compelled you to attend this UFO conference? This was held at Rice University. It was called the UFO and the Impossible. What compelled you to go and then eventually write a piece about it? Yeah, well, that's a simple one.

My friend of mine, who's an editor at the baffler, he and I have been looking at possibilities of collaborating on something for probably a couple of years now, and nothing's quite popped. And he sent me an email, it must have been in January, and said, what do you think about going to a UFO conference at Rice University and I said, yeah, of course. It sounds great, fascinating.

You know, convention, what I call it, you know, convention stories. You know, that's a kind of warhorse of the magazine genre. You know, people like David Foster Wallace are famous for these stories where they go to, you know, the state fair or the, you know, the adult video awards or go on a cruise ship. It's a, you know, kind of, it's for magazine writers, it's great. because you can drop in somewhere for a few days. Everyone is a controlled environment.

Everyone's there. You have them all trapped. And you can just kind of walk up to anyone and get an interview. And, you know, just embed yourself for a few days and come back with the story. So it's a nice, compact way to get into really kind of get into a subculture, basically. And then, of course, yes, who's not. who's not fascinated by UFOs? And so to do this.

And also that it was a kind of interesting spin on it that I was not aware of, that this was being put on by the Religious Studies Department at Rice University. And that this was building, it seemed to be kind of building on the work of Jeff Krepple and Diana Pesulka and who were people, I was not aware of their work.

But it was, you know, it was tackling it from a very broad sociological academic point of view. And so I thought, okay, that's gonna be, that's gonna be interesting to read a little going up to it and then really embed with these people for a few days and see who's there. And this is a kind of way that I could get at the topic as someone who's not, you know,

has not been researching the UAP phenomenon for 20 years. This is a way that, you know, I can get a lot of perspectives quickly and try to make sense of it a little bit. Awesome. Now, did you have any prior interest in the UFO topic or had you ever spoken to anyone who saw? Like, what was sort of your beliefs on this topic prior to the event? Let's start there, I guess. Yeah, I guess I've never written about UFOs per se. you know, but I feel like I've, you know, I've written about technology, you know,

with people like Tate Kaczynski, you know, I went, I wrote a piece about a decade ago for BuzzFeed, back when BuzzFeed published kind of long-form reporting, where I spent a week, this is another kind of convention piece. I spent a week at a place called Singularity University in Mountain View, California, and that had been founded by Ray Kurzweil and then Peter Diamandis. And it was, you know, it was essentially about the, the radical implications of the technological future. And that, you know, and I've written about space. I wrote about, one of the first stories I ever wrote.

I went to another convention story. I went to the annual conference of the Mars Society in Washington area. And I, you know, or people who are very, you know, very dedicated to humanity. exploration of Mars and of a future for humans that involves, you know, humanity becoming a space-faring species. So I had, and I visited NASA. I went to, I wrote a piece about the last space shuttle flight and really kind of the dissolution of the astronaut core, because it was sort of after the last space shuttle, you know, was flew. There was no U.S. space, there was no way for American astronauts to get up to the space station at that time without using going on the Russian Soyuz.

And then private industry was coming in, places like SpaceX. But you had a lot of people, a lot of the astronauts were leaving. We're no longer going to be an astronaut, which of course is that's like an interesting setup for me because an astronaut is like one of the most aspirational professions in the world. Oh my God, you know, I want to be an astronaut. it's like it's what a kid. Every kid, yeah. But then these guys who had spent their, and women, you know, who had spent their whole lives dedicated to this path that led them to being an astronaut, often, you know, decorated, you know,

Navy test pilot, also getting a Ph.D in aeronautical engineering or biochemistry or, you know, all the things you have to do. And they got it and they were there and they went to space. And then they said, you know, it's not that interesting a job anymore. I'm going to go and I'm not getting paid that much. I'm going to go work for Boeing. And that, you know, that's a, that is, that's reality, right? That's, you know, that's the difference, I think.

That's that's what you, you know, that's getting older and seeing what this world really has. And so I thought that was an interesting story to pursue. So I had kind of nibbled around space. I'd sort of nibbled around, you know, techno-utopianism and techno-dispopianism in the case of Kaczynski. And I think all of those things are pretty related to the UFO phenomenon and the way it's talked about. So I was interested in that space, but not, I had not, I guess I hadn't engaged directly with it before. And no, I'd never really talked to anyone who was an experiencer before. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We will get to that because that definitely changed when you, attended this conference. But what were those first moments like? You know, you sit down. You're hearing all these conversations happen around you, I would assume, you know, again, things that I have been embedded in for decades now. It's like in one year and now at the other at this point. But what were those initial moments like for you, Eric, sitting at a UFO conference and starting to kind of see, who can I interview?

Like, how was this going to go for the next couple days? What was that like? Yeah, but the diversity of the room was the first thing that struck me. Not, I should say, certainly not racial diversity or ethnic diversity. That was not present. It was a pretty, it was a pretty white room. Not exclusively, I should say. But it was diverse in, there were more women there than I expected.

I don't know why. I think because it's sort of a, it codes. technological engineering, that kind of thing. I think of it as sort of stereotypically male, but that was not the crowd. It was pretty diverse in terms of gender. And it was somewhat, I think the average age was probably over 50, but there were some younger people there. And the kinds of people there, it was just clear just from sitting down, there were, you know, there were kind of the science guys who were there who probably had worked in science, had an engineering background, we're sort of interested in this as a like a puzzle, a kind of engineering

puzzle, scientific puzzle. And then, you know, and then there were people who were more into the experiencer side of things who I think more, you know, I met a number of people who were social workers and came at this through, you know, an interest in hearing people's stories and talking to them and grappling with stories and ways of seeing reality. that differ from the kind of conventional wisdom. And so I saw just immediately from sitting there. And this was one person to my left who was one way, one person to my right who was the other way.

And so I could see it was a kind of a heterogeneous group that was assembled there. And that didn't actually surprise me because I knew from, I had read both of Diana Pasolka's, you know, UAP books before coming. I knew that she was kind of the roadmap to this. And so I was aware of the diversity of that, of these kind of the overlap of communities that came together for this question. Yeah.

That, you know, that's so interesting because that's the one thing I always tell people about the quote unquote UFO community. Yeah, it's a subculture. It's been gradually becoming much more mainstream, which we'll get to later in the conversation. But yeah, it's always fascinated me, even as someone, like I said, who's been doing this for a while, to see the military people there, the scientists, the religious scholars, the academics, the new age people or the woo-hoo's, as we call them. Yeah, it is such a breakfast club, man. And that's the one thing that I've always found beautiful about the UFO community. Yeah, of course. Like, we do wish it was more diverse, you know, racially.

gender-wise, it has always been predominantly male at these sorts of things and at the forefront of the conversations. But yeah, it is a very interesting community for sure. And I was exactly the mix of people that were at Singularity University. Exactly. There was a general in the army who was there, great guy who was there studying at Singularity University. There were, of course, lots of kind of tech and engineering people. But there were also, there was kind of like, you know, mystical, woo-woo-ish, you know, stereotypically Californian-type people there. And they had all come together and they all were interested in this techno-utopianism.

So it was a very, it was a mix of people that I immediately recognized. I said, okay, this is, I know these, I know this group. These are people I spent a week with. I wouldn't be surprised if they're, yeah, I don't remember. I'm sure UFOs and UAP were discussed at Singularity University. It was not a big focus of it, but it was a lot of similar worldviews that I was used to that comes around. Because both kind of techno-utopianism and the UAP phenomenon have elements of religion to them. Because whenever you're looking into the future and the unknown and you're kind of getting well beyond what can be proven, I think that's where, you know, that's where this sort of question of faith enters.

And that was kind of talked explicitly about explicitly at both places. That is fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. The connections are there. And yeah, belief is something I definitely want to touch on as well. I love how they kind of started the conference, and you called it kind of a somber tone, which I actually appreciate that they kind of easy into this stuff. And this was with a gentleman, a planetary scientist named West Waters. And he actually spoke about a meteor event that took place in France back in the 1700s. And I found that pretty interesting.

Why did you decide to kind of, I guess, almost start or springboard your piece with this? Yeah, I should say, I started with it. The conference didn't start with it. Wes, I think, spoke on the morning of the second day. The first speaker was Gary Nolan. Yeah, I started. So this is one of these things, where as a reporter, you're a writer, you're thinking about not only experiencing this, but part of your brain is thinking about, well, how do I?

I digest this in words for the baffler. And you're kind of thinking about ways in to a story, ways into a story for readers, but ultimately I find the way into a story for readers is the way into it for yourself. And this talk that Wes Waters gave immediately grabbed me. And I love history, I love the history of science. I find it very, you know, if you put a lithograph from the Vatican Observatory up and start talking about science in 1790s France, I'm hooked, I'm there. And so I have to trust that some, if I can, if I'm passionate about it and I'm hooked,

then I'm going to do an okay job of kind of hooking readers into it. And, you know, I think when you're thinking about UFOs and thinking about writing for a general audience, The first thing you're going to encounter is people are very skeptical or kind of or totally dismissive. And so what I liked about Wes's talk is it was showing that we don't know everything. That science is a kind of living corpus and that we, you know, the certainties of the world in the 18th. century that meteorites couldn't exist and the men of science saying this is this is BS it couldn't we have this reason that it couldn't exist we have that reason that it couldn't exist that began to crumble as the reality of meteorites became apparent first to lay people often uneducated lay people

and then eventually to a small group of scientists that became an expanding group of scientists who really looked at it and said, well, man, these rocks in the fields don't look like any rocks that come from around here. And, you know, boy, these things flying through the sky with fireballs and maybe they're not from a volcano. Maybe they really are coming from space. And you had science as something that was evolving. You know, I think it's always the tension that's at the heart of something like UFOs or back then of meteorites. And I think of a lot of science

is that where is the line between a sort of crackpot and of a sort of bold and pioneering thinker? That we don't want everyone to, you know, if everyone doubts everything and says, well, I'm doing my own research, I, you know, it's all, you know, I'm going to just sort of choose my facts. You know, that's not science.

and you don't have anything, and then it's just everyone's sort of, you know, making up their own stories. So you don't want that. But then if you are so certain of the, you know, the 100% reality and accuracy of whatever the conventional wisdom of science happens to be at a certain point, then you close off the very thing science is in itself, which is discovery and experimentation and asking, questions and then and then finding out if those if your hypotheses really hold up or not. And, you know, I had seen it myself in some work I had done. I'd written a story years ago about a guy who was a tumor immunologist named Jim Allison who ended up discovering a kind

of entire new mode of treating cancer and eventually won the Nobel Prize. And for a lot of, you know, and he had this conviction that the immune, the human immune system could fight, could be made to fight cancer, that you could unleash your immune system in the fight against cancer. And the question was how. And for a long time, that was kind of doubted by the scientific establishment. And he kind of kept going and experimenting and really kind of understanding the basic science of T cells and tumors and eventually was able to develop a, a drug. that led to the development of other drugs that allow this to happen without the immune system killing the person, which is, you know, that was the thing. You unleash the immune system and you take off all the breaks. It was going to eat the person alive, which it does, unless you know, unless you figure out a way for not to.

And so, and Wes actually has made this point. I think he made it even in the speech that in medicine, this is something that's done a lot. you know, it's not uncommon in medicine to kind of push the boundaries. But then in a lot of science, it is closed off to ask these kind of big, bold questions and to seize upon what seems like kind of nonsensical eyewitness testimony or, you know, or anything that just kind of doesn't course any irregularities, anomalies, and to kind of press on those hard and look at what happens. And so that's what really entranced me about this talk that he gave, that it was, here is an example of this.

Here's a concrete example of this happening in the history of science with something from space. And scientists asked hard questions and did the work and then came up with this new way of understanding the world. And I think then now, you know, he proposed, well, maybe we should do that with the UIP phenomenon as well. And I thought, well, that's a great, that's a great way in for me to this topic. I, you know, I understand those things. And that's, that's more approachable than someone, as plenty of people did at the conference, more approachable than someone coming up and saying, a confidential source that I know passed me some classified information that there's a reverse engineering and crash retrieval program

to which I'm going to be a little more skeptical than this kind of historical example that asks merely to ask an experiment and pursue hard questions. 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. Hey friends, it's Daniel Noah here. I'm the director of Spectrovision Radio.

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Now, this is an individual, an immunologist, actually, who has worked in the UFO space, I guess he could call it, forgive the pun, but he has been in the UFO thing for a while now. He claims to have looked at pieces of craft that have allegedly crashed on our planet or landed on our planet, you name it. What did you make of the work and the things being brought forward with someone like Dr. Gary Nolan

as opposed to West Waters? Yeah, and West is obviously much, more cautious in terms of how he talks about the UFO phenomenon than Gary is. I should say Gary actually is a close collaborator of Jim Allison, the guy, the Nobel Prize winner I just mentioned. So Gary's, you know, Gary's credentials obviously as a biologist and immunologist are, you know, are totally, you know, you know, impeccable. He, yeah, I think he, you know, I spoke to him privately after i mean privately it was for for the story it just didn't you know there's just so much that you're collecting and you know you have to focus yourself um yeah he he um yeah i think he

there's there's the part of him that is the scientist that is doing a similar thing to what um to what west waters was kind of calling for and that's yeah he's found there's materials that he's testing that he you know can't quite explain and there are possibilities he's asking people to look at in terms of, you know, interstellar travel, how long it would really take, kind of all of these possibilities. And then I think he also is willing, there's a kind of another part of him that's willing to indulge more in speculation and things that are a little separate from that. So, and I think he was pretty open about that there's stuff that he can prove and then

there are things that he, you know, that he believes are true. And, you know, he, I think what he can prove is that he's tested some materials that he's not, he can't quite explain what they are. I think that these are materials from a crashed alien spacecraft that's more falling into the belief area. He cannot prove that. Certainly, I don't, he didn't claim that to me or at the conference. Maybe he has in other forums, I don't know. But I thought, Yeah, I think he's, I think there's, there's, he's just feels for whatever reason, helpful to the conversation that he can, that he can go out on a limb a little more in terms of the, what he, what he kind of thinks about the phenomenon, while also doing his scientific work.

And he, I guess, doesn't see the speculation is detracting from the scientific work. Yeah. You know, he's a very engaging person, too. and he's a fun speaker and he's a kind of presence. But yeah, I actually was when I listened back to his talk, you know, at one point he talks about, you know, how potentially electromagnetic pulses can bring down alien spacecraft. And of course, even when he said that, he was actually, he said, you know, members of the alleged, you know, claimed crash return,

retrieval reverse engineering program said so so I think he's even as he kind of has I think gone out many times pretty far on a limb in terms of speculation he he's he's aware of that yeah we we grow very accustomed to the word supposed and alleged in the UFO world Eric that's for sure belief that was another big one you had mentioned dr. Diana Walsh of Soka now you know we've had her on know a few times. She wrote the foreword, actually, to my last book. And she is a religious studies professor and, you know, academic. She's been to the Vatican and things like that and looked into these things.

Now, you did personally interview her for the piece as well. What did you take away from her work and where that plays into this entire UFO conversation and subculture, as it were. Yeah, I think she's looking at the whole community, how people, you know, and how people respond to this, the many different ways that people respond to the UFO phenomenon and how, you know, how similar it is

to a lot of her previous work in looking at, you know, I think medieval or early Catholicism and, you know, many other religious traditions. And the way that you have these experiencer narratives that kind of are really the backbone. I mean, if there were no one, there were no experiencers, there'd be no UFO phenomenon, right? I mean, there'd be nothing to talk about. If there was no one who claimed to have seen anything or had, you know, interactions with NHI or anything like that, well, it would just be, I mean, it wouldn't be there. And just as, you know, I think in a lot of the more traditional religions,

without miracles, without prophets, without all of these things, well, what would we, I mean, we wouldn't really have a religion at that point. We might have a guy who had said some things, but that's, you know, that's philosophy or something else. This is a different space. and religion. So it's these kind of unexplained experiences, experiences with the sublime, experiences with the unknown that form the backbone of both organized religion and the UAP phenomenon.

And then there's this kind of inquiry into what those things are. and the inquiry is always, you know, to this point, the inquiry is always a little elusive. You know, the answers are a little elusive. What, you know, what is this thing? That even if you, as I think most people at the conference, I think, would say the UAPs are 100% real. But what UAPs are, that I think you would have a lot of disagreement on. And I think anyone who, you know, I think it would be a rare person who would say there are 100% this. And, you know, they're 100% in alien spacecraft.

There are 100% future version of ourselves traveling back in time. There are 100% some other breakaway from humanity occupying a multiverse who occasionally comes and checks on us. The things I all, I heard all of those things. But there's an uncertainty at the center of it. that's, I think, that's where, that's faith, right? You know, the kind of that you, you accept both that something is real and that something is, in some ways, fundamentally unknowable, you know, like God and like, I think, UAP for people. Yeah, I like that. I like that comparison.

Experience her. Now, we can't start to close things out here, Eric, without talking. talking about Nancy, because she is like the character of this piece as well. You met a woman named Nancy, and she left an impression on you. I don't know if she changed your beliefs at all coming out of this thing, but what impact did Nancy have on your writing of the piece? And yeah, tell us a little about her, if you don't mind. Yeah, so Nancy Berson is her name. She's quite a well-known artist, a kind of conceptual artist. And she's someone who was talking on the first night, not actually in the kind of main conference talk,

but there was a short film made about her, and they were showing the film, and then she was answering questions. And I just kind of happened to walk into the room because there were a bunch of people there. I think they'd mentioned it, but I wasn't really paying attention to that. I was kind of, because I went to, I was trying to,

talk with a lot of the people who just spoke and people like Gary Nolan and people like Jeff Criple I spoke to that night. And so I walked in and I was, yeah, to the extent that there are people who, that I think most of the people I met in this world would be 100% that UAPs are real, but quite a bit less than 100% about what they are. I think Nancy is 100% about what they are in her world and 100% about what they've done. And so I, you know, I, you know, I, My initial reaction to someone who's 100% about, well, nearly anything is I don't really believe that. Because I think part of reality is to sort of live and stew in doubt. And Nancy didn't seem to really have it.

That was my first kind of first blush. But then she was such a kind of eccentric and fun-looking character. And she's a very kind of small, avian woman who was wearing of the kind of pinstreet. you know, like a large, it seemed almost like too big, you know, the large, you know, sort of man's, you know, pinstriped jacket, and she had these spectacles. And, you know, she, yeah, as I said in the piece, I think she, you know, she sort of reminded me of morticia Adams. There was like a goth kind of element to her, you know, she's a woman in her late 70s. But there was something I really liked about. There was something kind of personally captivating about her. And yeah, I think

when you're going into a conference like this, you know, a world like this where you're, I hadn't talked to anyone before I got there. I just figured, because it's often the best way to approach someone is to approach them in person and they see you, they see you're not going to bite. They can, you know, they can, it's very easy to blow off an email. It's hard to blow off someone who's walked right up to you at a university conference and says, hey, you know, I'm doing this. Can we talk? So I was kind of, captivated by Nancy, I found a very interesting her story and what she said and kind of her certainty, but what I sensed even beneath the certainty is that she was talking about a lot of

things besides, you know, non-human intelligence, which is really what she was talking about more than UFOs, more than seeing, you know, craft in the sky. She was talking about non-human intelligence that had really affected her body and her mind and her struggle. with that. And she was talking very openly about it, which I, which I liked. And one thing that, one thing that I did find is there's a lot of kind of secrecy or intimations of secrecy in the, among kind of the UFO communities that I talk to. There's a lot of, I know this, but I can't really tell you how I know this.

Or, and what I liked about Nancy is she just kind of, you know, blew right through. all that. You know, she's what this is, this is how it is and this is what I know. And, you know, and I thought she was talking about, and she was talking about herself and her pain in a very open and honest way. And then we just sort of kept getting sort of thrown together by happenstance. And we had a lot personally in common that I would sort of find out so the more time I spent with her. And I just liked her. I liked that she was funny. I didn't find that. Maybe there is more, maybe there are elements of the UFO community that are funny, but I felt like there was not, there weren't a lot of jokes. There were some people like Jeff Krepple is very funny.

Gary Nolan's kind of funny, but there are a lot of people who aren't, you know, who I think are quite self-serious about all this. And I like that she, despite her claims about what, you know, the certainty that these NHI had implanted the Celtic cross in her back and done these experiments, on her and it had been this awful experience and deeply painful and she hated them she was funny about it and that's something that I'm always drawn to someone who can reflect on their experience reflect on the sort of absurdity of life and so yeah so that's that's that was nancy that's kind of a lot of what I took from her yeah and you know there's there are a lot of nymphs yeah and you know there's there are a lot of Nancy's out there in the UFO community.

And that's not to strip away from her individuality, but to say, yeah, a lot of these experiencers, something happened to them, you know, like, just like you, I've heard hundreds of these stories, Eric, at this point, of abductees, experiencers, which is the more positive term, a lot of them use, rather than having been kidnapped and experimented on and stuff. But no matter what,

happened or did not happen to these people, I find it not troubling. I guess I find it compelling of the aftermath of these claims they make. And they are left traumatized by something. They are left deeply affected by something that happened to them, whether it was an actual alien abduction or something else. They are left. changed and affected and brought them to this Rice University conference and, you know, inevitably meeting someone like you. So I do find that interesting. Even if we don't know what it was that did that to her, it greatly affected her. So I think it's important to at least hear least people out, you know, and not cast judgment immediately.

for me, I always tell these people, you know, they're like, well, what do I do? How do I stop it? Where do I go? And I'm like, go see a therapist. Like, deal with this as a human being first and foremost, rather than an alien abductee. Like, they need help. They need someone to listen. And I'm glad you were there to at least hear her out. I think that probably meant the world to her. Even if you don't necessarily believe it. or not. So that's pretty fascinating. Kind of the last thing I want to touch on with Eric is that that more secretive, serious nature to all of this. You know, you mentioned names like Luis Elizondo, David Grush, things like that. Tim Gallaudet was at this event. Carl Nell, again, names we know in this field, these are all military or former military who say they have seen these things. They've worked on these programs, but they can't let you. know who actually is in charge of it or any of that. So that's kind of where we're at in today's euphology. We have lost the magic of people like Nancy, and where it's been replaced by this kind of

very bureaucratic red tape military perception of the entire UFO phenomenon. So what do you make of all of that, what's going on in, I guess, the UFO world today and where it played a role in this conference, I guess. Yeah. I think one of the things you really need to unpack with the UFO phenomenon is not to open up the ultimate can of words, but it's kind of like the very nature of reality and consciousness. One thing that was surprising to me is I think consciousness was discussed almost as much of this conference as the UAPs. You were always going and and the idea of the way that the subject this kind of you know people talked about it kind of related it to quantum theory that the subject the act of being the observer can influence the reality of something and that the

subjective experience is is key and so the question There was an anthropologist who spoke, who really, really I liked his talk. It didn't end up making the piece just because you can't do everything. In some ways, he was almost making too many of the points. A guy named Hussein Aliagrama, who maybe you've had on. I think he's kind of well-known in the community. And he talked about, he said, you know, the UFO is a very kind of responsive. That the, you know, he is kind of the, you know, from the post-World War II world,

the way you know is very baked in you know we talk about secrecy and it's very technological and all of these things and the UFO the UFO has sort of responded to that now what does that mean right does it mean that there are there were alien spacecraft before and then in the post-world war two era of nuclear weapons and the militarization of you know the world and the Cold War that somehow the, you know, the aliens sort of saw this and just, okay, well, we're going to kind of respond to this. I don't think that's what he means. I think what he's getting at is that in this vast unknowability of the UFO phenomenon, that we human beings, you know, in our culture, interpret something that is very hard to know and see through our own lens, through ourselves. And so there are, to me, the least interesting element of the UFO phenomenon are, you know, is the possibility that this is merely there are aliens that have spacecraft that crashed into Earth that the government is covering up and getting to the truth means getting the government to reveal the truth they've been hiding. To me, that's a very simple story and that probably isn't true and that probably the reality is far more complex and involves stuff at the very edge of our ability to understand.

And that ultimately our own existence is very, very mysterious, right? Our own consciousness is very, very mysterious. And what I really like about the UFO community and the UFO phenomenon is that they are asking these very, very fundamental questions to me, you know, the many elements of it. What is it, what is our consciousness? What are we? And then what is this phenomenon that seems to be unexplainable? And how does it shine a light on this kind of deep mystery of what it means to be a conscious being in the universe? And so, and I think to their credit, people like Carl Nell actually are like, you know, while he's also into this disclosure narrative, he actually got up and talked about all of the

different possibilities of what the UAP phenomenon could be. And he had this amazing kind of flow chart of, I don't know, I think I counted in the, for the piece, like 72 different possibilities of what this could be from the, you know, we're totally buying into, you know, this is the, you know, the emanations of a Godhead to this is mass hysteria to these are alien spacecraft to you know there are all sorts of possibilities and so I think there is that tension among even those people that there's on the one hand they want to be asking big questions they want people to have open minds that's that's sort of what they're calling for and then there's also this this very post-war cold war secret

cover up, we need to get to the bottom of it. There's, you know, they're, you know, the kind of, I mean, you see, Fox Mulder, you know, the kind of stuff that, you know, Fox Mulder would be pursuing, you know, the cigarette smoking man, this kind of like, you know, secret wing of the government that's, that's in on it. And so I think those are, so, to me, that was kind of what I came with. Those are sort of the two ways of approaching this phenomenon,

one through a sort of sociological, metaphysical, what is reality? What are these things that seem to kind of break our reality that we can't explain? What does that mean about us? What are these things? Where are the possibilities? And the kind of military, industrial complex,

this is what these things are. What I actually, one of the West Waters, is why he was someone I started with and came back to, is I thought there was a way in which he, you know, as a scientist, he sort of was not coming down on any particular side, but he was saying what I want to do is actually see if I can measure some of this to begin to get more data on it, to begin to figure out what this really is. Because I think there's an element to this whole phenomenon where you can say, and people did say at the conference, well, like, we've learned nothing in 70 years. You know, people were talking about this stuff in the late 1940s. People were talking about the reverse engineering program and the crash retrieval program. People, you know, had all of these possibilities.

So what have we actually learned, you know, the 2017, you know, Leslie Kane, New York Times piece? We learned that there were elements of the government that were looking into this. But where does that really leave you? But I like that I like that waters, you know, through, I guess, Obie Loeb's project, the Galileo project, was kind of trying to find new information, new data. And I thought that was exciting. Yeah, absolutely, man. I think, you know, you kind of put it best in your subtitle of the mirror,

world. At the end of the day, whether you're a government person, military, scientist, religious person, or just interested in UFOs, all of it just puts it back on ourselves. What have we learned in 70 plus years about what UFOs are? Nothing. I can readily admit that. In the 20-something years I've been studying these phenomena and the people who've experienced it, I have learned very little about what the phenomena is, if anything, like you said. But what I have learned is things about myself, things about people, things about belief, things about faith, about science. Like, I've learned things through this elusive mystery that we may never know what it is or isn't.

But like you said, I think all of this leads back to that reflection on ourselves. That's why I, the piece was just so beautifully structured and written. And I strongly urge everyone to go read it because we really did just crack the surface of it. We will put a link for everyone to go read the piece. I highly suggest it. But yeah, any sort of last words that you want the reader to kind of go into when looking at this. And have you found yourself changed it all, Eric, after having attended this event and getting an inside look at this deeply interesting community? that I'm a part of.

Yeah. I don't know. Change is interesting. And of course, hard for a person to say about themselves because that, I mean, that ruffles with another kind of consciousness reality question. I, you know, I like, I think afterward, there are some other ways that I'm looking to write and explore some of these questions, I think, you know, through consciousness. through some research, it's actually happening with sleep.

So I think it's what I, I like how the UFO phenomenon when you get into it, I think you can, there are a few ways that the motion can, if you ping off it, you can bury deep into it itself and look into case studies and experience or narratives and really dig into it. more of where I'm likely to go is that a lot of the big questions that I heard people asking and found really refreshing that they were asking, I'm looking at sort of aligned, other aligned worlds to explore that I think ultimately are getting at a lot of the same things. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's good to hear that, you know, the work will continue for you

and you didn't run for the hills after going to the event. Because I do think, you know, I have met some of the most interesting people at these sorts of things and made some of my closest friends through this super weird topic of UFOs. Yes, we all have our lives outside of it. We all go do our jobs. We all, you know, live our routine lives. But at the end of the day, we all have this one thing in common. And I think this goes outside the UFO community is, like you mentioned, we're all looking for it.

to why we're here and, you know, maybe just as important, you know, are we alone or aren't we? And that can mean many different things, not just aliens per se. So I found it fascinating. Like I said, everyone, please go read the article, loving the alien three days in the mirror world of modern ephology over at Bathler. But yeah, any parting words for us here, Eric? and where can we find everything you're up to if you don't mind. Yeah, well, you can always visit my website, Eric Bensonwriter.com.

And, yeah, you know, you can check out that Baffler piece and check out Project Unabom on any podcast app near you. I think a lot of some similar questions really are explored in it. But yeah, I think, you know, keep asking big questions. And one thing I really do, I've probably already said it, but one thing I really do like about this community is, I think it can be very easy as a person in the world, in society, to not ask, not take a step back and not ask the kind of fundamental questions.

And this community seems very attuned to, kind of asking itself constantly, what, you know, what's going on? Who are we? And, you know, what is this world that we all share? And I think that's a really positive thing and a positive way to live. The example of what I guess Socrates would put it. I love it. I love that we can end with Socrates. That's the perfect way to put it, Eric. I have to thank you so much for coming on Somewhere in the Skies today. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for it. Somewhere in the Skies is part of the Somewhere Podcast universe. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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