Somewhere in the Skies - Mitch Horowitz: UFOs and Uncertain Places

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

On episode 291 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by author, lecturer, and occultist, Mitch Horowitz. Horowitz is a historian of alternative spirituality and one of today’s most literate voices of esoterica and mysticism. He is writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, lecturer-in-residence at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, and the PEN Award-winning author of the book, Occult America. Today, he joins Ryan and author, witch, and occultist, Sarah Lyons, to discuss his new book, Uncertain Places, and also to discuss the more esoteric side of UFOs, their liminal place in the occult, and then Horowitz answers your listener questions.   Order Mitch Horowitz's books and learn more at: https://bit.ly/3taBnEH  Order Sarah Lyons books at: https://bit.ly/3DPiw7d Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Book your Cameo video with Ryan at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Official Store: CLICK HERE Buy Somewhere in the Skies coffee! Use promo code: SOMEWHERESKIES10 to get 10% off your order: https://bit.ly/3rmXuap Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2022 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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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. I'm going to do a brief intro for both of you, for any of our viewers and listeners who are not familiar with either of your work here at Somewhere in the Skies. Sarah, you've been on in the past. So introducing my co-host for tonight, I knew I had to have someone come on with me to have this conversation with Mitch because this is new for me. I don't cover these topics much on the show. I am a UFO podcast, but we're going to see why this topic has so much to do with UFOs and the convergence we're seeing play out in today's world with UFOs, the occult and everything in between. So first, I want to introduce Sarah.

Sarah Lyons is a leading occult author and practicing wit. She and her work have appeared in Newsweek, Vice, Teen, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and BuzzFeed, she is a recurring guest on the CW television series, Mysteries Decoded, and has consulted numerous documentaries and filmmakers over the years. Her first book, Revolutionary Witchcraft, was published by Running Press in 2019, and her second book, How to Study Magic, releases on November 15th. So, Sarah, welcome to us back to Somewhere in the Skies. It's good to be back, Ryan.

And thank you. Thank you for having me. And nice reppping the Mysteries Decoded fam. Mysteries Decoded. Mitch, that was a TV show, both of us have been on. We won't go and do the behind the scenes of that. That can be an off the mic. I'm joking. I had a great time. It was fun. It was fun. Well, let's introduce our guest for tonight. Mitch is no stranger to a lot of you out there. But for those who aren't familiar with his work, Mitch Horowitz is a historian. of alternative spirituality and one of today's most literate voices of the esoterica, mysticism, and the occult. He is a writer in residence at the New York Public Library, contributing lecturer at the Philosophical Research Society in L.A. and the Penn Award-winning author of books including Occult America, Daydream Believer, and Uncertain Places. His book, Awaken Mind, is one of the first works of New Thought, translated and published in Arabic.

He's written on everything from the War on Witches, which we will definitely discuss tonight, to the checkered career of professional skeptic James Randi, and he hosted and produced a feature documentary about the occult classic, The Caballion, directed by Emmy nominee Ronnie Thomas, and shot on location in Egypt. Mitch, welcome to somewhere in the skies for the very first time. Great to be here, y'all. Thanks for having me. Of course, of course.

So I want to say off the bat, I've been following your work for a while now, but I know a lot of people in the UFO world, they might be new to you and your discussions. And I think a lot of that came from a event that you recently spoke at. I want to get this right. This was in New York City. And it was the inquiry into anomalous experiences and the phenomenon, which was hosted by Jay Christopher King and James Iodali. And I was so jealous I wasn't able to make it. this event when I saw the speaker's list. But before we even get into the occult in all the crazy amount of questions, Sarah and I have for you, man, tell us a little about this event and maybe a little about what you spoke of, if you don't mind. Sure. It was a very special event for me. It was about two, two and a half weeks ago from when we're all speaking. It was the first time I've ever addressed a conference that was dedicated exclusively to the UFO thesis. And I introduced to myself as the in-law in the room because I care very deeply about the UFO thesis, but it hasn't been a specific area of research for me. Primarily, I document metaphysical experience in history and in

practice, and I grew increasingly interested in the UFO question because I started to consider whether there were connections between UFO experiences and psychical financial. phenomena. And whether it, part of what may be going on, maybe our minds, our psyches, which I see as a compact of intellect and emotion, traversing different intersections of time. And that could be part of what lay behind certain anomalous experiences, whether it's UFOs or poltergeist experience, Bigfoot. And I started to think, you know, I've always regarded the UFO thesis as indirectly related to the cult, but the uncertain places that we live in today are such that I think these conversations are starting to converge. And the organizers took a chance and reached out to me and they just

opened up the mic to me. What I spoke about, and the talk is up on YouTube, actually, on a couple of channels, is called anomalous experiences and the crisis of skepticism. And I spoke about the manner in which the seeking community has pursued both the UFO and ESP thesis, how these things may be converging, and the paucity of real intellectual excellence on the skeptical side of things, because the skeptical side of things has, to a great extent, becomes such an entrenched polemical camp reliant so heavily on its golden oldies, so to speak, and using the same phraseology using the same sleight of hand, not really immersing

itself in the material in any way that justifies the title skeptic, which is a noble title. And we need skeptics. Blake wrote opposition is true friendship. We need people who are going to point out mistakes

and accidents. I used to walk up to the speaking podium terrified of getting something factually wrong, even just a date or something of that nature. And I've realized over time, look, I'm human. There is going to be a Thursday morning where I'm going to get something wrong. And if and when I do, and it's more than just a verbal typography error, call me out on it. Call me out on it. And when I write about ESP research, for example,

which I care really deeply about, I footnote it very heavily. I have a massive chapter on ESP research in my book, Daydream Believer. I posted a piece recently at boing-boing on the career of J.B. Rhine, who's a pioneering ESP researcher, all told at the end it had 46 footnotes. I encourage people, go into the footnotes. If I'm exaggerating, call me out. If I'm being overly shorthanded about something, if I get something wrong, you know, call me out. And the skeptics community is incapable of engaging at that level, because to them to engage at that level is to validate the question and they don't want to do that. They want to invalidate their being a real question, a debate, and exchange. So that was that was the other part of the talk.

Right. And, you know, I think sort of the, I don't want to say the impetus, but the backdrop of what you talked about was kind of framed around what has been happening in the past few years when it comes to the UFO topic. I mean, if you had told me five years ago that this topic was going to be in mainstream media, we were going to be having serious debates about it, the New York Times would be covering it. I would have thought you were crazy. But then that all changed on one day. None of us saw it coming, which is usually how these things happen. And the world kind of changed overnight, at least for us in the UFO believer, I guess. I hate using that word believer. in so many senses.

But it just changed. So what did you make of that? Is someone who kind of peripherally always looked at the topic, it's now front and center? What do you make of this whole 2017 New York Times post-Eufology, I guess? It's really wonderful and it's really incredible. And Elaine Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Keene, just performed amazing work,

that they got that into the time. is extraordinary on so many terms, just absolutely extraordinary. And the coverage continued. They wrote other pieces in 2017. They wrote other pieces in 2019. And I remember very vividly, I was attending a panel on UFOs in summer of 2019, of all places at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. not widely known as a fount of occult ideas.

And the place was packed, and the panel was wonderful. And afterwards, this very thoughtful curator who assembled at Troy Therian came up to me, and he said, let me ask you a question. At what point in our culture do you think it's going to become intellectually embarrassing to dismiss the UFO question? You know, it's just swamp gas, you're imagining things, you're drinking moonshine, whatever. And I said, you know, honestly, right at this instant, right now, no one of any real intellectual

substance or seriousness could deny the validity of the UFO question or the prospect of engineered phenomena captured on some of the videos that we have and that these aforementioned reporters have explored. And it's funny, I remember not long after that, there was a very long piece in The New Yorker about Leslie and Lou Alizondo and UFOs. And I thought, okay, this is all just going to be the red carpet leading up the steps to the guillotine. You know, where's it coming? Where's the axe? Where's the blade?

And there was no blade. There was no blade. And the reporter whose name escapes me, but he really deserves credit. He did something I've never seen done before in an opinion-shaping, so-called mainstream journal. And that is, and this was really remarkable and fruitful, and it made for a exciting reading as well. He held the skeptics to the same standards as, again, we don't like to use the term believer, but the skeptics to the same terms as the advocates, we'll say. And it was remarkable because not only was it truthful, but he examined the manner in which the skeptics are boxed into

their own world of denial, and they've painted themselves into a corner that permits almost no room for which is why their arguments on a given issue tend to grow more and more vociferous and more recycled as time goes on, because they've allowed for almost zero flexibility in their position, which is a really bad place to be intellectually. And I came away from that article with a point of view that the reporter himself was questioning of what some of the advocates had to say, but he was also questioning of what some of the professional skeptics had to say. And he made the observation, and I've never seen this before, of how the skeptics themselves work a kind of dog and pony show. And they have certain tropes, certain personal traits, certain ways of couching their phraseology that are trying to influence whomever the listener is. And one could say, well, gee, that's not news. I mean, that's just kind of human nature. We all do that to some greater or lesser extent. But I had never seen the skeptics subjected to being x-rayed side by side with the advocates. And I thought to myself, this is not going

away. You know, this is not just the UFO Summer of Love. This is really changing our culture. And so it has. So it has. Yeah. I mean, to the point where we have a new office opening in the U.S. government and, you know, make of that way you will. I know a lot of people don't, you know, put any stock in what the U.S. government has to do or say about this topic, having been part of a quote-unquote cover-up for some 50 years, if you do believe that. But you're right. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Right. We've had congressional hearings. It's crazy. Right. And if I may, just to add something to that about the government office, DOD office, office, NASA office. Seeing from one perspective, the...

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And so seeing it from one perspective, there's good reason for those of us who care deeply about advocacy of exploring the UFO question to feel skeptical of the government's involvement. But at the same time, one mustn't be too rigid about that. Gary Nolan, the immunologist from Stanford, who's done a lot to study the ET question, he was also speaking at this same conference. And he was asked a question from the audience about rejectionists in the government purposefully putting out misinformation or things of that nature. And Gary said something that is so important and it warrants amplification.

He said, look, within the intelligence world, within the defense world, within NASA, you've got a complex of factors going on. You've got people who are veritable whistleblowers who want to get this information into the public eye. And yes, you've got people who are dedicated to rejectionism or for whatever reason, disinfo. And one has to remember that there are whistleblowers and there are whistleblowers in finance. There are whistleblowers in government. There are whistleblowers everywhere for as diverse a number of reasons as there are human beings. And you've got that same dynamic playing out where there's people who want to forward the debate, who want to move the ball down the field.

And there's people who want to disable the debate. And we're going to see both going on. Yeah. I mean, if I can just jump in there, like I think. there's a tendency to say like the government and then that's this blanket entity when really like the U.S. government is a miss a bunch of often competing ideological and political like messes and like agencies with their own agendas and their own ideas about a lot of this stuff. And so it's like not very it's not very precise to just talk about it as like one entity. And I've seen this a little bit about now the kind of new skeptical thing that I am seeing is not people saying, well, there's no, like no one's seeing anything in the skies.

This is all something else. They're saying it's it's drones or it's new technology. And this is all a ploy to like, you know, hype up fear to bring us into war with China or bring us into war with Russia or something like that. And I understand where that skepticism is coming from because it's not like lies like that haven't happened before. But it's just so it's so intellectually lazy to me. Like it's not, you can tell that the people who are making that argument haven't really looked into the UFO phenomenon, like what that is when we're talking about it very much. And like how weird it is and what a complicated thing it is. And I just think it's like there's a lot of intellectual laziness when it comes to this topic that it seems very simple at the top.

And then once you get into it, it's so much weirder than you thought it was. That is such an important point. And I feel like what you all are doing on this podcast and what I saw in practice at the conference is just incredibly refreshing because I think that a toll has been taken socially on the euphology movement because of past and possibly present coverups. That's real. And it's very understanding that when you feel feel that people are fucking with you, it gets you into a constant defensive crouch. But, you know, as Sarah was pointing out, very rightly, there's a complexity of factors going on in any human situation. If you have a personal problem, there's a complexity of factors. There's a complexity of factors behind a social problem, and there's going to be, if any, a complexity of solutions.

So, like, for example, when the social media companies are concealing their own in-house study, of posts or patterns that tend to feed violence. We know about these things because of whistleblowers. The Wall Street Journal did a terrific

series about how Facebook, now called Meta, has suppressed its own algorithmic research into the manner in which certain of its posts were fomenting violence specifically against Muslims in India.

And that's a deadly, deadly problem. That's a huge problem. And we know about this because whistleblowers from the inside leaked this info to a Wall Street Journal reporter, and he ran with it for a five-part series. There are going to be other instances where the reporter is excessively cozy with the prevailing powers and things that should get said or should get framed in a certain way. Maybe don't. You know, Julian Barnes in the New York Times had this piece that we've alluded.

to, I guess now it's about 10 days ago, where he said, well, the sources I've spoken to say it's all space junk, and this is going to, well, not even space junk, drones or what have you, and this is going to foment debate and so forth. You know, so there are times where a reporter's voice cuts one way, cuts another. Usually it is a pattern, but there's such a multiplicity of people involved in this at this point, both inside, both outside, both within meetings. within the questioning community, everyday people. And there's a lot going on. There's a complexity of things going on, and we mustn't get too rigid.

Right. The UFO phenomenon. A lot going on there. Right, right. A lot of people and a lot of motives. Right. Well, let's talk about some of those complexities and motives. I know Sarah literally just got back to New York from the Hudson Valley.

And the Hudson Valley is just like one of those places, both for the occult and for uphology, that just, it has such a rich history. So I'd love to give both your thoughts on this. We have this rich history of the occult there, which Mitch, I'd love for you to touch on it, if you don't mind. And then we also have this crazy UFO wave that happened in the 80s. And then we also had Whitley Streeper's event happened not too far from the Hudson Valley. So for me, I'm just like, there's got to be some. geological or geographical reason for all of this stuff to have maybe imprinted itself in this one area or maybe it's sheer coincidence. I don't know, but I love both your thoughts on the Hudson Valley

and everything going on there. Mitch, I guess we'll start with you, man, if you don't mind giving us sort of the occult angle there. Sure. I mean, there is such a rich occult history there when I was writing my first book, Occult America. I went into the writing expecting to spend a lot more time on California because everybody sees California, and rightly so, as the engine of religious novelty, the springboard of the New Age, and so forth, and that's very, very valid. But what I discovered, to my surprise, more and more, was the centrality of upstate New York, specifically central New York State and the Hudson Valley to the development of a new kind of occultism in the modern world, specifically for a couple of generations in the early 19th century.

And this area, specifically of central New York, was called the burned over district. And it really was connected arterially to the Hudson Valley, especially since you had to go through the Hudson Valley to get up to the burned over district, depending on where you were coming from. And that was the birthplace of so many new religions, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, the spiritualist movement, as well as social movements, the suffragist movement, the perfectionism movement, America's first, experiments in communal living or the practice of voluntary communism. And it was just an unbelievable place that kept producing all of these radical movements one after the other for the first half of the 19th century. And a lot of folklore went back very deep in the Hudson Valley, that it had once been home to an ancient tribe of Israel,

older than any of the oldest Indian tribes. and this tribe got wiped out in a conflagration with the Native Americans. And this very mythos, and I use that term in its highest sense, appears in Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon, published in 1830. That was a book and a movement that emerged from the burned over district. And depending on your point of view, you could either say that the Book of Mormon is echoing local folklore or confirming local folklore. It all depends upon one's perspective. but there are so many such episodes. And then, of course, in the Hudson Valley, you had in the town of Poughkeepsie,

the presence of Andrew Jackson Davis in the 1840s. He was known as the Poughkeepsie Sear. He popularized mesmerism across the country. He helped popularize spiritualism across the country. And although he never uttered an explicitly political word, his vision was a very radical one because he would go into these trans states and travel. So he said to the afterlife, and the afterlife was filled with all kinds of different people. Catholics and Jews and vanquished Indian tribes and people from other lands and eras.

And without directly saying so, Andrew was undermining the idea so widespread at that time that salvation is only available through one doctrine or one congregation, one church. And Americans took to it. They really took to it. So it's continued, obviously. I was just interviewing Whitley Streber the other day for a program of UFO-thene films that's showing at Anthology Film Archives right now, actually. And we talked about his Hudson Valley Cabin and his experiences, but the thing I now realized that I neglected to ask Whitley, and we know him on another for 12 years, I've never had been asked him this question, why the Hudson Valley? What is going on there?

So since Sarah has been there most recently, maybe she can respond to the question I didn't ask. Yeah, please. Well, what's so funny is that the people that I was staying there with, I have a friend, a couple that live up there, and they see UFOs like all the time. Like, they're UFO magnets, especially it's a husband and wife. And the husband, like, literally is a UFO magnet. He just sees UFOs all over the place. And like, it's so casual to them. We're getting ready to start a fire and like a bonfire.

And, like, a bonfire. And, like, it's so casual to them. And he goes like, oh, it's overcast, but maybe we'll see some UFOs tonight, like as if it's just, you know, birds, you know, migrating birds. And I mean, I think that there, that's something I think about a lot with how weird the UFO phenomenon is as a whole, not just the Hudson Valley is like that it can be attracted to a single person. I have this other thing kind of with that, that I, maybe this is a little too heady and a little too weird.

But I think that whatever the phenomenon is definitely has a sense of humor. because both of these people are artists. He works in advertising and graphic design and she is an illustrator. And I think it's like, of course they're appearing to you guys because no one would believe you if you came forward and showed these pictures because you would know how to Photoshop this. But I know that you're not lying to me because I'm seeing them too when I'm around you. So it's just like, to me, that's like a weird sense of humor that it has.

But I don't know. It's interesting to me, I want to go back to something you said, Ryan, that you brought up something like geological, that there might be something in the land itself that, you know, is causing it. And I think that that's not a wrong impulse, but it does, it is a little bit of a materialist impulse, right? That you want to find a like, there's got to be quartz deposits under there, right? Or there's got to be some sort of like electromagnetic field. And there might be like, I'm not a geologist. I don't know.

But there is something, I think, to be said for when you get enough people in an area over a very long period of time, praying or doing magic or thinking in a certain way, I think that that creates kind of a morphic field. And Mitch probably can speak about this more than I can, but it's hard to categorize a vibe. You know, it's hard to put a vibe in a bottle. But it's definitely a real thing. And I think that, you know, when you have a place that was very sacred to indigenous peoples that were there before,

we don't have to get into like the whole Hiawatha myth and like the, you know, rule giver and all this kind of stuff, but it was a very like sacred place even before settlers came. and then afterward, it's obviously maintains this very sacred, very religious kind of fervor. There's something to be said, I think, for like, you know, ideas can catch like pollen, you know, and just attach themselves to people and blossom and grow in this way. And I think that that's a region where that's been very rich over the years. That's fascinating.

And I've asked some of the same questions myself about California in the 20th century. What is it about California, especially Southern California, that has, made it such a proving ground for new spiritual ideas that are frequently spread out across the world. In 1888, when Madam H.P. Blavatsky published her occult cosmology, the secret doctrine. She said that humanity was poised for another step forward in the evolution of consciousness, or the psychical evolution. And she said it is in California that the change will begin. And this was 1888.

when California, you know, although it was thriving agriculturally, it was a cowtown, you know, and you had ranches and you had mines and you had groves, but it was very much an agricultural area, not the area that you would have picked out in 1888 for, you know, that's where it's all going to go down. You know, you might have said Paris or something of that nature. And she's saying California, and her protege, Annie Bessent specifically felt that, that Madam Maviski was talking about Southern California. That was her takeaway, at least. Again, long before this really developed into this New Age mecca.

So it's very interesting what Sarah is saying about a morphic field or something. I mean, there are studies that contend that like mindsets, particularly meditative mindsets, will wield an influence over a given area. My friends in the TM movement call it the Maharishi effect, which they've sought to study. When you have a certain core of people meditating within a geographical zone for a certain period of time, their studies have sought to document decreases in crime and other maladies. And so it's an interesting question, especially if one considers the UFO question. in conjunction with psychical research.

Is it possible? And I'm speaking in shorthand here, but I explore these issues a lot in different articles and inquiries into ESP research. Is it possible if our psyches are capable of moving among different intersections of time or what we sometimes call dimensions? And there's evidence of this effect, even if the vocabulary is kind of metaphorical. some of these sightings could be a result of things that people are experiencing within different intersections of time altogether real as this conversation we're having right now not necessarily or not always extraterrestrial but actual

but time-based dimensionally based versus what we refer to as as extraterrestrial and can that affect amp up if a given pool of people are engaged or sympathetic, these are interesting questions. Right. Well, and that brings to mind, you know, that famous cover of passport to Magonia, you know, these different masks that the alien wears throughout history and culture. And I know both of you are, I hate using the word students, but definitely, I guess, fans maybe of Mr. Jacques Valet, Mitch, I know you've spoken to him on many occasions.

Sarah and I had a conversation about him in the past on the show as well. But I'd love to get both your thoughts on where does his, and I use his euphology as kind of a big sweeping thing, where does that land in terms of, you know, you have science, you have data, you have repeatability when trying to investigate UFOs. And then you look to the other side and you've got this whole interdimensional or consciousness. aspect to all of it as well. Sarah, I love your thoughts first, you know, having really looked into the work of Jacques Valle. What do you think? Are we dealing? Can we look at the UFO phenomenon strictly from a scientific basis and I guess kind of a interdimensional or mystical basis? What do you think? Well, I mean, I'm going to ask a question about science later, but I mean, I certainly think you can look at all of this from a scientific perspective. And I don't think

that it's, I don't think it's wrong to want to apply like the scientific method to all of this. But it is, to me, I think that some people are very rigid in that they can only, because people feel like they can only have like one ideology about something. And it's like, that's it. And because there's this part of it that cancels out another piece of this belief system, I can't hold both of them at the same time. And I think that like, we're complicated and we're able to exist under kind of different, many different paradigms at the same time. So I'm able to accept the scientific method as valid a lot of the time and then also see that it has limitations and where those limitations are, other things might come in. I, I, I, so my experience with a lot of

this comes from spirit work. I'm a witch. I'm an occultist. I work with spirits is my primary field of working with magic. Like that is how I understand a lot of magic to work. Also with mental stuff as well. But I think that I think that, I think that. it's almost like a way for me to square the circle, right? It's like it the, it, to me, it's actually this, it's, well, it's a very complicated answer. It's a very simple answer to me almost of like, how do we put Bigfoot and UFOs and ghosts and spirits and all of the stuff into one category? Well, it's spirit phenomenon and we're just, and like plants and animals have different species, there's different species of this.

and it looks differently depending on region and culture and time and this kind of thing because maybe they evolve and change. Maybe they don't always want to be perceived. They have motives of their own that we can only kind of get to, but we will never really know all of their motives, right? And that to me is the most kind of straightforward answer to what we're dealing with. And people might want to call that interdimensional or, you know, an egregor or, you know, different type of terminology for this. I kind of see it sort of as the same thing. I don't think that that cancels out what I'm saying.

But I think that Jacques Valet's work is the work that has corresponded the closest to my understanding of spirits and how spirits work. And so I get excited when I hear him speak and when I've read his work because it is the, it's putting into, I think, a more, you know, intellectually rigorous and scientific language around spirits that is very difficult to do. And I think that that is why I'm a big fan of his work in particular. I don't know if that makes sense. But that's because maybe this is going into a different category of what I think UFOs are.

But I think that that is to me the simplest way to kind of, you know, obviously spirits have a material interaction because otherwise what are we doing here? Like why are we doing magic with them unless there's some sort of material effect at a certain point? But they obviously do not exist in the material world or else we could have measured them at this point, right? And it's that feedback loop that I think is very interesting and that his work touches on so much. Interesting. Yeah, Mitch, what do you make of Shock Valley's work? Oh, it's been a huge influence on me.

I don't know that Jock was absolutely the first person to propose the interdimensional thesis for UFOs, but he certainly put it out there in a way that made it part of the discussion, made it part of the exchange. And I find it alluring. I find it alluring. You know, we, part of the reason why these queries can be so confounding is because we don't, we can track phenomena. We can even statistically map it, but we don't have a sense of causes. We don't know what pipes these things are moving through. So right now, because of a convergence of ideas emerging from quantum theory, Bell's theorem,

which measures the effects that faraway objects elicit on one another, and I would also say important findings that have come out of academic psychical research, theorists are trying to model concepts of reality that might explain what's going on. And so one of those models, for example, is string theory, where everything is moving on these undulating strings and that there are different intersections of time, which actually comports really well with quantum mechanics and stuff that's going on in another dimension or intersection of time that we don't normally see might be affecting stuff that goes on in the world that we do normally see. And so then when you're considering UFOs, one of the big questions is if these things are extraterrestrial, how do they travel across such unfathomable distances?

And we have some models for that as well, like so-called cosmic wormholes, bends in space time. I personally would say that we as a human community have better theoretical understandings at this instance. And again, these are just concepts of reality, not reality itself. It's just efforts to figure out what's going on. I think we have better theoretical models for interdimensionality than we do for extraterrestriality in terms of the time needed to travel these unfathomable distances, even at light speed. And so I just think that the interdimensional model is better developed than maybe the cosmic wormhole model. And I think that that's a centrail.

It's a centrail. I had the great pleasure once of watching close encounters of the third kind with Jacques. And he is the character. There's a French UFO scientist in the film that's based upon him. We're going to be showing that film at Anthology Film Archives. And he said that when he was on the set, he told Spielberg that he favored the extraterrestrial thesis. I'm sorry, the intertemporal. thesis over the extraterrestrial thesis, and Spielberg agreed with him, and that was a long time ago, and I would say the interdimensional models have gotten better.

But we're still just on a, we're on our knees, you're peeking through a keyhole. We just don't know. But I do think Jacques has pointed into the direction of something important. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I love, I love that we can have such differing theories on what these things could be. And there probably isn't just one answer, you know. Sarah said phenomena, and I think that's very important. We're clearly not dealing with one thing, whatever UFO, a government coin term. Exactly. Exactly. If I may, it's so important to amplify that. And this touches on what Sarah was saying as well. It's really important in the search to grow comfortable with paradox, to grow comfortable with dangling questions, to be able to sustain a question, and not to get into this thinking of a magic bullet theory. There's just one thing. out there. And frankly, that's what some of the lesser skeptics do. You know, they find one potential solution and they're certain that they found the whole thing. So the placebo effect, for example, is nothing but endorphins being released into the body or nothing but, you know, immunob boosting enzymes being released or something. And all that may be true, but that could be one of a dozen things that are going on or that could be what the prayer appeal

looks like what the spiritual appeal or what hopeful expectancy looks like in the body. And it might look like 12 other things too. So, you know, we really get trained in the Western world to think in terms of opposites. There's true and there's faults. And to a degree that really comes out of Aristotle. And that can be incredibly restraining because there are very likely a complexity of factors going on in any situation. and including intimate situations. And the wish to find that magic bullet is kind of a cultural habit that we're in the groove of.

Yeah. I wrestle every day. I, you know, I've been chasing the UFO for half my life. And I think deep down, there's a part of me that doesn't want to know what it is. And that's not because, you know, I enjoy the journey. Yes, I don't, it's not so much the destination. But I also think, you know, if I did get those answers, Either I'm not going to like them.

They're going to be so far more complex that I'll never truly understand them. Or, you know, at the end of the day, they are just going to be aliens from another planet. And that's going to be, while exciting and obviously paradigm shifting in some senses, it won't be as complex and as exciting as I had hoped. So I do wrestle with that a lot. Well, I want to kind of open the floor, Sarah, to you. Since we, I'm here to talk UFOs with Mitch, but there. There's so much more to this book on certain places.

We literally just talked about the first chapter for about an hour. So we'll move on from that, guys. You can get the book to read more about the UFO question in Mitch's perception. But Sarah, what do you want to ask at this point with Mitch? Anything, please? I've got so many questions. Okay, one of the things that you say in the book and also in the lecture that you gave is that we we lack a good skeptical apparatus for this type of phenomenon and for I mean for a lot of things too like I think I think about this a lot like coming from the world of magic I sometimes feel like I like when I'm with family and we pass you know like a tarot card read in the reader in the street I'm like I don't know them like this is a scam blah blah blah but then like I will if a friend of mine or someone that I know gives me a reading like I believe that up with the utmost certainty right like you know so it's like there's a skepticism that comes from me

because I know what I'm talking about so I can smell that. And it doesn't come from the skeptical community, right? Because it doesn't seem like they even really have a desire to know what they're talking about when we talk about UFOs or magic or astrology or any of these things, new thought. And I was going to ask you, if we lack a good skeptical apparatus, what would a good skeptical apparatus look like to you? Wow, that's a wonderful question. a good skeptical apparatus would consist of people who have dedicated commensurate amounts of time to the phenomena that they're writing or speaking about as the participants themselves.

And that's a really, really tough thing to do. But people do do it. There are skeptics of certain ideas who are as deeply versed in, their target subjects as the participants. There's a philosopher of science of Paul Fayaraband, and he pointed out that horrible as it was when the first tracts of demonology were getting written by church authorities in the medieval period, and horrible and catastrophic as the consequences of these tracts were, because they were used to target and torment accused witches, those people were, it had to be said, deeply,

deeply ensconced and immersed in what they're writing about. And the implications were tragic. But by contrast today, any given scientist who chooses to speak on the topic, and he or she certainly doesn't need to, doesn't know the first thing about astrology, its history, potential principles, even statistical tables that have been attempted to correlate some of its principles to people's lives and so on and so forth.

And there's an abiding ignorance within a lot of the skeptical community today, and that abiding ignorance is a vacuum that gets filled with sarcasm, reticest, historical questions, sneering, sleight of hand, changing of subject, indirect, addressing of issues. And it's just a, it's a piss poor intellectual culture in many respects. And it could be so much better. So if they really cared about the subject, which they don't have to, it would first and foremost require immersion. What about the flip side of that, bitch, when you have the danger of belief getting mixed into all this?

You know, I spend half my life interviewing people who've seen UFOs who've claimed abduction experiences. And do I believe every one of them? No, I don't. And I've made that very clear. I'm very open about that. But there is a core mystery going on. You can't account for every one of these people having a traumatic experience as a child to explain away their abduction experience or sleep paralysis or misidentification of something in the sky. But then you have these kind of cult-like personalities crop up in these fields to take advantage of people as well.

Or you just have fantasy-prone people enabling one another. And I struggle with that every day being involved in this topic and kind of being a voice for it. I try to be as respectful of those who give me their stories and push my own personal beliefs and judgment aside. But at the end of the day, I'm like, oh, man, like am I adding to a problem that shouldn't be there? or should that problem be there, if that makes any sense? I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, it's hard to avoid, and I try to watch for that of myself, of course, probably very fitfully. We tend to arrive at convictions through an emotional process, and once the emotions are cemented,

unless that individual has something really dramatic and traumatizing happen to him or her, it almost never gets dislodged. And very frequently, if a person who's possessed of an emotional conviction experiences some sort of countervailing trauma, they usually slide all the way to the other side, which is why you have like a Marxist becoming a conservative, and it just makes no sense at all. I remember once I was talking to the conservative activist David Horowitz, who I'm not related to. And David was a member of the Black Panthers, and then he became a hardcore Reagan supporter and now he's a hardcore Trump supporter. And I said to him, David, I'm trying to understand your thought process. Wasn't there ever a time when you were just kind of in the middle,

like you decided that Black Panthers weren't for you? And you sort of were like supporting Walter Mondale or something. And he said, I didn't give a shit about Walter Mondale. I wanted a revolution. And I said, no, I dig that. I understand that. But there had to have been like a weekend or something where you were midstream and I couldn't get through to him. You know, I really couldn't get through to him. And we all tend to be very emotional about our points of view, almost like lovers in a certain way. You know, we have a point of advocacy. Maybe something traumatic happens where that point of advocacy gets dispelled. And then we go all the way over to the other side, absolutely convinced. Well, if Karl Marx was wrong, then Ein Rand must be right. And it's like, what if they both had

problems, but you know, you can take this from this guy and this from her. And it is really a conundrum of human nature. It's a terrible conundrum of human nature. And I think one of my intellectual heroes is J.B. Rine, who with his wife, Louisa, opened the parapsychology lab at Duke University in the early 30s. And J.B. worked really hard on himself to try to elude that emotionalism. That was also part of the reason, and I'm critical of him for this, to some extent, It was part of the reason why J.B., although he amassed enormous statistical evidence to demonstrate the ESP effect, he resisted theorizing causes, and he never assembled a theory. And that might have been a mistake because our scientific culture, if you want to participate in,

it really demands theories. You know, what's the cause? How's it traveling? Where's the path? Where's the pipes? And he resisted doing that because he didn't want to extrapolate from. data and he didn't want to get into this kind of believer category so much as he wanted to document things that occurred. And that may have been a mistake, but it grew partly out of a

virtue, which is that he was trying to avoid this orthodoxy. And I have to be really careful about it myself. It's hard to see. It's easier to see in other people, obviously, than it is at me. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. 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. I wanted to ask also, and this is kind of, I have my own ideas about this question, but I think it's a kind of series of questions. But I think it's good to just like have it out there, like have this like have almost the sound bite out there. I don't know. But do you think that people in the skeptical community are dedicated?

Because there's certainly very dedicated, right? Do you think that it is a dedication to science or materialism? Is there a difference? And if there is a difference, what is that? difference. That's great question. I would say certainly there is a difference. Science is really just a method. It seeks replicability. Materialism is a philosophical belief that matter creates itself, that everything is motor skill cognition, chemical, biologic, as we currently understand those terms, and everything

occurs within this box of Newtonian physics. And if there are exceptions to that, such as we see in quantum mechanics, don't get carried away with the implications. You know, there are no implications. And it flies in the face of what the founders of quantum mechanics themselves believed, all of whom, I would say, believed in a perceptual basis of reality, that perception interacts with reality in concrete ways, in ways that are felt in the human experience, in ways that can be documented. Otherwise, you know, what are we doing, measuring all these funny little particles that are moving in surreal ways, you know? And so I think skeptics tend to start out with a materialist basis. And in justice to them, I start out with a

spiritual basis. I define spirituality as extra physicality. I've believed in extra physicality ever since I've been a kid. So it stands to reason that when you believe something, you go off looking for evidence for it, depending on your mindset. Some people are less interested in that. Some people more, I'm sort of an evidence hound. And likewise, the materialist goes off looking for evidence of his or her own mindset. The problem with the materialists today, as their voice resonates within the skeptical community, is first of all, they have conflated materialism with science. And for them, materialism is a secular religion, essentially.

And to question that religion is to engender an emotional response. That's the equivalent of questioning the religion of anybody with fundamentalist point of view. So there's a lot of sentiment and there's a lot of emotion and there's a lot of reactivity within the skeptics circle. And it's it's almost all emotion because when you get into these debates, they will just flip over the chessboard if the debate is going against them. It doesn't matter. If you find an area of parapsychology that they agree with you on one day, the next day they'll reverse themselves once they get rehabilitated back. into their circle on social media or whatever it is. And it's impenetrable. It's just an emotional dedication to winning a debate. It's a contest of the lowest sort. And that's what one finds

frequently. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. I love that. We have some really good listener question, Mitch, if you're willing to stick around for some of these. But I think, sure. Cool. Thank you. Most of these came from our Patreon members who get priority to ask our guest questions. So we're going to start with those. They go to the front of the line. I like this one. Ben on Patreon asks, this is for Mitch and Sarah. The more woo corner of uphology feels that humanity is headed towards a lifting of the

veil as science and metaphysics converge. Because of this, do either of you think magical practice changed at all? By that, I mean, have you noticed any change in? its results or effectiveness. I'm having this moment where I'm like, I think that my magical practice has gotten better, but I think I've just been doing it for a while and I've gotten better at it because I've been doing it for a while. So maybe, but now I'm like, did something happen?

Like, did something happen and maybe I'm getting better for some other reason? No, I mean, I, I will say personally, I feel like I've gotten better at magic over the years. And by better, I mean, I think I've come to a better internal understanding of it. And I think I've witnessed better results in my life. But it's, I think I've just been practicing it. And so it's, you know, like an athlete or a musician or something like that. You get better at something where you practice it. And so I've, you know, you learn what things work for you and what don't and that kind of thing.

And so I can't speak to that. I can't speak to that for myself. And when it comes to other people that I know who've been practicing magic, I haven't heard, you know, people going like, oh, my God. I like, someone a demon last night. I haven't heard anything crazy like that. But I do want to just touch on the whole like lifting of the veil thing. Because I get a little bit skeptical when people say, you know, we're about to come into a time of a great consciousness shift.

We're about to, you know, the revolution is around the corner or like this kind of thing. Because I think it's kind of not, things don't really happen that way in history. Things don't suddenly like happen. It's that the conditions become right for something to happen. And then they either do or they don't. Like something sparks that off. or it doesn't, right? And the conditions for one thing or another occurring kind of Eben Wayne, right? And I think that the idea itself of the veil, like we're in this, we're still

kind of in Halloween time so we can talk about this, but the idea of the veil is a kind of 19th century idea, the idea of like a separation between our world and the next and that there's this thin thing that separates that. And it's kind of a Christian idea, right? This idea of like, God is up in the heavens and we're down here and there's like the material world is here and the spiritual world is up there. And indigenous people both in Europe and around the world, like, you know, pagans, whatever, they really didn't see the world that way. Like, they really saw the world as like fully spiritual, fully material like at once. And it was a, um, it's not that the veil became thin at certain times of year. Maybe your perceptions of it become better,

but the stuff is always there. It's, you know, the, it's more that, like, like this half of the year belongs to the dead, one half of the year belongs to the living in like that particular cosmology. But there's not, it's an animistic worldview, right? So there's no, there's no veil. It just is. And it's, you know, there's no. So I push back on that idea of saying that like, we're about to, like the gates of the

other world are about to be open or not. It's really just about if we notice it or not, in my opinion. Mm. At the observer. Yeah. Those are incredibly important points. and I really like how Sarah framed that. One of the things that I get concerned about in the search

is the manner in which concepts like veil or hierarchical concept, heaven is up here and hell is down here and so forth, or even concepts like attachment, non-attachment, personality, essence, we get cemented into thinking in these conditioned terms that have just come down to us, that are decisions or observations made by somebody else, once upon a time, and we feel like we almost have to think or frame our search within these terms. Not that I'm invading against generalities. We have to use generalities sometimes just to

speak to one another. I use metaphors all the time. I might use the term energy, and I'm speaking in terms of a metaphor perhaps. But, you know, these terms can become a kind of narrow corridor, you know, for all of us. And one of the the things I've really attempted in my search recently is to dispense with having to think in terms of those categories, however hallowed they may be by dint of repetition, even very ancient categories. And before we went on, we were kind of off mic, but you're very welcome to use it. We were talking about an essay in uncertain places where I question the imperative of forgiveness. That's another of these concepts that by dint of repetition seems to be always

fortifying and wholesome and helpful for the individual and I question that I question that in terms of a it being a milestone or a North Star of sorts on the path in the search and yeah it is very important that we not again we have to use generality sometimes just to communicate with one or other but we mustn't allow those things to become a kind of narrow corridor and in terms of magical practice changing. I'm very dedicated to the new thought tradition or positive mind metaphysics. I contend that thoughts are causative and I think that popular literature had an incredible instinct for transpersonal insights that didn't become more common until a long time later. And I go back to that

popular literature a lot and I really admire it's pioneers. I do find, though, that that popular literature too gets us into a narrow corridor, which is you have to think from a perspective of having already received that which you want. You have to think from the end. You have to get into the emotional state before you can enact the creative agencies of the mind or the reality selecting agencies of the mind, as I would prefer to put it. And that harkens back to the whole question of the psyche traveling among different intersections. And I thought to myself, well, the problem is, and this has historically been true, a person who's staggering under the weight of grief or depression or anxiety or fear,

and sometimes that person may have very good reason to be feeling those things, is that person locked out from the Royal Road to the psyche because he or she at a given stretch of life is just unable to assume the feeling state of the which, fulfilled or is it possible, is it possible that the more and more we come to validate and understand and document these aspects of thought maybe, maybe? The very conviction of possibility frees us up and it could be that an impassioned conviction itself animates some of these agencies and we don't necessarily need the prescribed methodology. The methodology might very well work, but there might also be cases where the

individual just can't access it because they're grieving, for example. And maybe the impassioned wish is enough to set off some of these energies. So that's an exploration that I make in daydream believer. All right. Here's another one from Fred on Patreon. He asks, this is so cool, love Mitch. Maybe it's an obvious question, but do you consider euphology or parts of it, occultism? There's no question the contact D movement is esoteric. But as a researcher who over and over goes through old cases and witness reports, it always ends up with me thinking, this is magic, this is a cult, this is symbolism at work, and I love it. Yeah, my thinking has grown more and more in the direction of a convergence,

especially right now. I mean, this past several months has been very important for me in that regard. I used to refer to UFOs as indirectly related to the occult. In fact, I think I say that in the introduction to uncertain places. A book I'd probably completed 12 or 18 months ago. And since that time, I've come to feel that that indirect convergence, for me at least, has grown fuller, has grown more vivid. Because if we're talking about experiences of the individual that go outside of common observation, that open us to phenomena that violates our ordinary

a sensory or physical apparatus, you start to touch upon very congruent conversations. Now, if I'm wrong about all this extra-dimensional stuff and the UFO phenomenon maybe is ET in nature, then that might bring it a step back. But there could be, again, as we've been discussing, a complexity of things going on. So for me, especially right now, there's a convergence of those topics. What do you think, Sarah? Is our UFO's occultism? I mean, yes.

It's funny. I think I said this the last time that I was on the show that I, I kind of mentioned this earlier in the podcast, but to me, the occult is like a way of seeing the world. It's one of many ways that I see the world and I understand it. And part of that understanding is seeing the world as kind of a matrix of like spirits and energies and intelligences.

And that's to be what UFOs are. So they're of course part of it. And I, you know, I'm wearing my Venus t-shirt today because UFOs are from Venus, right? But I think that, but it's like, you know, there's a, there's obviously a feedback loop there. There's obviously something going on where maybe the UFO of today was the God of yesterday or the spirit of yesterday or something like that, right? The fairy of yesterday. And I, it's in part because it's just how I see the world that I'm going to roll this into that in a way. But I, but I also think that it's, and going back to what I was saying about how people want to write off the UFO phenomenon now as this like purely materialist hoax by the government to like drum up war fever or something like that.

Like it, that totally discounts all the weird anomalous events that coincide with UFO experiences, right? like that totally discounts or just doesn't even like know about, you know, how it can persist through generations or how there's certain like animals that follow UFO encounters or how there's certain, you know, weird screen memories or rashes or different, you know, all these other things that kind of coincide with a UFO encounter that to me are just part, so much a part of magic. That when you do magic, it's not always, you know, I do a spell. and then the next day, this thing happens exactly how I wanted it. It's, I do this working.

And then the next day, the same symbol that I used is like on the truck outside my apartment. And then this, you know, these synchronacies kind of happen. And it's the same rhythm is being played in both. And so it's hard to discount that for me. Yeah. Here's one from, let's see, Rick and Bruce on Facebook. They actually asked an identical question. Talk about synchronicity.

Have you ever had a personal experience that is unequivocally convinced you that ceremonial magic was real? Mitch? I have had an experience which I write about in Daydream Believer, and I also write about it in my book, one simple idea, and this has to do with mind metaphysics. But we're talking about causation emanating from the psyche, so I don't necessarily see ceremonial magic. in one camp, new thought off and another, it's the individual seeking avenues for causation emanating from will or psyche. I describe an experience in detail in both books where I was in a spiritual group and I was given a job to go find these pink heart-shaped buckets for a winter camping trip that we were taking. And this was in the pre-digital day, well, it wasn't pre-digital,

but digital culture was less developed. And I was, I'm going to really, really condense it, but I made a Herculean effort, or Herculean effort to find these little pink, heart-shaped buckets, could find them nowhere. I went to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. And just about when I was able to give up, I discovered a brand new cache of them

in the unlikeliest of places, at the unlikeliest of moments, with an emotional component, attached to it that was beyond anything you could measure on an actuarial table. And it convinced me that something is lawful there. It was an extraordinary experience. I don't collect experiences. I don't have a whole lot of vacation photos that I show people from the other world.

But that was really, really far out. And I documented in detail in both books. Love it. Yeah. And it's such a personal thing. That's what I love about, you know, someone can give me a UFO story and, like, have a video with it. And the story will be 10 pages long about how it changed them and what it looked like and what they were feeling. And then I look at the video and it's a star or it's a dot in the sky.

And it truly shows, you know, that these things are, it's what meaning you give to it and what role it plays in your life. I think that's pretty cool. How about you, Sarah? As someone who practices, you know, literally every day of your life, anything. really stand out is like, I'm on the right path or I'm not on the right path or, yeah, anything really kind of shift you. Yeah. I mean, I like what Mitch said there of like, I don't collect experiences. Like, I don't have like a roll of decks that I can go through and be like, this ritual was particularly good, right? Like, I did a good magic that day. Because I think it is,

again, it's not like a, it's a part of my life, right? So to me, it's like, I'm on the right path so long as I'm like sane and things are going well and I'm happy and like you know it's fulfilling me and it's working right like you know so there's a part of it that is like it's working as long as it's working but I did do a really long like like month long like working where I was like trying to get a very particular outcome from this thing and it was like every day the same time I did like the same like ritual and I got that phone call at the end of it like I was like And I get, you know, it really was like, like the next day I woke up and I was like, oh my God, like the email's here. And I just, I, I think that one of the things I love about magic is that I sit here and I'm like, yeah, magic's real.

It's, it works. And I've never gotten over that feeling of the astonishment when it really works. You know, I've never not felt that like, holy shit, magic works kind of feeling when it, when something that clear happens. And that's one of the things I love about magic the most is that you that kind of constant wonderment doesn't really go away. I love that. Very inspirational. Magical thinking. I think that's, you know, keeping that in mind.

Magical thinking, not magical thinking. You know, it's like. Exactly. Magical thinking with a K. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes. I know you're partial to the K, to the K, Mitch.

We have these perceptions of what the occult is, what magic is from the outside perspective, for those of us who. haven't studied it or practiced it. But this is an interesting question. Brian on Facebook asks, any perspectives Mitch or Sarah have regarding the seemingly conflicting theories of demonic entities in terms of versus Moody's model of our post-mortem return to spirit?

Put another way, if we're all supposedly eternal beings of light on a path towards spiritual perfection, what the hell are demons and why? You know, if I may, this is another one of these areas that I think we as a seeking community need to be very careful not to get hemmed into, again, a narrow corridor based on definitions that have come down to us. The term demon in its original Greek is a neutral term. It just means a spirit, an extraphysical entity, like a genii, to use the Latin plural.

And it was only in later biblical antiquity and post-biblical antiquity that the term demon got this horrible rap as being something necessarily evil because it was an entity contacted outside of the framework of church authority in Luce's terms. And the term demon, of course, does appear, at least in the Greek, in a Maleficent sense in the New Testament. It wasn't exactly the case in the old. And then these things got really cemented in post-biblical antiquity to the point where you use the word demon today. And it's frankly not a heck of a lot different from what witch sounded like 100 years ago. And we need to free ourselves up from this a little bit. I mean, look at the diffuseness that you find inhumanity. We go on social media all day long.

There's all these people with their anonymous handles spouting off. about just everything, we're constantly coming into contact with negative entities. And they're called users, you know, and we're encountering them everywhere. And yet this discussion only seems to come up to people on the path when, you know, you invoke the Ouija border, you know, something of that nature. Be careful with that shit. You know, no one ever says that about, you know, the commensurate and much greater problem just in human relations, ethics, relations.

these things are omnipresent. But I wouldn't get, I just don't want us to get cemented into using terms like demons to mean something maleficent because it's, again, it's something, and this is apropos, something Sarah was saying earlier, it's a term that was really set into cement in the early Christian era. and we who come here to the pathless land not to get cemented into those things, sometimes find ourselves almost by asmosis just using those reference points. And I would say the individual has to be very, very free and conduct his or her experiments. And I couldn't have said it better.

No, I couldn't have said it better. I think the only thing I'll add is that I think, you know, when we talk about, yeah, with anything with magic, like demons, these things that conjure fear, not just with that, I think, in any kind of thing, if you are extremely afraid of something, I think it's worth asking who put that thought in your head and who benefits from you being extremely afraid of that thing, right? Because some fears are very valid and good. Like it's, it's like, it's good that we're afraid of certain things, right? It's good that we're afraid of a burning house or oncoming traffic, right?

But demons are one of those things. And magic in general, I mean, like, that's a plug my mind. own book. But it's like when I was writing my book, one of the things that I think I kept trying to put in into it is that people think that they're going to start this stuff all wrong. And then it's going to be the exorcist. And then they're going to be possessed and their life's going to fall apart. And it's like, that's very unlikely. Like, that's just really, I've seen that very few times actually happen. I've heard of that very few times actually happening. And I think that some of this is really put into our heads so that we don't investigate this power that we have. And like the

don't investigate the world or we're supposed to. be afraid of it somehow. And I do believe that there are, I don't think the world is just love and light. I think that there are malignant forces in the world and that can be spiritual or it can just be like humanity. But I think that it's worth investigating why, if you're so afraid of something, why are you afraid of it who gave you that idea, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I guess that kind of bleeds into one of our last listener questions here. Dan Zetterstrom through email asks, Was Alistair Crowley as dark and problematic as he was made out to be? Mitch, I see you laughing. What do you think of that?

No, I appreciate that question. I think I know Dan's name from social media. As far as I'm concerned, Crowley was a brilliant performance artist, provocateur, magician, translator. I personally would not have sought him out to work together or to become pals back in the day. I think there was a cruelty in the man. I think he could experiment with people, attract colleagues or collaborators, and just as quickly and as easily dispensed with them. He said some things that were alluring and wonderful.

He said some things that were horrible and ignorant. His aesthetic was incredible. I mean, if it wasn't for Crowley's aesthetic, I don't know, maybe I'd be wearing a mustard-colored sweater right now. you know, and you must give the man tremendous credit as an artist. I mean, the aesthetic that he set sail in our culture has proven so remarkable. He was a great man. I would not have sought him out as a friend, colleague, teacher.

I think there were personal failings that were too great. Interesting. Sarah, what do you think of Alistair Coley? Well, I think to the question of whether or not he was problematic, I just want to say, I don't love that word. Like, I think it's kind of just to put it out on the record, like, I think it's kind of a cowardly word when we say the term problematic because it's like, well, what was the problem? Like, what's the problem?

You know, like, and I think it's like just name what you think is wrong with the person or name what is the issue, right? Because it's like problematic how to whom, right? The short answer is yes. Like, I think, like, I think Mitch said it very clearly. like he was a very cruel guy in a lot of ways. Like there was he really hurt people. He left a lot of destruction in his wake.

He also left a lot of, you know, positive influence in his wake. I have found his writings very beneficial in my own life. And I found, you know, some of the magic and some of the philosophies that he's left behind very positive and very like influential in a good way in my life. I think it's like made me a better person to be honest. And so, you know, kind of cruel. you know, anti-Semiticot leave behind something good.

Like, sure, I guess, right, yeah. Look at Bongder, you know. Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, it's the history of the world, I guess. You know, it's like there's, it's possible for, you know, someone to be bad in one way and beneficial in another way. That's just the, you know, the complexity of human life. And that's, I think that that means, don't discount it.

Don't only look at him as a good or a bad person. I think that I think that Crowley is a guy that a lot of people wish, was very simple. Like, I think that people wish that he was just evil or he was like just good and people will really go to the mat for one of those things. And I think he is just an extremely complicated figure of the 19th and 20th century that like deserves the, deserves all the biographies that have been done of him and honestly more because I

think that there's a lot to be dove into there on the man. Yeah. Yeah. And if I may add, you know, reading the book of the law is a book that. I frequently go back to. And that really opened up a lot for me. And I think that book, as a colleague of mine once says, comes from a very powerful source, a very dynamic source.

The fact that he kind of downloaded this, so to speak, in handwriting over a period of three days is extraordinary to me. That book has cast a huge influence across our culture, and it's been a very intimate and important influence for me. So again, we have to be willing, as Sarah was saying, to sort of do the dance and realize, you know, there's a lot of different complexities going on. But I'll avail myself of his work and anyone's work who I feel had moments of splendor. Yeah. Seconded on the book of the law.

Yeah. Okay. It's a gorgeous book. It's a gorgeous book, and I recommend everyone read it, to be honest. Okay. I have not read it. I'm going to have to give it a look. I just know, of course, as a euphologist, all I know of Crowley is the lamb image, the very famous lamb.

Pretty wild. Keeps me up at night. That's a story for another time. Maybe we'll do a Patreon episode about that. Well, that's it for listener questions, guys. Mitch, I've got a couple of closing questions for you before we wrap up, if that's okay. Awesome. I kind of wanted to know your thoughts.

You know, we're now living in this new discourse in euphology. when it comes to the government and everything like that. And military government institutions, they seem to be wrapping their claws around this topic. And Sarah, I think, really said it best, like they're taking advantage of this mystery, of this phenomenon in terms of national security. How can we maybe up the military budget?

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that is a big aspect to it. But besides that, like, what do you hope for? when it comes to the UFO topic moving forward. It's now front and center like never before. And I think a lot of us were really taken back by that. And we're like, okay, do we even have a voice in this anymore? Or is it just Tom DeGrasse Tyson? Is it just Avi Lope? And, you know, and nobody's wrong or right to be kind of the poster child or whatever for a mystery like this or the paranormal. But yeah, what do you hope for moving forward with this topic? Well, I'm very interested in extra physicality. And my search is really the search for extra physicality and the manner in which I and others can expand their sense of human agency. And if the UFO phenomena has a psychical component,

you know, in terms of the extradimensionality, interdimensionality that I was talking about. My hope is that it helps wedge open a little more in our generation, the extent to which we place stock in the extra physical capacities of our mind, capacities that are not necessarily abound by time or localism or linearity. And if we do that, I think that that represents just a deepening of this question of who we are and what we can do with who we are. So that, I would say, is my fondest hope at this moment as the UFO thesis goes mainstream. I'll ask one more. Throw you a curveball here, Mitch, before we go.

I'm a big fan of cursed films on Shudder. That's kind of where I discovered your work. I was like, oh, this dude knows what he's talking about. I got to ask, are there any things? films that you truly believe are curse and kind of a side question to that do you have a favorite UFO or alien themed movie so any actual cursed films and second favorite UFO or alien theme movie well um i think a film is so deeply enmeshed in the experience of the viewer um yeah remember uh my friend michael mohammed knight asked the question of whether a film can serve a sacred

scripture and he began his conversion to Islam at age 15 after seeing the Malcolm X movie, for example. I remember as a child being profoundly touched by close encounters. I was not a Star Wars kid. I was a close encounters kid. I have, and we'll just have to tuck this away for a future episode, been very touched by the movie Rosemary's Baby in a variety of ways. And so I don't really take, I don't really think of films as being cursed, but I do think they can awaken things in people that are very powerful. And the director of the series, the writer, director, Jay Chil, who's brilliant, I think he always had to contend with the fact that he was given a kind of framework within which to, within which to, structure the series. And so he had to perform very creatively and very brilliantly in my estimation within that framework. And I guess I share his point of view that, you know, when the term

curse films is used, apropos that show, it's being used with a certain archness, with a certain wit. You know, it's making reference to the fact that, yeah, you know, we culturally think the Exorcist is cursed or what have you, but it's a way of telling the whole story behind the film and its sources, including weird things that happened on set. Jay's done some really brilliant forensics explaining how horrible accidents have happened on set. And the story behind these things are, you know, as in thralling and contain more pathos sometimes than the movie itself. So I think that that covers your question of favorites and Can a Film Be Cursed? And thank you for watching it. It was such a pleasure to work on that because Jay, the director, is someone who did not come to the series initially as someone predisposed to belief in the mystical or the extra physical.

And he involved me in it very early on because he wanted to have a voice that would discuss those things. And that was really meaningful. And he's just done so much to make that series now in two seasons. You're really epic. Yeah, absolutely. I hope there's going to be more. I definitely do. Well, on that note, Mitch, where can we find everything you're up to?

Do you have anything coming up in New York or abroad that you can tell us about? And obviously, where can we find the book? Sure. Well, the book, Uncertain Places, is anywhere you buy your books. It's in audio, digital, and print. It's on sale officially on November 8th. Best place to keep up with me is social media because I'm terrible about updating my website. I just don't have time.

And so I'm on Twitter at Mitch Horowitz. I'm on Instagram at Mitch Harowitz, 23. I'm giving a number of Zoom talks, and I'm giving a live talk here in New York City. I really ought to know this date, but I just take it hour by hour here because there's a lot going on. But I want to give you the talk because anybody who's in the New York City area, I'd love for you to come out live. I'm giving a live talk at Film Noir Cinema in Brooklyn, and that's on Thursday the 17th at 7 p.m. Film noir cinema in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And I'll be talking about uncertain places, signing the book.

I'm looking forward to that because I've bought a perfection for that place. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right.

Kayak, got that right. That's awesome, Mitch. Well, man, this, again, I can't thank you for coming on. We've definitely embraced you here in the UFO world ever since you came on the scene. And I know you've been doing a lot of work for many years. So I know this is just the beginning of our conversation. I'd love to have you and Sarah back on to discuss more of these things in the future. But I've got to thank you for any time.

Awesome. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. that was wow i i don't even know like how to respond to half of what mitch said it's just so much to think about so much to um ruminate on but yeah how do you think it went what what did you take from

that conversation i you know Mitch is just really such a gift in this field i really think like he not like i know that we're we're having this whole conversation about how like we need to like um you know we should you know we should act i was going to say that we're we're him during the interview, but he had this wonderful line in that talk that he gave about, like, we shouldn't apologize for being believers anymore. And like, as much as I believe all of that, it is genuinely so good to have someone on our side who, like, is so intellectually rigorous and really speaks this language and it does the work and does the research. And is like, I truly think that he's just such a gift that we have. And so it was, it was awesome to be able to pick his

brain on all of this stuff. I know. I had like 50 more questions. We'll have to get him back on. Yeah. And it's also, I just really am happy to be here for this like time and history, not to be too dramatic of like, you know, seeing a new thought and occultism and euophology like converge finally. It feels good to see that happening and that we're all kind of talking to each other finally. It's a genuinely like heartening thing to see. Yeah, be a part of. Absolutely. I know. You're finally getting like the jocks with the, uh, the drama the kids and lyrics and it's all coming together. It's the breakfast club. It's the goddamn breakfast club over here. And we're all. Well, I got to ask before I let you go, you have a new book

coming out this week as of the airing of this episode. So can you tell us a little about the book and where we can find it? And yeah, yeah, what kind of inspired you to write this one? Yeah. So my next book is called How to Study Magic. And that's what it's about. It is coming out November 15th from running press books, and it should be available wherever you get your books. I was inspired to write it both for people who are already in the occult world and people who are outside of it. For the people who are in the occult world, I wanted to write it because the question you get asked the most is, how do I get into this stuff? And the answer is different for every single person. It totally depends on who you are, what you want to study,

what, you know, what effects you want. And so you never really have a satisfying answer to that. And to people who want to study magic, there's really not a, like I said, there's not a satisfying answer to how you get into this stuff, quote, and quote. And so I wanted to write a book that deals with magic not as like a singular thing, but as several different paths that you can follow. So I have chaos magic. I have witchcraft.

I have grim war magic. I have ceremonial magic and I have paganism. I give people history on all of these practices, how they feed into each other. I talk about my own personal experiences with them and things that I do or don't like or like, these are books that I like. These are books that I don't really care for, that kind of thing. So I give book recommendations at the end of every chapter. I give people a piece of magic from those traditions to practice to see how they feel about

it and feel it out. And I give some general help at the beginning end on how to assess sources and how to actually like if you're looking at a book or watching a video, hearing a lecture, a podcast such as this, how do you check up and see that we weren't just bullshitting you this whole time? So I really tried my hardest to make it as accessible as possible. And if anybody out here listening to it has a great urge to study magic, but does it know where to begin? I wrote the book for you. So go get it. Nice. I love it. Again, that comes out November 15th. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, cool. Second question. So Halloween, obviously, we all watch our go-toes

every year. Mine is the Michael Myers franchise because I'm a simpleton, straight white male and loves his slasher movies. But I also really like focus, focus. So the sequel came out. I succumbed to Disney entertainment, and I loved it. But you recently, as a wish, were interviewed for Newsweek about Hocus Focus 2. So you got to tell me what was that experience like? What was the article about? Yeah.

What's so embarrassing is, no, what's so embarrassing is I haven't seen it? So it's like, what's embarrassing is that? They were like, what were your thoughts on Hocus Pocus 2? And I was like, oh, I could totally give my thoughts on Hocus Focus Pocus. But it was because they didn't ask me what I thought. Because people thought that that headline, the first headline title that was like, it's a mediocre film was like what I said.

about it and I haven't seen it. I can't judge if it's mediocre or not. But I I what they asked me about was like what did I think about the backlash to it and did I think it was accurate or not? And I kind of I took a bit of an intellectual jump and I figured it would probably not be too dissimilar from

the depiction of witchcrafted the first one. So I was like I think I can talk about how accurate it is based on that one. Like a Disney children's movie. I think I could guess about what's going on here. Right. So it was very, so what I, I liked that they included

both of my quotes because I felt like the, the second one was the spicier one about the kind of backlash to the film. But I, it's so funny

because I genuinely haven't seen it. So, so if you loved it, that's awesome. I did. I absolutely love it. It was just so cool that I saw your name pop up

with Hocus Bokus 2. Never, never thought I'd see the day. But yeah, it was, I mean, I do. I love the first one.

First one is one of my favorite. Halloween movies. Genuinely. And I love the Michael Myers franchise. I think it's one of the strongest horror franchises, if I do say so. Did you see the last one? No, I haven't seen the last. Okay.

We don't have to talk about that one. So that's fine. I just mean more like the, like Halloween is, that's my miracle on 34th Street. I watch that every year. But then I, I, um, I watch that every year. I love Halloween too. Justice for Halloween 3 season of the witch.

And, you know, I don't say, you know what, controversial opinion, just as for Halloween H2O. Halloween H2, I think kind of is cool. Like, it's got something going on that I like. It's, it's like definitely a 90s slasher, which, you know, people can have their problems with. But I think it's kind of fun. Yeah, I just saw it for the first time, actually. You got Josh Hartnett in it, 90s farce. I asked her second glass now.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun film. Guilty. Oh, my God. And like, talk about a definitive ending in terms of beheading Michael Myers and then cut to black. They ended it. Spoiler alert, everybody. Spoiler alert for a 30 year old movie. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's my disappointing answer. That's my chaos magic answer is I actually, I fooled you all into thinking I had seen Hoax. Pocus too, but it was but trickery. I love it. I adopted the paradigm that I had seen it. There you go. Yeah.

Think it and it will be. I got to ask last question. Of course, Sarah. Where can we find everything you're up to? You can find me on Instagram is where I am the most active. I am at City Mystic on Instagram. I am still on Twitter, Sarah dash Lyons. And you can find you there.

You can find my website, sarah dash Lyons. com. And what else? So I'm going to be doing my book launch for how to study magic. It's going to be the 21st of November at St. Vitus here in Greenpoint. So it's, if you're here in Brooklyn, come on by for my book launch. That's going to be 7 p.m. November 21st at St. Vitus. What else do I have going on? I am currently in the process of making a movie. So if anybody likes me on this, if any producers liked me on this podcast and want to sponsor a female horror director. Get in my email, which you could find on my website. So I'm doing that right now.

I am working on it. I've got a couple other projects that are percolated right now, which I'm posting about, mostly on my Instagram, like I said, but also on Twitter. And yeah, there you go. Love it. The work never stops. Sarah, I got to thank you once again for coming on Summer in the skies. Brian, thank you so much.

This was wonderful. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit tread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it, compliance. Get it? Join the 15-privileance. Join the 15-20. thousand companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANTA.com slash com.

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