Somewhere in the Skies - The Inverted Path with Joshua Cutchin

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Ryan welcomes back author and researcher Joshua Cutchin to discuss his latest book, The Inverted Path: Supernatural Disorientation and Interruptions in Travel. Cutchin explores fascinating connections between UFO encounters, fairy folklore, Bigfoot, ghosts, missing time, and paranormal experiences, focusing on moments when witnesses become mysteriously lost, stopped, paralyzed, or diverted. Ryan and Joshua also explore altered states of consciousness, electromagnetic effects, psychic phenomena, experiencers, UAP disclosure, and whether we may play an active role in these extraordinary encounters. Order the book: https://a.co/d/0eR4IHJO Join us at ANOMACON on September 12th: http://www.anomacon.com Send us a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/SomewhereSkiesPod Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All socials and books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: [e-mail] Opening theme song by Septembryo Closing song by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #UFO #UAP #Paranormal #JoshuaCutchin #TheInvertedPath #Bigfoot #Consciousness #SomewhereInTheSkies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always $375. And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. What if the world is far stranger than we've been led to believe? This September 12th, step into the virtual world of Anomicon, 2026. the premier online conference exploring UFOs, the paranormal, consciousness, cryptozoology, folklore, and all things anomalous. Hosted by me, Ryan Sprague of Somewhere in the Skies, and our leading researcher Suzanne Landers,

and featuring legendary paranormal broadcaster Jim Harold. Anomicon 20206 brings together researchers, journalists, filmmakers, authors, experiences, and investigators. from all around the world. And best thing about AnamaCon, there's no travel, no hotels, no expensive tickets whatsoever. It is 100% free to watch. Join us for fascinating ideas, original presentations, anomalous-themed music videos, and a global community exploring the unknown together. Watch Anomicon 20206 this September 12th on the Summer in the Sky's YouTube channel. and to learn all about our speakers and their presentations,

be sure to visit Anomicon.com. Links are in the video description or the podcast show notes. We hope to see you there September 12th, and remember, the Anomalous is waiting for you at Anomicon, 2026. 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 of 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. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague, And boy, has it been a while since we've had a new interview here on the channel.

Now, for many of you who may or may not know, I work in Canada primarily, and I host a ghost hunting show out in Nova Scotia. And I recently got back home here to Scotland in the UK about a few weeks ago and caught a really nasty virus, which then turned into bronchitis and a respiratory infection. and then I was on medication that also made me sick. And it's just been an absolute spiral since then, a nightmare to say the least. But I want to thank you guys for sticking with me through all of it. You know, we had some classic episodes of the show that we put up on the podcast and the channel. So I want to thank you guys for checking those out. It may have been a revisit for some of you are rewind as well.

But appreciate you checking those out while I try to heal myself. and get better for you. But I couldn't think of a better medicine and a better guest to come back in full force with. And that is the one and only Joshua Cutchin. My good friend and colleague, we've spoken at conferences together, and we've done interviews together and stuff like that. And I was so excited to hear about his brand new book that recently released. And it's called The Inverted Path Supernatural Disorientation and Eighty-Orientation and

interruptions in travel with a brilliant book cover by the one and only Mr. Sam Shearren as well. So shout out to Sam. If you're watching this, be sure to check out all of his artwork to you. And this book guys blew me away. I got a advanced copy of it and I'm still making my way through a lot of it. But I really think you're going to enjoy this conversation. It's really unlike a lot of the conversations we have here on somewhere in the skies. It's not just UFO specific, but it really gets into a lot of stuff. You know, the idea of being pixie led, in fairies, and the supernatural, and paranormal, and these moments in our lives where we are either disoriented or we are interrupted or we are just literally stopped in our tracks. And what that can mean,

and what that can mean when it comes to these phenomena, are they interconnected? Is this something they all have in common, the way they're able to, you know, malfunction our machines, our automobiles, our planes, or things like that, or literally paralyze us in place. Or we become disoriented and lost when we're in the woods and we see a big foot or whether we're in a house and it's haunted and we don't know where we're going, which door to use. Like all these different thoughts and theories and things, Joshua has really put into a cohesive and a pretty profound book. And I really hope you'll check out the book.

I really hope you'll check out this interview. And it was fascinating. I learned so much. I had a great time with Joshua. Be sure to check out all of his work at the links in the show notes on YouTube here or on the podcast as well. And while you're at it, please take just a few moments to rate and review somewhere in the skies on Apple and on Spotify.

Leave us a comment, a review. whatever you can, it helps out the show tremendously. If you'd like to help us out even further, you can support us on Patreon, on Apple Premium, and on YouTube membership as well. The links for all of those are in these show notes or video description too. But for now, I'm going to leave you with this interview

as I continue to try to get my health back to where it needs to be. And just look forward to some awesome interviews coming to you in the coming weeks here on the show and very special episodes as well. And the live stream is back too. So join us every Sunday for that too. I hope you're having a wonderful summer so far. And thank you. Thank you so much for sticking with us here at Summer in the Skies.

But without further ado, let's get to our interview with the one and only Joshua Cutchin. Welcome back to Somewhere in the Skies. and a huge welcome back to Joshua Cutchin. My friend, it has been way too long. How are you? It's been a while. I'm doing really well. Very busy, but very grateful.

Yeah. I mean, talk about, you know, kind of hitting the ground running. You have had a hell of a year, whether it's the books you've written, the conferences you've spoken at. The most recent one that I caught that you were speaking at was contact in the desert. So before we even get to your brand new book, which is kind of going to be the core of this conversation today, the book is called The Inverted Path, Supernatural Disorientation and Interruptions in Travel. We're going to talk all about it. But tell me about contacting the desert.

What did you talk about there? And what was that experience like? I've never been to contact in the desert. It was incredible and incredibly gratifying. and it was it was i mean i have so many thoughts and it was sort of a bucket list for me for the longest time i've been around many experiencers i have many friends who are experiences i've been to many events with experiencers but it everything feels a bit different when you go you know 50 feet and talk to a random person and they've had stories that can knock your socks off you know

so that was part of it um i spoke on some ecology of souls material i spoke on some forthwall phantom's material uh also uh did a podcast with kelly chase and um introduce some people like they they kept this hustling but it was it was a good kind of busy if that makes any sense um so yeah it was absolutely eye-opening in tons of ways and uh you know what's interesting is it's you know a lot of times when i leave conferences i have this sort of like void where it's like oh i just really you know it's sort of like a hangover and um i had a little bit of that but all Also, I think just the fact that it was, I got enough time with a lot of people, which I think sort of made me a little bit more ready to come home than I might have been. But not like, you know, I don't want to do this anymore because I could have stayed another three weeks, right?

But like more in a sense of like, oh, that was a satisfying experience. So it was absolutely wonderful. And yeah, it's been a wild ride of a year. Something like eight events or something. I just got back recently from the Lilydale Symposium up in New York that Shannon Taggart puts on. That the new book, I was on the Y Files back in June. The day that my W-Files interview dropped was the same day that my new book dropped. So it was a very hectic June.

It was perfect, yes. But for a while there, I basically had an email job where I was just answering emails all day every day for a couple of weeks. That's awesome, man. Yeah, I caught a little bit of the Y Files interview. I'm hoping to go back and digest a little bit more. And that's what I love about your work is when you buy a Joshua Cutchin book, you're not sitting down for like a breeze through, you know, in one day. Like this is a book you could use as a weapon.

Literally, they're so big. But I love it, man, because I can go back to, you know, Ecology of Souls. and whatnot and and the Phantom Smells book that's still like one of my favorite ones too and I just I love that you can pick up one of your books when something like dawns on you

whether it's like you experience a certain phenomenon you hear a discussion on these things and you're like I want to know what Joshua Cutchin thinks of this and I know he has at some point so that's what I love about your books and it's no different with this new one I would assume My friend that I wrote my Bigfoot books with, Timothy Runner, one time referred to the paranormal as having this sort of spider webbing quality, right? And of course, you know me well enough by now to know that I lump UFOs under the paranormal umbrella.

But I think, you know, with certain topics that I look into, I really, I fall prey to that. But I also think it sort of offers a more holistic picture, right? So a good example is this new book, The Inverted Path, where it became very apparent halfway through, to me at least, that these sort of paranormal disorientation narratives have a lot to do with these sort of tropes of UFO stopping cars. We can explain that later, but the point that I would get at is that like, so you just want to talk about, I'm just going to talk about, I'm just going to talk about disorientation. And then you're like, well, what about time slips? Aren't they kind of that same thing? And then if you're going to talk about time slips, then you've got to talk about these phantom diner narratives that you see across

Fortiana. So it's just like, it's a, you sort of end up with a book that you can use as a weapon. Well, let's start there. Now, the inverted path. I love the title. You mentioned, you know, kind of some of the ideas that are in it, whether it's car stopping when UFO things happen. Time seems to slip away, missing time and stuff like that. Or you have these paranormal experiences as well. You know, I get a lot of reports in the UFO field of people experiencing what they call the Oz Factor when they see a UFO.

and nobody truly knows how to define these things. You know, as our good friend Greg Bishop would say, like it defies definition. It defies logic at times. And I love to know what kind of led you on that path, I guess, to write the inverted path. Where did this idea kind of stem from, I guess? Well, you know, with so much of what I have tried to do over the past,

good Lord, I can't believe this, 11 years, I guess. It's been really sort of looking at one small aspect, with the exception of some of my more recent output, like Ecology of Souls and Fourth Wall Phantoms, it's mostly been about looking at one small aspect that's been sort of talked about in sort of a throwaway passage or a paragraph or a sentence and never really sort of like teased out and taken apart and looked at how it sort of echoes across the whole of the paranormal. So a lot of what I do is the comparative aspect, sort of putting a lot of the things that we see in cryptosology and dialogue with parapsychology, and in dialogue as ever with uphology.

But for the inverted path, you know, as often happens with me, it begins in fairy folklore, right? And I had seen some parallels to some disorientation narratives in fairy folklore as compared to the UFO phenomenon, which, again, nothing new there. This goes all the way back to 1969 and passport to Magonia. Thank you, Dr. Valle. But, you know, passport to Magonia, for me, is the gift that keeps on giving because there are these little resonances that you can continue to unpack.

So I've been long fascinated with this particular aspect of fairy folklore, which is known as being pixie-led. Now, you can't necessarily apply that term globally, although I do. Technically, pixies, piscis, Piscis are a Western English phenomenon. So like, you know, a Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset, those sort of areas. But the idea echoes itself through fairy folklore worldwide. and also through different aspects of the paranormal, as I try to illustrate. And in these pixie-led narratives, people get lost,

and it's inevitably blamed on their local variation on the fairy folk. In Ireland, it would just be called sort of being led astray, because the Irish were very much of the mindset that you should necessarily refer to the fairies by name. They'd have all these euphemisms, and they would refer to them as they. So they'd never say anything like, oh, I was fairy-led. They'd say, like, you know, I was led astray, but that's totally what they meant. And in the context of the pixie-led phenomenon specifically, and one of my favorite scholars in this space, Dr. Simon Young,

who is, I would argue, the world's authority on being pixie-led, divided them into two experiences, which were wandering experiences and field-crossing experiences. And the wandering experiences are the ones that sort of have a veneer of plausible deniability to them. So you're walking a familiar path, and all of a sudden you start paying attention, and you're like, wait, where am I? And, you know, there's always this sort of implication that maybe I took a wrong turn or I just got turned around or this or that or the other.

Typically in these narratives of both sorts, the spell will break and you'll hear laughter and you'll suddenly know where you are again. The more dramatic versions of this are those field crossing experiences that Young pointed to, which are a typical narrative would be someone, again, is taking a familiar path in rural England, especially in years past, that would often take you across. other people's land, fields, et cetera. And in these narratives, you might walk into a field that you know is the right way. And then you'll be like, well, wait, there should be a gate here. Why can't I get out here? And you look and you can't find it and say, okay, well, I'm going to turn around and retrace my steps and go back out.

And the entrance is gone as well. And so you find this, there's this entire body of stories of which I only, you know, scratch the surface in this book, where people are basically trapped in these spaces for hours on end. In the most dramatic versions, they will literally see their destination, you know, over the hedgerow or, you know, over the stone wall that they can't get over. And they'll just be trapped until for various reasons. And we can get into that or not, but through self-remedy or just the spellbreaking. Oh, there's the gate. I guess it was there all along, even though I looked and

looked and looked and looked. So once you start taking a look at this sort of like, these two sort of of ideas of wandering into places that you might not have had volition over your control, or like, going into old spaces that are rendered suddenly unfamiliar, I think it becomes rather easy to put that in dialogue with the UFO phenomenon. Because if you look at sort of the alien abduction research that was done in years past, your mileage may vary with some of those researchers. I understand that. But if we just look at the accounts as presented,

it's very common to see people say, you know, well, for some reason I turned down this road that I would, had no reason to turn down. And that's where their experience unfolds, right? And, you know, even beyond that, so many of these UFO narratives feature this sort of unnatural compulsion. I mean, you've heard it a thousand times. I don't know why I decided to look out the window, but I did, and that's when I saw the UFO. Or like, you know, I didn't really need to check on the front gate, but I did.

And when I went outside, that's when X, Y, Z happens. So there's this, there's a sort of implied compulsion to relocate, to move to change one's behavior that I think graphs on really well from the pixie-led narratives to the modern euphological scene. Very interesting. Now, I want to kind of dive into, you know, there's the pixie lead, but there's also this idea of this all being somewhat happenstance, you know, like whenever I get UFO reports, people are like, I didn't go out looking for this. Like I think I just happened to be right place, right time, right place, wrong time. I don't know. It really, like you said, my mileage varies when. it comes to like, you know, if you wanted this to happen, if you didn't want this to happen, and how you interpret that. So in terms of like being led astray or down a different path, what about the opposite of that, Josh? Like, do you, is that a whole other part of this as well?

Of like, this was meant to happen to these people that had happened to. Yeah, I think that there are certain. So this sort of body of folklore, again, just strictly looking at the sort of fairy aspect of it, because that has the most sort of superstition and whatnot around it, there were certain activities that you could do that would put you more at risk or less at risk. We'd be preventative action, right? For example, there was a lot of gendered activity and a lot of older cultures that would sort of put people at risk.

There were certain times that were prohibited to, for example, I believe, spin yarn. Like after a certain hour, don't spin yarn or else you might be let astray. Wood chopping for men was very common. If you go out into the woods to chop wood, that's when you're more at risk. Something that speaks to has a lot of implications, let's say, is berry picking. Berry picking was typically in a lot of cultures, a gendered activity for women. And they would go out, and that would be one of the times you'd be most vulnerable.

In fact, there's an entire body of stories in Newfoundland specifically about people who go out into the forest to pick berries and find themselves taken away or let astray or basically put into sort of this dissociative fugue of sorts. That's almost always blamed on the fairies. So I'm not entirely sure that that gets up your question because you're sort of getting it like this fated predestination kind of thing. But, you know, there are hints across various stories that the distinction between where we want to go and where we are led to go, where we are compelled to go, is not always entirely clear. There's a wonderful story from an archaeologist, I believe, by the name of Basil Barnum, who was in Dartmoor. And he just went out for a walk one evening, and he just found himself the next thing he had. It wasn't an unfamiliar place, right? But he found himself wandering into this place that he had no idea where he was.

And he assumed that he had been led there by the Pixies. And it was near one of these Iron Age ring forts. And he saw his eyes happened to fall upon an older Iron Age axe. And he was about to collect it and he had a voice in his head say, no, you know, leave it there. But it's one of those few stories that really makes it explicit that you can sort of led by surrendering control, perhaps, you know, we like to think of getting lost in the modern context as being, you know, oh, I was absent-minded. But the question that I would ask is when you're absent-minded, what comes in to fill that absence, you know, to the extent that I think

that alter states of consciousness might indeed play a role in these narratives. It's interesting to note that being pixie-led was, there's sort of an old saying that to be pixie-led is to be whiskey lead, right? And the term pixelated that we now associate with, you know, screens and whatnot, meant to be disoriented or to be intoxicated. And there are a lot of narratives where people come home from the tavern and then they lose their way and it's like, oh, well, these people were just, we're just drunk. But as Dr. Simon Young points out, there are also plenty of narratives about young people who are in these sort of those field crossing experiences where their surroundings completely change in broad daylight, you know, some people who are, who are, you know, teetotelers,

they don't touch a drink of alcohol. So there's something going on here, which is sort of a combination of factors that I think that allows us sometimes to be hijacked, perhaps. Interesting. Well, I like that term hijacked because I'm thinking like these people are in motion, they're in transition, literally, whether they're walking through a field, down a lonely road, something like that. Do you see this as like someone's in a, let's say, like a major life transition of some sort? We often hear that paranormal activity will increase when it's a pivotal moment in someone's life, a very emotional moment, things like that, and the phenomena kind of gets attracted to that.

Do you see any correlations between like these people being in transition and also this transformation happening to them with these phenomena, I guess? Yeah, a bit. I mean, so I would sort of lead into that, lead into that rather, by asking you, are you tired of seeing the way the word liminal has been misused across the internet? Yeah, especially with backrooms coming out. Yeah, and like I get what they're getting at. But like liminal has become an internet word for spooky, wherein it as actually in its truest sense, it means that sort of state in between or, you know, a more marginalized state. So I was speaking a moment ago about some of these sort of traditionally gendered activities that would allow you to become or put you more at risk of being pixie led. And there's a scholar by the name of Peter Nervailles who looked at those Newfoundland narratives of being led astray or being fair.

lead while picking berries. And if you look at sort of the roles, the people who filled those roles, I mean, honestly, yesterday and today, they are generally marginalized communities, right? They're sort of communities that patriarchies push to the fringes. So women, and now today, a lot of migrant workers, the very similar sort of cohort. And that's always sort of been the fairy MO, right? It's always been people who are deemed, whether they are or not, the most vulnerable. the, you know, there's always a longstanding belief that the children that were at most risk of becoming changelings were those who were born but not baptized. So, again, the sort of idea of a liminal space. So, yeah, there is a little bit of that.

It's not as clearly indicated to me in the UFO literature. However, there is a caveat here, which is that the very act of traveling is an act of transition, right? So it's always a liminal state whenever you're picking. led by definition because you're neither at your destination nor your starting point, right? You're always in transit. So it's thematically another expression of that sort of liminal idea. So while it doesn't necessarily mean that like, oh, well, you know, I was between marriages or, oh, I was between, you know, residences or anything like that, there always is in the moment in that sort of immediate sense, a liminal state that people are in during these experiences. Yeah, I find it very interesting that

you know, sleep paralysis happens in one of those liminal states between wakefulness and between being asleep. And there's a mildly comparable state called highway hypnosis that's been talked about. And if you really want to terrify yourself, Brian, like, go look into the highway hypnosis literature, and you realize how common and easy it is to happen. It's like, it's really terrifying. Not in a supernatural sense, but in a sense of like, oh, I'm behind, you know, a giant hunk of metal going 80 an hour and I might enter an altered state. But, you know, you do see references to that as well as being a possible altered state of consciousness that people lapse into while traveling. I've kind of had this happen myself.

You know, I make no bones about the fact that I'm a recovering alcoholic. So this is not when I was drinking, though. This was not when I was drinking. I was sober at this point. But I'm traveling up Interstate 85 between Atlanta and where my parents live. A lot of that is getting across the Greenville-Spartonburg metro area in South Carolina. And I distinctly remember there was one time probably around 2007 or 2008. No, it would have been 2008 or 2009, where I just have no memory of going across that entire metro area.

Now part of it is probably because I just, it's always a chore to get across that and I probably dissociated a little bit. But at the same time, the idea that I would dissociate behind the wheel is absolutely terrifying. yeah absolutely man i mean i've been i i travel by road so much when i'm in the states and when i'm working in canada and i will find myself three hours into a drive being like whoa where did that time go so now yeah yeah oh you're listening to a podcast and all of a sudden it's over and you're like what what just happened you're right you're you're going 80 miles per hour you're swerving in and out of traffic with these other metal tubes and in vehicles all around you. God forbid a deer tries to cross that interstate or whatnot.

And meanwhile, my brain isn't even like processing what I'm doing. It's crazy. It's probably comparable to the flow states that athletes and musicians get into when they're sort of doing their thing. It's probably comparable to that. But I would argue that, you know, if altered states of consciousness seem to play a role, not always, but often. facilitating contact or being able to see whatever this other space is and that seems to be indicated across a variety of literature and the sleep paralysis this stuff then maybe something about the act of traveling highway hypnosis does that as well now I don't think that highway

hypnosis happens when you're moving on foot or on horseback as in some of these stories but at the same time I think that something similar might happen where you sort of your mind wanders and then something rushes in to fill that vacuum Yeah. And what rushes into Philbath, I think, is where the real questions lay. You know, we talked a little bit about kind of UFOs and whatnot, a little bit of paranormal. But I'd love to touch on this aspect with you because there are cases in your book where you cover cryptids, you know, whether it's like Bigfoot and stuff like that, getting lost in the forest, encountering one of these hominids or missing links or something like that.

where do you think cryptids lay in this whole idea of the inverted path and disintory in i can't even say the word man disorientation good lord your your tongue has been pixie-led yes so so the book as sort of a 10,000 foot view is disorientation and stopping in within each of those sections i look at the fairy stuff i look at the UFO stuff i look at the ghost literature there's examples of that i look at the anomalous light literature which has significant overlap with the fairy literature and stuff and then the cryptid stuff too and I I mean I'm a contrarian right and it's really what it is like I just I want to like it's not that I criticize cryptozology because I love cryptozoology and I love cryptosologists but yeah so in the context of specifically the most famous cryptid celebrity

right being Bigfoot these sort of stories happen quite often as well where people will completely lose their way. Typically, the answer you will hear from cryptozoologists as to why this happens is the speculation that Bigfoot employ infrasound, which is below the level of human hearing. And infrasound can indeed sort of produce all sorts of effects similar to the being in the house, but among them is disorientation as well. Now, look, I am not one to say that whatever the theory phenomenon represents doesn't use infrasound. I'm not one to say that the UFO phenomenon doesn't use infersound or ghosts. Maybe all these things are using infersound to instill this sort of disorientation, right? I'm not saying that it's not the case, but what I do think needs to be acknowledged in

cryptozoology is the fact that some of these Bigfoot stories, in terms of, you know, I went into the forest and I was completely disoriented and I couldn't find my way out. I was super familiar with this area and then I saw a Bigfoot. But these are indistinguishable from the pixie-led narratives if you just swap out Madlibs. You know, if you swap out, you know, Oregon for Dartmoor and you swap out Bigfoot for the pixies, like it's, it reads the same way. So in other words, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that Bigfoot is a fairy, and I'm

not saying that fairies are Bigfoot or any of these things. I'm saying at the very least, the way that we metabolize perceived contact with other intelligences remains fairly stable across time and place, right? And that might indicate that these are the same thing. It might indicate that that's just sort of our perceptual bias. It might indicate that there are different things manifesting in our reality in the similar ways. I mean, the example that I'm fond of using lately is that, you know, if I talk to you about something that lives in your house and it's furry and it has four legs and a tail and ears and you pet it and it love scratches behind the ear, and it comes in and out through a door that's, you know,

set into the main door of your house and you feed it and it gives you love and companionship. I could be talking about a cat and I could be talking about a dog. I mean, I could be talking about a hamster or gerbil. Anyway, my point is that, well, they're both pets. They're very different things. Don't get me wrong. Like cats and dogs are very different on a lot of different levels. But they sort of do occupy a similar space in our lives.

So maybe that's what we're seeing. I don't know. But those are points of comparison that I think are worth teasing out. you know, and there are lesser, what's the best way to put this, less famous, less strong correspondences that you can sort of graft on to other cryptids as well. There's a wonderful book that I always encourage people to read. It's Michel Meijer and Claude, I believe it's Claude Gagnon's Lake Monster Traditions. And they look specifically at, you know, lakes in French Canada.

and a lot of these lakes that have late monsters just so happen to have one spot on the lake that's like this mini Bermuda triangle where the the winds will always prevail on the way that you don't want to go or it's really easy to get turned around or compasses will malfunction. So it's all sort of similar in vibe to sort of this broader theme of disorientation. Interesting. Okay, well, you have these encounters with these things. but I guess my next question for you would be how much do we have to do with it Josh

like are we is this is this us being pixie led at times but at other times are we the lead in the dance you've got this kind of whole co-creation thing again that our friend Greg Bishop would kind of coin like what role do we play in all of this are we like the

could we be considered you know the phenomenon on as well? I don't know. Does that make sense what I'm asking? It does make sense. Okay. Okay. And so at the end of each section of the book, the two main sections, there's just sort of speculation on some of these more philosophical, transpersonal depth psychology sort of angles. And I'll be honest with you, Ryan. I resisted the idea that this stuff comes from us in any way, shape, or form for a very long time. But, you know, my friend Soraya Azcath, where do the road go? eventually pushed me to the suspicion.

I won't say conclusion, but the suspicion that we are indeed, you know, sort of playing a role along with Greg's work, as you've talked about. So, yeah, I'd leave the door open to the idea that in some way these things might be projections of or from ourselves, or, again, meeting something else halfway. And just so many of these experiences are tailor-made to different individuals. There are some sort of thematic and symbolic resonances that I think are worth exploring. You know, the idea of spiritual revelation coming in the wilderness is almost universal. If you look at, you know, certain shamanic initiations, if you look at, you know, even in the Christian tradition of wandering through the desert or, you know, 40 days in the wilderness with Christ.

So I think that's all part of it. And if you sit and think with the broader themes of disorientation and navigation, it's all very egocentric, right? Like, I know where I am. And to become lost, you don't know where you are. And there's sort of something that I think mirrors that sort of ego death or ego dissolution that you find across moments of spiritual revelation or certain psychedelic trips, you know, some of these work, or even meditative states. So there's a sense of like you lose a sense of where you are in that sort of a sense of who you are. And you know, if you've ever, if you've ever been profoundly lost and found your way back to civilization, it does feel like a little mini rebirth narrative, right? Like you're so relieved.

You're like, everything looks brighter and you're like, oh my goodness, I actually got out of their lives. So I think that there are some, at the very least, at the very least some symbolic resonances there. To say nothing of the fact that, you know, it's a longstanding tradition across all. lot of different religions to use labyrinths as not only metaphors for one spiritual journey, but also for navigating and inducing contemplative states. I'm sure you've seen or been to or heard about certain religious sites that have a labyrinth in there, not to get people lost, but to leave them through in sort of a meditative state to the other side, right?

Yeah. Yeah, we've got a few here in Scotland as well too. And this is interesting, though, I realize that. No, it just has very little to do with the paranormal, but I think it's interesting. There's actually, in psychological terms, there is a difference between labyrinths and mazes, right? So a maze is meant to confuse you and get you into dead ends and to transform you, but labyrinths are not meant to sort of occupy that same thing. Labyrinths lead you through a twisting route into the center and back out again. Like they're not designed to actually stop you or arrest your traffic.

level. They're designed to bring you through. I found that interesting because I've always used those terms interchangeably. Right. Me too. Interesting. Yeah, I never would have thought of that. Okay, two things I want to touch on with what you just said. I want to rewind back to some of your earlier work when I believe I first met you and interviewed you. This was during your work with UFOs as kind of a symbol of death. And I, um, I, Again, I know we're kind of brushing off the memory banks here, but do you see any of that past work creeping into what you're doing now with this idea of the inverted path and disorientation and all that?

Do you still feel the possibility that these phenomena could be some sort of mask for the process of what we call death here on Earth? Yeah, does that play into any of your current work right now that you can? Yes and no. And we finally have an at least officially quasi-officially sanctioned term for this hypothesis. Okay. An article popped up on Wikipedia just the other day about the thanatological UFO hypothesis. So I guess that's what we're calling it from here on out, right?

Fanatology being the study of death. So that's part of the problem with sort of ecology of souls materials. Like, what do you really call this? Like the death hypothesis doesn't sound very elegant. So yes and no, right? I don't necessarily think that everything that I write has to nest neatly into what I've written previously, because I always try to treat things sort of a new with like a new thought experiment. But, you know, there are plenty of ways that I can sort of make these ideas play together.

Ecology of Souls was all about, you know, the paranormal and death. Fourth Ball Phantoms was all about, well, more or less that sort of porous boundary between imagination and real-life experience. I'm not convinced that the imaginal realm or the imaginal space isn't the afterlife isn't the same as the afterlife. By which I mean, you know, when people pass on, they certainly live on in our heads and our hearts, right? So there's sort of that idea that they're sort of kept alive in some sort of meaningful way that we can all sort of agree on objectively, regardless of our religious impulses, that, yes, the dead are alive as long as there are people around to remember. them that might be perhaps one of the reasons that ancestor veneration has been so widely you know accepted across the world is like you're literally keeping the dead alive so those ideas kind of play together um at the same time you know when i got to so i did ecology and i was like well how do you go you

know how do you widen the scope from there well how about like what is reality and it's like well how do you wind you don't you don't widen the scope from there so that's why the inverted path is sort of harkens back to some of the earliest stuff that i did with food taboos and with smells with child abduction It's like, well, let's really narrow the focus again and look at something that plays itself out across various paranormal domains. You know, to that end, I do think it's,

this is sort of where the title comes from, the inverted path. The theme of inversion kept on popping up time and time and time again across this work. One of the remedies for getting yourself out of being pixie-led and to find your way again was to invert an article of clothing. That was the thing that most commonly broke its spell. And you see contemporary accounts of people who grew up with that folklore being in these narratives and inverting a glove or turning their jacket inside out or something, and suddenly they know where they are. Don't know why that works, except for perhaps the idea that you're being placed into an inverted space.

And in that sort of double negative sense, by inverting something in an inverted space, you make things right again. And there are allusions to this in various forms of fairy folklore in Western Europe, the idea that summer in our world was winter and winter. fairyland or the idea that they laugh at funerals and cry at birth. So there's always sort of this topso-turvy inverted kind of idea. But it occurred to me, coming back to the whole idea of death, which was your original question, which I promise I'm circling back to, in these narratives where we get lost, it kind of become a ghost, don't you? Like, you're inverted in that sense, and the dead are inverted from us in many ways. But then it sort of puts you in the mindset of like, well, what does a ghost experience in a haunted house?

I'm reminded of the Winchester house, you know, that I had a chance to visit where all these sort of doors leading to nowhere and staircases leading to nowhere and dead ends and such. The idea apocryphal, though it may be, was that Sarah Winchester was trying to keep ghosts from finding her. But it's this idea of like, you know, you hear these stories about ghosts that, you know, a revolutionary war soldier who appears to walk on his knees across the floor,

than you find out, oh, the floor of the original house was three feet lower than it is today. So what does a ghost experience in a house that's been renovated where walls have been put up or walls have been knocked down? I would argue that it's probably pretty similar to what we experience when we're pixie live, right? Oh, this is a very familiar space, but like this is all different. Why is this different? I know exactly where I should be. So I do think there's something about long story short, this idea that we are, mirror image of whatever that other side is.

I think that other side might be the same place that all these sort of mysteries stem from. That's fascinating. What are some of your favorite cases from the book that you use as examples, I guess, of these things, whether it's part one, part two. I want to dig a little bit more into part two. I'm going to be very opportunistic and use my favorite case, which is the case that kind of blew open this whole idea of this book as one of my as sort of a transition to part two because

it was the case that was hard for me to categorize. Hello, this is Ryan Sprague, the host of Summer in the Skies. If you're enjoying our podcast, our live streams, and our videos, and you'd like to support the show, there are several ways to help while unlocking exclusive perks. Join our Patreon community for early access to episodes, priority guest questions. exclusive articles, bonus content, and access to a growing community of fellow UFO enthusiasts. You can also subscribe to Summer in the Sky's premium on Apple Podcasts for ad-free listening, early access, and exclusive premium content. If you're watching on YouTube, consider becoming a channel member to unlock bonus content, members-only posts, batches, and so much more.

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Go! Out there. Just kill or be killed. Jacob Allurdy. There are people out there? They need our help. Josh Berlin. Shoot first and inquire afterwards.

Margaret Qualley. Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In The Theater's Friday. Get tickets now. There's a wonderful book by Dermott McNanis called The Middle Kingdom

that talks about various stories. One of the first stories in there is a story of a reverend who has one of those field crossing experiences that we were alluding to. But there's another story of, according to McManus was, I believe, his aunt who needed a caretaker. And she, rather, hired this young girl, believe about 18 years of age in County Mayo to be the caretaker. And so one day, the girl has decided to pay a visit to some neighbors at her new live-in work situation and she decides that she's a bit homesick. So she walked to the top of this fairy fort called Lissard. And she walked to the top of it and from the top of the fort

she can see her old, the rooftops of her old hometown. So I guess it was rather close. But she stayed up there for a while. She sort of scratches that homesick itch and then she realizes, well, it's kind of chilly I'm going to get on my way. So she goes down to the bottom of the fairy fort. And if you've ever been, had the chance to visit some of these fairy forts, a lot of them are hingeiform forts, which means that there's actually a moat on the inside. It's the whole thing I can nerd out on. But long story short, there's a ditch that you have to go through and then go up, a higher rise, and then out the other side.

Gotcha. And in this story of this young lady being lost atopoulous ard, she gets to the edge of the fairy fort and can't get out, by which I mean she literally hits an invisible wall. She tries to push against it. It feels everything like there is an invisible wall there. So she retreats back to the top of the Ferry Fort. As the day goes on, she is overdue for her original visit. And search parties come out.

Parties that come within 20 or 30 yards of her, shouting her name. She can see them. She can see their torches. She's yelling out to them. She's causing a racket. There's no reason that they should not be able to see or hear her, and yet they don't. This continues several more times until finally, for whatever reason, she tries in desperation to get out of the Ferry Fort again, and the invisible wall is no longer there. She gets to the house where she was due around midnight, you know, and cries and tells this whole story.

Now, what I think is interesting about that is number one. Remember, I was talking about like, you know, we kind of become like ghosts, whatever we do that. That sounds like, I bet that's what being a ghost is like, you know? You see people walking around that can't see or hear you. But the other thing is, how do you qualify that story? Like, how do you categorize that? Is that a pixie-led story? Well, it certainly has a lot of the aspects of those field crossing there,

because I was talking about earlier, where you're in a space and you can't get out. But there's also this idea of she was stopped from getting out, right? And if you look at that sort of phrase, invisible wall, that has been directly cited in a lot of UFO literature about car stopping. Like, you know, it's not necessarily that the engine stops, although that happens most of the time. I'm not going to deny that. But there are also illusions of like, no, my engine was fine, but it was like my car was pushing up against an invisible wall or something was holding it back. So that, to me, was the light bulb moment when I said, okay, I think, and again, you don't have to co-sign this at all. But I personally have come to the conclusion that the disorientation and the supernatural stopping narratives, you know, famously UFOs stop cars, right?

Those are two sides of the same coin. They are both keeping you from where you're going, right? The disorientation is subtle. The stopping of cars is overt. But I think that they really are different expressions of the same idea. And so that leaves into the second half of the book, which looks at how UFOs stop cars and horses and people. Huh?

That's funny. Ferries stop cars and horses and people. Ghosts do it, lights do it, and cryptids do it, which really pushes against what we think cryptids should be, right? But it goes beyond that. It's, you know, it's cars getting stopped. It's livestock getting stopped. It's the wheels of wagons not working.

It's psychics stopping locomotives with a glance. It's narratives of paralysis. And it's also narratives of ships becalmed at sea. And again, as I said earlier, I have this contrarian streak, right? And in UFO circles, the most common explanation for this offered completely without any rigor or thought is, oh, electromagnetism. Right. Every time. I had this interaction with the rather prominent euthologist at Contact in the Desert.

And a friend of mine was wanting me to pitch some of my work. And I was like, I'm sort of a wallflower in a lot of ways. But I was like, okay, I'll do it. And the latest book came up and I make mention of this. And the response was with UFO stopping cars, oh, that's just electromagnetism. And it's like, hold on. Like, hold on.

And I was fresh off of writing this book and I've got like, you know, Electromagnet magnetism looms over this entire book in a lot of different ways. Because we seem to have a magnetic sense of direction. You get these narratives of GPS failing and compasses spinning. Electromagnetism can kill car engines. but it can't stop the wind for ships. It can't take over the steering wheel of a car in 1954. It can't make your brakes fail in 1972.

So there's something about this, and there are plenty of other, there's several different cases that I go into in the book, up to an including an engine being disassembled after a UFO sighting over a battle, over an oil tanker, right? Like really weird stuff. That's not, I don't care, that's not electromagnetism. So I'm not saying that electromagnetism doesn't play a role because some of these cases

pretty clear cut. People have their hair standing on end and their lights fail and there are mechanisms for that, right? But not every one of them. And if you dig into sort of the work of the people who really looked into this, like McCampbell and Rodger, even some of the more conventional stories of UFO's stopping car engines have this puzzling detail of the cars restarting by themselves after the UFO leaves. Again, what can and can't happen has changed a lot in recent years because of how

computerized our cars have become, right? But in the 1960s, if you told a mechanic, my car started on its own, they would laugh at you. There's just no way without physical intervention to have made that happen. So it's electromagnetism plays a role in these stories, but it is far from the entire story. And I would argue that a lot of this starts to look like those experiments expressions of poltergeist activity that sort of wind their way through the UFO narratives that people don't always acknowledge, right? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of process. Another good example. I want to talk about this because I really wish it had to be included in the book, but the Tehran, the Tehran UFO. It's my favorite case. Right. I was reading, I was reading up on it again. And, you know, at one point, all the instruments went out in the cockpit.

Yep. everything went dark. Electromagnetism, right? He goes to trigger the ejection seat and the ejection seat doesn't work either. You would never build an ejection seat that's reliable on electronics. It defeats the point of having an ejection seat. You know what I mean? It's a mechanical device, right?

And so the idea that whatever this is is also controlling mechanical devices, I think needs to be looked at a lot more closely. And I, in my own limited way, I tried. So I guess kind of my overarching question, Josh. And like this is probably the biggest question of the book. I don't, I don't expect you to have like the full answer because I don't think any of it. What planet did the aliens come from? Yes, exactly.

That's what this has all been leading up to, man. So get ready. Why? My question is why are these things happening? Why are we brought or led down an inverted path? why are we being interrupted? What does the Bigfoot want? What is the ghost one?

What's the alien one? Why are they stopping us? What is this? Why? Well, I'm going to go through sort of conventional things that were talked about in fairy lore and then sort of my own speculation. So in the pixel-led narratives, sometimes it was just for poops and giggles. I don't know if you have the explicit rating on your podcast or not. Not all, buddy.

goes just for a lark right um uh and that meant that you know if you died while it happened it wasn't because the pixies wanted you to die or the fairies wanted you to die it was just a side effect it's like well i'm sorry we were just having a good time right that was the most common explanation for those disorientation narratives right yeah it's dark um but uh there were also indications that it was to reorient you away from fairy territory there are plenty of stories where it was a prelude to a kidnapping which obviously is prefigured in some of the UFO literature. You'll see that quite often where people are compelled to drive down a road that they have no business traveling down,

and that's where their experience unfolds, and that's where they get aboard the craft and all that stuff, right? So that's part of it, and I'm not ruling that out. But in the case of the stopping narratives, it's entirely possible that it's a side effect. It really is entirely possible at that. I will say that attention is a currency, right? And in both cases, you sort of are made to pay attention.

Yeah. If you get lost, suddenly you're a lot more aware of your surroundings, right? In the cases of having your car stopped or being paralyzed by a UFO, like you're definitely going to pay attention to your surroundings. So look at us. But then it gets the question of what is the purpose behind the UFO. You know, similar to your question about how much of this sort of stuff comes from us, I'm also not ruling out the possibility that this is some sort of innate psychic self-defense self-defense technique, you know, that we might not even realize.

You know, there are all sorts of allusions throughout the occultism to protective magical circles and invisible barriers and things like that as well. So what if we do all have these sort of psychic talents within us all, which I suspect we do, then maybe we're throwing up, these barriers to protect us from something. Or, you know, maybe it's like an immunological response on the behalf of the phenomenon, right? Like, you know, stop. Don't get me closer. You know, when you have a pathogen seeking to enter your body, your first line of defense is a barrier. It's literally your skin. And then you get into your body and there are all these things that attack it. So like maybe that's akin to your engine stopping and then all the physiological effects that people sometimes experience after UFO sightings of conjunctiveitis and sunburns. Like maybe that's

like a step, a degree further of the immunological response, right? Yeah. Of course, that's all sort of also radiation stuff too, which brings electromagnetism back into the discussion. So that is the million dollar question. And all I can sort of present is a plethora of possibilities. One idea that I do settle on is that, you know, there are traditions throughout the world, but especially in the Greco-Roman traditions of necromancy,

where you sort of stop a spirit to get information from them. And I wonder if something comparable isn't sort of happening, except we're the ones being stopped in these situations. They want something from us, and they're stopping us for it. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating theories, man. Like you said, like we have to ask the questions, you know?

It's why, not only why is it happening, but why is the happener making, it happening. Right. And the thing that we have to, the thing that we have to really be open to, I saw a video essay the other day who was arguing that, like, cosmic horror should be taught in schools. Like, you should have to read Lovecraft and, you know, the King in Yellow and stuff like that. Because it sort of introduces you to the idea that there are things that are completely beyond our ability to grasp, motivations that are beyond our ability to grasp, and that, like, All these things that are so important to us might not really even be intentional or meaningful to the intelligence that's creating them.

So that's always the variable that gets thrown into this discussion as well. Yeah. It's the meaning we give it. Oh, what I would have given for a Lovecraft course in college or high school or middle school. I'm sure there are places doing it now. There's got to be. There's got to be. There's UFO courses now.

Come on. That's true. That's true. In parapsychology. Awesome. Well, I have one more kind of major question for you. And then I got a few listener questions if you really stick around for them. Absolutely.

Awesome. Thank you. Disclosure today, 2026. We're living in a probably what I consider one of the most, how do I say this politely, the most boring times in euthology and also one of the most mainstream. I'm going to be completely honest with you. I am sitting here in August of 2020. and I was out of the UFO discourse for about two months.

I didn't know what was going on with the congressional stuff, the intelligence people, the UAPDAs, the bills, the offices. And dude, it felt so damn good to not think about that stuff. And I'm just so tired of it. It's boring. It's almost non-intellectual. I guess anti-intellectuals.

It's reheated. I mean, man, I'm not going to- I've talked with Greg about this a lot where Greg says that, you know, modern-day congressional discussions about UFOs are just 90s euphology, right? Like, it's like, I have this sense that some of these Congress people are like learning about Dulcy Base and being like, did you know? Guys, guys, did you know?

It's like, we've been talking about this for a while and we've sort, you know, it's not necessarily. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's one of the main main, reasons that I like people try to talk to me about the the happenings going on I'm like that's not even my thing like I'm just I'm with old texts and I'm with experience her reports and that's where I think that that's where I think the real show is right I I have I have such mixed feelings about this Brian because you know I've historically been very critical of disclosure and I think that I've I've

softened on it a great deal because if the goal, I had the goal of the disclosure movement backwards, right? I thought that there was, I thought that the people pushing for disclosure were this hope of having a moment where a president brings out an alien body and says they come from Zeta reticula and all the stuff and like really hard facts. And I'm not sure that was ever the case. I think it was more about sort of putting a crack in the facade of the consensus narrative. And in that sense, I mean, I have to admit it worked. You talk to the average person on the street, and they're like, I don't know what's going on, but something doesn't add up. Like, I'm surprised when I find someone who doesn't think there's anything to the UFO phenomenon nowadays.

That happens so rarely in my day-to-day life with, you know, quote-unquote normies, right? So if that was the goal, then I think it succeeded. I think that what is an interesting thing, the most interesting thing is happening to me right now in this space is that I'm starting to get this sense of the dog that caught the car. by which I mean, okay, well, we've got people questioning this, now what? You know, and I think that, and you know this as well as I do, the truth of what, it's not a truth is a strong word. A lot of people in the disclosure movement are fully aware of the fact that this touches on aspects of consciousness and things that are soul adjacent, like religion adjacent? I don't know, but like there are a lot of people who really suspect that who have been pushing the disclosure movement. And I just don't know if

that's the conversation that I don't think people are willing to have, right? It's like little green scientists, that's fine. But like once you start getting into this weird stuff, the conversation gets, is going to get uncomfortable for a lot of people, I think. And at the same time, it's weird because like we're already sort of starting to flirt with that. Like I would have, I mean, would you have ever thought that, like, you'd hear the word psionics and consciousness controlled craft as much as we are in the discourse? It's so strange to me. And I don't think that anybody's really sitting with the implications of that, like, the metaphysical dimensions of, like, oh, a craft that's controlled by your consciousness.

It's like, well, okay, well, then, you know, it's the near-death experience researchers and the consciousness researchers and the psychonauts who have a lot more to say about the. greater truth behind this than it is that it is the ephologist right right um so yeah i i just i kind of don't know what to make of this this moment um it's it's it's it's shaking out differently than i thought it would um and i'm just trying to sort of i have a big interesting if true basket inside my head right i have a small yes i have a small true basket and a small false basket and this interesting of true basket that's just overflowing these days and you know we'll we'll see what happens but i definitely resonate with you. I mean, it's, it's felt like, I don't even want to say three steps forward

and two steps back. It's been like three steps forward and five steps back and then two steps forward and one step back. It's just, it's been the, it has not been a steady progression towards any sort of disclosure in that original sense that I meant of like knowing anything. It's definitely been sort of the staggered, staggered version of half steps and half measures. Yeah, I totally get it, you know. And so I sort of let it wash over me. But my, the other thing is, man, like, my retention for this stuff is just not there. Like, I can't, it all happens so fast.

And it's also fluid and also changing that it kind of goes in one ear and out the other, which is why I preferred for my position over the past, you know, several years to be like, well, I'm just going to wait and see where things land, right? You know, see where the dust settles. But I totally feel you on that. I totally feel you on that. Yeah. Would you say, Josh, it's.

disorienting? I had to. I mean, yeah. And this is the thing that so, it not only is it disorienting, but it's, you know, there was a lot of understandable hand-wringing over the possibility that this might be the administration to give us some sort of UFO truth.

And I just had to take the perspective that this is entirely predictable from that George P. Hanson-Trix in the paranormal sort of position. Like, of course, this is the moment when we would get something approaching disclosure because there's always going to be this, oh, well, it came from this administration sort of attitude. It's just, it's so, I mean, like, you know, we could have explicit truths, quote unquote, come out from authorities, honestly worldwide. People are feeling this way, at least across the West, right? Our authority structures could say, you know, this is what's happening. And half the population at least is not going to believe it. So of course, this is when the phenomenon in all its tricksterish glory would choose the moment to become the most visible is when you can always have that, that aspect of plausible deniability, right?

Yep. The tricksters have done it again. Absolutely. Absolutely. Amazing. Thank you for that candor. I needed to hear it. No, you're not alone.

You are not alone. And here's the other thing, man. I just think that the not only the experiencer stories, the most important thing, which is, you know, what your work has always been about. How these experiences change people and stick with them. But they're also evergreen, you know, they're not going to be changed by any amount of redaction or anything like that, you know. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. The experiencers first and foremost, always for me.

Awesome. Well, we've got some experiencers on our Patreon who wanted to ask you some questions, you ready for these? Mm-hmm. All right. We have Alia, Alia on Patreon. She is at the top of the list here. Thank you for your support, Alia.

Why do some people, Josh, seem repeatedly drawn into anomalous experiences while others never encounter them at all? What might make someone more susceptible or receptive to these different types of phenomenon, in your opinion? Yeah, so our mutual friend, Red Pill, Junction,

he has theorized that just as some people might be colorblind, some people might be, you know, paranormal blind or something like that. You know, maybe it's that Richard Dawkins just doesn't have those receptors in his, in his mind or his consciousness. I think there's a lot, well, number one, I think that most people you talk to will have had something odd happen in their lives. number two i would say that i think there are a lot of little things we experience every day that we like you know catch a shadow out of the corner of our eye and we're like oh what was guess it was nothing we just sort of move on right and that might have been not always certainly not but that might have been something genuinely anomalous um i do think that there is something

to the idea of dissociation and trauma uh being a part of this um you know you look at sort of the, I've heard it leveled as a criticism at the modern horror genre that people are getting tired of trauma horror. And I get that. But if you look at the phenomenon, there does seem to be something to it, right? The actual phenomenon itself and not just the way it's portrayed in media. But I think that sort of misses the point. I don't think that the trauma, it's like, oh, trauma opens you up to paranormal experiences. I think that, yes, in a one way, but it's not really the trauma that's doing it. I think it's the dissociation aspect, right? Because people can have, have a psychedelic experience or a meditative experience or be anything that sort of pushes them

into that sort of dissociative state, you know, certain mental health conditions. Anything that pushes them into that sort of dissociative state, I think is sort of what allows you to tune into this stuff a little bit more. It's just that it just so happens that a lot of the way people get into a dissociative state is through trauma, right? And so I think that this is just my hypothesis, but I think that it's like spraining your ankle, right? So like once you sprain your ankle once, you're a lot likely more likely to roll that ankle again in the future. I think that, you know, as someone who is, has an ankle that he has

to watch out for. And so I suspect that once you have that sort of initial like separation of consciousness from your body or that ability to sort of dissociate, which is a lot of what we've just been talking about with this orientation, right? Once you have that ability to dissociate, you can lapse into that state much better and that makes you sort of a walker between two worlds, right that's just my own idea um because if you look at like sort of the the data people will have a near death experience and then they'll have UFO experiences after that or people will have a UFO experience and then later have a near death experience or a haunted house and then they'll see a UFO later like there's never a real like

catalyst or chicken and the egg sort of thing but a lot of times you'll go back and there will be something about some sort of mental abuse physical abuse um or physical physical physical trauma, right? And it's an uncomfortable topic, but there is reason to suspect that amongst experiencers, there is a higher incidence of things like child abuse in their past. Again, not saying everyone, because I just said, it's all about dissociation. It's not about trauma, but from the stats that I've seen, it's higher than the national average, which even talking about a national average for child abuse turns my stomach, but you take my meaning. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, I guess to stay on the controversial track a little bit.

In terms of that, you have these things like the telepathy tapes. Now, again, not something I have looked into. I'm not going to pretend to even know what it's all about, have a opinion on it. I haven't read into any of it. But do you think that maybe like someone on the spectrum, as they say, could be more susceptible to things that are non-conventional? paranormal, telepathic.

I don't know. Does that play into any of this in your personal opinion, if you're comfortable? No, I mean, no. I touched upon this a bit towards the end of thieves in the night. And I had this sort of misgivings as you do because there is sort of that trope and media of like, you know, the, the magically disabled person, right? The disabled person, developmentally disabled person who was able to contact other realms or has magical powers. And it's like, it's cringe, right? But you do have stuff like the telepathy tapes. You do have a discussion that's been ongoing in the religious studies area for a long time

about the possibility that certain ascetics and monks and saints and holy people were on the spectrum as well. You also have firsthand testimony from friends of mine like Kevin Kahn, who are autistic and who say, yes, part of the reason that I'm able to tap into this is because I am autistic. And this discussion is still ongoing in the work of folks like Dr. Jeff Criple. He mentions it in his book, How to Think Impossibly. So there is a thread that I think deserves to be pulled on there. The problem is when you just automatically make people into superheroes, right?

And that's not what we're being called to do. We're being called to sit with people and to listen to people and treat them as human, but also to be open to them when they say, I have experience, I have a different lived experience than people who are not on the spectrum or than people who are not neurodivergent, right? But I do think that there is something in that that we need to sort of sit with and be aware of. Okay, I love that. Darren, Darren from Osaka asks through email, Josh.

Big fan of your work. The all one thing hypothesis is very interesting. on the biggest possible scale, does that mean you don't think there's anything out there that's literally extraterrestrial or literally interdimensional in a physical sense? Like, when we're talking about that kind of interconnectedness of phenomena, like, do you think there are actual aliens visiting,

angels, performing miracles, Bigfoot, you know? Yeah, yeah. What are your personal ones like that? I mean, I mean, I love getting this question because I think that sometimes I do get sort of misread and it's, I get misread and I also misrepresent myself, right? So, yeah, I think that with all these topics, we need to be open to a plurality of the explanations, right?

I would also sort of cite the conversation that we, the analog that I mentioned earlier of cats and dogs, right? I will say that I think, I firmly believe that there is extraterrestrial life of varying degrees of evolution, of advanced nature, probably even civilizations out there, right? I really do. I just, I'm not entirely convinced that's what we're interacting with here on Earth.

I don't think people fully grasp the scale of the universe, and there are these wonderful animations that you can look at that sort of show you how far you can dial out and just keep going. But I have to remain possible, because I'm like, you know, if you look at sort of the ancient alien stuff, controversial though it may be it just had to happen once like you know as long as it's happened once in our in our history it then yeah it's true so I think that there's the possibility for that and I have to leave that possibility open I just see so many

of these experiences getting into for lack of a better term spiritual things and I have to say that I think that if it's aliens it's just really weird aliens like really weird aliens doing the psionics and the consciousness stuff right yeah so but yeah as far as I am a believer in extraterrestrial life somewhere out there. I'm just not sure that's what the UFO phenomenon is because the UFO phenomenon is so like symbolic and personal and transcendent and you've got stories of souls being taken out and it's responding through telepathy and telepathy means that materialism isn't necessarily the governing paradigm and if we don't need materialism then why do they have to be extraterrestrial you know all those things similarly with the cryptid stuff you know Mike Cleland talks about UFOs and owls Mike

totally believes in real owls, you know, he believes their owls exist, right? But there's also the owls that aren't owls, the owls that are weird owls. So with something like Bigfoot, we might have a small population of relicominoids living in certain places,

and that's another mask like the owls that the phenomenon chooses to take, right? I think that's possible. Similarly, though, I have to say that I just, just as euphologists don't always fully apprehend the scope of the universe, I don't think cryptosologists fully apprehend how deep the timeline goes. I mean, I mentioned this in the new book, but it's just, it's mind-boggling to me that it is

more historically accurate to have a T-Rex holding an iPhone than to have a T-Rex battling a Stegasaurus, by which I mean, there's less time between the iPhone and the T-Rex than there is between a dad-gum stegosaurus and a T-Rex. And that's just like, that just gives you an idea of how deep the Earth's history is. And what I mean by that is that if we have a plesiosaurus, looking more or less like it did, I don't know, 120 million years ago, I don't have the stats in front of me, but you take my meaning. Like, if that's what's in Loch Ness, like, that's just a long time to remain unchanged and to

remain for us to not have had more interaction with it to not have a body. Like, that's just a long, it's a long ass time, right? So that's sort of, that's sort of, those are, those are the actions that I grind. But I have to leave the door, in intellectual honesty, have to leave the door open to all those things. So there we go. I love that. So that's where I'm at. Awesome. Awesome. You and me both, buddy. Cool. Last listener question here back on Patreon. We have Sam the Wiseass. Love that name. Sam the Wiseass asks. Josh, love oh, love ecology of souls. There we go. Love ecology of souls. What is the biggest question you

were left with after writing inverted? path, something your research brought you closer to, but ultimately couldn't answer. That's, I honestly, and this sounds kind of a little bit like a cop-out, but it is that, it is that question that you asked me towards the end of our, our main discussion, which is like, why? Why? Why, why, why, why is the, why is the car stopping? Because sometimes it does seem like it's deliberate, and sometimes it seems like it's completely a byproduct. it. Why disorient people?

I mean, like in the pixie-led narratives, very rarely do you actually get like a pixie popping up and be like, ha, you know, in running off. It's usually people, usually those stories in, but people, the spell breaks and they hear laughter all around them, right? Which again, the entire reason that they attribute it to pixies is context-dependent. It's what they grew up with and the stories that they heard, right?

But like, I can't really get to the why in either case. And, you know, the fairy stuff is like shits and giggles. Like, that's what they say it's for. But I just, I don't, I don't have a really good idea of why the, why we have, there's a great story from New Zealand in, in the book that, uh, it's books, it's a wonderful book that is written by Linda Zimmerman, animal reactions to UFOs. And she talks about, um, in 1971.

this witness on horseback in New Zealand, the dog stop, the horse freezes, and the rider freezes as well. None of them can move. And this UFO just sort of like goes across the field of view, and then afterwards, everything's back to normal. All of them can move again, right? Why? Like, what's up with that? And that's why the only thing I can get to is that sort of a resting of attention. but that to me was the biggest question.

And so I tried to leave it on a whole bunch of different possibilities I leave the book on because I really can't nail down any single one. So that's probably the biggest question. Although, you know, I have so many questions about this. And that's why I really think that to be involved in the space, I think it is healthy to adjust your expectations and properly orient your goals, by which I mean, I'm not looking for answers. What I'm looking for is a better understanding, right?

I'm looking to have a lot of different options that may speak to me on one day and not on another day. And then I'm looking to sort of see how I can apply those in my own life and my own spiritual journey and all those different things. I love that. Do you feel you've ever been, pixie-led, ever been interrupted, disoriented in terms of these phenomenology personally? I'm sure I'm sure I have, Brian. I just can't remember a specific example. I do talk towards the end of the book. I was doing my research in my,

in my car. And it's the one time, I'm a knock on wood, right? Yeah. It's the one time like my battery died. It's like my battery died while I was researching this, this topic, which was kind of odd.

I was, I was in church of all places. And the pastor starts the sermon saying, this is while I was researching this book, the pastor starts the sermon and gets up there and goes, I don't even imagine that you're walking along the Appalachian Trail and I don't know, a troll pops out of the bushes and blindfolds you and spins you around and then takes off the blindfold and you don't know where you're going. And I'm like, you just talk about being pixieland while I'm researching this.

Like, what are the odds of that? Oh, my God, man. I do get, when I'm working on books, I do get sucked into these little synchronicities that kind of land with a gut punch it's like oh this is really weird what are the odds of that but i think that we all have been kind of we've fallen prey to that sort of disorientation in different times in our lives for sure yeah right and you mentioned earlier uh disassociating from it a lot of people just kind of uh shy away from these experiences whether they're big and profound or you know subtle and insidious oh i'm sure as soon as we hang up i'm going to remember

an event where I was disoriented. But honestly, like, the experience itself of being lost can be so, here's that word again, traumatic, that I might have just sort of blocked it out. You know, like to block out the experience. It was too scary, you know. Well, you let me know. We'll get back on Patreon and do a little bonus episode, Josh. That sounds good for me.

Dude, this has been fascinating. I've kept you longer than I told you. So, of course, I got to ask you, where can we? find the book. This will be going out in just a few days now on Monday of this upcoming week. So do you have anything coming up, any events or anything like that? Yeah, tell us where we can find everything. Let me look up everything. While I look up my upcoming dates, yeah, while I look up my upcoming dates, you can find everything that you need to about me. If you really hate yourself and want to listen to every interview I've ever done, you can find that there too

at Joshua Cutchin.com. That's J-O-S-H-U-A-C-U-T-C-H-I-N.com. And that is a good way to find out about upcoming appearances. And you can reach out to me directly through there about buy my books. I do the media mail in the United States. Overseas, I don't trust the post going out of the U.S. at all. The next event that I will be at is the 20. 26 Van Meter Visitor Festival in Van Meter, Iowa.

And that is taking place September 26th of 2026. Then I will be at Cumberland Khan in Somerset, Kentucky, October 10th through October 11th. There is likely another event that's happening in November that is not finalized yet, so I'm not going to speak to that. But just keep an eye out on my website, and it'll appear there when it does. Awesome. And again, guys, the website's right there on your screen. Links for everything will be in the show notes as well if you're just listening to this on the podcast. But this has been awesome, man.

Again, the book is The Inverted Path, Supernatural Disorientation and Interruptions in Travel by Joshua Cutchin. Thank you so much for joining us again, my friend. This was awesome. It was great, Ryan. Great to catch up and great questions. And this was wonderful. Thank you. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level?

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