It's a scary podcast for me because I feel like you're because I know a lot of the things that you've said and I've related to them and I've said okay this makes sense. Why is that scary?
OK, so it's scary because it's not consensus reality. And because it's not consensus reality, we could talk about it over hot chocolate, near a fire or something. But here we're talking about it and lots of people are going to be listening. Yes. So that is somewhat.
Yeah, that's the hurdle that we all have to get over. And the good thing about this is it really is just us talking. Right. You know, and there are a lot of people that are going to listen, but they're just people too. That's true. And they've probably had these experiences. Some of them have. Yeah.
The experiences that are available through psychedelics, I've always wondered. The thing that has always struck me about the UFO experience, particularly the abduction experience, is that it always happens when people are asleep. It always happens at night.
It either happens on the road when people are tired and insulated at night, or it happens like, why does it have to happen at night? The universe doesn't give a shit what where the sun is in position to the planet. That doesn't make any sense that all these UFO abduction experiences would happen only when the sun is on the other side. That's so dumb. It makes no sense. It's literally such an egocentric, earth-centric perspective.
that, and not even earth centric, hemispherical centric, right? It depends on where the sun is in position to the earth. For that to be the only time that UFOs come
I was always like, this seems like horseshit. There's something about it that seems like horseshit. But there's also something about it that seems real. When you listen like Betty and Barney Hill, when they're talking, boy that sounds like people talking about a real thing. Boy that sounds like a real experience. It really does.
And these people like the Whitley Strybers, these people that talk about these experiences that happen at night, we know for a fact that when you are sleeping, your brain is producing endogenous psychedelic chemicals. We have no idea why. We have no idea what the purpose of those things are. We have no idea what the quantity is. We used to think until recently, they weren't even exactly sure like where it was being produced, but now through Strosman's work,
And through the work of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, the people that do those DMT studies, they know that now your brain is producing this. And so is your brain, is it producing a chemical gateway into another dimension? And is that why these people are experiencing these abduction, you know, air quote abduction experiences?
these encounters, let's say encounters, is that why they're happening at night? Is that why they're happening while they're lying in bed? Because that seems to make way more sense.
Yeah, that's a great question. I can talk a little bit about this. Please. Okay, so I think that- I think we're starting weird. Yeah. Can we just start with how did you get involved in this? Okay. And please just tell people your background. Okay, sure. So I'm a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, and I grew up in California.
And I've always been interested in these experiences, but religion. And also I grew up, I was going to graduate school during the .com boom. So I saw how technology was changing everything. Our schools were the first to adopt computers and that type of thing.
So what I did was I was very interested in, I was working. You know, when your parents, you tell them you want to study religion and they're like, why not be a doctor, right? So I was going to college, but I kept taking courses in religion and philosophy. And when I got out, I got a job doing technology and things like that. And I made all right money, but I still read about religion and philosophy. So I figured if I could get scholarships to continue that I would,
And I kept getting scholarships, and that's how I got my PhD in religion. In religious studies, by the way, we actually were not ministers or anything like that. We don't advocate for any religious tradition. We study them. And since most people in the world are religious in some way, it's a good thing to know. But how did I get into studying UFOs? So I studied Christian history. And that's what I did for a long time until I was what's called a full professor. You can't go any higher. You're a full professor. That's it.
I studied these things called ascent narratives. So ascent narratives are when people levitate in the Christian tradition, people either levitate or they see things that they call angels or demons and things like this. And I studied them from a historical perspective.
And I found that going through looking at these ascent narratives through the historical record at the Vatican, actually, I kept coming across aerial phenomena in the historical records from 1,000 years ago, from 500 years ago, from, you know, very recently. And I recognized that this was happening in UFO literature. And so I started to look at abductions and UFO sightings and things like that. And I wanted to do a cross-cultural analysis of this.
And that was in 2012. And that's how I got into this. I just want to point out that not all abductions happen in your sleep. A lot of abductions actually happen in daylight. But I do agree with you that something's happening in your brain and you're perceiving something and you called it is there's some type of mental gateway. And I think there's absolutely a mental gateway.
Does this discount that this is objective of us? Like, you know, the question is, is this something subjective or is this something objective of us? My opinion at this point is it's something that is objective of us. There's something that we're accessing. And I don't think it's within our space-time reality to tell you the truth. So you think it's from somewhere else?
I do, but that doesn't, I mean, it doesn't have to be a location, you know, geography. Right. That's where it gets weird. It gets totally weird, but so does quantum physics. Quantum physics is totally weird. It's the weirdest stuff ever. Yeah. And it's completely accepted that you could have something that exists in one place and also in another place. Now it is. Now it's completely accepted. Yeah. The Nobel Prize in what was it, 2022, was about that.
Yeah, which is like, what are you saying? You're saying witchcraft's real? Like, what are you saying? Magic is real? Quantum physics is the nuttiest stuff of all time. I've had 100 people explain it to me. I don't get it still. Yeah. Well, see, OK, so you were talking about accessing this space. And if I can go back to something you were talking about, and I'm going to say this.
So what I found was, and I had this experience, too, when I was around 13 years old, I felt like the world was going to end. I felt like there was going to be some kind of war, and it was a visceral feeling. It wasn't something that made me depressed as a child, and it was real. I believed it was going to happen, and I believed it was going to happen at any time. Well, this, after studying religion and studying, by the way, this kind of prompted me to study in religion,
And recognizing that, you know, if you look at, say, Christianity or even other religions, people had ideas that the world was going to end and extinction events have happened and things like that. So it could very well be that information like this is coming to us, but it's out of our space time. So to us, it seems like it's going to happen now.
because our senses of linear time, right? So if we get a feeling and it's not from any of the input that we're getting, like our, you know, people telling us this is actually going to happen in the news, telling us this is actually going to happen. But it's coming to us as this feeling that you and I were just talking about. It could be coming from that space that we've just identified as, you know, people are talking about. And yeah, I think that we're at the very beginning of
doing a taxonomy or, you know, looking at this space in terms of the scientists that you just referenced and people that, you know, I think that actually people have, you know, indigenous cultures talk about this space. They have language about this space. I talked about this in encounters that, you know, religious traditions do talk about these spaces, but in secular culture we've lost that language.
Well, it is interesting that that language exists when you're discussing things like quantum physics because that is a language of like, you know, it's a bizarre, non-tangible impossible to understand to the layperson when you're explaining that these things are all interacting with each other without physical contact.
Like, what do you mean? Like, what are you saying? Like, can you show me these things? Are there photos of them? No, we're just drawing it. We're writing it down on paper. We're pretty sure we have these equations and we know what it is. Like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Like, why am I supposed to believe you? Because you guys are PhDs. Like, what? This is nuts. Like, but because this is like a field of science, this is a field of study that's universally accepted.
we have we've like given them a pass to talk about crazy stuff but if you want to talk about crazy things in terms of
encountering some sort of thing, some entity, some consciousness that exists in an alternative realm that has access to this realm occasionally, or perhaps that you can transcend your normal state of consciousness and access
this other realm, occasionally, through some methods, whether it's through meditation, through psychedelic trips, through something, near-death experiences, something happens that perturbs the normal state of reality, and you have
brief access to this transcendent experience that everyone has talked about, all of the great prophets, all of the great saints and religious figures have talked about from the beginning of written history.
Yeah. So I think that it's not just that we give those physics guys a path and girls. We just don't. What they produce actually is creates our world, right? The computers we look at and the technologies we use, even the structures we live in. And so this is what prompted me to go back into our historical record and look at the writings of Plato again.
And some of these people that you're talking about, like the great minds, right? And I recognize that, say Plato, who writes about his mentor Socrates, who's, by the way, killed by his country, was killed by Athens, the town he lives in, not the town, but the state he lives in. And he's executed for being an atheist, by the way.
And if you look at what he's talking about, he's actually talking about this space. He's actually talking about having a vision of something that we can't see. And he calls it the good. And he says it's the best thing, okay? And he says it makes you do things that are just. And you don't do them because they're the right thing to do. You do them because you really want to do them.
And so to me, this is, I thought this was fascinating. So I went back and I recognized that he was what's called a math realist. So he believed that, and he was one of the first people, well, not just him, but people, you know, we're talking about the, you know, 300s before the common era. So many, many, many years ago.
He's already identifying these things called platonic solids that now we can prove exist, but we weren't able to prove them. So he was using, and he even has this language too, Joe. He has this language. He says that we can actually
We can actually perceive these through our minds, but it's not normal intellect. It's not your normal abstract thinking, but it's a type of thinking. And he relates it to protocols, like physical protocols, like, did you know he was a wrestler?
No, I didn't. Yeah. Oh, I did know that. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. In fact, his name even means that he's really not just a wrestler, but an awesome wrestler. So Socrates, that name? No, no, Plato. Oh, sorry. Yeah. These guys were all physical. They were all, it was basically this like philosophy, almost like a fight club, I think. These guys, you know, they were like, they were wrestlers. And, you know, they believed that this was good. They believed that these protocols helped them
Use their brains to access this the good. So, what was the methodology behind that? Was it the breaking down of the normal states of consciousness through rigorous exercise and exertion? That's my opinion. Like a runner's high.
Yeah, that's my opinion. Yeah. So when I talk about it, because I like to teach my students about this, because honestly think that this is what progresses civilization, this kind of thing. So I think when I did American Cosmic, which is the first book about UFOs, again, which I never thought I'd be studying, I encountered this man, Tyler, and
And he's, he works for the space force and he's been working for the space force since the whole space shuttle program. Okay. And he's a special kind of person. He's a mission controller, but he does a lot of other things too. But he's also a multimillionaire space rocket scientist. I mean, just so strange. And, and I called him Tyler.
after the character in Fight Club, because that's who reminded me of. He reminded me of that character in Fight Club, because he had this, first of all, he has more than 44 patents, and they're all related to space. And the space force has a special place for him, like he's special, right?
What I found was that he was practicing these types of protocols. I called them protocols because they reminded me of Plato and monastic traditions, the traditions of monks and things. So he would make sure that he got sunshine. He would make sure that he got plenty of sleep.
He would not have too much caffeine. He exercised a lot. He boxed, right? So he was also a fighter. And he tried to stay away from people. I know it sounds weird, but that's what monks do. They tried to monitor their input of people because those people can actually take them off their game or something like that. But so this guy was put into another mental state. And during this mental state, he said that he could receive
calculations, he could receive information, he could receive things, and then he could gather a group of scientists, and he wouldn't tell them where he came from, because he honestly thought they were coming from these things outside of space-time, kind of like ETs or something off-planet intelligences. Which Tesla also believed?
And the people who started our own space force believed it. So this isn't common knowledge. That's what I found. It's like a lot of people aren't, they don't know this history of the American space force and the Russian space force. Very much the same. These people were doing these things. And this allowed them, you see this in sports, right? So people, I was just using this example in a class yesterday. I saw this basketball game two or three years ago with Steph Curry.
And, you know, the way they were playing, it was almost as if there was an emergent phenomenon that was bigger than each of the people, because they somehow anticipated what the other guy was going to do. And I used to do sports, and I know that this is something that can be done. There's a flow state, right? And I think that this is what Plato was trying to get his group into through these protocols.
Well, that makes sense. And one of the things that happens in flow state is that you stop being there. That's right. Yeah, it's not you. Yeah. And you're just experiencing this thing. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You experience it on stage doing stand.
I imagine that. When you do it right, when you get it right, you're on a ride. You're just sort of making sure that, okay, feed this into the machine and go, and it goes. And you're sort of in tune with what you're saying, but you're almost outside of yourself. That's exactly right. And you know there is science that shows that this is the case. Right, with brain waves.
Yeah, the problem is that when Joe's out there on stage, they're not gonna hook you up to an MRI, right? They can't do that kind of, because when it's happening, it's happening spontaneously, it just happens, and no one can actually predict when it's gonna happen, but you hope that it happens. And also, if they did hook you up to it, you would also be aware that you're being monitored and would change the stage. And you'd lose it, yeah, you'd lose it. Yeah, it's like when you were in a lucid dream, and you go, oh my God, I'm in a lucid dream, and then, pfft, wake up. Yeah. Damn it.
I've had that happen so many times. I'm like, wow, I know there's a way to facilitate lucid dreams. I know there's a study behind it, but for whatever reason, it seems so stupid that I've never done it, but I've never even had the desire to do it. I just wanted to come to me when it comes to me.
Which is dumb. Not necessarily. Yes, I respect that. Yeah, but part of me doesn't. Part of me is like, you're just lazy. Why don't you just like go like start the practice and study it and figure out how to make it happen more often. You know? But for whatever reason, I have zero desire. I don't know why. There might be some wisdom there. I don't know. I go back and forth with whether or not it's laziness. I don't know what it is.
But there's obviously a fascinating aspect to lucid dreaming to what is going on there. How are you managing this weird thing that for most of us, you wake up, you go, God, what the hell was that? Why was Godzilla in my dream? Why was on a skateboard? That's right. It's just weirdness to it. And then there's people that try to interpret that with far too much confidence.
Yes, I think so too. I think so too. So in Tibet, there's a Tibetan dream yoga, and that's what they do. They basically teach you how to do, and you have to have a teacher, by the way, because they say it can be dangerous. So I think that's probably why you think you're not doing it, because I don't think you're lazy, frankly. I know the kinds of things you do. I know that that's not part. Yeah, but I am lazy. That's what's crazy.
Well, I really am. I'm lazy, but I'm disciplined. Okay. I'm both of those things. Like, I do all the things that I'm supposed to do, but God, it's a sludge. It's a struggle. It's like, but I always do them. Okay. Well, that you'd be up for Plato's. He'd invite you to his school.
The only time things are not a struggle is when, like, when I was competing. When I was competing, then my discipline wasn't a struggle. Then it was an obsession. So it was like, people say, God, he's so disciplined. Like, no, I'm mentally ill. I'm crazy. Yeah, I understand that. There's a giant difference between discipline. Like Mike Tyson said this on the podcast. He said, discipline is doing something you hate, but doing it like you love it.
That's right. Yeah. So when you love it, it's not really disciplined. No, it's not. It's obsession. Yeah. And there's a different thing to that. That's what I was telling you about when I saw your picture out there of Jimi Hendrix. Yeah. And when I was a kid, I was an artist. I really like to do art. And I remember the first time I became obsessed was when I was doing this drawing of Jimi Hendrix.
And I went on for about a week. And my parents were like, what are you doing? And I was just obsessed with getting it correct. It had to be absolutely correct. And I did get it corrected. It was pretty amazing. Do you have it? No, I always give my stuff away. Do you have a photo of it or anything? No, no, no. This was like pre-cell phones. So I gave it to my best friend. Oh, that's cool. And I don't regret it.
That's cool. Yeah, but I mean it was the experience though that was the best part of it. Yeah, I, the reason why this podcast is called the Joe Rogan experience is because I think Jimi Hendrix is a religious figure. He is. He absolutely is. I think, I mean the guy died at 27, which when I was 27, I was a fucking moron. I had never done anything good.
This guy had transcended the normal boundaries of what music was and had tapped into something, whatever it was. But when you listen to Voodoo Child to this day, I've listened to that song thousands of times. But if I'm on my way to go do something cool,
And I listened to that song loud in my car. He tapped into something that was just out of this realm inaccessible to the average person that plays a guitar, inaccessible to the average artist. He hit some crazy vibration.
And I've always got that feeling when I listen to this stuff. It's always like moved me in a very weird way where I'm just completely captivated, like immersed in the sounds, immersed in his music.
Me too. So he, I think, well, he knew that he was doing that. So he, as you know, I'm sure you know this, but, you know, he had a guitar when he was five. And he was so good at it. He was immediately like, he, he streamed sacred information through his music. And he knew he did. He called it his electric church.
So he knew he did that and how incredible and yes we can hear it. And I think probably part of the reason I felt that when I listened to his music and I somehow put that into that picture, that drawing that I made.
And it was a beautiful experience. And that was, you know, I mean, it sounds so strange, but that's part of the reason why I was interested in studying religion and things like that because of that experience. Yeah, that you're tapping into something that's higher than normal consciousness.
Yes, and it's pretty cool. It's exactly what Plato said it was. You do it for its own sake. You don't do it for anything else. You do it because of it. You don't do it because after this, I'm going to make up a lot of money. Or after this, it'll make my parents happy. You don't do it for those reasons. You do it for in and of itself.
Well, the people that I know that do do it for those reasons, I'm gonna be famous, I'm gonna be this, I'm gonna be that, they never make it. There's something about it, they just don't, they just don't. Maybe some of them will become pop stars, like someone will plug them into the right songwriter and the right producer and they'll figure it out, but it'll never be transcendent. It might be catchy, it might be okay, but there's not, it's not Hendrix. No. No. Yeah.
That kind of, what we like to call genius, like what is that? But it's not, I mean, clearly it's him. He's a vessel. He's a receiver, an antenna, whatever he is. But he's getting something from a higher state.
No doubt. And the wildest thing with people, what I always want to tell people about Hendrix and a lot of the particularly impactful people from the 1960s is that you have to understand how different the 60s were from the 50s. Like the difference between 2014 and 2024 is nil. There's very little difference other than the ubiquitous
technology, AI, things that are much more powerful than they ever were before, the impact of social media. But there was an impact of social media even 10 years ago, right? There's something about
the 60s that were very different than the 50s, and I connected to psychedelic use, because all of those people were doing psychedelics, all of them, all those transcended people, all the Beatles, when the Beatles, from their early days to the psychedelic days, it was a completely different band, like completely different style of music. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Completely of an impact. There was something about it. What had happened in the 1960s was
a stunning revolution in culture. And it's hard for us to understand it because we weren't teenagers when that was happening. I wasn't even born when Hendrix was in his prime, or it was just a baby. When you listen to that now, it's hard to put it into context of how revolutionary that was.
I think you're right. For most people, I think that's unless you lived through it. Yeah. And yeah. And that's also the terrifying aspect of what government can do. Because through the Sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970, they made everything illegal.
and they did it to squash dissent. They did it to stop the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and they did it to so that they could arrest all these people that were involved in all these groups because all of them were involved in drugs.
And so they figured, well, this is the best way to just make everything, at least obviously these people are doing acid and ruining our country. Let's make everything illegal and then lock everybody up that does it. And then you get the 80s. And the 80s is like this confused child that was raised improperly, was then cast out into the world with a distorted sense of values.
that was expressing these values in some of the most clumsy and goofy art human beings have ever done.
And the drugs changed. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. It became ego-driven drugs, the worst kind of drugs. Right. So, you know, it's really interesting because that wouldn't be the, that the 60s wouldn't be the only culture that's informed by psychedelics, right? Right. Or entheogens, you know, as they're called and Native American churches are, you know, that. But what's interesting to me, and I don't know if you have any ideas about this, is that
Most likely it was through the government that the drugs became available. Sure, yeah. And then once the effects seemed to be counter to how, who knows, maybe there were just two factions of government. One that was pro, let's see what happens. Let's do this experiment. And then the other was push back and let's change the culture through making these illegal.
Mmm, but what you see now is you definitely see a you know using these for therapeutic purposes mm-hmm Yeah, the the MK ultra experiments
when you realize what the government was involved with and what they were doing, how they were running the Hate Ashbury Free Clinic, and they were administering psychedelics to people in brothels without their knowledge and observing them and what they did with Charles Manson. That's very well detailed. I don't know if you've read Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos. Have you read that? Yeah. Insane.
Yeah, I know. It's insane because Tom is so detail oriented. I mean, he's so crazy that he studied this one thing for 20 years and really kind of like tanked his life. And then finally got the book out there and the book is just holy shit because the facts, the absolute undeniable facts in that book, just those alone.
Forget speculation, forget theory. Just the facts alone are insane. They most likely created Charles Manson, most likely gave him psychedelics, gave him LSD, taught him how to mind control influential young people or easily influenced young people and get them to do horrific things and demonize the hippie movement. Yeah, it makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Yeah, like what's going on right now? That's exactly what I think. I don't think there's good right now. I think right now they're baffled by this thing called the internet. I think the internet threw a giant monkey wrench in propaganda because it made people so much more resistant to bullshit. Yes. And then when you see things like especially coming out of the pandemic,
when you see how incompetent these people that are supposed to be leaders are and how foolhardy they are and how stupid their decisions were and then you just look at the undeniable transfer of wealth to the upper small area of the country that gained billions of dollars in wealth and how much devastated small businesses and like
Did you guys do this on purpose? Like, do you know what you're doing? Are you idiots? Like, why are you telling us what to do? You guys are fools. And especially when it comes to like, does anybody believe that Joe Biden's ever had a transcendent experience?
Does anybody believe that Joe Biden has ever met God and came back with a message for mankind? No, it's like everything is bizarre, ego-driven, narrative-driven lies and propaganda and just nonsense that's supposed to make it look like they're doing the right thing always. Yeah, that's a terrible idea of justice. Yes. But it's the appearance of justice without actually doing the right thing.
Yeah, and it's just, I mean, it's also very, it's got all the aspects of a cult. All the people that go along with it, no matter what the evidence shows, the people that aren't like stepping back and going, wait a minute, we are being run by people that have zero feelings for the actual populace. And all they're trying to do is feed this machine that's got them to where they are in the first place.
Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. And as it moves forward, it creates the need for resistance. And it creates the... That's what I've always thought about evil and negative things in the first place. Like, they are necessary.
because they motivate change and they motivate evolution. They motivate expression of disdain of people that are completely displeased, people that are very upset with the way things are. They know this is the wrong way. And it motivates the zeitgeist to move into a different direction, which I think is happening.
I hear that. This was actually a comment from a student. The exact same comment that you just said is that, you know, there's this structural evil, right? There's this evil. And it actually does some good in the sense that it motivates people to transform. Yeah. Okay. I mean, yeah.
I agree with you, and I'm at the same point. So through my looking at the UFO phenomenon, and I knew all of this. I grew up in Northern California. There were the
I can't think of the name. It's right above where I live. The Bohemian Grove, you know, so I kind of already had an idea of this kind of thing, you know, of the group, the cult, as you call it. Yeah. All right. And it's easy to see.
Um, well, for those who have, who can see it, it's easy to see. Some people don't want to see it. Right. Okay. So once you see it, you're like, okay. Um, but then to live it to, this is what I felt like happened to me. So in 2012, after I started the study of UFOs, I recognized that the management of that
that message of the UFO for the American public had been organized not just from the 1940s, but really from earlier, from early 20th century. And once I started to recognize, even meet the people who were responsible for managing this in a very cohesive, tight way, very specific, that's when I recognized that it was, you know, I felt it, I guess that's the difference, was that before I just saw it,
on the sideline, you know, like we talk about it now, you and I, and it looks like we're talking about it from the sideline. We're saying, yeah, this is really bad, what they're doing and stuff. But I was part of it. I saw it. I know those people. They talked to me about it. They talked to me about why they were doing it. And they said, Diana, you don't want to help these people. They will kill you if you had something that they wanted. Like, these are not good people, is what they were saying.
about these people specifically. The general population. They were talking about the general population. The general population would kill you. That's what they were saying. They were saying that these people only do good because they have to do good. They are actually bad. And so this was the argument I was getting. So it caused me to eject these people from my life for one, but also to
To understand more deeply and believe me, I've already thought a lot about the problem of evil. I spend my life reading about it and talking about it with people. What can we do? I recognize we can't do anything except work on ourselves.
And that's where I had to reread some of those texts, like the Plato text that I talked about. He talks about your idea of evil that perhaps, or he calls it injustice, injustice. And he says that perhaps people are unjust just because there needs to be an injustice for other people to recognize it and then to do this thing. How do we create a just society? That's his question.
And I don't think he so he doesn't actually answer that question with words But he does it through giving stories and one of the stories is the allegory of the cave Where you know that allegory it's it's like the matrix, right? It's like you know where people are in they're being tied up and there's puppeteers who are showing them and
these shadows on the wall and they take that for reality, but somehow some person gets out and they see, well, what he's talking about is this mystical tradition that you and I've talked about early when we started talking. We talked about if we do those things that we love and we're carried away and we become, you said it was obsessed, you know, you're obsessed with it. And I call it doing it because it's pretty awesome, right? That's my word for it. Yeah. When you do that, justice happens.
Like, you're not worried about, you know, so it's almost like an emergent phenomenon from these communities that do it, and they're small communities. So there is structural injustice, and there's structural evil, and it doesn't seem like we can fight. That's what I learned from doing the UFO. I learned that there were these things, UFOs, but more intensely and more personally, I learned that the government was doing this, and that's what was upsetting to me most.
So I want to take it back to that because a lot of this is probably hard to follow for people that aren't like well read in this. When you say that they have been engineering or orchestrating public perception of this experience from the beginning, what's the earliest known instance of this?
OK, so the one that is unclassified is Project Blue Book. And that's from 1950s, 1952. But I know that. And I have to explain how one knows this. So we have documents that talk about Project Blue Book. And they're managing the perception, the public perception of UFOs. It goes back to like 47 even with Roswell and that kind of thing.
There's another, and this is what I've found, is that there's an oral tradition that is part of the communities that run these programs, like the UFO programs.
That information is carried within people. It's not written down. They even have a word for not writing it down. When they're going to have these meetings, they have this special term, and everybody puts down everything. What's the term? It's called pencils up.
pencils up. So pencils up means they're just going to discuss these things. And then that's the only record of it. Yeah, it's the oral tradition. Now, why I was able to look at this is because I had done work looking at oral traditions in religious communities. Like oral traditions go back 10,000 years, whereas written traditions are like 2,000 years old.
Oral traditions are actually more accurate than we think they are. We tend to think of it as telephone game. But you can get a lot of information from oral traditions. And this is actually how a lot of classified information is kept through oral tradition. Especially in a very disciplined and structured environment like high level military. Yeah.
So they have a perception, and one of the things that you said earlier is that they think that the greater population is not good, and that they will turn on you, and that they're evil. Well, that's one faction. So what I found was that there were several different factions within the perception management of UFOs. And one of the factions
was responsible for sadly harassing people who do research. And I found this out by being harassed. How, how are you harassed? Okay, so, you know, here I am just your average professor doing their work and, you know, and doing it pretty well. At my university, I was the chair of my department, well regarded by my colleagues and students and never really doing anything weird, right?
Then I start to study UFOs thinking that they're not real, thinking that it's just a new form of religion. Then quickly having people come into my research sphere who are part of CIA, part of FBI, that kind of thing, and then getting a shock that, whoa, this could be dangerous and maybe I shouldn't be doing this.
Just simply because those people are contacting you or specific reasons why you would think it's dangerous. It indicated to me that there was something that I shouldn't maybe be doing, that it could be dangerous.
Right. That you could suffer consequences for your curiosity or for your research. Yeah. And that they would punish you or you could be punished. That's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah. No, most certainly. And plus I had done some research on UFOs by that time, of course. But what is it about the research and what is about what you could possibly uncover that would be so dangerous?
Okay, so of course, that's a question that's loaded. So I'm going to talk a little bit about, I'll answer it in part. Okay. So in part, this is before the crash retrieval became a term that the Congress used. Right. So I was... What year were we talking about?
So I started in 2012. By 2015 and 16, I was already in full shock mode of, wow, this is bigger than I thought. And I had been invited to go to a crash retrieval spot in New Mexico that was under a no fly zone.
And I still didn't believe that when UFOs at this point, you have to understand that. So I just thought that the person inviting me is Tyler. He's a scientist. He works for the Space Force. He believes this, and I'm wondering, how does he even believe that this is real?
We're going with Gary Nolan, who's from Stanford, and he's out. But at the time, I called him James in my book. And I'm the one actually who invited him to go, because I didn't really want to go by myself. And so I insisted that Gary go with me, and Tyler figured out who Gary was, and he said, OK, so we went out there. We had to actually wear blindfolds, and it was out in the middle of this place in New Mexico. I don't know where.
I know what was near it, but I don't know where the actual place was. And we were looking for parts, right, that had been put out there. And during the time period, so I think part of it was the danger was that parts exist, right? So things like this do exist. And there are anomalous materials. This is what I was finding out. And I think that this is what
I'm an OK researcher. It's not like I would make this up, nor would I lie. I'm publishing with Oxford. So my reputation is at stake, right? So I'm doing the best I can to kind of adjudicate, like, am I being fed disinformation or what's going on? Gary now will be able to identify by taking these parts back and analyzing them through his laboratories, whether or not they're engineers or not.
And he's been doing that ever since. So these are the kinds of things that I would have found out. I think part of it was also that I was finding out that there was an oral tradition and that the perception management was very tight. And I think this is what they were afraid. But I've said this now publicly. But I did get harassed, though. I did get harassed. And it still happens. How did you get harassed?
Most of it is doxing and email harassment at my university began and both to me and Gary at the same time and people showing up. People. Yeah, people in my town showing up. What kind of people? Schizophrenics?
No, but people you wouldn't want to meet. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that's targeted, you think that's a privilege. Oh, it was for sure. But do you think that also that might just be people that are obsessed with this particular subject? No, these are people that are affiliated with people in those that... Okay. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt.
So tell me about the crash retrieval site. Yeah, so this isn't, okay, so now you have to understand this is a long time period. So I start this in 2012. I get this shock where I'm being, you know, people are asking me to meet, you know, people from these programs and from the Space Force. And I'm actually not meeting with them because I'm waiting. I'm kind of thinking, I've got to think this through. It wasn't until about
2014 that I actually start to meet the people, like the affiliated people. And they show me some things and they, you know, they asked me to go to this crash retrieval site in New Mexico. No, this is a recent crash.
No, it's okay, so this crash is part of a series of crashes that happened in the 1940s. So the Roswell? It wasn't Roswell, actually. It was one of the crash sites that's near, it's in New Mexico, but it's not Roswell. So there was more than one crash in New Mexico? Yeah, I think they said that there were probably four. Maybe even more, I don't know.
What about the shitty UFOs? I know, I know. Well, they don't believe that they crash. They use that term, but they don't think it's a crash. They think that it's, they personally, I'll tell you from a professor standpoint, like their idea of this is that it's a donation. They call it the donation site. So they think that these were donated materials and they're going to get information and they do.
And that's how Tyler was able to create a lot of the things that he created through, and he would fly these on the space shuttle, by the way, these experiments and so forth. It was very, very fascinating to me. I mean, I think anybody would be fascinated with it to tell you the truth. When you say fly these, you don't mean physical materials.
So he would have an idea that he would get through these protocols that I told you about. So he'd practice these protocols. And it would be related to something that he would then want to fly on the space shuttle because this was during the time the space shuttle was happening. And the space shuttle had anti-gravity environments.
And he needed these environments in order to create this. And now this is actually a whole field called Biologics. So there's a real field now that where people are doing these experiments in space and creating things that we can't create here. Like what?
medicine, certain types of metals, kind of like ceramic metals. He created something, I actually wrote about this and published about it, totally academic paper. So, you know, most general reason would never read it. It's because it has academic jargon in it. But I talked all about it.
James got something your research is capitalized on microgravity and space to accelerate drug discovery and development. That was one of the speculations about the type of metals that were retrieved supposedly from these crash sites that these, whatever these metals were, they were layered and that they could only be layered specifically the way they were done in a zero gravity environment.
Yeah, that's right. They were engineered. So I actually did talk to Gary before I came on your podcast because I just wanted to be sure, you know, because I don't want to represent his research incorrectly. So I said, can you please, you know, recap that he always thinks I'm an idiot too. He's like, how many times have I told you this? So yeah, so he has parts from various of the crash sites that are clearly engineered.
not by humans. But he's not going to jump to the conclusion that is extraterrestrial. He says, we just don't know. Right. It's just something that is outside of the realm of our current understanding of how we create physical materials. That's correct. And how much of the stuff do they have? Do they have full crafts? I've never seen any full crafts. What did you see when you went to the crash site?
So I saw two types of materials. One, I can say, it looks like a kind of metallic frog skin. And another... And this is on the ground at the crash site, or do they have it in warehouses? Okay, so that's an interesting... I have to tell you a little bit about how we came about this. Now remember, this is the first book that I wrote about this, so I've written two books about it.
I wasn't a believer. So when I went there, I even wasn't a believer. I was like, I think they're trying to give me misinfo or, you know, something's going on. Maybe they really believe this. Well, they both really believe this. I know that for sure. So we're there and we had to wear blindfolds in order to go. Me and Gary. So Tyler's taking us.
We drive to a certain place, he says, put the blindfolds on. We had to leave our cell phones. We couldn't take any technology with us. And so we go out, it takes about an hour to get out to the site. We're blindfolded. We get out to the site. We're wearing, like I guess there's rival snakes out there. So we have to wear certain boots and things like that. So we get out, we take our blindfolds off,
And the first thing I do is I look around because it looks really familiar to me, even though I've never been out there. And Tyler looked at me and he said, looks familiar, doesn't it? And I said, you know, yeah. And he said, you've seen it in the X files. And I was like, what? He goes, they had an insider on their team.
And I honestly thought, OK, this actually fits into my research that we learn everything we do about religion from media. You want to know what Moses looked like. You just watch the Ten Commandments and things like that. It's not true, of course, but that's how most people learn about their religions. And so this made me understand
This is what's going on. It's like people are believing this through this, and then I'm coming to this, and I'm going to confirm that it indeed looks like this, and it is a crash site. It's just too weird for me, but this is what I study, so I'm going to study. But that gets to your point. How did we get this stuff? So he actually did have metal detectors that were configured for specific types of metals that he had these built.
Is there a scientific term for these particular types of metals? They're called metamaterials. Metamaterials. Yeah. I think that's just a fancy word for saying, we don't know what this is, frankly, because they're meta, right? And they're layered in some sort of a way where it's like literally like atom upon atom.
Yeah, well, I don't actually know the science of it. I just know what these guys tell me because, you know, they're doing the research at, you know, their laboratories. The people are very cagey about it. Like Jacques Valle was very cagey about the way he was willing to describe it and the way he was willing to describe these things. It's almost like they don't want to blurt out too much because it'll cut off access.
I don't, okay, so that could be. But I know that the reason that I don't want to is there's some type of national security issue, and I am an American. Right. So there's something like that going on.
Right, especially if someone else can figure out how to use these things. Yeah. So when you go to this site, do you see the physical ground where this thing hit? Okay, yes. So what does it look like? Okay, so at this point, the whole site is covered with rubble that looks like rusted rubble and it's not sand. So there's the sand of the desert, right? And then there's this rubble everywhere.
And I'm stepping on the rubble, and I'm kind of looking at it. How big are these pieces? Well, this is all just less than... Gravel? Yeah, it's like gravel. And so I asked Tyler, what's this? And he said that after the government retrieved the crash, and they didn't want anyone out here looking, so what they did was they dropped a bunch of tin cans out here in the 1950s, and these have disintegrated down into this rubble.
And so I put that in my book because that's what he said. And when I put that in my book, the editor of my book said to me, you can't say this because it's ridiculous. And I, at the time, I was like, it is ridiculous, but this is what happened and it's data. And even though we don't understand it now and it seems ridiculous, we need to keep it in there because- It doesn't seem ridiculous to me at all.
Well, this is a person who absolutely, you know, the editor, who absolutely doesn't believe in UFOs at all, but knows that I'm doing good work on a new type of religion, therefore is keeping the Oxford brand, you know, Oxford University straight and narrow.
But I convinced her, I said, it's data, so we've got to keep it in there. And I'm really happy I did. I kept it in there. I kept a lot of stuff in there that didn't make sense to me at the time. But when I look back on it with everything that's coming out now, I'm like, OK, I'm glad I did that. Well, the strategy for disseminating disinformation along with real information has long been used, where they'll say a bunch of really ridiculous things and connect them to something that's probably real.
Right. And that way everything gets thrown out. It's the baby with the bath water. The whole thing gets thrown out. Totally. And if you have a site where they've picked up these anomalous metals that defy our understanding of metallurgy and you're calling them metamaterials, no one knows where the hell it comes from, what's the best way to confuse people? We'll just throw a bunch of regular metal everywhere.
That's right. That's exactly. Yeah, just throw 10 cans. But we were out there all day. So we were out there for probably 10 hours. And I know, so at many points in the day, Gary and I would go aside and kind of confer without Tyler listening and saying,
You know, is this a setup, you know, and so he goes well, let's just try to find some stuff and I'll analyze it and I'll tell you So are you? Do you notice that the ground has been disturbed? Is there there an indication that something hit there?
Yes. So Tyler took us and showed us everywhere. Like he's been a part of this retrieval site for like 40 years or so. And he knows the people that like the original people and the story and everything like that. So he gave us a tour of the whole place.
and we did and we found parts by the way and the some of the parts were so deep down into the grounds like there are rocks and things like that and Gary I like I'm afraid it's gonna get bit by a rattlesnake frankly he's putting his hand down there and you know spending like
hours at this one place trying to get something he found some things there and I thought if people are trying to fool us and put things down they did a really good job because they would have had to come here like a year ago or something and put that down there so I don't honestly that's my personal opinion is I don't think that this
this was put out there for us. They found, they did find, we did find things. What's interesting to me is this is that after we found these things and we did all this kind of data collection and everything at the site, you know, very much like anthropologists do by the way, you know, documenting what we found, when we found it, you know, what it looked like and things like that and putting into special containers. Then I was like, I don't want this, I don't want any of this stuff.
And they both looked at me and laughed. And so Tyler told us what was going to happen when we went back to the airport. He said, once we get back to the airport, Gary said he's going to take this stuff. Gary's going to get stopped. Oh, Tyler can go through airports, by the way. He doesn't have to go through the normal thing that I have to go through, like the TSA and everything. He just goes through. So he went through that through. I had to go through. Gary went through. And he did get stopped.
Everything that happened exactly as Tyler said it would. There was going to, you know, they weren't, they were going to look through everything. They were going to like take everything apart. Uh, then, you know, all that was, was a signal to someone in DC that somebody had these parts. And this is who that's what he said was. So, and that, and I don't know if the signal went to DC, but everything else happened. And Gary and I were both sweating, right? We were like, Oh, so they essentially allowed this. Yeah.
Yeah. Is it because they want different perspectives from different academics? I think so. My personal opinion is that and in fact there was a conference at Stanford like a month ago and I was at that conference and part of what was said was that
This is information that we can't keep siloed because it's too important and we need to have the best minds on this information, this data, this material. And so they're kind of like outsourcing. How big are these pieces?
So these pieces that I found weren't very big. I mean, one of them was about this big, right? Okay, so the size of a pack of gum? Yeah. And the actual frog skin type thing was probably about this big. Like a small notebook? And we found a couple of those. You found a couple of those just wandering around this area.
Well, we weren't wandering. We were actually digging in and looking. Yeah. Yeah. Wanda's bad word. That's okay. Exploring. This frog skin.
What is it? What is it? Is it malleable? Is it? Yes, it's malleable. And you could crunch it up and it'll go back to its original form. I've heard of that before. That was something that they talked about in Roswell, that there was some bizarre metal that you could crumple up like a piece of paper and it would flatten right back out. And that's what you experienced? I don't know if it was the same material, but... Similar. Yeah, it was like that. What did that feel like when you did that?
uh... it's hard to explain because you have to understand i'm i was really resistant to you know ten years ago think about it
This was a time period when we weren't talking about UFOs. Right, it was ridiculous. In 2017, this is my time story. That's right. And my book was impressed during that time. So during this time period, I'm doing this research and I am not going to believe that this is... But so many indicators were telling me that it was, yes, this is Diana, this is what's going on, you know, there is something.
And so much. And when I looked back at the space force, our space force and also the history of that, I could see, okay, there are, there are so many things that just don't add up here that this is probably, and I met too many people that had been long timers in the program, like seriously long timers, like their whole lives live and die by this, live and die by it. When they die, they die with that information. And it's, it's traumatizing to them and their family too.
I can only imagine. Yeah. Yeah. The people that worked on Roswell that spoke about it many, many years later, they have that sort of same weight that they're carrying around with them.
We fill up Corso and all those other people when they describe the experience like many, many years later. So there's a weight to the information that they're carrying. It's almost like they want to tell the world, but the world is not going to even believe them and how could they unless they experienced it. And even though they experienced it, they're still baffled by it.
That's exactly the feeling I got. It was a weight. There was a sense of duty to the American, you know, to be an American, of course, and there's a patriotism there. But there was also a sense that these were the true actors in history, and we will never know their names.
So you spent 10 hours at this site and are there any guidance? Are they describing things to you? Are they telling you what you can and can't do? Is there any? No, it was just me, Gary and Tyler. There was no no one else. So who who transported to do there?
Well, Tyler did because it was his site. So Tyler blindfolded you? Yeah, yeah. He's the person who worked on this site for 40 years. So obviously he has permission to do this. He does. In fact, he had to get permission for Gary to go. He had already received permission for me to go, and he had to get permission for Gary to go.
And what kind of information are they giving you in terms of what their conclusions are? How many different possibilities that they have some eyes like do they have a summary of all the different? aspects of this phenomenon that they think it could be or might not be or so Yes, so the story actually begins there and then
I continue to work with Tyler because I'm pretty fascinated by what he does and I'm fascinated about the programs and I'm fascinated by the fact that the two actors of history are unknown.
What do you mean by that? Because these are the people that are doing things that actually change history. Like think of the first people that decided, hey, let's give these people LSD and see what happens, right? Well, they probably weren't Richard Alpert, Ram Das and Timothy Leary. They probably weren't them. There you go. Okay. And most people don't know who that is. Okay. So what that's what I'm saying is like, there's a whole other level to our history.
And I already knew this anyway, being a historian of religion. But when it, I guess I was a patriot, right? And it's still am. And so when I... How's mine? So when I learned about this, I was, I really wanted to share the story because I felt like these people, even if they remained invisible, they should get their due. Like because these people keep us safe in ways that we just don't know. And they're dedicating their lives and they're getting no recognition for it.
Okay, no recognition. And so that really prompted me more than anything to write about it. So I was working with Tyler and I was scheduled to go to the Vatican.
And it was at the Vatican where a lot of things happened for Tyler that I saw made him understand that this was something that had been going on historically for a very long time period. See, we didn't just go to the Vatican. We also went to the Vatican archive.
which is hard to get into, but I could get into it. And we also went to the space observatory archive, which most people don't even know that the Vatican has a space of observatory. And how that all happened was not set up, Joe. It was so organic. Because it happened before I even met Tyler. And I put off going there because I had at the time very young kids. And I didn't want to leave them and go to another country.
for, you know, three weeks or whatnot. But I had been invited by Brother Guy Consulmonio to go to the space observatory because I had been studying about the space, you know, research. And I said, does a Vatican have like a lot of space documents, you know, documents about space? And he said, every single thing that the Vatican does, and we do, he said.
comes to where I live, which is at the Space Observatory. And we have a scholar's residence, and you're welcome to stay for as long as you want. You have full access to the Space Observatory Archive. And... What is it like? It's great. It's great. Describe it to me.
Okay, well, for me, it's great. Right. Many people may think, oh, how boring, right? But original Kepler's and Copernicus's, and you know, every single thing that people, scientists from 1200, 1300 on up, thought about space and about magnetism and propulsion and things like that, it's all there, every one of them. And so you go in there and we had full access to it, Tyler and I.
well they've had a kid would have it so because you know who was doing this five hundred years ago there was no united states so of course they're gonna have it they also have an amazing meteorite collection uh... they have a lot of really cool things there and there again there's these monks their astrophysicist monks and they're just hanging out there they've got the best lattes by the way
Italians. Yeah. They know how to eat. My experience, though, of the Vatican itself was different than the archive. And I've actually heard you talk about the Vatican, and I agree. Like you said, I saw you talking about it, and you said, you know, I'm looking around, and I see all this stuff, and they stole it from all these countries. It was like all this booty, you know, the Vatican is filled with it. That was my experience as well. So when I went, you know, we did all the, we did the scholarship, of course, but we also
did the touristy thing. So, you know, we went and looked at all the museum and everything like that. And everything I saw seemed to me to be like, you know, colonization, you know, the colonization of these people and taking their stuff and the colonization of these people and taking their stuff. And they have it all there. And when you're inside the Vatican, by the way, it's different than when you're outside of it because, you know, when you're outside of it, there are those guys that the Swiss guards. Well, those guys are militia when you go inside.
And they're everywhere. The thing that fascinated me about it was just the volume. Yeah. The volume. It's like they're hoarders for insane art. Yeah.
I mean, there's stuff that should be in its own room, and it's just stacked next to other stuff that also should be in its own room. It's almost like they don't have enough space for all the stuff that they have. That's what it seems like. Well, it's kind of like this place. If you see our stack of art that we have out there, I have stuff that I need to put on the walls, just like too much of it, because so many people send me cool shit.
This is such an awesome studio. It reminded me immediately when I walked into it, I was like, OK, I want to take photos of everything. But I didn't. But I did want to. Well, you can. It's OK. Yeah, it's just art. It's amazing. You have some really amazing stuff. Thank you. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool to be connected to so many fascinating artists that send me stuff, or that I buy their stuff, like I bought the Hendrix painting.
The thing about the Vatican, well, I got very fortunate that we had a professor that took us on a tour. And my children were pretty young at the time. And when we went, we were outside in this courtyard area, where the pinecone is. And he said, do you know the significance of the pinecone?
And I said, does it represent the pineal gland? And he said, yes. And so he got so yeah, that's it's also in the the pope staff. If you look at the staff that the pope cares, the staff has a pine go see if you can get a photo of the staff, the pope cares. There's a pine cone.
in the center of it. The pinecone, which is depicted in many, many ancient pieces of art, religious art, and it represents the pineal gland. Because it's similar in appearance to a pinecone. So this pinecone, which also, I'm sure, probably represents the Fibonacci sequence, which also represents itself in the pinecone. That's the seed of the soul. That's where DMT is made.
This might be the gateway place. Yeah, it's well, the reason why they have it an immense pine cone. I mean, that's not an accident. No, of course not. No, that's so here it is. Fascinating. So he has it in his staff. And that massive pine cone that is the sculpture at the Vatican, that that's what that is.
that it's representative of the pineal gland. And this is what this professor was telling me. And like you see it there in that ancient Mesopotamian art, it's probably Sumerian with that god that has that, I mean, that's the Anunnaki carry that thing. And then the fact that they're holding it specifically, that they're telling you, like, this is what's up. This is the connection. This is the connection to the gods. Did you guess this?
Well, I knew that the pineal gland looked like a pine cone. And so when he asked you, you just knew this? Yeah. That's pretty amazing. Well, I'd already had a lot of experiences with TMT. Right. It's already new. I knew there was a realm accessible to anybody that gets in contact with that stuff that is beyond imagination.
It is more real than reality. And when you go there, you've been there before. The most bizarre feeling about it is this terrifying fear while it's happening, and then incredible peace when you get in there, and a recognition like, oh, I know this place. I've been here. I'm here all the time. I know these things. I know these beings. These beings are truth. They're something from somewhere else.
somewhere that's probably around us all the time. That's influencing us all the time. I know a lot of people have had very negative experiences, like horrific experiences of demons and negative encounters. I've had none of it. No negative experiences like that. My experiences are all in these very enlightened, bizarre creatures that contact you.
And they seem to know like what's wrong with me, like right away. And they seem to like also work on you. Like there's this bizarre feeling like they're like, let me get in there and fix your fucking wires. Well, that of course sounds like the abduction experience. Yes. Very, very, very similar to the abduction experience. I think they're all connected. I really do. I think that's one. I mean, I know you're saying that some of them do happen during the day. I'm sure.
I'm sure some of them happen during the day. Most of them happen at night. The vast majority of them happen during what people are sleeping. That's true. And that seems to be completely connected to that. It's the only explanation that makes sense to me other than an actual, you know, like.
you know, Hollywood style UFO landing and then come and get new and which seems so theatrical. I think the reality is far more bizarre than that. I think that is, that's one of the things that McKenna said about DMT and also about mushrooms. Turns McKenna said that they show you themselves in that way to comfort you
because the reality of what they are would be too much for you to handle. And that what you're seeing, even though it's mind blowing, it's just a tiny little piece of what it actually is. So when I'm at the Vatican and I see this pine cone, I'm going, okay, so there's this recognition that this connection to God, this connection to this higher experience, this higher power,
It's available inside of us. There's a gateway, and that's the gateway. That pinecone is the gateway.
That's amazing. And, you know, my parish priest actually about a year ago gave me a little pine cone, a little gold pine cone. And I put it on my bag. And I didn't know this, actually. And as I came here to Austin, it fell off in the airport. And it's not gold or anything, but it looks gold and it fell off and it kind of went away. And it would be, I thought, maybe I should just let it go.
And then I looked at it, and I was like, nah, that's really important for some reason. So I picked it up and put it back in the bag. Oh, wow. That's wild. I know. Yeah. It's a strange representation of what, I mean, it's an icon of this thing, whatever this thing is that's inside of us, that is this gateway.
And it must have been that Plato in his school was basically, they were basically trying to make the body healthy enough for people to, you know, access through this, which is a type of mind, like he didn't call it intellectual. He had, he had another word for it. They have like Greeks, they have different words for knowledge, right? So gnosis and
You know, so this was a form of the dialectic, which was a certain type of knowledge, a certain type of knowing. It wasn't like mathematical knowing. So this must be this type of thing, I'm thinking. Because, you know, Plato's Republic actually went and influenced Christians in early Christianity.
So this idea seems to not be just specifically Christian, as you say, you saw, you know, we saw some photos of Egyptians, you know, with them. Yes. Fascinating. All throughout history. Yeah. And then all throughout history, the use of psychedelics. I'm sure you're aware of Brian Murarescu's work. Oh, yeah. I know him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that whole thing, the illucine and mysteries. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That was all about that.
That's right. Are you aware of Maria Sabina? Yes. Yes. Okay. So when I was young, I learned about her and how she worked with psilocybin to heal people. And when she died, I think it was in the 1980s, the president of Mexico announced it. So in that culture, it was well known. And she called the psilocybin, the mushrooms, little saints.
Did you ever read John Marco Allegro's work? No, I haven't. Do you know of it? No, I probably have read it. You know, think I've read a lot of books. So I may have just forgotten. John Marco Allegro was an ordained minister who became an agnostic when he started studying theology. And he was one of the people that was studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years. And he wrote the sacred mushroom in the cross. OK, yes. I do know that book. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
And then he wrote, that one got, I think he got bought out by the Catholic Church, and you can get old copies of it, but then it was just re-released a few years back. But then he wrote something in the Christian myth, I forget what it was, Sacred Mushroom and the Christian Myth. Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and then there was another one he wrote that he published after that other one was bought out that's readily available.
But this guy studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the oldest version of the Bible that we know of. That's right. It's written in Aramaic. And the Dead Sea Scrolls is a particularly meticulous transcription. The way they had to transcribe this is very bizarre.
because it's written on parchment, which is animal skin. So they had to do DNA tests on the various pieces of parchment to make sure that they came from the same piece, because the idea that they'd be from different cows. So they take this parchment skin, they're laying it out, they do DNA tests on it to make sure it's all from the same, and then they try to piece together what it is. And not all of it is even available. Jamie, check me that out. Behind you to the right. Thank you.
His conclusion after all of this, the summary of his conclusion was the entire Christian religion was all about psychedelic experiences and fertility rituals, and that this was what all these stories really meant, and he even connected
the word for Christ to an ancient Sumerian word, which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen, and that these ancient people believed that when it rained, it was God having an orgasm on the earth, and that these mushrooms, which if you've ever seen mushrooms appear after the rain, they come up out of nowhere, and that these mushrooms, these people would eat them, and they would experience God.
and that they wrote these things down. First it was an oral tradition for who was how long and then they wrote them down and then it gets transcribed to Greek and Latin and English and it's all. And a lot is missing out of those translations. A lot is missing even from the ancient Hebrew translation because the words in ancient Hebrew had numerical value.
Yes, that's true. Which is a very complicated language where the word love and the word God have the same numerical value. And the numerical value in words is very important to what the meaning of these sentences and what these phrases meant. And we lose a lot of that.
We also lose people's gender through these translations. So some early apostles are called who are women are called men in the translation from Greek to Latin. Um, so I'm aware of this idea. And of course, Brian's work as well. And in my field, that's, that's one, we have categories for, you know, obviously, you know, like medicine, you know, has different categories.
And that's one category is entheogens and different types of religions. So the early Christian church, I would say that not all, I don't agree that all of Christian tradition is this. I would say that there definitely is a lot of it. But there are also other types of Christian traditions.
I mean, when I look at the Jesus movement in the first century, it to me looks like a philosophical school, like Plato. And Plato did the mysteries. But I don't know if, I think Jesus was part of an scene movement, like the John the Baptist is Jewish, he's out in the desert, and they're practicing these water rights, and they basically have their own community.
And he looked like he was part of, he had been baptized into this community. So the Jews in the first century were just trying to survive because Rome is killing them and they're going to destroy their temple. So a lot of these communities
You know those so that's one interpretation and I'm not discounting that that's correct for those Those traditions, but there are other traditions that are not they're not no I'm sure filled with antigens and things like that. I'm just letting just being accurate. That's what I could do. I'm sure there's a lot. I mean you
Yeah, it was super diverse. Today, look at how diverse it is. So I think there are thousands of, well, there are thousands of Protestant denominations of, you know, and there's Catholicism and, you know, so we have so many different, and even Catholics don't even know what they are supposed to believe. So some here believe this, some over here believe that. They have the same mass that they go to, but their belief structures are different.
So that leads us to one of the most fascinating interpretations of what we're experiencing collectively when it comes to this UFO, UAP, whatever it is, phenomenon, that this is not
a thing from another planet that comes on a spaceship and lands here to show us how to do things correctly but that they've always been here and that they are the things that are being described in Ezekiel that they they are a phenomenon that is both here and not here at the same time that it's your you are literally dealing with angels and demons
that this phenomenon is connected to these ancient stories of religion, and it's not as simple as other beings like us from somewhere else.
Okay, yeah, so I can respond to that. All right, so because you've said a huge amount of information in there, and I'm going to parse out some of that and tell you just about what I think. So part of why I continued to study this was that I saw that the historical record included a lot of these events.
And these events were weird back then, just like they're weird today. And when you look at these events back in that time period, you also see a common pattern that happens today. And what is that pattern? That pattern is that, you know, let's take St. Francis of Assisi's stigmata. I don't know if you want to show, you know. So if you look at his stigmata, where it looks like he's being, you know, basically radiated by UFO,
That's what my students say when they go and they see this in the Louvre and such. If you look at his primary sources for that, this happens in the 1200s, and you look at what, yeah, so that. So here you see St. Francis, but also over here on the right, you see his friend, Brother Leo. Brother Leo actually at the time is probably 15 or something like that. He's 15? Yeah, he's really young. Hard life back then. Dude looks 80.
Well, he does actually look like that. So the artist actually are not getting at the primary sources. And that's what similar things are happening today. So the representations that we get in the media don't look at all like an abduction. They don't look at all what people experience. And so what I did was I went through a lot of the primary source materials for Teresa of Avila has a weird experience that looks like an abduction.
But they look beautiful. They're domesticated. They're made to look a lot more happy or something like that. And I think part of the reason for that, I don't think is intentional. I think because it's traumatic. I think because once you recognize the people themselves are traumatized by this in both good and bad ways. So this experience is still happening.
To call it angels and demons is is accurate except for one part and this and because there are bad things that happen sometimes people get hurt Francis died from that wound or he died from wounds
that were bleeding, so when he had this experience, until he died, which was about a year and a half later, they tried to keep it silent in his monastery because they didn't know what happened to him. And they were horrified by it. And so until he died, they didn't actually tell anybody. So he kept it between him, Brother Leo, and probably another monk. So there's this idea of shame, almost. This is shameful.
But also this idea that bad things happen. And that's why people say, well, demonic or something like that. And people do experience these things in different ways. And they still do. They still do. But what should we call it? Should we then use the terminology of people from 100 years ago and call it angels and demons?
I don't think we should. I think that what we have to do is we have to take case by case, look at patterns, and maybe just try to proceed with different language. Because some of the things were really interesting. If you do look at, say, experiences that Catholics have, say in the 1960s that have been videotaped, so Virgin Mary experiences where the Virgin Mary appears. And she reads people's minds. She's doing these kinds of things, levitating people together.
If you put physics on that case, physicists on that case, and if you take the work of those people who are working at, I think it's the University of Washington where they're doing MRI imaging of what people are thinking and they're able to replicate it. So if they're looking at a Van Gogh painting, they can replicate that. Well, this looks like a technology.
So that's what I'm trying to say is that there's something going on that could possibly be different. And we need different language for it. And I think we're at the very beginning, just like doing this stuff with DMT, we're at the very beginning of learning about this, this other world. You know, another thing that's fascinating about ancient religious art is the halo. Yeah.
Have you ever seen the earlier depictions of the halo where it looks like a mushroom cap? That is wild. Because it seems to be that what they're trying to say is that this person is under the influence of the entheogens. I mean, it's a literal representation of a mushroom cap. It changes over time and over history.
and it becomes different and it eventually becomes like a hula hoop around your head. But the earlier versions all look like a mushroom cap. They have the lines of the mushroom cap. Jesus is depicted there. The enlightened ones, the saints, the religious figures that are of prominence, they all have that mushroom cap experience behind their head. Even the Buddha, that photo of the Buddha there with the halo, click on that, the statue, yeah. Even that.
I mean, they all have this thing behind them, which you could interpret as these people are under the influence. I agree with you that their mushrooms are seen in Catholic churches near Guatemala, down in Mexico, and things like that, inlaid.
But I would have to suggest that there might be more going on. So I'm going to push back on your interpretation, although I'm not going to say that psilocybin and mushrooms aren't part of that iconography. I would say that a lot of the iconography is going to be something about the light that emanates from people
who are accessing these realms. And I say that because I've read so many reports and they're not. I think that if some of the monks and nuns who report being lit up right in their cells and things like that, if they were doing psilocybin, if they were doing mushrooms, they would have said so. They would have written it because they write a lot. So the Catholics have immense records. They took good notes. Well, I don't think it's the only way to do it.
Oh, I know. I mean, I think it's something that they discovered. Oh, for sure. I think it's a part of it. I do. Yeah, I think that. But so the magnetism of what's this kind of light that's happening, you can see that even in the shroud of Turin, which is, by the way, an anomalous artifact.
that scientists have looked at, even atheist scientists have looked at it, and it appears to be some type of imprint from radiation onto a cloth. So I think we're talking about forms of light as well. But the shroud of Turin is only 500 years old.
well not necessarily so yeah so uh... when you're so there are certain parts of it that could have been repaired that are five hundred years old so the problem is there is a whole department of this you should get this priest on here on here by the way you'd have a really good discussion with him uh... he's an expert on the shot of true and he just came out with new research that's been done about six months ago and there's a whole department in the vatican just for
doing research on the Shroud of Turin. So it's not necessarily just 500 years old. There are different parts of it. Do you know how you were talking about the parchment? Is the Shroud of Turin real after all? 1988 report wrote off the relic as a medieval fake, but now the science seems to be turning. Could it have been a miracle all along? Okay, let's see what it says.
How many 170 peer reviewed academic papers on the crowd have been published in scientific and archaeological journals around the world? Despite all the attention, there's a little consensus of just how ancient this ancient linen really is or what it actually shows. The record places the shroud in, how do you say that? Lyrie? Lyrie? L-I-R-E-Y?
Northern France for four years until 1357, the Alpine town of Chamboree from 1502 to 1578, where it was damaged by fire before being passed to the Dukes of Savoy in 1578. The Savoys moved it to their capital Turin,
and aside from periods of wartime evacuation has stayed in the world chapel of San Giovanni Batista Cathedral ever since. Consensus has been the Shroutes history. Pre-1300 will never be established, and yet the French historian Jean-Christine Petitifils, how do you say that?
Patifio. Patifio has recently published a seriously-reviewed 400-page analysis of all the archaeological and scientific studies so far, and in Italy the peer-reviewed findings of a specialist x-ray study by a team of physicists indicate that the fabric is potentially up to 2,000 years old. There are now six studies which challenge the idea that Turin Shroud has nothing more than a cunning piece of medieval trickery. Could it be something more? The cloth?
which has been the object of mass veneration by catholic faithful for centuries was acquired by a french night uh... jafrai disharmée sharni uh... sharni how do you say that i would just say sharni i'm not quite sure
who deposited in the monastery in lire about a hundred thirty miles east of paris in thirteen fifty three this is a time of unparalleled relic mongering and forgery and according to the american archaeologists william mikham the shroud was most like most likely arrived in europe along with many other relics looted from churches and monasteries during the crusades research in two thousand fifteen
reported in the analysis and identification of dust and pollen samples extracted by an adhesive which existed that the shroud may have undergone a journey from the ancient Near East after the shot a sack of can't stop it can stop I can never say I know I can never say it constant to noble in 1204.
Still, where it not for the poignant image of its folds, chances are it would have disappeared into the morays of other spurious relics, kept in thousands of churches all over Western Europe. In Petitifil's latest book, how do you say it? Petitifil? I'm not actually Petitifil is what I would say.
Les Saint Suire de Turin Timon de las Pascion de la Jesus Christ, the Holy Shroud of Turin, witness to the passion of Jesus Christ. He examines more than a hundred years of historical, archaeological, and scientific research is conclusion. The cloth has all the characteristics of authenticity. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. Go back.
Even those who reject the idea of the shroud is a 2,000 year old, how do you say that word? Sepulchro, Sepulchro cloth. He writes are unable to explain the imprint of the body. Adversaries of the authenticity of the shroud come up against an enigma. That this one cannot be the work of a counterfeiter because to make such an image would have required unknown scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages.
The image is not a painting, no trace of brush strokes, no outline has been observed even under electron microscope. We must exclude the hypothesis of a smear, the application of a base relief of wood or marble or a metal statue heated and placed on the cloth. It was a Catholic Church itself unwittingly sparked
What would become a global obsession with the shroud in 1898 when it gave the green light to a rare public exhibition of the cloth. So Condo Pia and amateur became the first to photograph the linens strange sepia shadows and the high contrast created by black and white photography.
enhanced by blurry stains. When Pia went to the dark room to check his plates, he was startled to see that the negatives revealed a haunting, perfectly proportional facial image of a serene, bearded man in the imprint of a body tortured by what appears to be flogging lacerations and puncture wounds. Can we see an actual image of what the... Is that the actual image? Then click on that Jamie and make it large. Wow.
How bizarre, where are the puncture wounds? Is that what we're seeing in his stomach? Yeah, right. And that is where they didn't go through the hands. They did go through the wrists when the crucified people. And then there also appears to be something in his stomach, like you can look above his right arm, right above the wrist. That looks like a wound, which is what is detailed in the Bible. Very strange.
So if that really is 2000, very bizarre, very bizarre. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. You ever hear the second coming project?
No. I used to have a joke about it. Second coming project was a group of people that were, it was either a troll, they were joking around, or they were serious about it, where they wanted to obtain DNA from the Shroud of Turin and clone Jesus. And that's how Jesus was taught. Oh, I have heard about this. That's right. That's hilarious. Yeah. Wow, that would be so weird. Imagine. That's how they do it.
That would be so amazing. Yeah, that would kind of, I mean, that wouldn't create immaculate conception, but it kind of would. It seems like it. I mean, it's not birth from a virgin, but it's similar in that regard. But that's one of the things that I had a conversation with Taylor Sheridan the other day were discussing, like, what is the Bible trying to say when it describes certain things? But in the beginning, there was light and how God created everything in six days, like,
God, doesn't that sound like the Big Bang? Like told through the telephone game? I think so. Yeah, so the Catholic Church and science go together. Like even Catholics can believe in evolution. They don't generally know that. They believe in evolution. It's just theistic evolution. Right. That's all. Right. And most Catholics don't know that. And I don't know why. But Catholics, yeah, we're scientific. I've been messing around with this idea over the last few years that the universe itself is God.
I think, yeah, I mean... This idea that God created the universe, maybe it is God. I mean, if you want to talk about something that's all-powerful, beyond comprehension, is responsible for every single thing in the cosmos. It is the universe.
that all has some sort of law that keeps it together. Like an intelligence. Yes. And it's completely mysterious. One of the things you talked about in your book that's really fascinating was the Apollo 10 when they were hearing space music and they didn't want to talk about it. No, they didn't. What did they describe it like? You can hear it actually online. Really? Yeah. Let's hear it.
Apollo 10 space music. Let's fucking go. Maybe this has been my new workout music. Space music. I don't know. It really freaked them out. I don't want to imagine. Dr. Aya Whiteley, she's a space psychologist. She's the one who told me about it and said you should put this as a quote before my information because she talked about how they didn't want to report it.
because it was so weird. And that's the whole idea of this two data set. There are two data sets for a UFO reporting, like pilots will see stuff, but they won't report it. Right. Or they'll see stuff in the report stuff, but they won't. Um, let's listen, I guess. Here we go. You want some more brownies? No. I didn't mean to keep it down. Not her spacey, doesn't it?
Do you hear that? That whistling sound? Yeah, it sounds like, you know, otter spacetime music. Hey, Tom, is your insulation all burned off here on the front side of your window over here? Right now. Yeah. Mine's all burned off. Heading out here? Where are you, John?
Still is on for five minutes, I don't know. So it's just that sound. I think it's the sound that there are two tones. There's kind of like this high pitch sound and then that sound. Yeah.
Yeah, and you're also getting it. It's a recording from inside.
Obviously, it's not gonna sound exactly how they were hearing it this video can't be this it's not It's just video. I think like stock video of them on the Mission. Oh, so this is not the video of them experiencing it No way that audio would be recorded separately from the this and I think someone just mixed this together So there's something to look at let's see if there's just a recording of the audio itself This is the full this is the one that said full audio. I don't know that like this is from CBS. I don't know
That sounds like it. Wow. Mystery music heard space. What the hell is that? Yeah. What do they think it is?
uh... well what happens now i don't know what they think it is but i do know that they train astronauts for it now to get them they have simulation so when astronauts go into space they're not surprised by stuff so this is a common occurrence
There are so many weird things that happen. One thing that happened to them when they were in space, now this is getting back to the two data sets. So they've worked their whole lives to go into space, so they can't indicate that in any way they're mentally unstable. So when they go there and they come back, certain things happen. So one thing that happened was they were seeing flashes of light when they came back down to Earth, but they wouldn't tell anybody.
And then finally, a bunch of them said, do you see this flash light? Like when you close your eyes, you see light and everything like that. And they agreed that if they all reported it, they couldn't get fired. So this is how they were able to report weird stuff that they saw in space.
Isn't that crazy that exploring the outside of earth, you have to be careful about what you say because people think you're crazy. That's right. That's right. And the bizarre. Well, yeah. So it's these two data sets. So it happens here when people have, you know, when they see things and then they have these strange things that happen, they don't, they tell authorities the stuff, okay, yeah, I saw this. It was unknown. I don't know what it was. But then they tell their friends and family,
I actually had this feeling that it was looking at me and this is why I think that. And so they tell their subjective kind of weird things, you know, to their families and their family of friends. So yeah, so you get that with astronauts too. Who was that?
The front of the line when it comes to this stuff like who has been studying this the longest that has the greatest body of information available about space and stuff about the emergent phenomenon of some sort of contact.
Okay. This is a hard question to answer because there is a person, but will this person say everything this person knows? Probably not. But there is an official NASA historian
who, in my opinion, knows way more than he actually writes about, but he's written a heck of a lot. And his name is Stephen Dick. What an unfortunate name. Well, yeah. But it is his name. And he has an amazing body of work that anybody who's interested in this should read. He was also, at the very beginning, kind of, he was part of the initial stages of creating astrobiology.
uh yeah astrobiology and what leads you to believe that he's holding back information
Well, when I go back, and I'm in contact with him, and when I read what he's written, I can see that he was at the forefront of looking at this like AI back like 25 years ago. He was already talking about it, saying this is AI. ET is going to be AI, and this is why. And then kind of doing timelines and things like that.
Just conversations that I've had with him that are you know basically correspondences that indicate to me that I think he probably Has some information, but he you know a lot of this is classified right and probably for good reason What good reason? I don't know Yeah On asher biology that's not this
They argued since the ancient Greeks extraterrestrial life has been a theme tied to scientific cosmologies, including the ancient atomist, Copernican, Cartesian, and the Newtonian worldviews. Dick argues that from epistemological
point of view the methods of astrobiology in the 20th century are as empirical as in any historical science such as astronomy or geology. Dick has also surveyed the field of astrobiology in critical issues in the history philosophy and sociology of astrobiology.
On December 4th, 2013, while holding the NASA Library of Congress chair and astrobiology, Dick testified on astrobiology before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, arguing that SETI funding should be restored and integrated with the NASA astrobiology program. Hold on, go back to that.
this part, the intelligence principle. Yeah, this is the thing that he worked on more than 20 years ago. Is a hypothetical idea of Dix in the field of cultural evolution. Outlined is 2003 paper Cultural Evolution, the post-biological universe and SETI. The intelligence principle describes a potential binding tendency among all intelligent societies, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
The maintenance improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution. And that to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved. It doesn't actually have the next line that he writes about and says, and if it's not improved, it will be to the detriment of that society. That certainly seems to be true.
Yeah. So it's him, but also Joe. It's not just him. There's a group. They're called the Invisible College, and I'm not going to name who they are. People can search them and find out their names. But they're part of this oral tradition and this hidden tradition that's been at the forefront of doing this type of work for over 50, 60, 70 years.
So what has it been like for you to go from a person that before you visit this crash site, you think this is all nonsense to where you are now. I haven't written two books about it and very careful with your words and realizing how bizarre this is to now having this conversation with me in front of millions of people. Like what has this been like for you?
Yes, it's been life changing. Okay. So that's definitely a fact. And in the beginning, it was uncomfortable. Um, but I learned, this is where I learned about, you know, you're talking about the, the penile gland. And this is how I learned about this access. And I learned it through communities that are associated with this study. So I've learned about human potential. And I think that that's probably what's impacted me more than anything.
And I also learned about structural evil in societies. And how has it been for me? I think it's been great. Really? Yeah. I mean, I thought about it the other day because there were times when I said, I don't want to do this anymore. And I think that I thought, you know, I think the bad times have been worth it. The scary parts have been worth it.
Because I went into this wanting to know, right? I'm a professor of religion. I mean, I want to know. And I wanted to be a professor of religion since I was 11. And yeah, and now I am. That's cool to know what you want to do when you're 11. Yeah, it was pretty weird. But I knew. And now I feel like I'm getting answers. And it's not like I know conclusively. Part of it is that
We're not meant to know, is that part of it is that it is a mystery. But it's a fascinating one. It's almost as if this, for me, you talked about obsession, it's that. Like I do it in and of itself. I think it's fascinating.
I often struggle with the concept that the human mind is incapable of grasping the truth, that even if it was presented to us, we don't have the capability to truly incorporate it into our, not just worldview, but universe view, life view, existence view.
that it's too baffling. We're not quite ready yet. It's like showing Australia-Pithecus a cell phone. It's like, what the fuck is this? What is this? We're not ready for it yet. And I really wonder with the emergence of artificial intelligence and what seems to me, at least to be the inevitable, not just incorporation of it into our lives, which has already happened, but incorporation into it biologically.
I feel like that is a step that we're taking that seems inevitable, that seems there is going to be some sort of convergence, emerging of human consciousness and artificial... I think artificial intelligence is the wrong term.
I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's a type of intelligence that's created by the human being. And the human being is biologically hindered by the fact that biological evolution is so slow and technological evolution is so insanely rapid, especially if sentient artificial intelligence
becomes capable of creating its own version of artificial intelligence. And it's not hindered by the biological limitations of the human mind. I think Elon said it best, and you talked about in this book, that we're the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence. I've described it before I heard that, that we're a caterpillar that's creating a cocoon to give birth to the electronic butterfly.
and that this is also what fuels not just innovation, but materialism. Materialism is inexorably connected to innovation, because one of the things about materialism is everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing, and status is attached to those things. We buy new cell phones, like my friend had an iPhone, my friend, Eddie Bravo, he had an iPhone 13, and I go, why'd you get the 30? He goes, they gave it to me for free.
And I was like, did you want a 15? He's like, does it do the same thing? I'm like, it really does. But I wanted a 15 when it came out. I have zero difference between my 15 and my 14. But how do you get to 15? You know, it's like there's something connected to us that wants the latest, greatest, and we're connected to this idea of materialism. And if you look at the human being,
as an organism, and you were separate from it. And you said, well, what does this thing do? Well, this thing makes better things constantly. That's all it does. That's what it does. It does a lot of other stuff. Yeah, yeah. It does a lot of other stuff. But it makes better things. But even the better things it does, like when wars to control resources, why do they want resources so they can make better things?
It's all about better things. It's all about more control so that they have more access to more materials, to more better things. And that always, if you're dealing with intelligence and you're dealing with technological evolution and technological innovation, it's going to lead to artificial life or a life, a new kind of life. A new kind of life. Yeah. And that might be the kind of life that literally becomes a God.
If you think about it, it continues to get like there's I was looking at this This video that was on YouTube that was showing the stages of artificial intelligence and that there's these multiple stages artificial and the general intelligence sentient general intelligence, and then it goes to God-like artificial intelligence, but that is
Is that what God is? And is that what we're doing? Are we making God of God made us in his own image? Are we making God? Is that what this whole thing is about? Well, you know, it's these are some of the questions that I have when I go back to looking at some of the characteristics of these like the Virgin Mary sightings and things like that. Like we now have technologies that can replicate what it seems like was happening during that event, you know, like in Garibendol in Spain in the 1960s.
And if that's the case, then it looks like Stephen's idea of the intelligence principles correct when he says that there will be intelligent beings that will appear like deities to us.
which makes sense. Yeah. And he also says, you know, and I don't know if you've gotten to the chapter on Simone in the book, but she's a quantum AI person. And she's, she talks about UFOs and, and she hates the word artificial intelligence. She says this completely, we don't like make a painting and then say, see this artificial, you know, we don't do that. So why do we call it? Why is because she says we're afraid of it? You know, we're afraid that it's going to be sentient.
And we're afraid, you know, she said, but it's just another life form that we happen to be doing, creating. And she says it's special in that way, but it's also going to free us in many, many ways.
She's a tech optimist. She's an accelerationist. Yeah. Well, I hope she's right. Because it's happening. She better be right. Yeah, it's happening no matter what. Yeah. But I mean, I think if you could go back again to Australia, Pythagus and say, hey, man, one day you're going to be wrought with anxiety because it's
existential angst and you're going to be on anti-depressants and living in a cubicle all day, but that's the future. It's progress. Fuck that. I'd rather hang out here in the Savannah. I think it's in this inevitable part of the process of whatever we're going through because we're not in a static state. We're in a constant state.
social upheaval, cultural upheaval, a change of perspectives, this constant battle to try to define things and to figure out what's appropriate and inappropriate and gaslighting people who disagree with you, which is also fascinating just to watch people do that. It's fascinating to watch people try to put a positive spin on inherently evil things. Yeah, it's pretty terrible. It's really horrible. Yeah, it's a bad show.
Yeah, it's a weird show. That's for sure. It's a weird show. But again, I do have this internal struggle with this concept of good and evil that perhaps the negative aspects are there to enlighten us and to let us know that our work is not done and that we have to move
into a direction that we know is just and good and correct and loving. And that this is possible within small groups of people. It's possible with individuals and ultimately must be possible with the collective. It just has to be managed in some way or facilitated in some way.
and that it's not guaranteed. And that if you look at World War II and look at Holocaust, you look at the horrific things that human beings are capable of when they're allowed to just run rampant. And you talked about the Japanese horrors during World War II, like the Reagan and King. That's right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Oh my God, I remember reading that going, how are human beings capable of doing this? Power people will. Yeah, savagery, yeah, unbelievable. Bizarre.
bizarre in its cruelty. Unbelievable. Horrific. And that seems to be evil. That seems to be evil personified. Yeah, I think so. I'm not afraid to say it. Right, it is a thing. Evil's a real thing. Evil's real. I mean, as a professor teaching my students, I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, evil's real. But here I'm going to say, and I've said this on podcast, you can't say that human trafficking is not evil. Right. That's evil. Evil.
And let's just call it for what it is. Human medical experiments on children. It's evil. Evil. Evil. Yeah. And we do it. And we do it almost specifically for profit. Always. Which is also evil. Yeah. Yeah. So back to the allegory of the cave and the Plato. So he's dealing with these questions of, he doesn't call it justice, but calls it injustice. I mean, he doesn't call it evil.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is my position at this point after doing the study of this kind of thing is that it's the development of this mystic state that we've been talking about that I think this is how we need to counter because we can't decide these are the rules we're going to follow. People aren't going to follow those rules or they're going to follow those rules in cheat, right? Or they're going to pretend to follow the rules.
But if people actually engaged in the type of thing that we were talking about, the thing they love, that allows, then perhaps justice emerges, right? That's what I'm trying to point out to people that with these ideas have been around for a long time. They're not new ideas, but we've never actually done them. Small groups have done them.
So when you're alone with your thoughts and you've been studying this for a long time now, what do you think the UFO phenomenon is? Yeah. So I think, first of all, that there are a lot of different varieties of it. But when we look at, like we were looking at the Francis of Assisi and the kind of historical things and the abductions and things like that, I think that
that it's been around for a long time and that these are things that are in communication with us. So what I do in my book, both the books that I wrote about this is I talk to people who I think represent thousands of people. So each person in the book represents thousands, if not more, maybe many thousands of people who have had experiences and the ways in which they interpret them.
So all of the people seem to have had experiences with now what they want to do is they actually want to work for justice in different ways. Like Jose, the veteran in my book, he's working with young people and helping them deal with being addicted to social media and things like that and helping them get through life which is really hard right now.
And that's what he's doing. And then you look at Dr. Whiteley, right? So she's working in the space for us. She's trying to, you know, help people deal with the fact that they're seeing things that, you know, that could down planes and things like that. And she's helping people talk about that. She's helping people. Each person in, you know, is somehow doing what I'm suggesting that I think is an out, this kind of structural injustice that we see.
So I think that this is a transformational thing without the drugs is what's going on, like some kind of massive
experience that people are having and now it's getting out and people are being able to talk to each other through Reddit communities and different types of social media. We just see religions when they begin, they become viral at one point. We've never seen it in an age where we have digital technology, but this is what we're seeing now. What do you think the physical objects are?
Well, okay, so this is something that's very interesting. We just looked at the shot of Turin. I believe that there are these, I would call them, and this is just my own non-scientific term, interdimensional objects. They're objects that have characteristics of our dimension and some other dimension.