The Basement: Jeffrey Kripal | Inside the Archives of the Impossible

Every now and then someone would die. "Risk, true stories, no holding back." "It comes up behind me, and Whisper's right in my ear." "No one knows where you are, in no way can hear you scream." "Some of these stories will make you laugh till you're crying." "And then I realize, I'm unconscious." [laughter] "Some will stick with you for life." "They catch my mom poisoning my sister." "My brother, he died at the hands of my mother." "I said I might don't make the future place, but he did." People say risk makes them feel less alone and more alive. "During my time in prison, I discovered a podcast called "Risk." "That podcast saved my life so many times." "Live your authentic truth!" "Because you never know who may come to your funeral and turn that bitch out." "Risk, the show where people tell true stories, they never thought they dared to share." "Wherever you get your podcasts." Today I'm talking with Jeffrey Criple. He holds an endowed share at Rice University where he runs an archive of the impossible. Over a million documents on the paranormal. Jacques de laise files are in there. John Maxx, 150 boxes, and 3,400 letters people wrote to Whitley Shrieber after they read communion. "Yeah, Rice University. Isn't that what Kennedy said we'd go to the moon?" "Yep." "I was so technically, it's been an archive of the impossible since 1962." Jeff grew up in a Nebraska hardware store, and at 13 he stopped eating to become a saint. The one night in Calcutta in 1989, he thought the wall was electrocuting him. He says every book since came out of that night. "Yeah, if you think the wall is electrocuting you, I guess what? The wall is electrocuting you." Today we're covering what's in those boxes, why he thinks the X-Men are real, and his new series Archive X on AMC+ and then there's Nobel Prize winner and the glowing raccoon. That one got an actual woe out of me, and you'll hear it. "I even Nobel Prize winners can eat the pull-up is too high." We all can. Once we wrap up, we'll come back and break down the conversation, let's go down to the basement. Well, Dr. Kribels here, this is exciting. What drew me to your work, most of all, is your third space, which is not believing not debunking, just having a conversation, and that is the thesis of my entire channel. "Yeah, well fantastic." Why is it so hard for people to live in that space? Well, first of all, it is. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I see it every day, I walk into a classroom. Some people are set up to be reflexive, to step outside of their worldview, and to laugh at it, and to live in that third space, and most people are not. They're capable of it, and I don't know why, and I teach it a very elite, very selective university. So these are really smart kids, and there aren't many of them capable of this third space. So I don't know, I don't know. I don't either. It wasn't a facetious question. When I started the channel, I'm interested in the content, in the stories, but I only can only find people that just were totally believers, and a lot of it's like, that's bullshit. And then you have the other side, we're just these snide debunkers, very condescending. Well, try teaching religion. I mean, it's bad. And to get across what compare. When you compare religions, of course, what you see is the commonalities, but you also see the differences, and it's really hard. There's so much of our modern world is really scientific and materialistic, and it's based on a rejection of religion. And I think so that historical background is part of the answer, but the other part, I guess this will get us into the deep end, I think a lot of philosophical or religious truth is esoteric by which I mean its secret, by which I do not mean I can whisper to you a piece of data or information, which you suddenly know. I mean, you literally can't know, right? And you can tell people, until you're blue in the face about what is so, or what is the case, and they will not understand. And they're being very sincere and very genuine. I don't question their sincerity at all, but I think there are a lot of religious or philosophical truths that simply are not communicable. And I mean, this is what is. This gets into media, by the way, and then whether you can translate certain truths. What do you mean? Can you translate truths into a language or a poetry or an expression that lots of people can hear and maybe even be entertained by? Or is it always for a select group of people that is small? And that works away from the whole media or whole entertainment model. What I do, I do think about that, and I think that's what academics do really well, is they speak to a very small audience, basically, of the converted, basically, they preach to the choir. And I understand that, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you want to be confirmed in your belief system, that's a good way to do it. But what happens when you enter a public space is you encounter a lot of people who don't agree with you or who can't understand what you're saying. And that's why I think it's a really good situation to be in, certainly for an academic. And we tend to make fun, as you probably know, of popularizers. We don't like them. And by we, I don't mean me, but I mean, the Academy in general does not reward people who speak to a broad public. They reward people who speak to a very small public. And I don't quite understand that. I mean, I kind of do, but I kind of don't. It's an easier room, whether you're teaching or learning, if it's just confirms your own beliefs. And it's just an easier room. The thing, the thing about teaching though, I could talk about teaching all day, first of all, you have a lot of young people in the room who have separated from their families for the first time. And so they're vulnerable in a particular way. They're not vulnerable. They're open to new ideas. And they're usually living with people who do not look like them and do not sound like them and who do not believe like them. And that is really healthy. And so what you're doing as a teacher is you're not giving these kids a set of beliefs to sign their names to. You're giving them a way to vocalize the questions they already have. And they don't even know what questions they have because they can't vocal. They can't express them. And so what you're doing as a teacher is you're just, you're trying to get them to see what their situation is and that other people have thought about this. For millennia and they're very grateful for that ability to express those questions. The way we frame this is, I'm not here to give you answers, I'm here to ask better questions. I gave you to ask better questions. And that's really true, actually. That is really what a fine education is about, I think, is asking better questions. I don't know if every teacher shares that view. No, they do not. But certainly, so there's basically two models of education. There's the fill up the bucket model, you know, where you're going to give them the set of data or information and then they're going to go home and they're going to get a job and blah, blah, blah. And then there's the transformation model. You're going to rock them, you're going to rock the world. And you're going to see how they respond to that. And I'm much more, of course, the transformation model. Those are the teachers that I remember, I think that everyone remembers, that you just couldn't wait to get the class because you know you're going to have your mind belong. Yeah. And they probably didn't know, they didn't know what, they didn't have a set of answers to give you, but they made you a better questioner, they made, they made you think. And I think that's really what, at least at its best is what education is about. That's the information I retain as well is those teachers who did that. Yeah. And it could be the most boring class, but the right professor makes it magical. My, my finest, my most memorable teacher in high school was my mathematics teacher. And you remember everything about that class, and I remember that there, there was actually a bust of Plato up, up on his shelf, and he, he never mentioned that number once. And I like, that was Plato. And of course, it makes total sense, of course, it makes total sense, because a lot of mathematicians are, are basically platenous. Do you think numbers exist? some esoteric space. And he clearly did. And he was trying to communicate that to basically, it was just a bunch of kids in high school. And it was awesome. I was awesome. You're so lucky to have those teachers as I was. Amazing. So look, something quiet happened this week that most people missed. A former CFTC chair, the guy who used to regulate derivatives, went on record. And what he said should stop be cold. Congress banned a central bank digital currency. The Fed swore it wasn't building one. This guy said, quote, "That does not mean we're not looking at how to create one." Project Agura. Look it up. Meaning, soon every account you own becomes a switch somebody else controls. And they've been telling you why they're going to want to flip it. National debt just crossed $40 trillion. Interest alone over a trillion a year. Bigger than Medicare and Medicaid combined. There's one way out of that math and you already know what it is. China's central bank has bought gold 21 months in a row. JPMorgan is telling clients gold hits $6,000 by year end. This isn't a prediction anymore. It's already happening. That's why I trust gold and crest metals. Physical gold and silver you hold in your hand. It can't be hacked, can't be printed, can't be turned off. Go to yfileslovesgold.com and get the free 2026 info kit or text files to 638257. yfileslovesgold.com or text files to 638257 because when they clicked switch, I was going to all cut it. I had so much math in high school from this teacher that there was no math class they could give me in college. Nope. None. So I'd never had another math class after my senior senior year at high school. I had to classics in high school and no college could match it because it was the right teacher, right teachers. Classics? Classics. Wow. Yeah. Homer, and Virgil and so forth. So Greek and Latin? Yes. And philology. You were, this is why you're a Renaissance. Is that what I. It's you're still a Renaissance person. Yes. I'm just getting by. Your bio and doubt share at rise 12 books, three volume studying progress, but your last line is he thinks he may be Spider-Man. And there's a plaque on your door. What? You gotta explain that. What do you mean by that? I like to tell bad jokes, of course. When I was a kid, I grew up reading Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man and my brother loved the credible Hulk by the way. And there was something about Marvel in the 60s and 70s that we couldn't articulate as kids. And today I would say it was questioning authority. Yeah. It was standing outside and it was making fun of itself. It was practicing this reflexivity that I think is profound actually. And so Spider-Man for me is it's a way to be reflexive. It's a way to make fun of myself. I also think it feeds into the alien thing. These big buggy eyes and this costume. And I know I have Spider-Man is literally the name on my door and my joke at the university is that he never shows up. And I just I just use his office, you know, and people laugh at that. They think that's funny, but maybe that's why I tell it. Maybe that's why that and that line is there because a woman who's now a dean at Yale, she spit out her coffee after after that was read. Laughing, you know, and I was like, okay, that's a good one. I'll use that one. Well, he's he's bitten by accident. He's given powers. He can't tell anybody about. And he makes fun of his villains and he's twisted and contorted and messed up and yeah, he's awesome. Peter Parker, he's awesome. Yeah, he is. And that's that's that's the story I read as a kid. And I mean in the 60s and 70s when comics were it was John literature. It was it wasn't it wasn't the Hollywood stuff. It was just a bunch of guys in New York making a few bucks out of a bunch of kids, you know, across the country, mostly boys, by the way, who were like 11 or 12 or whatever we were, I don't know, 10. And we bought comics in the drugstore on these metal racks and it was great. Stanley was he was definitely anti-establishment. No DC for you guys. No, no what DC? No, we were we were a moral house too. All the dad grew up with DC. I I remember the Batman show 1966 and you know, I was a kid. I was four. I was born in 62, by the way, to place me. And I thought it was all true. Yeah, it was awesome. It was. It was great. But they were making fun of themselves. Yeah. So there was a kind of. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I thought Adam West was cool. Yeah. I didn't know that either as a kid. I was like, wow. That is so awesome. So that was the DC that what that attracted me. And the super man and Batman were they were too blocky. They were too sure of themselves. They were basically impenetrable white males. And I just wasn't drawn to them, you know, for whatever reason. Marvel always have the anti-hero, the reluctant hero. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. Um, we're going to talk a lot about mutants and mystics today. Okay. I want to get into. What do you want to talk about? I want to talk about what you want to talk about. I want to talk about go carts. Okay, go carts. Let's talk about go carts. The go cart that you and your dad found in the barn. Uh-huh. Tell me that story. Awesome again. Dad is a former mechanic. And he had a he actually had a go cart company when he was young. They sold go carts through milk catalogs. And my mom, my mom actually modeled one of these go carts. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, when, when I, I don't know, I was 10 maybe or nine. And dad wanted to find, find a go cart and, and, and introduce Jerry and I, Jerry's my brother, younger brother, into, into the magic of go carts. And we found this, this two cycle racing go cart in a barn near where I go up. How did you stumble across a go cart? I don't know. It was probably in the paper. It was probably the farmer selling it. It was a fox go cart. It was a professional race cart. And, and so we just, we, when these races started, we were literally lapping people. What engine was in that? It was a two cycle engine. It was probably 125 cc's. It was, and it had a gearbox on it, which means it didn't have a chain. So it was, it had this incredible power to it. It was so, it was so much power for a kid, you had to pick it up and run with it and then drop it. And then it would, then it would start. You couldn't just pull a chain. No, mine had to start out of hill. That's the way. Yeah. This was like, this was like, a man had to like lift this and run with it and, and then, and then, and then drop it. And, and I was just a kid. I was nine or 10. So I didn't weigh anything. And it was all I could do to keep it on the track. It was just like a, it was like a rocket. It was like fantastic. Now I read that you had your dad drop a different motor in there to slow it down. I did. We did. I, which Jerry didn't approve of. Yeah. So this, I started to get weird and religious and anorexic, you know, eventually about 13 or so or 14. And I think that's when we put the smaller engine on it. I think that was part of your piety. No, it's part of, I was part of my weirdness. Suffering shows up a lot. Oh, it was, it was not good. It was, it was bad. But this, I this kid and my this kid, I mean, me, I was, I was, could, could follow. There was a guy who, who won the races. He was from this other town named called Fairberry. And he was an adult. He was a young adult. And I was just like 11 or 12. And I was always, you know, right behind him. If he made a mistake, I would, I would, I would, he never did make a mistake, by the way. But it was, I was really good. It was, it was awesome. All these guys were twice your age, right? Yeah. And they, then there was this whole culture of go cards that grew up around these races that happened for two or three years. And we race mostly on dirt tracks, by the way. And so you were constantly sliding, you know, and then there was a, there was a long runway. But everything else was a curve. And you were, you basically were always in a, and it taught me how to drive. You know, I was, it was really good. Yeah. It was, I know I keep saying the word awesome, but it was awesome. It was really great. I was a go card kid. I know it. I know it. Do you remember, did you have a four cycle or a two cycle? It was, it was, it was a two stroke, Yangtang. out of an old lawnmower. (laughing) - Yeah, that's what most people have. - Yeah, just pull chain and drop it down a hill. - I know, that's it. - I didn't win anything though. - Yeah, this was a real racing car. My brother, my brother raised in the horse cycle division. And he had a horse cycle, motorcycle. But it was again, it was a racing car. And this was 'cause of dad. And dad was our mechanic and kept these carts going. We were just, we were just the kids. - We were just the drivers. - Do you remember like taking that lead and looking over and seeing dad's face? - I don't. - What? - I don't, but I'm sure it made him happy. - Sure. - Yeah, mom was happy too. Mom went to all of our races. And I think they were both really happy for us. But it was a good time, you know, as a kid. - Well your dad was a mechanic. His dad was a mechanic. What can you fix? - Yeah, I remember, I mean grandpa Cripple died when I was a little boy. Grandma Cripple died of some disease, maybe cancer or something. And then grandpa didn't live long after that. We lived in another town. They were very poor. They were dirt poor. And I remember, I loved their house, but I remember it was basically a big garden and they had chickens and goats, I think. And I think it was all because of their poverty. I think they were trying to raise their food. And grandpa was, Grandpa Cripple had a garage, had a Chrysler garage, but never really made it financially. And that town, that town was wiped out in 51 or 52. I can't remember the year 'cause I wasn't there. I wasn't born by a tornado. And I think it really destroyed the garage that grandpa had too. So it was just, yeah, it was hard. Grandpa, I am a graded from Czechoslovakia, by the way, 1910 or 1911. My mom saw their German farmers, and they immigrated in the 1850s and 1860s. - So can you fix anything? Are you handy? - You didn't. - I think it skips the generation. It's what I'm trying to sometimes. My wife thinks I secretly just say that, but I can't fix things. That may be true, but I'm certainly not as handy or as mechanical as dad is. - Well, there's a quote of yours that really stood out to me, and when you're describing your dad as a mechanic and a talented metal worker, the fact that you called a metal worker talented really struck me. Yeah, dad is somebody who should have went to college and never did, and I'm sure it was because of money, and I'm sure it was, he was the youngest. He was the baby of that family, the six or seven kids there, and I think it was just a financial thing. His older brothers were in the military, but college just wasn't a thing, then. And he should have went. - Yeah. - He should have went, and he didn't. And my brother-- - What do you think you would have got from college that he couldn't get working? - He would have become an engineer. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think he would have had a very different career. As it was, they had a fine career. Mom and dad bought a hardware store. I grew up in a hardware store, and that was, that was, they knew everybody in this little town, and that was sort of the center of the town, that hardware store, and that was awesome, but again, I was just reflecting on dad's lack of college education, and that he should have went, but he didn't. - Do you feel like he wanted to, or is it? - He did. - I just don't think it was a possibility then. - Yeah. - And the way that feeds into this story, so when Jerry and I got to be kids, mom and dad definitely wanted us to go to college. So there was this American thing of it, you want the kids to essentially do things you didn't. And we went, I became an academic, and Jerry became a medical doctor, so we did a lot of school, and sort of overdid it as it were, but I think that's because there was none of this in the family, or very little of it, or should say. - Yeah. - But there's a lot of respect for blue collar work and small business in your story. - Yeah. - What did you learn from that hardware store? - But people are people? - Yeah. - I learned, wow, learning is not even the right metaphor. I mean, this goes gets into the show to the television series. I mean, there is this sense that speaking to people, when I say people are people, what I mean by that is that people are really smart, and I think they know a lot that they don't say, and they don't always have the opportunity to say things. I mean, the virtue of the Academy is that you have an opportunity to say things, but these people didn't, and I think they actually did know a lot, and had a lot of these same experiences that I talk about. - I think your first comparative religion teacher was Dewey. - Was who? - Dewey. - Who? - He's a Native American man. - Oh, oh, Dewey, I'm sorry. Yeah, it just didn't register. Yeah, Dewey was this elderly Indian man, who actually loved my mom and dad, came into the store a lot. He was described to me as a horse trader, by which I think he didn't have any money, and they had to call him something. And he lived outside of town, and I didn't think of it as that way. That's kind of why the question threw me off, but I suspect he was. That was my first introduction to religious diversity, I suspect. Yeah, I think you mentioned that the rest of the town didn't trust him. - Probably not. I did. My mom and dad did. So that town, the notion of religious diversity was whether you were Lutheran or Catholic. Everybody was German, but there was this difference, and there was one Jew in town, and by the way, he was a lawyer, so just fit into the stereotype. But there were no African Americans, and there was Dewey, but the town, Nebraska is really founded because of Native American culture and Native America. I mean, even the name, Nebraska, the flat river, the flat river, has this French name, but there is this background, this Native American background of things, that you really do get when you grow up in that part of the country. And this notion, I think, really did inform a lot of what come later. - What did Dewey have to say about the town and the people there? I mean, he was probably not old enough to see things change as much as they did, but his parents certainly did. - He, Dewey, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking, I'm just remembering him. Dewey had a notion of the divine that was not Christian. It was very much about a great spirit that was overlooking everyone, and it was a very ecumenical kind of notion, but I just remember just hearing about this notion of divinity that was very different from what I, I certainly I grew up with. The Catholics and the Germans were very certain, you know, that God was X, Y and Z, and Dewey's notion of the divine was much more open, I think. - How old were you when you were talking in? - Probably 10 to 12 maybe. - So before you got very Catholic. - Yeah. - We are, but I wasn't, you know. - I was very Catholic, you know, very anorexic in my youth, but not in a moral sense. I wasn't condemning of other worldviews, but-- - Hold on, I have to push back on that. - Okay, well maybe I was then. - Maybe you were, because when you were 13, I think you wrote-- - Oh, that you wanted the porn out of your comics. - Well, okay, I did. - No, I did, I wrote about that actually. - What? - I did, I did. - Who did? - I did want the porn. - We wanted more porn in the comics, me and my friends. - You wanted it in? - You wanted the, yeah, you wanted voluptuous. - Okay, so you were the crybaby. - So yeah, yeah, I was. - I think, okay, let me back up a bit. - Let me defend myself, first of all, yes I did. My first published piece was a letter to the editor asking them to remove the, I didn't use the word porn, by the way, you-- - Use pornography. - Yeah, yeah, I think, pornographic, I think. - Okay, okay. - That these images were pornographic. They were, it was sort of porn for kids. I think that was part of the attraction of the comics, by the way. I think that's kind of what drew us to comics with those voluptuous bodies. Of course, but at 12 or 13 or whenever this was, whenever I published this piece, I had become aware very much of that dimension and was objecting to it. But that's really not the same as the Dewey thing with the other cultural worldviews. I was very moral. I very much was. But not I wasn't, it wasn't the condemnation of other cultures or other, I guess what I'm trying to say. There was definitely a pushback against sex, definitely, and vulgarity and a whole bunch of other things that was very painful. There's a lot of irony in your story. There is a ton of irony. What was so offensive about the pornographic material in the, in the 70s, it wasn't that bad yet. In the 80s, it got pretty, pretty rotten. Those are my years. I mean, these were my anorexic. This is the beginning of the anorexia. So I was definitely pushing back on sexuality and I was offended, I think, by my own, my own instinctual attractions to this. I mean, I'm looking back on it now. Yeah. And of course, I wrote about that in the memoir or the manifesto because I think it's very significant. I think my first published piece was about sex and gender. Was it detracting from the story? Was it, I don't think it was yet profitable. I mean, looking back at you, it was, it was not a problem, but it was to me then, definitely was to me then. That's, I think it's such an important part of your story. Yeah. I think so too. I mean, that's why I feature it. That's why I foregrounded it because I do think it's an important part. Yeah, I read your memoir with my, with my mouth open. Like, I didn't know this guy at all. You've been told for years that weight loss comes down to willpower, skip the fries, hit the gym, just try harder. But if that were the whole story, it would work by now. 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Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain. Weight loss by Hymns is not available in all 50 states. Well, Govy is the registered trademark of NOVO Nordisk AS to get started and learn more, including important safety information. Well, Govy clinical study information and restrictions visit Hymns.com. Yeah, and you know, I brag about today. I think it's great when I can get away with swear words to copy editors. I leave swear words and books and stuff, and I just wait for the copy editor. Sometimes usually the copy editor edits it out, but not always. Sometimes they let me get away with it. They do? Yeah, and so I use it. I think vulgarity is really useful, actually, as long as it's not used too much. You know, you can kind of use it as a seasoning. Yeah, that's how I use it. Provocation, and I do. I use it in my teaching too, and I use it in my writing. I heard you say that you will correct others' obscenities. I did, as a young teenager. I would literally go into the locker room and everybody was swearing, of course, because that's what kids did, and I would just correct everybody. It was awful, AJ. It was really, it was really, I was really, I was the annoying, weird, religious kid. I really was. And your parents weren't? No, not at all. And I think my parents were very compassionate with me, but they definitely were not, they were not prudish, and nor was my brother. I think Jerry was just embarrassed by it, because I grew up, I was this cool, athletic kid, and then I became this weird, religious freak that nobody knew what to do with. And you don't remember the trigger? What were you trying to fill? I think the trigger was puberty, frankly. I think what happened, I mean, I'm looking back on this, and you read the memoir, I think what happened was I was kicked out of Eden. I think my childhood was basically perfect, and I didn't want to grow up, and I saw sexuality, I saw my own sexual maturation as a exit from the garden, and I'm speaking methodically now, obviously, and I just didn't want to do it. And so the natural conclusion is you're going to stop, you're going to stop the sexual maturation, and of course you can, but that was the effort, and I pretty much shut it down for over six years. Your sexuality? Yeah, it came back, it came running back, which came running back, but, but after I was entered psycho, this is another stage of my whole thing, but after psychoanalysis, and I figured out, you know, this is a later stage, but this was really the origin of me becoming an intellectual too, is I figured out that people were driven by instinct, instinctual forces that were often sexual, of which they were not in control. And I was number one, I was the number one example of that in my own life, because I, if you would have asked Jeff at 16, why are you not eating, he would have said to you, I'm fasting, I'm trying to be a saint, and I was reading the life of saints, and I was into superpowers even then, both from the comics and from the lives of the saints. And so I framed all of the eating behavior, and religiously, and I think that was very sincere, and I don't question that, but there was this other thing at work that was happening, this this pushback on sexuality, and when I realized what was going on, that's when the sexuality came roaring back, you know, in my college years, in my early 20s, and so that distinction between what was conscious, the religious behavior, the religious beliefs, and what was unconscious, the sexuality, or the psychosexual development was profound to me, because I had never heard of the unconscious. Didn't. No. I was just a kid from Nebraska, there was no sense of the unconscious, there was no, the human was just one thing, was just conscious. But it didn't, your anerexia was basically cured by observing the unconscious. Yeah, then I was introduced to the unconscious. I was introduced to Freud, and I was introduced to psychoanal, but that was all in college, and none of that was available to me in high school. There was, there was no such model available. Were you not eating in high school as well? It was not. So I was not eating from about 13 or 12 till about 19 or 20. What did mom and dad have to do or say about that? They were, they were deeply disturbed because their, their boy was once an athlete, and now he was this skinny uber pious weirdo, you know, basically, and I'm using my own language there, but I think that, I think it was very difficult on them for sure, and it was, it was difficult on everybody around me. I'm sure of that. But I think that's what turned me, that's what turned around in, in the college, in the introduction to psychoanalysis, and that's really what made me think about all the things I think about today. It, it shows in your work. You grew up in tornado alley, just north of Kansas, and I think you've written that Oz was part of your psyche. Yeah. And you played the wizard, the college play. I did. Are you still the wizard? You're still the man behind the curtain? Probably. Yeah. Nobody's ever asked me that before. The wizard of Oz was the defining, certainly movie and and defining mythology of where I grew up. I mean, I literally grew up in a town, was destroyed by a massive tornado 10 years before I was born. So I grew up in the shadow of this monster storm. And so the Wizard of Oz, which of course begins with and ends with the tornado, made a lot of sense to me. And if you watch the movie, it's all about religion, it's all about the paranormal too. It is. And I of course wouldn't have articulated any of that as a kid, but that was deeply informative on my psyche. And when I played the Wizard, that was a high, that was a grade school or middle school. That's a grade school play. Were you good? What's that? Were you good? No. Do you remember the costume? Yeah, I was bad. I was bad. It was. Remembering lines? No. I don't remember the line. I mean, I just was bad, AJ. But that's what they had to work with kids, you know, in a grade school play. You were lucid dreaming, you're four and five, and you had a way of snapping out of it. Kind of like tapping your feet together. Yeah. Did you realize that you were learning to click your heels to go home? No. That's again, that was that that's in the memoir. I didn't know. I didn't know the Wizard of Oz connection. It never occurred to me that I had learned that in a in a movie, but I think I did. Yes. You played Hermes as well. Yeah. And that shows up. And you were personality. No, what was that costume like? Did you have the wings on the feet and everything? It was a kid. We're the fun. That's spandex. I mean, it was just it was awful. I mean, Hermes is a silver god. I remember that. Yeah. And then I remember that there was these demons in the background who were played by basically the kids who beat me up and it was it was just bad. It was awful. But yeah, I mean, I think I think I think the Wizard of Oz and the Greek mythology, I think they were deeply informative. Yes. Yeah. What play would that be that you were Hermes? I don't know. They would it would have been some grade school play again. Something some Greek story. Yeah. Was your town so small that like everyone had to be in the show? Yes. Yeah. It was small. Yeah, small. I mean, I had I had 64 people in my graduating class and that was huge. 64. That was really big. I think after that, I think in Jerry's class, there were like 45 or 40 and and there was only one class that was ever bigger than ours. There was like 68 or 70 or something. It was a small town. What's the town like today? This is Hebron. Yeah. It's even smaller. It's even small, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I you know, we had about 18, 1900 people that I think there was 16 or 1700 people in the town today. And I go back there, you know, twice a year. And it's smaller. And the school, the high school is what's called a consolidated high school now, which means it drew in from other towns. Yeah. Because it had to. These these little towns had their own school at one point and then they didn't. There's a story that you tell that I really like that could relate to is when you were playing safety and time stopped. Can't tell us that story. Yeah. So again, I was it's really hard to be a football player when you're anorexic by the way. Yeah. But I was I was and one of the positions I played was safety and I was pretty good at it actually. And I remember this one time. I saw the quarterback. I saw him pass and I went up for this this interception and everything just got real quiet time stopped. Everything I was is a slow motion. It was a classic kind of thing that people report in accidents a lot. And I remember the band and the all the noise just went away and I could maneuver my body and and then when I hit the hit the grass and it intercepted the ball, then all the noise came back and time started. And I I didn't think about that as a kid like what I didn't think about what was that and but that definitely happened. Well, it's happened many times. I could still remember time stopping at the balls. Just I know it's going to be there. Did it ever happen again? This is flow state to the extreme. Yeah. I don't I mean, I do think this feeds into like the contemporary work and that I don't think we think about these things. I don't think because it's hard to integrate that into a world view. Like how does that? You know, to go back to the Spider-Man stuff. I mean, this comes into the Spider-Man movies too. And I'm like, yeah, that really happens actually. So the movies and the science fiction I think are based on actual human experiences. But we're not we're not in control of those experiences. I can't reproduce the time. No, you can't. I can't will it. You've never hit that state when you're writing. I mean, because you're prolific. So writing for me is a really special thing. I you know, I wrote a whole book on writing called Authors or the Impossible. And I think writing is a time or a place where weird things happen. And people who really write, who really, really write, they know this and they kind of get into a zone and they drink coffee or whatever they do. They create their own little ritual and they get into a mild translate. And I you know, I've written about this. I think, you know, like my my poor wife, you know, she would interrupt me writing. And once once that translate's interrupted, you can't get it back. No, you can't. At least for that day, it's just gone. And so, you know, Julie saw me sitting in this chair basically doing nothing. But I was in this mild translate and I was writing. And I think it really does happen. And I think writers know that. And I think getting I think once you understand the trans and once you understand the writing process, then you can also understand why when someone interrupts you, it's really over. And you can kind of accept that in a way that you can't accept before you realize that. And you know, Eric Wargo, he talks about pre-cognition and. I was just going to bring him up. Yeah. I think that happens too. I'm not so much of my own writing. I've only, I've had one pre-cognitive experience that I think really was pre-cognitive. But it wasn't, it wasn't about writing. What happened? I don't write about this. And the person's now gone. So I, I suppose I can talk about it. It was a dream. You know, a lot of pre-cognition, according to Eric, happens in dreams. And this one definitely happened in a dream. And it was me at the front door holding the front door. And there was a storm coming from the other side of the street. And I, and I was trying to protect myself and my family and my house from this storm that was definitely coming. And that day, that very day, and I, I didn't experience the dream as pre-cognitive by the way. But that day, a woman came into my office. This was a previous institution. This was not where I'm at now. And she said to me, well, she shut the door. And she said to me that she was having a relationship with, with a colleague of mine. And she didn't want me to tell anyone. Why is she telling you? Right. So I responded, I mean, my own response, I walked home, and I said, I need to talk to the college counselor about confidentiality issues. And really, what I wanted to know was, did I have any legal responsibility to, to maintain secrecy? Because basically what happened was this woman sat a piece of information between us that was devastating to, to certainly this colleague. And potentially to me, if I, if I married colleague, what's that married colleague? Yeah. And when were you looking for a reason to tell? I didn't. I knew that if I didn't speak this to someone, it would come back. And I was afraid that I would get fired. And that it was, it was a family and a professional issue. But it also implicated my colleague. And it was really hard. It was really tough. And this is why I went to the counselor. And she said to me, she said, Jeff, you don't, you don't have any legal responsibility. And so what I end up doing was, and I, and as I walked back, it was either that day or it was the day after I saw the counselor, I walked and I remembered the dream. I think, oh, that's what that dream was about. And so the dream helped me do what I did, which was very difficult. But it protected, certainly, I protected me and protected my family and protected my-- What did you do? I went to the administration and I told them what had happened. Did they take action? Oh, no. But then what ended up happening, AJ, was the person who told me this eventually came to me and thanked me. Because she obviously said this, so somebody would do something. Yes. And I realized at that point, oh my God, I was supposed to do this. And it was really, really difficult. But it was the dream that really helped me to kind of-- what I'm trying to say, that placed all this in a context. So I think that was my one really powerful pre-cognition. And I don't experience pre-cognitive dreaming or pre-cognitive writing other than that. Do you write down your dreams at all? Not anymore. I used to-- I mean, you just-- you get tired. Yeah, it's hard. And that's why Eric-- I'm so jealous. He's got what, 21 years of dreams. I used to write down my dreams obsessively. And it was largely for psychoanalytic or interpretive reasons. And I just don't do that anymore. I mean, we can get into this. But I think, at some point, it's not even necessary. Really? You don't think so. I learn so much when I go through. Well, as a young person, as a young man, yes. That was very significant. I'm not so sure-- there's a lot to learn now. That's a fair point. Yeah. I'm tired, AJ. I am really tired. And I've written a lot. And sometimes I think I've probably written too much. And I just don't have much left. Yes, you do. Well, thank you for saying that. Thank you for believing that. I'm not so sure I do. Well, I mean, you're on your third career at this point. Eric's going to be something new. But I'm doing something-- it gets me away from writing. It gets me away from that. And that's useful to get out of there. I think so. It is for me. I think so, because I don't-- we can talk about this too. I don't think people read anymore. The thing about writing, which is so powerful to me, is these books will exist when I'm gone. They'll keep working with people. They'll keep doing their magic. And I can interact with a reader thousands of miles away now. And I don't even know the person-- and people write me all the time. And they'll say, you will appear to my dreams. And you did x, y-- like, OK, that's creepy. That's creepy. Don't say that. Don't say that. But OK, OK. Then that means what I wrote was effective. It got into you. And I think you are actually the magus here or the magis. You're really doing the magic. But I do understand that the books-- there's a certain openness to things that people pick up and then they act on that. So what I'm trying to say is, books are really important for me because I can work with people even though I don't know. I'm working with them. And I don't even have to be alive. They'll work in 50 years, just fine. But I am at a particular point in my life cycle, or where I want to reach people who don't read books. And books are a particular-- as you know, they're a particular genre. But one of my jokes about film and television is there are no footnotes. Well, there are footnotes in books. And they're really important. And it's where you can back up. And you can qualify what you just said. Well, you can't do that. No, you can go in a revise, a new addition. You can't do that. Yeah. And so it's a different set of challenges is what I'm trying to say. And it's much more intimate though, the book. I think so. I think reading and writing are profound. I think they're way more profound than we think they are. And I think there's a kind of potential paranormal dimension that happens. And what struck me with paranormal experiences was how many of them actually involve reading. I was like, well, this is a book. And we talked about this already with the Wizard of Oz stuff, or they involve a film, or they involve some kind of writing. Or the person is impelled to tell this story, or to write out this story. They're connected to writing in some way. It's interesting that you say that because in watching your show, and I see this with all experiencers, and something happens to them. The first thing they do, they don't go to Google. They go get the books, they go get communion, and they read. And I think it's because of that intimate connection. I've had experiencers tell me, particularly communion, particularly books like that, black communion, that that was the only place that they got what's the right word. I mean, they got support for what they experienced. And they realized that, oh, willy, in this case, willy, experienced what I saw. So there is this profound transmission, is another word that I'm looking for here. There's something profoundly transmission like that happens in books that does not happen elsewhere. And that's what I'm trying. I think that's true with Jacques Vallet, and Bertrand Mu, and Amy Michelle, and John Keel. I mean, a lot of the people we know, when we can talk about, there's something that happens that it goes way, way beyond any kind of mechanical notion of reading or writing. And I think that's mysterious. I'll give you an example of this. I just wrote an essay called The Flying Saucer in the Quest. And-- Where can we read that? Where is that essay? It's in ARC. ARC, it's online. OK. It's in ARC and religion, politics, et cetera, as is the subtitle of the-- But what's so significant about that essay is, I talk a lot about Jacques Vallet's original vision of The Flying Saucer, which he had in 1955 as a teenager. But he became a science fiction writer after that. There's something about that that results in his case science fiction. And then I also refer to this major religious leader in the essay. And I spoke to this person, and he saw a flying saucer. And then he entered a religious quest as well. And he had never put the two and two together, but I did. And I said, well, what happens after-- what often happens after one encounters a flying saucer is one goes on a spiritual quest or become a science fiction writer or what have you. And he looked at me, and he was just shocked. He was like, oh my god, my spiritual quest began right after I saw that UFO. And he became a major religious leader. In another country, not Christian. So I think there's some connection between these extraordinary experiences and the act of writing or the act of a spiritual quest or a spiritual sensibility that I think we don't understand. I agree. And later, if you don't mind, I'd like to talk about Kirby and PKD a little bit. Because I think you're 100% right. I think they lived it. Yeah. Can you take us to the pivot point where you're in seminary and you make the pivot? So the pivot, as it were-- so I was healed, the monks who trained me were very concerned about me. Because I was basically dying. I was down to 125 pounds. And what you see here is basically 220, 225. It's 100 more pounds. You're still like for Nebraska. I was dying. I wasn't eating. And the monks were very concerned. And one of their own was a psychoanalyst. And so they put me into psychoanalysis. And I immediately started having dreams and did the whole Freudian thing. And I realized that the anorexia was tied up with my sexual repression. And I ceased to be sexually repressed in the seminary. And that was, I guess, troubling for a lot of reasons around my vocation. that I assumed I had, but it was-- Well, a Benedictine psychoanalyst should have been able to size that up in five minutes. He did. He did. He did. Okay. He knew instantly. I didn't. Right. But I had a series of dreams over the months of the psychoanalysis or over the years that were very, very revealing to me and very, very significant. And I eventually did realize it, and that was my pivot. And so basically what happened, AJ was my-- I gained 60, 70 pounds in six months. I mean, I just-- I just blossomed physically. But as I was blossoming physically in my sexuality, it was also coming back online. And that's a problem, as you know, if you're going to be celibate and the whole vocation thing. And so-- But the seminary, they were so wise. And it wasn't about shedding the doors and turning you into a monk or a priest. It was helping you decide whether you had such a vocation. And so they understood very well the-- what was happening. And I then, you know, after I graduated from college seminary, I entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student. And that really took me into this, this. But that really was the pivot. It was really all around sexuality and religion. And I realized that religion is about-- partly, it's about suppressing that sexuality for religious reasons. And that some people can do that very well, for a lot of historical and cultural reasons. And other people can't do that and shouldn't do that. Do you think it's required to be pious? It wasn't my tradition. Yes. There was an identification between not being sexually active and being holy, who definitely was. So as you were coming back online, did you feel less pious? Yes. Was there shame? No. Good. No. The seminary where it was wasn't about shame. And I think they were just so wise and so good. There wasn't a moral judgment about it. But it was definitely-- I definitely did see a lessening of piety, certainly in my own life. The more I became a sexual being, yes, yes. And that, of course, informs the later work. Yes, it does. In a major way. Was that-- were you in seminary where that priest scolded you in the boys after a party? That he did what? Skolded you in the-- and the other boys after a party? I don't want to step on the punch line. So I don't know the story. Maybe you should give the punch line. It's the gay bar story. Oh, OK. Oh, yeah. No. So OK. I've only been to one gay bar and it was with this priest. I don't judge him in here. I'm from New York City, man. Yeah, yeah. It was Chicago, actually, is where it was. And it's just-- this would have never happened when I was in the seminary, actually. But it happened when I was in graduate school. And there was no-- there was nothing inappropriate that happened. But it did strike me that this was with the priest, obviously. And I didn't fit in, AJ. I know more fit into the gay bar than any straight guy does. I was completely out of the water. And you were. I was. But it was funny. I mean, the humor was like integral to the experience. It wasn't about some kind of moral condemnation, I guess, as we're trying to say. And I felt nothing but compassion for certainly the priest I was with, because he was doing-- I don't know. I don't know what his motivation was or whether this was in hiding, as it were, or in confidence or not. I just don't know. Do I write about that? No. No. Well, how did you know? That's none of your concern. [LAUGHS] OK. All right. I must have written about it somewhere, or somebody told you that. Yes. It's OK. The last thing before we go to break is your famous story, is Calcutta 1989, the night. Yeah. Can you walk us through it happen? Yeah. So I get asked that a lot, actually. But before we get to the night, I want to know about the day. It happened during the day. Yeah. During the day, I was very ill. OK. And by ill, I don't-- you know, it's a typical kind of gut thing. I mean, I was sick. And then at night, it was during Calipuja in 1989 in Calcutta. So there were all these what are called pondles or temporary temples around the city. And it's a big party, AJ. It's fun. And I was going to all these pondles in the city and seeing this goddess who is either-- is over this god and the god is either asleep or entranced or sexually aroused. There's different-- there's different stories to it. And then I got back to my apartment, it was probably late at night. And this happened probably early in the morning. And basically, what happened was there was some-- there was an energy-- and I mean a profound energy. There was so much energy that I thought something in the wall. I thought it was electrical and there was some kind of electrical malfunction. I thought I was being electrocuted. I mean, we're not talking about a subtle pious dream experience. We're talking about a major electrical-- electrocution really, a kind of spiritual electrocution. And you're awake? Certainly that was my experience. And I was also sexually aroused. And I had the profound sense that I should not come. In other words, don't ejaculate. Because it will end the experience? So I didn't. And the energy focused into my heart region. And it felt like a kind of black hole or some kind of portal just sucked into my heart. And then I had this out-of-body experience. And I was outside my body. It felt like there was a magnet up somewhere in the ceiling. And that I was just being pulled up to this magnet that was somewhere up there. And then I don't have any memory of what happened. And then I remember coming back to my body and I remember holding onto the bed, the banister, and trying to get back into my body. It was actually funny. I thought it was funny. And then I got back into my body and I got control of my body again. Did you click your heels to get back? Did what? Did you click your heels? No. I got back into my body, the clicking the heels thing was over, I think, at that point. I got back into the body and I just felt like all of this stuff had been down, I mean, we didn't even have the metaphor of downloading at that time, it's 89. So there was no public computer at that point. There wasn't this notion of downloading. But looking back on it, there was definitely this downloading of this massive amount of information that just flowed into me. And then I wrote my dissertation pretty much out of that same state. And we can talk about the dissertation after the break. But if he came my first book and it was a huge, it expelled me really from, from certainly Indian studies. But it was because of this mystical state. And that then feeds into my interest in scholars who have mystical experiences and what they do with them and how that feeds into scholarship. I think there's a, there's a kind of superhuman or a kind of esoteric dimension to a lot of things that kind of goes unnoticed. Why is there a transmission of information through a hypersexual experience? I don't know, but there was. I'm just curious, I don't, there definitely was. I mean, there's this whole tradition in India of Kundalini awakening that is often very sexual and very bodily, but it also is a transmission event. I've had a similar experience during meditation, which I'm not very good at and I can't, I can't get back there. I can't get back there either. I've never had this experience again. But that, that was a major kind of event because it was profoundly sexual, it was profoundly mystical or spiritual. But sexual without gender, without, without corporeal. Yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't any visual component to it. I understand this very well. But it was definitely bodily. but not bodily at the same time, I mean that sounds paradoxical, but that was really the case. But I think it leads into the books. I thought what I actually think looking back on it, because I've written about it and thought about it for that happened in '89. So this was almost 40 years ago. I've thought about it for those four decades. I really believe this was because of reading PKD by the way. I really believe all the books were transmitted into me then. And are there still books to be written from that experience? I don't know. That's a good question. That's why I feel like it's been so easy to write these books because they're just me expressing whatever happened to me in '89. Now, there are expressions that are based on reflections of historical materials. So these books wouldn't have happened without say mutants and mystics without the comics and the science fiction. So yes, they're about that, but they're also about this transmission that happened. And I don't think AJ, I don't think I had any context. Well, I know I didn't in 1989 for any of these books. And so I couldn't have told you if you would have asked Jeff in 1989 in November of 1980, what was that about? He would have just looked at you like, I don't know. That was awesome though. That was really awesome. And it made me interpret or it helped me to interpret the Hindu materials that I was reading in a non-reductive way. That because I realized that somebody could have a sexual experience and it not really be about sex. Yes. And that was stunning to me, but it was also obvious. That was obvious. I was like, yeah, that happens. It happened to me. I can happen to anybody. It certainly happened to these this textual tradition. I don't think people can understand that fully without going through it. No. It just blows. It blows our binaries as we say in the academy. It blows the way we split the world into the spiritual and the sexual. It blew my world. It blew my religious world where we do make this division between the spiritual and sex. And I don't think those two things are separate. No. When I came back, my wife was there. She was like, what was that? I said, I don't know, but that was fantastic. Well, Eric would say that you did have context that all of your creativity just came at once. We usually get it one at a time. I think Eric's right about that. I do too. Yeah. So you had one night. And when we come back from the break, we'll talk about how now you're spending all of your time documenting everyone else's night. Well, it's hot in here. And I've heard that the archive of the impossible is hot. So I've seen it on your show, The Archive of Rice. Yeah. Is it really shells to the ceiling? It really is. Is that really the place on the show? It's really like that. That's a literal place. I thought there's no way that's real. It's 20 foot. Okay. So the archives themselves, it's three stories. You're looking at three stories. And that's actually what it looks like. And they're stored off site, which means not on the university campus, and a special building that's literally three stories tall. And the archives of the impossible, or the center for the impossibles is called now, is about 2% of the archival holdings. So it represents 2% of what you're seeing there, but it represents 50 to 60% of research interests. Sure. So 2% of the archives, about a million documents. I mean, it's pretty big. It constitutes over half of people who come to Rice to do research. So it started with Jacques. It started in 2014. I remember it. I was in Berkeley. I was being taken to the airport by Jacques. And Jacques asked he had just met with Gary Nolan, by the way. And I remember Jacques asked me for help to place his archives in a university somewhere. And I said, yes. Well, he was worried about what? Well, he didn't make it clear then. But since then, particularly in his journals, Jacques has made it very clear that he wanted to place his own files in an archive to avoid the silos, the secrecy, basically, that defines a lot of the government programs, but is very frustrating to a researcher. Because to do research on any topic implies public knowledge. Sure. And you can't speak about things that are secret or confidential. So Jacques was very frustrated with that. And so he asked me for help. I didn't even think of Rice. I just said, sure, I'll help. And then I went back to Rice and we have a long connection with NASA, by the way, and space exploration. And so it just made a lot of sense. And so I approached our director of the archive, our director of Woodson Research Center then. And he said, yes. And so we negotiated this gift with Jacques for about four years. Why did Jacques choose you? I think this will sound a little narcissistic, but I think he chose me because I had written about him in a book called Authors for the Impossible. And he was very impressed with that essay. He knew that I was not someone who would reduce his thought to some simple explanation. And that I deeply appreciated both the humanistic and the scientific. And I think he felt that that was the place he wanted to place his own life work. And so he gifted us pretty much everything in three different gifts from 2018 to I don't know, 2020, 23 or so. So it came in three sections. And so Jacques is our first gift. And that's about 50 boxes. Why did it take four years? People are, and I'm not speaking just of Jacques, but people in general are very slow to give up a life work. And it's it's a poignant and powerful conversation to have with people. And basically the conversation is around, it's usually people in their seventies or eighties. So it's it's partly about mortality. Sure. And I think that's why it took so long. And as the gifts went on with Jacques, in particular, they got more and more significant. So the first gift is just background information. And it's not that significant. The second gift is correspondence. That is significant because it's pretty much everyone in this world going dating back to the fifth, 1950s. And then the third gift is his files, you know, his case studies. And he held back his contemporary case files, particularly the stuff he's doing with Gary now. So that might come later still. Well, he's journaled about you. Did you read it? Well, if you're talking about the journal, the diaries, I read all the diaries. There's seven volumes now, right? And I definitely have read those. And including about myself and about his gift to us and how he thinks about archives, which I think is correct. What's his handwriting look like? What's it? Jacques is one of the most, I don't know, his handwriting per se. Well, yeah, I do know because he's one of the most organized people I know. Really? Yeah. I mean, these boxes came to us incredibly organized already. And he had a whole filing system and he had a way of organizing his correspondence and his case studies that was already super organized. You know, we've got now their gifts. The archive is referred to them as paper bombs. That is not Jacques Valle. Right. If anything, Jacques is super or super organized and they, the archivists have to do very little, actually. So I read that there's an embargo in some of his work, 2028, 2031. Who places that embargo and Jacques the donor does. He does. Yeah, we do not do that. I personally think Jacques wants to be dead to make this available. And he definitely wants it made available. He wants it a publicly accessible archive, but he doesn't want to be around. And I personally think one of the reasons he doesn't want to be around is a lot of the files, AJ, which I think you'll appreciate are him debunking case after case after case. And you know, he's famous for that, as you know. And it's hard to do in some cases, but also easy to do in others. And you wrote a whole book called Messengers of Deceptive, about it, but we have all of the original material that he wrote those books for, out of, you know, we have all those case studies. We have, we literally have the cab receipts, you know, it is major synchronicity with Malkizadak. We have that in the archives. So, I mean, I've seen it because I had to help archive it, but other people can't see it because of the donor, the wishes of the donor. And what the, what's that research center does, it's led, it's led by a woman named Amanda Fokie now. The donor has legal rights, the copyright over the collection, the university does not claim copyright, but it does claim ownership. And so, there's a legal document that the donor signs, but the donor can at any point access the material. So, I've read that you can request seeing some of the archives. You can, as a researcher. Most of the, most of the collections, not all of them, there are two or three collections that are on Moratorium, by the way, because of the donor, but there's 25 collections or about, they're about. And most of them are totally public, which means a researcher can come and request to see X number of boxes. And those boxes will be driven from the offsite archive where you saw me in the show to Woodson, which is a room in the library. And that's where the researcher's actually done. It takes about 24 hours. And there's a computer thing that goes up and down those three stories and selects the box out. And, oh, wow. I mean, it's impressive. I'd love to see it. It's awesome. I mean, I hadn't seen it as a faculty member. I had been at Rice for almost 24 years at that point. I've been there about it 25 years now. And I had never seen it. You didn't. No, no, because what faculty do, faculty who use the archives, which is not a lot of us, we simply go to Woodson and we request things and then they're delivered to us, you know, on campus the next day. But we don't go offsite to see the actual physical archives. Have you thought about digitizing any of this yet? Okay. It's a question. I get a lot. Here's what people maybe don't think about. There are moral or ethical reasons why it's tough to digitize stuff. We are to answer your question. We are digitizing particular collections for what's called a metadata research center. But we have to remove what are called identifying markers. We have to remove all addresses and phone numbers and names and places. And that takes money and that takes time. And so we're in the process of doing that. But we can't just scan everything and make it publicly available because we're bound to something called the IRB institutional review board. And it's for moral and ethical reasons, particularly around medical records. Sure. And there's a lot of medical records. Well, you have John Max work. And he was a psychiatrist. Yes. So those are those are medical records. And they're from the 1990s, which means these people are still alive. That's right. And so we have to be really, really careful about that. Do you have all his videos as well? I know it and his family is very protective of him. I know that personally. So for you to be entrusted with that work. Yes. We so the executive director of the Center for the Impossible, I work with her virtually every day as Karin Austin. And Karin was John's assistant. So there's a direct line from John Mac to Jeff Kriple. I'm trying to say and I say that with with humor and humility. But there is through Karin. And it was Karin who really chose us. I remember her showing up at the back of the library with with a U-haul. So you didn't reach out first. I did not reach out to Karin. Karin reached out to me. And she saw very quickly that this was the place to place John Max archives. And we don't have, by the way, we don't have all of John's archives. We have 150 boxes. We have everything from 87 to 2004 when he died. All of his, all of the UFO stuff, we have all of it. But we don't have this stuff before that that Harvard has. But the family was very insistent that things after 87 or 88 or whatever were not going to Harvard, but they were going somewhere else. And we were the rice university was the place that was chosen by both Karin and the Mac family, by the way. Has Harvard ever come back around? I mean, they were borderline abusive to John. Of course, they came around. Yeah, they did not ultimately challenge his tenure or his job. They retracted. But it was after a year of basically being literally on trial. It was a very public. I mean, the chair of his department was giving parable interviews. The damage was done. The emotional damage was done. And I don't, I can't speak for that university, of course, but there. It was a very different scene in the 1990s than it is in the 2020s. And John was basically a scholar of one. He was a person of one who was studying this phenomenon and was insistent that it was not psychopathological, that there was something to it. And he wrote all these books, which I I've all read and have thoughts about. I'm not concerned about my, you know, a question I also get is am I concerned about rice coming after me? And no, I'm not. And partly it's because of rice. I think rice is very capacious and generous in terms of intellectual freedom. But also, I'm a weird religion professor. I don't know anything to begin with. Where John was very much in a medical school and he was a psychiatrist and he was exposed. He was exposed to things I'm not exposed to. And again, I just think it's just very different in 2026 than it is 1994 or 1995 whenever he was put on trial. And it's I didn't know until I saw your show that Karn was an experienceder herself. Yeah, big one. Big one. Big time. Yeah, I watched that episode, which I guess was episode two. I've only seen one and two. I think third comes out tonight as we record this. The third the third comes out next Thursday. Next Thursday. And I watched that episode with Google Maps on my lap and and research and all of it lines up. Man, it was wild. Karn is not, you know, Karn is not just an experienceder as Mike put as Mike Casanova puts it. She's wicked smart. He's insane. She she really is. She's very articulate. And I've had her into class and I've written about Karn and she's ideal. She's not just an experienceder. She's articulate about why this is important and why Mac was so interested in it. And you know, her and I both and we can get into this too. We we both work against what we call the fear narrative, which is basically it's always bad. You know, it's always about horror or demons or something nasty and mean abduction. Well, not just abduction really anything. I mean, anything in this realm, all the anomalous stuff, it's always it's always bad. And so like all the government stuff, all of the it's always bad, you know, and Karn's, Karn's whole stick, which is my stick too, is that there's just transformation involved. It's not just bad. It might start out in fear or horror or terror, but it morphs into transformation or transmission. And there's this other really positive component too that just gets sliced off. And we're trying to that's really what the what the archives of the impossible or the Center for the Impossible is about is that that whole narrative that involves the fear or the terror initially, but then morphs into transformation or transmission. I think John would have been very happy with your approach to this. Did you know him? No. I think he would. If you read if you read max stuff, if you read his book on abduction in 93 or 94 and you read his later book, Passport to the cosmos, he's read what what he's really about is fundamentally pushing back against the scientific narrative. It's not just about science or or reduction, but it she's also pushing back against the the religious narrative. And he's saying there's some some other kind. There's a third worldview that's trying to develop here. And we don't actually have a language for it. It doesn't exist. And that's really what I think John Mack was about on some level was that and that's certainly what what we're about, you know, it's certainly what the series is about as well. It's certainly what the center for the impossible is about in my own mind is that third space. I remember you told a story that you were lecturing at Harvard and an elegant gentleman stood up and asked about aliens and you thought that might have been John. Do you think it was? That's certain it was. What was his question? What was the lecture? The lecture was on Hindu mysticism, and it was Sudhir Kakaar, by the way, it was the lecture. And I was there. I taught at Harvard from 2000 to 2001. What was that like going there after they turned down your application to study there? That's why you went to University of Chicago, right? Yeah. Harvard said no. Yeah. That was the height or the nadir, depending on your view of the campaign against college child. And Harvard was interviewing me basically because of Harvard College child. That was a year long interview, basically, that's what it was. And I didn't know this. Yeah. And they asked me to come back for a second year. What year was this? 2000, 2001. So college was still very active. Very, very active. And I said no. I'm not coming back. I'm not doing a second year. And I did it mostly for family reasons. Our girls were young then, and I was living, we were living in a place called New Wilmington in Pennsylvania. And it was really hard for me. It wasn't hard for the girls or for Julie. I mean, I thought I was like irreplaceable. Turns out I wasn't. Yeah. Turns out they didn't need me. So it was hard on me, but it wasn't hard, so hard on the family. And so when Harvard asked me to do it a second year, I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And the truth is that the campaigns against me got so bad while it was at Harvard, because I was at Harvard that I just didn't want to do that again. I didn't want to live like that. I think if it was 2001, you were kind of getting to the end of your rope with all of it. I was. It started in '96 and I wasn't at the end of my rope. Do you want to give just two sentences of what we're talking about just for the audience with Rodney Collins? Yeah. I don't want to put words in your mouth. Yeah. So my first book was my dissertation, actually. It was my first book called "Colley's Child, the Mystical and the Arotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna." It was very much about that experience we talked about earlier, but it was also, I didn't mention that experience. It was just in the background. It was very much about the texts around the life and teachings of this Hindu saint. I basically made the argument that his homoerotic orientation was significant and was central really to both his spiritual teachings and to his charismatic genius, really. That just blew the circuits. Yeah. You didn't see that coming? I saw it coming intellectually. Yes. I did not see it coming emotionally. Because if this were a Catholic saint, it would have been the same. Well, I wrote the same about Jesus. I know. Well, I know. But they don't know. Yeah. I think the same thoughts about any charismatic religious figure, pretty much I think the same thoughts, but they didn't know you're right. It was awful, AJ. When I say a campaign against me, it was from January of '96 to really the summer of 2003 or so. I mean, this was not a flash on the panel. This was many, many years of opening my email and just getting a flood of hate mail and really concerned, concerned American Hindus, concerned about my safety actually and writing me out of the blue and just don't go here. Don't go there. Don't go to this. Of course, I listened to them because they were obviously very concerned and I was receiving lots of explicit pushback for this, which is all to say my intellectual life began in the midst of controversy and really flame and I was pretty much expelled from an entire culture and country. I mean, the book was debated in Parliament. Yes. I mean, this was not a small thing. No. Twice in Parliament. Yeah. And I was just a kid. It's a young 30-something PhD, just fresh out of graduate school. So either you spent 15 years studying this culture that you loved that no, it's repudiated. Yeah. And I couldn't do it anymore. And so by 2003 or so, or 2000, pretty much by the time I moved to Rice, 2002, I was done with it. And by done with it, I mean, I was exhausted. And I had PTSD and I had seen therapists and I mean, I had done everything that a human being can do and nothing was resolving it. And so I ultimately left in about '03 or '02, somewhere in there and turned to the American counterculture and wrote the history of Iceland. Really because of that, I couldn't no longer go to India, but I could go to Big Sur and my joke was, well, the hippies aren't going to kill me for thinking about sex and religion. And I was absolutely right, by the way. Not only did they not kill me, they wanted to tell me stories. Sure. They wanted to tell me more. I was like, you know, I can't write about that. And they just kept telling me stuff and I was like, oh, my God, they were just telling me stuff. And by stuff, I mean, they told me story after story of some extraordinary experience they had that usually involves sexuality or spirituality and kind of blew my circuits as it were. Before we get to Iceland, do you remember John's alien question during your lecture? He wanted to know. He asked Sue there. Sue, there was a friend, was a colleague, was a hero of mine actually, an intellectual hero of mine. He asked Sue there whether he thought there were aliens and Hindu mysticism, you know, something like that. And Sue, they didn't know how to respond. No. I'm sure he stumbled over that one. And as any academic would, it just struck me because out of the blue, and there was this elegant gentleman in the back, I'm absolutely positive that was John back. And of course, I didn't know him then and I didn't, I didn't have any interest in certainly aliens or UFOs or anything like that at that point. So how did you go from Hindu studies to Iceland? Yeah. Well, because of Colley's child. Well, here's what happened. So the man who co-founded Iceland is a man named Michael Murphy. He read Colley's child and he loved it. He read it correctly by correctly, I mean, the way I intended it. And he called me, he called me out of the blue in the June of 98. I think it was. And he said, this is an amazing book. You've really talked about this metaphysical shift. It had to be a sob of a phone call, like thank you. It was very confirming and then he invited me out to Iceland and I went out in November of 98 for the first time and I saw that community and saw that community of intellectuals and they were very not only interested in these very issues, but were deeply committed to them. And I did find it very confirming and I found it heartening. And so when I wrote, Iceland, it was really to save my soul. No, it really was, I really wanted, no, I didn't want it, I was saving my soul. And the interest in all of the weird stuff that we can eventually tell you about was really because of people, I just talked to human beings who just told me all these incredible things that happened to them. And I realized, A, they were not making this up, the stuff had really happened and B, academics had no way of talking about it. We always, and by we, I mean historians and scholars of religion, always reduced it to some power game or some social representation or something with the brain or whatever the explanation is and I realized that none of it really works. And it's not that they had the answer, they just had the experiences that were so significant. And so I set myself after the Iceland book to sort of understand this and that's what then produced authors of the impossible in mutants and mystics and so forth and so on. And that's why we're here. I hope, I think, I think that's why we're here. I think so. So you became professor Xavier. Yeah, I mean, that was, that was my, you know, I grew up again with Marvel comics and the X-Men by the way were, it was a B level. It was. was not good. But it became good in '75 or whatever, whatever year it was. It was re-invited. And it struck me, again, we can get into the Mutants and Mystics book, but it struck me that, first of all, it's Professor Xavier. It's an academic who's also disabled, by the way, and highly telepathic. So they were integrating a lot of parapsychology, but also academia into the mythology. And it just struck me as a very powerful way to express what I was trying to do and what I'm still trying to do. A lot of those kids in the story are, like Spider-Man, they didn't ask for it, they didn't want it. They're freaks. They don't fit in. They're social deviance. And it often, by the way, involves sexuality. And so I rocked it immediately. I mean, immediately in 2007 or 2006 or whenever that was. And it also, this is actually, this is funny. I tell this story as well. It involves the Esland history, because I realized that the Esland history is really the history of the human potential movement, which became the new age and now the spiritual but not religious. But really, the human potential movement in its origins is really about people with special powers who are evolving. And I was like, holy shit, this is like the real world X-Men, you know, the X-Men was just this like mythology on the East Coast, wait, yeah, East Coast, told by a bunch of men for kids, but the human potential movement was really for 20 and 30 somethings and was, they man it. It wasn't, it wasn't just a story for them. And then what happened was I went to this movie, I went, I remember it was, it was an X-Men movie, 2006, because I remember the year. It was probably days of future past, I think it was. And I came out to my minivan or our minivan. And this X was on the parking lot and it was just claiming, it was just like there. And I was like, why is, what is that doing there? And I picked it up and it was, it was just a piece of cheap jewelry, you know, you know, that someone had dropped. But it was an X. It was definitely an X. You still have it, don't you? I still have it. I framed it actually. And it was, so I realized, okay, so this was all part of the same process, this kind of creative process in which I realized that I was writing about the real world X-Men and then I was watching this X-Men movie and then this synchronous, so there was something about the world that was calling me to live out this myth. And then what happened at AJ was, no, days of future past was later. So then what happened was, somebody can look up days of future past, what year that it was. But what happened was, is that the screenwriter who wrote that movie contacted me and said, Professor Criple, blah, blah, blah, where you signed these copies, we're going, we want to give mutants and mystics out to this end of the shoot party, to all the cast and the characters. And I was like, are you kidding me? Of course, I'll do that. So I signed copies to everyone. Of course. And I mailed them off, they were like 12 or 13. And then I mailed them off. And my first thought was, some guys, I just lost 12 copies. But then I looked up the address and it was in Beverly Hills and it was real. And then he sent me pictures of the boxes that they gave out. And so, and then what happened was, later a director of one of the, of the new X-Men movies, I knew him. His name's Josh, Josh Boone. And I said to Josh, I was like, because this screenwriter was no longer writing me. And I was like, well, why aren't they writing me? And Josh says to me, he says, well, I don't know, Jeff. He says, but I know when I agreed to do the new X-Men movie, they handed me one book, and it was yours. So I was like, okay, that's significant that the book is in the stream of the mythology that's appearing on the screen. And it's, it's not direct. There's not a direct influence, but it's, it's behind there somewhere. Do you feel that 11 year old boy come out a little bit? You have to. Yeah. Yeah. That was a very proud moment for me. Of course. Yeah. That was awesome. It was great. I was like, okay. And it wasn't just, it wasn't about writing a letter to some comic book. It was like, this Hollywood. It was like major figures, major actors and directors. They were reading my stuff. And, and when the screenwriter wrote me, he was like, listen, I'm sitting on set. I remember the email. He says, I'm sitting on set with Magneto and Professor Xavier. And I'm reading them new and simplistic. Wow. So I know through this correspondence that this was done, you know? And, and again, I don't have any proof of any direct influence, but, but other readers do. I mean, other readers write me and they like, well, this is this happened here and this happened there. And this is because of what you wrote. What a joy for an old nerd. It's not just Professor X Magneto. It's Jean-Luc Picard and Gandalf. Uh-huh. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. I know. So when I say Professor Xavier, it's not, it's not just me blowing steam. It's like, no, that's, that's like really going on. That's like really behind. And so that's this link between science fiction and the paranormal. I think is a real one. I don't think it's, it's, it's, and it's religious. And, you know, I do think there's something about the study of religion. Like, it doesn't bother me at all that a lot of this stuff is faked. Of course, it's faked. That's what religion is. It's show business. It's fake. It's fake to you make it. Yeah. That's, that's it. And a lot of religious stuff is totally fraudulent. And some of it's real. And it's all, it's all mixed together. And the fake stuff leads to the real stuff. It's, there isn't this binary. It's not like it's empirically real or it's faked and fraudulent. It's like it all goes together. And it doesn't bother me. And, but I think it's because I'm a, I mean, religious studies. I really do. I don't think it's, I'm not in the sciences. I'm not a, I don't care. I've heard you say that to be a good fraud, you have to be intelligent anyway. Yeah. And I often talk about the placebo effect. I mean, you just fake it. You just make shit up. And then it works sometimes. And it does. We don't know why it works, but it does. It works for me. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of this stuff that, you know, a lot of the weird stuff that we talk about or you talk about on your show. You know, some, a lot of it is fraudulent or, or can be fake, but, but there's also a there there. There's something to it all. And again, I don't think we have a language for putting those two together. We just, we just turn it into two binaries. So about science fiction, do you think Jack Kirby was an experiencer? I mean, we can agree that PKD definitely was. I think Kirby in particular. So I read Kirby as a kid. I didn't, I scorched it. No, I'm, I think Kirby, well, I know Kirby was fascinated by the paranormal. My parapsychology. I think, you know, Chris Knowles calls Kirby a shaman with a pencil. And I think he was. I've called him a time traveler. Yeah. He did a story about the face on Mars 40 years before. Yeah, that's, that's so Chris Knowles. I mean, Chris is really, you know, our gods were spandex kind of author. And he loves Kirby because of this actually. And I think a lot of Kirby's fantasy is, is real experiences that he had. And by real experiences, I mean, just experiences he had. I think those experiences themselves were fantastic. And by fantastic, I don't mean not real. I mean, they're expressing something, you know. What about Phil K Dick? Well, Dick too. I mean, so for the, for your listeners, so you've probably seen a movie based on a Philip K Dick story. Almost certainly. Hollywood is probably made a dozen films now at a Philip K Dick. Philip K Dick was an American science fiction writer who died in 80, 81 or so somewhere in there. But he had a massive in rush, massive metaphysical in rush about 1970, January. February, February of 1974, and then he wrote these novels afterwards, which are basically barely novels, but it's all about this, it's he called a valus, vast active living intelligence system, and Dick came to believe that a lot of his science fiction was true and that it was from the future, and that what some writers like himself were doing was accessing this sort of supermoving mind that existed in the far future that was retrograding or retrocausing inspiration into particular people in the present, and he was one of them. I'm constantly directing people to his talk that he gave in 1978 in France and Metz. In Metz, where I think fans were going there for like a meet and greet, and he goes on a three hour, takes you on a three hour tour of his alternate reality and seeing the future and the people and the faces and the crowd are priceless, but it's brilliant. Yeah, I think there's a lot of discomfort in the audience, because they thought, oh, you know, he's just a great science fiction writer. No, he intended this. See, this was like serious to him. And Translator gave up after a while. I think the matrix is largely indebted to Philip K. Dick. Yes. I think a lot of later science fiction ideas are basically Phil Dickie and ideas. He did attribute these ideas to this valus, this supermind. But I don't think Hollywood knows what to do with that. You know, they love the earlier Philip K. Dick. But they don't know what to do with the later Philip K. Dick, who was like, that was Philip K. Dick. That's who he really was, exegesis. There's films in there, but how do you make them? Yeah. And it's, I mean, I talked to Josh about this sometimes, Josh Boone, the X-Men director, and he loves the later Philip K. Dick too, you know, but it's hard. It's hard. How do you, how do you do that? How do you make a film based on basically a religious idea of the future? And of course, you can do it. Like days of future pass, for example, it's all about the future. It's all about pre-cognition, the whole thing. But it's turned into fantasy and science fiction, of course. What happens when you think the science fiction is real? Which is what Dick thought. He thought it was real. Oh, yeah, he thought, Dick is so interesting. I've called the exegesis. I think it's one of the finest pieces of mystical literature in English. And the reason I say that is it's really funny. Yes. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He could step out of himself. But you can see him interpreting this experience in various ways. And he never lands. He never lands because he doesn't know. And the profound sense you get out of the exegesis and the later novels is that maybe I don't remove the baby. The paranormal is about inspiration. It's about interpretation. It's not about landing. It's about creating another worldview or creating another story. And that's really what Dick Dick was about. He just story after story after story after story. That's ultimately what killed him, by the way. Yeah. I mean, I think Eric has said that every paranormal event can be connected to something that has to do with time. Certainly makes sense in PKD's life. Eric makes a lot of sense of a lot of writers actually. Yeah. But PKD in particular. And I keep telling Eric about Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. I mean, he would love Friedrich Nietzsche. He doesn't know anything about Friedrich Nietzsche. But Nietzsche was all about this too. And it was before there was science fiction. No, there was just weird German philosophy at this point. But this notion of time is circular and knowing the future. And it's all in Nietzsche early on. But it gets articulated and thought about differently in the 20th century and science fiction for certain. I've heard you compare Nietzsche to Magneto. Yeah. How does that connection work? Well, if you just listen to Magneto, it's Friedrich Nietzsche. It's pure Nietzsche. The Holocaust survivor? The angry, the anger at humans. And the affirmation of the mutant or the Superman or the superhuman, it's pure Nietzsche. And certainly the Holocaust stuff, the anti-Semitic Holocaust survivor stuff, that's really a correction, I think, of a particular reception of Nietzsche, which I think is just wrong. Nietzsche died, by the way, in 1900 and went into basically a psychotic state in 1889. So he really wasn't even here from 1889 on. And then the Nazis definitely loved Nietzsche and read him in a particular way, which I think is a profound misreading. And so I think what Magneto is is a kind of reclaiming of Nietzsche that is extremely powerful actually. And actually the two kids who invented Superman in 1938, both Jewish kids, they were thinking of Nietzsche. That's who invented the Superman, was Nietzsche. Is that your theory or do you know that? Because that's a great story. Well, Uberman, Superman, I mean, and Nietzsche was already being talked about in American English in the early 1900s or 1903. And later, I mean, George Bernard Shaw, who I know is English, he writes a play called Man in Superman in 1903. So it's in the, it's in the cultural lexicon already 35 years before the comic book character. And you know, they just came up, I mean, they didn't really know it. They were kids, you know, kids from Cleveland. And so I do, I do, I really do think a lot of the Superman myth is basically the Uberman. I'm going to reread it now with Magneto in mind. Well, yeah. Magneto is Friedrich Nietzsche. Yeah. You have Whitley Strieber's letters. Have you looked through those? Yeah. Those are amazing actually. Tell us about one. That's a sound. One of the reasons I say they're amazing is a lot of them are illustrated. And these are letters that he received. Yeah. So basically what happened was Whitley Strieber was or is a well-known and famous horror and science fiction writer. And in 1987, he published a book called Communion in which he relates his own alien abduction experience in very graphic detail. Oh, yeah. This is a horror. Yeah. And Whitley made the mistake of putting his address in the back of the book because he thought, Oh, it doesn't people. And Communion became a bestseller on the New York Times list. And he wrote the numbers differ, but they probably received about a quarter of a million letters. Wow. And Anne is late wife. Well, these late wife whom I knew, I knew quite well, she took it upon herself to read through them all. And she did and she kept 3,400 of them. And those are the letters we have in our archive. And you can see Anne's notations, you know, over them. And of those 3,400 letters, probably 50 of them maybe are illustrated with drawings or paintings or ink drawings. And so people didn't. And when you read through the letters, what the sense you get reading through the first of all, there are about a lot of things other than just abduction. There are about a whole bunch of things. But they recognized Whitley's Communion as a book that was deeply supportive of what they had experienced. And a lot of times they experienced the very entity on the cover. And they were shocked by that. And when you read these letters, they're basically letters asking Whitley to call them or to write them back. And of course, he can't because there are a quarter million of these. But but this is the profound sense you get from the letters is this this human desire for I don't want to say communion because that's too cute of me. But there's some kind of community that there's some kind of cross-cultural transmission that's going on there. And you know, the other thing about communion that I think is so significant culturally, it's really the origin of the icon of the alien. It is. I mean, We see that around here, but that didn't really exist as such until communion came out. And basically, though, the cover is this painting, by the way, the painting is only about this big. It's small. And it was done by a portrait artist who was basically painting a crime scene. And Willy originally went to the psychiatrist to basically figure out this crime scene because he was basically bleeding from the anus. And so again, a very serious kind of traumatic experience that he was trying to figure out. And he was relating this entity to the painter who was then trying to paint it, you know, to try to figure out the person who had basically committed this crime. And it turns out it wasn't a person. It was the entity that he calls the visitors in the book. And the thing about Willy's books is he doesn't really land on the alien hypothesis directly. He calls them visitors and communion itself really begins with this line about the human mind. And so you always, he always leaves open the door that this is some aspect of the human mind that is interacting with this. And then he goes back and forth on that through multiple books. And we wrote a book together later. I wrote a chapter in Newtonsonistics all on Willy on the visitor, where I called the visitor corpus. And then later, we wrote a book called The Supernatural together. So I know Willy well. And he's really, he's careful about, he's careful about the alien hypothesis, but he also is very explicit about what happened to him. And you know, my, my line that you've probably heard on other podcasts is Willy's main sin is that he just told, he said too much. And I don't mean that as a condemnation, I think that's remarkable. But if he wouldn't have said everything, he wouldn't have been attacked the way he was. But then we wouldn't know. You just wouldn't know. No, he changed everything. Do you think he regrets? Do I think he was right? Do you think he regrets some of the details he put in communion? No. It doesn't seem to. I don't think he regrets it. I don't think he could do it today. It's just like I couldn't write Callie's child today. But do I regret it now? You don't. I think he was absolutely right. Good for you. But I couldn't do it. No. Yeah. So I think regret is a difficult, difficult category. I don't think writers regret what they wrote, but they understand well that some things are possible in certain moments and at other moments they're not possible. When you're going through John Max files, did you see similar stories to Whitley's show what you did? Yes, I did. Because this would be, well I guess, let me just tell you one story, because I'm not sure I tell this in the books, but one of the people who had an abduction experience, very similar to Whitley's, was Carrie Mullis, and Carrie won the Nobel Prize for Genetics in 1993 for the Polymer Race Chain Reaction. It basically made possible the human genome project, and Carrie is no longer with this, but Carrie told me this story in person. Carrie was a genetic geneticist, Berkeley I believe, somewhere in the Bay area, and he had a home. He had a cabin up in Northern California, and so he drove up there one night, and he got in about midnight, and he had to pee like we do when we drive a long time and drink coffee. And so he takes a flashlight, and he goes down to his outhouse, it was an outhouse because it was a cabin, and this raccoon, this glowing raccoon, says, "Good evening, doctor, perfect English." And that's the last thing Carrie remembers for the rest of the evening, and then he wakes up, he comes to, and he's walking down the road to his cabin at like 630 in the morning or whatever time it was, and his clothes are not wet, so he wasn't outside, he wasn't aware he was. So he had some kind of abduction experience, and so he, what happens is his daughter calls him and says, "Dad, I want you to read this book called Communion." This happened to me on our cabin property, that's what she says, and she didn't know about her dad, and so the dad and the daughter meet through this book again, through this Communion book, over these two abduction experiences that happened on their cabin, and the daughter directly related what happened to Willie to what happened to her, because she was gone as well for some time, and then her dad told her the story, obviously, and he, Carrie writes about this to hold chapter in his memoir. He does? Yeah, it's called "No Aliens Allowed," that's the name of the chapter. It's in a book called "Walking Naked in the Mind Field," okay. He writes about it, and basically what Carrie says is, he says, "Look, you can't do science with this, but it happened, it really happened, and that to me is that third space again, no, you cannot do science with this, and the reason you can't do science is that you can't replicate it, you can't do it over and over again and measure it or control it, but that doesn't mean it's not part of our reality." Then Carrie has a whole story about a Japanese colleague who abandoned a conference and went back to Japan because of basically the hitchhiker effect, basically, so I just, I just have heard so many stories like that, it's just after a while you're just like, "Okay, okay. This has happened," but you don't know what it is though, right? And Carrie would never say that, I mean, but it's something, it's something, something powerful, could it just be processing trauma? It doesn't explain things, I mean, that's an easy, I think it is related to trauma, by the way, but I think that's our language, I don't think we know what trauma is, you know, because trauma can be a portal or a door to some kind of experience, it really comes down to whether you see these things, you see the brain as producing everything, or you see it as a receiver, you know, and that there are certain moments like trauma, for example, that make the brain and the body more receptive to other realms. When I'm doing a story on poltergeists, the first thing I'll do is go back in the home and see who's having a hard time. Yeah, that's what I. Which is okay, let's take poltergeists. Okay. Okay, I was once at a Parapsychology Institute in Germany in Freiburg actually, and we were talking about poltergeists, and I was talking to some psychiatrist, and they go into a poltergeist home, a haunted house, and the first thing they do is family therapy, and the family is like, what the fuck are you doing? We brought you in because we have a ghost, and you're talking about how I feel about my father, and the psychiatrists are just adamant. No. If you deal with these emotional and sexual processes, this will go away. If you do not deal with it, it will not go away. So again, the poltergeist stuff, yes, there's this emotional sexual component to it, but things are still flying around. So what do we do with that? You know, I mean, bodies are still getting scratched. Curtains are still catching on fire. Vases are still exploding, you know. So somehow the mind can exteriorize itself through these traumatic moments. So we can understand the trauma, it's what I'm trying to get at, but we can't understand the excursion or the relationship between mind and the matter, mind and matter. But it's something's happening. Yeah. Doesn't, does that go against the filter hypothesis to receive a hypothesis? Or can they make sense? I think the filter hypothesis, so, you know, the filter hypothesis is a way to theorize a lot of this stuff, but it doesn't explain like psychokinesis. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't work for every situation. So I think anything we come up with doesn't work, though, for particular cases. And so what I think people do, particularly debunkers, what they do is they say, well, this didn't happen. And I'm like, well, it did happen. happen though. And if it happened, it has to be part of the world too, and it has to be part of the science too. You know, I mean, scientific mind is going to think about all of reality, not just some of it. It doesn't have to be ghosts, but something happens. I think once we theorize it, I don't think it is ghosts, by the way. I don't either. I think it's living human beings. I think it's people. But I think people are way more than they think they are. I think we're capable of stuff that scares us, frankly. But that's a theorization of the phenomenon. You know, it's not the experience itself. Like, I don't. Wait, how do I say this? I don't think the experiencer is the authority over their own experience. I can put it that way. How do you mean? Well, like, take a near-death experiencer. I don't think the afterlife looks like that, certainly for everyone. It looks like that. For that person, that person had that near-death experience, they experienced it that way, but that doesn't mean that's what the afterlife is. You're acknowledging that the afterlife at all? I'm saying that those experiences, those near-death experiences happened and they do. They are part of our reality. They are. But whether that's the afterlife, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, to me, that's an interpretation. That's what I mean when I say the experiencer is not the authority over his or her own or their own experience, is I don't. I think they need the theorists to come in, just as much as the theorist needs the experiencer. I don't think theorists are omniscient or infallible either. Listen, I know. I know that. I can tell you that. But the experiencers don't have the theory either. And they want it. They do. Or they just want someone to listen. Well, they want that. I mean, so I know a lot of experiencers and a lot of people have told me stories, and I know from these conversations they desperately want someone to listen, someone to say they're not crazy. But they don't have control over their own experiences, you know, generally. And they don't understand, like this is what the series is about. The television series, they don't understand either how all of these things were probably connected. Like, how is the abduction experience connected to the near-death experiences connected to the telepathic experiences connected to the pre-cognitive? I think they're all connected. But once we go down that road or we go down that rabbit hole, then we start to theorize this and we'll come into conflict, I think, with individual experiencers. But that's the nature of all theory. That's the nature of all models. Speaking of the television series, you said something that made me laugh a while ago is someone asked you about Skinwalker Ranch and you said smart people stay away, but dumb people go in and say I'm going to study this and you know what? Let's make a television series. And then you made a television series. How are your cameras different than what's going on at Skinwalker? You know, first of all, I'm not sure where I said that. Skinwalker, the television series Skinwalker Ranch is too scientific. Too scientific? Yeah. They think that series in particular thinks that if you can prove something scientifically, it's real. And I don't believe that for a second. I think a lot of this stuff escapes our scientific net completely. And I think that's perfectly fine. So I would say that what this series does that the Skinwalker Ranch series does not do is it doesn't do that scientific thing. It doesn't, it just doesn't. But it doesn't do the religious thing either, the literalist belief thing. It holds back and it tries to say how are these all connected, which again, I think requires a kind of model that that we don't have. And what I think, what I think is happening here, this will go down a lot of different rabbit holes. What I want to say most of all is what we should do with the experience or is listen, should just listen. Don't reduce that story to your secular or scientific worldview or to your religious worldview. Just don't do that. Just listen. For people who are going to watch Archive X looking for answers, they're not going to get them. They're not going to get them. You're going to get stories about people. They're going to get theories though. They're going to get, they're going to get ideas that will provoke them. But they're not going to get clear answers because there are none. You know, as I as I joked with you earlier, people who are certain scare the hell out of me. People who don't have a sense of humor scare me. And I'm sure they're not right. And so people are going to get a sense of wonder and a sense of awe, but also a sense of humor and a kind of capaciousness from the series that, but they're not going to get certainty. Don't, don't watch it if you're looking for certainty. It's, it's really great. You said that when you watched the first cut, you cried. I did. What was going on on screen? This was the telepathic autistic daughters who were interacting with the mothers. And it's just as apparent. I just, I just found it very moving. It was. I had the same reaction, by the way, for the abduction one, which just, which just dropped yesterday. I, I found those stories deeply emotional. And the, the filmmakers, AJ, kept me away from the experiences, by the way. I did not interact directly with the experiences. I wanted to ask you about that because I noticed it that you were not on screen with any of them. No, but I said, I wasn't there. They were talking about their story at rice, by the way. They flew them in and, and they were, I set up the founders room. I mean, the filmmakers were there because of me, but I, they didn't want me there with the experiences. Hey, I think they didn't want the experiences distracted by having to deal with Jeff. But B, they wanted me to interact with the researchers about the experiences, but they wanted to maintain a certain distance. And I don't think ultimately that distance between the theorist and the, and the experiencer is true. But I understand that. I understand how that works for, worked for the filmmakers. But, but so when I see the episodes, you know, and I see these stories, and I say, I cried, I mean it. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. I mean, I think that they're deeply emotional stories. And what I, what I really think that's happening, AJ, with a lot of these experiences is that, okay, this is my theory of the paranormal. Basically, what is happening is that the person lives in a particular story, a particular worldview, and that story is no longer working so well. And the experience is happening to basically push that experience or out of that worldview and to tell a different story. And it's up to that person or the culture to tell a different story. I don't, I don't think the phenomenon cares or knows what that story is. But that story doesn't work, doesn't work anymore. And you see this over and over again in these experiences. The experiences will say things like, I didn't believe this. It's just didn't fit into anything that I, I thought. And I think that's the point of the experience, is to show you that your own worldview is limited. And then it's up to you or up to the, the theorist and the, and the experiencer to come up with a different story. And, and so that's what we're trying to do in the series is come up with a different story essentially. It's really well done. Let's take a quick break and I have some more questions about the show. All right, I've got a question for you. You still get up at 4 4 30 every morning? Yeah, I do. Wow. So you're either reading or writing or doing something. What are you doing lately for that perst hour? That I'm either writing or what I call reading to write. I think those early hours, at first of all, it's not a virtue. I guess not. No, I, I get the same amount of sleep as everybody else gets. I go to bed early around eight, you know, so eight to four, I'd say eight hours. I mean, it's all, it's, you just shift. I really believe in writing, and I think those early hours are the best time to write, at least for me, and they're the best time to write because it's the easiest to get into a trance. Is it? For me, I mean, a mild trance. I don't mean a meditative trance. I don't mean a serious trance. No, but I'm always looking for tips to how to be more efficient with my writing. I think getting up early works for two reasons. One is it's easier to get into a mild trance state, but also nobody will bother you. I'm usually doing it at night when no one will bother me. Well, other people have other bodily cycles. You know, some people are night owls, and of course, I recognize that, but the early morning really works for me just because of that. You know, and I'm managed to be productive over the years, so it's worked. You know, and also editors are really important, by the way, you know, to have a sympathetic person to bounce ideas off of and to write for is like really important, particularly in my world. Speaking of editors, for your wrestling book, you had an appendix that you cut, didn't you? Probably. Do you remember that? Sort of. Oh, it's on the X-Men, though. It's on the X-Men, that's what I published it in a place called alter ego, which was a comics fan scene. Oh, okay. Yeah. Why did you cut that? It was probably too long. You know, when you write books, what you what you were told or what you learned very quickly is it's all about length and and page numbers because the bigger something is the more they have to spend to copy edit it and the more they get cost to publish it and then the sales rates go down because it costs more money and I kind of think so. I mean, it is a problem. For you. Also, that appendix is probably, um, you know, one of my, well, my my doctor, Mooder, my my dissertation advisor in graduate school was Wendy Doniger and Wendy used to say that she's like a mother hen and there are multiple books in her at different stages and I found that to be true and and this appendix, which I, I cut, it became then mutants and mystics. You know, so you I'm working on you, I what I find is that I often write stuff that's not for the book. I think it is. It's for a future book. That's what I'm trying to say. Yes. And there are multiple books happening all at once. Um, I thought I saw you say you were reading John Mac again recently. Why were you reading John's work? Well, one of the things I don't think this is a secret. One of the things that Karin wants me to do and that the Mac family wants me to do is finish John's last book. Wow. Yeah. How far did he get? You wrote a book, um, after passport to Magonia, which came out in 99 called passport to I'm sorry, passport to the cosmos. Yep. It was based on passport to Magonia. Um, passport to the cosmos. Then he was working on a book called When World Views Collide. And the way the book is set up, the first half of it is very much about John's trial at Harvard. And then the second half is where he thinks we're going. And so when World Views Collide is this, this reference to the scientific psychiatric community that's reacting against John and he calls his experience a passion play. I mean, he uses Christian language to talk about this even though he himself was very Jewish. Um, and so when World Views Collide is very much about this collision of these two World Views, and then the second half of the book is this third World View that he thinks we need to go to. We we're not going to go to to the traditional religious world view, but we're not going to go to the materialist reductive scientific world view. We're going to go to something else. Did he articulate what that was? No. He did not. Well, that's a big lift. So the thing about the thing about I really spent a lot of time with Mac. The thing about Mac's earlier work. Well, first of all, he was a he was a nuclear activist in the 1980s and he was writing about Lawrence of Arabia. And he was really interested in intercultural understanding or kind of cross cultural understanding. And he took Lawrence of Arabia as a really powerful example of this. And then he was interested in this anti nuclear activism. And then he got into UFOs and abductions. And if you read his early work, it's very much a kind of psychoanalytic listening. And what he's really struggling with in abduction and then password to the cosmos is the is the fact and it is a fact that the experiencers usually begin with some kind of terror. And then that terror morphs into transformation. So we call it human alien, alien abduction and transformation. And it's putting those two together that is the real challenge for him and these books. And I think for when world views collide is how do we think about those two things together and how do we well, how do we do that? That's that's the question of the book. And so the reason I'm so involved in John Mac is true. And they want me to and by the I mean Karen and Danny and the Mac family. They really they want me to bring it up to the present. They they don't want the book just to sit in 2004 or whatever wherever he left it. They wanted to speak to 2027 or whatever year it comes out of 2028. And so that's what I'm doing now is I'm thinking about certainly a lot about John Mac, but also about our present moment where we're at. But you don't really like to define that. No, but neither did Mac. If you again, if you read Mac, I share a lot with John Mac. I mean, he really foregrounded the experiencer. And he was convinced that there was not a psychopathology involved and that he was really convinced by the comparative patterns that he saw. And so am I. And these books are filled with discussion of sexuality and hybridity and penises and vaginas and orgasm and it's very very psychoanalytic. And so this hooks on to all my earlier work on sexuality, which I I think is absolutely central here. And we don't understand that again. And we're moving towards some kind of transformation that certainly involves all of this, but is not just this. So I actually I really like John's work. I think it's fantastic. But it certainly deserves a bringing it into the present. Yeah. And my other my other conviction, AJ, is that people don't read anymore. I mean, we get into this, you know, I mean, people would read this. They'll read this. You finishing John Mac's work, yes. That's great. You don't think so. I am surprised how many people you talk to that no, John's work and jocks and all. Yeah. I am always struck, though, by how a lot of the conversations, particularly around the UFO, it's just ignoring the earlier literature. It's just it's just not aware that we've been here before. We've had this conversation before. And can't we can't we acknowledge that conversation and and and move move move the conversation forward or apparently not. Apparently we we we we have to reinvent the wheel as it were. And I don't I don't think we have to reinvent the wheel. I think the wheel's already been invented. So you think we've been this far as close to disclosure mainstream mainstream UFOs? I don't think we have. My view about disclosure and ontological shock is that human beings have always been ontologically shocked. And disclosure is a perfect translation, by the way, of the apocalypse. And apocalyptic thinking has been around for millennia, not not the last 10 years. So I think this is ancient and and you know this all this conversation around and I know you have this conversation with Diana about religion and traditional religion. I think a lot of religion is just one ontological shock after another. I think that's what creates a new religion. You do deny the the earlier ontological shock and you have another ontological shock and you have another ontological shock and you have another and so I think that's where we're at as as a species is where we're becoming aware of all the ontological shocks that we've had, and I think the alien stuff is just really just another way of talking about ontological shock. And to the extent we don't keep in mind these earlier ontological shocks, I think we do ourselves a disservice. Do you think shock was right about his control theory? And UFOs manifesting based on what's in the zeitgeist? I think religion has always been about control. Sure. I think human beings have been controlled for as far as we can see back. I know I tell a lot of bad jokes, but one of my jokes is the greatest conspiracy theory of all time is called the humanities. If you want to be suspicious of everything forever, just study the humanities. You will never believe anything ever again. That's true. And so I think being suspicious of the cultural narrative, whatever it is, is just part of being an educated person. I think that's, and I think what the conspiracy theorists do is they shove this suspicion of the cultural narrative and they become certain of a particular answer to that. And I think that's just nutty. I don't think there is a particular answer to it. But I think the humanities and intellectuals in general have been very suspicious of cultural narrative for a long long time. Well, I think that's the struggle with finishing John's book is is no definition. I mean, was he trying to define it? I would consider him more of a believer than you. John, he wasn't a believer in the, it depends on what you mean by a believer. Well, I mean, sitting down with the girls at Ariel School, he was very receptive to the religious narratives and the understanding of the experiencers. But what's, again, what's striking about the abduction book and password to the cosmos book is how they integrate psychoanalysis and a kind of suspicion of those cultural narratives as well and aim at a kind of theorization of some third worldview that is on the horizon and that isn't yet apparent. So yes, I think he definitely listened to the children at the Ariel School, but I think he also would have asked questions about their experience. And I think we should. I'm not, you know, I'm a historian of religions by training and by that, I mean, I'm interested in the broad comparative conversation, not a specific answer to it. So I'm not actually interested in Mahayana Buddhism or Vaishnava Hinduism or Roman Catholicism or whatever, whatever you want, but they're all part of this painting that I think is like really important. And I don't think we've had that conversation yet. And the thing about this, and this might, this might surprise you, the thing about the history of religions from my own training, it has a deep connection to writing and a profound connection to fantastic literature or what most people would think of as science fiction, that there is this awareness that the magic, the magical is real and that writing about a worldview is itself part of the process, it's religious in nature. And so when I say I'm a historian of religions, I don't mean that in a secular anthropological sense, I mean that in a weird, fantastic science fiction sense, but it's that whole picture, it's everything back to the cave paintings, you know, and it's evangelical Christianity today, and it's childhoods end, and it's everything, you know, it's not one thing. And again, I don't know where that one's going. And maybe where that's going is we don't know. I think about AI here, and I don't mean to be popular with AI, but I think AI gives us an ability to do this broad comparative thing in a way that hasn't been possible before. It's good for pattern recognition. Yeah. Yeah. And I think people have the thing about the study of religion, it's come a long, long ways in 200 years. We know a shit load about pretty much everything, but individuals don't know much about everything, but we do. So it's that species-wide scholarly or comparative reach that fascinates me, not the individual expertise. In the other religions, I mean, growing up in New York Italian Catholic, I'm aware of all the miracles and certainly have to recent, but you know, all of those. Do you see those stories in the other religions as well? Letitation and. Yeah, I grew up, of course, Roman Catholic too. And, you know, at least the story I heard was that Roman Catholicism is Roman Catholicism is true, because only miracles appear in Roman. Well, that's just bullshit. That's just nonsense. I know. Miracles happen all over the world in every tradition and every culture. So to me, the main comparative sameness is in fact the miraculous or the paranormal. And the content or the revelation or the scriptural is in fact what's different. And so that's why I'm so interested in the impossible or the paranormal. It's not. It's not because it's cool, although it is, it's not because of podcasts because there is, but it's because of this global similarity that I think is ancient and global and very human. I agree. Third volume of your trilogy is. I've heard you say the soul is a UFO or the soul as a UFO. What's the actual title? The soul is a UFO is the way the title is. The bomb, technology and the end of all things. So you say the apocalypse and disclosure are the same word. Yeah. I guess the apocalypse means disclosure. It does. It means uncovering. Right. Yeah, what people don't understand about. First of all, the trilogy. I mean, I should speak to that. The trilogy is about the new story that I think is in fact forming and it's forming around science. And I think we. You know, the first volume is called the physics of istics. It's about physics and cosmology and the big bang and quantum physics and the fascination that the quantum theorists had with mystical literature, by the way. And I think there's a reason for that. And then the second volume is what reason? Well, I think that they saw very clearly that there was a role for consciousness or subjectivity even in physics. John Wheeler certainly did. There's a kind of idealism or the idea that consciousness is fundamental to the natural world, which they saw very. I think they saw that very clearly and that was weird, by the way. That was weird for a physicist to see that, to think that. It from bit was weird. Well, John Wheeler was weird. There's a lot on John Wheeler, by the way, and the physics of mystics book. And he's the best kind of weird. Wheeler himself was very anti-paranormal, by the way. He was? Yeah. Yet consciousness is fundamental, but. I know, I know, I know. It's ironic, but physicists in general are often very anti-paranormal, but their ideas are crazy batshit. And they're often very paranormal ideas. And so, you know, one of my jokes is why do the physicists get all the good stuff and why don't scholars of religion take that stuff back? And I really think that. Because the stuff the physicists say, it's just so idealistic and so mystical and so potentially useful here, but they turn it all into into physics, and we're into cosmology or science. And so that's the first volume. And the second volume is called biological gods. It's this idea of evolution, which is really key to a lot of people's understanding of religion and spirituality today. And the third volume is called the Soul of the UFO, and it's on the nuclear bomb again and technology and the end of all things. So it starts with cosmology and ends with what we call eschatology or the doctrine of the end. And I don't know what you want me to talk about there, but I want to know what you mean by the end of all things. I mean apocalypse. I mean, but does your apocalypse have to be the end? Okay. I remember it's the end of all things. Right. It's the end of all separate things. Okay. I don't think things are separate. And I think what the UFO phenomenon is showing and what a lot of mystical literature implies as the things are not separate. It's what's the end of all things. Things as objects as separate things. But it's also the end. I think the apocalypse is the end of a world. It's the end of a particular, secular, scientific world view. And I think that's what the UFO phenomenon is about. But it's also the bomb. I grew up in the 60s and 70s. And I grew up actually in the anti-nuclear movement. And that still could end the world. That's how I grew up. We thought Russia was going to send a nuke every day. Well, that could still happen. And you know, entire cities can be wiped out. I mean, entire hemisphere can be wiped out. I mean, entire ecosystem can be wiped out tomorrow. And so to me, that's the real danger. And you know, everybody wants to say how positive and wonderful sciences and techno. I'm like, yeah, but it created the bomb. Yeah. It could end everything instantly. Why is that a good thing? Why is that? I just don't get it. And I grew up imagining, you know, I know you were born in '72, I think. I was born in '62. I just thought there was going to be a nuclear exchange and that I wouldn't live to be 40. Of course, 40 was an old man. There's no way to see 40. Well, that's 2002. I mean, I didn't think I would live that. I assumed it would end in the '90s or the '80s. And I mean everything. I don't mean it would end. I mean, it would just be gone. And that's still a possibility. So I think if you go up with that nuclear fear, I think the UFO thing makes a lot more sense. A lot of my own UFO dreams in particular are really about the end of the world. They're not about anything else. You know, it's ships appearing in the sky to usher in the end of an age or the end of the world. And I think that's the case with a lot of these apparitions and a lot of these appearances, particularly around nuclear sites. I think that's what it's about fundamentally. So you think about the end of the world? I do. As a real-- as a practical-- OK. So that's a good question. So if you study the history of religions, people have been talking about the end of the world for a long time. Yes. And it's never come. Yes. So when people talk about the end of the world, I'm like, oh, here we go again. But we have the technological ability to do that now. I think that's fundamentally changed things. You know, when they talked about the end of the world in the first century of the common era, there were no nuclear bombs. There are nuclear bombs now. There are thousands and thousands of nuclear bombs. We could end everything. So I'm really concerned isn't the right word, horrified, but by that. Was it Mara Kumio said that deep down, everybody is expecting the end of the world to come? Of course, it does. You know, one of the things I often say is we're organic beings. We all die. The world ends for all of us. And that's the-- I think that's the origin of religion. This focus on death and destruction and disease, and we just end. And I often get asked, well, what about the soul or what about the person? AJ, I don't actually believe in the person. I don't believe in the soul. You don't believe in the soul? I do not. Do you separate that from a consciousness? Yes. OK. I think immortality is collective. You do not think it's individual or personal. And I think souls do last. I think they're definitely as communication after death. But ultimately, I don't think so. We're just-- we go back to the ocean as a drop. I think so. I think so too. Yeah, but that's a fundamentally different view of the afterlife than, you know, I'm going to see grandma. I'm going to see-- I don't think so. Yeah. No, you're not. You're going to go back to the ocean. Yeah. So, well, one of my favorite lines in this book-- I just finished this book called The Physics of Mystics. And there's this great line in it by Irwin Schrodinger, who was a quantum physicist. And he was asked if dogs or maybe horses, if dogs have souls. And he said, of course not, either do human beings. Yeah. But what he really believed was that human beings returned to the light, returned to this ocean, you know? And I think he was right about that, actually. That's what my instinct tells me. And that is a religious notion, by the way. That's extremely common in a lot of religious world views, this idea that souls go back to some kind of super soul or some kind of ocean. And intellectuals often land there, too, by the way. Do you think there's a conscious purpose for us landing these bodies? I do. I do, too. I do. Do you think we choose it ahead of time? What's that? Maybe. I mean, certainly there are people who believe that we choose, you know? But what do you believe? I don't believe anything. And by that, I don't mean nothing. I mean, I just don't know. I just don't know. But I definitely think human beings-- I think we evolve. I think human beings have some kind of purpose. I don't think we know what that purpose is. I think we're part of each other. We're connected in a profound way. And I think there is something we can call God, something we-- people often say, well, you're an atheist. And-- I've heard you say, you believe in God. I do. But I believe it in this collective-- It's not a man with a beard in the sky. No, no, it's not. No, so I think I am an atheist in a relationship to a lot of images of God that people have. I'm like, yeah, I don't believe in that God, that God sucks. But I'm not an atheist, you know, in the sense that I don't believe that there's something ultimatum. So-- and people have a hard time. That's that third way again, you know? I think people have a hard time with that. But I'm like, OK, but that's just being honest. You know, I mean, OK, you have a hard time with that. OK, so what? What's the most common criticism that you get from your work? I don't get a lot of criticism from my work today. I get a lot of love. You get a lot of love. Yeah. Well, that's nice. It is nice. I don't think-- I don't think people realize how radical I am. That sounds selfish of me or narcissistic or something. But I think a lot of this stuff is-- there's a profound sexual element to it. And I don't think people see that. I don't think people realize what I actually think. Because I often don't say that. I suppose it's my fault. But by sexual, I don't mean biological or instinctual. I mean, super-sexual. I mean, something's going on that is really dramatic. And biological and evolutionary in some way. And I don't think people realize how skeptical I am of all these religious answers. But also of all the scientific answers. I'm skeptical of everything. Well, I know that. People don't think you're skeptical. Again, I'm so used to being-- for a decade or so in my early career, I was attacked for not believing anything, which was totally wrong. And now I occasionally-- there's a occasional debunker. There's an occasional evolutionary biologist that comes after me. But it's very occasional. And I think people see correctly that I'm basically trying to change how we think about the human. I really want to push the conversation forward. And I think people detect a lot of affection and love in my work. And I think they're correct to do that. Because it's all about-- it's all about positive movement or positive conversation. It's not about deconstruction or criticism. It's not. And after your first episode with telepathic autistic children, halfway through, I said, uh-oh, there's going to be criticism in comments about this. And it was such a positive. episode. It was very human. Yeah. And to tell the stories of these mothers and their daughters. But I, you know, I think the, this is where Diana and I, Diana Pasoka and I really work together on this, there's this positive nature of things that gets erased. And the debunkers or the skeptics in particular, it's so predictable. I know what they're going to say. It's, it's so boring. It's so boring. And we've integrated all of that. I get that. That's all correct. It's priced in. It's like, okay, but we get that. That's part of it. It's like, okay, now how do we, how do we talk about the autistic children now or how do we talk about the abductees or how do we talk about the precogs? You know, that to me is a much more interesting conversation than taking this apart. And often the debunking strategies, they're so unbelievable. It's not just that they're boring. It's that they're completely unbelievable. You have to believe A, B, and C, which is total bullshit, I suppose to X, Y, and Z. It's like, what? That doesn't, it doesn't work. I don't mind the debunkers as long as they don't want to shut down the conversation. Of course, they always want to shut down a conversation. That's what they want to do. And that's my problem. That's my problem with it. And that's why they aren't on the show, by the way. I mean, that's because of me. I take full responsibility for that. But did the showrunners want to put skeptics on there? Originally, we were talking about the skeptical voice because, and I'm like, don't do that. That's just so, no, it's so ordinary. And look, I have, I have my skepticism about the telepathy I do. Good. But which is fine. Yeah. But why put those mothers through that part of it? There's no reason for that. The, the experiences are so used to being dismissive the mean. Because she reads it every day, that mother. She gets the emails. And I just, that dismissal and that demeaning, it's just wrong. And the experiences themselves are very I think they are really having those experiences. And they're just telling us like it is. And it's up to us now to theorize or interpret that. And the skeptical questions will come in. And they're important. And they're part of the conversation. But they're part of the conversation. That's the point. Let's have the conversation. Let's not shut it down. And what, what a lot of the skeptics want is to shut down and to stop the conversation. And whether they know that or not, that's the effect of those strategies. And that is what I object to is that shutting down. Not the, not the reasons themselves, which of course, I think are one are great. But just as part of the conversation. I, you know, I would think that in in those 150 boxes of Johns, there's plenty of cases where he didn't buy it. But this can't be a single case where he was dismissive of anybody. Well, and so was Jacques. I mean, a lot of those, a lot of those case studies, basically, as messengers of deception, it's basically Jacques showing that the particular religious movement or the particular cases is didn't happen or or not so. And that's just baked in. That, of course, of course, I want him to do that. I love, I love that. Yes. I love messengers of deception and Jacques nailed a bunch of stuff in that book before it even happened. And I was like, that's fantastic. So let's do that. But so with Jacques, you know, Jacques thinks that there's a there there, you know, in the the UFO phenomenon. And so do why. So the question is always how, how do we affirm that they're there and do the criticism or the debunking? And of course, you can do both, but, but you can't study something that you say didn't happen. That makes sense to me. Yeah. So you and your mom really saw that UFO, you think? Mom and dad. Well, you were five. Yeah. It was mom and dad who stopped the car and I didn't know your dad was there also. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. And so was my brother. I asked Jerry about it. He's like, dude, I was three. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, that's probably right. I don't remember it. But yeah, I think mom and dad really stopped and really did she tell you more of that story. I only heard you mentioned in passing. No, she didn't. And we, she told me that story. We were watching a bad Ford commercial. They were it was a it was a UFO on a on a string that they were hovering over some kind of Ford pickup truck or something. And she said, Well, Jeff, do you remember the time we saw a UFO? And I was like, what? I'm like, no. And she why she told this whole story about going up to Yangton, which of course, I remember, you know, I, of course, the cousins at Yangton. And through Northern Nebraska and and the she saw or they saw or we saw a rectangular UFO that just hovered there. No, I have no memory of that. But that didn't become part of the family door. No, they didn't talk about it until that bad commercial, you know, in 2010 or so. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, they just came out. It's like, what? Yeah. I have just have a couple for you. Yeah. So you tell your grad students that they shouldn't study comparative religion till they've lost at least two worlds. Yeah. I guess yours were Catholicism. And what Hinduism? I mean, the tontra Hinduism I lost too. But I also lost secular science. And I've lost many worlds. And I, I mean, personally, I've lost many worlds. But I think I've seen this in many people if they don't lose a worldview at all, they'll never become scholars of religion. Because why would you? Why would you study another religious? Well, they don't come comparative scholars of religion. Okay. They might become scholars of that religion. And they just want to lift up or or affirm that particular worldview. But they don't really become comparatives because there's no reason to. And if they've lost one worldview, which is usually a religious worldview, that they were born into, they've probably just jumped into another worldview. It's probably secular science. They think now that evolution or biology or physics or whatever the science is has the answers. And I just, I just don't, of course, think it does. And, and, and when they lose that world, then they become real comparatives in my, in my mind. By which I mean, they don't have answers. They're really about comparing many worldviews and not assuming the truth of one. I didn't expect that answer. It's a great one. Well, that's the answer I always give. It makes sense. It makes total sense. That's the thing. When you talk, it makes a lot of sense. Next episodes, we've got near death experiences coming up. So the next episode is pre-cognition, which leads into a whole bunch of rabbit holes, and then there's talking to the dead, and then there's near death experiences, and then finally, there's angels and demons, a kind of religious interpretation, I think, of, of these experiences. That's something that's happening a lot more lately is attaching spirituality to the, to the phenomenon. Yeah. You know, my, you, I'm sure you've heard this on, on other podcasts, but what are my comments is that I've never met a demon who didn't look like a suffering human being. Sure. So I don't like the demonic reading. I think people have negative experiences, and they have demonic experiences, for sure. But I think ultimately, demonic interpretations just ends up putting judgment and suffering upon suffering. And I think we need to like stop that, and pull back and, and stop, stop hurting each other. And I think a lot of paranormal experiences, we talked about this, I think, is because of trauma. I think people are hurting other people, and people are being hurt by life, and, and, but that this suffering acts as a kind of portal into, into these other dimensions, or into this, this greater reality. So it's not that suffering is, is, is, is inherently bad. Sometimes it's, it's, it results in good things, but it's still suffering. It's still trauma. I've, I've talked about it as, um, if with this universal consciousness that the suffering is a tear, it's just a tear. So it, it's a wound. And that's why things will manifest, because we're all part of it. I, you know, my, my example of this is always the near death experience. I mean, the, the fact is that near death experiences are inherently traumatic, because you almost died. right, but you've also seen and had this astonishing experience because of the trauma. Right. And now you don't fear death anymore. Now you don't fear it anymore. So you can't reduce the near death experience to the trauma, but the near death experience would not have happened without the trauma. And I think that, I think, is the key. And I think it applies to all of these experiences. Like, I don't think you get telepathic children without autism. You don't. I think autism is really significant. It's a significant form of trauma or suffering. The results in these telepathic children. I mean, children can have telepathic experiences. I mean, human adults have telepathic experiences all the time. But I don't think we generally talk about them. And I think they get suppressed for a lot of reasons. But I think something like autism is a particular form of trauma that results in these phenomena. You had one mother on that I hadn't considered what she said was, once we learn language, we lose that ability. And I thought it was interesting. These autistic children can't speak. So this is a survival mechanism. This is, you know, the thing to talk about there is the children who remember previous lives, the court cases, generally memories of previous lives appear around three or four, the acquisition of language. But they're gone by five or six. So they depend on the acquisition of language to vocalize them. But they also depend on a particular stage of life in which they're then suppressed. And I think the autistic telepathic kids are a lot like this, although that autism never goes away in their case, you know. They don't have language. So I do think there's this relationship between language acquisition and these anomalous experiences. It's a good study waiting to happen, what parts of the brain are lighting up, with these children versus the language centers. I bet a correlation would be found. Yeah, and again, to go back to my critique of science, science is always this third person external, you know, a study of this. But it's not this first person experience of it. And we need to put those together somehow, you know. Yeah, I don't know how to do that. I mean, I think they're there are beginnings of that. But I don't know how to do that. Archivex unexplained is on AMC Plus. Everyone should watch. It's great. Last question for you. So you had your one night. I had one day. Most people don't get one at all. You spent over 40 years chasing that one night. Is one enough? I think so. But I tried to recreate it, tried to have it back. Like I'm sure you did many times. So whether it's enough or not, I mean, it doesn't come back. I mean, some people are just set up though to have it many, many times. It's like unfair. It's not fair. It's not fair. But they'll say part of me, you know. One of the views and religious studies is the once born and the twice born, which is from William James. And the once born of those that are always happy basically and life is good and the twice born are people basically are fucked up. But who have some kind of religious conversion experience and they see, oh my god, this is amazing. And so I think I'm much more like the once born and I think the twice born are the people who have many, many experiences like this. So it's okay. And I'm very Buddhist about this too. I don't think it matters, frankly. I don't think it matters that I don't have these experiences. Jeff Criple, thank you for coming in. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you, AJ. Bye everybody. Jeff Criple, we covered go cards, a Hindu saint, the X-Men, a talking raccoon, and the end of all things. And I looked up all of it. The archive is obviously real. The rice keeps over a million documents and UFOs and the paranormal. And Jacques Valais' case files are in there. And some of them are sealed until 2031 at his own request. And Jeff thinks a lot of it is Jacques debunking cases. And I'd pay to read that box. Now they're raccoon. Jeff says a noble prize winner lost a knight to a glowing raccoon that said, "Good evening, doctor." It's in Carrie Melissa's own memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998. Jeff got the title a little wrong. "The raccoon" is exactly right. The X-Men's story I can't check. Jeff says a screenwriter handed his book to the whole cast at the rap party. And I can't find anyone from the movies saying so on record. We have to take his word for it. But his word has been good all day. His one night enough. He says yes. The admits he spent 40 years trying to get it back. I had one day like that. And I can't get back there either. So I believe him. I'm not neutral, but I admit it. Archivex, unexplained phenomenon, is on ANC+ right now. I just started watching it. I think you'll definitely like it. It's also on Sundance TV. Jeff's books are at JeffreyJCryple.com. That's K-R-I-P-A-L. And everything I mentioned is linked below. Until next time, be safe. Be kind. Know that you are appreciated. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] I play Bolivia's an area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and the paranormal bars. As well as mirrors in. So I'm saying it like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth. My friends. And it never ends. I know it never ends. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]