Today, I'm talking with Joshua Kuchen, a researcher who spent the last decade building the case that every paranormal phenomenon we've ever recorded is a different facet of the same thing. UFOs, fairies, big-foot ghosts, near-death experiences, his book Ecology of Souls argues that all of it connects to death, or whatever is on the other side of it. This theory is being taken seriously by serious people. Every cripple at Rice University teaches it to his PhD students. Today, we're covering how he built that theory, what the fairy literature gets right that you apology keeps ignoring, and his latest book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, which is about fictional characters that cross into real life. We also talked about how CHAT GPT is addicted to goblins. This is a true story. You're going to want to hear it. After the episode, I'll do a quick breakdown of what we covered, and what I can prove. Now, let's go down to the basement. Josh Kuchen is here. Welcome to the basement. Thanks so much for having me. I'm still in shell shock, but are you? Yeah, it's a lot to take in, and I'm always under the assumption that people have no idea. Hot dog vendor. Remember, I said that earlier. No, people in this space know you are. Well, I appreciate it, and everybody here's been so welcoming and hospitable, so it's wonderful to be invited into this fairyland, the subterranean fairyland, really. Everyone's nice because you're nice. Not nice people don't get to the studio, they just, we send them home. Fair enough. Goodbye. So you studied tuba. I said to my wife, I said there's going to be an icebreaker question, and I know exactly what it's going to be. It's going to be the tuba question. tuba under Fred Mills, Canadian brass, one of the best players of generation. He says that tuba is underestimated as a storytelling instrument. You're a storyteller, and a tuba player. Do you agree? I would. I'll be missing. Yeah, no, I would. So yeah, oh man, we could do a whole podcast about Fred Mills' story. Yes, they broke them all with Fred. Yeah, I worked with Fred at the University of Georgia in the quintet setting, which, you know, if you're going to work in a brass quintet setting with Fred Mills, who was head of the Canadian brass, that's quite a privilege. But yeah, tuba gets pigeonholed a lot as being like, you know, the joky, farty kind of instrument. Yes. But it really has so many different types of characters that it can be, you know, there's a powerful, and there's a minus to it. I mean, if you go back and listen to some of those John Williams scores, you've got Jim Self playing a lot of these tracks and these themes and like, home alone, there's a playfulness to it. That's true. An ambitiousness to it. So I think of Peter and the Wolf. Yeah, yeah. And it's just, it's, I think that, you know, it's kind of been an interesting journey for me because I go into the music space where I have a lot of my friends, you know, and gig because that's a big part of still what I do. And I was like, so what's up with the UFO thing, Josh? And then I go into the UFO space and I'm like, what the tuba, like, what, where does this come? So I kind of feel like, you know, outside or everywhere. Well, yeah, I mean, you're the jazz playing, tuba playing UFO researcher, researching alien food offerings. So how did that, yeah, what was your household like? Is the weird stuff always around? Well, that's a really good question. You know, and so as far as this current author journey that I'm privileged to be on, the only person in high school who really wanted me to go into music was my high school band director because as we were saying a little bit earlier, you know, I had to also to work at the music stuff. The writing stuff just kind of came tumbled out of me. But as far as my household growing up, you know, I've always kind of been befuddled by people who say, you know, I grew up in a conservative Christian household and we weren't allowed to talk about ghosts or anything strange or supernatural. I grew up in a household that pretty much acknowledged the fact that the Bible is the most paranormal book ever written of course. Yeah. Is it like a heavy Christian upbringing? Yeah. I mean, you know, at the time I didn't think so, but now in 2026, you know, I don't know, or vice versa. I just thought it was, you know, just basic North Carolina Christian home. But yeah, there was never a hesitancy to say, like, yeah, people see strange things, you know. My father claimed, maybe this could be in your fact, checking the end of the episode. My father claimed to have subscribed to a newsletter that the BFRO had at one point. It was like, you know, so we wrote the BFRO, yeah, field researchers organization. So we were always talking about Bigfoot, and that really was my first love was Bigfoot. So there was never was a concerted effort to shut down these areas of inquiry, you know, and I came to the UFO question rather late because I was kind of perceiving a lot of the skeptical arguments like, why are there so many types of craft, why are there so many different types of entities? I can believe that we're being visited by one species, but not 240. I sort of go de-locks my way there as is obvious from me sitting in the basement. But yeah, it was just it was a very supportive household in terms of just being curious about stuff. So you dad Bigfoot, you start with Bigfoot, I've got friends. They're fascinated by Bigfoot. I'm not like my audience wants Bigfoot stories all the time, like really the hairy ape thing. What is it about Bigfoot that's so awesome? I think that is he the tuba of the cryptids? I mean, he's the under-approach. I mean, kind of a punch line, yeah, I can definitely see that. Now, I think that part of what it is about Bigfoot, it's the same thing that we see when we see chimpanzees. It's like this is so close to what we are, but not. And if Bigfoot is a relic primate, which I don't think it is, but if it is, it's even closer to a primate. I think that, well, I think it's more in line with the UFO thing. I think that it's something that loves wearing that as a mask, you know, because there's so much, this is an awfully early in the discussion to be derailed by Bigfoot, but we'll get into trickster. But I think that there is so much symbolism embedded in something like the Wildman archetype that I think that it's a great mask for this thing to call us back into right relation with the environment, to remind us that the edge of town is still a precarious place, right? And I think that to paraphrase my co-author and friend Timothy Renner, I think that the Wildman archetype is still out there, and a lot of times it manifests as footprints and howls in the night, and on especially rare occasions, you're lucky enough to see this archetype somehow embodied. And it's kind of weird because Bigfoot's having a moment right now. It's been having a moment for the past ten years or so. We could probably go out and park him a lot across the street and find at least one car with a Bigfoot decal. That's as ubiquitous as the Grey alien was in the 90s, I think. And I think that says a lot about where we are at this moment in terms of being severed from our naturalistic origins, I think it says a lot about a lot of the ecological anxieties that we see. I think Bigfoot has become an avatar for that part of our cells that really wants to go back to the forest. It's interesting that you said it on the edge of town because I think liminality and thresholds are going to come up a lot today. I think. To follow me. Would you take on the Patterson film? Oh boy. So this is this is the part where I like make half the people mad and half the people happy. That's the world I live in is everyone's angry. Yeah, I mean, I'd heard rumblings a while back that it wasn't everything that it was cracked up to be. I think that look at the end of the day, it's a remarkable bit of footage, right? It's either proof of Bigfoot or it's a hoax that lasted what coming up on 60, 60 years. And I think either way, it's incredible and should be regarded as that way. I think that it's fascinating to me that like 90% of Bigfoot iconography is based on a possible hoax now. It's always the same post. But yeah, I feel like the real people who lost out on this possible outing of the Patterson film as a hoax are probably the forensic analysts because like if you can't get to the bottom of this over 60 years, like how foundational is the science, right? Are we incarcerating people with the same techniques that we're used to analyze the Patterson film footage? I tried to debunk it and my Bigfoot episode, I couldn't, it's good. It's great and that's what a lot of my work in recent years has sort of been angling towards. It's just taking the pressure off of any one of these things so that I don't have to have my entire world view collapse if something's outed as a hoax, right? I think that there are people in these communities who base their entire careers around a single bit of evidence. And then when that falls through, sometimes they're very hesitant to step forward. Someone who I will sing as praises all day is Peter Robbins. When the Rindlesham case seemed to be less than what would appear to be Peter said, yeah, I can't, I can't vouch for this anymore, which is a remarkable thing for somebody in this space to do. And I wish I saw more of that decorum from the Bigfoot community in regard to that. You don't. And because Rindlesham was a great example, because I feel like that's debunk, but that people don't like hearing that. Well, and here's the thing, it's like you get into these sort of both and both and both hand, right? That's where that's the line that I try to tell all the time. This doesn't mean Bigfoot doesn't exist. Right. A piece of evidence that isn't what it appeared to be. It's still a part of the history. I do think it's interesting to see how much of what we have seen.
assumed about Bigfoot from a primatological perspective is down stream of the Patterson film. - That's true. - To this day, I will still press my copy of Jeff Mulderman Sasquatch Legend Meet Science into people's hands if they're interested in Bigfoot. It's a great book, but from what I understand, some of the stuff about mid-tarsal breaks and some of this primate anatomy stuff was based on his assessment of the Patterson film. And so for me, that's the feedback loop that we're probably gonna talk about. - Yeah, it's the feedback loop. - And I just, I'm trying really hard not to have a certain level of shot and froida or to sound like, you know, I told you so or any of that stuff, but I do kind of have to smile a little bit when I think about the position that I've been occupying and that Tim Rinner has been occupying, that is this is the wild man. This is not necessarily a hominid, a primate that you can catch and bag and tag. This seems to be something older and weirder and deeper. You can find antecedents for it very clearly in the old world. And I think that as a lot of the biological stuff seems to have been built on a foundation of sand, we're gonna see more acceptance of the high-strangeness in Bigfoot reports. And that, again, is at the heart of a lot of what I do, is because I've gotten tired of seeing people be treated as sensible and, you know, foundational witnesses when they see a big monkey cross the road, but then to have their report tossed out when the end of the report is and it turned into a ball of light. It's like, we're all living in glass houses here. The stuff is very strange. I believe in believing experiences and then sort of like a flip of Blackstone's formulation. I'd rather believe nine hoaxers than to toss out one person who's generally wrestling with what they saw. - Summer is here. And if you wanna actually feel confident, let's bloated and energize the season, it starts with your gut. I thought bloating after every meal was just normal. It's not. Once I fix my gut, everything else followed. And the one thing that made the biggest difference is cowboy colostrum. Cowboy colostrum is 100% American grass fed made right here in the USA. True, first day whole colostrum packed with bioactives, immunoglobulins, and growth factors. It stabilizes your gut and the peptides make your skin and hair look amazing. It's the highest quality bovine colostrum you can buy. I started taking it for my gut. The results I didn't expect are the ones that got me, thicker hair, clearer skin, no more bloating after meals. And I'm not the only one. 83% of participants in cowboy's clinical study reported improved gut health. 79% less bloating, 72% improved digestion. 62% fuller thicker hair. And cowboy colostrum doesn't strip it down. Whole, full fat, high protein, no artificial flavors, no fillers. Vanilla in your iced coffee. Strawberry with milk like a milkshake. It's effortless and delicious. And yes, calves get fed first. They only collect the surplus. For limited time, our listeners get up to 25% off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum.com/yfiles and use code yfiles@checkout. That's 25% off when you use code
[email protected]/yfiles. I think that's fair. Did you ever get to the bottom of your honeymoon Bigfoot story? That was a weird story. No, not to this day I have it. Can you tell us what happened? That was crazy. Yeah, I was being a drunken idiot. Yeah, so we had gone to Blue Ridge, Georgia for our honeymoon, which is a little did I know at the time, actually a pretty active area for Bigfoot. And I was always, as always, interested in this stuff, not writing about it, not as immersed as I was, and I was in the hot tub, and I was drunk, and I was shouting across the valley, beautiful location. But this cabin was at the top of-- I've read hold it like different times in the angle of the driveway and the length of the driveway always changes. But let's say something substantial, between a quarter and a half of a mile. Very, I will say, very, very sharp inclined. And so it wasn't some place that you just walk alongside this house and see this house. So that's all set up. It's all preamble. Because the next day, my wife's taking stuff out to the car for us to go home. And she takes a small bag out and she comes back and she's like, why did you do that? What are you talking about? She's like, why did you do that? And I said, well, look, we're-- You're first six days. Six days, yeah, we're six days into the marriage. We're going to have an argument over this, like, what is this? And she said, come on, look. And behind, as I recall it, my rear driver's side tire is a rock about this size. I used to have a photo of it and I lost it. But I'm a rock about this size. It's kind of wedged behind the tire. I sure as heck didn't drive over that thing. No. Because this was like a staycation. We just sort of stayed in the cabin, doing what Newlywoods do. And so I didn't drive over it. I'm looking around, like, there's kind of a garden over here, but there's not a big-- because that would leave a hole if you picked it up off the ground. Anyway, didn't seem to have fallen off the side of the mountain, which was all red Georgia clay, because that stuff stains everything. And it was right after this hoopin' and holler in that I did. I said, did all that preamble about the length of the angle of the driveway? Because if you're going to prank somebody, I don't know if I walk up that slope in the middle of the night. And if I'm going to put a rock somewhere, I'm going to put it on the hood of their car, or on the top of their car, I'm really going to get to them. But this was just like, hey, stop messing around. Leave. Like something like we're here, we're listening, stop messing around. So that was my first-- I call it a Sasquatch adjacent experience. Yeah. Do you feel like that was a signal? That was a message? That was an invitation. I'm inclined to now with the trajectory that my life has taken. I mean, there are so many things that kind of came together in that moment. Because as part of my story, I did this is 2013. Seven years later, checking myself into rehab for alcoholism. So that was kind of an interesting thing to have happened after, especially drunk in the night. Wait, what year was that Bigfoot Rock that was-- That was 2013. That was a big year for you. Yeah. What triggered going into rehab, you don't mind? Well, so 2013 was the honeymoon. Because you're, I guess, halfway between being a famous writer and sobriety. Yeah, it was a weird thing. So 2013 was the Bigfoot Rock. And then, 2020-- I mean, what happened to me in 2020 is what happened to everybody in 2020, right? And if you're-- I'm not saying this to frame it so that people-- pandemiced wrong, right? I'm not saying that. But if you were going to choose an organic inflection point to change your behavior, seemed like that's what all is being pointed towards. Because everyone was angry. Everyone was depressed. And everybody started drinking more. I started. And when you start ideating about checking into a hospital just to get a break, it's like, well, maybe I should actually check into a hospital just to get a break. And there's some-- What was that decision? You woke up and you were like, that's enough? Or was it your wife? I mean, it's sort of like-- I understand how-- No, no, no. And I'm an open book about this. I'm just trying to find the right way to articulate it. I was obviously doing some stuff wrong. She was obviously doing some stuff wrong. We had twin boys the year before. And that was a weird time to be sort of cooped up with screaming toddlers. Yeah. And it was just like an hour and a half. I can't really put a pin in that moment. I have a friend I mentioned on the Patreon segment. So I don't know if I want to repeat myself here and delete that. But I'm a friend who's working on a very interesting book who looked at my birth chart and thinks that it was always going to happen. Something was always going to happen on this particular day. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And basically I was due for a death rebirth narrative of some sort. I could choose it, or I could have it forced on me. But it's happening either way. It's happening another way. And so, you know, I'm just synchronicities clustered at the head of that, you know, that was-- Give it a-- give it a-- yeah, yeah. It was the Feast Day. It was August 28th, 2020. It was the Feast Day of St. Moses, which was one of the desert fathers who lived a life as a brigand until his sudden and instantaneous 180 conversion, which had some significance to me. And the fact that I also went to Mount Sinai, which was Moses's namesake, was the name of the rehab center. My therapist there was an extra-- my therapist there grew up in point pleasant during the Mothman flap, during the collapse of the silver bridge. When John Keel was there. Yeah, so I got to have conversations with my rehab therapist about Jungian archetypes, and yeah. Which I mean, it's not to be unexpected, but also like we could go into like the silver bridge and Keel. And it was just-- Did he meet Keel? No, no, not to my knowledge. I mean, he was a boy at the time. But it just seemed really odd. You know, I got home, and there were-- I don't know, I'd probably characterize it as like a light, poltergeist effects. Like things would be moved in some strange ways. And the most dramatic thing was this synchronicity that I still can't quite explain. But having twin boys, I get concerned about the softness.
software. I'm constantly revisiting, like, what do I, like, what all do I need to, what have I learned through cultural osmosis and I need to teach them about, you know, entropy and the October revolution and like, I don't know, the, the battle of, of, of Midway and like all this, like, all this random stuff that I've accumulated, where do I accumulate it from? So, you're homeschooling. Yeah. And, um, well, I'm just like, you know, even at the time they weren't, you know, in school per se, but it was just like, I wouldn't, like, got to start, got to get on this and, am I fostering an environment where they're going to learn all this stuff? So, I said, fine, we've got to start somewhere. Where do I start? And for whatever reason I seized upon ASAP's fables. So, I was in my aftercare at the time and I said, okay, I'm going to go home and I'm going to go online. I'm going to order a book of ASAP's fables because I don't remember where I learned about ASAP's fables. Do you remember where I learned about ASAP? Cultural osmosis, what was that? But there's a lot of good lessons in ASAP's fables. So, whatever you do, go home, Josh, you learn about ASAP's fables, go online, get a copy of ASAP's fables. Whatever you do, ASAP's fables. So, I'm driving home ASAP's fables. ASAP's fables. And I get home and my wife's like, well, you got to take the boys out for a walk. So, it's like, okay. So, I'm like, okay. So, the entire time around the neighborhood, I'm going, okay, I'm going to go home and get ASAP's fables into their hands because, hands because, like, you know, you can learn a lot of foundational stuff and moral stuff and some ways to think is ASAP's, that's what ASAP's fables is. ASAP's fables. ASAP's fables. And I get into the garage and I'm literally taking the boys out of their stroller. And I get a call from my mom. I'm like, I don't need this right now. I need to go in and order ASAP's fables, right? And she says, hey, where are the beach? Which I knew that they weren't the beach. And we're at the bookstore that you always loved. And I just got the boys something that I think they'll really enjoy. Do they have a copy of ASAP's fables? Now, we all have this story. Amazing. Yeah. And you talked to Eric Wargo and he'd say it was time loops. It was retro causality. And I'm not denying that it could be that. But it's interesting to me that the trigger for one of those profound synchronicities, the trigger for all my profound synchronicities that I've had has been, you know, that emotional undercurrent. And that sort of, in this case, like a down payment of some sort of life change, death and rebirth narrative, really, quite frankly. So, you know, I admire to the Moon and back Eric's work because I think that regardless of where I depart with his perspective on things, something in there is bang on right. Something in there is bang on right. I agree. So for people who don't know Eric's work, maybe explain time loops and where you stand on it. Yeah. So the idea is that there is neither cause nor effect, but there is these things are embedded in a retro causal loop. And that oftentimes that is accompanied by the trauma of that experience or the emotional investment, the emotional intention that causes that to manifest forward or backward. And that's a very poor way of Eric's. It's a very poor way of framing it, but go back and watch the episode. But you were pre-remembering ASAP's favor. Right. Right. And, you know, I've, again, I've, I've corresponded with Eric, I've known him for Jesus since the beginning, really. And I think there's a lot to that. I just have some quibbles here and there, which is like, well, what's this at the center of that of that time loop? You know, it's the idea of like, oh, I saw this great math equation because I came back and gave myself the answer and, you know, where does, where did the answer come from? Yeah, that's the working paradox. That's the working paradox. And I would trust Eric's assessment on why that isn't a paradox and all these things. And he explains it. I'm in the same boat. I'm like, yeah. I'm, again, I'm, the work has to come from somewhere, though. Right. And I think that ex nihilo space as he's sort of been angling towards in his latest book from nowhere, I would argue that that is where the metaphysical slips in. Right. You know, and I would point to creation myths for that. Wow. And in creation myths, I would say creation myths are stories and they are words or they are sung. The world is sung into being. And a lot of these indigenous cosmologies, these are themes that you see over and over and over again. So I think that there has to be, again, a both-hand model where we're dealing with rhetoric causality, but we're dealing with some other forces that are not going to correspond to materialism or physicalism. The other thing is, you know, an example that I didn't, I don't want to try this to be beating up on Eric, because I love his work so much. But he doesn't watch this show. I know, but I just, I want to emphasize, I want to emphasize the amount of respect that I have for him. Same. He's changed my thinking on how time works. Yeah. But another thing that I would disagree with him on is that, you know, he was speaking of a, of a patient coming to their analyst with a dream, full of archetypes. And the analyst didn't know what it was. The analyst reads in a book, the correspondences of these archetypes, and informs the patient. And that's what the patient was reacting to was that sort of fulfillment that their archetypes could be pinned down. Well, that's Young's Beatles story. Beep for beep. It is the Beatles story. I just, I just feel like there are plenty of people who go through life and end up embodying archetypes without ever having that payoff, right? Like I've met these people who are tricksters or they fulfill the mother archetype or any number of things. And they never, they never read the red book. You know, they never, they never have that moment to where they're, where they're being confirmed in terms of how they're behaving, you know, where they people have just sort of fallen into these patterns because the patterns pre-existous all. So they just exist as this archetype? What do you mean by it never gets paid off? So I have a friend who has a late friend who was a biker and he was a rough and tumble kind of fellow, but apparently a sweetheart. And he lost an eye in a scuffle with a gun, with a gun, with a gun. And by the time my friend got to know this gentleman, he would often wear a wide-bremmed hat and carry a walking staff because he had some leg problems. And now these two hounds that would sit on either side of them in this living room underneath a stuffed eagle. And he started volunteering at the VA doing therapeutic massage for veterans. That's Odin. Like I don't know. That's Odin. And finally, like after he passed away, my friend approaches his wife and says, "Hey, did you ever, did you ever say anything about this, did he ever know about it, was this ever in your life?" And she's like, "What's Odin?" So my point would be that if a lot of retro causality is contingent upon pre-membring, upon that payoff that would have made him, "Oh, I'm being Odin, so that's what made me start acting like Odin." That never happened. And so that's what I would sort of quibble with is that there's some force that seems to me. And again, if anybody is unfamiliar with my work, I'm first and foremost probably a mystic. There seems to be some sort of force that reaches down and seizes us. Or, you know, to use one of my favorite definitions of archetypes as Jung would have put forward. You know, these are river beds that are carved through the landscape. These are furrows with little tributaries here and there. And they can go dry. But once you get a substantial enough rainfall, it's exactly where the water is going to go. And it's because the two meat is what causes it. Right. Right. And so, you know, I feel like we are constantly falling into these modes of being a lot more than we consciously realize. I think you might be right. 2012, 2013. So, I know that you're writing press releases, your substitute teacher, you're listening to paranormal stuff. You listen to paranormal podcasts. What was just like a Tuesday like for you before this all started? Oh, before sobriety, usually involved with 750 milliliters of vodka bottom shelf. No, it was just it was just what you're what's your commute? You wake up in the morning and you have your flash. Yeah, I mean, so to sort of summarize my journey. A lot of potential to be an orchestral tuba player in the world of classical music that probably is going to steer you towards higher ed professorships sort of thing because orchestral jobs. I mean, they're what 50 orchestral tuba player job. There's one person that fulfills that role in the orchestra and they keep it till they die. So, like, you've got to sort of. Anyway, long story short, I ended up having some performance injury issues. That made it difficult for me to sustain some stuff to sustain notes, focal dystonia. It's run rampant through a lot of brass players. It's I've since recovered because I'm not spending eight hours, you know, playing all the time. I took time off, but at the time was pretty devastating. So, it's like, well, what do I do? Finish to masters in music literature, which is like a musicology light degree. It was supposed to be a performance degree. I pivoted. Then got a second masters in journalism and then again said, what do I do? The idea is to go into arts journalism, a worked as public affairs director for the University of Georgia School of Music for three issues. And in the meantime, at a university in the summer, there's not a lot.
going on. So I had picked up a copy of J. Robert Alley's Rainco Sasquatch, which is a great book, and it he mentions that among other things, you know, Alley's perspective is that we are dealing with a hominid, but he pays a lot of attention and respect towards indigenous belief. And in the book he mentions that the Bigfoot analog for the Quackutil in Alaska, the book was, is known to give people who are led astray, give them food. Usually it's, it looks like dried salmon, but it's actually tree bark that's been disguised to look otherwise. And if you take this food from the bequeuse, you're trapped with the bequeuse forever. And I said, wait a minute, this is, this is right out of Western European fairy folklore. If you take food in fairy land, you're trapped with the fairies forever. But Alaska's kind of far from, from Ireland. Even the, the cloaking of the bark to look like salmon is, is fairy glamour. Like there are numerous solutions in Western European traditions where once fairy glamour is removed, the food that they give you is like leaves and twigs and stuff. It's like, that's just so specific to me that I sat with that for a while and I said, look, there's, there's one of three things happening here. Either there was an international civilization that was exchanging myths and legends at a level much deeper than we appreciate, or the collective unconscious is a thing, or people are describing objectively their interactions with the other world. Any three of those, which I think are kind of the only three options that I can figure out, any three of those blows apart your worldview. I said, this is really cool. Nick Redford should write a book on that. And I sort of sat around and waited for Nick to write a book because this was in the air when Nick was just pumping them out like every six months. I'm like, is it me? Is this, is this what I'm supposed to be doing? So one summer, I pulled all the resources together and wrote the book that became a Trojan feast. And I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why, I don't know what my wife was thinking, honestly. But I timed the release with my two weeks notice at the University of Georgia. And then it was a while of just playing gigs. Well, how risk is that? Well, my, my wife had, had, had my wife worked for CDC. So we had a, a, a, a net, we had a safety net. But it was just, I mean, there were a lot of things that contributed to my alcoholism, but having 60 bosses in a university setting is, yeah, is one of them. So it was obviously unsustainable in that regard. But the musician author also sounds like a reason to drink to me. I mean, you don't know. I mean, it's musician author, but also like low brass players have a reputation for knocking them back too. Oh, it's like, yeah, so it's like, I'm getting Scott, Scott, I'm, I'm Scottish too. So it's like, it's got, I've got all the, all the risk, the risk factors. I went to school in Wisconsin. I mean, like, it's like, I'm set up for failure in terms of substance abuse. But anyway, so yeah, it was, it was risky, but it was, it was killing me. And so what I did was I pivoted and I built a, a pretty good little cottage industry of just gigging and teaching private lessons and doing a lot of like in school clinics. And then we had our boys. And it would became very apparent, a parent rather than I was spending all day out just to turn around and give money to someone to watch the kids. So I became Mr. Mom. That sort of brings us closer into 2020 when the Mr. Mom thing was kind of what was making me fall down that rabbit hole too. Well, hang on a second. Music literature. So you're studying architecture, structure, motif, patterns. Is that informing your methodology with, with Trojan? Um, so you don't get out of two master's degrees without like kind of appreciating hunting down sources. Sure. That's the way I look at it. And your footnotes are ridiculous. It's half the book. Yeah, I got, yeah, I got a new one coming out next month. It's like 1300 in notes. And I feel like I've kind of undershot my, my goal. But yeah, I try to, well, that's the problem. That has been historically the problem in the space that people will just say stuff and not say where to find it. And I could do a little bit better job of pinpointing actual page numbers, but I have my reasons for not doing that. Kindle. Kindle of looks difficult to do that. Yes. Um, but, uh, anyway, so, so that's part of it. Um, you know, part of it is, is, you do end up reading things like Adorno and, and philosophers of different types that make you think in different ways. That's part of it too. Although, you know what? AJ, it's, it's really kind of wild. I, um, I looked back on one of my earlier, but one of my earlier essays and it was about taking a look at Strauss's to a lowland Spiegel, who was a trickster figure. And one of the books that I cracked open was Louis Hyde's trickster makes this world, which is a book that I still used today. So, and like the trickster phenomena has influenced and informed so much of the way that I think about this stuff that it's like, Oh, was that where the seeds planted in that with that particular book? Um, and it was like, it's probably the best bit of musical writing I've ever done. I've, it's stuffed away in a binder or somewhere, but yeah. Um, so I think that all these things do sort of come together and that's the thing. If you would go back 15 years until your older self, what younger self, what you're doing today, you'd be like, what? Like, how did you get there? Why did you get there? You know, but at all, you do, you do kind of tend to get nudged in the right direction with the, um, paranormal offering food. So that, that book comes out and people in the space were saying, why didn't anyone think of this before? I had, it's kind of good that I had no idea what I was stepping into. Um, I had a, uh, for, for whatever reason, um, I had a degree of efficient of, of a familiarity with, we're not a, uh, parasocial relationship, I guess with Micah Hanks, um, because we both were from North Carolina and I just sort of cold emailed Micah at one point and explained to him my project and like, do you know where I should shop this manuscript around? And who's he? Um, Micah is a dear friend now. Uh, he just completed, um, the audiobook of my novel, them old ways never died, but should be coming out any day now. Um, but he is a UFO researcher, 14 par excellence master of the endless comma. Is that what I was saying about Micah? Um, but just a really sharp guy, very grounded. Um, he runs the debrief website. Um, and Micah was just so warm and welcoming about it. And he, he, not only, like, so he, he, he had me on his show, not even having this thing published for whatever reason is beyond me. Um, somehow I think he was really, really running with the mysterious universe guys at the time, and they had me on mysterious universe without having a publishing like, what is going on here? But, but with that sort of momentum, and again, this grace of God, with that sort of momentum, um, it made Patrick Weige at an almost book sort of take an interest in, in the manuscript. And Patrick's first thing was like all book publishing house, um, heads of those sort of things was like, well, you know, we reject most stuff that we get, but I'll take a look at it. And Patrick was over the moon about it. And I still have a great relationship with Patrick today. I don't publish with a novelist anymore, but it's, it has nothing to do with him as a person. Um, he was just so supportive. And Patrick Weige, I read his books in middle school, like, you know, I've got his copy of his guide to, you know, lake monsters and sea serpents that he did with Lauren Coleman, like, and now he's my publisher. How cool is that? Yeah. And then like, you know, there's a favorable review from Jerry Clark in 14 times, I think. And like, it's just, it was just one of these things where it's like, what world have I stepped into? And now if I look at my, the contact list on my cell phone, it's like, what, what, like, what is, it's, it's, I'm, I'm so, so blessed and so happy, because it does feel like the kid who, you know, ends up shooting hoops in his neighborhood and's playing with, you know, Michael Jordan or something. It's the way it feels sometimes. Can you give us some examples of the exchange of food? Cause I hadn't heard that. Yeah, abductees. Well, that was sort of, one of the things that I think people were overlooking. Um, so one of my central contention is that this phenomenon, um, is everything and nothing at once, right? It wears a lot of different masks. My favorite depiction of the phenomenon is that reissue of passport to megania, where it's got this, um, his valet. Yeah, it's, but it's, it's, it's, um, from that book. It was daily girl daily girl publishing. They've got a gray alien holding a, a fairy mask and a demon mask and a, in the 50s and sci-fi alien mask. The actual original painting showed that the gray alien itself was a puppet being puppeteered off of, out of the frame, which is like the perfect summation of the phenomenon. Like, there's something there, but it's always changing and adapting and adopting. So, valet had already made a lot of, uh, pointed comparisons to older European spirit belief in general theory, belief more specifically in passport to megania. It's like a foundational text for everything that I've done. Um, and, uh, one of the things that you look at when you look at a lot of fairy folklore, and again, we know this mostly from Western Europe, but I can provide examples from pretty much every inhabited continent, um, is that if you go into fairy land and you are given something to eat or drink, you've got to refuse it because you're going to be stuck there. At the time, I didn't know that this was a more pervasive myth. Um, you'll find it in Oceania regarding the dead, the land of the dead, similarly in South America, but like whenever you're in that other space, you don't eat and don't drink. And so, if valets. comparisons between fairies and UFOs holds true, then do we see the sort of food taboo from fairy folklore manifesting itself in the UFO context? And you kind of do. The point that I tried to make in that first book was that a lot of these encounters are relatively brief like you're being very hospitable within I spread out there, but I'm not sure that that would have been necessary for an abduction or for a contactee, you know, two or three hour meeting, but food and drink did get exchanged in these stories. They get exchanged in alien abduction accounts as well. What kind of food? Well, let me sort of put a pin in this other thought. They get exchanged in the abduction stuff as well, but they've also kind of changed, right? We're talking about how the phenomenon changes and how it adapts. I think an argument could could be made that, you know, injections and ointments and pills and things that feature all across abductions are sort of a variation on that. The sorts of, I hadn't thought of that, that's true. The sorts of food and drink that get exchanged roughly correspond to the character of the experiences, right? So contactees of the 1950s and 60s, people who met with space brothers voluntarily. Those are voluntary pleasant experiences and the alien abductions, especially the 70s and 80s. Again, the phenomenon's changing. We can't talk about that if you want to. Non-voluntary, non-consensual unpleasant. And so the sort of food that you see in these experiences oftentimes aligns with that. No get references to milk and fruits and a lot of the contactee experiences. No get references to again ointments and nasty tasting liquids. Obviously, these people came back unlike in the ferry folklore. They consumed in the other world, but they were able to come back. But I still think that not being able to go home can mean a lot of things, right? It can mean you don't get to go back to the way it used to be. Your world is forever changed, or you're going to be a recurring experiencer. But one of the interesting things is that if you look at, if you look at the timing of a lot of these consumptive acts in the UFO literature, a lot of times it'll happen towards the end of the experience. And so you kind of have to sit back and say, okay, well, if, if I consume certain things in this space, I go there, you know, if I, if I take five dried grams of mushrooms and silent darkness, I go there, right? I go there. So is this them their way of sending us back sometimes to consume something over there? Because again, I'm not entirely sure there's a physical component to this. I'm not entirely sure how physical it is all the time. The communion communion be related to this? Yeah, I mean, Whitley talked about being given things to consume and communion. I think just that the very heart of it, that the name itself speaks to what's going on there. I said, the body of Christ, you, I guess you become. Oh, you mean, specific? Yeah, I went to Whitley, right? Oh, well, this is, this is, so this is, this is a whole another. Yeah, I mean, this is, I think this is a hundred percent part of this. So yeah, the, the act of sitting and breaking bread historically is a type of communion, a type of coming, coming, gling and accepting and being in and of that space. But yeah, I would argue that the act of Christian communion says a lot more than we really think about because you're eating in the tradition, flesh, and drinking blood. And this ties back into some very ancient, very widespread ideas in certain indigenous cosmologies. People are probably familiar with this, but like, you know, you might vanquish your foe and eat part of them to take on their power. Sure. Or you might fashion, you know, you might fashion a cup out of their skull. It's a similar idea. And so there's actually, there's an ancient trope called eating the God, the idea that by the act of consuming the divine, you're in, you're internalizing it and becoming, communing with it, right? Sure. Similarly, if you look at, you know, the ayahuasca traditions and their analogs in South America, there is the assertion that the medicine is at once plant and vine and drink and deity as well. So you're literally consuming of the deity and internalizing it. And so I think that something similar, at least on the motivical level is what we're seeing in some of these stories from experiences. There must be something to it because the experiences are so similar across cultures. Yeah, it's the fairy UFO thing is the gift that keeps on giving it away. In the sense that I was not fairies were fun little things until I started research. No, it's. So what Dr. Ville did in Passport to Magonia was something that I think the best observations do, which it wasn't, hey, look at this similarity. That's all by that's cool thing that he noticed. No, you can continue and keep on packing it and keep on unfurling and finding other dimensions to it. There's plenty of stuff that he didn't mention about similarities between the faithful can aliens, but let's put a pin in that sort of backtrack to what fairies are, right? It's tough sometimes. It really is because I talk about being interested in fairies and people think I'm meaning something completely different. The fairies of folklore, the fairies that a lot of our ancestors, my ancestors in Scotland, might have interacted with were never really depicted as tiny winged a feat. You know, sprites. They were dark, sonic, oftentimes sized, like a proportion like in your average human being. Great if they liked you and you treated them well, did not want to get on their bad side. If you made a mistake, sometimes an innocent mistake like whistling, you could get punished for whistling in the wrong place or failing to leave out offerings, which is sort of where a lot of this various stuff comes into with the Trojan Feast as well. But anyway, very different class of character. The theory that we know today is children's books and Shakespearean playstaging and stuff like that. There's a whole other conversation to have about what fairies look like in witness reports now and what that says about the phenomenon, but you know, we can go there if we want to later, but the original sort of version of that was darker and stranger. And a lot of the things that Felle was pointing out really do seem to line up. And you've got stature. You've got little men in green, becoming little green men, powers of levitation, although fairies didn't have wings in terms of folklore. They were always granted powers of levitation people being picked up and whisked away to other different spaces. Faryland reads a lot like some of the descriptions of either the rooms aboard spaceships or sometimes in the contact you literature, these other planets that people went to. Could they read a lot like Book of Enoch and you're not traveling with Uriel to the ship? Well, yeah, I think it's a part, again, part of this multiple masks sort of thing or the gin. Oh, absolutely. In the gin, there's reason to quibble with this statement, but the gin could very easily be understood as as muzzle and fairie analogs, right? But all these different things sort of add together and I've completely lost track of where the question was. Just, but fairies are missing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're misunderstood. But then there are these other things that sort of Valle left out that I don't think he did intentionally and he probably even saw them, but like, and there's only so much you can put into a book. A lot of times in these older fairy stories, not fairy tales, fairy stories, which imply eyewitnesses and folk tales. You've got the smaller fairies all around, but there's a fairy king or fairy queen and they're usually taller, much taller in life. And that sounds a lot like what we hear from David Jacobs, your mileage may vary, but it's like a lot what we hear from David Jacobs about the taller supervising grays. Yes. There's a connection between fairies and the dead and UFOs in the dead, which I've explored recently. You know, there's the fact that fairies came in all sorts of variety of shapes and sizes, like a Pokemon catalog, right? And that's some, similarly, that's what we see with the, with the taxonomy of aliens today. It's endless variation. So it's just you can just keep on unpacking this and unpacking this and unpacking this. There was one researcher I forget her name, but I think she said at one point far in the past, every fairy was a dead person. This is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around. It's how to make that work, right? So that's that's the one thing that you'll run into some people when they say they know what fairies are. It's like, nobody knows. I have plenty of friends who are fairy scholars. Check out Morgan Daimler's work, check out Simon Young's work, even they will say, we have no idea. Like there are arguments to be made and there are better arguments and works arguments to be made, but we really don't know for sure. There's the argument that they were demoted pagan deities. You know, the Christians came along and said that they were the angels that were too good for hell and too bad for heaven that fell to the earth. But you know, something that Dr. Simon Young has pointed out is that a lot of these cultures, when they've talked about fairies, we're trying to find some way to talk about the dead because you innumerable stories, stories involving the food taboo. People will be at the fairy banquet. They walk by a fairy fort and they're invited inside because it's opened up this one day a year and they go inside and they're all these and then they'll see somebody that they recognize and it's a dead friend or a dead neighbor and they're the one who says, don't don't don't eat or drink this because you're going to be trapped here. But that's sort of mode of [BLANK_AUDIO]
mechanism of metamorphosis is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around. And so the way that Claude Lekuto, former professor at the Sorbonne, described it, he just passed away this past November. But he writes my favorite UFO books because he never uses the word UFO, but like it's just great stuff. But he wrote a lot of books on household spirits and spirits of the land and such. And he described the process as you have someone who is revered by the community, a chief dinner, a soldier or a priest or priestess. And then they're buried in a certain place. And that place becomes revered as their burial spot. But over time, as we are want to do as a species, like we sort of forget and we sort of treat those connections more loosely and then become sort of a spirit of the place. And from there they sort of get syncretized with fairy beliefs as being these sort of spirits out in the wilderness. We see this really clearly actually in some cultures, even in the more modern era, Burriette Schommens would be interred in one place and then later exhumed and then specifically buried in a new location to serve as the spirit of that place. So this genus Locai idea, which is very closely related to spirits, you know, that's a fairy Glenn, that's a fairy pond or whatever, these ideas sort of start to merge together. And burial mounds and things like that? Yeah, I mean that's the other thing. Like so many of these sites that are associated with fairies, again, I feel like I say it all the time. But in Western Europe, but arguably worldwide, are our support role sites, their sites that involve burials. I mean, the serpent mountain Ohio, they see all kinds of stuff over there. Yeah. And but thinking specifically to like, you know, Ireland and the British Isles, these burial mounds are unambiguously burial tumuli, you know, but they're also where the fairies are. And to be there, you know, there are many traditions that say that the dead live inside hills, not coincidentally, you know, that's where we put a lot of our underground alien bases in modern UFO mythology. But there's this strong connection through that that even, you know, does extend, especially in my part of America with the Cherokee, there's a strong association between some of the burial tumuli and the tumuli down there and the Nanyanae. They're very variant, one of their very very, so yeah, it's just, and that's, that's what always gets me. That's what all, that's, that's what really keeps me going is I take a look at, you know, those Cherokee traditions, for example, and reading the association between fairy, what we would call fairies, very clearly, time dilation, missing time, taking people away into the forest, that sort of thing. Sounds familiar. Being associated with these earthworks and people across the Atlantic saying the exact same thing. And look, I have to remain open to cultural contamination, right? That's always an ever-looming specter. But if not, that's what gets me going because it's like some, there's some strata of reality that we're interacting with where we're all coming to the same conclusions as a, as a humanity. I have a question about it. Let's take a quick break when we come back. Let's, I want to talk about some more patterns that you found that nobody else is specifically Grimstone. Okay. Yeah. We are back. So, 1994, my dad has an operation, what up many, he dies on the table, they bring him back. When he comes back, he says, he had a conversation with his mother and he smelled of roses. And in Grimstone, it's, it's so, it's so funny because you would think like, is there enough data to write a whole book about smells? I got that a lot, I got that a lot. But there is. It's one of those things, and this is sort of a lot of what I've done is one of those things that people mention in passing in their own books and they'll say, that's kind of interesting, kind of funny. It's all about, anyway, and they continue with the next story. And those are the details that always sort of make me go, well hang on, hang on, let's, let's go back to that and revisit it. What can we learn by unpacking a lot of this stuff? You know, I think this was a similar philosophy to what the late Carla Turner had was that, like, some of these details might be holding the key to understanding a lot of this stuff. So after Trojan Feast, went on and wrote the Brimstone deceit, which kind of sounds like a Joel Austin book title, but it doesn't, but what do you call a book about, you know, paranormal smells, especially when sulfur appears so often. So that's what we went with. And there was, I still see stuff today that I'm like, oh, that would have been great to have put in that book. It's just, it really is a pervasive sort of observations that happen in this area. Moe was the first one that made you go, wait a minute. Well, it was, it wasn't, I'm not sure if it was a specific account, but it was probably some of those observations that John Keel had made, as you know, if I could, if I had a shrine in my house, it would probably be to John Keel and Jackville, like, I feel there's so much of what I do. That's interesting because they fundamentally completely opposite on what's going on. They had different hands on the elephant, you know, different hands on the elephant. That's right. That's a great way to put it. And uh, you know, the goal is to become the coincidentia positorum, right? That's right. But I think it was some of those observations that Keel had made very presently that, you know, people report Brimstone or sulfur in these accounts. And there's this knee jerk reaction, especially in, you know, Christian America to say, oh, it must be demons. And it's like, well, have you ever like really understood the origins of that smell or the history of the way that smell was identified and stuff? I mean, for example, um, if you go back all the way into antiquity, people in the classical traditions were misidentifying the smell of ozone as the smell of sulfur. It's a, you know, the lightning strike and it was the smell of sulfur. And similarly, um, in more recent years around the turn of the 20th century, people were being sent to, uh, to convalesce by the seaside because of the great ozone vapors in the air. And it's like, no, you're probably talking about sulfur. Yeah. So there's, yeah, hydrosis, there's that to consider, um, about the Oracle of Delphi. Same. Yeah. And that's, that's sort of the, so whenever you establish an area to look into, you sort of, it sort of starts branching out like tributaries. And one of those is the idea of things like the Oracle at Delphi and Hailing Certain Fumes are the idea that burnt offerings are meant to trans, they're meant to transmit the offerings themselves to the suburnal realms through the smoke. That's a means of getting the offering from here to there. So there are all these things that you've just sort of got to sit with and say, well, what bearing, if any, does this have on a lot of these modern experiences? And, uh, so I really wanted to try and unpack that. And for a while, it kind of looked like I was going to get pigeonholed as the, uh, the five senses guy, like, I'm like, I don't want to write a book on, on paranormal touch that sounds like, right, it sounds like a dangerous place to go, but yeah. What is it, um, what I find interesting about the smells is it's the one sense that bypasses Thalmic altogether goes directly to the MiGdala Emotion Center. There's no narrative structure at all. So it's culturally agnostic. That's an excellent way to put it and doesn't that make it more real, more real of the account? Well, it not only makes it more real, but I think it also makes it more ripe for hijacking, right? So there's actually an entire subset of, like, scent philosophy, olfactory philosophy, which was a surprise to me. But one of the things that they've sort of examined, some of these scholars, gear rare, I think, is the one that I was looking into. Um, talked about how we've oftentimes treated our noses as, um, reliable witnesses, right? You know, it passes the smell test, the nose, nose, and all these things. If you smell it, like, something's, so you can smell it, something's off. And so the idea that you would be, I could make a thousand different explanations for a trick of the light for me to see something strange, but when you've got that accompanied by something that you're smelling to, it really does put it in a place of, of authenticity, right? In addition to, like you said, just like jumping right to your emotional centers, like, if I, if I, I have ex-girlfriends, sorry Sarah, if you're watching this, I have ex-girlfriends that, if I smelled their perfume, like, I would immediately think of that person and those emotions associated with that. And if we are dealing with a phenomenon, as I've suspected, that really does like to traffic and meaning and, and quite frankly manipulation for, for, good or for ill, what a, what a tool to use. Yes. And because your memory goes right there when you smell something childhood, you can, you can try not to think of it, like, you can not want to think of it. Right. And it'll just, it'll override that completely. Yes. Um, which is kind of like, it's almost like even better than, than telepathy, or it's akin to telepathy where it's like, it's going straight in your head and there's no way you can not hear it or, or miss hear it. Um, and, and the smell is like, a lot of my work proposes that there's a, um, meta position intelligence that's in control of how it's seen and when it's seen and what it does while it's seen.
which is my logical exemption for why we don't have better evidence, right? - That's kind of a valet-esque way to look at it. - Well, yeah, that there's a structure. - Yeah, and that if it doesn't wanna be seen, it's not gonna be seen. Or when it does get seen, it's a colossal fuck up. There we go, that's my phone. (laughs) - That's your app on the show. - Hang on, that's George Hansen's trickster theory, is it can't be seen, is you try, and what I love about Hansen's work is, he says the trickster, you try to observe it, as soon as you try to observe it, you can't. Like that's quantum mechanics, man. - It really is. And it's not only that, but it's one of those things that it's almost like we as a species intuitive that before we had the tools to sort of interrogate quantum mechanics. But yeah, it's, so if the phenomenon can control how it's seen and how it's presumably smells, like what a smell to choose, so. - Yeah, why, why roses? - And so roses and sulfur, yeah, so the book is the brimstone to see, and it talks about bad smells, but there's just all smells ended up in the book. And you do see rose smells in terms of saints and in terms of blessed Virgin Mary sightings. - Of course. - And in select UFO encounters as well, I think it was, it was either Dennis Kucinich, who smelled a rose scented UFO? I don't know. - There was one. - I could look it up, yeah, that's one. - Yeah, I believe that's what it was, and if not, I'm mistaken, but it's a smell that you get from time to time. But a lot of these do have some sort of sulfur smell, and then the task there is to sort of unpack what people mean, right? So do they mean ozone, sulfur, that sort of conflation that we're talking about? Do they mean hydrogen sulfide, which is that rotten egg smell? Do they mean sulfur dioxide, which is that gunpowder smell? - Right. - And then even things that people make other comparisons to say, oh, it smelled like natural gas. Well, natural gas is overless. We add methamethyls to it to make you more aware when there's a gas leak. And guess what those contain? Those thyls contain sulfur. So there's something about this sulfur connection that I think is really fascinating. And we've so long associated with demons, but if you look at, like, you know, for example, biblical sources, it's always been presented as a great thing, the cleansing breath of God's, whenever God makes a point to cleanse something he's using sulfur, and we know about this today, like acne medications often contain sulfur. Like sulfur is a fume again, it's an antimicrobial. And so, like, the fact that the devil, the devil and demon smell like sulfur isn't the fact that they smell bad 'cause they're evil. It's God trying to cleanse them, throwing them into the red fire. You have to unpack all this stuff, but hydrogen sulfide specifically, this fact blows my mind every time I think about it. We are so sensitive to hydrogen sulfide that we can detect it at 0.5 parts per billion. To put that in perspective, if I had a semi, those carrying like a liquid semi, you know, like oil tanker or whatever, or a semi full of milk, whatever. And you should get a medicine dropper, and you put one drop of ink in there, that'll be twice the concentration at which we can smell hydrogen sulfide. So, if this phenomenon wishes to not be noticed, and it's in control of how it smells, it's a poor choice. So, it's almost like it's designed to be attention grabbing. - Well, I mean, astronomers are using spectrography to see if there's life in other planets, right? They're looking for oxygen, they're also looking for hydrogen sulfide. - Right, right. And there's some of the emissions on Venus. I don't know if this has been settled since, but some of the emissions on Venus of sulfur are so plentiful and not reacting the way that they should, that there's been some speculation, that there's some sort of artificial generator of some of these sulfur compounds on Venus. Even for me who doesn't describe the extraterrestrial hypothesis, that makes you go, "Huh, okay, that's interesting. I don't know what to do with that." 'Cause you would think that chemistry would be a universal constant. - Right. So yeah, and I think that these things, again, if we are to posit that this is deliberate, and it may well not be, then it might be to get our attention because some of these experiences seem so tailor-made to people relying on their personal lives and their personal symbolism and seeing sometimes dead loved ones and such. I'm also open to other ideas that, like, you know, this isn't, we're not smelling these things decaying, like maybe they enter our reality and they have a sort of half-life, right? They have a sort of half-life where as soon as they show up, they start literally interpeeing or decaying. - As a Christian, has your views changed all, being in this space? - I mean, there's just so much cognitive dissonance every day. Yeah, it's weird. - Selfers in the Bible. - Yeah, I mean, it's, so my own sort of faith journey, where I've sort of landed with a lot of that, is that Christ was a meeting point of a lot of different archetypes. Maybe the most potent meeting point of archetypes that's ever been in existence. And I don't think that, you know, because I do run into, well, number one. - Which archetypes did you attribute to Christ? - Well, obviously, the Messiah. - Correct, I mean, yes. But, you know, the redemptive sign, but also the son and the father, there's just so many different things coming to it, to a head in that. But the thing that I would sort of come back to is that a lot of, I think it behooves Christians to be interested in these topics and to think them through before disclosures of any sort happen. But I also have to say that, I also have to say that I've thought of the way that I look at these topics, and what they might say about my own faith, is sort of being like a kid taking apart a clock, right? So I wanna understand how the clock works, right? And I wanna get in there and take a look at the timing mechanisms and the cogs and the wheels and such and the pendulum. But even when I take apart the clock, and even if I understand how the clock works, the clock is the universe, it's not gonna tell me what time is. It's not gonna make me more punctual, you know. That layer of interfacing with reality is where my spirituality comes in. - This is a nice metaphor. - Yeah, I was really proud of it when I came up with it. (laughing) Because you know, I've had to think about this a lot. And so yeah, I think that's sort of where I've been able to make peace with it. And it's so, I kind of wrestle with how much and how I speak about it. Because when you say that, people start drawing conclusions about how exclusionary you are regarding these subjects, right? Or that at the end of the day, I must boil down and think that UFOs are demons. And that's not at all where I land. I'm sympathetic to people who think that because they're thinking outside of that extraterrestrial hypothesis framework. And then we can have a conversation about transpersonal psychology. We can have conversation about trickster phenomena. We can have all those conversations. If they're not automatically on that sort of orthodox ETH trajectory. But that's still not what I think. I think that everything is so much more complex than we give it credit for. And that's why I've always gravitated towards that ecology of souls phrasing is because I love the idea of the diversity and the richness of a bunch of different weird things that maybe we can call spirits, I don't know. Like another dimension is synonymous with the other world is synonymous with fairy land to me. Maybe even synonymous with the afterlife. But like a rich ecosystem of different intelligences and presences all filling these niches. And oftentimes completely removed from this dichotomy of good versus evil that the Christian discussion always forces us into. You know, the example that I use is like a tornado or a shark could really ruin my day, but they're not evil. And I think that might be a little bit more of what we're seeing rather than the sort of reductive binary that the UFOs or demons question always gets forced into whenever you start talking about these topics and Christian energy. Well, the demons were just UFOs being spiritual. I'm hearing that more and more and more. And yet, and I think you might have even said this, the 2017 New York Times piece was probably a setback for UFO research. - I've thought that. I've thought that-- - Because we're back to aerospace. - We're back to, yeah. Well, this is something that I've noticed throughout the UFO. It's an interesting day to be, you're talking about this, right? - Yeah. - The mediation of the conversation. My friend, David Metcalf, brilliant fellow, he's pointed to the fact that these narratives often get mediated. Good example that he likes to use is that in the Cold War in the '50s, I believe it was Project Moon Dust was dedicated to retrieving space debris and ostensibly Soviet materials. But maybe if they came upon a UFO, they clicked it too. But nobody was really talking about crash retrieval programs in the '50s when it was actually happening. And then like a light switch in the '90s, that's all we can talk about. That's all we're talking about. And I think people, I think it would be in everyone's interest to really pay attention to what you're being told to talk about, right? So what I was perceiving prior to the release of the New York Times article, neo-fight that I was, admittedly, had a lifelong interest, but I was only two books in at this point.
I did see sort of a course correction in terms of the narrative because people were talking about altered states of consciousness and all these things that like really get me going Because that's the way I found myself to being interested in the UFO topic was that I said Well, these don't have to be thousands of different types of craft and thousands of different civilizations It can just be this one thing that's interacting with us in this never-neverland, right? But that New York Times article drops and we're back. You're right talking about propulsion systems and anti-gravity systems and There's another form of of real loss here that I think is happening because this is a very Western European sort of way of thinking about the UFO question. There are all these cohorts From marginalized populations and from indigenous populations that don't think about this phenomenon in that way If they wrap it in with spirituality and NDE's right So when you're talking about like hybrid programs or propulsion systems or any of this stuff They just right doesn't and so they feel like they're on the outside of it when a lot of them are having these same experiences They're just not framing them in the same way and I mean a classic example of this is you know if you look at the work as Cynthia Hind who actually did Started asking the right questions in the right ways with people and Believe it was in Bobboy She was finding that a lot of these people were framing this as ancestor phenomenon and that there really wasn't a distinction between craft and Occupant and any of this stuff these things were morphous categories where There was no real There was no real Contradiction and the idea that you would have a Craft come down and then turn into a human being which is something that you honestly kind of do here in a lot of these and share stories So I that's something that really makes me very hesitant towards the you know friend of mine Dr. Jeff crap We'll call it the threat narrative that we're being fed constantly I'm not saying that all this stuff is sweetness and light. We know that it's not right My rehab trip was not all sweetness and light now But it needed to happen. Yes, it was necessary and so I think that This this sort of naive a day of like oh these things are up in the sky and we need to shoot them down We can't shoot them down. I'm not sure that's the most mature way to take it and that felt like one of those pivots and and mediation mediating of the narrative moments When that article dropped but at the same time at the same time It got people acknowledging the paranormal component, you know the idea that we were Looking in the things like skoon walk a ranch true, but then when Luis Elizondo says this is an existential threat I go, oh no, but this is not helpful at all. Yeah, so is that narrative? being Constructed or is that the trickster in the way it reminds me of that that Simpson's episode where mr. Burns is mistaken for an alien I say it's bringing peace and love break its legs Yeah, I mean and that's that's the thing. That's what I've resonated so much with you know if anybody listen to this Pick up one book from this discussion. Don't pick up my books pick up George P. Hanson's the trickster in the paranormal and Be gentle with yourself take time to read through it. Some of it reads like VCR instructions. Yes I think that that that that a comparison is especially more app now that VCRs aren't a thing Because it's even more unscrupulous But it's the only book that I've run into that has predictive power. Yes, it really does and that's something remarkable and In case anybody doesn't know George is making the argument that the trickster archetype hovers over all these phenomena Do not make the mistake that we're talking about like a capital T trickster god or anything Archetypes remember they're those dry river beds. They're the way that things tend to go when things happen So this isn't a conscious Consciousness or sadness I mean you can never say never right, but I think what because of the way that he frames that it's just If paranormal events and phenomena seem to be governed governed by these archetypes and these tendencies down to as we were leading to with Lu Down to the organizations that study them. So the trickster archetype is liminal Guardian of the threshold boundaries It up ends the status quo. It's social leveling. So the higher brought low and the lower brought high It's transgressive It is playful. It is mischievous. It encodes Wisdom in the grossest of spaces PK dicks insight from the trash stratum or the Philosopher's stone in the head of a toad right from from from the draws of society. You'll find wisdom and insight Trickster figures Hermes Loki To Loyal and Spiegel that I mentioned earlier Renard the Fox Rabbit from African cosmologies Coyote from indigenous American cosmologies Rare rabbit. Yeah, rare rabbit. Yep and So this is an evil. This is just this is necessary chaos. It's rehab. It's rehab. It's rehab I hadn't thought of that, but that's that works. Yeah, and So what it does is it fulfills this necessary role and That's one of the things that handsome points to is the fact that trickster phenomena the trickster archetype loves to self-negate So it'll show you one thing maybe a predictable pattern of behavior and just when you think you've got it It'll pull the rug out from underneath it. Right. It will set you up. It relishes an absurdity, which is arguably what high strangeness is, right? It's antistructural. That's the big thing to the stars Academy of Arts inside always thought this sounds like a Montessori school. It kind of does But like this is it's the same thing and like you know the late Jeff Ritzman who was an incredible thinker Sort of solve that when that when that announcement was made It's like this is going to fall apart because that's what trickster theory says it does and of course it of course it did So I don't think you can ever get out in front of this thing that sort of antistructural Self-negating aspect I think is best exemplified in the contactees or some people who've had poltergeist interactions Something genuinely anomalous will happen to someone then they'll be asked to perform and they'll have to start faking it and Eventually that leads to oh, it was fake all along, right? Right. Yes. Very Geller and spoon bending, you know Or as my friends or I ask Kath on where to the road goes says like just because I can Just because I can fake a punch in a movie doesn't mean that all punches are fake, but neither here nor there But you know the society that like to beat Greg Bishop my mentor says These phenomena are repeatable, but not on demand. That's right We're handsome said you can't photograph it. Right. You can't and if you or you can photograph it But you're gonna get something back that's going to make you seem even less reputable, right? That makes me think of the epigraph From Swedenborg that right you shouldn't trust spirits and cuz there's little lighties always lighting you yeah And again, we're losing you're using these terms loosely like spirits means the other whatever that is like But there's these these phenomena seem seem to lie to you. It's the reason that we always have that punchline of of UFOs only abducting red necks Right, which isn't true, but it's that idea of that sort of marginalization and Disrepute ability that we sort of have associated with the with the phenomenon So yeah, these groups to study it always fall apart attempts to study it always fall apart again That's probably because it's not reliable and I again am positioning a and proposing a meta position intelligence But it's also due to the fact that like You're never gonna get IRB approval to put someone through a near-death experience No, you know this this these sort of things happen. They're associated with trauma like they really are and So you're not gonna do that in the lab. You're just not going to it's like saying let's you know let's measure Title fluctuations in a bathtub or something like it's just not gonna happen or as Jeff Kribal says going to Antarctica and saying where the zebras You know, it's like this. It's not you're looking in the wrong place right because there's no zebras here So zebras don't exist right and it's it's it's also Christ in the wilderness with Satan right Satan's like do this do this do this He's like no That's not the environment and what this happens like you can't be asked to do this. That's why it's this why Maybe if a psychic needed to predict lottery numbers to save their life they could do it But that's why you don't get psychics predicting lottery numbers right and I'm doing George's work such a disservice because it's such a profound book It is dense and it's difficult for you through but once you start to see that you're like oh, I can kind of see the way that a lot of the shape of a lot of these things I think why does the act of dying seem to be or the nexus of dying seem to be the center of all this What is it about death? Death in UFOs Yeah, I joke that the things that you can't talk about are what used to be sex and religion right or sex and politics sex religion Politics sex religion and politics and UFOs, but I repeat myself, right? Yeah, I I don't know. I mean is this is this where we're gonna segue into ecology of souls because it has because I want you Just want you to draw back the string on that the era goes fly and I let her fly College of souls is worth. I mean, it's a thousand. It's two volumes. It's 250,000 words Yeah, and it's got a separate volume just for appendices and in notes and the bibliography and I hate that it's that long but The idea was to write a quaint little book on UFOs and death and then it was like to explain that I have to Have all this preamble and it just seemed like I'd needed to do the topic justice I think that to your original question that death keeps on cropping up Because we're kind of misinterpreting what that moment is what that NDE moment is. I just think it's
It's one expression of these threshold moments, right? What I mean by that is, this is why I asked if we're going to go off into ecology of Solstyratory. I had always been haunted by a statement from Ann Streiber, Whitley Streiber's wife. They were collecting correspondence in the wake of communion, probably one of the only places that you could write at the time, if you're an experiencer. And Ann was making some notes from the correspondence, one of the things that she noted that Whitley, they were later related, was this has something to do with what we call death. Now, what we call death, I think, is a great little haunting phrase in it of itself. It is. But I heard that and I was like, well, what do you do with that? Because again, there's what I want the phenomena to be, right? I really do want there to be fairies at the bottom of the garden. You do? I think that's cool, yeah. But you don't want there to be a little reman from Zed reticule? Well, I mean, yeah. I just want it to be luminous and weird. But I guess what I'm saying is like, there's what I want it to be and there's what I think the evidence is pointing towards. And there's a part of me inside that doesn't want this to be about death and about all just us and projections of us and drawing us into it. But there's a lot of evidence in that regard. So I took, I thought about Ann's statement. A lot of people have talked about this in passing. And I also thought about some other researchers who I thought have done impeccable work. Somebody who doesn't get nearly enough attention is Thomas Bollard. Eddie Bollard wrote UFOs measure of a mystery back in the '80s, which at the time was like the most comprehensive collection of alien abductions, made extensive comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic initiation. Now we can unpack the problematism behind that term, shamanism specific to Siberia, et cetera, et cetera. But just shamanic figures in their communities and their respective communities, which we might call medicine men or women or early religions. Yeah, just let's substitute any culture-specific term for that intercessor with the spirit world. Sure. You do a lot of comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic experiences in terms of the symbolism, in terms of the spaces that were there were going to most notably in terms of the dismemberment that people would have in shamanic initiations. Dismememberment? Yeah. So there was this idea that you would go to the spirit world, and you would be taken apart and put back together again better, and then come back to serve your people. Similarly, one of the scholars of shamanism that historically, the most looked at-- Marcia Eliade talked about certain traditions talking about the shamanic initiation being given by the spirit a crystal in their head to facilitate communication. You see where this is going. All very salient points. So we've got Anne in the death, and we've got Bullard and the shamanic initiation. And then you enter Kenneth Ring into the equation, who wrote the project of MEGA, which talked about the similarity between UFO experiences and near death experiences. And-- I have this reading list for everybody, anyway. OK, it's a long-- it's a long list. Bullard, Ring, Kenneth, they're all here. That's undeniable, too, in a lot of ways. They're narratives of a scent, as Diana Pissocal would call them. Does the DMT experience track with this? That ego death? Well, we can put a pin in that for a moment. I'm happy to have you there. I'll get there. This part of this equation, too, is part of my cork board-- My cork board with the red yarn. Jazz guy's riffing. I have a lot of riff. I'm not-- I usually lose my way before the solo is done. So tunnel-- oops, sorry. So tunnel experience, themes of ascension of lifting up, going to certain spaces. There are a lot of descriptions of alien worlds that sound like afterlife meadows and such. People have seen aliens and near-death experiences. More often than not, they see beings of light. But that's been revealed as one of the more common yet under-reported entities seen aboard craft and alien experiences are beings of light. So that's transferable there. That's absolutely true. It's Ray Hernandez's free study, the stuff that you do on that, the beings of light were really common. So all these things are starting to play well together. Then you do enter-- so yeah, I told you I get there-- you do enter into the DMT in the altered states of consciousness space. Your structure has quite a few passages about beings of light. I'm sorry? Your scripture has beings of light. Yeah, the light imagery is everywhere all over it. My good friend and editor, Barbara Fisher, who runs the six degrees of John Keel podcast is making me work on a book about lights. And it's the toughest thing I've ever done. I love it. Love you, Barbara, but it's tough. But yeah, that's one of the things like you look through scripture, and it's just like-- It's easy to lie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're a close story. But the DMT-intheogen sort of space-- a lot of those were interpreted or thought of as being vectors for talking with the dead, right? To the extent that you could translate ayahuasca as vine of the spirits or vine of the dead. And that's just one example among many. Iboga, you see similar descriptions about accessing the spirit world. Terence McKimmis said that he thought of the DMT as bungee-cording and to the bardo. Have you ever tried it? Me? No, I'm too chicken shit to do it. I just-- I can't break through. Well, and on the backside of recovery, I'm like, hey, is this a really good idea? I don't know. I wouldn't call it a recreation. You know, I wouldn't either. It's not fun. But again, I think it does come to me just being too scared to do it. Because I have some friends who have been like, I've never seen fairies. They're like, well, I can fix that for you. You really want me to? Well, maybe. And then I start thinking about, you know, blood pressure and all sorts of different things that co-morbidities. Anyway. But the wood elves? And I mean, they saw the same story. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and there are illusions to people being taken apart and put together under ayahuasca by a little being. So it's all starts to sound the same. And then you say, OK, well, the shamanic initiations oftentimes take you to the land of the ancestors, or at least two or pass the point of death, a near death experience, and bring you back with powers. Near death experiences come back with supposedly abilities of clairvoyance and pre-cognition and all sorts of things. UFO experiences have this happen too. People don't talk about it enough. True. Poltergal. These people all experienced poltergeist effects. Valais said it was the rule rather than the exception that experienced had poltergeist effects in their lives after their sightings. So we're checking the shamanic initiation box. We're checking the near-death experience box. We're checking the UFO box. We're checking the DMT box to a degree. Mario Kittness and David Luke stood a study that showed that a lot of people who have used psychoactive substances have reported an uptick in things like spontaneous out-of-body experiences and poltergeist effects and such like that. And trips to Fairyland. A tunnel. If you go to-- I had the privilege of the second honeymoon. The first honeymoon was to Blue Ridge. Drunkenly-- I drunkenly summon Bigfoot. The second honeymoon was to Ireland. And just to have a sense of place and to go there and to go these places and really be like, oh, that's what this is all about. A lot of these fairy forts include these subterranean passages called sutra rains, which are these. It's not really known entirely what they were used for. Perhaps storage, perhaps for hiding. But some of them stretched for miles underground. And so it's very similar to the idea of reading a lot of these fairy stories like other person went through a tunnel to Fairyland. Tunnel experience to a pastoral locale. That's the near-death experience. The tunnel experiences the beam of light that the UFO takes you on. The tunnel experiences prefigured in some of the Shamanic stuff as well. So it all starts to kind of play together. But then you've got to say, OK, well, are these all crossing over to the afterlife, depending on your spiritual tradition and coming back? Because it doesn't-- I have a hard-- I can do that with a Shamanic thing, right? I can say that people-- initiates are taking past the point of death and brought back. Because that stretches back into classical traditions. And I can do that, obviously, with near-death experiences as baked right there into the name. I can do that with Fairyland, because Fairy is of this association with the dead. I have trouble doing that with the UFO thing. And I have trouble doing that with all the altered states of consciousness and the Asian thing. So I would posit rather that we have these threshold events, thresholds, tricksters. We have these threshold events where we go and we come back different. And I don't know what that other space is. If you really are still in 2026 holding on to materialism, that's fine, whatever. We'll wait it out. And you really want to say that these are other dimensions. That's fine. I can meet you there. But we've been talking about it for thousands of years. It's the other world. It's Tierna Nag. It's Oz. It's Middle Earth. It's the imagination. I think it's all these things. And if you go there and you come back, and you survive that ordeal, the hero's journey, right? You come back with these abilities that I can't explain. But if you do spend time with this cohort-- we were talking about this a little bit earlier-- you do start to notice these strange things happening around them that you're like that. As someone who hasn't had-- I've had my death and rebirth experience, I guess. But as someone who's never had an alien abduction or in your death experience, per se, or any of these things, it's like, this doesn't happen to me all the time, and this happens to you. And it really does seem to-- I'm observing this cloud of strangeness around you. And so that's sort of what I tried to do with ecology of souls to answer your question 30 minutes later is to put all these things in dialogue with each other and to make them play together. Because all true narratives must reconcile, right? They must. And I see too much worth--
Preserving in the work of Bullard and the work of Ring Too many similarities to the fairy stuff in the work of LA. I'm like, okay. Well, how do these things all have to play together? I think it's the death thing. I really do. I just don't think we know what death is We don't know what death is. Yeah, why wouldn't it be birth instead? Well, that's that's an interesting idea that you know is sort of alluded to If you look at I believe it's the work of Croft and Croaker Some of those old dusty fairy folklore volumes. They'll make illusions two things like The fairies would laugh at funerals and cry at births or there are also illusions to fairy land being summer when it's winter over here It's a place of inversions. You see inversions again. That's trickster topsy turvy sort of stuff again, but Illusion of inversions. So that's an idea that I mean even Charles Fortblow this idea You know we are the ones who are truly dead and right he's so eloquent I can't even paraphrase him, but he was like we are the ones who are truly dead. We've emerged from this You know, we will someday emerge from this cloudy pseudo existence into you know the true the true light of our actual actual lives I hope he's right I hope he's right too, and I I think that he's even Even if I wasn't I didn't have my own faith background I Think I would still say that he's right, right? I think that there are certain hills that I will and won't die on The sci phenomena hill is is one that I will die on I wasn't aware until I watched your interview with I guess it was Eric That the Darryl Bim stuff had been replicated. Yeah So we've got that you've got some of Dean Raiden's work, but there's some tricksters and with BAM as well Yeah, I mean because okay because initially he couldn't be replicated Right and it couldn't really understand it, but it has been since well, and that's that's where you sort of invite in Rupert Sheldrake through the back door right with Morphic Revit resonance. So Rupert Sheldrake biologist and parapsychologist That's the episode that I'm releasing tomorrow. Okay, then I'll keep my mouth shut. Just watch that episode No, no, but yeah, but yeah, it's it's exciting. So so was this was this Was this possible was this possible until was this possible until until Darryl Bim Broke the seal right. I don't know for the for the pre-sintimate Studies well now you have to talk about shell. Okay, so Sheldrake's idea was that among his many ideas because he doesn't So merely just you work on pet telepathy and whatnot But the idea that there's the thing that he coined is Morphic Morphic resonance, which is basically the first time something gets done It's easier to get done later rats and amaze on the west coast running the maze First we'll have a more difficult time than rats on the west coast because something about the collective unconscious Maybe of that species has learned how to maze well, right? Yes, so nature nature has memory Yeah, and if you look at like sports. It's that seems to be the case right because records are broke It's like nobody's ever going to break this record and then that record's broken and then the bar keeps on getting raised higher and people keep on meeting it but uh I will die on the because of people like Sheldrake and like Bim and like Dean Raiden Who have been especially Raiden trying to play by the rules of of laboratory experiments That's a hill I'll die on but the near death stuff is I'm close I'm not I don't know if I'm dying on that hill, but I'm definitely being like mortally wounded on that hill, you know what I mean, okay, that's fair What about the reincarnation hill? Well, that's a good one too. I mean, you know Because there's there's good research. There's great research on it. There's a University of Virginia, so Jeffrey long believe I used to be able to spout this name off top of my head, but I'm there's really compelling stuff You know I with my boys I was kind of hoping that they would say something to me about a past life before age seven also their identical twins So I'll kind of like wanted to do those twin experiments, but no twins will happen to either either But yeah, I mean the reincarnation thing. I think it's part of it too, you know, that's where I break with traditional Christianity, although I think there are ways you can sort of You can sort of blur the the the lines to make it fit, but um, I think I can I think you can I think you can I mean and and just I get so tired of I mean, I'm probably rambling so I apologize, but um, I find the reincarnation stuff to be much more compelling than the Criticism of it. So I get so tired of these low-resolution Interpretations it's like well, why are there more people on earth now and they're ever been how like well how many waves can be on the ocean? You know how come five people say that they were Napoleon at my dinner party in their past life? Well, I don't know. Maybe they'll have a fifth of Napoleon like I don't know Like I like the idea of using the water cycle as an as a as an analog for the reincarnation process like you all get dumped into a soup and then you researchers like Raymond moody of it address that is that Soul energy could be broken off into pieces. Yeah, I think so I think so too Um, and that you know that might be what we experience when we meet Soulmates, you know as we we see a spark of that other thing that's inside of us or even people that you just get along with You know, there's some people that you can along with right from the start There's some people that you kind of don't want to be around, you know like you That's moody's work as well as these soul groups and you just hit it off with somebody. Yeah a hundred percent and you're just going through the experience together I mean you've had these experiences with people where like no matter what you say They're not picking up any of your references and like you have to explain all your aside jokes You're like well, I should have never made that joke because now I'm having to explain it and it's just You know awkward all the way down. There are a couple of musicians that I work with and I love them But that it's the same way. It's like well, you know, maybe maybe we are Our venn diagram of soul pieces does not that's true as a former stand-up. I've played to rooms or nobody But my soul is very true about Say that's ecology of souls. I mean so So the idea so but see you see all that you have to get to to before you can have that UFO conversation, right? And we're not really connecting it with death I'm sorry. We're not really connecting you opposed with that yet No, I mean, this is just the preamble, which is why it got split into into two things and you mean we as a culture or We in this room really all of it. I mean, yeah, it's I can't make the connection, but I but I feel like there's something to it. I mean Well, let me expand a little bit more We've got the the narrative the nuts and bolts the aerospace But I think you have even brought to everyone's attention that we're seeing more Experiences that are spiritual and less that are Abduction right like the narrative is changing culturally That's what the phenomenon does I think The late Earl Grey Anderson head of so-called Mufon Said that before he passed away so that he was noticing that a lot of these narratives in the UFO phenomenon are shifting more towards like Downloads astral traveling Consciousness excursions Structured craft or shifting a lot towards more lights in the sky. Yeah, I'm of multiple thoughts about this one of them is that As we globalize and we get we lose our cultural idiosyncrasies. We're seeing a a truer more stripped down version of the phenomenon right so instead of seeing I don't know a flying chariot or a flying saucer we just see the light that was there all along right just because because because culture is not as Distinct as it once was in a globalized era. Right. I mean Before Kenneth Kenneth Arnold said saucers. It's misinterpreted. He didn't see any saucers. Yeah, they're like batwing chevrons or things Yeah, but but then we people well now we're in fourth-waltive Phantom's territory. We can't get there. We gotta do it. We gotta still people ended up seeing saucers, but hey, so yeah So we'll go to break we'll come back quite well, but if you want to make a point do it Yeah, I would just say that um, so the phenomenon seems to be seems to change and adapt it seems to continue to be changing and adapting Even disclosure for better or worse is changing adapt. There are people talking about things aspects of the phenomenon that you didn't use to hear The people in that audience in those hearings read some very strange books. Let's just say that um, and uh It's almost as if the front-facing effort to get people to acknowledge UFOs is giving them the most palatable version here The nutsy boltsy things we won't quite talk about the psionics and the extended consciousness and the death connection because you Want to talk about something that would really be catastrophic disclosure. It would be the death connection of course, right, but you know they're Tracking that and researching it couldn't always happen 100% some stuff that I I'm not I hate when people talk about insider knowledge But I just don't want to be gosh or go sure anything and say something But anyway that people are reading weird books on this stuff people are authoring weird books on this stuff who are at the forefront of the disclosure movement, right? um and I think that We're going to continue to see this get weirder and weirder and weirder if this current Disclosure effort takes root and look it's gotten farther than I ever thought it would this time so We'll see Well, at the time this comes out. I think everyone's going to be disappointed They probably are they probably are yeah, but I'm trying to be I'm trying to be optimistic I mean like you know there was a time when I would just said nothing would happen But opinions like that aids like milk so yeah, all right We'll come back. We'll talk about a fiction bleeding into reality Fourth wall um jeffrey cryple said that that book saved your life Yeah How does that work the the gateway and the sort of germ of What became fourth wall phantoms? This is part of what saved my life and the lessons that grew into fourth wall Were what saved my life um So it was during that that rehab sent um
I had no idea what I was getting into, you know, I'm a little child of privilege. These are not my people in rehab, you know, they are my people, by the way. But you know, how do you find your way to navigate through this, you know, because they're guys, you know, they're guys who were, I learned this, they're crunching up goldfish and putting hot sauce on them. So it's like, oh, you've done, you've done time, apparently, that's a thing, that's a thing. You're the first stint. Yeah. And your last guy, Gab Willing. Yeah. Knock on wood. But how does, how does a Josh Couch in, in all of his fart sniffing, hoity, toity sort of way? How does he, how does he, how does he navigate that and how does he survive that? After acknowledging that these are your people, incomes, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Really? Yeah, so I, I journal, I filled up like two journals in the time that I was there. I'm just writing, writing, writing, I got known as the, the writing guy. How long did you do 30? I did like 12, okay, I should have done 30, but I should have done 30, but we're also six years later. Right. So I don't know, you know, um, but, uh, what really helped me was, was trying to, trying to pinpoint where I was at in the heroes journey, because this is not the way life is supposed to go, right? You're not supposed to wind your way and wind up in, you know, it's a sort of prison-esque sort of vibe, you know. So you're in, in the cave searching for the elixir? Yeah. Yeah, well, what was the belly of the whale? Okay. What's the belly of the whale? Um, and then what do you do after you get out of that? Like what? What does slaying the dragon mean, you know, does it, because this isn't a dragon that you slay, right? You don't, it's got to look different than that. Okay. So it was by leaning into archetypes, and finding, and leaning into that sort of heroes journey thing, and finding strength in those synchronicities with St. Moses and all that stuff. It really felt like something was plugged in and saying, you know, this, this, this matters, you know, this is, this is the way out if you, if you do it right. And to, quite frankly, toss a side that connection to whatever this other thing is, which was so, so tangible, you know, weeping up and weeping back, like that was, um, to toss a side, everything that you learn from, from interacting with the divine, to, to go back out there and do your thing back to the way you work, just seemed like it was, it wasn't just bad for me. It wasn't just bad for my family, it wasn't just a point, it was blasphemous, is really what it felt like. Um, you felt like you turned your back on God? It felt like it would have, or rather more, more to the point of the lessons that evolved into fourth wall phantoms, it would have been, it would have been making a shitty story. Right. It would have been going against that narrative direction, that, that empty riverbed, that dried riverbed that young talked about, it would have been like not following that. Like I think that God, the universe, if you're more inclined, wants you to follow some of these paths. They're, they're paths of least resistance that are sometimes the best paths for you. Totally agree. Um, and if you can learn and listen and lean in those moments, then things will turn out for the better. Um, so the entire introduction to fourth wall phantoms is me navel gazing and sharing my rehab experience, um, but just to, just to show that these ideas have, have real stakes. And I think when you expand those up to the macro level, to the societal level, I think they have even deeper stakes, um, about the stories that we tell ourselves, um, about the cynicism and dystopia that we've sort of been reveling in. I mean, honestly, like, I don't get me wrong. I love, I love irony and, you know, that Robert Downey Jr. asks, snark as much as the next person. But, um, there's something inauthentic about it, I think, um, well, then this is a detour I want to take. Um, usually an author's first novel, they can't help, but reveal a lot of themselves. So the old ways never died to 2023 is a musician, rural Georgia, having experiences, difficult relationships and struggling with alcoholism. Yeah. A musician in North Georgia. Yeah. I call it my, um, Appalachian addiction goblin trauma drama. Yeah. So are you, is it just Robert Coulter? Yeah. Rick, Rick Coulter, Rick Coulter. Robert Coulter's actually the name of the two of players in the last, um, he, he, he, he he wrote me is like, uh, that with me and I'm like, no, it wasn't you. It's Rick Coulter. Um, so what are you working out in that novel? Well, I, so the pre and post rehab experience was sort of trending towards looking at fiction in general. Prior to it, during the pandemic, I was putting together a collection of essays that I was editing and contributing to, but editing of, of people who might admire about fairies and film and how certain films talk about fairy folklore in authentic ways, um, and then after rehab, it was the novel, which was me processing, which sort of pointed me in the direction towards fourth wall fandoms, which is nonfiction about fiction, right? And in the novel, um, yeah, I mean, sometimes I feel kind of sheepish about it because it's like, thank you for attending and reading my therapy session everyone. But, you know, I always, I was wanted, but you needed to do that. I, I absolutely needed to. I mean, I wanted to so much, so much of that book is pulled straight out of my rehab journals. It really is, um, phrases and stuff that people said to me and, and stuff like that. Um, I also wanted to see if I could write a novel. You know, my favorite fiction is, is, is there, yeah, there's the monster, but the monster also symbolizes something, you know, there's something going on under the hood. So to speak with the monster, um, I thought that, you know, a, a generational fairy curse kind of looks a lot like addiction, you know, and alien abductions kind of look like hangovers, you know, post alien, you know, wake up and you're dry mouth and you don't know where your pants are. And you can't remember what happened last night after a certain point. Well, how does recolter change at the end of the novel? He realizes that he doesn't have to be perfect. He makes peace with who he is, in terms of who he was told he was versus who he truly is. And he, uh, he's not as self centered as he is at the start. But to do that, he has to give up something that's very important to him, which is the same thing that I give up. Very important to me, um, and, you know, I, I, I just got done, uh, going through the audiobook version of it with, with Micah Hanks and, um, you know, there's some stuff that would probably change. But at the end of the day, it really, uh, doesn't encapsulate. I say that ecology of souls has my head in it and, uh, fourth wall has my soul in it. And I think the old ways never died has my, has my heart in it in terms of, um, so the relationship that I'd developed with those characters and how they have taken me through my journey in the time since. Now, look, uh, another aspect of writing the novel was sort of pragmatic. I, I'd heard these stories, even from like real straight-laced, atheist materialist friends of mine who are authors. It's like, yeah, you know, you're writing a book and if you have really well-developed character, they won't let you do stuff. And I'm like, that's true. Can you say that again for the people on the back? Like, what are you? That's true. It's true. It's totally true. Follow them where they go. And I was sort of wondering what that was and I wanted to experience a little bit of that. I did get a little bit of that, not too much, but I got a little bit of that. Um, so it was, again, part of this journey that we, I was progressing on towards what it would end up becoming fourth wall phantoms. Well, you've heard Stephen King, same methodology, PKD, did you feel like you were writing inspired? Channeled. There was one, there was one chapter in it, especially that needed substantive revisions. And it wasn't the sense of like, oh, you Josh, you messed this up. You didn't do it. It was like, because when I rewrote it, it was like, oh no, just the transmission was garbled. Like that was, was that sense? It was like, no, this is coming in in a much more fluid way. This is the way it always should have been, right? So there was very much that sort of sense. And it, you know, back to what you were talking about, like, and it's one of my favorite things that Stephen King has said. I think he originally said it in bag of bones, but I think, um, characters him author, saying like, you know, the real work happens with the boys in the basement, the blue collar work in the boiler room, the deep of your subconscious, that's where the story really takes place and takes form. And I have my own version of that, which is I do the best writing between the desk and the fridge. Um, it was just so through the number of times I've been like, I can't figure out how to say this. And I go up and it's not necessarily the desk and the fridge, right? But like what the poem is, like whenever I go and do something else for like, even if it's going to get him to go the bathroom or do something with one of the boys that they need or say, say something to my wife, that's when it's like, I, you know, that's when it's like,
get so frustrated because I'm, as, as I'm about to accomplish the thing that I got up to do, that's when the perfect phrase enters my head. I'm like, just hold on and I brush back and ride it down and then come back. The muse, the muse fighting with the trickster. Yeah, very similar. Yeah, I, hold on a minute. That's okay. From everything I've read about it, it felt like a story of the forgiveness and you forgiving yourself. Yeah, it definitely is a big, there's a lot of stuff that I ended up working out. In myself, there are some relationships, some father-son dynamics that weren't father-son dynamics. They were grandfather-grandson dynamics in that book. But yeah, a lot of it was that and just trying to find a way to commemorate not only my time, struggling with what I struggle with and I guess continue to struggle with, but also quite frankly to commemorate what a lot of musicians went through during the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to have music and my writing, which I to this day, I'm so glad that I can switch back and forth between the two because they used completely different parts of my brain. But you know, a lot of my friends who were just performers didn't really have that and it was a, it was a painful thing to watch happen, really once. To come to fourth-wall phantoms, it's, you've got all this nonfiction, which essentially is not provable. Right. Speculative nonfiction. There used to be a spot in borders. Back when border book source were a thing that said speculative nonfiction and I love that. I didn't use it. Yeah, so it's nonfiction, so it's true, but it can't be proved. And then we've got your fiction novel, which is heavily researched. Yeah, it's, part of it was trying to say what would happen if you were faithful to fairy folklore and fiction, because that doesn't happen very well. Right. So that was part of that attempt, you know. So fourth-wall comes, is born from the novel, it feels like this sort of metacommentary? It was, it was, it was that trajectory that I was talking about. So looking at, well, let's kind of, let's kind of say how, how loyal some fictions are. Okay, let's kind of write your own fiction. And then this was like, how does, we know how the phenomenon affects fiction. How does fiction affect the phenomenon? And I think that it, it plays nicely with some of the ideas and ecology of souls. You know, one of the biggest bits of pushback that I get to some of the ideas and ecology is that we have crash retrievals, we have bodies, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't buy that? Not necessarily. I just think that I'm just not entirely sure that, well, I always have to leave the door open to not buying that, right? Because media, you do? Mediated narratives and stuff. You're open to it. Something, something, something smells. Something smells. And I think that there might be a way of looking at this that both scratches that crash retrieval itch and takes a look at how weird and slippery the phenomenon can be. So, um, to sort of launch into that. There is that idea that I mentioned to you about authors saying that their characters tell them what they can and can't do. And I really want to sort of explore that. And as it turns out, it's a not an outlier. A lot of authors have had this happen. To varying degrees of corporeality, let's say, Inair Gibson said that he met Nora from a doll's house. Dickens had some experiences like this. Most famously, Alan Warren, John Constantine, he was sitting in a sandwich shop in London and says that somebody walked through the door that looked just like John and they sort of acknowledge each other. Other people who worked on the Hellblazer title have also supposedly interacted with John Constantine. So, this is fiction started to bleed over. Fiction bleeding over into life. There's an entire wonderful book called "Embody to Imaginations" by Chad Donbroom-Ramesh on this. And it goes into like stats and to statistics on authors that have experienced this. But there are some got them on the iPad. Well, when Alan Moore's Constantine walks through the door, is it from the 80s? Is it the 2014 content? Is there a canonical character? He said that it looked, in the interview, which is originally a wizard magazine. He said it looked just like Sting. Actually, that's not true. It looked like Constantine because he based Constantine off Sting. But he says it looked like him. And so I guess it was the full trench coat garb. And it wasn't too far after his introduction and swamp thing if memory serves. But this is something that a tons of people, I mean, the Alice Walker color purple had some experiences too where her characters like actually, as she put it, would sit down and sit on the couch and talk with her. So these go all the way from intuitive senses of what your characters wouldn't like to do through oral hallucinations to visual quote unquote hallucinations. And apparently it's very common. There was a study that was conducted at the Edinburgh Book Festival that found that, indeed, it's some pretty staggering numbers. I don't have the stats on the top of my head. But this is something that authors experience quite a bit and creatives in general will tend to experience. And so it occurred to me like, what happens when you put that in dialogue with the UFO phenomenon or with these other things? And it has been done. And I'll get back around to the crash retrieval bit that I mentioned earlier. But it has been done to people who I think you're done have done great workings regarding Bertrand May used and Martin Katmeier. May used to take a look at pre-Kenneth Arnold sighting sci-fi pulps and solve that, especially even when there was a division between the pulps in France and the pulps in America, the UFO sightings and what would become alien abductions all featured elements from these that apparently first appeared in these pulp magazines, right? You know, Martin Katmeier has done the same thing. Classic example that I think he did really good work on is that the first instance of a UFO stopping a vehicle or interfering with electronics was actually again in science fiction short stories. Mad scientists from another planet plunges the New York City power grid into a blackout for ransom or something like that. That appears before any of that other stuff. So there seems to be some sort of interplay between, I would call it a dialogue loop between the phenomenon and our expectations and our fictions that feeds into itself and actually appears in these experiences, then goes round and round and round and round and round. We go. I think you could probably follow that sort of dance all the way back to petroglyphs, you know, and at which point like what is a petroglyph? Is it art? Is it life? I really don't know. But people have seen aliens that look like they're out of movies like describing like, oh, I saw Jawas, you know, it's like what do you do with that or or craft that look like, you know, my favorite, the my favorite Martian spaceship. And like the knee jerk reaction is to throw those in the waste bin. But as we sort of talked about in the beginning of our conversation, like I hate that, you know, and look, I'm not saying that we're not dealing with with mental illness and we're not dealing with hoaxers. But I've also talked to some people, some experiences with who I'm very close who have said that, yeah, you know, my own personal fictions that I was writing as a kid showed up during the time of my, you know, my UFO experiences. Is it the trickster changing costume to be culturally acceptable? Is it the trickster? Is it screen memories? You know, I don't really know what a screen memory is. Even after all this time in this field, like it's just sort of thrown out there, it's like, oh, it's screen memory. Very glamour, you know, right. But yes, it's adapting to our expectations, I think there's a good part of that. I mean, people will see something and like, did you see that? I didn't see anything. But I did. Well, and that gets to the sort of weirder way that reality seems to pick up, seems to pick up our fictions in general. I mean, cutmire at one point was talking about how we threw out a UFO report because it featured lithium crystals and that sounded too much like dilithium crystals, but now we have lithium batteries. So like, I don't, you know, I don't know where these lines intersect, but obviously you can see where this starts to interface with Eric's retrocosality. I was just thinking of that. Yeah. So the question is, I think it's Bob Lazaric. Retrocosality or manifestation. That's at the root of it, which I have this great anecdote and fourth wall fantasy as well as playing a video game Alan Wake too. Because the remedy studio does great stuff. And the entire one of the main thrust of that video game is retrocosality or manifestation. Is it really in the middle of writing this book? I'm reading like a, you know, a collectible in the game that's talking about this. But this happens. How, you know, how do you bring up shell Drake for nobody's heard of shell Drake while I'm writing that episode? I mean, well, I mean, yeah, it's there's something. Come on. There's something in the well, so another weird thing that happened to me was like, I was like, okay, this is weird that I'm playing this game as I started writing this book. And I'm brushing my teeth a couple days later. And for some reason, the sort of inversion of a common phrase pops into my head and it says, if you can't join them beat them. I'm like, I don't know why that popped into my head, but I tried to like, is that insightful at all? If you can't join them beat them, I guess maybe. And then literally that same not I sit down to place some of the DLC and one of the characters says, we can't join them beat them. I'm like, what the thing? So that was like, for me, that was reality saying, okay, look Josh, sometimes it is retro causality. It's, it's gotta be. But
But I think that if you look at, I think that I would prefer that there be a version of this that is manifestation because this is all manifestation, right? I mean, you know, somebody, somebody decided to design this and it was in their head at some point and they carved it and they molded it and now it literally is made manifest. This is like, you know, a cultism 101. And so, you know, you put that alongside of all the creatives who talk about ideas coming to them, as opposed to them coming up with ideas, quote, "apocryphally attributed to you" and also attributed to Hillman was, "People don't have ideas, ideas have people." You've ever been involved in a creative process, you know that this has happened to you at some point. Very much so. In fact, I wait for it. That's a great idea to sort of like set on a trap or an ambush, but like to sort of put yourself, I mean, that might be what the use of drugs in these situations is, right? It's just making yourself receptive to these ideas that come floating along. Like some writers want to smoke pop when they write, I can't do that, but that just makes them open to the news, which I'm 100% totally believe in. Yeah, I totally believe in it too. You know, Tolkien thought that he exhumed the Middle Earth more than inventing it. So, in appeal, Traverse, who wrote Mary Poppins, who was a mentor of Whitley's actually, talked about ideas coming along as like these little balloon ideas, these free-floating balloons that you sometimes grabbed hold of. Excuse me. Where do those ideas come from? Do they come from the collective consciousness, or is that retro-causality? That's the eternal debate, right? That's the eternal debate. Because Eric will say that's just you giving yourself a cat on the back. Okay, so I think that retro-causality is in there, but that's when I would invoke the sort of earlier discussion that we had about the center of that time loop is the ex nihilo. And for me, ex nihilo is the creative act. I'm with you, there. It is the spoken word. It is narrative. I think narrative and sacrifice runs everything. I get really starts to feel that way, the older I get. The news doesn't feel like me when it's there. It feels very different. I don't know if you experienced that. I think, I mean, look, the-- You said channeling. The last thing that I've ever composed was when I was, you know, shit-faced. So, I mean, which is here-- I mean, like Todd Wates wrestled with this, because he's like, you know, you get to a certain point when you get-- because he got sober. He was like, you get to a certain point and you're like, well, what if-- like, how much of this is me, and how much is the sauce, you know? Right. So, again, I think it's not an either/or proposition, but yeah, there is a sense that it's more akin to possession. Yes. And if you've ever been in a flow state, it's the kind of the same way. I mean, like, listen back to me, like, look, don't get me wrong. I got plenty of bad solos that are all across the internet, okay? Bad baselines, bad all sorts of stuff, but every now and then I'll listen to something and be like, that was not me. Like, it's me playing it, but that was not me, you know, and sports figures we'll talk about this. So, there seems to be an interplay. I want to talk about predator and bigfoot here in a minute, but let's put a pin in that. Because I opened this whole conversation with trying to find a, again, a logical exemption for crash retrievals. In a world, in a reality where this possibly is what's going on, where the phenomenon is listening to us in adopting aspects of our fictions, and they're plenty that I listen to the book. I'm not going to go through them right now. But, in a reality where the phenomenon is adopting aspects of our fictions, what do we make of crash retrievals? Like, what would you make of a blood sample from John Constantine, right? Right. Or a bit of mioneer. Like, what would that look like? Would it come back with like, oh, isotopes, we can't make, materials we can't create on Earth? Is that what it would look like? I don't know. But it gives me some wiggle room, I think. And I'm more of the opinion now. There's a great book called Illuminations, I believe it is, by Eric Wallet, that talks about among other things, the possibility that some UFO phenomena are mass formation poltergeist events. As we've alluded to, poltergeists seem to be as much a product of the human psyche as they are ghosts, right? And that's kind of a keel interpretation. It is. Wallet makes a great point that a lot of that falling leaf motion that you see in UFO accounts again and again is exactly the way that a port's fallen from the ceiling and up in poltergeist events. And there's already, as we've sort of mentioned, as Dr. Velay said, a connection between poltergeist and UFOs. Poltergeist supports this that the other. I'm not sure that crash retrieval isn't in even bodies, maybe. I'm not sure that they're not more akin to a port's. By which I mean, how do we distinguish these things that come from somewhere else, another dimension and manifest fully formed? How do we distinguish those from something that just wasn't in our reality? There's this great bit of research by Dr. Steve Mira, who was working on a longitudinal poltergeist case. What's a longitudinal poltergeist? It's just over time, not like a one-off, right? And there was a mug from a set that had deported. Now we have to sort of go into this with some expectations that there is a control group and that the mugs had been microwaved, whatever. I'm acknowledging that. But he did some tests on the mug that was deported rather than the mug that vanished and came back. And he compared them to the control that had not been reported to do that. And he noticed changes in the molecular composition. No. I know the audience is wanting me to be more specific. I'm crap at chemistry and crap at science. It's in fourth-wall fandoms, but changes in the meleseeverts and changes in—it was slightly more radioactive and had been subjected to heat if memory serves. Wow. The point is, again, those details I know I'm fudging on them. But the point is that he studied in a port at the molecular level and said that it looked different. It had somehow changed. Which to him brought up a couple of questions. The mug changed when it came back, or is it even the same mug? Is this an imposter mug, right? And yet we see things when we do these analyses of metamaterials, where there's molecular compositions and isotopes that we can't explain. So are we in a port territory? I don't know. The other thing that really gets to me, I think, is really worth commenting on, is, are you familiar with the phenomenon of angel hair? Yes. So for the—been nobody doesn't know—ectoplasm. It'sectoplasm. I don't know. Thank you for making that connection. So angel hair was used to hear about it a lot in the aftermath of sightings and the UFO sightings in the '50s and '60s. This wispy kind of stuff that would fall to the ground or be found at landing sites. You put it in a jar and it would evaporate. And if you look into reports of ectoplasm from mediums and seances, it would supposedly this gauzy wispy material that would come out of orifices and if it was collected in a jar it would evaporate. Is it the same thing? I don't know. And I'm not—I don't have a jar of either one on my desk and if I did apparently it would have evaporated. But it won't let you measure it. It won't let you. Right, right. What is that? There's another great example, too, the saga of the green stone, which is—it was basically like a larping, where they would get these dreams about having this fabled philosopher's stone, basically that was a green stone, and they would've gotten it in this giant mythology about the gunpowder plot and then a historical facts about how this green stone and this small sword and this casket all featured into it. But then people who were tangentially associated with it were having dreams about the locations for these things. And then they actually found like they can show you the green stone and the sword and stuff. And I don't know what that is because I'm listening to the historians and they're saying like this is none of this ever happened. And it sounds like it's a whole rabbit hole that I encourage people to check out this British phenomenon of psychic questing. Could this be the Philip experiment? Well, I think it's—I think it's souvenirs of the imaginal, right? I think it's souvenirs from that other space. And Philip experiment is they create a character. Right. It's something being created from whole cloth, right? And they know it's fake and yet they still summon they do a sands. And the thing about the thing about the green stone stuff, though, is that like we've got the actual thing. We've got the actual object that you can see in Holden Handel, which is like saints relics, fairy boots, fairy flags. And yet we put the UFO crash material over here. We separate it from all that. Do we have bodies? I don't know. The extreme version of what I'm talking about. But if reality is getting this weird, I don't know that that's not the case. Now, to your point, the Philip experiment, which I think is really important, a group of Toronto psychologists decided to create a ghost from whole cloth. And they came up with a believable backstory for him, Philip Ailsford, a spy in the English of a war gave him all the things he would expect from someone in that time period, highlights and low lights of his life. And then they started asking questions and asking for responses back and the form of wraps and such. And whatever they were asking questions of was correctly answering questions about Philip's fictional backstory. that do they actually create something to help a thought form.
I don't know, was it another spirit that was listening in, that was being a trickster, and you know, being like, oh yeah, I'm Philip, or was it a part of them that was projected out? I don't know, but this is sort of the message behind so much occultism, is that you can, if you play act stuff enough, you can kind of make things happen. - Like moving the Ouija board around? - Yeah, like moving the Ouija board, or you know, I mean, if you look at a lot of ceremonial magic, they're dressing up in a robe, and they're saying to the spirits that they are Solomon, and they're holding, they got props, it's theater, right? It's theater. - Yes. - And people get results. If you look at, like-- - Ceremonies are theater. - John Sebald, Dr. John Sebald has been doing work with recreating period dress, and period customs, and period props, and period phrases, and talking to sort of coax out ghosts, reenactors and ghosts. And he's gotten some success with that as well. It's almost like the act of pretending gets these things, it's this thing on the other side of the veil to respond. You mentioned Tulpa's, could you get into that real fast? 'Cause it's important. 'Cause that's foundation. - It is, and I kind of, I have to sort of, it's one of those things, you ever under these things that you're like, yeah, it could be that, but I really don't like it as much as I feel like I should. You know, so the idea of the Tulpa is supposedly, the idea that through enough concentrated dedication and thought you can make manifest, a thought, right? The famous example comes from Alex Andrew David Neal, who in Tibet claimed that she manifested a mischievous monk. And for a while, she thought just she could see it, but there was some physical contact, and eventually others started seeing it as well. She alluded to the fact that it possibly got out of her control. And she had to, again, through extensive concentration, make it dissipate. The idea of a thought forum or an Edgar Gore, I would think of Edgar Gore as that in the more collective level, right? - Yeah, that's a young unique thought. - Well, it's more of a, it's actually sort of, Edgar Gore is derived out of the watchers. - Yes. - Is what that is. But I think that you could make some real strong comparisons. I don't know if you've ever really mentioned the word Edgar Gore, you might have, but you can draw some comparisons between that sort of collective expression. I don't know if I believe in Tobels or not. I have, I wish I could remember who said this to me. I had a friend tell me one time, friend of a friend, right? Friend of a friend got an appointment with a high ranking Lama and goes into this private meeting. And he's so excited to ask about Tulpa's and he sits down and he asks the question, can you tell me more about the creation of Tulpa's? Goes through the translator, answer comes back. It says, he doesn't know what you're talking about. - So it's like, so, and there are some illusions to this that the Tulpa, the idea of the Tulpa is, while the idea of thought forms, you see everywhere, it's obviously the driving mechanism behind the cultism, right? The idea, there's some indications that Tulpa is just cultural appropriation all the way down, it's just theosophy. I mean, like so much of what you talk about on the Y-Files is theosophy, you know that, right? - I do. - So much is theosophy, it's influenced. - I should have a picture of the process. - I mean, yeah, it's, it's, I make the joke that paranormal studies nowadays are just theosophy and James Shelby Downard. - It's like actually. - So much of that is downstream from that. So yeah, I don't know, I think that ties into this idea. I think the, if the trappings of it, like, oh, this mystical, Eastern secret, if the trappings aren't accurate, the idea is something that has been talked about a lot. - Well, the reason I wanted to talk about it is Tulpa is her manifestation, her concentration. You scale that up to global, and now you've got John Keel's interpretation of manifestation, right? And then the bodies and the crash retrieval, 'cause that just manifestation. - Yeah, and the thing, the other thing, I'm gonna come back to that. The other thing I wanna say about Tulpa's that doesn't sit well with me is like, I prefer to think that like, you didn't make that monk, Alexandra. Like that monk was always there waiting for you to, yeah. Yeah, I think that you're onto something with that. This idea of, and again, it's not saying that this is necessarily all even us. There's something that's interacting with us and listening and it's in this, there are time loops, there are culture loops. There are culture influence loops in the phenomenon too. But, you know, we see a ghost train, and we don't try to like, get a cog from the ghost train. But if you did, what would it look like, you know? You see, you smell ghost perfume and you're not like, well, I'm gonna bottle the ghost perfume. So, you know, I really don't know, so where I've landed with a lot of this stuff. Is it when I wake up in the morning? I guess I'm part of me psychic. I've thought that I'm dead as a door nail, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm not thinking about astral traveling, getting this stuff, like, I want breakfast. I want to go to the bathroom and get breakfast. So, like, how much of me is psychic? 20%, 80%, but there's a part of me. We can say, like, you know, let's playfully agree that, sure, part of us is psychic, 80/20. What if these other phenomena are 20/80, right? So, they have that physical, just as I can step into that psychic space and do things in that psychic space, or I could if I actually had an aptitude or the time and training. Maybe these things are mostly in that psychic space, but can step over into this physical space, and then leave burn marks in the ground, and leave scoop marks in your hands, you know. One of the things when I wrote where the footprints and we started our conversation about Bigfoot, one of the biggest pushbacks that Tim Renner and I got was that we'll ghost not leave footprints. It's like, do ever read your early parents' psychology, 'cause I was like one of the first ghost hunting methods was to spread talcum powder on the floor and wait for footprints to manifest. So, we have something backwards about this physical, non-physical thing, right? And I think that we shouldn't be thinking in terms of, well, Jung would say we shouldn't be thinking about that in terms of physical, non-physical at all, because at the psychoid level, you go deep enough, like material and psyche are not distinguishable, which is only they sort of as they ascend that chain that they become distinguished. But the thing that I would say is that we should stop looking at these questions as physical psychic as internal external, as mental embodied. And honestly, maybe even fact fiction. Like maybe that's that same dichotomy that we see. The psychic physical dichotomy is that fiction fact thing. And-- - Does that mean Constantine was always there? - Maybe, you know, maybe. I would say what it definitely would mean to me is that just as, well, I don't really know the thing about this, because I had a thought, and I completely lost it. I would have to say that maybe Constantine was always there. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to deprive too much of our agency. 'Cause I just push back against Tulpa's being, you know. - My gut goes there, though. - Both and, you know, and it sounds like wiggle room, or sounds like I'm being weaselied, right, both and, but-- - But creative people understand this. - A lot of things in life are both and. - Yes. - I want to open my worst situations in my life because I wasn't both anding. You know, I was either oring. So that might be part of what we're seeing here. - So Valais says something's controlling it. Keel says we're controlling it. Who's right? - We are the other. - I mean, and this is-- - It's the only answer, I guess. - I started by saying I was a mystic, right? - Yeah. - But that's really what you do sort of trace back into. I mentioned that sort of psychoid layer. And, but that's also the lesson of something like monism, you know, the idea that the internal and the external are two sides of the same coin. It's also the idea I would argue, you know, idealism. Pan-psychism is the idea that consciousness is in everything. And idealism would be the idea that everything is in consciousness. And if everything's in consciousness and there really aren't distinctions between us and the other. And, you know, I don't know how literal we can take any of this. - That's all, it's always speculative. - Ignoring your research, not an academic answer. I just want to know what you think happens when we die. - Very simple question, even for in my way. I would have to say that I had, I have a very distinct memory of growing up in a church, where there was a Sunday school lesson that really terrified someone. And part of the lesson was, it evolved into a place where the Sunday school teacher basically said, "I think when you get to heaven, you might not even recognize it."
your family, which for a child is a terrifying thing to say. You might as well be saying that there's nothing, right? But I'm not sure that that's not the case now, you know, 41 years into my life. I think that if you look at how so many of these experiences point towards things like ego death, point towards again that that idea of monism that I just mentioned, that idea of one, you know, oneness, you can go through experience your accounts with UFOs and you'll read things like I am one with the one that is all and I am the V, I am the me within the and like these weird like spiritual phrases, but they do point back to that sort of like lack of distinction between things. And I think that does mean that points to suggests raises the possibility that when you die, it is like a river going to the sea and you end up mixing up and matching and you don't really care. Just like I don't care about like my sons are obsessed with Legos, but I took away their Legos, they'd be distraught, but is that are they going to feel that way in 30 or 40 years? I mean they might, but you take my point like the things that I care about now and place value on now at this point in my life are so different than as a child. I can only imagine what how differently I would treat the stuff on the other side of the veil compared to the things that are important to me now. I had never considered heaven as the same as oblivion before, but that's what it sounds like. Yeah, and that's terrifying, but would you care once you reach that point? No, but is this compatible with soul groups? Is this compatible with reincarnation? Well, that's why I like sort of invoking the water cycle is because you know the after the river goes to the sea, some of that evaporates from the top and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Bangladesh and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Perth and you get bits of a molecule that fell off the you know in Ecuador and they all come together in one raindrop that falls back to the earth as it becomes individuated again, falls back to earth and eventually it's going to hit that river and come back to the ocean because the water cycle is you know closed. I tend to agree. Yeah, but I and so that's why you get pieces of people and maybe even I mean for the longest a lot of a lot of my work has been pushing into areas where I'm really uncomfortable. My toast curl and my shoes and all the bad ways when I hear people talking about pre-birth memories with the ETs and reincarnation in these narratives, it's like oh I don't know what to do with that, but because I felt felt that way, I wanted to go there and you know if let's have our cake and eat it too. Yeah, there are ETs and yeah, their souls mix up in that same cosmic soup to evaporate and fall back down with us, so you could be part Zebulgenubian you know. I'm uncomfortable with it, but I can't disprove it. I don't I mean again again it's it's all speculative. I mean anybody who ever listens to me for hard facts. Despite all my end, despite all my end notes, everything at the end of the day that I talk about is speculative. I think there's so much that's rewarding in the speculation about these topics. Like the binary of does this exist or not, as you can tell, I just blew right past it like this because we've been doing we've been at this in the UFO question. I mean obviously for a lot arguably for a lot longer, but in the UFO case we've been doing this for like coming up on 80 years and we still haven't settled that binary question. So let's go ahead and say okay let's assume that they are what can we learn? Like what what is this pointing us towards? And I think that's such a more interesting place to go and I think that's also a place where we can meet the skeptics. I have so many skeptic friends who will still say to me like even if this stuff is bunk, it's important because it tells us about the way that we metabolize perceived contact with the other. It tells us about humanity. It tells us about ourselves. And that's that's valuable no matter who you are I think. It tells you something about what it is to be a human being. You mentioned that it's fascinating that you drawn to these ideas that are on the threshold of comfort. And I'm thinking that as we get more comfortable with certain notions we we keep pushing it meaning we've got flying sauces are uncomfortable with then we get then we got grays and then it's like they're just grays and we keep moving we keep moving now it's just retrieval we get it but now we're into AI and now we're scared. Yeah and is the AI the new trickster? Well it's kind of the sheltering thing right? Like yes. Or it's you know addiction has been a theme running through this it's like developing a new tolerance like a tolerance. I mean you you experience this I'm sure in this space where it's like you're like yeah okay you're taken by aliens yeah you saw a big foot like whatever like give me more give me more right right yeah yeah and so I think that that just makes perfect sense that that would happen on the on the societal level too and and I think it's a really interesting time to be into these topics for a lot of different reasons I mean again I'm eating I've been eating a lot of crow about the way that I've talked about the disclosure movement historically because like nothing's going to happen well something's happening I'm not sure if how useful it is I'm not sure of how revealing it is but this is different than other disclosure seasons because they come in season but it's also been interesting to be alive when the UFO phenomenon has gone through another one of these costume changes I promise I'll go back to the AI question but you know for years we had signs and wonders in the sky and chariots and starch and then as Dr. Vales pointed out you'll end up with airships in the early 20th century and flying saucers and the black triangles and I said as soon as the the 27th red pill junkie if you're watching this I said this I said as soon as the tic-tac video dropped I said okay we're gonna start seeing a conflation drones are the new UFO shape right yep and he said yeah but people aren't really reporting drones and I said nope it's gonna happen and then the New Jersey drone flap happened and I'm not saying that any of that was necessarily anomalous it might have been I don't I really don't know I'm agnostic on it but the point is how many news stories have you seen since then that conflate drones in UFOs mystery drone scene over this air force so I think it's we have been present for something that is a generational thing where the UFO has said oh okay that's that's a cool that's a cool one I'm gonna start wearing that now having said that that's the case with craft shapes um but the occupants seem to have done that over the years as well it's that passport to McGone you're drawing I was talking about the demons and the fairies and aliens we're way overdue for a for a mass change yeah I wonder if we have this conversation in the next 15 or 20 years if we wouldn't be saying you know the uh the AI robots came out of their underground server farms to harvest my genetic code and then took it back in their their their drones back to their server server farm like is AI gonna be the new mask that this 5149 it goes down like that yeah I think well 5149 it goes down literally like that literally like that but yeah um AI hallucinations sound like lies where you can ask AI question it will just tell you with fully confidently the answer that's totally false did you see the goblin bit no um some of these LLMs have been specifically asked multiple times on the back end to not bring up goblins unless specifically directive what yeah um and uh for someone like me I love that because it's like does a sufficiently complex system invite in goblins like right does it right does it sufficiently in goblin as a metaphor and goblin also was like maybe the metaphor made manifest is what we're dealing with when we see actual goblins right but I just found that to be absolutely fascinating because that's an idea that's you know some of my friends have talked about it's like you know does does any sort of sufficiently complex system invite in consciousness in this sort of primithian uh franken stiny in sort of way I don't know but it seems to invite in goblins because it apparently there's some of these large language models that love uh bringing up goblins even when you don't to the extent that they had like repeat numerous times don't bring up goblins that's wow you know in why goblins uh franken stiny prometheus those those aren't happy endings those stories no um before we go for anyone who's new to your work what do you want them to take away from it it's very personal even though it's what we search is very personal you know not not the book yeah yeah I got it um I would encourage people to be comfortable with ambiguity so I I had a therapist one time who was talking about the triangle being the most stable shape right um and how we like to think of things being settled on one plane so we're it's nice and stable and we have nice foundations um and if you flip a triangle up on this point it's not stable at all but there's the most chance to change chance to pivot right and uh inevitable inevitably it has to happen and I would encourage people to be more comfortable with sitting in that space with not having. what my mentor Greg Bishop calls a certainty fetish. With being able to look at things and be like, interesting of true, you know what interesting? I have a big interesting of true basket in my head. The true basket is small and the false basket is small, but that interesting of true basket is just overflowing. - Yes. - And you file stuff away and you say, "Okay, maybe this something will come out of this someday and maybe it won't." But I think what that does is that puts the things in your, it really places value on the things in your true basket, right? Because so many things default to interesting of true, the things that are in your true basket are the things that you just know in the marrow of your bones. You know, it's the relationships. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's the relationships. - It is. - It's the importance of who you are. - And what's really interesting is when stuff spills out of that interesting of true basket and winds up in the true basket. And for me, the thing that I walk away with after doing all this stuff is that the fact that the map is not the territory in life is firmly in that true basket. And I don't know what collective story we're telling ourselves but there is a better story to be told. And we have to start telling it where else it's never gonna happen. - Well said, Josh Kutchen. We'll link to all your goodies down below. This has been fun. - Thank you so much. - Thanks for coming in. - Good to blast. - Hi everybody. - That was Joshua Kutchen. We covered ecology of souls, the fairer UFO connection, fictional characters, bleeding into reality, and why chat GPT keeps generating goblins. So let's dig in. Here is what checks out. Jocfele laid out the food exchange pattern and passport to Magonia in 1969. Fairies and UFO occupants offering food. The same structure across hundreds of cases spanning centuries. He didn't theorize it, he catalogued it. The Joe Simonton pancake case, Eagle River Wisconsin 1961. A man claimed UFO occupants handed him four pancakes through an open hatch. The FDA tested them. They weren't space pancakes. They were regular pancakes made on a buckwheat flour. Okay, UFO drive through. The Philip experiment, that's real too, 1972 Toronto. A group led by Dr. George Owen invented a fictional ghost named Philip Balesford. They gave him a backstory and tried to make contact. What happened was recorded before 50 witnesses and published in Conjuring a Philip by Iris Owen published in 1976. Rapping sounds, that's knocking, not like hip-hop. Table levitation, the table moved toward people who tried to leave. They created something. They just didn't know what it was. They still don't. Alan Moore saw John Constantine in a London sandwich bar in Westminster, a man who looked exactly like Constantine. He made eye contact, he nodded, and then he walked off. Multiple other hellblazer writers reported the same thing independently. Lots of writers had had this experience, but none can explain it. Now the chat GPT Goblin thing that checks out too. Open AI found that the model kept spontaneously generating goblins, gremlins, and trolls. They explicitly trained it not to mention those things. It kept doing it anyway. PC World, NBC News, and Gizmodo all covered it. A system trained on the full weight of human imagination apparently has an addiction to goblins. That's not a good sign. Jeffrey Pryple at Rice University endorsed the ecology of souls and featured kitchen at the archives of the Impossible Conference in 2023. Whether it's formally on a first year PhD reading list, I couldn't pin that down. But when an academic of Pryple's standing calls your book important in front of his peers, that matters. He's a serious, serious researcher. Josh's honeymoon story, whether he found a rock that looked like they put it there, or his white found one that looked like a rabbit. Those stories have nothing really to do with the thesis. But somehow they fit the pattern that he spent 15 years tracking. A world arranging itself around whatever you're carrying emotionally. I don't know, it's hard to explain. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Of course, I can't prove those stories because they just-- Josh is just telling them. But I have no reason to think he's lying. "Fourth Wall Phantoms" is Josh's new book. He's out right now, grab it on Amazon. If you're into those synchronicities, I've covered those in a few episodes. If you like the Moth Man story, that's the-- we talked about John Keel a lot. That's the Moth Man story. I think that episode 141, that's on the channel. But a lot of the stuff we talked about today, you can find it in the Wi-FiOS library. Anyway, thanks to Josh for coming in. Thanks to you for hanging out. Until next time, be safe, be kind. And know that you are appreciated. 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