Do you think Ted Owens was an alien? >> This is a guy who could point his finger and lightning would strike where he pointed. And he said to me, "This is going to be one of the biggest UFO sightings ever." He said, "It will be seen by hundreds of people." And that happened about 4 days later. >> That is crazy. Engo Swan uh claimed to have used remote viewing to travel to the moon where he believed there were aliens who forced him off. >> Thinking [music] aloud. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Michionlo. >> I'm here with uh one of my heroes who has hosted for the last few decades one of the most incredible shows. I recently interviewed people who suggest that the intention is to build a civilization where humans and aliens will be living together. The ancient gods, the Anunnaki, perform genetic experiments on on our primate ancestors. It seems like a lot of religions, at least at their sort of more esoteric core, were centered around the liberation of the soul from the body. >> I would only qualify that by suggesting that while we use language that says the soul separates from the body, it might be almost the opposite. It might be like going deeper into the body. >> Have you ever had spooky things happen to you? >> [groaning] >> Christmas Eve 1985, I got a phone call from Ted Owens. And in his big booming voice, he said, "You have to notify the US government not to send up the next space shuttle because if they do, my UFOs are going to knock it right out of the sky." A few weeks later, the Challenger explosion occurred. >> We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. >> That is wild. >> Ignition sequence. [music] How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that. [music] Their existence cannot longer be denied. >> [music] >> I'm here with uh one of my heroes, Jeffrey Mishlov, who has hosted for the last few decades one of the most incredible shows. It's called New Thinking Aloud and it explores the frontiers of human consciousness, uh, UFOs, parasychology, survival of the soul after bodily death, all sorts of incredibly important topics at the fringe of human epistemology and knowledge. And you do it with uh such a childlike curiosity and uh but also intensity. And it's and it's amazing. And so I'm just so grateful to be here with you. >> I'm happy to be here. Thank you. I want to talk to you about an interesting essay contest you won. A lot of people in my audience might have heard of Robert Bigalow in the context of UFOs because he's a you know the budget suites billionaire who uh was supposed to actually get UFO material from Loheed Martin in 2008 and with Bigalow Aerospace his company is involved in some UFO material study it seems. Um, and then he ends up with a with a fascination and deep interest in near-death experiences and survival of the soul after after death. And he sets up this essay contest. And you win the essay contest. >> Robert had gone through uh some changes in his life. I think if I recall correctly, uh, his aerospace company had been shut down by the governor of Nevada during the COVID crisis. They in effect decided it was a non-essential business and he had a large staff and he had to let them go. At the same time around then his wife died and he decided to switch his emphasis. He knew that the at least in his mind and I would agree with him the two big unsolved problems facing humanity have to do with the nature of UFOs and the nature of survival after death. And he didn't feel like he could study them both at the same time. But he felt that it was time to switch from UFO UAP activity to look at the question of survival. And to begin with, he thought he would issue this essay competition. >> And I want to get into your submission, which is fascinating, and it's public for everyone to see. But before that, I find it very interesting that certain people like Robert Bigalow transition from this kind of hyper capitalist nuts and bolts. I want to figure out how the UFO technology works. you know, maybe he's looking at the technology or maybe maybe, you know, again, this transfer from Loheed Martin gets blocked by Glenn Gaffne, the director of CIA's science and technology division. Unclear kind of what happens there and how much progress he makes. But then he gets into, you know, the soul and mysticism and parasychology. You've also had on Nick Cook who wrote a whole book about nuts and bolts anti-gravity and he went through a similar transition where now he's writing about parasychology. So I find that fascinating. >> Well, I think it goes all the way back to at least the 1960s to the Betty and Barney Hill case, if not earlier, probably much earlier. There's always been this intangible consciousness related aspect to the UFO mysteries. Everyone who has experienced uh go in fact uh who was the fellow Arnold who first reported UFOs in >> Kenneth Arnold. Kenneth Arnold in 1947. I believe his daughter has now written a book talking about the mysterious paranormal experiences he had following his first sighting. So, it's pretty much always been there and sort of kept under the carpet because people weren't ready. Society wasn't ready to deal with these two mysteries at once. Even when I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1970s and I began doing research with this fellow Ted Owens who claimed to be in telepathic contact with aliens, my uh one of my professors in parasychology dropped off the committee because he said we just can't combine these two fields. It's it's hard enough to have one parasites without having uh the social repercussions of trying to do two at the same time. >> Well, you need to do two at the same time as the great biologist Io Wilson you know discussed consilience and uh you know uh uh matching up disperate domains is how you make progress in interdomain kind of uh discipline I think is really important. So if something is phenomenologically true but can't be encapsulated in some sort of repeatable scientific process, it doesn't make it not true or not subject to scientific scrutiny. >> That's how I've always felt. >> I know. [laughter] >> I'm preaching to the choir. >> The truth is that we live in a world where there are many narrow academic disciplines and they don't often speak to each other. interdisciplinary scholarship is still relatively rare. >> You said you were friends with a man named Ted Owens who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrial beings. He's known as the PK man. >> Yeah. >> Do you want to give just the audience a little bit of context as to who he was? >> Well, in 1969 he published his book called How to Contact Space People. Uh, I learned about it um not long after that because I had friends who were into UFOs and and they thought, "This is unusual. This guy is telling us how to actually achieve a a telepathic communication with what he called space intelligences. And he demonstrated that he could do this by um a a whole series of amazing things like this is a guy who could point his finger and lightning would strike where he pointed and many other things power blackouts and uh controlling uh the weather and UFO sightings. This was all documented in in his original book along with affidavit. >> He was studied by Russell Tar and Hal put off at Stanford Research Institute who started the CIA psychic spy program. Isn't that right? >> Well, almost correct. He reached out to them. They had become relatively wellknown because of their work with Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic who was world famous. and uh they had published in some scientific journals about their work with Geller. So Owens reached out to them and you know said why are you wasting time with him? I'm the world's greatest subject [laughter] and but they wanted nothing to do with him uh actually because they were getting funding from the CIA and they were already is in their minds uh too public be with Geller. They didn't want any flam another flamboyant psychic to be associated with them. So in February 1976, they had invited me to SRRI to experience remote viewing, which I did and and had a very successful trial at the time. But they were all a buzz about Ted Owens because they'd been ignoring him, ignoring him, ignoring him. And finally, he had shortly before my visit sent them a message saying, "I'm going to prove to you guys that I'm real. California was experiencing a bad drought at the time." And he said, "I'm going to show you what I can do. I'm going to end this drought, and it it's going to happen within a couple of days. The newspapers where you are will publish an article saying the drought is over." At the time, the articles were saying no end in sight to the drought. And furthermore, you'll know that I did it because there will be every kind of strange weather, snow and hail and sleet and UFO sightings, which is one of my trademarks. And all of that happened within a few days. And so they said, "Somebody's got to look into this, but we can't." So they said, "Would you please take our files, [laughter] get them out of our office and follow up?" Which I did. I worked with Owens for 11 years from 1976 to 1987 when he died. [laughter] >> Fascinating. Did Did you witness firsthand any of this stuff? The ability to summon lightning on command, control hurricanes, control the weather? Well, these things happened while I was studying him, but I didn't witness them in the sense that I wasn't present as they occurred. They were reported in newspapers, many, many things. >> And he would sort of call his shot and then the thing would happen. Is that correct? >> He would send out letters to me and to other scientists. He had a handful who were at least keeping files on him. And of course I had all the files from put off and tar and along the way other researchers sent their files to me. So I I've collected an archive and I've kept it for decades. >> What what are some of the most striking specific examples of predictions that he made? >> Well, I'll tell you the single most striking one. I had been ignoring him for a while because frankly he he was a difficult person. He wanted desperately for scientists and the government to pay attention to him and he was being ignored. And >> as a result of that, he said, "I'm declaring war against the United States government." And I would get newspaper clippings of poltergeist attacks on Navy vessels and strange things like like that. And then uh there was one >> and he would say that he was attributing that to himself. >> Oh yes. He would say, "I'm haunting this Navy vessel." >> Or using psychokinesis. >> Wow. >> Is what he claimed. Or it varied. At different times, he said, "Oh, I'm not using psychokinesis. I send telepathic messages to my friends, the space intelligences, manted like beings in in an invisible giant UFO hovering over the Earth. And they do it." And the manted beings, they were in touch with light beings that were above them, right? It was like the mantids were somehow intermediaries. >> Well, he would say that they are really energy beings, but when they take a form, it's sort of like a a large insect. >> Interesting. >> Mhm. Well, this is so fascinating because it makes me think that some of the quote unquote UFO disclosure stuff going on right now is sort of a misdirection uh towards this like nuts andbolts machinery thing because if there's a person who can create a poltergeist hysteria on a Navy ship, you have to think that that's being systematically done visav, you know, American adversaries all the time and then they're probably doing it to us as Well, and and some of this stuff we think of as sort of nuts and bolts is really sort of some consciousness projection or something. >> Well, maybe the truth of the matter is that mind and body or physical matter and mental things are really all one >> and and that uh we have been lulled into not appreciating the the vast potential of our own consciousness. And Owens uh was one of the uh people who broke out of that early in his life for various reasons. >> How does he say he broke out of that? >> There are different stories. Uh he would claim that the space intelligences were watching him since childhood. >> He would claim that they discovered he had the most powerful nervous system of anybody they had ever encountered since Moses. and and he claimed that the aliens he worked with, he called the space intelligences. He also had names for them. He called them Tweeter and Twitter. He said there were two of them. And and he gave them those names because he said when they communicated, it was like a high-pitched squeaky sound. And uh he said they arranged for him to have all of these different professions in order that he would have a mind that was flexible enough to interact with them telepathically. >> Fascinating. It was like he was being primed for communication. Yuri Geller has a similar story of being abducted, I think, as a as a young child and then he gained his psychic powers that way. But he would also claim that on one occasion he was driving along a highway in Texas as I recall. And [snorts] one day he found himself um on the road next to his car or truck as it was surrounded by a whole circle of tarantula spiders. And when he got back into the car, he realized that they had operated on his brain and uh [snorts] accelerated whatever native abilities he already had. >> It's wild. >> It's It's very wild. And I'm I don't know how to evaluate it, but to get to your original question, the most unusual thing >> I I was just explaining. I had been ignoring him. He had predicted a major earthquake for example as part of his attack on the US government and nothing happened. And at that point I you know I just did other things. I didn't pay attention to him until Christmas Eve 1985. I got a phone call from Ted Owens and in his big booming voice he said, "Jeffrey, this is the most important phone call you will ever receive." I guess he wanted my attention [laughter] and and he said, "It's up to you now. You have to notify the US government not to send up the next space shuttle because if they do my UFOs are going to knock it right out of the sky. >> Really? >> Yes. That's what he said. And I ignored him because first of all he for the last few years he'd been either you know silly little poltergeist activity fires for example aboard naval vessels and attacks on nuclear power plants those were also documented but the earthquake prediction was totally off base. And besides which, you know, I I was I was a nobody at at the time. I I did have my doctoral degree in parasychology, but I was I had been lieled. I was fighting a liel suit. The US government wasn't going to listen to me, and I didn't even know who to talk to. Uh so I ignored him. But then a few weeks later, the Challenger explosion occurred and I was, as you can imagine, just shaken completely. >> Bravo. >> It happened just over 1 minute into flight. >> 1 minute 15 seconds. Velocity 2900 ft per second. Altitude 9 nautical miles. Downrange distance 7 nautical miles. >> That is wild. Do do you think do you have any evidence outside of his statement? I mean that's that's a it seems like an eerily accurate prediction. Do we have any evidence that there was some sort of interference with the Challenger from an outside object? >> Not to my knowledge. >> Yeah, not to mine either. But but but but this is a very interesting data point. I don't know if you know this. There's a NASA mission controller uh whose name is Tim Taylor and he claimed to be part of a secret space program. Uh but he also and get like all sorts of interesting downloads and he also was the NASA mission controller for that Challenger mission where Judith Resnik ended up passing and it he took it really hard. It was really hard on him. >> And I just I wonder I wonder if you know there was some sort of transmission that was ignored elsewhere or something. I mean who knows? >> I have heard of of others. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. You've heard of others? >> Yes. Um I I don't have all the details, but I was contacted after uh I gave a talk for a small foundation and was active in the San Francisco Bay area at the time called the Foundation for Mind Being Research. and I talked about this event and afterwards I heard from them saying they knew of a another channeler somewhere who had made the same prediction. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. >> And then there was the time where I believe Ted Owens was so pissed off at being rejected by the Stargate crew by Halpov and Russell Tar that he said, "I'm going to do some 100day UFO apparition marathon." And this was also to prove to you how effective he was, right? And then >> there's literally a newspaper clipping from Soma of UFOs appearing in the sky. >> Well, I set up the experiment at that point in February 1976. I got the files from Put Off and Park that summer, July or August. I actually met Owens at a conference in London. And and what happened there was there was a drought in London and put off in Tar although they wanted nothing to do with Owens had arranged for a little news article to be published in Psychic magazine. No longer exists but it was active back then talking about what had happened in PaloAlto and in California ending a drought. So people in London were experiencing terrible drought. Uh it was so bad that they were bringing water by truck to some of the outlying communities and again the newspapers were saying no end in sight to the drought. So they reached out to Owens to end that drought and ended up inviting him to a conference sponsored by the Paris Science Foundation, the University of London in the summer of 76. So I met him there and befriended him and uh he agreed to work with me and I at that point asked him could he set up a a UFO demonstration for me and he [clears throat] immediately responded. He said yes. I'm going to create three UFO sightings within a 90-day period within a 100 miles of San Francisco. >> And he did just that. >> Not quite. >> Sort of. S sort of >> well because that his prediction was every day and this was just a >> No, not every day. >> It wasn't every day. >> No, three over 90 days. >> Okay. >> Within a 100 miles. >> Uhhuh. >> And I was I was a graduate student. So I figured I've got to try and make this as scientific as possible. And I reached out to colleagues in San Diego, which is a city of comparable population, and said, uh, we each sent out letters to all the law enforcement agencies within a 100 miles to see if we could collect information about any UFO reports. So, there was uh first there was one a person in conquered California walking in the middle of the downtown streets at 4:00 a.m. had no interest in UFOs but claimed that he had been abducted right off of the street in downtown conquered and and we interviewed him. It seemed legitimate enough. He wasn't looking for publicity. He filed a police report, etc. And so I was on the phone once again with Owens talking about, you know, what was going on. We were in regular communication and he said to me, Jeffrey, I can feel it coming. He said, "This is going to be one of the biggest UFO sightings ever." He said, "It will be seen by hundreds of people. it will be photographed and the photograph will be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers. And that happened about 4 days later. And and that was over uh Soma State College as it was then known in Ronert Park, California, about 50 miles north of San Francisco. The art department was holding a special artistic event with a pilot named Stephen Pleski who had a little airplane with smoke trailing out the back making designs in the sky. So that was his art form. And so the whole art department, about a hundred people, were out there with their cameras and videotape in December 1976 and a UFO appeared right over the campus uh about 3,000 ft above the campus. The and it was seen by the pilot and from the ground. It was photographed. The photograph was published on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette right in the San Francisco Bay area. And it was videotaped. The videotape was broadcast on the Channel 9 Evening News. >> That's wild. [laughter] It's pretty crazy. And there are people on record who witnessed him seeming to summon lightning as well, right? >> Correct. Yes. >> Who are those people? >> There was an attorney in Philadelphia. This is back in the 1960s. It was described in Owen's book. There was an affidavit from the attorney, Sydney Margules, uh saying that um he was taking a a break from work. I guess they go into the stairwell of this high-rise building where Owens was working as a typist for the law office. And Owens was bragging. He said, "I can make lightning strike." And the attorney uh said, "Oh, I don't believe that." Owen said, "You you tell me where you would like to see lightning." And at the time it was a cloudy day. There was light rain, but there was no lightning. And the attorney said, "Well, over there, the Camden Bridge leading from Philadelphia intoward New Jersey." And uh Owens pointed his finger at the bridge. according to the affidavit. >> Before we dive into this wild episode, I want to give a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, Dose. Dose for your liver is an extremely high quality drinkable supplement. It tastes absolutely delicious. It helps you feel your best and all you have to do is take it once a day. As you might know, I love nerding out and finding the best new health and wellness hacks. And it's super easy to overlook the biggest internal organ in your body, the liver. It's your body's most metabolically active organ. 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Owens pointed his finger at the bridge and according to the affidavit, lightning struck within a few moments, not hitting the bridge, but in that general vicinity. And uh I interviewed Sydney Margules back in the 70s when I started my work with Owens. I interviewed him again 20 years later uh when I published the book The PK Man. And um he remembered the incident vividly both times. He said it was one of the most vivid memories that he's ever had in his life. And he vouched for everything in the affidavit. >> And it's so fascinating that the the histrionic personality is impossible to decouple with the powers. You know, I think you see that a lot. You see that with people like Yuri Geller, too. >> So the CIA took me to Stanford Research Institute. drawings were done miles away and I had to receive those drawings telepathically. One drawing was done while I was in Palo Alto and a CIA agent in Langley, Virginia and I knew exactly what he was holding in his hand. >> You're like really this guy like he was like endowed with all of these gifts. And then I think if you look a little more deeply, you speak to people at, you know, the pair lab at Princeton and other places that studied him. >> I think there there often is a kernel of some magical thing that's going on beyond, I guess, in Yuri's case, he was a stage magician as well, and there probably things he faked. So, it's always very confusing, you know, but it's uh but it's fascinating nonetheless. And it feels like Ted Owens's legacy is being vindicated by all this modern UFO disclosure stuff that really is centered around the the human being and an individual's ability to attract these paranormal experiences. Um if you look at the testimony of Jake Barber or even look at the people under Bigalow, you know, studying, you know, stuff at Skinwalker Ranch, these things seem to sort of follow them home. You talk about the hitchhiker effect and I shared that most of my experience has been positive but I haven't shared that stuff has followed me home and that my family sees it. We have stuff show up over our house >> and it's more about the people. It's almost like disclosure is like uh disclosing ourselves to ourselves, you know, like that's more somehow significant than this sort of materialist reductionist nuts and bolts, you know, there's a craft and it's in a hanger somewhere narrative. >> Well, they could both be true. I think the idea of of the kind of wild personality that is gifted in this way goes back to the prophet Elijah in in the Bible who did something similar calling down lightning. He had a battle of the against the priests of Bal to see whether our god or their god would uh light this sacrificial fire. >> Yeah, it's so it's so interesting. Some people just seem to be endowed with some of these things and then it feels like sort of weakly entangled with reality or hard to repeat in this perfect way. And and and what do you attribute that to? Like it feels like whatever was going on in the Old Testament times, those prophets seem to be able to will these things and harness them uh in a more sort of onetoone clear way. >> Yeah. There's this uh idea I learned when I was uh young and taking religious education that these things no longer happen. They belong in biblical times, but God has decided that we don't need them anymore. Uh I think that's just putting on the blinders. These things are still going on. And Owens desperately wanted to work with scientists. He I have in in the files over a hundred demonstrations of this type that that he performed, but they're not mechanical 100%. They don't work that way. They're uh I suppose you could say like quantum physics. They have a statistical underpinning. >> Yes. Well, if you were an establishment power structure, you might be threatened by people like that. [laughter] >> Um, because they can attract all sorts of attention and I'm sure, you know, cults form around people like that. Have you heard of the prophet Yahweh? >> The prophet Yahweh was a fellow who lived in Las Vegas back in the day when I lived there, as a matter of fact, and he also claimed he could summon UFOs. and a a local TV crew took him up on his challenge. They went to a a local park in in Las Vegas and he said, you know, keep your eyes in the sky. It's going to happen. And all of a sudden, something strange appeared in the sky and they videotaped it and and reported it on the evening news. >> This guy says the Old Testament written in Hebrew taught him how to summon UFOs. I pray oh Yahweh that you send a sighting so that they know that I am not mentally ill. >> I see something straight up. >> Oh brother, look at there it is. >> Let's take a closer look here. It's an orange sphere that appeared out of nowhere. Yeah, that is a wild video because you see the reporter going in all smug like I'm going to dismiss this guy and then he comes out and he's like ah looks like something showed up and you see the kind of onlogical shock and integration process in real time with this reporter. Well, they've subsequently, I think people have looked at it and said he had a a a colleague, an associate who released a balloon. Um, which is, you know, there's no evidence that that actually happened, but it's an alternative hypothesis. >> Yeah, there always al alternative hypotheses and then those alternative hypotheses are often morphing constantly and weaker than just the thing happened. And you know it's funny I think of like um AAM's razor which comes from William of Aam in the 13th century you know that originally in its original connotation meant you know the least amount of entities was responsible for a thing happening and so at the time it would have been God in many cases it was sort of a way to justify miracles and now AA's razor is just because we're living in this age of disenchantment this sort of materialist reductionist soup that we're all swimming in it now is like this heristic that rationalists use to explain anything magical away. >> Yeah. >> And I find that to be such an interesting transition that show it shows that the same heristic is used in diametrically opposed way because undergirling that heristic is just this pre-leveraging of society to like believe in magic and not believe in magic. And so there's this sort of like fundamental mythology that you know underpins what we believe at any given moment. And if you're an enlightenment rationalist skeptic in the modern day, you can say you're immune to that. But you're clearly not. You're pre-leveraged by the rationalist thing. Well, I suspect that there there's a deeper evolutionary uh struggle going on between you could say predator and prey that you know the prey are always finding different ways to elude the predator and the predator is always finding different ways to overcome those mechanisms. So obviously people know that psychic abilities are could be an incredible weapon in the hands of a predator. So one of the defense mechanisms against that would be to establish a cultural norm that says all of this is impossible. M. >> So, Ingo Swan, for example, a great psychic, one of the godfathers of remote viewing, has suggested that humans are capable of vastly greater psychic functioning than than we normally exercise, but it's sort of been conditioned out of us. >> I think it has. And you read the kind of 19th century gentleman journeyer anthropologists, you know, the the the ones before it became this sort of solidified field. people like um you know JG Frasier for example, you read the golden bow and it's like all these tribes that were formerly uncontacted had forms of homeopathic and sympathetic magic where it was you know either the the use of like sort of the likeness of a of a person. So it would be like a voodoo doll or it would be like hair, teeth and nails in the form of sympathetic magic. And in these sort of closed circles, belief would become reality. And it was incredibly powerful. And then I think if you end up in this more kind of atomized, desperate society, you know, that gets that gets lost. And especially if the pervading mythology is just, you know, scientific skepticism. I [snorts] have heard, I don't have any firsthand information, but that the so-called legacy program working with what they called psionic assets to lure UFOs has been reaching out to people from native cultures around the world, especially young children who have never been taught that this is impossible. It is basically these people who are psionic assets who have been screened from third world countries that they use them. >> Yeah, I've heard that as well. And I've heard there are uh people sometimes mysteriously missing from those native cultures. Um I know somebody who studies this in census data. It's sort of a dark area that, you know, freaks me out to be totally honest. But they definitely are systematically looking for um, you know, often children who have nonverbal, autistic, you know, uh, predispositions, but just abilities to uh, perform telepathy, telekinesis, basically like kind of 11 and Stranger Things, you know, but like that's real. And I find actually a very similar kind of uh phenomena with 11 and Stranger Things and Ted Owens bringing it back. Um she requires getting angry for her powers. So when she is sort of backed into a corner, it's it requires a lot of her, but she gets all, you know, kind of goes into like Super Saiyan mode. She gets like really kind of amped up >> and then something paranormal happens around her. And that seems to be true of Ted Owens as well from from your book, The PK Man. Another example would be Ted Cerios, the famous thoughtgrapher who was a Chicago bellhop studied by Juel Eisenbud, the psychiatrist who produced these images on Polaroid film. I think very authentic from my point of view, although the the skeptics have attacked it viciously and unfairly, but he would get drunk uh basically in order to perform this act of psychokinesis. And Owens liked to do something very similar. He would uh occasionally sit in his living room smoking cigars and drinking whiskey and he'd have two or three TV sets going with football games and he would try and influence the outcome of the football games from a a state of intoxication. [laughter] It's so wild. Yeah. If if only people knew just how real I think this all is. And it's, you know, you have JB Ryan who actually worked with Ted Owens for a long time. He was the founder of the first real official kind of parasychology institute, the Ryan Institute at an elite university at Duke, uh, 1931, I believe. And so, yeah, everybody that studies these things at Duke, at Stanford Research Institute, at Pere, the Princeton, you know, engineering and anomalous research lab under Bob John who was the dean of their engineering school. They're all these very serious people. You yourself are the first person to kind of officially study it at Berkeley. Parasychology. >> I think I'm the only person in the world ever to have achieved an accredited doctoral diploma that says parasychology right on the diploma. That that's my unique distinction. But there are hundreds of people who have done doctoral research on parasychological topics. It's just that their degrees didn't say parasychology. >> And the larger point is that people like yourself who seem lucid, rational, very smart, all you know, spend decades of their lives looking at this stuff. Often, you know, you can't ex really argue with the experimental protocol. It's like a random event generator tied to something like radioactive isotope decay >> or you know some quantum tunneling effect or a double slit experiment with you know 50% slit A 50% slit B and you get really statistically significant effects when an observer is present who wants the output to skew towards you know slit A or slip B and uh you can't really explain that away you can always say things like oh it's P hacking and file drawer and you survivorship bias, whatever. But all of these serious people go in often skeptical to into the study of this stuff and they come out and they say, "I think there's something statistically significant here." >> There's no question that there is something statistically significant. The the the real question is what [laughter] is it? For example, mind over matter or is it precognition? that is still a hot debate within the parasychology community. >> We're always going to attempt to, you know, engage in these physicalist frameworks of these things like, oh, if we just figure out that orchestrated objective reduction works and Penrose was right, then it's, you know, the mind is a quantum mechanical system and then we're rendering reality and then we can affect the ones and zero. I I have a feeling it's not just like one more step like that and we've got it solved. I think it's probably way more complicated. It involves probably a paradigm um that turns time on its head. >> And so, you know, do we have math that lines up with that currently? Like maybe quantum mechanics points to that, but Schroinger's equation would be an effective equation that's couched within that just like Newton is couched within Einstein. So, I think we need a a fundamental paradigm shift and we are in the stone age on all this stuff when it comes to these sorts of conversations. Well, and there may be certain logical limits like the great logician who worked with Einstein who showed the limits of logic. No system is ever capable of explaining itself. >> Oh. Oh, Kurt Girdle. >> Girdle. Yes, of course. Girdle >> Girdle's uh logical >> incompleteness theorem. >> Incompleteness theorem uh I think applies here. For since we're talking about consciousness, is consciousness itself capable of explaining itself? >> Yeah, it's the eye seeing the eye. It's a fundamental problem. The point is is that I think while academia is caught up in what's the next theory of everything, how can we explain this, turn it into math and make it perfectly repeatable, >> I think aerospace and the government has been systematically exploiting it for the last 50 years. And so from Stargate and onwards, maybe arguably even earlier, you know, they've been systematically using remote viewing methods, you know, you knew Andre Puharic. >> Yes. >> And you know, he was sort of the father of MK Ultra. And you know, they were summoning this council of nine extraterrestrial beings, but he was a serious kind of neuroscientist at Northwestern before that. And so now you end up with today you have this UFO legacy program which is really just trying to gather up the most parasycchologically powerful people in the US. Like that's roughly what they're trying to do from your >> I don't know. >> Yeah. Okay. >> I I I don't have any privileged access to what the legacy program is. Well, have you heard of these like like it seems like the gifted and talented education system is like acting like a or has acted like a funnel for this sort of thing in the past where they find >> talented students, they drink this pink drink, they'll wear these headphones, hear these tones and try to sometimes affect certain materials with their mind, that sort of thing. I I have heard that, but I I have to admit uh until I get more evidence, I keep an open mind and uh because there's a history of people fabricating stories. So, I'm I would like more solid evidence as to what the legacy program actually has done. I want to close the loop on um human personality and its survival of bodily death which is actually the title of a great um uh book by Friedrich Meyers who was one of the original parasychologists and I think he wrote that in the 1870s and and so you wrote this amazing essay as a submission to uh Robert Bigalow and and and and what is the exact thesis? Well, Bigalow asked for an essay on the strongest evidence that human consciousness will survive permanent bodily death. And my essay uh basically said it's not a single line of evidence. The strongest evidence is that from nine different directions we have evidence for this. everything from mediumship to people who work with what's called EVP or ITC. ITC is instrumental transcommunication. EVP is electronic voice phenomena. In other words, people claim that they're communicating with their deceased friends and relatives using radios and computers and television sets. >> That's fascinating. I know about mediums. I didn't know people are using electronics to communicate with >> there are probably tens of thousands of hobbyists working in that area and and it's very common amongst ghost hunter shows all over uh TV these days. They have a different devices called the spirit box which goes through randomly selected radio channels and people sometimes say they're getting messages that way. Uh, I've heard of some striking examples that that occur and even instances where images will appear on a TV set and will be photographed and the TV set wasn't plugged in. >> I was just with a friend who tragically lost his sister >> and he was saying that he saw a medium and the medium immediately started kind of ragging on him the way that his sister did. So the medium was like, "What are you wearing? That's so ridiculous." Or something. And immediately he just knew. And then from there it was like all of these unique details about things that only she would know like like tens if not 100 plus of these details. >> Yeah. >> And if you were to, you know, use the scientific method against that the p values of figuring those sorts of things out that you know what are the odds somebody could do that through cold reading or you know you can't access this information online. It's not documented. in his case, you know, he gave me some of the examples, but I want to anonymize this somewhat. >> And so, you hear countless stories about this sort of thing, but it's all just disregarded. >> Well, even in the parasychology community, it's very controversial. There the alternative hypothesis is that well, the medium was psychic. It was ESP. It doesn't mean that uh the deceased person is actually alive in a spirit world. But originally parasychology really did look into this this question and it's actually the exception to rule to the rule to find a culture that believes that you know uh the human soul or personality doesn't survive the body as you point out so eloquently in your essay >> and the final thing I would say is even if you look at physics itself E= MC² so you have energy and matter conversion so where does the matter go it just get you know just goes into the ground and then but then there's there's a lot more going on than right now in a in an alive human than just matter. So where's the energy go? You know, like there seems like, you know, if we have conservation of energy, it seems like there's an energy loss going on in death or there's not and there's stuff going on around us and we just can't see it. >> There's also conservation of information. And to take things a step further, Einstein's theory of relativity would tell us, and it's been confirmed experimentally, that if you're a photon traveling at the speed of light, you can go from one end of the universe to the other end and takes no time at all. So, space and time disappear. >> Speaking of space and time disappearing, you have an incredibly fascinating interview. You have so many, but with Michael Talbett. >> Yes. who uh wrote the holographic universe, tragically died at a very young age. >> Um but he was really trying to reconcile kind of hardcore physics with this idea that the universe was sort of this holographic emanation of your mind. >> Prim was studying memory and found that there's evidence that the brain operates holographically and B was studying uh subatomic physics and found that on the subatomic level the fabric of reality seems to possess properties that are reminiscent of a hologram. Mhm. >> So if you put those two ideas together that our brain seems to be holographic and the universe is holographic, it suggests that maybe it's compelling evidence that that the universe may be a kind of hologram. Not that it's literally a hologram, but that it's a good metaphor or way of understanding the universe. >> He he was brilliant and and he was a good friend. I visited him at the hospital before his death. And the irony of Michael Talbot's death is is that he had written a novel about a vampire novel in which he claimed that vampireism was a rare form of leukemia and then he contracted a rare form of leukemia that killed him. >> Whoa, that is crazy. Jesus. Oh man, that is so weird. And that's like a horrible synchronicity, but it feel that feels do you think that was like coded somehow? You know, some of these guys that get to the brink of human epistemology sometimes feel like they're in danger or weird things happen to them. There's I don't know if you're familiar with Jacobo Grinberg. >> Yes. So this guy is studying this idea that the humans exist in this sort of lattice matrix of consciousness >> and he sort of says he figured it out and you know he goes missing and I think the last note he writes is about how he figured it out or whatever and and then he's never sort of found again. >> He was never found again. Uh we uh have a uh a program about that on the new thinking aloud channel uh with Alex Gomez Marin who studied that case. Grinberg was a friend of puharic in incidentally. Uh another example of this sort of thing would be Elizabeth Tar the the daughter of Russell Tar who was a psychiatrist and doing brilliant medical research on psychic healers. She was looking at geoblastto which are brain tumors, very deadly brain tumors. And she was working with healers to heal the the geoblastto tumor when she contracted one herself and died in in her early 40s. >> Jesus, that's horrible. Do you suspect there's now been this sort of missing scientists narrative? And I I think I am in a kind of a middle ground spot on the topic where can I say with confidence there's been a statistical speed up of scientific suppression? No. But can I say that in isolation a lot of these cases people are talking about Nuno Lorero who basically ran MIT's plasma fusion lab. Um, and you know, Carl Gilmare at Caltech, you know, uh, um, Neil McCasslin who ran the, you know, who's on the special access program oversight committee and ran the Air Force Research Laboratory at at Wright Patterson and was cleared to more things than the president. In isolation, I can say that all of those cases are extremely significant. And then I I would say that there's been a history of scientific suppression. So I don't I don't know if this represents a statistical speed up, but do you think that any of those cases, Talbett, Tar, do you think there was any sort of foul play? Grinberg, >> I I don't know. >> Yeah, maybe it's I don't know. Maybe it's maladaptive to think about those sorts of things. You got to kind of ignore it. Keep the blinders on. Have you ever had spooky things happen to you given that you're kind of swimming in this stuff? I mean, you must have to uh go into these things with a real pure heart. because if you don't I feel like if you go into these sorts of topics with any sort of mal inent uh you know it can go sort of badly. >> I I think you're right and maybe I've just gotten lucky. Um >> I doubt it's luck. >> I think I've been protected uh from things, but I I can give you one example uh that was a little scary. Not much really. I think for the most part uh whatever I've experienced has been positive. But there was an occasion after Owens had produced this amazing UFO sighting published on the front page of a local newspaper as he had predicted. I was on the phone with him again and you may remember he said he would produce three sightings and he was bragging about how good he was and I said, "Well, you've only produced two so far." And he slammed the phone down. He got angry and within minutes I could feel this sensation in my throat like um when you get a kind of scratchy feeling in your throat and it's just enough to let you know you're about to get a a real sore throat and um that's how it felt like I'm about to get really sick from this. And then 45 minutes later, he called me back and he said, "Jeffrey, I will never do that to you again." And it lifted. Oh, that's freaky. So, he had the ability to just remote influence people on command. >> Unfortunately, there were lives lost there and uh because he could be vindictive. >> Whoa. So, you think he took people out? Well, there were people who uh in his mind doublecrossed him, had promised him certain things and didn't deliver on their promises. And he was not always a nice person. He tried, for example, to get owners of various major league athletic teams to give him money in order to protect the team. And uh if they backed out on their promise um at least in one of those cases there was a suicide. >> Wow. >> And in other cases uh there was an example where a a sports writer I think of the Virginia Pilot newspaper invited Owens to attend a football game with him. Um, I may have the newspaper incorrect, I think, but because it was the Philadelphia Eagles they were watching, so it's probably a a different newspaper. And uh, in the middle of the game, Owens said, "I'm going to take out this player, told the reporter." The reporter later wrote about it and within moments that player who was sitting on the bench at the time who was a fullback got up and ran into the field unexpectedly and was kicked out of the game. >> No way. >> Yeah. >> So taken out in the sense that he was disqualified from the game because he broke the rules and just came off the bench ran. >> It was a totally irrational act on his part. >> Whoa. But in other cases, you're saying Ted Owens literally might have killed people. >> There were airplane crashes. There were um there were a number of unpleasant incidents. >> You must be protected. You dealt with this guy for a decade plus. That's insane. >> I had the attitude. You see, I started out working in criminology. >> Uhhuh. >> My when I was a young man, I was a graduate student in criminology. I was doing field work at San Quentin prison doing group therapy with murderers and rapists. And I cultivated an attitude early in life to treat everybody with respect no matter what. Even a murderer, even a rapist. And I treated Owens that way too. So he had no reason to ever treat me badly. And uh I think that attitude has has served me well in life and I I still believe it. >> You were almost primed to be able to be to deal with him. You were like the only one who could deal with him or something. >> Well, there were others. There were a few others. I remember back in 19 must have been 7778 uh I convened a meeting of scientists to because I really wanted while I was still a graduate student to launch a serious research program into this man and we actually coraled JL and Heinik to show up and his attitude was I wouldn't go near Ted Owens with a 10-ft bowl. [laughter] I'm with Heinick on that one. Uh that's wild. That's wild that you were able to get that close over such a long period of time and you know you had a 45se secondond scratchy throat. That that that's what that's that's all you got. Um it's fascinating because it's interesting also to hear the accounts of people at the you know Princeton engineering and anomalous research lab and SRRI where at times it almost feels like people studying parasychology for them it's almost like a a religious conversion experience and their ability to affect the statistical distribution you know the zcore on the random event generator is very correlated ated with their kind of heart centeredness or like kind of internal alignment. So I think about that with respect to Ted Owens and I'm like this guy seems like this angry vindictive like sort of you know very limbic guy but then he has these like higher powers and then I think about the people who go through this parasychological conversion process and they become these you know just like almost like modern saints or something and those two things feel very different. They are different and Puharic wrote about that in a book called beyond telepathy in in which he developed a theory that for receptive forms of ESP it's good to be relaxed and as you say heart centered uh he would call it choneric in in his book um meaning the acetylcholine uh hormones are active in the body so you get relaxed Then he said however for psychokinesis for an active form of telepathy or PK as as we call it uh that requires an adinuric state a lot of adrenaline you get aroused uh if you're sending a a message for example uh a very common experience reported in the 19th century was called the crisis apparition where somebody is in an accident or or near death and other people have an apparition, they appear and learn about it that way. Well, the one person in the crisis is in an adinuric state and the other person receiving the information would be in the choneric state. >> So somehow like this self disillusion or heart-c centeredness uh makes you more receptive to messages. But to send the messages, which it really seems like Tedto and specialized in, >> that requires maybe more aggression or anger or more adrenaline. [clears throat] >> It would seem to be the case. I don't think it's a hard and fast rule, but it it seems that there's a tendency in those directions. >> Tell me about Puharic because uh I find him to be such a fascinating figure. You know, I have a friend named Greg Malazzi who just made an amazing uh documentary on on him uh called uh The Mind Traveler. >> I'm Andrea Puharic. I'm a physician by training, research scientist by choice, and I've spent the last 25 years investigating people with unusual powers. >> Puharic was this guy who he was earnestly kind of interested in consciousness. He was at Northwestern and he starts studying this stuff and he kind of gets folded in in a way that I I don't think he was quite ever fully comfortable with throughout his life uh to kind of intelligence circles and CIA >> and um and then he he he has in Austining New York uh you know he has the space kids and he recruits all these people. brings in Yuri Geller from Israel and they're they're talking to this council of nine extraterrestrial beings and there's this open question of is he taking the beings existence at face value? Is there like a galactic federation that he's receiving transmissions from? So there's this like CIA scientist communicating systematically with aliens or is it this proto parasychological thing and he kind of knows that the whole time? Do you have a take on that? And >> oh, I could talk for a long time. >> Please. [laughter] Yeah, go for it. Well, we're here for >> Let me say at the outset, Mind Traveler, the documentary. I know it's been years in in the making. 11 years. >> I know Greg and I'm currently working with a fellow named Lance Mongia who worked closely with Greg. And Lance is currently working with me to build up a documentary on Ted Owens. >> Wow. >> So, there's a connection there. >> That's exciting. Yeah. 168 different demonstrations he performed over a period of 20 years. Roughly twothirds of them worked out the way he said they would. Puharic uh when I first met him was about 1972 and at Berkeley I sponsored a conference at in Zelerbach auditorium. 1,800 people showed up uh and Puharic was one of the speakers and it was at that conference that he made the very first public announcement about his work with Uri Geller and Puharic uh has always been uh wonderful to me. He he was an inspiration. I saw him as a role model and he encouraged me uh along the way. Uh so I owe a debt of gratitude to him. I think he was a fine researcher uh a very brilliant man. I only learned later on about all of his associations with MK Ultra. But he had already published uh some of his work with with psychedelic mushrooms. >> Yeah. Oh yeah. Sacred mushroom. >> The sacred mushroom. So he was known for that and I knew him to be a magical person because I had heard of before I even met Puharic people who read his book uh the sacred mushroom and within uh days of reading his book they find these mushrooms growing in their backyard. >> That's wild. >> Yeah. And I think he would attract all sorts of UFO flyovers at Austining. And uh he had a machine that he would hook up these sort of space kids to as well. So it was this sort of similar to your sort of, you know, um mediumship, you know, electronics. It was these electronics to to to speak with who he thought maybe was extraterrestrial intelligences. It was this council of nine, but there were also I guess he brought up uh the the nine Egyptian deities in this context. >> So I guess my central question on him is do you think he believed that he was in communication with extraterrestrials or do you think he kind of knew all along that you can't take any of this stuff at face value and it was just he was really looking into parasychology? There's so many touch points >> I know >> with Puharic and and UFOs, but I think it's fair to say that he was a very sophisticated man. And I'm >> sure he understood a that UFOs are real, that they were involved, for example, in the Erie Geller's history and and development. Puharic himself witnessed UFOs in conjunction with Ariel as well as synchronicities >> and I you know today we talk about the simulation hypothesis uh which is a very sophisticated way of looking at it and and in Puharic's day that hypothesis didn't exist >> as far as I know but I think Puharic implicitly understood that reality is not what it seems to be and that there's a real connection between the ancient Egyptian deities and people who are channeling information as he was working with different channels channelers and uh UFO appearances. I think he understood it was all interconnected and that he himself was he believed himself to be in direct communication with these entities whatever they were. He was so fascinating and he was I think uh just a focal point for so much good and then incidentally probably a lot of bad too but not necessarily due to his own intention but due to being sort of folded up into the wrong circles which can can often be the case I think in these topics you know I think uh it attracts a lot of left-hand path types who you know want to sort of instrumentally use this stuff for you know MK Ultra or you know their own power or you know instrumental technological use or whatever. >> I think first and foremost he was a scientist and and he wanted to understand these things and uh he had a broader vision than most anybody else in the scientific world at that time. >> You've spoken to so many interesting fascinating people. I don't even know where to start, but Terrence McKenna, uh, you have an amazing interview with him online, and it almost feels like when you ask him questions, he's like, uh, tethered to some metaphysical pool of other worldly truth or something. He's so precise in his language and, um, so semantically accurate, >> but then also extremely trippy. One possible view of the flying saucer is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet that it is Gaia, that it is in fact a kind of alchemical object haunting human historical time with a symbol of totality. [laughter] >> He he was wonderful and and one of the most articulate people I'd ever met. Yeah, there's a great clip of him with John Mack >> and he's interviewing John Mack and he's kind of um kind of uh goating John Mack in like a he's kind of being a little like a cheeky and in his interview questions and he's kind of leading John Mack in you know in a kind of interesting direction which almost feels like his personality type like he's this uh almost machine elf but in the real world or something. uh and uh and he's talking about to John Mack about like you know the western you know materialist reductionist paradigm and John Mack you can tell he's getting kind of ideologically heated about how he wants that paradigm to you know go away and and and that it's going to get and it's going to get hit really hard by you know this the the paradigm that's existed kind of in in cultures across millennia uh you know very hard >> if you want to shatter the western mental structures the the western mind so to speak which is now permeating the whole earth in its materialist dualistic philosophy. The way you do it is you take something that's supposed to be in the spirit world because even in the west we can make allowance for the spirit world and we can study it through mythology, through religion, through imagination, through poetry. But the one unforgivable sin to the western mind is when something that should be in the spirit world transgresses and shows up in the physical world. >> You've interviewed both of those guys. Yeah, >> it it almost felt like McKenna believed that mushrooms would sort of symbiotically they represented these sort of forms of intelligence. >> Yeah. >> And they would symbiotically attach themselves to humans and direct their thoughts and actions in, you know, interesting ways. >> Well, he had this theory that consciousness itself developed when our primate ancestors discovered these mushrooms. Yeah, exactly. >> So, we he he had some wonderful theories. Now, I've done some an interview and I've gotten to know his brother, Dennis, >> and uh Dennis's attitude is is a little different. Dennis uh would tell you that Terrence is is not the the saintly person that is sometimes viewed as, you know, the psychedelic saint of of some kind. He was certainly a pioneer and a forerunner, but the two of them got into a number of misadventures with psychedelics. And Dennis would say that, you know, a lot of Terren's ideas like his uh way of trying to connect the Eching with a a system of 64 different triagrams of of of the each or hexogs of the Echain with the genetic code and and so on was was just speculative and wrong. >> Yeah, fair enough. I mean clearly his life was very sort of free associative or something and you know I know they had multi-weekl long mushroom trips in the Amazon where they would sort of download and channel things. Theories like the stone ape theory are so fascinating and you know I don't know how much corroboration there is for that but it's it's an interesting question to why uh human brain size doubled from homohabilists to homo sapiens from 2 million years ago to you know 3 to 400,000 years ago. You know, if if human hunter gatherers are looking for scat and you know, psilocybin cubensus is growing on that, then maybe that in maybe that begets these sort of quicker epigenetic changes in neurogenesis that allows for that change to occur. >> Well, the other hypothesis would be that of Zachariah Sitchin, who suggests that the ancient gods, the Anunnaki, performed genetic experiments on on our primate ancestors. and and that's how the modern homo sapien developed. >> Yes, that's true. Yeah, there there are a lot of interesting theories and I think there's this latent sense, you know, Steven J. Gold had this discussion of punctuated equilibria. is an evolutionary biologist >> and there are holes in the evolutionary record and Carl Pauper would often talk about materialist promisory notes where you know materialism was taking out debt and and had all sorts of placeholders that they they would smuggle in sort of fake answers for things >> and I think the advent of uh culture and agriculture 10,000 years ago uh and this doubling of of you know brain size are examples of that where you get these sort of spikes in activity where it's Like you're just you're saying that we've been physiologically the same for the last at least 200,000 years as human homo sapiens. And then in 5% of that time 10,000 years ago we get culture, agriculture, history, you know, complex structures that we're building, specialization, urbanization. That seems a little weird. I think we have to take seriously the ancient astronaut hypothesis that the this planet has been under observation perhaps long before humans evolved on it and and that there have been genetic experiments taking place by we don't know exactly who or what the but many of the myths of ancient gods seem to point in in that direction. And if you look at the various claims about um a hybrid program taking place right now, uh people credible people in my mind such as Whitley Strieber who talk about you know semen extraction taking place during alien abductions. It may be the case that those genetic experiments are ongoing. >> That would be wild. And we were talking about Robert Bigalow. I find it fascinating that the UFO disclosure movement centers so much around Bigalow aerospace. It's all about this OAP program and Bigalow which was you know they were going to receive this UFO from Loheed Martin and he was clearly privy to all sorts of sensitive UFO stuff. He was studying these things at Skinwalker Ranch but also elite scientists were doing writeups in the forms of these these sort of durs on like exotic propulsion for him. So, he was really the tip of the spear as far as people we know about with resources um studying this stuff. And then Bigalow will also in interviews say aliens are walking among us. >> Yeah. >> Implying that maybe they're human hybrids or maybe they're men in black style aliens in sort of skin suits or something. I don't know. But what what what do you make of that? >> I don't think we can discount it. I I have heard numerous reports uh along those lines. I don't have any hard evidence whatsoever. But in the larger context of what I know and you know about uh what's been going on over the last let's say 70 80 years. It seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. >> Do you think Ted Owens was an alien? Hey guys, today's episode is brought to you in partnership with Ridge, one of the early OG supporters of the show. 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Do you think Ted Owens was an alien? >> No. Just to push back on that, I don't, you know, maybe he probably wasn't an alien, but like if you have, you know, variants of humans and you have somebody like that with like macro PK skills, >> I would, you know, like if I were to like choose the aliens, it would be the people who like Matilda style could do like telekinesis and like summon hurricanes and that sort of thing. Like that would those would be maybe my first candidates. Well, Ingo Swan uh claimed to have used remote viewing to travel to the moon where he believed there were aliens who forced him off the the moon. But his point was they have stronger psychic abilities than even a very talented human such as himself. And uh I think that's probably true that that all the reports talk about, you know, really clear telepathic communication with with these aliens. But it's not as if humans can't do these things. >> If you go to Mars telepathically, the first thing you'll encounter is a group of five telepaths who are not exactly welcoming. And if they don't manage to throw you out, then they add four more. So there's nine of them after which get a headache and go to bed. >> The aliens would then be on the continuum of human evolution and they would be more advanced than us. And uh epistemic frameworks coming from things like remote viewing would bump into aliens just like Pat Price's remote viewing these alien bases across the earth under skip atwater you know or with you know Ingo Swan where he's remote viewing an alien base on the moon. It's like you're bumping into their channel, >> right? >> It's like you first you're you're Maronei, you're the first person to develop a radio and then you get kind of a weird signal and you're like where's the signal coming from? And that's like maybe what's going on with the remote viewers or something. >> I think there's a lot to that idea and then one has to ask if they've been monitoring us. Some people would say we're like a a garden or a farm for them that they're watching. uh what is their ultimate intention? Where is this what is this leading to? And uh I recently interviewed people who claim to have direct information about that and suggest that they the intention is to build a civilization where humans and aliens will be living together on this planet. >> Who are those people? I've done a series of interviews with two individuals who exist in one body. They used the names Anakah and Tristan. I've now completed 10 interviews with Anakah and Tristan. Uh what they do is uh beyond anything to my knowledge that is known of in the literature of multiple personalities or what's called dissociative identity disorder. So when one of you is in the body, where's the other one? >> Um they are in a meditative state. So um sometimes they can be completely removed to the body. So Tristan just left the body completely like he just moved outside of it and he reduced his presence in the body completely. So now it's now it's just me. But then if I let go of the body and okay, so now I'm in the body. It's it's very jarring, too, cuz you're going from a state where you're you don't have access to the senses and you're very much in this very strange state of consciousness and then you're coming back into the physical world. So, it's it's jarring for us. >> They're perfectly comfortable with each other. They can switch back and forth uh instantly. Uh there are neuroscientists interested in studying them. I'm hoping to set up some serious laboratory uh work, brain scans and and the like neuroiming while that happens because it they can sing duets together and I've been interviewing them over a couple of years now. They claim at this point to have memories of having lived outside of the Earth on other planets and other lifetimes and that they're on a mission to help ease the what the way they would call it would be unifying the timelines, but ease this transition that humanity is going through right now of basically first contact with public contact with aliens who have probably been here for a very long time. My understanding is that their lifespans can be much longer than ours for example. So uh while we say you know human history goes back five maybe 15,000 years to go blacky the lifespan of of some aliens could be longer than that. Uh but in any case they claim that um that there is a plan uh and there are some books from contacties that go into greater detail about that. >> Wow. >> Which they endorse. >> Anukica and Tristan. >> Yeah. >> And these are two personalities in one body and they can switch back and forth at ease. >> Yes. And they're aware of each other while they're one of the personalities is sort of dominating the conversation or embodying the body. >> Yeah. >> It's aware of the other personality. >> Yeah. >> Unlike traditional dissociative identity disorder. >> Exactly. >> Wow. >> And there are now eight interviews that have already been released on the New Thinking Aloud channel. Two more to go. >> I can't wait to watch these. That's fascinating. And so they also claimed to sort of have knowledge of their past lives in which they were on other planets or something, >> right? They they were working on these same problems from the point of view of being an alien. >> What do they attribute that ability to integrate to, you know, like that seems really rare, the ability to switch back and forth like that and coexist in harmony? >> It it's rare. I don't know of another case like it. and they would attribute it to being part of their mission. That it's their way of demonstrating that uh there's more to human consciousness than we suspect. It it would seem to suggest that, you know, the soul and the body are separate that they they can each enter and leave the body at will. Well, you're a fan of William James, the you know, father of modern psychology, but also a lot of people don't know he was, uh, you know, the president of the society for psychical research as well, and he's really interested in parasychology, too. One of the early kind of proponents of it, and he had this transmission theory of consciousness, this filtering mechanism of consciousness that you eloquently write about and speak about. And so maybe, you know, if you were changing the channel on a TV or something, this sort of integrated double identity thing going on with Anukica and Tristan might make a little more sense. >> And if we can begin to nail down what happens in the brain while that is going on, I think that'll be an advancement. Whether you consider it two souls in one body as I do or an unusual case of dissociative identity disorder, it still says a lot about mindbody interaction. >> Yeah, you mentioned uh bending timelines or integrating timelines in order to sort of ease a transition involving contact with non-human intelligence. Uh, I'm sure you've had this thought, but you are probably a large node and a big part of easing that transition. >> Well, I sometimes suspect there may be more going on than I'm even consciously aware of. >> I bet you that that's the case. >> Yeah, >> because you also started the show. Well, I mean, what was the inspiration for the show? Because I think it has a very interesting origin story. Well, if we go back to when I was a graduate student in criminology, 1972, um I would say that um I was already very interested in the paranormal and in mysticism, but I never thought I'd have a career uh in in that area. I was specializing in what you could call deviant psychology, crime and and psychopathology. It's what I was looking at. And I had at that time two dreams that changed my life completely. Uh the first one was a dream where a great uncle of mine who I hadn't seen in years but was like my favorite greatuncle uh appeared in the dream. It was a I call it a visitation and it late I later learned it occurred at the moment of his death and when that happened I decided that I needed to change my career focus. uh and try to find a career that focused on positive forms of human devian rather than negative. That was very hard to do even though I was in at school at the University of California, one of the largest and best in the world. uh there weren't opportunities very much to study the paranormal or mysticism and but there were a few professors who who who were sympathetic and supportive and I agonized what am I going to do and uh then months later after months of agony really [sighs] I knew one day I was going to have a dream. I woke up and said, "Tonight the dream is going to happen. I'm going to know." And I had a dream that night in which I was visiting some friends of mine who lived across town in Berkeley um in a married student housing apartment. I knocked on the door. I knew them very well. There was no answer. And in the dream, I found a key, let myself in to their apartment, and in the middle of the living room floor, there was a magazine spread open. I picked it up, began paging through it. The name of the magazine in my dream was I, E. And then I woke up with this feeling of exhilaration, like, wow, I've got the answer. But I didn't know what it meant. And so instinctively, I acted out the dream. I put on my tennis shoes, ran across town, got to the apartment, knocked on their door, and there was no answer as I had dreamt. And in fact, I knew where they hid a key. And so I let myself in. And there in the middle of the living room floor, just as I had dreamt, was a magazine. I picked it up. It was called Focus. And it gave me Focus for the really the first time in my life. It was a magazine of listener sponsored radio and television, KQED, in the San Francisco Bay area. As I was paging through it, it dawned on me for the very first time in my life that I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the nonprofit se segment of the media. So, >> wow, that's amazing. So I I went to KPFA radio, Pacifica radio in Berkeley, which was also a nonprofit, and said I had my master's degree at the time. I said, "Can I volunteer?" And they said, "Sure. Sit at this desk, and when you hear the doorbell ring, push this button and let people in the front door, which I gladly did." And within three weeks, I had learned how to produce a radio program. I did my first program on You don't have to be from out of town to be psychic. >> Wow. >> And the program director liked it so much he said, "We have a slot for you every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. We'd like you to host this interview show called The Mind's Ear." And all of a sudden I found myself sitting just like this at of course there was a table in those days with leading experts, authors of books, people like Robert Monroe coming through the Bay Area on their book tour. And that gave me the confidence to then go back to the university and take advantage of a very obscure rule they had that if you're a graduate student in good standing. And you want to do a dissertation on a topic that no department would be willing to sponsor and you can find three faculty members of from different departments who will agree to sponsor you. you can create your own individual interdisciplinary doctoral program. And so that's how I ended up seven years later earning a doctoral degree in parasychology. >> That's amazing. It's almost like a little divine intervention. You had a precognitive dream that also I know another former interviewee of yours, Eric Wargo, would describe as a time loop. >> Yeah. Because had you not had the dream, you wouldn't have been motivated to, you know, find the magazine that said focus and then you wouldn't have got gotten the focus in order to join the radio station and then, you know, get the parasychology degree. And so if you hadn't have been paying attention to the dream, you wouldn't have taken action, >> right? >> It's so fascinating. >> Yeah, I'm still fascinated by it. It seems to me that little event in my life says say says a great deal. And and normally what I tell people about it, people ask is it seems to me that the universe as a whole wants each of us to become the best version of ourselves, which is going to be different for everybody. >> Uh and that if you set out to do that, to get in touch with, you know, your own deep inner purpose, the universe is going to help you >> in one way or another. >> Yeah. I think that's right. I think when you when you find the thing that you're supposed to be doing, it feels like almost paranormally things start to happen. It's almost like um the opposite of entropy. You know, I know people use words like centropy or whatever, but >> um it's like a reduction in the in the randomness and an increase in these synchronicities where you're you're being shown that you're on the right path and it's you know the the the path is sort of being cleared for you. I bet that's happened to you, too. >> Oh, yeah, it has. Well, meeting you originally and being such a fan of your stuff and Yeah, it has. Like, every step of the way, in fact, there are times I've tried to quit and um like early on especially um I'll give you an example. Like I didn't put out a show for nine months between Graham Hancock and David Grush. And uh I was really contemplating like you know I I was like I didn't have social media before starting the show. I don't particularly love the discourse on Twitter and you know other other platforms like that. And I just like to like read and meet people and I'm you know I'm sort of ultimately actually kind of an introvert and I get I don't know I get also with these sorts of topics they're fascinating to me and I feel like I I need to get deeper on them. I'm sure you have the same sort of impulse. >> And then I also simultaneously am sort of afraid of them and I'm afraid of getting deeper and I I realize that there are a lot of people who get, you know, too deep or they have sort of the wrong impure motivation. So I'm always trying to audit my motivations. So anyways, all of this is going through my head and I've basically all but quit. I haven't done a show in a long time and nine months and then I'm in Europe and I'm with my friend Omar who runs this amazing channel called Yes Theory, this really big YouTube channel. David Grush had already come out um through NewsNation and I had known him for probably a year and a half or two years at that point and my I was with my friend Amar and he's like you know this guy and everybody in the world is hanging on his every word. They want to know what he's going to say next because he's this guy who's very above board. He's handled the presidential daily brief. You know, colleagues have come out in support of his and he seems totally lucid and he's saying that he has like hundreds of pages of documentation of this legacy UFO crash retrieval program going on, Sub Rosa. He's like, "You need to interview this guy." And I was like, "Ah, man. I've YouTube. I'm I'm done with all this stuff." Uh, and uh, and uh, eventually he kind of convinces me and uh, I I call Dave with my friend Amar and he's like, "Oh, I'm a I'm a huge Yes fan. Like I, you know, I love what what they do and yeah, like why don't why don't we do a thing where it's like you can do something with Yes Theory and we we do something, you know, on the Hill for when I, you know, when I testify and then you can follow me back to Colorado. We'll we'll, you know, go ating together. We'll have a great time." And I'm just like, I can't say no to that. Sounds amazing. [laughter] So I do that. We have the best time ever. We create this little mini dock >> and then from then on I'm like ah I guess I'm back in it. And I've had a little instances like that where if I get demoralized I get like redirected back. >> Mhm. >> It's very fascinating. You can't you know as a morat you got to love your fate. >> Good point. Have you had instances like that where you feel like you you almost have to like test whether something is right for you where you you you peel back on it and then you get sort of forced back into it because clearly you're supposed to be doing that. >> Um there have been times as I mentioned earlier I had to fight a liel suit. >> Uh I have had to deal with uh skeptics who who viciously attacked me for different reasons. Uh there have been times when uh in order to support myself I got involved in other professions uh which is good. I learned things like as you learned along the way about business and about computer programming and a lot of practical skills that if I had only done paranormal research I might not have learned. >> Yeah. Well clearly you you know it's like the Steve Jobs speech. You can connect the dots going backwards but not forwards. And maybe this is an argument for retrocausality or something. But the fact that you studied criminology and sociopathy and then you were like uniquely fitted to dealing with Ted Owens for as long as you did, that just doesn't feel coincidental to me. >> Well, Ted Owens himself had a similar career. He had he was a high-speed typist in a law office. He was at one time a jazz musician, played the drums. He was a a bullhip artist in a sideshow and he had a knife throwing act with his wife. [laughter] Unbelievable. Something that's coming to mind for me is I had a flashback of I learned this from you. You said this on New Thinking Aloud that uh >> weird. The root of it is Celtic Wy RD. And that actually means fate. >> Yeah. And so I find it very interesting that your fate is studying the weird, but in the modern the modern connotation of weird, [laughter] I'd say the same for me in some ways. >> Some people think that weird is is a word of disparagement, which is how it's used these days, but I think of it as being a positive magical thing. >> Oh yeah. Well, like if you're part of the consensus, what are you adding? If you're weird, you know, you're you're you're you're at least adding. And you know, you could you could also be subtracting. It's it's it's one or the other. I always challenge people. I just debated Michael Shurmer on the show. Is there one non-conensus thinker now that you would get behind? >> I don't know because if I knew I would get behind him, [laughter] >> but is important to do that work, right, to take bets. Absolutely. You know, if history is moved forward by non-conensus thinkers, you know, of course, he get he claps back at me and he goes, "Well, you're picking the winners. You know, there are more bad non- consensus thinkers than good non-conensus thinkers. But I sort of maintain my my point. If history is moved forward fundamentally by non-conensus thinkers, if you can't pick one non-conensus thinker now that you agree with, then you're probably on the wrong side of history. And so you're systematically compiling these non-conensus thinkers. Well, there's also been some recent uh studies, in fact, just published, I think a week ago, um surveying physicists because there is this idea that oh, physicists have consensus. They all agree on the standard model of of cosmology and physics. And the survey recently showed that adherence to the standard model is only about 30% [laughter] of physicists. So the idea that there is a consensus is probably a myth. >> Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, it's funny again going back to the Shurmer discussion, we were talking about dark matter, which is when you think of dark matter, you think of it as this canonical staple in physics, in modern day physics. It's part of the bedrock, right? >> And I'm getting into it with him and I'm like, wait, so light doesn't interact with this thing and it kind of justifies gravity's weakness on a cosmological scale, but we have no idea what it is. We just call it dark matter. And then I'm going through all the UFO evidence, all the stuff around nuclear sites across the country. And I'm like, we directly measure these things on radar. We have optical. We have photos. In the case of McMinnville and Lake Coat, we have video. We have, you know, experiencers. We have all these things. And I was like, do you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter? And I eventually got him to sort of concede. But it's it's really certain things are sacred cows and you're not supposed to kind of question them. But you're right. If you have, you know, a few drinks with a physicist, they'll often say, "Oh, yeah, there are all these problems with the standard model." You know, [laughter] I think at people's core, everybody's more idiosyncratic and less herdlike than it seems. >> Dark matter and dark energy are just words. They're placeholders for something's going on and we don't know what. >> That's exactly right. With dark energy, you can literally put that through your favorite AI, Gemini, Chat GBT, whatever. And you say, you know, what is this? It's like, oh, it's cosmic inflation. What's the cosmic inflation being caused by? Oh, well, it's a repulsive almost form of gravity, but it's but it's not gravity. It's not one of the four fundamental forces. Like, what are you talking about at that point? [laughter] And then you just like throw it in the model. You Oh, okay. Oh, it's dark energy. Okay, cool. Okay. Okay. let's slam the door shut on that. And it's the same thing with quantum physics as you know very well with you know parasychology. There all these people who are like you can't affect random quantum processes with your mind. And then you say okay well what are you basing your dogmatic opposition to that on? And they say something like oh the Copenhagen interpretation. Then you say okay what's the Copenhagen interpret interpretation? Well the father of quantum mechanics Neils Boore said that you know you got to kind of you know it's a mathematical formalism. It's not a descriptor of reality and you know holds no weight as far as ontological truth. If you think you understand it, you don't understand it. And then you and then I'm like, okay, so you don't understand it. And then you had all these people at the time in quantum mechanics sort of flirting with the idea that maybe the mind is involved in wave function collapse, whether it was Vonoyman or Vner or later David Bow, who was seen as smarter than Einstein in many respects and was his student. And then it's like well this is totally unfalsifiable in both directions. Both both sides have sort of dogma and then you have evidence on the side of the parasychology people where you have all these random event generator experiments. >> It reminds me of um a book by my old friend Robert Anton Wilson. >> Oh yeah. >> Who wrote reality is whatever you can get away with. >> That's amazing. That's wild. You were friends with him. What what was he like? He was a lovely person and um he had a tragic life. He he had polio as a child and and then his daughter, his beautiful 15-year-old daughter was tragically murdered in in Berkeley. Um but he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And and I have to say I've now done a series of interviews with a fellow named Gabriel Kennedy who has written a biography >> of him. And I don't think when I knew him I thought of him as a brilliant novelist and a fun guy to be around and witty and a friend to Timothy Liry and so on. I didn't appreciate the the depth of his thinking when I knew him then. And I'm trying to make up for that by doing more interviews about him now because I think he was an important thinker. >> Oh yeah, definitely an important thinker and and an iconoclast as well. >> Yeah. >> Um getting back to this idea that the soul survives the body and is kind of transcends the body, >> you have mystery rituals in all these disperate cultures that sort of simulate death before death. Yeah. you know, on this cathedral in Greece around the Elusinian mystery rituals, you had, you know, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. And I'm probably botching that slightly, but >> that idea is prevalent across disperate cultures. And it's almost like the body is a collapsing function on a a default state of greater omniscience. If you go back to Plato, the the bodily senses are misleading and there's some fundamental prior truth involved in the soul. And when you temporarily kill the body, you somehow experience that soul state, >> right? >> Is that something that has been ritualized across cultures? And does that exist at all today? I mean a modern example of it would be the psychoantium developed by Raymond Moody that was based on the discovery in ancient Greece of underground temples uh where the priests lived underground and people who wanted to communicate with the dead would go visit them and I think uh they've been uncovered archaeologically now. They would have a big bowl filled with water which served as a device for scrying uh the way a crystal ball or a mirror. So, what would work? And Raymond Moody said, "All you really need to do is go into a dark room with a mirror." And it's useful to have some preparation in advance and sit in the dark room with the mirror for a while. And you'll see that uh you'll have communication or communion or an apparition will will appear. And uh people have now been researching that. It's an age-old practice. Um, Peter Kingsley writes about prescratic rituals even before the Elusinian mystery rituals as does Haidiger actually where if you cut off all of the senses, >> it's not like you get silence, you get all sorts of weird apparitions. And then John Lily, another CIA scientist, develops the sensory deprivation isolation tank. He claims to communicate with an alien intelligence he calls uh SSI. And you know that also seems to be like this thing that allows you to remote view and allows you to port your consciousness into all these disperate locations and and and sense things that are beyond the five senses. >> There have been many experiments like the the psychoantium and work with the sensory isolation tanks and the Gansfeld experiments. But really uh I would say the a deeper cultivation of these skills would be found in say Tibetan Buddhism where some practitioners will go into isolation for uh a year or more at a time living just in a dark cell and uh staying awake while they enter into the dream state and and so on that there there's such a a vast best difference between, you know, what modern scientists are able to do today and what a an ancient tradition like Tibetan Buddhism has been able to accomplish over centuries. >> It seems like a lot of religions, at least at their sort of more esoteric core, were centered around the liberation of the soul from the body, even the temporary liberation. And then you sort of come back and you have a higher purpose. you've experienced that more kind of primordial soul self and you understand your mission in life a little bit better. >> I would only qualify that by suggesting that while we use language that says the soul separates from the body, it might be almost the opposite. It might be like going deeper into the body. >> I don't have you ever read Alberto Ekko by any chance? >> I have. He he has this great book called Fuko's pendulum and it's sort of I don't know in some ways it's an interesting pmic on the whole research of UFOs or something and he talks about these sort of ecstatic states that you that you reach in sort of a gnostic sense and then through that you can also you know experience like a higher nosis or something >> and I think I think it's yeah it's either deep embodiment or deprivation or something you have the aesthetic protocols of St. Ignatius of Lyola and then you have this other sort of more you know kind of like hedonistic like full sensory thing and maybe in both cases >> you sort of you know transcend I don't know >> I think the problem is human language actually we have these categories we're always trying to make something fit into a linguistic model and we're dealing with a reality that transcends language >> yeah I think that's Right. Yeah. It's like the sending and receiving, you know, receiving you have to be selfless and sending you you have to be a little more aggressive or something. That's obviously an oversimplification, you know, like yeah, we're just uh we're just so so in the stone age on this stuff. And I just hope, >> you know, it's like what have we spent collectively on parasychology in the open source world in the last hundred years? Probably 30 to 50 million bucks or something if that. Yeah. >> And what do we spend on one large collider? $15 billion. And so that's the other retort to people who are like, well, why have you not made any progress? Well, it's there no resources and academia's kind of largely shut it down despite the actual academics who are involved with this stuff saying that there's something there. I just helped to create a doctoral and a master's degree program that includes a specialization in parasychology at the California Institute for Human Science and it's the first program of its kind since I used to teach at John F. Kennedy University back in around 1980 uh when they had a master's degree in parasychology and that program shut down I think after a year or two. It's heartening to see that there's a sort of resurgence. If you take a basket, uh, you know, psychedelics, UFOs, parasychology, all of those things were like very invogue in the ' 50s and 60s and then something happened in the late60s, early '7s where a lot of these things just started to get marginalized. And you could say that you could be conspiratorial, say that was kind of a systematic, you know, marginalization things like, you know, Timothy Liry was this intelligence construct and he intentionally went overboard with these things. You know, I'm sure part of that is true. Um, but it seems to be like a lot of these things are sort of coming back. Well, the work that you and I are each doing, just having a conversation like this that goes out over the internet, uh, is a way of, uh, expanding things slowly, but it seems as if the human population can only take so much at a time. >> Yeah. Well, that's interesting. When you study the random event generators, there's almost like a rebound effect. So, you're in like a flow state. You're getting a So, okay. So a one or a zero shows up on a graphical interface and that's tied to the random kind of quantum mechanical thing. And so the observer shows up, they say, "I want more ones." And all of a sudden they're getting more ones. They see a lot of ones. They see a lot of ones. There's a great book written about this by a guy named Herb Mertz who is at the um you know Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Center and he describes this. So you're in this flow state and it's just like you're shooting threes in basketball and you're making every shot and you're like how is this possible? or you're playing poker and you're just winning everything over and over again and then you become self-conscious and you're like, I'm pretty good at this, aren't I? Wow, I'm I'm doing this. And you you start to overidentify with your success. And then there's this sort of rebound effect. And it feels like when covering these sort of frontier consciousness things, I notice that I when I try to like speedrun it and go too fast, there's this bizarre rebound effect. And it's like, what? Not so fast. And it's almost like you you see a little mud get slung at the thing that you were so high conviction in. >> Yeah. And it it's like adaptively stigmatized in certain cases like like it's like you know both of us have these independent media you know it's like it's it's on YouTube and stuff and I think 90% plus of what you cover is really credible and I'd say the same of of of myself but it somehow has to move through or permeate you know society in like this way that like it like can't be too fast or something. That's what I find. It's like there's some higher intelligence holding it back. >> Well, I think it goes back to Freud actually who who pointed out the whole idea of Freudian defense mechanisms is that we is speaking of the human population. We don't really want to know what's in our own mind, let alone have other people be able to know what's in our own mind. So, so there's a motivation to suppress these things at a very instinctual level and and only slowly I think are people can now for example talk about topics that were forbidden in the 1950s. >> Yeah. And it's what I also find and I'm sure you would resonate with this is that the people who are deeply involved in UFO research and parasychology research, it's often some autobiographical quest and they have synchronicities that got them into the field >> and you know you read Ralph Blumenthal's amazing you know uh the believer you know about John Mack >> and it's like you think of John Mack as this like you point to him as this credentialed expert and you say, "Oh, he's looking into abduction, so take abduction seriously because he's a Harvard psychiatry guy." But then you read this book and you're like, "Oh, well, he was meeting with Stan Stal Grath and he was, you know, he was really he had issues with his mother early on in life and like, you know, he was sort of reconnecting with himself through holotropic breath work and through these techniques that he was evangelizing with, you know, these experiencers." And of course you have to present things in ways that you know make nice with the kind of epistemological paradigm of the present day, right? >> But I think if everybody were to go full open kimono about their lives and what why they believe what they believe, it would always be like super pre-leveraged by some autobiographical quest and need for personal meaning. We talked about the word weird earlier and and it's my understanding that most people probably well over 70% of the population have something weird going on. [laughter] >> That's right. No, I think they do. And I think this idea that you can't own that uh sucks and is stupid. I think we should just own like you know I interviewed Graham Hancock and his the first piece that he ever did was it was like for a I think a magazine or something and he was writing an article on the ark of the covenant. >> Yeah. >> And it was sort of this beautiful quest of like the search for all knowledge and then you know through that he you know then figured out that societ you know civilization is probably much older than we think it is. you have Gbeclette and other discoveries and he sort of really helps rewrite history but it was through this search for the ark of the covenant >> which to me is like so significant you know and >> I think you have all these examples like that when you speak to a lot of these people off camera and then on camera >> you know it's like you have to separate the observer and the observed which can never really be done you know we're all following we're all chasing our own mythologies everybody is the skeptic is too >> and people are afraid afraid that if they talk about it openly, other people will think they're crazy. >> Yes. Well, that's the other thing about, you know, I love this Terrence McKenna quote where he says, "A secret is not something that isn't told. It's something that cannot be told." >> Still a secret. It's still a secret. It's the secret that can't be told. And so I think some of these synchronicities, if you go open kimono with them, you really tell them to the world, they would land so flat and people would not take them seriously at all. They stigmatize themselves. >> And so I think they're extremely significant to the person and maybe to people with sort of ears to hear, but otherwise I think they, you know, they wouldn't resonate at all. And so this ability to even resonate with these topics is also kind of a gating factor for shows like ours to take hold in society too. And that's one of the reasons I think that poetry is so important that there's a way of expressing these truths that is non-threatening through through language that is poetical rather than logical. >> I would agree. You know, I think there's there's sort of a semantic truth and then there's truth that hits you on sort of a Gnostic deeper level. Yeah. >> And yeah, poetry gets at that. Art gets at that. Uh Schopenhau famously said, I think music is the closest thing to the divine. And so, you know, yeah, we can we can try to parse it all these things semantically, but we're just we're going to hopelessly triangulate a thing that is it's just there's no way to to to really talk about it without experiencing it. >> That's true. And and it seems as if uh having the firsthand experience makes makes the difference. Most of the scientists who are really serious about this field have had the experience and scientists who haven't had the experience tend to be skeptical even when they look at the data. >> Yeah, I think that's right. When Carl Young was asked, you know, do you believe in God? He said, I don't believe. I know. Mhm. >> And uh yeah, I think there's a there's a big difference between, you know, being able to sort of intellectually create firmament behind, you know, saying something's real and then just knowing it in your core. >> Did you ever interact with a woman named Valerie Ransone? >> And up at Northern Illinois University, 1971 October, it's around 11:00 a.m. and I noticed a strange object above the student union building. It was like an aircraft without a fuselage and it was just suspended above the building. And that was my first experience. >> She was like trying to communicate with aliens through xenol linguistics through uh she there was this group called the ether ship. This guy Willard de Bogart and um she was in the White House actually. >> I did. >> You did? >> My goodness. Yes. I I was invited >> Uhhuh. back oh it was just around the time I got married in 197879 she convened a meeting in um down in the desert near um Joshua Tree I think 29 palms in in that area and there was a group of about a dozen of us who showed up and and um she she was a channeler and she said she's in touch with what she called the boys upstairs. And she said, "The boys upstairs are going to meet us." And uh at 3:00 in the morning, and we got into a group of of jeeps and drove out into the middle of the desert, she said, "Four UFOs are going to come and and land and and we're going to meet with them." And we're out in the desert late at night and we see my mouth dropped open. Four lights slowly descending. >> No way. >> Yes. In in front of us. >> Really? >> Yes. >> Do you know her whole history? Cuz she is fascinating. She was a former model who was tied in with Puharic, but was also at the Nixon White House and had a lot of high access and was involved in a lot of deep scientific research and and and there was like even I think a general who said that she, you know, was routinely at the Nixon White House. >> Well, when I knew her, she was working in the Gerald Ford White House. >> Well, there you go. and she was uh I think she he had a program about inflation wind whip inflation now and and she was running that little program out of the White House and uh >> wait so she was involved with inflation stuff >> she was like wait I'm this is crazy >> if it's the same person I'm pretty sure her name was Valerie but this is so long ago my memory could be fuzzy >> I'm going to show you a picture the video But but yeah, go for it. >> The the end of the story is that it turned out the four lights were in that area there was a marine base and they were out on maneuvers and what we were witnessing were flares. >> Oh, so do you think she was a kind of a con artist? >> No. >> Okay. >> No, I think it was synchronistic. >> It was a synchronicity. >> Yeah. >> So she could sort of engineer the synchronicity or something. >> Well, or she got engineered by it. >> Or she got engineered by it. And then she went on to work with the Federal Reserve and like central banking. >> I never stayed in touch with her. >> Okay. But you were saying she was working on inflation in the in the Gerald Ford White House. >> That's my recollection. Yes. >> Whoa. Yeah. She's fascinating. I really want to interview her. >> I I wonder if I just haven't had any contact with her since 1979 or so. who of the people who you've interviewed cuz sometimes you meet these shadowy figures and you think that they know so much and then you speak to them and you're like you're just a person you don't know you know you're you're kind of groping in the dark like I am you know >> and then sometimes you meet certain people and you're you have this kind of inkling of like you're holding back you know a lot more than you let on >> who of the people who you've interviewed fall into that second category >> well I suppose As you know, a lot of the guests I sit down with, whether they're physicists, intelligence officers, people who've worked inside black programs, are operating at a really impressive level mentally. Sometimes I feel like I'm a chimp talking to human beings. Often their work takes a toll and a lot of them track their health obsessively. Regular lab work, obscure biomarkers, often things that most people never look at. Meanwhile, last time I went to a primary care doctor, they ran maybe like eight biomarkers and they told me I was fine and sent me home. This massive difference between the ordinary, broken, and limited health care system and what elite people are doing to track their health got me interested in superpower. The beautiful thing is they make elite level health care accessible. They'll literally send a licensed professional to your home or you visit a nearby lab. One simple lab test and you get over 100 biioarkers, heart, liver, thyroid, hormones, metabolism, vitamin levels, even environmental toxins. After that, their app builds you a full action plan, supplement suggestions you can buy directly through them. Nutritional guidance, lifestyle adjustments, they even give you your true biological age, and you can track that over time. And it's not just a one-time snapshot. Each test builds on the last, so you're actually seeing progress instead of starting from zero every year. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health and you start getting serious with Superpower. Not only did Superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with code alchemy. Head to superpower.com and use code alchemy at checkout for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about them. So, please make sure to mention American Alchemy to support the show. Who of the people who you've interviewed fall into that second category? >> Well, I suppose the most brilliant person who seemed to be in touch with at a heart level with the deepest reality >> that I ever met uh was probably Jean Houston >> who died just about two months ago. >> Tell me about Gene Houston. >> She um and her husband Robert Masters co-authored a book called Varieties of Psychedelic Experience in about 1968. She so she was regarded as a one of the founders of psychedelic research, one of the founders of the human potential movement and she created what she called a mystery school which I attended for some years >> and she had the ability a very rare gift to induce mystical experiences. >> She could induce mystical experiences. What what do you mean by that? Well, for example, on one occasion, I was in her mystery school program and she gave a lecture on Carlos Suarez book. He's a cobalist. He wrote a book called the cipher of Genesis. And she went through the very first sentence of the book of Exod uh book of Genesis. Uh in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And she went through it in Hebrew, letter by letter. Um, beret bar adono, etc. in Hebrew. In [clears throat] the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And somehow as I'm listening to this lecture, I got it. And I had the experience of how it happened, how God created this universe. And I was rolling on the floor. And I was laughing hysterically. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world that God created all of this. And the next minute I'd be in tears, tears of joy, really. And and [clears throat] she saw me like that rolling on the floor having this experience and she looked at me and she winked. Wow. [sighs] Wow. >> And she said to me, "Oh, so you're having an epiphany." [laughter] >> Yeah. But almost like in this cheeky way, like she knew exactly what she had induced. >> Yeah. >> That's wild. >> Yeah. >> She sounds like an ascended master or something. [laughter] and she was known for that. Certainly not the only person. People who knew her well had these kinds of experiences in her presence. >> It's interesting how it's often the people that aren't super self-promotional. And like I I don't know what your experience of her was, but I imagine she wasn't very egotistical or showy about her abilities. >> Well, she had a lot of theatrical talent. I can say that. Very talented. She could have been an actress and and she did voices and and she was within the human potential community very well known. >> Okay. Okay. Well, maybe she was self-promotional. I don't know. >> Well, you know, she supported herself throughout her life by uh doing these workshops and traveling around the world and uh she worked with many many different cultures. I would say, you know, she was she knew how to live a a very full life. >> Did you ever get deeper with her on her understanding of the nature of reality? And did she ever say anything that was pretty wild about that? >> Well, I think that time she winked at me was about as close as I got. >> Sure. Yeah. >> But she's written many books, maybe about >> Okay. >> 20 books. Okay. >> You know, she was amongst the she had a big following. Let me let me put it that way. >> You mentioned meeting Robert Monroe. That's pretty fascinating. He is another guy who >> studied consciousness. A lot of people now cite this Hemisync paper from the mid1 1980s >> that involves synchronization of both hemispheres. And you have the Monroe Institute of course in Virginia. >> Um, what was he like? Well, uh, he he seemed like a very self- aacing person. He was quiet. He, um, >> he invited me to kind of, uh, join his program, but, I was already in school at Berkeley, so it wouldn't have been uh, feasible or realistic for me at the time. I kind of imagine what would life have been like if I had I've done a whole series of interviews with Tom Campbell who worked with him closely and Tom has wonderful stories about how the Monroe Institute got built up and as a result of his experiences he's developed I would say a very credible theory of of how these things work. Uh Tom believes that he has the theory, the answer. >> Yes. >> Um and I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but I think he's very close. >> You got to tap into the right data stream. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. He's fascinating. Yeah. I think he also was at NASA, right? Tom Campbell, >> possibly. I'm not sure about that. >> So, you just intersected with all these amazing people. I feel like I'm missing somebody and I'm going to kick myself after this interview if I if I miss anyone. So, [laughter] are there are there any other kind of new thinking allowed guests that stick out for you that sort of shocked you or helped you develop your own worldview? >> Well, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Arthur Young. >> Oh, yeah. >> He he was a mentor to me and he was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, the first commercially licensed helicopter. He was an amazing human being. I would put him right up there with Jean Houston in in terms of the people who have influenced me the most intellectually and at a heart level. Um when I was just beginning my graduate program in uh parasychology, he showed up in my life and invited me to live with him to move into the institute for the study of consciousness he had set up in Berkeley. So I had that experience and he was a theorist. He had a theory of everything which I also regard as being very credible. What was his theory? >> Well, it's complex. It um it's enunciated in his book, The Reflexive Universe. And it's I would say it's consistent with the idea that um the the process the whole universal process is one of spirit descending into matter and then matter ascending back into the realm of spirit. M and so there's like a Vshape and it starts out pure spirit he would equate with light and and we talked earlier about how if you're a photon time and space don't even exist. But then you go from light to particles and the idea of attraction and repulsion and then to atoms where you get form something really solid and stable and molecules and then you get complex molecular chains uh like DNA and RNA and and then that's the beginning of where matter is moving back to the realm of spirit and then you get life forms single-sellled creatures and plants and animals and ultimately humans. What he did is he created what he called the grid and he took in effect the periodic table of the elements and he expanded it to be a periodic table of everything. M so within the human kingdom based on this model he placed modern humans such as you and I uh right about in the middle in the same place in the animal kingdom we would be equivalent to clams in terms of the potential of what an animal could be that so he would say the potential for you know to be fully capable of what a a conscious sentient being like a human could be. We We have a long way to go. >> I think about that sometimes like when we talk about non-human intelligences, we talk about them as others. We don't talk about them as a continuum from us. And we were just talking about how latent in every human are these sigh powers, abilities to sort of remote view, be intuitive, you know, be clairvoyant in certain cases. And that seems to be fully developed in the case of these kind of non-human entities. And so why would you think of those entities as wholly distinct from you rather than kind of the next step on a chain of evolution? And there are theorists, you know, pre-Darwin that used to think of the body or the vessel or the structure as following what could kind of hold the spirit. >> And when the spirit sort of like graduated that specific kind of training ground, then it would ascend into like another form. And so, and then you have, I don't know, great researchers like Don Hoffman who's at, you know, UC San Diego, and he describes, uh, embodiment as actually maladaptive for consciousness. And so, we're likely just teeming with, you know, disembodied consciousness where it's there's less latency and there's more, you know, uh, just ability to sort of instantly react and like know everything very quickly and and so it's just so interesting. Did would Arthur Young sort of agree with that graded ascent of man? >> I I imagine he would, but I think he also felt that figures like Jesus or Buddha represented uh the future for humanity. >> Yeah. Well, that's a great future. >> Yeah. >> So cool, too, that he started again another guy, nuts and bolts, inventor of the bell helicopter. Nobody can take that from him. And then he gets really I mean I know he was close with you and Booharic as well and he was involved in some of those seances with the nine and stuff. >> That's all true. >> So that's just such a such a fascinating clearly a polymath. >> Well here's the fascinating thing about him to me. He he was born as I recall in 1905. He went to school at Princeton. uh graduated in 1926, studied Einstein's theory of relativity back then when it was really new and and Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and he wanted to do process philosophy himself which is really what his theory is. It's about universal process but he also felt that philosophy as a field had failed. because it didn't anticipate all of the progress that humanity was making through technology. And he said to himself as a young man, 21 years old, in order to be worthy of doing philosophy, he had to show that he could master something in the physical world. >> Wow. So he went to the patent office in in Washington and looked for unsolved problems. He discovered that there had been at that point in 1926 maybe 200 different efforts to build what we now call a helicopter, a machine that could hover in midair. And uh they had all failed. So he set out with uh no particular background in engineering to to solve that problem and he worked on it from 1926 up until the first commercial helicopters came off the assembly line at Bell helicopters 1947. >> That is remarkable. And to talk about uh precociousness on the part of somebody so young. >> Yeah. to I mean most people you hear about these stories like you know Edison or Tesla or something it was like in their DNA from a you know young age and they were sort of playing with this stuff really early on in his case it's like to come to that intellectual conclusion and then to just go full force into you know and then and then to actually invent the helicopter the bell helicopter that's amazing >> he spent the first 12 years as I recall working on a design that uh at the end of the day failed completely like mini rotors at the ends of of the big rotors. But he kept at it. He maintained his focus. And after the helicopter had been released and he was, you know, at that point a very famous and wealthy person, uh, then he decided he had earned the right to do philosophy >> and I think well all these machineries and things are teach us laws how to make things. That's why I wanted to make the helicopter so I learn how to make things. >> It it it helps in in how to put a philosophy together. >> You picked a great mentor. >> He picked me. I >> Well, as as it's often the case, it's sort of birectional or meant to be. But that is so cool that what a what an amazing and uh complete life, you know. I think I I always find it interesting when somebody's kind of an industrialist and they interact with the physical world because philosophy can at times be divorced from it. You don't get the the feedback from the kind of cold hard free market uh or or or you know cold hard mechanics of technology. Um, but then on the other side, you can end up in this sort of philistine, you know, I just need to make more money and you're sort of, you know, have a lifeless attitude towards your consumers if you don't have the philosophical angle. And so I think having having both is very cool. It >> Yes, it can be a trap to be very wealthy. Most of the wealthy people I've ever known have been miserable, but not all of them. I another major supporter of my work was a fellow named Buck Charlesson who invented power steering. >> Wow. >> And and the hydraulic motor and he he was a person without much formal education and the ideas would just pop into his mind like with Tesla fully formed and and then he he was working with farmers in in Minnesota and he would ask them what what do you need? and and as a result of that he would make build inventions to satisfy the needs of the local farmers and that led to a hydraulic motor he built. I think the first one maybe came out in about 19 64 or so it was called the Jerrotor and um as far as I know they're still manufacturing them using the same design. >> Amazing. And so he felt that his his fortune and his his fame came to him from an intuitive source and therefore he wanted to give back to the source. >> Oh, that's beautiful. I love that. You know, it's also just so interesting that when you audit the scientific process, it looks a lot more like revelation than it does like some final inductive logic step. >> Yeah. where you just finish the equation. Often it's like, you know, you're in Einstein's case a patent clerk and you're sort of dozing off, you know, or you get you get some sort of I'm a big fan of this mid-century inventor named Thomas Townsen Brown. I don't know if you're familiar with him. >> I believe I've heard of him. >> He worked in the world of gravity manipulation and I think made more inroads than meets the eye. I think his work was sort of suppressed, but he attributes a lot of his life's work to a UFO experience he had, I think, at the age of 17 on Catalina Island. It was like this hierophony. >> Yeah. I'm sure there are many more cases like that we don't know about. >> Yeah. Well, I think if scientists were to scientifically study the phenomena of science, they would find it to look a lot more like, you know, religious experience than they would what they what it's conceived of in the modern day. It's similar to your sort of, you know, lack of consensus around the standard model pmic. There was a philosopher of science who took that attitude who I got to meet Paul Fireend. >> Oh, I love him. Against method. >> Yeah. >> Tell us about him. >> Well, he um when he published his book, you may know that there was an astrology chart he put on the back page. He took real issue with the scientists, about a hundred of them from the SCOP primarily motivated to uh publish an artic a a what would you call it? a white paper or something uh criticizing astrology, scientists who knew nothing about astrology. And he he he said that uh this was a total abuse of the scientific method to claim that they had an authority to to say that astrology was nonsense. So he published his own chart on on the back of his book and he said if you look at what scientists actually do, the great discoveries in science are often accidental or they come from people who totally disregarded what we think of as you know popper and the the scientific method. >> No, totally. Yeah. I I love the example of Maronei who was right because he was wrong. He thought that uh electromagnetic waves might curve when and so he tried to send it across the Atlantic, but he just didn't anticipate the ionosphere. So the electromagnetic wave bounced off the ionosphere accidentally and then he sent the the message successfully. I think poking at the boundaries of reality often gets you really amazing results. And like you said, sort of can be accidental. And that's not to say, you know, it's like the persistence finds you when you're hard at work. You need the you need the hard work. Often it's helpful to have some domain expertise, but you know the thesis of that book against method, the idea that there's some sort of formula and to be this sort of pedantic nitpicking expert makes you most likely to be next in line for the the actual next innovation I think is sort of a ridiculous notion. >> Well, you know who really put Robert Temple on the path that he's on? >> Who? >> Arthur Young. >> No way. >> Yeah. So, so Arthur Young put Robert Temple on the path that he's on. >> Robert Temple when he was a teenager. Uh, he was very precocious and he, if I recall correctly, he got a um scholarship and he was a student at it might have been Temple University or another university in Philadelphia where Arthur Young was living. And somehow they got connected and as a teenager in college, younger than his classmates, uh, Robert Arthur Young sort of took him under his wing and he actually helped Arthur write the first draft of the reflexive universe. >> That's amazing. That's such a wild story. So for the audience, a little bit of context on Robert Temple. He's this amazing also very polymathic thinker. He's written a few different books. He wrote a book called The Serious Mystery actually about um the Doon people um in in which African country in uh I think in Mali >> uh I forget. >> And they they somehow, you know, in their tradition knew that there were two Sirius planets, Sirius A and Sirius B. Or is it two stars, >> right? >> Yeah, two serious stars, a binary star system. >> And um you know, astronomy sort of backed it up much later. And you know there were they had a whole you know people that were kind of coming from that civilization that you know endowed humanity with arts and sciences and wisdom and knowledge. But he also has written an amazing book called a new science of heaven. And this book combines, I'd say plasma physics with metaphysics. And it is amazing because, you know, usually I open up these books and I'm like, I'm expecting a lot of kind of woo woo mushy brain thinking, a lot of, >> you know, uh, mutually exclusive things are true at the same time. You know, everything is everything style stuff. And I'm reading this book and he's talking about Nobel Prize winners who he's, you know, regularly in communication with. Goes through a whole history of plasma physics and then connects that with how, you know, Moses speaking to the burning bush could be like a plasmoid or whatever that's, you know, kind of a modern UFO encounter. Um, and then specifically talks about Cordallowski clouds, >> right, >> in the L5 position. and he's written an amazing research paper as a kind of a follow-up on this >> which is this cordallowski cloud between uh at the lrangeian point between the moon and uh the earth right >> and so the lrangeian point is where gravity perfectly cancels out so that this like sort of big >> plasma ball can sort of sit there >> and he believes that it's responsible for these long delay echoes these radio transmissions that were sent in the early 1920s uh where you know sometimes a few minutes later you'd get the exact same message back that you sent out and he thought that those messages were coming from this Cordelowski cloud. >> He claims that plasma itself is self-organizing. It plasma is physical but it's non molecular. It's really ionic. And most of the universe is composed of plasma. Stars are made out of plasma. The large gas clouds that cover the uh galaxy are largely made out of plasma, though there's some what they call dust mixed in with the plasma. And plasma physicists have said it's incredibly self-organizing. So these they're called the Cardelli clouds. There are two of them as I recall at the L5 point. They are approximately nine times as large as the Earth itself. They're barely visible to our instruments because uh the plasma clouds are um what can how would you describe it? Are they're not dense. And uh but he says that the the plasma cloud can have a structure far more sophisticated or intricate than the human body. And he believes they could be conscious entities. >> So fascinating. And there are studies now supporting that where you know uh plasma seems to cohhere to a human heartbeat when a person walks up to it. >> Uh it's almost like the random event generators where when you look at plasma it seems fundamentally erratic and random but it can cohhere almost in an intelligent way. You can get really cold bits of plasma coinciding with really hot bits of plasma. And this goes handinhand with Rupert Cheldre's idea that the sun is conscious because the sun is obviously made of plasma and maybe coronal mass ejections or you know cosmic radiation is a way of shining that int sending that intelligence you know to earth in some way. Well, the universe would be 99% composed of plasma. And for people who say, and I think it's very credible, that the universe as a whole is conscious, that that would be a way of thinking about it. >> Yeah, that's right. Atomic matter is the exception to the rule and most of uh what constitutes the universe are actually these charged ions. And then you get into really interesting ways of connecting that with your, you know, uh, survival of the soul after death research where, okay, where does the energy of the soul go and maybe it's around us, maybe it's always surrounding us, and maybe it exists in these sort of plasma forms. And when you see testimonies of, you know, people in the quote unquote UFO legacy program and these plasma balls seem to kind of cohhere and become inert and turn into these solid objects and then come out of the sky once they're summoned >> or certain cases directed energy is used against them, which is really sort of dystopian thing to even think about. Um, it's like plasma can turn back into particulate matter and then particulate matter can turn back into plasma. And that's not even an anti-scientific thing to say because these are just phase transitions that can occur all the time, right? >> But maybe that's what happens when you die as you go into your plasma state. I I think uh there's another wrinkle that you could add to that which is the idea of uh higher dimensions of space >> which uh are essential in string theory and the whole series of related theories. and brain theory and so on in physics all involve the mathematics of um higher states of or let's say additional states of physical space uh in addition to the three dimensions that we normally experience mathematically you can go right up to what's called Hilbert space which is a space of infinitely many dimensions >> so I I don't think we can rule that out either. Although I know Arthur Young, who was a huge inspiration to Robert Temple, would disagree. Arthur would have said that what we really should look at is a reduction in dimensions, not more dimensions. >> I don't know what we should look at. You know, I think there's some we're bumping up against our our our limits. But, you know, Ken Wilson, who was a physicist at CERN, he had this idea uh called renormalization, where materials would go through phase transitions based on the amount of energy that were being kind of input into the material and they would uh have properties attributed to them that would be totally disconnected from one another depending on the energy state of you know what's what's being kind of you know transmitted to the material. >> Mhm. >> And so you could think of physics like that too and you could think of that you know with respect to energy and maybe with respect to scale as well. And so you have to wonder what's going on with plasma you know in um speaking of its connection with you know possible soul afterlife that sort of stuff in Buddhist traditions uh and Shinto traditions I don't know if you're familiar with this Japanese concept of the hitoama but it's these uh plasma orbs >> that represent the soul and they sort of you know go up in the afterlife if you you can watch like a you know Miyazaki film like the boy in the huron And it's sort of this whole actually almost Pany's Quest style um you know tale of the afterlife >> but you see these little you know plasma balls and these are these souls that are disembodied. >> I'm not familiar with that but it would make sense and I think Robert Temple would concur. He he has told me that he has communicated with plasma beings. >> Really? >> Yes. >> He's personally communicated with plasma beings. He he I did a lengthy interview with Robert in which he talked about astral projection traveling through the universe, but he described a moment he was flying on an airplane and he said a plasma being entered the airplane and he had a lengthy conversation with her. It was a female. I had some extremely important interactions uh when I was flying to Singapore at 38,000 ft or whatever it was and one of them came into the plane uh she was a young woman a higher entity and um and she she I was asleep um and she bent over. I could see her in my sleep bending over because she's about eight feet tall. You know, the these higher entities are always tall. Um, and she kissed the top of my head and woke me up. >> What did she talk about with him? >> She talked about her relationship with her father >> of of all things. >> Wow. And but so she was just a fully like disconnected from his own life. >> Yeah. >> Whoa. >> Yeah. That that's what he claimed. And you know, if it was anyone else other than Robert Temple, I probably would have dismissed the idea completely. But, uh, he's a solid, credible person to my way of thinking. >> No, I think he's a really hard-headed guy. And now I'm, you know, maybe I'm over pattern matching here, you know, as one tends to do sometimes with these topics, but I think of blue beings showing up. I've had a past guest who was a construction worker and a blue being showed up in his bedroom and transmitted sophisticated physics principles to him and it put him on the radar of Eric Davis and Hell Putoff, people who, >> you know, whose physics prowess, you know, is kind of hard to argue with. >> You have this amazing blue being experience that prompts you to get into quantum physics. >> Because of what this being had showed me, I started looking into this notion of longitudinal scalar waves. Now, these were shown to me by this being as slinkies, so to speak, that that exist all around us. >> You know, he's really interested in all these kind of non-standard, you know, extended electronamical models and speaks about these things in like fairly sophisticated ways where like I don't know how you get from construction worker to that. >> And so, he's talking about this blue plasma being transmitting this information to him. >> There are other examples of of blue beings. Whitley Strieber talks about them. He calls them cobalts. >> Yeah. Wow. >> And I did an interview with Robin Foy who was uh one of the uh people who organized what's called the skull experiment in psychical research. It's uh uh one of the strongest cases uh in the literature of a an ongoing research program that manifested all sorts of dramatic paranormal phenomena. And Robin Foy was the central organizer of that. He's now deceased. But he talked about being in seances where a blue extraterrestrial being would manifest. Manifest physically to the point where he could touch them. >> Whoa. And these blue beings I feel like are generally described as good. But I maybe that's just my own anecdotal experience. Is that your understanding too? Like I think of gray aliens and they seem neutral at best and harmful at worst. >> Um and then these these blue beings are often, you know, I was just at this Joe Despensza retreat, you know, and and [clears throat] you know, it was really interesting. Uh and you know, you're doing these meditations and you know, you're tapping into your pineal gland and in some ways it's like a systematization of like a condalini experience. And so I think there's a lot of precedent >> for all sorts of miraculous healings occurring through this method. Despensza says that in his uh you know deep meditations, blue beings show up in the room and they tell him that the the collective the people in the conference need to vibrate higher in order for the blue beings to fully manifest and heal >> and and often in these healing these like kind of spontaneous healing occurrences the people say that the blue beings are doing the healing. Uh it's interesting. I I don't know much about it really. >> I don't either. Well, in your anecdotal experience, is are the blue beings generally positive or >> Well, uh yeah, I I would say so, but I probably say the same thing about uh all of them. I I can't say that I'm very knowledgeable, not ever having had any firsthand experience with any ET type of of being. I I've heard positive things about the grays and the mantids and the Nordics and the maybe not the reptilians, but I wouldn't uh necessarily discount them either. >> I recently heard of a positive story with the reptilians and I don't know this guy very well, but [laughter and gasps] it's like I don't know you. Well, I'll tell you my bottom line on on all of this and it comes through the raw channelings that Bharich was involved in with Carla Rukert who published the raw material and the law of one. I like the law of one. I subscribe to it and it is that we are one with every everything. So, you know, the most hideous creatures on earth or elsewhere are are part of who we are. Yeah, it feels like that sometimes these beings and and I was relisting to your interview with John Mack and John Mack's talking about all these abductees and they're talking about being in a fear state obviously the first time the onlogical shock you see a gray being in your bedroom or something. Then he took it one step deeper with you and he said but often the abductee starts to identify with the the being. A very powerful dimension of this phenomenon is what I call the double identity aspect. When you go deeply into the experience, we get past the trauma of the reproductive insults that are involved here and you come to a place where the individuals acknowledge particularly through connection through the eyes which is a very profound aspect of this. The joining the bonding that occurs through the the eye connection. When you get past that, you the experiencers, as they're called, will often experience themselves as aliens. That they have a whole other identity as an alien. >> And there's this sort of double identity where it's like they actually remember sort of seeing themselves through the being's eyes or being the being themselves. >> And so that's just fascinating. It's this idea you can sort of port your consciousness into anything. >> Well, Terrence McKenna had an interesting way of describing that. He said, "We are so unfamiliar with our own depths that when we get confronted with with it, we think it's an alien." >> Yeah. I mean, are you familiar with cobalistic traditions where often demonic seeming or bad beings show up when somebody is sort of seeking some primordial truth and those beings it's like the there's a Mozart flute symphony where um you fly by these demons and you know you you're playing flute and then they turn into your angels after you like get past that level. And so in a lot of these sort of celestial ascent traditions, there's seven levels and you have to like discard, you know, a garment or you have to say a passcode or something at each level, whether it's, you know, Rosacrruianism or Sumerian or, you know, the heckalotes uh, you know, uh, in uh, in in in the Hebrew tradition. Well, it's said and I think it's true. If you visit cathedrals or especially uh various temples in Asia, there are demons guarding every temple >> and and they're there for a purpose. And in Buddhism, they're in the service of the Buddha. >> Yes. Or they're an excavation of your own impure motivations. >> Yeah. And in order to be in the holiest of holies, the ark of the covenant, you have to be really of pure intent. >> And you have to confront your own shadow. >> Yeah. What's the the the young quote? You know, um until you confront your subconscious, you call it fate or something. [laughter] >> I haven't heard that one, but it makes perfect sense. It's consistent with what we're talking about that often times and very often in the UFO literature people who are abducted take Whitley Strieber as an example who said he was raped anally and to this day decades later he puts ointment on to uh cover the uh wounds he experienced but at the end of the day he says it was a communion. >> Right. Yeah. He is so fascinating. Like, you know, I know there are a lot of people that dismiss him. I think he's extremely high openness. This is the tricky thing with a lot of these people. It's like the high openness is what requires the greater epistemology and the greater amount of experience that these people they have literally like a wider aperture. >> Yeah. >> But then because they're high openness, they're what I think traditional western skeptics would also call credulous. So it's this weird hand in hand, you know, like one has to go with the other almost. And so I I would describe Whitley as somebody like that. And I don't know if you experienced this, but when I'm in Whitley's presence, I feel something. I feel like, oh, you're like in a your reality is like a local pocket of consensus reality that is different than the one I'm normally operating in. Jeffrey Kriel um who co-authored a book with Whitley tells about the time they shared a room together at the Eselin Institute and uh in the middle of the night Jeffrey had this experience and all he could think was oh my god like this is real and it's happening now and um he warned me because I have invited Whitley to stay in my house uh he said you better be ready for what what you experience. And I think uh my philosophy is, you know, welcome at all. As terrifying as it may seem, it's probably all for our good. I mean we we live on this planet in a in a world where probably 50% o of the human population are experiencing terrible privations and misery and political repression and not enough food and uh terrible diseases that are not being attended to. But there's a reason for all of that. And I think ultimately that we're here to know that we could experience anything. We could experience being in evaporated in the middle of a nuclear explosion and then discover that we'll survive even that. >> Yeah, that's beautiful. That brings to mind a quote which is with God all things are possible. >> Yeah. >> What does that mean to you? Well, among other things, it it could mean all things are God. >> So, you think we are uh splintered fragments of a hole and we are sort of reconnecting to that hole. We are re we are piecing piecing ourselves back together. >> We exist for the purpose of so that that whole can come to know itself. >> It's like an Alan Watts idea. >> Yeah. Mhm. >> That's brilliant. Well, Jeffrey, this has been a blast. Again, I know we could go for another few hours, [laughter] but we'll we'll we'll do a round two at some point. I'll have to come to New Mexico. And yeah, I just really I appreciate your time and uh yeah, everything you've contributed to humanity with your show, your work, and um yeah, you're such a a rich kind of pool of all sorts of amazing history. I mean, just the amount of people you've intersected with who to me are like these, you know, godfather legends, godmother legend. >> If you come to New Mexico, it would be a pleasure and an honor for me to interview you. >> Oh, come on. I'm I'm down. You say the word. I would love to come out. >> Okay, good. >> Yeah. No, that that would be a instant. Yes. >> We'll put it in the calendar. >> Oh, man. Well, thank you. That would be so fun. I don't know. I don't know if I'm qualified, but I'll I'll try I'll come prepared. [laughter] Thank you so much, Jeffrey. Well, cool. Till [music] next time. Till till Albuquerque. >> All right. [music] >> [music] [music]