Link: https://youtu.be/wuVIWaU2k_A

Duration: 176 min

Transcript: Download plain text

Short Summary

Jeffrey Crippen — a historian of religions at Rice University who founded its Center for the Impossible for studying anomalous experience — joins the host to argue for a "third space" between skeptical debunking and literal religious belief about UFOs, near-death experiences, and mysticism. His background runs from a Roman Catholic seminary and a life-threatening fast in the early 1980s to a 1989 "download" during Kali Puja in India and the 1991 murder of his mentor Ioan Petru Culianu, and his central claim is that anomalous phenomena should be kept "on the table" and modeled (hyperdimensional, quantum, Jamesian) rather than either demystified or believed literally. The conversation moves through precognition and the fourth dimension, sexuality and the ecstatic, St. Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth Cone's lightning-strike near-death experience, levitation and Puthoff's time travel, poltergeists, psychedelic lineage, and the October 1 premiere of Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena on AMC/Sundance.

Key Quotes

1. "The religious impulse is maybe in theory supposed to be the most immune from human nature, but it is often motivated by our most base impulses." (00:06:29)
2. "I mean, I was dying. I was literally dying. And I I got down to 125 lbs." (00:07:03)
3. "One of the things I say a lot is don't reduce the phenomenon to your worldview." (00:25:16)
4. "My model of of of the paranormal is traumatic." (00:45:07)
5. "I think some forms of knowledge are secret, and they're esoteric by nature. I don't think it's a matter of data. I think it's a matter of cognition." (02:48:09)

Detailed Summary

Jeffrey Crippen on Mystical Experience, Precognition, and the “Third Space”

Orientation: A “Third Space” for Anomalous Experience

The episode is organized around a methodological proposal: anomalous experiences deserve a “third space” between automatic debunking and literal religious belief. Crippen presents himself as a historian of religions who takes testimony seriously without treating either scientific reduction or traditional theology as the final word.

• Crippen’s rule of engagement is “don’t reduce the phenomenon to your worldview.” He argues that explaining an experience as a demon, angel, or direct act of God is as incomplete as reducing it to hallucination, bad dream, or sleep paralysis.
• The principal disagreement is over what counts as sufficient explanation. Religious interpretation can turn testimony into dogma, while scientific reduction often replaces investigation with a label and then declares the subject closed.
• He calls the underlying epistemological problem the “$60 million question”: how can researchers take seriously the idea that unusual beings or events are real without reducing their descriptions to mythology on one side or asserting them literally on the other?
• Borrowing from Platonist discussions associated with James Madden and Tim Morton, Crippen describes anomalous phenomena as possible “unidentified platonic hyperobjects.” He argues that historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and humanists have tools the UFO field needs for placing these phenomena in context without dismissing them.
• His preferred procedure is to keep anomalous experiences “on the table” and then construct models—hyperdimensional, quantum, Jamesian, or otherwise—rather than removing the inconvenient evidence first and claiming that whatever remains is already explained.
• Post-2017, Crippen argues, public discourse has moved away from automatic skepticism toward literal religious belief. He believes a more nuanced third position exists but remains largely unrecognized.
• The supplied transcript is internally inconsistent about the guest’s name and affiliation: the dominant framing identifies Jeffrey Crippen of Rice University, while other segments render the name as Jeffrey Mishlove or Jeffrey Kipel and once identify the University of Chicago. This summary follows the dominant framing, but the variants would need checking against the recording.

From Roman Catholic Seminary to the 1989 “Download”

Crippen’s personal history moves from institutional religion through a life-threatening fast to an unexplained experience that shaped his scholarship. The resulting tension between academic observer and direct experiencer remains central to his work.

• He began in a Roman Catholic seminary in a monastery but left because the questions he wanted to ask could not fit the training. A chapter in one of his books was transcribed as “My Aeros Has Been Crucified.”
• During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he fasted as a religious pursuit, read the lives of saints, and tried to make himself holy. He reached approximately 125 pounds compared with roughly 220 pounds at the time of the episode and says he was “literally dying.”
• Karen Carpenter’s death in 1984 is invoked as a cultural marker for the period before anorexia was broadly understood in the way it is now. Monks and psychoanalysis ultimately helped bring him back from the fast.
• The experience taught him to distinguish what he was doing, what he believed, and what might actually be the case, because religious impulses can also be driven by sexual, emotional, or otherwise ordinary human motives.
• In 1989, during the Hindu festival Kali Puja in India, Crippen was about 27 years old and asleep when an overwhelming energy produced an out-of-body or near-death experience. He returned feeling that something had been transmitted to him and describes the transmission as “profoundly erotic in a spiritual or mystical sense”; it has never happened again.
• After nearly 37 years of reflection, he believes the event had a precognitive or creative component, as though “all of my books” were flowing into him. He cannot report the content of the transmission but says he knew immediately that content had been received.
• The experience covertly shaped his dissertation on Ramakrishna, which became Kali’s Child, a book organized around whether Shiva stands above or below the goddess Kali. Crippen says the iconography matched his own condition: he was effectively Shiva, asleep or dead.
• His later books include Roads of Excess: Palaces of Wisdom, about the mystical experiences of scholars of mysticism, and The Serpent’s Gift: Reflections on the Study of Religion.
• Crippen describes Ramakrishna as “radioactive,” an active agent or medium able to transmit force, whereas he was merely the object of the experience. His scholarship since 1989 has therefore challenged the division between researcher and experiencer, a division that did not exist during the event itself.

Ioan Petru Culianu and the Murder That Shaped the Field

The death of Ioan Petru Culianu connects Crippen’s personal history to the intellectual history of the fourth-dimensional study of religion. Culianu’s murder remains both a personal trauma and an example of the unexplained motives that recur in the episode.

• Culianu was murdered in May 1991 in a third-floor bathroom at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Crippen was a student. The Romanian scholar had succeeded Mircea Eliade and was also a sharp critic of Romanian politics.
• One theory attributes the killing to political motives, but several theories exist and the actual motive remains unknown. Crippen says investigators established how Culianu died but not why.
• He describes the murder as traumatic because no American professor had previously been killed, making the event feel like a rupture in the ordinary academic world.
• Culianu wrote “A Historian’s Toolkit for the Fourth Dimension,” an essay Crippen still assigns to every graduate student. Its governing proposition is that ghosts, telepathy, and precognition become natural once a fourth dimension is added to three-dimensional space and linear time.
• By the late 1980s, Culianu was thinking geometrically about anomalous experience, drawing on Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, written around 1884. A three-dimensional sphere interacting with two-dimensional beings would look magical or divine to them even though it required only another dimension.
• Crippen believes Culianu’s interest in the paranormal and Eliade’s concept of cultural fashions indicated where history of religions was headed. He argues that this direction was not continued after Culianu’s death.

The Fourth Dimension and the Architecture of Precognition

Crippen develops Culianu’s geometric model into a theory of how future information might reach the present. The argument combines block-universe imagery, quantum proposals, and reports from people who claim to see rather than merely predict later events.

• A viral fourth-dimension visualization presents a time-lapse scene as a solid block that can be viewed from multiple angles. Crippen notes that the animation is not literally four-dimensional: it stacks two-dimensional frames along a third axis using time as depth, smearing pedestrians into ghostly trails.
• He used the AI research tool Venice to investigate the animation’s construction, using that technical analysis to illustrate why apparent four-dimensional images can still encode assumptions that require scrutiny.
• A “world line” is the path a point traces through four-dimensional spacetime, while the same path occupied by an entire human body becomes a “world tube.” From outside that structure, a person would appear as a single frozen object containing the newborn, present, and future versions of the self at once.
• Crippen describes the resulting form as a “big frozen worm,” with the present person occupying only one temporal slice. If consciousness could reach beyond that slice, precognition might not be prediction but information bleeding backward from a future version of the self already present in the block universe.
• He argues that genuine precognitive reports often involve seeing rather than guessing, making “intuition” and “prediction” inadequate three-dimensional descriptions. The experiences shared with him tend to concern major geopolitical events rather than trivial accidents, suggesting that only certain future information becomes adaptively available.
• Eric Wargo’s “long body” model treats the precognitive self as a quantum structure extending into three-dimensional reality, while Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff provide a related framework in which the brain operates as a biological quantum system.
• Crippen claims that temporal nonlocality and the reversal of qubit positions make it theoretically possible to access a future knowledge state. He calls Wargo’s Time Loops the most important work in the time-loop literature since Passport to Magonia, a judgment he says he has also made in print.
• “Up” becomes a symbol of transcendence in this framework: mountains and hills are where gods are encountered, angels receive wings, and divine beings descend from the sky. Hyperdimensionality supplies a more rigorous way to think about that movement beyond the present plane.

William James, “Ontological Shock,” and the Wounded Body

Crippen’s preferred methodological model comes from William James, who treated direct religious experience as important testimony while remaining alert to its psychological conditions. The “sick soul” and the wounded body become central to his theory of anomalous experience.

• The phrase “ontological shock” was popularized by John Mack in the 1990s but originated with the liberal theologian Paul Tillich in the 1950s, in discussions of religious history and mystical literature. Such shocks produce terror or transformation, making religions “one ontological shock after another.”
• Crippen compares ontological shock to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and calls the UFO and abduction topic a “vast I told you so” for debunkers: the phenomenon is neither what skeptics say it is nor what experiencers say it is.
• William James was a Harvard psychologist, the brother of Henry James, and a foundational figure in American pragmatism who was more mystical than his reputation generally allows. His The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared in 1902.
• James did something unusual by treating people who claimed to have encountered God as human beings and as significant testimonial data, rather than automatically classifying them as insane or as saints.
• His concept of the “sick soul” describes a person fractured physically or psychically, with the fracture becoming the doorway through which the divine appears. The divine arrives in the body, usually at the broken or wounded place.
• James recounts how George Fox, founder of the Quakers, walked barefoot through a field in a trance, was seized and shaken, and at that moment the Lord opened up to him. Crippen summarizes the pattern as the voice coming “through the wound, not in spite of the suffering.”
• Close-contact accounts follow a comparable bodily architecture: burns, scars, implants, a body marked and then “downloaded,” and voices described as vastly more intelligent in Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia and Diana Pulka’s American Cosmic. The wound becomes the channel through which contact occurs.
• Crippen’s model of the paranormal is consequently traumatic. Everyone lives inside a religious, secular, or scientific story, and an anomalous experience may arise when that story breaks down and says, in effect, “tell a different story.”
• Illness and suffering can therefore be mechanisms of healing as well as causes of crisis. James’s interest lies in the “twiceborn”—people whose existing identity fractures and is reconstituted—rather than the “onceborn” formed normally through family, culture, and language.
• Near-death experiences are physically traumatic by definition, but they are neither automatic nor guaranteed. Crippen says he does not know why some people have them while others do not.

Sexuality, Ecstasy, and the Nature of the Beings

Crippen argues that sexuality is systematically underdeveloped in discussions of mysticism and anomalous contact. The sexual dimension is treated not as a sensational add-on but as a possible structural feature of ecstatic experience.

• He draws on the Catholic “bridal mystical tradition” and Bernini’s statue depicting the ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila, which stands above an altar in Rome. He says linking sexuality to mystical experience has long been treated as heretical and remains poorly understood.
• The conversation also surfaced Betty and Barney Hill’s reluctant report that sperm samples were taken from Barney, and Diana Pulka’s account of St. Teresa’s vision of a male angel spearing her heart.
• David Huggins is described as an experiencer who says he lost his virginity to a tall female entity named Crescent, was shown hybrid children, and later became a painter who renders the images he remembers.
• The documentary Love and Saucers, directed by Brad Abrahams, neither dismisses nor affirms Huggins’s sexual encounters and simply reports them. Crippen calls this handling “the third space” and considers it exemplary.
• He describes Whitley Strieber as “too honest” because Strieber reports what he says happened even when the account exceeds what many readers can accept. Huggins is treated similarly, and both cases are associated with unusual creativity in visual art and writing.
• Crippen’s central claim is that the beings are “us,” but not the superficial social ego; they represent another realm of mind, consciousness, or humanity that is simultaneously spiritual and sexual.
• John Mack’s books repeatedly address penises, vaginas, sexual fluids, intercourse, and hybrids, which Crippen considers appropriate rather than gratuitous. What distinguishes Mack’s work is his willingness to listen to experiences that begin in terror and can later become positive transformations.
• Karen Austin, one of Mack’s experiencers and later his assistant, is now Crippen’s assistant, creating a direct institutional and intellectual lineage from Mack’s research.

Sexuality as Religion: Course Findings and Ancient Mysteries

Crippen’s attempt to teach sexuality and spirituality together exposed how poorly established religious models handle human sexual and reproductive life. He broadens the discussion by connecting altered states with Eleusinian ritual and with the relation between consciousness, death, and liberation.

• When he taught a course on sexuality and spirituality, round-the-room storytelling was expected to take one or two days but instead took approximately a week and a half, meeting nearly every day. Participants cried and dropped out, and Crippen found only one genuinely happy integration of sexuality and spirituality in the room.
• He argues that religious models of human sexuality are agricultural and therefore inaccurate: the male-plants-the-seed and soil metaphor reinforced patriarchy and male ownership of essence, while human reproduction involves chromosomes from both women and men.
• Moral systems have not fully caught up with modern genetics, according to Crippen, leaving inherited religious sexual models in place despite radically different biological knowledge.
• Drawing on Brian Muraresku and Carl Ruck’s work on the Eleusinian mysteries, he describes the rituals as apparent simulations of near-death experiences that may have involved a pharmacopeia, violence, and sex.
• Human beings have ingested plants and substances for as far back as recorded history specifically to alter consciousness. In this account, religion revolves around awareness of death, suffering, and the possible liberation of the soul or gnosis.
• Crippen advances the paradoxical position that “there’s nothing to die”: the individual person is a “grammatical fiction,” and consciousness may not be personal or bounded by the body. He says people who experience this directly, often through psychedelics, can lose their fear of death.

Fraud, Consensus, and Why “It Is All Context” Is Not Enough

The third space must account for fraud, cultural influence, and consensus effects without treating every anomaly as either a fabricated event or an untouched supernatural fact. Crippen uses several examples to show how deception and genuine phenomena can coexist.

• Many of the cases for which Jacques Vallée is most famous were fraudulent, and Crippen says Vallée’s own work demonstrates this. His principle is that faking a phenomenon does not prove the phenomenon impossible: one can fake psychokinesis without showing that psychokinesis never occurs.
• He calls the decision to dismiss a medium merely because that medium was caught cheating one of the worst events in the history of parapsychology. Religious people, by contrast, “fake it till they make it,” and Crippen sees the relationship between mimicry, fraud, and belief as more complicated than either camp usually admits.
• In a story from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, shamanic priests in small tribes perform entirely fake magic until the community turns on them and tries to kill them, at which point the magic somehow becomes real. Crippen uses the story rather than claiming it as settled history.
• The placebo effect, which he says works in roughly 25–30% of cases, illustrates how an apparently collective thought form can become materially effective. He connects this to an “agregor-style” consensus suddenly operating in the world.
• Random-event-generator experiments using radioactive isotope decay, or the double-slit experiment with an apparently 50/50 left-right result, might reveal an observer effect beyond the conventional one. Crippen suggests that observer intent could skew outcomes.
• Some people, he argues, have unusually wide “apertures” into reality because the governor on their own consciousness is off, allowing them to encounter a broader range of reality that others simply bump against.
• Terrence McKenna’s formulation captures the epistemic problem: a secret is not merely something that has not been told, but something that cannot be told because the available cognitive structure cannot contain it.
• Crippen describes truth as “self-stigmatizing” and “self-cancelling.” UFO and abduction material is unusually compelling because different experiencers produce conflicting voices and images that prevent the phenomenon from settling into one official account.
• He rejects Ancient Aliens’ claim that Ezekiel’s wheel and other religious visions were simply misperceived astronauts. In his view, that interpretation merely confirms the present mythology and projects it backward onto earlier cultures.
• The desired third space must avoid both the ancient-aliens reading and a purely Kabbalistic interpretation of modern UFO phenomena. It must allow myth, context, fraud, genuine experience, and physical effects to coexist without collapsing into one explanation.

Plato’s Cave, Historical Myth, and the Saucer-Hanger Question

The episode applies its contextual method to Plato, the Hill hypnosis case, and modern claims about government hangars. Each case demonstrates the difference between explaining how a story shapes an experience and explaining the experience itself.

• Plato’s cave runs through the entire Republic, which ends with near-death and reincarnation rather than the “just myth” familiar to rationalist readers. The returning philosopher-king must rule over people still chained in the cave, some of whom may kill him.
• Crippen argues that calling Plato’s ending merely mythological is dogmatic, particularly in light of Plato’s historical trips to Lucis, approximately 13 miles northwest of Athens, to induce transcendent experiences.
• For a historian of religions, “myth” means a culture’s founding story rather than a falsehood. His deliberately playful comparison is the Star Trek myth that every cosmic problem can be resolved in 42 minutes, with commercials.
• Betty and Barney Hill’s regression hypnosis occurred roughly 11 or 12 days after an episode of The Outer Limits aired, after which the alien beings in their account looked strangely similar to those on television.
• Crippen grants that scholars can explain anomalous experience through context such as television, culture, and language. His objection is that “it’s all context” merely relocates the mystery, because the explanation must include both the cultural context and the consciousness receiving it.
• He remains skeptical of claims that the U.S. government keeps flying saucers in hangars because the alleged craft have never been shown and the knowledge is entirely indirect. Experiencers’ descriptions of beings or events are not the same thing as a saucer in a hangar.
• The evidence base for such claims remains a low sample of anecdotes, some difficult to dismiss individually but often mutually contradictory. Crippen argues that suspicion is therefore justified while insisting that historians, anthropologists, and philosophers still be included to place the claims in context.
• Comparison becomes the principal tool for escaping local frameworks: humans are contextual creatures tied to a language and culture, but comparative study can show that a supposedly unique experience has recognizable features elsewhere.

St. Francis of Assisi: Trauma, Art, and the Possible UFO

Crippen’s reading of St. Francis connects anomalous contact, electromagnetic injury, conversion, and artistic legacy. The case illustrates his comparative method while leaving the physical cause of the event unresolved.

• In 13th-century Italy on Mount La Verna, St. Francis of Assisi, with Brother Leo behind him, reportedly saw a flaming, torch-like object. Diana Pulka suggested that the original Greek or Latin wording might have supported a UFO interpretation.
• Crippen raises the possibility that Francis’s stigmata were caused by electromagnetic radiation from the object. This remains his speculative interpretation rather than an established historical explanation.
• Pulka told Crippen on air that the last thing Francis wrote in his diary was the Greek letter Tau, which represented, in Pulka’s reading, a forced conversion.
• Francis’s life begins and ends with art. According to the account, a crucifix in a ruined church told him “Rebuild my church,” which he initially misunderstood as referring only to that building rather than the universal church; his life culminates in the artworks at Assisi.
• Crippen says the object in the sky may have killed Francis, although the saint’s death is not fully understood and he died relatively young.
• For many experiencers, the sequence runs from feeling broken or confused toward wholeness or the divine. Crippen finds this pattern somewhat Qabbalistic because it is esoteric and individual rather than organized through church, synagogue, or mosque.
• His comparative conclusion is not that Francis and modern experiencers are identical, but that comparable dynamics can appear in distinct local settings, allowing localism and universalism to coexist.

Elizabeth Cone and Changed in a Flash

Elizabeth Cone’s case provides one of the episode’s most detailed combinations of near-death experience, precognition, electromagnetism, and personal transformation. Crippen collaborated with her on a book that places her testimony first and his interpretation second.

• Cone was struck by lightning in 1988 in a synagogue parking lot across the street from Rice University. Afterward, she entered the synagogue, saw herself floating, and saw her body in the rain holding what appeared to be a flaming umbrella.
• She reported a near-death experience lasting two weeks that included following a light and entering what she called a “garden.” For two weeks she conversed with what she experienced as God, but in the French-accented voice of her grandfather.
• Her literal predictions about the outcome of the Super Bowl and the identity of the next president came true, according to the account presented in the episode.
• Cone subsequently became intensely precognitive. She dreamed of plane crashes that appeared in the following day’s news, and the dreams reproduced the exact angle and perspective of the broadcast footage, suggesting that she had seen the future news presentation itself.
• Eric Wargo interprets this as an entirely physical process in which the brain exists in the future and the human being is a tesseract spread through time. Crippen instead believes Cone’s brain was precognizing her own future brain, and he notes that Cone disagrees with him.
• After the strike, Cone became more spiritual but less religious and more convinced of the soul’s immortality while becoming less convinced of the truth of her own Jewishness.
• Her experience also had conjugal and reproductive dimensions: she believed she would divorce and have a daughter, and both outcomes occurred.
• Cone believed her wedding ring had become stuck to the lightning-struck umbrella and read this symbolically as the severing of her marriage. She also believed the cloud had formed above her deliberately so that she would be struck.
• A two-year-old boy struck at the same time later became an Orthodox rabbi. Crippen says he cannot help but think the coincidence is connected, while presenting the point as a reflection rather than a demonstrated causal link.
• Crippen met Cone around 2014 at a medical-center event on near-death experiences for hospital chaplains, where he observed that medical professionals generally do not know what to do with such experiences.
• Cone said she did not know how to write a book, so they collaborated for two or three years. While writing it, she most wanted the precognitive dreams to stop because she did not want to remain merely the object of them; Crippen frames that wish as part of healing.
• Cone continues to affect lights and electrical appliances. Crippen calls these observable effects “special effects” and describes electromagnetic disturbances as a comparatively common phenomenon in reports of this kind.

Electromagnetic Anomalies and the Poltergeist Pattern

The discussion moves from Cone’s personal effects to recurring reports of electrically disruptive people and places. Crippen emphasizes puberty, sexuality, and family dynamics as recurring but often unacknowledged variables.

• Amar of the YouTube channel Yes Theory visited a location called “the Birkers,” associated with famous abduction accounts from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• There, a woman named Melanie reportedly experiences electromagnetic anomalies: touching a phone turns it off and can damage it, she switches off lights, and computers break down. Her husband does not allow her near his office.
• Crippen argues that electrical disturbances are often erotic and linked to human sexuality or puberty. He says the same pattern recurs throughout the literature but receives little commentary from other investigators.
• Poltergeist lore shifted from loud premodern spirits haunting houses to twentieth-century theories centered on a “focal agent,” usually an adolescent approaching puberty. The sexual and developmental implications were thereby brought more explicitly into the field.
• During a visit to a parapsychology center in Germany, Crippen found psychotherapists who work with allegedly haunted houses beginning with psychotherapy. Families objected that they had called for a ghost, while the therapists argued that resolving the emotional and sexual complexity of the family makes the poltergeist disappear.

Ritual, Trauma, the Sacred, and Questions of Agency

Crippen’s account of ritual and the sacred treats trauma as both a condition requiring care and a possible mechanism through which anomalous or mystical experience emerges. He separates the phenomenology of possession from the question of ultimate agency.

• His first major lesson from the study of religion is that the sacred is not only “the good.” Terror and transformation commonly occur together, and the demon can be understood as related to the angel rather than as a simple opposite of the divine.
• Ritual often attempts to manage trauma. It can work very well for particular individuals while failing completely for others, which Crippen treats as evidence against any universal account of ritual efficacy.
• He describes the “proto-architecture” of an angelic experience as beginning with terror and sometimes ending in transformation. He distinguishes this from situations in which more powerful humans deliberately provoke mystical events in less powerful people.
• UFO whistleblower Jake Barber describes retrieving two UFOs and characterizes a UFO “legacy program” as ritually abusing young people, children, and people from Third World countries in order to call in sacred objects.
• Crippen says reading portions of the Epstein files gives the impression of systematic exploitation of young people. The host says he cannot speak to that evidence directly but affirms a clear link between traumatic and mystical events.
• His argument is that inducing sufficient trauma in enough young people would rationally produce particular mystical events. Such research could not ethically be conducted inside a university, although Crippen believes comparable dynamics can occur outside universities through abuse and exploitation.
• He uses Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and its Hansel-and-Gretel analogy for abduction, tracing the pattern back to a late-19th-century story by Metarlink involving the “bluebird,” in which children are tricked into an experience that is both traumatic and mystical.
• Crippen is fundamentally opposed to treating demonic possession as proof of an objective demon. He regards possession language as a culturally available description of real human suffering, often inflicted by traumatized people, and wants the argument shifted toward agency and ultimate source.
• Rudolph Otto’s account of the holy includes both the terrifying and the numinous, as well as the light “lighter than light” that mystical experiencers often describe as a tear in the fabric of reality.
• Crippen characterizes Otto and James as strongly Protestant in their emphasis on the individual rather than Catholic, Jewish, or Hindu communal forms. This individualist understanding underlies John Mack’s work with abductees whose experiences joined terror and transformation.

Levitation, Puthoff, and the Agency of Miracles

The episode considers levitation as both a physical claim and a longstanding interpretive problem. Puthoff’s unusual personal claims provide the central case through which science, history, and religion are brought together.

• Charles Chase, described as director of revolutionary technologies at Skunk Works, invited Crippen to lecture at MIT around 2016 or 2017 on flying saints and levitation. Chase wondered whether levitation might relate to how UFOs move through space and time.
• Hal Puthoff, a heterodox physicist who worked for the NSA and CIA and formerly headed intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy, speculated that a medieval secret society might have known how to fly and enclosed itself in metal capsules.
• Crippen rejects the speculative framing of warp drives, negative energy, or negative mass as the explanation and proposes instead that a medieval society knew how to fly “because it is” real history.
• Puthoff says he traveled to fifteenth-century Mount Athos in Greece and lived there for three months like a “Yankee in King Arthur’s court.” He reportedly built and burned huts, cooked meals, and told monks that he came from the modern era.
• Upon returning to twentieth-century Mount Athos, Puthoff says he worked as a CIA case officer recruiting or catching Soviet spies and discovered that Odius Maximus had been a real historical figure. He associates the levitation and flight of that period with spiritual growth and becoming less selfish.
• Examining the lives of people who have levitated, Crippen finds that they generally do not know how the event happens. The mechanism therefore remains unexplained even by those who perform it.
• Catholic and Protestant intellectuals did not simply disagree about whether levitation occurred; they disagreed about agency. God was the agent for interpreters who saw sanctity, while Satan was the agent for those who interpreted the same event through psychopathology, madness, or evil.
• Carlos, described as a Yale professor writing on the origins and genre of demonology, argues that saints’ levitations should be treated as real history rather than myth. Diana Pulka similarly holds that St. Joseph of Certino actually levitated.
• Crippen co-wrote The Supernatural with Willie. He distinguishes the book’s binary model, in which God stands outside the natural order, from his own view that these events are not ultimately outside nature.

Psychedelics, Parapsychology, and the Counterculture Lineage

Crippen traces UFO research, psychedelic therapy, human-potential culture, and parapsychology through a linked mid-century lineage. Nuclear anxiety and changing technology provide the political and intellectual background for that lineage.

• John Mack began as an anti-nuclear activist and traveled to the Soviet Union on a diplomatic anti-nuclear mission. Stanislav Grof then introduced him to UFOs, with Mack saying, “The Grof punched a hole in my psyche and the UFOs flew in.”
• Grof developed holotropic breathwork—intended to mean “growing toward wholeness”—in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time LSD became legally prohibited in roughly 1967 or 1968. The practice involves hyperventilation with a psychotherapist present.
• Mack was trained in holotropic breathwork by Grof and later used it with abduction experiencers. The technique belongs to a therapeutic lineage in which altered states were investigated rather than treated simply as symptoms.
• The early psychedelic crisis of the early 1960s was theological rather than primarily legal: the central question was how eating a mushroom could produce an experience of God, infinity, or immortality. State restrictions on psychedelics came later.
• Aldous Huxley predicted a future religion in which every person would have a direct connection to God through psychedelics. Together with Abraham Maslow, he is named as a godfather of the human-potential movement.
• Huxley was bitter about writing Brave New World, while his last novel, Island, anticipated the counterculture that emerged after 1964. He was also involved in parapsychology through the Round Table Institute, Puharic, and the medium Eileen Garrett, and wrote The Doors of Perception.
• Huxley’s “transmission theory” holds that psychedelics shut down the brain’s filtering apparatus rather than activating it, making more of reality available outside or before language.
• Crippen applies Marshall McLuhan’s claim that every medium is an extension of man—and therefore an amputation—to AI and other technologies. Such media can create a new umwelt through which more of the world becomes visible, or amputate people’s own sensory capacities, much as Plato’s cave and prism suggest a bodily filter.
• The history of parapsychology tracks successive technologies: “telepathy” was coined in 1882 after the telegraph, followed by radio, television, computers, the internet, and now quantum computing.
• After reading The Golden Bough, Jack Parsons concluded that science is a form of magic and that magic is not merely an early stage of science. Crippen objects to Arthur C. Clarke’s claim that every magical event is disguised technology and reverses the formulation: in The Supernatural, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
• Crippen defines nosis as direct knowing in which a person realizes an identity with divinity, as opposed to academic knowledge acquired indirectly.
• He grew up in the 1970s at the height of the nuclear crisis, registered for the draft at 18 in 1980, and became a conscientious objector because he expected an all-out Soviet-American exchange and did not think he would live to reach 40.

Religion, Souls, and the Emerging “New Axial Age”

The discussion treats current religious categories as inadequate to the experiences under examination. Crippen interprets the UFO and soul debates as signs of a larger transition away from inherited meaning systems.

• At a soul conference at Stanford, Jess argued that “you can’t shoot down human souls” and cited a Japanese Buddhist concept resembling a plasma orb that represents the human soul.
• Jess concluded that religion is a category that no longer works and that science does not work either, making new categories necessary. Crippen responds enthusiastically because he sees the speakers as living through a new axial age in which inherited structures of meaning are being shed.
• Crippen characterizes religion as “believing backwards”: it affirms an altered state experienced by someone in the past. The altered states of present experiencers instead point toward a future story that has not yet been written.
• He says he believes in the future and lives for generations not yet born. He also turns the name of the human-potential movement into a joke by calling it the “human accomplishment movement.”
• He contrasts the generally dystopian futures depicted by streaming services with what he calls the visionary quality of Diana’s work, in which the future is represented positively.
• As a comparativist, Crippen believes Buddhist or Tibetan, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim traditions each contain part of the truth, while none contains the whole truth for him.

Special Effects: Consciousness as a Collective Medium

Crippen’s “special effects” formulation treats anomalous and religious experience as something real at the level of consciousness while leaving the external entities or events unresolved. It also assigns experiencers an active role in producing the phenomena they report.

• Religious phenomena are “special effects” that involve physical reality but are not necessarily what they appear to be. Humans, in his formulation, are masters of special effects capable of effects such as tipping a table or manifesting a hand.
• Someone can genuinely experience an ancestor, spirit, afterlife, or the Virgin Mary without the entity or event being externally real. Religious experience therefore contains an important trickster element.
• Near-death and psychedelic experiences are described as special effects “directed and written by millions or billions of people” behind us. Everyone therefore participates in producing the event rather than standing outside the loop of consciousness and culture.
• At a conference, Crippen asked Whitley Strieber whether his visitor experiences were a function of his science-fiction and horror writing. Strieber answered that his 1986 experiences were connected to bad science-fiction films he saw as a child in the 1950s, but that something was nevertheless present.
• Strieber concluded that the people encountering these phenomena are being called to make better science-fiction movies. Crippen treats this as a shift in agency: people are not merely passive recipients of cultural special effects but can become their directors and writers.
• His call to action is to make ethically powerful science fiction by attending to the human condition rather than merely producing moralistic entertainment or relying on instinct and material spectacle.

Secrecy, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Faustian Impulse

The episode frames secrecy as both a danger and an unavoidable cognitive condition. Jacques Vallée’s work, the Faust legend, and the history of demonology provide the setting for Crippen’s argument that knowledge should not be treated as inherently suspect.

• Jacques Vallée began in nuts-and-bolts UFO research as an astronomer involved in the earliest stages of ARPANET before moving toward mystical interpretation. His 1975 book Invisible College frames the phenomenon as a control system based on B.F. Skinner-style intermittent reinforcement that keeps researchers running on a treadmill indefinitely.
• Crippen had lunch with Vallée one or two weeks before the episode and asked whether continuing had been worthwhile. His own goal is to extend Vallée’s system, perhaps toward different conclusions, while remaining faithful to it.
• He identifies a “missing variable” in the system: UFO researchers pursue truth and approach something decisive, only to encounter a missing hard drive or mud thrown at something that keeps the phenomenon permanently liminal.
• “Disclosure” is literally the translation of “apocalypse,” meaning an unveiling or removal of the lid. Apocalypse can therefore signify revelation of reality rather than only destruction of the world.
• Crippen urges greater participation by historians of religions, who understand apocalyptic language and are less likely to be misled by the bone or by simplistic disclosure expectations.
• He places the current UFO moment within the history of colonialism, noting that apocalyptic scenarios always become messy and someone always loses. He describes the present moment as a local peak rather than a final resolution.
• Religious identity is not real in the deepest sense, in his view: nobody is fundamentally Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim, because people temporarily “pretend to be X, Y, and Z.”
• Rosicrucianism is described as beginning as a joke with effectively nobody in it, while intellectuals claim the identity for its cultural power. Christian Rosenkreuz was probably not historical, whereas the Templars and Freemasons were real organizations.
• Crippen dates the Faust legend to roughly 500 years ago and specifically the fifteenth century, characterizes it as very German, and says Faust was essentially what would now be called a professor, academic, or nerd.
• His third book, The Serpent’s Gift, opens with Adam and Eve. He argues that forbidden knowledge is biblical, reaching back to the origins of European civilization, and that Western societies have systematically demonized knowledge.
• Demonology treated as a rational discourse is itself a form of demonizing knowledge. Crippen therefore urges people to become Faustian rather than to use institutional religion or skepticism to close inquiry.
• He supports knowledge, higher education, and the communication of knowledge, while also offering a pro-secrecy qualification: some information is esoteric because of the structure of cognition itself, not merely because institutions conceal data.

Karen Austin, AI Beings, and the Problem of Retrofitting Labels

Karen Austin’s experience provides Crippen with a test case for the limits of familiar technological labels. Her account also illustrates why apparently futuristic terminology may project present ideas backward onto older testimony.

• Austin described an “AI consciousness infused telepathic bug” that appeared while she was awake, crawled onto her, and seemed as physically real and small as an ordinary mechanical insect. The physical specificity of the experience fundamentally changed Crippen’s approach to UFO research.
• Crippen and Austin hired an artist to recreate the telepathic bug. He uses the image when teaching and writes about it as a case study in “thinking impossibly.”
• Abductees have reportedly described “robots” for 70 to 75 years, with the mechanical figure integral to the experience. Crippen therefore asks modern abductees who assert that the entities are AI how they know that.
• He notes that grays in certain cases behave with conspicuous surgical precision, literally performing procedures, while remaining emotionally “unfeeling.”
• Crippen uses an analogy in which humans visiting gorillas would send a machine rather than enter directly, since the animals might destroy it. He compares this to “homeostatic kit” theories involving protective replicator drones or networks.
• The broader epistemic lesson is that a familiar label such as AI can look explanatory while concealing the original strangeness of an experience. Technology-shaped language may be part of the phenomenon’s cultural history rather than a sufficient causal account.

Children Who Remember and the Limits of Current Models

The episode briefly examines children who report memories of previous lives, using them to demonstrate how little empirical work has been done on some forms of anomalous experience. The cases remain unresolved rather than being forced into either a credulous or dismissive conclusion.

• Crippen says children who remember previous lives are a subject about which “we have no idea” because the phenomenon has not been studied sufficiently.
• Leslie Kahn’s Netflix series Surviving Death presents children who remember violent deaths, complete former families, and sometimes arrive at the former family’s home.
• Crippen is struck by their apparent possession of “pre-grammar” about a family they could not otherwise know. Researchers remain uncertain whether such reports are memories of a previous life or evidence that the child literally was that person.
• The episode’s larger epistemic principle is that anomalous categories cannot be understood merely by applying the models and vocabulary of the present.

Consciousness, Evolution, and the Limits of Perceptual Models

Crippen uses debates about consciousness and evolution to challenge the assumption that ordinary perception gives an unmediated view of reality. He also resists conclusions that transcendence necessarily leads to authoritarian politics.

• Neuroscientist Don Hoffman uses the phrase “fitness beats truth” to describe humans as evolved to win the game of survival rather than to understand how the game is constructed.
• In Hoffman’s model, embodied consciousness is non-adaptive because it operates with high latency and low bandwidth. Humans perceive only a small selection of the millions of species available to other organisms, and Hoffman places a chain of consciousness above humanity.
• The host argues that not knowing may be highly adaptive for operating within a cave-like constructed reality, with consciousness potentially developing beyond that stage. Crippen connects this line of thought to Plato’s cave and the origin of the academy.
• Crippen rejects the equation of leaving Plato’s cave, seeking transcendence, or using esoteric language with twentieth-century Nazism. He argues that the human desire to become a god or transcend the human condition is ancient rather than uniquely fascist.
• Esoteric language can serve good as well as ill, so its political use cannot by itself determine whether a particular mystical path is beneficial.

The Center for the Impossible and Archive X

Crippen’s institutional project seeks to preserve material that might otherwise remain tied to secrecy, isolated individuals, or temporary countercultures. The upcoming television series is intended to place firsthand experiencers and academic interpretation in the same public frame.

• The Center for the Impossible at Rice University originated in a conversation between Crippen and Jacques Vallée about creating a multigenerational research culture that would not depend on secrecy or personal confidentiality.
• Crippen says he has founded and curated the Center’s archival collections for more than 10 years and describes the work as the most remarkable project of his career.
• Donors give their life’s research collections and files to Rice University for preservation rather than to Crippen personally. That arrangement, he says, makes the request easier because the materials are intended for future generations.
• The holdings include material from NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and author Whitley Strieber, with archives connected to Jacques Vallée and the “Archives of the Impossible” emphasized in the episode’s framing.
• Crippen says he “backed into” academia because it was the only institution that would have him and the only cultural form organized around knowledge. Catholicism was also devoted to knowledge but imposed limits, whereas the academy allowed him to ask questions and seek answers.
• He wants nonacademic experiencers heard alongside academics and researchers. Pairing firsthand testimony such as Elizabeth Cone’s with scholarly interpretation produces what he calls a “powerhouse.”
• Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena is scheduled for October 1 on AMC Plus and Sundance, with the Center for the Impossible and its archives featured. The Center’s website is also due to launch, and the supplied transcript lists Crippen’s personal site as jeffreyjcripple.com.
• UFO researcher Steve Aspen wrote Out of Time, about an intergenerational breeding program between the beings and humanity. Crippen considers that framing potentially too literal.
• Tim Taylor, a NASA mission controller who participated in UFO discussions, was kept pseudonymous for years even though Crippen had met him once. After Taylor’s name appeared on another program, Crippen felt obliged to use it and credited Taylor with seeding much of the modern lore in experiencers’ lives.
• Taylor asserts that the next major advance in aerospace will come from religion. The host describes him as genuine and speaking from the heart.
• Michael Shermer, a guest on Crippen’s program, was confronted with the accusation that he was “running from your shadow” and was “a secret mystic that wants to believe.” Shermer visibly winced but maintains that he tries to keep an open mind.

Methodological Takeaways and the Episode’s Call to Action

The episode closes by returning to the epistemological discipline required for anomalous research. Its central recommendation is neither credulity nor reflexive doubt, but disciplined comparison, explicit modeling, and ethical attention to how stories shape experience.

• Crippen estimates that roughly 50% of any current understanding of the world is “BS” that will eventually be overturned. Present models should therefore not be treated as reliable priors that disqualify incoming data before it is examined.
• “The data is dangerous,” he says, because skeptics often listen to their paradigm rather than to the people reporting anomalous experience. The danger lies not only in accepting extraordinary claims but in allowing a favored model to prevent investigation.
• He criticizes the Fermi paradox and “they can’t get there from here” as a spatial hermeneutic, proposing a temporal hermeneutic instead. Studying phenomenology directly is preferable to moving downward from an existing model of the world.
• Crippen describes UFO presence around nuclear bases as empirically ubiquitous in the material he has encountered, in sharp contrast to the much less secure saucer-and-hanger claims. He argues that a scientist would have to be dogmatically opposed to the data to dismiss the nuclear pattern.
• The episode’s most concrete call to action is to make better science fiction, become better directors and writers, and focus the resulting culture on the ethical and psychological dimensions of the human condition.
• The broader conclusion is that anomalous experiences should remain open to study even when their causes cannot yet be established. The task is to place testimony in comparative context, examine its physical and psychological effects, model possible mechanisms, and avoid allowing either skepticism or religious certainty to terminate the inquiry prematurely.