[@JesseMichels] The Man Who Controls a UFO Fleet With His Mind

Link: https://youtu.be/lcaY-rd9Dhc

Duration: 168 min

Transcript: Download plain text

Short Summary

This wide-ranging episode of "New Thinking Aloud," hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove — the only holder of an accredited doctoral diploma literally reading "parapsychology" from UC Berkeley — covers Ted Owens' psychokinesis demonstrations, Andrija Puharich's ESP physiology, David Grusch's alleged Sub Rosa crash-retrieval program, Robert Bigelow's UFO research, and Terence McKenna's Stone Ape theory. The featured interviewee is a long-time parapsychology researcher mentored by Arthur Young who helped establish a doctoral parapsychology specialization at the California Institute for Human Science and had his first UFO sighting over Northern Illinois University in October 1971. The conversation explores how consciousness research, sensory deprivation practices, plasma cosmology, mystical traditions, and mind-matter interaction studies have been historically marginalized despite persistent anomalous evidence.

Key Quotes

1. "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." (00:01:39)
2. "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." (00:24:15)
3. "the two big unsolved problems facing humanity have to do with the nature of UFOs and the nature of survival after death." (00:04:34)
4. "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." (00:28:32)
5. "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." (00:36:11)

Detailed Summary

Episode Overview & Host Background

This sweeping episode of New Thinking Aloud, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove, weaves together decades of paranormal research, government programs, and UFO disclosure developments, with Mishlove drawing on his unique position as the only person to hold an accredited doctoral diploma literally reading "parapsychology" from UC Berkeley.

• The diploma was earned through an obscure interdisciplinary rule and required three faculty sponsors.
• The featured interviewee is a long-time parapsychology researcher mentored by Arthur Young who was invited to live at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley during his graduate program in parapsychology.
• The guest helped create a doctoral and master's degree program with a parapsychology specialization at the California Institute for Human Science — the first such program since JFK University's master's in parapsychology around 1980, which shut down after roughly two years.
• The guest's first UFO sighting occurred at Northern Illinois University in October 1971 around 11:00 a.m., where he observed a craft suspended above the student union building.

Ted Owens — "The PK Man"

Ted Owens published How to Contact Space People in 1969 and was known as "the PK Man." He claimed telepathic contact with mantid-like "space intelligences" he named "Tweeter" and "Twitter", described as sounding like high-pitched squeaky sounds, living in an invisible giant UFO over Earth with light beings above the mantids.

• Mishlove first visited Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in February 1976, completed a successful remote viewing trial, and was given their files on Owens; he worked with Owens for 11 years, from 1976 until Owens' death in 1987.
• Owens claimed to point his finger and cause lightning to strike, produce power blackouts, control weather, and generate UFO sightings, reportedly documented in letters to scientists.
• SRI originally refused to work with Owens because he was "too flamboyant," but they handed over their files after Owens predicted an end to California's drought that occurred within days, accompanied by strange weather and UFO sightings.
• Owens performed 168 demonstrations over 20 years, with roughly two-thirds working as he predicted; an affidavit (later affirmed by Sydney Margules in two interviews, decades apart) describes lightning striking near a bridge moments after Owens pointed at it.
• Owens famously predicted the Challenger disaster on Christmas Eve 1985, giving Mishlove specifics — 1 minute 15 seconds into flight, velocity 2,900 ft/sec, altitude 9 nautical miles, downrange 7 nautical miles — all matched by the actual explosion.
• Owens agreed to produce three UFO sightings within 100 miles of San Francisco in 90 days; about four days later, a UFO appeared over Sonoma State College in Rohnert Park (approximately 50 miles north of SF, roughly 3,000 ft above campus), made the front page of the Berkeley Gazette, and aired on Channel 9 Evening News in December 1976.
• Owens could be vindictive: when asked to produce three sightings and only produced two, he slammed the phone down; Mishlove felt a scratchy throat within minutes, and 45 minutes later Owens called back saying "Jeffrey, I will never do you do that again" — the sensation lifted.
• Owens allegedly influenced a Philadelphia Eagles game (a benched fullback ran on the field and was ejected), and was associated with a suicide of an owner who reneged on a deal after Owens tried to extort team protection payments.

SRI, CIA & Remote Viewing

Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at SRI started the CIA's psychic spy program and had published on Uri Geller before Owens contacted them; SRI was already CIA-funded and publicly declined Owens due to his Geller association.

• Ingo Swann, described as "one of the godfathers of remote viewing," claimed to have remote-viewed the Moon and been driven off by aliens with stronger psychic abilities.
• Swann is identified as the source of the Anunnaki ancient-aliens-genetic-experiments framing; he argued humans possess far greater psychic functioning than they normally exercise but have been "conditioned out" of it.
• Sydney Margules was reportedly taken by the CIA to SRI and given remote viewing tests, including drawing what a CIA agent in Langley, Virginia was holding while Margules was in Palo Alto.
• US intelligence allegedly maintains a "legacy program" using "psionic assets," with reports of recruiting young children from native cultures who had not been taught that psychic abilities are impossible, and that people have been "mysteriously missing" from those communities.

Andrija Puharich & ESP Physiology

Puharich — described as the father of MK Ultra — was a Northwestern neuroscientist who spent 25 years studying people with unusual powers before being folded into CIA circles. He allegedly worked with a "council of nine" extraterrestrial beings (later connected to nine Egyptian deities) and brought Uri Geller ("space kids") from Israel.

• In Beyond Telepathy, Puharich theorized that receptive ESP requires a "cholinergic" state (relaxed, acetylcholine active) while psychokinesis/active telepathy requires an "adrenergic" state (adrenaline-driven, aroused), illustrated by the 19th-century "crisis apparition" phenomenon where the dying person is in adrenergic state and the receiver is in cholinergic state.
• Gregory Malazzi produced an 11-years-in-the-making documentary called The Mind Traveler about Puharich.
• Mishlove met Puharich in 1972 at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, where 1,800 people attended Puharich's first public announcement about Uri Geller.

Robert Bigelow, AAWSAP & UFO Disclosure

Robert Bigelow, the Budget Suites billionaire and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, was supposed to receive UFO material from Lockheed Martin in 2008, but the transfer was reportedly blocked by Glenn Gaffney, then CIA director of science and technology.

• A later move of Lockheed Martin material to Bigelow's Nevada aerospace operation was blocked by the Governor of Nevada during COVID as a non-essential business, forcing layoffs; around the same time, his wife died.
• Bigelow identified two unsolved problems — UFOs and survival after death — and could not study both, so he launched an essay contest that Jeffrey Mishlove won, producing an essay drawing on nine lines of evidence for consciousness surviving bodily death, citing Friedrich Myers' Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1870s).
• Bigelow has publicly stated that aliens are walking among us (possibly human hybrids or men-in-black in skin suits) and studied UFOs at Skinwalker Ranch, commissioning elite scientists to write white papers on exotic propulsion.
• Aerospace and government have allegedly been systematically exploiting consciousness-related phenomena for 50 years, beginning with Stargate and arguably earlier; allegations include gifted-and-talented programs functioning as a funnel, with students given a pink drink and headphones producing tones to attempt psychokinesis.

David Grusch & Sub Rosa

David Grusch first came to public attention through NewsNation, but Mishlove had known him personally for 1.5–2 years before that.

• Grusch is described as having handled the presidential daily brief and as someone colleagues publicly supported after his disclosures.
• Grusch claims to possess hundreds of pages of documentation describing a legacy UFO crash retrieval program called Sub Rosa.
• Mishlove's friend Omar (Amar) of the Yes Theory YouTube channel encouraged him to interview Grusch.
• During a nine-month gap between interviewing Graham Hancock and David Grusch, Mishlove reports seriously contemplating quitting the show; former interviewee Eric Wargo characterized Mishlove's precognitive dream as a "time loop."

Terence McKenna & Consciousness Evolution

McKenna's Stone Ape theory posits that human consciousness itself developed when primate ancestors discovered psilocybin mushrooms, viewed as symbiotic intelligences directing human thought and action.

• McKenna termed the "unforgivable sin" of the western mind something from the spirit world transgressing into physical reality.
• Dennis McKenna clarified that his brother was not a saintly psychedelic saint but a pioneer with many misadventures, and called Terrence's mapping of the I Ching's 64 hexagrams to the genetic code "speculative and wrong."
• McKenna's hypothetical telepathic Mars journey describes encountering first five then nine unwelcoming telepaths before forced retreat; Ingo Swann reported remote-viewing alien bases, and Pat Price / Skip Atwater are cited for similar SRI work.
• Homo sapiens have been physiologically the same for at least 200,000 years, yet in the last 5% (~10,000 years) developed culture, agriculture, urbanization, and specialization.
• Brain size doubled from homo habilis to homo sapiens between roughly 2 million and 300,000–400,000 years ago.
• Zecharia Sitchin's Anunnaki-as-genetic-engineers theory and Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibria are invoked as evidence of gaps in mainstream evolutionary theory; Carl Popper's "materialist promissory notes" are cited as debt-laden placeholders for unexplained phenomena.
• Whitley Strieber is cited regarding ongoing abduction-era genetic experiments (e.g., semen extraction).

Anakah & Tristan — Integrated Identities & Survival After Death

Mishlove has completed 10 interviews with two individuals (Anakah and Tristan) who share one body, can switch control instantly, remain mutually aware, and sing duets; 8 interviews have aired on the New Thinking Aloud channel, with two more to come.

• They claim memories of lifetimes outside Earth and view their mission as easing humanity's transition into first public contact with aliens who they believes have been here for a very long time, possibly with lifespans exceeding humanity's 15,000 years.
• Neuroscientists have expressed interest in brain scans and neuroimaging during switches.
• EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) and ITC (Instrumental Transcommunication) involve claiming contact with deceased persons via radios, computers, and TVs; featured devices include a "spirit box" scanning random radio channels, with reportedly tens of thousands of hobbyists in this area.
• A friend of Mishlove's reported a medium channeling a recently deceased sister with tens to over 100 highly specific undocumented personal details; Mishlove notes parapsychology treats mediumship evidence as controversial, with an alternative ESP/hot-reading hypothesis.

Arthur Young & the Institute for the Study of Consciousness

Young was born in 1905, attended Princeton (graduating 1926), invented the Bell helicopter (first commercially licensed in 1947), and established the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley.

• At age 21, Young decided to master something physical before doing philosophy, leading to the helicopter project; he spent 12 years on a design (mini rotors at the ends of big rotors) that completely failed.
• His book The Reflexive Universe describes a V-shaped universal process: spirit descends into matter then matter ascends back into spirit, from light through particles, atoms, molecules, and complex chains like DNA and RNA.
• Young created a grid expanding the periodic table of elements into a "periodic table of everything," placing modern humans at the equivalent of clams in latent potential.

Robert Temple & Plasma Cosmology

Robert Temple wrote The Sirius Mystery about the Dogon people of Mali, who knew Sirius is a binary star system (Sirius A and B).

• Temple's A New Science of Heaven combines plasma physics with metaphysics, with a follow-up paper on Kordylewski clouds at the L5 position — two plasma clouds approximately nine times the size of Earth where gravity perfectly cancels out.
• Approximately 99% of the universe is composed of plasma, described as incredibly self-organizing; coronal mass ejections could transmit intelligence from the sun to Earth.
• Temple describes an encounter on a flight at 38,000 ft to Singapore where an eight-foot female plasma being bent over him while he slept and discussed her relationship with her father.
• Marconi's accidental success in transatlantic radio transmission occurred when electromagnetic waves bounced off the ionosphere instead of curving as expected.

Blue Beings & Anomalous Encounters

Whitley Strieber calls blue beings "cobalts"; Robin Foy (now deceased) organized the "skull experiment," one of the strongest ongoing psychical research programs, reporting physically manifesting blue extraterrestrial beings.

• Joe Dispenza's deep meditation retreats report blue beings appearing and instructing participants to "vibrate higher" so the beings can fully manifest and heal them.
• John Mack described a "double identity" in abductee experiences, where individuals initially fear gray beings but eventually identify with them through eye contact.
• Terrence McKenna is quoted: "We are so unfamiliar with our own depths that when we get confronted with it, we think it's an alien."
• Whitley Strieber publicly stated he was anally raped by aliens but ultimately frames the experience as a "communion."
• Around 1978-1979 near Joshua Tree/29 Palms, Valerie Ransone (a channeler with White House connections) convened about a dozen people and claimed four UFOs would land at 3:00 a.m.; the group drove into the desert in jeeps and observed four lights descending — later identified as flares from a nearby marine base conducting maneuvers; the guest frames this not as a con but as a synchronicity, saying Ransone "got engineered by it."

Sensory Deprivation & Mystical Traditions

John Lilly, described as a CIA scientist, developed the sensory deprivation isolation tank and claimed to communicate with an alien intelligence called SSI (Solid State Intelligence).

• Raymond Moody's psychomanteum was based on underground Greek temples where priests used water bowls for scrying; Moody claimed dark rooms with mirrors can produce apparitions.
• Tibetan Buddhist practitioners enter isolation for a year or more in dark cells while remaining awake and entering dream states.
• St. Ignatius of Loyola's "aesthetic protocols" represent another form of deep sensory deprivation, contrasted with hedonistic full-sensory approaches — both producing transcendence.
• The Eleusinian mystery rituals featured "if you die before you die, you won't die when you die," with similar death-simulation rituals across disparate cultures.
• Many celestial ascent traditions (Rosicrucianism, Sumerian, Hebraic) involve seven levels where seekers discard garments, speak passcodes, or pass tests.
• The speaker subscribes to the Law of One, derived from channelings involving Bharich and Carla Rukert, positing "we are one with everything."
• The host argues humans are splintered fragments of a whole reconnecting, echoing an Alan Watts idea that all experiences serve the whole's coming to know itself.
• Robert Anton Wilson wrote "reality is whatever you can get away with"; Gabriel Kennedy has written his biography.

Physics Consensus & Funding Disparities

A survey of physicists (taken roughly a week before the recording) found only about 30% adherence to the standard model of cosmology and physics, suggesting a "physics consensus" is a myth.

• The host argues history is moved forward by non-consensus thinkers, suggesting that if you cannot identify one you currently agree with, you are probably on the wrong side.
• Dark matter and dark energy are characterized as "placeholder words" for phenomena not understood, with no identified physical mechanism.
• Niels Bohr reportedly stated quantum mechanics is a mathematical formalism, not a descriptor of ontological truth, and Von Neumann, Wigner, and David Bohm (Einstein's student) all flirted with consciousness playing a role in wave function collapse.
• Parapsychology researchers cite random event generator experiments at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Center as evidence for mind affecting quantum processes, including a "rebound effect" tied to observer flow states.
• Mishlove recently debated skeptic Michael Shurmer, pressing him to name any current non-consensus thinker he would endorse, and cited UFO radar, optical, and photographic evidence (naming the McMinnville and Lake Coat cases) as rivaling the evidential basis for dark matter.
• Parapsychology research has received roughly $30 to $50 million total over the last hundred years worldwide, compared to $15 billion for a single large collider.
• Psychedelics, UFOs, and parapsychology were in vogue in the 1950s and 60s before becoming marginalized in the late 60s and early 70s.

Parapsychology Methodology & Notable Cases

J.B. Rhine founded the first official parapsychology institute at Duke University in 1931 and worked with Owens for a long time; the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab operated under dean Bob Jahn.

• Random event generators tied to radioactive isotope decay, quantum tunneling, or double-slit experiments (50% slit A / 50% slit B) show statistically significant effects when observers intend skew; a central ongoing debate is whether observed effects are "mind over matter" or "precognition."
• Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem (Gödel having worked with Einstein) is invoked to argue consciousness cannot explain itself.
• Einstein's E=mc² and the conservation of energy/information are cited as raising an "accounting problem" for bodily death — matter and energy seem to dissipate, implying phenomena not yet measurable.
• For a photon traveling at light speed, traversing the universe takes no time at all, so space and time effectively disappear.

Miscellanea — Notable Researchers & Anomalous Cases

Jacobo Grinberg studied the "lattice matrix of consciousness," wrote a final note claiming he had figured it out, then went missing and was never found; New Thinking Aloud ran a program on his disappearance with Alex Gomez Marin.

• Elizabeth Tar, daughter of psychiatrist Russell Tar, was researching psychic healers treating glioblastoma when she herself contracted a glioblastoma and died in her early 40s.
• Kenneth Arnold made the first widely recognized UFO report in 1947, and his daughter has since written a book about his subsequent paranormal experiences.
• A "Prophet Yahweh" in Las Vegas allegedly summoned a videotaped orange sphere on a TV news crew outing (others suggested a balloon; Mishlove notes no evidence for that).
• Mishlove's concept of "centropy" — an opposite-of-entropy reduction in randomness with increasing synchronicities — captures his belief that pursuing one's deep inner purpose triggers the universe to help clear the path.

Closing Philosophical Stance

The host interprets "with God all things are possible" to also mean "all things are God," and welcomes all experiences including terrifying ones, estimating roughly 50% of the human population faces privations, misery, political repression, food insecurity, and unattended diseases, but believes there is a reason for it.

• The word "weird" is traced to Celtic "Wy RD" meaning "fate."
• Mishlove invited the guest to New Mexico for a future round-two interview.