Speaker 1: The paranormal, UFOs, monsters, mysteries. As you're listening to Talking
Speaker 1: Weird and now from a Kevin Deep in the northwards
Speaker 1: your host, Doctor Dean Bertram.
Speaker 2: Wow, Well, greetings, or my fellow widows and widows, welcome
Speaker 2: to Talking Weird on the Untold Radio Network. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Dean Bertram, and as always I'm delighted you've decided to
Speaker 2: spend the next hour or so of my life and
Speaker 2: your life with me, whether it is watching and listening
Speaker 2: live when we go out every Thursday night at nine pm,
Speaker 2: or perhaps you're watching or listening to it after the fact,
Speaker 2: where it's archived on YouTube and Facebook and x as
Speaker 2: well as the audio only version on almost every podcasts
Speaker 2: platform there is on this weird planet. Welcome, thank you
Speaker 2: for being here. It's wonderful. It's summer in the north Woods.
Speaker 2: My daughter and I are planting still so for some
Speaker 2: later harvesting things. We've got. Our chickens are going wow,
Speaker 2: loving this crazy weather. We're going to the lake. It's gorgeous.
Speaker 2: Summer always is, but summer always makes me think, particularly
Speaker 2: this time of the year, of the summer of the sources.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen forty seven, where all of this whole,
Speaker 2: whether you want to call it a belief system, a reality,
Speaker 2: a delusion, wherever you stand on the UFOs on Flying Sources,
Speaker 2: where it all began. And it was literally seventy nine
Speaker 2: years ago this week, August twenty four when Kenneth Arnold
Speaker 2: had his first sighting. He had many sightings throughout his life, incidentally,
Speaker 2: but his first sight near Mount Rainier in Washington State,
Speaker 2: and that triggered the modern UFO era, the Flying Source era.
Speaker 2: And I can't think of anybody I would rather talk
Speaker 2: to about this tonight than our guest. He's an independent researcher,
Speaker 2: a multimedia specialist, and digital communication strategist. His work explores
Speaker 2: the cultural dimensions of anomaloust experience. Through his research, writing,
Speaker 2: and public presentations, he examines the ways folklore, religion, technology, media,
Speaker 2: and belief shape human encounters with the unknown. He is
Speaker 2: the founder of the Liminal Analytics Applied Research Collaborative and
Speaker 2: serves as Scholar in Virtual Residence at the Windbridge Institute.
Speaker 2: He's taught and collaborated with scholars, including Dianna Pasuca, on
Speaker 2: projects exploring animalistic or anomalistic I should say no animalistic,
Speaker 2: that's a whole other meaning anomalistic and cultural epistemology. He's
Speaker 2: published and collaborative work spans topics ranging from UFO belief
Speaker 2: and contemporary mythology to Latin America and folk traditions, including
Speaker 2: extensive research on Santamurta. And I'm delighted, so welcome back
Speaker 2: to talking with literally one of the finest thinkers in
Speaker 2: this very weird space that we're all interested in. David Metcalf, Greetings, very.
Speaker 3: Much, Greetings, It's great to be here again.
Speaker 2: Man, there's literally nobody I'd rather be talking to about
Speaker 2: this this week.
Speaker 3: I'm you know, I'm really this is great. So yesterday
Speaker 3: I did a presentation on Kenneth Arnold in celebration of
Speaker 3: the anniversary for the Anomaly Archives in Austin. And you know,
Speaker 3: this is awesome to be able to do two days
Speaker 3: celebrating and talking about and exploring this. Really the anniversary of,
Speaker 3: like you said, I mean, the beginning, the beginning of
Speaker 3: all of this when the name was named, right when
Speaker 3: the name was put down on this anomaly, And here
Speaker 3: we are today. We've got all the document releases and
Speaker 3: all that, and it all stems out of one man
Speaker 3: flying a clive private plane over some mountains in Washington.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's I wondered then, how many people would
Speaker 2: have thought this would have gone on for so long.
Speaker 2: I don't think even euphologers thought it, did. I know
Speaker 2: that the people who consider themselves second generation, So not
Speaker 2: the Ray Palmers and not the not the Gray Barkers,
Speaker 2: not the Kenneth Arnold's, not the Donald Keyhos, but people
Speaker 2: like you know T L and Greenfield and who I know,
Speaker 2: and and and Jeans Steinberg and Rick Kilberg, that generation
Speaker 2: who knew all those original sorceress like this. They said,
Speaker 2: they'll say, we thought we'd solve it, you know, people,
Speaker 2: we'd work it out, you know.
Speaker 3: But that's exactly it when I was talking about it
Speaker 3: last night, I mean, that's what you know, as I
Speaker 3: was doing research for the presentation and that kind of
Speaker 3: refreshing myself and finding new threads, you get that sense.
Speaker 3: I mean when you read that, when you read the
Speaker 3: stuff from that time period, you know it's like, this
Speaker 3: will be solved in a month and a year, we're
Speaker 3: going to get on it. And it's amazing to read
Speaker 3: the narratives that were going on back then because they're
Speaker 3: so similar to what we're what we have today.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: That was one of the things I explored in my
Speaker 3: presentation was just you can literally find all of these
Speaker 3: narratives that are being you know, repeated today as if
Speaker 3: it's new in a discovery, and you know it's it's
Speaker 3: all from back then. I made a joke that you know,
Speaker 3: you can read it. Go to Tim Beckley's Commander X, right,
Speaker 3: and you've got you know, just sort of update the
Speaker 3: language a little bit, and you have every narrative that
Speaker 3: you you possibly could find and the you know, what's
Speaker 3: being presented as legitimate and maybe legitimate today. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's it's interesting even when you go back to
Speaker 2: like Keyho's flying sources are real and he's talking like
Speaker 2: you just we just knock on the door hard enough.
Speaker 2: The Air Force know everything they're going to tell us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And and there's been lots of knocking.
Speaker 3: There's that door is not opening. And you know it's
Speaker 3: amazing too because you know, like thinking about like kind
Speaker 3: of Tharnold, right, like that's nineteen forty seven. And one
Speaker 3: of the things that I was really intrigued by. I
Speaker 3: recently went back just out of just pleasure reading to
Speaker 3: my teenage interest in HP Lovecraft's work and those authors, right,
Speaker 3: So that's twenties and thirties in that, And as I
Speaker 3: was reading through Lovecraft, there were so many little snippets
Speaker 3: where it's literally the UFO narrative right before there's ever
Speaker 3: a UFO. You know, there's Martian canals, and there's other
Speaker 3: things that were kind of sparking that idea. But you know,
Speaker 3: he's talking about like photographic evidence and Whisper in the
Speaker 3: dark darkness where he's talking about the how the protagonist
Speaker 3: receives these photos and how the photos send him almost
Speaker 3: into like a you know what is being called now
Speaker 3: ontological shock because it's actual evidence of this thing, you know,
Speaker 3: and you think about the way that the photos, you know,
Speaker 3: after the Arnold sighting, right like you know, there's all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, there starts to be photos almost immediately
Speaker 3: because you know, as you said, some are the saucers.
Speaker 3: It wasn't you know, he saw this thing and put
Speaker 3: a name on it in the news. But he wasn't
Speaker 3: the only one seeing things. This was across the entire
Speaker 3: United States. Within weeks, people were seeing something anomalous and
Speaker 3: strange in the Skuis, you know. Yeah, and again with
Speaker 3: the Lovecraft thing, Clark Ashton Smith, who was writing for
Speaker 3: Weird Tales he in the late twenties had a sighting
Speaker 3: of what he described as it was a black medior
Speaker 3: but it wasn't flying. It was actually flying, right, It
Speaker 3: wasn't like a meteor just going and then burning up
Speaker 3: and landing or whatever. And he said it was something
Speaker 3: that Charles Fort would take note of, right, but he
Speaker 3: recognized it as something anomalous, you know. But then this
Speaker 3: Kenneth Arnold sighting is a thing that puts that name
Speaker 3: on it, where suddenly people are, oh, that's that anomaly
Speaker 3: that I'm looking at. It's a flying saucer, right, or
Speaker 3: you know ufo. So it's just it's fascinating the just
Speaker 3: that that time period and that I can't imagine what
Speaker 3: it would be like. You know, there's the news story,
Speaker 3: there's the newspaper stories of people just sitting out in
Speaker 3: their backyard and uh, you know they're seeing these things
Speaker 3: in the sky, right, like that's that's incredible. And and
Speaker 3: the belief that you know, reading those stories too, how
Speaker 3: exciting that would have been to you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: as you said, the first, the first generation, right, and
Speaker 3: even the second generation, like knowing that you could step
Speaker 3: outside and maybe see something we don't quite have that today.
Speaker 2: It's I love that you bought love Craft up. That's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons I love talking about because so
Speaker 2: few people today are able to contextualize this within any
Speaker 2: broader historical or esoteric tradition. And when you look at
Speaker 2: the pulps and when you look at love and I
Speaker 2: think people used to be a little bit broader in
Speaker 2: their thinking, like if you look, for example, at Mourning
Speaker 2: of the Magicians, the book by Bergier empowers it, which
Speaker 2: kind of is really the I'm sure von Danik and
Speaker 2: cribbed from it. I'm sure they had a big impact
Speaker 2: on it. But they were conscious of a love Craft
Speaker 2: and thoughts and you know, Atlantean myths and how all
Speaker 2: these things into wayn Whether they're right or not in
Speaker 2: their ultimate thesis, it's still they're able to see the
Speaker 2: commonalities in these things. And Lovecraft has direct connection through
Speaker 2: the Shaver mystery, which anybody who's here and talks about
Speaker 2: all the time will be aware of. Richard Shaver himself
Speaker 2: said that he thought Lovecraft as well as a merit
Speaker 2: who was a more influential author of the time has
Speaker 2: been all but forgotten now, but wrote about underground civilizations
Speaker 2: that those people had too been to the caves, and
Speaker 2: they'd had the type of experiences with these extra tras. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't think Merit and Lovecraft had actually been to
Speaker 2: the caverns, but it's a Shaver he was riding as
Speaker 2: part of this tradition, right, And I think that pulp
Speaker 2: tradition segued very much into sort. I mean, everybody knows
Speaker 2: I talk about Palmer all the time, as you do too,
Speaker 2: but Amazing Stories had set up so much of this,
Speaker 2: not just with the Shaver mystery, but with the interest
Speaker 2: of the editor Ray Palmer, who was fascinated with Charles
Speaker 2: Ford and constantly talked about fort in his editorials. He's
Speaker 2: one of his main writers. Vincent Gaddis, we now look
Speaker 2: at as one of the main Forteans of the time.
Speaker 2: And when the all Shaver issue of Amazing Stories, the
Speaker 2: June nineteen forty seven issue was on the news stands,
Speaker 2: it's when Kenneth Arnold had his sighting and in that issue,
Speaker 2: the great Fortien Vincent Gaddis wrote a piece Visitors from
Speaker 2: the Void, before he had the term flying sources. He's
Speaker 2: essentially talking about the historical cases of flying sources. And
Speaker 2: this is on American news stands right the day that
Speaker 2: Arnold sees the sourcestuff. You're right, I think it's so
Speaker 2: important to look back and see how, even as we're
Speaker 2: talking about the first seventy nine years of sources, how
Speaker 2: this stuff really has a tradition that goes back far
Speaker 2: further than that seventy ninety.
Speaker 3: Well, you know you mentioned Keyho, right, Keyho wrote for
Speaker 3: Weird Tales in nineteen twenty seven. I think it was
Speaker 3: Master of Doom. Was He may have written other ones
Speaker 3: as well, but the one that I'm familiar with his
Speaker 3: Master of Doom. So he was, you know, he was
Speaker 3: writing for Weird Tales before you know, twenty years before
Speaker 3: he he ends up, you know, getting involved in the
Speaker 3: in the UFO stuff.
Speaker 1: And the.
Speaker 3: You know, the other interesting things. The other interesting thing
Speaker 3: about the that pulp mill you is that there's a
Speaker 3: really there's a really interesting correlation between Weird Tales ceasing
Speaker 3: publication and Fate Magazine and Mystic Magazine, which was another
Speaker 3: Palmer application coming out. Mystic Magazine actually has its first
Speaker 3: issue the same year that Weird Tales has its last
Speaker 3: when it's original run. And if you look at the
Speaker 3: you know, August Darylis wrote for Fate magazine. Right, So
Speaker 3: August Drylis famously being the one who helped popularized Lovecraft
Speaker 3: after Lovecraft's death. You know, he he was writing for
Speaker 3: Fate magazine. He was writing things for Fate magazine. And
Speaker 3: there were there were other authors from Weird Tales, writers
Speaker 3: from Weird Tales who crossed over into writing for for
Speaker 3: Fate and that and for other magazines that were coming
Speaker 3: out in that miliu. So there's this really interesting movement
Speaker 3: almost where everything that's being covered in Weird Tales, which
Speaker 3: you know, as you as you were talking about Shaver's
Speaker 3: reaction to Lovecraft, right like, there were people, you know,
Speaker 3: Roberty Howard who wrote the Conan stories and some other
Speaker 3: conan Asques things, and no, no, not to down in
Speaker 3: great Roberty Howard's work, but most people know him for Conan.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So he originally started writing the Lovecraft because he wanted
Speaker 3: to he wanted to get in touch with the mythos,
Speaker 3: right like the actual thing, Like he wanted to know
Speaker 3: about these cults and these books and his magic, and
Speaker 3: Lovecraft was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Like, that's not what
Speaker 3: I'm doing, you know. But you know, love was really
Speaker 3: well aware of Fort. He mentions Fort in some of
Speaker 3: his stories. You know, you can see the letters between
Speaker 3: him and Clark Ashton Smith and other writers. They're talking
Speaker 3: about Fort and you know, they're talking about Fort as
Speaker 3: a way to get information for what they're going to
Speaker 3: be writing about in fiction. But you know, there's this
Speaker 3: this interesting corollary between the fictional expressions of it, which
Speaker 3: you know, again people at the time, there were people
Speaker 3: who thought Lovecraft was writing was real. He actually had
Speaker 3: a correspondent who was a merchant marine or something who
Speaker 3: I believe he he helped the guy edit his poetry
Speaker 3: and the guy was writing because Weird Tales published poetry
Speaker 3: as well, and the guy was writing poetry. But the
Speaker 3: guy was absolutely convinced one that he had seen these
Speaker 3: things right, that he had met these nameless cults, and
Speaker 3: that when he was on his thing, so he would
Speaker 3: tell these stories about about going out into the woods
Speaker 3: and meeting you know, cultists or entities and that. But
Speaker 3: he told Lovecraft, you keep saying, you don't you know,
Speaker 3: you're not writing isn't real, right, Like what you're writing
Speaker 3: is in reality, but you're just denying the truth, which
Speaker 3: is that you're an unknowing you know, conduit for these
Speaker 3: outer you know, for what was the what was the
Speaker 3: goddess thing the visitors from the voice? Right, yeah, like
Speaker 3: you're an unknowing conduit for this.
Speaker 2: So that's just quickly how amazed those people must have
Speaker 2: been who had those kind of theories when Ray Palmer
Speaker 2: would let them write letters to amazing stories in reference
Speaker 2: to the Shavin mystery and when they said we've had
Speaker 2: these encounters poo pooed them, right, Palma one of those letters,
Speaker 2: you know, Shame responded to those letters.
Speaker 3: Right, and you know, and it's funny. And then and
Speaker 3: then that's the transition is between you know, because Weird
Speaker 3: Tales was getting those letters as well, but it was
Speaker 3: always framed as fiction. And then the fiction starts to
Speaker 3: go away when suddenly you have you know, flying saucers, right,
Speaker 3: Arnold has this thing, the name is put on it,
Speaker 3: and suddenly these things that have been written about become
Speaker 3: more real, you know. And at the time period as well,
Speaker 3: you know, jb Ryan starts to get sort of popularized
Speaker 3: in the thirties, and so by the time the forties
Speaker 3: is around, you have you know and jb Ryan being
Speaker 3: the person who sort of started scientific parapsychology, so you know,
Speaker 3: the psychical aspect of it is now being presented as science, right.
Speaker 3: And you have the Air Force investigations. That's one of
Speaker 3: the really interesting things about that the time period with
Speaker 3: Arnold is because the Air Force gets involved, it suddenly
Speaker 3: authorizes it in a certain way. And you see the
Speaker 3: Air Force's involvement being used by all these different groups
Speaker 3: to sort of say this is real, right. The Government's
Speaker 3: looking at it, the Air Force is investigating this, this
Speaker 3: is real, including revivalists. There was a big healing revival
Speaker 3: going on at the time, and you have people at
Speaker 3: Gordon Lindsay who was in the same kind of revival circles,
Speaker 3: Oral Roberts and that, you know, Gordon Lindsay is writing
Speaker 3: these articles for Voice of Healing about the prophetic significance
Speaker 3: of the Flying Saucers right as this sign of the
Speaker 3: Second Coming, and those articles that were in the Voice
Speaker 3: of Healing, Palmer actually ends up republishing later in some
Speaker 3: issues of Flying Saucer magazine, you know, And so there's
Speaker 3: this amazing cross current of authorization and all of that,
Speaker 3: and again all of it stemming from you know, this
Speaker 3: arnold sighting, which becomes sort of this just it put
Speaker 3: the pin in the in the butterfly, and you could
Speaker 3: say that it existed.
Speaker 2: You know, absolutely. I'm going to loop back to a
Speaker 2: lot of that in a minute. We have a question
Speaker 2: from a good friend of the show. He's also a
Speaker 2: guest of the show, Horace Smith, who's Professor Emers of
Speaker 2: Astronomy and Physics at Michigan State University. He's also a
Speaker 2: massive Lovecraft fan. He's written a book on Lovecraft, He's
Speaker 2: written pieces on Lovecraft. Oh excellent, And he says, your
Speaker 2: guest is very familiar with Lovecraft. Has he read the
Speaker 2: extensive collections of Lovecraft's letters published by Hippo Campus Press.
Speaker 2: Funnily enough, I got two Hippo Campus Press books in
Speaker 2: the mail the other day.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: St. Josh's Life Life in Lovecraft's Yeah, yeah, and the
Speaker 2: I forget the title of I haven't read yet, the St.
Speaker 2: Joshi fictional novel about Lovecraft, but it's funny. So that anyway,
Speaker 2: So have you have you read those?
Speaker 3: Those I've read? So I've read excerpts from it, but
Speaker 3: I haven't read the actual ones. Actually, the only Hippocampus
Speaker 3: Press book I have is the awesome annotated edition of
Speaker 3: Fungi from You Goth just because I absolutely love that
Speaker 3: that They They send chills through through me when I
Speaker 3: when I read that poetry, and there's that great Canadian
Speaker 3: recording too, it's like late eighties synth background and uh,
Speaker 3: guy reading just a really beautiful reading of the poems.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean the Lovecraft letters. I'm glad he
Speaker 3: brought those up because that's it's such a rich trove
Speaker 3: of material. I also want to get the one his
Speaker 3: correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith, which is where that that
Speaker 3: black Meteorite U anecdote comes from. And uh, just so
Speaker 3: interesting to see them, you know, see to see what's
Speaker 3: behind the writing, you know, and and also I think
Speaker 3: that you know, obviously Lovecraft is fairly controversial to a
Speaker 3: certain extent, but to see the person right behind that
Speaker 3: and to see to see the thought that went into it,
Speaker 3: and that the complex and kind of rich intellectual life
Speaker 3: that he had really deepens the stories. So thank you
Speaker 3: for bringing that up, because now I'm more excited to
Speaker 3: go to go acquire more books.
Speaker 2: When when I have some spare money, I am. I've
Speaker 2: looked at it many times. I want to push the
Speaker 2: button on the Arkham House collected Lovecraft letters, but there
Speaker 2: they're very expensive. Yeah, I have a little Arkham collection.
Speaker 2: It's it's a guilty pleasure of mine. I don't have
Speaker 2: those in it yet. Though. Back to the back to
Speaker 2: the sources though, So let's maybe this is you know,
Speaker 2: we were we were we were talking about Keyho and
Speaker 2: we've talked a lot about the lead up to it,
Speaker 2: and we've spoken a little bit about Arnold. I want
Speaker 2: to tell you something that I just saw the other day.
Speaker 2: It just occurred to me now to talk about. I
Speaker 2: don't even know who I was going to plan to,
Speaker 2: but I I don't know why. Maybe I was looking.
Speaker 2: I was googling, as you do something, and some AI
Speaker 2: recommend it, like some AI interpretation of my script or
Speaker 2: AI thing popped up in Google or start page or
Speaker 2: wherever the devil I was searching, and it talked something
Speaker 2: about how American. The American public fascination with flying sources
Speaker 2: began with two things in nineteen forty seven, Kenneth Arnold
Speaker 2: Siding and the Roswell crash a week later, and from
Speaker 2: them on, Oh, they were all excited about it. Funnily enough,
Speaker 2: I had congress people say the same thing in congressional hearings.
Speaker 2: Ever since the forty seven crash in Roswell, the American
Speaker 2: people have wanted. But this is something a professor of
Speaker 2: mine at university, the late I don't know if you
Speaker 2: I shouldn't say Late Green, I don't happy's still alive.
Speaker 2: I haven't talked to him for so long. But he
Speaker 2: was older Bob Drea, who was this incredible polymath, and
Speaker 2: he wasn't an official supervisor of my dissertation, but he
Speaker 2: was an unofficial supervisor and a good friend. And something
Speaker 2: he told me early on which really helped me, really
Speaker 2: helped me thinking on this whole thing, was because he
Speaker 2: knew a lot about other secret additions in European esotericism,
Speaker 2: like he understood the history of Masonry and Illuminati and
Speaker 2: things like that, to the capacity that the people who
Speaker 2: believe in these things, their history is often different to
Speaker 2: the actual history if you laid it out. So Masons
Speaker 2: might say, well, we trace our you know, back to
Speaker 2: the Temple of Solomon. But if you look at the
Speaker 2: actual history of masonry. You can go well, free masonry, well,
Speaker 2: it seems to start here, you know, like in the
Speaker 2: eighteenth century or whenever it is right youupology is very
Speaker 2: similar and it's history. And this is something I'll throw
Speaker 2: the ball back to you. Seems too as much as
Speaker 2: we can see the same themes coming up again and again,
Speaker 2: as we mentioned early on, and you're so right about that,
Speaker 2: but its history seems to be reimagined and doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to be an accurate history of what took place. And
Speaker 2: I bring up the Roswell thing as I do often
Speaker 2: because AI is wrong. The congress people were wrong, the
Speaker 2: American public weren't. Roswelld didn't spark any fascination in them.
Speaker 2: The news story got picked up by you know, news
Speaker 2: wise all around the world, but then the next day,
Speaker 2: when the Air Force said up was just a weather balloon,
Speaker 2: it got dropped just as soon. It doesn't appear in
Speaker 2: any of the UFO literature for almost the first thirty years.
Speaker 2: But now we talk about Roswell as being the defining
Speaker 2: moment always historically, so much so that AI will tell
Speaker 2: us and Congress people will tell us that's when the
Speaker 2: American public got interested, just as that as a kind
Speaker 2: of a launch for the next part of the conversation,
Speaker 2: What do you think about the difference between an historical
Speaker 2: reality and maybe an imagined or a re envisaged history
Speaker 2: by the people who subscribe to the belief systems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's a that's a perfect example because
Speaker 3: you know, as you said, I mean it was late
Speaker 3: it was late seventies when Rosweald gets brought back into
Speaker 3: the conversation, and it's actually after maybe it was asked,
Speaker 3: I don't know it was Stringfeld, right, was he's the
Speaker 3: one who is the has the crash crash retrieval report. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know it was It wasn't until he started
Speaker 3: writing some and it wasn't Roswell that he was writing about.
Speaker 3: He was writing about believe it was Aztec, but it
Speaker 3: may have been another one that in investigating those that
Speaker 3: it suddenly Roswell comes in, you know, in the late seventies,
Speaker 3: and that that's so interesting that yeah, it becomes you know,
Speaker 3: because if you google world UFO day right, which is
Speaker 3: associated with either Arnold or the Roswell crash, You're going
Speaker 3: to get the Roswell thing right, because Roswell has a tourist.
Speaker 3: They've got a tourist bureau, you know, so they've got
Speaker 3: that that drives the sort of search algorithms and that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's really interesting and that, you know, what
Speaker 3: are the world's Orson Welles broadcast is another example of that,
Speaker 3: where when people are talking about the potential of ontological
Speaker 3: shock and they go back to this idea that Orson
Speaker 3: Wells spread panics throughout the populace. There's actually a great
Speaker 3: Slate article that went back and looked at that claim
Speaker 3: and found that it was absolutely not true and that
Speaker 3: in the time period newspapers were publishing that there was
Speaker 3: this panic, but there were people writing into the newspapers saying, hey,
Speaker 3: I was on the street that didn't happen, Like this
Speaker 3: isn't real. And then further research showed that it was
Speaker 3: most likely done because newspapers were losing ad revenue to radio,
Speaker 3: and so it was an easy way to create this
Speaker 3: story to show that the radio was this you know,
Speaker 3: social blight that was going to misinform the public and
Speaker 3: scare the public. But if you go back to the
Speaker 3: twenties and thirties and forties and you listen to the
Speaker 3: radio programs that were on. They're pretty explicit, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean they would be if you filmed the things
Speaker 3: that they're talking about, a lot of them would be
Speaker 3: r rated or worse. I mean, they're pretty they're pretty graphic.
Speaker 3: And so the idea that people were panicking because Orson Wells,
Speaker 3: who was the voice of the Shadow and a well
Speaker 3: known radio performer, was doing this is rather silly in retrospect,
Speaker 3: but it still gets brought up in a similar way
Speaker 3: that you know, as you're saying Congress people referenced Roswell
Speaker 3: is sort of this beginning. You know, academics and people
Speaker 3: will reference Orson Wells and the panic as being an
Speaker 3: example of ontological shock, and so it does. It has
Speaker 3: this really interesting sort of rewriting to the present moment,
Speaker 3: you know. And you can go further back too, right
Speaker 3: before there were before flying saucer was a term that
Speaker 3: was invented, no one would look at those Renaissance paintings
Speaker 3: that have the clouds the circles and say it was
Speaker 3: anything other than the Holy Spirit or you know, coming
Speaker 3: down during the Annunciation or something like that. As soon
Speaker 3: as flying saucer is coined, suddenly there's this retrospective that
Speaker 3: can be put back on the past and looked at
Speaker 3: in a way that up to that point literally could
Speaker 3: never have happened, you know. I mean there was no
Speaker 3: category with which to investigate it through that, you know.
Speaker 3: And so there's this interesting, this maliability to the cultural
Speaker 3: memory that occur, especially with topics like this, which are
Speaker 3: anomalist and which you know, each sort of generation has
Speaker 3: a different perspective on and we've seen it since twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: where there's almost a cultural amnesia for anything that went before.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: I was reading one of Beckley's was it the the
Speaker 3: UFO Review? And Brad Steiger has a sort of a
Speaker 3: these are the these are the potential hypotheses for what
Speaker 3: the Flying Saucers could be or the UFOs could be, right,
Speaker 3: and every single one of them are things that are
Speaker 3: being represented, you know, within academia as oh, it could
Speaker 3: be this like Yeah, Brad Steiger wrote that in a
Speaker 3: much more intriguing and readable way back in you know,
Speaker 3: a magazine that you would find to be trash.
Speaker 2: You know, But it's funny you should say that because
Speaker 2: it's something I've been super conscious of. There was the
Speaker 2: help put off Altric Terrestrial. Yeah, try article and then
Speaker 2: there paper, and then there was the one by two
Speaker 2: Harvard academics and somebody from Montana Tech who kind of
Speaker 2: round me that idea. And in fairness, the Montana Tech
Speaker 2: and the two Harvard guys reference Richard Shaver and reference
Speaker 2: John Keel in there regarding the idea of a subterranean
Speaker 2: you know reality. But when you hear when you hear
Speaker 2: congressional hearings, or you hear disclosure proponents, or when you
Speaker 2: hear any of this stuff in the media about maybe
Speaker 2: they're got secret ocean bases or oceans below the earth,
Speaker 2: can I can pull stuff out of amazing stories from
Speaker 2: the nineteen forties, which is saying the same exact same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, that's that's exactly it, you know. And there's
Speaker 3: a there's an almost review. It was. It was funny.
Speaker 3: And Mike'sophone, who's the president of the Society for UAP Studies.
Speaker 3: He's awesome, he's a really cool he's one of my
Speaker 3: favorite contemporary academic researchers in this and he's taking a
Speaker 3: very honest and thorough look at it. And his specialty
Speaker 3: is history of science, and it's particularly in physics and that.
Speaker 3: But it was funny because it was you know, there's
Speaker 3: within academi it's called great literature, right, like it's this
Speaker 3: it's the the ufology books there and no one's touching them,
Speaker 3: like they're almost like radioactive, you know. And so we
Speaker 3: were talking about the you know, how do you frame
Speaker 3: this stuff? The Society for UAP Studies is working on
Speaker 3: something that's being termed the empirical weird, So how do
Speaker 3: you sort of create like an empirical methodology to study
Speaker 3: the anomala stuff? And I just I send them a
Speaker 3: picture of my bookshelves, you know, which is all great literature,
Speaker 3: you know. And I was like, well, you know you're
Speaker 3: going to have to tackle this because everything you're gonna
Speaker 3: say is in this stuff. And he's like, oh, now,
Speaker 3: I don't know if I can do that, you know,
Speaker 3: like I don't know if I can go into that.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, no, you're gonna have to read you know,
Speaker 3: what was the Star Gods Clone Masters? You know, like
Speaker 3: if you if you don't read Star Gods Clone Masters
Speaker 3: by Brad Steiger, like you're going to be missing something,
Speaker 3: you know. But it's interesting too because people like Steiger,
Speaker 3: I mean, if you go back you're talking about more
Speaker 3: well rounded, right, the idea of people were reading Ford
Speaker 3: and people were reading these things. If you go back
Speaker 3: to the you know, the sort of academic and even
Speaker 3: the when the psychic warfare programs and that stuff start
Speaker 3: in the seventies, these people are well familiar with Ford,
Speaker 3: and they're familiar with Ralf Steiner, and they're familiar with
Speaker 3: Brad Steiger. You know, God's of Aquarius. He's sitting right
Speaker 3: next to people that were working with SRI and that
Speaker 3: I mean, he's right up in that milieu. You know.
Speaker 3: So there was this cross conversation that's not really happening
Speaker 3: today in the same way, you know, and maybe it is,
Speaker 3: and it's just you know, it's hard to see because
Speaker 3: you're in the present, but I don't see the same
Speaker 3: sort of conversation and cross pollination of things like if
Speaker 3: you you know Mead Lane, the borderland science research with
Speaker 3: Mark Probert and that stuff's amazing. Yeah, and again you
Speaker 3: see a lot of the stuff that he's talking about
Speaker 3: with the ether you know, the etherships and that coming
Speaker 3: up as people start to talk about, oh, these are
Speaker 3: trans medium like well, you know, yeah, when he talks
Speaker 3: about Matt and d Matt like he's talking about trans
Speaker 3: medium travel in that, you know so, but nobody would
Speaker 3: touch med Lane today.
Speaker 2: Just talking about med Lane quickly, did you see in
Speaker 2: that the first UFO files drop that the Department of
Speaker 2: War did recently in the PDF with a bunch of documents.
Speaker 2: It was one of the FBI ones. One of the
Speaker 2: things in there was it was it round Robin, Round Robin.
Speaker 3: Somebody someone had reported mead Lane. It was incredible that that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if folks are interested and then they should definitely check
Speaker 3: that one out because it's and that was available before
Speaker 3: that that doc drop too, and it was the Meadlane
Speaker 3: FBI file that was hilarious because somebody went to a
Speaker 3: meeting and was like, I think you should look into
Speaker 3: these guys, like this is this isn't good.
Speaker 2: You know, well most of it was. That's that's it,
Speaker 2: and we can maybe get to some of it. This,
Speaker 2: I suppose is just supports what you were saying about
Speaker 2: this kind of ahistoricity of current UFO researchers and people
Speaker 2: who are interested in it, because so many of the
Speaker 2: things which were available in the UFO files that dropped
Speaker 2: were already available out there anyway. I mean, so many
Speaker 2: of that some of them were less redacted actually this time.
Speaker 2: But for example, all the all the supposed NASA UFO photos,
Speaker 2: they've been available for decades on like academic websites, Like
Speaker 2: there was so much stuff in there that wasn't a
Speaker 2: shock to anybody who had paid a little bit more attention,
Speaker 2: I think to this stuff. But but since since we've
Speaker 2: we we we we've kind of gone back and forth
Speaker 2: a little because there's there's so much to talk about.
Speaker 2: But but you're talking about Steiger then made me think
Speaker 2: about when John Keele wrote his piece and I think
Speaker 2: it was like the Journal of Popular Culture or something
Speaker 2: like that, and he talked about he had this incredible
Speaker 2: positive feeling in the seventies because of people like Steiger
Speaker 2: and himself and Valet, and he suggested where at the
Speaker 2: point of a new eufology is what I was talking about,
Speaker 2: and this is, you know, on the cusp of close encounters,
Speaker 2: or around the time of close encounters. And there, I
Speaker 2: think in the UFO community then there was an idea,
Speaker 2: certainly amongst people like you know, kill Valas at all,
Speaker 2: there was this there was this idea that somehow, again
Speaker 2: it might it was a little different to the original.
Speaker 2: You know, we knock on the Air Force door, we'll
Speaker 2: get the secret. But there was a positive idea again,
Speaker 2: what what did you what do you see? Happened to
Speaker 2: that kind of idea with the new eupology in.
Speaker 3: That it's interesting today. That was something I brought up
Speaker 3: in my talk yesterday was from Official UFO Magazine, which
Speaker 3: was a Myrant Fast. Myron Fast was this incredible exploitation publisher,
Speaker 3: similar to Backley, but more exploitation and not. He didn't
Speaker 3: care about the subjects really all. He had a rule
Speaker 3: of ten thousand. You had ten thousand sales of the
Speaker 3: magazine or he cuts it off. Doesn't matter if it's
Speaker 3: you know, if you had something that was a cliffhanger
Speaker 3: in the last one, it was coming out the next one.
Speaker 3: If that issue didn't sell ten thousand, get rid of it.
Speaker 3: So Official UFO Magazine was one of the ones that
Speaker 3: made it through, and it actually had some fairly decent
Speaker 3: editors that helped it to have some legitimate writers writing
Speaker 3: for it. So although it was published by an exploitation press,
Speaker 3: it was it had serious writing in it. And one
Speaker 3: of the stories from nineteen seventy seven or one of
Speaker 3: the articles was on how computer databasing was going to
Speaker 3: solve the problem of the UFO photos, that you could
Speaker 3: put them into a computer and it would database it
Speaker 3: and you would get the answers right. And that's the
Speaker 3: exact same thing that you're saying the people are saying
Speaker 3: now with AI, you know, and Valet did a lot
Speaker 3: of database work, like the Capella database in that with
Speaker 3: NIDS her boss. I don't know which one he was
Speaker 3: working with at the time, but one of the big
Speaker 3: low groups and the Capella database on that. So you know,
Speaker 3: it's really strange because even that that solution sort of
Speaker 3: thing starts to con repeat itself, like we're, oh, we're
Speaker 3: going to find it because the computer you know, Oh,
Speaker 3: well we have a different computer and that one's going
Speaker 3: to find it. Uh, and the anomalist still stays anomalous.
Speaker 3: And it's just it's really interesting. And you see, I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, Keel obviously had become fairly disenchanted at the
Speaker 3: end of his life with that stuff. If you talk
Speaker 3: to people who had met him at the end of
Speaker 3: his life, you know, he often gave the advice like,
Speaker 3: stay away from this topic. It's just going to ruin you.
Speaker 2: You know, I got to have Quill very briefly at
Speaker 2: fort fist ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Oh fantastic.
Speaker 2: It was an incredible trip. Ye, I got to interview
Speaker 2: him form my pH d dissertation, and he certainly was
Speaker 2: at a station in his life the way I think
Speaker 2: he was cranking and dissolution. I mean, I love the man.
Speaker 2: I mean, I love Kiel Well, then I probably love
Speaker 2: anybody else that I don't know properly, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. I do know Doug Skinner very well, who
Speaker 2: was yes, the air of and he he he retained
Speaker 2: a lot of cue stuff, but he would he would
Speaker 2: also tell you that by the end of his life,
Speaker 2: just like you said, he'd become kind of you a
Speaker 2: cranky and dissolusions.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, and
Speaker 3: we're you know, there's a there's a fresh kind of
Speaker 3: enthusiasm amongst a new generation of people. But the lack
Speaker 3: of historical through line is troublesome, you know, because if
Speaker 3: you I think when you were talking about the first generation,
Speaker 3: second generation, right, and then we can move into like
Speaker 3: a third generation, there was a through line there where
Speaker 3: they were all having a conversation with the generations before
Speaker 3: and being mentored to a certain extent apprenticeship and right,
Speaker 3: and we don't have that as much anymore. You know.
Speaker 3: Some of it is because the media, the way that
Speaker 3: media worked back then, it wasn't quite as enticing and
Speaker 3: hypnotizing and and all encompassing, where now people sort of
Speaker 3: have to personal brand and do all this stuff to
Speaker 3: kind of be out there and be that, you know,
Speaker 3: so it becomes more difficult to have those kind of
Speaker 3: like serious mentor mentorships and conversations cross generationally, you know.
Speaker 3: And with the with the increased interest from official parties,
Speaker 3: now there's money on the line with this stuff, so
Speaker 3: that changes the conversation as well. I mean, you look
Speaker 3: at like the Avulob board that was recently stood up
Speaker 3: in that there's money on the line there, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean that's research grants, and that's that's a bunch
Speaker 3: of stuff, and it's serious money. It's the same kind
Speaker 3: of money that became on the line with the psychic question.
Speaker 3: When you know, SRI and some of those groups in
Speaker 3: the seventies were able to get research grants for it,
Speaker 3: Suddenly you had this boom of parapsychology, but to the
Speaker 3: dearth of you know, a more kind of rounded psychical
Speaker 3: research that had been going on up to that point,
Speaker 3: which had laid the ground for that to even happen,
Speaker 3: you know, but then that disappears. You know, the Harold
Speaker 3: Sherman's who was an ESP teacher in the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 3: who actually worked with Ingo Swan as part of an
Speaker 3: SRI program during the Jupiter remote viewing. I think it was,
Speaker 3: you know, the Harold Shermans disappear and we just get
Speaker 3: the help put offs in the science and you know,
Speaker 3: it sort of it reduces it to this lane that
Speaker 3: can be funded. And you know, and you see that
Speaker 3: with the parapsychology too, where the history of the seventies
Speaker 3: and eighties parapsychology is this rich, strange field of you know,
Speaker 3: people that now in retrospect as people are trying to
Speaker 3: legitimize it, you know, and legitimize their time in that period.
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of people like Andrew's Puherik, it's
Speaker 3: like written out and like kind of shoved off to
Speaker 3: the side. He's having kind of a renaissance because his
Speaker 3: son who's been working with the documentarian who's putting out
Speaker 3: some more information on him. But for the longest time.
Speaker 3: You know, he was conspiracy fringe because no one would
Speaker 3: talk about it. But he was a core player in
Speaker 3: the remote viewing that everybody wants to talk about now
Speaker 3: as being you know, legitimate. But he's ignored. He goes
Speaker 3: fine to some extent, gets ignored like that too, because
Speaker 3: he was too unique. He was too radical in some sense.
Speaker 3: And you know, I mean Ray Palmer now, right, like
Speaker 3: too radical.
Speaker 5: For for for the taste you know, he's he's probably
Speaker 5: probably maybe even like the Black Book of Ray Palmer, right,
Speaker 5: that's not even great literature now, it's it's the Forbidden
Speaker 5: Tomes of magazine.
Speaker 2: And I think I think he was written out of
Speaker 2: the history very early on for a number of reasons
Speaker 2: that she probably the time to go into. But if
Speaker 2: you if you look at and if you look at
Speaker 2: the way he's and he's treated unfairly too by people
Speaker 2: who you think would have gaven him, given him a
Speaker 2: better shake. People even wrote for him, do you know
Speaker 2: what I mean? Like to a degree, John Keel was
Speaker 2: certainly dismissive of Shave, but he was you know, kind
Speaker 2: of to Palm. Of course he'd written for him. But
Speaker 2: if you look at the work of Jerome Clark, who's
Speaker 2: probably what second generation I guess, but he's still one
Speaker 2: of the most probably powerful second generation people left. His
Speaker 2: disdain for people like you know, Palmer and Keel just
Speaker 2: shines through and you see it an academic literature. I
Speaker 2: mean the first, the great, the first great UFO history
Speaker 2: was David Jacob's UFO controversy in America, right before Jacob's
Speaker 2: kind of went you know, off the plantation or whatever
Speaker 2: you say, and joined the UFO people himself. But Palmer's
Speaker 2: like a footnote in that book. But the reality is,
Speaker 2: for people who are interested in sources, Palmer probably had
Speaker 2: far more to do with shaping their ideas than NCAP did.
Speaker 2: And Palmer's oh feud with Nightcap. He had this incredible
Speaker 2: feud with Nightcap, which has been written out of the
Speaker 2: history books.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, and I mean it was incredible too.
Speaker 4: I mean, those those editorials are fantastic, in the articles
Speaker 4: where he's ripping into Nicap and like ripping into the
Speaker 4: room Pelp book and like yeah, like and talking about
Speaker 4: how they're you know, disinforming and betraying and so yeah,
Speaker 4: those those are incredible, and you.
Speaker 2: Know what, I think it's more telling now than ever
Speaker 2: when you look at that, because one of the things
Speaker 2: Palmer recognized which was so obvious, is that Nightcaps leadership
Speaker 2: were all ex military or ex civilian intelligence people, often
Speaker 2: very high up people. So it's not just that you've
Speaker 2: got major you know, Keiho, Right, You've got people who
Speaker 2: were heads of you know, naval departments in the CIA.
Speaker 3: You had the head of the former head of the
Speaker 3: I don't know if he was the president of.
Speaker 2: He was a board member anyway, he was one of
Speaker 2: the board. Yeah, and these are the people who then
Speaker 2: were kind of at the heart of collecting UFO data.
Speaker 2: And I think to a degree for whatever look not
Speaker 2: necessarily even looking at conspiratorially, but I think people even
Speaker 2: in the UFO community unfortunately tend to, at least after
Speaker 2: the facts, look back at, well, these are the legitimate people.
Speaker 2: I mean, if I thought there was a conspiracy, these
Speaker 2: would be the people at least at least I've been trusting,
Speaker 2: all right, Palma, But before I'd be trusting an x
Speaker 2: C I A head to tell me the truth about you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's exactly it, you know, And that that
Speaker 3: and and that repeats itself, right, I mean, we have
Speaker 3: that that same repetition. I think Greg A. Gagin's book
Speaker 3: that he wrote in the History of the Development of
Speaker 3: the Flying Saucer and Culture, that he came out a
Speaker 3: couple of years ago. Oh, it's really good. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: a fantastic book. I mean, I can't remember. I can't
Speaker 3: remember the name off the top of my head. It's oh,
Speaker 3: after After After the Flying Saucers came. It's really good,
Speaker 3: really good book. Greg's a fantastic researcher. But you know
Speaker 3: he talks about that too, sort of the repetition of
Speaker 3: that trust and the repetition of these characters that kind
Speaker 3: of step in from a foal, you know, things, And
Speaker 3: and it's always the hope of that knock, right like
Speaker 3: you were talking about that knocking on the Air Force door.
Speaker 3: You know, Folks always are hoping that the person who
Speaker 3: comes out is answering that knock, you know, but we
Speaker 3: never get any answers. And I, you know, I I
Speaker 3: personally like kind of love that fact. I'd be And
Speaker 3: Greg Bishop did a design, Uh, the Saucers will keep
Speaker 3: their secrets, you know, kind of a pro MYSTERI in
Speaker 3: reading of the Flying Saucer Mystery, you know, and can.
Speaker 2: You involved with the UFO Taro as well with Greg Riley. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I have that here, so wonderful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got the I got the honor of writing
Speaker 3: the Whitley streeber uh card, the writing they streaber bio
Speaker 3: for that. That was that was fantastic. I love Whitley,
Speaker 3: So that was a good That was a good thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe where we can just transition a little here, because
Speaker 2: I think this is something worth talking about. We've we've
Speaker 2: talked very much about euphology and some of the major
Speaker 2: personalities and some of the ways you know, they've they've
Speaker 2: affected our beliefs and some of the ways they've been
Speaker 2: ignored or brought into the you know, official fold and
Speaker 2: the ahistoricity of of your euphological research. But what's your
Speaker 2: what's your take on the way the popular culture representations
Speaker 2: of it is so say, from those early source of
Speaker 2: movies in the fifties through I think Close Encounters of
Speaker 2: the Third Kind is a great example, and we have
Speaker 2: a wonderful new example of course, well we can go
Speaker 2: through the X files as well, and and up to
Speaker 2: of course Disclosure Day today. How do you how do
Speaker 2: you think that the the the popular culture is represented
Speaker 2: what people believe in uthology, how has it represented the
Speaker 2: the phenomenon accurately or otherwise? And what's the interaction between
Speaker 2: all of these things.
Speaker 3: That was actually a conversation and while we were making
Speaker 3: the Ufology Taro, we were talking about what would it
Speaker 3: take to do justice to these the actual sense of
Speaker 3: a UFO or flying Saucer encounter, right, because you never
Speaker 3: see plasma stuff, you know, but Project Identification out of
Speaker 3: Missouri with Harley Rutledge, if that was all plasma stuff
Speaker 3: for Hezeldin, was plasma you never see? I mean maybe nope.
Speaker 3: Kind of comes around to like a Trevor James Constable
Speaker 3: esque sort of maybe, but not really. But there's so
Speaker 3: much richness there that just doesn't get covered. And you know,
Speaker 3: the idea that this is impossible to film, then you
Speaker 3: can't film it, but I think that, like I'm sure
Speaker 3: that Jacques Turner could film it, you know, a great
Speaker 3: nineteen forties director who did Knight of the Demon and
Speaker 3: Cat People and that who worked with you know, Cat
Speaker 3: People is almost all suggestion, right, and just working that suggestion,
Speaker 3: you know, and so there, but we don't have that
Speaker 3: type of filmmaking anymore. And Jack Turner never made a
Speaker 3: Flying Saucer movie, right, so we have a very like
Speaker 3: it's you know, it's the same we talked about Lovecraft.
Speaker 3: It's similar to the Lovecraft thing. People o Lovecraft's unfilmable,
Speaker 3: like no, not really like you again, I think Jack
Speaker 3: Turner could have done a great Lovecraft adaptation with suggestion
Speaker 3: and with with actual filmmaking, you know, and not just
Speaker 3: here's a rubber monster or something, you know, because Lovecraft's
Speaker 3: not about monsters. Like if you read Lovecraft, most of
Speaker 3: the description is about architecture and atmosphere and that and
Speaker 3: the entities and that kind of thing are not minor,
Speaker 3: but they're they're more atmospheric. And so yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: know that there has been like a really good, good
Speaker 3: I haven't seen Disclosure Day, but you know, I don't
Speaker 3: know that there's been something that really captures the the
Speaker 3: full sort of feeling of it. You know. Do you
Speaker 3: have a do you have a film that that strikes
Speaker 3: you as like a.
Speaker 2: I think the two I think the three best UFO movies,
Speaker 2: and some of them aren't UFO movies of at least
Speaker 2: the era since I've been alive, probably Close Encounters, the
Speaker 2: third kind at least up until I'm when I saw
Speaker 2: as a boy, I was just mesmerized by it, right,
Speaker 2: But I tend to agree with Valet's criticism of the
Speaker 2: literalism of that final act. Like, up until that final
Speaker 2: act where the sources come down and a little beautiful
Speaker 2: aliens angelic aliens wander out, it very much encapsulates that
Speaker 2: weird experience that an experiencer goes through, like it gets
Speaker 2: the Royniery experiences right, the horror of a mother whose
Speaker 2: child's been abducted. I think it captures the weirdness of
Speaker 2: the experience very well, and it also captures the wonder
Speaker 2: of the phenomenon very well, which Disclosure Day totally I
Speaker 2: think fails in. But that's another story. I think another
Speaker 2: campmpletely non UFO movie, although it's an alien movie, is
Speaker 2: the film k Pax. Have you seen the film film
Speaker 2: k Pax with with who's the outer favorite actor? Now,
Speaker 2: what's his name? Because he would star? What's his name? Goodness, gracious,
Speaker 2: it'll come. It'll come to me anyway. Cape the story
Speaker 2: of k paxes and I don't want I'm going to
Speaker 2: have to spoil it a little bit, but is that
Speaker 2: there's this person who's had a traumatic experience and now
Speaker 2: he believes, well, he's no, he's gone, he's He's essentially
Speaker 2: about what's called a walk in in the broader UFO world,
Speaker 2: that an al can take over abody after traumatic experience.
Speaker 2: I met a walk in and it was she was
Speaker 2: very intense, almost frightening, to be honest. Back in my
Speaker 2: PhD research days in Sidona, I met a very strange
Speaker 2: woman with very strong presence and almost you know, frightening
Speaker 2: to talk to. But the idea that this traumatic experience,
Speaker 2: he's been taken over by an alien being called Kpex.
Speaker 2: And the cleverest thing about that film is that by
Speaker 2: the end of the movie, I think there's still there's
Speaker 2: still a degree of uncertainty whether he has been or
Speaker 2: he hasn't he is he mental? Is he insane? This
Speaker 2: guy just through a traumatic experience or is he really
Speaker 2: had is he really as an et you know, taken
Speaker 2: over this person's body and once bought the very end,
Speaker 2: but it manages to what Totter of the Great Literary
Speaker 2: Theorist suggested that in the genre of the fantastic, there's
Speaker 2: actually kind of three subgenres. There's the fantastic and that's
Speaker 2: when the character has had an experience, but you're not
Speaker 2: sure yet whether it's genuinely like other worldly or whether
Speaker 2: it could just be a misinterpretation. So it either slides
Speaker 2: into the uncanny, which is when it's all just the coincidence,
Speaker 2: or maybe the basist version would be a Scooby Do
Speaker 2: cartoon where the mask gets ripped off the evil landlord
Speaker 2: at the end and he's just trying to, you know,
Speaker 2: annoy those kids. The other side of it is the marvelous,
Speaker 2: where it really is angels or extraterrestrials or ghosts. But
Speaker 2: I think the best we can do, and I think
Speaker 2: the strongest it can ever be, is when it's like KPEX,
Speaker 2: when we tell the story and it's rooted in this
Speaker 2: realm with the fantastic, because let's be real, that's where
Speaker 2: we all are. We don't know yet if it's how
Speaker 2: much it's psychological, how much it's genuinely you know, something other,
Speaker 2: what the other is. So I think when a movie
Speaker 2: can maintain that space in the fantastic, it does a
Speaker 2: really good job. The other fantastic UFO movie, I think
Speaker 2: is the Richard Geeve vehicle, The Mothman Prophecies, even though, and.
Speaker 3: As you're talking, I am thinking of some other ones
Speaker 3: that like kind of touch on that. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it's called The God Wants You Dad or something.
Speaker 3: It was like a I forget it. It was basically
Speaker 3: about it's the guy who did Cue the Winged Serpent.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a movie by him.
Speaker 2: Larry is it Larry Fiestens something?
Speaker 3: Yeah, something, Larry something. I can't remember. I would remember
Speaker 3: if this was like a year ago, but now now
Speaker 3: that it has all all been moved by life. But
Speaker 3: the but yeah, there are there are some good but
Speaker 3: it's it's exactly what you're saying. It is the ones
Speaker 3: that hit that uncanny note where there's a little bit
Speaker 3: of ambiguity and that, you know, going back to love Craft,
Speaker 3: you said you had to have the realism before you
Speaker 3: had anything weird. The reel had to be as real
Speaker 3: as it possibly can be, you know, And I think
Speaker 3: that that that gets missing, especially you know, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of and you find this in contemporary novels and
Speaker 3: contemporary movie making. There's almost like a cartoonishness to it,
Speaker 3: where the framework of the storytelling is just so blunt
Speaker 3: and like the you know, the Aristotilian arc is just
Speaker 3: so just like Chunky. You know, maybe that's the too
Speaker 3: like a rough like the really are brute application of
Speaker 3: Joseph Campbell's you know, storytelling circle kind of thing. But
Speaker 3: it's just this really blunt way of storytelling that doesn't
Speaker 3: have the nuance that that can capture that or bring
Speaker 3: the realism. You know, Tarkowski probably could have made an
Speaker 3: amazing UFO movie. You know, maybe Stalker in some sense
Speaker 3: has has some elements of similarity to that, that uncanniness
Speaker 3: and strangeness, you know.
Speaker 2: Or it's Larry Cohen, by the way, I remember Cohen.
Speaker 2: He's one of my favorite I used to love him
Speaker 2: when I was a kid in Yeah Stuff and The
Speaker 2: Island of the Alive or It's Alive or whatever it
Speaker 2: is and all those.
Speaker 3: Yes, good, Yeah, Larry Cohen is a king.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that that we find some of these themes
Speaker 2: told better in stories that people don't think of as
Speaker 2: you know, traditional movies and Disclosure Day. Unfortunately I'm not
Speaker 2: I'm not going to give you any spoilers, but it
Speaker 2: really is just like if I think have been great
Speaker 2: if you watch it in ninety six or something, but
Speaker 2: we've seen it in X files, done in the adult,
Speaker 2: non disnified version, and it's far more compelling and far
Speaker 2: more interesting. And it's it's a very naive, hopeful, not
Speaker 2: naive the way Close Encounters was naive and wonderful. It's
Speaker 2: just not it's just silly, you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: to be honest. But you should go see it just
Speaker 2: so you can bad.
Speaker 3: Mouth can be disappointed. Exactly I was.
Speaker 2: I went with my daughter. She seemed to have fun.
Speaker 2: It's fast moving, I mean, it's moves quickly, so.
Speaker 3: It's you know, I mean, Spielberg's a he's a he
Speaker 3: can make a film, right like the very at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, he could at least make a film,
Speaker 3: which not everybody, not everybody can do. It's not always
Speaker 3: the best film, despite the appliuse.
Speaker 2: But on this, on this quickly though, how much do
Speaker 2: you think that the film versions of these movies, So
Speaker 2: let's forget Disclosure day, course you haven't seen it. It's
Speaker 2: only riffing on ideas that were already in the pop culture.
Speaker 2: Forget about eupology anyway. But how much do you think
Speaker 2: that your average perhaps non eufologist, just man on the
Speaker 2: street has had his perceptions, his belief system framed around eupology,
Speaker 2: by these movies, by these alien invasion movies X files
Speaker 2: closing counts. How much do you think that frames our
Speaker 2: average cultural conception of what extraterrestrial life might be, like,
Speaker 2: what UFOs are, all of these kind of things.
Speaker 3: Any any person that I talk to that is not
Speaker 3: into the subject is usually coming from that perspective, even
Speaker 3: if they have sort of a cursory interest. A lot
Speaker 3: of times the defaults to frameworks that are given through
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff, the X file stuff and the
Speaker 3: you know, the yeah, the popular culture kind of kind
Speaker 3: of framing of it, and it gets you know, I'm
Speaker 3: so far into this, and I'm sure you're in the
Speaker 3: same way where you're just like it almost becomes like
Speaker 3: a translation problem. You know, you're like, it's not really
Speaker 3: what I'm talking about, but you know, okay, like that's
Speaker 3: not that's not it, but okay, you know that that's
Speaker 3: what we that's what we can start to work through.
Speaker 3: And then when they see the other side, though, they're like, whoa,
Speaker 3: Like there's this whole other realm that's much more interesting
Speaker 3: and it's not just kind of you know, cartoonish pop
Speaker 3: culture trope. Alien stuff, you know, And and it's interesting
Speaker 3: too because there's a some people even have it's it's
Speaker 3: you know, it's like the Robert Anton Wilson, you know,
Speaker 3: like Fnord, where they just can't see past it and.
Speaker 2: They can't I'm rerating the Illuminatus trilogy at the moment,
Speaker 2: So that's weird that you should bring it.
Speaker 3: Watch out for the florids, you know, so like they
Speaker 3: But yeah, it becomes like this, this blind that that
Speaker 3: people can't see past. I've been tracking for a while
Speaker 3: since most since twenty seventeen Google trends. You can look
Speaker 3: UFO and see where it goes, you know, And this
Speaker 3: was something I've talked about a lot. The biggest spike
Speaker 3: was in two thousand and eight for the Stevensville, Texas siding.
Speaker 3: And no matter the amount of saturation and we've had,
Speaker 3: you know, especially in the last year or so, the
Speaker 3: saturation has been intense. And then you know, going back
Speaker 3: to twenty seventeen in the New York Times article, it's
Speaker 3: been a constant hammering of this topic. Hasn't peaked to
Speaker 3: what happened in two thousand and eight, you know, so
Speaker 3: the public interest, you know, there's there's a lot of
Speaker 3: the memes of like the Aliens. The aliens are here
Speaker 3: and it's the great I got to bill to pay,
Speaker 3: like can you come back later? I don't really care,
Speaker 3: you know, the economic situation for the majority of people
Speaker 3: you know across the world, or the climate situation. Right
Speaker 3: there's record heats in Europe and they don't have air conditioning,
Speaker 3: so like, you know, it's people are you know in
Speaker 3: how many wars we have going on now and all
Speaker 3: the rest of it. So it's there's other things to
Speaker 3: think about. And I think that that also plays a
Speaker 3: part into you knowgnitive load, right, Like you can only
Speaker 3: fit so much in there, and so you're going to
Speaker 3: default to what you see everywhere around you. You know.
Speaker 3: That's why I like to be in my book Corner, right,
Speaker 3: So then all my cognitive load and everything I'm saturated
Speaker 3: with is the deep weird.
Speaker 2: In the book corner is always a happy place. Horace
Speaker 2: Smith very kindly let us know that it was Kevin
Speaker 2: Spacey who played the walking alien in k Pax, which
Speaker 2: was good. I'm not asking you to be a prophet,
Speaker 2: but before as we wind down, do you at their
Speaker 2: changes you imagine within our perception or our conversation, perhaps
Speaker 2: are these things or the direction it's going to go.
Speaker 2: And given the fact that since twenty seventeen there's been
Speaker 2: a considerable shift, as you said, almost it's almost amnesia
Speaker 2: before then. But now that there seems to at least
Speaker 2: be I guess, a situation where it appeas to be
Speaker 2: the UFO phenomenon appeas to be being taken seriously by
Speaker 2: the media and the US government and everything else. Do
Speaker 2: you see there to be any blowback a change continuing
Speaker 2: in this direction? And again, you're not going to be
Speaker 2: held to the record for this's what's your gut feeling
Speaker 2: of where we're going in the next five to ten years.
Speaker 3: I so if this were like a year ago, I
Speaker 3: would have I would be less sure that it wasn't
Speaker 3: a five ten year trend, right, and that it was
Speaker 3: going to peter out. Since Neil de grass Tyson has
Speaker 3: come out and had to completely reverse track and what
Speaker 3: he's been saying the entire time that he's been a
Speaker 3: hunded right, and he's now had to well not accepting it,
Speaker 3: he's had to give credence to it at all and
Speaker 3: have a calm, rational discussion about it without just throwing
Speaker 3: out ad hominems and shutting things down with bad science
Speaker 3: and fake science, you know. And he's actually had to
Speaker 3: address these issues and written a book about it, right,
Speaker 3: So he's even jumping on the trend of it. Michael
Speaker 3: Shermer joining this board. I know a lot of people
Speaker 3: are upset by that. But you know, Shermer, since he
Speaker 3: had that weird kind of like instrumental transcommunication with the
Speaker 3: radio and I don't know if it was his wife's
Speaker 3: grandfather or father something who had passed and it was
Speaker 3: a radio with no batteries that started playing a favorite song.
Speaker 3: Ever since that, he's he's been a little bit more
Speaker 3: open to this stuff, you know. And if you think
Speaker 3: about having to shift those narratives, you need to have
Speaker 3: those public figures change before those people who follow those
Speaker 3: public figures change. You know, you start with the leadership,
Speaker 3: and once you can turn the leadership, then you get
Speaker 3: the flock to follow the shepherd.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So the fact that you've got like Shermer and you know, Degress,
Speaker 3: Tyson and that are starting to have to they're publicly
Speaker 3: to alter the way that they talk about these things,
Speaker 3: I think that that's a good signal that there's probably
Speaker 3: going to be a continued roll out of taking the
Speaker 3: topic seriously. Now, with that said, the fact that there
Speaker 3: is this cutting off at twenty seventeen, and that I've
Speaker 3: seen a lot of the academic dialogue on it, and
Speaker 3: no one outside of cultural studies, you know, or media
Speaker 3: studies has any interest in going back to the old stuff.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like, let's wipe the slate clean and
Speaker 3: we're going to start with what we see and we're
Speaker 3: going to start with science and if we see something new,
Speaker 3: but we don't need all these old records. They're there,
Speaker 3: it happened. You know, there's people like Beatrice via Role
Speaker 3: who is doing the Vasco project and looking at the
Speaker 3: astronomical data on the slides from some of the observatories
Speaker 3: and finding that there's these transient anomalies, and there's this
Speaker 3: discussion over what those are. You know, is it a glitch,
Speaker 3: is it a cosmic ray? Was it something during a
Speaker 3: nuclear test that was causing these these flashes in the
Speaker 3: in the film. You know, there's there's those conversations which
Speaker 3: are looking at the history, but they're the cultural history itself,
Speaker 3: and figures like Keel and the rest of it are
Speaker 3: not not going to be taken seriously, you know, and
Speaker 3: that that's what that worries me. I guess is that
Speaker 3: that because that's where the richness is to it, that's
Speaker 3: where the human side of it is, you know. And
Speaker 3: all I see as we move forward into the systemization
Speaker 3: of this stuff, it did nothing good for for parapsychology,
Speaker 3: you know. All it did was the the increasing focus
Speaker 3: on minuscule returns, you know, until and anything that looked
Speaker 3: bigger than that was rejected as as not you know,
Speaker 3: not to be a look dat right, it was too
Speaker 3: scary or something. That's changed a little bit with stuff
Speaker 3: like the telepathy tapes. But when it in the current
Speaker 3: time period, it seems like when it changes, it gets
Speaker 3: really modeled and mixed with things that that mess it
Speaker 3: up even more. So I don't know. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean I think that I think the ball is going
Speaker 3: to keep rolling. I think that we will. I don't
Speaker 3: think that there's going to be a lid put back
Speaker 3: on it, you know, but I don't think it'll be
Speaker 3: the same UFO Flying Saucer and or even the UAP
Speaker 3: from twenty seventeen. I think it's going to be a
Speaker 3: much drier, you know, unless there's some sort of massive flap,
Speaker 3: and that would be the thing that would change it.
Speaker 3: Right that that's kind of the you know, the nineteen
Speaker 3: forty seven moment, regular people were seeing these things. This
Speaker 3: wasn't just an academic question. It was you're in your
Speaker 3: backyard and you see something hovering over you. I mean Valet, right,
Speaker 3: he had a sighting of a ructured saucer craft when
Speaker 3: he was a kid. So you know, that would change
Speaker 3: the conversation. Outside of that, I think it's going to
Speaker 3: be probably similar to parapsychology, where it it fritters out
Speaker 3: into the established disciplines and what you know, what there
Speaker 3: can be there becomes renamed so it's not weird and
Speaker 3: it and it moves on, you know, and gets gets
Speaker 3: kind of absorbed into that. This is a little bit
Speaker 3: different because it's a question of non human intelligence. Does
Speaker 3: that exist? What is that? So if that is there
Speaker 3: floating in the background, then the you know, that might
Speaker 3: be that might change that dynamic of of sort of
Speaker 3: just diffusing it into the culture. But barring that, I
Speaker 3: don't I don't, I don't know. I think that the again,
Speaker 3: the ball will keep rolling, but I don't think we're
Speaker 3: going to have a beautiful golden age of saucers. You know,
Speaker 3: we'll have the dry age of the UAP.
Speaker 2: That's so depressing but so thoughtful. I could ask you
Speaker 2: another three questions just from that response that we would
Speaker 2: be talking until dawn my time. And while I would
Speaker 2: love to do that, I'm i going to hold you
Speaker 2: over all my audience. It's always so fascinating talking to
Speaker 2: you and with you. David. Is there anything you're doing
Speaker 2: at the moment, or any URLs or anything you'd like
Speaker 2: to let our listeners and viewers in on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would you know. If you're in the LA
Speaker 3: area this weekend Burbank specifically, there's an art show that
Speaker 3: Greg Bishop from Radio Mysterio So, author of Project Beta
Speaker 3: and a bunch of other good stuff, is for a
Speaker 3: damp skin that Greg Bishop is curating an art show
Speaker 3: called Power to the Paper jail Breaking Disclosure, and it's
Speaker 3: a really neat selection of artists. Some of them are experiencers.
Speaker 3: You have Steve Neil, who worked a lot with Whitley
Speaker 3: Strieber but also did special effects for Star Trek in that.
Speaker 3: But he's got these amazing I would recommend to just
Speaker 3: look up Steve Neil's art because it's really really cool
Speaker 3: kind of experiencer art. There's Susan Demeter, who some folks
Speaker 3: may be aware of. She's a researcher from Canada who
Speaker 3: is Her husband is Massimo Teodorani, who's one of the
Speaker 3: leading physicists right now working on these questions. And Susan's
Speaker 3: got some art in there. Erica lux who is a
Speaker 3: podcaster and researcher, James Pike who's an experiencer. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of different folks in that in this show that
Speaker 3: just some amazing stuff. Barbara Fisher is in there as well,
Speaker 3: and then there's going to be Dean Aleotto who did
Speaker 3: the McPherson tapes and more recently did the I think
Speaker 3: it's called Experiencers or something like that, or been Disclosure something.
Speaker 3: He's got a new documentary out as well. But he's
Speaker 3: going to be on a panel, so it's kind of
Speaker 3: like an art show. Greg's going to give a lecture,
Speaker 3: there's going to be a panel. It should be pretty good.
Speaker 3: So that's power to the paper jail Breaking Disclosure. If
Speaker 3: you were in the California area, and.
Speaker 2: I wish I was, and I wish I could go,
Speaker 2: I love all of Greg Bishop's work. I have all
Speaker 2: of his books and a number of his magazine publications
Speaker 2: on my shelf over there, and he's I think Project Beida.
Speaker 2: I probably other than maybe The Mothman Prophecies or Keels,
Speaker 2: Operation Trojan Horse or The Ways Messages of Deception, I
Speaker 2: probably recommended Project Beata more than any other any UFO book,
Speaker 2: although I do mention or always reference, like Chris Orbeck's
Speaker 2: Sources book now, which I encourage you to get as well. Man,
Speaker 2: it was so great talking to you again, David. It
Speaker 2: had been too long. Thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you Dean. Yeah, absolutely, and what a great time.
Speaker 3: The seventy ninth anniversary of the Age of the Saucers.
Speaker 3: That's a good, good, good thing to celebrate and talk about.
Speaker 2: And I couldn't have There's nobody on this planet I
Speaker 2: would have rather have chatted to about it with than you.
Speaker 2: So thank you so much, David for visiting with me.
Speaker 2: And until I talked to you again, David, hopefully not
Speaker 2: in the two distant future, and until I talk to
Speaker 2: everybody else out there, which will be the same weird
Speaker 2: time at nine pm Thursday Central, same Weird network. The
Speaker 2: untold radio network. Please keep it weird.