Speaker 1: Literally thousands and thousands of pages. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: while all of this is going on, it's sightings and
Speaker 1: personal experiences and encounters. There was a strong interest in
Speaker 1: the possibility that the universe was populated by people like
Speaker 1: ourselves WHI, which was an idea that started in ancient
Speaker 1: Greece in the in a philosophical school called atomism, in
Speaker 1: which they truly believed that the world consisted of atoms,
Speaker 1: that material objects consisted of atoms that had swirled around
Speaker 1: and come together to form what we see as people
Speaker 1: and things and whatever parts of the Earth. And they
Speaker 1: thought that this probably had happened also elsewhere in space.
Speaker 1: So they reached the conclusion that there are other planets
Speaker 1: very similar to ours and inhabited like ours. And this
Speaker 1: is an idea that kept recurring throughout time in medieval
Speaker 1: In the medieval period, it was debated among theologians who
Speaker 1: who reached the conclusion. Many of them did that the
Speaker 1: universe was probably full of extraterrestrial life. This opened up
Speaker 1: another debate about whether Jesus Christ had reincarnated every on
Speaker 1: every single planet and died an infinite number of times.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is that on the one hand, we
Speaker 1: have the sightings. On the other hand, we have a
Speaker 1: growing interest in the idea that the universe is teeming
Speaker 1: with life. But not until the nineteenth century do we
Speaker 1: see people starting to talk about maybe the things that
Speaker 1: they saw in the sky were actually visitors to the planet.
Speaker 1: And so interestingly, around the middle of the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: we have the first story of artificial artifacts and sort
Speaker 1: of objects that have come down from the sky, maybe
Speaker 1: sculptured into the form of a human bust or covered
Speaker 1: in hieroglyphics, very very Roswellian in their descriptions. So we
Speaker 1: see the first signs of this around eighteen fifty and
Speaker 1: that escalated during the rest of the nineteenth century. When
Speaker 1: we get to the eighteen eighties, it's I think people
Speaker 1: spoke more about artificient objects from other planets landing on
Speaker 1: Earth than they do today. It's an massive explosion of interest.
Speaker 1: So I've sort of gone off on a tangent a
Speaker 1: little bit from your question, I'm afraid, but it's a
Speaker 1: really complex subject and there's so much to talk about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and how much of this phenomenon do you think
Speaker 2: we have created with our own mind right, Because you know,
Speaker 2: when you look back at a lot of these topics.
Speaker 2: Like I mentioned earlier, with missing time and screen memories,
Speaker 2: that all came from Bud Hopkins in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 2: and then after his book came out, everyone started having
Speaker 2: missing time and screen memories. And then with Whitley Strieber
Speaker 2: in his book Communion, after that book came out, everyone
Speaker 2: started having great alien experiences. Right, So, through your research,
Speaker 2: how much of this has been a creation of our
Speaker 2: own perpetual thoughts and ideas behind it? And then how
Speaker 2: much would you say would be actual, real phenomenon. Now
Speaker 2: I know that that's an impossible percentage to put on that,
Speaker 2: but I just wanted to get your thoughts well.
Speaker 1: As far as the sentenges is concerned, Yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to get a number on it. But I think
Speaker 1: that logically we can sort of estimate how much of
Speaker 1: it in a sense is man made. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you sort of compare it to something else like medieval
Speaker 1: knights and soldiers and people wearing armor on horses and
Speaker 1: rescuing damsels in distress. We know that practically all of
Speaker 1: the stories that knights in armor were fake, I mean fake,
Speaker 1: They were literature, They were invented at the time to
Speaker 1: entertain people. But that doesn't mean that knights on horseback
Speaker 1: never existed. I mean jousting happened. They definitely were battles
Speaker 1: between people wearing armor. But what happens is, of course
Speaker 1: we have thousands and thousands of pages of fairy stories
Speaker 1: about that. The same thing can be said about eupology,
Speaker 1: because there were genuine sightings reports by astronomers. I think
Speaker 1: some of the encounter reports, if they don't reflect dreams
Speaker 1: and hallucinations, they seem to indicate that something happened at
Speaker 1: some point, really experience things. But of course all of
Speaker 1: this interest generated a lot of science fiction, and then
Speaker 1: there's a There was always a kind of symbiotic relationship
Speaker 1: between between what was reported as fact and fiction published
Speaker 1: around the same time. So what happened was science fiction
Speaker 1: or proto science fiction. Writers were inspired to create stories
Speaker 1: about visiting aliens by people's reports and testimonies and probably hearsay,
Speaker 1: and then as people read that that science fiction, they
Speaker 1: would be these ideas would crystallize in their brain about
Speaker 1: what was expected of an alien or a UFO and
Speaker 1: so on, and then they would regurgitate this and come
Speaker 1: out with stories that resemble those books, So we have
Speaker 1: a situation in which there was probably a physical stimul
Speaker 1: for a lot of this. It was something that was
Speaker 1: absolutely real, But then so much jump was published and
Speaker 1: so much speculation happened that much of that has survived
Speaker 1: into modern day ethology. So, for example, the idea of
Speaker 1: crop circles. So we know that a lot of crop
Speaker 1: circles in the nineteen nineties early two thousands were fake,
Speaker 1: or practically all of them done by university students, old
Speaker 1: men with planks of wood and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: But the idea that UFOs could leave landing traces goes
Speaker 1: way way way back, I mean even circular ones, and
Speaker 1: then not only weird objects from the sky, but also
Speaker 1: fairies and goblins. They also had an impact on fields,
Speaker 1: at least in folklore, and left sort of circular traces,
Speaker 1: as the Devin also did that in several folk tales.
Speaker 1: So there's this constant sort of sharing of ideas between
Speaker 1: what people saw what they thought they saw. Fiction created
Speaker 1: about that, hoaxes, newspapers taking advantage of people's new found
Speaker 1: interest in alien subjects. It's just so complex, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why I've spent the last sixteen
Speaker 1: years working on untangling it all very tall, It's very difficult,
Speaker 1: but that's why I've been doing it bit by bit
Speaker 1: and the research group that I founded in two thousand
Speaker 1: and threes. It's always worked really well. People are still
Speaker 1: finding things and sharing things. I think we've accumulated about
Speaker 1: forty or fifty thousand cuttings over the last twenty years.
Speaker 1: But some time ago I had to stand back from
Speaker 1: all of that and start sorting through it and trying
Speaker 1: to work out what was real and what wasn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: the great thing is we're living in a period in
Speaker 1: which artificial intelligence can help us map these things out,
Speaker 1: find patterns in the data that would be very difficult to,
Speaker 1: you know, for any individual to find just reading them
Speaker 1: sitting in an arm chair. So I have great hopes
Speaker 1: for the future in that sense. I'm actually beginning to
Speaker 1: use artificial intelligence now to sort through the data.
Speaker 2: So have you done any research into the thought or
Speaker 2: the idea that this phenomenon might be us in our
Speaker 2: military with highly advanced craft. Definitely when it comes to
Speaker 2: the abduction phenomenon, because I've read through the Betty and
Speaker 2: Barney Hill documents and Barney his first statements was that
Speaker 2: it was a military and that he saw the military.
Speaker 1: Beings with a very human nose, a large one that
Speaker 1: Jimmy Durantemo's said, Actually, yeah, it's I would say that
Speaker 1: a percentage of modern claims probably come from stem from
Speaker 1: some kind of military involvement, misinterpretation of what they've experienced,
Speaker 1: and so on, maybe even some kind of military cover
Speaker 1: up at some level. I can't deny it or confirm it, obviously,
Speaker 1: but there's no reason to believe that every abductee is
Speaker 1: making it up. But then there's no reason to believe
Speaker 1: that what they're reporting is exactly what happened. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've seen movies in which you get soldiers dressed as
Speaker 1: aliens to carry out this kind of thing. I think
Speaker 1: there's no reason why that where that couldn't have happened
Speaker 1: at some point, Considering it's very difficult to find two
Speaker 1: aliens that are the same and two UFOs that are
Speaker 1: in the sky. It's it wouldn't surprise me to discover
Speaker 1: that people in the military or at some other level
Speaker 1: but experiment it with dressing up or at least putting
Speaker 1: ideas in people's minds about what they've seen, so yeah,
Speaker 1: why not, I mean that that theory. I didn't used
Speaker 1: to believe in that at all, but I've read just
Speaker 1: so much about about military experiments psychological experiments that it
Speaker 1: wouldn't surprise me anymore.