Speaker 1: You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Last week I
Speaker 1: went to see a film called Alien Intrusion. Here's a
Speaker 1: little sample from the trailer.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm a science fiction fan and I can tell
Speaker 2: you the truth is out there, but it's a lot
Speaker 2: stranger than any science fiction.
Speaker 3: It's claimed that over twenty million Americans have seen a UFO.
Speaker 2: The Ropapole concluded that up to four million Americans had
Speaker 2: been abducted by aliens.
Speaker 4: I've been involved in the development of space vehicles for
Speaker 4: expiration for over sixty years. You know, there are massive
Speaker 4: problems with the idea that advanced aliens can simply work
Speaker 4: themselves around the galaxy. The starship Enterprise travels at multiple
Speaker 4: factors of lights.
Speaker 5: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 6: A giant hairy creature, part ape, part Matt in Larkness,
Speaker 6: a twenty four mile long bottomless lake of the Highlands
Speaker 6: of Scotland, if a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Monstert.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 1: Blake Smith, and this week we're going to be talking
Speaker 1: about a film that I saw last week called Alien
Speaker 1: Intrusion and how it relates to something called the ultraterrestrial hypothesis.
Speaker 1: In the interview that follows, you're going to hear a
Speaker 1: discussion with Joe Laycock, Natasha Michels, and Jeb Card, all
Speaker 1: of whom have been on Monster Talk before. Joined Natasha
Speaker 1: teach religious studies. We've had them on to discuss Tulpa's
Speaker 1: in relationship to the slender Man, and we had on
Speaker 1: Joe to talk about Satanism and the Satanic Panic and
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons, and we've had Jeb on to talk
Speaker 1: about fairies with our archaeological fantasies crossover. Anyway, you'll recognize
Speaker 1: their voices, I believe if you're a regular listener, and
Speaker 1: their discussion we're about to have is about ultraterrestrials, John Keel,
Speaker 1: the paranormal unified field theory, and this film Alien Intrusion
Speaker 1: and how it ties in UFOs and demons. It's really
Speaker 1: quite interesting and I hope you'll give it a listen.
Speaker 1: And I want to give a quick thank you to
Speaker 1: Peter Ahler, my friend who joined me to watch this
Speaker 1: film in preparation for this episode.
Speaker 3: MOREMS Tutle.
Speaker 1: All right, so welcome to Monster Talk again. All of you.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much.
Speaker 7: Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1: So we're here tonight to talk about some things. This
Speaker 1: is going to be kind of a roundtable discussion. Jeb
Speaker 1: and I, along with Sharon Hill, have been working on
Speaker 1: researching something that we're calling well, actually, Jeb, why don't
Speaker 1: you explain what the PUFT is.
Speaker 3: The puff to the paranormal Unified field theory. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think we're going to come back to it again and end.
Speaker 3: But basically wrestling with the idea that all sorts of
Speaker 3: things that people put into what academics might call the
Speaker 3: Celtic a milia, which include conspiracy theory as well as
Speaker 3: words like occult, paranormal, etcetera. I'm probably not the person
Speaker 3: to talk about this in this conversation, but that people
Speaker 3: would talk about as being paranormal are all increasingly in
Speaker 3: the community that's very interested in such topics interlinked. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's a thing that I'm interested in. And when
Speaker 3: we went to cryptocon we saw very firsthand, and it's
Speaker 3: a thing I've been talking about a lot. And then
Speaker 3: I think I finally all convinced you all that it
Speaker 3: really was a thing after seeing it there with dogmen
Speaker 3: and whatnot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, the Michigan dog Man and other aspects of
Speaker 1: the paranormal. They don't fit into the flesh and blood,
Speaker 1: meat and bones sort of aspect of things. And this
Speaker 1: is not new because even really early on in the
Speaker 1: UFO world there was a split. And I say UFOs
Speaker 1: first because that sort of predates Bigfoot. It doesn't really
Speaker 1: predate theety, but it does predate Bigfoot. There was a
Speaker 1: split between the UFOs are real physical craft and UFOs
Speaker 1: are some sort of ultradimensional or transdimensional phenomena. And I
Speaker 1: guess the guy who really focused on the ultraterrestrial hypothesis,
Speaker 1: in fact, who gave it that name, is John Keel.
Speaker 3: He doesn't invent he doesn't invent the concept. And honestly,
Speaker 3: I think we're probably going to backwork into the roots
Speaker 3: of this in all right, So, if you listen to
Speaker 3: the show that I'm usually on archaeological fantasies, we generally
Speaker 3: have two drinking game words. One is Victorian and the
Speaker 3: other is theosophy. And I'm about to say both. So
Speaker 3: I just did what's.
Speaker 8: That that we have drinks and hands?
Speaker 3: All right? So why don't we have why don't we
Speaker 3: talk about let's bring in the other people on this
Speaker 3: because I guarantee, because I'm just going to say this
Speaker 3: straight out one y'all's discussion of Tulpa's which are very
Speaker 3: tied into this on Monster Talk was astonishing, and also
Speaker 3: it appears to have made it on the X Files,
Speaker 3: which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: That is awesome.
Speaker 3: Locks Yeah, yeah, no, very much.
Speaker 1: Well, let me let me explain why I invited joined
Speaker 1: Natasha on. It's because, in conjunction with this research I've
Speaker 1: been doing to help Jeb on an article that he's
Speaker 1: working on, I synchronistically had a friend point me to
Speaker 1: this theater event that was happening called Alien Intrusion, and
Speaker 1: I looked into it and within about five minutes realized
Speaker 1: that this was not a UFO documentary, This was a
Speaker 1: religious documentary.
Speaker 3: Well it is a UFO doctors.
Speaker 1: Well it is, I'd say, it's just kind of the point,
Speaker 1: right it is. It is a Well, in fact, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that. But because of the fact that it
Speaker 1: looked to me like they were basically saying that UFOs
Speaker 1: were a demonological phenomena, I thought that there was a
Speaker 1: good chance it might tie in with this ultra terrestrial
Speaker 1: hypothesis stuff, and so I went to watch the film,
Speaker 1: and after and even before I went to watch the film,
Speaker 1: I reached out to Joe because.
Speaker 3: This is a film in theaters, right.
Speaker 1: It was a special event Fathom Events hosted, So this
Speaker 1: is like a one night simulcast across many theaters.
Speaker 3: And so you saw in the theater, and Joe and Natasha,
Speaker 3: I believe you saw it in the theater.
Speaker 7: It was one night only. How could we resist?
Speaker 3: That's right? Yeah, So I am going to be the
Speaker 3: This is a horrifying position for everybody involved. I guess
Speaker 3: I'm going to be the audience proxy because I have
Speaker 3: not seen this. I've looked into it. I've seen the
Speaker 3: guest list or the speaker's list, but I have not
Speaker 3: seen this. So I will probably be asking questions about us.
Speaker 1: I'm the I'm the far end of that spectrum. I've
Speaker 1: lived this. So when I was growing up, my mother
Speaker 1: told me not to be afraid of UFOs or aliens
Speaker 1: because Lucifer is the lord of the heir and could
Speaker 1: make all things appear to be something that they're not.
Speaker 1: Basically that it's much more likely that it's demons than
Speaker 1: physical aliens from another planet. And that was really seriously
Speaker 1: the hypothesis of this film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it did go straight up demons. Oh absolutely,
Speaker 3: and I want to get into it quite Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: just no.
Speaker 1: But Joe or Natasha both being religious studies people, both
Speaker 1: being very familiar with the field and having a much
Speaker 1: deeper knowledge of religious studies than I have. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've only got sort of the evangelical Christian view and
Speaker 1: the lightest understanding of other religions. So I thought it
Speaker 1: would be helpful to have them to give us some context.
Speaker 1: So I really appreciate you guys joining us and for
Speaker 1: attending the film, because it gives you absolutely the best
Speaker 1: position to talk about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, the way that they did this is you were saying,
Speaker 7: Fathom looks like they were set up if you know,
Speaker 7: there's a show and you want to watch it at
Speaker 7: a movie theater live, and so using that as a
Speaker 7: distributor whatever audience there would be. It seems that it
Speaker 7: just got split up across because multiple movie theaters in
Speaker 7: Austin were showing it. When we went, there were less
Speaker 7: than a dozen people in the audience. A good portion
Speaker 7: of them seemed to be UFO buffs who walked out
Speaker 7: in anger. Really about halfway through it, and I looked
Speaker 7: today on the IMDb page for this film, and in
Speaker 7: the trivia it actually says lots of people walked out
Speaker 7: of this film because they didn't know it was religious.
Speaker 7: And Natasha also got pretty restless and got up during
Speaker 7: the film and actually saw an audience member berating the
Speaker 7: poor guy taking tickets.
Speaker 3: Oh God, Latasha, what can you remember.
Speaker 7: From that conversation?
Speaker 5: So he was out talking to the young young guy
Speaker 5: taking tickets and was just saying that, well, I guess
Speaker 5: I should have researched this film better, but shame on
Speaker 5: you guys for showing this. And this poor kid is
Speaker 5: you know, he doesn't make these decisions. He take some tickets,
Speaker 5: and then he kept saying, you know, I want to
Speaker 5: go out and get a breath of fresh air, but
Speaker 5: I don't have my ticket to return.
Speaker 8: You know, He's like, I think I need.
Speaker 5: To go take a walk, and he seemed very very agitated.
Speaker 5: And I was actually in the search of trying to
Speaker 5: get myself a water or something, because by this point
Speaker 5: the movie had been going on for about two hours,
Speaker 5: and at this point I was just beating us over
Speaker 5: the head with New Testament versus and different things from
Speaker 5: Paul's letters, so sure.
Speaker 1: So it would have been a great one hour sort
Speaker 1: of presentation, I think. I mean, you could have made
Speaker 1: the case in an hour, but they stretched it out
Speaker 1: to two and then had like a Q and a afterwards, a.
Speaker 3: Q and a. Yeah, like there were people from the
Speaker 3: film sort of the company or whatever.
Speaker 1: Right, Oh wow it was. It was definitely a bait
Speaker 1: and switch, I think.
Speaker 3: Which the first IMDb review that shows up the title
Speaker 3: is I feel lied to, with lied to being all caps,
Speaker 3: which is why I put a little more volume behind that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do know the bait and switch evangelical approach
Speaker 1: has been around for a long time. I mean I
Speaker 1: remember many times when I was a kid going to
Speaker 1: the fair and then have like free puppet show and
Speaker 1: you know it's a puppet show, but it is definitely
Speaker 1: an evangelical, you know, conversion puppet show.
Speaker 3: I've also done that to good anthropology majors.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I remember in college there was a free
Speaker 5: comedy night and it was an evangelical bait and switch.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's kind of like it's almost like
Speaker 1: a pious fraud. You know, it's not like quite faking
Speaker 1: a miracle, but it is it is a little bit deceptive, and.
Speaker 3: Which is, by the way, literally the subtitle of the movie.
Speaker 3: It is alien intrusion unmasking a deception. Well, surprise, I
Speaker 3: got one of the deceptions for here, narrated by John Schneider,
Speaker 3: one of the two dudes from the Dukes of Hazzard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 7: Was also interesting because John Schneider now does something called
Speaker 7: Faith Works Productions and so important again, but he did
Speaker 7: not introduce himself as Bo Duke from Dukes of Hazzard.
Speaker 7: He introduced himself as Clark Kent's dad from the show Smallville.
Speaker 3: Interesting, that's right, yeah.
Speaker 7: After the sci fi craft.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also just people who are, you know, younger
Speaker 3: than a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Let me tell you a different view of the audience.
Speaker 1: My theater sold out to auditoriums, and it real almost
Speaker 1: entirely church groups where everybody knew everybody. Everybody was like, hey,
Speaker 1: brother so and so, and hey sister so and so.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: There was there was a real sense that I had
Speaker 1: walked into a church service. And before the movie started
Speaker 1: there were a lot of advertisements about creation ministries. It
Speaker 1: was really and the narrator or not the narrative, the
Speaker 1: director of the show is from Mostustralia, so he wasn't
Speaker 1: ken Ham, but there is a strong I'm just it
Speaker 1: just kind.
Speaker 3: Of immediately go where my mind went. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no exactly. It wasn't Knham, but it was yet
Speaker 1: another strong Australia anti evolutionary thing, and I wish Karen
Speaker 1: was here to defisure your country.
Speaker 7: Christian Ministries had a nasty breakup with ken Ham in
Speaker 7: two thousand and six, and the reasons for this are
Speaker 7: not entirely clear, but there's a lot online if you
Speaker 7: want to dig into that breakup.
Speaker 1: It was a secret anti chin beard sort of movement.
Speaker 3: Wow. Wow, that's harsh but fair. By the way, he
Speaker 3: does not have They sell a little pamphlet about UFOs
Speaker 3: at the so pretty much if you go to the
Speaker 3: Kraast Museum, all the stuff they sell text wise is theirs,
Speaker 3: which surprised me when I went there. I've not been
Speaker 3: to the ark and Kaa, but in the Karat Museum
Speaker 3: and they do have a tiny little pamphlet on UFOs
Speaker 3: and they don't do the demonology thing. They actually have
Speaker 3: a largely skeptical perspective that basically says sightings are probably blah,
Speaker 3: blah blah, mistakes and the idea of aliens reifies evolution.
Speaker 1: Let me just say that a good seventy percent of
Speaker 1: the first half of this movie. I know that's a
Speaker 1: little bit of too much math, probably, but the predominant
Speaker 1: content of the first half of the film was about
Speaker 1: what the UFO phenomena is and why modern day science
Speaker 1: rejects the idea that physical extraterrestrial craft are traveling from
Speaker 1: other planets. It could have been put on by psychop
Speaker 1: It was absolutely you know. Bullet pointed the same arguments
Speaker 1: that most physicists have against the idea that just a
Speaker 1: visiting Earth but they move does open the way for demons,
Speaker 1: which makes that they move on to the argument, well,
Speaker 1: people are seeing something, so what are they seeing. If
Speaker 1: it's not physical craft, it must be demons. So I
Speaker 1: mean that there's a lot of things that I would
Speaker 1: have liked them to include it, But the idea that
Speaker 1: maybe it's misidentified or misunderstood or sleep paralysis, none of
Speaker 1: those ideas came up.
Speaker 3: So how much of it was abduction? Like looking at
Speaker 3: the IMDb thing, abduction seems to come up a lot.
Speaker 3: Was a lot of it, which if they're talking about
Speaker 3: sort of demonological, you know, nocturnal attacks. Abduction seems like
Speaker 3: it would be a big part of Is that a
Speaker 3: big focus in the film?
Speaker 1: The second half is all about abduction.
Speaker 7: Yeah, because the narrator says, abductees are the most testable
Speaker 7: evidence that we have of this phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Wow, which I guess how well.
Speaker 7: In the sense that you can bring an abductee.
Speaker 3: To a lab and like yeah on them.
Speaker 7: But a lot of ufologists, including you know, Jacques Ballet,
Speaker 7: have said the contact these are the worst evidence, right,
Speaker 7: The best evidence are is ideally a video or something
Speaker 7: like that, and not something who is remembering something under hypnosis.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, of course Ballet is also
Speaker 3: mister aliens or fairies, which if you want to be
Speaker 3: away with the fairies and missing time under the hills and.
Speaker 1: They brought up fairies, you'd have been so proud of them.
Speaker 3: I've made all the made all the mistakes in my life,
Speaker 3: especially when.
Speaker 5: They use the abduct keees, because it's like they were
Speaker 5: they were trying to show in the first half of
Speaker 5: the first two thirds, like this is all illogical. You know,
Speaker 5: fast than light travel is illogical, and you know, all
Speaker 5: this other.
Speaker 8: Stuff and then when we got to the abductees.
Speaker 9: There was just so much crying and with like really
Speaker 9: sad piano keys in the background, and it was just
Speaker 9: it was just this like kind of blatant appeal to emotion.
Speaker 3: It was telling stories over sad piano interest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's very popular.
Speaker 3: Sorry it's a little in joke there, but so so
Speaker 3: it was very very like like sort of therapy culture
Speaker 3: kind of word of with the which is not a
Speaker 3: new criticism of abduction stuff.
Speaker 1: Not so much. They treated the abductees like they'd had
Speaker 1: legitimate experiences. They very politely discussed the common feature of
Speaker 1: the rectal probes, and then they it basically came down
Speaker 1: to correct me if I'm over simplifying this, Natasha Joe.
Speaker 1: But I think it came down to invoking the name
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ repeatedly is the best defense against alien abduction.
Speaker 7: That's right. And and two of the people in the
Speaker 7: film are involved in this ministry called alien resistance.
Speaker 3: I think the websites they're in there, that's amazing. I've
Speaker 3: been in their church yep, right across right, Well they're
Speaker 3: not anymore, but they used to be literally across the
Speaker 3: street from the UFO Museum in Roswell.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and there's a resistance is fertile?
Speaker 1: Nice?
Speaker 3: Nice? Do they still have as their symbol the sort
Speaker 3: of no smoking aka Ghostbusters like the red circle with
Speaker 3: oh my god, what the alien had the gray head
Speaker 3: in the middle. My favorite picture period of all is
Speaker 3: I went to the two thousand and two UFO Festival
Speaker 3: in Roswell and the Rallians, the group that is basically
Speaker 3: a contact ee flying saucer religious new religious movement primarily
Speaker 3: based out of Quebec, all though a ton of them
Speaker 3: in Korea. They were going to speak, not it wasn't
Speaker 3: gonna be rey Ale, but it was disciples of His
Speaker 3: who made their hair and beard look like his who
Speaker 3: were going to speak at the International UFO Museum and
Speaker 3: Research Center aka the Big Museum with a almost as
Speaker 3: big gift shop attached to it. Then at the last
Speaker 3: minute their speaking got revoked because they were too weird
Speaker 3: for the UFO Museum, which is a merit badge. But
Speaker 3: they were allowed in to the Alien Resistance storefront church,
Speaker 3: which at that time existed across the street. And the
Speaker 3: story behind that is I know his name is Guy,
Speaker 3: I don't remember his last name, but he was from
Speaker 3: I want to say, Tennessee in the nineteen nineties, and
Speaker 3: if you all know the story, better please interrupt me.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen nineties he started having in essence what
Speaker 3: would be sort of alien abduction or what a skeptic
Speaker 3: would say would be sleep paralysis events, but he interpreted
Speaker 3: them from a born again perspective as demonic attacks. And
Speaker 3: so he decided, well, where am I going to go
Speaker 3: into the belly of the beast. He went to Roswell
Speaker 3: right at the sort of the height of all of this,
Speaker 3: and opened up a storefront church of a ministry against
Speaker 3: aliens because he believes their demons. But they allowed the
Speaker 3: aliens who say they don't worship aliens, they say they're atheists,
Speaker 3: but they kind of worship aliens, allowed them to come
Speaker 3: in and speak. And there is a picture that a
Speaker 3: dude who was sort of reliving the film Six Days
Speaker 3: in Rosse, which is a very interesting film. God of
Speaker 3: me listening to all of this, and I now have
Speaker 3: it in every who Am I? Because I don't want
Speaker 3: to do this lecture at the beginning of semesters.
Speaker 7: The guy I'm malone, I want to say it.
Speaker 3: Was guy alone. That seems very like Batman Gillin from
Speaker 3: the thirties. I wasn't certain, but that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7: He and Joe Jordan, who they said was the moof
Speaker 7: on director for South Korea. Interesting players in the film.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and then Jim Subtle from Roswell as well.
Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah. I don't know if they're still in Roswell.
Speaker 3: I know they are no longer right in front of
Speaker 3: the museum, but I don't know if they've left Roswell.
Speaker 3: I get the feeling they're still there because I saw
Speaker 3: some YouTube videos a few years ago of them having
Speaker 3: sort of an alternate conference at the same time as
Speaker 3: the Big festival, and one of the people in the
Speaker 3: film spoke there, who I don't believe has the same
Speaker 3: ideology one Nick Redford. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, I don't know what Nick believes exactly, but I
Speaker 1: know that he makes his living off of the same
Speaker 1: sort of topics that I'm interested in and doesn't have
Speaker 1: the sort of skeptical framework that I do. But he
Speaker 1: was in the movie quite a bit, and every time
Speaker 1: Nick Redford appears, it's moments later we see John Keel
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. So it's like Nick Redford,
Speaker 1: Nick Nick Redford serves as John Keel's proxy for this film.
Speaker 3: Well, do we want to briefly talk about that a little? Like? Like?
Speaker 1: Not briefly, I think we should talk about a whole lot.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, I mean I just didn't know if
Speaker 3: if there was anything else we need to get out
Speaker 3: of the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I think. I mean, I think the main
Speaker 1: thing is that, you know, my position as a skeptic.
Speaker 1: You know, we're a podcast that works with Skeptic Magazine.
Speaker 1: But I've always felt that I think it's absolutely fine
Speaker 1: that people have religion. I you know, I grew up
Speaker 1: in a religious family. I'm not an anti god person.
Speaker 1: I'm not an anti religious. I am a very pro
Speaker 1: evidence person, and I don't think I think that the
Speaker 1: usefulness of using skeptical methodology to figure out whether things
Speaker 1: are really demonstrably true or testably true or not is important,
Speaker 1: and critical thinking is important, and I find it unfortunate
Speaker 1: that this whole thing is also wrapped up in a
Speaker 1: big anti evolution nutshell, because I think there's very few
Speaker 1: scientific theories that have turned out to be so demonstrably
Speaker 1: reliable as natural selection as an explanation for evolution and
Speaker 1: as a quick reminder for audience members who may not
Speaker 1: know it. The evolution itself was never really debatable. I
Speaker 1: think prior to Darwin, Darwin was looking for a mechanism
Speaker 1: to explain it. He wasn't inventing evolution. Evolution already existed.
Speaker 1: His grandfather had talked about evolution. But what he did
Speaker 1: was came up with natural selection as a methodology to
Speaker 1: explain how over time selective pressures can cause change that
Speaker 1: looks like design. And it's interesting to me that that
Speaker 1: a group that's primarily focused on pro creation as not
Speaker 1: not pro creation but promoting Yeah.
Speaker 3: That creation is that they're primarily clear that up.
Speaker 1: I think that that's their primary, uh sort of focus.
Speaker 1: That they would hop into the alien hot tub and
Speaker 1: want to have a swim with us is fascinating. So
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure where that metaphor just went, but uh, well.
Speaker 3: Well let's let's let's I think I'm as an archaeologist,
Speaker 3: I always like to sort of look at things from
Speaker 3: a let's let's go to an origins. If you watch
Speaker 3: any random documentary about although maybe these days maybe not
Speaker 3: so much, but in the past, and I think sleeve
Speaker 3: in today about UFOs, what would the origin be like,
Speaker 3: what what what would be the UFOs were first blah
Speaker 3: blah blah blah blah, Well what would it prop what
Speaker 3: would the sort of always popular.
Speaker 1: As Keneth Arnold as the first and then the.
Speaker 3: June twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then they go back and say, oh, but
Speaker 1: there were also airships and go back to the Bible
Speaker 1: and Ezekiel.
Speaker 3: Right. But the thing, so the typical kind of kind
Speaker 3: of perspective on this is you have this sudden emergence
Speaker 3: of this phenomenon of strange things seen in the sky
Speaker 3: that may have something to do without her space, although
Speaker 3: it takes a few years for it to sort of
Speaker 3: go there, in the summer of nineteen forty seven, specifically starting,
Speaker 3: as Keiland has pointed out, on Saint John's Day, on
Speaker 3: about this day, on June twenty fourth. Bye, And I
Speaker 3: would love to turn this over to people probably know
Speaker 3: a hell a lot more about this than I do.
Speaker 3: The actual origins of all of this, can of what
Speaker 3: we call flying saucers and UFOs and many of the
Speaker 3: ideas that we see emerge after nineteen forty seven can
Speaker 3: all be found. And I'll put your glasses in your
Speaker 3: hand in the late Victorian period and in sort of
Speaker 3: the movement known as theos Fee, which is sort of
Speaker 3: a reaction to modernity in some ways and in other
Speaker 3: ways it's not. It gets really complicated, and I'd love
Speaker 3: you all to talk about more than me. That then
Speaker 3: kind of tracks through places like Maurice Doriol and Richard
Speaker 3: Shaver and gets up there. So the reason I say
Speaker 3: this is the idea that you'd have psychical interests or
Speaker 3: what would call parapsychological or psychic mixed in with strange
Speaker 3: things in the sky, mixed in with weird places, mixed
Speaker 3: in with strange creatures is actually not new. And if
Speaker 3: anybody wants to jump in, feel free.
Speaker 7: Yeah, a couple of things. You know. The Christian attitude
Speaker 7: that these are just demons goes back to probably the
Speaker 7: seventies and is fairly mainstream and serving the movements. How
Speaker 7: Lindsay wrote a lot about this, that the UFOs are
Speaker 7: the false miracles that's going to usher in the end times.
Speaker 7: What was different about this was I have never seen
Speaker 7: a Christian take on UFOs that gets into Jacques Pallet
Speaker 7: and John Keel and what you call the puffed yeah
Speaker 7: unified field theory and there's some consequences to that. One
Speaker 7: of them is people like hal Lindsay assumed UFOs have
Speaker 7: never happened before, and if they're happening now, it's because
Speaker 7: these are the end days. Interesting in this film they
Speaker 7: have to say, well, this is actually always gone on, right,
Speaker 7: because there's always been demons you mentioned I think Blake
Speaker 7: mentioned Ezekiel, which is interesting Ezekiel did not show up
Speaker 7: in this film, Yeah, because that would have kind of
Speaker 7: thrown a monkey ranch into their claim that all anything
Speaker 7: that looks like an alien is demonic, right, because they
Speaker 7: can't say the wheels that's seen by the prophet Ezekiel
Speaker 7: were demonic.
Speaker 3: They have been because they're they're angelic, right.
Speaker 7: They're angelic, right, So that's interesting that that was sort
Speaker 7: of a left interesting.
Speaker 5: Angel Gabriel and Mohammad showed up, as did the as
Speaker 5: did Joseph.
Speaker 1: Smith ran what Yeah, yeah, because these are I think
Speaker 1: that tied into the nobody should add anything to the
Speaker 1: Bible approach, right, Like the original prophecies of the Bible
Speaker 1: are the Bible incomplete, and anything that happens after that
Speaker 1: is entirely suspect.
Speaker 3: Right. So this thing basically argue that Gabriel and Mohammad
Speaker 3: is demonic and Joseph Smith is demonic, not them, but
Speaker 3: the revelations thereof.
Speaker 7: Yes, and wonderful quite at scientology. And so really the
Speaker 7: film was putting all three of these religions in the
Speaker 7: same category of oh sonic propaganda.
Speaker 3: When they talk about scientology, tell me more about the
Speaker 3: scientology that may actually get into some of what I
Speaker 3: would love to talk about. Tell me more what they
Speaker 3: talked about in the film.
Speaker 7: Well, so they're approaching euthology from what I would call
Speaker 7: a heresiological perspective, basically saying this is a false religion, right,
Speaker 7: they say it's a scientific theory, it's not. It's a
Speaker 7: false religion. And I mean they actually make some good
Speaker 7: points on that front. Some religion scholars might agree with them,
Speaker 7: not that it's a false religion, but that it serves
Speaker 7: a kind of religious function in people's lives. And then
Speaker 7: they say, and we know that there are religions that
Speaker 7: have been started by contact with these entities such as scientology,
Speaker 7: and there's a slide very quickly of a scientology temple.
Speaker 7: I don't really think it's an accurate assessment of the
Speaker 7: history of scientology. I think they were banking on the
Speaker 7: fact that people will have heard of this religion and
Speaker 7: they'll have a negative attitude about it, and this will
Speaker 7: sort of score points with the audience down.
Speaker 3: So they didn't get into like say Jack Parsons, no, no,
Speaker 3: because given that they got redfern there. So we will
Speaker 3: probably come back to this, but probably Nick Redferns, who's
Speaker 3: written a lot on UFOs and his big thing he
Speaker 3: talks about like his I. You know, he likes the
Speaker 3: idea that like things like NeSSI and Bigfoot may actually
Speaker 3: be psychic thought forms or spirit not spirits, but more
Speaker 3: parapsychological than biological. But he wrote a book in twenty ten,
Speaker 3: I believe, called Final Events where he argues that there
Speaker 3: has been this group inside the United States government. He
Speaker 3: calls the Collins elite that have become eventually born again
Speaker 3: or evangelical Christians that pretty much buy into this worldview
Speaker 3: that UFOs in fact are demonological, and that they intend
Speaker 3: to do something about it. And I actually there's an
Speaker 3: episode of Sharon Hill's fifteen Credibility Straight we talked about
Speaker 3: this at some length because that's what I do. How
Speaker 3: the recent revelation and things related to it. I don't
Speaker 3: want to really get into this too hard unless it
Speaker 3: becomes an issue, because there will be a rabbit hole
Speaker 3: of the Department of Defense. Recent UFO project actually lends
Speaker 3: some interesting credibility to the idea that such a group
Speaker 3: or groups like it, or one could see how such
Speaker 3: groups might be in essence bouncing off of a longer
Speaker 3: term sort of parapsychological euthological sort of I like to
Speaker 3: use the word rolodex, but sort of contact list of
Speaker 3: people you call people in the remote viewing thing. And again,
Speaker 3: this is getting into a rabbit hole. So let's leave
Speaker 3: it alone for the moment. But that's why we keep
Speaker 3: bringing up in addition to him being the one who
Speaker 3: is not a primary religious apologist. In the film Nick Redford.
Speaker 7: And Final Events is discussed explicitly.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is. It's in my note. So ye oh,
Speaker 3: so let's let's let's let's talk about that then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell us somebody, I mean, I still have
Speaker 1: not read Final Events, although after seeing this, I well, what.
Speaker 3: Do they say in the film? What did they say
Speaker 3: in the film?
Speaker 1: I wrote down Final Events? Look this up. This is
Speaker 1: super helpful, right, it was one of the I know
Speaker 1: they made quotes from Redfern. He explicitly talked to me.
Speaker 1: He said, I talked about this in Final Events. I
Speaker 1: believe it is what he said. I can go back
Speaker 1: and get the exact quotes. Later.
Speaker 7: Redford names his source, who he said was a priest.
Speaker 1: And I've got that written down.
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to say it. But it's his final event.
Speaker 3: He's he's been in mouf On. He's been a long
Speaker 3: term UFO investigator, but he's also a priest.
Speaker 7: The head of Nebraska moved on.
Speaker 3: I believe. Yeah, yeah, he was like a state director.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, but he's not.
Speaker 1: I've got a contact in Moufon. I don't want to
Speaker 1: talk much about this, but he said that it's an
Speaker 1: interesting mix of people and there are people who you know,
Speaker 1: who believe in the extra trictional hypothesis, and there's people
Speaker 1: who explicitly believe there's angels and demons involved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's correct.
Speaker 1: I find that fascinating. But you know, it's so. Moufon
Speaker 1: has been around the mutual UFO network exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, since the seventies. It basically arose out of the
Speaker 3: ashes of APRO I think was the aerial phenomenon research
Speaker 3: organization which sort of arose out of the ashes of
Speaker 3: Nicap NICAP, which was sort of for a long time
Speaker 3: the big UFO Civilian Bureau since the fifties and so
Speaker 3: since the seventies and especially since the eighties, Moufon has
Speaker 3: been the sort of last man standing of UFO groups
Speaker 3: and the recent Department of Defense stuff. It has not
Speaker 3: been proven that government funding was directed towards them, but
Speaker 3: pretty much everybody's look at the situation, looks at timelines
Speaker 3: and says Robert Bigelow was funding them at points, and
Speaker 3: here's when he got money from the government, and it's
Speaker 3: the same time. Therefore, therefore therefore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting ties. You can
Speaker 1: draw lines all over the place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So final Events is brought up in the film. Interesting.
Speaker 3: So again, this book that Redford, and you can find
Speaker 3: a lot of podcasts and interviews and things he's done
Speaker 3: pretty much tells you a lot about the book out there,
Speaker 3: so you can just look this up everywhere. But basically
Speaker 3: he makes the argument that so in this guy Ray
Speaker 3: b O'Shea who is in movifile, comes in and says, look,
Speaker 3: there's this group called the Collins Elite that has come
Speaker 3: to me and has told me that there are groups
Speaker 3: inside the United States government that are very involved in UFOs,
Speaker 3: but they have come to the conclusion that it is demonic,
Speaker 3: and some of them want to fight it, and some
Speaker 3: of them want to weapon exploit it. And then this
Speaker 3: all gets very stranger things.
Speaker 1: And then I just inject here that the drinking game
Speaker 1: now switches to Tom Collins ELI, which is a regular
Speaker 1: Tom Collins the abd who that's your call, that's your
Speaker 1: abbadouri makes it green? Go for it, all right?
Speaker 3: So oh there you go, a Verry nice. Okay, that's fair.
Speaker 3: But he basically spins this tale, which I used the
Speaker 3: word spins the tale simply in the sense he produces
Speaker 3: a narrative. I'm not actually putting a judgment on that.
Speaker 3: That Jack Parsons, who is one of the co founders
Speaker 3: of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was in the same
Speaker 3: social circles until things went sour with al Ron Hubbard,
Speaker 3: which is why I brought him up at that point.
Speaker 3: And he was a follower of Alistair Crowley and the
Speaker 3: Ordi templar uh is it Ordo Temple Orientalis the the
Speaker 3: which again I'm not the expert on this panel on
Speaker 3: but basically Alister Crowley's kind of spin off from the
Speaker 3: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and blah blah blahlah. So,
Speaker 3: the one of the co founders of JPL in the forties,
Speaker 3: is also a hardcore interested in the esoteric occult scene
Speaker 3: in California. And Redford argues that near the end of
Speaker 3: his life because he blows himself up, he's a major
Speaker 3: pioneer of rocketry in the United States. But near the
Speaker 3: end of his life he starts wanting to offer his
Speaker 3: services to the newly founded nation of Israel, and he
Speaker 3: gives them a little too much when he's making sort
Speaker 3: of his job proposal, too much in terms of potentially
Speaker 3: classified information. So there is an investigation, and Redford in
Speaker 3: the book basically says the group of FBI and whoever
Speaker 3: then investigate him, go, wait, he's hanging out with demon worshippers,
Speaker 3: and wait, he's doing all these things and wait, and
Speaker 3: then they link this into alleged UFO stuff, and this
Speaker 3: begins this sort of Delta greenish kind of group in
Speaker 3: the government. And I have thoughts about some of this
Speaker 3: history that I think is not relevant to really get into.
Speaker 3: But that's basically what Redford is suggesting. And then around
Speaker 3: the time of Ronald Reagan becoming president, this group changes
Speaker 3: its perspective in Redford's telling, decides that things like abduction
Speaker 3: are demonic attacks, that in essence, we are a farm
Speaker 3: for demons eating our souls. Again, this is Redford telling
Speaker 3: the story he was adamantly said, but multiple times he
Speaker 3: doesn't believe this. He just says what he believes. There's
Speaker 3: a group that says this, and that this group was
Speaker 3: at one point sort of plotting various things to try
Speaker 3: to defend the United States with spiritual warfare.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to me because I think when you look
Speaker 1: at all these well think of it this way. When
Speaker 1: you look at government, I think most people think of
Speaker 1: sort of a monolithic, long term thing, this organization, But
Speaker 1: it's made up of people, and each one of these
Speaker 1: individuals has their own belief systems, and it's really easy
Speaker 1: when you're thinking about these kind of stories to sort
Speaker 1: of put your own spin on it. I mean, the
Speaker 1: fact that you've got Ronald Reagan. He represents to some
Speaker 1: people this sort of ultimate you know, macho American tough guy,
Speaker 1: and then to other people we see him as a
Speaker 1: sort of a befuddled old man who you know, relied
Speaker 1: on astrologers to get his information, and it's it's there's
Speaker 1: so many nuances to the individuals involved in these stories,
Speaker 1: but there's such a rich, rich well of material to
Speaker 1: form your own opinions on. It's it's really hard to
Speaker 1: kind of pin down what's really going on. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of some of the better episodes of The X Files,
Speaker 1: where you know, you think you know what's going on,
Speaker 1: and then there's a twist, but what if it really
Speaker 1: means this? And what if it really means that? And
Speaker 1: I don't really know what it all means, but I'm
Speaker 1: more inclined to think that using sort of the same
Speaker 1: natural selection thing that that what's really going on is
Speaker 1: we just get by. Like the sort of bozos who
Speaker 1: sort of make these decisions that sort of form our government,
Speaker 1: we just managed to get. Like, the fact that we're
Speaker 1: still around is kind of a remarkable because a lot
Speaker 1: of really strange people with weird beliefs, they are really
Speaker 1: making things work.
Speaker 3: Well given the events of this weekend. Yes, yeah, but
Speaker 3: that we are all still alive is impressive. So Joe
Speaker 3: and Natasha, you both mentioned that in the film, this
Speaker 3: was the first time you had really seen as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: like John Keel and Jacques Valet, And I think for
Speaker 3: what we're talking about, that's I think that's actually really important.
Speaker 3: Could you talk about that a little more like in turn,
Speaker 3: not the person I've ever seen them, but first I
Speaker 3: ever seen them in relation to these ideas.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So, I mean usually when I see Christians talking
Speaker 7: about UFOs, they say that they're demons, kind of just
Speaker 7: to get it out of the way. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 7: just kind of just like, don't pay attention to UFOs.
Speaker 7: Those are just demons, and this was different. These were
Speaker 7: two people, Guy Malone and Joe Jordan, who were really
Speaker 7: part of the UFO culture, and then it appears that
Speaker 7: they became kind of born again afterwards. And so interesting.
Speaker 7: Interesting kind of what a Religiou study was something to
Speaker 7: called hybridity, right, where two differentations begin to resemble each other.
Speaker 3: I have literally edited volume and ran a conference on hybridity.
Speaker 3: So it's a thing that I've up to the gills on.
Speaker 7: Yes, but I see this a little bit as a
Speaker 7: as a case study in hybridity. Because the one of
Speaker 7: the narrators begins saying, you know how annoyed he is
Speaker 7: when people like their aliens say, oh, well, Jesus was
Speaker 7: really just an advanced alien, right who came to give
Speaker 7: us wisdom. And so I see this kind of turning
Speaker 7: it around where the kind of Christianized uthology weirdly mirrors
Speaker 7: groups that have been doing this youthologized Christianity, yes for
Speaker 7: a while, and it's a kind of you got chocolate
Speaker 7: in my peanut butter, right, Yeah, the blending of ideas.
Speaker 1: Heaven's Gate, Heaven's Gate was like that. They I mean,
Speaker 1: they had their whole the luciferian actions of these aliens
Speaker 1: versus the good level above human approach, right, So exactly.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, But before before we go further, I would
Speaker 1: like to mention that when you're talking about hybridity and
Speaker 1: you're talking about aliens, I want to be clear we're
Speaker 1: not talking about alien hybrids, which is a different thing.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, i'd be very curious here. From my perspective,
Speaker 3: hybridity is basically it's as an archaeologist, as a student
Speaker 3: of social this, that and the other. It's a very
Speaker 3: valuable concept, though it's a contested concept or people have
Speaker 3: issues with it. But basically a recognition, a recognizing recognition.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm looking for that. Uh. So much of
Speaker 3: culture is actually made in the interstitial spaces in between things. Uh.
Speaker 3: And that you know, the idea that, oh, there's a
Speaker 3: cultural normal here, It's like, well, in reality, a lot
Speaker 3: of things are mixed up, and actually you understand the
Speaker 3: structures of society and the structures of global society by
Speaker 3: looking at that mixing up. Is that is that sort
Speaker 3: of what y'all are talking about.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we used to use this term syncretism, yes, religious traditions,
Speaker 7: and they decided, well, hybridy is better because that implies
Speaker 7: a kind of agency that this doesn't just happen by accidents.
Speaker 7: And you can really see that agency when you see
Speaker 7: these Christians kind of reading John Keel and.
Speaker 3: Often a subversive agency, often a subversion of existing concepts.
Speaker 7: Right. So this kind of polemical reading of people like
Speaker 7: Valet and Keel and sort of seeing what here is
Speaker 7: useful to us and what are we going to have
Speaker 7: to kind of sweep under the rug to make our arguments?
Speaker 3: Well, the thing I find particularly interesting So you all
Speaker 3: mentioned you know that they didn't mention Ezekiel, but you
Speaker 3: all were like, but they should because they're pulling this
Speaker 3: from ancient aliens or ancient astronauts or the term I
Speaker 3: use in my book ancient extraterrestrials because no one's trademarked it.
Speaker 3: But Ezekiel is always brought up there. But as you
Speaker 3: all pointed out, you can't call that demonic if you're
Speaker 3: wanting to say this is all demonic, blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: And I think what you're finding there, and this is
Speaker 3: one of the beauties when you when, for example, I
Speaker 3: look at mater real culture, that's hybrid is when you
Speaker 3: can find trace markers, when you can find there's a
Speaker 3: term that we use that is on the tip of
Speaker 3: my tongue, and I'll come back to it when it
Speaker 3: pops in my head.
Speaker 1: A brief interjection. The term Jeb was trying to remember
Speaker 1: is skew morphism. He wrote me after the interview to
Speaker 1: say that when elements transfer from a design and when
Speaker 1: medium to a design and another, even though they aren't
Speaker 1: purely functionally needed, that's skew morphism. Things like attempts at
Speaker 1: preserving elements of a desktop are books or newspapers, et cetera.
Speaker 1: In a computer interface, there are tons of examples in archaeology,
Speaker 1: including rivets on ceramics that were modeled after metal buckets.
Speaker 1: And we now return to the conversation.
Speaker 3: When something survives in one material into another kind of medium.
Speaker 3: And it's really bugging me. I can't think of it
Speaker 3: right now. But you're seeing this here where you all
Speaker 3: expect Ezekiel. It should be there if you're looking at
Speaker 3: things that are reinterpreted from a UFO perspective, but you
Speaker 3: can't do it over here for the reasons that you
Speaker 3: brought up. And I think that's what's happening with Keel.
Speaker 3: So John Keel. He he's often depicted as a respectable reporter,
Speaker 3: like a journalist in the nineteen fifties and sixties that
Speaker 3: then gets wrapped up in UFOs, in weird strology and
Speaker 3: so on. Around his most famous book, The Mothman Prophecies,
Speaker 3: involving the incidents around nineteen sixty seven in Point Pleasant,
Speaker 3: West Virginia that he writes the book, and I want
Speaker 3: to say it's seventy five where he was not the
Speaker 3: first person to sort of para to pioneer this idea
Speaker 3: of a sort of unified theld theory that these things
Speaker 3: he called himself a demonologist, and he didn't mean that
Speaker 3: in a theological sense, but he sort of did.
Speaker 7: That was clouded extensively in the film.
Speaker 3: Oh Really, Horse Yesh, which I am literally reading right now.
Speaker 3: I have not I had not read it before, and
Speaker 3: I'm reading it right now. I've read some of his
Speaker 3: other works in reality, keel if you read his first book, Jadoo,
Speaker 3: which has not been easily found until recently, likes it's
Speaker 3: not lost, but it was not as you could find
Speaker 3: Operation chidjre On, as you could find the mothin prophecies.
Speaker 3: Good luck finding Jadu. Until we've now gotten into the
Speaker 3: era of easy self publishing. He started looking for magic.
Speaker 3: I mean you could pretty much just put Max Weber
Speaker 3: in the index and index most pages. I mean, he
Speaker 3: literally talks about the lost magic of the landscape that
Speaker 3: is about to be swept away by industrial civilization. So
Speaker 3: he goes to the Middle East and Egypt and India
Speaker 3: to find it, and that's how he starts. So the
Speaker 3: fact that he then pretty much in every one of
Speaker 3: his works brings in this concept of finding magic in
Speaker 3: the landscape, finding spirits in the landscape, finding a sort
Speaker 3: of not anti science but extra science. In the landscape.
Speaker 3: Well that is anti science in places, is not surprising.
Speaker 3: He then becomes the darling of sort of UFO intelligentsia,
Speaker 3: him and Jacques Valet. And since Vala was brought in,
Speaker 3: do you all want to talk about like who Jack
Speaker 3: Valet is or was what he is? He's still alive.
Speaker 3: I'mike John Keel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know him as a UFU researcher, but he
Speaker 1: was also a it guy.
Speaker 3: He was. He started as an early like he's now
Speaker 3: a venture capital. He started doing early statistics, early computer stuff.
Speaker 3: But I want to say around sixty five, nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 3: he decided to start applying his statistic statistical background to
Speaker 3: UFO sightings. He came up with a few interesting things
Speaker 3: and then two years later it was like, actually they're fairies.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He writes the book called Passport to Magonia, which
Speaker 3: is I think literally written one year after mom. It's
Speaker 3: not involved with Mothmam, but it's all in the same
Speaker 3: era and it's four years or five years before Mothmann
Speaker 3: prophecies where he goes back and he reads tons of
Speaker 3: the first occupant UFO reports that are not obviously contact
Speaker 3: e Angelic. So when we use the word contact d
Speaker 3: We're talking about basically since around nineteen fifty to fifty one, people,
Speaker 3: many of whom who had a background in theosophical lodges
Speaker 3: other esoteric pursuits. They meet, often very white, Nordic tall
Speaker 3: These are names they give, and some of them were
Speaker 3: actually Nazi sympathizers. Others were not. In the desert and say, oh,
Speaker 3: here's a new revelation. But you start having in the
Speaker 3: middle of the nineteen fifties reports in France and then
Speaker 3: in South America, and then in the United States and
Speaker 3: elsewhere of people seeing little people collecting flowers and doing
Speaker 3: weird things outside of flying saucers and them running away. Valet,
Speaker 3: in his book in nineteen sixty eight passworda Macgonia Catalog These,
Speaker 3: analyze these and says these are almost the same, if
Speaker 3: not the same as and then he pulls out a
Speaker 3: huge amount of early modern, late medieval to early modern
Speaker 3: stories from Europe of fairies involving people who are taken
Speaker 3: away by the fairies. This is when induction is beginning
Speaker 3: to become a thing in upology. People that have missing
Speaker 3: weird time, people that have strange events, and so on,
Speaker 3: and Valet basically makes the argument, and this is the
Speaker 3: sort of bedrock of what I call the puff the
Speaker 3: paramil unified field theory. These things and Keel makes the
Speaker 3: same argument, these things are normal to this planet. They
Speaker 3: are not from outer space in nineteen forty five because
Speaker 3: we blew up nuclear bombs. They've been here forever. They're
Speaker 3: older than us, and they're strange and we don't understand them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which then kind of fits demons if you want to
Speaker 3: go that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. And also I think most people would
Speaker 1: know weirdly, they would know Valet through his proxy as
Speaker 1: Claude Lencolm lacom and uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's there's some dispute whether that's really based on
Speaker 3: them or not. But Vallet was one of the people
Speaker 3: that Spielberg was reading. Yeah, he created close Encounters of
Speaker 3: the third kind, right, and they used to get a
Speaker 3: Heinech uh well and jail and Heinech by the end
Speaker 3: of his life had basically come over to a parapsychological
Speaker 3: slash sort of quasia cultish perspective on UFOs as well.
Speaker 1: To be honest, So I know we're going to keep
Speaker 1: talking about sort of is you followed your religion? That's
Speaker 1: one of the is the ultraterrestrial hypothesis of religion. Your
Speaker 1: religious studies people, what's a religion?
Speaker 3: Wow?
Speaker 5: So when I teach so, when I teach World Religions
Speaker 5: at Texas State, one of the assignments I have my
Speaker 5: students do is to create a definition of religion and
Speaker 5: have to do it three times throughout the semester. And
Speaker 5: this is really be to kind of demonstrate that there
Speaker 5: is no inherent definition to religion, that we create working
Speaker 5: definitions based upon the data that have and so, and
Speaker 5: that's how I would answer it.
Speaker 1: Well, the reason I ask is because I think over
Speaker 1: the course of Monster Talk, I've talked to a lot
Speaker 1: of different people about religion, because religion crosses into monsters
Speaker 1: in a lot of interesting ways. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that seems, I guess, in modern in modern times,
Speaker 1: especially within Christianity, religion is about a faith that's what
Speaker 1: you believe. But that didn't seem like it was always
Speaker 1: the case. Religion was sometimes what you do. It was
Speaker 1: the actions you take and the sort of practices that
Speaker 1: you have. And maybe it's a hybrid of that.
Speaker 5: But well, there's a one theoretical model thinking about religion
Speaker 5: that says that there are religions that are more based
Speaker 5: on orthodoxy, so what you believe, and religion is more
Speaker 5: based on orthopraxy what you do.
Speaker 8: And this is how you determine who is in or
Speaker 8: not in the religion.
Speaker 5: And I think there's a really interesting divide, a very
Speaker 5: interesting kind of theoretical tool that can be used to
Speaker 5: think about religions.
Speaker 8: Another one that I was.
Speaker 5: Thinking about you guys are talking about this puffed theory
Speaker 5: is the idea of a sacred canopy.
Speaker 8: And this was made by sociologist Peter Berger.
Speaker 3: That's a cannop pay. That's a cannop pay, very different.
Speaker 8: So the sacred canopy, and Joe can jump in if
Speaker 8: you can explain this a little bit better than I can.
Speaker 8: But the sacred canopy is the idea that religion is
Speaker 8: a way.
Speaker 5: To organize the world, that we are bombarded by information
Speaker 5: all times, and that religion is a way to kind
Speaker 5: of make categories and to put things in their place,
Speaker 5: and that you kind of exist under this large sacred canopy,
Speaker 5: and that to be in a religion is to say, oh,
Speaker 5: I know where to put this new phenomenon.
Speaker 8: I just saw it goes into this category.
Speaker 7: And so in many ways.
Speaker 5: The idea of puffed, I think, is in some ways
Speaker 5: making a sacred canopy out of this saying that all
Speaker 5: this data is actually interconnected and interwoven.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I could definitely disagree with me.
Speaker 7: Maybe no, that I thought that was great, Natasha. So
Speaker 7: in religious studies, we know that religion as what we
Speaker 7: call a second order category, meaning it's not something that
Speaker 7: exists out in the world. It's something that we make up,
Speaker 7: and we decide what goes in the category and what doesn't.
Speaker 7: And there's not a perfect definition of what gets lumped
Speaker 7: in the category and what isn't. But one of the
Speaker 7: things I try to impress on my undergraduates is it's
Speaker 7: important that we are fair about what the rules are
Speaker 7: when we talk about what is or is not a religion,
Speaker 7: because there's something at stake. So in San Marcos, where
Speaker 7: Natasha and I teach, there was someone on the city
Speaker 7: council who, in retweets was saying that Harry Potter is
Speaker 7: a religion, and so it is unconstitutional to have Harry
Speaker 7: Potter books in public schools. But Islam is not a religion,
Speaker 7: and so Muslims do not have any constitutional rights, and
Speaker 7: so that's the kind of gaming the system that goes on,
Speaker 7: which is why theories of religion are important. And to
Speaker 7: the credit of these filmmakers. Gary Bates is the filmmaker.
Speaker 7: He actually says, I define a religion as having with
Speaker 7: following three characteristics. Yeah, and he defines it in terms
Speaker 7: of answering questions, right, where do we come from, what
Speaker 7: are we're doing? What happens when we die? So he
Speaker 7: is at least fair right that he says, these are
Speaker 7: the rules of the game, and by these rules, ethology
Speaker 7: is a religion.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The reason I ask is because they treated within
Speaker 1: that film, they treated eupology ufology as though it were
Speaker 1: a religion, or it seemed to me that they did.
Speaker 7: And.
Speaker 1: It tied in so nicely with the Keel ultraterrestrial hypothesis.
Speaker 1: So Keel, even though he viewed himself as a demonologist,
Speaker 1: I didn't get the feeling in any of the things
Speaker 1: I've read. Of course I still haven't read this Operation
Speaker 1: Trojan Horse yet, but I didn't get the feeling that
Speaker 1: he was necessarily prescribing any sort of protection from these things.
Speaker 1: Oh God, no, Yeah, he was just saying, here, whatever
Speaker 1: this is, it's not in this world.
Speaker 3: So John Keel basically suggests we all are living in
Speaker 3: a horror novel.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he doesn't literally say that, but his
Speaker 3: is a dark world of at best, tricksters and at
Speaker 3: worst things that eat us, oh spiritually or otherwise.
Speaker 1: Oh that fits in nicely with the fairies, doesn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fair folk. Yeah, yeah, no, that that's his world. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he is.
Speaker 3: He has no he the the in his world. Like
Speaker 3: if you read his Mothmaan Prophecies, there's all these contact ees,
Speaker 3: but the aliens or whatever the hell they are, that
Speaker 3: they're he's they're talking to lie and lie in not
Speaker 3: good way. So, I mean the the the famous beginning
Speaker 3: to end. Everybody forgets at the very beginning of the movie.
Speaker 3: Not the movie the they did make a movie, which
Speaker 3: is interesting, but the beginning of the book of the
Speaker 3: Mothmann Prophecies. He tells you, by the way, this is
Speaker 3: all about this bridge collapse which killed forty six people.
Speaker 3: And then he writes this amazing book. I'm not saying
Speaker 3: it's true, but as a book it's really good. Is
Speaker 3: the reason it's famous. It's creepy. At the end, you've
Speaker 3: forgotten this. And then there's this bridge collapse, and all
Speaker 3: throughout he's having all of these people in his sort
Speaker 3: of network sause he's going on the long John Neble Show,
Speaker 3: which is sort of the predecessor to Art bel which,
Speaker 3: as a processor to George Norris is the predecessor to
Speaker 3: the entire History Channel and contact teaser saying this is
Speaker 3: gonna happen, This is gonna happen. He's freaking out about
Speaker 3: there's gonna be some horrible disaster and he's thinking it's
Speaker 3: a nuclear war or a giant power outage. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then this bridge collapses in this town that he's been
Speaker 3: visiting for thirteen months. As he writes it, I have
Speaker 3: seen letters like original letters endpoint pleasant of John Keel.
Speaker 3: I don't know what he believed, but I mean there's
Speaker 3: literally scrawled in the sides of these typewritten letters to people,
Speaker 3: I think something's bad is going to happen, Like he's
Speaker 3: not entirely bullshitting people.
Speaker 7: Yes, letters too, and I believe Linda Scarborough.
Speaker 3: Yesh yahsie, you would have. Yes, you're a fantastic article
Speaker 3: on the whole point pleasant mothman stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but he did tell her. I think the men
Speaker 7: in Black, which kind of emerged partly out of the
Speaker 7: Mockman story or After Your Baby kind of changeling lore there.
Speaker 7: And he actually did I think if you hang a
Speaker 7: gold cross up, this will help keep the men in
Speaker 7: Black away.
Speaker 3: So he did occasionally make those sorts of suggestions.
Speaker 7: But not as supplications. This was a letter to a
Speaker 7: breend basically.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, so yeah, But he is very in
Speaker 3: this and I'd love to hear if you'd agree that.
Speaker 3: I would see that Keel sees a sort of a
Speaker 3: demon haunted world. I mean, and when he says a demonologist,
Speaker 3: he doesn't mean that he's He's not suggesting that he's
Speaker 3: He's the Warrens, He's not Earl of the Rain. He's
Speaker 3: not saying he's an actual demonologist. He's just basically saying
Speaker 3: this is a demon haunted world. And that's what I've
Speaker 3: been studying for the last forty years. But he does
Speaker 3: mean it with that sort of menace, I would say.
Speaker 7: And the thing about this film, I think groups like
Speaker 7: creation ministries and answers in Genesis are very good at
Speaker 7: cherry picking right and finding people who have authority on
Speaker 7: a particular topic and homing in on the one quote
Speaker 7: that really makes their point and sort of sweeping other
Speaker 7: things under the rug. Keel and the Mockman prophecies basically
Speaker 7: suggest that the ancient Israelites were being tricked by the entities. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and that the Arc of the Covenant has these electrical
Speaker 7: powers because it's basically a machine the entities told them
Speaker 7: to build. Of course, none of that is going to
Speaker 7: show up in the Alien Intrusion movie. Keel's ideas are
Speaker 7: kind of held up as being sort of good research
Speaker 7: that leads us closer to the truth of what these
Speaker 7: entities are.
Speaker 3: Well, and that's the thing in reading and reading Nick
Speaker 3: Redfern's final Events, like I again, because of the recent
Speaker 3: revelations about the DoD Ands more sort of thinking about
Speaker 3: and seeing who's involved, I'm like, you know, maybe he's
Speaker 3: describing an actual group of some kind and in sort
Speaker 3: of their interaction with more parapsychological uri Gellar led how
Speaker 3: put off John Alexander groups inside inside the government. But
Speaker 3: the thing is, at one point, the sort of leap
Speaker 3: that he suggests this Collins Elite made only kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense, like that the fact that they would have
Speaker 3: seen Crowley and his his contact with this spirit called Lamb,
Speaker 3: which has only in recent times been allegedly tied into
Speaker 3: gray aliens and blah blah. Basically, the point is, parts
Speaker 3: of it only makes sense if you actually know your
Speaker 3: ufology stuff, and they have to sort of sand parts
Speaker 3: off to put it in here. But that's been done,
Speaker 3: or allegedly been done. I have the page by the
Speaker 3: way for the alien intrusion thing up and it is guy.
Speaker 3: I'm alone and I'm looking at the credits. I see
Speaker 3: Nick Redfern, I see person in Johnny Hunt. I don't
Speaker 3: who that is. The next one is Norio Hayakawa. So
Speaker 3: did he showed up in the film?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 3: What was his role in the film? I'm curious. I
Speaker 3: have a reason for asking.
Speaker 1: He was if I remember correctly, and I could verify
Speaker 1: this later, but I believe he was along the same
Speaker 1: lines talking about the I don't remember if he explicit
Speaker 1: in many religious comments, but he seemed to be paralleling
Speaker 1: the comments from the guy from from Korea that the
Speaker 1: whatever the physical explanation of aliens is, that it's not
Speaker 1: thisly extraterstrial craft, therefore it fits in with the demon hypothesis.
Speaker 5: I remember thinking during the film that he was like
Speaker 5: the more reasonable gentleman. Yeah, he was a more reasonable
Speaker 5: reflection of the gentleman from South Korea.
Speaker 3: So Nori Ohayakawa's primary calling card within ufology, and I
Speaker 3: think he sort of backed off this a little has
Speaker 3: been he was for a long time the primary purpose
Speaker 3: person interested in studying the Dulcet, the Dulcet legend. Do
Speaker 3: you all know the Dulcet legend.
Speaker 1: That's the secret military base beneath the Dulce.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the La the Archilada mountain ridge in northwestern New
Speaker 3: Mexico that is tied into Paul Benowitz all these other things.
Speaker 3: But basically, there's this legend that appears to have been
Speaker 3: at least partly seated potentially by a member of the
Speaker 3: Air Force in the nineteen eighties, Richard Dodi into the
Speaker 3: euthological and that gets really complicated. But of a horrifying
Speaker 3: underground and I'm just going to say, we've been talking
Speaker 3: about religion and demons. Just listen to everything. I'm about
Speaker 3: to say. A horrifying underground base where there are humans
Speaker 3: and aliens that have made a pact and they kidnap
Speaker 3: people and they do horrible, horrible experiments on large numbers
Speaker 3: of people, and this emerges in the late seventies early eighties,
Speaker 3: and that literally Level six is referred to as the
Speaker 3: Hell level because of all the terrible things that are
Speaker 3: done to people there. And in reality, while the government
Speaker 3: made this pact, according to the legend, everything went horribly wrong.
Speaker 3: The aliens double crossed them, and they've been there for
Speaker 3: far longer, and there's deeper, deeper levels that the human
Speaker 3: zone of access to, and eventually they killed all the humans,
Speaker 3: or they were a bunch of them killed in a firefight,
Speaker 3: and now it's this, it's pretty much Hell under New Mexico.
Speaker 3: And so Dulcie has become this very sort of infamous
Speaker 3: thing that most ufologists don't think. There's necessarily a lot too,
Speaker 3: but it's a kind of beacon on what I believe
Speaker 3: Jerome Kart called the dark Side, sort of theoretical approach
Speaker 3: to UFO conspiracy theory. The fact that they're talking to
Speaker 3: him is fascinating.
Speaker 7: And Christopher Partridge, who's a religion scholars, yes, and basically
Speaker 7: looking at how when this phenomenon begins in the fifties,
Speaker 7: the aliens are very angelic. There are space brothers. I
Speaker 7: think Carl Jung called them technological angels, and then by
Speaker 7: the period that you're talking about, it's the opposite, right there.
Speaker 7: Demons live underground, they torture people, and Partridge I think
Speaker 7: kind of suggests that, you know, Christianity has just permeated
Speaker 7: our culture so thoroughly that this is just sort of
Speaker 7: naturally the way that these legends are going to take shape.
Speaker 3: And I think he's not wrong. I also, though, as
Speaker 3: we've sort of all been I think kind of nosing around,
Speaker 3: I think that it's going both ways. And I'm one
Speaker 3: of my favorite authors is Michael Barkoon and his discussion
Speaker 3: of sort of forbidden knowledge and the idea that once
Speaker 3: you have some ideas and kind of conspiracy culture and
Speaker 3: in the cultic milieu, they all start to well, they
Speaker 3: start to hybridize, like we've been talking about, and these
Speaker 3: ideas coming for people like Keel and coming for people
Speaker 3: like Valet and frankly I'll just drop this because we
Speaker 3: know I was going to go there. Coming from their ancestors,
Speaker 3: people like Charles Fort and people like the fiction writer HB.
Speaker 3: Lovecraft of a demon haunted ancient aliens world are influencing
Speaker 3: the other side. And I would say that the two
Speaker 3: are sort of influencing each other, which is how you
Speaker 3: end up with Norio Ohayakawa and Nick Redfern in a
Speaker 3: Christian apologetic UFO demon documentary.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I mean one thing that you know, some theologians have
Speaker 7: said about the kind of fundamentalists movement and its claims
Speaker 7: that the earth is five thousand years old and biblical
Speaker 7: and airancy, which are both positions of creation ministries international,
Speaker 7: is that this has kind of changed what Christianity is about. Right.
Speaker 7: It's taken a text that has many meetings and it's
Speaker 7: kind of actually said, well, really, this is about history
Speaker 7: and cosmology and geology, and that's kind of the most
Speaker 7: important thing to it. So while these movements present themselves
Speaker 7: as being very conservative, they're actually it's something very new, right,
Speaker 7: that's a very new way of reading the Bible and
Speaker 7: interpreting ms to say, and I think we're seeing something similar.
Speaker 7: So just as the fundamental really begins in the beginning
Speaker 7: of the twentieth century in response to Darwin, Yeah, and
Speaker 7: so called Hierachrism of the Bible, and it sort of
Speaker 7: makes this new form of Christianity that's very concerned with
Speaker 7: kind of the discourse of science and the authority of science.
Speaker 7: It didn't exist before, and we may be seeing a
Speaker 7: similar move now, right, Well, we're seeing this kind of
Speaker 7: new brand of Christianity that is about theories of the paranormal,
Speaker 7: and it sort of begins to look increasingly like the
Speaker 7: people that it is in dialogue with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you throw in into this conspiracy theory,
Speaker 3: which is never far behind these topics, all of this
Speaker 3: starts to get very political.
Speaker 1: Also, well, yeah, that's there. I guess one of the
Speaker 1: things that I'm curious about is you've got this is
Speaker 1: an easy way for a sort of an evangelical foothold,
Speaker 1: or at least an incursion into the euthology world. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a big production. I mean, I don't know what
Speaker 1: it costs exactly, but this was not a small thing,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it's going to have an
Speaker 1: effect because they didn't have people there. You know, I
Speaker 1: didn't see John three to sixteen come up on screen,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the classic sort of things I
Speaker 1: would have expected an evangelical conversion sort of approach I
Speaker 1: didn't see. But what I did see was a straight
Speaker 1: up Hey, you know, if you're a Christian, you should
Speaker 1: be concerned about uthology. You should care because this is
Speaker 1: the work of demons, right. So I don't know how
Speaker 1: it works as outreach, but I am curious as to
Speaker 1: how it works as far as latching itself into this mix,
Speaker 1: because there's no orthodoxy here as far as that goes.
Speaker 1: This is another example of I guess, using your term hybridism,
Speaker 1: where you're taking something they're glombing into something that's not
Speaker 1: really a religion in trying to pick out the pieces
Speaker 1: they like well.
Speaker 3: And bar Koon's term for that is improvisational apocalypticism. Ooh,
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So it didn't feel apocalyptic, but it definitely
Speaker 1: felt like how it felt like a war, Like I
Speaker 1: don't know what the right word is for that, but
Speaker 1: it felt like this was a pitting us versus them,
Speaker 1: whatever they are.
Speaker 7: But it actually was unusual to me how not apocalyptic
Speaker 7: it was. I assumed Christian's talking about UFOs is going
Speaker 7: to be this is a sign of the end times, right,
Speaker 7: you know, maybe left and I didn't see that. So
Speaker 7: that does suggest this is something new.
Speaker 3: And this could be again maybe Keel and people like
Speaker 3: Keel the this is a permanent part of our reality
Speaker 3: kind of effect. Possibly, I think you're right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think if they've accepted Keel and Ballet enough
Speaker 7: to think that this is more or less normal. This
Speaker 7: isn't some new dispensation that began in nineteen forty seven
Speaker 7: signaling the end times, it's more or less okay and normal.
Speaker 1: So going back to my personal feelings on this is
Speaker 1: I don't personally mind people trying to deal with what
Speaker 1: I would suspect is sleep paralysis in a variety of ways.
Speaker 1: If if you have sleep paralysis problems in praying helps
Speaker 1: you with it, great, you know, but I don't you know,
Speaker 1: my personal experience was it wasn't effective. So I'd like
Speaker 1: to see some clinical trials on that or something. I
Speaker 1: just don't know. I mean, it's the kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of the the I think the harm here is
Speaker 1: that if you tell people that, if they say, you
Speaker 1: know the name of Jesus Christ, and it will drive
Speaker 1: away these alien invaders that are actually demons, and then
Speaker 1: it doesn't work, then it becomes they even threw in
Speaker 1: the you know, real Christians versus the just wow walk
Speaker 1: the walk versus talk the talk kind of people.
Speaker 3: Well, the one thing I do want to add here
Speaker 3: is that's been a that is not a new idea
Speaker 3: like that has there has There has been for I
Speaker 3: would say at least twenty years, this sort of dialogue
Speaker 3: within the out of abductee community that oh the author
Speaker 3: so they'll point at you know, there was at one
Speaker 3: point the sort of the trifecta of abductee rights. There
Speaker 3: were others, but there was There was John Mack, the
Speaker 3: Harvard psychologist. Oh god, I'm forgetting his same, Bud Hopkins,
Speaker 3: but they were both in there, and David Jacobs. Now
Speaker 3: David Jacobs is the one of those three that's still
Speaker 3: alive and he's talked about hybrid invasions. Bud Hopkins was
Speaker 3: was sort of your X files like medical experimentation aliens,
Speaker 3: and John Mack was more they're here to warn us
Speaker 3: about ecological disaster. But there was always this undercurrent within
Speaker 3: the abduction community that if you if you said the
Speaker 3: Lord's Prayer or if you invoke Jesus, it would end this.
Speaker 3: And this is not new, and there was always the
Speaker 3: idea that the abduction people are not talking about this.
Speaker 3: This was the dirty secret. Hm.
Speaker 1: I never could get it to work, but I you know,
Speaker 1: that was just my experience.
Speaker 7: Well, and we do know that Bud Hopkins would hypnotize
Speaker 7: people and sometimes they would recall details that he thought
Speaker 7: just didn't fit and so just delete them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Apparently this element was one that all
Speaker 3: three of them, allegedly and again this is something I've heard,
Speaker 3: were like, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk
Speaker 3: about that at all. Yeah. And if you go back
Speaker 3: to was it Betty Andreasen who's often considered the second
Speaker 3: or third kind of on the record alien that ductee
Speaker 3: in American culture, Her visions or whatever you want to
Speaker 3: call them, were fairly explicitly religious in nature, unlike say
Speaker 3: Betty and Barney Hill, but hers were and that goes
Speaker 3: back to the early seventies, late sixties, I think, late
Speaker 3: sixties of the Betty andreas in case.
Speaker 7: Joe Jordan's talking about the talk, the talk versus walk.
Speaker 7: The want Christians was also interesting. There was this great
Speaker 7: book called Paranormal America by the sociologists who at Baylor
Speaker 7: who crunts these numbers from the Baylor Religion Survey that
Speaker 7: asked to bound paranormal topics, including aliens, and one thing
Speaker 7: they found was that religious people are more likely to
Speaker 7: believe in paranormal topics, but that regular church attendance correlates negatively, right,
Speaker 7: So the ideal person to report a paranormal experience would
Speaker 7: be someone who's religious but doesn't attend church regularly. In
Speaker 7: other words, a talk to talk, but not a walk
Speaker 7: the walk Christian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So I thought that was interesting that he was
Speaker 7: finding that pattern as well.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: I guess that makes me ask, then, So you've been
Speaker 3: talking about like sort of hooks in and outreach. What
Speaker 3: is the ultimate purpose from what you can tell of
Speaker 3: this film. Is it to get people who are interested
Speaker 3: in UFOs? Is it to explain to people why UFOs
Speaker 3: are demonic? What's this sort of the purpose of this
Speaker 3: particular film familiar? Again from what you can tell.
Speaker 7: Honestly, I think part of it is CMI had this
Speaker 7: painful split with answers in Genesis. Genesis has the Creation Museum,
Speaker 7: they have the Noah's Arc thing. I think partly they
Speaker 7: just thought, we want market share, we want something to compete.
Speaker 3: So they want to get into pop So they're seeing
Speaker 3: this as sort of a pop culture outreach.
Speaker 7: I think, yeah, More than anything, this was sort of
Speaker 7: just this is a way to get on the map
Speaker 7: and answers in Genesis can't do it, only we can
Speaker 7: do it. We've got this, this book that people are reading.
Speaker 7: Let's let's take a chance on this. I also think
Speaker 7: this was an attempt to sort of be the apostle
Speaker 7: to the sci fi geeks, particularly by having the narrator
Speaker 7: emphasize his credentials, as you know, being on the show Smallville.
Speaker 7: So I think and they sort of thought, this is
Speaker 7: another angle we can take towards discrediting the Big Bang
Speaker 7: theory and evolution. Right, if we can get you to
Speaker 7: think UFOs or demons, maybe we can get you to
Speaker 7: think that these are false scientific theories as well well.
Speaker 5: I think in going back to this idea of the
Speaker 5: sacred canopy that we talked about before, I mean, this
Speaker 5: is a way of like for CMI a very demonstrably
Speaker 5: showing Look, Christianity can explain this, and these people are
Speaker 5: now part of our sacred campy aliens don't challenge us.
Speaker 5: We have engulfed them into our idea in our worldview.
Speaker 3: That and that very much fits with what I saw
Speaker 3: in person with the alien resistance thing, Like they were
Speaker 3: not afraid to let these people in and talk. You know,
Speaker 3: there's like, go ahead, We've got this covered.
Speaker 7: And I think at the end of the film, Gary
Speaker 7: Bates says, and I think he was being very honest
Speaker 7: about this. He says, it grieves me that people have
Speaker 7: these these problems with aliens and they don't think to
Speaker 7: come to the church. Right, we are the ones who
Speaker 7: should be equipped to help you if you're having this
Speaker 7: kind of problem, and we need to sort of let
Speaker 7: people know that we're the place you should go to.
Speaker 3: Not I don't know what.
Speaker 7: Else he was thinking, the History Channel, paranormal websites, right,
Speaker 7: something something like that's that's again.
Speaker 3: That is an excellent insight, I think, because you see
Speaker 3: a lot of the so we haven't mentioned. But if
Speaker 3: you're interested at all in ancient alien stuff at all,
Speaker 3: obviously go check out Jason Colovito's blog. But he has
Speaker 3: documented really well that there is that often in many times,
Speaker 3: the great enemy sort of in the kind of populist
Speaker 3: response to ancient alien stuff is not mainstream science. I mean,
Speaker 3: they all kind of poo poo that, but it's it's
Speaker 3: literally what we're talking about sort of a demonic or
Speaker 3: a religious conspiratorial mindset versus the San Shan aliens mindset.
Speaker 3: And I think the thing that really pointed this out
Speaker 3: there was there was this film that many of my
Speaker 3: students are actually very familiar with, the YouTube focused film
Speaker 3: called Ancient Aliens Debunked, and it's gotten millions upon millions
Speaker 3: of views. But it was coming from a religious perspective,
Speaker 3: but it was not advertised as such until you watch
Speaker 3: it and you realize it's invoking the deluge and giants.
Speaker 3: But I think that actually really pointed out that in
Speaker 3: many senses, the potential audience for both of those cells,
Speaker 3: if you want to put it that way, are the
Speaker 3: same people or potentially the same people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's and I think many many great arguments were
Speaker 1: made in that video, but you're right, they most of
Speaker 1: it's fine, yeah.
Speaker 3: Until they're like, also, by the way, the flood's real.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, So I'm not envious, but I do understand
Speaker 1: that the ultraterrestrial hypothesis is a perfectly rational way to
Speaker 1: deal with the fact that there's no physical evidence for
Speaker 1: the things that many people are experiencing, and it can
Speaker 1: sort of explain away why we have no evidence because
Speaker 1: these things are coming from another dimension, and the reality
Speaker 1: is that the skeptical alternative, which I've been calling the
Speaker 1: nul terrestrial hypothesis, is there's nothing there. Everything that we're
Speaker 1: having is people misunderstanding phenomenal misunderstanding things that they're seeing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's problems of human perception, not problems of things that
Speaker 1: we just don't understand right.
Speaker 3: Or not even problems I would say features features.
Speaker 1: It's not as exciting, uh, but it fits into a
Speaker 1: world where you can actually test things and it comes out, you.
Speaker 3: Know, on bat you know. I mean if if you
Speaker 3: believe you live in a magical spirit in demon and
Speaker 3: trickster haunted world, Yeah, there's a certain aspect of like again,
Speaker 3: re enchantment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, it's very exciting and magical. I just don't think
Speaker 1: it's real. So but it but I am concerned about
Speaker 1: its market share in the in the in the psyche
Speaker 1: of pop culture and what's I think maybe one of
Speaker 1: the most ironic things is that, uh, if, if natural
Speaker 1: selection is real, which I think it is, that the
Speaker 1: idea of sort of Dawkins's mimetics means that what will
Speaker 1: end up coming out of this will be the parts
Speaker 1: that people like will stick and the parts that people
Speaker 1: don't want, and you'll end up with a hybridization that will,
Speaker 1: in at least somewhere become a new view of the
Speaker 1: role over religion as ties into eupology. Maybe not new,
Speaker 1: but at least it'll have evolved.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So what could be more bizarre and fitting than that
Speaker 1: that that the anti evolution people themselves are actually demonstrably
Speaker 1: showing how ideas can evolve over time.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm pretty sure. I'm just going to
Speaker 3: answer with I'm not sure it was demons, but it
Speaker 3: was demons. It's pretty much where I'm going there.
Speaker 1: I noticed we've been talking for like an hour and
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, and I do have to edit a little
Speaker 1: bit out, but I do like to keep the episodes
Speaker 1: around sixty minutes. Is there anything you guys would like
Speaker 1: to add that we haven't sort of naturally segued into.
Speaker 7: I can't think of much.
Speaker 8: I mean, this has been actually very informative for me.
Speaker 5: I was mostly a bystander to this, and Joe tends
Speaker 5: to drag me to all sorts of crazy things, and
Speaker 5: so promised me there'd be a pint of beer afterwards.
Speaker 1: I with him.
Speaker 3: That's the way to do it.
Speaker 1: I did mine up front. I should have done it afterwards.
Speaker 1: That would have been very smart.
Speaker 7: Don't take your significant other to this film?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, I was so glad I took a
Speaker 1: friend instead of a wife. Yeah no, but you know
Speaker 1: good on YouTube.
Speaker 3: Right if we if we had a movie theater in town,
Speaker 3: I might have seen it, but I'd have to get
Speaker 3: in a car in the snow, so I did not
Speaker 3: see it. The only thing I would I would add
Speaker 3: to this is I will try to watch this when
Speaker 3: it comes to a place that I can actually see it,
Speaker 3: because I am actually very very curious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you'll agree.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 1: It should have been about thirty minutes shorter.
Speaker 3: So I think everything should be shorter when it comes
Speaker 3: to media.
Speaker 7: So it's shorter.
Speaker 8: It just kept going, Oh is so bored?
Speaker 1: Oh I'm so sorry. I've hears you going.
Speaker 3: Though I'm highly selling it, I'm just saying and that's
Speaker 3: probably fair. Well.
Speaker 1: I I'm one of those people who went to see
Speaker 1: Expelled with Ben Stein, and so.
Speaker 3: I've still never seen that.
Speaker 1: I do have something positive to say about this movie.
Speaker 1: It didn't go full hit, so good for them. Ben
Speaker 1: Stein's little film ended with a giant Poe argument. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, come on now, is that Poe or
Speaker 1: is that the was Godwin's right?
Speaker 3: Sorry? God, yeah, god Godwin argument. No, so there was
Speaker 3: no Nazi bell, there was no.
Speaker 1: Relatively Nazi free So good for them.
Speaker 3: Well then I don't know if I'll make it on
Speaker 3: the History Well these days, I'll make it on History Channel. Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I want to thank you all for coming and
Speaker 1: spending some time on Sunday evening, and I really appreciate
Speaker 1: you guys coming back to talk to me.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Now Monster, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science
Speaker 1: show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith, and you just heard
Speaker 1: a roundtable discussion with religious studies experts Natasha Michels and
Speaker 1: Joe Lacock and archaeologist Jeb card As. We talked about
Speaker 1: the connection between John Kiell's ultraterrestrial hypothesis are the ut
Speaker 1: H and the new film Alien Intrusion, a creationist film
Speaker 1: tying Evangelical Christianity into ufology. I do not know if
Speaker 1: the UTCH is really gaining market share or if my
Speaker 1: increasing recognition of it in paranormal literature is merely confirmation bias,
Speaker 1: but it seems to be popping up more and more,
Speaker 1: and perhaps someone with the time in academic training can
Speaker 1: see if a literature survey supports my suspicion. What concerns
Speaker 1: me is that the UTCH is unfalsifiable. We've talked about
Speaker 1: this before, using Carl Popper's idea that in order for
Speaker 1: an idea to be considered scientific, it needs to be
Speaker 1: testable and falsifiable. The UTCH, by its very nature, is untestable.
Speaker 1: It is the invisible magic dragon that Carl Sagan talked
Speaker 1: about in his book The Demon Haunted World. As such,
Speaker 1: I hope that serious enthusiasts of the paranormal and cryptozoological
Speaker 1: will continue to reject it as the research dead end
Speaker 1: it truly is. Monster Talk is an official podcast of
Speaker 1: Skeptic Magazine. The views expressed on the show are those
Speaker 1: of myself, my respective guests, and do not necessarily reflect
Speaker 1: the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or the Skeptic Society. We
Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Each episode
Speaker 1: we strive to bring you the best in monster related content,
Speaker 1: with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety
Speaker 1: of ways to support the show, all with convenient links
Speaker 1: at monster talk dot org forge slash Support. That's monster
Speaker 1: talk dot org forge Slash Support. There we have links
Speaker 1: to our Patreon pages as well as a donation button.
Speaker 1: A great way to support the show is to buy
Speaker 1: us books from our Amazon Monster Talk wish list, which
Speaker 1: directly helps us with our research. We love usbooks very much,
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Speaker 1: Thank you so so much for listening.
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Speaker 3: I'm not responding to anything that's happening right now.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're editing also all of what we just talked to.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, got it.