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Speaker 2: Keith, I'd be fascinated to learn how your work, your
Speaker 2: writings influenced the late great John Mac, Harvard University.
Speaker 3: I had there's a great question. I got to know
Speaker 3: John Mac, a very well respected pull up Surprise winning
Speaker 3: author from Harvard University. I had already been studying the
Speaker 3: UFO phenomenon and had written an article that was based
Speaker 3: on a talk I had given to UFO abductees and
Speaker 3: individuals who had close encounters. I was invited to come
Speaker 3: and share my research, and I had developed in that
Speaker 3: talk the idea that there are parallels between what goes
Speaker 3: on in these abductions and these close encounters and traditional
Speaker 3: rites of passage in indigenous societies where there are you know,
Speaker 3: the children are taken from the home, separated and taught
Speaker 3: the initiat the the traditions of the culture, for example,
Speaker 3: the mythology of the culture through initiation, ceremonies, and rights
Speaker 3: of passage. I said, so there's a sense in which
Speaker 3: these abductions seem to be initiatory. John Mack found that
Speaker 3: article and he said, that's very fascinating, that are they
Speaker 3: real are these events really happening? So he sent me
Speaker 3: an email said we need to talk, and I knew
Speaker 3: who John Mack was, and I said I'd be happy
Speaker 3: to So we got to know each other and we
Speaker 3: had many very interesting conversations over the years, and he
Speaker 3: was so what he did. He went on to become
Speaker 3: one of the leading researchers of individuals who have direct
Speaker 3: encounters the abductions, who have the experience of being taken
Speaker 3: against their will into what appeared to be craft and
Speaker 3: various procedures are performed and then people are returned back.
Speaker 3: He was asking the first question, are these people mentally?
Speaker 3: Is there any indication that abductees have some part killer
Speaker 3: psychological disorder? He was a psychiatrist. He's no longer alive
Speaker 3: for twenty years now, but he was a psychiatrist, so
Speaker 3: that was his first question. He was able to eliminate
Speaker 3: that hypothesis off the right, off the top. So he
Speaker 3: and I had many good conversations about what kind of
Speaker 3: reality is involved in this, and he too reached the
Speaker 3: conclusion that we are going to have to try to
Speaker 3: expand to reach the data. We're going to have to
Speaker 3: expand our models into the phenomenon rather than trying to
Speaker 3: shrink the phenomenon down into our established categories. And he
Speaker 3: got in a lot of trouble At Harvard University. There
Speaker 3: was an inquisition looking at his practices, the standards and
Speaker 3: practices he was using. What they were really criticizing was
Speaker 3: the topic that he was covering. It's as if you
Speaker 3: can at Harvard with a divinity school, so okay to
Speaker 3: talk about angels at the divinity school, not so good
Speaker 3: to talk about aliens. He said, I'm asking these as
Speaker 3: a researcher, I'm asking these as an investigator, as an explorer.
Speaker 3: I'm not trying to establish some subtled truth and coming
Speaker 3: with answers. I'm asking questions. So I had a great
Speaker 3: opportunity to get to know doctor mac and I certainly listened.
Speaker 3: He he was he made a great contribution to these
Speaker 3: round to our understanding of this phenomenon.
Speaker 2: So had he started working with abductees prior to reading
Speaker 2: your article or did your did your work your conversations
Speaker 2: lead him into that work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't say. I know he'd already he'd already
Speaker 3: encountered evidence for the abductions. He knew about them through
Speaker 3: Bud Hopkins researcher, and David Jacobs, a professor of history
Speaker 3: at Temple University who took up abduction research. He worked
Speaker 3: with both of them and adopted their models for a while,
Speaker 3: but he began to see that there were aspects that
Speaker 3: had really pointed in the direction of needing to take seriously.
Speaker 3: The parapsychological, the paranormal sense. If people are are floated
Speaker 3: through through walls, they have the experience of being floated
Speaker 3: through walls? Is that something that has ever been reported
Speaker 3: in any other aspect of human nature. That was one
Speaker 3: of the areas that he was interested in, and I
Speaker 3: introduced him to evidence that in the Catholic contemplative tradition
Speaker 3: there are credible, not confirmed, but credible reports of contemplatives,
Speaker 3: contemplative practitioners of faith, meditation and prayer, indeed levitating, indeed
Speaker 3: transcending gravity, and having other phenomena such as stigmata, the
Speaker 3: arising on the body of craw crucifixes, and other physical
Speaker 3: emblems that reflect deep faith. I mentioned that because abductees
Speaker 3: return with physical markets, so he was interested as I
Speaker 3: am interested in the larger patterns of mind body interactions
Speaker 3: that are not acknowledged by our science, and that do
Speaker 3: appear in the UFO phenomenon, that also appear beyond the
Speaker 3: UFO phenomenon in other areas of science that show these
Speaker 3: kinds of potentials, and we could discuss those.
Speaker 2: In greater length, right, because there are some fascinating parallels
Speaker 2: between the abduction phenomenon and the ND which you've experienced.
Speaker 3: Right, that's exactly right. When I was in my mid twenties,
Speaker 3: I was a body surfing with friends off the coast
Speaker 3: of Hawaii. I misjudged the waves, including the rip currents,
Speaker 3: and this time of year people are out in the water.
Speaker 3: Be very careful. Rip currents are the real danger. They
Speaker 3: pull you back out. It's not the big waves coming
Speaker 3: in all we swim parallel to the shore. If you're
Speaker 3: caught in a rip current, that's Keith Thompson's advice for
Speaker 3: the night, so that you can avoid a near death experience.
Speaker 3: I was taken out and I was exhausted, and I
Speaker 3: was pummeled repeatedly and taken by waves, and it came
Speaker 3: a point when I was convinced that I had that
Speaker 3: I was dying. I said, I'm I'm going to die.
Speaker 3: There was just the recognition and suddenly I was rising up,
Speaker 3: I thought, from the bottom of the ocean, from the
Speaker 3: sand where I had just been whacked pretty hard. In fact,
Speaker 3: I was rising above the ocean, Richard, I was. In fact,
Speaker 3: I had never heard of the out of body experience.
Speaker 3: But I found I left my body through the back
Speaker 3: of my head, and I saw the swimmer named Keith,
Speaker 3: and I saw the friends on the shore who had
Speaker 3: not gotten into the trouble I'd gotten, and I had
Speaker 3: the absolute certainty that I had died. I went through
Speaker 3: the tunnel. And by the way, this was all before
Speaker 3: the near death experience had been made famous by the
Speaker 3: research of Raymond Moody in his book Life After Life.
Speaker 3: So I'd never heard of these stages. So I wasn't
Speaker 3: confirming something I'd already believed or heard about, in fact,
Speaker 3: coming back and telling people that I'd had this because
Speaker 3: I survived. Obviously, there was one key here's one key element.
Speaker 3: We could say that the near death experience of seeing
Speaker 3: at departed relatives, which I did, seeming to be in
Speaker 3: a celestial place that resembles reports of heaven or the afterlife,
Speaker 3: which I did. And I'm not from a deeply religious family,
Speaker 3: but those can all be explained in principle. You know, well,
Speaker 3: that's just brain systems and enacting patterns that can be.
Speaker 2: Explained of m and doorphins.
Speaker 3: Right, that's exactly right. And one of my friends on
Speaker 3: the shore, I was two. The body called Keith was
Speaker 3: two hundred yards out according to witnesses, and it was
Speaker 3: flailing in waves and the sound of the waves was deafening.
Speaker 3: So one of my friends, speaking at the volume of
Speaker 3: tone that you and I are talking right now, named
Speaker 3: Mary Payne, turned to her friend a front another friend
Speaker 3: of ours, who is on the trip, and said, why
Speaker 3: didn't he listen? I told him it was too dangerous?
Speaker 3: Why did he go out anyway? And I told her
Speaker 3: from wherever I was, of a kind of vast space
Speaker 3: of awakened mine, I said, I'm fine, I'm okay. Dead
Speaker 3: isn't dead? I remember the recognition that dead isn't She
Speaker 3: couldn't hear me, So long story short, I survived. I
Speaker 3: was carried into a cove. I was surrounded by two
Speaker 3: dolphins that accompanying accompanied me in. I noticed them and
Speaker 3: it was confirmed by my friends later. Turns out dolphins
Speaker 3: are very often part of this. The next day, after
Speaker 3: I had survived and had recovered with aches and pains
Speaker 3: and scrapes and scratches. I asked Mary, could we go
Speaker 3: for a walk. She said sure, she knew I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk to her, and I said, I heard she
Speaker 3: said yesterday on the beach. Said what are you talking about?
Speaker 3: I said, I heard you say that. I why didn't
Speaker 3: he listen? Why did he go out? I told him
Speaker 3: it was dangerous. Richard, I watched the blood bringing out
Speaker 3: of my friend marriage. We both knew what it had meant.
Speaker 3: We've never given any thought to when consciousness is on
Speaker 3: and when it's off. I had told her the day
Speaker 3: before I had died and come back, but none of
Speaker 3: my friends had heard of it either. So one of
Speaker 3: the things that near death experiences and UFO experiences have
Speaker 3: in common is they find that when they tell others
Speaker 3: about their experience, there's disbelief. There's often scorn and scoffing.
Speaker 3: I learned it very quick, as the German poet Garretta said,
Speaker 3: tell a wise person or else keep silent, because the
Speaker 3: masses will mock it right away. I learned very quickly
Speaker 3: that talking about seemingly having died, experiencing death and coming
Speaker 3: back was not something to talk about casually at parties,
Speaker 3: So that gave me a deep affinity with UFO close
Speaker 3: encountered people.
Speaker 2: You mentioned something earlier in your conversations with the late
Speaker 2: John Mack, and that is something you also you write
Speaker 2: about in the book, and that is that the UFO
Speaker 2: the abduction phenomenon has to do with or or is
Speaker 2: similar to some of these well known rights of passage
Speaker 2: where in human societies, where where you know, young boys
Speaker 2: are taken from the family and they have to survive
Speaker 2: in the woods on their own, or what have you.
Speaker 2: So what is the suggestion here that that this UFO
Speaker 2: phenomenon is part of a a initiation ritual to help
Speaker 2: humans transition from what from what good?
Speaker 3: To what? Very good question, Very good question. Certainly, I'm
Speaker 3: talking about it in two ways. One is that is
Speaker 3: the effect it is like an initiation in that sense
Speaker 3: that the children at the Zimbabwe School one of the
Speaker 3: best cases in the nineteen nineties sixty sixty some children
Speaker 3: saw a craft during recess one day. One of them
Speaker 3: was a young girl named Emily Trim. She came from
Speaker 3: a conservative Christian family. She had a direct interaction with
Speaker 3: a luminous being with dark eyes, they locked eyes. She
Speaker 3: it had deeply touched her soul. So that was the beginning.
Speaker 3: That's stage one of an initiation ceremony. Ever, write a passage,
Speaker 3: a separation from reality as you know it, and you
Speaker 3: were suddenly placed in a middle ground psychologically, speaking of
Speaker 3: the middle ground betwixt and between your marginal you tell
Speaker 3: people what you saw that didn't really happen, so your
Speaker 3: own existence, You question your own sanity, your own existence. Finally,
Speaker 3: the final stage is when you complete it and in
Speaker 3: some sense find the resources you need. Joseph Campbell talks
Speaker 3: about this in his marvelous book The Hero with a
Speaker 3: Thousand Faces. So young Emily Trim, eight years old, finally
Speaker 3: completed her right of passage, even though she didn't know
Speaker 3: that it was a right of passage. That language wasn't
Speaker 3: available to her. But it was only by returning to
Speaker 3: the Zimbabwe School in Africa after her parents had taken
Speaker 3: Emily and her brother out of the school taken them
Speaker 3: back to Canada. She only finished her right of passage
Speaker 3: when she came back to Zimbabwe met with a local shaman,
Speaker 3: a spiritual elder, who said, you must speak of what
Speaker 3: you have seen and in doing that, she was able
Speaker 3: to complete the process. So in that sense, they like
Speaker 3: a right of passage, a separation, an initiation, and a
Speaker 3: return with wisdom for the rest of the community. But
Speaker 3: in another sense, I'm arguing that it may be that
Speaker 3: reality itself is calling on us, calling on humans metaphorically literally,
Speaker 3: early or both to say, expand this is a call
Speaker 3: from the cosmos. I continue to say, it's as if
Speaker 3: we're getting news from the universe that there is more
Speaker 3: to reality than we have acknowledged, and that we are
Speaker 3: being asked, are we ready to join that? Are we
Speaker 3: ready to become bigger? Are we ready to behave as
Speaker 3: if we are part of the larger, larger cosmos, meaning
Speaker 3: right here and now, are expanding our maps of science
Speaker 3: and even religion to become consistent with the capacities that
Speaker 3: we already have. I think the answer is yes. And
Speaker 3: you know, a call from the cosmos is only a
Speaker 3: one way trip. It's a monologue until we respond. Then
Speaker 3: it becomes a dialogue. And I'm trying to invite a
Speaker 3: dialogue with the phenomenon on some new levels, including a work.
Speaker 3: I strongly believe that the abductions are already happening in
Speaker 3: some common ground we have with the aliens. We can
Speaker 3: call them aliens or beings, whether they are the same
Speaker 3: beings that the philosophies in other cultures. Indigenous cultures, for example,
Speaker 3: have always described humans as being in interactions with such beings.
Speaker 3: So they may not be from outer space, but in
Speaker 3: any case, there's already common ground that shaman shamans in
Speaker 3: the sap shamanistic cultures have worked with. The shaman is
Speaker 3: that figure in indigenous cultures who works with the beings
Speaker 3: in the lower realm, the middle realm, and upper realm.
Speaker 3: So I bring that kind of material into the book
Speaker 3: that takes it beyond the saucer frame of reference only,
Speaker 3: which is in some ways confusing for people who think
Speaker 3: the UFO phenomenon is nothing but et It may be extraterrestrial,
Speaker 3: but even then the craft certainly don't behave entirely as
Speaker 3: solidly physical, or they are only physical in some of
Speaker 3: their spaces. They trans they transfer, they move between physical
Speaker 3: and paraphysical with equalities that our science has a trend
Speaker 3: us to expect. So we're learning on the fly with
Speaker 3: this phenomenon.
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