Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grin
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron, making for the best experience listen
Speaker 1: with headphones.
Speaker 2: In the course of doing research for this season of
Speaker 2: Strange Arrivals, I ran across the book The Believer Encounters
Speaker 2: with the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle,
Speaker 2: by Sarah Krasnstein. Like Strange Arrivals, it is concerned with
Speaker 2: issues of belief, but approaches the topic a little differently.
Speaker 2: Here's my interview with Sarah. We talk about the creation Museum,
Speaker 2: UFO experiencers and people who will come to your house
Speaker 2: inclensed of evil or just annoying spirits.
Speaker 1: My name is Sarah Krasstein, and I am a writer,
Speaker 1: and you'll find that I have a very strange hybrid
Speaker 1: accent because I am a dual American Australian citizen, and
Speaker 1: I've spent probably about half my life in each country
Speaker 1: by this point, and I often forget what's the right
Speaker 1: word for the right country. And we're in the liminal
Speaker 1: podcast space, so I guess that doesn't matter, but I'm
Speaker 1: flagging it. That's me.
Speaker 2: What was the impetus behind writing this book?
Speaker 1: So it's probably generous to describe it as a process,
Speaker 1: but with each of my kind of book length work
Speaker 1: so far, it really just starts off as something that's
Speaker 1: not really even intellectualized. It's just a feeling that these
Speaker 1: are interesting stories that deserve kind of more than a
Speaker 1: magazine type treatment, and that if they're willing, these people
Speaker 1: that have kind of sparked my curiosity or interest, I
Speaker 1: would like over the next indefinite period, which so far
Speaker 1: has shaken out to about four years each book, to
Speaker 1: get to know them, like see the world through their eyes,
Speaker 1: their interior life. And with the Believer, it was disclosed
Speaker 1: over the process of those kind of four year interviews
Speaker 1: that it was different people speaking from vastly different perspectives
Speaker 1: about the grief in the gap between the world as
Speaker 1: it intractably is in the world as we'd love it
Speaker 1: to be, and what they did to make that gap
Speaker 1: cognitively or spiritually work for them.
Speaker 2: How did that become apparent to you?
Speaker 1: Well, again, like I say, it's just like and this
Speaker 1: is difficult because before I wrote full Time, I was
Speaker 1: a lawyer and I have a PhD in criminal appeals,
Speaker 1: and it is not a really intellectualized, repplicable process. It's
Speaker 1: much more intuitive. It's that there's something that they're telling
Speaker 1: me that is either immediately identifiable to me and I
Speaker 1: feel it too in some strange way, or alien to me,
Speaker 1: and I want to explore that difference. So I was
Speaker 1: hearing the same phrases again and again. And what the
Speaker 1: believer is is six braided together, very different stories that
Speaker 1: on the surface have nothing in common. And I was
Speaker 1: hearing this phrase again from all these people, whether they
Speaker 1: were the ghost hunters or the Eufologists, or fundamentalist Christians
Speaker 1: or Buddhists, that this life can't be all there is.
Speaker 1: There has to be something else out there. And whether
Speaker 1: they came at that from a you know, Kingdom come
Speaker 1: evangelist perspective, or a Buddhist non attachment perspective, or a
Speaker 1: personal kind of agency perspective or literal alien perspective, it
Speaker 1: was this longing for something more, for some meaning, for
Speaker 1: something greater than we appeared to be able to produce
Speaker 1: for ourselves in this kind of quotidian, daily daily life.
Speaker 2: Was it just these six groups that you looked at,
Speaker 2: or were there other ones that that you sort of
Speaker 2: started with that kind of fell away as time went on.
Speaker 1: As a writer's question. That's right, Yeah, there were there's
Speaker 1: always what are they say? You've got to have a
Speaker 1: lot of milk to get to the cream, you know.
Speaker 1: There's there were a number of others which I wished
Speaker 1: could have worked, but for whatever reason, usually because they're
Speaker 1: coming to me with kind of a prepackaged story, or
Speaker 1: they are kind of to screen ready or camera ready
Speaker 1: and I don't feel I'm getting the kind of true
Speaker 1: emotional honesty or depth, they fall away. But it could
Speaker 1: be for a range of reasons. So the process kind
Speaker 1: of self selects people that are happy to speak to
Speaker 1: me honestly and who I'm happy to spend time with.
Speaker 1: And that's not going to be everyone that I initially
Speaker 1: thought at the beginning it would be.
Speaker 2: I've got a bunch of just I mean, they they're
Speaker 2: like slightly detailed, but I think they kind of hit
Speaker 2: it different. Things. I thought was that I thought we're
Speaker 2: interesting in the book, so and I think this is
Speaker 2: answers in Genesis, which I've been interested in for years.
Speaker 2: Just bizarre, bizarre that ken Ham is such an odd
Speaker 2: the idea that you're trying to prove Noah's ark, and
Speaker 2: that there are like triceratops is on the arc is
Speaker 2: just so strange. But I think it's in one of
Speaker 2: those sections that you make a point about tolerating uncertainty
Speaker 2: versus defending a point just for the sake or defending
Speaker 2: a solution just for the sake of like having that solution.
Speaker 2: Can you talk about that a little bit? I thought
Speaker 2: that was an interesting point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's something that you know, again kind of
Speaker 1: I see across all these stories, or I saw across
Speaker 1: the stories, whether it was the paranormal researchers, the ghost
Speaker 1: hunters at work, or some of the euthologists, the kind
Speaker 1: of inability which is a very human, universal inability. We
Speaker 1: all do it in different ways to have difficulty tolerating
Speaker 1: uncertainty and therefore our own actual lack of control over
Speaker 1: daily circumstances, yet alone the larger course of a life
Speaker 1: manifested in Kentucky. As you know, it's in the literal
Speaker 1: name of the ministry. It's answers in Genesis. Anything you
Speaker 1: want to know, there is an answer, a solution, a
Speaker 1: certainty for and I'm jealous of that. I found myself
Speaker 1: increasingly jealous of it over my time there, which was
Speaker 1: the shortest of any kind of the stories in the book.
Speaker 1: It was only a week, although it felt like a
Speaker 1: million years. It was you know, any any question, any
Speaker 1: kind of gotcha moment that science could provide, would have
Speaker 1: a neatly wrapped up, seemingly watertight to them answer. And
Speaker 1: I was not really interested in defeating religion with science,
Speaker 1: you know, as the ministry specifically, you know, has been
Speaker 1: the subject of Bill Nye's work, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: something that's easily mockable and easily kind of defeated. It's
Speaker 1: just like cotton candy, these arguments. But I was interesting
Speaker 1: more in what was underlying that impulse to kind of
Speaker 1: have a complete explanation for circumstances that you know, the
Speaker 1: best astrophysicists will tell you are still not fully understood,
Speaker 1: and that's part of the joy in the glory of science.
Speaker 1: They couldn't sit in that space. And then it led
Speaker 1: to the question, well, where can the rest of us
Speaker 1: not sit? What is intolerable to the rest of us?
Speaker 1: What kind of magical thinking do we do reflexively on
Speaker 1: a daily basis. It might not be as extreme as
Speaker 1: having a big, perfectly articulated argument why dinosaurs had to
Speaker 1: be on Noah's ark and they were vegetarians and whatnot,
Speaker 1: but we might do it, you know, nonetheless in smaller,
Speaker 1: trickier ways, and there's universal kind of touching vulnerability to that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I feel like a lot of the UFO people end
Speaker 2: up talking to would say the same thing about like skeptics,
Speaker 2: in that it's like, you like the you like to
Speaker 2: be able to sort of get rid of the uncertainty
Speaker 2: of what's up in our skies and that we just
Speaker 2: can't really comprehend it by by providing explanations that are comprehensible,
Speaker 2: which I think is sort of the flip side of
Speaker 2: the coin that I look at them at. But it's, uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's an interesting thought. And Georgia, I can't even read
Speaker 2: my own handwriting. Yeah, so she seems like she's almost
Speaker 2: like the ultimate of that in which it's She kind
Speaker 2: of makes the argument at one point that essentially like, Wow,
Speaker 2: when people take issue with something I say, I just
Speaker 2: like I realized that it's not really me they're taking
Speaker 2: issue with, it's the Bible. And so if they want
Speaker 2: to take on the Bible, And it's like this sort
Speaker 2: of complete confidence that her interpretation of the Bible is
Speaker 2: absolutely correct, So any criticism of her is actually sort
Speaker 2: of a criticism of God. So she's not going to
Speaker 2: like get too worried about it. I thought was kind
Speaker 2: of interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I think all kind of the executive positions
Speaker 1: that they use. Everyone I spoke to kind of had
Speaker 1: this very neat reply to these issues of meaning and
Speaker 1: answers being somehow entirely external from them. And again, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: I'm jealous of that kind of faith that there's a plan,
Speaker 1: it's explicable. This is not my thing. I didn't come
Speaker 1: up with this. I'm just you know, discovering or you know,
Speaker 1: going along with something that exists objectively and independently, and
Speaker 1: anyone else who can't see that is wrong. And again,
Speaker 1: underneath that kind of maddening logic is you know, a
Speaker 1: very young part wanting certainty and justice and fairness and control.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean at the level of conversation or discourse,
Speaker 1: it's really not good enough. It's quite unsatisfactory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I want to talk about this spirit section
Speaker 2: a little bit. So it's just kind of interesting because
Speaker 2: I didn't know I have any background in it. What
Speaker 2: was your what's your take on that experience?
Speaker 1: So you know, it was like take your writer to
Speaker 1: work day for the paranormal investigators who agreed to let
Speaker 1: me watch them at work, and they're clearing haunted houses,
Speaker 1: and they're leading kind of workshops and conferences into how
Speaker 1: people can do this for themselves, or little field trips
Speaker 1: into haunted places, and again a very unlikely place to
Speaker 1: end up. I had no independent interest in this before
Speaker 1: I was in Kentucky at Answers and Genesis and at
Speaker 1: the Creation Museum, which you know, after that week it
Speaker 1: became clear that this really wasn't about any kind of
Speaker 1: ethical system or morality, and it was more about kind
Speaker 1: of this fundamental injustice of how can we explain the
Speaker 1: fact that all this and everyone we love, including ourselves,
Speaker 1: will die? And what will we do with the idea
Speaker 1: that death just exists? Can we make it less scary
Speaker 1: by conceiving it as a punishment for sin? And is that?
Speaker 1: Is that really kind of a form of grief or
Speaker 1: longing for something that feels more comfortable? And so I thought, well,
Speaker 1: who can I find that has a more spacious attitude
Speaker 1: towards death? And that opened up a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stories and the paranormal researchers were one of them, because again,
Speaker 1: death becomes explicable, becomes friendlier, it becomes something that you
Speaker 1: can wish away or think away more to the point.
Speaker 1: And I didn't expect to be as freaked out as
Speaker 1: I actually was, so more fool me. But I mean,
Speaker 1: I think most of the time. Well, firstly, I have
Speaker 1: to say that these were some of the most pleasant
Speaker 1: people to spend time with that I've worked with. They
Speaker 1: were universally quite intelligent, universally very kind, and self aware
Speaker 1: in many ways. So one of them was a neurophysiologist
Speaker 1: whose kind of leisure time on the weekend is spent
Speaker 1: looking for empirical proof of ghosts. Another one is kind
Speaker 1: of comes at it from a more kind of depth
Speaker 1: psychology background. But again, it's been actively clearing haunted houses
Speaker 1: for about three decades, and lovely people to spend time
Speaker 1: with their work, their hobbies or interests. They approached this
Speaker 1: in a very utilitarian, pragmatic way. It's almost bureaucratic, and
Speaker 1: it's mundanity that they're just there clearing another house. And
Speaker 1: so I had come along with that. I was just
Speaker 1: doing my job as well. And then you're sitting there
Speaker 1: at midnight and a you know, one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: year old building, and I found myself very nervous to
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom by myself down a long, dark hallway,
Speaker 1: or you know, wondering about the space at my bed
Speaker 1: and finding myself more freaked out than I thought I
Speaker 1: would be. So isn't it interesting where we end up? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I thought when I was reading that part, I was
Speaker 2: thinking about how important setting is for so much stuff
Speaker 2: that you know, and that being in some abandoned place
Speaker 2: that's really dark and quiet and like every creek like
Speaker 2: sort of sets a tone for certain moods or perceptions
Speaker 2: or whatever. I really liked the Vlad. I just I
Speaker 2: kind of kind of felt bad for him because he
Speaker 2: wanted so badly to perceive the stuff that all these
Speaker 2: other people were just like, you know, supposedly perceiving with
Speaker 2: like no problem, and just like, oh, look at all
Speaker 2: these people, Look at all these spirits hanging out in
Speaker 2: this room. It's like I can't see any of them.
Speaker 2: I can't feel it. I want to get back to that.
Speaker 2: A second part of one of the things that you
Speaker 2: brought up in here that I thought was interesting is
Speaker 2: you talk about the god helmet and how you know,
Speaker 2: which I guess is a contraption that somebody came up with,
Speaker 2: and that if you use weak magnets can initiate a
Speaker 2: sounse that there's something in the room with you, and
Speaker 2: if you, you know, stimulate another part of the brain,
Speaker 2: you can like kind of give it sort of positive
Speaker 2: or negative. What was your thought about including that?
Speaker 1: So Latt is a he's an academic. He teaches neurophysiology
Speaker 1: at a university, and he has a very kind of
Speaker 1: intellectualized approach to the world. Super smart guy, loves a footnote,
Speaker 1: loves the small print, and presents in every way like
Speaker 1: a professor. And then, as you say, has this real
Speaker 1: longing to kind of experience what many of these more
Speaker 1: very intuitive, kind of hippyish people were experiencing spiritually when
Speaker 1: they walked into a space. There was something that he
Speaker 1: told me once about how the brain responds to the
Speaker 1: physical stimulus of you know, for instance, if you like
Speaker 1: touch someone's wrist and then you touch further up their arm,
Speaker 1: the brain will register touch at every point in between.
Speaker 1: It just kind of fills it in as a shorthand
Speaker 1: for that explanation of why it physically felt something at
Speaker 1: the start and at the finish of the space of
Speaker 1: your arm. And I thought that was really interesting also metaphorically,
Speaker 1: for how we tend to fill in these creepy spaces
Speaker 1: or empty rooms or the quieter parts of our lives
Speaker 1: with a story that might not be comforting but makes
Speaker 1: sense to us, or a story that is suspiciously comforting.
Speaker 1: How bad we are at something that's unknown or not
Speaker 1: yet proved, or that we can't make sense of, or
Speaker 1: that we wish was different. So I found kind of
Speaker 1: that correspondence between what the body does physically and what
Speaker 1: the mind does cognitively through a whole range of cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance biases. We have confirmation bias and conformity bias and
Speaker 1: normalcy bias and nego bias, and what it lacks in accuracy,
Speaker 1: it really makes up for in comfort uncertainty. And we
Speaker 1: say that in a range of ways. So you know,
Speaker 1: it played out in the kind of ghost hunting sense
Speaker 1: in that way, a willingness to approach evidence or the
Speaker 1: possibility of kind of collating what would ideally be a
Speaker 1: peer reviewed standard of academic scientific proof on the one hand,
Speaker 1: and kind of the reality of this is not a
Speaker 1: space that lends itself to that sort of proof and
Speaker 1: what are we going to do? How we're going to
Speaker 1: you know, think about that in that glaring gap. So
Speaker 1: all of that was kind of at play. It was
Speaker 1: what I was seeing, but it was more more creepy
Speaker 1: that I thought it would be. While having all of
Speaker 1: these kind of thoughts.
Speaker 2: You know, two things. At one point, I think it's
Speaker 2: flat who says we don't know what caused it, so
Speaker 2: we just assumed it was something genuinely paranormal, which I
Speaker 2: just thought was kind of nice but also interesting. The
Speaker 2: other thing that I was kind of, you know, troubled
Speaker 2: by is that is that Spirits seemed like kindergarteners in
Speaker 2: some ways in the way that Rob was kind of
Speaker 2: dealing with them. So you've got this sort of scene
Speaker 2: where he goes to this guy, Ah, is it George
Speaker 2: or Jane?
Speaker 1: Oh, I think Jane at the old Man's house.
Speaker 2: I think it's Gene George. It's somebody's different. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: he's like clearing out his house and he kind of
Speaker 2: carries on this sort of you get one side of
Speaker 2: this conversation he's having with this with Spirits, but he's
Speaker 2: essentially like kind of disciplining him and telling him to
Speaker 2: like do what he wants them to do. And apparently
Speaker 2: that's what it takes. Can you do that if you're
Speaker 2: not an intuitive apparently.
Speaker 1: Not strictly, not in according to the rules of that discipline,
Speaker 1: But the upshot is that if you're not intuitive or psychic,
Speaker 1: you won't be seeing the ghosts so often in these spaces.
Speaker 1: I was the only admitted non psychic, and I was
Speaker 1: therefore spared the possibility of seeing or experiencing any kind
Speaker 1: of paranormal interference. So you won't see it, and you
Speaker 1: can't kind of show them away. And again, I mean
Speaker 1: thinking of it more kind of metaphorically or at a
Speaker 1: deeper level. He said to me, this is his name
Speaker 1: is Rob Tilley, and he's been clearing haunted houses for
Speaker 1: thirty years and a lovely guy, very smart, very creative,
Speaker 1: really wonderful person to hang out with. He was like,
Speaker 1: you know, they're just like annoying people. They're just of
Speaker 1: like bullies, and if you don't give them attention, they
Speaker 1: go away. So what does it mean to be haunted
Speaker 1: by something? What does it mean to feel a threatening
Speaker 1: presence or the yeah of the past where you are now?
Speaker 1: And how comforting might it be to have someone in
Speaker 1: there who seems to control what is uncontrollable and hurting
Speaker 1: you and scaring you. And it was a very beautiful
Speaker 1: kind of human moment. There's nothing kind of exploitative about
Speaker 1: what he's doing. He does charge like the bare minimum
Speaker 1: to cover his travel costs, but if he's dealing with
Speaker 1: a client who can't afford it, he will he will
Speaker 1: do it for free. And so I have to say, like,
Speaker 1: I didn't expect this at all from myself, but you know,
Speaker 1: we had moved into a new house during the course
Speaker 1: of that research, and I remember it's a very old house.
Speaker 1: My house was built in eighteen eighty and I remember
Speaker 1: having a thought, well, oh, there's something creepy here. I
Speaker 1: can call Rob and he'll take care of it. And
Speaker 1: it was so comforting. So, you know, I didn't expect
Speaker 1: to have that thought me and go through my mind,
Speaker 1: but there it was.
Speaker 2: You've got a guy in the industry, I know a guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: My conversation with Sarah Kraststein will continue after the break.
Speaker 2: For people who are listening, there's there is like at
Speaker 2: the end of this, you write, I think very sensitively
Speaker 2: about Jean's experience, and he I mean, he basically says that, well,
Speaker 2: his wife died and you know, that's fine. What he
Speaker 2: really misses is his dog. And then you have this
Speaker 2: kind of two paragraphs, one talking about what it's like
Speaker 2: to have lived with somebody for however many years and
Speaker 2: just not really miss them when they're gone, and then
Speaker 2: what his life is like now he's sort of adopted
Speaker 2: this sort of spiritual view of things, and how that's
Speaker 2: not really worked out exactly the way that he he
Speaker 2: most likely would have liked to. So he's gone to
Speaker 2: this new world with its own set of problems for him,
Speaker 2: which I thought was sort of insightful of moving. The
Speaker 2: other thing before we kind of move on is that
Speaker 2: there's every once in a while like something would pop
Speaker 2: up in a couple of places in ways that were
Speaker 2: sort of unrelated. And one of those things in the
Speaker 2: first section of the book is dragons, because I believe
Speaker 2: there's some conversation about how, because dragons are mentioned a
Speaker 2: couple times in the Bible, that they definitely did exist
Speaker 2: and existed with people. And then there's also I don't
Speaker 2: know if it's rob but he has to rid a
Speaker 2: Chinese gentleman. I think is how he described him house
Speaker 2: of a dragon, and it was just so big that
Speaker 2: he ended up just like wrapping it around the outside
Speaker 2: of the house.
Speaker 1: And that was a purely like that was a water
Speaker 1: cooler conversation between two kind of house clearers about how
Speaker 1: they dealt with these dragons and where they put the dragons.
Speaker 1: Very you know, it was like they were talking about
Speaker 1: the traffic. It was beautiful to behold. Carl Jung wrote
Speaker 1: a book on flying saucers where he was interested not
Speaker 1: at all and whether they were real or not, and
Speaker 1: more in the kind of archetypal or symbolic experience of
Speaker 1: all of us. All cultures have recourse to this shared
Speaker 1: repository of images, and what did they serve? What purpose
Speaker 1: do they serve in human society and personal meaning making?
Speaker 1: And the idea that this dragon, which if you think
Speaker 1: spent enough time thinking about the physicality of a dragon,
Speaker 1: is an actual thing is quite terrifying. What role do
Speaker 1: these kind of fearsome, mystical, beautiful, you know, literally awesome
Speaker 1: beasts continuously playing in these different cultures and our different
Speaker 1: kind of personal outlooks. So again, you know, between six
Speaker 1: stories that on the surface have nothing in common. I
Speaker 1: kept on saying they were like harmonies. They were just
Speaker 1: kind of like these little resonances and echoes. And it
Speaker 1: was this notion that let's not try to defeat this
Speaker 1: with logic, because if fact moved the world, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have any of the stories that are in the newspaper
Speaker 1: every day. What can we where can we go emotionally
Speaker 1: that makes us recognizable to each other and might create
Speaker 1: some chance of understanding mutual dialogue or not. I'm not
Speaker 1: that hopeful about the actual reality of that manifesting, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a really interesting space to wonder about.
Speaker 2: I want to get into the UFO stuff a little bit.
Speaker 2: So you talk about I guess kind of the two
Speaker 2: biggest Australian UFO stories. Why did you pick these two?
Speaker 2: And that was kind of interested, like your entry point
Speaker 2: to them as well.
Speaker 1: So I'm not a UFO person. I'm not interested. I
Speaker 1: had not before I found these stories been at all
Speaker 1: across or interested in becoming across the areas. And I
Speaker 1: was looking at one of those websites says like what
Speaker 1: happens on this day randomly, so it wasn't I didn't
Speaker 1: even set out looking for a UFO story, and that's
Speaker 1: when I first learned about Frederick Valentiche and that was
Speaker 1: kind of in my back pocket for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: And then when I had spent that time with the
Speaker 1: ghost Hunters and the other Australian story in the book,
Speaker 1: which is a woman who helps people die is a
Speaker 1: Buddhist death dula, and I had these two kinds of
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about death, thinking about the unknown, and
Speaker 1: then I started looking at Valentage in that light as well,
Speaker 1: less for the truth of how that pilot disappeared and
Speaker 1: more about the people he left behind, thinking about the
Speaker 1: lack of kind of confirmation, the lack of knowledge, and
Speaker 1: what one does in the space where you don't even
Speaker 1: have a body. Then it led to the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, I've been in Australia since nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: I've lived in Victoria all that time, where Melbourne is.
Speaker 1: It's the capital of the state of Victoria. And I
Speaker 1: had never heard about the Valentage disappearance. And I know
Speaker 1: that people who are interested in the area globally have
Speaker 1: heard about the story. And I found it so odd
Speaker 1: that it had been kind of ghettoised in Australian history
Speaker 1: or Victorian history or kind of cultural history that it's
Speaker 1: still kind of a niche story. Yeah, I contacted the
Speaker 1: fiance that he left behind, and I started the research
Speaker 1: in that way, and that led me to the west
Speaker 1: All siding.
Speaker 2: At this point in the conversation, I was interested that
Speaker 2: the Westall sighting didn't attract the same theorizing from researchers
Speaker 2: that Aerial School or Roswell or any number of high
Speaker 2: profile encounters have. I asked her what she took away
Speaker 2: from her look into this case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, i'd say journalistically, like forensically, from like
Speaker 1: a not a strictly speaking legal standard, but you know,
Speaker 1: using actual evidential rules that the people that I spoke
Speaker 1: to definitely did see something at the school, I mean,
Speaker 1: and they had there is funny memories. The funny thing
Speaker 1: because the short answer to your question is, I think
Speaker 1: everyone saw something that the military then tried to cover up.
Speaker 1: And then from there, as kids left the school and
Speaker 1: kind of ran down to the adjacent park land, that's
Speaker 1: where stories start to differ in fairly cinematic ways. But
Speaker 1: what happened at the school, and again I kind of
Speaker 1: write about this weather balloon that had come down, you know,
Speaker 1: not long before in a different place, and what that
Speaker 1: would have looked like, particularly to you know, people in
Speaker 1: the mid sixties. So there's kind of more mundane explanations
Speaker 1: for what they may or may not have seen and
Speaker 1: what the government did or did not want them to
Speaker 1: be telling other people. But the guy that I spoke
Speaker 1: with and completely reasonable, totally normal guy, he was like,
Speaker 1: there was a road here, I was standing on it,
Speaker 1: I was kicking with football on the football field, and
Speaker 1: this is what happened. And you know, I go back
Speaker 1: and I look at historic roadmaps of the suburb at
Speaker 1: the time, and there was a road there and it
Speaker 1: hasn't been there for forty years. So the memory of
Speaker 1: that is perfect. Is he then one hundred percent reliable
Speaker 1: in his recollections, which are you know, bona fide. He
Speaker 1: actually believes this that when he goes down to the parkland,
Speaker 1: there's you know, a balloon that changes shape and it's
Speaker 1: weightlessness and element you know, all of these different things
Speaker 1: that start to kind of get a lot more murky
Speaker 1: and a lot more dramatic after the citing that everyone
Speaker 1: can agree on. So I don't think it's an all
Speaker 1: or nothing kind of proposition. I also don't think that,
Speaker 1: you know, government's covering something up, could cover something up
Speaker 1: for a totally mundane reason or operational reason that has
Speaker 1: nothing you know, I often wish the government was effective
Speaker 1: enough to be carrying out some sort of big you know,
Speaker 1: jupe like that. But often this the explanations are so
Speaker 1: much more banal and damply disappointing than we kind of
Speaker 1: created in our minds. So yeah, Westall is interesting for
Speaker 1: that reason. And if you do try to find a
Speaker 1: lot of the evidence, and other researchers have have done
Speaker 1: a great deal of work in that area, the primary
Speaker 1: sources are noticeably missing. That's interesting as well. Videotapes of
Speaker 1: the coverage, news coverage at the time. So again, all
Speaker 1: of those issues of memory and group memory and kind
Speaker 1: of that that sort of bias confirm confirmation bias are
Speaker 1: live there. But something something was seen on that day
Speaker 1: with what it is is a different story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's all these things that happened to memories over time,
Speaker 2: and you know, as you're as you're telling the story,
Speaker 2: any you know, that becomes what you remember rather than
Speaker 2: you know, there's all these different polluting aspects. So you
Speaker 2: talk to a few other people Jamie and Aspasia, Aspasia, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Aspasia, Espasia, Leonardo.
Speaker 2: They were pretty interesting, super interesting. What led you to them?
Speaker 1: So the different Australian grassroots ufo RES research organizations are
Speaker 1: a kind of initially confronting, confrontingly similar massive initials, and
Speaker 1: I had to kind of educate myself about their differences
Speaker 1: and their histories. And yeah, Jamie was the spokesperson for
Speaker 1: the Sydney based research group and he I was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I was looking for people that had kind of
Speaker 1: immersed themselves in this area, aware of the knowledge that
Speaker 1: at least if you have a sighting in Australia, the
Speaker 1: police or the military are not going to be interested
Speaker 1: in the slightest if you even got through to them.
Speaker 1: These are the groups that would take you seriously. And
Speaker 1: I think there's something really beautiful about that willingness to
Speaker 1: listen and to kind of meet people where they are
Speaker 1: in their concerns. Also, you know, there but for the
Speaker 1: grace of whatever you want to call it, if I'm
Speaker 1: driving home one night, these are the people who will
Speaker 1: listen to me. So I kind of came to him
Speaker 1: with not knowing a great deal and I had a
Speaker 1: number of really wonderful conversations with them. I went to
Speaker 1: the UFO Research Sydney group Christmas party and spoke to
Speaker 1: kind of the broader base of members. Are the Leonardo's
Speaker 1: are fascinating people, even if you just take out the
Speaker 1: UFO stuff. They are you know, self educated in many
Speaker 1: respects to a level that you know, you'd wish most
Speaker 1: people had that curiosity about other people in the world.
Speaker 1: We live in what we share and just full bottles
Speaker 1: on kind of anything that I was curious to know about.
Speaker 1: So that's how I got there. I spoke to a
Speaker 1: whole range of you know, it's a broad church. There's
Speaker 1: not one type, there's not one kind of personality. But yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting stories came out of that. And
Speaker 1: Valentage was the reason why I went there initially, but
Speaker 1: it kind of opened up outside of that particular incident.
Speaker 2: Some of the stuff they said was super, super interesting.
Speaker 2: And then they are also like, you do include a
Speaker 2: Spasias like sort of theory about how if you put
Speaker 2: a I can't remember exactly what it was, but like
Speaker 2: you put a bear in a water long enough and
Speaker 2: it turns into a whale. And that's not how evolution.
Speaker 1: Not how evolution again, I mean the correspondences between this
Speaker 1: belief that look at this screwed up planet, look at
Speaker 1: what we've done to ourselves in the late state of capitalism.
Speaker 1: Is this natural? We must not be from here, There
Speaker 1: must be some other place. And how this, you know,
Speaker 1: incredibly intellectual woman who has read everything in her field
Speaker 1: and can talk at a very high level for as
Speaker 1: long as you want. What is she showing at an
Speaker 1: emotional level? At least? That's very similar to what Georgia
Speaker 1: at the Creation Museum was saying about. This can't be
Speaker 1: all there is that We've got to have something, you know,
Speaker 1: there's another home for us. We look around what we've
Speaker 1: done this, this can't be us really And I found
Speaker 1: that really moving again, kind of the if you could
Speaker 1: take the highway to the intellect to the emotional heart
Speaker 1: beneath all this kind of intellectualization. Maybe while we're all
Speaker 1: wearing very different clothes in the arguments about it, maybe
Speaker 1: we're coming from the same kind of wounded place.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. So I guess maybe the last thing I
Speaker 2: want to talk about specifically is you talk about Neil
Speaker 2: who you know, he says like he always had a
Speaker 2: sense I didn't belong here, And then I believe he's
Speaker 2: had abduction experiences and then he has this thing where
Speaker 2: these giant craft land in his backyard. I thought that
Speaker 2: this is another kind of interesting and moving story about
Speaker 2: a person dealing with I guess, just a sense of
Speaker 2: you know, unbelonging or isolation or what have you, and
Speaker 2: you know, bringing some sort of importance or reason for this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right. So you know, sitting around the
Speaker 1: Leonardo's dining room table chatting with this man and you know,
Speaker 1: again they came to this their work by starting the
Speaker 1: first kind of support group for abductees in Sydney, but
Speaker 1: also I think Australia nationally. And I was interested in
Speaker 1: what he was saying. And he's a perfectly nice guy.
Speaker 1: He's got kids, he has a business, he has a
Speaker 1: big dog and a messy car, and you wouldn't look
Speaker 1: twice at him, or if you spoke to him on
Speaker 1: the street, you wouldn't think this guy is not credible.
Speaker 1: But I was less interested in his stories of kind
Speaker 1: of contact and abduction or the veracity or otherwise of
Speaker 1: what he was saying, and more interested in observing the
Speaker 1: relationship between him and the Leonarders. What does it mean?
Speaker 1: To have an abductee support group. What is that dynamic?
Speaker 1: What does it mean to kind of find somebody who's
Speaker 1: willing to meet you where you're at and to say,
Speaker 1: I mean they very much believe him, but also kind
Speaker 1: of to confirm that you're worth listening to something disturbing.
Speaker 1: Disturbing happened to you and you're not alone in that.
Speaker 1: And I found it kind of gently beautifully ironic that
Speaker 1: if we are kind of alone in the big universe
Speaker 1: or being menaced by, you know, these powers that we
Speaker 1: don't understand, how beautiful that at least in those spaces
Speaker 1: they're not alone. And yeah, so watching and also but
Speaker 1: at another level, you know, in a country where a
Speaker 1: million people are having a cup of tea with their
Speaker 1: neighbors at a table or were anyway pre COVID, this
Speaker 1: is just one of the infinite human conversations that's going
Speaker 1: on on a Tuesday afternoon, and it is about what
Speaker 1: happened when you were visited by multiple alien aircraft on
Speaker 1: your farm that time. So I just find it adorable
Speaker 1: and infinitely interesting that that was just another kind of conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Interesting. It also struck me like how a fair
Speaker 2: amount of the stuff there's like sort of a good
Speaker 2: versus evil battle going on. So that just seemed like
Speaker 2: another interesting sort of through line through most of this stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's like religion and you know, even rooting
Speaker 2: for sports teams. But I just it's another kind of
Speaker 2: one of those themes that seem to sort of flow
Speaker 2: through everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, well, thank you for saying that. I mean
Speaker 1: that as well, kind of this idea that maybe it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that we do this, Maybe this kind of
Speaker 1: inability to see clearly doesn't really matter. Maybe that's just
Speaker 1: how we are built, but how we use it is
Speaker 1: probably the difference between good and evil if you insist
Speaker 1: on looking the other way when it comes to proof
Speaker 1: of consequences or the faults of your kind of reasoning process.
Speaker 1: Could that could be you know, quirky in one context,
Speaker 1: or it could be genocidal in another context. And it's
Speaker 1: kind of at its cool are the same impulse of
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance or magical thinking, and so the facts both
Speaker 1: do and don't matter. Our approach to it very much,
Speaker 1: very much matters, and is often the difference between what
Speaker 1: we call good and what we call evil. And it's
Speaker 1: not as much as we'd wish it to be as
Speaker 1: external as we think it is.
Speaker 2: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and
Speaker 2: Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was hosted by Toby
Speaker 2: Ball and produced by Rima L. Kayali, Jesse Funk, and
Speaker 2: Nuami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick and
Speaker 2: Aaron Mankey, and supervising producer Josh Thane. Learn more about
Speaker 2: the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals and
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