Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grin
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 2: For the best experience, listen with headphones.
Speaker 3: But I sometimes think that there are some things that
Speaker 3: can't be explained in the ordinary way, and I want
Speaker 3: to warn you you'll best be prepared to cope with
Speaker 3: something perhaps supernatural. Oh but Inspector Craig, I know what
Speaker 3: you're going to say. There's no such thing that. From
Speaker 3: the viewpoint of science, all phenomena have a material basis.
Speaker 3: I've never yet met a case of ghostly interference that
Speaker 3: wouldn't stand investigation. That's why you're the man for the job.
Speaker 2: I'm Toby Bald and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode eleven
Speaker 2: the Ranch. You've probably noticed that there's a resurgence of
Speaker 2: interest in UFOs. There are a few reasons for this,
Speaker 2: including the number of UFO shows on cable television, the
Speaker 2: sharing of stories and footage on social media and so on.
Speaker 2: But the biggest reason I think is the US government's
Speaker 2: acknowledgment that it was to some degree investigating the topic.
Speaker 2: The interest was exposed in twenty seventeen through the national news,
Speaker 2: most importantly in the New York Times. When I talk
Speaker 2: to people about UFOs, they often point to this apparent
Speaker 2: official interest as validating the probable existence of mysterious craft,
Speaker 2: possibly not made by humans in our skies.
Speaker 4: Our initial goal was to basically talk about the United
Speaker 4: States government's kind of interest in the UFO topic and
Speaker 4: really dive into why UFO became such a popular thing
Speaker 4: in twenty seventeen after the New York Times article dropped.
Speaker 4: My name is m J. Baniyas. I'm a journalist and podcaster.
Speaker 4: I'm the host of Alien State, which is a podcast
Speaker 4: from Something Else and Sony Entertainment. I'm also a journalist
Speaker 4: with The Debrief as well as a whole host of
Speaker 4: other news outlets that set the UFO world in motion
Speaker 4: for the last five years, and what it evolved into
Speaker 4: was a much deeper dive into the fact that this
Speaker 4: UFO program that we all heard about via the New
Speaker 4: York Times was nothing new. What we learned as a
Speaker 4: result of doing the investigation in the podcast was there
Speaker 4: was a lot more to this UFO Pentagon program than
Speaker 4: we initially thought, and it really kind of muddied the
Speaker 4: waters of what was true and what was not true.
Speaker 4: When that article came out and just kind of the
Speaker 4: subsequent UFO news that's been released since.
Speaker 2: The article that spurred this renewed interest ran on the
Speaker 2: front page of the December seventeen, twenty seventeen edition of
Speaker 2: The New York Times. Its authors were Times Pentagon correspondent
Speaker 2: Helene Cooper and two other reporters with a deeper interest
Speaker 2: than UFOs, Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal. We heard from
Speaker 2: Blumenthal earlier in this season talking about John Mack. In
Speaker 2: addition to writing a biography of Mac. Blumenthal is retired
Speaker 2: from a long career as a New York Times reporter.
Speaker 2: Leslie Kane is a researcher and reporter with a lengthy
Speaker 2: history in the UFO world. She wrote the twenty ten
Speaker 2: book UFOs Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record.
Speaker 2: According to the obituary of abduction investigator Bud Hopkins run
Speaker 2: by The New York Times on August twenty fourth, twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: she was Hopkins' companion at the time of his death.
Speaker 2: She also wrote the twenty seventeen book Surviving Death, a
Speaker 2: Journalist Investiga Gate's Evidence for an Afterlife. The Times article,
Speaker 2: which you can find on the Internet under the title
Speaker 2: Glowing Auras and Black Money. The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program
Speaker 2: describes a Pentagon program that had received about twenty two
Speaker 2: million dollars from two thousand and eight to twenty and
Speaker 2: eleven to look into reports of UFOs. That money was
Speaker 2: largely used to pay a contractor, an aerospace research company
Speaker 2: called Bigelow Aerospace to oversee the work. Bigelow Aerospace was
Speaker 2: owned by Robert Bigelow, who we heard about earlier this
Speaker 2: season when he funded John mac and Bud Hopkins' alien
Speaker 2: abduction survey. The story also reported that Bigelow had augmented
Speaker 2: some storage facilities in Las Vegas to how's materials recovered
Speaker 2: from UFO crash sites. It quoted an engineer named Harold
Speaker 2: put Off, who had done research on esp for the CIA,
Speaker 2: as saying our understanding of these materials was like, quote,
Speaker 2: if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage door opener.
Speaker 2: It's a good line, definitely, But none of these materials
Speaker 2: have been shown to the public anyway. Time has dampened
Speaker 2: the initial enthusiasm for the claims in this article. Specifically,
Speaker 2: there was initial excitement that this was the first step
Speaker 2: in what was referred to as disclosure with a capital D,
Speaker 2: a government acknowledgment that it has evidence that UFOs are
Speaker 2: real and aliens have visited Earth. This hasn't happened, but
Speaker 2: at the time it seemed as though things might be
Speaker 2: changing drastically.
Speaker 4: The whole New York Times article, as well as the
Speaker 4: subsequent releases, kind of are indicative of that. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot more to the story than people realize,
Speaker 4: and it's been going on for decades and decades now
Speaker 4: with kind of a similar cast of characters who all
Speaker 4: have been in government work at some point or another,
Speaker 4: but also are fascinated by the UFO topic in some way.
Speaker 2: When Benias and others began to tug at the strings
Speaker 2: of this story, they found a connection that suggested that
Speaker 2: the government effort included more than just an investigation into
Speaker 2: UFOs as physical craft in the skies. Like John Keel,
Speaker 2: the modern government funded investigation was looking at a broader
Speaker 2: range of phenomena, which they theorized were all connected.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's unusual all in this world for
Speaker 5: people to have these eufology theories of everything, right that
Speaker 5: they kind of tie all of these phenomenon together, whether
Speaker 5: it's like Bigfoot or ghosts, or UFOs or cryptids. I'm
Speaker 5: Travis Tritten. I'm the Pentagon Bureau chief and the deputy
Speaker 5: managing editor for Military dot Com. There's this tendency to
Speaker 5: try to find some universal solution, and the way that
Speaker 5: you phenomenon started, I think was with a group of
Speaker 5: people who thought that they had found that universal solution,
Speaker 5: specifically in Skinwalker Ranch.
Speaker 2: Skinwalker Ranch is a mainstay of shows about the paranormal.
Speaker 2: It spawned books, podcasts, movies, and television shows. It's a
Speaker 2: huge tract of land in Utah that some people claim
Speaker 2: as a setting for a wide wide range of paranormal phenomena,
Speaker 2: including UFOs, but other strange things as well, as we
Speaker 2: will see. The ranch's supposed paranormal properties first became publicly
Speaker 2: known when it was owned by Robert Bigelow, the same
Speaker 2: Robert Bigelow who, according to the New York Times, was
Speaker 2: creating storage spaces in Las Vegas for UFO crash debris.
Speaker 2: He doesn't own the ranch anymore, but he originally bought
Speaker 2: it in order to study the strange events that supposedly
Speaker 2: occurred there.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean it seems like fairly obvious that
Speaker 1: it's not just simply UFOs the researchers are talking about.
Speaker 1: It goes far beyond that. The simple data point is
Speaker 1: Skinwalker Ranch. There's just so much intertwined with Skinwalker Ranch
Speaker 1: and Robert Bigelow in particular. My name is Mick West,
Speaker 1: and I'm a UFO investigator. I also investigate a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of other things, like conspiracy theories and strange phenomena,
Speaker 1: but most recently I've been into investigating UFOs, which I
Speaker 1: really enjoy doing. My background is that I'm a video
Speaker 1: game programmer. I worked on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Speaker 1: series like a long time ago, and I kind of
Speaker 1: semi retired and just kind of been pursuing my own interests,
Speaker 1: including writing and investigating things. If you look at Robert
Speaker 1: Bigelow's interests, they're not just UFOs. They are life after death,
Speaker 1: and they are entities like ghosts essentially, and the supernatural, yeah,
Speaker 1: essentially magic interests of the people associated with those, people
Speaker 1: like Bigelow kind of naturally like include those things. They entertain,
Speaker 1: these broader aspects. So there might be some kind of
Speaker 1: reality distortion field or some kind of essentially Poltergeist type activity.
Speaker 2: Travis Trittan.
Speaker 5: I think that project really began with book skin Walkers
Speaker 5: at the Pentagon. I had just kind of a personal
Speaker 5: interest because it involved the military and being somebody who
Speaker 5: covers the military. The Pentagon. It was it was really
Speaker 5: just kind of the way out there. It was so
Speaker 5: far out. The answer kind of put together some of
Speaker 5: the pieces and the answer some of the questions that
Speaker 5: I had had before about where's all this UAP stuff
Speaker 5: like coming from? And I thought, this is just too good.
Speaker 5: I need to get to the bottom of this. I
Speaker 5: need to figure out what is the truth here and
Speaker 5: like what is the fiction as were it guarded.
Speaker 2: The twenty twenty one book Skinwalker's at the Pentagon by
Speaker 2: James Lakatski, Calm Kelleher and George Knapp, begins with the
Speaker 2: experiences of a senior aerospace engineer in Naval Intelligence who
Speaker 2: is given the pseudonym Jonathan Axelrod. Axelrod we are told
Speaker 2: was quote well versed in investigating anomalies, utilizing a thoroughly
Speaker 2: professional approach. The book opens with him accompanied by two
Speaker 2: other military men on Skinwalker Ranch. They reportedly are struck
Speaker 2: with feelings of fear and dread as they are hiking
Speaker 2: at night. The source turns out to be a dark
Speaker 2: oval shape quote radiating a menacing presence, only visible using
Speaker 2: a night scope. We'll hear more about the consequences of
Speaker 2: Axl Rod's visit to the ranch later. Suffice it to
Speaker 2: say that Skinwalker Ranch was reputed to be the site
Speaker 2: of a wide range of paranormal phenoma, including UFOs and
Speaker 2: glowing orbs, crop circles, poltergeists, huge animals, impervious to bullets,
Speaker 2: and so on.
Speaker 5: It's a fun book, right, It kind of gives you,
Speaker 5: like the creepy tingles. It's like Stephen King novel or
Speaker 5: something where you know it's a little bit cheesy, but
Speaker 5: still you get a little bit creeped out. And that's
Speaker 5: kind of the feeling I got from that. It was
Speaker 5: like a really like fun read. But you just have
Speaker 5: to ask yourself. I mean, people are seeing were wolves
Speaker 5: in their backyards. There's just a variety of just really
Speaker 5: crazy stories. There's cryptids, you know, strange creatures. There's the
Speaker 5: blue orbs that travel through people's bodies and caused health effects.
Speaker 3: MJ.
Speaker 2: Benaias investigated the Skinwalker Ranch in the late twenty teens.
Speaker 4: Skinwalker Ranch has held a really long history within the
Speaker 4: UFO lore, but it's been fairly silent. Skinwalker Ranch entered
Speaker 4: the UFO picture in the nineties, but not a lot
Speaker 4: of people talked about. It was kind of whispered about,
Speaker 4: sort of hush circles.
Speaker 2: The ranch became more publicly known with the two thousand
Speaker 2: and five publication of the book Hunt for the Skinwalker
Speaker 2: by Colem Kelleher and George Knapp.
Speaker 4: My journey there occurred after twenty seventeen. There was a
Speaker 4: documentary that was released called Hunt for the Skinwalker, and
Speaker 4: it was released by a filmmaker named Jeremy Corbel, and
Speaker 4: it basically explained that the ranch was sold by Robert Bigelow,
Speaker 4: who was the original owner of the ranch in the nineties,
Speaker 4: and he sold it to a sort of mysterious player
Speaker 4: and nobody knew who he was, and to be frank,
Speaker 4: the documentary films kind of discombobulated it weird, but it
Speaker 4: kept the owner secret and it didn't really expose what
Speaker 4: was going on on the ranch. It kind of maintained
Speaker 4: the mystery of the ranch and it created the drama
Speaker 4: of the ranch, but it didn't really get into like
Speaker 4: what Skinwalker Ranch actually was as a thing. At first,
Speaker 4: I didn't care very much, but I was able to
Speaker 4: look There's a picture that was posted online of a
Speaker 4: private aircraft that was owned by the owner of the
Speaker 4: ranch with a tail number two missing, and I was
Speaker 4: able to use that photograph, as well as some other
Speaker 4: clues that were in the documentary, to basically figure out
Speaker 4: that the owner of Skinwalker Ranch was a Utah real
Speaker 4: estate mogul named Brandon Feugel. Connecting those dots. I just
Speaker 4: simply reached out to him. And I was a journalist
Speaker 4: for Vice at the time, and I just simply reached
Speaker 4: out and said, listen, I know you're the owner of
Speaker 4: Skinwalker Ranch. I'm writing an article about it. Do you
Speaker 4: wish to comment?
Speaker 2: This resulted in a series of conversations during which Fugal
Speaker 2: offered benaias a couple of exclusives and an invitation to
Speaker 2: visit the ranch.
Speaker 4: My editor and I took the deal and we decided
Speaker 4: to run an exclusive feature about the ranch, which was
Speaker 4: my first trip out there in twenty eighteen, I think.
Speaker 4: And then a few months later we did an exclusive
Speaker 4: interview with mister Fugal where we sort of exposed his
Speaker 4: identity and he gave us the exclusive there. So that
Speaker 4: was my first trip out to the ranch.
Speaker 2: Let's take a step back. How did the Skinwalker Ranch
Speaker 2: become so prominently connected with the Pentagon funded investigation into UFOs? Well,
Speaker 2: not too surprisingly, it results from a confluence of power, money,
Speaker 2: and a paranormal experience. Initially, it was set up when
Speaker 2: a Pentagon official approached Harry Reid, who was then the
Speaker 2: Senate Majority leader. The official had been to Skinwalker Ranch
Speaker 2: and had had what Mickwest describes as quote essentially a
Speaker 2: mystical experience.
Speaker 1: He was in the kitchen of this house there and
Speaker 1: he's awesome. What looked like tubola bells the materialized in
Speaker 1: the middle of the kitchen, and then he realized that
Speaker 1: there was something freaky was going on, and so he
Speaker 1: kind of persuaded Harry Reid to set up this program.
Speaker 2: MJ.
Speaker 4: Benaias you had one individual in the entirety of the DIA,
Speaker 4: which has thousands of employees.
Speaker 2: The DIA is the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 4: He had one individual who was interested in the possible
Speaker 4: security implications of a phenomena he personally witnessed at Skinwalker Ranch.
Speaker 4: This individual then went to a senator who he was
Speaker 4: he sort of knew was also interested in the paranormal
Speaker 4: and the UFO phenomenon and had that senator broached a
Speaker 4: sort of contact with Robert Bigelow, who owned the ranch
Speaker 4: at the time, to kind of work together, and the
Speaker 4: three of them patched this plan to create a proposal
Speaker 4: and a contract with the DIA to study what they
Speaker 4: called advance like weapons and weapons application systems.
Speaker 2: The idea was that they were going to be researching
Speaker 2: the weapons of the future, or at least that was
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 4: What they were really doing, though, was using the government
Speaker 4: money to investigate anomaloust phenomena on Skinwalker Ranch as well
Speaker 4: as other locations around the United States, chiefly a handful
Speaker 4: in Brazil, to figure out what UFOs were, with the
Speaker 4: intention of returning to the DIA and saying, listen, you know,
Speaker 4: we've spent this money and we've figured out that UFOs
Speaker 4: are some sort of advanced technology that we can utilize
Speaker 4: and weaponize.
Speaker 1: Again, Mick West, the real aim of the project was
Speaker 1: to investigate what was going on at Skinwalker Wrench and
Speaker 1: investigate the ghosts and the UFOs and the strange happenings.
Speaker 1: So somehow the government, the Pentagon ended up spending money
Speaker 1: on this high strangeness, that skinwalker wrench, which is some
Speaker 1: degree kind of normalized that type of thing the government
Speaker 1: might spend money on the UFOs.
Speaker 2: The funding for this program was short lived MJ. Benias.
Speaker 4: Actually that never happened. Quickly, various other parties in the DIA,
Speaker 4: who are responsible for making sure the job you've been
Speaker 4: contracted to do is getting done, realized what was going
Speaker 4: on with the money and decided, after the initial sort
Speaker 4: of surge of twenty two million dollars, to cut funding
Speaker 4: and just say there's no intelligence value here. Generally, there
Speaker 4: was a consensus sort of at the top levels of
Speaker 4: the DiiA that this was a silly thing to do.
Speaker 4: Chasing werewolves, for example, in Utah is not a good
Speaker 4: use of taxpayer dollars, especially from an intelligence standpoint.
Speaker 2: When The New York Times picked up the story, the
Speaker 2: Pentagon not surprisingly did not emphasize the skinwalker ranch aspect
Speaker 2: of the program. Mick West.
Speaker 1: When it came out in the New York Times that
Speaker 1: something had been happening, they didn't really talk about the
Speaker 1: ghosts or anything, and they just talked about possible foreign
Speaker 1: craft in ours Bace and how it's a national security issue,
Speaker 1: but really underlying it at all, it's this really weird,
Speaker 1: deep strangeness that drives the current push over the past
Speaker 1: few years. Has grown in momentum because there's been more
Speaker 1: and more interest from the press, there's been more lobbyings,
Speaker 1: and more politicians are being convinced that they should do
Speaker 1: something about it, which I don't really think is based
Speaker 1: on good evidence. I think it's based on compelling testimony
Speaker 1: from compelling people.
Speaker 2: Compelling people whose beliefs about UFOs and the paranormal are
Speaker 2: not what you might expect. After the break, strange arrivals
Speaker 2: will return in a moment. Coverage of the Pentagon funded
Speaker 2: UFO program that came to light in twenty seventeen focused
Speaker 2: on what you can think of as traditional UFO physical
Speaker 2: craft buzzing around in the sky. Again, MJ. Benias.
Speaker 4: With any subculture, you're gonna have divisions in ideology, right.
Speaker 4: Everyone within the UFO subculture kind of has similar linguistic background, right.
Speaker 4: We all kind of use the same terms when terminology
Speaker 4: to describe what's going on. But you know, there's different
Speaker 4: ideologies that exist within the UFO community. You have some
Speaker 4: individuals who believe in a sort of very nuts and
Speaker 4: bolts technological these are aliens from other planet and they're
Speaker 4: flying here in spaceships that are, you know, constructed like
Speaker 4: we would construct spaceships with fancier, shinier technology than we have.
Speaker 4: But you know, they're just more advanced and that's it.
Speaker 2: This belief was exemplified by a number of the classified
Speaker 2: Pentagon videos that were made public, videos that showed fuzzy
Speaker 2: images from specialized cameras, often accompanied by the pilot's audio transmissions.
Speaker 3: There's clean up.
Speaker 2: I looked on the assay, Oh my gosh, are going.
Speaker 4: Against the wind?
Speaker 1: The winds one hundred clients in the west.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 2: But there is another school of thought about UFOs.
Speaker 4: You have other people within the UFO community who believe
Speaker 4: that this is sort of a much more spiritual or
Speaker 4: mystical concept, that whatever the source of UFOs are are
Speaker 4: a manifestation of some larger system, not just space aliens
Speaker 4: for another planet flying here in a space ship. So
Speaker 4: I would say the founders of the DIA program, the
Speaker 4: ones who kind of brought it to fruition, have some
Speaker 4: sort of interest in all aspects of the paranormal pantheon
Speaker 4: of beliefs, whether they believe in like a consciousness being,
Speaker 4: you know, you know, I don't know. I mean, there's
Speaker 4: going to be kind of divisions amongst all of them,
Speaker 4: but they all clearly view the phenomenon not as a
Speaker 4: nuts and bolts thing, but as a spiritual thing that
Speaker 4: could be utilized and reverse maybe not inered, but reverse
Speaker 4: spiritualized for some sort of gain, whether it's technological gain,
Speaker 4: monetary defense, whatever.
Speaker 2: As we saw last episode when we looked at John
Speaker 2: Keel's beliefs. The idea is that there is a phenomenon
Speaker 2: that presents itself in different ways, and it has been
Speaker 2: doing this for centuries. Its manifestations the result of people's
Speaker 2: expectations of what the paranormal would look like.
Speaker 4: The same things that are the sources of ghost sightings
Speaker 4: or sightings of elves back in the fifteen hundreds, or
Speaker 4: vampire sightings or werewolf sightings or all of those things.
Speaker 4: It's a merger of spiritual concepts that present themselves in
Speaker 4: different ways at different times.
Speaker 2: But Nias is about to mention pan spermia. We're not
Speaker 2: going to get into it, but briefly, it's the idea
Speaker 2: that life is distributed throughout the universe and can be
Speaker 2: spread by space, dust, comets, and so on. It also
Speaker 2: suggests that life on Earth may have started with microscopic
Speaker 2: organisms from space. It's definitely fringe.
Speaker 4: Whatever the phenomenon is in this, like panspermia, like UFO concept,
Speaker 4: like the unified theory of everything. Paranormal UFOs are just
Speaker 4: a manifestation of whatever the phenomena is. And it's just
Speaker 4: today manifesting itself as UFOs because we are more technological
Speaker 4: as a species compared to let's say, four hundred years
Speaker 4: ago when people would see ghosts and monsters roaming around
Speaker 4: in fields and imps and whatnot.
Speaker 2: And it's not just four hundred years ago. Earlier in
Speaker 2: this episode, we heard about the naval intelligence officer given
Speaker 2: the pseudonym John Axelrod. He had encountered a mysterious presence
Speaker 2: at Skinwalker Ranch. But if you believe it's a count,
Speaker 2: physically leaving the ranch didn't end his interaction with strange forces.
Speaker 2: About Axelrod, Benaiah says.
Speaker 4: We know, for example, who that individual was. I'm not
Speaker 4: sure how public his name is, so I won't say
Speaker 4: it on this podcast, but he was employed by the
Speaker 4: Office of Naval Intelligence, he's well established and well respected
Speaker 4: within the intelligence.
Speaker 1: Community and within the sort of the US.
Speaker 4: Government is a high ranking civilian intelligence official. But there's
Speaker 4: also that aspect of belief, and I think that that's
Speaker 4: what really plays a role in all this. I've been
Speaker 4: to Skinwalker Ranch twice and not had an experience at all.
Speaker 4: Nothing's followed me home. People, for example, told me stories
Speaker 4: about hitchhiker effect and all these things where if you
Speaker 4: try to upset the whatever is on Skinwalker Ranch, it
Speaker 4: will purposefully try to come after you.
Speaker 2: The hitchhiker effect. This is the idea that even once
Speaker 2: you've left the ranch, there's a possibility that the phenomenon
Speaker 2: will attach itself to you, that it will follow you
Speaker 2: and make its presence known. According to the book Skinwalkers
Speaker 2: at the Pentagon, the family of the pseudonymous Jonathan Axelrod
Speaker 2: experienced this effect at their home in suburban Virginia. His
Speaker 2: wife reportedly saw a dark figure in their bedroom and
Speaker 2: herd footsteps in the house. One of his teenage sons
Speaker 2: saw glowing orbs in his bedroom that he felt were
Speaker 2: under intelligent control. More bizarrely, his wife looked out the
Speaker 2: window to see a quote huge wolf like creature unquote,
Speaker 2: standing upright and leaning against a tree. Days later, the
Speaker 2: two sons saw the same creature again, standing on two
Speaker 2: legs and then dashing into the forest.
Speaker 4: We were doing all that stuff, walking around the ranch
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night, you know, insulting it,
Speaker 4: being mean, calling it names, like trying to get some
Speaker 4: sort of reaction, and nothing occurred. But I also don't
Speaker 4: believe that Skinwalker Ranches home to anything but a couple
Speaker 4: of cows. Actually a lot of cows. There's a lot
Speaker 4: of cows on the ranch, to cows and sort of
Speaker 4: a caretaker couple as well as just the people who
Speaker 4: work there. You know. I think it's just a plan
Speaker 4: old ranch in Utah.
Speaker 2: So here's the thing. When you take a look across
Speaker 2: the field of paranormal phenomena, there is such a wide
Speaker 2: range of beliefs and experiences that it is really hard
Speaker 2: to see how they connect to each other. Just narrow
Speaker 2: it down to the UFO stories that we've looked at
Speaker 2: over three seasons of strange arrivals, and you see that
Speaker 2: it is hard to reconcile them with each other. The
Speaker 2: idea of hundreds of thousands of alien abductions doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to square with a sighting on a school yard in Zimbabwe,
Speaker 2: which seems different than Betty and Barney Hill's encounter with
Speaker 2: a crew of fairly friendly aliens. And then Lonnie Zamora's
Speaker 2: flying egg and the Roswell crash and so on and
Speaker 2: so on. The idea that all of these things are
Speaker 2: just different parts or different views of the same single thing.
Speaker 2: It's a way to reconcile all of these different conceptions.
Speaker 2: Then you add in other paranormal phenomena like poltergeist, cryptids,
Speaker 2: esp near death experiences, and myriad others. In fact, it
Speaker 2: sounds a lot like John Keel's conception of the super
Speaker 2: spectrum and ultra terrestrials. It can encompass all paranormal activity
Speaker 2: because it is just one big thing that takes the
Speaker 2: form of the observer's unconscious choosing.
Speaker 4: You have again, this nice, packaged, unified system, which is
Speaker 4: I think from it's kind of lazy, but from a
Speaker 4: kind of a euphological perspective, I think it's for people
Speaker 4: who believe it's really nice and tidy, because you can
Speaker 4: then allow for all of the anecdotes to exist cohesively
Speaker 4: together and say, hey, man, everything goes because it's just
Speaker 4: a system that's occurring all around us that we're part of.
Speaker 4: And whether you saw a UFO or Bigfoot, it's all
Speaker 4: the same, you know. Again, unfortunately, it's not falsifiable in
Speaker 4: any way. It boils down again to faith and belief.
Speaker 2: This is the way we talk about religion and spirituality,
Speaker 2: not observable phenomena that we want to study scientifically. Yet
Speaker 2: that's the area of investigation that was funded by the Pentagon,
Speaker 2: and that's how the people receiving the money conceptualize what
Speaker 2: was happening.
Speaker 4: So for sure, I think it's become a big part
Speaker 4: of how this particular group of individuals views the UFO
Speaker 4: topic and just in general kind of paranormality as an
Speaker 4: idea overall, that it is some kind of universal system
Speaker 4: that crosses a whole bunch of different ideas of what
Speaker 4: paranormal is or isn't, and it kind of governs us
Speaker 4: in some way, or it exists next to us in
Speaker 4: some way, and yeah, it just kind of messes with us,
Speaker 4: and it's a mind right.
Speaker 2: While viewing UFO encounters as well as other paranormal activity
Speaker 2: through a spiritual lens isn't very useful for scientific studies,
Speaker 2: it works better when looking at white p people believe
Speaker 2: in UFOs, and if belief in the reality of UFOs
Speaker 2: is like a religion, who are the priests next time?
Speaker 2: On Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was
Speaker 2: written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima
Speaker 2: il Kyali Jesse Funk, and Noami Griffin, with executive producers
Speaker 2: Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manke, and supervising producer
Speaker 2: Josh Thame. Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com,
Speaker 2: slash Strange Arrivals.
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