Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron making for the best experience listen
Speaker 1: with headphones, George.
Speaker 2: Basically, what we're dealing with here is I'll give you
Speaker 2: the bottom line. I'm not trying to sell it. I
Speaker 2: want to hear your thesis. I'm not trying to sell
Speaker 2: a book. I'm not trying to promote a lecture. This
Speaker 2: is based on what I've come across after intense research
Speaker 2: in the last year, and I have found out that
Speaker 2: the government has retrieved between ten and fifteen flactual flying saucers,
Speaker 2: three of which have been in perfect condition, one of
Speaker 2: which they tried to fly. They have between thirty and
Speaker 2: fifty alien bodies in cryogenic storage. We even have the
Speaker 2: name of the person whose job it is to show
Speaker 2: these bodies to the heads of state and the people
Speaker 2: who are authorized to see them. They represent at least
Speaker 2: five different civilizations.
Speaker 3: I'm Toby ball in This is Strange Arrivals, Episode twelve,
Speaker 3: Priests at the Ziggarat What do you see when you
Speaker 3: look at the UFO world? Do you see scientists and
Speaker 3: researchers who are scoffed at by their colleagues while they
Speaker 3: work to uncover the great mystery of our times, a
Speaker 3: professional wrestling style artificial drama created by people playing roles
Speaker 3: in what is essentially an entertainment industry, or something more
Speaker 3: like a religion or spiritual movement guided by a select
Speaker 3: group determining its followers' beliefs. The answer is probably that
Speaker 3: there are elements of all three of these visions. But
Speaker 3: when I look, what I mostly see is something that
Speaker 3: resembles a religion.
Speaker 4: Stories of UFO sightings and especially UFO contact, people who
Speaker 4: claim contact or some sort of connection with extraterrestrial or
Speaker 4: ultraterrestrial or interdimensional beings. I think it has gone underrecognized
Speaker 4: as an element of American or maybe Western spirituality.
Speaker 3: Host of the Saucer Life podcast, Aaron.
Speaker 4: Gaullas, these are stories that are things that in another
Speaker 4: time and place might have been considered divine encounters of
Speaker 4: some kind, and so can there be some kind of
Speaker 4: way to integrate some of these stories into our conception
Speaker 4: of human experiences with the divine, with the supernatural, going
Speaker 4: all the way back as far as we have records
Speaker 4: of those things. At the same time, thinking about it
Speaker 4: like that might downplay the role that the popular culture
Speaker 4: and the historical context play in how these stories develop
Speaker 4: and what details are there.
Speaker 3: In this season's final episode, I want to look at
Speaker 3: a theme that has come up again and again in
Speaker 3: conversations that I've had in the course of making three
Speaker 3: seasons of Strange Arrivals. Belief in UFOs and other paranormal
Speaker 3: phenomena can occupy the same place in people's lives as religion,
Speaker 3: and this can affect how they view UFOs. We've heard
Speaker 3: about Robert Bigelow several times during this season. He is
Speaker 3: a billionaire the owner of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites
Speaker 3: of America. He once owned Skinwalker Ranch, lobbied Senator Harry
Speaker 3: Reid to fund a Pentagon program to investigate the paranormal,
Speaker 3: and reportedly retrofitted storage units in Las Vegas to house
Speaker 3: debris from crash to alien craft. These are just a
Speaker 3: few of the things that he initiated or funded. In
Speaker 3: June of twenty twenty, he founded the Bigelow Institute for
Speaker 3: Consciousness Studies, an organization that sponsored a competition offering a
Speaker 3: cash prize for the best evidence of the survival of
Speaker 3: consciousness after death. Bigelow founded this institute just four months
Speaker 3: after the death of his wife of fifty five years, Dianne.
Speaker 3: His interest in an afterlife, which his wife shared, predated
Speaker 3: Diane's death. In nineteen ninety two, their son committed suicide
Speaker 3: at the age of twenty four, a devastating event. In
Speaker 3: January twenty first, twenty twenty one New York Times article
Speaker 3: Ralph Blumenthal, who we heard from earlier this season, as
Speaker 3: John Max's biographer, wrote, seeking comfort. After their son's death,
Speaker 3: the Bigelows held sittings with the renowned medium George Anderson.
Speaker 3: Did their son make contact, Not really, mister Bigelow said,
Speaker 3: but what I got out of the readings I think
Speaker 3: was that his spirit existed and that he was okay.
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety seven, he established the Bigelow Chair of
Speaker 3: Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but
Speaker 3: shut it down after a few years when it didn't
Speaker 3: make much progress. He then turned his attention to studying UFOs.
Speaker 5: A lot of what drives Robert Bigelow's interest in the
Speaker 5: paranormal was the death of his son, which is a tragedy,
Speaker 5: but that type of loss will definitely push people to
Speaker 5: reach out to try and grab onto something greater in
Speaker 5: hopes that someone you love isn't truly lost.
Speaker 3: Journalist and host of The Alien State podcast MJ. Benaias
Speaker 3: they're out there somewhere, they're still around for sure.
Speaker 5: That's going to drive people. I know it would drive me.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've got kids. I know if something like
Speaker 5: that happened to me, I would definitely reach out to
Speaker 5: anything to try and hold on. So we know that
Speaker 5: there's this kind of moments in people's lives, whether it's
Speaker 5: through work, or whether it's through research, or whether it's
Speaker 5: through personal loss, as tragic as it is, that is
Speaker 5: going to propel them to find faith in something larger
Speaker 5: than themselves. And I think the UFO topic, I think
Speaker 5: the paranormal topic in general, is that I think it's
Speaker 5: just our natural tendency as a species to latch onto
Speaker 5: that which is bigger than us that we hope is there.
Speaker 3: Clearly, the desire for the existence of a greater power,
Speaker 3: be it divine or paranormal, can lead people down many paths,
Speaker 3: with religion being by far the most common, but it
Speaker 3: is not the only path.
Speaker 6: What kind of magical thinking do we do reflexibly on
Speaker 6: a daily basis that might not be as extreme as
Speaker 6: having a big, perfectly articulated argument why dinosaurs had to
Speaker 6: be on Noah's ark and they were vegetarians and whatnot.
Speaker 6: But we might do it nonetheless in smaller, trickier ways,
Speaker 6: and this universal kind of touching vulnerability to that. My
Speaker 6: name is Sarah Krasisdean, and I am a writer. And
Speaker 6: you'll find that I have a very strange hybrid accent
Speaker 6: because I am a dual American Australian citizen, and I've
Speaker 6: spent probably about half my life in each country. By
Speaker 6: this point.
Speaker 3: I spoke with Sarah about her book The Believer, which
Speaker 3: takes a look at the lives, experiences, and beliefs of
Speaker 3: people from six different walks of life. Death doula ghost hunter,
Speaker 3: Evangelical Christian at the Creation Museum, Mennonite, a woman incarcerated
Speaker 3: for killing her abusive husband, and UFO believer.
Speaker 6: I was hearing the same phrases again and again. And
Speaker 6: what the believer is is exprated together very different stories
Speaker 6: that on the surface have nothing in common. And I
Speaker 6: was hearing this phrase again from all these people, whether
Speaker 6: they were the ghost hunters or the euthologists, or fundamentalist
Speaker 6: Christians or Buddhists that this life can't be all there is.
Speaker 6: There has to be something else out there. And whether
Speaker 6: they came at that from a you know, kingdom come
Speaker 6: evangelist perspective, or a Buddhist non attachment perspective, or a
Speaker 6: personal kind of agency perspective or literal alien perspective, it
Speaker 6: was this longing for something more, for some meaning, for
Speaker 6: something greater than we appeared to be able to produce
Speaker 6: for ourselves in this kind of quotidian daily life. It's
Speaker 6: something that you know again, kind of I see across
Speaker 6: all these stories. I saw across the stories, whether it
Speaker 6: was the paranormal researchers, the ghost hunters at work, or
Speaker 6: some of the ethologists, the kind of inability, which is
Speaker 6: a very human, universal inability. We all do it in
Speaker 6: different ways to have difficulty tolerating uncertainty and therefore our
Speaker 6: own intractable lack of control over daily circumstances.
Speaker 3: Sarah sees a range of beliefs and interests addressing the
Speaker 3: human need to perceive something greater than ourselves. Again, for
Speaker 3: the vast, vast majority of people, this is found in religion.
Speaker 3: Religion runs on faith. You don't require scientific proof to believe,
Speaker 3: but that's not the case in the worlds of UFO
Speaker 3: and paranormal belief. The people in these worlds value proof.
Speaker 3: Robert Bigelow, for instance, has used his considerable fortune to
Speaker 3: study the phenomena he is interested in. It's not enough
Speaker 3: to believe or have faith, he wants scientific proof. Any
Speaker 3: number of cable television shows center O finding evidence evidence
Speaker 3: of aliens who have visited Earth in the distant past,
Speaker 3: evidence of more recent famous encounters such as Roswell or
Speaker 3: rendelstromp Forrest, more current evidence of UFOs taken by cell
Speaker 3: phones or cameras mounted on military jets, or evidence that
Speaker 3: the government is hiding the truth from US abduction researcher
Speaker 3: Bud Hopkins claimed that experiencers from around the globe were
Speaker 3: left with similar scoop shaped scars and even tiny implanted devices.
Speaker 3: The problem is that none of this evidence has stood
Speaker 3: up to scientific scrutiny as proof.
Speaker 7: I think that one of the reasons why people are
Speaker 7: getting into UFOs as opposed to say, other religions, is
Speaker 7: because in modern times, you know, we consider ourselves these
Speaker 7: kind of rational, scientific minded people, and UFOs can kind
Speaker 7: of take the place of religion. But we can see
Speaker 7: it being real. My name is Jeff Knox. I'm a
Speaker 7: UFO researcher. I tend to focus on the history of
Speaker 7: the topic. I also do a lot of work on
Speaker 7: archival stuff and digital preservation, scanning documents, files and preserving
Speaker 7: them for the next generation researchers.
Speaker 3: Jeff speculates that UFOs offer a plausible alternative to religion
Speaker 3: because our current technology and scientific knowledge make further advances
Speaker 3: such as travel to other solar systems seem attainable by
Speaker 3: us or someone else.
Speaker 7: We can hypothesize interstellar travel, we can hypothesize us visiting
Speaker 7: other planets, and we can think, well, maybe aliens are
Speaker 7: doing the same, they're visiting us, and so UFOs is
Speaker 7: something that kind of fits within our scientific worldview as
Speaker 7: something that's at least very plausible.
Speaker 3: About some people who become involved in the UFO topic.
Speaker 7: Jeff says, UFOs will act as kind of that belief
Speaker 7: system for them, and it seems more plausible than you know,
Speaker 7: fairies or angels or demons, because life in the universe
Speaker 7: ex stressal life is almost probably a certainty out there somewhere.
Speaker 3: Another aspect of this dynamic of UFOs as belief system
Speaker 3: is that skeptical pushback against UFO claims can be seen
Speaker 3: as an attack against a person's core beliefs. It's understandably threatening,
Speaker 3: and the response from believers can seem excessive. One person
Speaker 3: who is often on the end of these responses is
Speaker 3: UFO researcher Mick West.
Speaker 8: Is an interesting thing that blowback because the people in
Speaker 8: the UFO community, a lot of them are very passionate,
Speaker 8: and some of them are super passionate. It's almost like
Speaker 8: a religion, but in some ways it's more than a
Speaker 8: religion because for the individual person in ufology, they're often
Speaker 8: basing that belief on personal experience. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 8: if your religion was based upon God speaking to you directly,
Speaker 8: it will be that personal. And for someone who's seen
Speaker 8: a UFO or even in some cases feels like they
Speaker 8: were had contact with an alien or even were abducted
Speaker 8: by aliens, is a deeply personal thing, and so when
Speaker 8: someone comes along and they're saying, well, that's probably just
Speaker 8: a bird, they take it very much as a personal attack,
Speaker 8: and so they get very defensive. So I've kind of
Speaker 8: learned that over the years that you have to be
Speaker 8: understanding of people's beliefs if you're going to communicate effectively
Speaker 8: with them.
Speaker 3: So here's the thing. If you are a UFO believer,
Speaker 3: what kind of proof do you need? What is adequate
Speaker 3: to confirm to yourself that this is in some sense real?
Speaker 3: Because there is no hard evidence right now that is
Speaker 3: going to make the scientific case, or if there is,
Speaker 3: it's not public MJ. Benias.
Speaker 5: Whatever the phenomenon is, it's by definition kind of unknowable.
Speaker 5: You can observe UFOs for five thousand years and you
Speaker 5: will probably never get enough observational data to say, Okay,
Speaker 5: we can now make a scientific conclusion here. You can't
Speaker 5: just bring one into a lab. It's never really going
Speaker 5: to happen unless literally something crashes and we're able to
Speaker 5: recover it and haul it into a lab and study
Speaker 5: it or something. We have a lot of stories about
Speaker 5: that type of event occurring, but there's no actual evidence
Speaker 5: or data to back it up apart from just anecdote. Unfortunately.
Speaker 5: That's kind of where we're stuck.
Speaker 3: But is scientific certainty necessary for belief in UFOs? When
Speaker 3: I interviewed Diana Pisolka, who is a professor of philosophy
Speaker 3: and religion, at University of North Carolina Wilmington. I asked
Speaker 3: her a question about how proof of alien visitors would
Speaker 3: be accepted by religious and non religious people.
Speaker 9: People in religion, practitioners of religion already believe is things
Speaker 9: that are non human intelligences. They already had this category.
Speaker 9: They've lived with it their whole lives. Right, they go
Speaker 9: to synagogue, they go to temple, you know, they go
Speaker 9: to wherever you know, church, and there they talk about
Speaker 9: unseen realities, spiritual realities, things like that. Atheists want hardcore evidence,
Speaker 9: They want like a flying saucer to land on the
Speaker 9: White House lawn. But that kind of thing, I'm not
Speaker 9: sure they're gonna get that. They're gonna get some stuff,
Speaker 9: some you know, realities like radar signatures and things like that.
Speaker 9: They're gonna get that. They're also going to get a
Speaker 9: lot of reliable, credible witnesses who've seen things as well.
Speaker 3: So her answer seems to be that belief will have
Speaker 3: to be based on indications, not proof. Signs like radar
Speaker 3: signatures and stories, the types of things, signs and stories
Speaker 3: that underpin religions, and maybe that's all that Many people need,
Speaker 3: something that supports their faith in the existence of UFOs,
Speaker 3: even if it falls short of actual proof. But for others,
Speaker 3: myself included, something more is needed, something that would hold
Speaker 3: up under scientific scrutiny or in a court of law. MJ. Benias.
Speaker 5: For me to believe, I need to actually see it.
Speaker 5: I need to actually research it. I actually need to
Speaker 5: speak to the people who are there. I need to
Speaker 5: see more data in order for me to actually believe
Speaker 5: in it. And I think it's a lot of people,
Speaker 5: and I think that's why the UFO topic remains in
Speaker 5: this category of permanent observation and anecdote and never getting
Speaker 5: anywhere further.
Speaker 3: If this sounds like things are at an impasse, they aren't,
Speaker 3: because there is no lack of interpretation and conjecture about
Speaker 3: the types of information that Diana mentioned, and there is
Speaker 3: also the promise of more information to come after the
Speaker 3: break Strange Arrivals will return in a moment. Over the
Speaker 3: course of three seasons of Strange Arrivals, we've examined a
Speaker 3: host of leading figures in the UFO world. One who
Speaker 3: we haven't, though his name has come up a few times,
Speaker 3: is Jacques Vallet. Valet has had a wide ranging career,
Speaker 3: including as an astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist, but
Speaker 3: he is best known for his UFO research and theorizing.
Speaker 3: He is the inspiration for the character Claude Lacombe played
Speaker 3: by Francois Truffau in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Speaker 10: Vashonieri, please one more question.
Speaker 3: Have you recently had a Close Encounter? We heard John
Speaker 3: Keel complain that Vallet was taking his ideas earlier in
Speaker 3: this season. Valat is a critic of the extraterrestrial hypothesis
Speaker 3: and speculates that the phenomenon might be extra dimensional and
Speaker 3: responsible for some religious events, such as the Fatoma Visions,
Speaker 3: a supposed apparition of the Virgin Mary, who imparted prophecies
Speaker 3: to three farm children in Portugal in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 8: Mick West, I think this is something you see in
Speaker 8: UFO researchers, is that they're not really objective and that
Speaker 8: they a lot of people are interested in UFO research
Speaker 8: because they're trying to validate something. They're trying to validate
Speaker 8: a particular belief that they already hold, and so they're
Speaker 8: not really trying to figure out what happened in certain cases.
Speaker 8: They're trying to use certain cases to bolster their argument,
Speaker 8: and it seems fairly obvious that's what's happening, even if
Speaker 8: perhaps they don't realize it themselves. Jacques Valet has a
Speaker 8: tendency to believe everything that the witnesses say. So they've
Speaker 8: spin some complicated story about being visited by aliens or
Speaker 8: something happening, or white powder being sprayed on their house
Speaker 8: or something like that, and he believes that it all
Speaker 8: happened exactly as they described it, and then he tries
Speaker 8: to fit that into some kind of framework. And the
Speaker 8: only way you can really do it is kind of
Speaker 8: go really far out there. It's not just simply people
Speaker 8: seeing lights in the sky that they can't explain, which
Speaker 8: might be alien spaceships. I mean, that's almost fairly straightforward.
Speaker 8: How do you explain these actual encounters that people supposedly
Speaker 8: have and he comes up with explanations about essentially tricksters
Speaker 8: from other dimensions who are going in and perhaps even
Speaker 8: altering reality on an individual scale. They're really just not
Speaker 8: based on evidence. That just a way of trying to
Speaker 8: fit the stories into reality, and the stories really don't
Speaker 8: comport with reality. And so the simpler explanation is just
Speaker 8: that these stories are not accurate. But if your default
Speaker 8: position is to believe this story is one hundred percent accurate,
Speaker 8: then you've got to jump through so many hoops to
Speaker 8: try to make it actually fit in the world.
Speaker 3: We saw this dynamic with John Keel's theories about the
Speaker 3: super spectrum and ultra terrestrials. The point is that people
Speaker 3: like Valet and Keel and mac and Heinek have served
Speaker 3: as interpreters of UFO information throughout the years, and now,
Speaker 3: following the twenty seventeen New York Times article describing the
Speaker 3: Pentagon's UFO program, there is a new generation. The characteristic
Speaker 3: of this generation is that they claim to be privy
Speaker 3: to knowledge that the rest of us are not.
Speaker 6: I happen to be privileged enough to.
Speaker 1: Being on the fact that we have been visited on
Speaker 1: this planet.
Speaker 10: With absolute certainty, that four species, four different species at least,
Speaker 10: had been visiting this planet for thousands of years.
Speaker 11: And the original stuff that a tip did was Foye
Speaker 11: exempt and people, how do you know that? Because I
Speaker 11: stood there with the memo in my hand that said
Speaker 11: these are literally I watched the DoD memo that said
Speaker 11: it and it was signed.
Speaker 3: Is that it is my belief that the United States
Speaker 3: is in possession of exotic material, and unfortunately, that's about
Speaker 3: all I can I can say at this time. Again,
Speaker 3: M J.
Speaker 5: Benias, Ancient history was what I used to teach you,
Speaker 5: and the ancient Babylonians had these massive temples, and they
Speaker 5: would believe that at the very top of the temple,
Speaker 5: the priests could go in there and commune with the God.
Speaker 5: You could talk to the gods and the gods would respond,
Speaker 5: but only the priests could do it. If a person
Speaker 5: like you or me walked up the ziggarette and walked
Speaker 5: into this temple, nothing would happen. But if a priest
Speaker 5: did it, they would see God and they would communicate.
Speaker 5: It's kind of a very similar situation. We're kind of
Speaker 5: trusting people within the no trusting people who claim to
Speaker 5: have evidence of UFOs or evidence of aliens or whatever.
Speaker 5: We're trusting them to be the ones to communicate with
Speaker 5: the gods for us. But if we try, well, we're
Speaker 5: we're not on the inside, we're not part of that community.
Speaker 5: We're never going to get access to that. So it
Speaker 5: kind of exists in this kind of anecdotal world. Much
Speaker 5: like the priests of ancient days would communicate with gods
Speaker 5: and then come back down and say, like this God
Speaker 5: says this, you have to listen to me because I'm
Speaker 5: a priest. I think it's kind of a similar mindset.
Speaker 5: You have this kind of religious system operating within eufology,
Speaker 5: within the paranormal community, within nineteenth century spiritualism, of these
Speaker 5: kind of priestly class that functions at this high level,
Speaker 5: that has access to allegedly all the evidence from the anecdotes,
Speaker 5: and then the rest of us who will never see
Speaker 5: that ever in our lives.
Speaker 3: A theme in the world of ufology that goes back
Speaker 3: decades is the belief that the government knows much more
Speaker 3: about UFOs than it is letting on the idea that
Speaker 3: the government will at some point reveal publicly what they
Speaker 3: know is called disclosure with a capital D. We talked
Speaker 3: about this a little bit in the previous episode. The
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen New York Times article kicked off renewed anticipation
Speaker 3: that disclosure was imminent, if it wasn't already under way,
Speaker 3: and this heightened excitement about disclosure sets a dynamic that
Speaker 3: can be seen in religious movements. In eighteen twenty two,
Speaker 3: a wealthy Baptist named William Miller determined that the second
Speaker 3: Coming of Jesus Christ would occur in eighteen forty three
Speaker 3: or eighteen forty four. In eighteen thirty one, he made
Speaker 3: this prediction public, and over the next decade the movement grew.
Speaker 3: He eventually set several time periods or actual dates when
Speaker 3: the second Coming would occur, and each would see a
Speaker 3: building of excitement and then pass without event, but his
Speaker 3: followers remained until a final date of October twenty second,
Speaker 3: eighteen forty four was put forward and then passed. This
Speaker 3: was referred to as the Great Disappointment Capital G Capital D,
Speaker 3: but some followers remained in daily anticipation of Christ's return.
Speaker 3: More recently, in nineteen ninety three, the ninety year old
Speaker 3: Monoca Mendel Schneerson suffered a stroke while praying at the
Speaker 3: grave of his father, leaving him unable to speak. Schneerson
Speaker 3: was a rabbi in the lubavitre sect of Orthodox Judaism,
Speaker 3: based in the Crown Heights section of New York City.
Speaker 3: He was known as the Rebbee, a title given to
Speaker 3: the spiritual leader of the sect. There was a wide
Speaker 3: belief in the Lubavitor community that Schneerson was likely the
Speaker 3: Masayak or Messiah. After his stroke, the community was consumed
Speaker 3: with the expectation that at any minute he would be
Speaker 3: revealed as the Messiah. This is from the January third,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety three edition of The New York Times about
Speaker 3: so called messiah beepers. In the pre cell phone days,
Speaker 3: beepers or pagers were a way to get a message
Speaker 3: to someone who wasn't by their landline phone. The messiah
Speaker 3: beeper was to alert people that the Messiah was revealed.
Speaker 12: They need the beepers so they know immediately when the
Speaker 12: Messiah has arrived. There's an expectation that at any moment
Speaker 12: there will be a revelation, said heim Alberstam, the audio
Speaker 12: visual expert who oversees Messiah beeber sales. People are very
Speaker 12: tense waiting could happen any second, said schiffra Hendry.
Speaker 3: This kind of anticipation is very powerful. It galvanizes believers
Speaker 3: and disclosure acts in a similar way. The truth is
Speaker 3: going to be revealed soon, or the revealing of the
Speaker 3: truth has already begun. The two congressionally mandated Pentagon UFO
Speaker 3: reports over the past two years were the subject of
Speaker 3: great expectations from the UFO community, thinking that this would
Speaker 3: be the moment that the government secrets were revealed. Both
Speaker 3: reports were duds, revealing little and forcing believers to sift
Speaker 3: through the verbiage for clues. But an odd thing happens
Speaker 3: when these events fail to come off. Many followers don't
Speaker 3: lose faith. Often, in fact, they become even more convinced.
Speaker 3: William Miller's followers stayed with him through several prophecied dates
Speaker 3: that ended in disappointment. The same happens in the UFO community.
Speaker 7: What ends up happening is the prophesied disclosure or the
Speaker 7: prophecies landing of the ships never happens, and so it
Speaker 7: dies down for a bit, and then it repeats all
Speaker 7: over again. Cycles or people come up with new justifications
Speaker 7: as to why the disclosure hasn't happened yet, or as
Speaker 7: to why in some of those religions the ships haven't
Speaker 7: landed yet. To help us all out, they come up
Speaker 7: with excuses and justifications as to why the prophecy's never occurred.
Speaker 7: They push it, and this is basically again the same
Speaker 7: thing you see with disclosure. They come up with reasons
Speaker 7: why it doesn't occur and then they push the data
Speaker 7: out further. This way, you kind of never reach an
Speaker 7: endpoint and you can keep the cycle going perpetually. And
Speaker 7: unfortunately a lot of people in the UFO world, while
Speaker 7: they may not be in an actual uf OR religion,
Speaker 7: they treat the topic like a religion. It becomes their
Speaker 7: belief system and they approach it in the exact same way.
Speaker 3: I want to come back to something we looked at
Speaker 3: in episode ten, John Keel's ideas about the super spectrum
Speaker 3: and ultraterrestrials. In his book The Eighth Tower, he lays
Speaker 3: out his theory that there is a whole reality that
Speaker 3: inhabits the same space that we do, but which we
Speaker 3: cannot detect because it exists at frequencies beyond our ability
Speaker 3: to sense. Occasionally, his theory goes, a being from the
Speaker 3: super spectrum is pulled into our reality. In our reality,
Speaker 3: it doesn't have a form until it is experienced by someone,
Speaker 3: at which point it adopts the form that matches the
Speaker 3: experiencer's expectations. That is, it appears to be what the
Speaker 3: observer expects of a paranormal being expect a ghost, and
Speaker 3: the ultra terrestrial is a ghost. Expect an alien, and
Speaker 3: you get an alien. The idea is that there is
Speaker 3: an external thing that exists but doesn't really have a
Speaker 3: form until it is given one by our own subconscious
Speaker 3: It is created both outside of and within us. Does
Speaker 3: this make sense? Maybe not literally, but that's not how
Speaker 3: Keel claims he meant it. Researcher and folklore professor David Clark.
Speaker 10: I thought he was convinced that these ultra terrestrials were
Speaker 10: real and the big sort of thing that blow as
Speaker 10: he was at the time when I met him and
Speaker 10: we had this long discussion, was he just told me
Speaker 10: that he invents it. The whole thing.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 10: It was a literary device.
Speaker 3: And it seems to me to be a great literary
Speaker 3: device because people have always told stories about the magical
Speaker 3: or the paranormal. These stories have been told through centuries
Speaker 3: and across cultures. Jacques Valet would say that these stories
Speaker 3: are told about something real and strange that we don't understand.
Speaker 3: I think telling these stories is part of the human condition.
Speaker 3: It's a way of trying to understand the world we
Speaker 3: find ourselves in. The Other part of this is that
Speaker 3: these stories reflect the times UFOs appear in the late
Speaker 3: nineteen forties, when our own craft were becoming increasingly common
Speaker 3: sights in the skies. Before that, it was airships that
Speaker 3: reflected our use of hot air balloons, and before that,
Speaker 3: when we had no access to the skies, it was
Speaker 3: divine beings such as angels. And this makes these stories
Speaker 3: different from religious stories, which stay rooted in the era
Speaker 3: they were created. There is no serious reimagining of Old
Speaker 3: Testament figures in the mind world. They will always be
Speaker 3: of their time. Throughout this season, we've looked at the
Speaker 3: effect that researchers have on UFO accounts. I think about
Speaker 3: Keel's literary device and how our expectations determine what form
Speaker 3: the paranormal takes. I think these expectations largely come from
Speaker 3: a handful of prominent UFO researchers. Did Bud Hopkins, David Jacobs,
Speaker 3: and John Mack stumble upon a vast conspiracy of alien abduction,
Speaker 3: or did their accounts of it cause some people to
Speaker 3: interpret their own experiences, whatever they were, real or imagined,
Speaker 3: as abductions. Did Jacobs and Mac happen to only interview
Speaker 3: people whose abduction experiences fit with their theories, or did
Speaker 3: the researchers they talked with determine how their subjects recalled
Speaker 3: abduction experiences. I'm sometimes asked how researching three seasons of
Speaker 3: this podcast has changed my thoughts about UFOs. Well, it
Speaker 3: hasn't changed my belief that there aren't actual physical craft
Speaker 3: from a different planet or different dimension flying around our skies.
Speaker 3: I just don't see the evidence. I think it's also
Speaker 3: important to acknowledge, though, that a lot of people sincerely
Speaker 3: believe that they have had experiences with UFOs or the paranormal,
Speaker 3: whether it be experiencers of alien abduction or witnesses to
Speaker 3: the appearance of strange lights or craft, and these perceived
Speaker 3: experiences often have a profound effect on those people's lives.
Speaker 3: Just because I don't believe their experiences were the result
Speaker 3: of something not of this world doesn't mean I don't
Speaker 3: honor their right to their own memories. In the end,
Speaker 3: they agree with Aaron Gullias when he says that UFO's
Speaker 3: stories are under recognized as an element of American spirituality.
Speaker 3: They are the mythology of the technology driven post World
Speaker 3: War two world, and like myths from other times, they
Speaker 3: tell a story about our fears and our aspirations. Strange
Speaker 3: Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild
Speaker 3: from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: produced by Rima El Kali, Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin,
Speaker 1: with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron and
Speaker 1: supervising producer Josh Thame. Learn more about the show at
Speaker 1: Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals and find more podcasts
Speaker 1: from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.