Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 2: For the best experience, listen with headphones. This is a
Speaker 2: bonus episode of season three of Strange Arrivals. Bonus episodes
Speaker 2: feature interviews that I conducted during my research but that
Speaker 2: I either didn't use or used sparingly in the main episodes.
Speaker 2: There were great conversations that, for one reason or another,
Speaker 2: didn't make the cut, but I think they add valuable
Speaker 2: perspective to the ideas we explored this season. Doctor Diana
Speaker 2: Pisolka is professor of philosophy and religion at University of
Speaker 2: North Carolina, Wilmington and the author of the very interesting
Speaker 2: book American Cosmic. I interviewed her in May of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, just a few days before the first congressional
Speaker 2: hearing in more than fifty years, to focus on military
Speaker 2: reports of UFOs. As you'll see, we have quite different
Speaker 2: takes on the UFO phenomenon, but I think she has
Speaker 2: a unique approach and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Speaker 1: So I am Diana Pasolka, and I'm a professor at
Speaker 1: the University of North Carolina in Wilmington and I have
Speaker 1: been a professor there for twenty years. I have a
Speaker 1: PhD in religious studies, and my field has been in
Speaker 1: Catholic history and Catholic traditions. That's what I was trained in.
Speaker 1: Before that, I lived in California. I grew up in
Speaker 1: the California environment of eclectic spirituality. My mother is kind
Speaker 1: of like a reformed Jew, and my father was Catholic.
Speaker 1: I went to Catholic schools. I was Catholic, really, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, and I went to Catholic high school. And
Speaker 1: then after that I decided to attend the Jesuit School Theology,
Speaker 1: which is a tribute. It's affiliated with Berkeley's UC Berkeley's
Speaker 1: they have a partnership. It's like a divinity school. It's
Speaker 1: called the Graduate Theological Union. And I did my master's
Speaker 1: degree with taking classes at UC Berkeley and taking classes
Speaker 1: at the Jesuit School Theology and the Jewish School Theology there,
Speaker 1: and then I went to Syracuse University to get a PhD.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, And one other thing about the way
Speaker 1: I've been trained is I did this in the late
Speaker 1: nineties and nineties and well actually throughout the nineties. And
Speaker 1: this was in California, where I grew up during the
Speaker 1: dot com boom, so I was fascinated with technology and
Speaker 1: how technology informs belief and especially like beliefs about God
Speaker 1: and things like that. So I've spent a lot of time,
Speaker 1: actually since I was eleven, reading everything I could about religion, religion, technology, technology, philosophy,
Speaker 1: you know, everything I could find about these these things.
Speaker 1: So I didn't intend ever to study UFOs. I thought
Speaker 1: that they were very odd. I didn't want anything to
Speaker 1: do with them. But I ended up doing that in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, and now I've been doing that ever since.
Speaker 2: So twenty eleven, what was kind of your entree into
Speaker 2: the UFO world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of strange, but this is it. There
Speaker 1: were a few things. I was finishing a book on
Speaker 1: the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, in which it was it
Speaker 1: was a huge project. I went to archives all over
Speaker 1: and I looked at anecdotes from European Catholics, North American Catholics,
Speaker 1: Canadian Catholics, from you know, for the Europeans back to
Speaker 1: Frankly from the eleven hundreds up to the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: And what I was looking at is Catholics used to
Speaker 1: do devotions to souls in purgatory, and that all kind
Speaker 1: of stopped, and they don't do those anymore, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to know why. And so what I found was
Speaker 1: I found the reasons for that, and I wrote a
Speaker 1: book about it. But I also found that Catholics had
Speaker 1: a lot of experiences of aerial phenomena from basically a
Speaker 1: thousand years ago till now. And because they're Catholics, and
Speaker 1: you know, and their the Catholic Church takes pretty good notes,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're known for their record keeping. And
Speaker 1: I've been to the Vatican Library and Secret Archive and
Speaker 1: looked at a lot of the documents there. I found
Speaker 1: that there were all of these aerial phenomena incidences, and
Speaker 1: the frameworks for understanding those were basically religious, you know,
Speaker 1: like they've you know, they thought these were their souls
Speaker 1: from purgatory. They'd see something like a disc in the
Speaker 1: sky and they'd call it an angel, or they call
Speaker 1: it a demon, or they call it a lost soul
Speaker 1: from purgatory. But they were, you know, the patterns were
Speaker 1: really the same. And at this point it never occurred
Speaker 1: to me that these were like kind of like UFOs,
Speaker 1: but they were. They were you know, unidentified objects that
Speaker 1: then were identified through Catholic frameworks. So I finished this
Speaker 1: book and I had a big log of these accounts,
Speaker 1: and I didn't quite understand. I knew that i'd do
Speaker 1: something with them, but I wasn't quite sure what. And
Speaker 1: the Japanese tsunami happened, and that was just something that
Speaker 1: was so incredibly devastating and tragic and like just apocalyptic, right,
Speaker 1: like kind of like the end of the world for
Speaker 1: this country kind of thing that I started to think
Speaker 1: about the apocalyptic nature of things. There was also something
Speaker 1: that happened in twenty eleven in Berkeley. This man predicted
Speaker 1: the end of the world and all of these people
Speaker 1: believed him and kind of like sold everything they had,
Speaker 1: their retirement and everything for this man. And sadly, a
Speaker 1: young person committed suicide because she believed that the end
Speaker 1: of the world was going to happen. So I was
Speaker 1: really not happy about this. My students were wanting to know,
Speaker 1: is it going to be the end of the world,
Speaker 1: And I was like, no, no, no, you know, this
Speaker 1: has been happening for a long time, Like the end
Speaker 1: of the world has been predicted so many times. It
Speaker 1: hasn't happened, right, But I was still fascinated with apocalyptic narratives,
Speaker 1: which are end of the world type narratives, that I
Speaker 1: started to study those. And what happened was that I
Speaker 1: found that a lot of people who had these apocalyptic
Speaker 1: narratives were also what people call experiencers, people who experience
Speaker 1: UFO events, And I thought that was confounding. So I
Speaker 1: started to get into studying communities of people who were experiencers.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I showed a friend of
Speaker 1: mine my log of Catholic history anecdotes, you know, of
Speaker 1: aero phenomena, and he said, this looks like UFOs, you know,
Speaker 1: And I said, you're crazy, But you know, it all
Speaker 1: came together for me one weekend when I attended a
Speaker 1: conference on UFOs and I saw, I heard experiencers talk
Speaker 1: about their experiences, and I realized, the patterns here are
Speaker 1: so similar to the patterns from eight hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: six hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, that this
Speaker 1: is what I have to study now. And it started there.
Speaker 2: That's interesting when you take a look at something like
Speaker 2: that as a religious studies training religious studies, so are
Speaker 2: you looking at it as there is you know, a
Speaker 2: thing that's been happening through all these years, and it's
Speaker 2: just people kind of interpret it differently based on sort
Speaker 2: of their cultural you know, their cultural moment or their beliefs,
Speaker 2: or is it that there's something in the human condition
Speaker 2: that sort of manifests like this, And so you get
Speaker 2: these different stories coming down through the year. Because I'm
Speaker 2: sure you could go back further to Greek times or whatever,
Speaker 2: where you know, they talk about God's being in the
Speaker 2: skies and stuff like that. Like I understand that for
Speaker 2: religious studies, you're kind of setting aside whether you know
Speaker 2: the doctrine is real, you're but you're studying the doctrine itself.
Speaker 2: Is that right? Am I? Right in that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So the framework that I was trained in is
Speaker 1: a framework that's actually changing and has changed. And I'm
Speaker 1: one of the people that, well, I have to say
Speaker 1: I have to change it because it doesn't that method
Speaker 1: doesn't work here in this case. So the method is
Speaker 1: this is that we're told to bracket our beliefs about
Speaker 1: whatever we're studying. Say it's like apparitions of the Virgin
Speaker 1: Mary or you know, things like that, and we're told
Speaker 1: to study communities and social effects. But the truth of
Speaker 1: the matter is kind of some we don't actually get into.
Speaker 1: We don't say, well, these people are obviously constructed in
Speaker 1: their own you know, they're embedded in their own religious frameworks,
Speaker 1: so they're not going to see this for what it
Speaker 1: actually is, which is like some kind of socio economic phenomena.
Speaker 1: And that was how not necessarily. I feel like my
Speaker 1: department at Syracuse University was better than that, Like they
Speaker 1: understood that that there's something more than that, and I
Speaker 1: think I stumbled upon the something more, and so I
Speaker 1: had to kind of hammer out a methodology for studying
Speaker 1: this stuff because frankly, when I studied Catholic history and
Speaker 1: extraordinary types of things that happened in Catholic history, I
Speaker 1: never had the kinds of things happened to me that
Speaker 1: happened to me when I first studied UFOs. I had
Speaker 1: people that were government affiliated come to me and want
Speaker 1: to talk to me about what I was studying. Literally,
Speaker 1: I had FBI agents wanting to talk with me, and
Speaker 1: that never happened to me when I was doing this
Speaker 1: other research. So obviously things are different in this field, right,
Speaker 1: So you've got something that people are perceiving as transcendent
Speaker 1: and they're having experiences of religion with it, right, spiritual experiences,
Speaker 1: and you're also having government agencies fascinated with it. There
Speaker 1: there will be a hearing next Tuesday about this. This
Speaker 1: is May what May eleventh today? Yeah, so in a
Speaker 1: couple of days, and it's a hearing on the reality
Speaker 1: and security issues of aerial phenomena. Right, And that would
Speaker 1: never happen in anybody else's except for you know, if
Speaker 1: you study like other religions that are involved in there's
Speaker 1: a lot of war that goes on with you know,
Speaker 1: different religious interpretations. So it was a different kind of
Speaker 1: way for me to study. And I'm still working that out. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'm doing a lot of publication right now where I
Speaker 1: am helping people in my field, people in anthropology, people
Speaker 1: in the social sciences, try to understand what's going on.
Speaker 1: And this is what I have so far. Okay, how
Speaker 1: do we study something that appears to be transhistorical, Right,
Speaker 1: So we're looking at something that most people would identify
Speaker 1: with a certain time period, and most scholars identify the
Speaker 1: rise of the UFO belief and practice and things like
Speaker 1: that with the Cold War between Russia and the United
Speaker 1: States starting in the nineteen thirties and forties, mostly started
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties, and they say, this is obviously
Speaker 1: a Cold War kind of anxiety narrative. And at first,
Speaker 1: you know, Carl Jung, he's you know, he's kind of
Speaker 1: the famous intellectual who you know, founded different types of
Speaker 1: psychology like union and psychology. And he basically said the
Speaker 1: same thing when he first started studying flying saucers and
Speaker 1: the UFOs. Well, then what happened was similar to what
Speaker 1: happened to me, was that a few people from the
Speaker 1: government said to him military specifically, you need to come
Speaker 1: look at some evidence, and so he did. He looked
Speaker 1: at some evidence. After that he changed his perspective and
Speaker 1: he said, I don't understand. He said, I think this
Speaker 1: is an archetype, but it actually has physical components to it.
Speaker 1: So he was also getting into this kind of you know,
Speaker 1: what are we dealing with right now? So what I'm
Speaker 1: working on now is this idea that it's this thing
Speaker 1: called a myth theme. So it's a myth theme. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a meme myth. And what this
Speaker 1: is is it is an idea that is way more
Speaker 1: than a myth. Okay, So a myth is something that
Speaker 1: a myth theme is thought to be kind of the
Speaker 1: progenitor of the myth. So it's there's something that occurs,
Speaker 1: like a story that keeps occurring, but the characters are
Speaker 1: changing for different periods of time, but the story remains
Speaker 1: the same. Right that there are these non human intelligences.
Speaker 1: They interact with humans. Sometimes they give us things, like
Speaker 1: Prometheus gave us technology, you know. So this looks like
Speaker 1: that kind of a mythme. However, in this day and age,
Speaker 1: we even have to change this idea of the mythme
Speaker 1: because mythings except for the case of Prometheus, where we
Speaker 1: actually do have fire, right, you know, and we did
Speaker 1: have fire, but we didn't have any evidence that this
Speaker 1: Greek god or Titan gave us this fire. But here
Speaker 1: in this day and age, we have some very strange
Speaker 1: things that are happening. And so I start out with
Speaker 1: that in the book American Cosmic, I read it a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago, and this so this is what
Speaker 1: happened to me, And it's very much like a mythme.
Speaker 1: I'm just a kind of normal idiot human going about
Speaker 1: my day, right, and then I start to study something
Speaker 1: that I assume is just to myth and a lot
Speaker 1: of people tell me it's not. Well, one person in particular,
Speaker 1: who I call Tyler in my book, he works for
Speaker 1: a space agency. He's a you know, Space Shuttle launch
Speaker 1: mission controller, and so he tries to get in touch
Speaker 1: with me through friends, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I want to complicate my life like this,
Speaker 1: but it's what I study, so it's kind of part
Speaker 1: of my job. So finally, after about a year, I say, yo, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk. And he says this to me. He says,
Speaker 1: you think that this is completely subjective, and he goes,
Speaker 1: fair enough, but what if I told you that it's not?
Speaker 1: And what if I give you evidence that it's not?
Speaker 1: And I said, I'm open to that. And so he
Speaker 1: suggested that we go to New Mexico to this place
Speaker 1: where there's an alleged UFO crash. It's not Roswell, and
Speaker 1: I said, I'll go, not thinking that, not understanding the
Speaker 1: circumstances of going. So apparently it's this kind of secret
Speaker 1: place under a no fly zone to wear a blindfold
Speaker 1: going to it, and so I'm like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a friend. I'm not going by myself.
Speaker 1: And so he said, hey, I had to get permission
Speaker 1: for you to come, so it's either just you or
Speaker 1: no one else. And you know, no one else can come.
Speaker 1: And I said, no, I'm not going to go then,
Speaker 1: And so I suggested who it now is known. It's
Speaker 1: Gary Nolan. Gary Nolan is a professor at Stanford University
Speaker 1: and he's a molecular biologist and he's really a well
Speaker 1: known professor, just kind of like a superstar. And he's
Speaker 1: also interested in UFOs, but from a different perspective than me.
Speaker 1: And so we'd become, you know, pals. And I said,
Speaker 1: I like to take Gary Nolan, and so Tyler. I
Speaker 1: knew that Tyler would say yes because I think that
Speaker 1: ultimately Tyler wanted to show us that there was actually
Speaker 1: physical evidence of anomalist debris. And so Gary went and
Speaker 1: I went, we did you know? We blindfolded, We got blindfolded.
Speaker 1: We went to this place and we had these metal
Speaker 1: detectors and you know, so this was how American Cosmic
Speaker 1: opens up, and this was what I did, you know,
Speaker 1: and then everything happens after that, these debris get analyzed.
Speaker 1: You know a lot of things happen. I write American
Speaker 1: Cosmic I traveled to Rome to look at, you know,
Speaker 1: things that are in the Vatican Secret Archive, even having
Speaker 1: to do with New Mexico, strangely enough, things from like
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. You can say that it was a
Speaker 1: constant having my mind completely you know, regenerated, like every
Speaker 1: month or so kind of like so Tyler was right,
Speaker 1: Like I definitely shifted my perspective to realize that there
Speaker 1: had to be a new way because something really interesting
Speaker 1: is happening right now.
Speaker 2: My conversation with Diana Pisolka will continue after the break.
Speaker 2: I asked Diana Pisolka about the upcoming congressional hearing on
Speaker 2: UFOs that was going to be held in May twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, shortly after this interview took place.
Speaker 1: I think that what they're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: is well, first off, do I think they're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about the right things? That's a good question.
Speaker 1: I think that there's something that's going on. If I
Speaker 1: didn't have a historical perspective on this and actually see
Speaker 1: these things in documents from two hundred years ago, three
Speaker 1: hundred years ago, like I said, I would think that
Speaker 1: this is some kind of weapon that's developed, like a
Speaker 1: stealth weapon. Okay, but I do have that historical perspective,
Speaker 1: so that complicates it for me, Like it'd be awesome
Speaker 1: just to say put it in a and say, ah,
Speaker 1: this is just another stealth weapon campaign kind of thing.
Speaker 1: You know, we shouldn't know about it because we're civilians
Speaker 1: and you know, they're just doing what they do the military.
Speaker 1: But it's not that. Now, let's take this into context
Speaker 1: since the nineteen forties, and it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: phenomena that's been around prior to the nineteen forties, but
Speaker 1: it gets exacerbated in the nineteen forties. Why probably because
Speaker 1: we're going all over into airspaces right where like we
Speaker 1: developed the Air Force. I mean, the Air Force comes along,
Speaker 1: and I believe it's nineteen forty seven too. I think
Speaker 1: it's also as the CIA that comes along in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven. So a lot of things happened at this
Speaker 1: time is at a coincidence. So maybe before we weren't
Speaker 1: flying around like two hundred years ago, we just saw
Speaker 1: these things from the ground and had to develop an
Speaker 1: interpretive framework for that. Well, now we're seeing them from
Speaker 1: in the sky and sometimes in space. So the question
Speaker 1: then becomes, well, this narrative has to change, right, because
Speaker 1: we have more information, we have better tools to understand
Speaker 1: this information. So we're in the very midst of reassessing
Speaker 1: what this information is. And we don't have religions to
Speaker 1: fall back on. Well, we actually do, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people are not going to fall back on those
Speaker 1: religions because we've been secular. You know, we have a
Speaker 1: very secular society that more people well I would say
Speaker 1: more people, but a lot of people who are not
Speaker 1: religious are actually believers in UFOs. Okay, so you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of this stuff going on.
Speaker 2: I then asked Diana if she thought, from her perspective,
Speaker 2: the right questions would be asked during the hearing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. And I was putting this in context of,
Speaker 1: you know, we've had a perception management campaign from the
Speaker 1: nineteen well, let's see, when did it start. It started
Speaker 1: right after the nineteen forties, right, and it went off.
Speaker 1: It was Project Blue.
Speaker 2: Book, right, right, so like forty seven, yeah, through sixty
Speaker 2: a long time whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and the people that were
Speaker 1: involved in it, we have to forgive them now, but
Speaker 1: we shouldn't forgive them if they still do this. So
Speaker 1: the people that were involved in it, like Heineck. Alan Heineck,
Speaker 1: he was he was a debunker, so his job was
Speaker 1: to go debunk claims of UFOs and no one really
Speaker 1: bought that, right, like the American public said, Ah, no way,
Speaker 1: especially after the big Michigan UFO flat in the nineteen sixties. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Heineck comes out and he even jokes, and he says, Okay,
Speaker 1: I actually do believe that there's something here. I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is, but we definitely need to study it.
Speaker 1: Is what he basically comes out to say. All right,
Speaker 1: So that's why we can forgive him is because he's
Speaker 1: he's you know, gone back on what he did, which
Speaker 1: is intentionally creating disinformation and discrediting witnesses uncle stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: but maybe in context back then we can understand it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I give them a pass, but I don't give
Speaker 1: people like Dodia pass. You know, at this point, we're
Speaker 1: mature enough to deal with it, right, and so I
Speaker 1: say that. You know, so these congressional hearings, let's put
Speaker 1: these in the context of that. The attempted dupe campaign
Speaker 1: has been going on for so many years. You know,
Speaker 1: we have lots of witness reports from civilians, respectable credible
Speaker 1: civilians and even air force personnel and people like that.
Speaker 1: We have people like me who are you know, have
Speaker 1: studied religion and know those languages of back in the
Speaker 1: day and can translate those documents. So we do have
Speaker 1: that as well, which we didn't actually think to have
Speaker 1: back in the forties. Right, even though the Ellis were
Speaker 1: doing out at the time, they were saying, wow, you know,
Speaker 1: look at this kind of historical consistency. So I guess
Speaker 1: my point is that let's not be afraid to open
Speaker 1: it up to better study and also to you know,
Speaker 1: these campaigns that have been going on, this misinformation campaign.
Speaker 1: So I just questioned whether it's still happening, because it
Speaker 1: happened back then, it's been happening for years and years.
Speaker 1: And in fact, my book American Cosmic kind of like
Speaker 1: broke it open too, even though I didn't need to.
Speaker 1: I was I was hanging out with people who were
Speaker 1: part of these programs, which at the time weren't acknowledged
Speaker 1: to be programs. And then in twenty seventeen and eighteen,
Speaker 1: and by the way, my book was already written at
Speaker 1: this point, they came out and said these things are real, right,
Speaker 1: and these programs are real. And I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: I did that, but I was I didn't have any
Speaker 1: help doing it, like you know, I kind of was
Speaker 1: doing it on my own. So I had a comment
Speaker 1: so can cous me. It's a parallel tradition of whatever
Speaker 1: kind of disclosure they're doing right now. It was like
Speaker 1: kind of a frankly, like a disclosure that was not
Speaker 1: meant to be that's American cosmic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels to me when I was reading it,
Speaker 2: like it's almost like, I guess you used the word
Speaker 2: parallel that it seems like it's a little bit and
Speaker 2: this is not this is only in a good way
Speaker 2: removed from like a lot of the stuff that you
Speaker 2: see is sort of more prominent. I think, yes, And
Speaker 2: that's one of the reasons why I thought it was
Speaker 2: really interesting is because it it doesn't engage in any
Speaker 2: of that stuff at all. It seems to be really
Speaker 2: focused on on you know, a few individuals who are
Speaker 2: you know, thinking about this in sort of interesting ways,
Speaker 2: and then you're own thoughts And I guess you talk
Speaker 2: a lot about jock La too. And I was just
Speaker 2: trying to you know, when I was asking that question.
Speaker 2: I was trying to think of some congressman from Nebraska
Speaker 2: or something asking a question about material reality versus spiritual reality,
Speaker 2: and like, how does that apply to the phenomenon that
Speaker 2: to me seems seems like a really interesting question and
Speaker 2: probably is getting more to it, more towards some kind
Speaker 2: of understanding than what I assume they're going to talk about,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, sort of more concrete things that
Speaker 2: they think they have around, like the Nimts or whatever.
Speaker 2: The tic TAC video. Congressional hearings aren't really set up
Speaker 2: to deal with like the kind of really interesting stuff
Speaker 2: that you have in your book, because you know, I
Speaker 2: think a lot of their constituents would be just like,
Speaker 2: what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: Definitely, I think that if they do talk about religion,
Speaker 1: it's going to be this way, because I've had some
Speaker 1: ask me already, you know, will disclosure that extraterrestrials exist ruined, Like,
Speaker 1: will they will completely you know, destabilize the religious traditions
Speaker 1: of the world. That's their question, that's what they want
Speaker 1: to know. And I always answer them no, because, you know,
Speaker 1: contrary to what they think, people in religious traditions have
Speaker 1: talked about extraterrestrials for a thousand years or more, like
Speaker 1: they've been talking about, are their tribes on Venus? You know,
Speaker 1: do people live on the moon? Like what kinds of
Speaker 1: creatures are out there? They believe that their god, whoever
Speaker 1: it is, you know, in the different religious traditions, is
Speaker 1: big enough to have created all of these things. And
Speaker 1: so the people who are actually religious have a category
Speaker 1: within which they can put extraterrestrials. And I think it's
Speaker 1: more secular people and especiallytually hardcore atheists that will like
Speaker 1: be destabilized. So if they're worried about some groups of people,
Speaker 1: those are the ones they should be worried about.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. Why do you think it would destabilize atheists
Speaker 2: in particular?
Speaker 1: Because people in religion, practitioners of religion already believe in
Speaker 1: things that are non human intelligences. They already had this category.
Speaker 1: They've lived with it their whole lives. Right, they go
Speaker 1: to synagogue, they go to temple, you know, they go
Speaker 1: to wherever you know, church, and there they talk about
Speaker 1: unseen realities, spiritual realities, things like that. Okay, atheists want
Speaker 1: hardcore evidence. They want like a flying saucer to land
Speaker 1: on the White House lawn, which it almost did, by
Speaker 1: the way, in the nineteen fifty which I think is
Speaker 1: really funny, you know, it's ironic. But that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure they're going to get that. They're going
Speaker 1: to get some stuff, some you know, realities like you know,
Speaker 1: signatures and things like that, you know, radar signatures and
Speaker 1: things like that, and they're going to get that. They're
Speaker 1: also going to get a lot of reliable, credible witnesses
Speaker 1: you've seen things as well, and apparently now they're going
Speaker 1: to get peer reviewed research on weird anomalist debris.
Speaker 2: So it's funny because I like, I'm an atheist, and
Speaker 2: I would love to see the kind of evidence that
Speaker 2: I could like take to a courtroom and like make
Speaker 2: a case on, you know. And I never really thought
Speaker 2: about the idea that, like having a more sort of
Speaker 2: religious background in which you're willing to, I guess seriously
Speaker 2: consider things that don't have that kind of evidence would
Speaker 2: better prepare you for something like this. I've always kind
Speaker 2: of thought of it as being, you know, so much,
Speaker 2: at least in my understanding, I certainly would not you
Speaker 2: know a lot more about this than I do, but
Speaker 2: sort of the centrality of man to religion and that
Speaker 2: we're man as man and God's image to the fact
Speaker 2: that there are you know, aliens with huge heads and
Speaker 2: little bodies and stuff. It's like, does that in some
Speaker 2: way sort of undermine this idea that humans are specifically
Speaker 2: God's chosen creatures or whatever?
Speaker 1: Sure, Oh, if I can't actually address what you just
Speaker 1: said about.
Speaker 2: Religion, yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Okay, So yeah, so what you just described is a
Speaker 1: very I don't want it's a very typical way of
Speaker 1: looking at religion. Right. So, you know, so atheists and
Speaker 1: people who are agnostic and you know kind of like
Speaker 1: just non religious people think of religious people as being
Speaker 1: fairly superficial in what they believe to be their dogmas. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, man is created in the image of God
Speaker 1: and by the ways, and if you go back to Genesis,
Speaker 1: like we're talking about the Christian and Jewish tradition and
Speaker 1: even you know, the Muslim tradition, it's there are two
Speaker 1: creation stories in Genesis, and one of them is about
Speaker 1: a female and a male, but the other one is
Speaker 1: just about human creatures. So it's like non gendered human
Speaker 1: creatures are non gender and God refers to God's self
Speaker 1: in the plural right, So once we start to and
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of people who are religious,
Speaker 1: so they're not in actuality as we paint them, right
Speaker 1: as these people who just believe that these things are
Speaker 1: the case, they have more nuanced ideas. And also I
Speaker 1: think that we have to be careful about using the
Speaker 1: Jewish Christian history and saying that religions have to look
Speaker 1: like them, because look at Buddhism, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: many denominations of Buddhism. They might have things called bodysphas
Speaker 1: that look like saints or gods or something, but there
Speaker 1: is no God. There's no idea of God in Buddhism.
Speaker 1: It's a it's kind of a I wouldn't call it
Speaker 1: an atheistic religion, but many people do is atheistic. So
Speaker 1: there are different forms of religion. Even in Hinduism, you
Speaker 1: have all kinds of different things there other than what
Speaker 1: we I even hesitate to call those gods and goddesses.
Speaker 1: I call them what Hindus call them devis and devas
Speaker 1: you know, and things like that. They're just not what
Speaker 1: Westerners ascribe to typical ideas of religion.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. What haven't we talked about do you think
Speaker 2: is really important for myself or people who listen to
Speaker 2: kind of understand.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. So I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that I was most astonished by in my work,
Speaker 1: and I lay it all out there, which is kind
Speaker 1: of funny because I don't think it gets read. This
Speaker 1: is it. It's that what we see in the media
Speaker 1: about the phenomena is not what this phenomena is like
Speaker 1: in reality. Okay, So if you're a field researcher and
Speaker 1: you go and you you go to people who've had
Speaker 1: these experiences or see these experiences, you go hang out
Speaker 1: and watch like the you know, and talk to people
Speaker 1: where there have been multiple witnesses and things like that,
Speaker 1: it gets I mean there. I have specific examples of
Speaker 1: how this gets changed, and I'll share with you one example.
Speaker 1: This is called you know, mofon the Mutual UFO Network.
Speaker 1: And okay, so this is an organization that's not federal,
Speaker 1: it's privately funded, and it's like a database of where
Speaker 1: you can go and if you see a UFO or
Speaker 1: something like that, or you know, have a UFO event
Speaker 1: or experience, you can tell them what you know. There's
Speaker 1: a place where you can input your information, and if
Speaker 1: they find it interesting, they're going to come out there
Speaker 1: with field researchers and they're going to talk to you
Speaker 1: about it and get in for in data, take pictures.
Speaker 1: If there are any like sample weird things, they're going
Speaker 1: to take those two and they're going to do an
Speaker 1: analysis of that.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, a lot of people that I know and I
Speaker 1: put two. I put one in my book. Maybe I
Speaker 1: put two in my book, but at least I put
Speaker 1: one in my book. Where is Ray Hernandez's account where
Speaker 1: he basically input his experience into a Moufon database. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying all Moffon people know this or know
Speaker 1: that they're party to this, but they are. What happens
Speaker 1: is that that experience goes into the database and Moufon
Speaker 1: had a contract with Hangar one, which is the media
Speaker 1: production company, and they take those experiences and they completely
Speaker 1: change them. And we're talking about what was a good
Speaker 1: experience becomes a really scary experience that people then consume
Speaker 1: in the media. Okay, So I want to put some
Speaker 1: information out there that people can what do you call it,
Speaker 1: connect the dots? Okay. After Project Blue Book, Alan Heinek
Speaker 1: leaves Project blue Book and he found kufos right. The
Speaker 1: Center for the Study of UFO is very much like
Speaker 1: Moufon kind of the same template and what Moufon is
Speaker 1: in my interpretation and excuse me Moufon, And I know
Speaker 1: not all Moufon people are like, are doing this like that?
Speaker 1: I know lots of good field researchers, but these you know,
Speaker 1: this is a database that's taking all of this information
Speaker 1: and then we have to you know, why is it
Speaker 1: being changed and then repackaged for the public consumption? I
Speaker 1: want to know, and I want to know it looks
Speaker 1: like misinformation. Are they doing it just for money? I
Speaker 1: don't think so, because I think that a really happy
Speaker 1: UFO experience event would also bring you know, people would
Speaker 1: still be interested in watching that. So the questions, I
Speaker 1: think these are the kinds of questions that they should
Speaker 1: be asking at the congressional here they won't be asking
Speaker 1: these questions. That's why we have researchers who are now,
Speaker 1: by the way, because of the recent acknowledgment by the
Speaker 1: government in June that UFOs were you know, small percentage
Speaker 1: were unknown. Do you know how many researchers now are like.
Speaker 1: What I'm talking about is people like me, only like younger,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty years younger, and are now emboldened to
Speaker 1: do this research. And they're all coming out with their
Speaker 1: own research and their own you know, ways of looking
Speaker 1: into this and things are going to change.
Speaker 2: Is there funding now available for that?
Speaker 1: There is funding available for that. Yeah, So you know
Speaker 1: there's first off, you have to understand that people who
Speaker 1: are like assistant professors, they want to get published and
Speaker 1: they have to get published in order to stay professors basically,
Speaker 1: So they're going through and there's what's called a pure
Speaker 1: review process where other academics who they don't know are
Speaker 1: looking at their work and assessing whether or not it's
Speaker 1: well done enough to be published. And that's what's happening
Speaker 1: right now to a lot of people like me and
Speaker 1: Gary Nolan and people that kind of did this without
Speaker 1: any kind of support. You know, we did it because
Speaker 1: that's where our data took us. And you know, I
Speaker 1: was scoffed a lot, frankly in you know, before anything
Speaker 1: came out, before twenty seventeen. But I was already a
Speaker 1: full professor and chair of my department, so I wasn't
Speaker 1: worried about being scoffed at. But I didn't enjoy it,
Speaker 1: you know. But so those young people weren't inclined to
Speaker 1: do this kind of research because they wouldn't get tenure,
Speaker 1: they would not keep their jobs and things like that.
Speaker 1: And things have changed now, So I think the whole
Speaker 1: landscape of research is going to change. So maybe in
Speaker 1: ten years at the congressional hearings, we'll be hearing from
Speaker 1: academics about it.
Speaker 2: Strangeer Rivals 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 El Kayali, Jesse Funk, and
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