The Creative Process and Channeling

This show is supported by Odu . When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up, and it gets complicated and confusing. Odu solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on features you need. Check out Odu at OD . com That's OD . com Rayband Metaglasses take the friction out of travel, move through the world with your hand s free and your head up. Hey Meta, where's the nearest metro station? Closest metro to you is Union Square, about three blocks away. Hey Meta, text Mom, I'm getting on the train now. Sending message, juggle your itinerary, take calls, and listen to music with open ear audio, no digging for your phone, no stopping for a map, just you and your glasses. Ray Ban Meta Iconic style meets Meta AI, available at Walmart and other authorized retailers. Today I'm talking with Joshua Cutchen, a researcher who spent the last decade building a case that every paranormal phenomenon we've ever recorded is a different facet of the same thing UFO's, fair ies, bigfoot, ghosts, near death experiences . His book, Ecology of Souls argues that all of it connects to death , or whatever's on the other side of it. This theory is being taken seriously by serious people. Jeffrey Krippel at Rice University teaches it to his PhD students people are not going to like this theory. Today we're covering how he built that theory, what the fairy literature gets right, that UFOLGY keeps ignoring , and his latest book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, which is about fictional characters that cross into real life. That one's true. One day on Hollywood Boulevard, I saw a Spiderman Thor and two SpongeBobs. We also talked about how Chat GBT is addicted to goblins. This is a true story. You're gonna want to hear it. After the episode, I'll do a quick breakdown of what we covered and what I can prove. Now let's go down to the basement. Josh is here welcome to the basement? Thanks so much for having me. I'm still in shell shock. But are you? Yeah, it's just it's a lot to take in, and it's always I'm always under the assumption that people have no idea who I am . So yeah, hot dog vendor. Remember I said that earlier so. Now people in this space know you are. Well I appreciate it and it's everybody here has been so welcoming and hospitable. So it's wonderful to be invited into this fairyland, the subterranean fairy land really. Everyone's nice because you're nice . Not nice people they don't get to the studio. They just we send them home. Yeah, fair enough. Bye bye. So you study Tuba . I said to my wife, I said, there's going to be an iceberger question. I know exactly what it's going to be. It's going to be the Tuba question. Tuba under Fred Mills. Canadian brass, one of the best players of generation , he says that the tuba is underestimated as a storytelling instrument. You're a storyteller and a tuba player. Do you agree? I would. Missing? Yeah, no, I would. So yeah, I mean, we could do a whole podcast about Fred Mill stories. That was they broke the mold with Fred. Yeah, I worked with Fred at the University of Georgia in the quintet setting, which you know, if you're going to work in a brass quintet setting with Fred Mills, who was head of the Canadian brass, it's quite a privilege . But yeah, the Tuba is gets pigeonholed a lot as being like, you know, the jokey Farty kind of instrument , but it really has so many different types of characters that it can be There's a powerful and there's a menace to it . I mean, if you go back and listen to some of those John William scores, you've got Jim Self playing a lot of these tracks and these themes and like home alone, there's a playfulness to it an impishness to it. So I think of Peter and the Wolf. Yeah, yeah, and it's just I think that you know it's kind of been an interesting journey for me because I go into the music space where I have a lot of my friends, you know , in gig 'cause that's a big part of still what I do. And then I'm always like, So what's up with the UFO thing, Josh ? And then I go into the UFO space and I'm like, What the tuba like where does this come? So I kind of feel like, you know, outside or everywhere. Well, yeah, I mean, you're the jazz playing , Tuba playing UFO researcher, researching alien food offerings. So how did that ? What was your household like? Is the weird stuff always around? Well, that's a really good question. So as far as this current author journey that I'm privileged to be on, the only person in high school who really wanted me to go into music was my high school band director. Because as we were saying a little bit earlier,, you know I had always had to work at the music stuff. The writing stuff just kind of came tumbled out of me. But as far as my household growing up, you know, I've always kind of been befuddled by people who say, you know, I grew up in a conservative Christian household and we weren't allowed to talk about ghosts or anything strange or supernatural. And I grew up in a household that pretty much acknowledged the fact that the Bible is the most paranormal book ever written. Of course. Yeah . But was it like a heavy Christian upbringing? Yeah, I mean, you know, at the time, I didn't think so, but now in twenty twenty six, sure. You know, I don't know, or vice versa. I just thought it was, you know, just basic North Carolina Christian home . But yeah, there was never a hesitancy to say like, yeah, people see strange things, you know. My father claimed maybe this could be in your fact check at the end of the episode. My father claimed to have subscribed to a newsletter that the BFRO had at one point. So like, you know, we were BFRO Bigfoot field researchers organization. So we were always talking about Bigfoot and that really was my first love was Bigfoot. So there never was a concerted effort to shut down these areas of inquiry . You know, and I came to the UFO question rather late because I was kind of perceiving a lot of the skeptical arguments, like why are there so many types of craft? Why are there so many different types of entities? I can believe that we're being visited by one species, but not two hundred and forty I sort of goldilocks my way there is obvious for me sitting in the basement . But yeah, it was just it was a very supportive household in terms of just being curious about stuff. So your dad, Bigfoot, you start with Bigfoot. I've got friends. They're fascinated by Bigfoot. And I'm not. Like, my audience wants Bigfoot stories all the time. I'm like really the Harry Abe thing. What is it about Bigfoot that's so awesome? I think that is he the tuba of the cryptids? I mean, is he under stood? I mean, yeah, kind of a punchline. Yeah, I can definitely see that. Now I think that part of what it is about Bigfoot, it's the same thing that we see when we see chimpanzees. It's like this is so close to what we are but not. And if Bigfoot is a relative primate , which I don't think it is, but if it is , you don't think he's even closer to primate? I think that well, I think it's more in line with the U FO thing. I think that's I think that it's something that loves wearing that as a mask, you know? Yeah. Because there's so much is un awfully early in the discussion to be derailed by Big Flip, but I mean, we'll get into trickster and yeah, but you know, I think that there's there is so much symbolism embedded in something like the Wild Man archetype that I think that 's a it's a great mask for this thing to call us back into right relation with the environment to remind us that the edge of town is still a precarious place , right? And I think that to paraphrase my co author and friend Timothy Renner, I think that the Wild Man archetype is still out there. And a lot of times it manifests as footprints and howls in the night and on especially rare occasions you're lucky enough to see this archetype somehow embodied . And it's kind of weird because Bigfoot's having a moment right now. It's been having a moment for the past ten years or so. We could probably go in the parking lot across the street and find at least one car with a big foot decal. It's ub asiquitous as the Grey alien was in the nineties, I think. And I think that says a lot about where we are at this moment in terms of being severed from our naturalistic origins. I think it says a lot about a lot of the ecolog ical anxieties that we see. I think it's Bigfoot has become an avatar for that part of ourselves that really wants to go back to the forest. It's interesting that you said on the edge of town because I think liminality and thresholds are going to come up a lot today . I think. They tend to follow me, yeah. What's your take on the Patterson film? Oh boy. So this is the part where I like make half the people mad, half the people happy. That's the all world I live in is everyone's angry? Yeah, I mean, I'd heard rumblings a while back that it wasn't everything that it was cracked up to be. I think that look, at the end of the day it's a remarkable bit of footage, right? It's either proof of Bigfoot or it's a hoax that lasted what coming up on sixty, sixty years . And I think either way, like it's it's incredible and should be regarded as that way. I think that it's fascinating to me that like ninety percent of Bigfoot iconography is based on a possible hoax now. Like it's always the same post . But yeah, I feel like the real people who lost out on this possible outing of the Patterson film as a hoax are probably the forensic analysts 'cause like if you can't get to the bottom of this over sixty years, like how foundational is this science, right? You know, are we incarcerating people with the same techniques that we're used to analyze the Patterson Gimbel footage? I tried to debunk it in my big foot episode. I couldn't. Yeah. That's good. It's great, and look that,' ands that's what a lot of my work in recent years has sort of been angling towards is just taking the pressure off of any one of these things so that I don't have to have my entire worldview collapse if something's outed as a hoax, right? I mean I think that there are people in these communities who base their entire careers around a single bit of evidence. And then when that falls through, sometimes they're very hesitant to step forward. Someone who I will sing his praises all day is Peter Robbins when the Rendlesham case seemed to be less than what it appeared to be. Peter said, Yeah, I can't vouch for this anymore, which is a remarkable thing for somebody in this space to do . And I wish I saw more of that decorum from the Bigfoot community . Yeah in regard to that. You don't. Because Randelstrom is a great example because I feel like that's debunked, but that people don't like hearing that. Well, and here's the thing. It's like you get into these sort of both and both and both and right. That's where that's the line that I try to toe all the time. This doesn't mean Bigfoot doesn't exist. Right. It means that we have a piece of evidence that isn't what it appeared to be. It's still a part of the history . I do think it's interesting to see how much of what we assumed about Bigfoot from a promontological perspective is downstream of the Patterson film . That's true. To this day, I will still press my copy of Jeff Mildred's Sasquatch Legend Meet Science into people's hands if they're interested in Bigfoot. It's a great book, but from what I understand some of the stuff about mid tarsal breaks and some of this primate anatomy stuff was based on his assessment of the Patterson film . And so for me , that's the feedback loop that we're probably going to talk about. Yeah, yeah, it's the feedback loop. And I just I'm trying really hard not to have a certain level of Schodenfreuda or to sound like, you know, I told you so or any of that stuff, but I do kind of have to smile a little bit when I think about the position that I've been occupying and that Tim Rinner's been occupying that is like this is the wild man. This is not necessarily a hominid, a primate that you can catch and bag and tag. This seems to be something older and weirder and deeper. You can find antecedent for it very clearly in the old world . And I think that as a lot of the biological stuff seems to have been built on a foundation of sand , we're going to see more acceptance of the highest strangeness in Bigfoot reports. And that again is at the heart of a lot of what I do is because I've gotten tired of seeing people be treated as sensible and foundational witnesses when they see a big monkey cross the road, but then to have their report tossed out when the end of the report is and it turned into a ball of light. It's like we're all living in glass houses here. This stuff is very strange . I believe in believing experiences and in sort of like a flip of Blackstone's formulation, rather, I'd rather believe nine hoaxers than to toss out one person who's generally wrestling with what they what they saw . Summer is here, and if you want to actually feel confident, less bloated and energized this season, it starts with your gut. I thought bloating after every meal was just normal, it's not. Once I fixed my gut, everything else followed. And the one thing that made the biggest difference is cowboy colostrum. Cowboy Colostrum is one hundred percent American grass fed made right here in the USA True First Day whole Collostrum packed with bioactives, immunoglobulins, and growth factors. It stabilizes your gut and the peptides make your skin and hair look amazing. It's the highest quality Bovine Colostrum you can buy. I started taking it for my gut. The results I didn't expect are the ones that got me thicker hair, clearer skin, no more bloating after meals , and I'm not the only one. eighty three percent of participants in cowboy's clinical study reported improved gut health, seventy nine percent less bloating. seventy two percent improved digestion . sixty two percent fuller thicker hair. And cowboy cholestrum doesn't strip it down. Full fat , high protein, no artificial flavors, no fillers. Vanilla in your ice coffee, strawberry with milk like a milkshake, it's effortless and delicious. And yes, calves get fed first. They only collect the surplus. For a limited time, our listeners get up to twenty five percent off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum. com slash wi files and use code Y files at checkout. That's twenty five percent off when you use code wilies f at cowboy closstrom dot com slash wi files I think that's fair. Did you ever get to the bottom of your honeymoon bigfoot story? That was weird story. No, not to this day. I haven't. Yeah. That was what happened that was crazy. Yeah, I was being a drunken idiot. Yeah. So we had gone to Blue Ridge, Georgia for our honeymoon, which is little did I know at the time actually a pretty active area for Bigfoot . And I was always as always interested in this stuff, not writing about it, not as immersed as I was. And I was in the hot tub and I was drunk and I was shouting across the the valley beautiful location . But this cabin was at the top of I rehold it like different times in the angle of the driveway and the length of the driveway always changes, but let's say something substantial like between a quarter and half of a mile, very, I will say very, very sharp incline. And so it wasn't someplace that you just walk alongside this house and like see this house. So that's all set up. It's all preamble. Because the next day my wife's taking stuff out to the car for us to go home . And she takes a small bag out and she comes back in and she's like, Why did you do that? Like, what are you talking about? She's like, Why did you do that? And I said, Well, look, we're you know, your first divide. Six days were six days into the marriage. Why, you know, I have an argument over this? Like what is this? And she said, come out and look. And behind , as I recall it my driver's rear driver's side tire is a rock, like about this size. I used to have a photo of it. I lost it, but a rock about this size that's kind of wedged behind the tire. I sure as heck didn't drive over that thing. No, 'cause this was like a stay case. Like we just sort of stayed in the cabin doing what Newlywoods do . And so I didn't drive over it. I'm looking around, like there's kind of a garden over here, but there's not a big that would leave a hole if you picked it up off the ground. Anyway , didn't seem to have fallen off the side of the mountain which was all red Georgia clay because that stuff stains everything . And it was right after this holl hoopin' and hollerin that I did. I said, you know, I did all that preamble about the length length and the angle of the driveway because if you're going to prank somebody, I don't know if I'd walk up that down slope in the middle of the night. And if I'm going to put a rock somewhere, I'm gonna put it on the hood of their car or on the top of their car, I'm really gonna get to them. But this was just like, hey, stop messing around, leave. Like something like we're here, we're listening, stop messing around. So that was that was my first, I call it a Sasquatch adjacent experience, you know? Did you feel like that was a signal? That was a message, that was an invitation . I'm inclined to now with the trajectory that my life has taken. You know, I mean, there's so many things that kind of came together in that moment because as is part of my story, I did it's twenty thirteen, seven years later checked myself into rehab for alcoholism. So that was kind of an interesting thing to have happened after an especially drunken night. Wait, what years was that Bigfoot rock? That was twenty thirteen That was a big year for you. Yeah What triggered going into Reap? You don't mind? Well, so twenty thirteen was the honeymoon and 'cause you're I, guess halfway between being a famous writer and sobriety. Yeah, yeah, it was a it was a weird thing. So twenty thirteen was the was the big foot rock and then twenty twenty, I mean, what happened in twenty to be twenty is what happened to everybody in twenty twenty , right? And if you're I'm not saying this to frame it so that people, you know, pandemic wrong, right? I'm not saying that, but if you were going to choose an organic inflection point to change your behavior . Seemed like that's what I was being pointed towards. Everyone was angry, everyone was depressed. everybody started dreaming more. I certainly didn't Yeah, and you know, when you start when you start ideating about like checking into a hospital just to get a break, it's like, well, maybe I should actually check into a hospital just to get a break . You know, there's some what was that decision? You woke up and you were like, that's enough or was it your wife ? I mean, look, it's sort of like, um you know, I understand No, no, no, and I'm an open book about this. I'm just trying to find the right way to articulate it. I was obviously doing some stuff wrong. She was obviously doing some stuff wrong. We had twin boys the year before and that was a weird time to be sort of cooped up with screaming toddlers. Yeah And it was just like a now or never. I don't really can't really put a pin in that moment . I have a friend I mentioned on the Patreon segment, so I don't know if I want to repeat myself here and delete that but I have a friend who 's working on a very interesting book who looked at my birth chart and thinks that it was always going to happen. Something was always going to happen on this particular day . Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And basically I was due for a death rebirth narrative of some sort. And I could choose it or I could have it for stumping . But it's happening either way. It's happening either way. And so you know, a bunch of synchronicity cl ustered at the head of that, you know, it was give us Yeah, yeah it was the feast day it was august twenty eighth, twenty twenty was the feast day of Saint Moses which was one of the desert fathers who lived a life as a brigand until his sudden and instantaneous one hundred and eighty conversion , which had some significance to me . And the fact that I also went to Mount Sinai, which was Moses' namesake, was the name of the rehab center. My therapist there was an extra my therapist there grew up in Point Pleasant during the Mothman flabby during the collapse of the Silver Bridge. When John Keel was there. Yeah, so I got to have like conversations with my rehab therapist about Yungian archetypes and which I mean is not to be unexpected, but also like we could go into the S likeilverbridge and Ke el and it was just Did he meet Keel? No, not to my knowledge. I mean, he was a boy at the time. Sure. But it was just it just seemed really odd . You know, I got home and there were, I don't know, I'd probably characterize it as like a light polter geist effects. Like things would be moved in some strange ways . And the most dramatic thing was the synchronicity that I still can't quite explain, but so having twin boys, I get concerned about the software, right? I know the software. I love this one. The software to upload into their brain. Yeah. And so like , I'm constantly like revisiting like what do I like what do I need to, what have I learned through cultural osmosis? And like I need to teach them about, you know, entropy and the October Revolution and like , I don't know , the battle of Midway and all this all this random stuff that I've accumulated, where did I accumulate from? Is your home schooling ? Yeah. And well, and just like, you know, even at the time they weren't, you know, in school per se, but it was just like, I gotta start, got to get on this. And am I fostering an environment where they're going to learn all this stuff. So I saidine,, we F've got to start somewhere where I start for whatever reason I seized upon ASOPS fables. So I was in my aftercare at the time and I said, Okay to go home and I'm going to go online, I'm going to order a book of ASOPLE because I don't remember where I learned about ASOPS. Do you remember where I learned about Cultural Omosis? What was that? There's a lot of good lessons in ASUS. Whatever you do, Josh, learn about ASUS. Go online, get a copy of A subtles, whatever you do . So I'm driving home ASUPLAS ASAP . And I get home and my wife's like, Well, you gotta take the boys out for wal ak. So it's like, okay. So I'm like okay, so the entire time around neighborhood, I'm going okay, I'm going to go home. I'm going to get ASOP stables into their hands hands because like, you know, you can learn a lot of the foundational stuff and moral stuff and some ways to think is ASO that's what ASOS isB ALESOPSS AOP SABLES . And I get into the garage and I'm literally taking the boys out of their stroller . And I get a call from my mom . I'm like, I don't need this right now. I need to go in and order ASOP s Fables, right? And she says, Hey, we're at the beach, which I knew that they were at the beach. And we're at the bookstore that you always loved. And I just got the boys something that I think they'll really enjoy. Do they have a copy of ASOPs Fables Now we all have this story. Amazing. Yeah, and you talked to Eric Wargo and he'd say it was time loops, it was retro causality and I'm not denying that it could be that. But it's interesting to me that the trigger for one of those profound synchronises, the trigger for all my profound synchronic views that I've had has been , you know, that emotional undercurrent and that sort of in this case, like a down payment of some sort of life change death and rebirth narrative really, quite frankly. So I admire to the moon and back Eric's work because I think that regardless of where I depart with his perspective on , something in there is bang on right. In there is bang on right. I agree. So for people who don't know Eric's work , maybe explain time loops and where you stand on it. Yeah, so the idea is that there is neither cause nor effect , but there is these things are embedded in a retro causal loop and that oftentimes it is accompanied by the trauma of that experience or the emotional investment, the emotional intention that causes that to manifest forward or backward. And that's a very poor way if Eric's listening is a very poor way of framing it, but go back and watch the episode. You were pre remembering ASOP's fame. Right, right. And you know, I've, again, I've corresponded with Eric , I've known him for geez since the beginning, really . And I think there's a lot to that. I just have some quibbles here and there, which is like, well, what sits at the center of that time loop? You know, it's the idea of like, oh, I solve this great math equation because I came back and gave myself the answer and you know where did the answer come from? Yeah, that's the working paradox. That's the working paradox and I would trust Eric's assessment on why that isn't a paradox in all these things . And he explains it and I'm in the same boat. I'm like, I'm again, the work has to come from somewhere though. Right. And I think that ex Nihilo space, as he's sort of been angling towards in his latest book from nowhere , I would argue that that is where the metaphysical slips in , right? You know? And I would point to creation myths for that . Wow and in creation myths I would say creation myths are stories and they are words or they are sung the world is sung into being in a lot of these indigenous cosmologies these are themes that you see over and over and over again. So I think that there has to be again, a both end model where we are dealing with retro causality, but we're dealing with some other forces that are not going to correspond to material ism or physicalism. The other thing is, you know, an example that I didn't I don't want to turn this into beating up on Eric because I love his work so much. But he doesn't watch this show. I know but I just want to emphasize I want to emphasize the amount of respect that I have for him. Same he's changed my thinking on how time works. Yeah , but another thing that I would disagree with him on is that you know, he was speaking of a patient coming to their analyst with a dream full of archetypes. And the analyst didn't know what it was, the analyst reads in a book the correspondences of these archetypes and informs a patient. And that's what the patient was reacting to was that sort of fulfillment that the other archetypes could be pinned down. But that's Jung's Beatle story, people beat. It is the Beatle Story. I just feel like there are plenty of people who go through life and end up embodying archetypes without ever having that payoff , right? Like I've met these people who are tricksters or they fulfill the mother archetype or any number of things and they never read the red book, you know? They never they never have that moment where they're where they're being confirmed in terms of how they're behaving, you know, where they people have just sort of fallen into these patterns because the patterns pre exist us all. So they just exist as an archetype. What do you mean by it never gets paid off? So I have a friend who has a late friend who was a biker . And he was a rough and tumble kind of fellow, but apparently a sweetheart . And he And he lost an eye in a scuffle with a gun with a gun . And by the time my friend got to know this gentleman , he would often wear a wide brimmed hat and carry a walking staff because he had some leg problems . I had these two hounds that would sit on either side of him in his living room under neath a stuffed eagle . And he started volunteering at the VA doing therapeutic massage for veterans . That's Odin. Like, I don't know . That's Odin . And finally, like after he passed away , my friend approaches his wife and says, Hey, did you ever did he ever say anything about this? Did he was this conscious? Did he ever know about it? Was this ever in your life? And she was like, what 's Odin, you know ? So my point would be that if a lot of retro causality is contingent upon pre membering upon that payoff , that would have made him, oh, I'm being Odin, so that's what made me start acting like Odin. Right. That never happened. No, you know . And so that's what I would sort of quibble with is that there's there's some force that seems to me and again, anybody isn't familiar with my work, I'm first and foremost probably a mystic. Like there seems to be some sort of force that reaches down seizes us. Or to use one of my favorite definitions of archetypes as Jung would have put forward . These are river beds that are carved through the landscape. These are furrows with little tributaries here and there . And they can go dry . But once you get a substantial enough rainfall, it's exactly where the water's going to go. And it's because the two meet is what causes it. Right . Right. And so , you know, I feel like we are constantly falling into these modes of being a lot more than we consciously realize . And I think you might be right twenty twelve, twenty thirteen . So I know that you're writing press releases, you're a substitute teacher, you're listening to paranormal stuff. You listen to paranormal podcasts. What was what was just like a Tuesday like for you before this all started? Oh, before sobriety, it usually involved sure. Seven hundred and fifty milliliters of vodka. Bottom shelf. No, it was just it was just what you're What's your commute? You wake up in the morning and you have your flat? Yeah, I mean, so to sort of summarize my journey , a lot of potential to be an orchestral tuba player in the world of classical music that probably is going to steer you towards higher ed professorship sort of thing because orchestral jobs I mean, there are what fifty orchestral tuba player jobs there's one person that fulfills that role in the orchestra and keep it until they die. So you've got to sort of anyway, long story short, I ended up having some performance injury issues . That made it difficult for me to sustain some stuff to sustain ed notes, focal dystonia it's run rampant for a lot of brass players . I've since recovered because I'm not spending eight hours playing all the time. I took time off, but at the time was pretty devastating. So it's like, well, what do I do? Finished a master's in music literature, which is like a musicology light degree. It was supposed to be a performance degree. I pivoted, then got a second master's in journalism and then again said, What do I do? The idea was to go into arts journalism, I worked as Public Affairs Director for the University of Georgia School of Music for three ish years . And in the meantime, at Hello Smeban Days Fifth Workup Mill Jigo McDonald's Gwybassos Lecandios in Line Naptimos, Christian Supiden Police , David Becks, Beckham Lamin the Dream Jamal, Gronald Lino, El Mago, Monsieur Titi, Hungry , son Sani, Hyun Bing. Alfonso, Fonzi, Dames, Santi Portek Menes, Yila Portilla Hilkin Tapo. Brimes os Legendarius Connectifa World Cup meal. McDonald's participate. A university in the summer, there's not a lot going on . So I had picked a copy of J Robert Alley's Raincoast Sasquatch which is a great book. In it he mentions that among other things, you know, Ali's perspective is that we are dealing with a homininob, but he pays a lot of attention and respect towards indigenous belief . And in the book, he mentions that the Bigfoot analog for the quakutil in Alaska, the Buques is known to give people who are led astray that give them food . Usually it's looks like dried salmon, but it's actually tree bark that's been disguised to look otherwise. And if you take this food from the Bequest, you're trapped with the Bequest forever. And I said, wait a minute. This is right out of Western European fairy folklore. If you take food in fairy land, you're trapped with the fairies forever . But Alaska's kind of far from Ireland . Even the cloaking of the bark to look like salmon is fairy glamour. Like there are numerous illusions in Western European traditions where once fairy glamour is removed, the food that they give you is like leaves and twigs and stuff. It's like that's just, so specific to me that I sat with that for a while and I said, look, there's one of three things happening here. Either there was an international civilization that was exchanging myths and legends at a level much deeper than we appreciate , or the collective unconscious is a thing , or people are describing objectively their interactions with the other world . Any three of those, which I think are kind of the only three options that I can figure out , any three of those blows apart your worldview. I said, This is really cool. Nick Redford should write a book on that. When I started sat around and waited for Nick write a book because this was in the era when Nick was pumping out like every six months . I'm like , is it me? Like is this one I'm supposed to be doing? So one summer I pulled all the resources together and wrote the book that became a Trojan feast . And I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know what my wife was thinking, honestly , but I timed the release with my two weeks notice at the University of Georgia. And then it was a while of just playing gigs. Well, how is it ? Well, my wife had my wife worked for CDC . So we had a net, we had a safety net . But it was just, I mean , there were a lot of things that contributed to my alcoholism, but having sixty bosses in a university is one of them . So it was obviously unsustainable in that regard . But being a musician author also sounds like a reason to drink to me . Yeah, wow. Well, I mean, you don't know, I mean, it's musician author, but also like low brass players have a reputation for knocking them back too. Yeah, so it's like I'm getting Scott I'm Scottish too. So it's like it's got I've got all the risks the risk factors. I went to school in Wisconsin. I mean, like it's like a set up for failure in terms of substance abuse but But anyway , so yeah, it was risky, but it was killing me . And so what I did was I pivoted and I built a pretty good little cottage industry of just gigging and teaching private lessons and doing a lot of like in school clin ics . And then we had our boys and it became very apparent rather that I was spending all day out just to turn around and give money to someone to watch the kids. So I became Mr. Mom. That sort of brings us closer into twenty twenty when the mister Mom thing was kind of what was making me fall down that rabbit hole too. Well, hang on a second . Music literature. So you're studying architecture, structure , motif , patterns . Is that informing your methodology with Trojan ? So you don't get out of two master's degrees without kind like of appreciating hunting down sources. Sure. That's the way I look at it. You know, and your footnotes are ridiculous. It's half the book. Yeah, I got yeah, I got a new one coming out next month. That's like thirteen hundred end notes and I feel like I've kind of undershot my goal. But yeah, I try to, well, that's the problem. That has been historically the problem in the space that people will just say stuff and not say where to find it. And I could do a little bit better job of pinpointing actual page numbers, but I have my reasons for not doing that. Kindle makes it difficult to do that. Yes. But anyway, so that's part of it . You know, part of it is you do end up reading things like Adorno and philosophers of different types that make you think in different ways. That's part of it too. Although you know what? AJ, it's really kind of wild. I looked back on one of my earlier books, one of my earlier essays and it was about taking a look at Strauss's Till Elen Spiegel who was a trickster figure . And one of the books that I cracked open was Lewis Hide's Trickster Makes This World, which is a book that I still use today. So and the like trickster phenomena has influenced and informed so much of the way that I think about this stuff that it's like, oh was that were the seeds planted in that with that particular book? And it was probably the best bit of musical writing I've ever done. It's stuffed away in a binder somewhere, but yeah . So I think that all these things do sort of come together. And that's the thing. If you would go back fifteen years until your older younger self what you're doing today, you'd be like , What? Like how did you get there? Why did you get there? You know, but you do kind of tend to get nudged in the right direction. With the paranormal offering food , so that book comes out and people in the space were saying, Why didn't anyone think of this before? I had it's kind of good that I had no idea what I was stepping in . I had a for whatever reason , I had a degree of familiarity with or parasocial relationship, I guess, with Micah Hanks because we both were from North Carolina . And I just sort of cold emailed Micah at one point and explained him my project and like, do you know where I should shop this manuscript around? And who's he? Micah is a dear friend now. He just completed the audio book of my novel The Mold Ways never died, which should be coming out any day now . But he is a UFO researcher, fourteen par excellence, master of the endless comma is sometimes I say about Micah , but just a really sharp guy, very grounded. He runs the debrief website . And Micah was just so warm and welcoming about it. And he not only so he had me on his show , not even having this thing published for whatever reason is beyond me . Somehow, I think he was really running with the mysterious universe guys at the time and they had me on mysterious universe without having it published. I'm like, what is going on here? But with that sort of momentum, and again, just the grace of God , with that sort of momentum , it made Patrick Wheeze an anomalous book sort of take an interest in the manuscript. And Patrick's first thing was like all book publishing house heads of those sort of things was like, well, you know, we reject the most stuff that we get, but I'll take a look at it. And Patrick was over the moon about it, and I still have a great relationship with Patrick today. I don't publish with anomalists anymore, but it has nothing to do with him as a person. He was just so supportive and Patrick Whij I read his books in middle school. Like, you know, I've got his copy of his guide to, you know, Lake Monsters and Sea Serpents that he did with Lauren Coleman, like and now he's my publisher. How cool is that? Yeah, and then like, you know, there's a favorable review from Jerry Clark in fourteen tim es I think . And like it's just it was just one of these things where it's like, what world have I stepped into? And now if I look at my the contact list on my cell phone, it's like, what is it I'm so blessed and so happy it does feel like the kid who, you know, ends up shooting hoops in his neighborhood and playing with, you know, Michael Jordan or something. It's the way it feels sometimes. Can you give us some examples of the exchange of food? Because I hadn't heard that with abductes . Well, that was sort of one of the things that I think people were overlooking . So one of my central contentions is that this phenomenon is everything and nothing at once, right? It wears a lot of different masks . My favorite depiction of the phenomenon is that reissue of passport to Magonia , where it's got this is valet? Yeah, but it's from I believe it's Daily Daily Grail publishing. They've got a gray alien holding a fairy mask and a demon mask and in a fifties sci fi alien mask. The actual original painting showed that the gray alien itself was a puppet being puppet eered off of the frame, which is like the perfect summation of the phenomenon. Like there's something there, but it's always changing and adapting and adopting . So Valet had already made a lot of pointed comparisons to older European spirit belief in general fairy belief, more specifically in passport to Magonia. It's like a foundational text for everything that I've done . And one of the things that you look at when you look at a lot of fairy folklore, and again, we know this mostly from Western Europe, but I can provide examples from pretty much every inhabited continent is that if you go into fairyland and you are given something to eat or drink , you gotta refuse it because you're going to be stuck there. At the time I didn't know that this was a more pervasive myth, you'll find it in Oceania regarding the dead, the land of the dead, similarly in South America. But like whenever you're in that other space, you don't eat and don't drink. And so if Valeal' comparisons between fairies and UFO's holds true , then do we see this sort of food taboo from fairy folklore manifesting itself in the UFO context ? And you kinda do The point that I tried to make in that first book was that a lot of these encounters are relatively brief. Like, you know, you're being very hospitable with a nice spread out there . But I'm not sure that that would have been necessary for an abduction or for a contactee two or three hour meeting, but food and drink did get exchanged in these stories . They get exchanged in alien abduction accounts as well food . Well let me sort of put a pin in this other thought . They get exchanged in the abduction stuff as well, but they've also kind of changed, right? We're talking about how the phenomenon changes and how it adapts. I think an argument could be made that injections and ointments and pills and things that feature all across abductions are sort of a variation on that. The sort of I hadn't thought of that. That's true. The sorts of food and drink that gets exchanged roughly correspond to the character of the experiences, right? So contactes of the nineteen fifties and sixties, people who met with Space Brothers voluntarily, those are voluntary pleasant experiences and the alien abductions, especially the seventies and eighties, again, the phenomenon's changing. We cannot talk about that if you want to . Non voluntary, nonconsensual, unpleasant . And so the sort of food that you see in these experiences often times aligns with that. You'll get references to milk and fruits in a lot of the contact you experiences, and you'll get references to again ointments and nasty tasting liquids . Obviously, these people came back unlike in the fairy folklore. They consumed in the other world, but they were able to come back. But I still think that not being able to go home can mean a lot of things, right? It can mean you don't get to go back to the way it used to be. Your world was forever changed or you're going to be a recurring experiencer. But one of the interesting things is that if you look at the timing of a lot of these consumptive acts in the OFO literature, a lot of times they'll happen towards the end of the experience. And so you kind of have to sit back and say, okay, well if I consume certain things in this space , I go there, you know if I if I take five dried grams of mushrooms in silent darkness , I go there. I go there . So is this them their way of sending us back sometimes is to consume something over there? Because again, I'm not entirely sure there's a physical component to this. I'm not entirely sure how physical it is all the time. Could communion be related to this? Yeah, I mean Whitley talked about given things to consume in communion. And I think just at the very heart of it that the name itself speaks to what's going on there. So the body of Christ, you I guess you become Oh, you mean specific . How went the Whitley where this is this is so this is this is a whole another yeah, I mean this is I think this is one hundred percent part of this . So yeah, the act of sitting and breaking bread historically is a type of communion a type of commingling and accepting and being in and of that space . But yeah, I would argue that the act of Christian communion says a lot more than we really think about because you're eating in the tradition flesh and drinking blood . And this ties back into some very ancient, very widespread ideas . In certain indigenous cosmologies , people are probably familiar with this, but like, you know, you might vanquish your foe and eat part of them to take on their power . Or you might fashion you might fashion a cup out of their skull. It's a similar idea. And so this actually is an ancient trope called Eating the God , the idea that by the act of consuming the divine, you're internalizing it and becoming communing with it, right? Sure . Similarly, if you look at the Ayahuasca traditions and their analogues in South America , there is the assertion that medicine is at once plant vine and drink and deity as well. So you're literally consuming of the deity and internalizing it. And so I think that something similar at least on the motivic level is what we're seeing in some of these stories from experiences . There must be something to it because the experiences are so similar across cultures . Yeah, it's the fairy UFO thing is the gift that keeps on giving. Is it in a real ways? In the sense that I always thought fairies were fun little things until I started researching and I was like, could be more can we? We got a stretch for this one. No, it's so what Dr. Villa did in Passport to Magonia was something that I think the best observations do , which it wasn't Hey, look at this similarity . That's all by. That's a cool thing that he noticed. Note, you can continue and keep unpacking it and keep on unfurling it and finding other dimensions to it. There's plenty of stuff that he didn't mention about similarities between the Fey Folk and Aliens, but let's put a pin in that and sort of backtrack to what fairies are, right? Yeah , it's tough sometimes. It really is because I talk about being interested in fairies and people think I'm mean ing something completely different . The fairies of folklore , the fairies that a lot of our ancestors, my ancestors in Scotland might have interacted with , were never really depicted as tiny winged effect sprites . They were dark , thonic , oftentimes sized like a proportion like your average human being great if they liked you and you treated them well, did not want to get on their bad side. If you made a mistake, sometimes an innocent mistake, like whistling. You get punished for whistling in the wrong place or failing to leave out offerings, which is sort of where a lot of this fairy stuff comes into with the Trojan feast as well. But anyway, very different class of character. The fairy that we know today is children's books and Shakespeare an play stagings and stuff like that . There's a whole nother conversation to have about what fairies look like in witness reports now and what that says about the phenomenon, but you know we can go there if you want to later later but the original sort of version of that was darker and stranger . And a lot of the things that FLA was pointing out really do seem to line up. And you've got stature, you've got little men in green becoming little green men . Powers of levitation, although fairies didn't have wings in terms of folklore, they were always granted powers of levitation, people being picked up and whisked away to other different spaces . Fairyland reads a lot like some of the descriptions of either the rooms aboard spaceships or sometimes in the contacty literature, these other planets that people went to They read a lot like Book of Enoch and Enach traveling with Uriel to the ship. Well, yeah, I think it's again part of this multiple masks sort of thing. Or the gym? Oh, absolutely. In the gyn, there's reason to quibble with this statement, but the gym could very easily be understood as Muslim fairy analogues, right? But all these different things sort of add together and I've completely lost track of where your initial question was just about how fairies are misunderstood. Yeah, yeah. So they're misunderstood. But then there are these other things that sort of Vale left out that I don't think he did intentionally and he probably even solved them, but like there's only so much you can put into a book . A lot of times in these older fairy stories , not fairy tales, fairy stories which imply eyewitnesses and folk tales . You've got the smaller fairies all around, but there's a fairy king or fairy queen and they're usually taller, much taller and lithe. And that sounds a lot like what we hear from David Jacobs. Your mileage may vary, but it's like a lot we'll hear from David Jacobs about the taller supervising grays. Yes . There's a connection between fairies in the dead and UFO's in the dead, which I've explored recently . You know, there's the fact that fairies came in all sorts of variety of shapes and sizes like a Pokemon catalog, right? And similarly that's what we see with the taxonomy of aliens today is that it's endless variation. So it's just you can just keep on unpacking this and unpacking this and unpacking this. There was one researcher, I forget her name, but I think she said at one point far in the past every fairy was a dead person . This is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around . It's how to make that work, right? So that's the one thing that you'll run into some people when they say, Oh, they know what fairies are. It's like nobody knows like I have plenty of friends who are fairy scholars. Check out Morgan Dimler's work, check out Simon Young's work . Even they will say we have no idea like there are arguments to be made and there are better arguments and works arguments to be made but we really don't know for sure. There's the argument that they were demoted pagan deities . You know, the Christ Christians came along and said that they were the angels that were too good for hell and too bad for heaven that fell to the earth . But you know, something that Dr. Simon Young has pointed out is that like a lot of these cultures when they talked about fairies were trying to find some way to talk about the dead because you enumer able stories, stories involving the food taboo. People will be at the ferry banquet, they walked by a ferry fort and they're invited inside because it's opened up this one day year and they go inside and there are all these and then they'll see somebody that they recognize and it's a dead friend or a dead neighbor and they're the one who says don't don't eat or drink this because you're going to be trapped here . But that sort of mode mechanism of metamorphosis is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around . And so the way that Claude Lecuto, former professor at the Sorbon described it, he just passed away this past November . But he writes my favorite UFO books because he never uses the word UFO, but like it's just great stuff. But he wrote a lot of books on household spirits and spirits of the land and stuff . And he described the process as you have someone who was revered by the community, a chieftain or a soldier or a priest or priestess , and then they're buried in a certain place . And that place becomes revered as their burial spot . But over time , as we are wont to do as a species, like we sort of forget, and we sort of treat those connections more loosely, and it becomes sort of a spirit of the place . And from there, they sort of get synchrotized with fairy beliefs as being these sort of spirits out in the wilderness . We see this really clearly actually in some cultures , even in the more modern era. Buryat shamans would be interred in one place and then later exhumed and then specifically buried in a new location to serve as the spirit of that place. So this genus locai idea, which is very closely related to spirits. That's a fairy glim, that's a fairy pond or whatever. These ideas sort of start to merge together . And burial mounds and things like that? Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing is like so many of these sites that are associated with ferries , again, I feel like I say it all the time, but in Western Europe, but arguably worldwide are sepulchral sites. They're sites that involve burials. I mean, the serpent mount in Ohio, they see all kinds of stuff over there. Yeah. And but thinking specifically to like , you know, Ireland and the British Isles , these burial mounds are unambiguously burial tumuli, you know? But they're also where the fairies are just so happen to be. You know, there are many traditions that say that the dead lives inside hills . Not coincidentally . You know, it's where we put a lot of our underground alien bases in modern UFO mythology . But there's this strong connection through that that even does extend, especially in my part of America with the Cherokee. There's a strong association between some of the burial tumuli and the tumuli down there and the Nun ahi. They're very variant, one of their fairy variants. So yeah, it's just and that's what always gets me. That's what that's what really keeps me going is I take a look at , you know , those Cherokee traditions, for example , and reading the association between fairy what we would call fairies very clearly . Time dilation, missing time , taking people away into the forest, that sort of thing. Yep , sounds familiar. Being associated with these earthworks and people across the Atlantic saying the exact same thing . And look, I have to remain open to cultural contamination , right? That's always an ever looming specter. But if not , that's what gets me going because it's like somewhat there's some strata of reality that we're interacting with where we're all coming to the same conclus ions as a humanity. No question about it . Let's take a quick break. When we come back , let's wanna talk about some more patterns that you found that nobody else does specifically Grimstone . Okay. Yeah yeah,, bear back. So nineteen ninety four , my dad has an operation one of many. He dies on the table. They bring him back . When he comes back, he says he had a conversation with his mother and he smelled roses and in brimstone , you know, it's it's so funny it's so funny because you would think like is there enough data to write a whole book about smells . I got that a lot. I got that a lot . But there is . It's one of those things and this is sort of a lot of what I've done is it's one of those things that people mention in passing in their own books. And they'll say that's kind of interesting, kind of funny. I wonder what that's about. Anyway, and they continue with the next story. And those are the details that always sort of make me go , well, hang on , hang on. Let's go back to that and revisit it. What can we learn by unpacking a lot of this stuff? You know, I think this was a similar philosophy to what the late Carla Turner had was that like some of these details might be holding the key to understanding a lot of this stuff . So after Trojan Feast went on and wrote the Brimstone Deceit, which kind of sounds like a Joel Austin book title, but it does. But what do you call a book about paranormal smells , especially when sulfur appears so often . So that's what we went with. And there was I still see stuff today that I'm like, oh, that would have been great to have put in that book. It's just it really is a pervasive set of observations that happen in this area. Move was the first one that made you go wait a minute Well it was it wasn't I'm not sure if it was a specific account but it was probably some of those observations that John Keele had made. Because you know, if I could if I had a shrine in my house, it would probably be to John Keele and Jacques Volley, right? Like I feel like there's so much of what I do. That's interesting because they fundamentally are completely opposite under what's going on. Had different hands on the elephant, you know, different hands on the elephant. That's right. That's a great way to put it. And yeah, the goal is to become the coincidentia oppositorum, right? The Union of opposites. But I think it was some of those observations that Keel had made very preciously that people report brimstone or sulfur in these accounts. And there's this knee jerk react ion, especially in , you know , Christian America to say, Oh, this must be demons. And it's like, well, have you ever really understood the origins of that smell or the history of the way that smell was identified and stuff. I mean, for example , if you go back all the way into antiquity , people in the classical traditions were misidentifying the smell of ozone as the smell of sulfur. It's a lightning strike and it was the smell of sulfur. And similarly in more recent years around the turn of the twentieth century people were being sent to convalesce by the seaside because of the great ozone vapors in the air. And it's like, No, you're probably talking about sulfur sulfur. Yeah, so there's hydrogen and sulfur. There's that to consider the oracle of Delphi . Same ? Yeah, and that's that's sort of the so whenever you establish an area to look into, you sort of sort of start branching out like tributaries. And one of those is the idea of things like the oracle at Delphi inhaling certain fumes or the idea that burnt offerings are meant to transmit they're meant to transmit the offerings themselves to the supernal realms through the smoke. That's a means of getting the offering from here to there. So there are all these things that you've just sort of got to sit with and say, well, what bearing, if any, does this have on a lot of these modern experiences ? And so I really wanted to try and unpack that. And for a while it kind of looked like I was going to get pigeonholed as the the five senses guy. Like I'm like, I don't want to write a book on paranormal touch. That sounds like right that sounds like a dangerous place to go. But yeah . What is it ? What I find interesting about the smells is it's the one sense that bypasses Thalmic altogether goes directly to the amygdala emotion center, there's no narrative structure at all. So it's culturally agnostic . That's an excellent way to put it. Doesn't that make it more real the account? Well, it not only makes it more real, but I think it also makes it more ripe for hijacking, right ? So there's actually an entire subset of scent philosophy, olfactory philosophy , which was a surprise to me . But one of the things they've sort of examined some of these scholars . Guerre, I think, is the one that I was looking into , talked about how we've oftentimes treated our noses as reliable witnesses, right? You know, it passes the smell test the nose knows all these things. If you smell it, like something you can smell that something's off . And so the idea that you would be I could make a thousand different explanations for a trick of the light for me to see something strange . But when you've got that accompanied by something that you're smelling to, it really does put it in a place of authenticity, right? In addition to, like you said, just like jumping right to your emotional centers, like if I have ex girlfriends, sorry, Sarah, if you're watching this, I have ex girlfriends that if I smelled their perfume, like I would immediately think of that person and those emotions associated . And if we are dealing with a phenomenon, as I've suspected that really does like to traffic in meaning and quite frankly manipulation for good or for ill . What a what a tool to use. Yes . And because your memory goes right there when you smell something childhood . You can you can try not to think of it like you can not want to think of it and it'll just it'll override that completely . Which is kind of like it's almost like even better than telepathy where it's akin to telepathy where it's like it's just going straight in your head and there's no way you can not hear it or mishear it and the smells like a lot of my work proposes that there's a metaposition intelligence that's in control of how it's seen and when it 's seen and what it does while it's seen , which is my logical exemption for why we don't have better evidence, right? That's kind of a valley esque way to look at it. Well, yeah, that there's a structure. Yeah, and that if it doesn't want to be seen, it's not going to be seen. Or when it does get seen, it's a colossal fuck up. There we go. That's my bomb. That's dragon. Now hang on, that's that's George Hansen's strikster theory is it can't work is you try and what I love about Hansen's work is he says the trickster you try to observe it as soon as you try to observe it you can't like that's quantum mechanics man It. really is . And it's not only that, but it's it's one of those things that it's almost like we as a species intuited that before we had the tools to sort of interrogate quant um mechanics . But yeah, it's it's so if the phenomenon can control how it's seen and how it presumably smells, like what a smell to choose? So yeah, why roses and soul? So roses and sulfur yeah so the book is the brimstone to see and it talks about bad smells but there's just all smells end up ended up in the book and you do see rose mels in terms of saints and in terms of blessed Virgin Mary sightings. Of course , and in select UFO encounters as well, I think it was on june twenty sixth, Super Birl arrives in theaters. Let's up? Your powers are gonna take in now . It's very impressive. Get ready for a movie event unlike any other. Superman, he's the good and everyone. And I see the truth. Get your tickets now for the most fun. Crypto and fresh movie of the summer. What do you play today? Swimming stupid. No, it's a party . DC's supergirl home in theaters june twenty sixth. Get tickets now, Radi thirteen may be inappropriate for children under thir . This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies eighteenf y . It was either Dennis was it Dennis Kusinich who smelled a rose scented UFO? I don't know. I could There was one. I could look at it was one. Yeah , I believe that's what it was and if not I'm mistaken but, it's a smell that you get from time to time . But a lot of these do have some sort of sulfur smell. And then the task there is to sort of unpack what people mean, right? So do they mean ozone, sulfur, that sort of conflation that we're talking about. Do they mean hydrogen sulfide, which is that rotten egg smell? Do they mean sulfur dioxide, which is that gunpowder smell? And then even things that people make other comparisons to say, oh, it smelled like natural gas . Well, natural gas is odorless. We add methyn files to it to make you more aware when there's a gas leak. And guess what those contain? Those files contain sulfur. So there's something about this sulfur connection that I think is really fascinating and we've so long associated with demons . But if you look at like for example biblical sources, it's always been presented as a great thing, the cleansing breath of God's whenever God makes a point to cleanse something he's using sulfur. And we know about this today, like acne medications often contain sulfur. Like sulfur is a fumigant. It's an antimicrobial . And so like the fact that the devil and demons smell like sulfur isn't the fact that they smell bad because they're evil, it's God trying to cleanse them, throwing them into the light of fire. You have to unpack all this stuff, but hydrogen sulfide specifically, this fact blows my mind every time I think about it . We are so sensitive to hydrogen sulfide that we can detect it at zero point five parts per billion . To put that in perspective, if I had a had a semi that was carrying like an oil like a liquid semi, you know, like oil tanker or whatever, or a semi full of milk, whatever. And you took a medicine dropper and you put one drop of ink in there. That would be twice the concentr ation at which we can smell hydrogen sulfide . So if the stuff if this phenomenon wishes to not be noticed and it's in control of how it smells, it's a poor choice. So it's almost like it's designed to be attention grabbing. Well, I mean astronomers are using spectrography to see if there's life on other planets, right? They're looking for oxygen, they're also looking for hydrogen sulfide. Right , right. And there's some of the emissions on Venus. I don't know if this has been settled since, but some of the emissions on Venus are of sulfur are so plentiful and not reacting the way that they should that there's been some speculation that there's some sort of artificial generator of some of these sulfur compounds on Venus . Even for me who doesn't ascribe the extraterrestrial hypothesis, that makes you go, huh? Okay, that's interesting. I don't know what to do with that because you would think that chemistry would be a universal constant. Right . So yeah, and I think that these things , again, if we were to posit that this is deliberate , and it may well not be that it might be to get our attention because some of these experiences seem so tailor made to people relying on their personal lives and their personal symbolism and seeing sometimes dead loved ones and such. I'm also open to other ideas that like, you know, this isn't, we're not smelling these things decaying like maybe they enter our reality and they have a sort of half life, right? They have a sort of half life where as soon as they show up they start literally entropy oring decaying . As a Christian, have your views changed at all being in this space ? I mean, there's just so much cognitive dissonance every day. Yeah, it's weird. Selfers in the Bible. Yeah, I mean, it's so my own sort of faith journey, where I sort of landed with a lot of that is that Christ was a meeting point of a lot of different archetypes , maybe the most potent meeting point of archetypes that's ever been in existence . And I don't think that , you know, because I do run into well, number one , which archetypes would you attribute to Christ? Well, obviously the Messiah. Yes. But you know, the redemptive son, but also the Son and the Father. There's just so many different things coming to a head in that . But the thing that I would sort of come back to is that a lot of I think it behooves Christians to be interested in these topics and to think them through before disclosures of any sort happen . But I also have to say that I also have to say that I've thought of the way that I look at these topics and what they might say about my own faith as sort of being like a kid taking apart a clock , right ? So I want to understand how the clock works, right? And I want to get in there and take a look at the timing mechanisms and the cogs and the wheels and such and the pendulum . But even when I take apart the clock, and even if I understand how the clock works, the clock is the universe , it's not going to tell me what time is, it's not going to make me more punctual, you know ? That layer of interfacing with reality is where my spirituality comes in. This is a nice metaphor. Yeah, I was really proud of it when I came up because Because you know, I 've I've had to think about this a lot. And so yeah, I think that's sort of where I've been able to make peace with it. And I've it's so I kind of wrestle with how much and how I speak about it because when you say that people start drawing conclusions about how exclusionary you are regarding these subjects, right? Or that at the end of the day, I must boil down and think that UFOs are demons, and that's not at all where I land. I'm sympathetic to people who think that because they're thinking outside of that extraterrestrial hypothesis framework, and then we can have a conversation about trans personal psychology, we can have a conversation about trickster phenomena. We can have all those conversations if they're not automatically on that sort of orthodox ETH trajectory . But that's still not what I think. I think that everything is so much more complex than we give it credit for. And that's why I've always gravitated towards that ecology of souls phrasing is because I love the idea of the diversity and the richness of a bunch of different weird things that maybe we can call spirits. I don't know. Like another dimension is synonymous with the other world, is synonymous with fairyland to me, maybe even synonymous with the afterlife. But like a rich ecosystem of different intelligences and presences all filling these niches and oftentimes completely removed from this dichotomy of good versus evil that the Christian discussion always forces us into. You know, the example that I use is like a tornado or a shark could really ruin my day, but they're not evil . And I think that might be a little bit more of what we're seeing rather than the sort of reductive binary that the UFOs or demons question always gets forced into whenever you start talking about these topics in Christianity. Well, that the demons or just UFOs being spiritual, I'm hearing that more and more and more and yet and I think you might have even said this . The twenty seventeen New York Times piece was probably a setback for UFO research. I've thought that. I thought that because we're back to aerospace. We're back to yeah, well, there's something that I've noticed throughout the UFO. It's an interesting day to be talking about this, right? Rediation of the conversation . My friend David Metcalfe, brilliant fellow . He's pointed to the fact that these narratives often get mediated . A good example that he likes to use is that in the Cold War in the fifties, I believe it was Project Moon Dust was dedicated to retrieving space debris and ostensibly Soviet materials, but maybe if they came upon a UFO they collected it too. But nobody was really talking about crash retrieval programs in the fifties when it was actually happening . And then like a light switch in the nineties, that's all we can talk about. That's all we're talking about. And I think people I think it would be in everyone's interest to really pay attention to what you're being told to talk about , right? So what I was perceiving prior to the release of the New York Times article, Neo Fight That I was, right, admittedly , had a lifelong interest, but I was only two books in at this point I did see sort of a course correction in terms of the narrative because people were talking about alter states of consciousness and all these things that like really get me going . Because that's the way I found myself to being interested in the UFO topic was I said, well, these don't have to be thousands of different types of craft and thousands of different civilizations. It can just be this one thing that's interacting with us in this never land, right? But that New York Times article drops and we're back, you're right talking about propulsion systems and antira gvity systems. And there's another form of real loss here that I think is happening because this is a Western European sort of way of thinking about the UFO quest ion. There are all these cohorts from marginalized populations and from indigenous populations that don't think about this phenomenon in that way. They wrap it in with spirituality and NDE's. Right. So when you're talking about like hybrid programs or propulsion systems or any of this stuff, they just right . And so they feel like they're on the outside of it. When a lot of them are having these same experiences, they're just not framing them in the same morning . And a classic example of this is, you know, if you look at the work of Cynthia Hind, who actually started asking the right questions in the right ways with people in I believe it was Zimbabwe . She was finding that a lot of these people were framing this as ancestor phenomenon and that there wasn't a distinction between craft and occupant and any of this stuff. These things were morphous categories where no there was no real contradiction in the idea that you would have a craft come down and then turn into a human being, which is something that you honestly kind of do here in a lot of these insurance stories. So that's something that really makes me very hesitant towards the friend of mine, Dr. Jeff Krappel would call the threat narrative that we're being fed constantly. And I'm not saying that all this stuff is sweetness and light. We know that it's not, right? My rehab trip was not all sweetness and light. No , but it needed to happen. Yes. It was necessary . And so I think that this sort of naivete of like, oh, these things are up in the sk y, and we need to shoot them down. We can shoot them down. I'm not sure that's the most mature way to take it. And that felt like one of those pivots and mediation mediating of the narrative moments when that article dropped. But at the same time , at the same time , it got people acknowledging the paranormal component, you know, the idea that we were looking into things like skinwalker ranch. True, but then when Luis Elizando says, this is an existential threat, I go, Oh no, this is not helpful at all. Yeah . So is that narrative constructed or is that the trickster in the way? It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Mr. Burn s is mistaken for an alien and say it's bringing peace and love, break its legs, don't let it get away . Yeah, I mean and that's the thing. That's what I've resonated so much with , you know, if anybody listening to this picks up one book from this discussion. Don't pick up my books. Pick up George P. Hanson's The Trickster and the Paranormal . And be gentle with yourself, take time to read through it. Some of it reads like VCR instructions. Yes I think that that comparison is especially more apt now that VCRs aren't a thing 'cause it's even more unscrutable . But it's the only book that I've run into that has predictive power in place. It really does. And that's something remarkable . And in case anybody doesn't know , George is making the argument that the trickster archetype hovers over all these phenomena do not make the mistake that we're talking about like a capital T trickster god or anything. Archetypes remember they're those dry river beds. They're the way that things tend to go when things happen . So this isn't a conscious consciousness or sample you can never say never, right? But I think what because of the way that he frames it is just if paranormal events and phenomena seem to be governed by these archetypes and these tendencies down to as, we were alluding to with Lu , down to the organizations that study them. So the trickster archetype is liminal , guardian of the threshold boundaries . It upends the status quo. It's social leveling. So the higher brought low and the lower brought high . It's transgressive . It is playful , it is mischievous, it encodes wisdom in the grossest of spaces, PK Dick's insight from the trash stratum or the philosopher's stone in the head of a toad, right From the d ra ofw socisety you'll find, wisdom and insight . Trickster figures, Hermes , Loki , Till ins Begle that I mentioned earlier, Rynard the Fox , Rabbit from African Cosmologies, Coyote from Indigenous American cosmologies . Brear rabbit? Yeah. Bare rabbit. Yep . And this is an evil. This is just this is necessary chaos. It's rehab. It's rehab. It's rehab . I hadn't thought of that, but that works. Yeah . And so what it does is it fulfills this necessary role and that's one of the things that Hansen points to is the fact that Trickster phenomena, the trickster archetype loves to self negate . So it'll show you one thing, maybe a predictable pattern of behavior and just when you think you've got it, it'll pull the rug out from underneath you. Right . It will set you up it relishes an absurdity, which is arguably what high strangeness is, right? It's antisructural. That's the big thing to the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. I always thought this sound like a Montessori school. I kind of did it's the same thing. And you know, the late Jeff Ritzman, who was an incredible thinker sort of saw that when that announcement was made. He's like, This is going to fall apart because that's what Trickster Theory says it does. And of course, of course it did. So I don't think you can ever get out in front of this thing. That sort of anti structural self negating aspect, I think is best pl exemified in the contact tees or some people who've had poltergeist interactions. Something genuinely anomalous will happen to someone, then they'll be asked to perform and they'll have to start faking it . And eventually that leads to oh, it was fake all along, right? Right. Yeah, that's Errigeller and spoon bending, you know? Or as my friend Sarai Azcath on Where do the Road Go says, like just because I can just because I can fake a a punch in movie doesn't mean that all punches are fake. But neither here nor but the idea that like to be Greg Bishop, my mentor says these phenomena are repeatable but not on demand. That's right. Ranshon said , you can't photograph it. Right. You can't and or you can photograph it, but you're going to get something back that's going to make you seem even less reputable , right? That makes me think of the epigraph Swedenborg , that you shouldn't trust spirits and because they're going to lie to you. They'll always lie to you. Yeah . And again, we're losing you using these terms loosely. Like spirits means the other, whatever that is. Like these phenomena seem to lie to you. It's the reason that we always have that punchline of UFOs only abducting Rednecks, right? Which isn't true, but it's that idea of that sort of marginalization and disreputability that we sort of have associated with the phenomenon. So yeah, these groups to study it always fall apart, attempts to study it always fall apart. Again, it's partially because it's not reliable and I again positioning I'm proposing a metaposition intelligence . But it's also due to the fact that like you're never going to get IRB approval to put someone through a near death experience. No , you know, these sort of things happen, they're associated with trauma, like they really are. And so you're not going to do that in the lab. You're just not going to. It's like saying let's, you know , let's measure tidal fluctuations in a in a bathtub or something. Like it's just not going to happen. Or as Jeff Kri bel says, going to Antarctica and saying where the zebras, you know, it's like you're looking in the wrong place. Right? Because there's no zebras here so zebras don't exist . Right. And it's also Christ in the wilderness with Satan, right? Satan's like do this, do this, he's like, No , because that's not the environment this happens. Like you can't be asked to do this. That's why maybe if a psychic needed to predict lottery numbers to save their life, they could do it, but that's why you don't get psychics predicting lottery numbers. And I'm doing George's work such a disservice because it's such a profound book. It is dense and it's difficult to read through. But once you start to see that you're like,, oh, I can kind of see the way that a lot of the shape of a lot of these things . I think. Why does the act of dying seem to be or the nexus of dying seem to be the center of all of this? What is it about death?, De deathath in UFOs' . Yeah, I joke that the things that you can't talk about are what used to be sex and religion, right? Sexual religion in politics, sexual religion in politics and UFOs, but I repeat myself, right? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, is this is this where we're going to segue into ecology of souls? Because once you draw back the string on that, the arrow goes flying and let her fly Okay of souls is worth, I mean, it's a thousand it's two volumes. It's two hundred and fifty thousand words . And it's got a separate volume just for appendices and end notes and the bibliography , and I hate that it's that long, but the idea was to write a quaint little book on UFOs and death. And then it was like, to explain that, I have to have all this preamble and it just seemed like I needed to do the topic justice. I think that to your original question, that death keeps on cropping up because we're kind of misinterpreting what that moment is, what that NDE moment is. I just think it's one expression of these threshold moments, right? What I mean by that is and this is why I asked if we're going to go off into ecology of Souls territory . I had always been haunted by a statement from Anne Streber, Whitley Streber's wife . They were collecting correspondence in the wake of communion, probably one of the only places that you could write at the time if you were an experiencer . And Anne was making some notes from the correspondents and one of the things that she not ed that Whitley Labor later related this has something to do with what we call death. Now, what we call death, I think is a great little haunting phrase in and of it. It is . But I heard that and I was like, well, what do you do with that? Because again, there's what I want the phenomena to be, right? I really do want there to be fairies at the bottom of the garden. Like I mean, I think that's cool. Yeah. But you don't want there to be a little green men from Zater and Tickwin. Well, I mean, yeah. I just want it to be numerous and weird but I guess what I'm saying is like there's what I want it to be and there's what I think the evidence is pointing towards and there's a part of me inside that doesn't want this to be about death and about all just us and projections of us and drawing us into it, but there's a lot of evidence in that regard. So I took I thought about Anne's statement and a lot of people have talked about this in passing . And I also thought about some other researchers who I thought have done impeccable workbody. who S doesnome't get near ly enough attention is Thomas Bullard, Eddie Bullard , wrote UFO's Measure of a Mystery back in the eighties, which at the time was like the most comprehensive collection of alien abductions , made extensive comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic initiation. Now we can unpack the problematism behind that term shamanism specific to Siberia, et cetera, et cetera. But just shamanic figures in their communities in their respective communities, which we might call medicine men or women or early religions. Yeah, just let's substitute any culture specific term for that intercessor with the spirit world.? Sure He drew a lot of comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic experiences in terms of the symbolism, in terms of the spaces that were they were going to, most notably in terms of the dismember ment that people would have in shamanic initiations. Dismemberment? Yeah, so there was this idea that you would go to the spirit world and you would be taken apart and put back together again better and then come back to serve your people similarly, you know, one of the scholars of one of the scholars of shamanism that has historically the most looked at Mercia Eli talked about certain traditions talking about the shamanic initiation being given by the spirits a crystal in their head to facilitate communication. You see where this is going . All very salient points. So we've got Anne and the Death and we've got Bullard and the Shamanic Initiation. And then you enter Kenneth Ring into the equation who wrote of the Project Omega, which talked about the similarity between UFO experiences and near death experiences . And I have this reading list for everybody by the way. Okay It's a long ring. And that's undeniable too in a lot of ways. They're narratives of ascent as Diana Pasolka would call them. Does DMT experience track with this? The ego death? Well, we can put a pin in that for a moment. I'll get there. I'll get there. This part of this equation too. This is part of my cork board. My corkboard with the red yarn. A jazz guy's riffing. I let him riff. I usually lose my way before the solo is done. But so tunnel oops sorry so tunnel experience themes of ascension of lifting up , going to certain spaces, like there are a lot of descriptions of alien worlds that sound like afterlife meadows and such. People have seen aliens in near death experiences . More often than not, they see being s of light, but that's been revealed as one of the more common yet under reported entities seen aboard craft in alien experiences are beings of light. So that's transferable there. Absolutely true. That's Ray Hernandez's free study of stuff that he did on that. They show that beings of light were really common. So like all these things are starting to play well together. Then you do enter, see I told you to get there. You do enter into the to the DMT in the altered states of consciousness space Scripture has quite a few passages about beings of light. Scripture beings of light. Yeah, the light imagery is everywhere all over it . My good friend and editor Barb,ara Fisher, who runs the six degrees of John Keele podcast is making me work on a book about lights, and it's like the toughest thing I've ever done. But I love it. Love you, Barbara. It's tough. But yeah, that's one of the things like you look through scripture and it's just like Ezekiel . Yeah, yeah, exactly a full story. But the DMT in Theogen sort of space, a lot of those were interpreted or thought of as being vectors for talking with the dead, right ? To the extent that you could translate Ayahuasca as vine of the Spirits or Vine of the Dead. That's just one example among many. Eboga, you see similar descriptions about accessing the spirit world . Terrance McKinna said that he thought of BMT as bungee courting into the bar do . Have you ever tried it? Me? No, I'm too chicken shit to do it. I can't break through. Well, and you know, in the on the backside of recovery, I'm like, Hey, is this a really good idea? I don't know. I wouldn't call it recreation. You know, no, I wouldn't either. Not either. But you know, I'm sort of you know, again, I think it does come to me just being too scared to do it because I have some friends who have been like, I never see fairies and they're like, well, I can fix that for you. You really want me to. It's like, well, maybe you know, and then I start thinking about, you know, you know , blood pressure and all sorts of different things that comorbidities. Anyway , but the wood elves and I mean it's all the same story . Yeah, I mean, yeah, and there are allusions to people being taken apart and put together under Ayahuasca by little beings. So it's all starts to sound the same. And then you say, okay, well the shamanic initiations oftentimes take you to the land of the ancestors or at least to or past the point of death, a near death experience and bring you back with powers. Near death experiencers come back with supposedly abilities of clairvoyance and precognition and all sorts of things. UFO experiencers have this happen too. People don't talk about it enough. True. John. These people all experience poltergeitist effects, Valay said it was the rule rather than the exception that experiencers had poltergeist effects in their lives after their sightings. So we've got checking this shamanic initiation box we're checking the nearby experience box, we're checking the UFO box. We're kind of checking the DMT box to a degree , Mario Kitness and David Lukes did a study that showed that a lot of people who have used psychoactive substances have reported an uptick in things like spontaneous out of body experiences and polarge effects and stuff . End trips to Fairyland , a tunnel. Like if you go to I had the privilege of the second honeymoon. The first honeymoon was to Blue Ridge or drunkenly I drunkenly summoned Bigfoot. The second honeymoon was to the second honeymoon was to Ireland , and just to have a sense of place and to go there and to go to these places and really be like, oh, that's what this is all about. A lot of these ferry forts include these subterranean passages called Suterraines, which are these It's not really known entirely what they were they were used for, perhaps storage, perhaps for hiding, but some of them stretch for miles underground . And so it's very similar to the idea of reading a lot of these fairy stories like a other person went through a tunnel to fairyland, tunnel experience to a pastoral locale. That's the near death experience. The tunnel experience is the beam of light that the OFFA takes you on, the tunnel experience is prefigured in some of the Shremanic stuff as well. So it all starts to kind of play together, but then you've got to say okay, well are, these all crossing over to the afterlife, depending on your spiritual tradition and coming back? Because it doesn't I have a hard time. I can do that with a shamanic thing, right? I can say that people initiates are taken past the point of death and brought back. Because that stretches back into classical traditions and I can do that obviously with near death experiences baked right there into the name . I can do that with Fairyland because fairies of this association with the dead. I have trouble doing that with the UFO thing I have t. Androuble doing that with all the altered states of consciousness in theogen things. So I would posit rather that we have these threshold events, thresholds, tricksters . We have these threshold events where we go and we come back different . And I don't know what that other space is . If you really are still in twenty twenty six holding on to materialism, that's fine, you know, whatever . We'll wait it out. And you really want to say that these are other dimensions, that's fine. I can meet you there. I can meet there. But we've been talking about it for thousands of years . It's the other world . It's Tyran . It's Oz, it's Middle Earth. It's the imagination . I think it's all these things. And if you go there and you come back, you survive that ordeal, it's a hero's journey, right? You come back with these abilities that I can't explain . But if you do spend time with this cohort , we were talking about this a little bit earlier , you do start to notice these strange things happening around them that you're like, that, you know, as someone who hasn't had I've had my death and rebirth experience, I guess, but someone who's never had an alien abduction or a near death experience per se, or any of these things . It's like, this doesn't happen to me all the time and this happens to you. And it really does seem to I'm observing this cloud of strangeness around you . And so that's sort of what I tried to do with ecology of Souls to answer your question thirty minutes later is to put all these things in dialogue with each other and to make them play together because all true narratives must reconcile, right? They must I see too much worth preserving in the work of Bullard and the work of Ring Too many similarities to the fairy stuff in the work of Villet. I'm like, okay, well how do these things all have to play together. I think it's the death thing . I really do . I just don't think we know what death is. We don't know what death is. Yeah. Why wouldn't it be birth instead ? Well, that's that's an interesting idea that , you know is, sort of alluded to . If you look at, I believe it's the work of Croft and Croker , some of those old dusty fairy folklore volumes, they'll make allusions to things like the fairies would laugh at funerals and cry at berths, or there are also illusions to fairyland being summer when it's winter over here. It's a place of inversions. You see inversions, again, that's trickster, topsy turvy sort of stuff again . But this illusion of inversion. So that's an idea that I mean, even Charles Fort played with this idea, I know, we are the ones who are truly dead. And he's so eloquent and I can't even paraphrase him, but he was like, We are the ones who are truly dead. We've emerged from this , you know, we will someday emerge from this cloudy pseudo existence into, you know, the true the true light of our actual our actual lives. I hope he's right . I hope he's right too, and I think that he's even This is a Bose moment. You're ten boring blocks from home until the beat drops in Bose clarity . And the baseline transforms boring into maybe the best part of your day. Your life deserves music. Your music deserves Bose . Find your perfect product at bose dot com LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business . We cannot make your email response time faster . We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place . We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video . LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business . Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn. com slash small business . Even if I wasn't in my own faith background , I think I would still say that he's right, right? I think that there are certain hills that I will and won't die on . The psy phenomena hill is one that I will die on . I wasn't aware until I watched your interview with I guess it was Eric that the Darryl Bim stuff had been replicated. Yeah . So you've got that, you've got some of Dean Rayd's worken. But there's some tricks in with Ben as well. Well, yeah, I mean because initially he couldn't be replicated right and they couldn't really understand it, but it has been since. Well, and that's where you sort of invite in Rupert Sheldrake through the back door, right? With morphic residence. So Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and parapsychologist. That's the episode that I'm releasing tomorrow. Okay, then I'll keep my mouth shut. Just watch that episode. No, no, no, yeah, but yeah, it's exciting. So was this was this was this possible was this possible until was this possible until until Darrell Bim broke the seal, right? I don't know. For the for the pre sentiment studies. Well, now you have to talk about Sheldrake. Okay, so Schildrake's idea was that among his many ideas because he'd done some really interesting work on pet telepathy and whatnot , but the idea that there's a thing that he coined as morphic resonance, which is basically the first time something gets done, it's easier to get done later. Rats and a maze on the west coast, running the maze first will have a more difficult time than rats on the west coast because something about the collective, unconscious maybe, of that species has learned how to maze well, right? Yes. Nature has memory. Yeah. And if you look at sports, that seems to be the case because records are broken. It's like nobody's ever going to break this record, and then that record's broken and the bar keeps on getting raised higher and people keep on meeting it . But But I will die on the because of people like Sheldrake and like Bim, and like Dean Raden , who have been especially Rayden trying to play by the rules of laboratory experiments . That's a hill I'll die on. But the near death stuff is I'm close to I'm not, I don't know if I'm dying on that hill, but I'm definitely being like mortally wounded on that hill. You know what I mean? Okay, that's fair. What about the reincarnation hill? Well, that's a good one too. I mean, you know, 'cause there's good research. There's great research on it. There's University of Virginia is Jeffrey Long, I believe I used to be able to spout this name off the top of my head, but there's really compelling stuff you know with my boys I was kind of hoping that they would say something to me about a past life before age seven. Also they,'re identical twins so, I kind of like wanted to do those twin experiments with no twins of the either either . But yeah, I mean the reincarnation thing, I think, is part of it too. That's where I break with traditional Christianity, although I think there are ways you can sort of You can sort of blur the lines to make it fit. But I think I think you can, I think you can. I mean, and just I get so tired of I mean, I'm probably rambling, so I apologize, but I find the reincarnation stuff to be much more compelling than the criticisms of it. So I get so tired of these low resolution interpretations. It's like, well, why are there more people on Earth now than there ever have been? How I'm like, well, how many waves can be on the ocean ? You know How come five people say that they were Napoleon at my dinner party in their past life? Well, I don't know maybe they'll have a fifth of Napoleon. Like I don't know . Like I like the idea of using the water cycle as an analog for the reincarnation process. You all get dumped into a soup and then you get further around . And researchers like Raymond Moody have addressed that is that soul energy could be broken off into pieces. Yeah . I think so. I think so too And that, you know, that might be what we experience when we meet soulmates , you know, as we see a spark of that other thing that's inside of us or even people that you just get along with. You know, there's some people that you get along with right from the start . There's some people that you kind of don't want to be around, you know, like you That's Mooney's work as well as these sold groups and you just hit it off with somebody. Yeah, one hundred percent. And you're just going through the experience together. I mean, you've had these experiences with people where like, no matter what you say, they're not picking up any of your references and like you have to explain all your as jideokes. like You're, well, I should have never made that joke because now I'm having to explain it and it's just awkward all the way down. There are a couple of musicians that I work with and I love 'em, but it's the same way. It's like, well, you know, maybe we are our Venn diagram of soul pieces does not mean that 's true. As a former standup, I've played to rooms where nobody would have my soul. That's very true about yeah . So that's a College of Souls. I mean, so So the idea but you see all that you have to get to before you can have that UFO conversation, right? And we're not really connecting it with death . I'm sorry. We're not really connecting UFOs with death yet. No, I mean, this is just the preamble which is, why it got split into two things. And you mean, we as a culture or in this room really all of it. I mean, yeah, it's I can't make the connection, but I feel like there's something to it. I mean let me expand a little bit more . We've got the narrative, the nuts and bolts to aerospace , but I think you have even brought to everyone's attention that we're seeing more experiences that are spiritual and less that are abduction . Right. Like the narrative is changing culturally. That's what the phenomenon does, I think. The late Earl Grey Anderson , head of Sokal Mufin , said that before he passed away, said that he was noticing that a lot of these narratives in the UFO phenomenon are shifting more towards like down loads, astral traveling , consciousness excursions , structured craft are shifting a lot towards more lights in the sky. I have multiple thoughts about this. One of them is that as we globalize and we get we lose our cultural idiosyncrasies, we're seeing a truer more stripped down version of the phenomenon, right? So instead of seeing , I don't know , a flying chariot or a flying saucer, we just see the light that was there all along, right? Because culture is not as distinct as it once was in a globalized era. Right. I mean , before Kenneth Kenneth Arnold said saucers it's misinterpreted. He didn't see any saucers. Yeah, they're like bat wing chevrons and things. Yeah. But then we well now we're in Fourth Wall Family's territory. Well, we can't get there. We're not getting people still people ended up seeing saucers, but hey, so yeah, so we'll go to break. We'll come back to fourth while. But if you want to make a point, do it. Yeah, I would just say that so the phenomenon seems to be seems to change and adapt. It seems to continue to be changing and adapting . Even disclosure for better or worse is changing and adapt. There are people talking about things , aspects of the phenomenon that you didn't used to hear . The people in that audience in those hearings read some very strange books. Let's just say that And it's almost as if the front facing effort to get people to acknowledge UFOs is giving them the most palatable version. Here are the Nutsy Boltsy things. We won't quite talk about the psyonics and the extended consciousness and the death connection because you want to talk about something that would really be catastrophic disclosure, it would be the death connection. Of course, right. But you know they're tracking that and researching it could always have been. A hundred percent. Some stuff that I 'm not I hate it when people talk about insider knowledge, but I just don't want to be gauche or gauche or anything and say something. But anyway, people are reading weird books on this stuff. People are authoring weird books on this stuff, who are at the forefront of the disclosure movement, right ? And I think that we're going to continue to see this get weirder and weirder and weirder if this current disclosure effort takes root. And look, it's gotten farther than I ever thought it would this time . So we'll see . By the time this comes out, I think everyone's going to be disappointed . They probably are. They probably are. Yeah, but I'm trying to be optimistic. I mean, like, you know, there was a time when I would just said nothing would happen, but opinions like that age like milk. So true. All right, we'll come back. We'll talk about fiction bleeding into reality . Fourth wall , Jefforey Krippel said that that book saved your life Yeah How does that work? The gateway in the sort of germ of what became Fourthwell Phantoms is part of what saved my life, and the lessons that grew into fourth wall were what saved my life. So it was during that rehab stent I had no idea what I was getting into . You know, I'm a little child of privilege . These are not my people in rehab, you know, they are my people by the way . But you know, how do you find your way to navigate through this? You know, because there are guys, you know, there are guys who were I learned this. They're crunching up goldfish and putting hot sauce on them. So it's like, oh, you've done time. Apparently that's a thing. That's the thing. So that was your first stint ? Yeah . On your last God, God willing. Yeah, knock on wood . But how does a Josh Cutchen in all of his fart sniffing holy toy sort of way. How does he survive? How does he navigate that and how has he survived that? After acknowledging that these are your people . In comes Carl Young and Joseph Campbell . Really? To save my yeah. So I journaled, I filled up like two journals in the time that I was there just writing, writing, writing. I got known as the writing guy . How long did you do thirty ? I did like twelve. Okay. I should have done thirty, but I should have done thirty, but we're also six years later. So I don't know, you know. But what really helped me was trying to try to pinpoint where I was at in the hero's journey because this is not the way life is supposed to go, right ? You're not supposed to wind your way and wind up in a sort of prison esque sort of vibe , you know? So you're in the cave searching for the elixir? Yeah, yeah, what was the belly of the whale? Okay, what was the belly of the whale? Um , and then what do you do after you get out of that? Like what does slaying the dragon mean? You know, does it because this isn't a dragon that you slay, right? You don't it's got to look different than that . So it was by leaning into archetypes and find leaning into that sort of hero's journey thing and finding strength in those synchronicities with Saint Moses and all that stuff . It really felt like something was plugged in and saying, you know, this matters, you know, this is this is the way out if you if you do it right and to quite frankly toss aside that connection to whatever this other thing is , which was so tangible , weeping up and weeping back that was to toss aside everything that you learned from interact ing with the divine, to go back out there and do your thing, back to the way you work, just seemed like it was it wasn't just bad for me. It wasn't just bad for my family . It wasn't just disappointing. It was blasphemous, is really what it felt like. You felt like you turn your back on God ? It felt like it would have. Or rather more to the point of the lessons that evolved into Fourth Wall Phantoms. It would have been it would have been making a shitty story , right ? It would have been going against that narrative direction, that empty riverbed, that dried river bed that Jung talked about it would have been like not following that . Like, I think that God , the universe, if you're more inclined , wants you to follow some of these paths. They're paths of least resistance that are sometimes the best paths for you. Totally agree . And if you can learn and listen and lean in those moments, then things will turn out for the better. So the entire introduction to Fourth Wall Phantoms is me navel gazing and sharing my rehab experience , but just to show that these ideas have real stakes . And I think when you expand those up to the macro level, to the societal level. I think they have even deeper stakes , about the stories that we tell ourselves , about the cynicism and dystopia that we've sort of been revealing in. I mean, honestly, like, don't get me wrong, I love I love irony and , you know , that Robert Downey Jr. Esque snark as much as the next person . But But there's something inauthentic about it, I think. Well, then this is a detour I want to take. Yeah an author's first novel they can't help but reveal a lot of themselves . So the old Ways never died twenty twenty three is a musician in rural Georgia having experiences, difficult relationships and struggling with alcoholism. Yeah. A musician in North Georgia. Yeah, I call it my Appalachian addiction goblin trauma drama. Yeah . So are you is it Robert Colter? Yeah, Rick Rick . Rick. R Coolbertter Colter is actually the name of the Tuper in Atlanta He wrote me and he was like, oh, that was me and I'm like, No, it wasn't me. It's Rick Colter. It's Rick Colter. So what are you working out in that novel? Well, so the The pre and post rehab experience was sort of trending towards looking at fiction in general. So prior to during the pandemic I was putting together a collection of ess ays that I was editing and contributing to, but editing of people whom I admired about fairies and film and how certain films talk about fairy folklore in authentic ways. And then after rehab, it was the novel, which is me processing, which sort of pointed me in the direction towards fourth wall fandoms, which is nonfiction about fiction, right ? And in the novel , yeah, I mean, sometimes I feel kind of sheepish about it because it's like than k you for attending and reading my therapy session everyone. But you know, I always wanted to you needed to do that I absolutely needed to. I mean, I wanted so much so much of that book is pulled straight out of my rehab journals. It really is . Phrases and stuff that people said to me and stuff like that . I also wanted to see if I could write a novel. My favorite fiction is there ye'ahs, the monster but the, monster also symbolizes something, you know, there's something going on under the hood, so to speak with the monster . I thought that a generational fairy curse kind of looks a lot like addiction. You know, and alien abduction is kind of look like hangovers. You know, post alien wake up in your dry mouth and you don't know where your pants are and you can't remember what happened last night after a certain point. Well, how does Riculter change at the end of the novel? He realizes that he doesn't have to be perfect . He makes peace with who he is , um , in terms of who he was told he was versus who he truly is and he 's not as self centered as he is at the start . But to do that , he has to give up something that's very important to him, which is the same thing that I gave up that was very important to me . And you know, I just got done going through the audiobook version of it with Micah Hanks and you know, there's some stuff that would probably change, but at the end of the day, it really does encapsulate. I say that ecology of souls has my head in it and a fourth wall has my soul in it , but I think the Moldways never died has my heart in it in terms of the relationship that I developed with those characters and how they have taken me through my journey in the time since. Now look another aspect of writing the novel was sort of pragmatic. I'd heard these stories even from real straight laced atheist materialist friends of mine who are authors. It's like, yeah, you know, you're writing a book and if you have a really well developed character, they won't let you do stuff. And they're like, That's true. Can you say that again for the people in the back? Like, what are you reading? That''ss true true. It It's totally true. Follow them where they go. And I started wondering what that was. And I wanted to experience a little bit of that. I did get a little bit of that, not too much, but I got a little bit of that. So it was again part of this journey that we was progressing on towards what would end up becoming fourth ball phantoms. You've heard Stephen King methodology, PKD . Did you feel like you were writing inspired? Channeled? Channeled. There was one chapter especially that needed substantive revisions . And it wasn't the sense of like, oh Josh, you messed this up. He didn't do it was like because when I rewrote it, it was like, oh no, the transmission was garbled. Like that was that sense. It was like, no, this is coming in in a much more fluid way. This is the way it always should have been, right ? So it was very much that sort of sense . And back to what you were talking about, you know, it one of my favorite things that Stephen King has said. I think he originally said it in Bag of Bones, but I think character is an author saying like, you know the real work happens with the boys in the basement , the blue collar work in the boiler room, the deep of your subconscious. That's where the story really takes place and takes form. And I have my own version of that, which is I do the best writing between the desk and the fridge , which is so true. The number of times I've been like, I can't figure out how to say this. And then I go up and it's not necessarily the desk in the fridge, right? But like the point is whenever I go and do something else for like even if it's going to go to the bathroom or do something with one of the boys that they need or to say something to my wife. That's when it's like I get so frustrated because as I'm about to accomplish the thing that I got up to do, that's when the perfect phrase enters my head. I'm like, just hold on and rush back and write it out of them. Then the music fighting with the trickster. Yeah, very similar. Yeah, hold on a minute. That's okay. Very good . From everything I read about it , it felt like a story of forgiveness and you for'greiving yourself . Yeah, it definitely is a big there's a lot of stuff that I ended up working out in myself . There's some relationships , some father son dynamics that weren't father son dynamics. There were grandfather grandson dynamics in that book . But yeah, a lot of it was that and just trying to find a way to commemorate not only my time struggling with what I struggled with and I guess continue to struggle with, but also quite frankly to commemorate what a lot of musicians went through during the pandemic . I was fortunate enough to have music and my writing, which I to this day I,'m so glad that I can switch back and forth between the two because I used completely different parts of my brain . But a lot of my friends who were just performers didn't really have that. And it was a painful thing to watch happen really once . To come to Fourth Wall Phantoms, it's you've got all this nonfiction which essentially is not proable . Right. Speculative nonfiction. There used to be a spot in borders back when borders bookstores were things that's speculative nonfiction and I love that. I did it. Yeah. So it's nonfiction, so it's true, but it can't be proved. And then we've got fiction novel, which is heavily researched. Yeah. Part of it was trying to say what would happen if you were faithful to fairy folklore and fiction because that doesn't happen very well. Right. So that was part of that attempt, yeah . So Fourth Wall Comes is born from the novel it feels like this sort of meta commentary ? It was it was it was that trajectory that I was talking about. So looking at let's kind of let's kind of say how loyal some fictions are . Okay, let's kind of write your own fiction then. this And was like how does we know how the phenomenon affects fiction? How does fiction affect the phenomenon ? And I think that it plays nicely with some of some of the ideas in ecology of souls. You know, one of the biggest bits of pushback that I get to some of the ideas in ecology is that we have crash retrievals, we have bodies, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't buy that ? Not necessarily. I just think that I'm just not entirely sure that, well , I always have to leave the door open to not buying that, right? Because media do you? Mediated narratives and stuff. You're open to it. Something something smells. Something smells , and I think that there might be a way of looking at this that both scratches that crash retrieval itch and takes a look at how weird and slippery the phenomenon can be. So to sort of launch into that. is that idea that I mentioned to you about authors saying that their characters tell them what they can and can't do. And I really wanted to sort of explore that . And as it turns out , it's not an outlier . A lot of authors have had this happen to varying degrees of corporeality, let's say . Einerich Ibsen said that he met Nora from a doll's house . Dickens had some experiences like this . Most famously Alan Moore and John Constantine, he was sitting in a sandwich shop in London and says that somebody walked through the door that looked like John and they sort of acknowledge each other. Other people who've worked on the Hillblazer title have also supposedly interacted with John Constantine. So this is fiction starting to bleed over. Fiction bleeding over into life. There's an entire wonderful book called Em Ibmodagied inations by Chidombro Mesh on this, and it goes into like stats and statistics on authors that have experienced this . But there are some got them on the iPad. When Alan Moore's Constantine walks through the door, is it from the eighties? Is it the twenty fourteen ? Is there a canonical character? He said that it looks in the interview which was originally in Wizard magazine, he said it looks just like Sting . A thatct'uallys, not true. It looked like Constantine because he based Constantine Olsting. Right. But he says it looked like him . And so I guess it was the full trench coat garb . And it wasn't too far after his introduction in swamp thing if memory serves . But this is something that a tons of people, I mean Alice Walker, Color Purple had some experiences too where her characters like actually , as she put it would, sit down and sit on the couch and talk with her. So these go all the way from intuitive senses of what your characters would and wouldn't like to do through oral hallucinations to visual quote unquote hallucinations . And apparently it's very common . There was a study that was conducted at the Edinburgh Book Festival that found that indeed some pretty staggering numbers. I don't have the stats on the top of my head. But this is something that authors experience quite a bit and creatives in general will tend to experience . And so it occurred to me like what happens when you put that in dialogue with the USO phenomenon or with these other things? And it has been done . And I'll get back around to the crash retrieval bit that I mentioned earlier . But it has been done to people who I think have done great work in this regard are Bertrand Mayst and Martin Kotmeier . Mayst took a look at pre Kenneth Arnold citing sci fi pulps saw that especially even when there was a division between the pulps in France and the Pulps in America the UFO sightings and what would become alien abductions all featured elements from these that apparently first appeared in these pulp magazines, right? You know, Martin Kotmeier has done the same thing. A classic example that I think he did really good work on is that the first instance of a UFO stopping a vehicle or interfering with electronics was actually again in science fiction short stories . Mad scientist from another planet plunges the New York City power grid into a blackout for ransom or something like that . That appears before any of that other stuff. So there seems to be some sort of interplay between I would call it a dialogue loop between the phenomenon and our expectations and our fictions that feeds into itself and actually appears in these experiences and goes round and round and around and around and around we go . I think you could probably follow that sort of dance all the way back to petroglyphs, you know, and at which point what is a petroglyph? Is it art? Is it life? I really don't know . But people have seen aliens that look like they're out of movies, like describing like, oh, I always saw Jawas, you know? It's like do you, what do with that or craft that look like my favorite my favorite Martian spaceship ? And like the knee jerk reaction is to throw those in the waste bin. But as we sort of talked about in the beginning of our conversation, like I hate that, you know . And look, I'm not saying that we're not dealing with mental illness and we're not dealing with hoaxers, but I have also talked to some people , some experiences with whom I've been very close who have said that, yeah, you know, my own personal fictions that I was writing as a kid showed up during the time of my UFO experiences. Is this the trickster changing costume to be culturally acceptable . Is it the trickster? Is it screen memories? You know, I don't really know what a screen memory is even after all this time in this field. Like it's just sort of thrown out there. It's like oh screen memory very glamor, you know? Right. But yeah, it's adapting to our expectations. I think there's a good part of that. I mean, well, people will see something and like, did you see that? I didn't see anything . But I did. Well, and that gets to the sort of weirder way that reality seems to pick up seems to pick up our fictions in general. I mean Kotmeyer at one point was talking about how he threw out a UFO report because it featured lithium crystals and that sounded too much like dilithium crystals, but now we have lithium batteries. So I don't you know, I don't know where these lines intersect, but obviously you can see where this starts to interface with Eric's retrocozy. I was just thinking of that. Yeah. So the question is thinking about Bob Lazar retro causality or manifestation. That's at the root of it. Which have this great anecdote in Fourth Wall Phantoms where I was playing a video game Alan Wake because the Remedy Studio does great stuff and the entire one of the mrusts of that video game is retro causality or manifestation is really in the middle of writing this book, I'm reading like a collectable in the game that's talking about this. If this happens, you know, how do you bring up Shell Drake where nobody's heard of Shell Drake while I'm writing that episode Well, I mean yeah, it's there's something come on. There's something in the well so another weird thing that happened to me was like I was like, okay, this is weird that I'm playing this game as I started writing this book and I'm brushing my teeth a couple days later and for some reason the sort of inversion of a common phrase pops into my head and it says if you can't join them beat him. And I'm like, I don't know why that popped into my head, but I tried to like, is that insightful at all? If you can't join them, beat them. I guess maybe . And then literally that same night I sit down to play some of the DLC and one of the characters says, We can't join them beat him. And I'm like, what the So that was like for me that was reality saying okay look Josh, sometimes it is retro causality it's it's got to be but you know I, think that if you look at I think that I would prefer that there be a version of this that is manifestation because this is all manifestation, right? I mean, you know, somebody somebody decided to design this and it was in their head at some point and they carved it and they mouldered it and now it literally is made manifest. This is like a cult is one hundred one. Sure . And so So you put that alongside of all the creatives who talk about ideas coming to them as opposed to them coming up with ideas. Quote apocryphally attributed to Jung, also attributed to Hillman was people don't have ideas, ideas have people . If you've ever been involved in a creative process, you know that this has happened to you at some point. Very much that. Yeah. I wait for it. That's a great idea to sort of like set not a trap or an ambush, but like to sort of put yourself , I mean, that might be what the use of drugs in these situations is, right? It's just making yourself receptive to these ideas that come floating along. Like some writers want to smoke pot when they write, I can't do that. Right. But that just makes them open to the news, which I hundred percent totally believe in. Yeah, I totally believe in it too. You know, Tolkien thought that he exumed Middle Earth more than more than inventing it . So welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumy . I got you. Serum moisturizer or moisturizer serum. Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade . Let's get you meshed. There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora. Hi , I let's get you a basket . So you're saying with Hilton honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere. Anywhere. What about fancy places like the Canopay in Paris? Yeah. Hilton honors baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries, like the Conradon Talum? Hilton honors baby. What about the five star Waldorf astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all nine thousand properties? When you want points that can take you anywhere anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay Appeal Travers who wrote Mary Poppins, who was a mentor of Whitley's, actually , talked about ideas coming along as like these little balloon ideas, these free floating balloons that you sometimes grab hold of. Excuse me . Where do those ideas come from? Do they come from the collective consciousness , or is that retro causality? That's the eternal debate, right? That's the eternal debate. Because Eric will say that's just you giving yourself a right of the back. And so I think that retro causality is in there, but that's when I would invoke the sort of earlier discussion that we had about the center of that time loop is the XNHLO. And for me, Exni Hello is the creative act. I'm with you. It is the spoken word. It is a narrative and I think narrative and sacrifice runs everything. Like it really starts to feel that way, the older I get. The muse doesn't feel like me when it's there. It feels very different . I don't know if you experienced that. I mean, look, you said channeling. The best thing that I've ever composed was when I was, you know, shit faced. So I mean, which is I mean, like Todd Waze wrestled with this because he's like, you know, you get to certain point when you get 'cause he got sober and he's like, you get to a certain point and you're like, well, what if how much of this is me and how much is the sauce, you know? Right. So again, I think it's not an either or proposition. But yeah, but yeah, there is a sense that it's more akin to possession. Yes. And if you've ever been in a flow state, it's kind of the same way. Like I listen back to me like, look, don't me wrong. I got plenty of bad solos that are all across the internet, okay? Bad basslines, bad all sorts of stuff. But every now and then I'll listen to something and be like, That was not me. Like it's me playing it, but that was not me, you know, and sports figures will talk about thing. So there seems to be an interplay . I want to talk about Predator in Bigfoot here in a minute, but let's put a pin in that because I open this whole conversation with trying to find again a logical exemption for crash retrievals in a world, in a reality where this possibly is what's going on where the phenomenon is listening to us and adop ting aspects of our fictions, and there are plenty that I list in the book. I'm not going to go through them right now. But in a reality where the phenomenon is adopting aspects of our fictions , what do we make of crash retrievals? Like what would you, what would you make of a blood sample from John Constantine, right ? Right Or a bit of Miolnier ? What would that look like? Would it come back with like, oh, isotopes we can't make materials we can't create on Earth. Is that what it would look like? I don't know, but it gives me some wiggle room, I think. And I'm more of the opinion now. There's a great book called Illuminations , I believe it is by Eric Wallet that talks about, among other things , the possibility that some UFO phenomena are mass formation poltergeist events . As we've alluded to, Poltergeist seem to be as much a product of the human psyche as they are ghosts, right? And that's kind of a keel interpretation. It is. Wallet makes a great point that a lot of that falling leaf motion that you see in UFO accounts again and again is exactly the way that a ports fall and from the ceiling and up in poltergeist events . And there's already, as we've sort of mentioned, as Dr. Velly said, a connection between poltergeist and UFOs . Poltergeist supports this, that the other . I'm not sure that crash retrieval isn't in even bodies, maybe . I'm not sure that they're not more akin to a ports . By which I mean how do we distinguish these things that come from somewhere else, another dimension and manifest fully formed? How do we distinguish those from something that just wasn't in our reality. There's this great bit of research by doctor Steve Mira who is working on a longitudinal poltergeist case. What's a longitudinal ? It's just over time. Okay . Not like a one off, right? Okay . And there was a mug from a set that I deported . Now we have to sort of we have to sort of go into this with some expectations that there is a control group and that the mugs had been microwave, whatever. I'm acknowledging that . But he did some tests on the mug that was aported, or disapported, rather, the mug that vanished and came back. And he compared them to the control that had not been reported to do that . And he noticed changes in the molecular composition. No. Now I know the audience is wanting me to be more specific. I'm crap at chemistry and crap at science. It's in fourth wall phantoms, but changes in the Melisiverts and changes in it was slightly more radioactive and had been subjected to heat if memory serves, okay? Wow . The point is , again, those details, I know I'm fudging on them, but the point is that he studied in a port at the molecular level and said that it looked different. It had somehow changed, which to him brought up a couple questions. of Did the mug change when it came back or is it even the same mug ? Is this an imposter mug, right? Right. And yet we see things when we do these analyses of metamaterials, right? Where there's molecular compositions and isotopes that we can't explain. Right. So are we in a port territory? I don't know. The other thing that really gets to me and I think is really worth commenting on is you familiar with the phenomenon of angel hair? Yes. So for anybody doesn't know Ectoplasm Ectoplasm. It's ectoplasm. I don't know. Thank you for making that connection. So angel hair was used to hear about it a lot in the aftermath of sightings and the UFO sightings in the fifties and sixties, this wispy kind of stuff that would fall to the ground or be found at landing sites, you put it in a jar and it would evaporate . And if you look into reports of ectoplasm from mediums and seances , it would supposedly this gauzey wispy material that would come out of orifices and if it was collected in a jar, it would evaporate. Is it the same thing? I don't know. I don't have a jar of either one on my desk. And if I did, apparently it would have evaporated, but it won't let you measure it. It won't let you. Right, right What is that? There's another great example too. The saga of the Green Stone , which is which is it was basically like a larping . Yeah, where they would get these dreams about having this fabled philosopher's stone basically that was a green stone and they would gotten in this into this giant mythology about the gunpowder plot and a historical facts about how this green stone and this small sword and this casket all featured into it . But then people who were tangentially associated with it were having dreams about the locations for these things. And they followed up on them. They actually found like they can show you the green stone and the sword and stuff and I don't know what that is because I'm listening to the historians and they're saying like none of this ever happened. And it sounds like it's a whole rabbit hole that I encourage people to check out this British phenomenon of psychic questing. Could this be the Ph illip Experiment? Well, I think it's I think it's souvenirs of the imaginal, right? I think it's souvenirs from that other space . And well, the Philip experiment is they create a character. Right. It's something being created from whole cloth, right? And they know it's fake and yet they still summon they do a san and the stuff thing about the thing about the Greenstone stuff though is like we've got the actual thing. We've got the actual object that you can see and hold and handle, which is like saints relics , fairy boots, fairy flags . And yet we put the UFO crash material over here. We separate it from all that. Do we have bodies? I don't know, and that would be a very extreme version of what I'm talking about. Yes . But if reality is getting this weird, I don't know that that's not the case. Now, to your point, the Philip experiment, which I think is really important . A group of Toronto psychologists decided to create a ghost from whole cloth and they came up with a believable backstory for him Philip Aylesford , a spy in the English Civil War gave him all the things you would expect from someone in that time period highlights and low lights of his life . And then they started asking quest ions and asking for responses back in the form of raps and such. And whatever they were asking questions of was correctly answering questions about Philip's fictional backstory . Is that did they actually create something Tolap thought form? I don't know, was it another spirit that was listening in that was being a trickster and you know being like, oh yeah I'm Philip or was it a part of them that was projected out? I don't know , but this is this is sort of the message behind so much of so much occultism is that you can if you if you play act stuff enough, you can kind of make things happen. Like moving the ouija board around? Yeah, yeah, like moving the Ouija board or if you look like a lot of ceremonial magic, they're dressing up in a robe and they're saying to the spirits that they are Solomon and they're holding the props. It's the theater, right? It's theater . And people get results. If you look at like ceremonies are theater . John Sabal, doctor John Sabal has been doing work with recreating period dress and period customs and period props and period phrases and talking to sort of coax out ghosts, reenactors and ghosts. And he's gotten some success with that as well. It's almost like the act of like pretending gets these things gets this thing on the other side of the veil to respond. You mentioned Tulpas. Could you get into that real fast? Because this is important that's foundation . It is, it is. And I kind of I have to sort of it's one of those things. You ever read these things that you like, you're like, yeah, it could be that, but I really don't like it as much as I feel like I should. You know , so the idea of the Tulpa supposedly the idea that through enough concentrated dedication and thought you can make manifest a thought, right? The famous example comes from Alexander David Neil , who in Tibet claimed that she manifested a mischievous monk . And for a while she thought just she could see it, but there were some there was some physical contact and eventually others started seeing it as well . She alluded to the fact that it possibly got out of her control and she had to, again, through extensive concentration make it dissipate the idea of a thought form or an agregor, I would think of aggregores as that at the more collective level, right? Yep. That's yummy in the it's more of a it's actually sort of egregory is derived out of the watchers. Yes. Is what that is . But I think that you could make some real strong comparisons. I don't know if Jung ever really mentioned the word Egory, you might have , but you can draw some comparisons between that sort of collective expression I don't know if I believe I don't know if I believe in Tobles or not. I wish I could remember who said this to me. I had a friend tell me one time . Friend of a friend, right ? Friend of a friend got an appointment with a high ranking llama and goes in this to private meeting and is so excited to ask about Tulpas. And he sits down and he asks the question, can you tell me more about the creation of Tulpas? Goes through the translator, answer comes back and says , He doesn't know what you're talking about. No, it's like so and there's some there's some illusions to this that the Tulpa the idea of the Tulpa is while the idea of thought forms you see everywhere, it's obviously the driving mechanism behind occultism, right? The idea there's some indications that Tulpa is just cultural appropriation all the way down. It's just theosophy. I mean like so much of what you talk about on the Y files is theosophyh knowo, you that right? I do. So much is theosophy. It's influenced. I should have a picture of the I mean yeah, I make the joke that paranormal studies nowadays are just theosophy in James Shelby Downard ly so much of that is downstream from that. So yeah, I don't know, but I think that ties into this idea. I think if the trappings of it, like, oh this mystical eastern secret, if the trappings aren't accurate, the ide a is something that has been talked about a lot. Well, the reason I wanted to talk about it is Tulpas are manifestation through concentration. You scale that up to global and now you've got John Keele's interpretation of manifestation and then the bodies in the crash retrieval. Is that just manifestation ? Yeah, and the thing the other thing just I'm going to come back to that. The other thing I want to say about Tulpus that doesn't sit well with me is like pref, Ier to think that like you didn't make that monk, Alexandra. Like that monk was always there waiting for you to yeah. Yeah, I think that you're onto something with that. This idea of and again, it's not saying that this is necessarily all even us. It's there's something that's interacting with us and listening and it's in this there are time loops, there are culture loops. You know, there are culture influence loops in the phenomenon too . But you know, we see a ghost train and we don't try to like get a cog from the ghost train . But if you did, what would it look like ? You see , you smell ghost perfume and you're not like, well I'm going to bottle the ghost perfume. So I really don't know so where I've landed with a lot of this stuff is that when I wake up in the morning , I guess I'm part of me psychic. I've thought that I'm dead as a doornail, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm not thinking about astral traveling or any of this stuff. Like, I want breakfast, you know? I want to go to the bathroom and get breakfast. So like, how much of me is psychic? twenty percent? eighty percent of me. We can say like, you know, let's playfully agree that sure, a part of us is psychic, eighty twenty . What if these other phenomena are twenty eighty, right? So they have that physical just as I can step into that psychic space and do things in that psychic space, or I could if I actually had an aptitude or the time and training . Maybe these things are mostly in that psychic space, but can step over into this physical space and then leave burn marks in the ground and leave scoop marks in your hands. You know, and one of the things when I wrote where the footprints and we started our conversation about Bigfoot , one of the biggest pushbacks that Tim Rinner and I got was Oh, g wellhost don't leave footprints . It's like , did you ever read your early pair of psychology? Because that was like one of the first ghost hunting methods was to spread talcum powder on the floor and wait for footprints to manifest. So we have something backwards about this physical, non physical thing, right ? And I think that we shouldn't be thinking in terms of, well, Jung would say we shouldn't be thinking about that in terms of physical, non physical at all because at the cycloid level you go deep enough like, material and psyche are not distinguishable. It's only sort of as a sin that chain that they become distinguished. But the thing that I would I would say is that we stop looking at these questions as physical psychic , as internal, external, as mental , embodied, and honestly, maybe even fact fiction. Like maybe that's that same ichotomy that we see. The psychic physical dichotomy is that fiction fact thing . And does that mean Constantine was always there? Maybe , you know, maybe I would say what it definitely would mean to me is that just as if I think about this. because I had a thought and I completely lost it . I would have to say that maybe Constantine was always there. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to deprive too much of our agency, you know, because I just push back against Tulpas being , you know , my gut goes there though. Both end , you know, and that sounds like wiggle room or sounds like I'm being Weasley, right? Both end. But creative people understand this. A lot of things in life are both hands. Yes. I wound up in my worst situations in my life because I wasn't both ending . You know, I was either oring So that might be part of what we're might be part of what we're seeing here . So Valle says something's controlling it. Keel says we're controlling it. Who's right We are the other. I mean, in this is it's the only answer, I guess. I started by saying I was a mystic, right? Like but that's that's really what you do sort of trace back into mention that sort of psychoid layer and but that's also the less on of something like monism, you know , the idea that the internal and the external are two sides of the same coin . It's also the idea I would argue, you know , idealism Pan psychism is the idea that consciousness is in everything and idealism would be the idea that everything is in consciousness and if everything's in consciousness then there really aren't distinctions between us and the other . And you know, don't know how literal we can take any of this It's always speculative Ignoring your research not an academic answer. I just want to know what you think happens when we die Very simple question, even throwing my way I would have to say that I had I have a very distinct memory of growing up in a church where there was a Sunday school lesson that really terrified someone and it was part of the lesson was It evolved into a place where the Sunday school teacher basically said I think when you get to heaven , you might not even recognize your family . Which for a child is a terrifying thing to say. Like you might as well be saying that there's nothing , right? Yep . But I'm not sure that that's not the case now, you know, forty one years into my life . I think that if you look at how so many of these experiences point towards things like ego death point towards again that that idea of monism that I just mentioned, that idea of one, you know , oneness you can go through experience your accounts with UFO s and you'll read things like I am one with the one that is all and I am the I am the me within thee and like these weird like spiritual phrases, but they do point back to that sort of like lack of distinction between things. And I think that does mean that points two suggests raises the possibility that when you die, it is like a river going to the sea and you end up mixing up and matching and you don't really care . Just like I don't care about like my sons are obsessed with Legos . If I took away their Legos, they'd be distraught. But is they going to feel that way in thirty or forty years . I mean, they might, but you take my point. Like the things that I care about now and place value on now at this point in my life are so different than as a child. I can only imagine what how differently I would treat this stuff on the other side of the veil compared to the things that are important to me now. I had never considered heaven as the same as oblivion before, but that's what it sounds like. Yeah , and that's terrifying, but would you care once you reach that point? No, but is this compatible with soul groups? Is this compatible with reincarnation? Well, that's why I like sort of invoking the water cycle is because after the river goes to the sea , some of that evapor ates from the top and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Bangladesh and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Perth and you get bits of a molecule that fell off the in Ecuador and they all come together in one raindrop that falls back to the earth as it becomes individuated again and falls back to Earth, and eventually it's going to hit that river and come back to the ocean because the water cycle is closed loose. I tend to agree. Yeah. But that's how you get pieces of people and maybe even I mean for the longest a lot of my work has been pushing into areas where I'm really uncomfortable . My toes curl in my shoes in all the bad ways, when I hear people talking about pre birth memories with the ETs and reincarnation in these narratives, it's like oh I don't know what to do with that. But because I felt felt that way I wanted to go there . And you know if let's have our cake and eat it too. Yeah, there are ETs and yeah their souls mix up in that same cosmic soup to evaporate and fall back down with us. So you could be part Zebulganubian, you know? I'm uncomfortable with it, but I can't disprove it. I mean, again, again it's all speculative. I mean, anybody who ever listens to me for hard facts , despite all my despite all my end notes, everything at the end of the day that I talk about is speculative. And I think there's just , I think there's so much that's rewarding in the speculation about these topics. Like the idea, the binary of does this exist or not, as you can tell, I just blew right past it like this just because we've been doing we've been at this in the UFO question. I mean, obviously for a lot arguably for a lot longer, but in the UFO case, we've been doing this for like coming up on eighty years and we still haven't settled that binary question. So let's go ahead and say, Okay, let's assume that they are. What can we learn? Like what is this pointing us towards? And I think that's such a more interesting place to go. And I think that's also a place where we can meet the skeptics . I have so many skeptic friends who will still say to me like even if this stuff is bunk , it's important because it tells us about the way that we metabolize perceived contact with the other. It tells us about humanity, it tells us about ourselves . And that's that's valuable no matter who you are, I think. It tells you something about what it is to be a human being. You mentioned that that it's fascinating that you're drawn to these ideas that are on the threshold of comfort . And I'm thinking that as we get more comfortable with certain notions we keep pushing it , meaning we've got flying sauces we're uncomfortable with. Then we get then we got grays and then it's like they're just grays and we keep moving, we keep moving. Now it's just retrieval. We get it. But now we're into AI and now we're scared the new trickster? It's kind of the shell break thing, right? Like yes. Or it's, you know, addiction has been a theme running through this. It's like developing a new tolerance, like, you know? Exactly. A tolerance. I mean, you've experienced this, I'm sure in this space where it's like you're like, yeah, okay, you're taken by aliens. Yeah, you saw a big foot like whatever. Like me more, give me more. Yeah. And so I think that makes perfect sense that that would happen on the societal level too. And I think it's a really interesting time to be into these topics for a lot of different reasons. I mean, again, I've been eating a lot of crow about the way that I've talked about the disclosure movement historically because like nothing's going to happen. Well, something's happening. I'm not sure of how useful it is. I'm not sure of how revealing it is, but this is different than other disclosure seasons because they come in seasons . But it's also been interesting to be alive when the UFO phenomenon has gone through another one of these costume changes. And I promise I'll get back to the AI question . But you know , for years we had signs and wonders in the sky and chariots and stuff . And then as Dr. Vales pointed out, you'll end up with airships in the early twentieth century and flying saucers in the black triangles. And I said, as soon as the twenty seventeen red pill junkie, if you're watching this , I said this . I said as soon as the TikTok video dropped, I said, Okay, we're going to start seeing a conflation. Drones are the new UFO shape , right? Yep . And he said, Yeah, but people aren't really reporting drones. And I said, Nope, it's going to happen. And then the New Jersey drone flap happened. And I'm not saying that NIC that was necessarily anomalous. It might have been. I really don't know. I'm agnostic on it . But the point is, how many news stories have you seen since then that conflate drones and UFOs? Mystery drones seen over this air force? So I think it's we have been present for something that is a generational thing where the UFO has said, that's a cool that's a cool one. Let's start wearing that now . Having said that , that's the case with craft shapes . But the occupants seem to have done that over the years as well. It's that passport to Magonia drawing I was talking about the demons and the fairies and the aliens . We're way overdue for a mass change. And I wonder if we have this conversation in the next fifteen or twenty years , if we wouldn't be saying , you know , the AI robots came out of their underground server farms to harvest my genetic code and then took it back in their their drones back to their server server far m. Like is AI going to be the new mask that this five thousand one hundred and forty nine it goes down like that I think so fifty one forty nine it goes down literally like that literally like that but yeah , AI hallucinations sound like lies where you can ask an AI question and it will just tell you with fully confidently the answer that's totally false. Did you see the goblin bit? No Some of these LLMs have been specifically asked multiple times on the back end to not bring up goblins unless specifically directive. What? Yeah . And for someone like me, I love that because it's like does a sufficiently complex system invite in goblins? Is it sufficient in goblin as a metaphor and goblin also is like maybe the metaphor made manifest is what we're dealing with when we see actual goblins, right? But I just found that to be absolutely fascinating. Because that's an idea that some of my friends have talked about is like, you know, does any sort of sufficiently complex system invite in consciousness in this sort of promethean frankensteinian sort of way . I don't know, but it seems to invite in goblins because it apparently there's some of these large language models that love bringing up goblins even when you don't to the extent that they had to like repeat numerous times, don't bring up goblins. That was yeah. Wow , you know, and why goblins? Frankenstein and Prometheus, those aren't happy endings. Those are us. No . Before we go , for anyone who's new to your work , what do you want them to take away from it? It's very personal, even though it's well researched, it's very personal . You know, not the book. Yeah, I got it. I got it. I would encourage people to be comfortable with ambiguity. So I had a therapist one time who was talking about the triangle being the most stable shape, right ? And how we like to think of things being settled on one plane so we're nice and stable and we have nice foundations and if you flip a triangle upon this point it's not stable at all but there's the most chance to change, chance to pivot, right ? And inevitably , inevitably. It has to happen . And I would encourage people to be more comfortable with sitting in that space with not having what my mentor Greg Bishop calls a certainty fetish , with being able to look at things and be like interesting if true. You know, an interesting I have a big, interesting of true basket in my head . The true basket is small and the false basket is small, but that interesting true basket is just overflowing. Yes. And you file stuff away and you say, okay, maybe something will come of this someday and maybe it won't. But I think what that does is that puts the things in your it really places value on the things in your true basket, right ? Because so many things default to interesting if true. The things that are in your true basket are the things that you just know in the marrow of your bones , you know? It's the relationships. I don't know that sounds cheesy, but it's the relationship. It is It's it's the importance of who you are . And what's really interesting is when stuff spills out of that interesting true basket and winds up in the true bas ket . And for me , the thing that I walk away with after doing all this stuff is that the fact that the map is not the territory in life is firmly in that true basket . And I don't know what collective story we're telling ourselves, but there is a better story to be told . And we have to start telling it or else it's never gonna happen. You have one new message Translating . Disney and Pixar's hoppers is now available on Disney plus. You could say that again. Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever, and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard, potato, it's certified fresh and verified hot . Now we party . This is incredible . Wow. I am clear in the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's hoppers is now available on Disney plus. Braded PG . This episode is brought to you by Subaru. Go further in a long range Subaru hybrid with up to five hundred eighty one miles per tank in the forester hybrid, longer range, better fuel efficiency, and legend ary symmetrical all wheel drive, standard. The Subaru Forester Hybrid Visit Subaru. com slash hybrid to learn more. Maximum range based on EPA estimated combined fuel economy and a full tank of fuel, actual mileage and range may vary. All said, Josh Cutton, we'll link to all your goodies down below. This has been fun. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming in. A blast. Hi everybody. That was Joshua Cutchen. We covered Ecology of Souls, the Fairy UFO connection, fictional characters bleeding into reality, and why Chat Gippete keeps generating goblins. So let's dig in. Here's what checks out. Jacques Valle laid out the food exchange pattern and passport to Magonia in nineteen sixty nine , ferries and UFO occupants offering food, the same structure across hundreds of cases spanning centuries. He didn't theorize it, he cataloged it. The Joe Simmonton pancake case, Eagle River, Wisconsin, nineteen sixty one . A man claimed UFO occupants handed him four pancakes through an open hatch . The FDA tested them. They weren't space pancakes, they were regular pancakes made out of buckwheat flour. Okay , UFO drive through . The Philip Etern, that's real too. nineteen seventy two Toronto. A group led by doctor George Owen invented a fictional ghost named Philip Aylesford. They gave him a backstory and tried to make contact . What happened was recorded before fifty witnesses and published in Conjuring of Philip by Iris Owen published in nineteen seventy six rapping sounds that's knocking knock, like hedip hop table levitation. The table moved toward people who tried to leave. They created something . They just didn't know what it was. They still don't. Alan Moore saw John Constantine in a London sandwich bar in Westminster, a man who looked exactly like Constantine. He made eye contact, he nodded, and then he walked off. Multiple other Hellblazer writers reported the same thing independently. Lots of writers have had this experience, but none can explain it. The chat GPT goblin thing got checks out too. Open AI found that the model kept spontaneously gener ating gobl ins, gremlins, and trolls . They explicitly trained it not to mention those things. They kept doing it anyway. PC World, NBC News, and Gizmodo all covered it. A system trained on the full weight of human imagination apparently has an addiction to goblins. It's not a good sign. Jeffrey Crypel at Rice University endorsed Ecology of Souls and featured Cutchen at the Archives of the Impossible Conference in twenty twenty three. Whether it's formally on a first year PhD reading list, I couldn't pin that down. But when an academic of Kripals' standing calls your book important in front of his peers , that matters. He's a serious, serious researcher. Josh's honeymoon story where he found a rock that looked like they put it there or his wife found one that looked like a rabbit. You know, those stories have nothing really to do with the thesis , but somehow they fit the pattern that he spent fifteen years tracking a world arranging itself around whatever you're carrying emotionally. I don't know, it's hard to explain, but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Now of course, I can't prove those stories because they just Josh is just telling them , but I have no reason to think he's lying. Fourth Wall Phantoms is Josh's new book. out It' rights now. Grabbing it on Amazon. If you're into those synchronicities, I've covered those in a few episodes. If you like the Mothman story, that's the we talked about John Keele a lot. That's the Mothman story. I think that's episode one hundred forty one. That's on the channel . A lot of the stuff we talked about today you can find in the WiFi's library. Anyway, thanks to Josh for coming in. Thanks to you for hanging out and until next time, be safe , be kind , another you are appreciated A brave Libya scenario , a secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my you embodies and paranormal buns as well as music singing the like I but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends and it never ends No it never ends A fear of the crap guy I got stuck inside Mal's home with them Kaltruck ain't only two way Did Stanley Cubrid face the moon landing alone on a film set or the shadow be ar ? Good Roswell Annie just fought the sm iling man I'm told and his name was Cole . I can't leave a catching with the fish and complete on Thursday night Wednesday J un and Rep after the night everyone was to just give the drug to whip after the night The Mothman sidings and the solar storm still come to Agtha to see the city under ground Mysteries Number Station's planets are supposed to project stock game when the dog watch ers found a singleimilation . The Black Knights had a light in to so I can't leave the daughter with the fish and fish on Thursday next Wednesday J two and weapons rapping me up to the night everyone wants to do the truth of weapon Levit me up to the of fish on Thursday next Tuesday J une weapons be unto the night White and was to just give the true moments meet of too loves to dance on the dance because she is a camel camel love to dance when the filling is wild waiting inside Ralph's makes it easier than ever to satisfy all your protein and fiber needs with our exclusive brands. Now you can find these extra benefits in the foods you already know and love. Snack smarter with Simple Truth protein salsa verde tortilla chips, or grab a simple truth protein energy bar or flavored protein water when you're on the go. Stop by Ralph's and discover new favorites today . Ralph's fresh for everyone . Ryan Reynolds here from Midmobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for fifteen dollars a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities , so do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mint mobile com dot