Michael Shermer with David J. Halperin — Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO

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David Halpern he is a religious studies scholar he it's official bio here he taught Judaic studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill until his retirement in 2000 he has published five nonfiction books on Jewish mysticism and messianism as well as the coming-of-age novel Journal of a UFO investigator he blogs about UFOs religion and related subjects at WWE vet Halperin dotnet so his new book is called intimate alien the hidden story of the UFO as regular listeners to this podcast now I'm very interested in this subject and like dr. Halperin I don't believe aliens have landed here on earth he's a skeptic like me so in this book he's interested in the mythic meaning of UFOs that is to say this idea that there's somebody out there that knows we're here that cares about us that's vastly superior to us that's just technologically but morally all these things add up to something like a religion now it's not a perfect analogy with religion because religions also have ecclesiastical hierarchies and social structures like that that the UFO community doesn't really have but this idea of a belief in some kind of higher power is is real so we get into that starting from the very beginning with what do you mean by religion what is a religion what is a myth what's the difference between religion and science what are we trying to answer when we're asking these questions about the meaning of UFOs he gets into young with you know you want to wrote a famous book in the 1950s on UFOs and their mythic meaning and where that ideas gone since then we in that the beauty of this whole concept is that almost like pinpointing the start of Mormonism or Scientology to a particular day or person a year whatever an event that's in the fairly recent history we can really see it and track it and see how these stories get started and become mythologized and even deified in a way we're able to do that with UFOs because it's a fairly recent phenomenon and so David does that with alien abductions for example he pins point right pin points right down to the day when when this story began same thing with the structure of what aliens look like you know they're kind of big bulbous head with the almond-shaped wraparound eyes and so on and the mythic meaning of what that why we see that and what people think when they see that and anyway we can end all that UFOs of more recent times from Roswell all the way to the the new military videos that were shot say from the Nimitz aircraft carrier the r8 radar system and the Jets that were recording these things and so on so eat we examine all that all the way up to what the future might hold will we eventually end up with something like a universal UFO religion then they displace regular old-time religions given the rise of the nuns and so on and then we end with am i asking about the future of society and post kovat 19 because we're recording this in the middle of the pandemic so with that I give you David I'll print maybe you could give us before we dive into the book and the subject a little bit of background of your professional career before we get into your your teenage years when you got into UFOs you you are a professor of Religious Studies recently retired from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill oh you retired in 2000 and you've published five non-fiction books on Jewish mysticism and messianism so give us a little bit background just-just-just your your professional interests and then how that intersects with the UFO mythology as a religion well I think I have to start out with the UFOs literature why not I was a ufologist before I became a Hebrew scholar that I became a ufologist when I was 12 going on 13 and was quite a dedicated UFO researcher until about seventeen and then my interest shifted but perhaps not as much as you might imagine that although I became when as I grew up a specialist in Judaica and UNC hired me as a Judaica specialist my field of interest was in things like the visions of Ezekiel especially the wheels and religious traditions of heavenly journeys and otherworldly experiences which I recognized even at the time were my old ufology in a more respectable guys and although by that time I no longer believed in UFOs which I do not at present I have never ceased to feel their pull on me so in this book I turned to ask what was that pull and can I use that as a flashlight as it were to illuminate the pull that they have on our culture yeah well you did that beautifully I have long wanted to write a book like this but I don't have to now because you did it and and there's two others out that no Diana Priscilla and Sarah skulls and yeah it's it's been done I mean you guys all did it beautifully now before we talk about UFOs as a mythology or UFOs as a religion what do you mean by religion what do you mean by mythology as a professional scholar of these topics I would say that when I talk about religion I think of encounter with the transcendent and all the structures all the stories the belief systems that follow from that and there are certain features of religion that I have to say right away I do not find in ufology it does not seem to me to have anything like an ecclesiastical structure but it does have a powerful intricate and ramified mythology by which I mean the stories of encounter with the transcendent with the numinous that can be used or someone who's not been blessed with the actual experience to connect with it right so it in my myth you mean store not things that are not true you mean stories that carry meaning some kind of moral homily or or some message or finding meaning in human life or something like this yes let yeah let us say that the focus is meaning then and this is why as I emphasized in the book that to meet the essential question is not what are UFOs or where do they come from but what do they mean yeah yeah I think it's good to kind of lay out the structure of the question I always like to separate two separate questions are they out there and have they come here so people like the SETI scientists are interested in finding some sort of signals or indicators that there's some form of extraterrestrial life of any complexity somewhere in the cosmos and that's a completely separate question in terms of who studies it and how its studied from have they come hear it but even if we just set aside the SETI part for now and look at the follow G part have they come here even the hardcore believers in UFOs as representing extraterrestrial spacecraft will agree with me and presumably you as a skeptic that 90 90 to 95% of all the sightings are explicable you know it was planet Venus it was the b-1 bomber it was a flock of geese you know whatever we're really only talking about it and an anomaly - sort of a small category of unexplained anomalies you and I are willing to say well we don't know what it was now let's talk about what it means but other people are willing to construct a whole nother worldview of conspiracies and aliens building monumental architecture on earth or whatever so we're really it's really a tiny bit of data or whatever you want to call it stories that we're even talking about and yeah I would agree with that but I would add something here that very often they explained UFO sighting is at least as interesting as the unexplained okay you know we learn from that how people attribute meaning mm to what they see I mean I think you know the whole episode of the Zond for re-entry from May of 1968 all right yeah recount that for us yeah there was a Soviet moon probe I think and it came but we entered the atmosphere broke into four pieces which created quite a dramatic light show lasting a few seconds and thousands of people saw that and many of those thousands described it more or less as it was as a movie camera would have recorded it but others saw it as a cigar-shaped object with windows about the height of the trees and interestingly some people who witnessed it had physiological reactions doing what one woman a PhD experienced an inexplicable sleepiness she could not keep herself awake and it was either this woman or I thought or another one I don't remember whose dog behaved peculiarly now I cannot imagine that a dog would respond to a flash in the sky with peculiar behavior I think it must be that the dog picked up on some [Music] weirdness of its master or mistress right and all of this is happening with a phenomenon that we know is miles away and that is simply fragments of metal burning up so I would say that very often where I'm looking for meaning I will look to the places where the sighting is explicable right so it's almost like whether it's explicable or not is a secondary question - or orthogonal to this other question of meaning yeah because I'm gonna I mean I and this is my bias okay now there are people who I respect enormous ly who would disagree with me on this but I have to take for granted that all UFO sightings are explicable if we have the right information and yet some of them are so powerful so vivid in the minds of the experiencers that we can say as I do in the book that the UFO came from within hmm and that we asked what is the meaning that that inner alien comes bring me the inner alien right but parenthetically would you would you make that same application to all religious claims like whether or not they're real or whatever they represent it's what they represent mythically or for in terms of human meaning I think so yeah yeah I think we'd be I would find it very difficult to argue for the existence of a God outside us hmm now whether there is something either inexplicable or simply so far unexplained within us that is functionally equivalent to a God and that we project outside us that to me is a very interesting question yeah which I remain open and I would have to tell you I mean I know you are an atheist but I also have the sense that you have a great deal of sensitivity for religious issues that I myself am very much plugged in to the religious worldview yeah I think that's why I resonated with your book a lot here I'm thinking like examples where somebody will send us articles to skeptic explaining what really happened with the flood or the parting of the Red Sea you know it was a volcanic eruption or the the fish falling from the sky was this biological phenomenon or you know a meteor struck and that caused these apparent miracles and that's what really happened in the Old Testament whatever to me it's like it's interesting but you're kind of missing the point of the story because it has nothing to do with meteors or volcanoes or the sky splitting or whatever there's something else going on yeah or at least we're what's going on that that that the meteor may have happened I don't necessarily reject such explanations but I agree with you that that that's not where than where the beef is where the beef you know is where the human experiences it and transmits it yeah yeah I've had this kind of ongoing conversation with Jordan Peterson about the meaning of myths and you know he's really into young and and and Freud and Nietzsche and and so forth and and and finds great meaning in those and so I try to acknowledge and and and understand what he's trying to say with that and and I do see that you know whether Jesus was really resurrected from the cross is kind of a side story it's what the resurrection means that you know sort of redemption starting over being born again and you're missing the point if you're going to get all hung up about whether it really happened or not yeah I mean I would not go quite as far as that because I think the quiet you know look if Jesus was in fact resurrected from the dead then that is an event of really earth-shattering importance as Christianity claims it is right but even if we say Sasa and I would not be I mean I'm really quite interested in the question of what really went on with Jesus's miracles right I am one of those people who think that probably a lot of the miracle stories are rooted in actual events of Jesus's life but but I would agree with Peterson that there is a dimension to them which remains valid and important even if you deny the event at the core yeah I had Bart Ehrman on the podcast recently and asked him could could one be a Christian and not believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus that it was kind of mythically true or psychologically true or whatever and his point was yes a lot lots of people are not hung up on whether it happened or not they just they just kind of believe it as a element of their faith and you know they're not attempting to prove it and my favorite example of this I was at a conference with Richard Dawkins and and that Ken Miller now Ken Miller is a biologist at Brown University as the best-selling micro biology textbook he was the chief debunker of intelligent design creationism and yet he's a Catholic and he accepts Jesus as his Savior and the resurrection the whole thing in the last chapter of his book on all this and and and Richard's like but but but but ken let's say we found a piece of the true cross and on the piece of the true cross was a little bit of flesh and we got the DNA of Jesus you know would it be only half human DNA and the rest was divine DNA or whatever it would be and Ken's response was Richard you're missing the point I don't I'm not claiming this is biologically true or scientifically true it's just my faith tradition full-stop I'm not trying to defend it yeah yeah I know Adam I'm hesitant I'm really very hesitant because at the same time I I acknowledge the legitimacy of that position hmm and at the same time I cannot give up that very elementary question is it true yeah is it not true because I do believe there is a truth out there or not just what happens inside us I think actually it's the interplay of the two yeah that's where the interest lies I'm right there with you on that I do wonder if we live 500 years ago or a thousand years ago this would not even be a question because there was no empirical science and there was no culture in which you have to have evidence for your claim so there's no pressure for that so that you would see this as a very modern question yeah a very mod ulema yeah that's right and and you know that's the tension in your book I think and you know because most people you if I would just they want it to be really true not just I mean I can imagine they're reading your book going yeah yeah yeah this is all very interesting but they're really here regardless of what it means they're really here and that's important to them those and though among them there are very sophisticated people among the youth ologists who would say that the questions that I'm asking are important and valid questions whether or not the UFOs exist and that it as you know Thomas Bullard yeah what he's known as he Bullard in me in the field he once wrote to me that if we are being visited by alien beings they are for the most part innocent bystanders to our inner psychic conflicts that's funny and I mean I think at least at the time he wrote that he did believe we were being visited but that for him I think he was already shifting his interest I mean he's a trained folklorist right it was its interest to the kinds of questions that I asked so I'm able to have quite an amicable dialogue yeah with people who feel that that UFOs are physically realized as they say we'll look the questions you're asking are perfectly legitimate and it's only on one point that you're wrong one of my favorite science fiction movies of all time was the day the Earth Stood Still the original 1951 version and and I never realized till a science fiction friend of mine pointed out and I'll back in the 90s and I went back and rewatched it that it's a Christ allegory you know that you know this the deity comes down from on high mingles among the common people he can't see the authorities they don't take him seriously and then they track him down kill him and then he's put in the morgue and then Gort the robot goes and takes him out of the morgue brings it back to the spaceship and resurrection and then he you know he delivers his message to the humans and then he ascends back to Evan and I thought oh of course it's and his name by the way you know Klaatu was his alien name but his earthly name was mr. carpenter beautiful and also my friend pointed out that in the original script cuz he went looked it up in that in the scene where dort takes him back to the spaceship and puts him on the slab and does some stuff with the with the magic technology buttons and the lights come on and all that and he's resurrected in the original script the the female character plays sort of Mary Magdalene character Patricia Rani she says - sorry says - Michael Rani they the the alien is this the power that that you know you have to bring people back to life in the original script he says yes but the brain censorship board and the 50s said you can't say that that will offend religious people so the line he uses in the movie is something like no no only the Great Spirit in the sky has that power or something like that this is only temporary let's get back to your book so and back to this idea of mythology so you start by talking about reading Jung's famous book on UFOs as myths when you were 13 I'm not sure I understand it now so but that kind of launched you into that that area yeah there was really I mean if I have to look back at my intellectual forerunners in the direction that I've gone I would list young as number one and number two as Jacques Vallee yeah and I perhaps experienced a a resurrection as a ufologist in 1971 quite by chance I was working for a Stanford professor and Jacques was at Stanford at the time and the professor introduced us I think not really knowing that about my interest in UFOs and the year before Jacques Vallee had published his passport - magana hmm which I read it I thought it was completely brilliant ah and it seemed to me to extend the Jungian tradition and it prompted for me a rereading of Jung and this is really the trajectory that I've gone on so capsulate for us for our listeners Jung's position in this Magana and what that represents yeah well to start with with young that young young was never quite sure whether UFOs had a physical existence or not and I mean people still debate what he really believed and I think the end the reason is that he was never sure what he believed and he kept waffling on the point ah but what he was sure was that they were operating within us that they functioned whatever they might be physically they functioned as symbols that we were using for the healing that we needed in the torn tormented and I would say hideously endangered world that followed World War two for I mean one one example when I'm using my own language year rather than Jung's is that that the classic UFO was the flying saucer that was actually the original term for them you know aerodynamically I don't know that you can make a case of a disc as being a viable uh I won't even say space vehicle a vehicle to travel through the air but see it as a symbol what Jung had written about for most of his life as the the mandala which is the symbol that integrates the opposites and then it becomes totally intelligible why a torn society should dream of UFOs one of his chapters in its book was UFOs and dreams why UFOs should appear in their art why UFOs should be projected into the sky and here young had to stop short because it didn't seem to explain why they could be detected on radio yeah I love that line in your book but that dreams give off an echo and a radar echo what yeah I mean you know that's a funny kind of psychic projector the people who went in the Jungian tradition black young who followed sort of the way I did young and then Vallet often found themselves think saying that well what you thought was too crazy to even be imagined might be true that psychic projections could take on and embodiment and idea there that was long after young died and I don't think that convinced most people yeah yeah we had to look for for something else and I have to say I want a little bit on that too I mean what there there have been what they call radar visual sightings where apparently there is some correspondence between the radar blip and what people see and the only answer I could give is that yeah we're going to ignore the cases where you've got radar blips and it's well known that there is anomalous propagation of radar and where people see something that doesn't appear on radar yeah well here we might go back to your server about the Russian probe coming back to the atmosphere really happened it was really there but that secondary to what people thought they saw our found meaning in what they saw yeah yeah so Magana ganya yeah well valet well when when I fix proc valet really hard I suspected the single thing that most impressed him was the 1897 airship do you know that you're a bit patella for ephedrine yeah that starting I think in November 1896 people began and it started on the west coast that men spread eastward a dirigible throughout the the early months of nineteen eighteen ninety seven a dirigible shaped airship that could not be identified and it seemed witnesses remembered propellers on okay now we're gonna stop here because the conventional ufologist responses to say oh well these are UFOs being seen fifty years before the modern UFO era but why do they have propels right you know that they seem to be just one step ahead of the technology of the time Japan it is yes well propeller decade after that I'm sorry adela flight is a decade after that yeah though I think that didn't the dirigibles that's right yes of course that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah so so that there's sort of extensions of the the technology of the times and people do make contact with the pilots up and sometimes even shake their hands the pilots however are not intergalactic aliens but American inventor is often from New York State with a peculiar tendency to be named Wilson here yeah the lay was unwilling to write off these stories as hoaxes or fantasies that they seem to they bore that elusive quality the mark of truth and yet there's no way they can have been real so he posited some sort of a reality that interacts with us the same of the reality that earlier generations called fairyland hmm oh and the fairies did seem to behave in some ways the way the UFO beings did and he caught that Magana why because in the writings that he covers 9th century AD aboard archbishop of lyon octopod debunks a claim made by what he calls illiterate peasant that there exists a land beyond the clouds from which cloud ships come to steal the crops of honest farmers and in fact a foursome three men and one woman at which point Young's ghost starts rattling or glasses and says that's a quaternary that's the archetype or the quaternary three men and one woman that say the mob says are debarred set upon them as having fallen from Amma go nian cloudship and would have stoned them to death at the archbishop not intervene so this sounded so much like the hypothetical source of the UFOs which by 1970 it was becoming pretty clear that Mars and Venus would not function as their source and that it became it could be used as an emblem for this unknown rail mm-hmm that interacts with ours and it also Magana has overtones of magicians which may be what the name means so okay now I cannot go that far with ballet I will have to put the brakes on approximately where Jung did mm-hmm and say we've got to be talking about something that's coming from within us that's akin to what came from within the people who told stories of fairyland and the people who believed in the sky share the cloud ships from Lamia so but it seems like you at some point we need some sort of external stimuli to at least kick off the the mythology or the mass delusion or whatever the people in 1897 probably did see blimps or some people saw blimps that started the story rolling and then the details get filled in from the imagination I'm not sure what that would be for fairies other than just spooky weird unknown anomalies that just happened in nature now that would make sense to me I mean certainly when we get into the modern era then we can we can point to stimuli I mean like the reentering fragments of the of the Zahn four or more recently the Colorado drone hysteria that everybody was seeing drones all over Denver and the Denver Airport and so forth well there are drones and no one saw madmen masses of people a decade ago didn't see spooky drones all over the place but yet the authorities could never track down what it was exactly people were seeing even if it's just teenage kids with the illegal drones or something they never even found that yeah I mean that would be completely intriguing yeah so it's it seems to be some combination of some external stimuli internal imagination mythic storytelling that gets wrapped on it and then it just builds from there I'm often reminded of that psychological experiment of the young woman the old woman illusion where you know the figure it could go either way yeah and so subjects that are showing the slightly stronger older woman version then showing the neutral one see the old woman and the subjects that see the slightly stronger younger woman image then shown the neutral image see the younger woman and so forth it but that only works when it's it's sort of on the cusp or you can't quite make out what's going on so I use that example with Galileo and Saturn you know so as you know Galileo is the first attorneys telescope to the heavens and you know the moon you know craters on the moon spots on the Sun the phases of Venus Jupiter's moons you know these are all anomalies that don't fit Aristotelian cosmology but when he gets to Saturn there's two things first the the data is pretty crappy it's it's kind of fuzzy can't quite make out and - there's no theory of planetary rings so he's got nothing to interpret it through so he's rambling through different hypotheses like well maybe it's three big planets one big one and two smaller ones it's almost like it has ears on the side of it and then you know six months later oh no no it looks completely different now I can't figure it out maybe it's this maybe it's that you know so but again once you can see it clearly it's obviously a ring and you have a theory of planetary rings but in that nebulous area can't quite make it out you know you just start filling in the gaps with your imagination yeah it reminds me of the story that I told in my book which I I came across not looking for UFOs but as you've told the people I have a great interest in Jewish messianism and a figure associated with a 17th century messianic movement Abraham Cardozo and about how he sees something on the moon and at first doesn't know what he's seeing until his friends tell him there are four shapes on the moon three men and one woman back now that goes young is really right in the bells for us right at em and now Cardozo says now I could see them clearly right and as you remember the three men later come to visit him in his room dressed in black hmm here are the three men yeah so let's turn to this this is one of my favorite images from your book I think that's the cover of the gray Barker's book I knew too much about flying saucers 1956 I was two years old but again it's that kind of classic men in black you know decade half a century before the men in black movies made it famous but that's another old mythology storyteller so walk us through what that means well let's take that this is a pattern Michael that I see that I see regularly and you in in UFOs that the myth has both a historical and a timeless dimension I guess I could call it prehistoric but I'm not sure if that has evoked quite the right images that we know just as we know that the abduction myth started one February morning in 1964 when a black man married to a white woman named Barney ill underwent hypnosis by a very prominent Boston psychiatrist that we also know that the men in black myth started with what a you yeah UFO researcher named Albert bender claimed had happened to him and I think he's telling the truth that he was visited by three men in dark clothing who forced him to shut down his international flying saucer bureau and that was let's say that was in 1953 that's the first germ and then it's somewhat developed in 1956 when grey Barker publishes this book and slightly shades the dark clothing into black suits Barker invented very little hmm but he brought together different elements that took on a new meaning when he brought them together and shaded things very very slightly hmm and thus the three men in black take their ma begin their march mostly subterranean hmm that they're sort of you know you fought you fall just remembered them and mostly with some ridicule that we I ingrates that we were we turned against bender when we stopped believing that he'd solved the UFO mystery and abused him quite I think quite unjustly but it sort of survived in kind of an underground way and then in 1997 it hit the big screen with men in black mm-hmm this was 13 years after after Barker experienced his his untimely and tragic death and since then men in black are are are are are a staple of our cultural mythology okay that's the history hmm the prehistory takes us to Abraham Cardozo hmm it takes us to the man in black who kept cropping up in English witch trials hmm in the in the 17th century not not going back quite that far it takes us to the mustard that the so-called Mori Island mystery of 1947 where a a harbor were a harbor a worker in the head in the harbor at Puget Sound sees UFOs discharged some sort of slag and then is visited by a man in a black suit who knows exactly what the witness saw and tells him not to talk about it now we know that the witness made up the whole story mm-hmm and I myself think that the MANET man in black entered the story after two Air Force officials who came to investigate it were killed in a crash hmm and that the man in black is death her song five hmm so just parenthetically what's the man in black in the witch trials ah that he's the leader of the witches and then he tells the witches they are to worship them and if they Abner God and worship him he will give them all the dainty's that he has at his disposal hmm so it's sort of an explanation for gaps in the story or a causal explanation for outsiders this is this is my answer to your probing question it was this man in black that made me do it or talked me into it or via this hidden authority of some kind yeah yeah and I think most basically the man in black is an emblem of death he appears as such in the Talmud hmm ha ha that is a story of a Jewish high priest who comes out every every year on Yom Kippur the high priest must enter the Holy of Holies where he burns incense it's the only time of the year that any human being is permitted to enter the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple and the priests come up high priest comes out and he says I'm going to die in this year hmm and I'll say how do you know he says every time I go into the Holy of Holies and I'm getting goosebumps as I start to tell you this every time as I get going to the Holy of Holies I meet a man in white who comes out with me hmm hey I met a man in black and he not come out with me like the Grim Reaper yeah yeah and then and sightings of the men in black following gray Barker sometimes gave him a sickle whoa or it said boy this man dresses like an undertaker whoa oh and Undertaker right wow that's super interesting right I wonder if that's related psychologically to that you know that sort of paradox of death and dying that that we see it around us we know we're going to die but we can't imagine being dead because you can only imagine being alive because to imagine anything you have to be alive so you end up with this you know this kind of paradoxical tension in your life but no one knows when it's going to happen for themselves you know unless you're on death row and it's another interesting piece of research they're people that are on death row they know exactly when it's gonna happen and they get to make a last statement but that's pretty rare most of us don't get to do that yeah that's super interesting Wow okay so the men in black represents death right I always thought of it is is sort of the excuse that you apologist could give for why they don't have concrete evidence well the government's covering out the authorities you know squelched it silence the witnesses and so forth but it's way more than that oh I think so which does not rule out that it serves that function bail right has the proof and it does seem to me that you follow just tsar often far more interested in that aspect of the cover-up than they are in the UFOs themselves and there's one there's one III think Lee a reason why that the UFOs themselves what can we possibly know about them but if there's a government cover-up well who knows the next Julian Assange will you know yeah the smell the beans about that wiki like the fact that no one has I think is proof that there is no well I see here I use this example of the absence of evidence is evidence of absence because the the claim is that well it's top-secret that's why we can't show you the evidence or the evidence isn't public but with WikiLeaks there's millions of tot top-secret clouds did classified documents made public nothing in there about Roswell aliens in area 51 and by the way nothing about Bush in the Bush administration orchestrating 9/11 or having anything to do with it so that was also revealing I thought in terms of conspiracy theories yeah yeah yeah yeah a super super interesting well you know this is a what I call this sort of God of the gaps argument that is where there's a gap in human causal explanation the mind abhors a vacuum so you fill it in conspiracies are so convenient because they're almost impossible to falsify yeah so the other interesting thing about your book is it that this mythology or religion whatever you want to call it is recent enough you can pinpoint it down to the date whereas you know Judaism and Christianity are kind of lost in the mists of time was so long ago it's almost like Scientology oh we know when that happened that was in 1947 with Dianetics whatever and the same thing with this you just mentioned you know Betty and Barney Hill and that's the really the launching of the abduction element of the UFO religion so talk talked us through that how that came about and what you think it was going on with that okay well I made a very controversial statement yeah yeah I know which is yes yes and but what the heck if you're if you're not gonna go out on a limb why point of having a book is we want your opinion yeah textbook that that it's that it seems to me significant that the abduction myth was created unconsciously because this came out in him under hypnosis and there's every reason to think that Barney was actually experiencing something the psychiatrist who hypnotized them said that later said that he was a Frey Barney was gonna throw himself out the window he was so agitated yeah and so terrified which to me is proof that there's something genuine was coming out there it wasn't what it appeared to be at face value but it was real and that he's a black man married to a white woman and we're talking 1960 1964 Martin Luther King is not as in many circles regarded as a dangerous agitator civil rights are not respectable here are these two people who have married who have work have worked tirelessly for civil rights we share my listeners that the Supreme Court case of loving was until 1967 where it legalized interracial marriage so what they did was actually illegal in a lot of states yeah I mean hardly more than six years after they took the 1961 trip but you know the memories of which surfaced halves every a few years later ah that Emmett Till had been lynched in Mississippi for supposedly making suggestive remarks to a white woman here's a black man with a white woman okay he's on the hypnotist couch and he remembers having been abducted in the middle of the night and taken aboard an alien craft I think how did his ancestors get to this country did in the middle of the night taken aboard an alien craft and I mean for us you know an old-fashioned sailing ship of the 18th century is not exactly your intergalactic spaceship to the victims it was it was an extraordinary machine they could not understand how I think like that could something so large could move over the water and then I looked more closely and details start emerging the the abductors who by the way through most of their recollections of bunny a party Barney and Betty are essentially human beings it's only toward the end that they start getting more diminutive hmm that they they they want to know they asked Betty why is it that Barney's teeth come out and yours don't hmm I mean isn't this ridiculous you know space travel early right poking around people's mouths asking about their teeth but that's exactly what if you were a slave trader mm-hmm that's exactly what you had to look closely at right okay and that Betty talks about what is that the trading stops somewhere in between the galaxies oh come on in the galaxies but in the 18th century Atlantic that makes absolute sense right so I said what I supposed is that somehow rather the way I mean this is well established that Hawk that the trauma of Holocaust survivors is transmitted usually not through explicit narration but through their actions to which replicate what they saw heard to their children and grandchildren suppose that this could happen over eight ten generations and that bot is re-experience him what his ancestors endured and injecting it all unwittingly this is a man of the most extraordinary generosity of character along with dignity but all unawares injects it into the culture that has perpetrated these crimes so that they can know what it's like to be taken aboard an alien ship subjected to intrusive physical examinations it goes latent that's one of my big word late you know Burt for about 20 years and then in the late 80s and the 90s it blossoms into fantastic flower hmm interesting yes I like the hypothesis I think one way to test it would be is if say African Americans who have had have more abduction experiences along those lines than say white Americans or but or people of descent from oppressed groups have more of these kinds of imaginings or dreams or recovered memories than you know not oppress people's which they don't and thereby I am disconfirm but of course a hypothesis will be flexible enough to incorporate this confirmation and to say that as I do that perpetrator and victim are partners mm-hmm and the greatest star I see and a mystery you have in there about the couple the unmarried couple in the 70s having sex and a child out of wedlock and how that was not so acceptable at the time and maybe there was some projection there of their encounter with with aliens yeah well they what they see it I mean there there are four people uh yeah youngest pounding on your door or on your windows now best thing to come in there are four people three of whom see a dome disk of a fairly conventional sort the fourth sees what I identify and people my facebook fans have confirmed that this is not my own sex addled brain but is a deep missing penis sheathed in a condom that has ruptured precisely where it needs to stay intact and the person who sees this has gotten his girlfriend pregnant which in 1974 was a really rather major major event so now looking what what's your of my faith one of my Facebook fans pointed out is that this condom has on one side a red light on the other side of blue light and he said a green light and he says that that's FAA regulations for all airplanes I don't think UFOs have follow FAA regulations so I'm going to say what these people actually saw the stimulus the trigger that we've been talking about was an airplane mm-hmm and yet they perceived it in the most diverse ways one of them perceiving it as a as a heavenly projection of his own personal dilemma I'm looking for that do you remember what page that I want to show that picture that you have to draw I do yeah the vision of a zero the production of masks it's no it's on page I have to it's page 39 oh okay there we go all right yeah yeah there we go so just so anybody watching can see what that looks like yeah though I can't make good night now I could make it yeah yes it does kind of look like that I have to say but you know so it's so here's my thoughts on that you know we're such a sexual creatures I mean sex just dominates human society you know porn is the most watched thing on the internet and so forth and so it shouldn't surprise us that people have sexual components to their dreams and so one explanation we have for the abduction phenomenon is that people aren't making this up they have some kind of real experience and sleep paralysis is our best hypothesis for this you know people that you know kind of wake up with a kind of lucid dream while they're sleeping but they're still actually under but they feel like that at least partially under and they're prone and lying flat and they feel like they can't move and in part you know the brain shuts down a lot of muscle movements when you're sleeping so you don't get up and walk around and fall out of the tree or the cave or whatever and and so and then they have a sense presence in the room now in the Middle Ages there was also you know these sense presences were described as incubi and succubi and there's often a sexual component to it and in the modern era it's you know it's aliens because we don't live in a demon haunted world we live in an alien haunted world and we published an article in skeptic years ago by this a woman named Heidi love who had these sleep paralysis experiences from the time of her early teens to her early 30s and there was often a sexual component to it which she described in detail as well as sort of an anxiety about this lurching big creature that was sort of amorphous couldn't make out the face but was present in the room kind of threatening or sometime sexual and you know so it's easy to then see that really happening in the brain some kind of physiological neural chemical event that really happens and then the culture tells you how to talk about it what's the narrative story what am i what am i telling people yeah and I think when you bring in the incubi and the succubi then you point back just as there's a prehistory to the men in black there's a prehistory to the early in abductions and that to me one of the most fascinating things is how the history and the prehistory merge and you don't understand the tradition unless you combine them mm-hmm interesting yeah yeah so so abductions and okay and then communion of course this was I have a funny story about this I met whitley strieber in the green room at Bill Maher's ABC show politically incorrect back in the 90s and I knew about his book because he you know it was as you as you note in the in your book it was runaway bestseller kind of off the off the books it wasn't really tracked by the New York Times but sort of an underground best-selling book and anyway so we're chatting and I you know I knew about his abduction story but I didn't know much about him personally so I said so what do you do for a living you know when you're not writing books like this and he said well I write science fiction fantasy and horror I went oh okay so here's the guy that makes this stuff up for a living and then he stamps nonfiction on this particular one I didn't get depression he was lying or making it up just to sell books that's that he had some real experience and but but a guy like that it's got a very vivid imagination I mean when I read Stephen King I was like I just think how does he come up with this stuff my brain never goes in that direction and that but maybe people that make stuff up like that their brain their imagination just go in that direction triggered maybe by some little stimuli and boom they're off and running or flip it around that he did have experiences where I'm inclined to go that he did have experiences that are qualitatively different from the experiences you or I might have and that that that some awareness of that or something within him which made him prone to such experiences also fed into his creativity yeah yeah it seemed that means that seems an entirely naturalistic explanation for an apparently supernatural phenomenon without abandoning the recognition of its mythic meaning for the storyteller something like that and remember that streamer I don't think ever said it was supernatural and he never ever said it was aliens yes don't worry yes yes yes oh well we should also know that let's get his book cover up there again of where that image comes from that that the the wraparound eyes you know that the bulbous head the almond-shaped eyes and so on you can kind of pinpoint that well you have the story about the Outer Limits TV show the something shield episode the ropes the bolero shield yeah but but wasn't the bulbous head slightly predating that from some other store I forget now what the timeline is on that I don't know I don't know I mean perhaps you can get the individual elements of this but this the unsung really goat I'd I would go out on a limb and say it goes it it goes back to streamer or to the collaboration between streamer and Ted Jacobs or your artist who paint the cover it's outrageous ya-ya-ya-ya-ya because that that let's see this book was 1987 it was kind of after that that aliens really began to gel and all look like that image rather than the their variation there was they back in their 30s 40s 50s and when people said they saw aliens they were a quite a variety of of visions yeah I mean Patrick Wiggins published a published a book on UFO aliens the depictions of them and before 87 there's nothing like that and the quiet boy what everybody looks to us as a comparison I should say everybody many people do his Close Encounters of the Third Kind but the aliens there are different in an absolutely crucial respect which is that if you watch the scenes within Close Encounters where the aliens appear they blink continually and I think that's Spielberg's way of saying look they're essentially human hmm and these eyes are never gonna blink something there's something new but also something very old because we have a prehistoric mass from Kosovo oh yeah yeah you have images like that right this one yeah I mean it's it's not you know the Bobbsey Twins they're right there they pointed differences but I mean I told him either by book this my good friend Mark Bregman that he heard me lecture on UFOs at UNC Greensboro and I showed a slide oh they used to be called slides it both of their there of the cover of streamers book and two and a half years later he sent me an email saying did you say did you show a picture of a UFO alien EB mark had been reading Maria Kim Buddha's book on the gods of a of prehistoric Europe and he'd seen that now this is a man who acts up outside of our friendship he has no interest whatsoever in UFOs and yet that recognition responds interesting game yeah and to meet that to me the most significant thing about streamers book which I mean I have to say I admire streamer very much uh the it's a strange book but the the most significant thing about it is that tens of thousands of people see that cover and think I've seen that cover and thought this is something I've seen yeah this happen it resonated with their experiences that to me is a monumental fact that needs to be accounted for yeah well faces are very potent in our brains we see faces everywhere the face on Mars there's there's websites dedicated to you know showing funny places where faces appear you know on the sides of buildings and in water stains and things like that I have a whole slide show on these things I call it pattern isset II but we know that you know the facial recognition software is in the temporal lobe this fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe right about here Oliver Sacks wrote about this you know people with damage to that area from stroke or tumors or accidents you know they have a face blindness they can't recognize faces they don't really recognize themselves in a mirror they think they're looking at like a pizza fruit with slots in it you know representing the eyes and mouth or whatever so you know with the it but faces are super important for human sociality and we look at people's faces we read their eyes we recognize the dilation of their pupils you know we bond and an imprint on our mothers faces bases are super important so like sex it shouldn't surprise us that you know the face of aliens is really important and yet if we're gonna if we're gonna you know think about this as an extraterrestrial hypothesis well what are the chances aliens are gonna be like us bipedal primates with you know a symmetrical face and two eyes and a mouth and so on you know Sagan was always careful to not portray what the aliens would look like like in contact you know with the movie they never showed the aliens you know Jodie Foster sees the aliens it looks like her father because he did because hurt Carl didn't want to show the typical Hollywood ailing and because that whatever they're gonna look like from an evolutionary perspective they can't possibly be bipedal primate yeah I mean I would not even well I was you know I would not even entertain the hypothesis right we're dealing extraterrestrials here right yeah yeah exactly but I just want to throw that in because you know that that is what you apologist believed and by the way I should I should acknowledge you're right I strieber did not say it was supernatural in fact the whole UFO community they're pretty grounded in Natural Science that they're just arguing they're biological creatures just more advanced than us yeah yeah and in a way if you think about this one of my fun little pet hypotheses I call schirmer's last law because you shouldn't name laws after yourself that's the last one and it's that any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God you know this is a play on arthur c clarke third law any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic so if they're far enough advanced of us which surely they will be they're not gonna be like five years advanced of us and we back engineered computers out of their spaceship or something like that it would be like five million years ahead of us or something like that they'd be able to do things that would look like to a Neanderthal what our cell phones look like or something just pure magic supernatural paranormal power and yet when you know the technology behind it it's fully understandable so if we did encounter you know super advanced extraterrestrials they would look indistinguishable from deities and maybe that's kind of what it represents yeah but the other thing reading your book gets there's about what aliens represent that made me think of it's just kind of a basic idea like there's something else out there that knows we're here and you know we recognize them they recognize us or some kind of connection their moral more advanced than us not just technologically but morally you know that's that's kind of the religious impulse right that that we're not alone it's not so scary it's one aspect of the religious impulse and you know when people say okay well the you are the the UFO beings are the modern equivalent of sky gods there's a truth in that but there is also I mean that the that if I asked you to name the most familiar UFO story most familiar UFO mini-myth surely it's Rosslyn yeah that's the one that yeah and those aliens can't save themselves much less us they're small they're fragile then essentially they're children both in the fragility of their bodies and in their outsized heads so yeah okay they me yeah the way actually I put the a long time ago in a blog post that the Greeks believed that gods were in were immortal the ufologists know better and that they they yeah okay you can say they are sky gods but they're also us interesting gradual childlike being mortal facing a doom yes mortal mortal facing a doom we can neither avert nor comprehend and I think that's what we see in Roswell you know and why it haunts and fascinates us yeah Roswell as you know didn't become Roswell until the 1980s now just to remind our listeners this is you know June July of 1947 and I always cite this study in 1960 something of like the the 500 top all-time UFO sightings and Roswell is not even on the list Jerry Clark whose monumental UFO encyclopedia for me is the absolutely indispensable guide to this that he found I think a total of one reference to Roswell in the UFO literature prior to 1980 Wow that 1980 was when that I can't remember the title but it was William Moore wrote it with the nominal collaboration of Charles Berlitz and that hit describing ever traditions that he'd gathered two years earlier in 1978 and in those traditions unlike in the original news reports the original news reports just spoke of a landed disc which turned out to be a weather balloon nobody mentioned corpses by 1978 corpses were embedded in the store right so to me that great Roswell mystery is those dark decades of latency yes yes well here's the famous picture of the debris found at Mack Braswell's Brazil's ranch outside of Roswell New Mexico which you know it doesn't look exactly it look like extraterrestrial spacecraft looks like what it is tin foil and balsa wood and so on and so this is a side story to this you know when when you have followed to say well you know the government lied lies about UFOs they did lie about that because it wasn't a weather balloon you know it was this project mogul lofting these Akoo take instruments high into the atmosphere to listen to Soviet to test Soviet possible Soviet tests of nuclear explosions so of course they're going to admit that in 1947 so they made up a story and then in 1995 as you write about you know they go okay here's what we were really doing so when you have follow just say you know they lie about these things that that's true yeah and whether and whether it was mogul because there are so there there aren't there are some serious objections to the mogul hypothesis but it certainly has an elegance that was that the that particular day would have had to bend balloon launch number four but somebody tracked it I forget which you have followed just tracked it down that that one wasn't launched that day because of the weather so it couldn't have been that which is that which is a real problem there weren't that many I mean I iiiiii like the Mogul hypothesis very much because it is so elegant for the reasons you've you've chosen yes there was a cover-up it was just not what the ufologist say but I do think I mean I don't know I was going to say that it's the the case of a beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact but there may be a way to explain away the fact I hope there is because I I like yeah so what is your take on the mythic meaning of Roswell death death because the Cold War you mean well yeah to me it's not a coincidence that UFOs became a cultural phenomenon in June of 1947 which is the same month that the Doomsday Clock first appeared on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and I think that we were absorbing the notion that the collective death of the species is now possible for the first time in history I mean previously of course there could be a doomsday a day of judgement but then there'd be resurrection and judgment and God would wipe away tears from all faces and all and all but this is just this is an extinction of humanity and God together you know and I think to me the there I think UFOs have many meetings they're part of their power is that they coalesce these meanings but the most basic is the aliens of death yeah which is the ultimate alien as you point out you cannot I cannot imagine what it's like to be dead I can better imagine some impossibly distant planet around and impossibly this star then what I will be when I'm dead and at the same time it's the most intimate alien mmm-hmm bone of my bones flesh of my flesh and I think you you remember that I that I noted the coincidence that again I don't think it's a coincidence that it was the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Airfield that supposedly got hold of the land disc it was the 509 Thawne group that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and right I saw yes I it was like I did not know that I read they're here yeah it was the only military unit in any country that was tasked with nuclear warfare hmm so to me how crucially how just and how fitting it was that the emblem of fallen divinity and fallen humanity should appear on their doorstep Wow interesting well but that's true in a way that is nuclear weapons really are the only existential real existential threat to the species because you know even with the reduced number we have now less than 10,000 that would be enough well I'm not asking would you would you add global warming to that not not as a species ending event the no matter how long it takes it or terrorism or or artificial intelligence I don't think any of those are potentially ending of the entire species I think they'll always be survivors nuclear weapons could could do it just because of the overkill factor I mean I had read kaplan on the podcast he has that book new book called the bomb or he kind of recounts how how much overkill there was not out of some evil genius at the top the cigarette smoking man designing this program but that bureaucrats trying to keep their jobs and keep the industry going they had to find new targets to to target for nuclear weapons I mean there were some bases that like are in the middle of nowhere that are closed ten months out of the year in Siberia and you know we had like 10,000 nuclear bombs you know allocated just for that place you know just because they kept making more bombs there to find more sites and so on so you get this kind of crazy escalation and therefore you know the overkill factor even at less than 10,000 is probably enough well Carl had it figured out you need less than good segment less than a thousand to avoid avert nuclear winter but even if he's off by an order of magnitude we have 10,000 that could that could truly do do us in in the long run for you know the destruct disruption of the atmosphere and all that stuff anyway that's kind of a sidebar I see what you're I see where you're going with with the Roswell thing what do you suppose the transmission of these mythic elements would be through culture you know that happens kind of under the radar where we don't notice and historians or scholars like you look back and go oh I see the connection here how does it happen when we're just living our lives and sort of going around doing our thing and that this carries through you mean how do we how do we transmit the Roswell story in email if we're not any men yeah boy now that is the real stumper of a question like that but I'm just curious what you think I think there are well I go back to the experiences of Holocaust survivors children that there are all sorts of subtle ways in which the trauma is conveyed I believe Helen Epstein wrote a book oh it's the children of the Holocaust and I I mean they're the I mean I guess I'm working around I don't know I mean just analogously in my book the moral arc I speculate on the kind of bottom up drivers of moral progress that is there's top-down laws and Supreme Court decisions things like that you can tag and go yeah gay marriage you know interracial marriage that date and so on but the bottom up is harder to track like just you know that novels and how they're written like Richard Dawkins makes this point that you can pinpoint down to about the decade when a novel was written in the last two centuries based on the language used to describe Blacks and Jews and women you know you can say well that's you know look how they even just like a few decades ago it's embarrassing and awkward to read some of these passages talking about Blacks and Jews and women it's like oh my god we don't talk like that anymore how did that happen and there's no place to pinpoint it's like well you know Ellen came out on her show on that particular Dave in this comic book and the and the movie script and the TV show Seinfeld blah blah blah yeah there's like 10,000 little things that sort of bubble up that carry us all along but it's hard to see it well I mean I'm trying to remember when I first heard about Roswell and I don't know fright when I was a teen you apologist I mean Jerry Clark found the reference to it in nht wilkins's book flying saucers on the attack and I did read flying saucers on the attack but I don't think Roswell registered with me at all see there I'd be only when I first became aware I probably saw it in a magazine article or a TV documentary or something like that but no don't because we that wouldn't happen until the 80s and you became aware of it earlier than that right I don't think so I don't know when it was I I really don't think I picked up on Roswell until probably everybody else in the world had picked up on Roswell right right yeah I had met Stan Friedman who was one of the chief proponents of making Roswell Roswell and you know he used to hold up these documents with the blacked-out passages you know the classified documents you know see is like I see nothing I mean you have you know you know the blacked-out paragraph is not evidence it's just I don't know what it is you don't know what it is it's that and there again is when the imagination fills in the you know the blacked-out paragraph I think I can imagine what it says you know that's a myth I mean I struck I strongly suspect that a lot of these cover-ups are people in the military who in some way or another violated regulations know and know and want to conceal that I do often wonder if the if the government loves all this UFO stuff the military in particular or people at the testing aircraft at area 51 or something they probably think this is great what a great distraction from what we're really doing you know which is probably some nefarious military thing you know I'm fine to point out my work on conspiracy theories that you know when when people like Alex Jones go out the deep end with their crazy theories about Sandy Hook being a false flag operation or whatever yes that's crazy but our government has conducted false flag operations we have we have manipulated elections in South American countries to favor a fascist dictator over the Communist dictator we do things like that so it's not completely crazy to think you know our government does stuff like that sometimes yeah yeah that's that's where the catch is don't you think yeah yes it's it's off it's true just often enough that it pays to be constructively conspiratorial just in case I mean that's who I think the three men in dark clothing were who visited bender and too terrified him into silence and forced him to shut down the the his flying saucer bureau that they had gotten hold of one of his business cards and this was 1953 Joseph McCarthy was at the height of his power and influence J Edgar Hoover was perfectly obsessed with rooting out the masters of deceit that communists and the FBI agents looked at the court international flying saucer Bureau Oh communists right and so they came by that that Albert bender had to stop interest of their yes yes possible there is the truth yeah well we know that the FBI sent that letter to dr. King telling him his suggesting he killed himself or they're gonna make public his sex tapes that's pretty bad yeah I mean wait it's like our government did that for a US citizen protected by the Constitution yeah if I was the FBI had cover that up too yeah well there's another story I like to tell about at the JFK assassination you know conspiracists pinpoint this a comment by Johnson where he makes reference to you know don't if there's a conspiracy let's not make it public because then I'll have to do something if it's the Russians or the Cubans or whoever I'm gonna have to take action and I don't want to take action we don't want to war and but you know but then he agreed it was a lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald not a conspiracy but the fact that you know they're thinking along those lines like well we're going to cover this up if that is because not for nefarious reasons because it's the FBI or or the Mafia or whatever but but that you know this will cause international tensions with our allies or potential enemies yeah one last thing before we get to the final chapter on John & O COEs UFO sighting which I knew nothing about the Ezekiel story so since you're a biblical scholar you know there's a lot of weird things in the Bible along these lines that are I don't know representative the book of Revelation is certainly crazy like this but Ezekiel is a pretty a pretty weird hallucinatory type book what's going on with that okay I did publish back in 1993 a psychoanalytic study of Ezekiel no boy that I represented him as a and I mostly would stand by it that I I would say that he was a man with immense talents and immensely tormented with a loathing and horror of female sexuality that manifests itself in different ways in his book now one saw part of the book I did not discuss was the first chapter which as a ufologist as the precisely the chapter I should discuss that's the chapter where the heavens are open that I saw visions of God and living creatures and the wheels and I do not know here's the picture you put in your book of ezekiel on the wheels yeah it's like wheels within wheels yeah and what he says wheels that their shape was as a as a wheel within a wheel and I do and I mean if you're if you want to see them as domed disks then wheel within a wheel is not a bad way to describe it but of course I'm not good I don't believe aliens are visiting the earth now so I don't believe they visited an Ezekiel's time and I don't think that if aliens were speaking to their first earthling they would say son of man I send you to the house of Israel a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me they and their fathers unto this very day I mean there's no this this does not this does not compute but I do think as ikkyo saw and I won't say so cuz I don't think he thought with his eyes I think he experienced hmm something that was beyond his own understanding that he described it fumbling Lee and confusingly the way I might describe a powerful yet less than lucid dream hmm and I think it is cognate to the experience that people now have as UFOs hmm so if you say if you ask me did Ezekiel see a UFO yes I think he did do I think he saw an interplanetary spaceship no way cuz that's not what I think UFOs are yeah yeah interesting what are your thoughts on the recent Brugha over the pentagon's UFO program and the nimitz video there's these three different videos the tic-tac video and the in the rotating one and all that yeah you sent me the links to so to some explored it was a videos of someone explaining yeah my quest and although I yeah I don't have the technical knowledge to evaluate what he said it sure sounded plausible to me yeah and I've assumed from the beginning that there was God there was likely to be some mundane explanation yeah what fascinates me far more is how those videos first came to light mmm a front-page story in The New York Times yeah with a byline that included Leslie Cain yeah I when you there and there was no link to Leslie came from which I infer she had absolutely no connection with the New York Times since when does the New York Times promote UFO stories right never when I was young no since when do they give a prominent UFO author who may have no connection with a byline right I answered that but and I answer that rhetorical question as since December 2017 because since then The Times has been I maybe I go too far here but I would say unabashedly Pro UFO yeah so I think something has happened and I would connect it with the great seismic event of our time which is the 2016 election yeah yeah I have to lied and thought about with the election but I do think we could be in the midst of another myth another mythology taking form triggered by the New York Times is what I saw I know who Leslie Kean is of course to the read her book and it's like how did she get a byline in the New York Times as if she's just some neutral investigative journalists whose uncovered this great no but the average person's not going to know who Leslie Kean is like no she's the Carl Sagan of UFOs no not at all because she is a journalist so it's like okay so it must be just beat must be legit and then you have this to the Stars Academy with with Tom DeLonge promoting it and you know that was a second round of releasing the videos and then you know last week another round of releasing the same videos by the government this time saying yes but this is the language is key it's like we we're acknowledging the videos are real which everybody says oh so the UFOs are real the government says UFOs are real no the video is real it's not fake but that doesn't mean that you folks are extraterrestrials it's just so funny how quickly that language switches but surely it's an important question why they chose right now yeah to do that yeah and my own feeling is it is connected with the coroner virus crisis it could be yeah Pippi right it's UFOs begin as a cultural phenomenon when we soak in the reality of nuclear destruction mm-hmm they become widely respectable after the election of a president who disbelieves in global warming and is unwilling to take any steps against it and they are there's a spate now of UFO activity right starting now that we've got this genuine alien invader menacing us right right invisible deadly invisible yeah deadly yeah yeah well I guess we we won't know to the mythologist fifty years from now look back and and and and deconstruct everything we're doing now good to see see how this got started and carried forth let's talk about the your last chapter which I'd never heard this story maybe I should have I don't know if you uncovered it or how this came about that John and OCO had all had a UFO experience yeah John and May he was separated only okay was that yeah I didn't know about that either right part of an affair that that Yoko had actually engineered oh he would take up with his assistant why she did that I have no idea but they were lifted living together and on August 23rd 1974 it had been a hot day but it had cooled off enough they could open the windows which seems to me an important detail and that John who likes to walk around the apartment naked goes outside and says many may come here she's just showered she drops the towel so she's naked too and both of them keep emphasizing they're naked hmm when they come out they see this UFO passing over they've got a camera they photograph it the pictures are black there's nothing men right now if we if I we were to ask your your listener your viewers when was the last time a naked human couple confronted numinous presence hosted answered yet when the Lord God walks in the garden at the cool of the day and says Adam where art thou and gets the answer I was naked and I was ashamed so I hid myself now to me this is a reenactment of the story of Genesis 3 quite unconscious hmm and to me we've got to let the ghost of young in here okay a suggestion that there is something archetypal about that story that all unawares it would be recapitulated by a man who three years before had sung about imagine a world in which above us is there's no heaven above us only sky yeah and the enchanted heaven says ha ha ha you can't banish me as easily as you imagine yeah you right here in you and your book with this this was Freud in his mystic mode not the rigid rationalist of the stereotype the thoughts from which the dream is born he went on can have no definite endings rather they are bound to branch out in every direction in the intricate network of our world of thought put mythic themes in place of dream thoughts understand our world of thought to be not just yours or mine but the total psychic life of our culture and species and his words will apply to the collective dream we called the UFO and that dream does not have a spot where it connects and draws nourishment from the unknown I'm sorry and that dream does have a spot where it connects and draws nourishment from the unknown we can't follow it or know what it is we can only gaze on it and marvel that's a beautiful ending that's a great book David I love this book it's just so thoughtful and and I love how you begin the story with you wanted to write this book when you were 13 or whatever with your buddy and now it's sort of toward the end of your career you finally get to do this so I must feel good or my life like yeah so it kind of brings closure to your youthful interests in these subjects what are you gonna write what are you working on now what's next oh I don't know Michael I had a project on translating a Kabbalist totally totally different a Kabbalistic book by one written in the 18th century by probably the most prominent rabbi of his time that I read as a charter of the world religion of the future Oh which is rooted in Kabbalistic Judaism but unlike any religion ever known hmm that part of it is the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity gender equality and the recognition of gay sex as a legitimate form of sexual expression they're like the elevation of secular humanism into a world religion but found it proven by Scripture and by the sayings of our ancient sages of blessed memory the book attracted considerable attention of its time one prominent rabbi said this is a book of heresy beyond anything any Gentile has ever written and it most certainly deserves to be burned oh my god you have to do this book this is fabulous I gotta get that my mind has been in UFOs and away from Kabbalah so long I it's got to be a strain to get back into it but maybe this this self this imposed seclusion yes oh and now will be a good time to do it well this is something I've been thinking a lot about with the rise of the nuns you know the 25% of all Americans 33 percent of Millennials have no religious affiliation now they're not necessarily atheists or agnostics or skeptics they just don't affiliate with any religion and you know humanists have been talking about this for decades like if we debunk God and and get rid of religion we better replace it with something some moral code or some system of some and you know so I've been thinking about you know going forward say over the next century or two if those if those trend lines continue and religion continues to fall into disuse what will replace it what are your thoughts on that I don't know but I will tell a story is that okay yeah that you need you know the whole business with storm area51 no this is summer no no okay that's somebody put up a on Facebook yes just storm as and yeah right so yes I know about that yeah they they can't shoot all of us there presumably there's going to be alien corpses or perhaps living alien somewhere in area 51 and we can run faster than their bullets and two million people signed up right to show up there I mean the town of Rachel Nevada was terrified if you go to two million people descend on at the storm area 51 as it turned out three 3,000 showed up and they had a grand time they were about 10 percent of the more African Americans hmm which is like it's about the proportion of African Americans in the population you know so this was a fully integrated group liberals had plasm conversations with Trump supporters and harmony was achieved so I find myself thinking wouldn't you follow G function nicely as a religion the unifier I love that that's what after all that's what a mandala is it's the archetype of unifying opposites all right me too under Mogga hat with their arms around each other oh my god you are a visionary I hope you're right oh I do too I'm so sorry that that's what are the saddest things about this pandemic that that that it looks like storm area 51 is not gonna happen again this sorry amber yeah it doesn't yeah do you have any thoughts on how the pandemic is going to change culture society life in the coming decades I fear terrible things I hope for beautiful ones the skies in India I understand they're turning blue right the canals in returning clear yeah the kappa pollution over China has vanished at horrible human cost yeah I hope the we may learn a lesson that will help us keep the skies blue and the canals clear and the pollution gone without death and misery yeah I hope you're right no yeah David Avrin wait thank you for your your thoughts that's that's beautifully put thank you for your book I absolutely loved it thank you for your time we really appreciate it thank you for having me Michael was a great pleasure it was really good

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 7,181

Keywords: Michael Shermer, alien abduction, atheism, belief, COVID-19, mythology, religion, Roswell, skepticism, UFOlogy, UFOs

Id: 8jkJNoiBtVc

Length: 103min 50sec (6230 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020