- 2 weeks ago
Academics and scientists are finally able to study UFOs and alien encounters without risking their careers. Some subjects remain taboo, though - including materials allegedly left by UFOs, and the frightening stories of "experiencers."
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00:00Scientists are beginning to realize that there appears to be more to this than we thought.
00:26We have such excellent sensor systems that have been developed.
00:29You've got the pilots tracking the infrared radar system, the detection of the events.
00:37But what the military sees with their devices is only maybe 10% of the cases.
00:47What about what Whitley Strieber saw?
00:50What I wanted to do was to find out that there was some explanation for this that was normal,
00:55a rational, rational explanation.
01:00Whatever it is, it's part of being human and part of our world that, for whatever reason,
01:06we are very reticent to face head on.
01:11Good night.
01:15About 9
02:49My name is Jeff Kripal, and this is our Archives of the Impossible 2 conference, symposium, mashup.
02:56It's great to see you all here.
02:58I know a lot of you.
02:59So let me begin by saying that we are doomed in a good sort of way.
03:06What I mean is that there is no way, no way at all, we are going to wrap our heads around this thing, what some have called the phenomena and what I want to call the impossible.
03:17Jeff Kripal is really one of the world's foremost thinkers on weirdness and the paranormal.
03:24His Archives of the Impossible conference was one of the first UFO conferences that I went to, and it was transformative for me.
03:32I think that he's really created a space for people who have had strange experiences or who study kind of the outer fringes of human experience.
03:43And so as soon as I walked into Archives of the Impossible, I was like, oh my gosh, I found my people.
03:48Going first here, I feel a little bit like the opening band for a weekend music festival.
03:57You guys get the Beach Boys.
04:00You're really here to hear Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
04:04And knowing a few of you, probably the Grateful Dead, but you got me.
04:08We've definitely undergone a kind of renaissance, if you will, over the last two to three years.
04:18Primarily because the U.S. government has shown a lot more interest in this topic.
04:24And that, I think, has kept things alive and kept people really interested.
04:31The second part of this, though, is that the academic world has really stood up and taken notice.
04:37This is something that we really haven't seen on this scale before of mainstream academic science,
04:45mainstream academic scholars saying this stuff needs to be looked at in university settings.
04:54Jeff Kripal is one of the chief forces within academia today fostering this change.
05:03His academic credentials are impeccable.
05:07Jeff was formerly the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice.
05:13Today he's an associate dean.
05:16And Jeff has opened up a whole intellectual landscape within academia,
05:23which previously was very, very limited.
05:26The first thing I want to say or claim is that the impossible constitutes the deepest secret
05:32of human creativity and culture.
05:35The archives of the impossible is named after a book I wrote called Authors of the Impossible.
05:43I was in Berkeley, California, with a gentleman named Jacques Vollet, and Jacques asked me to help him place his papers and case studies in a university archive because he was becoming concerned about their future.
05:58You know, we live in a world where all computer data is fungible.
06:02I have correspondence with 1,000 people around the world studying this problem going back over 50 years.
06:10Jeff Kripal sent me a letter, I guess, about 10 or 15 years ago at least, and I thought how interesting a professor from the big prestigious university on the level of Harvard.
06:28And suddenly in there, there is the archives of the impossible.
06:34Ed May donated a lot of the remote viewing material.
06:38And Whitney Streber donated about 5,000 letters.
06:42And it just kind of sucked things in from there.
06:47Will this collection help future researchers connect the dots?
06:53Are you familiar with the term invisible college?
07:00Well, so first of all, the invisible college is an old term.
07:07It arises in the 17th century among British Protestant intellectuals who are studying science.
07:15And they know darn well that if they say out loud what they're thinking, they're going to be in big trouble.
07:23Science as we know it really came out of a group of enlightened scientists, most of them noblemen, because they had the luxury of their own opinions and their own fortunes behind what they did,
07:38who essentially took a position that was somewhat antagonistic to the church position.
07:45The position of the church was that many of the phenomena of nature belong to God, and you're not capable of understanding those phenomena.
07:59You're not supposed to open somebody's body to look at how their heart is beating.
08:05And you're not supposed to ask questions about the stars, because the stars are mystical.
08:10These physicists and biologists in England conspired to study those things together and to put money behind the research and to start publishing their research independently of the church.
08:31It was essentially a group of intellectuals who thought and studied things that were not supposed to be thought or studied.
08:46In the 1970s, Jacques wrote a book called The Invisible College, and it was about a group of intellectuals and scientists who were studying UFO topics and parapsychological topics.
08:57So that was a new Invisible College, because there were a college of researchers that were not publicizing their work.
09:09And Dr. Hynek thought that by then there were, you know, maybe 12 or 15 of us in different countries.
09:15Certainly some of the leaders in French science, biologists like Dr. Chauvin, the physicists like Costa de Beauregard, who worked with Einstein, were vitally interested in the UFO reports.
09:29And we were discussing it together.
09:31Most of them would not admit publicly to a TV station and so on, wouldn't come forward and say they were interested in UFOs.
09:39Invisibility is just a kind of code for, we're going to do this in a secret fashion because we can do more.
09:48These extreme anomalous experiences, which are not supposed to happen, but do all the time, lie somewhere close to the wellsprings of human civilization in its various modes.
10:00I consider the project here to be the visible college.
10:07I want to make the invisible visible.
10:09I want to mainstream it.
10:10I want to do it in a much more public and much more explicit way.
10:15Today, more and more philosophers recognize that there are aspects of the mind that even if they are correlated with things that are happening in the body or happening in the brain,
10:27that they're, they're not reducible to these things.
10:31They are something more.
10:33It's amazing to me, honestly, the way that academia has evolved in the last 10 or 15 years.
10:41This conference, setting the tone for how people engage with this.
10:46One of the really valuable things that Jeff Kruipel is doing is providing this very safe place to explore further beyond the bounds of current science and current explanation and try to figure out what is going on.
11:03I'm very grateful that I'm still alive at my advanced stage to see a transition.
11:11You came on my radar when Oumuamua, which is an object that we detected in space that you believe could possibly have been extraterrestrial.
11:24We had a seminar, a lecture about this object at Harvard, and a colleague of mine after the lecture said, this object is really weird.
11:35I wish it never existed.
11:37You know, I was really appalled by this.
11:39How can you say something like that?
11:40You learn something new.
11:41It's a learning experience.
11:43We learn that we have to revise the way we think about reality, you know.
11:46That's a good thing.
11:50As somebody who covered national security for so many years, it's fascinating to watch how this issue kind of moved off screen into the middle of the screen.
11:59A former military intelligence officer of 14 years, as well as two former fighter pilots appeared before Congress this week to blow the whistle on UFOs.
12:08The question is, do I think we're up to the task of handling this? Based off of the hearing yesterday and the way it's been performed, I think we are.
12:14I think what's most remarkable is no matter what your viewpoint might be, if you believe the government is hiding aliens or you believe, you know, the government knows more than it's revealing, we now have U.S. senators stand up and talk about UFOs as a serious policy issue.
12:34Can you just give us some raw numbers of how many UAPs you've analyzed, how many have been resolved and sort of in what buckets, and then how many are still left to be resolved?
12:45It's opened the floodgates for scientists and sort of, you know, the academy, so to speak, is to take this topic more seriously and not just marginalize it as, you know, oh, that's the tinfoil hat crowd.
12:59You know, this is a real scientific question that maybe with all the technology we have today, we can answer whether the government tells us what they know or not.
13:08I had no interest in this early in my career. I was interested in very typical things that historians and scholars of religion are interested in.
13:23In the early part of the millennium, I wrote a book on the California counterculture and a movement that focused in Big Sur around a place called Esalen Institute.
13:31And I met a lot of people, and these people told me some really, really strange stories that I knew couldn't have happened, but I knew happened, because I knew these people, and I knew they weren't lying.
13:47I knew they weren't doing this for any kind of ulterior reason.
13:52And I realized that we had no way of thinking about those stories.
13:56In the quiet Mississippi town of Pascagoula, two local men confronted authorities with a rather bizarre story.
14:04Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker told of a strange craft landing near their fishing site and of being taken aboard by three unearthly creatures.
14:12When they carried me inside, they seemed to just lean me by, you know.
14:17And this eye, it moved up in front of me about this close, and it started right in my eyes, looking right in the eye.
14:26And it seemed that it hesitated there for a few seconds, and it just started moving over my entire body.
14:33Sheriff Diamond, can you tell me just what happened that night?
14:36No, sir, I can't.
14:37All I can tell you is it was two men came in the sheriff's department, approximately 8.30 and 9 o'clock.
14:42They were all excited, upset.
14:45Tell me about the lie detector, Ted.
14:47These men, in my opinion, believed that they saw this, and that they were being honest in reporting what they have reported.
14:53Back then, our only way of thinking about these stories was not thinking about them.
15:00Oh, that person drank too much alcohol, or that person was on LSD, or that person was hallucinating.
15:07I mean, they're just this easy kind of explanations that actually explain nothing.
15:11And so I got really interested in why intellectuals don't think about those experiences,
15:21which presumably lie at the core of a lot of basic religious beliefs.
15:26I actually liken a lot of this topic to religion, because it is very similar to me.
15:37I mean, I think there's a lot of commonalities.
15:40For many people, the truth is out there, and it's very emotional, and it's part of their belief system.
15:46Just like if you're Hindu, or Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, I mean, you have a belief system.
15:51And I think some people have experienced things, and whether you and I think it's real, it's real to them, in a real way.
15:59And so we can't just dismiss it, especially since it's not like just a few people.
16:03You know, there's a lot of people, and a lot more coming forward now.
16:06It's right up there, and then it flew, like, right across over, and down that way.
16:11I think paranormal phenomena are essentially the building blocks of what become religion.
16:19So things like belief in an inseparable soul, or immortality, or divination, or the ability to know what's going to happen before it happens.
16:29I mean, all these are kind of classical religious ideas, but they're also really common paranormal phenomena.
16:36And I think these beliefs develop because people have always had these experiences.
16:40I think that's really the bottom line.
16:43Up there, I saw a UFO, and it went down the river, turned right at the United Nations, turned left, and then down the river.
16:51And it looked, what sort of?
16:53Silent, and it looked dark, like black or gray in the middle, and it wasn't a helicopter, and it wasn't a balloon, and it was so near.
17:03Has this been a hard transition, exploring this subject matter as an academic?
17:07I teach at Rice.
17:09Rice is a very STEM-oriented institution.
17:12Most of my undergraduates are going to be engineers, or chemists, or maybe doctors.
17:18They're very science-oriented.
17:20And when I started to teach comparative religion here, I was using kind of classical religious texts.
17:26And I realized they were dismissing all of them.
17:29And they were dismissing them because they would say to themselves, oh, this person doesn't know science.
17:37Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area.
17:45According to this morning sample, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.
17:52That's a big Twinkie.
17:56So I shifted, and I started to use the anomalous experiences of scientists and engineers and medical professionals.
18:03Anomalous experiences.
18:05In other words, something that science can't explain.
18:08Yeah.
18:09This is essentially what you've termed the flip.
18:11Yeah, a scientist or an engineer is trained in a very materialist worldview, where there's only matter.
18:19And the mind or consciousness is some sort of accidental byproduct of dead matter behaving in very complicated ways in our brain.
18:29So mind is essentially not real.
18:32What the flip is, is when a scientist realizes that, oops, actually mind is fundamental.
18:40And matter is actually some kind of expression of mind or consciousness.
18:43And so they have this complete flip of orientation, usually from a near-death experience or a psychedelic experience or an illness.
18:52I mean, there's a lot of things that will flip an intellectual or a scientist.
18:57But once they're flipped, they're flipped.
18:58It's hard to get them back to the earlier kind of materialist perspective.
19:07My own flip, I was living in Calcutta in 1989.
19:11It was the fall of 89.
19:14It was during a festival called Kalipuja, which occurs in late October around our own Halloween.
19:19You have this goddess with cut-off heads and cut-off hands and goat sacrifice.
19:28I mean, it's our Halloween, only way, way more.
19:33There's a whole elaborate kind of religious worldview wrapped around this as well that I was very familiar with and I was, in fact, studying.
19:40One night, I came back late from visiting all these temporary temples in the city and I fell asleep.
19:53And I woke up.
19:57But my body didn't wake up.
19:58It was what, you know, I think a doctor would call a sleep paralysis event.
20:03And this energy just kind of came out of nowhere, came out of me, out of the room, out of somewhere,
20:10and started to interact with me in very conscious, very intentional ways that were not me.
20:16It was not me.
20:18And it was not subtle.
20:20I thought I was being electrocuted.
20:24I thought I was having a heart attack.
20:27Maybe I was.
20:28I mean, but it was, it was powerful.
20:32And it resulted in the, it kind of imploded into my chest region.
20:36And the experience was I left my body and I floated to the top of the ceiling in a kind of dream landscape.
20:46And I just felt like, to use a later language that did not exist in 1989, I felt like, you know, something had been downloaded into me.
20:59It was just like, oh my God, there's something in me now.
21:02I grew up in a religious atmosphere as a child.
21:18I had an orthodox bar mitzvah.
21:20There was always an unspoken quality of faith in the household.
21:24And I think probably from a very young age, I had an instinct that there was reality in the extra physical.
21:32I had occasional experiences myself involving things like prayer or astrology or tarot readings.
21:40And I suppose that my chief interest was in discovering how some of this ancient material had endured across centuries and even millennia.
21:56The Neanderthals themselves, quite literally, had their own system of spirituality.
22:01They had talismans.
22:02They had figurines.
22:04They had devotional practices and paintings.
22:06And we're talking about the most primeval origins of humanity.
22:12So this is obviously something that goes far beyond what we today would call credulity.
22:17It's baked into the human experience.
22:23When people claim they know what this is about, whether it's some kind of fraud or it's some kind of mechanism,
22:29I'm like, my eyes just roll.
22:31I'm like, you either don't know what you're talking about or you're lying.
22:36For me, Jacques Vallée is the barometer.
22:42I love Vallée's work because it combines the sciences and what I would call the humanities in really effortless ways.
22:52Jacques Vallée is a broader viewpoint.
22:54That maybe it isn't just E.T.s coming from some galaxy far away.
22:59The idea that, well, it's just a space fair wandering around through the galaxy and happens to take a look at us, that doesn't really quite match the data.
23:09There are hundreds of sightings every year going back millennia, which is a point that Jacques really goes out of his way to make.
23:18I think Jacques flipped somewhere in the late 60s.
23:22I think it actually happened in libraries in Paris, and he was reading folklore around fairies and demonology and sort of medieval folklore.
23:34And he realized that these stories were essentially about what we call UFOs today, and that there was definitely a connection between the old folklore and occultism and the modern mythology that's really developed around the UFO and the modern world.
23:50Open your Bible.
23:51I mean, what is it that Ezekiel saw?
23:59I mean, Ezekiel describes a craft, you know, a material craft with entities that made a tremendous impression on him and abducted him.
24:13he woke up on top of a mountain you know some miles away okay and he didn't know what had
24:20happened to him and he described wheels within wheels. Ezekiel gives us this account of the
24:27engineering the architectonics of this of this object are unfathomable and enigmatic and suddenly
24:34we're required to interpret what the hell this means. The Bible has preserved it as a religious
24:42experience. Well what was it? In the early books of the Old Testament that's really the critical
24:53first framing in terms of the story of imagining ourselves into a time when our ancestors understood
25:02extraordinary experiences as every day. And Jacques Vallée in his Wonders in the Sky gives us a great
25:13chronicle for instance of aerial phenomena through the ages. There's some excellent events from Egypt
25:23millennia ago where you know two armies are fighting and suddenly there's a craft in the air they come
25:30down and help one side versus the other. They imagined that they were the gods coming to save their skins.
25:40The evidence for that kind of thing is scattered throughout our literature in all different
25:45countries so it isn't just a Western thing. We don't have a complete map you know but we have 19th century
25:54observations by astronomers and in those days there was no stigma attached to it this was you know the wonders
26:01of science with everything documented including some wonderful engravings from Germany and from England
26:10and from France and so on of Tic Tacs. You know that's straight out of a fairy tale I mean if you read this
26:20without knowing the context you'd say it's another fairy tale. It turns out fairy tales come from folklore
26:29and they are based on real observations. In the 17th century if you were to tell a story like that
26:38the priest would say you were in contact with the devil it could only have been the devil
26:44and you would suffer the consequences. So people in those days it would filter into folklore into cute
26:55stories you tell the kids. This has been very deep in human history we just don't pay attention to it.
27:04We're at the very beginning of a time where it's going to be feasible to ask these questions seriously
27:17without the giggle factor, without the discomfort, without what must be for some people spiritually
27:23unsettling. The idea that some of these scenarios may defy our conventional understandings of our
27:31religious traditions. We have a bigger toolkit now than we ever had before in terms of both the empirical
27:39end of the studies, the kinds of instruments we can use in terms of examination of the physical world.
27:46I also brought a few things you know in terms of what samples look like. Pieces of things people have
28:08picked up after a UFO case. Jacques, in discussing, he started talking about some of these materials that he had from UAP.
28:23Wait a second, I never knew about this. There's actual materials that people have? I can look at those.
28:29That's something that a scientist can do. These are materials that I have collected
28:36with different teams in Brazil. Data from 50 years ago.
28:47There was a series of sightings reported in Brazil in 1957. These are from the most famous,
28:53I guess. The account of an explosion over a resort beach called Ubatuba.
28:59The Ubatuba materials. Those two vials that have Moisture A and Moisture B sample in Spanish.
29:08What's good about these materials is that they have a chain of custody.
29:14So I said, okay, well, as it turns out, some of the instruments that I've developed in my laboratory
29:21for the biology that we do are actually designed to look at metals.
29:28I had all this instrumentation available to do the work.
29:32And no, I'm not a metallurgist. I'm not going to claim things about metal structure that I don't know.
29:37But I can at least tell you what's there.
29:39One of the samples showed isotope ratios of magnesium, which were way off Earth normal.
29:49Now, that doesn't mean it's from an ET. It just means that somebody altered the isotope ratios.
29:56But at the time these things were found, that would have been a multi-million dollar operation.
30:01And it doesn't sound like something you would go throwing around a beach in Brazil.
30:05You work with Dr. Nolan, is it to show leadership in the scientific community on the UFO, UAP issue?
30:20I just admire Dr. Nolan and his work. I mean, obviously, his work in biology and medicine is exceptional.
30:29But I admire his willingness to jump into this and assemble a new generation of scientists
30:37to look at the accumulated data. We've already published, as you may know,
30:42the sophisticated analysis of data from an unidentified UFO case.
30:51Council Bluffs, Iowa, 77.
30:53At Council Bluffs on Saturday, December 17th at 7.45 p.m., three people traveling towards North 16th Street
31:01noticed a reddish object about 600 feet in the air falling straight down.
31:06An object was seen hovering. Multiple people saw it from several different vantages.
31:15Something bright seemed to drop from it.
31:19It disappeared behind the trees of Big Lake Park, followed by a huge flash of blue-white light
31:25with two, quote, arms of fire shooting in the air as if it had crashed.
31:29They thought it was a plane crash.
31:31One eyewitness said, quote, it looked like a great big sparkler with lava-like material dripping,
31:37appearing to slow as it cooled. Now, another young couple saw, quote, a big round thing hovering in the sky
31:43below the treetops, and they called the fire department. Upon arriving, they find a pool of liquid metal.
31:50The police arrived, took Polaroids, which I have,
31:58and then large pieces of the material were recovered by some of the witnesses.
32:04There were a lot of potential explanations for it, you know, all reasonable. Things like thermite,
32:11et cetera, and they were all discounted based on the evidence. It wasn't a meteor crash,
32:17because meteors don't leave pools of molten metal behind. They leave holes.
32:21Again, there's a story. There's witnesses. There's police validation that at least the stories
32:38all comported. And then there's material evidence. As you can see, this one comes from Council Bluffs
32:45in Iowa, which is a paper we published. Jacques brought me the material evidence. Now,
32:50I analyzed it with one of my machines. We published a peer-reviewed paper.
32:54The only thing we found about it was that it was inhomogeneous. It's a fancy way of saying
33:00incompletely mixed. The material shows no sign of technology. The material is clearly the result
33:05of an industrial process, and it was incompletely mixed. Okay, so why? Again, that's the question you
33:12ask all the time when you see data. It's like, why? Why would you do it? What could have generated it?
33:19And why would you dump it in the middle of a field in a small farming town in Iowa?
33:24Is this really what the Soul Foundation? Tell me about the Soul Foundation. What is the purpose?
33:28Right. Well, the purpose of the Soul Foundation is to legitimize the subject matter and to bring a
33:33level of discourse that's professional. Academics, for all of its flaws, has a methodology that it uses,
33:41which involves proving something to a level of acceptability through peer review. Now,
33:47peer review doesn't mean it's right. We're saying, here's the kinds of questions we need answers
33:53to. We need a white paper on this, or we need something published in the literature that examines
33:59this problem. Just in the year and a half or so that I've become active and have started interviewing
34:04people. I have met dozens of people who, commercial military coast guard mariners and submariners,
34:12who have had observations. This is several dozen people that have seen phenomena in our oceans,
34:19in the tropical eastern western Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean,
34:24and the Indian Ocean, and the North Atlantic and eastern seaboard. So, this is happening.
34:38I love my job in the Navy because every part of the Navy needs to know something about the physical environment.
34:44The Marines or the Army, they use a term, they talk about high ground and taking high ground,
34:51because high ground gives some advantage over, tactical advantage, over an opposing force.
34:58There is a high ground in the ocean, and that's what I gave the U.S. Navy. Having knowledge of the
35:04physical characteristics of the sea surface, as well as the ocean volume, will help determine how well
35:10your sensors perform, whether they be acoustic or optical or radar. And so, knowing where we could
35:16basically see the adversary and they could not see us, giving detailed information about the ocean
35:22structure was basically providing high ground to the naval forces I supported. Do we have any sensors
35:28underwater to detect on submerged UAPs? Anything that is in the ocean or in the seas? So, I think that would be
35:38more appropriately addressed in closed sessions. Okay. July 15th, this thing dipped into the water,
35:44and that sent the crew into sort of a routine. They announced something to the effect of splash,
35:50splash, which marked the spot where the thing went in. They conducted a search looking for wreckage.
35:54There was none there. It disappeared from sonar and radar, and this thing was just gone.
35:58What is a USO? That's the term people are using for UFOs in the water, an unidentified submerged object.
36:16I think USOs have been observed since at least the 60s, and there are some books and reports that have
36:23been published since then. And now we're seeing a little more attention towards the topic. Carl Feint is
36:31one of those who has published a book on that. And now, more recently, Richard Dolan is publishing
36:36a compendium of all the reports of USOs, and he's let me review that for him.
36:43We're seeing in the oceans the same kind of phenomena that's in the atmosphere in our skies,
36:49where different types of craft and different shapes like triangles and discs and elongated cylinders.
36:57We're seeing different lighting configurations like you see with UFOs. And we're seeing basically
37:02activity and characteristics that defy the laws of physics as we know them. And when I say we're
37:08seeing, these are the reports that eyewitnesses have come forward with. Multiple witnesses report
37:14seeing a large blue object fall out of the sky and into the ocean.
37:20Oh, the going lying in the water, whatever it is. She described it as being larger than a telephone
37:26pole and says she never heard it make any sound.
37:33The idea of the space and ocean comparison is interesting to me. There is a famous astronaut named
37:40Scott Carpenter, who I got to meet, and I asked him, how do you compare the two? And he said,
37:44oh, space is just glorious. It's bright, it's shiny. You go, you launch on the top of a rocket,
37:51and it's very fast, and you get these missions done quick, and they're brilliant. And then he kind of
37:56paused for like a dramatic effect, and he said, the ocean is cruel. It's cold, everything breaks in it,
38:03and it's just difficult. We've only explored about 5% of the ocean's volume. Think about that,
38:1295% of the ocean's never even been examined. And so when you think about it, if we're just seeing a
38:19little bit in the areas of the ocean we're looking at now, in terms of USO activity, what might we be
38:25missing? It could be quite a bit. We're going to have to somehow wrap our minds around the fact that
38:36the scientific method that is directed toward the physical world isn't complete.
38:44There has to be another level of methodology that somehow enables us to accurately address
39:01this numinous level of reality. And that is going to be a very interesting journey,
39:08because I have a feeling it's not going to involve detection with instruments,
39:13as we now understand. What do you think it's going to involve?
39:20I think that those instruments will be as much part of us as they are part of the world around us.
39:30And I don't want to speculate. I was a science fiction author, but I'm not now.
39:35The accounts of experiencers, from my perspective, are testimony. And over time, testimony becomes a record.
39:49People will sometimes dismiss testimony as anecdote, which is actually a term that's intended to be
39:55disabling. But we use testimony all the time. We use it in medicine to try to understand under what
40:01conditions a person experiences pain or under what conditions is that pain alleviated. Therapists and
40:08patients use testimony commonly to prescribe psychopharmacological drugs and so forth. We use
40:14testimony to measure the efficacy of those drugs. So testimony is a common source of information in
40:21the sciences as it is elsewhere. Over time, testimony becomes record. And that's part of what's happening in our time.
40:37Most people that have had anomalous experiences don't want to talk about them. They don't want to shout
40:43about it from the rooftops. They're not looking for publicity. They just want to talk with other people
40:48that have been in similar situations. And they want to do the research so that they can figure out some
40:54more clues to these enduring mysteries. The Experiencer Group is a community site for people that have
41:00had anomalous experiences of any and all kinds. So that can mean people that have had UFO encounters,
41:07encounters with non-human intelligence. There are people that have had out-of-body experiences, near-death
41:13experiences, precognition. We find that folks that have had one type of experience, sometimes, you know,
41:20the quiet secret is that it's more than one modality that they've actually experienced.
41:26You sit down and you read letter after letter after letter, you realize that this is something
41:32marvelous that we've discovered about ourselves. People will sit down and write a detailed long letter
41:40letter about something that really happened to them that is the central question in their life.
41:50There's a strong association with fear and the shame and the hiding that people feel when they can't
41:59talk about anomalous experiences. And then it's also important to remember that there are other
42:03experiencers that seem to have lucked out. And it's just all cosmic high fives the entire time, right?
42:09Just in the last nine months alone, we've organized three hybrid conferences
42:15that happen online and in New York City, featuring people like Gary Nolan, Leslie Kane,
42:23Ralph Blumenthal, Christopher Mellon. That has been incredibly fruitful for small group work,
42:30to be able to have luminaries like that be coming into the situation and engaging with other experiencers.
42:39One situation that I recall that really helped unlock recognizing that I needed to deal with my history,
42:49with anomalous phenomena, was a situation where I was in Miami for a wedding with my ex-wife,
42:57and we had a shared experience where I was looking out the window of this high rise that we were in,
43:04and there was an illuminated swimming pool down below. I was looking at it, and for some reason,
43:11about five or six stories down between where I was in the pool, there was this ball of electricity that
43:18just appeared out of nowhere exactly where I was looking. And I just thought, uh-oh, this is not good.
43:27And seemingly, this ball maybe was about the size of a basketball or so. It started slightly moving
43:34and growing in size towards where I was. I called my wife over, and she saw it out the window. And right
43:47as she saw it, it moved very quickly towards our position. And she turned around to run away from it.
43:57And as she did, she was seemingly rendered unconscious. And I had to move to grab her head
44:05so it didn't hit the floor on her way down. And when I turned around, there were two non-human entities.
44:15And strangely, I know it sounds very weird, they were standing outside the window
44:21in some way, as if there was some overlapping realm that they were on. And as had happened at other times
44:32in the past, I was somehow moved over to kind of an operating theater. And I was laid down on a slab
44:42that was seemingly levitating. And there was some kind of medical procedure happening. And I
44:51I woke up in the morning with part of my suit still on, on top of the covers in the bed. And
44:59my then wife was just staring at my face. She had already woken up. And I was like,
45:07can we talk about this? She was like, no, we can't talk about this.
45:13And I realized that that relationship was not going to work. And I realized that the way that I was
45:19handling this stuff was not going to work. Because denying that it was happening or acting like
45:26I wasn't an experiencer didn't make it go away. And so I had separated from my wife and I started
45:35researching these subjects. And now here I am about 12 years later.
45:41Here's the thing people don't understand. When I talk about revelation, for example,
45:48which is a religious notion, what I mean is the person doesn't make up the story. The story appears
45:57to the person. It's passive. The person is shown something. It's not, it's not the dreamer or the
46:05visionary or the near-death experiencer that's making some shit up. That's not what's happening.
46:10Something is happening to the experiencer or their person being shown to them. And that's why they'll
46:16say it was a revelation. They're not sitting around daydreaming and, you know, making up something,
46:23you know, fantastic in my mind. That's not it at all.
46:33The first time that I encountered Whitley Strieber's work
46:35was the film adaptation of Communion. I was probably 14 or 15 years old flipping channels
46:41and then shock and amazement that I saw a being on television that was, that was close enough to
46:50what I had seen when I was younger. And I remember being perplexed, a sense of panic that I couldn't
47:02really identify the source of. And I remember the visual of seeing Christopher Walken playing Whitley
47:10Streber and him being severely troubled, working with a therapist. And I remember turning off the
47:20television at that point.
47:23I think I wasn't ready to engage with the idea that as an adult, I would have to be doing similar
47:33work as what I was seeing in that scene. I didn't want to engage with that yet.
47:37People really responded to that because they thought, well, wait a minute, this is very much like
47:44what happened to me. And the face on the cover, I sat beside the artist, Ted Jacobs, who drew that face
47:52and described my memories in great detail. And that face is pretty much what I remembered.
47:58It's a very complex human experience. And like so many other people, couldn't let it go.
48:07What I remember is that through my wall came some beings around my bed. And I ran between them
48:15and ran out of the room into my mother's room to hide from them. And what happened is they followed
48:21me in there. And that's the last I remember of it. However, it's interesting because after that,
48:28uh, I never told anybody about that. And I just buried it in the back of my mind. And me and my
48:35brother, we never even spoke about it. The abduction process, which is what I experienced, is only a small
48:43part of our relationship with whatever they are. I think Whitley is a hero. I think Whitley Strieber is
48:52such a brave, courageous, and an important figure in this field.
49:00It can be hard to figure out how to approach Whitley Strieber.
49:05The, the gravity around him in interpersonal situations is very strong.
49:11I remember meeting him for the first time and having to walk away.
49:26I remember the first time in, in meeting Whitley that I actually had to walk away and go to the
49:39bathroom so that I could cry and come back.
49:42He's used to people saying thank you to him. But I can't thank him enough.
49:58Annie put it one day, she was reading all these thousands of letters we got pouring in. And she
50:04comes out of her office and says, Whitley, this has something to do with what we call death. And,
50:10you know, we're way beyond the alien abduction idea at that point.
50:17I can't tell you what's going on. But I can tell you this, if we ever figure it out, it's going to
50:23change the world.
50:26Probably every two or three months, I would hear fairly compelling stories of near-death experiences,
50:32or shared-death or after-death communications that should have gotten my attention. But I kept
50:39dismissing them, thinking, no, you know, that's wishful thinking. We don't have any way of proving
50:44that. No, we don't seem to have memories of past lives. I don't know that I believe in reincarnation.
50:50Certainly having my own personal experience went of light years towards opening me up to
50:55accepting and admitting this beautiful kind of expansion in our knowledge of ourselves and the universe.
51:02There came a slowly spinning white light, and this white light had fine silvery golden tendrils,
51:13and it came towards me, very slowly spinning. And as it did so, I realized it came with a perfect
51:19musical melody.
51:20In the core realm, I was told, you're not here to stay. We'll teach you many things. You'll be going back.
51:29So why was it that I had the most profound, rich, detailed spiritual experience, when my brain was
51:34most remonstrably off? That was part of the mystery I was to answer over these 15 years since that time.
51:41I'll be right back.
51:54So why is the only thing that I have been tahu over this thing?
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