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July 13, 2025 79 mins
Flashback to January 2018:
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we return to discussion of the Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis (UTH) and what seems to be its growing influence in paranormal circles. It’s been used to explain UFOs, mothman, bigfoot, fairies, dogman, ghosts and many other phenomena which defy scientific demonstrability. Now it crops up again in a new film event titled Alien Intrusion which turned out to be a stealth evangelical creationist film which suggests that aliens and UFOs are actually demonic. We are joined by MonsterTalk alum Joe Laycock, Natasha Mikles and Jeb Card to discuss the UTH and Jeb’s Paranormal Unified Field Theory (PUFT) as it relates to this film and the work of John Keel and others.

In Research Of…

MonsterTalk

Joe Laycock Natasha Mikles

Jeb Card

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House Presents. This episode is part of our Monster
Talk flashback series. I'm cross posting it to our sister
show in Research of the show where Jeb Cart and
I watch and comment on episodes of the Vintage Leonard
nine Boy host a TV series in search of if
you somehow ended up listening to one of our shows
and weren't aware of the other. Links to both were
in the show notes for in research of I'm currently

(00:30):
editing the Bimini Wall episode, but ironically I'm running behind
because of many unavoidable issues, one of which is that
I'm going to be in Bimini in person with my
wife to celebrate twenty five years of marriage on a
skeptics cruise hosted by the long running podcast Skeptoy.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
If we don't.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Disappear to the Permuter Triangle, I'll be able to finish
up this Bimini episode soon after returning home. The episode
is a flashback from January twenty eighteen, and I'm cross
posting it because Jeb and I just posted a five
hour look back at the film The Mothmet Prophecies, and
Jeb was suggesting that revisiting our discussion of the utch

(01:06):
in this roundtable would make a good supplementary episode for
that topic. So links in the shows to all this
cross pollination stuff, and I hope.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
You enjoy the monstrutle.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Last week I went to see a film called Alien Intrusion.
Here's a little sample from the trailer.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Now, I'm a science fiction fan, and I can tell
you the truth is out there, but it's a lot
stranger than any science fiction.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's claimed that over twenty million Americans have seen in UFO.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
The Ropapole concluded that up to four men in Americans
had been abducted by aliens.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
I've been involved in the development of space vehicles for
expiration for over sixty years. You know, there are massive
problems with the idea that advanced aliens can simply work
themselves around the galaxy. The starship Enterprise travels at multiple
luck pusion.

Speaker 5 (02:01):
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
A giant, hairy creature, part ape, part Matt in Luckness,
a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Highlands of Scotland.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster. Monstert.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith. And this week we're going to be talking
about a film that I saw last week called Alien
Intrusion and how it relates to something called the ultraterrestrial hypothesis.
In the interview that follows, you're going to hear a
discussion with Joe Laycock, Natasha Michaels, Jeb Card, all of
whom have been on Monster Talk before joined the Tasha

(03:04):
teach religious studies. We've had them on to discuss Tulpa's
in relationship to the slender Man, and we had on
Joe to talk about Satanism and the Satanic Panic and
dungeons and dragons, and we've had Jebond to talk about
fairies with our archaeological fantasies crossover. Anyway, you'll recognize their voices,
I believe if you're a regular listener, And their discussion

(03:25):
we're about to have is about ultraterrestrials, John Keel, the
paranormal Unified Field theory, and this film Alien Intrusion and
how it ties in UFOs and demons. It's really quite
interesting and I hope you'll give it a listen. And
I want to give a quick thank you to Peter Ahler,
my friend who joined me to watch this film in
preparation for this episode Morensterutle. All right, so welcome to

(03:49):
Monster Talk again, all of you.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Thank you very much, Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
So we're here tonight to talk about some things. This
is going to be kind of a roundtable discussion, and I,
along with Sharon Hill, have been working on researching something
that we're calling well, actually, Jeb, why don't you explain
what the PUFT is.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
The puff to the paranormal unified field theory. Yeah, I
think we're.

Speaker 6 (04:12):
Going to come back to it again and again, but
basically wrestling with the idea that all sorts of things
that people put into what academics might call the Celtic amelia,
which include conspiracy theory as well as words like occult, paranormal, etcetera.
I'm probably not the person to talk about this in
this conversation, but that people would talk about as being

(04:33):
paranormal are all increasingly in the community that's very interested
in such topics interlinked.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, and it's a thing that I'm interested in. And
when we went to.

Speaker 6 (04:45):
Cryptocon we saw very firsthand, and it's a thing I've
been talking about a lot. And then I think I
finally all convinced you all that it really was a
thing after seeing it there with dogmen and whatnot.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
So, yeah, the Michigan dog Man and other aspects of
the paranormal, they don't fit into the flesh and blood,
meat and bones sort of aspect of things. And this
is not new because even really early on in the
UFO world, there was a split. And I say UFOs
first because that sort of predates Bigfoot. Doesn't really predate

(05:20):
the yety, but it does predate Bigfoot. There was a
split between the UFOs are real physical craft and UFOs
are some sort of ultradimensional or transdimensional phenomena. And I
guess the guy who really focused on the ultraterrestrial hypothesis,
in fact, who gave it that name, is John Keel.

Speaker 6 (05:43):
He doesn't invent he doesn't invent the concept. And honestly,
I think we're probably going to backwork into the roots
of this in all right, So, if you listen to
the show that I'm usually on archaeological fantasies, we generally
have two drinking game words. One is victorian in and
the other is theosophy. And I'm about to say both.

(06:08):
So I just did what's that that.

Speaker 7 (06:11):
We have drinks and hands.

Speaker 6 (06:12):
All right, So why don't we introduce why don't we
talk about let's bring in the other people on this,
because I guarantee, because I'm just going to say this
straight out one y'all's discussion of Tulpa's, which are very
tied into this on Monster Talk was astonishing and also
it appears to have made it on the X Files,
which is pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
That is awesome.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Locks Yeah, yeah, no, very much.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Well, let me let me explain why I invited joined
Natasha on. It's because, in conjunction with his research I've
been doing to help Jeb on an article that he's
working on, I synchronistically had a friend point me to
this theater event that was happening called Alien Intrusion, and

(06:57):
I looked into it and within about five minutes realized
that this was not a UFO documentary. This was a
religious documentary.

Speaker 6 (07:04):
Well it is a UFO doctors, Well it is, I'd say,
it's just kind of the point, right, it is.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
It is a Well, in fact, we'll get to that.
But because of the fact that it looked to me
like they were basically saying that UFOs were a demonological phenomena,
I thought that there was a good chance it might
tie in with this ultraterrestrial hypothesis stuff, and so I
went to watch the film. And after and even before

(07:30):
I went to watch the film, I reached out to
Joe because this is a film in theaters, right, It
was a special event Fathom Events hosted, So this is
like a one night simulcast across many theaters.

Speaker 6 (07:42):
And so you saw in the theater, and Joe and Natasha,
I believe you saw it in the theater.

Speaker 7 (07:47):
It was one night only. How could we resist?

Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's right? Yeah, So I.

Speaker 6 (07:51):
Am going to be the This is a horrifying position
for everybody involved. I guess I'm going to be the
audience proxy because I have not seen this. I've looked
into it. I've seen the guest list or the speaker's list,
but I have not seen this.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
So I will probably be.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Asking questions about us. I'm the I'm the far end
of that spectrum. I've lived this. So when I was
growing up, my mother told me not to be afraid
of UFOs or aliens, because Lucifer is the lord of
the heir and could make all things appear to be
something that they're not. Basically, that it's much more likely

(08:26):
that it's demons than physical aliens from another planet, and
that was really seriously the hypothesis of this film.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, so it did go straight up demons.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Oh absolutely, And I want to get into it quite Yeah,
I'm just no. But but Joe or Natasha both being
religious studies people, both being very familiar with the field
and having a much deeper knowledge of religious studies than
I have. I mean, I've only got sort of the
evangelical Christian view and the lightest understanding of other religions.

(08:58):
So I thought it would be helpful to have them
to give us some context. So I really appreciate you
guys joining us and for attending the film, because it
gives you absolutely the best position to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (09:08):
Well, the way that they did this is you were saying,
Fathom looks like they were set up if you know,
there's a Broadway show and you want to watch it
at a movie theater live, and so using that as
a distributor whatever audience there would be. It seems that
it just got split up across because multiple movie theaters
in Austin were showing it. When we went, there were
less than a dozen people in the audience, A good

(09:31):
portion of them seemed to be ufo buffs who walked
out in anger really about halfway through it. And I
looked today on the IMDb page for this film, and
in the trivia it actually says lots of people walked
out of this film because they didn't know it was religious.
And Natasha also got pretty restless and got up during
the film and actually saw an audience member berating the

(09:54):
poor guy taking tickets.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Oh God, Asha, what can you remember.

Speaker 7 (09:59):
From that conversation?

Speaker 8 (10:01):
So he was out talking to the young young guy
taking tickets and was just saying that, well, I guess
I should have researched this film better, but shame on
you guys for showing this.

Speaker 5 (10:14):
And this poor kid is you know, he doesn't make
these decisions. He take some tickets, and then he kept saying,
you know, I want to go out and get a
breath of fresh air, but I don't have my ticket
to return. You know, He's like, I think I need
to go take a walk, And he seemed very very agitated.
And I was actually in the search of trying to
get myself a water or something, because by this point

(10:36):
the movie had been going on for about two hours,
and at this point I was just beating us over
the head with New Testament versus and different things from
Paul's letters.

Speaker 7 (10:49):
So it's so.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
It would have been a great one hour sort of
presentation I think. I mean, you could have made the
case in an hour, but they stretched it out to
two and then had like a Q and a afterwards.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
A Q and a.

Speaker 6 (11:08):
Yeah, like there were people from the film sort of
the company or whatever.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Right, Oh it was. It was definitely a bait and switch,
I think.

Speaker 6 (11:17):
Which the first IMDb review that shows up the title
is I feel lied to, with lied to being all.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Caps, which is why I put a little more volume
behind that.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, I do know the bait and switch evangelical approach
has been around for a long time. I mean I
remember many times when I was a kid going to
the fair and then have like free puppet show and
then you know it's a puppet show, but it is
definitely an evangelical, you know, conversion puppet show.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
I've also done that to get anthropology majors.

Speaker 5 (11:46):
But yeah, I remember in college there was a free
comedy night and it was an evangelical bait and switch.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, I don't think that's kind of like it's almost
like a pious fraud, you know, it's not like quite
faking a miracle, but it is it is a little
bit deceptive.

Speaker 6 (12:06):
And which is by the way, literally the subtitle of
the movie, it is Alien Intrusion Unmasking a Deception.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Well, surprise, I got one of the deceptions for here.

Speaker 6 (12:15):
Narrated by John Schneider, one of the two dudes from
the Dukes of Hazzard.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (12:20):
Yeah, that was also interesting because John Schneider now does
something called Faith Works Productions and so important. Again, but
he did not introduce himself as Bo Duke from Dukes
of Hazzard. He introduced himself as Clark Kent's dad from
the show Smallville.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Interesting, that's right, yeah.

Speaker 7 (12:39):
After the sci fi craft.

Speaker 6 (12:42):
Yeah, and also just people who are, you know, younger
than a lot.

Speaker 7 (12:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Let me tell you a different view of the audience.
My theater sold out two auditoriums, and it real almost
entirely church groups where everybody knew everybody. Everybody was like, hey,
brother so and so, and hey sister so and so.
There was there was a real sense that I had
walked into a church service. And before the movie started,
there were a lot of advertisements about Creation Ministries. It

(13:14):
was really and the narrator or not the narrative. The
director of the show is from Australia, so he wasn't
ken Ham, but there is a strong I'm just just kind.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Of immediately go where my mind went.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Thank you, Yeah, no exactly. It wasn't kN Ham, but
it was yet another strong Australia anti evolutionary thing, and
I wish Karen was here to defish your country.

Speaker 7 (13:38):
Christian Ministries had a nasty breakup with ken Ham in
two thousand and six, and the reasons for this are
not entirely clear, but there's a lot online if you
want to dig into that breakup.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
It was a secret anti chin Beard sort of movement.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Wow wow, that's harsh but fair. By the way, he
does not have.

Speaker 6 (14:01):
Like they sell a little pamphlet about UFOs at the
so pretty much if you go to the Creation Museum,
all the stuff they sell text wise is theirs, which
surprised me when I went there.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
I've not been to the ark and Karra, but.

Speaker 6 (14:11):
In the Creation Museum and they do have a tiny
little pamphlet on UFOs and they don't do the demonology thing.
They actually have a largely skeptical perspective that basically says
sightings are probably blah blah blah mistakes, and the idea
of aliens reifies evolution.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Let me just say that a good seventy percent of
the first half of this movie. I know that's a
little bit of too much math, probably, but the predominant
content of the first half of the film was about
what the UFO phenomena is and why modern day science
rejects the idea that physical extraterrestrial craft are traveling from

(14:53):
other planets. It could have been put on by psycop
It was absolutely you know. Bullet pointed the same arguments
that most physicists have against the idea that just as
a visiting Earth, but they moved, which does open the
way for demons, which makes that they move on to
the argument, well, people are seeing something, so what are

(15:13):
they seeing. If it's not physical craft, it must be demons.
So I mean that there's a lot of other things
that I would have liked them to include it, but
the idea that maybe it's misidentified or misunderstood, or sleep paralysis,
none of those ideas came up.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
So how much of it was abduction?

Speaker 6 (15:32):
Like looking at the IMDb thing, abduction seems to come
up a lot, was a lot of it, which if
they're talking about sort of demonological you know, nocturnal attacks,
abduction seems like it would be a big part of
Is that a big focus in the film Big?

Speaker 1 (15:46):
The second half is all about abduction, Yeah, because.

Speaker 7 (15:50):
The narrator says, abductees are the most testable evidence that
we have of this phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Wow, which I guess wow in.

Speaker 7 (16:00):
The sense that you can bring an abductee to a.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Lab and like yeah on them.

Speaker 7 (16:05):
But a lot of upologists, including you know, Jacques Ballet,
have said the contact these are the worst evidence, right,
The best evidence are is ideally a video or something
like that, and not somebody who is remembering something under hypnosis.

Speaker 6 (16:18):
But on the other hand, of course Ballet is also
mister aliens or fairies, which if you want to be
away with the fairies and missing time under the hills
and uh.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
They brought up fairies. You have been so proud of them.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Oh, I've made all the made all the mistakes in
my life.

Speaker 5 (16:37):
Especially when they use the abductees, because it's like they
were they were trying to show in the first half
or the first two thirds, like this is all illogical.
You know, fast than light travel is illogical, and you
know all this other stuff.

Speaker 7 (16:53):
And then when we got to the abductees.

Speaker 9 (16:55):
There was just so much crying and with like really
sad piano keys in the background. Music was horrible, and
it was just it was just this like kind of
blatant appeal to emotion as it.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Was telling stories over sat piano. Interesting.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's very popular.

Speaker 6 (17:12):
Sorry, it's a little in joke there, but so so
it was very very like like sort of therapy culture
kind of sort of with the app which is not
a new.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Criticism of abduction stuff.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Not so much. They treated the abductees like they'd had
legitimate experiences. They they very politely discussed the common feature
of the rectal probes, and then they basically came down
to correct me if I'm over simplifying this, Natasha Joe.
But I think it came down to invoking the name

(17:46):
of Jesus Christ repeatedly is the best defense against alien abduction.

Speaker 7 (17:51):
That's right, and and and two of the people in
the film are involved in this ministry called alien resistance.

Speaker 6 (17:57):
I think the websites they were in there, that's a
amazing I've been.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
In their church yep, right across right.

Speaker 6 (18:03):
Well they're not anymore, but they used to be literally
across the street from the UFO Museum in Roswell.

Speaker 7 (18:08):
Yeah, and there's a resistance is fertile?

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Nice?

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Nice?

Speaker 6 (18:17):
Do they still have as their symbol the sort of
no smoking aka Ghostbusters like the red circle with oh
my god, what the alien had? The gray head in
the middle. My favorite picture period of all is I
went to the two thousand and two UFO Festival in
Roswell and the Rallians, the group that is basically a

(18:41):
contact ee flying saucer religious new religious movement primarily based
out of Quebec.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
All those a ton of them in Korea.

Speaker 6 (18:50):
They were going to speak, not it wasn't gonna be
rey Ale, but it was disciples of His who made
their hair and beard look like his, who were going
to speak at the International UFO Museum and Research Center
aka the big museum with a almost as big gift
shop attached to it. Then at the last minute their
speaking got revoked because they were too weird for the

(19:11):
UFO Museum, which is a merit badge. But they were
allowed in to the Alien Resistance storefront church, which at
that time existed across the street. And the story behind
that is I know his name is Guy. I don't
remember his last name, but he was from I want
to say, Tennessee in the nineteen nineties, and.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
If you all know the story, better please interrupt me.

Speaker 6 (19:35):
In the nineteen nineties, he started having in essence what
would be sort of alien abduction or what a skeptic
would say would be sleep paralysis events, but he interpreted
them from a born again perspective as demonic attacks, and
so he decided, well, where am I going to go
into the belly of the beast. He went to Roswell,
right at the sort of the height of all of this,

(19:55):
and opened up a storefront church of a ministry again
aliens because he believes their demons. But they allowed the aliens,
who say they don't worship aliens, they say they're atheists,
but they kind of worship aliens, allowed them to come
in and speak. And there is a picture that a

(20:16):
dude who was sort of reliving the film Six Days
in Roswell, which is a very interesting film. God of
me listening to all of this, and I now have
it in every who am I? Because I don't want
to do this lecture at the beginning of semesters. The
guy I'm Alone, I want to say it was Guy
Alone that seems very like Batman, villain from the thirties.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
I wasn't certain, but that sounds right. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (20:38):
Yeah, He and Joe Jordan, who they said was the
moufon director for South Korea. Interesting players in the film.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah yeah, and then Jim Subtle from Roswell as well.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (20:53):
I don't know if they're still in Roswell. I know
they are no longer in right in front of the museum,
but I don't know if they've left Roswell.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
I get the feeling they're still there.

Speaker 6 (21:00):
I saw some YouTube videos a few years ago of
them having sort of an alternate conference at the same
time as the Big festival, and one of the people
in the film spoke there, who I don't believe has
the same ideology one Nick Redford.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
I don't know what Nick believes exactly, but I know
that he makes his living off of the same sort
of topics that I'm interested in and doesn't have the
sort of skeptical framework that I do. But he was
in the movie quite a bit, and every time Nick
Redford appears. It's moments later we see John Keel over

(21:47):
and over and over again. So it's like Nick Redford,
Nick Nick Redford serves as John Keel's proxy for this film.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Well, do we want to briefly talk about that a little? Like?

Speaker 1 (21:57):
Like, not briefly, I think we should talk about a
whole lot.

Speaker 6 (22:00):
Okay, all right, I mean I just didn't know if
if there was anything else we need to get out
of the way.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah, no, I think. I mean, I think the main
thing is that, you know, my position as a skeptic.
You know, we're a podcast that works with Skeptic Magazine.
But I've always felt that I think it's absolutely fine
that people have religion. I you know, I grew up
in a religious family. I'm not an anti god person.
I'm not an anti religious person. I am a very

(22:27):
pro evidence person, and I don't think I think that
the usefulness of using skeptical methodology to figure out whether
things are really demonstrably true or testably true or not
is important, and critical thinking is important, and I find
it unfortunate that this whole thing is also wrapped up

(22:49):
in a big anti evolution nutshell, because the I think
there's very few scientific theories that have turned out to
be so demonstrably reliable as natural selection as an explanation
for evolution, and as a quick reminder for audience members
who may not know it, the evolution itself was never

(23:10):
really debatable. I think prior to Darwin, Darwin was looking
for a mechanism to explain it. He wasn't inventing evolution.
Evolution already existed. His grandfather had talked about evolution. But
what he did was came up with natural selection as
a methodology to explain how, over time, selective pressures can
cause change that looks like design. And it's interesting to

(23:31):
me that that a group that's primarily focused on pro
creation as not pro creation but promoting.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yea, is that they're parly clear of that up.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
I think that that's their primary sort of focus. That
they would hop into the alien hot tub and want
to have a swim with us is fascinating. So and
I'm not sure where that metaphor just went, but uh.

Speaker 6 (23:55):
Well, well, let's what's I think. As an archaeologist, I
like to sort of look at things from it. Let's
let's go to an origins. If you watch any random
documentary about although maybe these days maybe not so much,
but in the past, and I think sleep in today
about UFOs, what would the origin be like?

Speaker 2 (24:17):
What? What what would be the.

Speaker 6 (24:19):
UFOs were first blah blah blah blah blah, Well, what
would it prop what would the sort of bill.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
Popular Keith Arnold as the first and then the.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
June twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah, and then they go back and say, oh, but
there were also airships and go back to the Bible
and Ezekiel, right.

Speaker 6 (24:36):
But the thing, so, the typical kind of kind of
perspective on this is you have this sudden emergence of
this phenomenon of strange things seen in the sky that
may have something to do without her space, although it
takes a few years for it to sort of go
there in the summer of nineteen forty seven, specifically starting,
as Keiland has pointed out, on Saint John's Day, John
about this day on June twenty fourth, bye, And I

(25:00):
would love to turn this over to people who probably
know a hell a lot more about this than I do.
The actual origins of all of this can of what
we call flying saucers and UFOs and many of the
ideas that we see emerge after nineteen forty seven, can
all be found? Can I'll put your glasses in your hand.
In the late Victorian period and in sort of the

(25:23):
movement known as Theosophy, which is sort of a reaction
to modernity in some ways and in other ways it's not.
It gets really complicated, and I'd love you all to
talk about more than me. That then kind of tracks
through places like Maurice Doriol and Richard Shaver and gets
up there. So the reason I say this is the

(25:44):
idea that you'd have psychical interests or what we'd call
parapsychological or psychic mixed in with strange things in the sky,
mixed in with weird places, mixed in with strange creatures
is actually not new.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
And if anybody wants to jump in, feel free.

Speaker 7 (26:04):
Yeah, a couple of things. You know, the Christian attitude
that these are just demons goes back to probably the
seventies and is you know, fairly mainstream and serving the movements.
How Lindsay wrote a lot about this, that the UFOs
are the false miracles that's going to usher in the
end times. What was different about this was I have

(26:25):
never seen a Christian take on UFOs. That gets into
Jacques deval At and John Keel and what you call
the puffed yeah, unified field theory. And there's some consequences
to that. One of them is people like haw lindsay
assumed UFOs have never happened before, and if they're happening now,
it's because these are the end days. Interesting in this

(26:47):
film they have to say, well, this is actually always
gone on, right, because there's always been demons you mentioned
I think Blake mentioned Ezekiel, which is interesting Ezekiel did
not show up in this film, yeah, because that would
have kind of throw a monkey ranch into they're claim
that all anything that looks like an alien is demonic, right,
because they can't say the wheels that's seen by the
prophet Ezekiel were demonic.

Speaker 6 (27:07):
They have because they're they're angelic, right, They're angelic, right,
So that's interesting.

Speaker 7 (27:11):
That that was sort of a left interesting the.

Speaker 5 (27:14):
Angel Gabriel and Mohammad showed up, as did the as
did Joseph Smith.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
That right, what yeah, yeah, because these are it goes.
I think that tied into the nobody should add anything
to the Bible approach, right, like the original prophecies of
the Bible are the Bible incomplete and anything that happens
after that is entirely suspect.

Speaker 6 (27:38):
Right, So this this thing basically argue that Gabriel and
Mohammad is demonic and Joseph Smith is demonic. Not them,
but the revelations thereof.

Speaker 7 (27:48):
Yes, wonderful at scientology. And so really the film was
putting all three of these religions in the same category.
Who propaganda When.

Speaker 6 (27:58):
They talk about scientolic, tell me about the scientology that
may actually get into some of what I would love
to talk about. Tell me more what they talked about
in the film.

Speaker 7 (28:05):
Well, so they're approaching euthology from what I would call
a haresiological perspective, basically saying this is a false religion. Right,
they say it's a scientific theory. It's not it's a
false religion. And I mean they actually make some good
points on that front. Some religion scholars might agree with them,
not that it's a false religion, but that it serves
a kind of religious function in people's lives. And then

(28:26):
they say, and we know that there are religions that
have been started by contact with these entities such as scientology,
and there's a slide very quickly of a scientology temple.
I don't really think it's an accurate assessment of the
history of scientology. I think they were banking on the
fact that people will have heard of this religion and
they'll have a negative attitude about it, and this will
sort of score points with the audience down.

Speaker 6 (28:47):
So they didn't get into like say Jack Parsons now
because given that they got redfern there. So we will
probably come back to this, but probably Nick Redferns, who's
written a lot on UFOs and his big thing and
he talks about like his ide you know, he likes
the idea that like things like NeSSI and Bigfoot may
actually be psychic thought forms or spirit not spirits, but

(29:09):
more parapsychological than biological. But he wrote a book in
twenty ten, I believe, called Final Events where he argues
that there has been this group inside the United States government.
He calls the Collins elite that have become eventually born
again or evangelical Christians that pretty much buy into this
worldview that UFOs in fact are demonological and that they

(29:32):
intend to do something about it. And I actually there's
an episode of Sharon Hill's fifteen credibility straight. We talked
about this at some length because that's what I do.
How the recent revelation of and things related to it.
I don't want to really get into this too heard
unless it becomes an issue because there will be a
rabbit hole of the Department of Defense. Recent UFO project

(29:58):
actually lends some interesting credibility to the idea that such
a group or groups like it, or one could see
how such groups might be in essence bouncing off of
a longer term sort of parapsychological, youthhological sort of I
like to use the word rolodex, but sort of contact

(30:18):
list of people you call people in the remote viewing thing.
And again, this is getting into a rabbit hole. So
let's leave it alone for the moment. But that's why
we keep bringing up in addition to him being the
one who is not a primary religious apologist.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
In the film Nick Redford.

Speaker 7 (30:39):
And Final Events is discussed explicitly.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Yeah it is. Oh, so let's just let's let's talk
about that then.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, so tell us. I mean I still have not
read Final Events, although after seeing this, I.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Well, what do they say in the film, what do
they say in the film.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
I wrote down Final Events. Look this up. This is
a super helpful, right. It was one of the I
know they made quotes from Redfern he explicitly talked about
he said, I talked about this in Final Events. I
believes what he said. I can go back and get
the exact quotes.

Speaker 7 (31:09):
Later, Redford names his source, who he said was a priest.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
And I've got that written down.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
I didn't want to say it, but it's his Final Events.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
He's been in Moufon.

Speaker 6 (31:20):
He's been a long term UFO investigator, but he's also
a priest.

Speaker 7 (31:23):
He was the head of Nebraska move On, I believe.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, he was like a state director. Yeah yeah,
but he's not.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
I've got a contact in mouf On. I don't want
to talk much about this, but he said that it's
an interesting mix of people and there are people who
you know, who believe in the extra tristial hypothesis, and
there's people who explicitly believe there's angels and demons involved.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, that's correct.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
I find that fascinating. But you know, it's so. Moufon
has been around the mutual ufone network exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Yeah, since the seventies.

Speaker 6 (31:57):
It basically arose out of the ashes of APRO. I
think was the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, which sort of
arose out of the ashes of NICAPAP, which was sort
of for a long time the big UFO Civilian Bureau
since the fifties and so since the seventies and especially
since the eighties, Muffon has been the sort of last

(32:17):
man standing of UFO groups and the recent Department of
Defense stuff. It has not been proven that government funding
was directed towards them, but pretty much everybody's looked at
the situation, looks at timelines and says Robert Bigelow was
funding them at points, and here's when he got money
from the government, and it's the same time.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Therefore, therefore therefore.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting ties. You can
draw lines all over the place.

Speaker 6 (32:42):
Yeah, so final events is brought up in the film interesting.
So again this book that Redford, and you can find
a lot of podcasts and interviews and things he's done.
He pretty much tells you a lot about the book
out there, so you can just look this up everywhere.
But basically he makes the argument that so in this
guy Ray b O'Shea, who is in movifile comes in

(33:04):
and says, look, there's this group called the Collins Elite
that has come to me and has told me that
there are groups inside the United States government that are
very involved in UFOs, but they have come to the
conclusion that it is demonic, and some of them want
to fight it, and some of them want to weapon
exploit it.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
And then this all gets very stranger things.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
And then I just inject here that the drinking game
now switches to Tom Collins Elite, which is a regular
Tom Collins. That the ad who that's your call, that's
your abbadouri makes it green? Go for it, all right?

Speaker 2 (33:38):
So oh there you go, all right, nice, Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 6 (33:41):
But he basically spins this tale, which I used the
word spins a tale simply in the sense he produces
a narrative. I'm not actually putting a judgment on that.
That Jack Parsons, who is one of the co founders
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was in the same
social circles until things went sour with al Ron Hubbard,
which is why I brought him up at that point.

(34:03):
And he was a follower of Alistair Crowley and the
Ordy templar is it ordo templary orientalis the which again
I'm not the expert on this panel on but basically
Alister Crowley's kind of spin off from the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn and blah blah blah. So the
one of the co founders of JPL in the forties
is also a hardcore interested in the esoteric occult scene

(34:29):
in California, and Redfern argues that near the end of
his life, because he blows himself up, he's he's he's
a major pioneer of rocketry in the United States. But
near the end of his life he starts wanting to
offer his services to the newly founded nation.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
Of Israel, and he gives them a little too.

Speaker 6 (34:49):
Much when he's making sort of his job proposal, too
much in terms of potentially classified information. So there is
an investigation, and Redford in the book basically says the
group FBI and whoever then investigate him, go, wait, he's
hanging out with demon worshippers, and wait, he's doing all
these things and wait, and then they link this into

(35:10):
alleged UFO stuff, and this begins this sort of Delta
greenish kind of group in the government, and I have
thoughts about some of this history that I think is
not relevant to really get into. But that's basically what
Redford is suggesting. And then around the time of Ronald

(35:32):
Reagan becoming president, this group changes its perspective in Redford's telling,
decides that things like abduction are demonic attacks, that in essence,
we are a farmed for demons eating our souls. Again,
this is Redford and telling the story. He was adamantly
said we multiple times. He doesn't believe this. He just
says that he believes there's a group that says this,
and that this group was at one point sort of

(35:54):
plotting various things to try to defend the United States
with spiritual warfare.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
It's fascinating to me because I think when you look
at all these well, think of it this way. When
you look at government, I think most people think of
sort of a monolithic, long term thing, this organization, But
it's made up of people, and each one of these
individuals has their own belief systems, and it's really easy

(36:23):
when you're thinking about these kind of stories to sort
of put your own spin on it. I mean, the
fact that you've got Ronald Reagan he represents to some
people this sort of ultimate, you know, macho American tough guy,
and then to other people we see him as a
sort of a befuddled old man who you know, relied

(36:44):
on astrologers to get his information. And there's so many
nuances to the individuals involved in these stories, but there's
such a rich, rich well of material to form your
own opinions on, it's it's really hard to kind of
pin down what's really going on. It reminds me of

(37:04):
some of the better episodes of The X Files, where
you know, you think you know what's going on, and
then there's a twist, but what if it really means this?
And what if it really means that? And I don't
really know what it all means, but I'm more inclined
to think that, using sort of the same natural selection thing,
that what's really going on is we just get by.
Like the sort of bozos who sort of make these

(37:26):
decisions that sort of form our government, we just managed
to get by. Like the fact that we're still around
is kind of a remarkable because a lot of really
strange people with weird beliefs are really making things work well.

Speaker 6 (37:38):
Given the events of this weekend. Yes, yeah, but that
we are all still alive is impressive. So Joe and Natasha,
you both mentioned that in the film this was the
first time you had really seen as you mentioned like
John Keel and Jacques Vallet, and I think for what
we're talking about, that's I think that's actually really important.
Could you talk about that a little more like not

(38:00):
that's personally I ever seen them the first I ever
seen them in relation to these ideas.

Speaker 7 (38:04):
Yeah. So, I mean usually when I see Christians talking
about UFOs, they they say that they're demons, kind of
just to get it out of the way. Yeah, So
it's just kind of just like, don't pay attention to UFOs.
Those are just demons, And this was different. These were
two people guy I'm Alone and Joe Jordan who were
really part of the UFO culture and then it appears

(38:25):
that they became kind of born again afterwards.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
And so interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 7 (38:30):
It was kind of what in religious Sudy was something
to called hybridity, right, where two differentations begin to resemble
each other.

Speaker 6 (38:36):
I have literally edited volume and ran a conference on hybridity.
So it's a thing that I've up to the gills on.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Yes, but I.

Speaker 7 (38:44):
See this a little bit as a as a case
study in hybridity, because the one of the narrators begins saying,
you know how annoyed he is when people like their
aliens say, oh, well, Jesus was really just an advanced alien,
right who came to give us wisdom. And so I
see this kind of turning it around where the kind
of christianized youuthology weirdly mirrors groups that have been doing

(39:07):
this youthologized Christianity, yes for a while, and it's a
kind of you got chocolate in my peanut butter, right, Well, yeah,
that's blending of ideas.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
Heaven's State, Heaven's Gate was like that. They I mean,
they had their whole the luciferian actions of these aliens
versus the good level above human approach, right, So exactly.
But before before we go further, I would like to
mention that when you're talking about hybridity and you're talking

(39:39):
about aliens, I want to be clear we're not talking
about alien hybrids, which is a different thing.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Well together, I mean, i'd be very curious here.

Speaker 6 (39:47):
From my perspective, hybridity is basically it's as an archaeologist,
as a student of social this.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
That and the other. It's a very valuable concept.

Speaker 6 (39:56):
All it's a contested concept that people have issues with it,
but basically a recognition, a recognizing.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Recognition, that's what I'm looking for that Uh.

Speaker 6 (40:06):
So much of culture is actually made in the interstitial
spaces in between things. Uh and that you know, the
idea that, oh, there's a cultural norm over here. It's like, well,
in reality, a lot of things are mixed up. And
actually you understand the structures of society and the structures
of global society by looking at that mixing up. Is
that is that sort of what y'all are talking about.

Speaker 7 (40:27):
Yeah, we used to use this term syncretism, yes, religious traditions,
and I decided, well, hybridy is better because that implies
a kind of agency that this doesn't just happen by accidents.
And you can really see that agency when you see
these Christians kind of reading John Keel and sort of
and often.

Speaker 6 (40:43):
A subversive agency, often a subversion of existing concepts.

Speaker 7 (40:47):
Right, So this kind of polemical reading of people like
Valet and Keel and sort of seeing what here is
useful to us and what are we going to have
to kind of sweep under the rug to make our arguments.

Speaker 6 (40:58):
Well, the thing I find particular interesting. So you all
mentioned you know that they didn't mention Ezekiel, but you
all were like, but they should because they're pulling this
from ancient aliens or ancient astronauts or the term I
use in my book ancient extraterrestrials because no one's trademarked it.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
But Ezekiel is always brought up there.

Speaker 6 (41:21):
But as you all pointed out, you can't call that
demonic if you're wanting to say this is all demonic,
blah blah blah. And I think what you're finding there
and this is one of the beauties when you, for example,
I look at material culture that's hybrid is when you
can find trace markers, when.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
You can find uh.

Speaker 6 (41:36):
There's a term that we use that is on the
tip of my tongue, and I'll come back to it
when it when it pops in my head.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
A brief interjection. The term Jeb was trying to remember
is skew morphism. He wrote me after the interview to
say that when elements transfer from a design and when
medium to a design and another, even though they aren't
purely functionally needed, that's skew morphism, things like attempts at
preserving elements of a desktop are books or newspapers, et
cetera in a computer interface. There are tons of examples

(42:04):
in archaeology, including rivets on ceramics that were modeled after
midtal buckets. And we now return to the conversation.

Speaker 6 (42:17):
When something survives in one material into another kind of medium.
And it's really bugging me. I can't think of it
right now, but you're seeing this here where you all expect, Ezekiel,
it should be there if you're looking at things that
are reinterpreted from a UFO perspective, But you can't do
it over over here for the reasons that you brought up.

(42:40):
And I think that's what's happening with.

Speaker 10 (42:41):
Keel So John keel He he's often depicted as a
respectable reporter, like a journalist in the nineteen fifties and
sixties that then gets wrapped up in UFOs and weird.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Strology and so on.

Speaker 6 (43:02):
Around his most famous book, The Mothman Prophecies, involving the
incidents around nineteen sixty seven in Point Pleasant, West Virginia
that he writes the book, And I want to say
it's seventy five, where he was not the first person
to sort of para to pioneer this idea of a

(43:24):
sort of unified theeld theory that these things. He called
himself a demonologist, and he didn't mean that in a
theological sense, but he sort of did.

Speaker 7 (43:32):
That was clouded extensively in the film Oh really from
Operation Trojan Horse Ye, Yeah, which I am.

Speaker 6 (43:39):
Literally reading right now. I had not read it before
and I'm reading it right now. I'd read some of
his other works in reality, keel if you read his
first book, Jadoo, which has not been easily found until recently,
Like it's not lost, but it was not as you
could find Operation chijan On as you could find the

(43:59):
mauthor prophecies. Good luck finding Jadu until we've now gotten
into the era of easy self publishing. He started looking
for magic. I mean you could pretty much just put
Max Weber in the index and index most pages. I mean,
he literally talks about the lost magic of the landscape
that is about to be swept away by industrial civilizations.

(44:20):
So he goes to the Middle East and Egypt and
India to find it, and that's how he starts. So
the fact that he then pretty much in every one
of his works brings in this concept of finding magic
in the landscape, finding spirits in the landscape, finding a
sort of not anti science but extra science in the landscape.

(44:45):
Well it is anti science in places, is not surprising.
He then becomes the darling of sort of UFO intelligentsia,
him and Jacques Vala. And since Vala was brought in,
do you all want to talk about, like who Jack
Vale is or.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Was he is? He's still alive unlike John Keel.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, I know him as a UFU researcher, but he
was also a it guy.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
He was.

Speaker 6 (45:07):
He started as an early like he's now a venture capital.
He started doing early statistics, early computer stuff. But I
want to say around sixty five, nineteen sixty five, he
decided to start applying his statistic statistical background to UFO sightings.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
He came up with a few interesting things.

Speaker 6 (45:25):
And then two years later it was like, actually they're fairies.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (45:31):
He writes the book called Passport to Magonia, which is
I think literally written one year after mothmant It's not
involved with Mothmam, but it's all in the same era
and it's four years or five years before Mothmann prophecies
where he goes back and he reads tons of the
first Occupant UFO reports that are not obviously contact e Angelic.

(45:53):
So when he used the word contact d we're talking
about basically since around nineteen fifty to fifty one, people,
many of whom who had a background in theosophical lodges
other esoteric pursuits. They meet, often very white, Nordic tall
These are names they give, and some of them were
actually Nazi sympathizers.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Others were not.

Speaker 6 (46:14):
In the desert and say, oh, here's a new revelation.
But you start having in the middle of the nineteen
fifties reports in France and then in South America, and
then in the United States and elsewhere people seeing little
people collecting flowers and doing weird things outside of flying
saucers and then running away. Valet, in his book in
nineteen sixty eight Passworamagonia catalogs these, analyze these and says

(46:40):
these are almost the same, if not the same as
and then he pulls out a huge amount of early modern,
late medieval to early modern stories from Europe of fairies
involving people who are taken away by the fairies. This
is when inbduction is beginning to become a thing in uthology.
People that have missing weird time, have strange events and

(47:01):
so on. And Valet basically makes the argument, and this
is the sort of bedrock of what I call the
puff the parami unified field theory these things, and Keel
makes the same argument, these things are normal to this planet.
They are not from outer space in nineteen forty five
because we blew up nuclear bombs. They've been here forever.

(47:22):
They're older than us, and they're strange and we don't
understand them. Yeah, which then kind of fits demons, if
you want to go that way.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, it does. And also I think most people would
know weirdly, they would know Valet through his proxy, which
was as Claude Lenc Lacomb And uh.

Speaker 6 (47:40):
Yeah, there's some dispute whether that's really based on them
or not. But Valet was one of the people that
Spielberg was reading. Yeah, he created close encounters of the
third kind, right, and they used to get a Heinech
well and jail and Heinech, by the end of his
life had basically come over to a parapsychological slash sort
of quasi cultish perspective on UFOs as well.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
To be honest, So, I.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
Know we're going to keep talking about sort of is
you followg your religion. That's one of the is the
ultratreustural hypothesis of religion. Your religious studies people, what's a religion?

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Wow?

Speaker 7 (48:14):
So when I teach so, when.

Speaker 5 (48:15):
I teach World Religions at Texas State, one of the
assignments I have my students do is to create a
definition of religion. They have to do it three times
throughout the semester. And this is really be to kind
of demonstrate that there is no inherent definition to religion,
that we create working definitions based upon the data that

(48:36):
we have. And so, and that's how I would answer it.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Well, the reason I ask is because I think over
the course of Monster Talk, I've talked to a lot
of different people about religion, because religion crosses into monsters
in a lot of interesting ways. And one of the
things that seems, I guess in modern in modern times,
especially within Christianity, religion is about a faith that's what

(49:02):
you believe. But that didn't seem like it was always
the case. Religion was sometimes what you do. It was
the actions you take and the sort of practices that
you have, and maybe it's a hybrid of that.

Speaker 5 (49:13):
But well, there's a one theoretical model thinking about religion
that says that there are religions that are more based
on orthodoxy, so what you believe, and religion is more
based on orthopraxy what you do, and this is how.

Speaker 7 (49:26):
You determine who is in or not in the religion.

Speaker 5 (49:30):
And I think that's a really interesting divide, a very
interesting kind of theoretical tool that can be used to
think about religions. Another one that I was thinking about
you guys are talking about this puffed theory, is the
idea of a sacred canopy. And this was made by
sociologist Peter Berger.

Speaker 6 (49:48):
That's a cannop pay, that's a canno pey, very different.

Speaker 5 (49:54):
So the sacred canopy, and Joe can jump in if
you can explain this a little bit better than I can.
But the sacred canopy is the idea that religion is
a way to organize the world, that we are bombarded
by information all times, and that religion is a way
to kind of make categories and to put things in
their place, and that you kind of exist under this

(50:15):
large sacred canopy, and that to be in a religion
is to say say, oh, I know where to put
this new phenomenon. I just saw it goes into this category.
And so in many ways, the idea of puffed, I think,
is in some ways making a sacred canopy out of
this saying that all of this data is actually interconnected
and interwoven.

Speaker 7 (50:34):
I don't know, I.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Could definitely tell that disagree with me.

Speaker 7 (50:36):
So maybe no, that was I thought that was That
was great, Natasha. So in religius studies, we know that
religion as what we call a second order category, meaning
it's not something that exists out in the world. It's
something that we make up, and we decide what goes
in the category and what doesn't. And there's not a
perfect definition of what gets lumped in the category and
what isn't. But one of the things I try to

(50:57):
impress on my undergraduates is it's important that we are
fair about what the rules are when we talk about
what is or is not a religion, because there's something
at stake. So in San Marcos, where Natasha and I teach,
there was someone on the city council who, in retweets
was saying that Harry Potter is a religion, and so
it is unconstitutional to have Harry Potter books in public schools.

(51:20):
But Islam is not a religion, and so Muslims do
not have any constitutional rights. And so that's the kind
of gaming the system that goes on, which is why
theories of religion are important. And to the credit of
these filmmakers that Gary Bates is the filmmaker he actually says,
I define religion as having the following three characteristics, and

(51:40):
he defines it in terms of answering questions, right, where
do we come from, what are we're doing? What happens
when we die? So he is at least fair right
that he says, these are the rules of the game,
and by these rules, ethology is a religion.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
The reason I am because they treated within that film,
they treated religious eupology upology as though it were religion,
or it seemed to me that they did, and it
tied in so nicely with the Keel ultraterrestrial hypothesis. So Keel,
even though he viewed himself as a demonologist, I didn't

(52:21):
get the feeling in any of the things I've read.
Of course, I still haven't read this Operation Trojan Horse yet.
But I didn't get the feeling that he was necessarily
prescribing any sort of protection from these things. Oh god, no, yeah,
he was just saying, here or whatever this is, it's
not of this world.

Speaker 6 (52:35):
So John Keel basically suggests we all are living in
a horror novel.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Nice.

Speaker 6 (52:41):
Yeah, I mean he doesn't literally say that, but his
is a dark world of at best tricksters and at
worst things that eat us spiritually or otherwise.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Oh that fits in nicely with the fairies, doesn't it. Yeah,
the fair folk.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
Yeah, yeah, No, that's his world. Yeah, yeah, he is.

Speaker 6 (53:01):
He has no where he the the in his world,
Like if you read his Mothman prophecies, there's all these
contact ees, but the aliens or whatever the hell they are,
that they're he's they're talking to lie and lie in
not good way. So, I mean, the the the famous
beginning to end. Everybody forgets at the very beginning of
the movie. Not the movie the they did make a movie,

(53:24):
which is interesting, but the beginning of the book of
the Mothman Prophecies. He tells you, by the way, this
is all about this bridge collapse which killed forty six
people and then he writes this amazing book. I'm not
saying it's true, but as a book it's really good.
As the reason it's famous, it's creepy and at the
end you've forgotten this. And then there's this bridge collapse,

(53:45):
and all throughout he's having all of these people in
his sort of network seuse he's going on the long
John Neble Show, which is sort of the predecessor to
Art bel which is the preecessor to George Norris, is
the predecessor to the entire History Channel, and and contact
teaser saying this is gonna happen, This is gonna happen.
He's freaking out about there's gonna be some horrible disaster

(54:06):
and he's thinking it's a nuclear war or a giant
power outage.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (54:12):
And then this bridge collapses in this town that he's
been visiting for thirteen months. As he writes it, I
have seen letters, like original letters in point pleasant of
John Keel. I don't know what he believed, but I
mean there's literally scrawled in the sides of these type
written letters to people, I think something's bad is going
to happen. Like he's not entirely bullshitting people those letters.

Speaker 7 (54:39):
Too, and I believe Linda Scarborough.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yes, Yeahsoel, you would have.

Speaker 6 (54:42):
Yes, I wrote a fantastic article on the whole point
pleasant Mothman stuff.

Speaker 7 (54:47):
Yeah, but he he did tell her I think the
men in Black, which kind of emerged partly out of
the Mockman story or After your Baby kind of changeling
lore there, and he actually, I think if you hang
a go old cross up, this will help keep the
men in Black away.

Speaker 6 (55:03):
So he did occasionally make those sorts of suggestions, but
not as supplications.

Speaker 7 (55:06):
This was a letter to a friend basically.

Speaker 6 (55:09):
Right, Yeah, yeah, so yeah, but he is very in
this and I'd love to hear if you'd agree that.
I would see that Keel sees a sort of a
demon haunted world. I mean, and when he says a demonologist,
he doesn't mean that he's he's not suggesting that he's
he's the Warrens, He's not Earl of the Rain. He's

(55:31):
not saying he's an actual demonologist. He's just basically saying
this is a demon haunted world. And that's what I've
been studying for the last forty years. But he does
mean it with that sort of.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Menace.

Speaker 7 (55:43):
Yeah, I will say, and the thing about this film,
I think groups like creation ministries and answers in Genesis
are very good at cherry picking right and finding people
who have authority on a particular topic and homing in
on the one quote that really makes their point and
sort of sweeping other things under the rug. Keel and
the Mackmann prophecies basically suggests that the ancient Israelites were

(56:05):
being tricked by the entities. Yeah, and that the Arc
of the Covenant has these electrical powers because it's basically
a machine the entities told them to build. Of course,
none of that is going to show up in the
Alien Intrusion movie. Keel's ideas are kind of held up
as being sort of good research that leads us closer
to the truth of what these entities are.

Speaker 6 (56:26):
Well, and that's the thing in reading and reading Nick
Redfern's Final Events like I again, because of the recent
revelations about the DoD and more sort of thinking about
and seeing who's involved, I'm like, you know, maybe he's
describing an actual group of some kind and in sort
of their interaction with more parapsychological uri Gellar led how

(56:47):
puts off John Alexander groups inside the government. But the
thing is, at one point, the sort of leap that
he suggests this Colins elite made only kind of makes sense,
like that, the fact that they would have seen Crowley
and his contact with this spirit called Lamb, which is

(57:09):
only in recent times been allegedly tied into gray aliens
and blah blah.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Basically, the point is.

Speaker 6 (57:15):
Parts of it only makes sense if you actually know
your ufology stuff, and they have to sort of sand
parts off to put it in here. But that's been done,
or allegedly been done. I have the page by the
way for the alien intrusion thing up, and it is guy.
I'm alone, and I'm looking at the credits. I see
Nick Redfern, I see person in Johnny Hunt. I don't

(57:37):
know who that is. The next one is Norio Hayakawa.
So did he showed up in the film?

Speaker 1 (57:42):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (57:43):
Yes, what was his role in the film. I'm curious.
I have a reason for asking.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
He was if I remember correctly, and I could verify
this later, but I believe he was along the same
lines talking about the I remember if he explicit in
many religious comments, but he seemed to be paralleling the
comments from the guy from from Korea that that the
whatever the physical explanation of aliens is that it's not

(58:10):
thisly extraterstrial craft. Therefore it fits in with the demon hypothesis.

Speaker 5 (58:15):
I remember thinking during the film that he was like
the more reasonable gentleman. Yeah, he was a more reasonable
reflection of the gentleman from South Korea.

Speaker 6 (58:25):
So Nori Ohayakawa's primary calling card within ufology, and I
think he's sort of backed off this a little, has been.
He was for a long time the primary purpose person
interested in studying the Dulcet, the Dulcet legend.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Do you all know the Dulcet legend, that's.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
The secret military base beneath the Dulcei.

Speaker 6 (58:47):
Yeah, the Archleda, the arschilda mountain mountain ridge in northwestern
New Mexico that is tied into Paul Benowitz, all these
other things. But basically, there's this legend that appears to
have been at least partly seated, potentially by a member
of the Air Force in the nineteen eighties Richard Dodi

(59:08):
into the euthological and that gets really complicated, but of
a horrifying underground and I'm just going to say, we've
been talking about religion and demons. Just listen to everything
I'm about to say. A horrifying underground base where there
are humans and aliens that have made a pact and

(59:31):
they kidnap people and they.

Speaker 5 (59:33):
Do horrible, horrible.

Speaker 6 (59:36):
Experiments on large numbers of people. And this emerges in
the late seventies early eighties, and that literally Level six
is referred to as the Hell Level because of all
the terrible things that are done to people there. And
in reality, while the government made this pact, according to

(59:57):
the legend, everything went horribly wrong. The aliens double crossed them,
and they've been there for far longer, and there's deeper,
deeper levels that the human zone have access to, and
eventually they killed all the humans, or they were a
bunch of them killed in a firefight. And now it's this,
it's pretty much hell under New Mexico. And so Dulcie

(01:00:18):
has become this very sort of infamous thing that most
ufologists don't think. There's necessarily a lot too, but it's
a kind of beacon on what I believe Jerome Kart
called the dark Side, sort of theoretical approach to UFO
conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
The fact that they're talking to him is fascinating.

Speaker 7 (01:00:38):
And Christopher Partridge, who's a religion scholar, has us basically
looking at how when this phenomenon begins in the fifties,
the aliens are very angelic. There are space brothers. I
think Carl Jung called them technological angels, and then by
the period that you're talking about, it's the opposite, right,
They're demons, live underground, they torture people, and part I

(01:01:00):
think kind of suggests that, you know, Christianity has just
permeated our culture so thoroughly that this is just sort
of naturally the way that these legends are going to
take shape.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
And I think he's not wrong.

Speaker 6 (01:01:13):
I also, though, as we've sort of all been I
think kind of nosing around, I think that it's going
both ways. And I'm one of my favorite authors is
Michael Barkoon and his discussion of sort of forbidden knowledge
and the idea that once you have some ideas and
kind of conspiracy culture and in the cultic milieu, they
all start to well, they start to hybridize, like we've
been talking about, and these ideas coming from people like

(01:01:37):
Keel and coming from people like Valet and Frankly, I'll
just drop this here because we know I was going
to go there, coming from their ancestors, people like Charles
Fok and people like the fiction writer HP Lovecraft of
a demon haunted ancient aliens world are influencing the other side.

(01:01:59):
And I would say that the two are are sort
of influencing each other, which is how you end up
with Norio Hayakawa and Nick Redfern in a Christian apologetic
UFO demon documentary.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:02:15):
I mean, one thing that you know some theologians have
said about the kind of fundamentalists movement and its claims
that the Earth is five thousand years old and biblical
and errancy, which are both positions of creation ministries international,
is that this has kind of changed what Christianity is about. Right.
It's taken a text that has many meanings and it's

(01:02:37):
kind of actually said, well, really, this is about history
and cosmology and geology, and that's kind of the most
important thing to it. So while these movements present themselves
as being very conservative, they're actually it's something very new, right,
that's a very new way of reading the Bible and
interpreting ms to say, And I think we're seeing something similar.

(01:02:57):
So just as the fundamental really begins in the beginning
of the twentieth century in response to Darwin, Yeah, and
so called Hierchrism of the Bible, and it sort of
makes this new form of Christianity that's very concerned with
kind of the discourse of science and the authority of science.
It didn't exist before, and we may be seeing a
similar move now right, Well, we're seeing this kind of
new brand of Christianity that is about theories of the paranormal,

(01:03:21):
and it sort of begins to look increasingly like the
people that it is in dialogue with.

Speaker 6 (01:03:27):
Yeah, and if you throw in into this conspiracy theory,
which is never far behind these topics, all of this
starts to get very political.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Also, well, yeah, that's there. I guess one of the
things that I am curious about is you've got this
is an easy way for sort of an evangelical foothold,
or at least an incursion into the ufology world. You know,
it's a big production. I mean, I don't know what
it costs exactly, but this was not a small thing,

(01:04:00):
and I don't know if it's going to have an
effect because they didn't have people there. You know, I
didn't see John three to sixteen come up on screen,
you know, some of the classic sort of things. I
would have expected an evangelical conversion sort of approach I
didn't see. But what I did see was a straight
up hey, you know, if you're a Christian, you should

(01:04:20):
be concerned about ufology. You should care because this is
the work of demons, right. So I don't know how
it works as outreach, but I am curious as to
how it works as far as latching itself into this mix,
because there's no orthodoxy here as far as that goes.
This is another example of I guess, using your term hybridism,

(01:04:41):
where you're taking something they're gloming into something that's not
really a religion and trying to pick out the pieces
they like well.

Speaker 6 (01:04:50):
And Barkoon's term for that is improvisational apocalypticism.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Ooh, I like that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
Yeah. Yeah, So it didn't feel apocalyptic, but it definitely
felt like so it felt like a war, like I
don't know what the right word is for that, but
it felt like this was a pitting us versus them,
whatever they are.

Speaker 7 (01:05:09):
But it actually was unusual to me how not apocalyptic
it was. I assumed Christian's talking about UFOs is going
to be this is a sign of the end times, right,
you know, maybe left and I didn't see that. So
that does suggest this is something new.

Speaker 6 (01:05:23):
And this could be again maybe Keel and people like
Keeld this is a permanent part of our reality kind
of effect.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
Possibly.

Speaker 7 (01:05:30):
I think you're right. Yeah, I think if they've accepted
Keel and Ballet enough to think that this is more
or less normal. This isn't some new dispensation that began
in nineteen forty seven signaling the end times. It's more
or less okay and normal.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
So going back to my personal feelings on this is
I don't personally mind people trying to deal with what
I would suspect is sleep paralysis in a variety of ways.
If you have sleep paralysis problems in praying helps you
with it, great, you know, But I don't you know,
my personal experience was it wasn't effective. So I'd like

(01:06:07):
to see some clinical trials on that or something. I
just don't know. I mean, it's the kind of it's
kind of the the I think the harm here is
that if you tell people that, if they say, you know,
the name of Jesus Christ and it will drive away, uh,
these alien invaders that are actually demons, and then it
doesn't work, then it becomes they They even threw in
the you know, real Christians versus the just wow walk

(01:06:28):
the walk versus talk the talk kind of people.

Speaker 6 (01:06:31):
Well, the one thing I do want to add here
is that's been a that is not a new idea
like that has there has There has been for I
would say at least twenty years, this sort of dialogue
within the kind of abductee community that oh the author
so they'll point at you know, there was at one
point the sort of the trifecta of abductee rights. There

(01:06:51):
were others, but there was there was John Mack, the
Harvard psychologist.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
Oh god, I'm forgetting to say Bud.

Speaker 6 (01:06:59):
Hopkins, but how because yep, they were both in there,
and David Jacobs. Now, David Jacobs is one of those
three that's still alive and he's talked about hybrid invasions.
Bud Hopkins was sort of your X files like medical
experimentation aliens, and John Mack was more they're here to
warn us about ecological disaster. But there was always this

(01:07:20):
undercurrent within the abduction community that if you said the
Lord's prayer or if you invoke Jesus.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
It would end this.

Speaker 6 (01:07:29):
And this is not new, and there was always the
idea that the abduction people are not talking about this,
So this was the dirty secret.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
I never could get it to work, but I you know,
that was just my experience.

Speaker 7 (01:07:42):
Well, we do know that Bud Hopkins would hypnotize people
and sometimes they would recall details that he thought just
didn't fit and so just delete them.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:07:53):
Apparently this element was one that all three of them,
allegedly and again this is something I've heard were.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Like, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about
that at all. Yeah. And if you go back to.

Speaker 6 (01:08:04):
Was it Betty Andreasen who's often considered the second or
third kind of on the record alien that ductee in
American culture, her visions or whatever you want to call
them were fairly explicitly religious in nature, unlike say Betty
and Barney Hill, but hers were, and that goes back
to the early seventies, late sixties, I think, late sixties

(01:08:26):
of the Betty andreas in case.

Speaker 7 (01:08:28):
Joe Jordan's talking about the talk, the Talk versus walk
the Walk Christians was also interesting. There was this great
book called Paranormal America by the sociologists who at Baylor,
who crunts these numbers from the Baylor Religion Survey that
asked about paranormal topics, including aliens, and one thing they
found was that religious people are more likely to believe

(01:08:49):
in paranormal topics, but that regular church attendance correlates negatively. Right,
So the ideal person to report a paranormal experience would
be someone who's religion but doesn't attend church regularly. In
other words, a talk to talk, but not a walk
the walk Christian.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 7 (01:09:06):
Yeah, So I thought that was interesting that he was
finding that pattern as well.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Well.

Speaker 6 (01:09:11):
I guess that makes me ask, then, So you've been
talking about like sort of hooks in and outreach. What
is the ultimate purpose from what you can tell of
this film.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
Is it to.

Speaker 6 (01:09:23):
Get people who are interested in UFOs? Is it to
explain to people why UFOs are demonic? What's this sort
of the purpose of this particular film familiar again from
what you can tell.

Speaker 7 (01:09:36):
Honestly, I think part of it is CMI had this
painful split with answers in Genesis. Answers in Genesis has
the Creation Museum, they have the Noah's Arc thing. I
think partly they just thought, we want market share, we
want something to compete, so.

Speaker 6 (01:09:52):
They want to get into pop So they're seeing this
as sort of a pop culture outreach.

Speaker 7 (01:09:55):
I think, yeah, more than anything, this was sort of
just this is a way to get on the map
and answers and and as can't do it, only we
can do it. We've got this, this book that people
are reading. Let's let's take a chance on this. I
also think this was an attempt to sort of be
the apostle to the sci fi geeks, particularly by having
the narrator emphasize as credentials as you know, being on

(01:10:17):
the show Smallville. So I think and they sort of thought,
this is another angle we can take towards discrediting the
Big Bang theory and evolution. Right, if we can get
you to think UFOs or demons, maybe we can get
you to think that these are false scientific theories as well.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Well.

Speaker 5 (01:10:34):
I think, and going back to this idea of the
sacred canopy that we talked about before, I mean, this
is a way of like for CMIA, very demonstrably showing, look,
Christianity can explain this, and these people are now part
of our sacred canpy.

Speaker 7 (01:10:50):
Aliens don't challenge us.

Speaker 5 (01:10:52):
We had engulfed them into our idea, in our worldview.

Speaker 6 (01:10:57):
And that very much fits with what I saw in
person with the alien resistance thing, like they were not
afraid to let these people in and talk. You know,
there's like, go ahead, We've got this copboard.

Speaker 7 (01:11:14):
And I think at the end of the film, Gary
Bates says, and I think he was being very honest
about this. He says, it grieves me that people have
these these problems with aliens and they don't think to
come to the church, right, we are the ones who
should be equipped to help you if you're having this
kind of problem, and we need to sort of let
people know that we are the place you should go to.
Not I don't know what else he was thinking, the

(01:11:35):
History Channel, paranormal websites, right, something something like that.

Speaker 6 (01:11:41):
Again, that is an excellent insight, I think, because you
see a lot of the so we haven't mentioned, but
if you're interested in all the ancient alien stuff at all,
obviously go check out Jason Colovito's blog. But he is
documented really well that there is that often in many
times the Great Enemy sort of in the kind of

(01:12:03):
populist response to ancient alien stuff is not mainstream science.
I mean, they all kind of poo poo that, but
it's it's literally what we're talking about, sort of a
demonic or a religious conspiratorial mindset versus the same shann
alien's mindset. And I think the thing that really pointed
this out there was there was this film that many
of my students are actually very familiar with, the YouTube focused

(01:12:24):
film called Ancient Aliens Debunked, and it's gotten millions upon
millions of views. But it was coming from a religious perspective,
but it was not advertised as such until you watch
it and you realize it's invoking the deluge and giants.
But I think that actually really pointed out that in
many senses, the potential audience for both of those cells,

(01:12:47):
if you want to put it that way, are the
same people or potentially the same people.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
That's and I think many many great arguments were made
in that video, But you're right, they most of it's.

Speaker 6 (01:13:02):
Fine, yeah, until they're like, also, by the way, the
flood's real.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Yeah, right, So I'm I'm not envious, but I do
understand that the ultraterrestrial hypothesis is a perfectly rational way
to deal with the fact that there's no physical evidence
for the things that many people are experiencing, and it

(01:13:27):
can sort of explain away why we have no evidence
because these things are coming from another dimension and the
reality is that the skeptical alternative, which I've been calling
the nul terrestrial hypothesis, is there's nothing there. Everything that
we're having is people misunderstanding phenomena, misunderstanding things that they're seeing.
You know, it's problems of human perception, not problems of

(01:13:49):
things that we just don't understand right.

Speaker 6 (01:13:51):
Or not even problems I would say features feature.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
It's not as exciting, but it fits into a world
where you can actually test things and it comes out
you know.

Speaker 6 (01:14:02):
On bound you I mean, if you believe you live
in a magical spirit in demon and trickster haunted world, Yeah,
there's a certain aspect of like again re enchantment.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
No, it's very exciting and magical. I just don't think
it's real. So, but but I am concerned about its
market share in the in the in the psyche of
pop culture and what's I think maybe one of the
most ironic things is that if natural selection is real,
which I think it is, that the idea of sort
of Dawkins's mimetics means that what will end up coming

(01:14:37):
out of this will be the parts that people like
will stick and the parts that people don't want, and
you'll end up with a hybridization that will, in at
least somewhere become a new view of the role of
religion as ties into eupology. Maybe not new, but at
least it'll have evolved.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
So what could be more bizarre and fitting than that
that the that the anti evolution people themselves are actually
demonstrably showing how ideas can evolve over time.

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
I don't know, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 6 (01:15:08):
I'm just gonna answer with I'm not sure it was demons,
but it was demons.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
It's pretty much where I'm going there.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
I notice we've been talking for like an hour and
fifteen minutes, and I do have to edit a little
bit out, but I do like to keep the episodes
around sixty minutes. Is there anything you guys would like
to add that we haven't sort of naturally segued into.

Speaker 7 (01:15:28):
I can't think of much.

Speaker 5 (01:15:30):
I mean, this has been actually very informative for me.
I was mostly a bystander to this, and Joe tends
to drag me to all sorts of crazy things, and
so promised me there'd be a you know, pint of
beer afterwards.

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
I with him, that's the way to do it. I
did mine up front. I should have done it afterwards.
That would have been very smart.

Speaker 7 (01:15:51):
Don't take your significant other to this film?

Speaker 1 (01:15:53):
Yeah, yeah, no, I was so glad I took a
friend instead of a wife. Yeah no, but you know
good on YouTube.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:16:02):
If we had a movie theater in town, I might
have seen it, but I'd have to get in a
car in the snow, so I did not see it.
The only thing I would I would add to this
is I will try to watch this when it comes
to a place that I can actually see it, because
I am actually very very curious.

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
Yeah, I think you'll agree.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Though.

Speaker 1 (01:16:21):
It should have been about thirty minutes shorter.

Speaker 6 (01:16:22):
So I think everything should be shorter when it comes
to media.

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
So it shorter.

Speaker 5 (01:16:27):
It just kept going, Oh.

Speaker 7 (01:16:30):
Is so bored.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):
Oh, I'm so sorry I've shart you going.

Speaker 6 (01:16:34):
Though I'm highly selling it, I'm just saying and that's
probably fair.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
Well, I'm one of those people who went to see
Expelled with Ben Stein, and so.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
I've still never seen that. I do have something.

Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
Positive to say about this movie. It didn't go full Hitler,
so good for them. Ben Stein's little film ended with
a giant Poe argument. I was like, oh, come on,
is that Poe or is that the O was Gudwins right?

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
Sorry? Guy, yeah, Godwin Godwin argument. So there was no
Nazi bell, there was no.

Speaker 1 (01:17:07):
Relatively Nazi free so good for them.

Speaker 6 (01:17:09):
Well then I don't know if they'll make it on
the History Well these days, I'll make it on History Channel.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Yeah, awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
Anyway, I want to thank you all for coming and
spending some time on Sunday evening, and I really appreciate
you guys coming back to talk to me.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
Thank you, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Now Monster, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science
show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith, and you just heard
a roundtable discussion with religious studies experts Joe Laycock and
Natasha Michaels and archaeologist Jeb card As. We talked about
the connection between John Kill's ultraterrestrial hypothesis are the ut

(01:17:43):
H and the new film Alien Intrusion. A creationist film
tying evangelical Christianity into ufology. I do not know if
the UTCH is really gaining market share or if my
increasing recognition of it in paranormal literature is merely confirmation bias.
But it seems to be pop up more and more,
and perhaps someone with the time in academic training can

(01:18:03):
see if a literature survey supports my suspicion. What concerns
me is that the UTCH is unfalsifiable. We've talked about
this before, using Carl Popper's idea that in order for
an idea to be considered scientific, it needs to be
testable and falsifiable. The UTCH, by its very nature, is untestable.
It is the invisible magic dragon that Carl Sagan talked

(01:18:23):
about in his book The Demon Haunted World. As such,
I hope that serious enthusiasts of the paranormal and cryptozoological
will continue to reject it as the research that end
it truly is. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Monster
Talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys. Thank you
so much for listening. This has been a Monster House presentation.

Speaker 6 (01:19:31):
I'm not responding to anything that's happening right now.

Speaker 2 (01:19:36):
That's fantastic. Yeah, we're editing also all of what we
just talked.

Speaker 1 (01:19:40):
Okay, great, got it.
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