45 - The Weird Ideas of Journalist John Keel (Part II)

Starting with a discussion of the cult classic "The Eighth Tower," the conversation moves to map Keel's ideas onto the landscape of contemporary lore. We learn that Keel's travels exposed him to the arcane theology of the middle eastern Yezidi people. These so-called 'devil-worshipers' gave Keel the idea of a machine that projects influence over human history in the form of specters, apparitions, and religious manias. Integrating this idea with his own research, Keel proposed that the increasingly bizarre nature of UFO and cryptid encounters might be a sign that unknown occult influencers are in need of a new means of control - the Eighth Tower. This line of speculation leads to a discussion of modern esoterica, including the 'name game', synchronicities, 'dead internet', and whether the world wide web could be a trojan horse for reasserting weird dominion over our haunted planet. The conversation ends with a discussion of the psychic perils of daring to think like John A. Keel.