Tales From The Rabbit Hole

What is a University professor doing investigating UFOs?  Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University heads the Galileo Project, which seeks (in part) to identify the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by establishing a network of telescopes and instruments with the goal of obtaining the first unambiguous clear photos of UFOs.

We talk about the demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the rationale for the project, the cha...

Mia Bloom is Professor of Communication at Georgia State University with a PhD in political science from Columbia University. Sophia Moskalenko is a research fellow at Georgia State University and a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.  Together they wrote the book Pastels and Pedophiles – Inside the Mind of QAnon. 

We discuss how the book came about, the historic roots of the...

Jason Colavito is an author and journalist with a focus on “alternative archeology” and, more recently, the UFO cultural phenomenon. In May 2021, he wrote the article: “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers” in the New Republic, describing how “a collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some outré, and potentially dangerous, ideas.”

Jason’s historical research into the under...

Michael is a “follower” of Q, in what is commonly known as the QAnon conspiracy theory. I first talked to him one year ago, February 2020. We met on Twitter discussing UFOs, but had a long discussion about QAnon. Michael thought for sure that Trump would win the election, and was quite hopeful about the prospects of a massive wave of arrests of the supposed child-abducting elites.

Since he made some predictions, we agreed to meet ...

Alex was raised by conspiracy theorists. This makes him different from most people who end up down the rabbit hole in that assuming nefarious plots were going on was never a surprise to him. Indeed, it was the default.

We talk about growing up in a conspiracy theory family, how his perceptions shifted when he went out into the real world, and how he ended up going even deeper down the rabbit hole before he finally found his way out...

QAnon is a very American conspiracy theory, focussing upon a supposed plan by a mysterious entity named ‘Q’ who was working with Donald Trump to rid the US of a corrupt elite.  But despite this American focus, it has adherents around the world. One of those adherents is a friend of this episode’s guest, Georgina.

Georgina and her friend were both fans of documentaries about cults, but despite what you right think of as inoculation...

My guest this week thought all was well when she started dating a handsome intelligent man. But then a few things he said, particularly about “the Jews” started to seem like something more than just the jokes she initially took them for. Here she describes how her relationship with a conspiracy theorist got started, and how it turned out. Along the way, we discuss toxic masculinity, incels, and the importance of teaching history an...

Sarah’s ex-partner seemed like a normal person, but a few years ago he discovered conspiracy theory videos. Starting with claims that the Moon Landing was fake he quickly progressed to Flat Earth and eventually ended up follow a cult-like group that was predicting the end of the world in 2018 in an event called “EMPCOE”. He began to prep for this, but the predictions never came to pass and new predictions were made. Despite this, h...