010: Dr. Brannon Wheeler on UAP, Non-Human Intelligences, and the History of Religion

Episode Transcript
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(00:23):
Welcome to The Anomalous Review,the official podcast of the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
My name is Michael Glawson. I'm a philosopher of science and
technology, and I'm the host of the show.
My guest today is Doctor BrandonWheeler.
Doctor Wheeler is a professor inthe Department of History at the
United States Naval Academy, where he teaches the history of
Religion and Religious history of the Middle East.

(00:44):
Brandon has a PhD from the University of Chicago and he's
published a staggering 11 scholarly books, the most recent
of which is On Animal Sacrifice and the Origins of Islam when is
published by Cambridge University Press.
His current research, however, focuses on the role of non human
intelligences in human history. That term, non human

(01:06):
intelligence, is meant to encompass a really wide variety
of phenomena that are not yet well understood, including not
only UAP, but angels, demons andgin, and forms of intelligence
and phenomena that we may not yet have names for.
For this project, Brandon has spent a lot of time in the last
few years talking with people who've had extraordinary

(01:26):
experiences with beings or phenomena that represented
intelligence beyond the human. I'm excited for you to hear this
conversation because Doctor Wheeler brings exactly the
combination of rigorous research, intellectual
curiosity, and capacious thinking that the UAP community
needs to establish a new research discipline with its own

(01:47):
scholars and works of scholarship.
Doctor Wheeler, I think, is a good prototype for exactly the
kind of scholar that we need. I think a lot of listeners will
be simply excited to hear from an academic who takes these
subjects seriously. I find that it's actually not
that uncommon for academics to take these subjects seriously if

(02:07):
you just stick around the bar ofthe hotel where the conference
is for a while. What is hard to find though is
an academic who takes these subjects seriously in their
academic work. Which is a shame because
academic scholarship is meant tobe one of the freest and least
regulated spheres of human creative activity.
However, I can say from my own 15 years in academia, the while

(02:31):
academia is officially nearly unregulated, there are plenty of
unofficial, unwritten, and unspoken rules that still chill
certain ideas, dampen curiosities, and encourage a
kind of conformity that I think is fundamentally at odds with
the basic goals of academic investigation.
And because those unofficial rules aren't susceptible to the

(02:53):
official loopholes, they're often much more effective than
any explicit regulations ever could be.
One of these unwritten rules of academic scholarship that
pertains to the conversation I have with Doctor Wheeler is the
unspoken rule that if you decideto study ideas that lie outside
of or that contradict the prevailing world picture or

(03:14):
consensus reality that we all share, you have to treat those
ideas with a kind of detachment that is you.
You can't really take them seriously.
A result of this rule, to give just one example, is that while
many academics write about religion, they usually limit
themselves to describing the religious practices of various
cultures. What they almost never do is

(03:36):
take the religious beliefs that they study seriously in the way
that religious believers do. So one can write about a belief
in God's, but one must never write about God's as if they're
a reality. The same goes for various
political, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic
ideas that lie outside the current vague consensus that

(03:56):
prevails over academia. So because we don't all
currently agree about whether gods or spirit beings or
extrasensory perception or extraterrestrial visitors are
real, the implicit rule is that scholars should only speak about
those things as hypotheticals, or as counterfactuals, or as
curious beliefs of some other group.

(04:19):
The boundary between what good scholarship can and can't take
seriously is always at least partially drawn by our shared
conception of what is and isn't real, though, and any historian
of ideas can tell you that that boundary constantly shifts over
time. So scholars signal that they're
staying comfortably within the lines of consensus reality by

(04:39):
adopting a detached posture thatat best reads as respectful
agnosticism, but just as often reads as polite condescension or
thinly veiled irony. This is true even, and perhaps
especially of people who personally really do believe in
the phenomena or the practices and traditions that they're
writing about in their scholarlylives.

(05:01):
I personally know several well respected scholars who've had
profoundly real experiences of the very things that they write
about in their scholarly work, but you'd never know it from the
detached stance that they take in their writing.
Now, this isn't a criticism of that approach to scholarship,
but I'm not sure that it should be the only acceptable approach
towards scholarship. Good scholarship should be able

(05:23):
to radically depart from the assumptions that form the basis
of our current consensus view ofthe world.
So for this reason, it's unusualand very exciting to find
someone who is both working on atopic that falls outside of the
consensus view of reality that prevails over academia, and who
takes the topic seriously without the kind of sterilizing,

(05:44):
agnosticism or detachment that'sexpected of most scholarship.
Doctor Brandon Wheeler is just such a scholar.
His current research takes phenomena like UAP and
encounters with non human intelligences very seriously.
And make no mistake, Doctor Wheeler is a serious scholar.
And despite having ACV that would intimidate any fellow

(06:06):
academic, my conversation with Brandon was one of the most fun.
And relaxed. I've had all 2024.
I think you'll agree. And so I'm very happy to bring
you this episode. Here now is my conversation with
Doctor Brandon Wheeler. So can you just like tell me a
little bit about your backgroundand and how you got into

(06:29):
teaching what you did? And before we even talk about
the the UAP weird stuff. So I mean, I, I, I did as an
undergraduate, I majored in history and in religion, even
though our, my school didn't have a religion major.
I, I was at the Claremont Colleges in California.
And so I was at Pitzer College and they had a history major,

(06:51):
but I took the religion major atPomona College.
And both of those were really small schools.
So we had like three people in our senior seminars and three,
three professors with us in the senior seminars.
So it was kind of nice, and I knew I was interested in the
Middle East because I had been there before I went to college

(07:12):
and I had always been interestedin religion.
But I thought, I thought I could.
Study history and religion together.
I didn't really know why. In college, I actually spent a
year studying overseas, which allowed me to further immerse
myself in the Middle East. And then my wife and I, we met

(07:33):
in high school. We went to different colleges,
but we went to Graduate School together at the University of
Chicago. And I ended up taking taking the
route of being in, in area studies in Near Eastern
languages and civilizations, primarily because I was told,
rightly so, that the Divinity School, the history of religions

(07:54):
program didn't have a lot of money to support students, but I
could study. I had to learn all the languages
anyways, so I might as well takethat route.
We after leaving the University of Chicago, we've we've spent a
lot of time overseas. I've taught at a lot of
different colleges and universities, been resident

(08:14):
fellow at a bunch of different places.
And we finally landed at the Naval Academy about 20 years
ago. I was a trailing spouse.
My my wife was hired to teach inpolitical science.
They needed someone who worked on the Internet and the Middle
East, which is exactly what she does.
And I was brought on to teach to, to run a Center for Middle

(08:34):
East and Islamic studies, which I did for about 6 years, just
teaching one class at a time. And then I moved full time into
the history department where I now teach 6 courses a year.
Most of what I teach are core courses, which is true of most
civilian faculty members. So 3 I teach 6A year, but four

(08:57):
of those are a core course. And it's usually the same
course, which is a course in premodern Middle East history.
And I'm getting to the to the tothe part you asked about.
So then the other course is an elective course.
And so it allowed me to start teaching some of my interests in
the history of religion and in teaching about specific themes

(09:17):
that I've encountered in the history of religion.
So I did a course on history of the Bible a couple times, and I
started thinking that I had somelarger questions that I wanted
to address. And I have a captive audience of
20 students who were really smart.
Who have to read? What I tell them to read and
talk to me about it. So I I started by teaching.

(09:43):
At the tail. End of the pandemic, a course
called zombie apocalypse. And so we basically examine
different catastrophes and kind of the human, human propensity
to catastrophize. So we started with with alien
invasions. You know, we watched The Day the

(10:03):
Earth Stood Still, the original 1.
Of course we we talked about radiation monsters, right?
Godzilla and Mothra and all thatkind of stuff.
We talked about robot uprisings and AI taking over, right,
Terminator, all of that stuff. And we eventually got into to
the zombies, which I saw as kindof a, a perfect fit with, with

(10:26):
the pandemic, right? Because it's a virus that's
going around and people are catching it.
And and and in the meantime, we read a lot of theoretical stuff.
So it wasn't just a a class where we watched a lot of movies
and things. So we read the.
Theory stuff that you read. Well, we, we read some film
theory. My, our, our middle son is, is a
professor. He works in political theory,

(10:48):
but he has a degree in film theory.
And so I would ask him about books and he'd give me stuff.
So we read some of that. We read serious social
scientific studies of the thingswe're reading.
So there's a really good book onGodzilla that we read.
We read a book on the Orson Well, Broadcast of War Worlds.

(11:09):
Yeah, really good book on that. And then we read some more
social scientific theory. Like Baudrillard is one of my
favorites 'cause he talks about the the simulacra and it little,
little bit of time to get the students to understand the
difference between a simulation and a simulacrum.
But I think when we did, and then I convinced them that films
weren't about what they seem to be about it, it turned out

(11:31):
really well. So I, so from that I, I taught a
course on the history of truth and then won a history of
consciousness and then, and thenmoved into mystery religions,
which included a segment on whatwe called UFO religions.
And after doing that, I decided,you know, I've really been
interested in science fiction mywhole life.

(11:51):
I, I in high school, I read every, I read like 400 titles my
senior year just because I, I was consuming everything I could
always watched all the films andI thought, well, this, there's
been a lot of talk lately about,about UAP and I, at the time I,
I used the term UFO and now I use the terms interchangeably,
but for specific reasons. So I, I, I taught a course

(12:15):
called history of, of UFOs and Ithink you saw the syllabus.
It was kind of a kind of a broadattempt to address all the
different topics. So we talked about ancient
aliens and we talked about abduction.
We talked about the mythology. We, for example, we reread Diana
Pasulka's books and we talked about like, why is this a

(12:36):
specific American mythology? I really like Densler's work and
LEP Seltzer's work, probably my favorite, favorite stuff out
there. And the students were challenged
to analyze what they were looking at and social
scientifically, of course, therewere a lot of students in there
that just wanted to know if UFOswere real.

(12:59):
And the I, they all did a research paper and I had at
least two of them writing about how it's true that the aliens
built the pyramids. And I said no, no, you have to
ask, why do people? Think the aliens built the
pyramids, right? You can't.
You can't ask the crossword directly.
So that that course made me reada lot.
It took me 6 months just to find6 books that I thought were

(13:22):
serious social scientific studies of the phenomena.
And afterwards, I realized that I was really interested in this,
and I was more interested in it than the research that I've been
doing for 40 years roughly, which is on ancient religion and
Islamic texts mostly. Why?
Why more interested in this? Is it because it seemed more

(13:43):
tangible and real and current or?
Probably, it probably is the other direction that I was kind
of tired of doing the stuff thatI've been doing.
And as I read through the materials that I was looking at,
I started meeting people, I started going places.
So I went to Sweden to visit thearchives for the Unexplained,

(14:06):
and then I went to Chicago to meet some people who worked with
the Center for UFO Studies there.
And I started talking and meeting people and I thought one
thing I like about studying UAP is that it's very
multidisciplinary. The same way the study of
religion is Islamic studies, is is very specialized.

(14:30):
And then even within the field of Islamic studies, there are
SPE sub specialities. Like, oh, I work on Islamic law
or I work on theology. And there's a, there's a whole
set of rules about what you can and can't say.
And I've always been drawn more to, to something I can study
where I'm learning new things all the time.
So when I, when I study what I'mlooking at now, I have to read

(14:53):
what physicists are writing and then I have to, I talked with an
immunologist about a month back and I'm like, this is really
interesting. Stuff.
I talked with an anesthesiologist and I'm like,
well, of course. Right, because we're not
conscious, but we're still alivewhen we're under anesthesia.
That's really interesting. I've started reading stuff about
DMT entities and I thought that this is, this is fascinating

(15:17):
stuff, right? So I find it, I find it
intrinsically fascinating, but Ialso scholarly find it something
that's challenging because I have to look at a lot of
different disciplines and I. I think probably the, the main
difference between what I, what I normally did and what I'm

(15:37):
doing now is that what I, when Iworked before, I had to know a
lot of languages. I had to read a lot of texts in
foreign languages and know a lotabout that specialization, You
know, very, very, very, very specialized this.
I have to be as general as possible and I have to, I have
to maintain like I do in the study of religion, a very open

(15:57):
mind. So I think my background as as a
scholar of religion or. I, one of my graduate advisors,
called himself a student of religion.
I'm not really sure if I'm a historian or not, even though
the proper title would be historian of religion.
I think it's prepared me to study this because I can read
things and I can hear people tell me things and I can just

(16:19):
take it in. I don't have to judge whether
it's true or not or how it fits or doesn't fit with something
else. And probably the most helpful
piece of advice I've gotten so far I got from John Alexander.
If you know that name, he told me, he said, he said if you if
you find all the puzzle pieces, they won't all fit together.
No, I like that. And I said, OK, perfect.

(16:42):
That's that's that's what I wantto study something that doesn't
have a an ending point. Then there's sort of like a Coen
paradoxical flavor to that. It's like a well, Vickenstein
has this has this says if a lioncould speak, we couldn't
understand him. And I think about that a lot
with with relation to this subject, like there's a truth,

(17:02):
but it might might not be comprehensible in the terms that
we're already using. But I think that I think that
people in the humanities are especially well suited to this
for the reason that you're saying, like physicists come in
and they have a paradigm of physics that they have to fit
things to, whereas they have to invent a new one.
If you come in from the humanities, you aren't obligated

(17:23):
to be right about everything. You don't, you aren't obligated
to, to judge or, or evaluate thetruth of every claim.
You can sort of hold everything in a, in a little bit of
suspended tension and see how they fit together and play with
them. And I mean, ultimately you do
probably want to find what's right or wrong or true or not,
but you get to play a lot more with those ideas before making

(17:43):
any judgement than other disciplines do.
And I think that's kind of the challenge of these things, not
only figuring out, you know, what the truth is, but before we
even ask those questions, figuring out like what the right
questions are and what the rightangles are.
And like, what do we need to be reading?
Is it just physics? Or is it like, I think you and I
have similar reading lists? Like I'm reading actor Gallimore

(18:04):
right now about the DMT stuff. And that's not stuff that I
thought was initially relevant. And a lot of physicists might
not see how it is, but it seems to me at least potentially
relevant. Yeah.
So I mean, as a, SO as a, as a historian of religion, I always
tell people I don't know what religion is.
What I do know is what people say and do when they claim

(18:28):
they're being religious or, or more commonly, what other
people, when other people claim those people are being
religious. And I think that's kind of, for
me, that's kind of like what studying all of the phenomena
related to UAP is like. I don't know what it is I'm
studying. I don't know if I'm, if I'm
looking at technology, if I'm looking at paranormal phenomena,

(18:52):
if I'm looking at hallucinationsin someone's mind or a con
artist or whatever it might be. But they tell me whether the,
the sources I'm reading are the people I'm talking to that,
that, that it's connected with UAP.
And so I take that in and I, I make a note of it and, and put
it somewhere in a pile. Right now it's not really

(19:14):
organized. It's kind of more of a pile.
And I'm, I'm slowly getting to the point where I think I have a
like two or three ideas that I could actually draw on and and
publish something or work in in a certain area.
What are those? Are you, are you willing to talk
about those two or? Three.
Yeah, I think so. And I, I wrote down some notes
here too, because I'm at the, I'm at the end of teaching all

(19:37):
day. So it's like, you know, it's
like I've been teaching all of this other stuff.
So I, I would say I have, I havekind of a couple of ideas and
they're related. So one idea is, is the whole,
how would I describe it? I don't want to call it ancient
aliens because that's too, it's too popular.
But what? When?

(20:00):
When? People study the Bible or they
study the Quran. They generally study it
critically, right? And so they take approaches that
were developed in the 19th century or the 20th century or
even in the 21st century, sociology, anthropology,
linguistics, and you apply thosethings back on the text,
archaeology as well to try to understand and interpret the

(20:21):
text. So I, I asked, started asking
myself the question, well, how, how is that that template that
people use, that social scientific or humanities
template, how is it any different than than other
templates? So, for example, if somebody
tells me that what they're reading about in a text is not

(20:41):
an encounter between a divine being and somebody, but it's
actually a biological being fromanother dimension or from
another time or from another planet or something, I don't, I
don't see, as a historian of religion, how I could decide
between those two. You know, the text telling me,
you know, Yahweh spoke with Moses.
Well, yeah, But how do I, most historians just say, well, you

(21:04):
know, just ignore that. That's what they told me.
But isn't it possible that this that that the way they
understood Yahweh back then was actually a a biological entity?
Or we don't, we don't know that stuff.
So I'm, I'm interested in the idea that that throughout human
history there has been intervention by non human

(21:27):
intelligence. And I don't know if that's means
gods or angels or aliens or something else.
You know, maybe there's beings that live with us on the earth
that we don't know about. But certainly religion attested
the fact that there's intervention in human history.
And now there's for the past 40-50 years, there's been a lot

(21:48):
of people writing books claiming, you know, back to von
Daniken, right, and Chariots of the Gods and, and Zacharias
Sitchin and his Earth Chronicle stuff.
I mean, that stuff is dated and there's problems with it.
But I don't think we have to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. Sure.
Yeah. That's kind of.
It's not entirely wild speculation.

(22:10):
So, yeah, so, So part of my point is that I don't think it's
crazy to talk about aliens in the Bible, in the Quran.
And the other part is, what doesthat mean?
So when I study religion, I havea model and I apply that model
to the examples I'm looking at, whether it's these maybe like an
Islamic example. So I just wrote a book about

(22:31):
sacrifice in Islam. So I take the concept sacrifice,
which is a generic model, and I use it as a term to understand
what I'm reading in these texts.But then when I read the text, I
find out that there's stuff that's going on in the
particulars that's different from the general model.
So that affects the way the general model looks for other
people to use. So I think it's a two way

(22:52):
process that you apply stuff from your context to the past
and then the particulars of the past affect the way you look at
at the world around you. Sure.
And we're always kind of like refining the one with the other.
But it seems like in some cases what we're doing, the model is
we're imposing a set of categories that just has no, you

(23:15):
know, no translation or, or no, no purchase in the really
ancient text that we're looking at.
And it seems to me that that sometimes is a problem, but also
sometimes just recognizing it might make us free.
Or like in the, in the case of asking about whether the gods of
the Bible are biological or not,Well, they didn't really have a

(23:36):
category of biology in the same way that we, there's not like an
analogous transplant between those they didn't have.
So, so that means they didn't have a category of like non
biological. It was more like seen and unseen
or visible and invisible like that.
So that means that it's both anachronistic and like not

(23:56):
really a problem to say that maybe these were biological
entities because they wouldn't have made the distinction in the
1st place, was it? Does that make that make?
Sense, I mean, so, so the way I'm imagining it now, and I'm at
the beginnings of this, the realearly beginnings of this is that
I'm, I'm collecting from, from people, from their books and
from talking to them. Kind of the, the, the call it

(24:17):
the UAP mythology or the non human intelligence mythology, or
how many, how many races are there?
Did they visit us? That from the future, are they
from a different dimension, kindof collect that mythology and
that that basically constitutes a worldview and that that
worldview. Then let's let's use that as a
lens to look back on ancient religions the same way you'd use

(24:38):
the modern any other modern theological.
Yeah. And I and I, I, I think I, I, I
think I don't know where it's going to go because I haven't
done it yet. But it, it did produce 11 kind
of side question for me, which Ithink might actually be a
separate, separate issue. So a lot of times I read about

(25:00):
people communicating with extraterrestrials or with non
human intelligences. And this is a big issue within
religious traditions. So for example, within within
Judaism, there's a very famous scholar named Maimonides or the
Rambam, and he writes writes this book, right?

(25:21):
The wrote a lot of books, but hewrote one called the guide of
the Perplexed. And he talks a lot in there
about the fact that when God spoke to Moses, he used human
language, right? So human language isn't perfect.
And so because it's not perfect and humans can only understand
certain things, God sometimes had to use figurative language
or metaphor. And Maimonides go so far to say

(25:43):
that God sometimes had to lie because sometimes when you're
teaching somebody something, youhave to use a simpler concept
that's not entirely true. And even says in one spot that
that sometimes God had to lie intentionally and actually try
to hide the fact that he was lying because he wouldn't want
people to know this. I don't know if this is an
example that Maimonides gives, but when that comes to mind is

(26:05):
God tells to Moses, I'm going tokill all of the Israelites and
start over with you right? Then Moses, you know, object and
and ostensibly persuades God. But on most theological
accounts, God already knew what the future would have been and
he wasn't really telling the truth.
He was doing a performative sortof thing.
So maybe that's for listeners who don't already have one in

(26:26):
their head, but go ahead. Yeah, but I, but I think, you
know, that the use of metaphor, the use of figurative language.
So we, we and, and we in the Islamic case, the Muslims will
say, well, the text that they have, the Quran is actually
God's words. Like God speaks Arabic in
heaven. He actually uses that language.
And it's a, it's, it's a very different paradigm, right?

(26:48):
Because now you're dealing with a text that's written in a
divine language. So you can't find any fault with
it, but you still have to interpret it.
So then, so then I, I say to myself, well, how is that
different from somebody who's, you know, seven years old and
they receive a phone call and it's from the future and they
start teaching them stuff, technology and physics and stuff

(27:12):
that they're going to use when they're older to be able to, to
reverse engineer UAP craft. This is how put off you're
talking about. No, it's a.
It's a different person and I won't use the name but but yeah,
so. Somebody in that circle, I
think, but. Yeah, yeah.
It's like that circle of people.Have this experience?
Yeah, no, it's not uncommon. So you know, is, is there a, is,

(27:33):
is there a difference when I'm looking at the two transferences
of information? And then I start asking myself,
so wait a minute, did did the person on the telephone speak
English right? Because how do how did how did
you know that language? And if the person was from the
future and they're human, OK, I can, you know, maybe they
studied your language, right? And they're translating or maybe
they still speak English in the future.

(27:55):
I don't know. But if it's a, if it's a
biological being from another world and another dimension and
they speak a maybe they don't use language, you know, maybe
they use hands. Their language is just hand
signals or something. Maybe they don't have sound or
something. So I asked myself, like how, how
does that communication occur? And, and some people will just

(28:17):
tell me, well, I just, you know,I, one person told me that they
saw words written like in their mind, like on a screen.
And so they could read them, They were in English.
And other people have said that that large batches of
information just were present intheir brain from and, and they
could do the vice versa, right? They could, they could upload
the same information back. But I think it's a question that

(28:42):
also involves neurology, right? Because I spoke to a person
who's a neurologist who's studying language and told me a
lot of really interesting things.
And we don't actually know how the brain processes language.
And people don't know whether we're born with the ability to
speak it or not. And if, if a alien race came

(29:04):
here, or even if it's a, you know, us from the future, it
will the same grammar apply, youknow, will the same rules of how
you use words. All we know that even within 400
years, the people weren't speaking English.
You know, Beowulf's written in Anglo-Saxon, right?
And we can't even read it today.So I that that's a more

(29:25):
practical question, but it's thekind of question I'm interested
in. So if we take seriously what
people are telling us, how, how is it possible that that works?
That's a fascinating question, especially to to like run the
thread from the early theological question of like God
having to condescend and sort ofuse imperfect language.
Or either like we've been giftedwith some divine language like

(29:48):
Arabic or Enochian or whatever it is.
And then run it toward the really practical question of
like extraterrestrial communication, like for sending
signals out to another star system or something.
What assumptions are built into that act of communication?
I think it's fascinating. That's a whole book project you
should pursue. Well, I'm going to start small
and see where it goes, but I'm glad you mentioned Inachic,

(30:09):
because one of my examples is, is John D this, this British
guy, English guy, I guess, who basically used to summon angels
so he could learn how to speak from them with a kind of an
immersion program. Because the idea was if some
people have read Umberto Echo's book, The Perfect Language that
you get to go, if you could go back to the language of Adam and

(30:29):
Eve, then you'd have this. That's actually God's language,
right? It's this language that has all
sorts of power and it might havealchemical qualities, right?
You might have the ability to toeffect change in the physical
world just by using certain words or even the the medieval
book the Sefir Yetzira that describes how the world is
created with by God using certain letters from the

(30:52):
alphabet. Oh, sure, yeah.
Yeah, so it's all I'm, I'm fascinated by all this stuff.
And the thing that keeps striking me over and over again,
which probably is why I'm getting more interested in it,
is I'm not even sure there's a difference between studying
religion and studying UAP. It's it all seems to be the same
thing. I I agree, or at least it I'm if

(31:12):
there's a difference between. So on the one hand, I sometimes
think I don't know the difference, and on the other
hand, I think, well, I see a difference, but I don't know
where to draw the line. Even though they seem different,
they blend into each other at some point and become totally
indistinguishable. Do you know?
I bet you know Jeffrey Kryple. I do know him, but not
personally. Yeah, I know his.
Work you should. He's a He's a lovely human

(31:33):
being. He would be happy to talk to
you. But I've written to him a couple
times but I haven't heard back from him, so we'll see.
Text him and and yell at him. He he's fond of saying that the
the history of like strange beings coming out of the sky and
doing things to humans is just the history of religion.
So I think that at least in the most general description, UAP

(31:57):
and religion are probably indistinguishable.
And it seems like that's a religious worldview if you think
that powerful beings are coming out of the sky and, you know,
messing with humanity. Well, and, and maybe, maybe the
thing that allowed me to, to justify doing this was that my
main graduate advisor, a guy named Jonathan Z Smith, who
taught at the University of Chicago for many years, wrote a

(32:20):
piece about alien abductions. So he used a lot of John Mack's
material and then he compared itwith, with late antique
abductions of people, right. So in late antiquity, a lot of
people get abducted and they go into heaven and they take tours
of heaven and stuff. And he compared the two and
tried to suggest that there's a similar sociological context for

(32:41):
like the late 20th century and, and late antiquity with the
political upheaval, the movementof people and the kind of
entrepreneurialism of religion of the time that people just
like, Oh yeah, you know, we're going to mix this thing and that
thing together and, and do it this way.
But I, I think, I think one difference that I have
recognized between religion and UAP, I guess to put it a funny

(33:03):
way, is that you can't pick up God on a radar screen.
And with the UAP, we actually have videos of, of objects right
of some sort. And the day that someone says,
yeah, we saw God's chariot across the sky and I picked it
up on the God Mode of my AG whatever in my Hornet.
Well, then we'll we'll have the complete similarities.

(33:23):
Do you have the luxury? So as a philosopher, I feel like
I have a unique luxury in the academic world of not only can I
like, I don't have to be right about anything and I don't have
to even believe the arguments that I make.
It's time for to just make an argument because we think it's
interesting and see what people do with it.

(33:44):
But I also have this luxury of being able to actually really
believe things I want, like philosophers of religion.
If I want philosophers of religion can be religious and
can argue for the position they hold that there's a kind of
distance that's required in other subjects, like sociology,
for instance. It's almost like part of the

(34:06):
orthodoxy of the discipline thatyou really need to remove
yourself from the group that you're studying and then
describe them as like, you know,be as descriptive and objective
as you can or whatever, you know, kind of this kind of myth
of objectivity. Do you, where do you fall in
relation to these things that you're studying?
Because it doesn't seem like youhave this totally removed, you

(34:28):
know, attempted objectivity. You're just trying to, to
describe what some UFO people say or what DMT experiencers
say. It seems you think there's a
there there. How do you navigate that?
That that's a really good question.
And it, it, it will, it would entail eventually what friend of
mine, Michael Mohammed Knight, calls auto theory, Right?

(34:49):
It's called auto ethnography. But then he said someone accused
him of doing auto theory. And he's like, yeah, that's what
I'm doing. So.
So there's other Professor Wheelers in our family, our
middle son. But my wife is a political
scientist and she uses a participant observation a lot as
her motive of interacting and analyzing.
And I spend a lot of time doing that with her.

(35:11):
And I've learned that that's theway that I interact with texts,
and it's also the way I have interacted with what I study.
So if I'm interested in in some sort of even an ancient idea or
an ancient place, I feel the need to go there.
And I know it's not, it's not 4000 years ago when whatever
happened was there. But being there allows me to

(35:32):
feel much more connected with what it looked like and what the
air was like. What did it smell like?
And we all know from even from Freud's stuff, that our memory
is terrible and we transport things to places they're not
supposed to be. But part of.
I guess I would say for me, all knowledge is experiential.
And so that doesn't mean I have to have the experience to know

(35:55):
what it's like or to, to, but I,I feel that that that experience
is, is the way I learn things and I, I, I, how would I put
this? I think that with with religion,
people often get accused of, of you, you can't study this

(36:17):
because you're not part of this group.
There's a famous book by that's called the that's about religion
and the experience of religion. And on page, I think it's 36 or
18 or something, he says. If you've never had this
experience of the numinous or whatever it is, you should just
stop reading now. No Rudolf Otto.

(36:37):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Idea of Holy is a
book. So my, my, my graduate advisor
said, good, I don't have to readthe rest of the book at that
point. And, and it's for a while, I'm
like, yeah, you know, you're probably right about that.
But then as, as I started to, tolive my life more, I started to,
I realized, no, you know, I actually do, I am interested in
being part of something. It's how I learn things by, by

(37:00):
participating, by being part of something.
And it doesn't it I've I've never had a an anomalous UAP
experience and I'm not sure thatI want to A couple of the people
I've talked to have talked aboutthe hitchhiker effect.
You know that if you meet them, you one might follow you home
type thing. I've talked to some people who

(37:21):
said that after a while they've studied it, they've started to
see orbs in their house and things like that.
And one of the things that that we discovered in teaching the
history, the students and I discovered in the UFO class was
it when people have anomalous UAP experiences there, they
don't really like them. You know, most people have a

(37:42):
religious experience. It's a very positive thing.
You know, I saw the Virgin Mary or, you know, Jesus talk to me
and it's a very positive. But I would say the bulk of the
reports that I've read from people having been abducted or
having an orb in their house, they're not happy about that.
They're like it would be better if this if this hasn't hadn't
visited me. Yeah, 'cause it's just

(38:03):
perplexing or or upsetting or something.
It doesn't really have like a transformative.
Yeah, well, I mean, even, I mean, Lou Elizondo in his most
recent book was like, well, you know, at least they're not the
the green ones, right? They're the blue ones.
You're OK. But he's heard the green ones
are bad. So.
And then and even when I talk topeople, I talk to people in my
family and stuff, some of them are really worried about it.

(38:25):
You know, they're like, well, you know, you're studying this
thing. You know what, what what might
happen to you? What are the experiences or, or
some, I've talked to some peoplewho are worried they're going to
be killed by the CIA because they're digging into, you know,
secrets of the government and stuff.
And. I know, I know a few of those
people too. And it's I don't think they're
totally insane like I would havethought five years ago before I

(38:47):
got into this. I would have thought anybody
who's worried the CIA is going to kill them is just really
needs mental help, not to like shame them for that.
But the more I've gotten into this, the more I've continuously
met people who not who not afraid of the CIA killing them,
but people who say things that Iused to think only mentally

(39:07):
disturbed people say. And I realize they're not
mentally disturbed. I mean, I know for a fact that
Chris Mellon is not mentally unwell.
And thousands of other people. Do you have a spiritual practice
at all? Are you?
Are you a religious person? So that's, that's a good
question because it's, it's, it's hard to answer for
precisely what we're talking about.

(39:28):
So because I'm a professional student of religion, I, I have
some, I don't want to call it objectivity, but I have some
distance from the things I studybecause I think I need to have
an open mind when I'm reading and looking at things.
But I think at the same time as I study things, I take things in

(39:49):
and I, I naturalize it into my own worldview.
And I, I would say that I'm not religious in the way that most
religious people would think of a religious person.
But at the same time, I'm not, I'm not, not religious.
So the way that people are normally described who are

(40:09):
considered not religious, I don't fit into that category
either. And.
I think it would be hard for me to make a list of the things
that I'm sure of, but it would be really easy for me to make a
list of all the things I don't know for sure and I'm not I'm I
haven't ruled out. I think you and I are in similar

(40:29):
places. Like I studied theology before I
did philosophy and used to be a religious an obviously like
religious person and now I'm not.
But I'm also, it's not right to say that I'm totally unreligious
or don't have any spiritual lifeor anything, but probably what
keeps me from I just casually identifying as as religious as

(40:53):
the fact that I really can't write down my, you know,
statement of faith or something,the set of doctrines that I'm
like, oh, yeah, obviously that'sright.
But I also want to take a condescending view and say, oh,
it's all just stories. That doesn't seem true to me
either. Well, and, and a lot of times
people, especially in the MiddleEast, so before they even ask

(41:14):
your name, they ask your religion and they're looking for
a one word answer, which I find impossible to give.
What do you say? It depends on who's asking,
right? It's the context that that
influences it. And usually in the, usually in
the Middle East, I, I try not toanswer because any, any answer

(41:34):
you give is going to immediatelyclassify, well, even even here,
right? If you, if someone asks you, you
know what your religion is and you give a one word answer,
you've immediately labeled yourself with a whole bunch of
things. That's in their mind.
And it's not in, not in your mind.
I mean, I, I, I've had a lot of very interesting experiences.
There's people in my family havehad visions of things.

(41:56):
We we visited Lilydale 2 summersago, which is the largest
spiritualist community in the United States and Western New
York. I discovered two years ago that
that part of my dad's family is really high up in the Latter Day
Saints Church, and I never knew that before.
So I started learning about a lot of the church history, which

(42:18):
is really fascinating. And I've and I've been
everywhere, if I can in the world.
Not everywhere, but I've been toprobably more than fifty
countries and I'm going to thoseto look at places of religious
pilgrimage, say Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka or the, you know, the
Central Pagoda in Myanmar. Went there a couple years ago
and just, you know, grab a door in Indonesia and I see.

(42:42):
And I, I, I feel like it's, it's, I guess, I guess in the
most general way, I'd say that Ifeel like everything's connected
that, that, you know, our bodiesare made out of the same stuff
that stars are made out of. And so we're all connected in
some sort of way. And if, if I understand what the

(43:02):
quantum physicists are telling us, a particle could be light
years away and it could be connected to one that's here.
And I don't know how that's evenpossible.
So I, I think we don't know. I think there's way more that we
don't know than what we do know.And sometimes I think that that
science and even anybody who makes any pronouncement is being

(43:26):
extremely arrogant to say things.
But we have to, right? We have to, to try to make
technology to better our lives and stuff.
And whatever works is true, right?
If it if, if, if my calculationsget the rocket to the moon, then
they were true, right? Because.
I mean because you can use models can be inaccurate but

(43:46):
still useful. They can be useful tools without
like actually describing reality.
I mean, like, Newton's physics are like that.
We don't think Newton's physics are true anymore, but it got us
to the moon. So is it better to say that,
like, truth just isn't the aim in when we're trying to model,
at least scientifically? Maybe we're just trying to get

(44:06):
used out of it or something. It's something that works.
Yeah. Yeah, I think I, I think the,
the idea of truth is a very, very difficult term.
And so I mentioned I taught a course on, on truth and
eventually I, I, I liked the, the Baudrillard stuff at the
very end because I feel like we are living in this hyper reality

(44:29):
and that the, the reality that we experience isn't even a model
of something that's real. It it's a model of something
that's not real as well. I mean, it's just just to try to
think back to, to before 2001. I taught a course on 9/11 once.
And the only thing I did was to try to get the students to to

(44:52):
imagine what life was like before then.
And none of them were even they.Were born too.
Like they don't. They were born before or after
2000, Yeah, but yeah. So it wasn't a class about
Muslim terrorists and what happened.
It was a class about how did theworld change with the war in
Iraq, with the proliferation of the Internet, with social media,

(45:15):
with the whole idea of hyper reality, all of that stuff that
that wasn't even around. I mean, I can still remember
when I first started using the Internet and now it's it's
impossible to not think of beingconnected all the time.
It's not even one thing anymore.Like the Internet used to be
just a thing on the computer that you right play with, and

(45:36):
now it's sort of suffused. My oven is on the Internet.
Like I can check, I can see whatit's doing on my phone and it's
only growing. And sometimes I try to imagine,
you know, what, what will, what will our world be like in 50
years? You know, So for example, my
favorite thing is, well, we haveWi-Fi now, which is a really

(45:56):
strange thing. Well, well, what if electricity
was like that, you know, that wedidn't plug things in.
We just, everything was powered all the time from some, you
know, mysterious source that right now we would think is, is
magic. And it's it sometimes it's scary
and sometimes it's the thing that I, I do find scary is, is
artificial intelligence, becausewith the new quantum computing

(46:19):
things, I read a really interesting article the other
day that was saying, if, if AI becomes conscious, think about
how quickly science and technology developed in human
history, right? So this, this artificial
intelligence could, could surpass us in a matter of hours

(46:40):
after like a year. We're just like the meaningless
to, to this thing. And it's, and it's, it's, it's,
it's basically our creation, right?
So. I guess we could hope that it
would take care of us out of. Yeah, well, that's what that's
what we hope about the aliens too, right?
You know, Robert Hastings work on the UFO and nukes and, and I,
I said to him, so are they, are they going to keep us from using

(47:01):
them? And he said, he said, I'm not
sure they're doing it to protectus, but they want the planet, so
they're going to make sure we don't use the nukes on the
planet. And I said, well, that's fine.
So the so let me ask about the like the end, the consequence of
some of these ideas. If like you want to take
seriously on the one hand, religious traditions and the

(47:22):
texts that they produce and the experiences that are recorded
there. But you also want to take
seriously like modern reports ofencounters that people have had
with non human intelligences. And you think maybe there's a
connection that doesn't seem implausible to me that one is
like the other and maybe maybe they're the same thing.

(47:42):
Does that put you in kind of theawkward position of looking at
all religions and saying like, Ireally know what your religion
is about and you don't, it's just aliens or whatever the non
human intelligences are? Does it fundamentally change
what religion is? Are they still?
I would I would say absolutely not.
I would say that the reason thatwe even think of the two

(48:05):
categories, AS2 categories is our own invention that somehow.
So for example, teaching a classwith a colleague right now, he's
teaching a history of Quran class, I'm teaching a history of
Bible class. We're basically doing it
together. We're talking about ideas of
scripture. So we had the students read what
we called alternative Bibles. So this would be like Thomas

(48:27):
Jefferson's Bible or the SatanicBible, but also some some texts
that were produced by people whoclaim they got them from aliens,
like Rael for example. OK, Yeah.
And, and, and then we asked the students then, so how, how is
this stuff different from the stuff we're reading in the Bible
or the Quran? And they, they kind of looked

(48:48):
perplexed for a minute, and rightly so, because we, we
assume that if something is morerecent, then it must not be as,
as weighty and as important as something that survived for a
really long time. And, and part of my response to
that is, well, we don't know that the that what people are
claiming today is producing those experiences wasn't the

(49:10):
same thing producing the experiences back then and vice
versa. We don't know that the
experiences people are having now aren't just as real as the
ones that say Moses or Muhammad had thousands of years ago.
If there were a way to to know that, then we really wouldn't
need the religion, right, Because this would just be

(49:30):
factual information. Yeah.
You know, God didn't, God didn'treveal the, the 613
commandments. That's not just reality, right?
It's, it's there. So I, so I think what I'm trying
to do is to erase at least to start to blur the line between
the two and then maybe just erase it all together.
And it's kind of like, I guess I'm thinking it was kind of like

(49:52):
an experiment. So what happens when instead of
calling it a ritual, we call it a protocol, right?
Which is the new term now that people are using to try to make
contact with the divine or something.
And maybe, and people even know there's a, there's ACE five app
you can get for your phone, right, which allows you to, to
make the protocol or the Raelians have a thing coming up

(50:14):
on the anniversary of the contact with Rael where you can
send in the number on your phone.
And then if you hold your phone close to your head at the
certain time, it'll beam the light from your phone right into
your head and you'll get to experience part of this thing.
And so. Yeah.
And I mean, you laugh and. And we?
Think but I mean, yeah, I'm not I'm not liking, but it's.
Why not? You know, maybe if the ancient

(50:36):
Israelites had had mobiles, you know that God would give Moses a
call, right? Rather than making him climb up
on the mountain. So I, I, I don't, I don't, some
people do, but I don't take it. I don't like to say, oh, they're
all crazy and it's all weird. Some people look at it that way.
And I, everybody I've talked to takes this extremely seriously

(51:01):
and, and I, and even to the effect that that they will give,
I have been mentioned already, they'll give me warnings like
maybe you don't want to study this or one person told me, he
said, well, if you ever encounter you see something, He
was talking to all my students. He said, don't shine a light on
it. Go in the other direction.
He said it's very dangerous. Is that metaphorical like?

(51:21):
No, I, I, well, he may have beenjust like don't use the
flashlight to shine the light onit.
But but he, he left, he talked to the class and he left and he
said, you know, if you see something, don't, don't seek it
out. He said it's dangerous.
It's it's dark, but the people. Background Like what was his his
worldview or religion? He is.

(51:42):
He worked with the CIA for many decades as part of their
paranormal division, and he's now part of a part of one of the
disclosure independent disclosure groups that's trying
to lobby For more information from the government.
But you could read, you could read a Bledsoe's book, God's

(52:04):
UFO, for example, and some of that stuff is in there.
So there's there, there's my point is that that that people
take very seriously their experiences and I suppose
somebody could be a really good liar and they could convince us
all that, you know, this is I'm being serious about it.
But really what they're after ismoney, right?

(52:26):
And they're trying to sell things and they got a product,
but there's, there's not a lot of money.
I mean I guess some people make a lot of money but but it it
would seem like AI guess. I guess as someone who studies
religion I I don't take that as the first option.
And I and you could safely just a assume that there are some

(52:48):
people who are just either crazyor manipulative making all this
up or something. And I've met people that I I
would label them that way. But it wouldn't really change
the whole like landscape of the religious world.
Like you certainly couldn't assume that everybody is
mentally ill or just lying and trying to get money because they
get what you're saying. There is no almost no money in

(53:11):
this. And you look at at people like
medieval thinkers like Muhammad Ghazali or Maimonides.
And I try to stress to my students when we read it like
these, like if you made a list of the top five smartest people
in human history, they're on this list.
And so we're not talking about uneducated people who are
religious. I'm sure we'll take this
version. Was an alchemist who was

(53:33):
studying astrology and stuff. And my wife will often say, if
I'm talking about my research, she'll, she'll say, you know,
he's met a lot of people and they all like have pH DS and
they're all professors somewhereor they're Admirals or, you
know, they're high in the government.
So these aren't like the kooks that live down the street and
only come out at night type stuff.
So I, I, I, I think, I think theracing, erasing that line is

(53:56):
necessary. And I want to, I want to know
what happens when we do that. You know what?
Maybe we come up with a new template for looking at human
experience with and I want to say non human.
But then Michael Masters would say I'm I'm missing his stuff.
But extra tempestual, they're usin the future.
But if we can leave that out, wewould say our our interaction

(54:17):
with non human intelligences or or even maybe they're not
intelligent. Maybe they're just entities of
some sort that are alive somehow.
Or we don't even. We don't even, I mean,
scientists tell me they can't even define what life is anyway,
so. Yeah.
There's there's not a good definition for a lot of the
basic concepts that we use to structure these thoughts.
So you you say that you're interested in erasing the

(54:39):
distinction between like the silly, the what we consider just
like silliness or or whatever inreligion and kind of dismissive
of it. And you know, the real stayed
storied in a religious traditions maybe.
And also maybe the difference between the kooks who only come

(55:01):
out at night and the Admirals who like I've seen you AP.
When you do that in your own mind, what is it done to like
your experience of the world? Because my experience has been
coming into all of this. Like, you start reading about
strange data, well, from radar systems or whatever, and you end

(55:22):
up reading like Indian Mystics and spiritualists and DMT elves.
And there's like no signposts along the way to say like, this
is where you stop if you want tobe a rational person.
All blends together. And my experience has been that
I'm just like, every day I wake up and at least 10 times have
the thought like the world is just a very weird place, so much

(55:45):
weirder than I thought it reallywas.
And like, really, it is weird. It's not just people experience
of it is weird, which I already knew, but it really is.
Has that been your experience? Do you have like a way of
keeping your compass needle straight?
Well, I mean, I think, I think the only way I keep it straight
is, is by doing what I have to do right.

(56:05):
I have to go to work and I have to go to bed and I have to eat.
And those are very practical things.
But sometimes when I go out and I walk and the more the more I
experience, the more I read I've.
I've, I feel like, and I don't, I don't think we're living in a,
in a simulacrum or a simulation.I know there's at least three

(56:26):
people who seriously write aboutthat.
Yeah. And Rick does that and, and he's
at Arizona. Some other people write about
that. I don't, I don't think that's
what's happening, but we don't know.
But I, but I kind of feel that way.
Like I'm looking around and I'm realizing that everything I see
isn't actually solid. It's actually hollow and

(56:48):
everything is actually moving like we're moving at thousands
of mph right now. That's, that blows my mind.
And, and then I, and then I start thinking about the
pictures I've seen where you just see thousands and thousands
of galaxies as far as the eye can see.
And, and the first thing that comes to my mind as well, the,

(57:10):
the stuff that I read from religion that seems really
simple, cannot possibly be true,right?
It's I, I can't imagine that, say, for example, God created
all of that just for us. That doesn't make any sense to
me. So, so there's some common, my
own, my own like gut feeling type thing.
But then the other one is like, well, what if I, what if I just

(57:30):
let my mind go like this? Am I going to make it home?
Like, because remember Neo in the movie, right?
The first matrix and like, everything started to dissolve
into just numbers. Like, I don't think that's going
to happen. But we take a lot for granted
because we have to. And there's of course a lot of
people, maybe it's the bulk of humanity, right, who don't ever

(57:52):
think those things because they don't have time, they don't have
the luxury, as you were saying, right?
As a philosopher, you have certain luxuries.
So as a scholar, right, I have certain luxuries because I'm
paid to think about things. But I think most people probably
don't worry about stuff like that.
They're worried about making enough money, making it home
safely on the freeway, you know,getting to bed at a reasonable

(58:13):
hour and then maybe having some fun on the weekend by watching a
football game or whatever it is.But yeah, I, I, I think, I think
it does have an, have an effect.And, and the other thing that I
think I mentioned earlier is just, I feel that the way to, to
hold on is to, to remain feelingconnected with everything.

(58:34):
So if I'm seeing trees and birdsand you know, stuff, I realized
that I'm, I am connected with all that stuff.
I don't think I'm like consciously talking to a tree or
something, but I'm, I'm made-up of the same material, right?
And, and it's, it's been great living in Maryland for 20 years,
'cause I grew up in Southern California where there's really
no seasons. There's just the wet season and

(58:55):
the dry season, and you see the leaves change colors and then
they come back again. You know, when a hawk family
comes and lives in your yard, and then the same, the babies
come back the next year and you just see this cycle of things
that, for me at least, reminds me that there's some regularity
to it, right? It's not if I don't know what

(59:17):
holds it all together, if it's the laws of nature or divine
being somewhere or whoever's in charge of the machine that's
running all this program. But there seems to be some sort
of structure to it. When we start talking about
quantum consciousness and quantum mechanics and gravity,
then it's like we're looking at the edge of things.
We're really understanding that underneath all of this, there

(59:40):
really is no structure. And maybe it's true.
You mentioned, I mentioned to you Corban and you asked me you
had had meant. And maybe it's true that Corban
is right, that it's not just when we read a text that our
encounter with it produces meaning, but like when we live
our lives, we create our reality.
I mean, ultimately, if, if for me, when I think about it, the

(01:00:04):
only thing I can really only know is me, because the only
thing I know is what goes into my ears.
It goes into my eyes and what mybrain sees.
So when you know the the famous thing, if I tell someone
something's blue and they agree with me, I don't know that
they're seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
I don't even know when I interact with people, if I see

(01:00:25):
the same thing other people see.I doubt it when I see a person.
So we we don't know any of that.We just have to pretend like
everybody's on the same page. Yeah, there's a consensus that
we all kind of agree to, even though we think it's pretty
shaky. And I mean, I, I have this
thought in trivial moments like when other people eat cilantro

(01:00:49):
and enjoy it. I am absolutely certain you are
not having the same experience that I have and I eat it like it
can't possibly be you would you would have a different reaction.
So I mean, I think that probablyeverybody's experience really is
fundamentally very different. I mean, what I see is blue, some
people might hear is like C flator something and just be a
totally different world inside their, their experience.

(01:01:12):
But at at least there's some exteriority or participation
that we all have. What what does this do to your
students? So your students are in the US
Naval Academy. You're kind of like, if this is
the content of your courses, you're dragging them into like a
deep philosophical disorientation sometimes.
What are they just there to likebe better soldiers?

(01:01:32):
And you're blowing their minds with aliens and mystery cults
and all this or? Have I thought so?
A lot depends on on how engaged the students get, right.
So students, they're, they're are often students who are just,
you know, do what they got to do.
So, so all of our students will graduate with a Bachelor of
Science, even if they're Englishmajors.

(01:01:55):
And they'll all be commissioned as second lieutenants in the
Marine Corps or ensigns in the Navy.
Do you? Come out as a officer.
Yeah, with very small exceptions, like there might be
one or two people in the graduating class that are
commissioned in the Coast Guard or the Army or something like
that, right. So a lot of the a lot of what
they learn is STEM stuff, which is why an English major still

(01:02:16):
gets the BS. So they they take classes in
engineering and in physics and in chemistry, and those classes
also challenge them. But at the end of the day, at
least as I understand it, my colleagues might get mad for me
saying this, but but there's a very practical outcome to it,
right? They have to have a certain body
of information to be able to function in the fleets, for

(01:02:39):
example, right? They need to know how a computer
works, basically, right? They need to have a basic idea
of how a, you know, an atomic power plant works, right?
Or how electricity works, which I don't know.
I don't know how that stuff works.
And, and in the humanities and social science school, we have
an English department, a political science department, a

(01:03:00):
languages and cultures and a history department.
And I think the econ department is still there, even though it's
math and they may have moved it to STEM now.
So some of those are practical too, right?
An English department can teach you how to write because you're
going to have to know how to do that.
And even a lot of the students have to take, well, all of them
have to take a, a naval history course, just kind of give them
the background. Like what are you getting into

(01:03:20):
here? What's the background of this?
So I do see my classes as doing something different.
And I think my colleagues kind of allow me to do that.
They're like, Oh yeah, well, that's, that's, that's Brandon's
class. He's just, you know, there a lot
of people want to take it, but Ithink, and you mentioned Jeffrey
Cripple's work before, you know,How to think impossible.
He's his new book. And I, I think, I think there's

(01:03:43):
a value to getting somebody to, to, to think outside of the box,
right. Think about something that you
don't normally think about and, and forcing them to to ask those
questions. I mean, I certainly, I certainly
wouldn't say that my class is practical.
Like, OK, you've taken my zombieapocalypse now.
So when the zombies show up, youknow what to do.

(01:04:05):
You'll be able to like, survive.It's it's not about that.
I mean, do you think, do you, doyou often wonder if it will be
practical in the sense that likea lot of the people who
encounter these UA PS, what we're calling UA PS right now
are in the military and that this is going to give them some
framework for thinking about that.
Is that like in the background of your mind when you're
teaching? Not really people, people.

(01:04:28):
And it is helpful for my research too, because they say,
oh, you're from the Naval Academy, so I want to talk to
you type stuff, but I don't, I don't have a, a security
clearance. I don't have inside information
on anything. I, I can talk to people that
know stuff though. So for example, when we were
watching the, the three releasedvideos, the, you know, the, the

(01:04:51):
go fast, all of that stuff. So we could, we could talk about
that because people had been, students had been in an
aircraft, they, they'd sat in front of an AG monitor.
They knew what 1 looked like. We could, we could talk about
that. And then we could say to
ourselves, OK, well, if these videos aren't real, what would

(01:05:12):
have to have happened for them to be faked?
Like who would who would be in on the secret?
How many people? Just the people in the air wing,
the people on the ship, the people, you know, how many?
And so we were able to kind of think through things in a way
that somebody who didn't have access to like how things work
wouldn't be able to think through it.
But but yeah, so I think fundamentally I do, I do want to

(01:05:34):
challenge students to think about questions, big questions
to to to rethink things. I'm not, not because I want them
to change their mind. I don't want to convince someone
to believe a different religion or believe in UFOs or anything
else, but just to be critical about the beliefs that they
have. One of one of the the text that
the students talked about today,one of the alternative Bibles

(01:05:57):
was is called the Satanic Bible.Anton's Anton.
Right. And so the way the student
characterized it, he said, well,it's not really about religion.
What it says is that you should critically examine your beliefs
if you're going to believe them.And I said, well, so what's
satanic about that? Isn't that what we're doing
here, Right. We're trying to critically
examine things that we we believe not so we can dismiss

(01:06:18):
them. And if something is true, you
shouldn't be worried about how many times you ask whether it's
true or not. The the the status of it being
true is not going to change if you challenge it.
And you shouldn't be afraid of whatever you find out if you do
challenge thoughts. I mean, I used to have this
Nietzsche quote written in my dorm room when I was in college.
It says that which wobbles must be pushed over.

(01:06:41):
Like if push over an idea and itfalls down and it's a good
thing, it's it's fine. You shouldn't worry that you
know you found out your religionwas false or whatever, like
you're in a better position thanyou used to be.
But the Weebles wobble and don'tfall over, right?
You? You might be too young for that,
right? The is that a?
Doctor there. Were these, there were these
toys that are called Weebles andthey were balanced.

(01:07:03):
They they, you know, you could push them over, but they always
popped back up and so. That weighted on the bottom.
Yeah, so their slogan was the Weebles Wobble, but they don't
fall down. That's funny, I like that.
Oh man, this is a delightful conversation.
Is there anything you in particular wanted to talk about
that you're working on? I just, I can stress that when I
talked before about, I'm really at the beginning of all this

(01:07:24):
stuff and in fact talking to youis helping me to think through
some of the stuff. How long have you been looking
into this? Like was there a a point where
you decided UAP or like a research interest in mine?
Yeah, I would say recently, I would say after I, so when I
started preparing to teach the class which I taught last spring
is when I, I, I, you know, I gotlike 50 books and read them and

(01:07:47):
tried to figure out which ones were going to, to be as serious
as I put it, social scientific analysis of the phenomena.
And then most helpful ones, Whatdid you like them?
So I, I mentioned some of those and I wrote them down too, so
that I wouldn't, wouldn't forgetbecause you, you had written to
me a question that yeah, I think, I think I found.
I think of course, Pasolko stuffand Kreipl stuff I liked, but I,

(01:08:11):
I my favorite ones were Brenda Denzler's and Susan Lepselter's
stuff. I thought those were the best.
But one of the, one of the best books that we read was Jung's
book on flying saucers. And I think there's a whole,
there's a whole other topic. Maybe that's that's what my
third field of I was interested in the whole thing of Aranos and

(01:08:32):
Ascona where back, you know, between the world wars, there
were these smart people like youand Eliade and Corban and they
would all go Suzuki, they will all go to this place and try to
think big thoughts. And they took religion
seriously. They they didn't think religions
were necessarily true as religions, but they thought
religions contained truth in them about reality that we

(01:08:55):
couldn't otherwise access. And not just like moral truths,
like the golden. No truths about the reality that
we live in. Yeah.
And so I know Eliade pretty wellbecause I was at Chicago and I
basically, you know, a whole generation of people studied
with his students. That was all all we knew.
But young stuff and Corbin, it all comes out of that that same

(01:09:16):
that same milieu. But I would, I would say that
even more helpful than that are probably books like by by Arthur
C Clarke or by Thomas Dish, His his book.
Oh, so you got to read Thomas Dish's stuff.
He wrote a he wrote a non fiction book called, I think

(01:09:38):
it's called stuff dreams are made of.
No, no, it's the dream stuff aremade of.
That's what it is. Because he, he, he argues that
all of our inventions are from science fiction, that, you know,
we watch Star Trek and stuff andthen we're like, oh, let's make
one of those. Let's make a replicator, you
know, or let's make a, a transporter because we see it in

(01:09:59):
science fiction 1st. And actually I just discovered
recently, you probably know thisthat Gene Roddenberry was
involved with, with Uri Geller and a lot of these guys and Jack
Parson, all this stuff. Yeah, he was, he was one of the
guys who was, who was interviewing these, these, these
psychics and these remote viewers.
Yeah. So there's it's all connected.

(01:10:20):
Yeah, there's some. I don't, I can't remember the
name of this person off the top of my head, but I just heard an
interview with him and I'm looking for his book where he
makes the the argument that they're all these ideas.
Timothy Mellie is his name and he, he argues that they're all
these ideas and experiences thatpeople have.

(01:10:40):
And if the, the world of scholarship and like scientific
industry doesn't have a place for it, it sort of automatically
shifts over into the world of fiction.
And you get this sphere of I can't remember what he calls it
like it's like a sphere of suppressed knowledge or like
taboo knowledge or something. But it really is knowledge.
And he gives these great examples of how, you know, a lot

(01:11:04):
of our you know, the knowledge that comes out of the the
intelligence world makes its wayinto what fiction or or spy
novels and things. And that you can actually read
these. If you understand how this shift
happens, you can start reading fiction as sort of, you know,
non fiction texts or something repositories of these ideas.
I. Think well the other way around

(01:11:24):
too. I've been reading, I don't know
if you know the book The Stargate Conspiracy.
It's a it's a very fun read. I'm not sure what I think of it
yet because I haven't finished, but they make the argument, the
two authors, that a lot of the stuff in the intelligence
community comes the other way around, right?
So they're reading stuff about the paranormal and about the
occult and fiction and they're like, well, what if, what if

(01:11:47):
this were real? Like what if we could open a
portal into another dimension and go in there and get some of
this technology? Like, shouldn't we try that
before the Russians try that? You know, the whole remote
viewing thing. You know, everybody's seen the
the film, right? Men's stare, stare at goats,
which is all part of the ProjectStargate thing.
But that was like, yeah, let's take, you know what, what if

(01:12:08):
it's true? What if we can remote view where
some submarine is in the water and then we know where it is so
we we don't have to search, search for it.
But yeah, that's, that was takenpretty seriously.
And now, now everyone's claiming, yeah, that didn't
happen, it didn't work. But, you know, that's the whole
point of things that are top secret, right?
You're supposed to actively spread disinformation about
whether it was true or not. But if you look at the there's a

(01:12:31):
1995 document that the CIA has on their website that talks
about why they defunded the remote viewing project.
And their explicit explanation is that it was they, they
consistently produced the statistically significant
results, but it wasn't strong enough to use for espionage
purposes. That's just a really high bar

(01:12:51):
For something to be good enough that you can like use it to spy
on the Russians is way higher than just statistically
significant. So it doesn't even say that it
didn't work, which I think is just crazy that that's just
right on the CI as website. Well, and the authors of the The
Stargate Conspiracy bring up thepossibility that it's connected
with MK Ultra and some of the other things where it wasn't

(01:13:11):
about remote viewing, but it wasabout putting ideas into
somebody's head. Oh, share like and sort of
inserting. Inserting memories or or ideas.
And so it wasn't about reading what they knew, but actually
influencing them. You know, one of the most
interesting. How is that any different from
aliens downloading information into your brain, right?

(01:13:32):
Sure, yeah. It's just not aliens now, it's
humans, which is even weirder. You would think aliens can do
it, maybe because they have somespecial technology.
But if we can do it, the world'seven weirder than we thought.
One of the ideas that occurred to me, maybe it didn't occur to
me, maybe somebody explained this to me, but that I thought
was really fascinating was considering why we have the

(01:13:56):
attitudes that we do towards some of these ideas like like
remote viewing or whatever, and why other societies didn't like
Russia, for instance, like Russia was or the, the, the
Soviet Union was explicitly likea materialist atheist society,
right? America's not we have those sort

(01:14:18):
of like kind of vanilla HallmarkChristian metaphysics underlying
all of our thinking that makes it kind of forbidden for us to
think of things like remote viewing because it's just
doesn't have any, it's magic or something.
It doesn't have any like naturalplace.
If you live in an atheist materialist society, you can be
open to anything because it's, if you can do remote viewing,

(01:14:38):
it's just some physics that we don't yet understand.
We that's there's nothing forbidden or weird about that.
And that explains like why Soviet science went in different
directions than ours did and whythey messed around with things
that we think are kind of kooky.But in their framework, it's
just not. And to get back, to get back to
that language thing, right, thatthe Soviets were the ones who

(01:14:59):
were experimenting on people whocame back from World War One
with, with brain damage. And they were the ones who first
figured out like, well, how doesthis language thing work, right?
Because they could people couldn't talk, right?
Or they couldn't hear certain words.
And they, and also the Soviets, we think about it, they had to
publish their newspaper and how many different languages every
day. So they had, they had to know,

(01:15:21):
they they thought a lot about language.
So it is a luxury to us in the West to think about language,
but it was a necessity for them.That is fascinating.
I never, I never knew that they were doing their research, and
it never occurred to me that theexpansiveness of the USSR
necessitated like more sophisticated thinking about
language. And some of the earliest
structuralist theorists, structural language theorists,

(01:15:44):
came out of the Soviet Union. Man, I could, I would just.
Want to actually human experiments?
Yeah. I just want you to write a
bibliography. OK, yeah, well, you got to send
me the stuff that you're readingas well.
I'm actually working on just a participatory bibliography with
another philosopher who's interested in this stuff, and we
just kind of want everybody to throw in their, you know,

(01:16:06):
reading. Well, I'll link you to it.
Yeah, that'd be great because the the more people I get linked
to, the more I learned. Same.
Yeah, there's all the, all the unknown unknowns out there,
things I didn't even know I needed to be thinking about.
One question I want to throw at you is about the so in in the
UFO community of people who are interested in UFOs, there's I

(01:16:29):
think a fictitious line, but a line that consistently gets
drawn that's like the nuts and bolts camp versus the other camp
that we don't really have a namefor.
And the nuts and bolts people just want to look at UAP as as
flying cars or something that have a different propulsion
system. And the other people want to
look at it as something else consciousness involved or or

(01:16:51):
whatever. Do you think that Lion makes any
sense? Do you feel like it seems like
if if somebody had to put you onone of the end of the spectrum,
you're pretty far on the other end from the?
On the non nuts and bolts. But but you do seem to take
seriously the idea that some of these things are craft like you
mentioned them showing up on radar.
How do those things jive like? Do you think that there are some
things that are just basic, basically hard technologies that

(01:17:14):
we don't understand and some things are purely spiritual?
Or is it all a spectrum? Well, I wish I knew the answer
to that, and I don't think I ever will unless some sort of
grand disclosure occurs tomorrow.
And, and, and even then, I doubtwe even know I would, I would
say, let me answer your questionindirectly.

(01:17:35):
OK, So first of all, ever since I started speaking with, with
people, as in, in addition to reading stuff, I've discovered
that this field is extremely political.
So one group of people won't talk to another guy.
People tell me I shouldn't talk to this person because of, of,
you know, what he voted for in Congress or this guy, you know,

(01:17:58):
is working with Putin and we andhe's a bad guy.
And, and it's like, I've never seen it so bad before.
Even, you know, people accuse academics of being, of being bad
like that, but I've never seen so much politics as people who
are studying UAP. It's it's crazy.
I mean, because you think peoplewho have an open mind about
something like this that transcends humanity would not be

(01:18:20):
involved in, you know, who are you voting for in the next
election cycle? I won't talk to you if it's the
person I don't like. So that's, that's one thing I've
noticed, which I find I, I don'tknow what to do with it, but I,
I wish it weren't there. The other thing is, you know,
when people who study religion talk about the difference
between studying religion and studying theology.

(01:18:43):
So, and normally I don't, I'm not sure I agree with this, but
it's, it's almost like the division between the nuts and
bolts and the non nuts and boltsstudy of UFOs, right.
So the theology people really want to know who God is and what
he's sending and what the truth is.
And the people studying religionare like, yeah, we don't know
that stuff. We're going to bracket it.
That's the technical term, right?

(01:19:04):
And then and then find out, you know what people say.
And I don't think you can do onewithout the other.
I was just reading the other day.
There was AI think his name was McKay, a British head, British
head of like their MUFON serviceor something.
And he published two articles, which I haven't read yet in
Flying Saucer Review, where he makes the argument that you can

(01:19:26):
only understand UAP. Well, UFOs in his case.
If you know about the occult, these are an occult occurrence.
You probably know the name Jim Semivan.
I talked to Jim and Jim said, yeah, you know, the two things
are, are related. So you can't you can't
necessarily learn about one or the other.

(01:19:47):
I had a, I had a student who dida, well, I had one student who
actually interviewed Tom Delong and, and did a really
interesting project on punk rockand, and UFOs.
Another student did a report on hallucinogenic drugs, right.
And he made the argument, oh, you know, these are all who's
nation, everyone's on drugs. And you know, Tom Delong's just
seeing things because he's influenced by substances.

(01:20:09):
And the response is, well, maybeit's necessary.
To alter your mind to be able toperceive things that you're not
prepared to see. Sure.
Yeah, like like before when I goon a walk and I see trees and
leaves and if I think for a moment, well, wait a minute,
that's not actually what I'm seeing.
I just think I'm seeing that maybe somehow certain substances

(01:20:29):
can make your brain or even meditation kind of wake up to
see things that you can't otherwise see.
So I, I agree that there are, there are physical objects of
some sort being picked up by radar, right.
So even Jung said that at the end of his book, Flying saucers,
like, yeah, but there's radar, right?
And there's a famous meeting when Lindenberg came.

(01:20:53):
Lindenberg and his wife came to visit Jung near the end of
Jung's life. And it was after he'd published
his flying saucer book. And Lindenberg came because he's
like, Oh, yeah, you know, and this stuff is all crazy, right?
I've never seen a UFO before. And then he writes back in a
letter back home, Lindenberg, hesaid, I was so shocked that you
can believe these things that hehe was saying they're on radar
and they're real objects. Like, how do you how do you

(01:21:17):
argue with something that's captured by a machine?
Maybe there's an error in the machine.
Sure, that's possible. I talked to Avi Loeb and he gave
me a whole a whole 20 minute lecture on how you can't talk to
people and ask them about UAP because that's unreliable.
You have to actually have an instrument observe it, like a

(01:21:38):
telescope or a camera. That strikes me as crazy I.
Mean, I said, I said. But don't.
Don't you have to look at the results of the instrument?
There's the interpretation goingon when.
We still interpret that, yeah, he said.
No, no, that's it's science, right?
He said. I've looked, I've looked at it.
We've we've had our cameras pointed at the sky here in
Boston for a year. We've seen a million objects.

(01:22:00):
There are clouds, there's birds,there's insects, there's
satellites, but there's nothing that we can't identify.
So I, I, I think there, I think there is a, a division between
people who claim to be nuts and bolts that really doesn't exist.
And I think it's there because of, I want to say because of the
insecurity of the people who, who are holding to the nuts and

(01:22:23):
bolts thing, right? If I talk about my, my UAP
experience, you won't take me seriously, right?
So I just, I just want to talk about the people I interviewed
or the things that are on my instruments.
But if I tell you I had an orb in my house, then you're not
going to take me seriously anymore.
Where the other group of people,they want to hear about the ORB
first because that establishes your credentials and then you

(01:22:45):
can talk about the other stuff. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. They're sort of inverse ways of
thinking about the world almost.I mean, the, the nuts and bolts
people as you're describing them, or at least under the
impression that they're like empiricists or something, that
they're just looking at the facts and the data and, or, or

(01:23:06):
bracketing or not even considering human experience or
something. They're trying.
They're assuming that they can take that out of the equation.
But I think you and I, you, you seem to have the same view that
I do, that you really can't takeinterpretation or experience or
subjectivity out of the equation.
It's like all the way down. Well, it may, it may be.
It may be the case that I can only know what I know and that I

(01:23:30):
only think I'm communicating this information to to you, for
example, that you're understanding and the, the the
neuroscientist that I talked to explained to me that when we
have a conversation, you actually respond to me before
your brain knows what I'm saying.
Oh, that's interesting. Because it takes it takes 500

(01:23:51):
milliseconds for the informationto travel to register, but you
actually respond within like 200milliseconds.
So now I'm caught in a loop because I don't know how to
respond before I now my responseis going to be and I don't know
how to pull out. I'm just going to pull out of
that loop. OK, That's who's the Who's the

(01:24:13):
scientist you were talking to? This is a Stewart Hamroff at
the. Oh, you frozen?
Am I frozen? I think you you froze on me for
a second. Yeah, you.
You froze on my end. That's OK.
We'll edit that out. Stuart Ham.
Someone, someone must be listening to our conversation.
Probably. I mean they're I hope they're

(01:24:35):
having a good time, Great time. Let's see few more questions if
you're OK with that whenever. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I I don't want to take it too long, but I'm good.
Yeah, yeah. Let me there's a, there's a few
that I ask everybody sort of marks some of the interview one,

(01:25:00):
if you had unlimited resources and time to study this
phenomenon, you were going to bejust a UAP researcher.
How would you go about doing it?What would your research program
be? I think I would go back to my my

(01:25:22):
original area of interest, what I'm interested in, which is how
can we know anything about the phenomena and phenomena until we
first understand how we communicate with each other?
Like how do we, how do we know anything?

(01:25:44):
If we can know that, then we might be able to figure out how
can we know something about something that's alien to us.
So we don't, we don't currently understand everything or maybe
even enough about how you and I communicate in the same
language. So if we now see something or
encountering another intelligence or consciousness

(01:26:07):
that's different from our own, how do we even know what that
is? So my, the, the way that I
understand it right now is there's a, there's a famous
Muslim scholar named Ghazali andhe has a midlife crisis.
He quits his job. He vows to never again work for
the government 'cause he was a professor at a university at a

(01:26:29):
government university. And he wanders around the
medieval world for about 11 years trying to figure out how
he can know what is true. And he, he, he deals with
scientists and theologians and others and, and one group he
encounters are the Sufis. So these are like interesting
experiential religion. And the reason he finds them

(01:26:50):
fascinating is he can have a forsure experience of the divinity
of the divine, right, like unitywith the divine.
So he can know for sure that there is a divine, that he
experiences it. But then he says, But I can't
put that into words. Like I can't articulate to you
what I've just experienced. I can experience it, but I can't

(01:27:11):
communicate it. It's.
Yeah, so, so so I could teach you maybe how to experience it
too. So I think, I think maybe many,
I haven't haven't heard what other people answer this
question because you could say, oh, you know, I'd send
satellites into space, you know,or that kind of stuff.
But for me, I would start with trying to figure out how, how do

(01:27:31):
we talk to each other? How do we talk about things that
we can't even imagine existing? Because that's going to have to
be possible? As if if we're, if we are now
encountering things that are truly alien to us, we don't know
how to talk about them. I mean, we're not even sure that

(01:27:52):
we're seeing them, right? Yeah, Yeah, I, I think along
similar lines, I don't know if we even have the concepts
necessary to like think productively about some of these
things, like if we could sit down with whatever is behind the
UAP phenomenon, even if it's just, if it's just one thing, I
mean it. I don't think it.
Yeah. No, I doubt it's.
What it is, but if you could sitdown with any anything behind it

(01:28:14):
and ask, are you an alien that they would probably say
something like, well, sort of like I'm sort of an alien, sort
of a ghost, sort of a God, sort of a hallucination.
Like you don't really have the, the term or, or, or whatever in
your head, or maybe you don't even have the cognitive
machinery necessary to think thethe right concept.
Like maybe I can only be be understood if you like already

(01:28:34):
know what a Hilbert space is or some, you know, super advanced
complicated concept. So your research program would
be about like understanding the mind and language and thought
and communication. And then would you ever get to
the the UAP question? It seems like that's such basic
research that you can never get out of the beginning phase.

(01:28:56):
But the but for me the the the research comes from UAP
experience. Oh, I see.
OK. So starting with those
experiences. Well, and and and not drawing a
line between those and religiousexperiences.
So that whole realm of of human experience with with non human
consciousness, how have we as humans described those

(01:29:18):
encounters? And can we learn anything from
the way we've described them? Do you see themes like Because
People, I mean you've already looked, we've had these
experiences. Do you see consistent themes
that link like UAP experiences to basic religious accounts?
Oh, yeah, no doubt. I mean, some of them are.

(01:29:38):
Some of them are obvious. Because if somebody will tell
me, you know, that they're encountering gods with, you
know, names that we recognize, right?
Like Norse gods or Greek gods orwhatever, Egyptian gods,
whatever it is. In other cases, I'll hear a
story of an experience that somebody had, and I'm

(01:30:00):
immediately taken back to, oh, this is exactly what what I read
about in Eliade's book about shamanism.
It's exactly the same scenario, or it's exactly the same late
antique story that we read like 50 different times in texts of
what happened to somebody. And one of my favorites is the
story of Enoch who gets turned into Metatron.
This, you know, God like figure.And you know, that's, that's

(01:30:24):
very common theme. If you read some of the
experience or literature that people are transformed into a
divine being of some sort. If they suddenly have knowledge
that's greater, they, they even say that their mind is no longer
encompassed in their body. It like expands to the whole
universe. I mean, it's, it's, it's
basically, it could be, it couldbe Metatron talking to you,

(01:30:44):
right? Like saying this is what I
experienced when I had that. So, so that I, so I think I
mean, talking to you makes it easier for me to think about it.
But I think that's, that's what I want to do.
I want to start with with those experiences that are recorded
and then see if we can figure out how it works.
I think Jeff, Jeff Kripal and David Abrams.

(01:31:04):
I don't know if you know David Abrams.
I don't know Eco philosopher who, but they've both recounted
experiences I've heard that are that are very much like that.
I mean, Jeff Kripkel had his sort of unity with Collie, the
Indian dollars Collie when he was in his 20s, I think.
And David Abrams spent a lot of time with AI mean, I guess you
call it a shaman, though that's he would he would quibble about

(01:31:27):
the usage of that word. But a Tibet or Himalayan shaman
who who who he swears could turnhimself into a crow.
And, and David Abrams talks about this experience that he's
had of, you know, his, his ego dissolving, but becoming aware
of the experience of the grass around him and the butt and the

(01:31:50):
crow flying away from him and, and sort of being able to
inhabit these other kind of spheres of, of experience.
Those are, Yeah. And, and most people who have
those haven't been reading the texts or they haven't been
reading Eliade or whatever. It's even though that this is
like a, a thing that happens throughout history.
So it it gives it a kind of fascinating credibility.

(01:32:11):
Well, and, and the way I regard it is the people I'm talking to
are subject matter experts, right?
Because they're, I mean, I'm nottalking to somebody as, as an
experiencer of some UAP phenomena.
I'm asking someone who's a subject matter expert in human
experience with non human consciousness.
Like if and if you've had the experience and you automatically

(01:32:32):
are a subject matter expert right?
Definitely. That's that's why I want to talk
to them. And, and then sometimes when I
say that to them, they're like, what?
I'm not an expert. I'm like, yes, you are because
you, you have had this experience.
And I, and I ask questions that they're like, why are you asking
me that question? Like I, I always ask, well, like
how, how did you get the, the communication?
Like, how did it work? Was it, you know, was it in

(01:32:54):
English? Was it a thought?
And, and I'm, I've just been writing them all down from both
from the religion stuff, you know, and in the Bible, people
eat scrolls and they suddenly have knowledge or they drink
fiery drinks, you know, all sorts of stuff.
And people like automatic writing that happens in the
Bible too. And it's just, it's I, I, I'm

(01:33:16):
not sure that there's a need to cordon off any area of human
experience. Or, or that it's even really
possible, like if you try to really clearly draw the line,
you have to start putting all sorts of things on the other
side of it that you don't want to.
You have to start putting the Bible on the other side of it if
you want to. If you don't want to do that or
whatever it's it becomes really difficult.

(01:33:37):
OK, next to the last question here, if you so the the question
that I'm maybe most excited about but but get the most
frustration from guests is if you had to bet on the nature of
the UAP phenomenon. If you had to single out one

(01:34:00):
theory, whether it's UAPI mean not UAP, the extraterrestrial
hypothesis or time travellers oror a cult phenomena, how would
you bet your money? That that's exactly what I'm
trying to find out by talking toall these people.
And I don't and, and I don't think we could, we could place a

(01:34:25):
bet yet because we don't know what the options are.
Every, every option that that I could come up with is something
that somebody imagined. So those are all products of our
historical context today. And whoever I am or how I was

(01:34:46):
raised or like, I, I mean, I love Michael Master's story,
right, of how he, he chose his profession because of this
experience he had when he was younger.
And the same is true of like Jack Sarfati experience that he
had caused him to choose his profession and what he went
into. So our our experiences affect

(01:35:06):
what we even think is possible. So I it, it could be that it
could be none of them. It could be all of them.
I mean, it could be, it could bethe Corbin is right that we
actually, each one of us createsthe reality ourselves.
This sort of interpretation is creating it.
Whatever, whatever. Well, I mean he uses, he uses

(01:35:28):
the word top wheel sometimes, which is the Arabic word to to
take it back to its origins. And then other times he uses he
uses other terms that have to dowith like experiential knowledge
and stuff. It may be.
It may be that Arabic has some words that are more useful to
understanding these experiences than than English does.

(01:35:50):
Yeah, there are a lot of concepts that English just
doesn't have. A have a translation of that
might be useful for thinking. So I I so I think I skirted
around your question, but. Well, let me push you one more
more time to so, and maybe this is the sense in which you're a
historian or a, a, a student of religion rather than rather than

(01:36:14):
just a person who wants to placea, a bet on one theory, Wouldn't
you? Why would you not just go with
the interpretation of the experiences themselves if they
say? Everyone tells me something
different. But that would just mean there's
a million different things goingon and.
Yeah, so, so, so you'd bring me back to when, when I was in
college, I wrote a, a thesis. It was over 100 pages long.

(01:36:38):
So it was ridiculous for an undergraduate.
And I only had two, two history advisors at my college.
And, and so one of them who I, Iknew for a very long time, he
passed away about 5 or 10 years ago.
He, he told me about a conversation he had with the
other one, which I wasn't Privy to.
And he said, yeah, the other guysaid the only way you can study

(01:36:58):
religion is if you're an atheist.
And, and he, and, and then my, the other advisor said, well,
how, how is that possible? Why couldn't you just entertain
multiple possibilities? So if you're if you're hearing
two people telling you two different things, maybe they
encountered two different gods, maybe it's not the same one.

(01:37:20):
That's that's certainly possible, right.
Neil Gaiman's stuff people have all read his stuff like American
Gods, for example, which is a great book that I've recommended
to people. I don't know if you know about
the theologian guy named John Hick.
Yeah, so John Hick has this is agreat idea that that when maybe
we are all in touch with the same reality, but because of our

(01:37:42):
cultural backgrounds, we're going to interpret it
differently. It's just different modes of
description. I think that that's his book,
The Nature of Religion or something.
Yeah. And then he has one that I, I
thought he had one something like God has 99 names or
something like that. I don't know, seems to, I
remember it. But he, he, he gets us back to
that. The problem with his

(01:38:02):
interpretation is that we can never then really know this
reality, because each one of us has to filter it through what we
know, which maybe means that ourknowledge will never be of what
really is. I mean, people trying to solve
that, right? Kant and Durkheim and Levy,
Strauss and Baudrillard, and that's the whole point.
And eventually it's like, no, wecan't actually know it.

(01:38:25):
And maybe, or maybe that's just the truth, like maybe that's not
a critique of it. Maybe there's we perspectives or
maybe you have to get out of your body or time or something
in order to to know things directly.
I I think there is a reality, I think there's a truth and I do
think it's beyond our perception.
So very last question, we, I, I make this bonus content.

(01:38:46):
OK, if, if you could push any number of books into the hands
of people who want to understandhow you approach this books that
maybe they haven't encountered or wouldn't normally encounter
by doing a Google search or likelooking around their books
bookstore at the UFO section. Would you give just everyday

(01:39:06):
people who want to have their horizons expanded a little bit?
So I've already mentioned a lot of stuff in the course of our
conversation. And so I won't, I won't, I don't
think I'll bring that up again. I would say that most people,
including me when I started this, try to look for what we
consider like the serious study of UAP.

(01:39:28):
You know, we look on the back. Is it published at a University
Press? Does the person have a degree?
I'm not sure that's the best wayof going about this.
I think that there's a lot of people out there who who write
about UAP and related phenomena that don't have a university

(01:39:48):
position, that don't, that maybeself publish their book, that
have had some sort of experienceor they've they've had the time
to put all of this together in their mind.
I'm hoping to talk to, for example, you may know the person
Ella Lebayne. I'm going to talk with her in a
in a couple of weeks, but she's got like 6 volumes out now of

(01:40:09):
this book called in the Cosmic Zoo.
And it's all about the differentnon human intelligences and how
they interact with human history.
I talked with a a woman out in Phoenix who runs the Phoenix
Lights project and she and her husband were both physicians.
They had this experience, the famous experience in Phoenix and

(01:40:29):
she now runs this whole program,which is all about like thinking
about what these things are. But she doesn't have a degree in
physics. She doesn't have a degree in in
religion. But I but I and I, but I
ultimately I would say that it'sit's we got to read the people
who are actively imagining this stuff like like science fiction.

(01:40:50):
I mentioned Arthur C Clarke Thomas dish, but the the the the
guy who's the the most interesting everyone knows is
Philip K Dick's stuff. I wasn't convinced all the time
that he was writing fiction. Well, and yeah, and, and his, we
only have 1000 pages of what probably were 10,000 pages of
his exegesis that he wrote on a nightly basis.

(01:41:11):
And he and he, he wasn't even sure that he believed the
experience that he had, you know, this beam of light and the
satellite and Valus and all thisstuff.
But that's if, if so, if we're trying to to conceptualize
something that is beyond our ability to conceptualize, then

(01:41:31):
it's not going to do any good to, to learn more about what we
already know, right? Because that's all bound by my
mathematics and by the laws of physics.
And those are all human inventions based upon our own
human experience. But if we can get people to
start thinking about like science fiction writers or
Mystics, people who are thinkingabout experiences that are, that

(01:41:53):
are outside of our normal everyday, how do they, how do
they describe them? Whatever.
Then, then I think we might be capable of understanding
something. But clearly there's something
there. I don't, I'm not, I don't know.
I mean, you'd have to be pretty stubborn to doubt at this point
that there's something going on,in my mind at least.

(01:42:17):
I agree, but we don't. We don't, I, I don't, I don't
know what it is and I, I honestly don't think we have the
tools to know what it is at thispoint.
And maybe fiction can give us more of those tools because.
It would allow us to start con conjecturing, right?
If you if you were going to, if you're going to put together a
team of scientists that we're going to prepare for, you know,

(01:42:37):
we we know the aliens are comingor whatever, like the three body
problems, right thing, right? They're going to be here, but
it's going to be 75 years. You definitely want some people
on that team that their whole job is just to sit around and,
and imagine things that we've never thought of before.
So first in order to do that, though, you have to read every
science fiction book that's out there.

(01:42:57):
So you know what everybody's thought of already, right?
And you read all the Mystics andall that stuff.
So you know what? Everybody's already imagined.
And then you can say, OK, what haven't we thought of yet?
Like what's the new stuff? I.
Love it. That's the fun stuff, right?
Then you can just start imagining, yeah.
Well, Brandon, this has been a fantastic conversation.

(01:43:18):
Thank you for your time and for being on the show.
I would love to have you on again sometime and keep talking
about this stuff. Yeah, well, thanks for talking
to me because you helped me to think through some of my ideas
and. Absolutely.
It was fun. The Anomalous Review is a
project of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
It's hosted and produced by me, Michael Glossin, and edited by

(01:43:39):
Kelly Michelle. Our theme song was written and
performed. By Thomas Rosanti Communication
and PR Workers by Preston Dykes Our advisory team includes
Jennifer Roach, Robert Powell, Richard Hoffman, Joshua Pearson,
and Larry Hancock. To find out more about SU, check
out Explorer scu.org.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}010: Dr. Brannon Wheeler on UAP, Non-Human Intelligences, and the History of Religion

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010: Dr. Brannon Wheeler on UAP, Non-Human Intelligences, and the History of Religion

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